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“Yeah the truth came out/ We finally removed all doubt/ If it’s in a movie, it’s gotta be true,” sings “Weird Al” Yankovic in “Now You Know,” a new song that plays over the closing credits of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. As with most things “Weird Al”-related, it’s worth taking these words with a heavy lump of salt. “Now You Know” caps off a gloriously over-the-top and hilarious biopic — starring Daniel Radcliffe as Yankovic, and streaming now on the Roku Channel and app — that, just like Yankovic’s famed songs, is itself a many-layered parody of one of the most historically self-serious genres of cinema.
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“I’ve known for a long time that any time you do something ironic or ridiculous, somebody thinks you’re being earnest,” says Yankovic today, sitting in his home with his many Grammy Awards behind him and wearing a safari hat (an attempt, he says, to tame his trademark unruly curls on a bad hair day).
So he’s prepared for the fact that some may see Weird and assume, say, that the idea for his “My Sharona” parody, “My Bologna,” came to him in a moment of quasi-divine inspiration while making a sandwich; or that he and Madonna had a lengthy, torrid love affair; or that his “Eat It” actually preceded Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” But he’s fairly sure his legion of hardcore fans will know the film is only sprinkled with kernels of truth — and that anyone else will at some point realize that, like his music, it’s all in good fun. “I just hope they don’t start changing my Wikipedia entry and making me into this person in the movie,” he says with a laugh.
Just after the film’s acclaimed opening, Yankovic spoke with Billboard about how he selected the songs featured prominently in Weird, as well as what Daniel Radcliffe gets most correct in his titular portrayal, and how top 40’s preeminent parodist continues to keep up with pop music in 2022.
There’s a clear throughline from the many movie parodies in your first film, 1989’s UHF, to this entire movie being a sort of matryoshka doll of movie parodies. Why did it take so long to get from there to here?
You know, I haven’t had great luck getting my film projects greenlit over the years – it’s been 33 years between Weird Al movies, and that’s not from lack of trying. I would have liked to have more of a film career over the course of my adult life.
But I’m very thankful this one came out. This one originated as a Funny or Die video that Eric Appel directed back in 2010, and neither one of us thought it would actually be a movie — we thought it was a trailer for a movie that did not exist and would not be made. But I used it in my live shows over the years, and fans would come up to me and ask, “When’s the movie coming out?” And I’d say, “It’s not,” and they’d go, “Oh but you should!” Which I took as a compliment — but I told them, it’s a three-minute funny bit, it is what it’s supposed to be.
Nine years later, I contacted Eric, and said, “Hey, there are all these biopics coming out like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman that really play fast and loose with the facts — I think the time might be right to make the Weird Al movie an actual thing.”
Why do you think music biopics in particular are so hard to do well?
When Eric and I were doing research and getting inspired to write the screenplay, we watched a lot of music biopics and trailers both together and independently, and we noticed they all pretty much have the same beats. Two that really stand out are 1) showing moments of inspiration – usually when an artist thinks of an idea, it’s not a big cinematic moment, but all these biopics have to make it into one because it’s cinema. And 2) the chronology — sometimes things that occurred over weeks or months or years, filmmakers have them happen in the same day, or evening, or show, from a storytelling standpoint.
They take a lot of creative liberty, and I understand why that happens. As a fan of these artists, I kind of want to know the real story, but you have to accept that a biopic is almost by definition not going to be 100% true. So Eric and I decided, let’s just really lean into that.
Has anyone ever approached you wanting to do a straight biopic about you?
I think we probably got a few offers, even while we were trying to get this movie off the ground. And I’m flattered, but it’s not the movie I wanted to do or the story I wanted to tell. I know there are hardcore fans, some people who would have preferred a more serious biopic. But there hasn’t been a lot of drama in my life.
You have such a huge catalog. How did you go about picking the songs to focus on in the movie?
