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Exclusive: Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett are set to star opposite Anne Hathaway in Amazon MGM Studios’ upcoming feature Verity. Michael Showalter is helming. Based on the No. 1 New York Times bestseller by Colleen Hoover, the current script is written by Nick Antosca. Prior drafts were penned by Colleen Hoover & Lauren Levine, Hillary Seitz, Angela Lamanna, and Will Honley & April Maguire. The film will be released in theaters.

Producers for the project include Eat the Cat’s Antosca and Alex Hedlund, Semi-Formal Productions’ Showalter and Jordana Mollick, Somewhere Pictures’ Hathaway, Heartbones Entertainment’s Hoover and Shiny Penny Stacey Sher. Dakota Johnson will executive produce, along with Heartbones Entertainment’s Lauren Levine.. The film will fall under Semi-Formal Productions’ first-look film deal with the studio.

The story follows, Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer who is on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford...

The Hulu September 2024 premiere schedule has been announced and can be viewed below. The streaming service has also revealed the titles that will leave next month.

The Hulu originals for the month include Child Star, How to Die Alone, In Vogue: The 90s, Little Miss Innocent, Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal, Tell Me Lies Season 2, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and She Taught Love.

Tell Me Lies Season 2

FX titles American Sports Story, English Teacher, Grotesquerie, The Oldman Season 2, and Social Studies are also coming in the month of September.

Hulu gives viewers instant access to current shows from every major U.S. broadcast network, libraries of hit TV series and films, and acclaimed Hulu Originals.

English Teacher Season 1 Highlights

A look at the originals, exclusives, and premieres that are part of the Hulu September 2024 lineup.

English Teacher: Series Premiere (FX – Streaming September 3)

FX’s English Teacher...

Sure, HBO series “The Deuce” may have piqued some interest in the history of classic porn cinema, but now the outrageous true story of Times Square staple Chelly Wilson is getting the spotlight.

Documentary “Queen of the Deuce” centers on Wilson’s personal history before building a porn theater in the notorious Times Square vicinity known as the Deuce. Wilson’s reign ranged from the late ’60s to the mid-’80s as she earned a reputation as one of the savviest and most enigmatic figures on the scene.

Greek-born Wilson escaped the Holocaust in WWII, emigrated to the U.S., and married a slew of men while being openly gay. Her legacy in the world of adult cinema is examined by filmmaker Valerie Kontakos (“Mana”), who has written, directed, and produced the documentary.

“Queen of the Deuce” is further produced by Ed Barreveld and Despina Pavlaki, who also co-wrote the...

The Cinema Eye Honors announced the winners for its documentary films and series competition Friday in Manhattan, with “32 Sounds” taking the honor for outstanding nonfiction feature. Maite Alberdi won outstanding direction for “The Eternal Memory” together with Kaouther Ben Hania for “Four Daughters,” while “Paul T. Goldman” won outstanding nonfiction series.

See all the winners below:

—Outstanding Nonfiction Feature

32 Sounds

Directed by Sam Green

Produced by Josh Penn and Thomas O. Kriegsmann

—Outstanding Direction

Maite Alberdi

The Eternal Memory

Kaouther Ben Hania

Four Daughters

—Outstanding Editing

Michael Harte

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

—Outstanding Production

Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, Raney Aronson Rath, Derl McCrudden and Vasilisa Stepanenko

20 Days in Mariupol

—Outstanding Cinematography

Ants Tammik

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

—Outstanding Original Score

Jd Samson

32 Sounds

—Outstanding Sound Design

Mark Mangini

32 Sounds

—Outstanding Visual Design

Thomas Curtis and Sean Pierce

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

—Outstanding Debut

Kokomo...

Shere Hite was a trailblazing sex educator who was pilloried for her work in the 1970s. This vivid documentary gives her the recognition she deserves

Here’s a documentary about a vanished woman that is not true crime (unless crimes against feminism count). It is about trailblazing American sex researcher Shere Hite, exploring how she disappeared from the who’s who of 20th-century feminists. In 1976, Hite became famous almost overnight with the publication of her groundbreaking book The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. Based on an anonymous survey of 3,000 women about their sex lives, it sold 48m copies. Hite’s big finding was that 70% of women didn’t orgasm from penetrative sex – breaking news in the late 1970s.

