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It all started with music supervisor Tony Von Pervieux’s dream of working with pop music maestro Max Martin for an original Ted Lasso song — and ended with an emotional tearjerker that was so good Jason Sudeikis wrote a specific scene for the tune in the season three finale of the Apple TV+ comedy. Sudeikis even had a tiny role in changing one of the song’s lyrics (more on that later).

This is the story behind Ted Lasso‘s Emmy-nominated track “A Beautiful Game,” performed by Ed Sheeran and written by Sheeran, Martin and Foy Vance.

A Song Is Born

When Von Pervieux received the go-ahead from Ted Lasso producers to pursue an original song by Martin for the series, he had to pitch the five-time Grammy-winning producer, who has launched 25 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. “He has always been one of the best producers of all time.

My career started exactly 20 years ago when I was cast in a pilot for Fox called “The 3rd Degree” with Jensen Ackles and Maggie Lawson. I was almost two years out of college and living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where I had a unique view of the Twin Towers from my rooftop.

In that pilot, our characters were students at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice and we solved crimes in between classes. It was pitched as “CSI” meets “Scooby Doo.” One scene took place in the six acre plaza of the World Trade Center. The camera focused on the top floors of the South Tower and slowly panned down the face of the building to find us sitting on the Cloud Fortress sculpture by Masayuki Nagare. After work, we went to the top of the South Tower, enjoyed the view and talked about what it’d be like to...

With viewers’ votes finally in play, Sunday’s episode of American Idol marked the end of the road for eight singers, leaving us with the Top 16 of Season 19.

Let’s start with the results. The following 16 singers are going through to the next round: Alanis Sophia, Alyssa Wray, Ava August, Beane, Caleb Kennedy, Casey Bishop, Cassandra Coleman, Chayce Beckham, Colin Jamieson, Deshawn Goncalves, Grace Kinstler, Graham DeFranco, Hunter Metts, Madison Watkins, Willie Spence and Wyatt Pike.

More from TVLineAmerican Idol: Og Judge Paula Abdul Replacing Covid-Stricken Luke BryanAmerican Idol Twist: Season 18 Contestants to Compete for a Spot in Season 19's Top 10 -- Who's Returning?...

“American Idol” judges Luke Bryan, Katy Perry and Lionel Richie watched along with viewers at home as the Top 24 contestants were cut down to the Top 16 on the ABC singing competition. Who did America choose and who was eliminated? And what did the sweet 16 artists perform live after receiving the exciting news they had advanced to the next round?

On April 11 the Top 16 hopefuls perform once again for America’s vote. The results will be revealed on April 12 as the Top 16 are winnowed down to 12.

Below, follow along with all the action in our live blog recap of Night 12 Season 19 episode of “American Idol.”

See ‘American Idol’ Winners: Where Are They Now (Seasons 1 – 18)?

8:00 p.m. — America voted and tonight 24 become 16. Will your favorite make the cut? We’re about to find out! A masked live audience is in the building as eight singers reach the end of their journey...

Willie Nelson will have a new book on shelves this summer. Willie Nelson’s Letters to America is an inspiring collection of letters from the Red Headed Stranger to his readers about what it means to be a U.S. citizen. Letters to America will be published by Harper Horizon on June 29th.

According to a release, the book is a reminder to readers of the “endless promise and continuous obligations of all Americans — to themselves, to one another, and to their nation — to stand with unity, resolve, and faith.

Willie Nelson learned how to write songs from listening to Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and more. But one person, above all, taught him how to sing: Frank Sinatra. And, on February 26th, Nelson will release That’s Life, a new collection of Sinatra covers.

That’s Life digs a little deeper than his previous covers album, My Way; in addition to hits like the title track and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” he includes lesser-known classics like “Just in Time” and “The Lonesome Road” from 1959.

“I learned a lot about phrasing listening to Frank,...

Spoiler Alert: Santa Claus blows a mean sax.

The high point of Netflix’s The Christmas Chronicles 2 comes at its least festive moment. The young and grieving teen Kate Pierce (Darby Camp) is mistaken for a runaway and taken away by airport authorities–while being lost in time–all the flights on Logan International Airport’s big board turn from hour-long delays to outright cancellations, and joy in that small part of Boston drops to 7 percent. People are all up in each other’s grills, nerves are frayed, and complimentary hotel stays are not going to cut it. They are not a merry bunch. If ever there was a time for a holiday miracle, this would be it. Only now, when things are at their darkest, does a flustered ticket agent named Grace (Darlene Love) reach for the public address microphone–and deliver “The Spirit of Christmas.”

Darlene Love...

Since True Colours launched in 2015, it has rapidly doubled the size of its lineups to roughly 20 titles per year, while continuing to carefully curate distribution strategies for each film and made lots of global inroads.

