It’s been a banner Emmy nomination day for Imagine Entertainment, the company notching 14 noms across a variety of categories including Outstanding Scripted Variety Series and Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.
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“I think it’s a real testament to the diversity of our teams,” Imagine Entertainment President Justin Wilkes told Deadline. “When you look at just the breadth of the nominations — which range from A Black Lady Sketch Show, to Emily in Paris, to our great feature doc on Judy Blume, the Letterman-Zelenskyy interview — it really just shows off the full range of what Imagine’s doing as a company. I’m incredibly proud of it.”
A Black Lady Sketch Show, from Imagine division Jax Media, nabbed three nominations, including Outstanding Scripted Variety Series, picture editing and production design. Emily in Paris, the Netflix series, also scored three noms – for makeup, hairstyling, and costumes.
Among other nominations, Imagine also scored for Fire Island (Outstanding Television Movie); The Other Two (Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series); The Ms. Pat Show (Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series), Bono & The Edge: A Sort Of Homecoming With Dave Letterman (Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Variety Series or Special), and My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman And Volodymyr Zelenskyy (an episode of the Netflix series where Letterman interviewed the president of Ukraine).
The latter project involved some risk to both Letterman and crew, as it was shot in the Ukrainian capital under wartime conditions.
“We very quickly had to mobilize from a production standpoint to figure out how we were even going to get into Kyiv at the time,” Wilkes recalled. “The week before we shot, there was actually a pretty large airstrike that had happened and everyone was concerned about safety, but it went ahead. We ended up shooting it in that bomb shelter that they have that’s in a subway station. It was just remarkable to get to pull that together.”
Wilkes added that President Zelenskyy displayed an affinity for his interviewer.
“It was the first longform interview that Zelenskyy had done that wasn’t like an official news interview,” Wilkes explained. “Zelenskyy, as it turned out, was a huge fan of Dave, which makes sense given his own comedic background. As a kid growing up in Ukraine he was watching The Late Show, he was watching Dave.”
On the documentary front, Imagine Entertainment finds itself in competition in the marquee category of Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special for Judy Blume Forever, the feature film about the famed author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and more than two dozen other novels. Filmmakers Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok also earned a directing nomination.
The Judy Blume documentary for Prime Video has hit at a particularly timely moment when many authors of young adult literature are seeing their work banned by red state legislatures. Blume has faced that kind of backlash for decades.
Wikes called the nominations “a real validation for everything Judy has stood for. I think it’s a validation for just how far and wide her books have traveled and what they mean to people of all ages. When you start these projects, you don’t necessarily have a clear indication of when they’re going to come out or what might happen as a project is coming out. But for books to literally be being banned in parts of this country, today, is almost unimaginable considering that this is what [Blume] went through in the early ‘80s when many of her books were banned the first time. It really becomes a contemporary issue.”
Companies like Imagine are closely monitoring the Writers Guild strike, and the possibility of actors launching a strike of their own.
“There’s this moment of reflection that’s happening across the entire industry, which needs and will lead to a reconciliation of just the overall economics of our business,” he said. “And everybody’s impacted from the studios to the producers, to the talent.”
Wilkes says Imagine is well positioned for the future once the labor contract issues have been resolved.
“I think what will be clear on the other side of this is that projects that can cut through — scripted or non-scripted projects that have A-list talent, projects that are about big ideas, documentaries that are about things that people are going to seek out, those will always be the winners at the end of the day,” he observed. “While we’re living in this moment of uncertainty, it’s also a great time to look forward and project forward, certainly for us as a company as to what do we want to be on the other side of it. And I think the good news for us is we want to be doing exactly what we’ve always been doing, which is delivering these great premium projects to audiences.”
AI has emerged as a major point of contention for both writers and actors.
“Any new piece of technology, if you go back just historically and look at it, whether it’s been in this industry or the music industry or otherwise, the technology’s not going away, right?” he said. “The technology’s only going to move forward and it’s going to be embraced. So, we as an industry have to figure out how to harness this technology and use this technology to its full advantage and think of it as a tool. What’s different with AI than perhaps some of the past technologies that we’ve seen — whether the advent of streaming or digital editing or CGI, et cetera, is that we’re only at the very beginning of understanding what the full power of this technology can be. And I think that’s what also rightly scares people. And so putting guardrails around that, I think is of the utmost importance.”
He added, “But at the same time, I think as a creative person, as a creative producer who works with a lot of creative talent, being able to embrace the technology and really figuring out what we can do with it, I think is going to lead to a much better result than pretending that it doesn’t exist.”
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