The room at the Aster hotel buzzed with entertainment creatives celebrating the end of the WGA strike after five challenging months. Some of the guests were already writers who were reuniting with colleagues, while others were there to simply mix and mingle and perhaps move toward getting their first job.
During a loose and lively conversation held at the Aster in Hollywood, veteran producers and writers Zoanne Clack and Gloria Calderón Kellett regaled a room full of guests with their stories about how they broke into the entertainment industry, sometimes with the help of others who served as their mentors.
What happens when you bring Hollywood to a Washington, D.C. think tank? The Statecraft Stories workshop, held virtually in July, invited Quincy Institute researchers, policy analysts, CNN contributors, journalists, authors, veterans, and a former CIA staffer to put aside their jobs promoting diplomacy to participate in interactive sessions designed to provide powerful storytelling tools in communicating important messages.
It’s no secret that plastic is bad for the environment, but the inextricable relationship between plastic and fossil fuels is often overlooked: 99% of the world’s plastic is made from refined fossil fuels, and plastic harms the planet at every stage of its eternal life cycle, beginning with air pollution and carbon emissions from the oil refineries that create plastic and ending with waste polluting the oceans and littering the Earth.
USC Annenberg's Hollywood, Health & Society made a splash with their recent mixer kickoff event titled Do the Write Thing, where creatives and community came together to celebrate voices that don’t get heard enough in Hollywood, specifically people of color and Indigenous groups.
When it comes to American TV entertainment, death is overwhelmingly delivered in breathtaking fashion—shootings, stabbings, suffocation (includes drowning), suicide, beatings, poisonings and explosions. Even the supernatural gets listed among the most common causes of dying onscreen.
USC’s School of Cinematic Arts presented a special screening of Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ series about climate change, that was followed by a Q&A with show creator Scott Z. Burns and executive producer and writer Dorothy Fortenberry.
Hollywood showrunners, writers and producers were joined by a medical expert for a discussion about young women affected by early onset breast cancer, how the disease disproportionately affects women of color, and the importance of messaging to raise awareness about risk.
Some of the brightest stars and creative talent in Hollywood attended the 2022 Sentinel Awards held Oct. 25 at the Television Academy, including Quinta Brunson, the creator, executive producer and star of ABC’s Abbott Elementary, and co-star Tyler James Williams; Hannah Einbinder and Paul W. Downs, co-stars of the HBO Max series Hacks; Sarah Podemski, co-star of Reservation Dogs; Allison Miller, co-star of A Million Little Things; and Shoniqua Shandai, Jerrie Johnson and Meagan Good of the Amazon Prime show Harlem.
A “lunch and learn” webcast discussion presented by Hollywood, Health & Society explored the health and wide-ranging effects of extreme weather, focusing on how do we lessen the impact of climate change, protect water resources, practice environmental sustainability and survive?
