News

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our array of film and TV chats cover horror mega lists, comic pastiches and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Modern Horror Podcast

Straying a little away from their usual patch, Hugh McStay and A. J. Black dissect Variety’s recent Top 100 Horror Movies of All Time list, but how many modern horror pictures make the cut?

You Have Been Watching

It’s getting creepy on our dedicated British sitcoms podcast as hosts Rob Turnbull and Alex Lynch tackle the cult curio that is Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible…

Make It So

Star Trek: Lower Decks continues its fifth and final season, with host Geoff Owen and guest Ashley Thomas discussing 5×03 ‘The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel’…

Britcom Goes to the Movies

Rod Heath and Guy Walker go to the transatlantic comedy well this week as they look back...

Audacy, Inc. (the “Company” or “Audacy”) announced today that it has successfully completed its financial restructuring, implementing a fully consensual, deleveraging transaction that equitized approximately $1.6 billion of funded debt, a reduction of 80% from approximately $1.9 billion to $350 million. The Company emerges as a healthy, scaled, multi-platform leader in the dynamic audio sector, with total net leverage of approximately 2.7x, differentiated by its #1 position in exclusive, premium audio content.

Audacy will continue to be led by David J. Field, its current President and CEO, and its existing management team. Field will also serve on the Company’s new Board of Directors.

“We are pleased to have successfully achieved all of our restructuring goals, emerging with an outstanding balance sheet, delivering industry-leading growth, serving our listeners and advertisers with excellence and honoring our commitments to employees and partners,” said David J. Field, President and CEO, Audacy. “Today, Audacy embarks on our next chapter,...

Leading premium podcast network Audacy Podcasts today announced a strategic partnership with acclaimed storytelling nonprofit The Moth to handle sales and distribution for the organization's award-winning podcast, including video, social and sponsorships for live events.

To date, The Moth's podcasts have been brought to listeners in partnership with Prx. Prx will continue to represent The Moth on public radio, which includes continued distribution of “The Moth Radio Hour” to more than 560 stations nationwide.

The Moth podcast feed will move to Audacy on January 1, 2025, and be accessible on the Audacy app and everywhere podcasts are available. The Moth will continue its release schedule with new and encore episodes of "The Moth Radio Hour" on Tuesdays and original episodes of "The Moth Podcast" on Fridays.

For over 27 years, The Moth has forged the modern storytelling movement, presenting over 60,000 true, personal stories to standing-room-only crowds at events and through storytelling workshops worldwide. Since...

If you managed to catch filmmaker Beth de Araújo’s feature directorial debut, the Gotham-nominated SXSW premiere “Soft & Quiet,” you already know how uniquely skilled de Araújo is at building dread and terror on both a technical and emotional level. Her first film, which debuted at the fest in 2022 before getting released in October of that year, used the one-take technique to follow a group of white supremacist women as they meet, mingle, and eventually attack a pair of Poc sisters.

While not based on a single real-life story, “Soft & Quiet” was the result of deep research into actual (and terrifying) culture shifts and personal experiences, from de Araújo’s own stories around a racist teacher to the Amy Cooper birdwatching incident and even the “Tradlife” movement. For her next film, de Araújo is again mining her own life and the world around her to tell what we...

Exclusive: Jessi Klein has signed a two-year overall deal with Sony Pictures Television. Under the pact, the TV writer-producer, author and comedian will develop and produce scripted series for cable and streaming platforms.

Klein, who helped develop Chappelle’s Show as an executive at Comedy Central, segued to becoming the head writer and executive producer of the network’s hit sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, which earned her an Emmy and Peabody awards. Klein also served as co-creator and showrunner of I Love That For You on Showtime, starring Vanessa Bayer and Molly Shannon, and headlined her own Comedy Central stand-up special.

She voices the sardonic Jessi Glaser and is a consulting producer on Netflix’s Big Mouth and has also written for Netflix’s Dead to Me, Amazon’s Transparent and NBC’s Saturday Night Live in addition to being the bestselling author of I’ll Show Myself...

