News

60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace was known for his hard-hitting interviews, never letting his subjects off the hook no matter how much they squirmed. It wasn’t any different when Wallace put late-night legend Johnny Carson in the hot seat. In fact, Carson pulled the plug during 60 Minutes’ first attempt at a profile, only to relent and try again two years later in 1979.

Even then, the comedian couldn’t understand why an investigative journalist would want to interview him. “Why are you doing this?” he asked Wallace. “I’m not running a boiler room operation. I have no phony real estate scam. I’m not taking any kickbacks. I did steal a ring from Woolworths once when I was 12 years old.”

While Wallace insisted that Carson was chosen because he was a national treasure, the interviewer still found ways to make the Tonight Show comic uncomfortable. He confronted Carson with “stereotypes” associated with him — shy,...

Kurtis Ming. (Photo courtesy CBS News and Stations / Paramount Global)

Kurtis Ming, the consumer affairs reporter and news anchor best known for his “Call Kurtis” consumer reports series, has departed Sacramento’s CBS station after more than two decades.

His departure was announced during the 4 p.m. news broadcast on Kovr (Channel 13), the CBS-owned station that served as Ming’s workplace for 22 years of his broadcast TV career.

No reason was given for his departure, with the station’s anchors only saying that Ming “has decided to take another road.” From the broadcast on Friday, it appeared Ming’s decision was his alone; his contract was set to expire in February, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Desk has reached out to Ming by e-mail for additional information.

Ming started at Kovr in 2003, when the station was owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group. At the time, he...

Toian Matchinga, who guest-starred three times on the 1960s CBS series The Wild Wild West and appeared on such other shows as Death Valley Days, I Dream of Jeannie and The Odd Couple, has died. She was 82.

Matchinga, who later in her acting career went by her birth name, Caryn Matchinga, died Sunday of natural causes at home in Belmont, Massachusetts, her family announced.

In films, Matchinga appeared for Don Siegel in Madigan (1968), for Irvin Kershner in Up the Sandbox (1972) and NBC’s Raid on Entebbe (1977) and, in her final onscreen role, for Costa-Gavras in Mad City (1997).

The Ohio native booked gigs on The Wild Wild West, which starred Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, in 1965, 1967 and 1969. Her résumé also includes episodes of The Wackiest Ship in the Army, The Rat Patrol, The Flying Nun, The Big Valley, Rango, Ellery Queen and Rich Man, Poor Man.

Caryn Lee Matchinga was born in Painesville,...

CNN anchor Chris Wallace is getting ready to leave the cable network.

Wallace, who hosts an eponymous show on weekend mornings and the CNN Max interview series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, will depart when his three-year contract ends. The 77-year-old, whose TV career spans half a century and multiple news networks, says he’ll look to independent platforms like streaming or podcasting for his next stop, as that’s “where the action seems to be,” he told The Daily Beast (which broke the news of his departure).

“Chris Wallace is one of the most respected political journalists in the news business with a unique track record across radio, print, broadcast television, cable television and streaming,” CNN CEO and chairman Mark Thompson said in a statement. “We want to thank him for the dedication and wisdom he’s brought to all his work at CNN and to wish him the very best for future.

Chris Wallace. (Courtesy photo)

Veteran journalist Chris Wallace is departing Warner Bros Discovery-owned CNN to pursue the development of his own media empire, he confirmed in a news interview on Monday.

Speaking with the Daily Beast, Wallace said the time was right to bring his brand of journalism to different platforms, at a time when news conversations are moving away from cable TV in favor of podcasting and streaming.

“This is the first time in 55 years I’ve been between jobs,” Wallace, 77, told the news outlet. “I am actually excited and liberated by that.”

Wallace said he isn’t sure what’s next, adding that “not knowing is part of the challenge. I‘m waiting to see what comes over the transom. It might be something that I haven’t thought of at all.”

In a statement, CNN’s CEO Mark Thompson called Wallace “one of the most respected...

Chris Wallace came to CNN to get heavily involved with reaching streaming audiences, and it looks like he will leave the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed news outlet still looking to do the same.

Wallace, a veteran commentator who held forth on Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Sunday” as well as NBC News’ “Meet The Press,” told The Daily Beast Monday that he planned to leave CNN, which he initially joined to participate in the scuttled streaming operation CNN+, to try his hand at reaching people via an independent digital venture.

CNN confirmed Wallace would leave three years after he initially signed on after leaving Fox News to do so. The typical anchor contract in the news business is for a similar amount of time. CNN tried to convince Wallace to stay, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Chris Wallace is one of the most respected political journalists...