Hite had been working as a model to pay her way as a PhD student when she joined New York’s feminist movement. The tipping point came when she...

Clockwise from bottom left: The Mother Of All Lies (TIFF), Bobi Wine: The People’s President (National Geographic), The Eternal Memory (Screenshot: YouTube), and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Apple TV+)Graphic: The A.V. Club

In the age of the internet, the world has become smaller, more connected—and a lot messier.

Aka Mr. Chow

(HBO Documentary Films)

This portrait directed by Nick Hooker follows the life and career of painter turned restaurateur Michael Chow, the owner of the Mr Chow restaurant chain, as he returns to the art world with his first solo show in nearly 60 years.

American Symphony

(Netflix)

Matthew Heineman switches gears from following the front lines of the Mexican drug war (the Oscar-nominated Cartel Land) and the early days of the Covid crisis in New York City (The First Wave), this time helming an intimate profile of Late Night With Stephen Colbert bandleader Jon Batiste as he balances an incredible year of professional success while aiding his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, through her battle with a rare form of cancer.

Anonymous Sister

(Long Shot Factory/Gravitas Ventures)

Emmy Award-winning director Jamie Boyle chronicles her family’s collision with the opioid epidemic. The film, currently holding a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes,...

The groundwork was laid for Nicole Newnham’s Oscar-contending documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite back when the director was just a girl.

“I was 12 years old when I discovered The Hite Report in my mother’s nightstand drawer,” the filmmaker has written, “sneaking it to read for myself, to learn about the world of female sexuality, a world that remained cloaked in shame and mystery for me as for so many others.”

For a time, The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality could be found in nightstand drawers or displayed less surreptitiously on bookstore shelves and in library stacks across the country, its author a fixture on talk shows and top of mind in the zeitgeist. Interest in her work was by no means limited to the U.S.: Hite’s study was translated into more than a dozen languages.

‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’

Newnham...

Oscar-contending documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite will be making an appearance in cinemas in the U.K. and Ireland within weeks, courtesy of Dogwoof.

The London-based documentary film company has announced a January 12 launch date in those territories for Nicole Newnham’s film about the famed American sex researcher who rocketed to fame in the 1970s but then faced a tremendous backlash that essentially drove her into exile.

“The Disappearance of Shere Hite remembers the feminist sex researcher, Shere Hite, whose findings rocked the establishment, presaged current conversations about gender and sexuality, and made her a target of the patriarchy,” notes a release from Dogwoof. “1976’s The Hite Report aimed to liberate women and demystify female pleasure and the orgasm by revealing private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents… Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses, filmmaker Nicole Newnham…...

IDFA – the largest documentary film festival in the world — has just wrapped its 36th edition, and it was a memorable one by every definition. Two hundred and fifty films screened in Amsterdam, representing work from across the globe –the Middle East to Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe.

In a special edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we report on the festival from Amsterdam, speaking on the ground with five notable filmmakers, including Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, who came to IDFA for the European premiere of his new Netflix documentary Stamped From the Beginning, an examination of how racist ideas have permeated American culture.

Sex researcher Shere Hite

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nicole Newnham tells us how European audiences reacted to her award-winning documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite, about the titular American sex researcher who became a sensation after the publication of her book The Hite Report in the 1970s,...

A new documentary examines the work of bestselling author Shere Hite and her absence from the feminist canon

Depending on your age, you probably either have some feelings about Shere Hite or know nothing about her. In 1976, Hite, an independent researcher of qualitative experience, sparked a “revolution in the bedroom”, as Ms Magazine put it, with her anonymous surveys on female sexuality. Namely, as she stated often and without equivocation, that women knew how to have orgasms when and how they wanted, with or without intercourse.

The Hite Report was an immediate bestseller – it has sold over 48m copies worldwide – and turned Hite into a media fixture. She was a frank interviewer and thus a lightning rod for criticism, having committed the cardinal sin of promoting female pleasure, which many took as demoting men, and then, in subsequent books, describing how men really felt and women’s feelings on love.

