• Paul Schrader — the 79-year-old writer-director behind Taxi Driver, First Reformed, and The Card Counter — delivered the keynote at the fourth annual AI on the Lot conference at Amazon/MGM Studios in Culver City on Thursday, despite facing backlash from fellow artists when he announced he would speak
• Schrader predicted that AI-generated synthetic performers will eventually become genuine box office draws, arguing that the real commercial future of AI in film is not visual effects but fully artificial protagonists: “The real tip of the spear is when we can create an AI protagonist, not a hybrid, and that movie makes money”
• “You do the new Clint Eastwood via text prompt,” he told the audience — sketching a future in which studios generate star-caliber performances digitally rather than hiring actors
• Schrader warned that Hollywood is “barely keeping a step ahead of the monster” on AI, and used the speech to question whether film schools and extras will remain relevant as the technology matures

Paul Schrader knew the invite was going to cause problems. When he posted on Facebook that he would keynote the AI on the Lot conference, the response from fellow writers and artists was, in his words, swift and hostile. “There was very much of a backlash,” he told the audience Thursday morning on a soundstage at the Amazon/MGM Studios lot in Culver City. “A lot of negative comments. Some of them were in fact insulting.” He went anyway — and laid out a vision of the film industry’s future that did nothing to soften that reception.

His central argument: the AI revolution in Hollywood isn’t really about monsters and spectacle. “I don’t think the real future of AI commercially is in all this flash, all these monsters — that’s just jacked-up special effects on steroids,” he said. “The real tip of the spear is when we can create an AI protagonist, not a hybrid, and that movie makes money.” He predicted audiences will eventually embrace fully synthetic stars the way they’ve embraced any new kind of performer, per The Hollywood Reporter.

‘The New Clint Eastwood Via Text Prompt’

The most quotable moment of the speech came when Schrader described what AI star-making could look like in practice: “You do the new Clint Eastwood via text prompt.” The line crystallized his argument that the end state of AI in entertainment isn’t a tool for filmmakers — it’s a replacement for the star system itself. Schrader also questioned whether studios still need to pay extras at all, and predicted upheaval for film schools as the craft knowledge they teach becomes less essential, per Deadline.

The LA Times reported that Schrader described Hollywood as “barely keeping a step ahead of the monster” — a framing that positions AI not as a tool the industry controls but as a force it is running from. Schrader, who has previously said he “procured an online AI girlfriend” (who he says dumped him), is an unusual advocate: an old-school auteur genuinely engaged with the technology rather than dismissing it, per the Los Angeles Times.

The post Paul Schrader Says AI Protagonists Will Be Box Office Draws: ‘You Do the New Clint Eastwood Via Text Prompt’ appeared first on Cream.

• One studio has attempted to make a preemptive $10 million offer for Curry Barker’s next original project — before he’s pitched a single idea
• The offer is “attempted” because Universal already holds right of first negotiation for Barker’s next feature; he’ll pitch to Universal executives first
• Barker, 26, came from YouTube — his debut feature Obsession made more money in its second weekend than its first, a near-unheard-of box office feat
• THR, which broke the story exclusively, described his rise as “a generational shift of where the industry’s next filmmakers could come from”

Curry Barker hasn’t told anyone what his next movie is. He doesn’t need to. Hollywood is already throwing eight figures at it.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, one studio has attempted to make a preemptive offer of $10 million for Barker’s next original project — sight unseen, no pitch, no logline, nothing. The 26-year-old filmmaker hasn’t even had his meeting with Universal yet, which matters because Universal holds the right of first negotiation for his next feature. That prior deal means any other studio’s offer is technically an attempted offer, not a done deal. But the fact that a competitor is willing to drop eight figures without knowing what they’re buying tells you everything about Barker’s current standing in Hollywood.

The context: Barker came from YouTube. His debut feature, Obsession, was low-budget horror — the kind of film that typically fades after its opening weekend. Instead, it increased its box office haul in its second weekend, a feat that defies normal theatrical patterns and signals genuine audience word-of-mouth rather than front-loaded opening night crowds. The second-weekend spike turned heads across the industry.

THR framed his ascent as something larger than one filmmaker getting hot: “his meteoric ascension heralds a generational shift of where the industry’s next filmmakers could come from.” The implied argument is that the pipeline from YouTube to theatrical filmmaking — which Barker appears to be proving out — could reshape where studios look for talent in the coming years.