Eric and I decided to focus on the very beginning of my career. So even though my very earliest stuff isn’t my best or my most clever, we thought since this was an origin story of sorts, by definition we needed to focus on the very early material, the stuff I wrote and recorded between 1979 and 1985 — although anachronistically, at the end we throw in “Amish Paradise” from 1996. Because at that point in the movie all bets are off.
It’s funny to hear you say your early hits aren’t that clever!
Well, I’m not embarrassed by them, but it’s kind of like looking at baby photos. They were fine for the time they were written. But I like to think I’ve gotten better since then. I firmly believe my last seven albums are better than my first seven. But I think in the context of the movie, they work fine, and they’re still funny. And people certainly seem to have a nostalgic love for them.
In the film, “My Bologna” comes to you in what appears to be a moment of divine inspiration, but that’s of course not how it actually happened. What is your writing process actually like?
There are only a couple instances I can think of where it was a strike of inspiration. When I heard there was going to be a world premiere of the new Michael Jackson video for “Bad,” I thought, ‘I have to do something with this single,” and before I’d even finished watching the video, I thought, “I have to do a song called ‘Fat,’” cause I just visualized a 900-pound guy trying to get through the turnstile on the subway.
But more often than not, it’s a case of me laboriously going through the Billboard charts, trying to think of variations on a theme. For any given hit song, I’d come up with several dozen ideas and sit down and think, “Which one of these has the most comedic potential?” Sometimes none of them do. But usually by process of elimination, I could find a direction to take that works.
In the movie, there are many references to the idea of the “Weird Al Bump” — a sales increase artists see after you’ve parodied them. I admit, I thought it could be a real thing — but the Billboard charts department told me, “No, this doesn’t appear to be a phenomenon.”
I haven’t gone through the charts so I can’t swear either way, but I will tell you, we got a call from a gentleman from Nirvana’s record label who told us that they sold an extra million copies of Nevermind after “Smells Like Nirvana” came out. So, I was told there was a Weird Al Bump! It may not happen in every case, but I was very much told it was a real thing! Again, not to the extent it was in the movie — but I still contend there is some truth to that.
You re-recorded many of your classic songs for the movie. Did you ever consider just using original recordings?
We used the original recording of “Eat It,” because [in the movie] you only hear that on a cassette tape recorder in the record company’s office and on a TV set, so there was no need to re-record it. But most of the other songs are “live performances,” so we figured to make it sound more real we couldn’t just use the studio recording – we wanted them to feel like real live performances. So I had to literally re-record them, and supply the sound mixer with the stems so they’d sound like they were performed at an outdoor party, or in a biker bar, or wherever.
Do you think your voice sounds different now from when you first recorded these songs?
It’s changed a little – mostly I like to think my voice has gotten better, because I’ve been practicing for 40 years now. Part of it was trying not to sing too well, or trying to match that very raw quality I had when I was starting out. It’s funny, “Another One Rides the Bus” was never officially recorded in a studio – the master tape of that was an aircheck from The Dr. Demento Show. So me going into a studio 40 years later and re-recording it was a bit odd, because we never really recorded it the first time.
Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Aaron Epstein/Roku
Watching this movie got me thinking about all the very specific legal issues you must have encountered throughout your career. In terms of your parody work, what are the challenges you’ve had to regularly deal with to get your music out?
I always use the phrase “gray area,” because it is with regard to permission. Generally the courts rule in favor of the parody artist, because it’s considered free speech — though you can still sue anybody for anything at any time, so I take pains to make sure the artist and songwriter is fine with what I’m doing. I always made a point of getting their blessing. And that’s one of the reasons I think I’ve managed to still have a career after all this time: I haven’t burned any bridges, and most artists look at it as an homage when they wind up with a Weird Al parody.
For all the people we’re impersonating in the movie, the lawyers told us not to bother getting permission, because they’re considered public figures. But we did have to have the music cleared. Queen still owns the publishing on my parody, the Michael Jackson estate still owns the publishing on my parody. So they kinda had final say on the cut of the movie.
