Fremantle signs first look deal with Kristen's Nevermind Pictures

We have agreed a first look deal with Nevermind Pictures, the production company from filmmaker and Academy Award-nominated actor Kristen Stewart (Love Lies Bleeding, Spencer), screenwriter Dylan Meyer (Moxie) and producer Maggie McLean (Boygenius: The Film, John Bronco).

The multi-year deal will see Fremantle become the primary home for all of Nevermind’s film and television projects, with the producer working closely with our Global Drama division and, for the TV titles, our international distribution team, FMI. The partnership was spearheaded by Christian Vesper, our CEO Global Drama, and Seb Shorr, COO Global Drama.

The first projects that will be produced as part of the deal will be announced shortly. They will include a wide range of titles encompassing films, drama and documentaries. Stewart, Meyer and McLean’s role will vary on each project with Stewart directing, writing and/or acting, Meyer directing and writing and all three partners producing.

Nevermind joins a prestigious collective of creatives under the Fremantle banner with other first look deals in place with the likes of Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín’s Fabula, Luca Guadagnino, Paolo Sorrentino, Angelina Jolie, Rachel Weisz and Polly Stokes’ Astral Projection, Edward Berger and his label Nine Hours, Johan Renck and Michael Parets’ Sinestra, Patrick Daly’s Caledonia Productions as well as ongoing collaborations with acclaimed writers and directors including Michael Winterbottom.

Kristen Stewart, Dylan Meyer and Maggie McLean, Partners, Nevermind Pictures, said: "We are emphatically thrilled to be partnering with such esteemed and likeminded creative partners. We're blown away by the talent Fremantle has amassed under their umbrella and can't wait to cut our teeth on our initial forays alongside them."

Christian Vesper, CEO Global Drama, Fremantle, added: “We are incredibly excited to join forces with Kristen, Dylan and Maggie and collaborate on their bold and inventive projects. The Nevermind team’s combined experience and talent are exceptional, and we are sure that Fremantle will be the natural home for their original, fresh perspective.

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NEW PROJECT: Kristen to play astronaut Sally Ride in 'The Challenger' for a limited TV series

Kristen Stewart will make her TV series-starring debut in The Challenger, a limited series in which she’ll play Sally Ride, the astronaut and physicist who became the first American woman to fly in space. She did this as part of a NASA space shuttle astronaut class of 1978 that was the first to be diversified and not comprised of all white men.  

Kyra Sedgwick’s Big Swing Productions developed and brought the project to Amblin and is executive producing with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners and Stewart through the latter’s Nevermind production label. Amblin’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey are also exec producers.

Maggie Cohn will serve as the writer and showrunner; her credits include American Crime Story, The Staircase and Narcos: Mexico. This has been the hot property on the TV auction block this week, and Amazon is close to tying it down.

The series is based on The New Guys, a book written by Meredith E. Bagby, who partners with Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler in Big Swing. They are also executive producers.

In some ways, this has the tapestry to tell the successor story to The Right Stuff, which was based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the culture clash that occurred when the cockiest world’s best fighter pilots jumped into the space race that America was engaged in with the Russians. Bagby tells the story of a group that was called by their predecessors ‘The F*cking New Guys,’ as NASA sought to diversify its pilots and crew for the space shuttle program. Ride was the first woman and the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to fly into space. Also in that program was the first Black and Asian American astronauts, and a married couple. They passed all the rigorous tests to become top of the class, and egos, ambition and romance were part of the cultural clash. They were also quite brilliant.

In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle, and became an instant celebrity. That joy was short-lived, however, when three years later the space shuttle Challenger blew apart 73 seconds into its ascent, killing all seven members of the crew. Ride then became the only astronaut to become part of the Rogers Commission, a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, and it later came out that she pinpointed the problems with O-rings that became stiff at low temperature, and that turned out to be the reason for the explosion. Ride died from cancer at age 61 in 2012, a true American hero.

The hope will be to get this ready to time the series in proximity of the Challenger disaster anniversary. That happened 38 years ago, on January 28, 1986. For Stewart, this continues a career evolution which started after the Twilight Saga films, in which she has established herself as a most watchable actress with range.

