Mark London Williams examines the impacts immigration laws and tariffs might have on the entertainment sector and overseas production, reports from the ACE Eddie Awards and explores techniques used in Apple Cider Vinegar and The Day of the Jackal. 

In our first column after America’s profoundly timeline-altering election, we mentioned two items likely to affect the entertainment business, despite the oft-held view that the industry is “recession-proof” (stemming from the notion that even in hard times, people need storytelling. And distraction. Perhaps even more so in hard times). 

The first item was the possibility that draconian enforcement of immigration laws (and/or making up new ones out of thin air) would likely have an effect on two global events that the US won bids to host: The World Cup and the Olympics. (Sports, given its prime position as broadcastable “content,” is, for our purposes, part of that “entertainment” discussion.) 

If you were an international athlete, would you want to travel to a country where you might be as likely to wind up in an ICE detainment facility as in your Olympic village room? Would countries in the midst of profound trade (and, increasingly, cultural) wars with the US want to send delegations here anyway? Would international crew members, actors, or other celebrities still be willing to come here for award shows, or multi-week shoots, only to have their phones and laptops ransacked by customs first to make sure they’re not just a little bit too outspoken?  

The other item was the likelihood of reckless, widespread tariffs, and how those might affect things like overseas production, or even the attitudes of potential overseas audiences. And while neither the World Cup nor the Olympics have been officially canceled, or boycotted… yet (though stay tuned) the dislocation of rapidly on-and-off again tariffs has arrived, and the effects appear to be exceeding the expectations of even the most fearful economic prognosticators.  

What impacts might this constant economic roiling have on an entertainment sector that still hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic (certainly in terms of audiences routinely returning to theaters) to say nothing of the strikes? The mantra was supposed to be “stay alive until ‘25,” after the walkouts, but now? “Find new tricks ‘til ‘26?” “Bar the gate ‘til ‘28?”  

The financial press has asked some of these same questions, and a recent Bloomberg article about potential tariff effects on entertainment, observes that “one wild card is how other countries respond to these tariffs. What happens if they impose taxes on US streaming services or movies? Some countries, like Italy, want to avoid a trade war. Others may be more aggressive.” 

Which gets us, as per a previous GOP administration, to the “unknown unknowns” of the situation: What if this continues to metastasise and becomes a full-blown culture war, as well? And other countries become more determined to “boycott America?” 

Sure, the current administration partially backtracked on some of the tariffs they imposed, all during the course of writing this column, (while doubling down on tariffs to China, and insisting the backtracking was only temporary). But the roller-coaster, improvisational nature of these “policies” and pronouncements is doing nothing to reassure markets, which appear – occasional spikes notwithstanding – to be trending steadily downward. On which note: China has announced it will begin “moderately reducing” the number of American films it imports, reducing box office revenue from a country where it was already trending downward.  

Back in the US, a version of an ICE poster said it was everyone’s job to help stop imports of another kind: not only “illegal” people, along with money, and products, but ideas. “Illegal” ideas. After some online pushback, the masked ICErs claimed they only meant to say “intellectual property.” Which will provide little reassurance to producers elsewhere hoping to find American markets for their shows, films, books, etc., and the “ideas” they contain – since the inference, made stark by recent actions, is that we’re talking about more than bootlegged DVDs or pirated content. What would it mean for a global industry and concept like “Hollywood” if the literal one finds itself behind the borders of a global pariah state? None of us really knows, yet. (Though, also during the time of this column’s drafting and layout, Hollywood’s home terrain, California, has become the first state to sue over those tariffs.)  

ICE’S “ILLEGAL IDEA” POST

On the other hand, if you’re stateside and thinking of buying cameras or glass from certain makers in Germany or Japan, perhaps the current partial tariff pause will force your hand, and your budget, a little more quickly this year than you reckoned.  

AWARDS HONOUREES

Other, more literal, conflagrations have forced other reconsiderations. Such as the fire-delayed ACE Eddie awards, held once again on the UCLA Campus, which came after the Academy Awards this year. But not for the first time! In an opening reel (need we even remark how well-edited it was?) honouring the awards’ 75 years of existence, there were highlights from the first 11 of those years– when the Eddies were a dinner convened to celebrate whichever film editor had just won an Oscar. 

More recently, the editing awards have often been used as one of the predictors of likely Best Picture winners, though that wouldn’t have been the case this time. Delayed about two months after its original January date – and thus coming about two weeks after Anora’s big night at the Academy Awards– the narrative feature Eddies went to Wicked in the Comedy/Musical category, and Emilia Perez on the drama side.  