We had a few jokes in there they made us change. In the very original script, Freddie Mercury was a character, and that was the one thing the Queen estate said: “No Freddie Mercury, you can’t even mention him, he can’t exist in your movie.” Okay, we’re fine with that. The Michael Jackson Estate made us take out one line – I’m not gonna say what it is – but just one line, and we did. But overall, they let us get away with a lot. I’m thankful that this movie exists at all, frankly, and that everybody involved had such a great attitude and sense of humor about it.
This movie has become a critical darling, and by this point in your career you pretty much have too — even your high-profile fans, like Questlove and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Josh Groban (the latter two of whom have cameos in Weird) are sort of the music elite. All of which I think speaks to a wider recognition now of the kind of real skill you have as a musician.
Yeah, that’s really nice to hear. It still blows my mind that all those people you mentioned actually enjoy my work. A lot of them kind of grew up on me. Questlove came to my Carnegie Hall show [recently] and came backstage and gave me glowing praise – and I mean, Questlove, he knows his music! His opinion means the world to me. To hear things like that from him, and Lin-Manuel, and Josh and everybody else, it’s incredibly gratifying to me. I still can’t wrap my head around it sometimes.
I know Daniel was determined not to do an impersonation of you, but it feels like he gets some truly core Weird Al essence right. What about you does he really nail?
I mean, we cast Daniel because I felt he had the right energy, I felt we were kindred spirits. It’s hard to articulate exactly how that comes across, but I feel the sweetness and the innocence in some of the early scenes, and his energy in how excited he gets about things… every now and then it really feels like he’s channeling me in all the right places.
We’re also similar in that we basically do what we want to do [creatively]. Daniel made his money and his fame early in his life, and now he does whatever he feels like doing, and I’m thankful one of them was my movie. And I’m kind of in a place as well where I’ve established and made a name for myself, I’m pretty settled, and now I feel like I want to take a chance, do some projects maybe people don’t expect me to be doing. And if I feel like doing another parody or two down the line I will — but I’m not under contract anymore, so I can do whatever I feel like.
Daniel Radcliffe and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic attend the “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” Premiere during the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival at Royal Alexandra Theatre on Sept. 8, 2022 in Toronto, Ontario.
Araya Doheny/GI
Clearly, your job requires you to listen to and be aware of a lot of pop music. How do you stay up on what the kids are into?
Absolutely. Whenever I do a parody or a pastiche, it generally comes from me being a fan. I suppose I could do a parody of song I hated, but then I’d have to play it onstage for years. Especially with the pastiches, I pick an artist whose body of work I admire, because I have to be intimately familiar with their oeuvre to lampoon it. I’m a huge fan of pop and rock music and always have been.
I’m a little less familiar with what’s on the charts right now, just because I’m kind of taking a break from the parodies for the time being. I’m mostly learning about music right now from my daughter – we hand her the aux in the car, so she’s our DJ on road trips. But I’ve always enjoyed it and been thankful I’m able to make a living… if not in pop music, than at least pop music-adjacent.
Universal has enlisted Black Panther: Wakanda Forever co-writer Joe Robert Cole and director Allen Hughes, who with his brother Albert directed movies such as Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, to tackle a definitive biopic of the influential, iconic rapper and entertainment mogul Snoop Dogg.
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Snoop is heavily involved with the project announced Wednesday, which will incorporate music from his cast catalog. He is also producing the feature along with Sara Ramaker and Hughes. The project will mark the inaugural film from Snoop’s Death Row Pictures which he runs with Ramaker.
“I waited a long time to put this project together because I wanted to choose the right director, the perfect writer, and the greatest movie company I could partner with that could understand the legacy that I’m trying to portray on screen, and the memory I’m trying to leave behind,” said Snoop in a statement. “It was the perfect marriage. It was holy matrimony, not holy macaroni.”
Snoop, whose real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., shot to fame in the early 1990s West Coast rap scene thanks to his collaborations with Dr. Dre and then his one-two-punch albums, Doggystyle and The Doggfather. He parlayed that into a media and business empire, becoming an actor, DJ and media personality as well as an entrepreneur with ties to technology, global consumer brands, food and beverage industries, and of course, the cannabis world.