In a moment where not a lot is selling in the marketplace, how does a plum package like this happen? Sedgwick explains this was a truly homegrown project, and not one that happened overnight:

“This is something we’ve worked on at Big Swing since 2017, me, Meredith and Valerie, about this new class of astronaut recruited by NASA in the early 1970s,” she said. “Sally Ride was among them, and the focus is this newly recruited wild, feral group of astronauts who were all very diverse. And then on an Oppenheimer track, it also tells the story of the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger disaster that Ride took part in. Growing up in Florida, Meredith Bagby was obsessed with space and the shuttle, and she also watched the Challenger explode. Meredith got hundreds of hours of interviews with the members of that class, and we have relationships with all those living astronauts and they will be part of our brain trust on the show.

“She wrote the book and it went on the bestseller lists,” Sedgwick told Deadline. “We wanted so much to tell this story as a limited series. Our goal at Big Swing is to tell familiar stories with a new perspective and point of view. I had a relationship with Maggie Cohn, and she fell in love with the book. Valerie had this dream of having Kristen Stewart, and after more than a year of trying to get Kristen this book through back channeling, she read it and she fell in love. Getting Kristen and Maggie was incredible, for a company nobody really knows yet. We are three girls with a dream.

“Then we thought, what better than to bring in Steven Spielberg to help tell this awe-inspiring story of the astronauts who inspired space travel for a new generation? They helped us prepare the pitch that went out to the marketplace, and it has been extremely competitive and we are close to a deal.”

Making Stewart the centerpiece was also interesting in that TV was not an obsession for her.

“She has never done television, but when she read this she became obsessed with telling the story of Sally Ride from her own unique perspective that I won’t even try to paraphrase because she is so eloquent about it,” Sedgwick said. “She was so stunning in these pitch meetings and that was a huge part of why it has been so competitive. She’s so compelling and was so rabid about telling this story about an American hero who had to hide who she was, in that time.

“Who better to play Sally Ride than one of the great actors of her generation? As they say in Hollywood, passion wins the day. Her passion for being an executive producer is vast. As dogged as we were about getting the script to her, she has been that dogged about getting it sold in the marketplace.”

Even though Sedgwick herself is most closely associated with the role of the closer, it was Stewart who played that role in the pitch process.

“Right now when everyone is saying that nobody is buying anything, she would not listen and nor would we because if we had listened to all the times we were told this would be too hard, we would never have gotten this off the ground. Amblin spoke first, Maggie was great, and then they passed it to me, I was the one to pass to Kristen and was the one who got to kvell about her because I’d just seen Love Lies Bleeding. We were all in it to win it.”   

Auction was brokered by WME (which reps Stewart and Amblin) and CAA (which reps Sedgwick, Big Swing and Cohn).

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Vertical acquires distribution for 'Sacramento' for North America, UK and Ireland release

Ahead of its June 8 world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, the road trip buddy comedy Sacramento, directed by and starring Michael Angarano (Oppenheimer), has been acquired by Vertical for distribution in North America, the UK and Ireland later this year.

In addition to Angarano, the starry indie’s cast includes Michael Cera (Barbie), Kristen Stewart (Love Lies Bleeding), and Maya Erskine (Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith). The film tells the story of Rickey (Angarano), an energetic and free-spirited young man with a Peter Pan complex who, following the death of his father, convinces his long-time friend Glenn (Cera) to hit pause on his blissful domestic life and embark on an impromptu road trip across California.

Angarano penned the screenplay with Chris Smith, and they produced the film alongside Bee-Hive Productions’ Stephen Braun, the Wonder Company’s Chris Abernathy and Eric B. Fleischman, and Sam Grey. Irfan Siddiqui served as associate producer.

In a statement on the acquisition, Angarano told Deadline, “Sacramento was a movie-making experience that was truly one of a kind. Each and every crew member believed in the movie we were making and had fun while doing it, which is all you could ever hope for as a filmmaker. It’s also a very personal film for me which is why I’m grateful to have a home like Vertical.”

Angarano noted that Vertical has established itself as “one of the great independent film distributors” and is “constantly demonstrating their willingness to champion movies like ours. We feel like we have found the perfect partner to continue this movie’s journey.”

Stated Vertical Partner Peter Jarowey, “It’s hard to imagine when Michael found time to sleep, but his incredible talent has produced a hilarious and poignant film that we can’t wait to share with audiences later this year. We’re also thrilled to continue our collaboration with Eric, Stephen, and Chris on this project and look forward to many more successful ventures together.”

