P-Valley’s hustlers are coming to Starz
Heard of Katori Hall yet? Well, here’s where you get familiar. She’s an Olivier Award-winning playwright, whose most famous work, The Mountaintop, a fictionalized account of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night alive, opened on Broadway in 2011. She’s the book writer and co-producer of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and now she’s the showrunner of the new Starz drama, P-Valley, a series based on her play Pussy Valley. (TV is somewhat more skittish than the theater about that word, it would appear.) It concerns strippers in the Deep South, their complex lives and dreams, and according to advance press it’s a moody and atmospheric piece of work. Furthermore, putting its money where its mouth is, so far every episode in the can has been directed by a woman, including Kimberly Peirce, Tamra Davis, and Empire star Tasha Smith. It drops this summer, a time when clothes come off, which is only appropriate.
Yossi & Jagger’s Eytan Fox has a new film and it’s under quarantine
Director Eytan Fox (Yossi & Jagger, Cupcakes) has a new film, Sublet, and he wants you to see it. Unfortunately, you can’t do that just yet. Sublet was scheduled to have its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, but thanks to… well, you know… that didn’t happen. Like Fox’s earlier work, it deals with queer subject matter and how the LGBTQ population of Israel lives their lives. John Benjamin Hickey (Love! Valor! Compassion!) stars as a depressed journalist visiting Tel Aviv. There he rents an apartment from a young gay man (Niv Nissim) whose life is considerably messier, and the two develop an intergenerational friendship. Now, unlike, say, a film like the Wonder Woman sequel, whose release would seem to be on hold indefinitely, indie and arthouse films are experiencing a smoother transition to the streaming model. Distributors are forming alliances with arthouse theaters for collaborative release and box office profit sharing, and depending on the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sublet might wind up finding its audience in that way. Keep your eyes open for this one.
Romeo San Vicente can’t wait for The Wonder Woman sequel.