With 35 million albums worldwide, he is a 17-time Grammy nominee, an American Music Award winner, and a Primetime Emmy Award winner. He has played himself in countless series and appeared in movies such as Training Day, Starsky & Hutch and this summer’s Jamie Foxx vampire action movie Day Shift.
“Snoop Dogg’s life and legacy makes him one of the most exciting and influential icons in popular culture,” stated Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group. “We met with Snoop shortly after he acquired Death Row Records and had the opportunity to hear his story in his own words. We are humbled to be able to create the lasting document of this singular artist.”
Universal has had previous success tapping into rap culture with musical biopics focusing on key artists. In 2015, it released Straight Outta Compton, centered on the West Coast hip-hop scene and N.W.A, the seminal group that Dr. Dre was a part of. The film grossed over $200 million and earned an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. With 2002’s 8 Mile, it told a thinly-veiled autobiographical story of Eminem and his rise into an industry and genre dominated by Black artists. That movie grossed over $250 million and won the Oscar for best original song with “Lose Yourself.”
With the Snoop biopic in development, Universal will now have a trifecta of the artists — Snoop, Dr. Dre, and Eminem — who performed during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Hughes and his brother, both born in Detroit and grew up in Southern California, made their names by telling stories of the Black experience with Menace and Dead Presidents at the same time as Snoop was making his rise. In 2017, he tackled the music scene by directing The Defiant Ones, the award-winning four-part HBO documentary focused on Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine.
“Snoop Dogg is one of the most internationally beloved figures in hip-hop,” states Hughes. “There’s just something about his energy that brings people of all walks of life together. Snoop Dogg, not just the artist, but the man and his brand, has transcended generations with his connection and appeal to audiences. His story is so authentic and utterly inspiring, and to have the opportunity to tell his story allows me to go back to the hood 30 years after Menace II Society, and say more now than I could then.”
Cole is a generation younger than Snoop and Hughes and grew up influenced by their work as he made his mark as a screenwriter. He’s notably worked with Ryan Coogler on the two Black Panther movies as well as a writer-producer on the Emmy-winning FX series American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson, for which he received an Emmy nomination for writing the episode “The Race Card.”
“I’ve been a fan of Snoop since ‘Deep Cover,’” says Cole. “His music and the films of Allen Hughes have left an indelible mark on me over my life. What excites me most is the humanity of Snoop’s journey to international icon. Universal has proven they can guide a movie like this to something special. I’m proud to be a part of the team.”
NBCUniversal’s president of music and publishing, Mike Knobloch, will supervise the project’s music. Universal’s senior vp of production and development Ryan Jones will oversee the project for the studio.
Snoop is repped by Stephen Barnes of Morris Yorn. Hughes is repped by WME and Hansen, Jacobson while Cole is repped by Circle of Confusion and Jackoway Austen.
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
As he revels in the accolades for his Weird: The Al Yankovic Story biopic on Roku, parody king “Weird Al” Yankovic is sharing one of the biggest Easter eggs in his joke basket.
In the new film, the music video for Al’s Grammy-winning 1984 Michael Jackson parody “Eat It” is playing on a TV in the background (with Weird star Daniel Radcliffe’s face superimposed on his body), and according to the singer, the movie’s producers had to jump through some hoops to brush up the nearly four-decade-old footage.
“‘Eat It’ was my breakthrough music video, but the online version always appeared to have been recorded with a potato,” Al told Billboard about the degraded quality of the deliciously silly food-focused visual. “Now, with this new 4K version, it’s literally never looked better.”
During filming, producers asked Al’s team to find the best-quality version of the original “Eat It” clip, which led them on a deep-dive into the vaults, where they found the raw 16mm film footage from the 1983 shoot.
While they worried that handling the brittle original film stock — which had sat untouched in a storage unit for nearly 40 years — might result in it crumbling after so many years, it miraculously held up and ended up in the finished movie.