It’s a cool indie weekend when the new album by André 3000, New Blue Sun, has morphed into a “cinematic listening experience.” Variance Films is putting the experience, directed by Terence Nance, into three theaters in NYC (IFC Center), LA (Cinepolis Inglewood) and Atlanta (Tara).

Right now, it’s just those locations but after this weekend, “We will see what happens, where the wind takes us,” said Variance CEO Dylan Marchetti. “I swear, I wanted to make a ‘visual album’ but this is literally the way the wind blew me this time,” André has said.

Asked what’s is on the screen, Marchetti said, “Vibes.”

New Blue Sun, out today, is André’s debut solo album, his first full-length LP since his group Outkast released its last record 17 years ago. He described it as “an entirely instrumental album centered around woodwinds; a celebratory piece of work in the form of a living,...

“Equality doesn’t seem dangerous to me,” says Shere Hite in an archive clip at the start of this film, with a shy smile. She seems to believe it – to have no idea of the magnitude of what she has done, or of what awaits her. A babe in the woods, and simultaneously one of the shrewdest, most daring academic voices of her age.

If you were alive in the Seventies or Eighties and had even a passing interest in feminism, you could not help but be aware of Hite’s work – at least of her first book, the groundbreaking Hite Report, which, for the first time in Western society, opened up a conversation about what women wanted out of sex and how that compared with what they were actually getting. Nicole Newnham’s documentary begins before that, when she was just a student at Columbia University, noticed mostly for her flamboyant.

James Hamilton has lived an envious life. As staff photographer at Crawdaddy, The New York Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, and The New York Observer, Hamilton chronicled the faces of New York culture, from Meryl Streep and Liza Minnelli to Jean-Luc Godard and Wes Anderson. One balmy night in 1980, I witnessed Hamilton shooting the iconic photo of Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York,” standing under the Statue of Liberty.

During the pandemic Hamilton began posting his gorgeous black-and-white photographs on his Facebook page on the celebrity’s birthday. He’s now in the habit. “Every day, it seems there’s someone I’ve photographed,” he said. And he owns his own photos. After he saw the art department at Harper’s Bazaar throwing out negatives, he possessively held his work close. He would happily stay up late at night inhaling photo-chemicals...

Nicole Newnham’s The Disappearance of Shere Hite is so packed with ideas, timelines, and input from various participants that a documentary twice as long would have been justified. Such is the significance of Shere Hite’s life and writings in the 1970s and ’80s on the subject of sex, particularly women’s bodies and how they typically achieve orgasm.

Hite’s 1976 book The Hite Report has become an all-time bestseller, in large part due to the controversy it sparked following its publication. While the film’s title initially suggests a mystery, Newnham’s remarkable use of archival footage, especially of Hite being ceaselessly berated on talk shows, composes such a clear and coherent portrait of her eventual exile from American culture that the film becomes a furious indictment of an openly repressive society.

While Newnham takes a mostly linear approach to explaining the trajectory of Hite’s research and fame,...

Hulu’s “The 1619 Project” and Showtime’s “Nothing Lasts Forever” lead all broadcast documentaries in nominations for the 17th annual Cinema Eye Honors, which were announced on Thursday during the Cinema Eye Fall Lunch at Redbird in downtown Los Angeles.

Each of the programs received three nominations in the five broadcast categories, with “The 1619 Project” nominated in the Anthology Series, cinematography and editing categories and “Nothing Lasts Forever” singled out in Broadcast film, cinematography and editing categories.

Other programs with multiple nominations include the broadcast movie “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” the nonfiction series “Dear Mama” and “Paul T. Goldman” and the anthology series “Edge of the Unknown With Jimmy Chin” and “Our Planet II.”

Hulu led all networks and platforms with eight nominations, followed by Netflix with five and Showtime with four.

Cinema Eye Honors, a New York-based organization devoted to honoring all facets of nonfiction filmmaking, also...

Returning to Sundance Film Festival earlier this after her Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, Nicole Newnham’s latest film explores the strange tale of Shere Hite and her 1976 bestseller The Hite Report as narrated by Dakota Johnson. The book famously liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Her findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Then, she disappeared. Ahead of a release next month from IFC Films, the first trailer has now arrived.

