‘The Osbournes’ VH1 Reboot at Center of Jack Osbourne Lawsuit

‘The Osbournes’ VH1 Reboot at Center of Jack Osbourne Lawsuit – The Hollywood Reporter

April 03, 2015 6 hours ago by Austin Siegemund-Broka

The son of Ozzy Osbourne says production partners are unjustly claiming they partially own rights to the reality series, which VH1 is reviving this year. Courtesy of Everett Collection

The son of Ozzy Osbourne says production partners are unjustly claiming they partially own rights to the reality series, which VH1 is reviving this year.

Like with any family, The Osbournes reboot planned for VH1 is seeing infighting.

But the latest dispute isn’t between members of Ozzy Osbourne‘s notorious brood, whose antics were the subject of the MTV series from 2002 to 2005. In several lawsuits filed earlier this week, Jack Osbourne is taking on several companies he partially owns, one of which he claims is trying to unjustly claim revenue for the reality series’ upcoming episodes.

In California federal court on Wednesday, the production company behind the MTV series, JOKS, of which Osbourne is a member, sued Schweet Entertainment. The company claims Schweet, which Osbourne owns with producing partners Rob Worsoff and Brian Wendel, contends it has a 55-percent interest in any upcoming episodes of The Osbournes.

JOKS claims to be the exclusive owner of interest in the show.

“JOKS’ idea to and interest in producing new episodes of ‘The Osbournes’ for television broadcast pre-dated Jack Osbourne’s involvement in Schweet, and was conceived completely independently of Schweet,” states the complaint.

JOKS never heard pitches or ideas for new Osbournes episodes from Schweet, continues the filing. “Contrary to Defendants’ contentions, JOKS never entered into any agreement, express or implied, related to the Defendants’ involvement in the production of new episodes of ‘The Osbournes’ and never conveyed to Defendants any interest in ‘The Osbournes’ and/or the copyrights and trademarks associated therewith,” claims JOKS.

Read the full complaint.

The lawsuit follows a separate action Osbourne filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday in which he looks to dissolve Schweet. He claims Worsoff and Wendel “paid themselves exorbitant salaries, but have failed and refused to pay” him, further claiming they’ve taken business opportunities for themselves away from the company, with which he produced the elite K-9 training reality series Alpha Dogs for National Geographic in 2013.

Osbourne filed four other lawsuits on Monday in which he seeks to dissolve other companies he runs with Wendel and Worsoff, some in film and TV production and some in music. In each, he makes similar allegations his partners overpaid themselves and diverted business opportunities.

Nicholas Rozansky of Ezra Brutzkus Gubner filed the complaints. THR could not reach Wendel and Worsoff for comment.

The Osbournes reboot featuring the Black Sabbath frontman, his wife Sharon, his daughter (and recently exited Fashion Police host) Kelly, and Jack is expected to air in 2015. It’s one in a series of upcoming reality reboots, including Fox’s Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and NBC’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and reboots in general, with networks reviving properties including NBC’s Coach and Fox’s The X Files.

VH1, which is not a party to the lawsuits, declined to comment.

Austin Siegemund-Broka

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Joshua Jackson on ‘The Affair’s’ Two Storylines and Playing a “Pretty Dark Character”

Joshua Jackson The Affair Still - H 2014

Joshua Jackson in ‘The Affair’

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Sunday’s The Affair premiere.]

Joshua Jackson has played good-guy roles in Dawson’s Creek and, more recently, Fox’s Fringe. But he’s taken a darker turn in The Affair, playing Cole Lockhart, the husband of Ruth Wilson‘s Alison.

“I think there is a great liberty in allowing the ugliness that can happen between humans just to happen,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. In Cole’s first scene of the newly premiered Showtime drama, he sexually assaults his wife — or at least, that’s how the scene is shown from the perspective of Noah (Dominic West), who’s having the affair of the title with Alison while on vacation in Montauk.