A new description of “Eat It” that accompanies the polished-up video explains: “In order to create that particular scene, the producers had to track down source material that was considerably better quality than the existing standard-definition version. So Yankovic went into his personal video vault and had all the original 16mm film that was shot for the video in 1983 lovingly transferred to 4K. Then, while traveling the country on his 2022 tour, he painstakingly re-edited the video on his laptop, matching the original video frame for frame. The resulting video is not without scratches and artifacts (even in a temperature-controlled storage unit, film will start to degrade after a few decades) but it is exponentially better quality than any version that has ever existed before.”
Watch the 4K “Eat It” video below.
Jennifer Lawrence was on an epic box office and awards run… until 2016. That’s when she pulled down a major payday and earned top-billing in the box office sci-fi dud Passengers, one of the last big-budget blockbusters she starred in before taking a break from the spotlight and slowing her pace for a few years.
According to a new New York Times profile of the Oscar-winning actress posted on Wednesday (Nov. 2), she might have avoided that ding in her resume if she’d just listened to her pal Adele.
“Adele told me not to do it! She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her,” Lawrence said of the movie about two astronauts on a giant spaceship who are accidentally woken up 90 years early from hibernation that grossed more than $300 million globally but drew so-so reviews.
The piece opens at the Greenwich Village, New York gay bar Pieces, where we’re told Lawrence tackled the “Easy On Me” singer to the ground in March 2019 after she lost a heated game of musical shots. The original plan was for JLaw to meet Adele at a concert, but since Lawrence was already at Pieces, she suggested the singer meet her there instead. Though both women are careful about their public exposure while out on the town and frequently disappear for months, or years, at a time when not on-cycle, they decided Pieces was a fine place to let loose.
And, according to the article, they did just that, with Adele competing in an onstage drinking game that prompted the very competitive Lawrence to yell, “How could you lose?,” before the aforementioned public takedown. They even indulged in a bit of karaoke, which is a gutsy move when your partner is a Grammy-winning global superstar whose album releases are massive cultural events. Lawrence, however, is a frequent presence at Adele’s concerts, including a cameo at last year’s star-studded “Adele: One Night Only” special.
Lawrence, 32, will return to screens this weekend with the Apple TV+ drama Causeway. Speaking to the Times, she dove into the period in her mid-20s after her run as the star of the Hunger Games franchise when suddenly her movies were not clicking with audiences as much and she could feel like they were losing interest. “I was like, ‘Oh no, you guys are here because I’m here, and I’m here because you’re here. Wait, who decided that this was a good movie?’,” she said.
As she enters a period of higher exposure following the Feb. 2022 birth of her first child with husband Cooke Maroney, Lawrence told the Times her carefree night out with bestie Adele was proof that she’s moved on from being afraid of the tween Hunger Games fans who got too in her head for a while.
“I can tell things are different by my interactions in the real world, just by the way that I can move about life,” she told the paper. “There’s an occasional article about me walking out in Ugg boots, but other than that, the interest has lessened, God bless it.”
Quentin Tarantino loves a good tall tale. But on Thursday night (Oct. 28) QT went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to pour water on a recent stem-winder that Kanye West told in which the embattle rapper (now known as Ye) claimed that he originally conceived the idea for Q’s 2012 historical revamp tribute to Spaghetti westerns Django Unchained.
After West said in a recent interview that he pitched a similar concept to Tarantino while working up the treatment for the video for his 2005 hit “Gold Digger” — which features Jamie Foxx, later the star of Django — Tarantino told Kimmel that’s not exactly how it went down.
“There’s not truth to the idea that Kanye West came up with the idea of Django and then he told that to me, and I go, ‘Hey, wow, that’s a really great idea! Let me take Kanye’s idea and make Django Unchained out of it.’ That didn’t happen,” said Tarantino of the 2009 Ye video that feature the rapper and Foxx frolicking with scantily clad models.