Barker will meet with Universal executives soon to pitch his new project. Whatever he brings into that room, at least one other studio has already decided it’s worth $10 million before hearing a word of it.

The post Hollywood Is Throwing $10 Million at Curry Barker — and He Hasn’t Pitched Anything Yet appeared first on Cream.

• Hayden Panettiere’s memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning is out now, detailing some of the darkest moments of her life
• She describes the devastating phone call from her father when her brother Jansen, 28, died in February 2023 from an undiagnosed heart condition
• The memoir also reveals an Oscar-winning actor exposed himself to her at a party when she was 19
• At 18, a trusted friend placed her in bed next to a famous British singer-songwriter on a yacht in the South of France
• Her estranged mother Lesley Vogel has publicly attacked the book, and Hayden says any hope of reconciliation now feels gone

Hayden Panettiere isn’t softening a single edge. Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, is out now, and in the weeks leading up to and since its release, the 36-year-old actress has been sharing some of the most painful, most private chapters of her life — the death of her brother, disturbing encounters with powerful men in Hollywood, a near-fatal childbirth, and a mother-daughter relationship that may be beyond repair. Taken together, it’s a portrait of a woman who has been through more than most people could imagine, and who is finally, on her own terms, telling the truth about all of it.

The Call That Changed Everything

The moment that cuts deepest in the memoir is the one Hayden has described as her brain going into autopilot. It was February 2023, and she was preparing for the Scream VI premiere when her phone rang. It was her dad. She let it go to voicemail. When he called again, she picked up.

He was hysterical, barely able to breathe. He told her that Jansen had missed a 9 AM appointment, that a friend had gone to check on him, and found him dead in a chair — a comforter pulled over him, like he’d simply fallen asleep. Then came the words Hayden wrote directly in the book: “Jansen’s dead. My boy is dead.”

She immediately started asking questions — was it suicide? A medical emergency? Foul play? Her mind raced through every possibility before the information began to settle. Then, still in that strange calm that can descend in moments of shock, she called her estranged mother, Lesley Vogel, who was at Venice Beach when she got the news.

The calm didn’t last. Hayden says she completely broke down afterward, crawling into bed and refusing to get out for the rest of the day. She has since shared that she developed agoraphobia in the wake of his death — and that she’s been “riddled with guilt” looking back at Jansen’s own struggles with substance abuse. “I, of all people, should have understood,” she told E! News. “But you can’t help somebody who doesn’t want to help themselves. It’s just a sad fact.”

Jansen Panettiere was 28 years old. He died from aortic valve complications and an undiagnosed enlarged heart. Hayden has said she credits her years in treatment for giving her the ability to function at all in those first hours after learning the news.

Hollywood’s Darker Side

The memoir doesn’t spare Hollywood either. Panettiere writes about two separate incidents involving powerful men that happened when she was still a teenager — experiences she has carried quietly for nearly two decades.

The first happened when she was 19, at a private party. She’d spent part of the evening talking with a group of men she described as being “in their forties and fifties,” and the atmosphere made her uncomfortable enough that she decided to leave. As she was putting on her coat, a man she describes as a “well-respected” Oscar-winning actor and director approached her with a strange claim — that he had a “big wad of gum on his pants.”

“I looked down and recoiled,” Panettiere wrote in an excerpt obtained by People. “This well-respected, award-winning actor’s testicles were hanging out from his unzipped fly.”

She left immediately — didn’t even stop to say goodbye to the friend she’d come with. She didn’t tell anyone what had happened, and at the time, she rationalized it away. “The gum on the pants, however, was a head-scratcher,” she wrote. “It hadn’t hurt me, and I was sure it was a drunken joke, but I’d never seen a grown man do something like that. I was shocked.” Her conclusion: “some older men had just grown up with no manners.”

She has since told The Hollywood Reporter that she chose not to name certain individuals in the book because many still work in the industry and naming them could create legal complications.

The second incident happened a year earlier, when she was 18. She was on a superyacht in the South of France — a celebrity-filled gathering — when a woman she considered a close, trusted friend led her down to a small room below deck. What came next still reads as a betrayal as much as it does a danger.

The friend, according to Panettiere’s account in the memoir, told her, “I want you to get in bed with him. He has a huge dick” — then left. The man in the bed was a “famous thirtysomething British singer-songwriter,” shirtless, propped up on pillows, the outline of his body visible beneath the sheets.

“‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘Is he naked under there?'” Hayden wrote.

