‘Duck Dynasty’
From left: Duck Dynasty reality stars Jep Robertson, Willie Robertson, Jase Robertson, Si Robertson and Phil Robertson.
From left: Duck Dynasty reality stars Jep Robertson, Willie Robertson, Jase Robertson, Si Robertson and Phil Robertson.
The family boasts a multimillion-dollar duck-call business, the year’s No. 1 unscripted show on cable and the No. 2 show on cable overall (behind AMC’s The Walking Dead). A Dec. 11 Christmas special drew 8.9 million.
They released four New York Times best-selling books, dropped a Christmas album (Duck the Halls), which debuted at No. 4on the Billboard 200 chart, and inked deals for more than 1,200 products, including action figures, board games and greeting cards. Next, rival execs will look to cash in on Duck — developed during Bob DeBitetto’s tenure atop A&E — with Dynasty knockoffs, an outcome that doesn’t seem to bother the Robertsons.
With the traditional family sitcom a rarity on the networks — and faith something of a dirty word — hungry viewers arrived in droves, making the show about a Louisiana family a hit
"It doesn’t hurt that our wives are, like, super, super pretty.” Jep Robertson says of the A&E show's success.
Chris Meledandri, CEO, Illumination Entertainment, grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and credits his parents for his determination and spirit. His father, who died in 1980, was a noted men’s fashion designer. “Both my parents were disrupters in their own way. In the 1960s, my father chose to introduce Italian-style clothing into a world that was filled with boxy Brooks Brothers suits. So if you were dressing in his clothes in New York or California, you were breaking a rule," says Meledandri.
This year, Illumination achieved the greatest feat of its six-year history with Despicable Me 2, returning to the world of reformed criminal mastermind Gru (Steve Carell) and his adorable — and easily merchandised — Minion army. Costing a mere $75 million to produce, thanks to lean management and a shorter development cycle, the sequel has grossed $918.6 million globally for Illumination and partner Universal, making it the second-highest-grossing film of the year so far after Disney’s Iron Man 3 ($1.2 billion) and the fourth-biggest animated film of all time, not accounting for inflation.
"What makes Steve McQueen’s picture distinctive is its all-encompassing organic feel," writes John Singleton of 12 Years a Slave. "Everything came together with this movie: the acting, by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o, among others; writing; McQueen’s direction; Hans Zimmer’s delicate, haunting score."
"This year has seen a number of films helmed by African-American directors that raise the bar and also many questions concerning the industry’s historical outlook on what is commercial and what isn’t," writes John Singleton. "In a town where many executives hold six-figure positions and are basically hired to say no ad infinitum, several projects have been made outside the system and are finding commercial and critical success."
Legendary producer Laura Ziskin initially developed Lee Daniels’ The Butler. The picture eventually found life with a phalanx of producers and financiers that included NBA ballplayer Michael Finley; Sheila Johnson, the ex-wife of BET’s Bob Johnson; and producer Cassian Elwes.
When Ryan Coogler, a newly minted USC film school grad, took his screenplay about the police killing of Oscar Grant to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in January 2012, he had no idea what the next year would bring. Within six months, the work was in production in his native Oakland with seed money from a Chinese investor and other producers, including co-star Octavia Spencer. A year later, the picture won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance and went on a worldwide tour, garnering kudos at Cannes, Deauville and from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the Independent Spirit Awards.
The successes of Fruitvale Station, Lee Daniels' The Butler and 12 Years a Slave have been game changers in Hollywood. Writes John Singleton: "The chains on what can be made and what can’t in Hollywood have been unshackled."
"Fruitvale Station was made totally outside the Hollywood studio system and every ounce of the picture feels authentic," writes John Singleton. "The lives of the people involved in the movie will never be the same."
The biggest rule Ted Sarandos and Netflix keep breaking is their decision to release all episodes of each series at once, enabling “binge” viewing, a very consumer-centric approach. Television series always have released new episodes on a weekly basis, with serialized dramas typically ending each week with a dramatic cliff-hanger to build anticipation between episodes.
"I watched Vince as he tried to wrap his arms around this beast of a story; you didn’t know where it was going. It could kill him at any moment," Cranston says. "But he dove in, head first. If you analyzed it now, it would seem pretty foolish. Friends should have told him, 'Don’t do it! Don’t do it! No one is going to buy this.' On top of it all, Vince is a man with no firsthand experience with drugs or killing people. When I tell fans, 'No, no, Vince is straightlaced,' they can’t believe it. Deep down, there has to be a crazy alien monster. There’s gotta be something! But he truly lives vicariously through the characters in his head."