“I’d had the idea for Django for a while before I ever met Kanye,” Tarantino continued. “He wanted to do a giant movie version of [his 2004 debut album] College Dropout the way he did the album – so he wanted to get big directors to do different tracks from the album and then release it as this giant movie – not videos, nothing as crass as videos, it was movies, movies based on each of the different tracks.”
That story differs significantly from the one West told British talker Piers Morgan in a recent interview. “Tarantino can write a movie about slavery, where actually — him and Jamie [Foxx] — they got the idea from me, because the idea for Django I pitched to Jamie Foxx and Quentin Tarantino as the video for ‘Gold Digger.’ And then Tarantino turned it into a film,” Ye said during the interview, in which he also continued to lean into his recent string of antisemitic comments that have caused his once sprawling business and music empire to crumble.
The Hype Williams-directed “Gold Digger” video consists almost entirely of West rapping the song in a raspberry-hued void while Foxx croons the refrain and buxom, lingerie-clad models dance with the men at a nightclub and pose for magazine covers. Tarantino’s controversial Oscar-winning film tells the story of a freed slave named Django (Foxx) who embarks on a killing spree across the South with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) as they search of Django’s wife (Kerry Washington); there does not appear to be any obvious narrative correlation between the “Gold Digger” video and Tarantino’s film.
Which is exactly what QT told Kimmel, though he did reveal that he did have a meeting with Ye that didn’t amount to anything.
“We used it as an excuse to meet each other and and so we met each other we had a really good time. And he did have an idea for a video,” Tarantino said, adding that the kernel could have turned into something. “I do think it was for the ‘Gold Digger’ video, that he would be a slave. And the whole thing was the slave narrative where he’s a slave and he’s singing ‘Gold Digger.’ And it was very funny. It was a really, really funny idea.”
When Kimmel quipped that it sounds like it could have been a “funny slave video,” Tarantino responded, “It was meant to be ironic. And it’s like a huge musical. I mean, like no expenses spared with him in this slave rag outfit doing everything. And then that was also part of the part of the pushback on it. But I wish he had done it. It sounded really cool. Anyway, that’s what he’s referring to.”
Watch Tarantino on Kimmel below.
Rihanna is officially back. Well, almost. The singer is slated to get back in our ears on Friday (Oct. 28) with the new single “Lift Me Up” from the upcoming Marvel sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The song, written by Tems, Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson, Rihanna and Panther director Ryan Coogler was recorded in five countries and produced by Göransson according to a release announcing the star’s first solo single since 2016.
Ri’s anticipated return to music was written as a tribute to late Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who died in August 2020 at age 43. The song will be released on the singer’s Westbury Road label in partnership with Roc Nation/Def Jam Recordings/Hollywood Records. A brief preview of the song appeared on RiRi’s Instagram on Wednesday (Oct. 26), with her wordless humming floating above a string section.
“After speaking with Ryan and hearing his direction for the film and the song, I wanted to write something that portrays a warm embrace from all the people that I’ve lost in my life. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if I could sing to them now and express how much I miss them,” said Tems in a statement. “Rihanna has been an inspiration to me so hearing her convey this song is a great honor.”
The rumored slot on the Wakanda soundtrack has been buzzing for weeks, with billboards hinting at RiRi’s involvement in the project via cryptic promotions on electronic billboards in New York, and, this week, a teaser post for the film in which the title resets to spotlight the “R” in “Forever” above Friday’s date.
The “Umbrella” singer hasn’t released an album since Anti dropped six years ago, and logged two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. She most recently hit the Billboard Hot 100‘s top 10 on her own with “Love on the Brain,” which reached No. 5 in March 2017. She added her most recent Hot 100 top 10 – her 31st – as featured, with Bryson Tiller, on DJ Khaled’s “Wild Thoughts,” which hit No. 2 in July 2017. In her most recent appearance on the chart, she reached No. 23 in April 2020 with “Believe It,” with PARTYNEXTDOOR.
Though she’s teased her next album several times since, no new solo music has emerged since the Anti era, as new mom RiRi has mostly focused on her Fenty Beauty brand. Her long break from live performance is slated to end on Feb. 12, 2023, when she takes the stage for the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show.
