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Exclusive: Amidst a recent expansion into docs and scripted series, after just two years as a producer-financier of features, Closer Media has added accomplished producers Joey Marra and Nate Matteson to its leadership team. Former Jigsaw exec Marra will lead the company’s non-fiction division, with former manager Matteson set to oversee scripted television.

The hires come following Closer Media’s successful run on the fall festival circuit with titles including its first narrative feature, Ezra, The Monk and the Gun, which was snapped up for North America by Roadside Attractions after bowing out of Toronto, and the documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.

Marra will be based out of New York City, with Matteson working out of L.A.

Since joining Closer, Marra has spearheaded development of the Elon Musk documentary Musk, from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, which was recently acquired by HBO. He produced...

Exclusive: Lucy Walker, the British filmmaker behind Oscar-nominated docs Waste Land and The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, has lined up her latest feature doc.

Walker is directing Of Night and Light: The Story of Iboga and Ibogaine and the film has landed a secret slot at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Of Night and Light: The Story of Iboga and Ibogaine tells the astounding unknown story of what might be the aha scientific breakthrough moment of our generation.

Back in 1962 a teenage psychonaut in New York City named Howard Lotsof experimented with an obscure psychedelic from the root bark of a West African shrub and recognized its unique therapeutic potential. Together with his African-American wife Norma, a pair of outsider NYU film students, they dedicated their lives to getting science and government to research it, convinced that it would be of great medicinal benefit, despite it sounding too good to be true,...

The top-to-bottom rebrand of Epix into MGM+ under Amazon’s ownership means an increase in not only scripted series but also documentary content.

R.J. Cutler’s “Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus and Mayhem in the USA” is the first of five docuseries that will stream on the new platform in 2023.

About Jack Roland Murphy, an infamous jewel thief turned murderer, “Murf the Surf” was commissioned by Epix three years ago after Imagine Documentaries’ president Sara Bernstein and her former co-president Justin Wilkes pitched the story to Michael Wright, former president of Epix and current head of MGM+. (Wilkes was recently promoted to president of Imagine Entertainment.) After reading a New York Times’ article with the headline “How a Band of Surfer Dudes Pulled Off the Biggest Jewel Heist in N.Y. History,” Bernstein and Wilkes were immediately intrigued.

“It read like an “Ocean’s Eleven” story,” Bernstein says. “So, we sought out Jack Murphy,...

Exclusive: Justin Wilkes, Chief Strategy Officer of Imagine Entertainment and President of Imagine Documentaries and Brands, has been promoted to President of the company, headed by Executive Chairmen Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

Following Wilkes’ promotion, Co-President of Documentaries Sara Bernstein has been named President Of Documentaries, leading the division.

In his new role, Wilkes will be working closely with Imagine’s COO Steve Shikiya, President of Features Karen Lunder, President of Television Kristen Zolner, President of Documentaries Bernstein, EVP of Brands Marc Gilbar, and Brooke Posch, President of Jax Media, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Imagine Entertainment. He will also continue to work with Alex Gibney and the team at Jigsaw Productions across their slate.

Wilkes replaces Jax Media’s Tony Hernandez and Lilly Burns who left earlier this month after a year-long stint as Presidents of Imagine Entertainment.

The exit of the duo, who departed both Imagine and Jax...

Netflix has taken peak TV to a new peak.

In a data point sure to fuel more quantity-versus-quality debate, Netflix broke its own record for number of original episodes released in a single quarter — with 1,026 in the third quarter of 2022, according to a tally by Wall Street firm MoffettNathanson.

That’s more than five times any other streaming rival: Amazon Prime Video and Hulu released 223 and 194 episodes, respectively, and Disney+ debuted 140 original episodes, per the report. HBO Max, now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, released 114 episodes in the third quarter — significantly fewer episodes than usual and comprising the lightest slate for the service since Q2 2020, the second quarter after launch. Wbd has been paring back HBO Max’s content slate in recent months as it looks to cut costs.

All told, Netflix premiered 159 original and exclusive shows in Q3, topping its previous high-water mark of 143 in Q4 2021 (which totaled nearly...

A new month has arrived, which means a fresh batch of movies and TV shows streaming on Netflix. Most monumentally, the beginning of the month saw the conclusion of “Stranger Things 4,” which began back in May but is just now finishing up. (There’ll be one more season before the series winds down.) Other new Netflix original series this month include the horror-comedy “Boo, Bitch,” the fourth season of “Virgin River” and the fifth season of all-ages animated spin-off “Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous” (which we’ve heard has some surprising connections to this summer’s blockbuster “Jurassic World: Dominion”).

On the Netflix original films side of things, the biggest new release is undoubtedly “The Gray Man.” A nonstop action extravaganza from Joe and Anthony Russo, the directing duo behind “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgmane,” it stars Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling as dueling spies. There’s also a new...

Frank Ocean has graced us with a little bit of new music, and it seems like there might be more on the way. On July 10, the 10th anniversary of the release of "Channel Orange," Ocean released two episodes of "Blonded Radio" on Apple Music. The first episode, titled "Blonded Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," features an atmospheric instrumental score by Ocean himself.

In the episode, which features a discussion about psychedelics with Dr. James Fadiman, Ocean also discusses working late nights in the studio. "Forgive how, like, free associative this might feel . . . I was working in Malibu this summer and I would go out, like, pretty late from the studio and there's, like, a big population of coyotes in Malibu," Ocean says around 13 minutes into the episode. He also changed the banner on his verified Spotify profile on the same day the episodes were released, fueling speculation about new music.

There was a time when psychedelics such as LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline were primarily relegated to those who were wild and weird enough to brave the legal and social throes imposed by the War on Drugs. But those days are ending — if they haven’t already slipped into the past. Today these substances are increasingly embraced for their therapeutic, spiritual, and recreational value, and journalist Michael Pollan has emerged as arguably the most prominent champion of their kaleidoscopic rewards.

“It’s for spiritual experience,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “It’s for self-exploration.