September 30, 2019-Cobain posts a statement on the Nirvana website. "I've realized that I've only got a certain amount of time in terms of being able to express myself, and of being able to perform it well. I've suddenly come up with enough material to be able fit 15 albums, and to ensure all this gets out, we plan on releasing an album a year for the next 15 years. This is in order to maximize our potential time left, so we'll make the most of it. I trust you all will find the material quite impressive when it all comes out."
October 3, 2019-Richard Jewell, Bombshell and 1917 are locked down.
October 4, 2019-Todd Phillips's Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, receives mass acceptance by the crowds and generally positive critical reception, and also breaks Deadpool 2's record as highest-grossing R-rated film.
October 7, 2019-Nirvana is announced to appear at this year's Voodoo Experience festival in New Orleans.
October 12, 2019-Springbok officially sells its equity stake in Six Flags New Orleans back to Six Flags Entertainment Corporation for $3 billion, having not only secured its place with the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, but even turned it around as among the more profitable parks in the portfolio.
October 18, 2019-A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon opens in the UK to universal praise and earns the equivalent of $31 million there. Blockbuster Entertainment buys the North American rights along with Lionsgate, to release direct to the streaming service on January 10.
October 19, 2019-Maleficent: Mistress of Evil opens to mixed to positive reviews and earns $560 million in its run.
October 22, 2019-From Variety:
"Banijay Close to Securing $2.2 Billion Deal for Endemol Shine," by Stewart Clarke and Elsa Keslassy
Banijay Group is on the verge of sealing a deal for production and distribution powerhouse Endemol Shine, sources tell Variety.
Vivendi-backed Banijay and Endemol Shine’s joint owners, Fox Corporation and Apollo, are understood to have scheduled a meeting for Thursday after talks accelerated in recent days, with Banijay now on the brink of finally closing a deal for a big asset it has been chasing.
Numerous industry players have taken a look at Endemol Shine, a huge production and content sales operation that has shows including Black Mirror, Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares and Big Brother in its deep catalogue. Eighteen months of on-and-off talks with various suitors have so far failed to reach a deal. All3Media dropped out of negotiations in recent weeks.
A source with knowledge of the situation told Variety that the purchase price of the proposed Banijay deal will be in the region of €2 billion ($2.2 billion). The source said Vivendi’s backing has been key to moving a deal forward. Another industry sources said that, out of the €2 billion, €1.75 billion would cover Endemol Shine’s debt, meaning that Banijay would be acquiring Endemol Shine’s catalogue and production companies for something in the range of €250 million.
Combining Banijay and Endemol Shine would create the largest TV producer-distributor in the market outside of the Hollywood studios and U.S. players. The merged company woudl have production companies on both sides of the Atlantic, a huge catalogue and sizable sales arms. There would be some overlap on the distribution side, however, and streamlining the sales operations would result in possibly major job cuts.
Banijay had been in advanced talks with Endemol Shine’s owners before, without a deal being finalized, but sources suggested that this time an agreement seems likely.
It would bring to an end a protracted sale process that has seen the likes of ITV, Fremantle, Endeavor Content and Sony among the numerous players that reportedly kicked the tires of a possible purchase.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph was the first to report the latest news on the potential sale.
October 23, 2019-Springbok Ventures announces that it is helping to fund a proposed wind energy expansion throughout North America.
October 25, 2019-From Deadline Hollywood:
"Nena Rodrigue To Run Television For Rian Johnson & Ram Bergman's T-Street," by Nellie Andreeva
Veteran TV creative executive Nena Rodrigue has been named President of Television for T-Street Productions, the independent studio launched recently by writer/director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman with the financial backing of Valence Media, which holds a minority equity stake in the company, and a first-look film and TV deal at Valence’s MRC.
Rodrigue will have creative oversight of all television projects for the studio. She most recently served as EVP of Programming and Production for BBC America, overseeing original scripted programming at the network following its acquisition by AMC Networks. She commissioned and worked on Killing Eve and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Rodrigue left BBC America a year ago when the programming operations for all AMC entertainment networks were consolidated under Sarah Barnett.
Prior to BBC America, Rodrigue was SVP of Programming and Production for AMC Networks’ Sundance TV, overseeing development and production of series such as Rectify, The Returned, The Honourable Woman, and Danny Boyle’s Babylon. While at Sundance TV, Rodrigue supported the establishment of Sundance Episodic Story Lab, which began in 2013 as a way to foster the next generation of TV creators.