Her survival instinct kicked in the second the door clicked shut. She turned to the man and told him directly: “Look… I don’t know what she said to you, but this is not going to happen.” She described the feeling of betrayal as being “kicked in the face” — the friend had “confided in me, pampered me and treated me like her best friend — then turned around and treated me like a call girl.”

On Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, Panettiere reflected on how the situation was made worse by the fact that there was no escape — she was, quite literally, out to sea. “There was no jumping off and swimming away,” she said. “And there was nobody who was going to be empathetic to my situation. I realized that this was nothing new to them.”

A Mother Who Slammed the Door

Through all of this, one of the most complicated threads running through Hayden’s press tour has been her relationship — or what’s left of it — with her mother, Lesley Vogel.

Vogel served as Hayden’s manager from the time she landed her first professional job as a baby. When Panettiere turned 19, she asked her mother to step back from that role. “I don’t want us to work together anymore,” she told her. “I just want you to be my mom.” According to Hayden, Vogel replied, “You owe me,” and walked out of her trailer on the set of Heroes. From that point, the business relationship was gone — and, Hayden realized, so was her mother’s interest in a relationship at all.

Vogel has responded to the memoir publicly, accusing her daughter of leaving her with “20 years of trauma” and suggesting the book was written for publicity rather than healing. She’s also claimed that Hayden’s decision to come out as bisexual while promoting the book was a calculated PR move.

Panettiere called those claims “false” and addressed them directly in a conversation with Entertainment Tonight, saying she has always left “that door cracked open in case” reconciliation was possible — but that Vogel has “slammed that door pretty hard in my face.” She added that her mother “has very clearly prioritized herself,” and that even though she’s not surprised, she still finds it hard to comprehend.

Hayden’s ex, Brian Hickerson — with whom she had a turbulent relationship that included multiple domestic violence incidents before they eventually rebuilt a friendship — has been more blunt. He told TMZ that Vogel is “by far one of the worst people I’ve ever met in my life.”

Kaya, Childbirth, and What Comes Next

The memoir doesn’t skip over the physical trauma either. Panettiere nearly died giving birth to her daughter Kaya — now 11 — via C-section in 2014. She required seven blood transfusions and battled a serious infection. “I was sitting there getting the C-section, and I knew that I was knocking on death’s doorstep,” she told E! News. “I just had the most motherly moment though, where I said, ‘God, please let me hear my daughter cry. I just want to know that she is OK and if it’s my time to go, I’m OK with that.'”

She survived. But the years that followed — the depression, the alcoholism, the substance abuse — eventually led her to sign over custody of Kaya to her ex-fiancé, boxer Wladimir Klitschko. “The idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be OK with it is heartbreaking,” she said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Today, she describes her bond with Kaya as “intense” and “incredible.” She travels as much as she can to see her, and FaceTimes often. And now, there’s a new wrinkle: Kaya, at 11, has started expressing interest in acting. Panettiere told E! News the calls have been “a nail biter.” She wants to support her daughter — but she also wants her to wait, to try other things, to have a college experience. “She still has the ability to fly under the radar,” Hayden said, “and once you give that up, you don’t get that back. Once you’re out there and you’re famous and known, there’s no getting your privacy back.”

She was introduced to the entertainment industry at 12 months old. When asked whether she would have chosen this life for herself if given the choice, she paused. “I will never know,” she said.

This Is Me: A Reckoning is available now wherever books are sold.

The post Hayden Panettiere’s Memoir Lays It All Bare appeared first on Cream.

• Cate Blanchett said the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” during a talk at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
• The two-time Oscar winner said she still counts 10 women to every 75 men on film sets each morning
• Blanchett warned that silencing the conversation means the underlying “systemic layer of abuse” can never be addressed
• Julianne Moore echoed the sentiment at Cannes, saying she’s been on sets where she and one other woman were the only females present
• Blanchett also revealed she’s set to work with Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist, on his next film

Cate Blanchett didn’t come to Cannes to mince words. Speaking Sunday at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival during a Rendez-vous with… conversation alongside moderator Didier Allouch, the two-time Oscar winner said what a lot of people in Hollywood have been quietly thinking: the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” — and the industry is still paying for it.

“It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting,” Blanchett said, her tone measured but pointed.

She didn’t stop there. “There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me, and the so-called average woman on the street is saying #MeToo. Why does that get shut down? What [the movement] revealed is a systemic layer of abuse, not only in this industry but in all industries, and if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve the problem. You shut that conversation down. You can’t move on.”

