Reese Announces the 2019 AT&T Hello Sunshine Filmmaker Lab!
AT&T and Hello Sunshine want to send YOU to Los Angeles this summer to learn the art of filmmaking from some of the best in the business! The program, from AT&T, Hello Sunshine and Fresh Films, creates unforgettable opportunities for young women to build skills, learn from industry experts and get hands-on experiences in professional film production.Young women with a passion for storytelling and creating content can submit now through June 2nd at att.com/FilmmakerLab. The program is free and open to any experience level. Good luck!
Audible Sets First Originals From Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine
Audible and Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s media company focused on telling women’s stories, have revealed three audio memoirs they’re co-producing exclusively for the Audible platform.
Audible’s initial Hello Sunshine originals are first-person narratives from three women: music-industry veteran Sophia Chang, judge Rosemarie Aquilina, and comedian-activist Maysoon Zayid. The multi-hour audio memoirs will be available on Amazon-owned Audible in late 2019 and early 2020.
The original productions fall under a pact the companies struck a year ago, which kicked off with the launch of Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine on the audiobook and audio-entertainment service last summer featuring titles with strong female characters.
Chang, Aquilina, and Zayid are each “singular women” who have “pursued their dreams with conviction, achieved success in the face of improbable odds, and are redefining societal norms around female identity and power,” said Charlotte Koh, Hello Sunshine’s head of digital media and unscripted. She added that Audible is “providing these women with a premium service that commands a wide and highly engaged audience.”
The 5 (original) ladies of Big Little Lies – Reese, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Zoe Kravitz and Shailene Woodley – are gracing their own covers of the US edition of In Style magazine this month! Each lady has their own cover, and inside the magazine has a new interview and photoshoot with each of them. Reese talks about ambition, female leadership, and her friendships with her Big Little Lies co-stars, and the accompanying photoshoot is a throw-back to the 60’s!
The magazine hits news-stands on May 17th (2 weeks away!), but you can read the interviews below and find the photos in our Gallery:
The 5 Stars of Big Little Lies Have a Lot to Say — About Each Other
Guess which actress is the most “rigorous,” who’s a “ninja,” and who reliably keeps “old-lady candies” in her purse.
Big Little Lies is a Very Big Deal. It is an epic, insanely entertaining, tremendously acted hit. It features an ensemble of women, from longtime movie stars to burning younger talents who are each Big Deals on their own (oh, and coming up in Season 2, Meryl Streep). But it represents more than that. It is, frankly, a triumph for the ladies. BLL is great work done by great women, with respect and craft, the conscious sharing of opportunity, and, most significantly, very real friendships.
The lives of the cast — Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoë Kravitz — have overlapped in myriad ways. Nicole and Reese have a production partnership (Big Little Lies is their brainchild). Reese starred with Laura in Wild. Laura starred with Shailene in The Fault in Our Stars. Shailene starred with Zoë in Divergent. Nicole has known Zoë since she dated her father, Lenny Kravitz, 16 years ago. And so it goes. These women’s relationships run much deeper than “ensemble cast”; rather, they have influenced and enriched each other’s lives.
Laurene Powell Jobs Invests in Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine has received funding from Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and a subsequent investment from Otter Media.
The strategic investments, announced on Wednesday, are designed to support two-year-old Hello Sunshine’s growth in the creation of stories celebrating women and distributed across multiple platforms. The values of the investments were not disclosed.
“We very intentionally chose strategic investors who passionately and unequivocally support our mission of changing the landscape for women by putting them at the center of every narrative we create, elevate, and champion,” said Hello Sunshine CEO Sarah Harden. “We are extremely proud to extend our relationship with Otter Media, who has been a devoted partner since the beginning. We are truly honored to begin working alongside the team at Emerson Collective given their commitment to supporting impactful storytelling.”
Hello Sunshine is a producer on HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere,” Amazon’s “Daisy Jones & the Six,” Apple’s “Are You Sleeping?,” and an untitled morning show project. Its unscripted “Shine on With Reese” launched in July, followed by “Master the Mess,” both on DirecTV. Feature projects include Sony’s “A White Lie,” Fox 2000’s “The League of Wives” and “Where the Crawdads Sing,” MGM’s “Legally Blonde 3,” and a Martina Navratilova documentary.