Read more The Affair: TV Review

It’s the two-sided narrative that intrigued Jackson most about the ambitious series. “What I loved is because we have this conceit of the memory play, you’re able to show [the characters] how they were received, not how they were acting,” he says.

He tells THR what drives his character, why cable “beats the pants off of broadcast” and what to expect from the buzzy drama’s first season. 

What about this script first attracted you?
It plays on our prejudices as readers and audiences that the narrative we’re being shown is the objective truth. We all have our own version of reality. The quality of the writing is incredibly strong, both [series creators] Hagai [Levi] and Sarah [Treem] are very strong writers, and once I got into conversation with Sarah about what she wanted the show to be, I signed right up.

What interested you about Cole? Did you read for him specifically, or for Noah too?
Sarah brought it to me with Cole in mind. What I love about Cole and the possibilities of that character are what I love about the conceit of the show. When you meet Cole in the pilot, you’re seeing a pretty dark character. There’s an unambiguously bad thing happening when he’s introduced, and you’re seeing it through Noah’s eyes. Then when you see him through his wife’s eyes, you see a more nuanced character, a softer version. I thought the possibilities of that are very interesting and very true to life. We all have our personal prejudices and the tendency to see people the way we expect to.

Given the unusual story structure, is this role like playing two different characters?
I don’t know that I would say it’s two characters. It’s different versions of the same thing. The root remains the same. The way Noah would see him — as his adversary, the other man — will continue to color their interactions, and the way Alison would see him as the woman who’s spent many years married to him will give you that side of him, and it would be very hard for those things ever to meet in the middle. That’s been the fun of the job. It’s fun to have the opportunity to go in and play with those things. There’s kind of an iconographic masculinity to Cole, too. In the second episode he rides in on a horse, with boots and cowboy hat. It’s very Marlboro Man. That’s fun to play with too, with perceptions and biases, and then you have a little time to spend a with them and you see something more.

Read more Joshua Jackson Signs With Anonymous Content

What’s most difficult about this role?
Having done melodrama and science fiction and coming-of-age, I’ve worked all over the place, and the challenge as I see it always is to find what is the human relatability at the center of this scenario. For Ruth and I, there is this grand imposition of this dead child that hangs over every one of their interactions, and you have to guard against playing into the maudlin side of that while recognizing that that doesn’t get compartmentalized. For Ruth and I, it’s just making sure that our relationship feels lived in, rather than the joy and freshness she’s experiencing with Noah — the thousand little ways you express your love to someone when you’ve been with them a long time, or the discomfort you now have around each other. I want to make sure above all that that marriage is portrayed fully.

Where’s Cole’s story going this season?
There’s an inevitability to the narrative. It’s called The Affair. The cat’s out of the bag on that one. For Cole, the development is, as much as Alison I think is still underwater in the grief of having lost her child, that the way he’s consciously decided to not deal with his grief is trying to “fix” his wife. That’s a convenient way for him to avoid the pain he’s also feeling. His journey over the season is basically to have that worldview collapse around him, to see how selfish that is, and as all these things get revealed, all the places he used to put importance in fall in on his head. 

Your TV work has been almost exclusively on broadcast shows. How do you like working on cable?
The pace of it is more like working on a film. It’s like working on a long film rather than a TV show. Just the nuts and bolts of it — we would shoot a 63- to 65-page script on Fringe, with car crashes and stunts and special effects, with multiple characters, in eight days. On The Affair, we have eight days to shoot a 55-page script that is mostly people talking. You can take the time and you have the opportunity really to dive into things, and you’re only doing 10 episodes. This is why cable consistently beats the pants off of broadcast in quality, frankly. It’s the human element. You can’t work 14-hour days for nine months and be as sharp in all of them. By doing only 9 episodes in the first season and the pilot, by the time everyone’s getting tired and worn down, you’re finished, which is amazing. The major difference is just the focus is on quality and attention to detail, rather than simply finishing and keeping going.