Jarowey and SVP of Acquisitions Tony Piantedosi negotiated the deal on behalf of Vertical, with Verve Ventures and UTA’s Independent Film Group repping the production.

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Michael Angarano talks about 'Sacramento' and mentions Kristen with Variety

When Michael Angarano was trying to get “Sacramento,” his indie buddy comedy about two friends who go on a road trip to a certain state capital off the ground, the question he’d get was always the same. Does it really need to be set in Sacramento?

“At one point we were ready to shoot the movie in Atlanta — we had the financing and everything,” remembers Angarano, who directed the film, as well as co-wrote it. “And this was for a movie called ‘Sacramento.’ But it’s like why try to cheat it? Maybe, we should we just call it ‘Athens’ or ‘Savannah’?”

And even though Angarano and his co-writer Chris Smith weren’t that familiar with the city that inspired their film, its appearance on a highway sign, informing them of the California city’s distance from Los Angeles, was foundational. For them, Sacramento wasn’t just a destination, it was a state of mind.

“We had just been to a batting cage and we were driving back and we saw the sign and we just played a game of chicken,” Angarano remembers. “It was like, ‘hey, want to go to Sacramento?’ ‘Yeah, sure. Why not?’ And it became sort of an inside joke. Like what if you just picked a random place and went there for no reason at all?”

That exchange plays out nearly verbatim in the film that Angarano and Smith finally, after many false starts and abrupt stops, finished. But the version that premieres at the Tribeca Festival this weekend has evolved just as the lives of the people involved with bringing it to the screen have changed in dramatic ways. In “Sacramento,” two estranged college buddies reconnect at a transitional moment in their lives. Michael Cera is Glenn, a soon-to-be father, stressed out by impending parenthood and facing a professional crisis. Angarano plays Ricky, his irresponsible friend whose happy-go-lucky persona masks some deeper personal issues. And though the two actors are longtime pals, they insist they are nothing like the people they play in the film.

“Our dynamic is not the same,” says Angarano. “Mike is not like the strait-laced one and I’m not the wild guy. We’re both pretty similar.”

But Cera notes the years it took to get the film off the ground meant that when cameras actually started rolling, the particulars of their lives had a lot in common with the parts they were playing.

“It’s a movie about these two guys on the precipice of fatherhood who are entering this new chapter,” says Cera. “And when this movie first started coming together that was a few years off for both of us. But it took so long to get started that by the time we were shooting, Mike and I had just entered into fatherhood. So it was very real and immediate to us.”

Making “Sacramento” changed Angarano’s life in other important ways. He met his future wife Maya Erskine after casting her in the film as Ricky’s ex-girlfriend. “Sacramento” ended up taking longer to get off the ground than anticipated, but she stuck with the project and with Angarano. The pair’s son was born in 2021 and they announced they were expecting their second child last April.

“This movie has this weird cosmic energy around it, where it’s life imitating art or art imitating life,” says Angarano. “Small little miracles happened around this film.”

To fill out the cast, Angarano approached Kristen Stewart, who he had dated in the early aughts, to play Rosie, the very pregnant wife of Cera’s character.

“I’ve known Kristen, since we were like 12 years old,” says Angarano. “We did not write it with Kristen in mind. But you get a list of stars when you make anything that the people who control the money are interested in having be in the film. Kristen was obviously on the very top tier of that list. We knew she’d be great in the role and she’s a person who has a history of doing smaller films like this.”

Stewart loved the script and wanted to work with Cera, so she agreed to join the project. That helped secure the financing, as well as a commitment from the movie’s backers to actually shoot the movie in Sacramento and not in an Atlanta suburb. But a few days before filming started, Cera gave Angarano a scare. The director had decided to take trip to Palm Springs by himself to decompress when he got a text message from his star that read, “I have an insane favor to ask.” But when Angarano wrote him back, Cera went silent. And that sent the filmmaker on a downward spiral.

“I texted everybody — the producers, everyone,” Angarano remembers. “I was like he’s pushing it. It’s falling apart.”

Eventually, Cera responded. He wanted to know if he could borrow one of Angarano’s guitars during the shoot. “He let me know that I had put him through hell,” Cera says sheepishly. “I think there was some non-psychotic reason why I didn’t respond. My phone had died or something.”

In the end, not only did the film get made, but Angarano lent Cera his guitar.

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