“It was a bombshell when it was published,” Newnham told Deadline. “The whole American public is sitting there thinking that if women were not having an orgasm through intercourse, there was something wrong with them. And Shere Hite is the one who finally comes out and says that’s not true… It really was such a profound thing in that it...

The documentary festival Doc NYC has unveiled the full lineup for its 14th edition. It will be a total of 114 features and 129 short films. The festival runs in-person November 8-16 at IFC Center, Sva Theatre and Village East by Angelika and continues online through November 26 with films available to viewers across the U.S.

The Short Lists sections showcase a selection of nonfiction features and shorts that the festival’s programming team considers to be among the year’s strongest contenders for Oscars and other awards. The Winner’s Circle are films already feted at major international film events while Come As You Are section highlights films about people striving to find their place in the world, or in their communities.

Short List: Features

20 Days In Mariupol

Director: Mstyslav Chernov

Producers: Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, Raney Aronson Rath, Derl McCrudden

An AP team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the...

PBS’ “20 Days in Mariupol,” IFC’s “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” and MTV’s “The Eternal Memory” are among Doc NYC’s 14th edition featuring 114 features and 129 short films.

The shortlist for Doc NYC, the largest documentary festival in the U.S., was launched in 2012 and has become a key indicator and predictor for the Academy Awards’ best documentary feature category. Ten out of the last 11 winners for documentary feature were screened at the festival. In addition, 12 of the 15 shortlisted docs from 2022 were among its lineup.

Some other notable inclusions are Julie Cohen’s moving “Every Body” about the generation of intersex people living among us, Lisa Cortés’ “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” an intimate look at the queer rock ‘n’ roll legend, and Matthew Heineman’s “American Symphony,” an emotional look into the life of singer Jon Batiste as he prepares for his performance at Carnegie Hall.

The festival runs from Nov.

Doc NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, on Tuesday announced its lineup in the short and feature categories, as well as for its Winner’s Circle category and its new section for 2023 titled Come As You Are.

All shortlisted films will have theatrical screenings at the festival. With Tuesday’s announcement, Doc NYC will present a total of 114 features and 129 short films in its 14th year, including 33 world premieres and 29 U.S. premieres.

The festival will run this year Nov. 8-16 at IFC Center, Sva Theatre and Village East Angelika in New York, and will run online through Nov. 26.

The festival’s new Come As You Are section features films about “people striving to find their place in the world, or in their communities,” according to the festival. The Doc NYC Short List for documentary features was launched in 2012. For 10 of the last 11 years, the festival has screened doc features...

"This is going to lead to real changes in sex between men and women." "Is there any danger in that...?" Yes indeed there is... IFC Films has revealed the first official trailer for an outstanding documentary film called The Disappearance of Shere Hite, from the award-winning doc filmmaker Nicole Newnham. This first premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it was one of my favorite discoveries of the fest. A thrilling portrait of groundbreaking sex researcher Shere Hite, her explosive rise to fame and notoriety, and her mysterious retreat from the public eye. It is executive produced by Dakota Johnson, who also stars as the voice of Shere in the film. Her findings in her infamous 1976 book rocked the American establishment & presaged current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. So how did Shere Hite disappear? Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses,...

After publishing “The Hite Report” in 1976, sex researcher Shere Hite all but vanished from the public eye. Now, thanks to documentarian Nicole Newnham and narrator/executive producer Dakota Johnson, Hite’s legacy is on full display.

“The Disappearance of Shere Hite,” which premiered at Sundance 2023, is written and directed by Oscar-nominated “Crip Cramp” filmmaker Newnham.

The bestselling 1976 book “The Hite Report” liberated the female orgasm by revealing the private experiences of 3,000 anonymous survey respondents. Shere Hite’s findings rocked the establishment, presaged current conversations about gender and sexuality, and made her a target of the patriarchy. Actress Johnson narrates the documentary, which charts Hite’s explosive rise to fame and then mysterious retreat, executive produces through her TeaTime Pictures banner. The film was also just nominated for three Critics Choice Documentary Awards: Best Archival Documentary, Best Biographical Documentary, and Best Narration.

As Hite herself says in the trailer, “Equality isn’t so dangerous to me.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam is beginning to fill out its lineup leading up to IDFA’s 36th edition next month. The largest all-documentary festival in the world today announced selections for the Competition for Short Documentary and the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary, along with the films selected for the Best of Fests section and the “Signed” section, a new addition to the IDFA program.

