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Andy Roddick Joins Fox Sports 1 Team

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Wednesday May 22, 2013 @ 2:21pm PDTTags: Andy Roddick, Fox Sports 1, News Corp

Newly retired tennis pro Andy Roddick will co-host Fox Sports Live, the network’s flagship news and highlights show, when Fox Sports 1 launches August 17. He joins Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole, the Canadian duo previously announced as the primary highlight team for the show, which will be the News Corp-owned network’s equivalent and rival to ESPN’s SportsCenter. Roddick is no stranger to the spotlight, having been the U.S.’ top male tennis player for years before being slowed down by injuries and age — he won a slew of titles but only one major, the 2003 U.S. Open, before he retired after the U.S. Open last August at age 30. On the media front, he hosted Saturday Night Live in 2003 and co-hosted a nationally syndicated Fox Sports Radio show last year — the guy knows his sports. Sports Illustrated has already reported that Charissa Thompson, co-host of ESPN’s SportsNation, will also join the team as a co-host.

Related: Wall Street Predicts News Corp Will Score With Fox Sports 1

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NHL Sets Kings-Ducks Outdoor Game At Dodger Stadium

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Monday May 6, 2013 @ 4:10pm PDTTags: NBC, NHL

The real fun might not be seeing the LA Kings against rival Anaheim Ducks in Chavez Ravine but instead those poor workers and Zamboni drivers trying to keep the ice from melting on a potentially hot LA day. That’s what first came to mind when the NHL today announced the Jan 25, 2014, game as part of its expanded outdoor schedule last year. The Stadium Series as it’s now called was spawned by the successful annual Winter Classic game on New Year’s Day, which has boosted awareness of the sport, and provided NBC a killer TV alternative to college bowl game blowouts. Toronto plays Chicago at Soldier Field on March 1, and other matchups are to be announced including likely Yankee Stadium games featuring the NY Rangers, NY Islanders and NJ Devils. Read More »

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ESPN Writer Clarifies Remarks On Gay NBA Player As Media Adjust To New Reality

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Tuesday April 30, 2013 @ 12:44pm PDTTags: Chris Broussard, ESPN, jason collins, NBA

Chris Broussard became part of the story yesterday with his outspoken comments about NBA player Jason Collins‘ coming-out in a Sports Illustrated column, making the journeyman center America’s first openly gay major sports figure. Broussard, a Christian and a longtime respected NBA beat writer who now works for ESPN The Magazine, called homosexuality a sin during a segment on the network’s newsmagazine OTL discussing Collins’ revelation. Not sure why anyone is surprised that a TV commentator provided commentary — agree or disagree with his take that’s what they pay the guy for, and he won’t be the last to offer an opposing view in this debate — but it prompted an apology from ESPN last night and a clarification by Broussard via Twitter:

Today on OTL, as part of a larger, wide-ranging discussion on today’s news, I offered my personal opinion as it relates to Christianity, a point of view that I have expressed publicly before. I realize that some people disagree with my opinion and I accept and respect that. As has been the case in the past, my beliefs have not and will not impact my ability to report on the NBA. I believe Jason Collins displayed bravery with his announcement today and I have no objection to him or anyone else playing in the NBA.

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Xfiniity On Demand Pacts With Tribeca Film Festival For Special Access

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Tuesday April 16, 2013 @ 10:47am PDTTags: Tribeca Film Festival, Xfinity

PHILADELPHIA – April 16, 2013 – Starting today, Comcast’s Xfinity TV and Tribeca Film® will bring Xfinity TV customers special access to the 12th Annual Tribeca Film Festival® on Xfinity On Demand. This offering includes four films available before they make their debut during the Tribeca Film Festival, which begins on April 17: The English Teacher, Fresh Meat, What Richard Did, and Greetings from Tim Buckley along with past Tribeca Film favorites that have screened at the Festival including Newlyweds, Grave Encounters, Janie Jones, Struck by Lightning, and over a dozen more.

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‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Winner Jeanine Mason Joins Fox Pilot ‘Delirium’

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Friday March 1, 2013 @ 3:14pm PSTTags: Delirium, Fox

Jeanine Mason, who won Season 5 of Fox‘s competition series So You Think You Can Dance, has been cast in the network’s drama pilot Delirium. The project, from 20th Century Fox TV and Chernin Entertainment and based … Read More »

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Why Did San Francisco Ignore The 49ers During The Super Bowl?