Email: Austin.Siegemund-Broka@THR.com
Twitter: @Asiegemundbroka

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‘The Leftovers’ Director Unravels Finale Mysteries

The Leftovers Mimi Justin - P 2014

HBO

Mimi Leder, Justin Theroux

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from this Sunday’s The Leftovers season finale, “The Prodigal Son Returns.”]

Tensions exploded between the citizens of Mapleton and the Guilty Remnant on Sunday’s first season finale of The Leftovers.

The episode is the third directorial effort of the series for Mimi Leder, who shot one of the show’s most shocking installments—the stoning murder of Gladys (Marceline Hugot)—and the introduction of Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn) and his National Geographic magazine, a storyline on which the finale touched in Garvey’s (Justin Theroux) fascinating dream sequence.

It had its fair share of metaphysical and character-driven questions: What was Garvey’s wish, and did Holy Wayne (Paterson Joseph) truly grant it? How did Laurie (Amy Brenneman) and Tom (Chris Zylka) happen to end up in the same park? What’s the effect of the Bible verse on Garvey, and the baby on Nora (Carrie Coon)? What’s with the dog?

Leder has answers (except when it comes to the dog; she says, “you just have to read into it yourself what you bring to it”). But she says her finale’s themes are those that run throughout the entire first run of the ambitious HBO drama, which will return for a second season. “I think there’s a common thread of anger, despair, grief, loss — of, is there hope for humanity?” she tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The director explains her episodes and discusses the season with THR.

What was hardest to get right in the finale?

One of the scenes that was so very hard to achieve, especially because it was shot in two days, was the burning down of the cul-de-sac of the GR’s houses. It was an intense, difficult scene to shoot. We’re not an action show, so my approach to it was to try to get into the head of Kevin Garvey — to follow him on this journey of seeing what has happened to his town, seeing it through his eyes. He’s discovering that the GR has done the unthinkable, has made them remember, after he’s gone through quite a confession himself.

That was a very difficult sequence to shoot. It had a lot of visuals and effects, like the fire; it was very emotional, seeing the bodies being thrown on the bonfire and Laurie being thrown out of the house, hearing her voice for the first time in all the episodes except for the flashback.

Were there scenes you thought would be difficult but that came together very naturally?

One of the scenes I feared the most was Nora Durst discovering her family and how that would work, and after the first take, we all just fell apart because it was just so painful to witness and so pure and honest a scream. We took the sound out of it, which made it even more difficult to watch. Just as you think that she’s recovering and moving on, you realize that you can never move on, as Holy Wayne says in episode 6 — she asks, “will I forget them?” and he says, “never.” And the Guilty Remnant will never let them forget. For Carrie Coon, who is a great discovery and a deeply affecting actress, she went there. She went to the floor literally in seeing her Loved Ones.

Another that was difficult was Justin Theroux’s reading of the Bible, in an extraordinarily brilliant performance that went so deep. It was just difficult to modulate not that performance, but the whole episode. You have that scene where he’s deeply affected by the words, and Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston) has definitely helped him in the reading of those words. But how far do you go with the tears, when you know you have a scene coming up where he confesses to Matt that he wanted his family gone?

The scene with Wayne was quite beautiful and quite powerful, and we wanted to do it very simply. There was the coincidence of Holy Wayne being in that bathroom, having had a huge effect on Kevin’s son’s life, and granting Kevin the wish that ultimately comes true, perhaps, in the last moments of the show.

What was he wishing for?

What I told Justin was that he was wishing for a new beginning, a rebirth, to start over. In that moment when Nora comes to the doorstep to leave the note and leave him and leave Mapleton, leave everything behind, she finds this baby. All she says is, “look what I found,” and you can see that in the midst of all this anger, grief, uncertainty and loss, there’s hope. There’s the possibility of love, the possibility of a new family.

How do Laurie and Tom figure into this new beginning?

