Malaysia to Beauty and the Beast: Be Our Guest

[View]( this email in browser. [Homepage]( March 21, 2017 It’s Tuesday, and I’m about to start on a very special musical episode of this newsletter with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. As soon as his agent calls me back. Hello from Los Angeles, where we’re waking up to Malaysian drama, watching TV get its groove back, and getting psyched to travel back to 1980s New York City with RuPaul. THIRD ACT REVERSAL Oh Malaysia, you drama queen. It was shortly after three A.M. Pacific Time today when my phone woke me up pinging with Malaysian tweets. After censors there tried to remove four minutes of supposed gayness from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, an appeals board overruled them on Tuesday. The Southeastern Asian country’s largest theater chain, Golden Screen Cinemas, [tweeted triumphantly]( “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST CONFIRMED FOR 30 MARCH WITHOUT CUTS. RT this and get excited! #BeOurGuest.” Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures. The reversal is the latest twist for the world’s most controversial movie featuring a talking teapot, and it shows the soft power the U.S. entertainment industry can still wield abroad when it wants to. Malaysian exhibitors have a major financial incentive to push for a loosening of their country’s censorship policies—Beauty and the Beast made more than $350 million at the global box office on its opening weekend, and seems poised to reach $1 billion by the time its run is finished. At the same time, Malaysia has other big Western entertainment companies doing business there—Twentieth Century Fox plans to open a theme park in Malaysia in late 2017, with rides based on films like Planet of the Apes and Titanic, and U.K.-based Pinewood Studios hopes to attract big-budget films and TV shows to the massive production facility it built in Iskandar in 2014. WGA WATCH As we enter week two of the Writers Guild of America contract negotiations, The Hollywood Reporter’s Jonathan Handel tackles one of the biggest chin scratchers surrounding this latest round of talks. Why isn’t the era of peak TV also the era of peak money for writers? [Handel’s piece]( which includes data supplied by U.C.L.A. researcher Darnell Hunt, points out that the number of TV writers has surged, and a trend toward shorter series orders means their wages are stagnant. Film writers, meanwhile, have seen their earnings plummet 21 percent between 2010 and 2015. Ouch. Handel’s piece has charts, graphs, and the phrase “arithmetic mean,” but the gist is best explained by one working TV scribe he quotes: “It’s becoming harder and harder to make a living as a middle-class writer.” A SONG IN OUR HEARTS TV’s hottest spring trend is musical episodes. Really, everybody’s doing it, including ABC’s Once Upon a Time, TV Land’s Teachers, and the CW’s The Flash. La La Land lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul contribute an original tune to the The Flash’s musical episode, which airs tonight. VF.com’s Jane Borden [digs into TV’s newest hummable obsession]( which also includes Drop the Mic, a new rap-battle spin-off show from The Late Late Show with James Corden coming to TBS in May. Drop the Mic head writer Eliza Skinner, who spent 12 years hosting the improvised rap-battle shows The Beatdown and Turnt Up! at the Upright Citizens Brigade theaters in New York and L.A., shares her extensive knowledge of teaching celebrities how to rap. “You tell them not to use their hands so much,” Skinner tells Borden. “That is not part of rapping. You don’t need to do it.” Noted. My next rap battle will be more subdued. YOU BETTER WERK VF.com RuPaul superfan Yohana Desta e-mails: There is not nearly enough RuPaul content in our lives, but J.J. Abrams is going to fix that. The supermodel of the world and host of RuPaul’s Drag Race is teaming up with Abrams’s Bad Robot production company to write a dramedy about Ru’s club-kid days in 1980s New York, writes Nellie Andreeva of [Deadline](. Back then, Ru was just a young transplant from Atlanta, by way of San Diego, werking the downtown club scene as a punk singer and go-go dancer. Wipe away that image away of glamazon RuPaul in skintight dresses and picture-perfect makeup—this was his genderfuck/black hooker era, when the up-and-coming star spent nights club-hopping with stars like Lady Bunny, dropping tabs of acid and [running into]( icons like Andy Warhol and a young Madonna. We know, we know—how was this not already a show? PALEYFEST IS POPPIN’ VF.com TV savant Joanna Robinson e-mails: TV fanatics will want to keep their eyes on Los Angeles this week as Paleyfest 2017 is in full swing. Situated between the two Television Critics Association Press Tours, the Paley Center event serves as something of a victory lap for the buzziest shows of the previous year. This year a couple of Shondaland shows, as well as Westworld, This Is Us, American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, and more will be serving up panels to members of the press and the public eager to get an insider look at how their favorite stories come to life. And though they don’t always break news, the Paleyfest panels can occasionally bear intriguing fruit such as the special screening of the Grey’s Anatomy episode featuring the directorial debut of one of TV’s [highest-paid actresses]( Ellen Pompeo. Robinson will be on the scene to see what scoops can be found from the Westworld and American Horror Story panels. Ryan Murphy, in particular, usually reserves some fun news for Paleyfest, and given how [packed his schedule]( is these days, the opportunities for breaking news are endless. VOILA! It makes me feel cultured to open press releases written in French, which is why I’m including the news that Italian actress Monica Bellucci will be the master of ceremonies at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu will oversee the student and short-film juries. I’m looking forward to attending my first Cannes in May, on the occasion of the festival’s 70th year, and have already begun receiving important tips from festival veterans. As suggested, I will bring sunscreen and earplugs, and try the lemon sorbet with vodka at La Pizza Cresci. Keep this kind of vital information coming! That’s the news for this rainy Tuesday in Los Angeles. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and rap-battle advice to rebecca_keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter [@thatrebecca](. 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