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Tuesday February 5, 2013 @ 12:09pm PSTTags: Super Bowl, TV Ratings

As media outlets race to determine who was at fault for the half-hour power outage during Super Bowl XXLVII — does it really matter now if it the power … Read More »

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Ryan Murphy And Jason Blum To Produce MGM Remake ‘The Town That Dreaded Sundown’

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Friday January 18, 2013 @ 9:39am PSTTags: Jason Blum, MGM, Ryan Murphy, The Town That Dreaded Sundown

Jen Yamato is a Deadline contributor.

Ryan Murphy spilled details at a screening last night for the season finale of FX’s American Horror Story. “The movie that I was most freaked out by as a child was this movie that … Read More »

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Sundance: Icarus Film Acquires Docu ‘The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear’

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Thursday January 17, 2013 @ 1:01pm PSTTags: Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Wrap-Up

ICARUS FILMS announced today its acquisition of all North American distribution rights to the Sundance Film Festival, World Documentary Competition entry THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR, directed by the young Georgian filmmaker Tinatin Gurchiani. The deal was inked

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Big Names Tackle Big Subject Matter In HBO’s ‘Phil Spector’: TCA

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Friday January 4, 2013 @ 3:15pm PSTTags: Al Pacino, HBO, Helen Mirren, Phil Spector, TCA

Ray Richmond is contributing to Deadline’s TCA coverage.

Phil Spector is, in a sense, being retried in the court of artistic expression in the HBO biopic Phil Spector that debuts this spring featuring the typically impressive HBO pedigree: Al Pacino in the title role as Spector and Helen Mirren as his co-star. Oh, and David Mamet as writer-director. At the afternoon TCA panel promoting the film, defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden, who defended Spector in his first trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson and served as a consultant on the film, remains unconvinced that her client did in fact commit the crime. “It was not proven,” she believes, “and to some degree that’s what this movie explores. What does reasonable doubt mean in a jury trial? Mamet, too, remains unconvinced of Spector’s guilt. “All I knew when we started the project is that he was a freak who killed some girl,” he said. But by the time he finished watching a documentary about Spector, Mamet admits he had changed his tune, to the point where he was almost equally convinced that Spector was extremely bright, misunderstood — and quite possibly not guilty. But his marching orders were “don’t indict the victim,” so he worked to make sure that was the case. Read More »

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Dane DeHaan Joins ‘Spider-Man’ Sequel As Harry Osborn

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Monday December 3, 2012 @ 11:59am PSTTags: Dane DeHaan, The Amazing Spider-Man

Dane DeHaan has appeared in four films this year — Lincoln, Lawless, Jack & Diane and Chronicle — and will play Harry Osborn in Columbia’s sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man alongside Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx and … Read More »

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DirecTV CEO Takes On Sports Programming Costs In Lakers Fight: “The Industry Is Broken”

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Wednesday November 7, 2012 @ 5:03pm PSTTags: DirecTV, Mike White, Time Warner Cable Deportes, Time Warner Cable SportsNet

DirecTV CEO Mike White is no stranger to taking a stand against rising programming costs, pulling 16 Viacom channels off his service during the summer for 10 days before reaching a carriage deal. Now his company and Dish Network are the lone pay TV providers serving Southern California who don’t have an agreement to carry the LA Lakers’ newly created TV homes: Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Time Warner Cable Deportes. The satellite companies are balking at the $3.95-per-sub-per-month price that TWC reportedly wants. (Verizon, AT&T, Charter and, as of today, Cox Communications have made deals and are carrying the channels.) DirecTV, with about 1.2 million subs in SoCal, also is holding out on making a deal for a third rookie regional sports net, the Pac-12 Networks. It says that costs are out of control. (A fine Sports Business Journal report on the LA mess calculates providers must pony up about $10 per sub per month to carry all the RSNs in town). White was, well, direct during his company’s earnings call yesterday when asked about negotiations. Sounds like the Lakers, who play their fifth game of the season tonight in Utah, won’t be on DirecTV anytime soon:

In terms of Los Angeles, I think it’s another example of how broken this system is. People take the same content, package it up, bid it up for 3 times the national average on a per-game basis and then try and stick it back to the other distributors in the geography. And I think that’s very unfortunate. We have a system of very carefully tracking churn by day to look at kind of what we think our customers will be most interested in. We are continuing to have active discussions about the Lakers network. We hope to have a deal on that content. But all of these new channels that – everybody here wants a new channel and they want to stick it into the bundle, is not right. I mean we are taxing most of our customers who wouldn’t be willing to pay for that content. And I’ve said before, I think the regional sports network structure in the industry is broken. And it is. But I’m probably not going be able to change that overnight. But adding other stuff to the bundle that the average consumer can’t pay for without allowing it to be sold to those that want to pay for it is just not right. So we’ll continue to stand strong for our customers.

