If you are invited to lunch at Oprah Winfrey's home, don't bring flowers.

That is what producer, writer and director Ava DuVernay learned when she got an unexpected invitation to a Mother's Day brunch at Winfrey's home, which she attended with her grandmother. The pair recalled the luncheon during a conversation…

An electrician who was badly shocked during filming on Selma in 2014 has filed a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures and a subsidiary that supplies lighting and grip equipment for location shoots. Ronnie Sands was setting up lights at the historic Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta when he was nearly killed by a…

EXCLUSIVE: Selma director Ava DuVernay has just been set by Disney to direct A Wrinkle In Time, an adaptation of the 1963 Newbery Medal-winning Madeleine L'Engle fantasy classic novel that has a script by Oscar-winning Frozen writer and co-director Jennifer Lee. Deadline revealed February 8 that DuVernay had been offer…

EXCLUSIVE: Writer/director Ava DuVernay is moving to CAA. DuVernay, whose last film Selma was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, had been at Paradigm. She rose from a publicist in Hollywood films to make a splash with Middle of Nowhere, which won her the Best Director prize at 2012 Sundance, becoming the first…

Marvel has been absolutely mum on the matter of just who might end up helming the Black Panther film adaptation, planned for 2018, but that hasn’t stopped the wild speculation train from barreling out of the station full speed. Case in point, recent rumors over the last month claiming that Selma director Ava DuVernay…

One year ago today, Ronnie Sands was nearly electrocuted while working on the set of Selma in Georgia. Unable to work and struggling to get by on his Workers' Comp benefits, he's now broke and facing eviction. He is marking the anniversary today after his regularly scheduled rehabilitation appointment by appearing in…

EXCLUSIVE: Common has committed to star in the ensemble cast of Barbershop 3, the MGM sequel that New Line will distribute. He joins Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, who are reprising, and The Best Man franchise director Malcolm D. Lee, who’s helming. Cube Vision is producing and MGM will run production. Bob…

Similar to last weekend with the $131.6M global bow of Disney’s Cinderella, women are the prime target again this frame with the opening of Lionsgate’s Divergent sequel Insurgent, based on the second title in the popular Veronica Roth young adult book trilogy. Industry estimates peg the global bow between $105M-$120M…

Selma director Ava DuVernay said today that as the seventh director offered the project, “I went into that film with one thought, singular and clear: Serve this story. You have to. It wasn’t made with any sort of achievement in mind.” In her keynote address to the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas…

One of the many salutary after-effects of Ava DuVernay’s Selma has been renewed interest in that city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of a violent confrontation between people marching for civil rights and Alabama state police half a century ago. Closing his Last Word program on Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell…

It is hard to believe that on Saturday the Independent Spirit Awards will be celebrating their 30th anniversary in that giant tent erected each year on the Santa Monica beach. I remember as a young producer of movie coverage at Entertainment Tonight attending one of the earliest Spirits gatherings in 1988 at the 385…

Can a song written for a movie about events of 50 years ago, with a rap verse that dares to be relevant and edgy by inserting hot-button topics and incidents of today, possibly become an Oscar winner a week from now?

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