Latest news with #JustineBateman
Sky News
06-05-2025
- Business
- Sky News
Hollywood is struggling, but some fear Trump's foreign film tariffs might do more harm than good
At Sony Production studios in Culver City, an area of Los Angeles steeped in the movie business, a steady stream of cars and lorries comes and goes through the security gate. It occupies the MGM lot which dates back to 1924. Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane were shot here and, more recently, Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises. But this is no longer the beating heart of movie making. In Tinsel Town the bright lights of the film industry have been fading for some time. Production in Hollywood has fallen by 40% in the last decade, sometimes moving to other states like New Mexico, New York and Georgia, but more often outside the US entirely. A recent survey of film and TV executives indicates that Britain, Australia and Canada are now favoured locations over California when it comes to making movies. San Andreas, a blockbuster film about a California earthquake, was shot in Australia. In America, a film about an Irish family settling in New York, was shot in Canada. The exodus of the film industry from Hollywood is mostly owing to economic reasons, with other countries boasting lower labour costs and more expansive tax incentives. But as productions have moved overseas, studios across Los Angeles are frequently empty and those who work behind the scenes are often out of work. President Trump has approached this problem with a familiar reaction - sweeping tariffs, a 100% tariff on all foreign made films coming into the USA. 'It's a different kind of situation than producing cars overseas' Justine Bateman is a filmmaker and sister of actor Jason Bateman. She is glad Trump is looking for solutions but does not understand how the tariffs will work. "I will say, I'm very glad to hear that President Trump is interested in helping the film business. But part of the problem is we just don't have very much detail, do we?," she says. "He's made this big announcement, but we don't have the detail to really mull over. He doesn't even say whether it's going to be films that are shown in the cinema or streaming movies, for example. "Tariffs can be a profitable situation for when we're just talking about hard goods, but something like a film and, particularly if you've got an American film that takes place in the south of France, you want to be in a particular location. "So it's a different kind of situation than producing cars overseas and bringing them back here." At the Hand Prop Room in Los Angeles, they supply props for TV and film. The warehouse is brimful of virtually any prop you could imagine, from portraits of former presidents, to replica handguns to African artefacts and 18th century teapots. The walls are decorated with posters from some of the productions they've supplied, including Babylon, Oppenheimer and Ghostbusters. 'It needs to be thought through' In the past five years, the prop shop has been impacted by the COVID pandemic, by both the writers' and actors' strikes and the globalisation of the film industry. Business is at an all time low. "It's not helping when so many productions are not just leaving the state, but also leaving the country," says Reynaldo Castillo, the general manager of the Hand Prop Room. "It's Hollywood, we have the infrastructure that nobody else has and I think maybe to a certain point we took it for granted. "I think we can all agree that we want more filming to stay in the country to help promote jobs. But you also don't want to do something to hurt it. "How does it work? Are there exceptions for X, Y, and Z? What about independent movies that have small budgets that are shot somewhere else that would destroy their ability to make something? It needs to be thought through and make sure it's implemented the right way."
Irish Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Justine Bateman: ‘This election was a tipping point for the woke mob mentality'
'Absolute cowboys, in the truest sense of it,' Justine Bateman declares, in praise of the frontier directors and producers who have come to embody the mythology of old Hollywood . She sometimes likes to leaf through the interviews that Peter Bogdanovich conducted with 16 auteur directors- Hitchcock , George Cukor, Fritz Lang – for a book called Who the Devil Made It. 'None of that work would have been made if they did not have that fearless attitude and just f**king do it. And that was the heart of that 100-year-old business.' As far as Bateman is concerned, that industry – 'that 100-year tree' – is no longer fully alive or relevant. The antic energy and fearlessness that drove the film and television industries in the Los Angeles of her childhood has been replaced now by an invidious caution, which has led to alarmed warnings and critiques about the decline of the industry in Lotus Land. Bateman has herself written a piece with the headline: Hollywood is dead. 'Greed, in short,' she replies when asked about the cause of its demise. READ MORE 'The film had three components that made it untouchable. Your true north was excellent work. The second thing was a financial ecosystem that worked for everyone. And we also had a great creative ecosystem. What happened was the studios going for only big-budget stuff that makes a lot of money. Then the tech companies decide they are going to use our work as material on their websites. Which they call 'content.' 