Before Sundance TV, she had an overall deal at Touchstone Television/ABC Studios and held development and production roles for Dick Wolf’s Wolf Films, Imagine Television, Witt-Thomas Productions (later purchased and folded into Springbok with Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas executives at Springbok's TV division), and in Fox’s alternative TV division.
“We are super excited to have Nena join our team,” said Johnson and Bergman. “Her proven track record overseeing high-quality content, keen eye for artistic vision, and support for budding creators will help T-Street as we continue to grow the company.”
Through T-Street, Johnson and Bergman recently completed their fifth film together, the upcoming Knives Out, which also hails from MRC Film and Lionsgate and is set to release on November 27. Its ensemble cast includes Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Colette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, LaKeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell and Christopher Plummer.
October 26, 2019-From Variety:
"Banijay Seals $2.2 Billion Deal for Endemol Shine, Paving Way for Huge New Global Player," by Stewart Clarke and Elsa Keslassy
France-based Banijay Group has sealed a $2.2 billion deal for Endemol Shine, in a move that will create a new pecking order in the international TV business.
The merged entity will be the largest non-U.S. player in the market, with a bigger catalogue than the main UK players, BBC Studios and ITV Studios. Banijay is owned by company chairman Stephane Courbit’s LOV Group and an arm of the Italian conglomerate De Agostini, and Vivendi.
The acquisition needs antitrust approval. Banijay is understood to be confident the deal will get past regulators. The deal will be financed through a capital increase at Banijay Group and debt financing, including a full refinancing of Banijay and Endemol Shine’s existing debt, supported by Deutsche Bank, Natixis and Société Générale. Banijay’s and Endemol Shine’s respective debt was approximately $486 million and $1.83 billion as of December 2018.
The combined group will be held by LDH (67.1%) ,which comprises Financière LOV, De Agostini and Fimalac, the investment company of Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, and French media giant Vivendi (32.9%).
Together, Banijay and Endemol Shine have interests in more than 100 production companies, including Kudos, Charlie Brooker’s House of Tomorrow, and Wiedeman and Berg Television on the Endemol Shine side. The likes of Bunim/Murray, RDF and Yellow Bird are in the Banijay stable. In its release announcing the deal, Banijay said the “total pro-forma revenue of the combined group is expected to be approximately €3 billion [$3.3 billion] for the year ending December 31st, 2019.”
“Endemol Shine brings an incredible array of industry-leading talent, globally renowned brands and high-quality creative content. Combining the resources of these two companies will instantly strengthen our position in the global market, and our capabilities across genres will further define us as a go-to provider of first class IP worldwide,” said Marco Bassetti, CEO of Banijay.
“Welcoming the Endemol Shine brands and talents to our existing business will signal enhanced opportunities in the marketplace, and we are all excited by what the future holds for the combined entity,” Bassetti said.
Sophie Turner Laing, the CEO of Endemol Shine Group, said: “This deal takes us into a whole new and exciting chapter and into a new enhanced global content house with many opportunities ahead.
“At Endemol Shine, we have continually inspired and entertained audiences around the world, a testament to every single person across the Group,” Turner Laing said.
Banijay chairman Courbit previously worked at Endemol (before its merger with Shine), as did CEO Marco Bassetti, and the company has long courted Endemol Shine. Numerous other big hitters took a look at the Fox Corporation- and Apollo-owned producer and distributor, but they either declined to put forward a bid or dropped out of the running, put off by Endemol Shine’s original reported asking price of $4 billion and its hefty debt load. Banijay ultimately closed a deal after an 18-month-long sale process.
Endemol Shine has a head count of more than 4,000. For staff who survived the post-merger cull when Endemol and Shine merged in 2014, it’s Groundhog Day. Sales and back office functions are expected to be the area of greatest overlap in the new Banijay-Endemol Shine entity and the most obvious targets for cost cuts. Cathy Payne, boss of distribution business Endemol Shine Intl., said she was leaving shortly before the Banijay deal was announced.
Banijay posted revenues of €826.6 million ($917.5 million) for the year to end-2018 and an operating profit of €72.8 million ($80.8 million). Endemol Shine posted revenues in the region of €1.8 billion to €1.9 billion ($2 billion to $2.1 billion) in recent years.
The combined Banijay and Endemol Shine catalogue approaches 90,000 hours of content, bigger than that of the BBC’s sales arm. Key Banijay titles include dramas Versailles and The Inbetweeners, and, in unscripted, Wife Swap. Endemol has Big Brother, Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares and MasterChef among its big-ticket unscripted titles, and Black Mirror and Peaky Blinders on the drama side.