One hundred films so far have now announced as part of the 2023 festival, which runs from Nov. 8-19 in the Dutch capital. “In addition, IDFA Forum, the festival’s iconic co-production and co-financing market has expanded to a total of 64 projects, including seven by Ukrainian filmmakers,” the festival announced. Full details on all the announced films are below.

The newly created “Signed” section is described as inviting audiences “to discover the new cinematic adventures of the most interesting contemporary filmmakers. The first selection...

Toronto’s Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, has added 12 films to its Special Presentations program. The first tranche of titles was announced March 14. The festival runs April 27 to May 7.

World premieres include Canadian journalist Michelle Shephard’s “The Man Who Stole Einstein’s Brain,” the uncovering of the story behind the pathologist who stole the genius’ brain in 1955; “The Rise of Wagner,” a chilling exposé on the collusion between Wagner Group mercenaries and the Kremlin, which has resulted in secret killings and countless human rights violations; “We Are Guardians,” the story of the Indigenous guardians of the Brazilian Amazon, struggling to protect their territories from the ravages of extractive industries, deforestation, corrupt politicians and profit hungry global corporations; “Who’s Afraid of Nathan Law?,” a chronicle of dissident Hong Kong politician and activist Nathan Law’s fight for democracy; and director Barry Avrich’s “Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella,...

Sundance 2023: ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ Directed by Nicole Newnham

U.S. Documentary Competition

The Hite Report, a groundbreaking study of female sexuality, remains one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976. The Hite Report brought the female orgasm out of unspoken shadows into the light of day by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Shere Hite’s findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender and sex.

Drawn from anonymous survey responses, the book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure. Its charismatic author, Shere Hite, a feminist sex researcher and former model, became the public messenger of women’s secret confessions. With each subsequent bestseller, she engaged television titans in unforgettably explicit debates about sexuality while suffering the backlash her controversial findings provoked. But who remembers Shere Hite today? What led to her erasure?

The takeaway of The Hite Report was that female expression of sexuality should not be defined by patriarchal power. This idea deeply offended the male establishment and consequently, the media made as much of their wounded ideas of themselves as of the book itself whose authentic and anonymous findings were treated with intense controversy.

The astonishing beauty of Shere Hite herself lies outside of the cliche perameters of the “scholarly” (i.e., “homely) woman. And so her methodical research was called “unscientific” and was called into question (and answered smartly by her). Her background as a working-class, bisexual, former nude model with photographs appearing in Playboy did not sit well with the offended and offensive men who interviewed her on top TV shows after the book became a runaway success. All of her many identities are displayed in the movie.

Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses, filmmaker Nicole Newnham transports viewers back to the 70s, a time of great societal transformation around sexuality (See Fairyland, about queer life in San Francisco, also playing here in Sundance,for another take on the 70s and Food and Country about the coming of age of California cuisine in the 70s under the guiding hands of Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse). Newnham’s revelatory portrait brings us to reconsider a pioneer who broke the ground for our current conversations about gender, sexuality, and autonomy. Her story also is a timely, cautionary tale of what too often happens to women who dare speak out.

Nicole Newnham is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary director and producer and four-time Sundance alum. She co-directed Crip Camp (2020) with Jim LeBrecht. Crip Camp was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Sundance U.S. Documentary Audience Award. Newnham’s other documentary directing credits include the Emmy-nominated films The Revolutionary Optimists, Sentenced Home, and The Rape of Europa.

U.S. Sales and Distribution: Josh Braun, Submarine Entertainment

There is no international sales agent. Maggie Pisacane at WME is the producers rep along with Josh Braun.

Directed and Produced By: Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp)

Produced By: Molly O’Brien, R.J. Cutler, Elise Pearlstein, Kimberley Ferdinando, Trevor Smith

Co-Produced By: Erica Fink, Eleanor West

Executive Produced By: Elizabeth Fischer, Liz Cole, Noah Oppenheim, Andy Berg, Eli Holzman, Aaron Saidman

116 minutes

Film FestivalsWomenDocumentaryGenderSundance...

Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Our first shoot on The Disappearance of Shere Hite was in the fall of 2021, when we filmed a requiem on the anniversary of Shere Hite’s cremation, held in Paris by her friend and artistic collaborator, the German fashion photographer Iris Brosch. At that time, it was of course already very clear to us that the backlash against feminism that […]

The post “Control of Women’s Sexuality Is What Makes Patriarchy Possible” | Nicole Newnham, The Disappearance of Shere Hite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Our first shoot on The Disappearance of Shere Hite was in the fall of 2021, when we filmed a requiem on the anniversary of Shere Hite’s cremation, held in Paris by her friend and artistic collaborator, the German fashion photographer Iris Brosch. At that time, it was of course already very clear to us that the backlash against feminism that […]

The post “Control of Women’s Sexuality Is What Makes Patriarchy Possible” | Nicole Newnham, The Disappearance of Shere Hite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Still one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976, The Hite Report offered a groundbreaking look at women’s sexual desires through anonymous survey responses. Despite its success at demystifying vulvas and those who possess them, the book’s author Shere Hite has remained a relatively obscure figure in popular culture. Filmmaker Nicole Newnham’s latest, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, attempts to bring this woman back into relevancy while investigating why her legacy has gone unspoken for so long. Editor Eileen Meyer tells Filmmaker about her experience cutting this project, also offering insight on she came to work […]

The post “…Feminist Thought and Knowledge of Bodies With a Vulva Have Been Suppressed Over and Over Again”: Editor Eileen Meyer on The Disappearance of Shere Hite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Still one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976, The Hite Report offered a groundbreaking look at women’s sexual desires through anonymous survey responses. Despite its success at demystifying vulvas and those who possess them, the book’s author Shere Hite has remained a relatively obscure figure in popular culture. Filmmaker Nicole Newnham’s latest, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, attempts to bring this woman back into relevancy while investigating why her legacy has gone unspoken for so long. Editor Eileen Meyer tells Filmmaker about her experience cutting this project, also offering insight on she came to work […]

The post “…Feminist Thought and Knowledge of Bodies With a Vulva Have Been Suppressed Over and Over Again”: Editor Eileen Meyer on The Disappearance of Shere Hite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaker Nicole Newnham’s latest, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, explores the author behind The Hite Report, one of the best-selling books of all time since its 1976 publication. Few remember Shere Hite today, and Newnham’s film interrogates why that might be. Cinematographer Rose Bush discusses how working on The Disappearance of Shere Hite was a perfect fit for her. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Bush: I’m a person […]

The post “A Larger Than Life Revolutionary”: Dp Rose Bush on The Disappearance of Shere Hite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaker Nicole Newnham’s latest, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, explores the author behind The Hite Report, one of the best-selling books of all time since its 1976 publication. Few remember Shere Hite today, and Newnham’s film interrogates why that might be. Cinematographer Rose Bush discusses how working on The Disappearance of Shere Hite was a perfect fit for her. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Bush: I’m a person […]

The post “A Larger Than Life Revolutionary”: Dp Rose Bush on The Disappearance of Shere Hite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

I am always up for a good documentary that re-establishes the legacy of an important person who has been forgotten in time. This film is one of those extraordinarily vital documentaries that will, when given a proper release sometime in the near future, reset the legacy and re-establish Shere Hite as the feminist hero that she really, truly was. If you're like me, born in the 1980s (or anytime after), you've probably never heard of Shere Hite. She hasn't so much as "disappeared" as been forgotten, buried by criticism and fanaticism and unjust hate. I'm lucky I could watch this documentary film at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and learn all about her, I'm so glad someone decided to tell her story accurately. The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a film about Shere - who she was, what she did, her books, what happened to her after he books achieved an...

On September 11, 2020 the New York Times published an obituary for Shere Hite, the renowned sex researcher and author, noting that her work “helped awaken women to their sexual power and advance the Second Wave of feminism.”

One of the readers of that obituary was filmmaker Nicole Newnham, and it became the spark that set her on a journey to document a woman who sold almost 50 million books worldwide but who faced such a backlash over her research that it drove her into exile. The result of that cinematic quest is the film The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which just premiered in U.S. Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

Director Nicole Newnham and editor Eileen Meyer attend the premiere of ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ at Sundance on January 20, 2023 in Park City, Utah.