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Francis Lawrence To Direct ‘Hunger Games: Mockingjay’ Pics

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Thursday November 1, 2012 @ 10:31am PDTTags: Big Deals Film, Catching Fire, Francis Lawrence, Lionsgate, Mockingjay, The Hunger Games

Francis Lawrence is seeing through Lionsgate‘s The Hunger Games franchise until the end. The director of the first sequel The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, now in production, has now signed on to helm the final two installments of the series, Mockingjay Part 1 and Mockingjay Part 2, which splits the final book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy into two films. Danny Strong is writing both Mockingjay pics, and Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth are back to star. The final two movies follow heroine Katniss Everdeen’s journey as she leads the districts of Panem in a rebellion against the tyrannical and corrupt Capitol, and she must decipher for herself who she can trust and what needs to be done, with everything she cares for in the balance.

Lawrence, whose credits include Constantine, I Am Legend and most recently Water For Elephants, replaced Gary Ross at the helm of Catching Fire in April. He was chosen in a race that came down to Lawrence and Moneyball helmer Bennett Miller, after Juan Antonio Bayona couldn’t do it. He is currently wrapping production on the pic with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jena Malone and Amanda Plummer joining the cast. Lawrence is repped by CAA and 3 Arts. Read More »

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UPDATE: AT&T U-Verse Joins Charter, Verizon To Carry Time Warner Cable’s New Lakers Channels As Others Balk At Price

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Saturday October 27, 2012 @ 2:45pm PDTTags: Big Deals TV, Los Angeles Lakers, Time Warner Cable, Time Warner Cable SportsNet

3RD UPDATE, 2:40 PM SATURDAY: Time Warner Cable today annouced that AT&T U-verse had signed on in Southern California in time for the L.A. Lakers’ season debut. Starting Tuesday, October 30, AT&T U-verse TV will provide SportsNet and Deportes — the local TV homes for the LA Galaxy and Los Angeles Sparks games as well as the Lakers. TWC SportsNet will be available for U-verse TV customers in Southern California (Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield and much of Fresno) with the U100 package and above on channel 1777 in HD and channel 777 in SD. TWC Deportes will be available in the U300 package or U-Latino package on channel 1778 in HD and channel 778 in SD.

2ND UPDATE, 6:25 PM Friday: Time Warner Cable has confirmed that it has agreed to terms on with Verizon’s FiOS system, with details in the coming days. (UPDATE: It was made official Monday. Time Warner Cable SportsNet will be available on FiOS TV Channel 78 in standard definition and on FiOS TV Channel 578 in high definition. Time Warner Cable Deportes will be available on FiOS TV Channel 79 in standard definition.)

1ST UPDATE, 4:40 PM: Charter Communications has just finalized a deal to carry the two networks in Southern California, with a launch targeted before the Lakers’ first game on the channels October 31. “Charter is committed to bring programming to our customers that mirror their interests,” said Allan Singer, Charter’s SVP Programming. “We are proud of Charter’s robust selection of sports programming.  Charter is the first provider of this brand new programming in our service areas, and we know that the addition of these networks especially pleases our customers in Southern California.” No deal terms were announced.

PREVIOUS: 2:59 PM: The tipoff of the NBA’s regular season is a week away. But there’s a pretty good game going on right now between Time Warner Cable‘s just-launched regional sports channels — the new digs of the Los Angeles Lakers — and the cable and satellite companies that have yet to pick them up. That includes pretty much all the Southern California operators, from DirecTV and Dish Network to Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-verse, Charter and Cox Communications. At issue is TWC’s reported asking price of $3.95 per subscriber per month. That’s a steep price for a lineup that just includes the Lakers, Major League Soccer’s LA Galaxy and the WNBA’s LA Sparks. The king of per-subscriber sports fees, Disney’s ESPN, commands an average of $5.13 per sub each month, according to SNL Kagan. Among Time Warner Cable’s fellow RSNs, six receive more than $3 — and half of them are from Comcast, including the highest-price one Comcast SportsNet Washington at $4.02.