'So now you have a content conveyor belt and giant-budget films and that is the focus. So that Hollywood business that we had is dead. The true north became the stock price and the studio executives chasing after the tech company model. And also, hardly anything is in person.' When we speak, over Zoom, Bateman is in 11th-hour preparation for the Credo 23 film festival she founded and organised along with like-minded souls – Juliette Lewis , Matthew Weiner of Mad Men and Reed Morano, the director during the first season of The Handmaid's Tale . The boutique festival has two abiding rules: that none of the entries have any Artificial Intelligence elements whatsoever and that they meet a certain quality threshold. 'The film-makers are so excited. There is one coming from England, another driving across the country to come. Social media has made people feel like they don't matter because it quantifies people by likes and follows. It means you have a society that feels unloved and unvalued. 'All to say: I think when you have an event focused on the value of an inherent talent that they time to enrich and, in this case, to make a good film, that's a spirit that people are responding to. It values humans. The criteria are simply: no AI and make a good film. Talent isn't discriminating.' Justine Bateman directing on set. Photograph: Steven Meiers Dominquez Bateman, who is 59, has navigated a decidedly unusual industry life. Her breakout acting role in television was as Mallory Keaton, the wryly amused younger sister to Michael J Fox's Reaganite conservative entrepreneur Alex and their hippy-era parents in Family Ties, the phenomenally successful sitcom that ran from 1982-1989. With that came an early taste of genuine fame. She's polite but clear in her lack of interest in rehashing war tales about that role and time in her life. Apart from anything else, she wrote a provocative, zesty book about it called Fame: The Hijacking of Reality. It is not a memoir ('I f**king hate memoirs' she clarifies in the opening sentence) but a bristling, stream-of-conscious polemic about the disconcerting attractions and vapidity of that late 20th-century iteration of fame. In the 1990s, her personal fame dimmed without ever disappearing and she has spent three full decades on subsequent acting, writing and directing projects. Justine Bateman (back) with felllow cast members of TV show Family Ties, including Michael J Fox (left). Photograph: Paramount TV/Family Ties Researching the book, she came across a comment online critiquing her appearance. It was a stranger remarking that she looked old. And it troubled her 'for longer than I thought it would', she told the actress and talkshow host Drew Barrymore after completing a second book. Face: One Square Foot of Skin, published in 2022, is 47 short stories based on people – mostly women – with whom she spoke about the subject of ageing and the beauty industry. She compares plastic surgery to a Ponzi scheme people invest in believing it will help them acquire a partner or obtain a promotion or, in the surface world of the film and television industry, prolong a career. Bateman herself had decided to allow her face to age as it will. The response to the book took her by surprise. 'I knew it would strike a chord with some people. But it was immediate and huge. I got over a thousand DMs from women – and some men – and the feeling was: relief. Under this accusation that their faces were broken and had to be fixed for so long, and you don't realise how much you were holding it in your body. 'The conversation had moved to: which procedures should you get? You know? It was a fait accompli. And I felt it was insane. So, people are saying perhaps that book was a tipping point – just like this election was a tipping point for the woke mob mentality momentum. Perhaps my book changed that 'your face is broken' momentum.' In addition to all of that, over the past five years Bateman has emerged as a provocative if unlikely crusader against the woke culture which, she argues, had made life in California suffocating and humourless. It's something she touches on as she explains the subtle but crushing shifts in the way the film and television business is conducted now, as opposed to a decade ago. Justine Bateman: 'The parties that used to take place weren't just for fun. You could talk about films and you were in this pot of truly gifted artists.' Photograph: Gianetta Fluent 'Los Angeles was different too. Up until eight years ago, it had that: 'hey man, you do you' attitude. It can be annoying but that was LA. And then we had the invasion of the hall monitors and the party-poopers and the finger pointing and people telling you what to do. That really jacked out the spirit of this place, At the same time, you had virtually all of the film business being conducted online. Zoom links,' she says, throwing her hands up in exasperation. 'Aren't there offices in Burbank? It is like a 20-minute drive. Okay, let us look into the availability. The parties that used to take place weren't just for fun. You could talk about films and you were in this pot of truly gifted artists. And studio executives. And producers. And marketing gurus. Now, that has completely shrunken down to some private clubs.' [ Why Jamie Dimon is right about meetings Opens in new window ] Even through a screen and from a distance of 3,000 miles, Bateman is animated and bright. She believes a Kamala Harris presidency would have been a disaster for the US. Her thesis is that liberal left wing orthodoxies had taken command of the cultural conversation and enforced on it a series of rules that she found to be increasingly shrill and absurd. During the Covid lockdown and afterwards, that shrillness intensified, particularly, she says, in her city. 