The company is known among Italian producers for transparency and providing rapid sales reports, while foreign buyers like working with execs “because they always make things easy,” says Nicolas Zumaglini, head of content at prominent Latin American distributor Telefilms, who notes that “they have definitely helped spread Italian cinema in the region.” As for True Colours giving cinema Italiano more global reach, the most poignant recent example is “Il Testimone Invisibile” (“The Invisible Witness”), a remake of Spanish thriller (“Contratiempo”), directed by Italy’s Stefano Mordini. “Invisible Witness” is the European title that’s scored the highest gross at the Chinese box office, roughly $5 million, since movie theaters re-opened in China post-pandemic.

The True Colours...

Don't expect to see Pauley Perrette back on the small screen.

The former NCIS and Broke star confirmed Saturday what she's been teasing for months:

She's done with acting and is looking to the future.

Perrette announced that she now has no contract with a Hollywood studio or modeling agency, meaning that she can do whatever she wants.

"I finally and happily retired! And this is what I was looking forward to," she wrote.

"My rules in life now are 'if my [rescue dogs] don’t care, it’s cool! I only answer to God and animals and plants now. Woot!!!"

While best known for her stint as Abby Sciuto on the veteran CBS procedural NCIS, Perrette was acting for many years before landing that big break.

Her film and TV career kicked off with the ABC special Magical Make-Over in 1994, before going on to appear on multiple episodes of Frasier.

Perrette's...

Drama based on life of Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of children from the Nazis.

Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn are to star in TIFF sales title One Life, a drama about British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of children from the Nazis.

The feature will be produced by See-Saw Films, whose credits include Lion and The King’s Speech, and will be introduced to buyers this week.

FilmNation Entertainment will manage international sales alongside See-Saw’s in-house sales arm, Cross City Films.

Directed by Irish filmmaker Aisling Walsh, One Life will tell the story of Winton, who championed...

Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn are set to star in “One Life,” a true story drama and biopic about a man who rescued hundreds of children from Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. The film’s production company See-Saw Films and managing directors Iain Canning and Emile Sherming announced the news Wednesday.

Aisling Walsh will direct the film about the life Sir Nicholas George Winton that will be launched to buyers at TIFF. And she’ll be working from a screenplay co-written by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake about the humanitarian’s story.

“One Life” is the story of Sir Nicholas George Winton, who at age 29 championed the the rescue of refugee children out of Czechoslovakia, under threat from Hitler’s death camps, to the safety of British foster families. Battling public apathy, political hostility and bureaucratic obstruction he succeeded in rescuing 669 children before the war broke out, the borders...

Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn are starring in the Holocaust drama “One Life,” centered on the life of humanitarian Nicholas George Winton.

Both actors will portray Winton, who championed the rescue of Czech children threatened with deportation to Hitler’s death camps to the safety of British foster families. He succeeded in rescuing 669 children before World War II broke out. Half a century later, he had a surprise reunion with the now grown children whose lives he saved in a moment captured on the BBC TV show “That’s Life.”

See-Saw Films’ managing directors Iain Canning and Emile Sherman and Joanna Laurie are producing the feature film with Aisling Walsh set to direct. The film will be executive produced by Rose Garnett for BBC Films, and See-Saw’s COO of film, Simon Gillis. BBC Films developed the film with See-Saw. Lucinda Coxon (“The Danish Girl”) and Nick Drake co-wrote the screenplay...

Exclusive: Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins (The Two Popes) and rising Brit actor Johnny Flynn (Emma) are attached to star in One Life, a feature drama based on the true story of British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, who helped save hundreds of children from the Nazis on the eve of World War II.

Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl) and Nick Drake (Romulus) have co-written the screenplay based on the extraordinary story of Nicholas “Nicky” Winton who, when just 29 years old, championed the rescue of refugee children out of Czechoslovakia, under threat from Hitler’s death camps, to the safety of British foster families.

Battling public apathy, political hostility and bureaucratic obstruction, he succeeded in rescuing 669 children — many of them Jewish — before the war broke out, the borders closed and the mission was abruptly ended. Half a century later, Winton famously had a surprise reunion with the grown children whose lives he saved...

True Colours, a top Italian sales agent, has acquired world sales rights to “Puntasacra,” one of 14 feature-length documentaries selected for main international competition at Switzerland’s prestigious – and now online – Visions du Réel Festival in Nyon.

The deal, one of the most important to go down on a title at Vision du Réel reteams True Colours with “Puntasacra” director Francesca Mazzoleni after the sales agents handled sales on her 2017 fiction feature debut, “That’s Life” (Succede).

Produced by Alessandro Greco at Morel Film, “Puntasacra” portrays the inhabitants of the last triangle of habitable land at the mouth of the Tiber, Punta Sacra, and the community of its Idroscalo di Ostia through protagonist Franca’s all-female family, which drives the stories in the film of a community which saw half of its houses destroyed in a fire in 2010. Now only a few hundred families remain, a communist on the verge if extinction,...