October 28, 2019-From Variety:
"Robert Evans Dead: Chinatown Producer and Paramount/Springbok Chief, Dies at 89," by Richard Natale and Carmel Dagan
Robert Evans, the Paramount and Springbok executive who produced Chinatown and Urban Cowboy, and whose life became as melodramatic and jaw-dropping as any of his films, died on Saturday night. He was 89.
Even though Hollywood history is filled with colorful characters, few can match the tale of Evans, whose life would seem far-fetched if it were fiction. With his matinee-idol looks, but little acting talent, Evans was given starring roles in a few movies and then, with no studio experience, was handed the production reins at Paramount in the 1960s. When he left the exec ranks, his first film as a producer was the classic Chinatown, and he followed with other hits, like Marathon Man and Urban Cowboy. Eventually, his distinctive look and speaking style turned him into a cult figure, and he had the distinction of being the only film executive who starred in his own animated TV series.
His life was a continuous roller-coaster. Amid the successes, Ali MacGraw left him for Steve McQueen, her co-star in the 1972 The Getaway, a love triangle that got huge media attention. (MacGraw was the third of Evans’ seven wives.) In 1980, Evans was arrested for cocaine possession and a few years later, was involved in an even bigger scandal: the murder of would-be Hollywood player Roy Radin during the production of The Cotton Club. Due to his association with Radin, Evans became a material witness in the execution-style slaying, though no proof of Evans’ knowledge of or connection to the murder was ever established.
Drug dependency and the studios’ changing corporate culture plagued Evans’ later career. When he eventually resurfaced at Paramount in the ’90s, his production track record was mostly undistinguished (The Saint, Sliver). He seemed to have bottomed out, until Springbok Productions hired him to be an executive, where he rebounded yet again. But even if that hadn't happened, by then his larger-than-life persona was already the stuff of Hollywood legend. Evans parodied himself in the film Burn, Hollywood, Burn (1998), and Dustin Hoffman, a longtime friend, borrowed liberally from Evans in creating the character of an outrageous producer in the 1997 satire Wag the Dog, earning an Oscar nomination in the process.
Evans was born Robert Shapera in New York. Before the age of 18, he had worked on more than 300 radio shows and the occasional TV show and play. A collapsed lung forced him to recuperate for a year, and when he returned, he realized he’d lost his momentum. He worked his charms as a salesman at the sportswear firm Evan-Picone, co-founded by his brother Charles.
Several years later, however, his show business career was revived: In the perhaps apocryphal tale, he was spotted by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel with actress Norma Shearer, who asked him to play her deceased husband, the legendary MGM exec Irving Thalberg, in the film Man of a Thousand Faces. Darryl Zanuck then cast him as a bullfighter in the 1957 version of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The other actors pleaded with Zanuck to replace Evans, but Zanuck sent a telegram, saying, “The kid stays in the picture,” which provided the title for his eventual autobiography. Evans’ good looks carried him only so far, however. His stiff onscreen presence in those movies and in The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) and The Best of Everything (1959) did not warm the hearts of reviewers, however, and he returned to the garment industry.
After Evan-Picone was sold to Revlon (netting Evans $2 million, according to some sources), he decided to return to the industry in a producing capacity. He purchased the rights to a novel, The Detective. New York Times reporter Peter Bart chronicled Evans’ tale in an article that caught the attention of Fox executives Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who put him in charge of such projects as Achilles Force (which was never made) and The Detective, starring Frank Sinatra. But his stay at Fox was brief.
He befriended and charmed Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western, which owned Paramount Pictures. The born salesman recognized another born salesman when he met him. In 1966 Bluhdorn controversially named the neophyte Evans VP in charge of production. By 1969 he was exec VP of worldwide production.
Evans’ early Paramount tenure included such monumental flops as Paint Your Wagon and Darling Lili, which were Bluhdorn’s pet projects. Evans oversaw disappointments including Catch-22 and the 1974 The Great Gatsby.
But they were more than offset by Evans’ successes, starting with Rosemary’s Baby, Romeo and Juliet, Goodbye, Columbus, Love Story and The Godfather films. The degree to which he personally deserved credit for any of these has always been debated, and even Evans claimed that some of the best decisions made during his tenure, particularly with respect to The Godfather, were arrived at over his objections.