It’s a distinction that matters to her — the gap between women who have enough social currency to speak publicly and those who don’t. For Blanchett, the silencing of everyday voices is exactly where the movement lost its momentum, and where the real damage sits.

Still Counting Heads Every Morning

For all the progress that’s been talked about over the past decade, Blanchett says the reality on actual film sets hasn’t changed much. She’s still doing a daily tally.

“I’m still on film sets and I do the headcount every day, and it is still, you know… there’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning,” she said. “I love men, but what happens is the jokes become the same. You just have to brace yourself slightly, and I’m used to that, but it just gets boring for everybody when you walk into a homogeneous workplace. I think it has an effect on the work.”

That last part — that the gender imbalance actually shapes the creative output — is the argument Blanchett has been making for years, and it’s one she clearly hasn’t let go of.

She was at pains to acknowledge some signs of hope, though. She praised the heads of major film festivals for signing a pledge to increase representation. “I was so grateful to Thierry and Alberto and Cameron and all the people who are leading the major festivals around the world [when they] signed that they would make a pledge to increase representation, because it’s better for audiences when you don’t see the same old, same old,” she said. “There are extraordinary films every year in each of these festivals, but when the voices are all the same, it does become a bit beige, and I do think it has affected the programming.”

A History of Showing Up

Blanchett has been one of the most consistent and visible voices on this issue at Cannes specifically. In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo moment, she served as jury president and led a women’s march up the steps of the Palais des Festivals, hand-in-hand with Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux, Ava DuVernay, Agnès Varda and dozens of others. There were 82 women in total — a number chosen deliberately to represent the 82 female directors who had competed at Cannes up to that point in the festival’s history, set against 1,866 male directors over the same period.

At the time, she said: “Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of the industry says otherwise. As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these stairs today as a symbol of our determination and commitment to progress.”

That was eight years ago. The headcount on set, she says, hasn’t moved much.

Julianne Moore Had Her Own Moment

Blanchett wasn’t the only one raising these issues on the Croisette this week. Julianne Moore, speaking at the Kering Women in Motion Talk, shared a story that landed just as hard. “I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC,” Moore said. She connected the moment to a broader reckoning: “It’s when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and we were both devastated. And I said, ‘Look around the room. We’re the only ones here.'” Moore acknowledged she’s seen some improvement over the years, but the baseline she described — being one of two women on an entire crew — speaks for itself.

Beyond the gender conversation, Blanchett dropped one piece of news that will have film fans paying attention: she revealed she’s “about to work with Brady Corbet” on a new film. Corbet, who directed the Oscar-winning The Brutalist, is also reported to have Selena Gomez attached to the project. Whatever that film turns out to be, a Blanchett-Corbet collaboration is about as exciting a pairing as you can get right now.

For Blanchett, though, the work she’s most focused on this week isn’t in front of a camera. She’s also hosting a panel at Cannes to announce the next cohort of artists supported by her Proof of Concept program, which backs women, trans and non-binary voices in filmmaking, and her Displacement Film Fund for refugee filmmakers. She’s been doing this quietly alongside the awards and the red carpets for years — building something structural, not just speaking about it.

Which is maybe why her frustration about #MeToo carries so much weight. “You shut that conversation down,” she said Sunday. “You can’t move on.”

The post Cate Blanchett: #MeToo ‘Got Killed Very Quickly’ appeared first on Cream.

• Julianne Moore said she’s “less and less interested in tragedy” and doesn’t want to act in movies with “explosions and guns”
• The comments came during a Kering Women in Motion Talk at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was receiving an award
• Fans online pushed back, pointing out Moore has appeared in plenty of violent and dark films throughout her career
• Moore’s recent projects include Netflix dark comedy Sirens and Apple TV+ thriller Echo Valley opposite Sydney Sweeney
• She also spoke about female representation in Hollywood and called Meryl Streep “the gold standard”

Julianne Moore had a lot on her mind at Cannes this weekend — and not all of it landed the way she might have hoped. The Oscar-winning actress, in town to receive the prestigious Kering Women in Motion Award at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, sat down with Variety’s Angelique Jackson for a wide-ranging conversation about her career, her values, and the kinds of roles she wants to take on from here. It was one particular answer that got people talking.

