State Champ Radio TV/Film
Page: 299
Kelly Clarkson took viewers back a few decades with her latest Kellyoke segment. For Thursday’s (Jan. 5) episode of her namesake show, the American Idol season one champ traded her sweetness for something a bit more nostalgic.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The “Since U Been Gone” singer, accompanied by her band Y’all, opened up the talk show with a cover of Ronnie Milsap’s “Lost in the Fifties Tonight.” The band kept things jazzy on the instrumentals, allowing for Clarkson’s voice to glide on the melody and allow her signature robust tone and vocal runs to steal the show.
“In the still of the night/ Hold me, darlin’, hold me tight, oh/ So real, so right/ I’m lost in the fifties tonight,” the vocalist sang, with a classy saxophone adding a romantic touch to the wistful track.
Milsap’s “Lost in the Fifties Tonight (In the Still of the Night)” was first released in 1985 and is the title track from the country star’s 17th album of the same name. The track — compromised of a medley from “Lost in the Fifties Tonight” written by Mike Reid and Troy Seals and a cover of The Five Satins’ 1956 hit “In the Still of the Night” — was a crossover hit for Milsap, peaking at No. 8 on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart at No. 8, and at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs.
Listen to Clarkson’s rendition of “Lost in the Fifties Tonight” above.
With the return of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the time has come for us to consider an important question asked throughout ages long past — what song do you think they’re going to lip synch to in the premiere?
With a Drag Race premiere, it’s not even a foregone conclusion that we will definitely get a Lip Sync For Your Life — back in season 9, for example, when guest judge Lady Gaga oversaw the queens’ first challenges, there was no elimination or winner lip sync. Then again, when season 13 rolled around, we got six lip syncs in the premiere episode as every queen faced off in pairs.
Assuming we’re getting at least one lip sync battle — be it For Your Life of For The Win — in season 15’s two-episode MTV premiere, we can also assume whose song we will be hearing. With Ariana Grande stepping in for her second stint as a guest judge, it’s safe to say that we will likely get a new rendition to one of her tracks.
It’s a position that Grande is very familiar with; the singer once held the record for most songs lip-synced on the show (other than Ru, of course). Today, she’s tied with Whitney Houston for second place, both having eight of their songs performed on the show and its All Stars seasons, while Britney Spears has had nine tracks earn their place on the main stage in 11 different lip syncs.
Which of Ariana’s songs can we expect to hear during the premiere? Tom Campbell, an executive producer of the show since its conception, told Billboard last year that RuPaul has final say over what songs make it onto the show, and he takes a lot of aspects into consideration. “He will reject songs because they’re the wrong tempo, they don’t build, there’s all of these factors he’s thinking about,” he said.
Billboard decided to offer up a few suggestions — below, we list out 10 songs by Ariana Grande that we would love to see featured in an upcoming lip sync on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15:
Eagle-eyed One Direction fans noticed a boy band-related oversight in Netflix’s new heist series, Kaleidoscope.
In the show’s “Green” episode, criminal Judy (played by Rosaline Elbay) is attempting to smuggle SIM cards to her boyfriend Stan (Peter Mark Kendall), who is in prison. Judy is caught by a prison guard, and goes on to bribe her with One Direction concert tickets.
The tickets however, are for a show on March 6, 2016, months after the band had already gone on hiatus. “IT HURTS BEING A DIRECTIONER,” one Twitter user wrote in response.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT ONE DIRECTION TOUR TICKETS IN 2016 MENTIONED IN THE NETFLIX SERIES #KALEIDOSCOPE !!!??? THE FACT THAT 1D WENT ON HIATUS IN 2015 AND WEREN’T EVEN TOGETHER IN 2016!!??? ALSO THEY PLAYED MSG ONLY ONCE IN 2012 WTFF😭😭💔💔 IT HURTS BEING A DIRECTIONER💔💔 pic.twitter.com/5yD2HLDsF9— LouHaz²⁸ || TOGETHER WE’RE THE GREATEST 💫🔥 (@Matildarryhs3) January 1, 2023
During their time as a group, the X Factor-born boy band had four No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 and six top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 including “What Makes You Beautiful” (No. 4) and “Best Song Ever” (No. 2).
Zayn Malik left the group in March 2015, and remaining members Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson went on to announce one final album as a foursome, Made in the A.M., before revealing that they will be going on a hiatus in August 2015.