For Newnham, the Oscar-nominated director of Crip Camp (co-directed with Jim LeBrecht), the new film amounted to a rediscovery of Hite.

If, partway through Nicole Newnham’s extraordinary new documentary, you find yourself fighting the urge to do a bit of Googling — just to make sure that Shere Hite was a real person and you are not the victim of some wildly elaborate deepfake prank — don’t be alarmed. Be a little ashamed, perhaps, but not alarmed: You are not alone if you simply can’t stop asking yourself, “How on earth did I not know about this woman before?” “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is an astonishing, beautifully made corrective to the cultural amnesia that has for decades surrounded Hite, the author of “The Hite Report,” a landmark 1976 survey on female sexuality, that is apparently still ranked the 30th best-selling book in history.

Aside from a few blips, like a 2006 “Colbert Report” appearance and the obituaries that ran after Hite’s 2020 death, it’s been a silence so deafening — in...

Writer and social scientist Shere Hite’s books on sex were publishing phenomena in the 1970s and 80s. Like Alex Comfort’s bestselling erotic “cookbook” The Joy of Sex, her monographs seemed ubiquitous in those days, especially in master bedrooms where readers could use them as informative, topical works of popular social science which just happened to double as erotic bedside reading. The books on male and female sexuality tessellate together thousands of micro stories, observations and admissions written by the many respondents who filled out her questionnaires anonymously. That meant that in those pages, readers found reassurance that there were others who felt and experienced sex in the same way that they did, and that being “different” was quite normal. Arguably nobody did more than Hite, for example, to dismantle the myth, promulgated by Sigmund Freud among others, that “clitoral orgasms” were somehow inferior to “vaginal” ones. Clitorises around...

The biopic documentary is well-worn territory at this point, it’s the meat and potatoes and bread and butter of non-fiction filmmaking. This year’s Sundance Film Festival will see premieres of films on Little Richard, Indigo Girls, Judy Blume, Brooke Shields, and Michael J. Fox. While the best such projects reveal something deeper about a beloved public figure, rarely do they uncover a previously unknown or long-since forgotten cultural phenomenon. to her rightful place in feminist history. That she ever disappeared in the first place is the sad shock at its poignant core.

Directed by Nicole Newnham, who co-directed the Oscar-nominated 2020 film “Crip Camp” with James Lebrecht, “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” thrums with the pulse of a story that was waiting to be told. Well aware that most viewers will be unfamiliar with her subject, Newnham doles out the ample material at a dizzying clip, hooking the viewer...

Exclusive: Award-winning actress Dakota Johnson and her producing partner at TeaTime Pictures, Ro Donnelly, have joined The Disappearance of Shere Hite as executive producers ahead of the documentary’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

Johnson also is featured as the voice of Hite in the film about the renowned sex researcher and author of The Hite Report, the mega-bestseller published in 1976 that “liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents.” Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp) directed the documentary, which premieres Friday, January 20 in U.S. Documentary Competition.

Hite, who died in 2020 at the age of 77, spent the last decades of her life living in Europe, having been subjected to relentless attack by conservatives in the U.S. upset by her work that “challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure.”

A description of the film adds,...

This year promises a revealing look at celebrities, scams and art on the big and small screen

As in years past, the calendar ahead for 2023 documentary remains patchwork at the moment. But it’s already sketched in with celebrity projects, overdue re-examinations (on artist Nam June Paik and sex researcher Shere Hite) and rushed-to-completion projects on headlining scams (multiple films on the collapse of crypto exchange Ftx.)

Will 2023 finally be the year of the long-gestating Rihanna documentary? With more sure to be announced in the coming months – not to mention many docuseries in the works – here are 10 of the most anticipated documentary films of 2023:...