The company is partnered with Eve Rodsky, whose debut book, “Fair Play: The 5 New Rules to Revolutionize Your Marriage, Home and Sense of Purpose,” will be published in the fall.
Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, founded social change organization Emerson Collective in 2004. Emerson Collective became the majority owner of the Atlantic in 2017.
Otter Media, part of WarnerMedia, was formed in 2014 to acquire, invest in, and launch global over-the-top media services. In addition to Hello Sunshine, its portfolio includes Fullscreen, Rooster Teeth, Ellation, VRV, and Gunpowder & Sky.
Starz to Develop ‘Kin’ Series With Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine banner has inked a deal with Starz to develop “Kin,” Variety has learned.
The multi-generational family drama comes from “Queen Sugar” and “Constantine” writer Davita Scarlett, who developed the project with Chester Jones III. Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine film and TV head Lauren Neustadter are on board as executive producers alongside Scarlett.
“The opportunity to work in partnership with Davita Scarlett as well as Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine on this series is serendipitous,” Starz president of programming Carmi Zlotnik said in a statement. “Hello Sunshine puts women at the forefront of the stories they are telling, and that fits perfectly into Starz’s overall programming strategy to offer compelling content that appeals to female audiences.”
Witherspoon described Scarlett’s script as “utterly original, complex, and incredibly nuanced.”
“She deftly explores issues around identity and the secrets family members keep to protect themselves and one another. I’m so excited to team up with Starz to bring these strong, memorable female characters to life on screen,” Witherspoon said.
Universal Joins Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Abrams, Jordan Peele in Committing to Hiring Female Directors
Universal Pictures’ Peter Cramer, Focus Features’ Peter Kujawski and DreamWorks Animation’s Margie Cohn have committed to hiring at least one female director in the next 18 months as part of the 4% Challenge.
The development was announced Tuesday and comes in the wake of Time’s Up and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative launching the challenge on Jan. 25 at the Sundance Film Festival. The organization said on Monday that more than 50 high-profile Hollywood producers — including Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Abrams, and Jordan Peele — have committed to the 4% Challenge.
The initiative is part of the Timesupx2 campaign to double the number of women in leadership positions.
The name is derived from women having directed only 4% of the country’s top grossing movies over the past decade. Nina Jacobson, Paul Feig, Amy Schumer, Angela Robinson, and Franklin Leonard committed to the promise during a panel discussion on Friday, and Tessa Thompson inaugurated the challenge during a keynote address. Regina King was the first to pledge to taking the 4% Challenge during her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, vowing to employ at least 50% women on everything she produces.
Lena Waithe, Rashida Jones, Olivia Wilde, Armie Hammer, Kumail Nanjiani, Josh Gad, Amy Pascal, Bryce Dallas Howard, Brie Larson, Eva Longoria, Rachel Brosnahan, Constance Wu, Janet Mock, Brad Simpson and Kerry Washington are among the notable producers on board.
The Sundance Film Festival recently reported that 31% of feature-length submissions this year had at least one woman director, as did 35% of episodic and shorts content. Of feature films and episodic content accepted in 2019, 41% had a woman director while 52% of shorts did.
Reese graces the cover of the new February issue of US Vogue! The magazine features a story on her as the “moral compass of Hollywood” (which is a great title for her!), and features an extensive new interview and a new photoshoot – including a photo with Betty and Ava. It’s a fantastic article exploring how Reese’s career has developed, and focuses mostly on her recent move into production and business; there are also some great quotes from Cheryl Strayed, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. I also liked reading about where her Oscar is, and that she has hardbound copies of scripts from her movies!
Read the full article below, and find high quality photos from the cover and the shoot in our Gallery. We’ll have scans for you soon. Make sure you pick up a copy when you can!
Reese Witherspoon: Activist, Advocate, Hollywood’s Moral Compass
The first time Reese Witherspoon found herself suspended from school was in third grade, when she was caught running a custom-barrette business from her desk. (She painted store-bought barrettes and sold them at a profit; when her paint pens leaked onto her desk, she was apprehended.) Another time was during her junior year, at a private girls’ high school in Nashville, when she complained to her English teacher that the work they were doing wasn’t challenging enough. Witherspoon was in many ways a model student—good grades, popular, a soccer player and cheerleader—but she also had a reputation for telling teachers what they were doing was wrong.
