Abi Morgan, the playwright and screenwriter whose big-screen credits include The Iron Lady, Shame and most recently Suffragette, has been set to adapt Tangerine, the upcoming Christine Mangan psychological thriller novel that Imperative Entertainment scored rights to in November 2016. Mangan’s debut novel, from…

EXCLUSIVE: Imperative Entertainment just won an auction for the novel Tangerine with George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse on board to produce and Scarlett Johansson attached to star. The story is about two women whose lives intersect more than once and both times leads to the death or disappearance of one…

EXCLUSIVE: June Pictures has come aboard to produce and finance Sean Baker's The Florida Project, the writer-director’s follow-up feature to his awards-season hit Tangerine. It is the second film attached to Andrew Duncan and Alex Saks’ production outfit June Pictures, which recently launched to finance and produce…

Tangerine co-star Mya Taylor made a bit of awards history today at the Spirit Awards, becoming the first transgender performer to pick up a major film acting award. She was given the Best Supporting Female nod for her role in Sean Baker’s low-budget indie. “No one tells you how nervous you’re going to be when you’re…

Open Road’s Oscar hopeful Spotlight swept the proceedings at the 31st annual Film Independent Spirit Awards this afternoon in Santa Monica. The drama about the Boston Globe investigation of the Boston Catholic Church’s child abuse scandal won four awards — Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best…

After generating a long string of diverse and disruptive narrative and documentary features including the Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme is vexed by the lack of diversity in the past two Oscars. In a guest column for Deadline, Demme suggests reforms that go beyond those being hastily…

ICM Partners has signed Mya Taylor, a star of the indie pic Tangerine that has been garnering attention this awards season. Taylor and the film’s co-star Kitana Kiki Rodriguez are in the midst of the first Oscar campaign for trans actors via distributor Magnolia Pictures and executive producers Jay and Mark…

With Sean Baker's microbudget trans feature Tangerine, executive producers Mark and Jay Duplass have had more success than they anticipated in terms of the indie’s reception by viewers and tastemakers. Shot on an iPhone 5S, candid-camera-style—with the actors and crew running around Hollywood shooting on the fly—Tanger…

Giving Oscar season a pre-holidays kick off, The 25th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards happened tonight, with the ensemble drama Spotlight and the made-on-a-literal dime indie Tangerine taking home the most awards. Spotlight, chronicling the Boston Globe’s groundbreaking investigation that uncovered systemic…

The 25th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards happens tonight at Cipriani Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Hosted by Broad City duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, this year’s ceremony sees The Diary of a Teenage Girl leading with four nominations, with Tangerine, and Carol, trailing close behind with three…

Made quasi-guerrilla style on Santa Monica Blvd. on iPhone(s), Sean Baker's trans-tastic Tangerine opened via Magnolia Pictures in four New York and L.A. theaters over the weekend to a solid start. The Sundance title topped all its fellow newcomers but one in per-theater average with just over $16K. The weekend's top…

Robin Williams’ final theatrical release, Boulevard, opens this weekend via Starz Digital. The feature, starring Williams as a 60-year-old married man who comes out of the closet, debuted at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, but was temporarily shelved following the actor’s death. Starz will open the film in a slow…