A lot will be said in the days and years to come about all the amazing and unforgettable Grammy Moments that Ken Ehrlich has somehow made happen decade after decade live on the Grammy Awards. Likely, a lot of it has already been said by my longtime mentor and lifelong friend Ken himself to Chris Willman in the surrounding pages of this distinguished publication that shares a name with the precise and splendid quality Ken has consistently brought to Music’s Biggest Night for four decades — Variety.

As you might imagine, working on the Grammy Awards for Ken over nearly two of those decades, I have enjoyed the tremendous and enduring pleasure of sharing a variety of the moments with Ken and the rest of a team that’s become like a family — occasionally like the Manson Family, but still, a family all the same. Although I had attended many...

In Howard Hawks’ 1941 comedy, Barbara Stanwyck plays a stripper with a penchant for snappy patter and Gary Cooper is the bookish grammarian who decides she’s a suitable case for study. Cooper is surrounded by a like-minded bunch of fussbudgets based on the seven dwarves making Stanwyck’s character a very unlikely Snow White. Billy Wilder wrote the story and collaborated on the screenplay with Charles Brackett. Danny Kaye starred in a musical remake, A Song is Born.

The post Ball of Fire appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

CineSavant poaches on Greenbriar Picture Shows territory with a quick slideshow of photos from New Yawk, New Yawk, where once upon a time, any old film release might get a gigantic ‘your name in lights’ opening on the Great White Way.

This photo idea won’t be a trend at CineSavant, but it is a welcome break. It came about because long-time correspondent ‘B’ wanted to assure me that some movies I had described as marginal, actually opened big in New York. To prove to me that the Louis De Rochemont social issue movie Lost Boundaries wasn’t a micro-release seen by nearly nobody (which seems to be the fate of so many pictures today), “B” sent along this color photo of the gigantic electric billboard at the Astor Theater, presumably in early July of 1949.

The Astor Theater

“B” wrote, “Back in the day — when ‘The Great White Way’ was...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Ball of Fire is playing on Mubi in the Us January 8 through February 7, 2016.To rephrase a popular literary adage, one shouldn’t judge a film by its credits. Many a noteworthy roster of talent has yielded a less than superior motion picture. Such is not the case, however, with the 1941 Samuel Goldwyn production, Ball of Fire. Aside from the legendary producer, who had over 100 movies under his belt by this point in his career, the film boasts an Oscar-nominated story by Thomas Monroe and Billy Wilder, a script by Wilder and frequent co-writer Charles Brackett, a supporting cast of famous faces like Dana Andrews, Dan Duryea, and Elisha Cook Jr., and superb star turns by Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Behind the camera, the music is by Alfred Newman, Gregg Toland is the cinematographer, Daniel Mandell is the editor,...

There is a terrific series titled ”Auto-Remakes” starting today at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The series, which runs through March 31, pairs films made and remade by the same director (in the way Michael Haneke did recently with Funny Games). C. Mason Wells, one of the programmers, writes “Anthology surveys the history of auteurs who – per Ken Jacobs – returned to the scene of the crime. Whether out of dogged perfectionism, playful abandon, or, yes, monetary gain, they changed their own films from black-and-white to color, from documentary to reenactment, from tragedy to comedy, from silent to sound, from noir to Western, from video to celluloid – reimagining the same stories, characters, or ideas with new collaborators, technologies, and formal strategies.”

What’s interesting about the pairs of posters for these films is that they are markedly similar. Aside from the casting, you can’t tell much about what differentiates the original and the remake,...

No 85 Judy Garland (1922-69)

She narrowly missed being "born in a trunk" on tour because her vaudevillian parents had gone off the road to manage a cinema with music hall acts in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. From taking the stage at the age of two, she remained in showbusiness up to her sudden death at 47 of an accidental drug overdose combined with illiberal use of alcohol while fulfilling nightclub engagements in London.

When she was four, her father had to relocate to Pennsylvania after importuning young male members of his staff. After working in a second-rate singing act with her older sisters and changing her name from Frances Gumm to Judy Garland, she was taken to Hollywood at the age of 13 by her fiercely ambitious mother (whom she later called "the real Wicked Witch of the West").

The biggest studio in town, MGM, added her to its roster of juvenile performers raised on the premises,...

DVD Playhouse—May 2009

Paramount Centennial Collection Paramount Studios releases two more classic titles from its library on special edition DVD: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is John Ford’s last masterpiece (although he would go on to direct two more very good films) from 1962: about an Eastern lawyer (James Stewart) who travels west only to find primal brutality in the form of sadistic bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, great as always) and pragmatic brutality in local rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), each two sides of a coin that represent a way of life slowly dying out as Stewart’s modern brand of civilization tames the West. A perfect film, period. Howard Hawks’ El Dorado is essentially a remake of his earlier classic Rio Bravo, with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan as lawmen joining forces against corrupt cattle barons. Great fun. Two disc sets.