 Wicked’s win proved handy for the evening, as not only was the afterparty done with an Ozian theme, but the hit film’s director, Jon M. Chu was this year’s Golden Eddie Award Honoree. Chu talked movingly about his own start and first breaks after film school, and how quickly time passes, both from the perspective of being a father, and a film director, who finds another two years swiftly gone by after each project is wrapped (though in being a director, also talked about the larger “families” one accumulates from film to film). And perhaps for the first time at an award show, the poet Derek Walcott was cited, with Chu reading from Love After Love, about a certain acceptance that comes with passing years. (“The time will come /when, with elation /you will greet yourself arriving /at your own door […] You will love again the stranger who was yourself”). 

Though of course, sometimes those doors – and the houses around them – are so fraught with memories it becomes much harder to arrive at, after all. Such was the case with Wicked’s winning editor, Myron Kerstein ACE, whose Altadena neighborhood perished in the fire – along with his children’s school. And though his own house – where he edited part of Wicked – was still standing, he has not been able to return to live there yet, for reasons both practical and heartfelt. But Kerstein has also been busy raising funds for the school’s rebuilding, and organising visits to studio backlots for displaced kids, still in need of some sense of normalcy and community. 

Which, of course, applies to America in general at the present juncture. A juncture perhaps applicable to what the late author Walker Percy had in mind in his essay Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time (written some fortyish, seemingly less apocalyptic, years ago), on the role of storytelling: “Even in bad times, writers had major roles […] because as bad as times were, there was still a consensus of sorts. Symbols signified […] A dirge, a lament, even a jeremiad implies an intact society.”  

 And so, evidently, do sitcoms, dramedies, thrillers and more, as we head from Oscar season – which still isn’t over yet, as our next column will report on the Academy’s similarly fire-delayed Scientific Technical Achievement awards! – into the early handicapping for the Emmys.  

 There are the shows which are touted, already likely, to score nods in various above and below the line categories – such as the latest iterations of The White Lotus, The Last of Us, et al. But also the surprises, like last year’s Baby Reindeer. Or the current Adolescence. 

 SOCIAL MEDIA SHOOTING

 Another current out-of-left-field, buzz-generating show (and like Reindeer and Adolescence, also on Netflix) is Apple Cider Vinegar, a six-episode binge fest detailing the duplicity of Belle Gibson, an early internet “influencer” (in the years just before that particular phrase’s undue, well, “influence” on popular culture) who rose to prominence, including app placements with Apple, as a “wellness” expert claiming to have overcome cancer – in fact, several cancer diagnoses and other maladies – strictly through diet and alternative methods alone.  

While the series takes an occasional too-easy swipe at the cultures of juicing and veggie burgers – diet may, after all, not be disconnected from the health of the body doing the eating – it has a lot of salient points to make about those who would take advantage of the desperation and vulnerability that comes with a frightening medical diagnosis (speaking as one who ventured through an all-too-memorable “medical year” himself). And yes, you really don’t want to rely on a coffee enema regimen when there are bleeding lumps on your arm.  

The Australian production stars Yank actress Kaitlyn Dever, a previous Emmy nominee for her supporting work in Dopesick (and a BAFTA rising star nominee to boot!), as Oz-born (though not the previously referenced “Oz!”) blogger, cookbook author, and ultimately charity fraudster Gibson, who used a growing celebrity to bilk, cajole and fool not only a raft of followers, but numerous media “professionals” as well. At least for a while. 

The Apple Cider Vinegar team had a “dedicated ’SMU’ Social Media Unit with their own director and the team largely using actual iPhones to capture a vast amount of online video and stills. If nothing else, the series makes you nostalgic for the days when manipulative sociopaths were eventually found out. But given that “blogger” connotes a previous era of digital media, we asked series DP Toby Oliver ACS, about what it was like incorporating the various visual modes of Facebook and Instagram videos, captured on earlier phones and cameras, into the overall visual language of the storytelling.  

He explains that the production had its own “dedicated ’SMU’ Social Media Unit with their own director and the team largely using actual iPhones to capture a vast amount of online video and stills, used to fully flesh out the (mocked up) Facebook and Instagram style online identities and personas of Belle, Milla [her social media rival who actually did have cancer] […along with] Belle’s app The Whole Pantry and various websites and blogs and online comments. 

“I tested the iPhone’s 4K video formats and put them through our workflow/post pipeline early on so there were no surprises – it was a fundamental part of the show. Director Jeffrey Walker had had less than ideal experience depicting social media footage in previous productions and he didn’t want to use main unit cinema cameras with dirtied up and degraded images to represent social media video – he wanted to use the real thing, i.e. an actual phone for the immediacy and reality of the footage – and ease of use for actors to film / shoot themselves in selfie situations. The technical concession we made was to use a contemporary phone such as the iPhone 14 rather than the legacy phones of the day (iPhone 5 or 6) for reliability and consistency.” 