The sequel to 2018 global smash Black Panther stars Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Winston Duke as M’Baku and Dania Gurija as Okoye, fighting to protect their nation from interloping powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s [Boseman] death. The film, also starring Martin Freeman, Lupita Nyong’o and Tenoch Huerta Mejia, is due in theaters on Nov. 11.
The Wakanda Forever soundtrack — produced by Coogler, Göransson, Archie Davis and Dave Jordan — will be out on Nov. 4, with Göransson’s score album due out also on Nov. 11.
Check out the “Life Me Up” tease below.
A lot of us love scary movies, but unless you are Elvira, Mistress of the Dark or Stephen King, your opinion on cinematic things that go bump in the night probably pales in comparison to those of the Boulet Brothers.
As drag culture iconoclasts and “horror’s new icons” per genre authority Fangoria, Dracmorda and Swanthula Boulet managed to create a reality competition series (The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula) that serves as both a love letter to horror and a refutation of the idea that reality TV can’t be underground and subversive. Now, the duo is launching The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Titans on Tuesday (Oct. 25) on Shudder and AMC+, a spin-off series featuring 10 standout contestants from Dragula’s first four seasons.
“The fans are not ready,” Swan tells Billboard. “The competitors dubbed it ‘Gagula’ because there’s so many different twists.”
With Halloween month (aka gay Christmas) and spooky szn upon us, we spoke with the Boulets about their 10 favorite horror movie soundtracks of all time. We’re talking about everything from John Carpenter’s iconic minimalist score for Halloween to Danny Elfman’s zany theme for the HBO series Tales From the Crypt to the synth fantasia Tangerine Dream crafted for the cult favorite Legend.
The Boulets also explain how the music in these movies affects their own work. “If it’s campier or more fun — and there are definitely fun challenges in this Titans season — you might hear a little music that sounds like Danny Elfman. But if it’s more epic and dramatic, you might hear our love for Bram Stoker’s Dracula and that score in those epic moments,” says Swan. “With so many episodes, it allows us to express musically all the ways we love horror.” Plus, the season will feature a new Boulet Brothers song called “Ascension,” which Drac says they “wrote specifically for the grand finale of the show.”
Read on — and expect to hear some of these sounds when the Boulets throw their annual Halloween Ball in Los Angeles on Oct. 28-29 at the Globe Theatre.
Kanye West claims he originally conceived of the idea for Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 historical revamp tribute to Spaghetti Westerns, Django Unchained. During Ye’s recent contentious chat with British talker Piers Morgan on Piers Morgan Uncensored, the MC/entrepreneur claimed that writer/director Tarantino and star Jamie Foxx cribbed the idea for the film from him based on a pitch he made while brainstorming for the 2005 “Gold Digger” video, which starred Foxx.
“Tarantino can write a movie about slavery, where actually — him and Jamie [Foxx] — they got the idea from me, because the idea for Django I pitched to Jamie Foxx and Quentin Tarantino as the video for ‘Gold Digger.’ And then Tarantino turned it into a film,” Ye said during last week’s interview, in which he also continued to lean into his recent string of antisemitic comments.
The surprise claim from Ye came after Morgan asked him if he believes in limits for free speech and, if so, what West thinks they are. “There are no limits to free speech,” Ye responded. “It’s all context, right?… In that film he creates a context where Leonardo DiCaprio use the [n-word] multiple times within that context.”
The Hype Williams-directed “Gold Digger” music video consists almost entirely of West rapping the song in a raspberry-hued void while Foxx croons the refrain and buxom, lingerie-clad models dance with the men at a nightclub and pose for magazine covers. Tarantino’s Oscar-winning film tells the story of a freed slave named Django (Foxx) who embarks on a killing spree across the South with a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) as they search of Django’s wife (Kerry Washington); there does not appear to be any obvious narrative correlation between the “Gold Digger” video and Tarantino’s film.