“All five of us met at an orgy,” Harper Steele deadpans while gesturing to the core team behind “Will & Harper,” the new Netflix documentary about a consequential road trip she took with Bff Will Ferrell after coming out as a trans woman. And Ferrell, his eyes sparking with punchlines to come, seizes the opportunity to build on the bit.

“We didn’t remember that we had met until much later,” he says. “We’re like, wait — Acapulco?” At that, Ferrell scrunches up his face like one of those suburban dads he’s so famous for playing on-screen and lowers his voice as if something embarrassing had slowly dawned on him.

They’re joking about the sex party, of course, but the group behind “Will & Harper” does boast a tangled network of connections that extend back through the decades, one that includes marriages, longtime friendships and artistic partnerships. It...

CBS is planning to supercharge the long-running newsmagazine 60 Minutes for its 57th season, giving it additional time on the broadcast network and adding a slew of digital spinoffs, including a podcast and a Fast (free, ad-supported streaming) channel.

According to 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, “The first thing we wanted to do was make sure that the bar was going to be as high for anything we do, wherever we put it out, as it is for the Sunday show.”

In digital, that means CBS News correspondent Seth Doane will lead a new podcast extension called 60 Minutes: A Second Look, which will dig into the show’s archives to unearth never-before-heard interviews, as well as conversations with the correspondents and subjects. Among the episodes are a look at Saturday Night Live (including never-heard audio from creator Lorne Michaels), and reporting on Taylor Swift, featuring a conversation that took...

You’ll need more than an hour a week this season to really experience “60 Minutes.”

The venerable CBS newsmagazine, entering its 57th season, will move firmly beyond its Sunday-evening model with the launch of a free ad-supported streaming channel devoted to its library of investigations, features and profiles — including Andy Rooney’s essays and Mike Wallace’s reports. CBS News is also debuting “60 Minutes: A Second Look,” a 12-episode audio series hosted by CBS News correspondent Seth Doane that gives listeners access to a vault of stories, along with never-before-aired material and interviews with the producers and correspondents who reported and assembled the material. The streaming channel is available Thursday on Paramount+, Pluto and CBS News digital venues while the audio show begins September 17.

There’s also a special edition of the program slated for Monday, October 7, that will offer new reporting on both the Republican and Democratic candidates.

Exclusive: Former Keshet International SVP Limor Gott Ronen has reunited with Alon Shrutzman at 5XMedia.

Gott Ronen has joined the management company and production house as partner/producer, working alongside 5X partner Ryan Lindenberg, the former Berlanti Productions exec who joined in June, to add to 5X’s scripted and premium docs slate. She will also continue to separately develop and produce projects she already has in the pipeline.

Between 2012 and 2021, Gott Ronen was SVP at the international arm of Israeli broadcaster Keshet, working under Shtruzman, who became Co-CEO of 5X alongside Gil Goldschien earlier this year. The pair were among the key players who established Keshet International as a major player by making Rising Star one of the biggest selling formats in the world and selling several scripted titles for adaptation in the U.S., including Prisoners of War, which became Showtime’s Homeland.

Since exiting, Gott Ronen has built a slate,...

Update: Donald Trump defended his personal attacks on Kamala Harris, despite some suggestions from allies that he focus on issues of the economy and the border.

“I think I am entitled to personal attacks,” Trump told reporters at a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, NJ. “I don’t have a lot of respect for her.”

Trump noted that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have been engaged in their own personal attacks, calling him and Jd Vance “weird.”

The press conference appeared to be a Trump campaign effort to get the candidate to do a bit of a reset. For the first 50 minutes or so, Trump read from notes, hammering Harris on the economy as well as the border and crime. Behind him were props of household goods, designed to emphasize the rise in prices during the Biden administration.

But Trump often meandered into different subjects.

Director Michael Mann's magnum opus is 1995's "Heat." The movie's sprawling shoot-out scene (the best of its kind) is what many most remember about "Heat," but the picture doesn't only rely on action. "Heat" is just as compelling when Detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) are sitting down for a cup of coffee. Mann's next film, 1999's "The Insider," relies only on dialogue scenes to keep up the tension and easily succeeds.

"The Insider" is nearly as long as "Heat" and is just as compelling despite there being no action scenes to break up the talky bits. Mann is one of our best action filmmakers, but his talents extend past action movies. (Read our full ranking of Mann's films here.)

A journalism thriller, "The Insider" recounts the story of a 1996 "60 Minutes" expose on the tobacco industry. (The story had previously been detailed...

Morgan Freeman is a veteran actor known around the world for portraying roles in several iconic movies like The Shawshank Redemption, The Dark Knight trilogy, and Se7en. Being an actor of color, Freeman has often talked about racism in the world.