The main narrative, which moves along at its own frenetic pace was shot with an ARRI Alexa 35, mostly owing to “its incredible extension to dynamic range over the original Alexa sensor, actually very helpful when on fast-turnaround locations, and the lovely colour science on skin tones. It was the first time I had used the camera on a long form shoot,” but Oliver adds the Super 35mm-size sensor “suited our choice to shoot with compact zoom lenses instead of primes. Jeffrey had expressed a possible desire to shoot handheld and with zoom lenses […referencing] Succession in his pitch and felt that a fast moving somewhat loose shooting style would work for the rapid pace… So I suggested the original Angénieux Optimo compact zooms (15-40, 28-76 and 45-120mm lenses) which I had used on several previous projects including Get Out and Happy Death Day to good effect. 

 “There was [also] time to discuss the look and feel with Jeff and creator Samantha Strauss at length, present ideas and put together some look books of imagery that pointed us in the right direction- the main mantra was ‘Bold Choices’ […] Most episodes had nearly double the number of cuts that is typical [for a one hour episode). Many times the B camera would split away and shoot additional cutaways and still moments while we moved onto the next scene [and] 1st AD Nathan Croft did a great job of building a lot of this extra ‘shot gathering’ into the schedule in and around everything else so Jeffrey had all the little moments to build on.” 

STAR OF THE SHOW 

Building on moments both little and big – and previously referenced in its iconic original film version – is the very stuff of NBCUniversal and Sky Atlantic’s Day of the Jackal, a modernised, reimagining of the Frederick Forsyth thriller, originally based on the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, by a cabal of militarists unhappy with his policy of increasing self-determination for Algiers. 

Unlike other grimly successful – and also timeline-altering – ‘60s-era assassinations, this attempt failed, with most of the perpetrators rounded up (and the ringleader executed), but Forsyth was able to create his elusive rifle-for-hire, the Jackal, from the events. Eddie Redmayne plays a 21st century version in the series from creator Ronan Bennett (with Forsyth aboard as a consulting producer), someone beyond politics, simply wielding a chilling skill with weaponry, along with an innate sociopathy (that trait again!) to earn vast paydays, as he’s hired to dispatch political and cultural figures across Europe. 

Pursuing him is MI6 operative Lashana Lynch, here a much more workaday, less glamorous agent – beset with family problems, no less – than when she was 007 in No Time to Die.  

Christopher Ross BSC helped set the tone for the series collaborating on its first block of three episodes with director Brian Kirk, who he’s worked with on prior series such as Luther and Hard Sun. Kirk had “spent a lot of time with Bennett […] so that the Jackal’s narrative was from a character perspective – you learn a lot about (him) in the first episode […] an anachronistic character that lives neither in time nor in space.” 

He and Kirk also stepped out of the present time spending “a lot of time talking about ‘70s thrillers,” including The Conversation, Klute, Three Days of the Condor, and the original Jackal directed by High Noon’s Fred Zinnemann, who bridged the end of Hollywood’s golden age to its reinvention in the 1970s. In addition to Kirk, there were the other collaborations with department heads, such as production designer Richard Bullock, on “quite concrete” aspects of the show, such as “the concept art for the Jackal’s home, MI6 headquarters,” and other tangibles like hair, makeup, costumes, and prosthetics (this Jackal also being a master of disguise).  

“Photographically, it’s much harder to do that” kind of concretising, certainly in the early-going, when you’re coming on board “with a very blank canvas, and some uncashed checks,” as he puts it. So in the search for “what kind of lens you might use, what kind of camera, how you might move it,” part of what he does now “is to create a mood film for each of the projects I work on.”  

Ross shared the short reel with us, as we chatted over Zoom from each side of the pond. Scored by a moody rendition of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Love,” by UK Band London Grammar, the film used clips from not only the aforementioned thrillers, but others including various Bond films, Bradley Cooper in American Sniper, Emily Blunt in Sicario, Warren Beatty in The Parallax View, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich, with some of “greatest operating ever” by Mitch Dubin SOC. 

 While joking – partially – that the search for mood references can lead to “thousands of Quicktimes [on] hundreds of hard drives,” this particular Quicktime led them to shooting with ARRI Alpha anamorphic lenses on a Sony Venice 2. Ross calls the Alphas “the real star of the show. If you were to think of the character of the Jackal as an efficient, elegant, well-designed and well-crafted human being – the ARRI Alphas are exactly that in terms of the image-making.”  

He also “hold(s) my hat off to the other three DPs who followed me on the series” (something well covered by colleague Robert Shepherd in a more expansive Jackal overview on BC’s magazine side), but also mentioned wanting to do “playful things” with the camera in that initial block of episodes, such as throwing it off a building to follow Redmayne’s escape down the side of a skyscraper (both, however, in rigs!). 

That playfulness, the sense of the unexpected, helped to visually amplify what Ross terms the “unreliable narrator” of the Jackal himself.  Which perhaps makes the story’s update perfectly suited to an age seemingly dominated by unreliable narrators, both on and off screen.  

We, however, hope to more reliably return in a month, and we’ll see you then. @TricksterInk / AcrossthePondBC@gmail.com