"It was the experience of working with Vince that allowed me to embrace Walter White as he was breaking the rules. It allowed me to say, 'You know what, why not? Vince is doing it.' Walt is the authentic manifestation of Vince’s demented mind. and that, to me, breaks all the rules," says Cranston.
"Vince started this journey on a whim — a fantasy, really: What if someone lost everything, bought an RV, went to the desert, started cooking meth and became a drug dealer? He then took this crazy, ridiculous germ of an idea, expanded upon it and let it grow in a petri dish and it became this [metaphorically] cancerous thing," Says Cranston. "Suddenly, he had something wonderful and dangerous."
"I’m pretty boring — I never intentionally break rules," says Gilligan. "I think that’s what most interested me about Walter White. So, as an experiment, I wanted to start the series with this nice, likable guy, and then, bit by bit, make him less so. Ironically, that’s the opposite of what happened. Walt remained likable throughout. People would tell me, 'He’s doing terrible things, but I can’t stay mad at Walt!' This is due to Bryan: He never vacillated, he never got scared. He just went for it, 150 percent."
"It’s funny, the only time I worked on Breaking Bad by myself was when I wrote the pilot," says Gilligan. "Sure, I had ideas for where the story might go, but honestly I’ve forgotten them all by now. It wasn’t until I had a relationship with Bryan and really got to know him that I could see all the possibilities."
"Bryan didn’t give just a 'performance' in the show — he was the embodiment of Walter White. Even as a nonactor, I can say it’s tough to not want to be liked onscreen and not want to be likable. It’s a basic human desire," says Gilligan. "But Bryan never tried to soften the character, not even one time. There was no 'What if Walt were just a little nicer to Jesse in this scene?' or 'What if he didn’t drive such a hard bargain with these drug dealers?'
"He always had courage," Gilligan says of Cranston. "That’s what we all expect and hope to get from actors, but many fear that people will dislike them for the character they’re playing. This never bothered Bryan for a minute."
From left A24’s Daniel Katz and Nicolette Aizenberg, actors Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley and A24’s David Fenkel.
By the time of the Sundance Film Festival in January, the 5-month-old finance and distribution company A24 had acquired three films for a combined mid-seven figures: Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring and James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now. “Everyone told us, ‘Very cool films, but they’re not going to work,’ ” says A24 co- founder Katz, 36. Too art house. But the New York-based company made them work — in a big way. The three films, which all tell colorful stories about teens, in total earned more than $26 million.
"For most of his career, Matthew had been put in a box as a comedic actor or a romantic-comedy leading man, and obviously, he was very successful doing that. But he had the guts to say, 'Hey, you know what, I am a great actor, period, and I want to stretch,' " writes Mud producer Lisa Maria Falcone. "He had so many other opportunities for much better paydays, but he said he wanted to do Mud, to do it for scale, and he gave his heart and soul. So he took on this small project for very little money, and he camped out on that island [in the Mississippi River], the site where the movie was shot. He didn’t want to stay in a hotel because he really wanted to become this character. That says a lot about a person and his respect for the craft."
"A lot of actors are not capable of moving outside of their comfort zones and taking risks because it’s too scary. But when I speak to him, and I see this intensity in his eyes, you know this guy is going to kill it because he’s ready and he has removed all doubt," writes Mud producer Lisa Maria Falcone. "There was a scene in Mud that stands out: when he is hitting the sand, and he’s hitting it extremely hard to the point where his hands were bleeding. You know, most actors will have somebody stand in in a similar situation. But no, he did it on his own."
"When The Next Day came out [in March], I was genuinely surprised — a new album from Bowie? That’s fantastic. I didn’t even know it was on the horizon, particularly with the rumors of his health circulating for the last few years," says Trent Reznor. "I listened to it while going back and forth to the Valley for Nine Inch Nails rehearsals. It was a puzzle — it didn’t sound like how I thought it might sound. I thought maybe it was a bit conservative sonically. But over several months, it made its way into my playlist on countless bus rides; when I’m sitting alone to listen to music, I reach for The Next Day. I’m still unraveling the riddle that he presented. I’m still getting new meanings out of the lyrics."
"Bowie is the most important figure to have inspired me," says Trent Reznor. "To a kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania, out of reach of college radio and on the wrong side of the Internet — in isolation — to see this alien creep in, this larger-than-life character who was smart … he’s been a consistent reference point as somebody who is uncompromising. He has found an audience yet challenges that audience and continues moving forward in a fearless way."
