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Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Nicolle Wallace launches ‘The Best People' podcast for MSNBC as spinoff looms
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace has delivered some sharp criticism of President Trump since she became a host on the progressive-leaning cable news network in 2017. So it's surprising that her new podcast shares its name with one of Trump's regular boasts about his team: 'The Best People.' 'I thought he had abandoned it,' Wallace, 53, told The Times. 'But I actually think 'the best people' was one of his best messages in 2016.' 'He abandoned it officially when he picked Matt Gaetz,' she added, referring to Trump's first choice for attorney general. Each week on 'The Best People,' starting Monday, Wallace will have lengthy conversations with actors, musicians, thought leaders and other figures outside of politics. The guest on the first episode is actor and fellow podcaster Jason Bateman, followed by Sarah Jessica Parker, music producer Jimmy Jam, folk singer Joan Baez and Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers in coming weeks. The jump into podcasting comes as the network looks for more ways to reach the growing number of consumers who are no longer watching cable TV. The network says its existing audio podcasts, which include series from hosts Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Jen Psaki, will top 10 million downloads in May. 'Our goal is to meet our audience where they are and to bring the talent of our hosts and anchors to them in those spaces,' said Madeleine Haeringer, MSNBC's senior vice president of digital, audio and longform. 'It's not a one-size-fits-all formula — but instead, tailoring each project to both the host and the platform.' Wallace said she was ready to expand her role at MSNBC before the corporate changes. Podcasting appealed to her because, as a working mom, she knows many women aren't available to watch her daily program in the afternoon. Her branching out into less overtly political territory is somewhat unexpected. The former Bush White House communications director's tenure on the ABC talk show 'The View' was brief, partly due to her lack of pop culture expertise. That's not a concern this time around, she said. The guests she solicited for 'The Best People' are coming to the table to discuss their own advocacy issues apart from the kind of instant political analysis presented on her MSNBC program 'Deadline: White House.' Wallace connected with Jimmy Jam when they discussed creating a 'We Are the World' type of musical production to aid Ukraine. She knew Rivers through his social justice activism (as coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, he had to guide the players through the scandal over former owner Donald Sterling's racist comments) and Parker for her devotion to literacy programs. The podcast format allows them to open up in a way that doesn't always happen on live TV. 'For some reason, people sitting in front of their computer screens on the Zoom are even more candid and forthcoming about how they feel,' Wallace said. Wallace is wading into digital media at a time when MSNBC is in transition. The channel, along with other NBCUniversal cable outlets, is being spun off from current owner Comcast into a new company called Versant. Comcast is getting out of the cable channel business, with the exception of its potent reality brand Bravo, out of concern about the steady decline of the pay TV audience. Over the last 10 years, cord-cutting has reduced the number of cable homes MSNBC reaches by 33%. MSNBC also saw a mass exodus of viewers just after the presidential election, as its loyal left-leaning audience tuned out after Trump's victory. The ratings have gradually climbed back up, with MSNBC maintaining its second place position behind perennial cable leader Fox News but well ahead of third place CNN. In May, the network was up 24% from the lows it hit in November and December, but is still down 35% compared to the presidential campaign-elevated levels of a year ago, according to Nielsen. But leadership at Versant has it made clear that MSNBC will continue to cater to a politically progressive audience. Wallace believes the commitment to the network's point of view has only deepened under new management. 'It's a culture that really rewards deep wonky coverage of politics,' she said. '[MSNBC President] Rebecca Kutler has come in and tripled down on all of that.' The spinoff requires separating MSNBC from NBC News, where some journalists were uneasy with the intensity of partisan commentary on the cable network. Versant is hiring its own newsgathering team — as many as 100 journalists — including justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian, who is moving over from NBC. 'To work for someone who is hiring reporters at a time when we're looking at an administration that seems a little meh about the Constitution is pretty forward leaning,' Wallace said. She was inspired to try something new by the extracurricular activities of her husband, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael S. Schmidt, who co-created the Netflix thriller series 'Zero Day' with former NBC News President Noah Oppenheim. 'Michael enjoyed it so much it gave me the idea to add something that is a little outside my comfort zone,' Wallace said. Wallace met Schmidt, 41, at MSNBC, where he is a contributor. They married in 2022 and a year later had their first child via surrogate. Wallace also has a 13-year-old son, Liam, from her first marriage. While Wallace and Schmidt have a business-like dynamic when they appear together on the program, family matters creep in off-camera. 'When we are both on set, my son is texting us about dinner,' Wallace said. 'During the breaks, we're never talking about the rule of law. We're talking about logistics.'