'Los Angeles is not a place where people move to start a family or contribute to the success of the city. New York has that. People go there to try and prove themselves. But here it is more: hey, LA, what have you got for me? I've been told in my little town in Minnesota I'm the prettiest girl in town and I should go to LA. The truth is you get here and it's like: get in line. There are never going to be enough roles or films to employ anybody. And also: you may or may not be talented as an actor. 'So, there are a lot of disappointed people that it never happened for. And the last thing they want to do is go home and admit defeat. So, they stay out here. And they can turn bitter and angry. And 2020 was perfect for them because they got to become these hall monitors. And they got to keep this going for two years. So how did it feel? It felt ridiculous. You kept your thoughts to yourself. Cancellation culture. Arbitrary rules. You say this doesn't make sense: then you're a Nazi! It was all just screaming, in your face. I found it unbearable. And I found it incredibly un-American.' Bateman blames 'greed' for having supplanted the energy and fearlessness of LA's film and TV industries with caution. Photograph: Gianetta Fluent Her glee at the November election originated, she says, in an outpouring of relief that she could breathe again rather than a pronounced political affiliation. Because of her views, she has been invited on to Fox News talkshows to discuss the disintegration of the Democratic leadership and belief system. But she makes it clear she is sceptical about politicians as a rule – and took exception to the Hollywood Reporter, the long-established trade paper, depicting her as a Trump supporter. 'I don't like politics or politicians, generally speaking. I was so glad that enough people were like: we are done with this. It got really insane and I kept thinking a senator or world leader or someone will say: enough. To me, the American spirit is: come over here and live your life however you like as long as that doesn't impinge on my right to do the same. Don't get in my face and start telling me how I am supposed to behave or relate to other people.' It is, of course, difficult for some among the generation of Americans who grew up with Family Ties and retain the archetypes of those characters to reconcile themselves with the contemporary reality of Justine Bateman. Her views are both lauded and vilified, according to political perspective and mirroring the prevailing mood in the country. When the conversation does turn to that show, she will allow that it was part of an irrecoverable period of utter domination for the television networks. The situation comedy had extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated, reach. [ When AI images become 'an insult to life itself' Opens in new window ] 'I was 16 and it never even crossed my mind to act for a living,' she says. 'I fell into my vocation at the time. There were a handful of television stars that crossed into movies- John Travolta, Mike Fox, and Christopher Lloyd. It wasn't done back then. 'And this is part of the 100-year-old business. Cultivating these extraordinary plants that were movie stars. There has to be context for that to happen. You can't just take all the best paintings in the world and throw them in a parking lot. So, when you throw 10,000 films online on a streaming website, you are telling people how to treat the work.' Bateman on the Hollywood picket line during the 2023 actors strike at Netflix Studios. Photograph: Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images At its peak, Family Ties was drawing in around 30 million viewers a week. Season finales could attract 50 million. All watching the same show, at the same time. Millions more watched around the world. Bateman agrees that the show subliminally communicated endless messages to its global audience about America, from its interior decor to the inherent values contained within the storylines. 'Yeah, such as: the showing up for friends. The good guys – bad guys. It was very clear when someone was stealing or lying. And also: just that cowboy fearlessness and don't sweat the small s**t, and just go for it. And pick yourself up and go again. It is not fair for me to qualify that as uniquely American, but it is woven into the American spirit.' Her contention is that the old model – dominant studios and the careful curation of actors who became – in the Hollywood walk of fame sense – movie stars – is done. The idea of the film star, born for the big screen, is still alive in the imagination of film fans, she believes. But in the torrent of content and streaming services and social media, the film industry has simply forgotten how to create them. [ Michael J Fox: 'My wife could have said, Parkinson's, that's not for me. But she stuck around' Opens in new window ] 'You have to have someone who is magnetic, personable, a good-to-great actor,' she says cheerfully. 'And then you have to cultivate that. And then, you have to frame it and put it in context. Brad Pitt was in specific films that were released in ways that films aren't released now. 'Do people still believe in movie stardom? Sure. Are there any new ones coming through? Hardly. Tom Cruise – he has a social media account but he isn't posting pictures of himself in his kitchen or whatever. Neither is Brad Pitt. Part of it is allowing yourself that under exposure. But ... that 100-year-old tree died. 'I say all this, and there is a new tree emerging. And the new film business is going to be filled with those same kind of people as before. It's going to be built on the same fearlessness. By people who aren't answering to anybody.'