“I’m less and less interested in tragedy, I would say,” Moore told the crowd. “Particularly now at a time when things are rough globally, it’s hard for me to invest in a story that I think is pretend, where I feel like the depth of the emotion doesn’t measure up to what’s happening in the world.”

Then came the line that set off the internet: “I don’t like someone being murdered. I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like histrionics. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without real feeling underneath. I mean, that actually bothers me because that’s like noise. I don’t know how to play it. I don’t want to watch it.”

The Internet Had Thoughts

A clip of the interview hit X, and the replies came fast. The sticking point for a lot of people? Moore’s own filmography. She played a porn actress in Boogie Nights. She starred opposite Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal — a film someone on X was quick to note featured a man having his skull removed and his brain eaten. She’s done thrillers, she’s done crime dramas, she’s done dark and disturbing material across a career spanning four decades.

“I’ve lost count how many movies she’s done with guns,” one person wrote. Another put it bluntly: “Funny how artists forget their own catalog until it’s time to virtue signal.” A third added, “That’s great! Now playback all the degenerate, violent entertainment Julianne has happily participated in throughout her career.”

Not everyone was piling on, though. Some fans understood exactly what she was getting at. “Julianne Moore choosing emotion over chaos is exactly why she’s respected worldwide,” one defender wrote. Another made a somewhat unexpected pivot: “I actually agree with her! We already have enough violence in the world! We need good family values in movies back!! That’s why The Devil Wears Prada was great.”

What She Actually Said — In Full Context

Reading the full conversation, Moore wasn’t declaring a crusade against action movies — she was talking about what excites her creatively at this point in her career. There’s a difference between the two, and it’s one the clip-and-react cycle tends to flatten.

She talked about how early in her career, there wasn’t much choice involved. “When you start out, you just do what comes your way. You don’t really have a lot of choices. You’re just like, ‘Great, I have a job, I’ll do it,'” she said. “Then slowly you gain a little more authority.” Now, at 65, with an Academy Award for Still Alice and nominations for Boogie Nights, The End of the Affair, The Hours, and Far from Heaven behind her, she can afford to be selective.

What she’s looking for, she explained, is point of view. “I want to be clear about whose story it is, how it’s being told, and whether or not it’s accurate. I often find that there are places that people will skip that step.” She also said she doesn’t believe in villains — “everybody’s always acting out what they believe is true and right” — which is a pretty clear statement about the kind of nuanced, character-driven work she gravitates toward.

Her most recent projects bear that out. She’s been doing Sirens, the Netflix dark comedy, and Echo Valley, the Apple TV+ thriller alongside Sydney Sweeney — neither of which is exactly a Marvel movie.

On Meryl, Women in Hollywood, and What Comes Next

The backlash overshadowed some genuinely compelling parts of the conversation. Moore spoke warmly about Meryl Streep, her co-star in The Hours, calling her flat-out “the gold standard.”

“She was the first woman that I saw who appeared to be touchable and untouchable at the same time,” Moore said. “There was something very human about her and something very modern. She was so precise in what she did and so modern and so accessible and yet glamorous and wonderful and brave all at the same time. So I feel like she kind of lit a fire under everybody in terms of how we wanted to be, in terms of what we felt we could achieve in our work.”

She also weighed in on a recent study showing that women in lead roles dropped to 37% among 2025’s highest-grossing films — a 10-point slide from the year before. Moore’s take was that the problem is bigger than Hollywood. “There’s not representation in C-suites, there’s not representation in media, there’s not representation in higher education. There are lots of places where we don’t have the representation we deserve,” she said. “And how do you change that? I don’t know. It’s like, how does a mouse get through a wall? One bite at a time.”

She also offered what she called “the secret sauce” for women in the industry: each other. “Women are each other’s greatest allies. We are the ones who have each other’s backs, we are the ones who hire each other, we are the ones that write stories about ourselves.”

As for the Kering award itself, Moore said receiving it gave her a rare moment of perspective on a long career spent moving from one job to the next. “As an actor, you’re part of a gig economy,” she said. “When you realize you’re being celebrated or asked to speak about what’s behind you, it’s like wow. This is something I created in my life.”

This isn’t the first time Moore has found herself in the middle of a controversy she didn’t exactly invite. When May December came out, Vili Fualaau — who became notorious for his relationship with his sixth-grade teacher in the late 1990s — called the film a “ripoff” of his life. Moore pushed back, maintaining that director Todd Haynes “was always very clear when we were working on this movie that this was an original story… a story about these characters.”