The Herald Scotland
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Why rock fans can't get enough of classic music documentaries
Recent other documentaries have focused on subjects as wildly diverse as Led Zeppelin, Cyndi Lauper, The Beach Boys, De La Soul, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan's mid-70s Rolling Thunder Revue, and the 'Yacht Rock' genre. Netflix alone has films about Wham!, James Blunt, Elvis Presley, Quincy Jones and the making of the 1985 celebrity recording of the single 'We Are the World', while Apple TV's roster currently includes documentaries on Sparks, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow and The Stooges. Coastal, filmed by Neil Young's long-term partner, Daryl Hannah, will be of considerable interest to Young's fans as well as acting as a curtain-raiser to his gigs at Glastonbury in June and at London's Hyde Park in July. Shot in arty black-and-white, it has footage of Young on stage and amiably chatting with his bus driver as he makes his way from gig to gig. In a new interview on Young's website, the point is made to Hannah that, given that Young is a 'storied, mythologised figure' while also 'quite inscrutable', the off-the-cuff moments in the documentary are valuable. 'I think you're right', she responds. 'People do find him this mysterious, inscrutable figure. That's why I decide ultimately to include those moments, so people get to see what a sweet and open person he can be. You see more of his humanity and less of the myth'. Writing in the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw notes that the film 'tests the fanbase loyalty to the limits by being pointlessly and uninterestingly shot in arthouse black-and-white (though it exasperatingly bleeds out into colour over the closing credits) and by including an awful lot of material on the tour bus which is – how to put this? – not very interesting'. 'Part concert film, part home-video-on-wheels - Neil and bus driver JD, perfectly happy nattering about nothing in particular like two old blokes on a road trip - it has the same warmth and chattiness as the gigs', said the reviewer in Mojo magazine. 'Hard to think of another live Neil Young movie where he seems both a little unsure of himself and so contented'. Over the years, magazines and critics have devised lists of the greatest-ever music documentaries. It's not exactly an easy task, given the vast number of films that have been made about a dizzying range of subjects. As the film critic Mark Kermode once explained when embarking on his own list, 'What I have tried to do is to chart an admittedly erratic course from early milestones such as Jazz on a Summer's Day to more modern offerings such as Dig! and Moonage Daydream to give some sense of the vast and unwieldy scope of the genre and its subjects – from low-budget obscurities to Imax-friendly blockbusters; from cool blues to frantic post-punk via unearthed Afro-Cuban history'. Here are 13 great music documentaries worth tracking down (if you haven't already seen them). * Gimme Shelter (1970), by cinema verite trailblazers Albert and David Masyles and Charlotte Zwerin, is a riveting look at the Rolling Stones' US tour of 1969 - the tour that ended in the infamous outdoor concert at Altamont Speedway, at which the band hired local Hells Angels to provide security. It didn't end well. Mick Jagger at one point asks the crowd: 'Who's fighting, and what for? We don't want to fight'. One man, Meredith Hunter, who drew a revolver, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel. It was the end of the Sixties, in more ways than one. * Moonage Daydream (2022), by Brett Morgen, was an immersive and mesmerising documentary about David Bowie. As A.O. Scott remarked in the New York Times, 'it's less a biography than a séance. Instead of plodding through the chronology of Bowie's life and career, Morgen conjures the singer's presence through an artful collage of concert footage and other archival material, including feature films and music videos'. Morgen's previous documentaries included Crossfire Hurricane, about the Stones. * Woodstock (1970), Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning documentary of the August 