News
Nick Antosca, Lenore Zion on Bringing ‘Brand New Cherry Flavor’ to Life
Brand New Cherry Flavor is set to debut on Netflix this Friday, August 13th, and we couldn’t think of a more appropriate day for it!
Set in the seedy world of Los Angeles in the early 90s, Brand New Cherry Flavor tells the story of Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar), a young filmmaker who arrives in Hollywood ready to make her big screen dreams come true. When she’s taken advantage of by a hot shot producer (Eric Lange), Lisa turns to a mysterious woman named Boro (Catherine Keener) who sets her on a path that will rip her whole world apart while dismantling his, as well.
The eight-episode limited series was created by Nick Antosca (The Act) and Lenore Zion (Channel Zero), based on the novel by Todd Grimson, and the showrunners sat down with iHorror to discuss the process of bringing this incredibly off-kilter story to life.
Antosca became aware of Grimson back in the late ’00s after discovering some of the author’s short stories online. He and Grimson began exchanging emails and the author told Antosca he should check out his 1996 novel Brand New Cherry Flavor.
“I read it and I didn’t know what to expect,” he explained. “I was just sort of taken aback. It stuck with me. The Lisa Nova character stuck with me. She’s this sort of amoral, yet relatable, artist who has got this stuff inside of her that she’s trying to get out into this sort of nightmare world of Hollywood and LA.”
Eventually Antosca took his own trip to Los Angeles where he began working as a writer in movies and television. It was then he met Zion when they were working together on Channel Zero.
Soon, he brought up the novel to Zion who was also unfamiliar with it. His question: is there something here that can be adapted?
“He sent me the book and I read it,” Zion said. “Todd has this sort of unrestrained imagination that is so wild and so fun to read. It’s one of those books that has endless possibilities for adaptation. I think any writer would get excited reading it and imagining what they might do with it.”
When adapting a book to another medium, there are several questions to tackle: What do you include from the source narrative? What do you leave on the page? And what do you need/want to add that will help the story translate to the screen while also adding a flourish or two of your own?
They’re difficult questions at the best of the times and perhaps even more so when the source material is as broad and unusual as Grimson’s novel.
As Antosca pointed out, they wanted to remain spiritually faithful to the original, honoring what Grimson wrote in Brand New Cherry Flavor, while paring the story down so that it could be told in one season, rather than five, on Netflix.
“So, we kind of mixed and matched,” he said. “We took the stuff that Todd created. We used some of that. We sent him the scripts as we worked. He was involved in the creative process. Then we brought some of our own stuff to it. I mean like the kittens were not in the book. That was Lenore’s idea. We just kind of fell in love with it. You could take it as a metaphor if you want. There’s a lot of that stuff that came from our own nightmares.”
The kittens…well, we’re not going to tell you about the kittens. We’re just going to tell you to watch Brand New Cherry Flavor to see for yourself.
With the story locked into place, it was important to find exactly the right actors to embody them, and both Zion and Antosca were over the moon at their luck in casting Keener and Salazar to lead their story.
“Catherine [Keener] is electric on screen,” Zion pointed out. “She has that thing. She’s got such a unique and skillful delivery of dryness and…there’s nobody who delivers emotion in quite such a unique way as Catherine. We were very lucky to get her. She brought a ton of her personal touches to her character right down to the wardrobe.”
“For Lisa Nova, we needed somebody who could do everything,” Antosca added. “Lisa Nova, the character, can be a bit of a cypher. She’s the protagonist but at the same time, she does some pretty crazy stuff, too. And goes to some really intense places. It’s hard to find an actress who can do all of that, but Rosa [Salazar] can. We were really lucky to get her as Lisa Nova. Her chemistry with Catherine, with Eric Lange who plays Lou, with everybody in the cast is crucial.”
As for the look of the show, they relied heavily upon their director of photography who, Zion says, was crucial to creating the look and feel of the series.
“We got very lucky with our DP Celiana Cárdenas,” she explained. “She is a genius and had a very specific and particular view of the show and the world of the show and she brought it to life beautifully. It looks beautiful because of her. Arkasha Stevenson who directed the pilot, she also contributed this crazy idea of the world that she had already prepackaged in her head somehow. Between those two we got a beautiful world for Brand New Cherry Flavor.”
You can see Brand New Cherry Flavor in its entirety on Friday, August 13, 2021, and we fully recommend a binge! Check out the trailer below and get ready for something like you’ve never seen before!
'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?
Follow our new YouTube channel "Mysteries and Movies" here.
Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?
Follow our new YouTube channel "Mysteries and Movies" here.
Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?
Follow our new YouTube channel "Mysteries and Movies" here.
News
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?
Follow our new YouTube channel "Mysteries and Movies" here.
-
News7 days ago
Brad Dourif Says He’s Retiring Except For One Important Role
-
News5 days ago
Original Blair Witch Cast Ask Lionsgate for Retroactive Residuals in Light of New Film
-
Movies6 days ago
Spider-Man With a Cronenberg Twist in This Fan-Made Short
-
News3 days ago
Perhaps the Scariest, Most Disturbing Series of The Year
-
Movies4 days ago
New F-Bomb Laden ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Trailer: Bloody Buddy Movie
-
News4 days ago
Russell Crowe To Star in Another Exorcism Movie & It’s Not a Sequel
-
Movies4 days ago
‘Founders Day’ Finally Getting a Digital Release
-
Lists3 days ago
Thrills and Chills: Ranking ‘Radio Silence’ Films from Bloody Brilliant to Just Bloody
You must be logged in to post a comment Login