The guns-and-explosions moment will probably fade. But Moore’s broader point — that she’s done chasing artificial stakes, that she wants stories with real emotional weight behind them — is the kind of thing that tends to define a later-career chapter. Whether the internet agrees or not.

The post Julianne Moore Doesn’t Want Guns and Explosions Anymore appeared first on Cream.

• Mark Ruffalo says he believes he’s already blacklisted by Paramount-Skydance for opposing their Warner Bros. acquisition
• The actor quoted a prominent agent calling Larry and David Ellison “vindictive motherfuckers”
• Ruffalo’s open letter against the merger has grown to nearly 5,000 signatures
• Paramount-Skydance’s deal values Warner Bros. at $110 billion, topping Netflix’s rejected $82.7 billion offer
• Ruffalo also fears the merger’s threat to journalism, citing CBS and CNN coming under Ellison control

Mark Ruffalo is under no illusions about where he stands with the Ellison family — and he’s made peace with it.

The four-time Oscar nominee appeared on the I’ve Had It podcast alongside attorney Norm Eisen this week, and he didn’t hold back when talking about the personal cost of his very public campaign against Paramount-Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. He believes he’s already persona non grata with the studio’s new power players — and he’s leaning into it.

“I’m doing this because I know we have to,” Ruffalo said. “And I know no matter what, if I don’t speak out, it’s the same outcome. I’m already on a list. I’m already not a friend of these people. And so you’re either going to fight, or you’re going to lie down. But the same outcome will be if you don’t fight, if you lay down. That’s the way it is with every bully in the world.”

He also passed along a blunt assessment from inside the industry. When talking about why so many Hollywood players were initially reluctant to sign his open letter, Ruffalo quoted a prominent agent — whose name he chose not to share — who summed up the climate in one line: “These are some vindictive motherfuckers, the Ellisons.”

Fear in Hollywood — and Why People Are Starting to Sign Anyway

That fear, Ruffalo says, was palpable when he first circulated the letter in April. A lot of people who privately agreed with him weren’t willing to put their names on it. But that’s been changing. The letter — organized by the Committee for the First Amendment, the Future Film Coalition, the Writers Guild of America, and the Democracy Defenders Fund — has grown from roughly 1,000 signatures at launch to nearly 5,000, adding about 2,000 more in just the past month.

“What we know is that courage is contagious, and there’s safety in numbers,” he said. “A lot of the people on this letter are people who either can afford to be there, like myself, or people who can’t afford to not be there. They’re fighting for their lives.”

He pointed to the Fox-Disney merger as a cautionary tale. “We lost so many jobs, we lost so many shows, so many films that were in production or in pre-production or being developed, and we know the writing’s on the wall.”

Ruffalo also called out Hollywood agencies directly, urging them to stop holding their clients back. “I really hope they start to change their tune and see the writing on the wall here,” he said. “Their clients are gonna suffer more from sitting back and letting this happen than getting out and fighting next to us, the unions too.”

A Deal That Goes Beyond Hollywood

The stakes Ruffalo is describing are significant. Paramount-Skydance, led by CEO David Ellison, is pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery with an offer valuing the deal at around $110 billion — a bid that ultimately beat out Netflix’s $82.7 billion offer, which Netflix walked away from in February after Paramount Skydance launched its hostile takeover with a “superior” $31-per-share offer.

But for Ruffalo, this isn’t just about movies and streaming. The merger would put both CBS and CNN under Ellison ownership, and he’s already alarmed by what he sees happening at CBS. He pointed to the network recently platforming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — whom he called an “accused war criminal” — as evidence of political pressure on journalism.

“He would have never been on 60 Minutes outside of this regime,” Ruffalo said. “And that’s another thing that people really understand — there’s a whole other part of this, which is the journalists are starting to sign on. We have journalists who are coming out against this.”

Beyond the podcast, Ruffalo has been escalating his campaign on multiple fronts. In May, he published an op-ed in The New York Times rallying opposition to the deal. In it, he wrote something that cuts to the heart of what he’s been saying publicly: “The most revealing thing about that letter wasn’t the people who signed. It was the people who didn’t. Not because they disagreed — because they were afraid. There are many reasons to block this deal, but we now believe the most fundamental one is what we encountered when asking artists to use their voices: fear. A deep, ugly and pervasive fear of speaking out.”