In March 2021, Styles became the first One Direction member to win a Grammy Award. He took home best pop solo performance for “Watermelon Sugar,” the No. 1 single from his Fine Line album.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Fox is unveiling its ultimate celebrity social experiment on Wednesday (Jan. 4). The new show, titled Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, will follow a group of stars as they endure some of the harshest, most demanding training challenges from the actual Special Forces selection process.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Unlike other competition shows, there is no voting or elimination. The only objective is to make it through the challenges. In this series, the only way for the recruits to leave the compeition is to give up on their own accord, through failure or potential injury, or by force from the DS.
We’ve compiled all you need to know about how to watch Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. See below.
How to Watch Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test airs on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Fox, with the premiere broadcasting on January 4.
Stream Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test Online
While no streaming service is currently offering the show on its platform, there are a number of ways to watch Special Forces without cable. YouTube TV, Sling TV and Philo, and DirecTV Stream are some of the more affordable options for live content, all of which offer Fox on their channel selection and can be accessed on mobile devices and laptops.
Who Is Competing in Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test?
Danny Amendola, Mel B, Hannah Brown, Tyler Florence, Kate Gosselin, Dwight Howard, Montell Jordan, Gus Kenworthy, Nastia Liukin, Carli Lloyd, Beverley Mitchell, Kenya Moore, Mike Piazza, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Anthony Scaramucci and Jamie Lynn Spears are the 16 celebrity recruits this season.
What’s the Prize?
There’s no prize for winning, as Special Forces is truly a test of strength, willpower and resilience.
Chris Ledesma, who served as the beloved music editor of The Simpsons on every one of its first 734 episodes, from the Fox animated series’ premiere in 1989 through a 34th-season installment in November, has died. He was 64.
Ledesma died Dec. 16 in Los Angeles, a spokesperson for the show told The Hollywood Reporter. No cause of death was revealed.
Ledesma had been hired to fill in as a music editor on Fox’s The Tracey Ullman Show, where The Simpsons began as a series of shorts playing in and out of commercials. He then started on the spinoff on Nov. 22, 1989.
“I was skeptical of turning the little 30- and 60-second featurettes on Tracey into a full-fledged, half-hour show,” he wrote on his blog in 2011. “All that went out the window as soon as I saw the first two shows.”
Ledesma noted on Twitter in September 2021 that he had been with The Simpsons for more than half his life. At the time, he was 23,242 days old and had been an employee for 11,621 of them.
Today is a significant milestone for me.I am 23,242 days oldI have worked on The Simpsons for 11,621 daysBorn 1/28/1958First day on #TheSimpsons 11/22/1989Not many can say they have worked at ANY job any more for LITERALLY half their lives.#Grateful #Blessed— Chris Ledesma (@mxedtr) September 16, 2021
He left the show in May, and his final Simpsons episode aired in November as the eighth installment of season 34. On Sunday night, the series paid tribute to him with an end title card that read, “In loving memory of Chris Ledesma.”
Christopher Frederick Ledesma was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 28, 1958. He started playing piano by ear at age 3, then took formal trumpet lessons beginning in the third grade.
While at CalArts, he decided to pursue a career in music editing after serving in that capacity on a student film. He also was an orchestral conducting major at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
When he wasn’t riding the tram as a tour guide at Universal Studios Hollywood, Ledesma sat in on scoring sessions for such shows as Murder, She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Airwolf and Amazing Stories. He called that “a priceless education that could never have been offered at any college or university.”
In September 1985, Ledesma landed a job as an apprentice music editor at leading music editing house Segue Music, where he handled acclaimed MTM Enterprises shows including Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. He then worked for Music Design Group and Music Works before launching his own company, Click Track Inc., in 1992.
(Through all this, he didn’t give up his job on the Universal Studios tour until spring 1988.)
Starting in 1994, the two-time Emmy nominee also was music editor on another animated show, The Critic, created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss of The Simpsons.
In September 2014, he conducted a tribute to Simpsons composer Alf Clausen, with whom he worked so closely for so many years, at the Hollywood Bowl.
His résumé also included the films Back in the U.S.S.R. (1991), Dark Shadows (1991), Pure Country (1992), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), Blast From the Past (1999) and Dudley Do-Right (1999); 20 Hallmark Hall of Fame telefilms; the 1988 miniseries War and Remembrance; and the 1993 TV movie Gypsy, starring Bette Midler. (He received Emmy noms for those last two projects.)
Survivors include his wife, Michelle; two daughters and two sons-in-law; and three grandchildren.
“The most rewarding part of the job for me is that I have been able to support and care for my family, and I work with genuinely nice people on a show that makes other people happy,” he said.
This article was originally published on THR.com.