Wanting people to live in harmony, Freeman once appeared in a 2005 interview and shut down racist comments with just five words. Explaining the unnecessary racist comments, Morgan Freeman truly stood for the people suffering from racism!

Morgan Freeman in a still from The Shawshank Redemption (Image via Warner Bros.)

When Morgan Freeman Shut Down Racist Remarks

After starring in The Shawshank Redemption and Se7en, Morgan Freeman found worldwide fame and love for his performance. Back in 2005, the actor once sat down for an interview where he talked about his views on politics and the current world.

Morgan Freeman with Clint Eastwood in a still from Unforgiven (1992)

Sitting for a...

Richard Leibner, a pioneering talent agent who represented such notable broadcast news journalists as Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney, Norah O’Donnell, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer and Fareed Zakaria, died today at his home in New York City. He was 85.

His death was announced by UTA vice chairman Jay Sures in a memo to staffers obtained by Deadline.

Leibner began his agency career in the 1960s as co-founder, with Nate Bienstock, of the New York-based firm N.S. Bienstock, which was acquired by UTA in 2014. Leibner retired in 2021.

“Richard will be remembered as the agent who transformed the news business,” Sures wrote in the memo. “Decades ago, he made it his personal mission to see that big name news stars should be treated and compensated like traditional movie and television stars. Over the years, he signed and represented some of the best and brightest and most iconic names including Dan Rather,...

Richard Leibner, the prominent talent agent who transformed the TV news business by guiding the careers of such renowned broadcast journalists as Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and Norah O’Donnell, has died. He was 85.

Leibner died Tuesday at his home in New York, UTA vice chairman Jay Sures announced. The agent started out in the 1960s at New York-based N.S. Bienstock, which was acquired in 2014 by UTA.

Leibner also signed and represented the likes of Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Bob Simon, Steve Kroft, Bill Whitaker, Chuck Scarborough, Paula Zahn, Brian Stelter, Daniel Schorr and Fareed Zakaria before he retired in December 2021 after 58 years in the business.

“Decades ago, he made it his personal mission to see that big name news stars should be treated and compensated like traditional movie and television stars,” Sures told staffers in a memo obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

Born in Brooklyn,...

Richard Leibner, a celebrated talent agent who represented some of the best-known anchors in TV news, first at a firm he helped build and then for UTA, died Tuesday after a battle with cancer. He was 85 years old.

In his time, Leibner served as an agent and adviser to Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Bob Simon, Steve Kroft, Bill Whitaker, Diane Sawyer, Chuck Scarborough, Paula Zahn, Brian Stelter and Fareed Zakaria, among others. He was a passionate advocate for clients, and was never been shy about delivering his opinion of the latest goings-on in the ever-churning news sector.

Leibner firmly believed that top news anchors should be treated akin to Hollywood royalty. “Decades ago, he made it his personal mission to see that big name news stars should be treated and compensated like traditional movie and television stars,” said Jay Sures, UTA’s vice-chairman, in a memo to staffers Tuesday.

Exclusive: Few people embody the act of balancing legacy media with the digital frontier quite like Bill Owens.

As the executive producer of 60 Minutes, he is the caretaker of a broadcast TV franchise well into its sixth decade, one of the few pieces of programming outside of NFL football capable of drawing mass tune-in. He is also aiming to deliver news about topics like the 2024 election, China, Gaza, the southern U.S. border, Cillian Murphy, and many more in a way that Gen Z cord-nevers can engage with it.

“I really do want to meet viewers where there’s interest,” he told Deadline in an interview in the show’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Far West Side. “We’re not trying to grab people on social media or TikTok by being something that 60 Minutes isn’t. We want to use the same language, we don’t want to do silly things.

Chris Wallace just found out Jon Hamm almost played his father Mike Wallace in a film.

During an appearance on Max series, Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, Chris talked to Jon about getting typecast in roles like his Don Draper in the show Mad Men.

During the conversation, Jon revealed that he was offered the similar role of portraying Mike Wallace, known for his tough interviewing.

Keep reading to find out more…

“You know, after Don Draper sort of made an impact in the zeitgeist, I was…every script I was offered had a cigarette and a hat and a skinny tie. In fact, I was offered to play your father at one point,” he said, via TheWrap.

“In a movie. It was it was an original script that someone had written about your dad’s life.”

“They sent it to me. And I said, this script is total bullsh-t,...

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers.]