Passages.The Sundance Institute has announced the films selected for their 2023 Festival, which will take place in-person in Park City, Utah, from January 19-29, 2023. A selection of the films will be available virtually in the US from January 24-29.U.S. Dramatic COMPETITIONThe Accidental Getaway Driver (Sing J. Lee): During a routine pickup, an elderly Vietnamese cab driver is taken hostage at gunpoint by three recently escaped Orange County convicts. Based on a true story. World Premiere.All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson): A decades-spanning exploration of a woman’s life in Mississippi and an ode to the generations of people, places, and ineffable moments that shape us. World Premiere.Fair Play (Chloe Domont): An unexpected promotion at a cutthroat hedge fund pushes a young couple’s relationship to the brink, threatening to unravel far more than their recent engagement. World Premiere.Fancy Dance (Erica Tremblay...

A documentary on Little Richard, a reexamination of the history of the Meatpacking District through the lens of trans sex workers, the film adaptation of a viral short story, and more will premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

The U.S. Documentary competition will boast the world premiere of Lisa Cortés’ Little Richard: I Am Everything. The film will simultaneously chronicle the career of the titular rock and roll pioneer while examining the genre’s Black queer origins in an effort to counterbalance the whitewashed history of American pop.

Somewhat similarly,...

HBO Max has greenlighted the Swedish original comedy Lust, starring The Bridge actress Sofia Helin and produced by Fremantle-backed Miso Film. It comes ahead of HBO Max’s launch in the Scandinavian country later this year.

Co-starring Anja Lundqvist, Julia Dufvenius and Elin Klinga, the eight-part series is billed as an outrageous and painfully honest comedy about four middle-aged women in Stockholm struggling to keep their libidos alive in a sexually frustrating world.

Anette (Helin), Nadia (Lundqvist), Ellen (Dufvenius) and Martina (Klinga) have all been friends since school. When they find out that Anette is conducting a government survey dubiously dubbed “Make Sweden Sexy Again,” they are intrigued. Is good sex — or the lack thereof — impacting the health of Swedish women over 40?

Lust is written by Frans Milisic Wiklund, based on an idea and in close collaboration with Åsa Kalmér, Dufvenius, Helin and Lundqvist. Ella Lemhagen directs, while the...

HBO Max has ordered a daring Swedish comedy series entitled “Lust” from Fremantle-owned banner Miso Film, ahead of its launch in Sweden.

The new Max Original half-hour series will be headlined by Sofia Helin (“The Bridge”), Anja Lundqvist, Julia Dufvenius and Elin Klinga as four middle-aged women in Stockholm who have been friends since school and are struggling to keep their libidos alive.

The series starts with one of them, Anette, getting commissioned to conduct a government survey dubiously dubbed ‘Make Sweden Sexy Again.’ She starts looking into the sex lives of Swedish women over 40 who have to juggle their careers, kids, marriages, divorces and physical shape.

Directed by Ella Lemhagen (“The Crown Jewels”), the series is written by Frans Milisic Wiklund, in close collaboration with Åsa Kalmér, Dufvenius, Helin and Lundqvist.

The show is produced by Sandra Harms and Karl Fredrik Ulfung at Miso Film, and executive produced by...

Exclusive: NBC News Studios has enlisted Nicole Newnham, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, to helm a feature non-fiction project about the life and work of Shere Hite, whose research on female sexuality drew widespread attention, and controversy, in the 1970s and 80s, ultimately leading to her self-exile to Europe.

Hite’s first book, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, published in 1976, sold tens of millions of copies, and was regarded as groundbreaking in its research findings. Perhaps the most quoted was her finding that 70 percent of women surveyed didn’t orgasm from sex, but most were able to do it easily on their own. That revelation of liberation, as The New York Times wrote in Hite’s obituary, proved to be “a sharp turning point after the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.”

Hite’s books and subsequent projects made her a household name, but also triggered a backlash...

It was the film that shook the 80s. Fatal Attraction's writer James Dearden relives the controversy it caused – and explains why his new version is fairer to the bunny-boiler

It is hard, even for me, to fully recall the furore Fatal Attraction caused on its release back in 1987, appearing on the cover of both Time and People, and generating hours of highly charged and sometimes hysterical debate. It was seen by some as a parable about Aids, by others as a critique of the permissive society, and by others still as an attack on feminism in general and single career women in particular. All of which could not have been further from my mind as I was writing the screenplay. It was even alleged that the cop shaking Michael Douglas by the hand at the end is actually congratulating him on a job well done – the crazed career woman put out of her misery,...