BY KELLY CONABOY |
Kelly's Curated Internet: TV's Fall Lineup, Don Draper, and James Franco's New Role
Happy upfronts! The time of year when major networks announce which of their pilots will be added to their fall schedules, while the rest of us spend a lot more time than usual reading about the business decisions of major networks. Today we have a roundup of upfronts news and I PROMISE some other stuff, too. (For example, did you know James Franco is going to play Tommy Wiseau in a movie about the making of The Room?) Let's get to it!
- Vulture talked to seven actors in could-be pilots, including Ben Feldman, Melanie Brown, and Cristin Milioti, about their upfront experience.
- E! put together a helpful guide to the 2014 upfronts, including the details about everything that has been picked up so far. Impress your friends!
- Oh, and I hope we're not too late with this one: Variety put together seven things to NOT do at your upfront presentation.
- And for one last bit of upfronts, the A.V. Club offers up a helpful list of what's happened so far, including the cancelation of Fox's Dads and the announcement of Law & Order: SVU's 16th season.
- David Ehrlich spoke with Richard Ayoade about his upcoming film The Double, adapted from the Dostoyevsky novella of the same name, for The Dissolve.
- Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are planning to executive produce a feature-length animated Flintstones film. No word yet on casting, but Grantland has a few ideas.
- "I’m not the first TV person to be puzzled and fascinated by the fifties. The two biggest shows of the seventies are MASH and Happy Days. Obviously that moment is some sort of touchstone for culture. Is Hawkeye not related to Don Draper? He’s an alcoholic Boy Scout who behaves badly all the time. I just wanted to go back and look again." Matthew Weiner on creating Don Draper, interviewed in the Paris Review.
- Speaking of Mad Men, what if AMC unbundled from cable? Janko Roettgers examines the possibilities.
- To celebrate Mother's Day, Fox put together a tribute to all of its animated mothers: Marge Simpson, Linda Belcher, Lois Griffin, and Francine Smith. Happy Mother's Day, cartoon moms!
- A couple of months ago, James Franco optioned rights to Greg Sestero‘s book, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, about the making of Tommy Wiseau‘s perfectly awful classic The Room. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are going to produce the film alongside of him, and now it looks like Franco might end up playing Wiseau himself.
- And while we're on the topic of James Franco, Karen Kemmerle spoke with Gia Coppola for Tribeca about making her directorial debut with Palo Alto, a film she adapted from James Franco's book of short stories, Palo Alto: Stories.
- Ian Crouch wrote about Jon Oliver's return to TV and his path to Last Week Tonight for the New Yorker.
- "Jess and I have been trying to figure it out.. I think it might be too difficult to do a visual representation of Wompler. In a case like that, I'll usually try to figure out something else for that performer to do (like Tom Lennon - we briefly did Lil Gary, but I think he had more fun as the Phantom). We do the Calvins Twins this year, and our one regret is that we couldn't make them four-foot-tall jockeys." Ahead of the season three premiere of Comedy Bang Bang, Scott Aukerman discussed the show and the podcast during a reddit AMA.