The musical legend of Leonard Bernstein was very much of interest to Emmy-winning editor Michelle Tesoro (“The Queen’s Gambit”). But what really drew her to Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” (Netflix) was the complicated love story, spanning four decades, between Lenny (Cooper) and Chilean-American actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Theirs was a rocky 25-year marriage that descended into a divided life consumed by his enormous appetite for music, fame, and same-sex lovers.

“The love story was more attractive to me in terms of telling a story and finding a way for people to connect with these iconic people,” Tesoro told IndieWire. “Love comes in many different forms: how we accept it, and how it functions in our lives is not always a romantic love. It’s that ‘you can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need’ type of thing. But then how do you deal with a life like that,...

Nobody can predict the future, but sometimes our predictions are way, way off. Back in 1946, 20th Century Fox studio executive and Oscar-winning film producer Daryl F. Zanuck said television was a fad that would run its course in six months. "People," he argued, "will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

Zanuck was wrong. Television not only changed the industry, it changed the world. And over time this medium that seemed like a flash in the pan developed its own identity, not just as an industry but as an art form. Brilliant writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling helped push the stories told on television into exciting and challenging directions, setting the stage for ambitious standalone and serialized entertainments that wowed audiences and made a genuine impact.

One television series that made its mark and remains influential and iconic today is Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone,...

David Corvo, considered the driving force behind Dateline, NBC’s top-rated and longest-running primetime series, is stepping down as Senior Executive Producer at the end of the year. He will remain with NBC News as an adviser on various projects, reporting to Rebecca Blumenstein, President of Editorial at NBC News.

Corvo will be passing the torch to Liz Cole, President of NBC News Studios and executive producer of Dateline. Corvo and Cole “have worked together to make Dateline the gold standard in true crime reporting, and successfully expanded it from the network to broadcast and cable syndication, to its streaming channel Dateline 24/7, and to audio where it consistently tops Apple’s podcast charts,” Blumenstein said in a note to NBC staffers announcing Corvo’s pending departure.

Cole began her career at NBC as a page, rising to Executive Producer of Dateline. Cole will remain President of NBC News Studios, which...

Bob Barker was a pillar of television’s greatest generation.

Barker, the enduring host of “The Price Is Right” who died Aug. 26 at the age of 99, was a World War II veteran who trained as a Navy fighter pilot. But his destiny was not to fly missions in the Pacific theater. Barker’s service to his country came in the years after the war, when he and an elite corps of seasoned radio announcers laid a large part of the foundation for commercial television as we know it today.

Barker was a born broadcaster. He had a resonant voice, and his 6-foot-1 frame didn’t hurt in making an impression on viewers in the early days of grainy TV pictures. But his biggest asset was the gift of being to speak extemporaneously on live television – and make it look and feel natural while doing so.

Bob Barker, Longtime Host of ‘The Price Is Right,...

This article contains discussions of racism and lynching.

The Twilight Zone was created by Rod Serling, who believed in using television as a platform for social activism and commentary. The show was initially inspired by the murder of Emmett Till, a Black teenager who was brutally killed in Mississippi in the 1950s. Serling's attempts to directly adapt Till's story were met with censorship, leading him to create The Twilight Zone as a way to subtly include social commentary within the sci-fi and horror genres.

The Twilight Zone has gone down in history as one of the best sci-fi TV shows of all time, but most people don’t know that the series started because of an infamous real-life murder. During the early 1960s, the anthology TV series presented stories that dealt with paranoia, social fears, and horror. The Twilight Zone includes memorable episodes like "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and "To Serve Man.

Tina Turner was a legend in every sense of the word, and her death at age 83 on May 24 sparked countless tributes, as well as a renewed interest in her life story. Turner's life was marked by incredible resilience, and the comeback she launched in the 1980s after leaving her abusive husband in 1976 made her a prime example of how to rise from the ashes after hardship.

Fortunately, Turner seemed to find new love and peace - as well as a new home - in the last few decades of her life. Turner died at her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, but she first moved to the country in 1995. As it turned out, love had something to do with her decision to leave America, but her own desire for peace and privacy also played a role.

In 1985, Turner began dating German record producer Erwin Bach, per People, and she...

“Come on,” CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said on Tuesday in response to a bold claim Fox News made after agreeing to pay Dominion Voting System nearly $800 million.

Fox News was of course sued for defamation by Dominion because, as part of the conservative network’s support of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election, it allowed guests and even network hosts to falsely claim that Dominion had manipulated the election results. During the discovery phase of the lawsuit, a mountain of evidence came out proving that Fox News knew that the claims were false. Nevertheless, it continued to fight the lawsuit until Tuesday, when just before the jury trial was to begin, Fox and Dominion reached that settlement, agreeing to pay $787 million.