In the show’s arc, [creators] Damon [Lindelof] and Tom [Perotta] so brilliantly crafted a closeness between Laurie and Tom. Laurie and Tom were both drawn to cults, they both sought out answers. I think Laurie is at this point very disillusioned by everything she thought she believed in, and Tom in his arc during the series has been disillusioned by Holy Wayne, feeling that perhaps he is the fraud that Wayne himself feels he is. (But perhaps in his moment of death Holy Wayne is not a fraud, perhaps the wish he granted Kevin will come true. We don’t know — we’ll see.) Their stories are about what we as human beings have the ability to believe in, how deeply we believe things can come true if we will them to.

Laurie and Tom have a very special connection. Kevin married her, fell in love with her, and raised Tom as his son, but Laurie and Tom have a special connection. Where she goes at the end is where it all began in the pilot, the memorial park. It was another coincidence — how does he show up and find his mother? I said to him and to her, this is the place where you guys would meet. This is the place where your mom would take you. This was their place. So just when she thinks all is lost, she looks into the water, into the abyss, she turns and sees her son.

He’s delivered the baby to Kevin’s doorstep, because he was abandoned by his father and Kevin took care of him. He took the baby to the only place he knew the baby would be taken care of.

So in the aftermath of the burning of the GR, Laurie’s disillusioned with the group?

In the aftermath, when Laurie is looking at her family again — I was reading some reviews about it, and people thought it was Kevin wanting her back. But it wasn’t. It was a moment about, “don’t come near us.” It was a moment about, “you’ve hurt us so much.”

She’s disillusioned and feels the shame of having put her daughter in jeopardy. One of the scenes that was most interesting and most difficult in many ways was the sequence in the house where her daughter (Margaret Qualley) is there and her daughter says, “talk,” and she says not, “go away, go home, it’s dangerous.” She wants to protect her daughter, but she wants to carry out what she has been planning with her group for all these months. The conflict of being the mother and that instinct coming out was a great challenge to her.

Where does this episode leave the GR, in particular Liv Tyler’s character Meg?

Liv Tyler has just been an extraordinary force. People see Liv as this very fragile kind of waif, and she’s really this strong, tough, powerful woman. I loved shooting her coming out of the house, taking over Patti’s (Ann Dowd) role as the leader and filling those shoes.

The GR will never let anyone forget what happened — you can go on with your lives, but you can never move on. They’re the realists. So, are they a cult, really? It made a lot of sense in many ways. They’d rather live in reality than in denial.

You directed the series’ other most devastating moment of violence against the cult, the stoning of Gladys. How did you go shoot that scene?

When I read it, I thought, “oh my god, how am I going to shoot a stoning? How am I going to do one of the show’s most shocking scenes?”

I wanted everything to be very still before they abduct her, and then I wanted everything to be so wild that you could barely see, just the struggling of being dragged through the woods and tied up and having this vow of silence. I shot it very simply in terms of camera angles. Once we got there, we needed to be still so that we could feel the effects of the stones hitting her face and destroying her life and the tragedy of her begging for her life even though she martyred herself. It was a very powerful thing to shoot, very frightening to shoot.

In your episode centered on Kevin’s father, what’s your sense of the elder Garvey’s mental state? Is he crazy?

My interpretation is that he is hearing voices and that he’s not crazy. I think he snapped after the departure, the voices really do come and talk to him. That’s why I did the shot of his reflection in the window — who’s he talking to? He’s definitely talking to somebody. He definitely hears the voices, the voices are telling him what’s important, and he tells his son to listen. This is Damon’s brilliant crafting — in episode nine, we go back and we see Garvey Sr. tell his son, “this is it. This is your purpose in life. You need to accept it. There isn’t any more than this.” In that moment, your mind will hopefully go back to this episode seven. It’s part of Kevin’s arc, finding out what is his purpose in this life.

Has he found it?

I think he’s still discovering it. I think he’s just, in this finale, confessing to what happened at the moment of departure and what he was wishing for. He was wanting his family gone, and he feels the guilt. He is still looking for his purpose.

Email: Austin.Siegemund-Broka@THR.com
Twitter: @Asiegemundbroka

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