Crew Call Podcast: Last News

Why did it take decades for a biopic to be made about Israel’s first and only female prime minister, Golda Meir?

After shooting the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana, deconstructing another pop icon in Brooke Shields was an organic segue for filmmaker Lana Wilson. The director is up for a Primetime Emmy nomination in Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program for the Hulu/ABC News docuseries Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

Oscar-nominated producer Bill Pohlad has a long history of aligning himself with auteurs on award-winning fare—from Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain to Terrence Malick on the Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life to Steve McQueen’s Oscar Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave, and getting financially behind them with his River Road Entertainment banner. We talk with Pohlad on Crew Call today about his third career feature as director, Dreamin’ Wild, based on the New York Times Steven Kurutz article about the Fruitland, WA-based Emerson brothers whose dad literally bet the farm (mortgaging it to the tune of $100K) on the duo’s singing talents in the 1970s, and built them a studio. They didn’t make it initially — not until 2008 when the album they made some near 40 years prior, “Dreamin’ Wild,” was discovered by a record collector in Spokane, Jack Fleischer, and championed fervently. The record’s single “Baby” ultimately became a cult hit when it was covered by Ariel Pink in 2012. Casey Affleck plays Donnie Emerson, the aorta of the songwriting duo, who grapples with the mid-life crisis of finding some facet of fame, when all seemed forever lost.

David Byrne knows where he’s going and he knows where he’s been, and the former Talking Heads band leader and near EGOT winner is on his way to the Oscars again, 35 years after taking home the original score Academy Award for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (which he shared with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su) with a song nomination for “This Is a Life” from A24’s 11x Oscar nominated Everything Everywhere All at Once which he co-wrote with the pic’s composers Son Lux and Mitski. If Byrne wins a second Oscar next Sunday, it doesn’t bring him closer to an EGOT; he needs an Emmy win to do that after two Grammys and a special Tony award for his Broadway showstopper American Utopia.

How to convince a studio that your own personal story is worthy of a big screen treatment?