Veteran unscripted producer Wendy Miller was attending a gathering for women over 40 in unscripted television who are unemployed when she had the idea. Though the get-together could easily have turned maudlin, one woman brought levity to the proceedings by telling a story about working on a past show that cracked up the whole room. Miller envisioned a storytelling event, akin to The Moth, where reality TV workers could share outrageous career tales to a paying audience, thus raising money for needy peers: “All of us are unemployed and have no money, but there are people who are way worse. What if we use this as an opportunity to raise money for someone who’s really in dire straits?” Miller pitched the group.

The ensuing “Hollywood Horror Happy Hour” (tagline: “We’re All Broke. Let’s Laugh About It!”), which took place May 21, was just one sign of the times in the nonfiction TV business.

Public media organizations Prx and The Moth today announced their collaboration with the podcast What’s Ray Saying? created and hosted by award-winning storyteller Ray Christian.

New episodes of What’s Ray Saying? begin on Wednesday, November 8. The podcast is available free across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. An audio trailer is available now.

What’s Ray Saying? is a world of Southern-baked personal narratives interwoven with Black American history, told by Ray Christian through the perspective of his remarkable life. A Bronze Star military veteran, goat wrangler, Fulbright Specialist Scholar in oral history, devoted father of six, and Appalachian, Christian is also a 12-time Moth StorySLAM Champion and host of the monthly Moth StorySLAMs in Asheville, North Carolina. Christian is the inaugural Black Appalachian Storytelling Fellow for North Carolina and resides in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. His storytelling...

A new kind of daily puzzle is on its way.

iHeartMedia and The New York Times best-selling author A.J. Jacobs have announced a joint daily puzzle podcast, The Puzzler, releasing this fall. It received an initial order of 260 episodes.

The short-form, daily podcasts will challenge listeners and celebrity guests with original, audio-friendly puzzles that are complete with weird history, fun trivia and lots of laughs.

The celebrity guests will be featured along fellow puzzle fans who will test their skills in real-time with Jacobs, before challenging listeners to solve the puzzles themselves.

The Puzzler was inspired by Jacobs’ most recent book, The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life, which explores the enduring power of puzzles — why people love them, what they do to people’s brains and how they can improve the world.

“I truly...

Fresh off her recent Emmy win for the comedy series “Hacks,” Jean Smart is ramping up development at her production company, SmartAngel Entertainment. Smart and her producing partner, Angeliki Giannakopoulos, have acquired the rights to the real-life stories of two individuals who challenged the status quo and took a stand to make a difference for marginalized voices.

Projects in development at SmartAngel include the true stories of John Hawkins, an Ole Miss college student who in 1981 refused to carry the Confederate flag; and country music artist, author and LGBTQ activist Chely Wright.

In 1981, Hawkins was at the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) under a band scholarship. He became the first Black cheerleader to join the Ole Miss Varsity Cheerleader Squad. When asked by a reporter if he was willing to carry the Confederate flag on game days, he said no — which led to racial abuse and threats. Hawkins’ story resurfaced...

Norm Macdonald, who passed away Tuesday at age 61, is being remembered for his sharp wit and sharper tongue. Watch these brilliant moments of comedy from his career.

The comedian was best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” which paid tribute to him on Tuesday as “one of the most impactful comedic voices of his or any other generation. There are so many things that we’ll miss about Norm — from his unflinching integrity to his generosity to his consistent ability to surprise. But most of all he was just plain funny. No one was funny like Norm.”

Here, we look back at some of his most side-splitting moments on screen.

Burt Reynolds aka Turd Ferguson on “Saturday Night Live”

While best known for anchoring “Weekend Update,” Macdonald found himself in other “Saturday Night Live” sketches. For the recurring “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketch beginning in 1996, Macdonald channel a hat-wearing, gum-smacking Burt Reynolds.

Exclusive: A re-examination of the life of South African Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius is in the works from Religion of Sports and Prx.

The company founded by Gotham Chopra, Michael Strahan, and Tom Brady and the public media organization have teamed up on False Idol, a new narrative series about the athlete, who was once considered the greatest Paralympian of all time.

Hosted by sports reporter Tim Rohan, the seven-part podcast, which will premiere on August 26, will look at how six months after becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete at the Olympics, he was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

The series will explore Pistorius’ rise and the tragic events that followed, in addition to complex issues like hero worship, gender-based violence, and race in post-Apartheid South Africa. False Idol tells the story through the eyes of the people Pistorius irrevocably changed, and brings needed attention...