It’s been nearly 20 years since American Idol debuted, and its first winner, Kelly Clarkson, has had an impressive career in the time since. The “Since U Been Gone” singer has become a three-time Grammy winner, coach on The Voice and is now a host on her namesake talk show, on which she invited fellow season one Idol alumn Justin Guarini to reminisce about their time on the singing competition for Wednesday’s (Jan. 4) episode.
Clarkson admitted that she often does not remember moments from her time on Idol, but asked Guarini if he had any special memories of his own.
“It’s wild because we got shot out of the cannon, but I just loved being around and the fact that we were at the beginning of things, nobody knew what was up,” he reflected. “The stakes weren’t super high for us. We got to hang out so much.”
Guardini then issued actress Alexandra Daddario, who was also a guest on The Kelly Clarkson Show, a stern warning. “If you ever have the chance to see Kelly and she says, ‘Hey, do you want to play a card game?’ Don’t,” he advised the actress. “We would hang out and we would play speed because there were huge swaths of time, and I think I may have won twice in the hundreds of time that we played together.”
“I feel like I have natural caffeine in me, so it was really my game,” Clarkson mused, to which Guarini said, “It was ridiculous! I just kept coming back for more.”
Guarini’s was the runner-up in American Idol‘s first season. He has since released two studio albums, two EPs and has appeared on Broadway and television.
Watch Guarini and Clarkson reminisce on their Idol experience above.
By now you’ve probably heard about the boatload of lies incoming New York Republican Rep. George Santos unleashed during his successful run to represent Long Island in the House. The 34-year-old fabulist is already facing probes from the House Ethics Committee, as well as federal, state and local authorities over his wide-ranging fibs, from lies about the elite Bronx prep school he didn’t attend and the colleges he didn’t graduate from, to the prestigious jobs he never held at a pair of Wall Street firms, lies about his grandparents surviving the Holocaust (and his Jewish heritage) and a series of whoppers he told about his mother’s death.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
It would all be pretty funny if it wasn’t potentially illegal and it didn’t put a pathological phony near the levers of government, so naturally The Late Show‘s cold open on Tuesday night (Jan. 3) took on the story by putting Santos’ many deceptions into song, cued to Meredith Brooks’ 1997 breakthrough hit, “B–ch.”
The “A Definitely True Message from George Santos” bit opened with news reports about Santos’ multiple misrepresentations of his mother’s death before a fake George said he had only one (or two, or maybe 10 things) to say. Then, to the strains of Brooks’ urgent pop hit, he proclaimed, “I’m half black/ I’m a Jew/ I graduated from Baruch/ My grandpa fled a war/ But wait there’s even more/ I invented root beer floats/ I’m the guy from Quaker Oats/ And that’s not even all the stuff I am.”
The parody went on, with fake Santos proclaiming that he’s also Chinese, from Belize and in a pair of claims outrageous even for him, that his hair is made of bees and that he’s actually Adele in disguise. Some of the fabrications sounded almost plausible, like that he ran the New York Marathon and was instrumental in demoting Pluto from planet-dom. And he swore the latter on both of his mother’s graves, so they must be true.
Santos had a pretty terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first day in Congress on Tuesday, with cameras catching him sitting by himself as other representatives seemingly shunned him and he walked briskly away from reporters, while a Washington Post writer revealed that when Santos stood up to vote for still-unseated Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a “Hispanic Democrat yelled “mentiroso!” which means “liar” in Spanish.
Watch the Late Show cold open below.
America’s Got Talent: All-Stars premiered on Monday (Jan. 2) and it has already been a jaw dropper.
Aerialist Alan Silva (Season 15), poet Aneeshwar Kunchala (Britain’s Got Talent 2022), hand-balancing group Bello Sisters (Season 15), a Capella group Berywam (Season 14), singer Caly Bevier (Season 11), singer Jeanick Fournier (Canada’s Got Talent winner 2022), singer Jimmie Herrod (Season 16), dance group Light Balance Kids (Season 14), magician Lioz (Season 10) and ventriloquist Terry Fator (Season 2 winner) all took the stage for the first episode, bringing the heat to the competition.
However, Fator — one of the most successful contestants in AGT history — was sent home. After winning the competition in 2007, the then-42-year-old signed a five-year, $100 million contract with the Mirage in Las Vegas and regularly made Forbes’s annual list of highest-paid comedians.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“I’m going to let in on a little secret,” Cowell told the champion during the episode. “When we decided to make All-Stars, we had one condition: We’re only going to do it if you competed. Seriously! Because if you’re going to say we’ve got the ‘best of the best,’ then you’ve got to get the best of the best.”