In a statement released as part of the settlement, Fox didn’t admit to any wrongdoing, and it offered no apology to Dominion. The closest it came was a passive,...

[Warning: The below contains Major spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5, Episodes 1-3.] The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is back and already making big swings in the show’s final season. In the first three installments of the fifth chapter in Amy Sherman-Palladino‘s Prime Video comedy, it was unceremoniously revealed that titular comedian Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) and her closest cohort, manager Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) had fallen out. Teased during one of the season’s flash-forward sequences, Midge sits down with Mike Wallace (played by Currie Graham) for a 60 Minutes interview. While sitting down for the chat, she is asked about her 25-year friendship and professional bond with Susie that seemingly ended in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, that’s the only information viewers are given in the first three installments, and it is sure to sit heavy in fans’ stomachs as they await an explanation. (Credit: Prime Video) The feeling isn’t dissimilar...

Morgan Freeman, a legend in Hollywood in more ways than one, is opening up about how he found his place as an actor in the middle of the civil rights movement and why it’s an “insult” for Black history to be just one month every year.

During an interview with The Sunday Times, published online Saturday, the Now You See Me actor said while he credits his career to courage and luck, he also credits changes in America.

“When I was growing up there was no ‘me’ in the movies,” he said. “If there was a Black man in a movie he was funny. Until Sidney Poitier came and gave young people like me the idea that, ‘Ok, yes, I can do that.’”

Freeman went on to be an Oscar-winning actor, starring in an abundance of films, including Million Dollar Baby, Invictus, The Dark Knight, Se7en, Driving Miss Daisy and most recently,...

It’s the final bow for Prime Video’s awards darling “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and the latest season introduces a new narrative device that changes the whole show.

The opening episode of “Maisel” Season 5 picks up not with Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) or her family or manager Susie (Alex Borstein), but with her daughter — a 23-year-old Esther Maisel (Alexandra Socha) decades in the future.

Creator and showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino told IndieWire that the “Maisel” creative team has toyed with using time jumps for years, but felt that it was too early to dive into the characters’ futures.

“It wasn’t earned enough. Nobody gave a shit yet,” she said. “But it was a device we really wanted to use… we kind of went all in on it because it’s a fun storytelling device, and it helps inform in quicker pops. It makes the current story that we’re doing...

In order to best explain the field of ethnomethodology, which studies how social order comes to happen through the actions of individuals, sociologist Harold Garfinkel set up “breaching experiments,” an invitation for researchers to break traditional societal rules and examine how people react to the disruption. For example: experimenters can act like they’re guests in their homes and tip their families for their “service,” or they can reach out to customers in stores and restaurants, “confusing” them for clerks and servers. With these social non-sequiturs, Garfinkel hoped people would see how they often are unconscious keepers of rules and referees of normalcy—therefore, beings with much more power than they imagined.

In 1958, while he was in the midst of defining ethnomethodology at UCLA, Garfinkel met Agnes, a 19-year-old who claimed to be intersex and arrived in hopes they would be eligible for genital surgery in order to live fully as a woman.

Chris Wallace, the CNN Anchor and host of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? on HBO Max, had a startling confession during his segment on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

During a conversation between Maher and Wallace lamenting today’s conservative/liberal polarization of the news, Wallace traced the problem back to the golden days of three major channels and the world tuning in at 6:30 Pm to hear about the world from Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley.

Those programs drew audiences of as much as 29 million, but they weren’t profit centers. But the men who ran the networks at the time saw news as a public service, and if it didn’t lose an enormous amount of money, they were fine with that.

But when Chris Wallace’s father, Mike Wallace, and his 60 Minutes team started in 1968, things shifted. That show began making money, “and suddenly, the executives in television said,...

The enduring legacy of Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" can be traced back to how the series revolutionized broadcast television in the 1960s. Described as a "series of imaginative tales that are not bound by time or space or the established laws of nature," "The Twilight Zone" ran for five seasons over the span of five years. Season 1's episode premiere, "Where is Everybody?" appropriately set the tone for the anthology series with its surreal and Kafka-esque qualities. However, somewhere around the fourth season, the show's appeal began to wane. Why did this happen?

The mixed critical response to season 4 was mainly due to Serling's dwindling involvement, along with scriptwriter Charles Beaumont's limited contribution due to illness. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, Serling said that he worked non-stop on the project seven days a week, which made him utterly exhausted in the process. While exhaustion contributed...

Dick Ebersol is one of the seminal figures in the past 50 years of broadcast television. He helped create “Saturday Night Live.” He hired Brandon Tartikoff, genius programmer and innovator, to revive NBC’s primetime fortunes. As president of NBC Sports, he oversaw the network’s Olympic strategy for many years. “Sunday Night Football” was his idea.