As for his own future at Paramount — or whatever the combined studio becomes — Ruffalo isn’t expecting a warm welcome. But he also doesn’t sound like someone who’s losing sleep over it.

The post Mark Ruffalo Thinks He’s on a Banned List After WB Merger Fight appeared first on Cream.

• Sally Field says The Flying Nun left her unable to get auditions after the show ended in 1970
• Jack Nicholson, a fellow Actors Studio student, called her an “undiscovered talent” and recommended her to a director
• The referral led to her role in the 1976 film Stay Hungry, which she calls “the beginning of the change”
• Field, now 79, has two Oscars, two Emmys, and a Tony nomination — and says she’s still not done

Sally Field has been refreshingly candid over the years about her complicated feelings toward The Flying Nun — the ABC fantasy sitcom that made her famous and then, by her own account, nearly destroyed her career. But in a new interview with People, the two-time Oscar winner is opening up about the unlikely ally who helped pull her back from the brink: Jack Nicholson.

After the show wrapped in 1970 following three seasons, Field found herself effectively locked out of Hollywood. “I couldn’t get in a room to audition,” she told People. “I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was. ‘No, thanks. We don’t want any of that.'”

The role of Sister Bertrille — a petite nun whose oversized cornette caught the wind and sent her airborne — had been a hit. But it had also put Field in a box that the industry had no interest in opening. She was 23 years old and, for all practical purposes, unemployable in the work she actually wanted to do.

Her Answer: Get Better

Rather than rage against the machine, Field turned inward. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg-led Actors Studio in Los Angeles and threw herself into training with a quiet ferocity. “I had to say to myself that if I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I had to get better,” she recalled. “Hollywood may be rotten and unfair, but it had to be that it was on me to make it different. I felt if I wasn’t doing that, then I was just handing them all the power.”

Her mantra was simple: “It will change when I’m good enough.”

The Actors Studio in those days was a serious place — serious enough that it drew serious people. “Everybody used to come,” Field said. “It was packed. You couldn’t get in.” Among those regulars: Jack Nicholson, then already building his reputation as one of the most dynamic actors of his generation.

The Moment Nicholson Stepped In

Nicholson watched Field work. And then he did something that would quietly redirect the entire arc of her career. He went to casting director Dianne Crittenden and director Bob Rafelson and told them about her — describing her, Field says, as “an undiscovered talent.”

Crittenden called her in for a meeting. It was Field’s first real industry “interview” since the 1965 sitcom Gidget — a full decade of closed doors, cracked open by one colleague’s word.

The meeting was for Stay Hungry, Rafelson’s 1976 comedy-drama set at a gym, starring Jeff Bridges and a then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger. Field got the role.

“So in some weird way, my theory was right,” she said. “I worked at the Actors Studio for so long — and it was so hard — that Jack had seen it and the word spread.”

Stay Hungry, she says, “was the beginning of the change.”

What Came Next

What a change it was. The same year the film came out, Field won an Emmy for the miniseries Sybil. From there came Smokey and the Bandit, then Norma Rae — which earned her first Academy Award — then Places in the Heart, which earned her second. The actress who Hollywood once dismissed as the flying nun had become one of the most decorated performers of her era, with two Oscars, two Emmys, and a Tony nomination to her name.

And she’s not finished. Field currently stars in Remarkably Bright Creatures, adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel and now streaming on Netflix. She also has a play in the works. “I’m supposed to go into rehearsals for a play at the end of summer,” she told People. “I still have my head down, and I’m always hoping to get better.”

Fifty years after a phone call from Jack Nicholson changed everything, Sally Field is still chasing the same thing she was at the Actors Studio: better.

The post Sally Field Credits Jack Nicholson With Saving Her Career appeared first on Cream.

• Mark Ruffalo says many Hollywood artists supported his anti-merger letter but were too afraid of retaliation to sign it
• The open letter opposing the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger has now amassed nearly 5,000 signatures
• Ruffalo and co-author Matt Stoller cite CNN passing on a merger segment and Paramount pulling ads from The Ankler as examples of chilling effects
• Signatories include Florence Pugh, Pedro Pascal, Edward Norton, Sofia Coppola, Denis Villeneuve, and 75 Oscar winners
• The deal still awaits regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe, and Ruffalo is urging state attorneys general to block it on antitrust grounds

Mark Ruffalo has a message for the Hollywood artists who quietly told him they agreed with everything he was fighting for — but just couldn’t put their name on it: he sees you, and he’s still fighting for you.

