Rejoice! It’s the weekend! And that means it’s time to read all those juicy long-form features you missed.
Among our curated picks from the past week: sit-downs with Ari Emanuel, whose new memoir Roll the Calls is rocking Hollywood (including recollections of our founder Nikki Finke), and James Gray, who discusses his New York Film Festival opener Paper Tiger. Plus, a review of new Brad Pitt-starrer Heart of the Beast and a deep dive into documentarian Barbara Kopple’s meaningful look at the workforce, Union Town. Finally, take a look at an oral history of the soon-to-end show, All American — the last YA series left standing on the CW, and one of the few that put a primarily Black cast on broadcast television.
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Ari Emanuel On The Making Of His Memoir
Image Credit: Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC Don’t let the kinder, gentler Ari Emanuel fool you. Despite what you may have heard during his media tour for his new memoir Roll the Calls, the WME Group and TKO boss hasn’t mellowed out.
The notoriously combative Emanuel is still taking names, making calls, taking no prisoners and, from Donald Trump and Barack Obama to Nikki Finke to Mike Ovitz, Mark Wahlberg, Patrick Whitesell, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Katzenberg and everyone in between (including a fictional “Dr. Calm” amalgamation of his various therapists), calling out friend and foe. To that, his Knopf memoir, ghost-written by J.R. Moehringer, is in part confession and in part altercation with a lot of big names in the mix and big Hollywood moments as the backdrop.
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Barbara Kopple Examines The State Of The Unions With ‘Union Town’
Image Credit: Courtesy of Camden International Film Festival Fifty years ago, a young director named Barbara Kopple came out with her first film, a documentary she thought would be little seen.
“When I started making the film, I thought, ‘Oh, my parents will see it and their friends and maybe a museum will show it,’” she recalls.
That film was Harlan County U.S.A., about a long running strike at a coal mine in southeast Kentucky, and it was immediately hailed as brilliant, earning Kopple an Academy Award. She would earn a second Oscar for her 1991 documentary American Dream, about a strike at a Hormel Foods plant in Minnesota.
Kopple has made many other documentaries in intervening years – on actor Gregory Peck, singer Sharon Jones, and country band the Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks), among others. But she returns to the theme for which she is best known – working people in America — in her new documentary Union Town. It just held its U.S. premiere at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine after bowing at the Venice Film Festival earlier in September.
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Why ‘Heart Of The Beast’ Will Make You Cry
Image Credit: Paramount Pictures Going to see Heart of the Beast is a dangerous proposition if you don’t want to be seen crying uncontrollably in public. This man-and-his-dog story is an emotional roller coaster that lays it all out there, and I lapped it up just like I did in My Dog Skip, Turner & Hooch, K9, Marley & Me, Old Yeller and countless others. But there was something visceral about this one, a largely dialogue-less film where the story is told in the eyes of Brad Pitt playing opposite a loyal and tough German Shepherd named Odin. This is a story of a 30-year military veteran and the dog who stood with him in Iraq and Afghanistan only to finally find peace in the Alaskan wilderness until the unthinkable happens and it becomes an even greater tale of survival against all odds. It stays with you, won’t let go, and gives you new appreciation for those who serve, whether on two feet or four paws.
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James Gray Talks ‘Paper Tiger’ & Reveals Who Inspires Him Most
Image Credit: Amy Sussman/Getty Images James Gray has quite a track record this century when it comes to appearing in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Starting in 2000 with only his second feature The Yards, he has had six films in competition including We Own The Night (2007), Two Lovers (2009), The Immigrant (2013), Armageddon Time (2022) and this year’s Paper Tiger. (Ironically, the only major festival where he won a prize was Venice, where he won the Silver Lion for his 1994 debut film Little Odessa.)
But while Gray deservedly remains a favorite son of Cannes. It’s not the only festival that favors him whenever it can, as will be apparent tonight as Paper Tiger makes its North American debut at the New York Film Festival, its opening-night selection. It will mark his fourth film at the NYFF in his hometown city (he grew up in Queens), but the first as the prestigious opener. In 2016, his brilliant Lost City of Z was the closing-night film and the only one of his NYFF attractions that didn’t first premiere in Cannes.
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How ‘All American’s Cast & Writers Feel About The Ending Of An Era
Image Credit: Art Streiber/The CW All American entered the television scene as yet another trailblazing coming-of-age story on a network with a history and a 2018 fall slate full of them. The series will end its eight-season run on Monday as the lone symbol of a bygone era at The CW.
Inspired by the life of former NFL linebacker Spencer Paysinger, the series, which is produced by Warner Bros. Television, debuted in October 2018 and began what would increasingly become an uphill battle to stay on the air.
Yet, as the television landscape (and the world) changed rapidly around it, All American always found a way. It stood its ground on issues from racial injustice to mental health awareness to substance abuse to exploitation in youth sports time and time again. When money was tight, the series faced slashed budgets and shrinking episodic orders that continually tested the cast and crew’s determination to keep it alive.
Not only did it stay alive, it ran for eight seasons and more than 100 episodes — a milestone that has long been celebrated on television and is becoming increasingly rare. It survived several major disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a historically long writers and actors strike, and an exodus of series regulars after Season 6. It’ll hang up its hat on Monday as the last of its kind on The CW, which has largely abandoned young adult television after the network made a name for itself over decades of evolution with the genre. And, despite the network’s storied history in the YA space, All American will stand as one of the few that put a primarily Black cast on broadcast television.
Through more than a dozen conversations with the cast and writers, Deadline has woven together an oral history of the series, from those nerve-wracking early days on Season 1 to the bittersweet end of production in December 2025.
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