Ebersol recounts the high (and sometimes low) points of his career in television in a new autobiography, “From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears and Touchdowns in TV,” published this week by Simon & Schuster.

While all of the great moments in his career were at NBC, Ebersol, now 75, started as a researcher at ABC Sports in 1967. Legendary ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge, Ebersol tells Variety, “was the most important figure in my life,” and the executive who eventually took on Ebersol as a trusted associate.

It was also...

CBS News’ venerable “60 Minutes” is creating a time machine, of sorts.

The long-running newsmagazine will form the bulk of a new channel at Pluto TV, the ad-supported streaming outlet that is, like CBS News, part of Paramount Global. The streaming channel is expected to launch sometime this year, Bill Owens, executive producer of the show, told staffers Thursday.

“The channel will allow us to share our broadcast and historic archive with the wider world,” Owens told employees in a memo. Nicole Young, a longtime producer who works with “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, will oversee the new venture, which will potentially let consumers sample decades of “60 Minutes” reports, whether they encompass a Mike Wallace investigation, an Ed Bradley interview with Bob Dylan, or Lesley Stahl’s various exchanges with former President Donald Trump.

New VIP+ Analysis: An Exclusive Data Dive into Fast Performance Metrics

The move shows “60 Minutes...

Accept no substitutes! Aleksandr Ptushko’s fairy-tale folk hero saga is the real deal in medieval spectacle. When the nation calls, warriors rise from the steppes to defend against invaders, even if they have to defy royal authority. The first Soviet film in anamorphic scope and stereophonic sound, Ilya Muromets is an eye-opening series of fantastic characters and storybook episodes, loaded with Ptushko’s amazingly beautiful special effects and jaw-dropping scenes with entire armies filling the scene. The capper is one hell of a fierce dragon — the fire breathing, three-headed Zmey Gorynych!

Ilya Muromets

Blu-ray

Deaf Crocodile / Seagull

1956 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 91 83 min. / Street Date May, 2022 / The Sword and the Dragon, The Epic Hero and the Beast / Available from Vinegar Syndrome / 34.98 & 39.98

Starring: Boris Andreyev, Shukur Burkhanov, Andrei Abrikosov, Natalya Medvedeva, Ninel Myshkova, Sergey Martinson, Georgi Dyomin, Aleksandr Shvorin, Nikolai Gladkov, Vladimir Solovyov.

Cinematography: Fyodor Provorov, Yuli Kun

Production Designer: Yevgeni Kumankov...

SAG-AFTRA’s unclaimed residuals fund has grown to roughly $76 million – up 60% from $48 million six years ago. According to the union, the fund now contains 124,000 separate accounts for members and others, living and dead, that it can’t locate. That’s up from 96,000 accounts in 2016.

“The funds may be unclaimed for a variety of reasons including a bad address or as a result of mail returned for other reasons; unresolved estate issues, or the funds may be in trust for an inactive or dissolved loan out corporation,” a spokesperson for the union said. “Most often, residuals may be waiting for a recipient or their agent to formalize a change of address or submit the appropriate paperwork to claim the funds. The union uses a number of tools to locate and get money to those individuals due unclaimed residuals including mail, email and telephone outreach to last known address and telephone number,...

Richard Leibner, the long-serving agent who has backed some of the best-known news anchors in the U.S., is delivering some headlines of his own: He’s retiring after decades on the job.

The veteran talent representative intends to step away from his role as partner at United Talent Agency at the end of the year, according to a memo sent to staffers by Jay Sures, co-president of the agency. “Throughout his career, Richard has represented one major news figure after another, building them up, helping make them household names and playing an important role ensuring journalism always stood for something meaningful, ethical and about high quality,” Sures said.

His exit from UTA will mark the end of an era. Leibner is a clever and passionate advocate for clients, and has never been shy about delivering his opinion of the latest goings-on in the ever-churning news sector — as long as he isn’t being quoted.

Chris Wallace is leaving Fox News Channel, he announced on his program Sunday morning, and will join the CNN Plus streaming-video outlet, a move that abruptly sunders the cable-news outlet’s connection with one of its most recognized and independent journalists.

Wallace delivered the news himself, in the last minutes of his “Fox News Sunday,” which he has anchored for nearly two decades on the Fox Corporation-owned outlet. “I want to try something new, to go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in. I’m ready for a new adventure. And I hope you’ll check it out,” said Wallace. The words will be the last he utters on the program.

CNN confirmed Wallace’s jump less than two hours after he announced his departure, and said he would lead a daily show during which he would interview newsmakers from the worlds of politics, business, sports and culture.