“I always tended to be outspoken with my opinions,” she says. “Whether they were appropriate or not.”
More than two decades later, Witherspoon is still fighting the status quo. Insofar as Hollywood is an extreme version of high school, a fishbowl of fragile egos, insecurity, and often-misdirected sexual energy, she has taken it upon herself to be a champion of the overlooked and the underestimated. She may still bear the imprint of the perky-blonde roles that kept her in American-sweetheart mode for the better part of two decades, but something’s changed beneath the surface. Witherspoon has become a formidable businesswoman, launching a company that has a hand in just about every imaginable sector of contemporary media, and she’s become a formidable activist as well, fighting for greater representation in Hollywood of people of color, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and—most of all—women.
“The idea is to put women at the center of the story,” Witherspoon says, sitting barefoot and in jeans in the kitchen of her sunny, sprawling Los Angeles home as her three dogs—a German shepherd named Nash (short for Nashville), a French bulldog named Pepper, and a lab named Hank—amble and snort among the rooms. “I was sick of making movies where I was the only female lead on the set. I was sick of seeing scripts where there was one female role, badly written, and yet every actress in town wanted the part because there was nothing else.”
There is perhaps no greater example in the history of television of putting women at the center than Big Little Lies, the HBO sensation that picked up eight Emmys in 2017. Witherspoon executive-produced the series with Nicole Kidman, with whom she also stars alongside Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, and Shailene Woodley. In the second season, which airs in late spring, Meryl Streep will bring the show’s number of female leads to six.
MGM Partners With Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine On ‘Eleanor Oliphant’; Liz Hannah Scripting
MGM has teamed with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine on the film adaptation of the Gail Honeyman bestselling novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Set to write the script is Liz Hannah, who wrote the Steven Spielberg-directed The Post. It is a potential star vehicle for Witherspoon. She is starring for MGM in Legally Blonde 3 and the studio has made it a priority to find more film vehicles for her to star in and produce.
Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Levy Neustadter will produce for Hello Sunshine.
Hello Sunshine optioned the book May, 2017. Eleanor Oliphant is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine who goes from living a lonely life to realizing the only way to survive is to open your heart. The novel was published by the Penguin Random House imprint Pamela Dorman Books. Witherspoon optioned the Glasgow-based novelist’s book very early and it went on the sell over 1 million copies in the U.S. and Canada with a long run on the bestseller lists.
Eleanor Oliphant author Honeyman is repped by The Artists Partnership, Emily Hayward Whitlock and Madeleine Milburn Ltd.
Said Witherspoon: “Gail has created an incredibly smart, funny, and eccentric character who beautifully demonstrates the ways vulnerability and human connection can so deeply enrich your life. Eleanor’s journey is utterly extraordinary. To know her is to love her, and I’m so excited to team up with MGM and Liz Hannah to bring this unbelievably gorgeous character to life on-screen.”
Said MGM President of Motion Picture Group Jonathan Glickman: “For over 17 years, Reese has been an integral part of the fabric of MGM both in front and behind the camera, and we couldn’t be happier to continue this partnership with her Hello Sunshine team on this wonderful and beloved novel.”
Cassidy Lange will oversee on behalf of MGM.
Honeyman is repped by The Artists Partnership, Emily Hayward Whitlock and Madeleine Milburn; Hello Sunshine is represented by CAA and Hansen, Jacobson; Hannah is repped by UTA, Echo Lake Entertainment and Jackoway Tyerman.
The Morning Show (2019) Seasons 1 & 2 available now on AppleTV+
Season 3 coming in 2023 Role: Bradley Jackson Genre: Apple TV+ Series - Drama News / Info / Photos / Official Site
Your Place Or Mine (2023) On Netflix now Role: Debbie Genre: Romantic comedy News / Info / Photos / Official Site
Legally Blonde 3 (202?) In production Role: Elle Woods Genre: Comedy News / Info / Photos / Official Site
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The Morning Show (2019)