Foxx was not originally attached to star in Django, with Tarantino originally considering the late Michael K. Williams and Will Smith for the lead role. A spokesperson for Tarantino could not be reached for comment at press time.
After NCT DREAM hit a career milestone with two nights in South Korea’s largest concert venue, the K-pop boy band is sharing the experience with fans worldwide through their first-ever movie.
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NCT DREAM THE MOVIE : In a DREAM will be released worldwide this November. The feature film will spotlight the group on stage and backstage at their Olympic Stadium show in Seoul from September earlier this year. Fans will also get to see the preparations that went into the concert and interviews with all seven members of NCT DREAM. According to a press release, NCT DREAM members Mark, Renjun, Jeno, Haechan, Jaemin, Chenle and Jisung will “share candid stories and their thoughts and feelings” and “a look at the future the members envision away from the stage.”
The new flick celebrates NCT DREAM’s THE DREAM SHOW2 : In a DREAM concert that played in Seoul, as well as multiple cities in Japan, after the release Glitch Mode album, which hit No. 50 on the Billboard 200 in April to become the group’s first entry on the chart.
In A DREAM will be released in CGV theater chains with ScreenX as well as 4DX and 4DX Screen formats, which offer multi-sensory effects for viewers. Distribution for the movie comes from Trafalgar Releasing (who have pushed fan-focused movie experiences for artists like BTS, Coldplay and Twenty One Pilots) and CJ 4DPLEX Inc. (the tech company behind 4DX, ScreenX and 4DX Screen theaters). ScreenX offers a 270-degree field of view perspective in movie theaters by expanding screens to the side walls, while 4DX provides moviegoers with special effects like vibrations, wind, scents and more to enhance on-screen visuals. Trafalgar reports over 344 ScreenX auditoriums including 4DX Screen around the world in 38 countries.
“We are pleased to continue our relationship with CJ 4DPLEX Inc. and to partner for the first time with SM Entertainment to bring NCT DREAM’s first movie to cinemas worldwide,” said Marc Allenby, CEO of Trafalgar Releasing. “NCTzens all around the globe will be thrilled with the epic live concert performances and exciting behind-the-scenes footage that is meant to be experienced larger-than-life on the big screen.”
NCT DREAM’s debut on the silver screen makes them the latest K-pop act to deliver fans a concert-documentary hybrid film, last seen from the likes of SEVENTEEN, who brought their Power of Love : The Movie film to cinemas in April.
Forthcoming premiere dates and ticketing information for the November screenings will be available here.
Ed Sheeran was very, very close to achieving an all-time career goal for any artist when he was tapped to write a James Bond theme song in 2019. In fact, he had already begun crafting his take on the venerable genre for Daniel Craig’s Bond swan song, No Time To Die, when he was swapped out for eventual Oscar/Grammy/Golden Globe-winner Billie Eilish.
“I was within a f—ing gnat’s pube of doing one [a Bond theme song], and they changed directors, and then they just changed scripts and that was it.. we’d done all the meetings, I started writing it,” Sheeran said colorfully on this week’s episode of That Peter Crouch Podcast. The singer said that as an English performer penning a Bond theme is always a career bucket list item. “I’m not gonna pretend it didn’t hurt not doing it. But if they came back I’d be like, ‘yeah, yeah, of course, yeah!’”
In 2019, Sheeran’s manager Stuart Camp said he and the singer had met with series producer Barbara Broccoli in Dublin in 2017 to discuss a potential Bond theme, saying the film’s team “were interested” in Ed taking a shot at being the latest English/Scottish/Welsh act to give it a go; Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, Lulu, Duran Duran, Adele and Sam Smith have all previously recorded Bond themes.
The opportunity at the time appeared tied to director Danny Boyle helming of the 25th Bond movie — Boyle had worked with Sheeran on Richard Curtis’ 2019 Beatles fantasia Yesterday — but after Boyle quit over creative differences and was replaced by Cary Joji Fukunaga, Eilish was tapped for the gig.
Listen to the podcast (Bond talk starts 31:29).