On Sunday, Scott Pelley gets a full hour to tell a story which has gripped him for 20 years.

In the season premiere of “60 Minutes,” the correspondent will give viewers a dramatic look at the firefighters who responded to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, complete with actual recordings of emergency calls made during the horrific event. Pelley went through tapes of conversations made available by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Fire Department of New York and found what may be the only one available between a victim of the attacks in their last moments and a 911 operator. Most, he says, have been kept out of the public sphere to give families privacy. In the end, Pelley conducts what is essentially a three-act suite, introducing firefighters, taking viewers through a harrowing trip up one of the Twin Towers in a doomed...

She keeps a list of men who’ve walked out on her. She’s Ok with that. She also keeps a list of men who’ve aced her out of gigs.

Lesley Stahl this week starts her 30th year as a top 60 Minutes correspondent, a role model for women who’ve not only survived but thrived in important sectors of the media business.

With non-scripted television now springing back to life, it’s worth noting that that there’s still a show that dates back to 1968 – a lively variant from Pooch Perfect, Whac-a-Mole, Love Island or the other heavy artillery of Reality Week.

The news business today arguably is run by women, both in front of the camera and behind — prime examples of the not-so-quiet revolution in the media world. A Covid survivor, Stahl, 80, got her first job thanks to the 1970s version of affirmative action. That meant apprentice-level opportunities...

Distinguished Canadian actor Christopher Plummer, best known for his role as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, has died at the age of 91.

He won an Oscar in 2012 for the film Beginners and was also nominated for The Last Station in 2010 and All the Money in the World in 2018. In the latter film, he replaced Kevin Spacey, whose performance as billionaire J Paul Getty was removed.

According to reports, Plummer died peacefully at his home in Connecticut with his wife Elaine Taylor at his side. Lou Pitt, his long-time friend and manager of 46 years, remembered him as "an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession", the BBC reported.

Plummer's many other films included The Man Who Would Be King and Knives Out.

He was a memorably villainous Klingon in the sixth Star Trek film and played TV anchorman Mike Wallace in 1999's The Insider.

He also...

While Julie Andrews might have felt that the hills were alive in the “Sound of Music,” it was Christopher Plummer’s Captain von Trapp who swept her off her feet in the 1965 Best Picture Oscar winner. Sadly, the Canadian-born actor is dead Friday morning at his Connecticut home at the age of 91.

His matinee idol good looks and smooth vocal intonations served him well throughout his seven-decade career in various venues, starting with Broadway in the ‘50s. He won two Best Actor Tonys, the first for the musical “Cyrano” in 1974 and the second for 1997 drama in “Barrymore,” based on the life of actor of matinee idol John Barrymore. He also was honored with two Primetime Emmy wins. The first was for his work in the 1976 miniseries “Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers” as a powerful banker pitted against a rival played by Kirk Douglas. The second was for narrating the 1999 children’s special “Madeline: Lost in Paris.

by Nathaniel R

I thought Christopher Plummer would never die. Which is to say, I thought he wouldn't die for a long time yet. The last act of his career, running roughly from the one-two punch of his second Tony win in Barrymore (1997) and his much-praised Oscar-snubbed Mike Wallace in The Insider (1999) through his mischievously pleasing star turn as Harlam Thrombley the manipulative patriarch in the surprise hit Knives Out (2019), was like a gauntlet thrown down; dare to imagine the movies without me!

We'd rather not, thank you very much. But now we sadly must with the actor's death at 91 years of age...

Update: “Beginners” director Mike Mills has spoken to IndieWire about the passing of Christopher Plummer, who won an Academy Award for his role in the film. Plummer played Hal Fields, an aging patriarch who comes out to his son late in life, and chooses to live his final years as an out gay man.

“It was a great honor to work with Christopher, to be in conversation with such a dedicated artist,” Mike Mills said. “In his 80s when we met, I marveled at his intense curiosity, hunger to make something vulnerable, and his need to challenge himself. Christopher was both dignified and mischievous, deeply cultured and always looking for a good laugh. As he said about playing my father who was dying ‘not an ounce of self pity,’ and that’s how he was. I’ll always be indebted to Christopher for honoring the story of an older man...

Christopher Plummer, the legendary actor known for “The Sound of Music” and countless other iconic roles including “Knives Out,” “A Beautiful Mind” and his Oscar-winning “Beginners,” has died. He was 91.

Plummer died early Friday at his home in Connecticut. His wife of 53 years, Elaine Taylor, said the cause was a blow to the head after a fall, according to The New York Times.