Exclusive: ABC has put in development Kim’s Spa, a semi-autobiographical multi-camera comedy from Peter Kim (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Mad TV alum Bobby Lee, both of whom star, The McCarthys creator Brian Gallivan and CBS Studios.

Written by Kim based on his life, in Kim’s Spa a pragmatic young man (Kim) returns home to work with his brother (Lee) and their lovable group of misfit relatives after their father dies in the hot tub of their family-owned Korean spa.

Kim and Lee are co-executive producers. Artists First’s Peter Principato, Brooke Shoemaker, and Casey Neumeier are executive producers. Gallivan is supervising producer.

Lee is maybe best known for his many years on Mad TV, and his top streaming comedy podcasts, Tiger Belly and Bad Friends. Other television credits include starring in ABC’s Splitting Up Together and NBC’s Animal Practice, as well as guest spots on Game On,...

Actor and filmmaker Stephen Moyer has set his sophomore feature directing effort with TriStar Pictures’ Möbius.

Based on the short story “Life on the Möbius Strip,” the project is described as a musical love story with cosmic reach. Janna Levin penned and performed the story for The Moth in collaboration with the World Science Festival, and it was later published as the opening piece in the show’s anthology, The Moth: 50 True Stories.

The short tells the true story of Levin, a renowned American cosmologist, and British musician, Warren Malone, and their unexpected relationship, which forces them to confront issues of class, culture and the ...

Actor and filmmaker Stephen Moyer has set his sophomore feature directing effort with TriStar Pictures’ Möbius.

Based on the short story “Life on the Möbius Strip,” the project is described as a musical love story with cosmic reach. Janna Levin penned and performed the story for The Moth in collaboration with the World Science Festival, and it was later published as the opening piece in the show’s anthology, The Moth: 50 True Stories.

The short tells the true story of Levin, a renowned American cosmologist, and British musician, Warren Malone, and their unexpected relationship, which forces them to confront issues of class, culture and the ...

One week after teasing a photo of mixtapes, Pj Harvey announced reissues of her entire catalog, beginning with her 1992 debut, Dry, out July 24th via Beggars Archive/Too Pure Records.

Reissued for the first time in 20 years, Dry will be accompanied by a collection of demos from the record, available as a stand-alone LP for the first time. You can hear a demo of the single “Sheela-Na-Gig” above. It’s a stripped-down version of the track, as Harvey strums a guitar and sings, “Look at these, my child-bearing hips/Look at these,...

Being able to buy a washer/dryer, refusing to play into stereotypes for roles, the ability to say “no” — that’s how a few of Hollywood’s most prominent Asian Americans have defined success over the course of their careers.

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May, Variety gathered prominent Aapi creatives Kumail Nanjiani (Marvel’s “The Eternals”), Hasan Minhaj (“Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj”), Jon M. Chu, Ally Maki (“Toy Story 4”) and Lulu Wang for a lively discussion about what it means to be successful in the entertainment industry, how their parents and family regard their careers, who their industry role models were as they came up and what what being successful means for AAPIs in the industry going forward.

The virtual roundtable is the inaugural installment of Variety’s “#Represent” series, dedicated to the intersection of race, culture and Hollywood.

Nanjiani candidly reveals that...

Last October, Beastie Boys’ Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz released the Beastie Boys Book, a 592-page tome detailing the history of the New York hip-hop group and its cultural influence. It was also, in large part, a tribute to the group’s third member Adam “McA” Yauch, who died in 2012 and was the creative force behind many iconic touchstones in the Beastie Boys’ history. Running through the stories of fame, their artistic process, the teenage hooliganism, was the group’s long-lasting sense of camaraderie with each other...

Pj Harvey penned the score to Ivo van Hove’s stage production of All About Eve, which is currently on stage in London’s West End with Gillian Anderson and Lily James in the lead roles. The singer has released two new songs, “Descending” and “The Moth,” which will appear on the play’s soundtrack, to be released April 12.

The first song, “The Moth,” is an emotional ballad that features James on vocals while the second, “Descending,” is an instrumental piece.

All About Eve—The Original Soundtrack is out April 12 via Lakeshore/Invada.