Special guests include Annette Bening and Jennifer Tilly
NOIR CITY: Hollywood returns to the Egyptian Theatre with 23 films for eight days this month -- March 20-23 and March 27-30. The lineup of classic film noir shines a spotlight on women whose cinematic legacy is entwined with the rise of film noir. FNF president Eddie Muller and board member Alan K. Rode will share hosting duties.
Many of this year’s films star the six actresses profiled in Muller’s 2002 book Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir, which is being reissued in April 2025 in a newly revised and expanded edition. Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Savage, Coleen Gray, and Marie Windsor are the core cadre of women featured in this year’s program, which includes some of their signature films, including, respectively, Out of the Past (1947), Tension (1949), The Prowler (1951), Detour (1945), The Killing (1956), and Hell's Half Acre (1954).
The festival opens with a nitrate screening of Road House starring legendary actress (not to mention, director, writer, producer) Ida Lupino. In addition to the classic noir films screening this year, the festival will present four neo-noirs: The Last Seduction (1994), The Grifters (1990) featuring a Q&A with co-star Annette Bening, Destroyer (2018) featuring a Q&A with director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Phil Hay, and Bound (1996) featuring a Q&A with co-star Jennifer Tilly.
Festival program schedule and tickets for NOIR CITY Hollywood are available here
The Mysterious Benedict Society Show: Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi interviews
Whenever I watch any show, I’m always interested in interviews with the creators/showrunners and The Mysterious Benedict Society is no different.
The show was devloped by a writing duo, Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi, who have never written for TV before. I’ve collected some interviews that I think are pretty interesting reads even for book fans because they share what they got from the books and what they hope they brought from the book to the show:
This 1st one from Final Draft is a shorter one about their writing process in general: https://blog.finaldraft.com/the-mysterious-benedict-society-finding-the-moments-of-truth-in-middle-grade-fiction
This one from The Credits focuses on why they were drawn to the books, never looking at it as a “kids” show, switching the streaming home it would be on mid production, the reasoning for casting Hale despite Benedict being older in the books, and having to work on production away from set: https://www.motionpictures.org/2021/06/creating-the-wonderful-world-of-disneys-the-mysterious-benedict-society/
This website "Showbiz Cheat Sheet” has gotten a couple articles out of the show: 1 about what they changed (confirming Curtain is the character they took the most liberty with because “He’s the most different in terms of how we portray him just because we found something about him very specific that we felt a guru type educational free thinker kind of clicked with the scenes and clicked in a slightly different presentation of this amazing character from the book.”) and another interview going more into what age group the show is for: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/mysterious-benedict-society-disney-series-change.html/ and https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/mysterious-benedict-society-what-age-disney-series.html/
and one final one from “The Wrap” that talks about a lot of interesting things in my opinion: https://www.thewrap.com/mysterious-benedict-society-showrunners-say-future-seasons-may-not-follow-the-books/amp/
One thing that stuck out to me in a couple of these interviews are them saying that if the show gets picked up for future seasons, it’s likely they’re going to mix and match elements from the future books (including the prequel) unlike this first season which stuck to the first book only. The first interview from “Showbiz” ends with Phil Hay saying “The first book really truly lent itself almost perfectly in scope and dynamic to a season that was contained. But the subsequent books, we’ll see if we’re lucky enough to get another season, I think there’ll be a lot of harvesting to do from different areas of those books but we haven’t figured it out yet. There’s some incredible stuff from the second book. We still haven’t conceptualized it completely. The first book is very much portrayed in terms of the story in this season. It makes for a very proper season I think.”
Then, stil by Phil Hay, gets more into it in the interview by “The Wrap”: “The subsequent books are all wonderful, and they’re very different, too, So if we were lucky enough to continue and get another season, I think it would likely draw from a lot of them in different ways, as opposed to being very, very specific. “We don’t know yet because we haven’t broken it down. But my feeling is, in a series of books, kids don’t age quite as quickly as they do in real life. So I think as we moved on, we want to be true to who the actors are as they grow so that the tone and style and stories we tell are tonally congruent with that.”
Also in the other way, Trenton Lee Stewart had a small appearance on an Arkansas news show where he got to share a tiny bit about his opinion on the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PHPVmaLR1w "They've really done a good job capturing the spirit of the story and the characters," and “I think they've striking the balance that I tried to strike in the books where things were light hearted and fun a lot of the times, but you could really still feel the vulnerability of these kids”
Blumhouse Productions is developing a currently untitled Dracula film. Karyn Kusama is set to direct the film and Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay are writing the script.
While the project does not yet have a studio attached, Blumhouse does have a first-look deal with Universal. The two recently enjoyed great success with The Invisible Man, so we can probably expect Universal to jump at the chance for another project featuring a classic horror monster.
