The Coen brothers‘ Inside Llewyn Davis won Best Feature tonight at the fourth annual IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards but lost some of the spotlight to presenter Lee Daniels, who made some eyebrow-raising remarks. Kicking off awards season in NYC, the trophy show propelled the CBS period folk music drama and Fruitval…

One of the most poignant moments to come out of last Saturday’s Deadline event THE CONTENDERS was the story relayed by screenwriter Danny Strong and co-producer Pam Williams demonstrating the late Laura Ziskin‘s unbridled  passion for getting Lee Daniels’ The Butler to the screen against all odds. As one of the film’s…

EXCLUSIVE: Following the success of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, ABC has put in development a limited series about another famous black White House servant. A Slave In The White House, from filmmakers Sheldon Candis and Justin Wilson (LUV) and Deborah Spera and Maria Grasso’s One-Two Punch Prods, is a 12-hour limited…

EXCLUSIVE: The duo behind hit feature Lee Daniels’ The Butler — writer Danny Strong and director Lee Daniels — are reuniting, this time in television. Strong and Daniels have been brought back together by Brian Grazer for a hip hop drama project that sparked heated bidding among the four major broadcast networks…

MONDAY 7 AM UPDATE: Lee Daniels’ The Butler from The Weinstein Company is the first film in 2013 to take #1 at the domestic box office for 3 straight weekends at this end of the 4-day Labor Day holiday. This, despite a $5 million head start by Sony Pictures/TriStar’s One Direction: This Is Us after overperforming for…

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is "a bunch of lies," says Ronald Reagan’s son, particularly in its portrayal of his father. “There you go again, Hollywood,” Michael Reagan wrote on the website Newsmax. “You've taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies. You took the true story…

Oprah did well by Bravo's Watch What Happens Live when she made her first visit to the show Thursday night – but she's no Orange County housewife. An average of 969,000 viewers watched Oprah visit Andy Cohen's program as part of her march across the talk-show landscape, plugging her new film, Lee Daniel's The Butler.…

UPDATE FRIDAY 2 AM: Oprah is all about carefully controlling her image at all times. But not this week when she made the media rounds to promote her return to the big screen in Lee Daniels' The Butler. During the process she made several public revelations about OWN that could complicate Discovery chief David Zaslav’s…

“I thought it would be fun to play her,” says Jane Fonda of her turn as Nancy Reagan in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, glimpsed in a new clip from the Weinstein Co. pic. The casting sparked plenty of controversy last year when it was first announced. But “I happen to know that she’s not unhappy that I’m playing her,” says…

Oprah Winfrey Network has ordered a new docu-series about "the crazy and chaotic family life" of former NFL star Deion Sanders. The network also announced this morning the next crop of celebs sitting down with Oprah for her Next Chapter franchise. The reality docu-series about Sanders – described by OWN as "football…

Here’s the end result of the brouhaha over The Butler — rather, Lee Daniels’ The Butler. The Weinstein Co just released this poster for the Lee Daniels-directed historical drama, out August 16. It stars Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, and David Oyelowo as occupants of the White House during one man's tenure as butler…

UPDATED, 8:07PM… Both sides are claiming victory — of course — in the battle over The Butler. As Deadline first reported Thursday and then updated this morning, the MPAA said tonight that its original ruling in the case went too far, and it has overturned the part that excluded the Weinstein Company from using the…