Bill Carter: Last News

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorStanley Tucci’s next trip to Italy will face a slight delay.CNN will bump the debuts of a handful of looming original documentary projects due to its ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The second season of “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” will premiere on CNN later in the spring, as will the new series “Nomad with Carlton McCoy.” Meanwhile, the WarnerMedia network will push back the debut of “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” to Sunday March 13 at 9 p.m., a week later than its previously scheduled March 6 launch.The network has built a new business out of documentaries and docuseries, but it must balance those projects with the demands of the news cycle.

Christopher Vourlias U2 frontman Bono made a surprise appearance Friday night at the opening ceremony of the Sarajevo Film Festival, with the Irish pop star leading a rapturous crowd in a cappella rendition of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The legendary vocalist, appearing alongside bandmate the Edge, took the stage after an emotional screening of “Kiss the Future,” director Nenad Cicin-Sain’s documentary, produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, about U2’s relationship with war-torn Sarajevo in the 1990s. Based on American-born aid worker Bill Carter’s “Fools Rush in: A Memoir,” the film chronicles the band’s efforts to publicize the plight of the city’s besieged civilians during the Bosnian War.

Bono made a surprise appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival this evening, where he accompanied the crew behind the U2-inspired Bosnian war documentary Kiss The Future, which opened the festival. 

EXCLUSIVE: The days of war between late-night hosts like David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien are long gone.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Watching “Kiss the Future,” a documentary about the band U2’s relationship with wartorn Sarajevo in the 1990s, it’s hard not to think: “We’ve seen this movie before.” That’s not to do with the doc itself so much as how aspects of the 30-year-old footage from Bosnia’s brutal civil war parallel what we’ve seen in the news coverage coming out of Ukraine for the past year. Both involve stranger-than-fiction (or stranger-than-fascism) scenarios of cosmopolitan cities suddenly subject to state terrorism, which makes the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-produced film coincidentally timely, for all its belatedness. In a sense, “Kiss the Future” is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out. In the early ’90s, genocidally minded Serbian president Slobodan Milošević tried to subject the happily mixed population of Sarajevo to ethnic cleansing by any means necessary. The area’s young people fought back in whatever spirit-lifting way they could — including founding underground discos, forming punk bands and otherwise keeping the arts alive as they dodged shelling and snipers. An American activist, Bill Carter, had the idea to enlist the stadium-filling U2 in publicizing their plight, which led to nightly satellite appearances by Sarajevo locals on the giant screens of the “Zoo TV” tour’s European leg.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Matt Damon revealed he was in the “early stages” on a project about Ukraine during the press conference for “Kiss the Future” at the Berlin Film Festival. Damon is a producer on the documentary which chronicles the struggle of Sarajevo citizens during the Bosnian War. World premiering in the Berlinale Special section, the politically minded documentary is directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and based on “Fools Rush in: A Memoir” the memoir of Bill Carter, an aid worker. It shows how his determination resulted in the enlistment of the world’s largest rock band, U2, to help shine a light. Fifth Season and WME handling worldwide sales. Asked if he was considering following the footsteps of Sean Penn with “Superpower” with a film on the war in Ukraine, he said he’s “watched as everyone has with horror that unfolded there in the last year,” and although they “don’t have anything on it right now there isn’t any doubt that we’ll be doing.”

Brent Simon There’s no shortage of movies that gauzily peddle the notion of art as a balm. Few, however, are as invested in the charged immediacy of art’s relationship to real-life pain as “Kiss the Future,” a documentary enjoying its world premiere Feb. 19 in the Berlinale Special slot, with Fifth Season and WME handling worldwide sales. Directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, and based on American-born aid worker Bill Carter’s “Fools Rush in: A Memoir” (the pair share a screen story credit), the film is a savvy mélange of history and cultural portraiture that affectingly chronicles the struggle of Sarajevo’s besieged civilians during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at LargeThe producers behind CNN’s new eight-part docuseries “History of the Sitcom” knew that trying to tell the complete 70-year history of the TV genre would be an impossible task. So they divided some of the biggest comedies of all time into specific categories — and set out to illustrate how the evolution of the sitcom mirrored real-life advancements in society.“It was pretty apparent that given the number of sitcoms that have been out there in history that you couldn’t do some sort of comprehensive, start-to-finish history, as though you were in a college course studying it from beginning to end,” says executive producer Bill Carter.

Steve Allen, the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, was largely responsible for late-night television as we know it.

Troy Sneed, a Grammy-nominated gospel singer, has died following coronavirus complications at the age of 52.