Jennifer Lee brought the heat to Disney with Frozen, which has reinvented the princess musical to critical and box-office acclaim ($266 million worldwide since opening Nov. 22). With Frozen, Walt Disney Animation studios celebrates its 90th anniversary. Lee, 42, is the first woman in the studio’s history to act as a director on one of its animated features (she co-directed with Chris Buck).
For her, the bigger accomplishment is that she’s the first writer, not just at Disney but at any major animation house, to become a director. Most animation helmers tend to start as animators and story artists before working their way up the ranks and eventually being handed the reins to a feature. Lee, who has been with Disney’s animation division for a little more than two years, was working on 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph as a writer when she was drafted by Disney and Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter to work on Frozen’s script. Her vital contributions led to being upped to co-helmer alongside Buck, who directed Tarzan and Surf’s Up.
“I think they really embraced my perspective coming in,” says Lee of the Frozen production team. “And a lot of people don’t realize that screenwriters are visual thinkers — but that’s what makes them screenwriters, so it’s not a crazy jump.”
With Gravity, director Alfonso Cuaron broke a rule: that you shouldn’t do business with family members. But he had done so before. “I have a long history of collaborating with family,” says Cuaron. “Two of my films were written by my brother, and now [son] Jonas and I wrote Gravity.” Says Jonas, 30, of working with his dad, “The idea sounds more crazy than the reality.” Adds his father, “What is great is that when you’re working, you’re not family, just writers.”
Together, the Cuarons dreamed up scenarios that would require new technology to realize, much in the way Alfonso and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki invented a virtuoso technique to capture a seamless four-minute scene for 2006’s Children of Men (a feat so fiendishly difficult, the crane operator collapsed in tears when it succeeded). Gravity features a host of innovative, near-impossible shots, and the spectacle keeps drawing audiences to theaters: Since its October release, the film has grossed nearly $650 million worldwide.
The Bible executive producers Roma Downey and Mark Burnett had been developing stories from the Good Book to bring to the small screen for more than a year and a half before the series debut in March.
“I’m known for my politeness,” says Downey, who played the Virgin Mary in the series. “I think if it were up to me, I might still be out there in town, knocking on doors politely, hoping that someone would make The Bible series with us. My husband is less polite than I am, so he came up next to me and kicked those doors down.”
“There really aren’t any rules,” says Burnett, who can boast six series on air in the U.S., including The Apprentice, Shark Tank, The Sing-Off and Trust Me, I’m a Game Show Host. “Someone once said, ‘Nobody knows anything,’ and I think that’s so true. People said to us, ‘Nobody’s going to watch the Bible on primetime television,’ and those same people were so shocked when millions of people tuned in. But we weren’t surprised.”
This year, James Wan found himself in unfamiliar waters. He was releasing a film in the middle of summer, an environment choked with sequels, prequels and remakes. When everything else had budgets that ranged into the hundreds of millions of dollars, his cost a mere $20 million. Instead of movie stars, he had Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga — excellent actors but nowhere near the A-list. And yet Wan’s horror film The Conjuring opened July 19 at No. 1, pulling down $41.8 million in its first weekend. Then Wan did it again: Two months later, his shock-sequel Insidious Chapter 2 — starring Wilson and Rose Byrne — opened at No. 1, grossing $40.2 million out of the gate.
“I try to keep the number of projects I’m involved in down to one per year,” says the 36-year-old Wan, who was born in Malaysia but raised in Melbourne, Australia. “But that wasn’t the case this year — it’s been pretty incredible going at this pace.”
Key and Peele's ongoing sketches featuring President Obama (Peele) and his volatile “anger translator” Luther (Key) have catapulted the duo into the zeitgeist. The President is a fan — he told them he needs his own Luther — and so is comedy kingmaker Judd Apatow, who will team with the duo on a semiautobio- graphical film set up at Universal.
Like Obama, both men are biracial. Key, 42, grew up in suburban Detroit, raised by progressive social worker parents who adopted him before having a biological son. And Peele, who turns 35 in February, is the only son of a single white mother who raised him on Manhattan’s Upper West side. “We both had similar experiences of going to school and having other students be like, ‘That’s not your mom,’ ” recalls Peele. Adds Key: “Being biracial, we have been acting since we were born to fit in in any given situation. That’s our story. And for the President of the United states to share our story, it’s kind of amazing.”
"We were trying to solve a comedic problem: How do you make fun of this man who is calm, reasonable, smooth, levelheaded, competent? Of course, we hoped it would be successful, but I don’t know that we ever thought that he’d ever see it," says Key. "What a gift for us to have actual confirmation."