In a New York Times op-ed co-written with American Economic Liberties Project research director Matt Stoller, the four-time Oscar nominee revealed that the most telling thing about the open letter opposing the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger wasn’t who signed it. It was who didn’t.

“The most revealing thing about that letter wasn’t the people who signed. It was the people who didn’t. Not because they disagreed — because they were afraid,” Ruffalo and Stoller wrote. “There are many reasons to block this deal, but we now believe the most fundamental one is what we encountered when asking artists to use their voices: fear. A deep, ugly and pervasive fear of speaking out.”

The open letter, organized by the Committee for the First Amendment, the Future Film Coalition, the Writers Guild of America, and the Democracy Defenders Fund, has grown to nearly 5,000 signatories since it began circulating in April. The list includes an impressive cross-section of the industry — Florence Pugh, Pedro Pascal, and Edward Norton among the actors; Yorgos Lanthimos, Sofia Coppola, and Denis Villeneuve among the directors. Seventy-five Oscar winners have signed. And yet, according to Ruffalo, the number could have been far larger.

“We heard time and time again from artists, when asked to sign this letter, that they supported it but were afraid of retribution. Their fear is not unjustified,” he and Stoller wrote.

The Chilling Effects Are Already Here

To back that up, they pointed to two incidents that illustrate just how real the pressure is. When Rich Rushfield, editorial director and columnist at The Ankler — one of the last independent entertainment trade publications — was spotted at an event carrying a bag of “Block the Merger” buttons, Paramount reportedly pulled its advertising from the outlet. That report, first published by TheWrap, landed like a warning shot across the industry.

Then there was Ruffalo himself. He had been suggested as a guest for a CNN segment discussing the merger, only for a producer to later say the network had decided to pass. According to the op-ed, CNN’s reasoning was blunt: “It’s a delicate subject for us at CNN given Warner Bros. Discovery is our parent company, and there are legal considerations around what we can and cannot cover or say while the merger is ongoing.” A Semafor report had previously flagged the incident.

“This merger will cause many harms in Hollywood,” Ruffalo and Stoller wrote. “But one is already in effect: People are afraid to say what they think about their own industry.”

How Ruffalo and Stoller Got Here

The two first connected in 2023 on a Zoom call during the Writers Guild strike. They found common ground quickly — both believed that Hollywood’s relentless consolidation into ever-larger corporate entities was the root cause of the labor struggles playing out in real time. The argument they’ve built since then is straightforward: more studios means more competition, and more competition means riskier, more ambitious projects actually get made.

As examples, Ruffalo pointed to his own career — his Emmy-winning HBO miniseries I Know This Much Is True and the Best Picture winner Spotlight. “Competition and opportunities for brave storytelling are intrinsically related,” they wrote, “and we both knew that having lots of competitive outlets to produce art and lots of paths to distribute it helps to ensure that riskier, more controversial films and TV shows keep getting made.”

The proposed deal — Paramount Skydance’s $31-per-share offer valuing the combined entity at roughly $111 billion — would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four. Netflix had previously entered the bidding war with an $82.7 billion deal signed with WBD in December, but walked away in February after Paramount’s “superior” offer emerged. The merger is still pending regulatory approval in both the U.S. and Europe.

The Plan: Go Around Federal Regulators

Ruffalo and Stoller aren’t counting on Washington to save the day. Their strategy is to go around federal antitrust enforcers — who they believe are unlikely to act under the current administration — and press state attorneys general to sue on antitrust grounds. They name-checked California AG Rob Bonta, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as elected officials who have already started speaking out, holding hearings, or launching investigations.

They also pointed to recent legal precedents as proof that this approach can work — a federal judge’s injunction blocking the Nexstar-Tegna merger, and a jury ruling against Meta and Google in a landmark social media trial over youth addiction. The message: the playbook exists. It just needs to be used.

“The oligarchs are still in charge. But they are starting to lose their grip on power,” Ruffalo and Stoller wrote. “We’ve seen what happens when monopoly-leaning companies benefit from a fear that silences dissent. But our growing coalition is demonstrating that when we don’t get stuck on the sidelines, don’t bow down to inevitability and join together to fight, we can win. And who knows? If we can defeat the oligarchs trying to seize control of our TV shows and movies, maybe we can do it elsewhere, too.”

A Paramount spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Mark Ruffalo: Hollywood Stars Too Scared to Sign Merger Letter appeared first on Cream.