So far, the networks — Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Spanish-language Time Warner Cable Deportes, which are being shopped as a package — have carriage on only one system: Bright House Networks, which operates in the Bakersfield area. That leaves a majority of fans — ESPN Los Angeles put it at about 4.8 million Angelenos who pay for TV — shut out unless they have Time Warner Cable, which has about 2 million subs in LA. In the past week, DirecTV and Cox have criticized the TWC channels amid ongoing negotiations. They say TWC’s charging too much for networks with one marquee tenant that will show only 53 of the team’s 82 games. Both said they offered to carry the channels on a specialty tier that subs would have to pay for separately, according to the LA Times. Read More »

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Casting Society To Honor Ben Affleck With Lifetime Nod

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Wednesday October 24, 2012 @ 4:09pm PDTTags: Artios Awards, Ben Affleck

EXCLUSIVE: The Casting Society of America will bestow its Lifetime Achievement Award on Ben Affleck during its 28th annual Artios Awards, set for October 29 at ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York.  The CSA also is … Read More »

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Santa Barbara To Honor Robert De Niro

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Tuesday October 16, 2012 @ 3:30pm PDTTags: Robert De Niro, Santa Barbara Film Festival

Santa Barbara, CA – Director, producer and Academy Award-winning actor ROBERT DE NIRO has been chosen to receive The Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s seventh annual KIRK DOUGLAS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILM at a black-tie Gala dinner at Bacara

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Screen Gems Acquires Rights To Young-Adult Book Series ‘Black City’

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Tuesday October 9, 2012 @ 11:30am PDTTags: Screen Gems

Los Angeles – October 9, 2012 – Screen Gems has preemptively closed a deal to develop the feature film based on the highly anticipated young-adult fantasy series “Black City” written by Elizabeth Richards. The first book in the series, “Black City,” will be released this coming November 13 via publisher Putnam Juvenile, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group. Screen Gems moved quickly to complete the rights deal for the series based on the high level of anticipation for the property in the online community and other young adult circles. Screen Gems is currently searching for a screenwriter to adapt the material for film.

“Black City” tells the story of a city where humans and Darklings are now separated by a high wall and tensions between the two races still simmer after a terrible war, sixteen-year-olds Ash Fisher, a half-blood Darkling, and Natalie Buchanan, a human and the daughter of the Emissary, meet and do the unthinkable–they fall in love.

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Steve Bing Donates $30M To MPTF

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Thursday September 20, 2012 @ 10:59am PDTTags: MPTF, Steve Bing

Los Angeles, CA, (September 20, 2012) – Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF) today announced that Producer/Philanthropist Steve Bing has confirmed his commitment of a $30 million legacy gift towards the MPTF Campaign goal of $350 million being led

… Read More »

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Golden Globes Trial: Judge Says Future Shows Will Be Under Legal Cloud With Appeal

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Tuesday July 24, 2012 @ 5:25pm PDTTags: Dick Clark Productions, Golden Globes, HFPA

U.S. District Court Judge A. Howard Matz said the Hollywood Foreign Press Association‘s appeal in the trial over who owns the Golden Globes is going forward (read today’s doc here). But he clearly isn’t happy about it, and he says the process likely will mean upcoming Globes shows will take place under a legal cloud just like the last one. In his order — a procedural ruling that makes way for the HFPA’s appeal against trial winner Dick Clark Productions — Matz as in the past seems frustrated that the dispute between the two parties wasn’t resolved much earlier given the Globes’ value to both, and the case will drag on as a result. Now, “even assuming an immediate appeal … it is unlikely that the parties’ dispute could be resolved before the 2013 or the 2014 Golden Globe Awards Show — which would already be three years into the contested contract period. Delaying … would push back appellate review another one-to-two years, possibly up to (or even beyond) the 2016 Golden Globes”. Read More »

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More NBC Olympics Announcers Than Athletes?

By PATRICK HIPES, Managing Editor | Thursday June 28, 2012 @ 12:13pm PDTTags: Bob Costas, NBC, Olympics

NBC Olympics London CoverageOK maybe it only seems that way, but NBC said today that a record 115 commentators are set for the network’s planned 5,535 hours of Olympics coverage across its properties. The group is led by primetime host Bob Costas, working his 10th Olympics and ninth with NBC. NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel said yesterday that there will be 3000 NBC cast and crew at the Olympic Broadcast Center by the time of the London Games’ Opening Ceremony on July 27. The commentators — including everyone in the NBCUniversal stable from Ryan Seacrest to Jimmy Fallon — will be broadcasting to an estimated 200 million viewers over the games’ 17 days. Here’s a list of the hosts, followed by a sport-by-sport breakdown of who’s covering what:

Related: An Olympian Effort: NBCUni Plans 5,535 Hours Of Coverage For London Games Read More »

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