Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli is reporting that the second season of Seth Rogen‘s multi-Emmy-winning The Studio is currently lensing in Venice, Italy, and that the setting, of course, is not just the Venice Film Festival but the forthcoming 83rd edition, which will unfold between 9.2.26 and 9.12.26.
Using the Lido’s Palazzo del Cinema, which is currently adorned in full festival regalia, the satirical showbiz series is pre-creating the 83rd gathering with Madonna, Micheal Keaton, Bryan Cranston, Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz and Julia Garner costarring.
I’m especially amused by the fact that Venice Film festival topper Alberto Barbera will perform a speaking cameo in the show.
Yesterday Madonna posted an Instagram video in which she and Garner lip-sync to “Like a Virgin”. Garner has been attached to star in a “long-delayed” (read: essentially scrapped) Madonna biopic that the singer has been wanting to make since ’22 and which may now be part of The Studio story line.
Never forget the fact (and this is the third or fourth time I’ve re-posted this) that Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition, basically about Madge’s struggle to make it as a pop singer in Reagan-era Manhattan, is the greatest Madonna biopic ever written.
It was reported way back when that Madonna is no fan of the script, and that she wanteds it killed. Then it was announced she would direct her own version, but that went by the wayside also.
It was a decade ago when I wrote that Ambition is going to be a good, hard-knocks industry drama — a blend of a scrappy, singing Evita with A Star Is Born mixed in. If the right actress plays Madonna the right way, she might wind up with a Best Actress Oscar nomination…maybe, who knows?
This is a flinty, unsentimental empowerment saga about a tough player who took no prisoners and was always out for #1. No hearts and flowers for this mama-san.
The success of Blonde Ambition will depend, of course, on who directs and how strong the costars are, particularly the guy who plays Madonna’s onetime-boyfriend John “Jellybean” Benitez, whose remix and producing of her self-named first album launched her career, as well as her Emmys bandmate and previous lover Dan Gilroy.
A Star Is Born‘s logline was basically “big star with a drinking problem falls for younger ingenue, she rises as he falls and finally commits suicide, leaving her with a broken heart.”
Blonde Ambition is about a hungry, super-driven New York pop singer who, like Evita Peron, climbs to the top by forming alliances with this and that guy who helps her in some crucial way, and then moves on to the next partner or benefactor, but at no point in the journey is she fighting for anything other than her own success, and is no sentimentalist or sweetheart.
Alternate: Our very own hungry, hustling, hard-charging singer, living on tips and dimes in NYC in ’81 and ’82, finally gets a leg-up when she cuts a deal with (and then falls in love with) Jellybean Benitez, who remixes her initially troubled debut album (which contained “Borderline” and “Lucky Star”) and makes it into a hit…but like with a previous boyfriend, bandmate Dan Gilroy, she eventually pushes Jellybean aside in favor of a new producer for her second album, Like A Virgin (’84). So Jellybean is the Vickie Lester of this tale, his heart broken at the end by a woman he loved but who finally loved only herself.