Bevier, Berywam, Fournier, Herrod, Kenchala, Silva and Lioz also went home during the premiere episode. On the other hand, Light Balance Kids snagged the Golden Buzzer from judge Howie Mandel, sending them straight to the finale. The Bello Sisters also made it to the finale thanks to winning the super fan vote.
America’s Got Talent: All-Stars airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.
Most Billboard readers have at least a rough idea of the top albums and songs of each year but may be less familiar with the top box-office hits from each year. Fortunately, boxofficemojo.com has that information for each year dating back to 1977.
So what do we learn scrolling through the list of top-grossing films for each year since Jimmy Carter became president and Elvis Presley died? One thing that comes across loud and clear is the degree to which sequels and franchises have come to dominate the marketplace. Just four of the year-end box-office champs were films that were not part of franchises (or did not spark a franchise or a reboot of some kind). Those four films that stand alone are E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Ghost and Titanic.
Star Wars is the top franchise on this recap, with six installments that have been the year’s top-grossing film. Batman is runner-up, with four installments that finished first for the year. Spider-Man is third, with three installments that yielded the year’s top box-office hit.
James Cameron and George Lucas are tied as the only directors who each directed three films that took the year-end crown. Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, Tony Scott, Steven Spielberg, Andrew Stanton and Robert Zemeckis are tied for second place, each having directed two year-end champs.
John Williams is far and away the top film scorer. The legendary composer scored 10 films that took the year-end box-office crown. Danny Elfman and Alan Silvestri have each scored films that finished first four times. (Hans Zimmer will join them if Top Gun: Maverick, on which he teamed with Harold Faltermeyer and Lady Gaga to provide the music, finishes first for the year.)
Lucas and Williams are the only director/composer team to collaborate on three year-end box-office champs. Six other such teams have collaborated on two year-end champs: Spielberg and Williams; Zemeckis and Silvestri; Scott and Faltermeyer; Cameron and James Horner; Burton and Elfman; and Stanton and Thomas Newman.
Top Gun: Maverick took the box-office crown for 2022, with a domestic (U.S. and Canada) gross of more than $718 million. The rest of the top five consisted of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Avatar: The Way of Water and Jurassic World: Dominion.
Let’s scroll back through the films that had the most success at the domestic box office (that’s the U.S. and Canada) in each calendar year since 1977, when Annie debuted on Broadway, Laverne & Shirley was the top TV show and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours dominated the Billboard 200.
If you thought that Snoop Dogg was the top dogg in the 1990s, think again. The 51-year-old rapper recently opened up about a time when none other than Dionne Warwick — legendary vocalist and unofficial queen of Twitter — once put him in his place. Or as he puts it, “out-gangstered” him.
In the new CNN film Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over, the “Heartbreaker” singer and Snoop recalled a time when she set up a meeting with a group of prominent ’90s rappers after deciding she’d had enough of the misogynistic lyrics notoriously present in the decade’s rap canon. The “Drop It Like It’s Hot” artist, Suge Knight and more were invited to arrive at her home no later than 7 in the morning — a prospect so intimidating, Snoop says he and his peers were all in her driveway by 6:52 a.m.
“We were kind of, like, scared and shook up,” Snoop said. “We’re powerful right now, but she’s been powerful forever. Thirty-some years in the game, in the big home with a lot of money and success.”
Once they arrived, the rappers were confronted by Warwick, who demanded they call her a “b—h” to her face. After all, that was the term many of them had been using to describe women in their lyrics.
“These kids are expressing themselves, which they’re entitled to do,” Warwick recalled thinking at the time. “However, there’s a way to do it.”
“You guys are all going to grow up,” she told the group. “You’re going have families. You’re going to have children. You’re going to have little girls and one day that little girl is going to look at you and say, ‘Daddy, did you really say that? Is that really you?’ What are you going to say?”
“She was checking me at a time when I thought we couldn’t be checked,” added Snoop, who actually did go on to welcome a daughter in addition to three sons. “We were the most gangsta as you could be, but that day at Dionne Warwick’s house, I believe we got out-gangstered that day.”
The Death Row Records owner says he was then inspired to change his musical approach, starting with his 1996 record Tha Doggfather. “I made it a point to put records of joy – me uplifting everybody and nobody dying and everybody living,” he continued. “Dionne, I hope I became the jewel that you saw when I was the little, dirty rock that was in your house. I hope I’m making you proud.”