1969 Woodstock festival, a counterculture landmark, features music by such acts as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Santana, Janis Joplin, Ten Years After, Jimi Hendrix and The Who, as a vast crowd descended on Max Yasgur's farm at Bethel, New York. Mick Richards's 2019 features documentary, Creating Woodstock, fleshes out the story. A two-disc 'Ultimate Collector's Edition' Blu-Ray set - Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music: The Director's Cut' - includes many never-seen-before performances from Joan Baez, Grateful Dead and others. * The Beatles: Get Back (2022) is Peter Jackson's three-part documentary series, based on footage and audio recorded in January 1969. Variety magazine sums it up thus: "What's startling about 'Get Back' is that as you watch it, drinking in the moment-to-moment reality of what it was like for the Beatles as they toiled away on their second-to-last studio album, the film's accumulation of quirks and delights and boredom and exhilaration becomes more than fascinating; it becomes addictive". Also featured: the Fabs' rooftop concert in London's Savile Row. * Laurel Canyon (2020), by Alison Ellwood, is an excellent two-part documentary series about the musicians who inhabited Laurel Canyon, 'a rustic canyon in the heart of LA' and made it a hotbed of musical creativity. Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt and Don Henley are among those interviewed. * It Might Get Loud (Davis Guggenheim, 2009), showcases three guitar virtuosos - Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White - to scintillating effect as we trace the development of careers and their signature sounds. Uncut magazine: "It Might Get Loud is about the way the electric guitar and the amplifier combine to create a kind of superpower, transforming the player into a sonic god". * Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999), is a brilliant retelling of how the American musician Ry Cooder assembled a diverse, mostly elderly, group of veteran Cuban musicians and steered them to global popularity. "Filmed in Amsterdam and New York, the concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being", as the New York Times described it. * Oil City Confidential (Julien Temple, 2010) is a celebration of R&B specialists Dr Feelgood - Wilko Johnson, Lee Brilleaux, John B. Sparks, John Martin - and the distinctive Canvey Island environment from which they sprang. * Muscle Shoals: The Greatest Recording Studio in the World (Greg Camalier, 2013) tells how a small city in Alabama became home to the Fame recording studios and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which were established by Fame's former house band. Among those featured are Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge and Keith Richards. * 20 Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville, 2013), deservedly won an Oscar for its sympathetic look at the careers of notable backing singers such as Merry Clayton, who duetted with Jagger on the Stones song, Gimme Shelter. Archive footage and new interviews combine to thrilling effect. Simple Minds: Everything is Possible (Joss Crowley, 2023) is a comprehensive look at the rise of Simple Minds, the Glasgow band who rose from art-rock beginnings to become the most successful Scottish group ever. Among the talking heads are band members as well as Bob Geldof, Bobby Gillespie and James Dean Bradfield. Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands (Blair Young, Carla J Easton, 2024) cleverly unfolds a story of Scottish pop music from the 1960s onwards through the recollections of those far-sighted women who helped make it; among them are Strawberry Switchblade, Sunset Gun, His Latest Flame and the Hedrons. Big Gold Dream (Grant McPhee, 2015) is a fascinating, award-winning account of two hugely influential Scottish indie record labels - Edinburgh's FAST Product and Glasgow's Postcard Records. Bands featured include Fire Engines, Scars, the Rezillos and Aztec Camera. Two years later, Grant took up the story again in Teenage Superstars, featuring The Vaselines, BMX Bandits, The Pastels, The Soup Dragons, The Jesus and Mary Chain, amongst others. Recommended.