Evans hired Bart at Paramount; Bart eventually joined Variety in 1989, and profiled Evans in his 2011 book Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex).
As a studio ambassador Evans was a success. His attention to day-to-day production, however, soon deteriorated, exacerbated by his public divorce from MacGraw and growing cocaine dependency. He clashed openly with Francis Ford Coppola on The Godfather (and was slighted by Coppola when he accepted his screenplay Oscar). After Barry Diller was brought in over him in 1974, Evans eased into a producing deal. His first crucible was Chinatown, a tempestuous but ultimately successful enterprise that was nominated for 11 Oscars.
After that, Evans started to slowly go downhill even as a producer. Thriller Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, was a hit in 1976, and 1977’s Black Sunday did OK, but did not live up to expectations. His tennis drama Players (starring MacGraw) was a flop, and neither Urban Cowboy nor Popeye (both 1980) were big enough hits to restore his golden-boy reputation.
In 1980, at age 50, he was convicted of cocaine possession, during a period when widespread drug use was plaguing the industry and tarnishing its reputation nationally. Evans’ Rat Pack-style behavior was by then quickly falling out of fashion in an increasingly buttoned-down corporate town.
A personal dream, The Cotton Club, became a never-ending nightmare, taking up several years of Evans’ life and almost $50 million. The hybrid of music and gangsters found Evans begging Coppola to take over the reins. The results were uneven, but artistically interesting; the production was tied to underworld money and, in attempting to raise more funds for the film, Evans became involved with Radin, whose murder seemed to be a case of life imitating art. The scandal cast a large shadow over Evans that he never successfully overcame. The Cotton Club, released by Orion Pictures in 1984, went down in flames.
Evans planned to make an acting comeback in 1985 in The Two Jakes, a sequel to Chinatown to be directed by Robert Towne (who wrote the original). But he had not grown as an actor and, soon after production began, Evans was fired. The film was shut down, only to be revived in 1990 under the direction of Jack Nicholson, who co-starred with Harvey Keitel. Evans was distanced from the sequel, which was a failure.
He returned to Paramount in the early ’90s as a producer, but the salacious Sliver (1993) and Jade (1995) were both significant failures. The comic-book-like The Phantom (1996) also sank without a trace. In 1997 Evans produced The Saint, based on the long-running TV espionage-adventure series. He’d been nurturing the project for several years and hoped the film would be the first entry in a franchise. But the movie, starring Val Kilmer, didn’t turn out as well as expected and the sequels never came to pass.
His private life once again made the headlines when Evans’ name was mentioned among the customers for Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss’ service. An entire chapter on his sexual habits was detailed in the salacious and hyperbolic book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again. Evans had already published a frank memoir of his life, 1994’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, admitting some of his virtues and his vices.
In 1998 Evans suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and unable to speak, but he eventually made a full recovery after much therapy.
He made a triumphant return in some sense with the 2002 documentary adaptation of The Kid Stays in the Picture, directed by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, in which Evans idiosyncratically discussed his life.
Taking advantage of the increased exposure, he exec produced Kid Notorious, a 2003 animated series based on his unique persona for Comedy Central. The same year he produced the successful romantic comedy How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
In 2004, Springbok Productions hired him as an executive, mainly to help with developing film projects, especially those being distributed by Paramount. Among the Springbok/Paramount projects that Evans received executive producer credit for are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Shutter Island, Young Adult, The Wolf of Wall Street, Interstellar, Inuyasha, The Hateful Eight, and the recent Elton John fantasy musical Rocketman.
Even with his Springbok duties, Evans maintained an office on the Paramount Pictures lot, and continued to develop projects outside of Springbok, though none came to fruition: He had long planned a movie based on the renegade car builder John DeLorean, written by James Toback to be produced with Brett Ratner; he also had in development a sci-fi movie set in a futuristic Manhattan and based on a graphic novel, NYC2123; Whip Smart, the story of a young dominatrix to be directed by Catherine Hardwicke; and a superhero film, Foreverman, based on an original character created by Stan Lee and to be produced with Lee.
He was married and divorced seven times, first to actress Sharon Hugueny, then to actress Camilla Sparv and, after his divorce from MacGraw, to former Miss America Phyllis George. His brief 1998 marriage to actress Catherine Oxenberg was annulled. Thereafter he was married to Leslie Ann Woodward and Victoria White.
He and MacGraw had a son, Josh, an actor and director. Survivors also include a grandson.