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Washington Post Inks Deal With OpenAI, News Stories to Be Featured in ChatGPT
OpenAI continues to strike deals with major media companies. The latest to join forces with the tech company behind ChatGPT? Jeff Bezos' own Washington Post. The Washington Post on Tuesday said that it had inked a deal with OpenAI that will make summaries, quotes and links to its stories available in ChatGPT. More from The Hollywood Reporter The Miyazaki Maelstrom: OpenAI's Ghibli Craze Signals a Troubling Future for Hollywood Justine Bateman Wants to "Give a Book of Matches" to the Tech Companies So They Can Burn Down Hollywood Court Advances The New York Times Lawsuit Against OpenAI 'We're all in on meeting our audiences where they are,' said Peter Elkins-Williams, head of global partnerships at The Washington Post. 'Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it.' 'More than 500 million people use ChatGPT each week to get answers to all kinds of questions,' added Varun Shetty, head of media partnerships at OpenAI. 'By investing in high-quality journalism by partners like The Washington Post, we're helping ensure our users get timely, trustworthy information when they need it.' OpenAI has been striking media deals across the industry, including major partnerships with Wall Street Journal owner News Corp., Hearst, Time, Condé Nast, and others. One outlet that has not taken OpenAI's money is The New York Times, which has spent millions in a legal battle with the tech giant. While many of OpenAI's deals have been with news outlets to bring timely information to ChatGPT, the company has its sights set on Hollywood next, with its video product Sora meant to speed up the creation of original content. Best of The Hollywood Reporter How the Warner Brothers Got Their Film Business Started Meet the World Builders: Hollywood's Top Physical Production Executives of 2023 Men in Blazers, Hollywood's Favorite Soccer Podcast, Aims for a Global Empire
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Justine Bateman tells young voters to ignore the media 'panic frenzy' and make up their own minds
"Family Ties" star Justine Bateman implored young voters to think for themselves in elections rather than pledging themselves to a "political team." "If you're under 30, you've most likely been convinced that you need to politically 'resist the other side.' You've been cheated," Bateman wrote in a post on X Wednesday. Instead, she said voters should "insist" candidates "audition for your vote" and that voters "examine their actions objectively and decide if, in the big picture, this is benefiting America as a whole." Justine Bateman Calls For Gavin Newsom To Be Removed Amid La Fires 'Before Something Worse Happens' "This is not about parties or pledging fealty to a 'political team.' This is about your right as an American adult to not be told by the media or the oldest people in either party how you should be interpreting policies and actions," Bateman wrote. She added people need to ignore the "ridiculous insistence that you give yourself a heart attack over nothing" and tell anyone who insists otherwise to "zip it." Read On The Fox News App "They disrespect your intelligence and innate wisdom," Bateman wrote. "Their weird panic frenzy is an anomaly, birthed in 2016. It's not the norm, and you intuitively know it. You don't need them. Make up your own mind. And then let it go, so you can so all those things that have nothing to do with politics." Bateman made a similar declaration in a viral X thread after President Donald Trump's election in November, describing the last four years as "walking on eggshells." "I have found the last four years to be an almost intolerable period. A very un-American period in that any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes were held up to a very limited list of 'permitted positions' in order to assess acceptability," Bateman posted on X. 'Family Ties' Star Justine Bateman Slams 'Un-american Period' Over The Last 4 Years: 'Common Sense Discarded' "I am neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else's freedom to live their own life. That's it," she concluded. Bateman also described Trump's election as a "kind of suffocating cloud" being lifted on free speech. "Regular people who had questions about decisions that were being made were threatened subtly or obviously into silence. And I feel like that's been broken, that sort of suppression has been kind of broken," Bateman told Fox News article source: Justine Bateman tells young voters to ignore the media 'panic frenzy' and make up their own minds
Fox News
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Justine Bateman tells young voters to ignore the media 'panic frenzy' and make up their own minds
"Family Ties" star Justine Bateman implored young voters to think for themselves in elections rather than pledging themselves to a "political team." "If you're under 30, you've most likely been convinced that you need to politically 'resist the other side.' You've been cheated," Bateman wrote in a post on X Wednesday. Instead, she said voters should "insist" candidates "audition for your vote" and that voters "examine their actions objectively and decide if, in the big picture, this is benefiting America as a whole." "This is not about parties or pledging fealty to a 'political team.' This is about your right as an American adult to not be told by the media or the oldest people in either party how you should be interpreting policies and actions," Bateman wrote. She added people need to ignore the "ridiculous insistence that you give yourself a heart attack over nothing" and tell anyone who insists otherwise to "zip it." "They disrespect your intelligence and innate wisdom," Bateman wrote. "Their weird panic frenzy is an anomaly, birthed in 2016. It's not the norm, and you intuitively know it. You don't need them. Make up your own mind. And then let it go, so you can so all those things that have nothing to do with politics." Bateman made a similar declaration in a viral X thread after President Donald Trump's election in November, describing the last four years as "walking on eggshells." "I have found the last four years to be an almost intolerable period. A very un-American period in that any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes were held up to a very limited list of 'permitted positions' in order to assess acceptability," Bateman posted on X. "I am neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else's freedom to live their own life. That's it," she concluded. Bateman also described Trump's election as a "kind of suffocating cloud" being lifted on free speech. "Regular people who had questions about decisions that were being made were threatened subtly or obviously into silence. And I feel like that's been broken, that sort of suppression has been kind of broken," Bateman told Fox News Digital.