“Chris was an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession with great old fashion manners, self-deprecating humor and the music of words,” longtime friend and manager Lou Pitt said. “He was a national treasure who deeply relished his Canadian roots. Through his art and humanity, he touched all of our hearts and his legendary life will endure for all generations to come. He will forever be with us.”

Plummer was a three-time Oscar nominee, first for 2009’s “The Last Station,” then again for Ridley Scott...

Christopher Plummer, the Canadian-born Shakespearean actor who starred in films including “The Sound of Music” and “Beginners,” died on Friday morning at his home in Connecticut. He was 91.

“Chris was an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession with great old fashion manners, self deprecating humor and the music of words,” said Lou Pitt, his longtime friend and manager of 46 years. “He was a national treasure who deeply relished his Canadian roots. Through his art and humanity, he touched all of our hearts and his legendary life will endure for all generations to come. He will forever be with us.”

An imposing theatrical presence with a well-cultivated, resonant voice, that critic John Simon once observed, “in its chamois mode, can polish mirrors,” Plummer was best known for playing Captain von Trapp in the Oscar-winning musical “The Sound of Music.” He also won an Oscar in 2012 for his supporting turn in the film “Beginners,...

At the dawning of 2021, one of the first big new releases harkens back to a movie trope that goes back nearly eighty years, the “team-up picture”. Probably 1943 really, when Universal Studios had the idea to pair two of its big “monster” properties in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, which proved so successful that they added Dracula for their House Of flicks before sending them out to pasture after encountering comedians Abbott & Costello. The idea would resurface in the 60s as the Japanese giant “beasties” tangled in several films (even our King Kong dropped in for one). In between those series other genres gave it a try with Westerns and crime sagas, low-cost since they’re historical figures. Most recently the franchises of Marvel and DC have converged for The Avengers (four so far) and Justice League. So, why not another “real-life re-uniting”? How about a fictional “get together” of four African American icons?...

So, How Was Your 2020? is a series in which our favorite entertainers answer our questionnaire about the music, culture and memorable moments that shaped their year. We’ll be rolling these pieces out throughout December.

Metallica had booked gigs all around the world, including several summer festival headliners in the U.S., but Covid had other plans for 2020. After the group canceled its tour dates, it donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Covid relief organizations through its All Within My Hands charitable foundation, using money it raised from streaming video of past concerts.

In the world of celebrity interviewers, softball questions are often the coin of the realm. And then there’s Leta Powell Drake, who was the longtime program director of Lincoln, Neb. CBS station Koln-tv and for 21 years the producer and host of its “Morning Show.” In the ’70s and ’80s, she interviewed some of the most famous names in entertainment with an approach that combined the charm of Mary Hart, the enthusiasm of Jiminy Glick, and the bluntness of Mike Wallace. It left many of her subjects staring wide-eyed into the camera, it’s impossible to imagine today, and it must be seen to be believed.

Currently obsessed with Leta Powell Drake, the greatest interviewer of all time. pic.twitter.com/3oCYAd9vZD

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 12, 2020

From asking “Splash” star Tom Hanks “How do you kiss underwater without bubbles coming out of your nose and mouth?” to telling Gene Hackman...

C-span’s Steve Scully, who was set to moderate the Oct. 15 town hall presidential debate, believes that his account was hacked when a tweet appeared on his timeline communicating with Anthony Scaramucci, the former Donald Trump aide who now is calling for his defeat in the election.

Scully is regarded as one of the most even-handed anchors in Washington, D.C., and his network prides itself on not taking sides in partisan debate. But on Thursday evening, a tweet appeared from his account that read, “@Scaramucci should I respond to trump.”

Earlier, Trump accused Scully of being part of the “never Trump” movement. There was some speculation that Scully may have been trying to direct message Scaramucci on Twitter.

But in a statement, C-span said that Scully “did not originate the tweet and believes his account has been hacked. The Commission on Presidential Debates has stated publicly that the tweet...

The best talk show hosts are made into stars by the medium. To wit: Rosie O’Donnell was a well-known comic and actor but hardly the dynamo she eventually became when she began her daily show. She reinvented the medium that had, before her, been dominated by former local news anchor Oprah Winfrey. Both these stars did not bring to bear huge amounts of persona that was already known to the audience, so they had to work to carry across an idea of themself with each episode and segment. At their best, you walked away from their shows knowing O’Donnell and Winfrey in a way you might not otherwise have, before.

Drew Barrymore, a newly-minted talk show host with her “Drew Barrymore Show” carried in daytime by CBS stations, has less of herself to introduce, and, more crucially, less apparent desire to do so. Barrymore has been famous for decades,...