"The standards and practices, like anywhere, are sort of arbitrary and weird," says Peele. "We can get away with certain super-edgy things, and then if we have a little bit of butt crack, you know, they’ll scrutinize that butt crack until we finally blur it. One of the joys of working with Comedy Central is at this point, they’ve had enough shows that have pushed the boundaries, so that now they’re like, 'Go for it fellas.' "
Averaging 2 million viewers on Wednesday nights, Key & Peele is the No. 1 cable show in its time slot among young men and a multiplatform phenomenon, boasting 400 million video streams.
"It looks like it could be a movie about family and what family means to different people. Jordan has just found family members recently. And I’m adopted, and I’ve had a relationship with my biological mother for about 16 years now," says Key. "I have siblings that I didn’t know 16 years ago; and what is the difference between these blood relatives and the brother that I grew up with my whole life? One of Judd’s great talents is he knows how to inject the heart into a story."
"He’s a real master of starting with truth, autobiographical truth," Peele says of their upcoming film with Judd Apatow. "The only siblings I know I have I’m starting to meet right now. My dad’s litter, as I call it, is sprinkled around the country. We would be playing characters close to ourselves with a similar [family] dynamic."
From left Bard and Vegard Ylvisaker.
It was supposed to be a joke, a prank for their Norwegian talk show, Tonight With Ylvis. When Bard and Vegard Ylvisaker (better known as Ylvis) recorded the now-ubiquitous “The Fox (What Does the Fox say?)” with renowned producers Stargate, the brothers hoped the song would fail so they could go on air and say they blew their chance to make a hit.
The Norwegian comedy duo even started working on a book for the stunt. “We thought it would be funny if we had, like, a tanked song project and merchandise that was really well made,” explains Bard, 31. But the video of their song quickly went viral on YouTube, racking up 20 million views in a week. As of early December, the video had more than 275 million views and was named YouTube’s top trending video of 2013.
Over the past few months, Ylvis has performed at the star-studded iHeartradio Festival, signed with a major label, appeared on U.S. talk shows and landed a Simon & Schuster deal brokered by CAA for the “joke” book. What Does the Fox Say?, featuring the song’s lyrics, was released Dec. 10 and has made Amazon’s top 50 sales ranking. But the brothers cite receiving an award for international favorite artist at Hong Kong’s Mnet Asian Music Awards as their most memorable event. “The whole thing was so big, so for us, that was really crazy,” says Vegard, 34.
Although Ylvis is amazed at the success they’ve had — and they did have to rewrite their talk-show script after their prank plan went awry — they’re thrilled by what’s happened. “This is like our big dream coming true,” says Bard. “This is what we have been working for for years.”
From left: CBS TV President David Stapf, actress Rachelle Lefevre, CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler and actor Dean Norris.
Prior to Under the Dome, summertime had been reserved for reality and low-budget scripted fare at the broadcast networks, and the drama — about an indestructible dome that cuts off a Maine town from civilization — fit neither category. It featured pricey sets, big special effects and a sizable cast of recognizable stars.
"To have us play ourselves was just one more element that pulled this movie beyond what was expected," says James Franco of This is the End. "Within the world of reality entertainment, you don’t expect the cast of Jersey Shore to have to deal with the end of the world. That’s what this movie is like, with all these familiar people in these extreme circumstances."
"It’s so much more impactful that Michael Cera dies in the beginning and not some partier played by Michael Cera," says Franco. "Some pretty lady doesn’t die. Rihanna dies. It let us riff on our actual selves, the public’s percep- tions of us and our fictional versions of ourselves. There’s a lot more energy in that."
"What’s been so satisfying is to watch this natural process that made them into great comedy filmmakers," says Franco. "I think a lot of it comes from Judd Apatow going back to Knocked Up and even Freaks and Geeks. It’s a very collaborative, open forum that happens at all stages of production."
"When they stepped into the role of director, it was so smooth because they had been in all other positions before, whether it was as writers or executive producers," says Franco. "Sure, there was this sense of, 'There’s absolutely no boss other than them! The kids are manning the ship!' "
Jehane Noujaim directed the acclaimed documentary The Square, a firsthand account of the Egyptian revolution.
Jehane Noujaim was photographed by Matt Furman on Nov. 12 at home in New York City.
Haifaa al-Mansour was photographed by Christopher Patey on Nov. 11 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Saudi director Haifaa Al-Mansour helmed Wadjda, the first Oscar submission from a country that famously has no cinemas.