ENCORE: ‘Sing Sing’ director Greg Kwedar models pay equity; This Week’s Banter: Hollywood turns on LA Mayor Karen Bass

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hollywood responds to a perceived lack of urgency from Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a new twist develops in the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni feud, and Donald Trump is unhappy with Comcast after comedian Seth Meyers makes fun of the incoming president. Kim Masters and Matt Belloni are here to help us all make sense of this relentless week.

Plus, we revisit our conversation between Masters and Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar. Everyone involved in the production was paid the same daily rate, a model that Kwedar hopes could bring more parity to film sets. The movie stars Colman Domingo as a wrongly-convicted man staging a play inside the real Sing Sing prison. Much of the cast includes formerly incarcerated actors playing versions of themselves.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:06.0	Despite many postponements and cancellations, it's still awards season.
0:10.5	So 824 is re-releasing Sing Sing, the true story of a group of inmates who form an acting company in the infamous prison.
0:18.2	It's also the first film to be released simultaneously in theaters and
0:22.2	correctional facilities, more than a thousand of them. So this week, we're revisiting our conversation
0:27.5	with Sing Sing Director Greg Kuitar, whose film was also unusual in another way. Everyone who
0:33.5	worked on it was guaranteed equal pay. We built a model on parody.
0:38.3	Everyone on our movie, the core casting crew from the star of the film all the way through
0:43.1	Post, we all work for the same rate, and we all collectively own the movie as well.
0:50.1	Quedar talks about working with Oscar contender Coleman Domingo, alongside formerly incarcerated men whose only acting experience came from performing in the real-life Sing Sing Prison Acting Troop.
1:01.6	But first we banter. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.
1:07.2	I am joined by my colleague in banter, Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt.
1:11.6	Hi there. Well, I will start out by saying that LA is still coping with fires and the aftermath of fires.
1:18.6	We now know that a lot of very high-profile people lost their homes and a lot of much less high-profile people.
1:25.6	This is a tragedy and a question of how does LA
1:29.3	rebuild. And one element of that is the question of production in LA. And as you know, man, a lot of
1:35.1	the production is still going because it's not shooting here. I would just like to say briefly,
1:39.3	I feel like Gavin Newsom, who has certainly made himself visible as being concerned with what goes on here
1:45.3	and how the recovery goes forward, the effort to bring filming back to L.A. would be the big boost
1:51.3	that a lot of people who live here would be hoping for. Absolutely. And there is this package of
1:57.8	tax incentives that California is mulling, that Newsom has been pushing, that is valued
2:03.1	at about $750 million, a big increase over what the state currently offers, but certainly
	...

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