Time Out
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
International music shows in Buenos Aires
The name of his tour says it all: 'Say Hello to the Hits.' Lionel Richie can indeed boast of being a hit-making machine over his five decades of career, with songs that have left their mark on various generations like 'Hello,' 'All Night Long,' 'Say You, Say Me,' and 'Easy,' to name just a few. A night to relive great songs with one of the most influential artists of all time. Fun fact: In 1985, Lionel Richie, along with his friend Michael Jackson, launched 'USA for Africa,' which raised over $100 million for poverty relief with the famous 'We Are the World.' When: September 11.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carnie Wilson's Daughter Lola Brings in Her Mom and Aunt Wendy to Audition for 'American Idol 'with 'Hold On'
It was a family affair on American Idol. On the Sunday, March 23 episode, Lola Bonfiglio — Carnie Wilson's daughter — auditioned alongside her mom and Aunt Wendy in front of the show's judges Luke Bryan, Carrie Underwood and Lionel Richie. "I'm guessing you come from a musical family," the "Before He Cheats" artist, 42, asked before Lola launched into her set. "First, I've gotta get some family members," the Idol hopeful, 19, who is the granddaughter of The Beach Boys' co-founder Brian Wilson, teased. Related: When Does American Idol Come Back? All About the Show's 2025 Season — Including Which Alum Is Returning as a Judge! Lola ended up bringing out her mom, 56, and Aunt Wendy Wilson, 55, two of the three members of Wilson Phillipps."Wilson Phillips?!" Underwood exclaimed. "This is so cool," Carnie said, noting that the audition would be "a family affair." Lola then performed a rendition of Wilson Phillips' classic 1992 hit, "Hold On," with her father, Rob Bonfiglio, accompanying her on guitar, alongside her mom and her aunt. After the performance, the "We Are the World" hitmaker, 75, noted how "good" Lola was, as the "Cry Pretty" artist said: "You can tell that is a thing with family; everybody is genetically designed to just sound good together." Carnie and Wendy said they "love singing" with Lola, with the former adding, "but we love Lola by herself even more." Lola then tackled a different song for the judges solo — Kacey Musgraves' 2019 track "Rainbow." After her performance, she received some feedback from the judges. "When you sing the lead, hold the story out longer. It could have been the nerves, but you were getting to the end and just cutting it off," Richie said, while the "Buy Dirt" singer, 48, noted, "The tone and pureness, and the quality of your voice, that's the perfect song for you. But this competition is going to require you to belt too, and let loose a little bit, filling up the room a little more." "If I'm on this show I'm going to push myself, that's why I want to be on American Idol. I want to grow," Lola replied. The judges unanimously voted to send her to Hollywood. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Related: Get a Sneak Peek at the Season 23 Contestants Competing to Be the Next American Idol (Exclusive) In an interview with Entertainment Tonight later that day, Carnie recalled how her daughter's musical education started in the womb. "When she was in the womb, I was playing Frank Sinatra with the little headphones, putting it up to my belly going, 'This kid going to be musical, whether she likes it or not,'" she teased. In an interview with PEOPLE in April 2024, Carnie raved about Lola's voice. 'To stand beside Lola and hear that voice, her voice is so beautiful,' she said at the time. 'She can sing anybody in this family under the table. I can't get over it. I get emotional when I'm on stage, so I have to look the other way." Read the original article on People
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ronald Reagan's daughter takes shot at Trump for cozying up to Russia: ‘I think he would be grieving'
Former President Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis took aim at President Donald Trump during an appearance on CNN, saying that her father 'would be grieving' over Trump's recent moves to isolate the U.S. from its traditional allies. 'The America that I grew up in, that we all have known, is one that had alliances and was friends with other countries, and it would go to other countries who were in trouble, who were being tyrannized, or invaded, or, you know, otherwise suffering from famines, for example,' Davis told CNN's Anderson Cooper, saying her dad 'would be heartbroken' by Trump's actions. The president has spent the first month and a half in the White House starting trade wars with U.S. allies such as Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, and berating Ukraine as it attempts to fight off Russian aggression, prompting widespread concern among European leaders. His administration has also gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development. Davis said Reagan believed in an America that was 'this force in the world that if another country was in trouble, would cross oceans to help them.' Speaking about the 1985 song We Are the World, which was recorded in support of sending aid to Africa, she said, 'That's the America that we know, and that we have been bonded with, and suddenly that America is no longer that. Suddenly we're hated in the world.' Davis, who uses her mother Nancy Reagan's maiden name, has previously slammed the Republican Party. 'I disagreed with my father,' she told CNN. 'I protested some of his policies.' But, she said, 'This is beyond politics.' In a New York Times op-ed that ran over the weekend, Davis recalled the only conversation she ever shared with her dad on why he wanted to become president. It was the evening of Reagan's first inauguration in early 1981, and he told her in the Lincoln Bedroom that he believed he could 'make this world a safer, more peaceful place.' 'When he left and the stillness of Lincoln's bedroom folded around me, with all of its history and stories, I was struck by the fact that he spoke about the world, not just America,' she added. Davis, 72, noted that while she at times disagreed with her father's policies, she never had any doubts regarding his intentions. 'I knew he wanted America to be a strong partner in the world, bonding with other countries to defeat tyranny and aggression,' she wrote in The Times.
