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exclusive: Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel, Inspired by Dirty Dancing and The Amazing Mrs. Messeris getting its own feature documentation treatment.
The Borscht Belt resort in upstate New York, which caters to a large Jewish clientele, will be the Cottage Media + Entertainment.
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It is one of many documentaries and improv projects for the company founded by Robert Friedman, which also trails Little Richard: I’m EverythingCNN feature doc by Dee Rees-exec premiered at Sundance, while Discovery+’s serving the hamptons.
Grossinger’s project will be directed by Paula Eiselt, who directed the 2022 Sundance Film Festival aftershock, hosted by Hulu. Harrison Solomon exec is in charge of producing the project, which has just begun production. Private equity investor David Moore, a minority investor in the NBA team Atlanta Hawks, is funding the filing.
It will tell the story of the resort where Elizabeth Taylor married her fourth husband, where Governor Nelson Rockefeller vacationed and Rocky Marciano trained to become a heavyweight boxing champion, and where many generations of families vacationed.
It closed in 1986, many of the resort buildings were demolished in 2018, and a fire destroyed what was left of it earlier this year.
Friedman, who acquired the rights to Grossinger’s, told Deadline it’s important to tell the story now because “for some characters, age isn’t necessarily on our side.” Some of those involved, like Jennie Grossinger’s daughter Elaine Grossinger Etess, who co-founded the resort with her husband, are still alive.
“It’s a really interesting story, especially with the anti-Semitism that’s going on in the world right now,” Friedman said. “It had a huge impact on culture, and it was also one of the few places at the time where African-Americans could perform and actually stay.”
between amazon Messerending with an upcoming fifth season and sequel face dance Baby, starring Jennifer Gray, is set to return in 2024, and now is a good time to tell.
Bungalow wants to take the doctor to the festival. “We thought it would be a favourite. In the world we live in, it might be poached, but we wanted to take it down the festival route.”
If it does, its latest documentation goes down this road; Little Richard: I’m everything, Directed by Lisa Cortés, co-produced with Rolling Stone, and commissioned by CNN Films and HBO Max, it will premiere at Sundance in January.
Friedman said that Little Richard’s career is “one of the most fascinating and important stories in the history of music and popular culture” and that the film “will unravel Richard’s immeasurable impact on the history of music and, ultimately, Give him his rightful place on the rock and roll throne.”
Former RadicalMedia president Friedman, who founded Bungalow in 2013, is also co-chairman of New Line Cinema and was part of the team that originally launched MTV.
It has produced a series of documentaries, impromptu TV shows and scripted dramas.In terms of scripts, it worked on the Fox series Construction Industry Bureaunetflix insatiable and Amazon’s modern love and Clive Owen’s feature film confirm.
On the documentation side, it produced a four-part mini-series Surviving Jeffrey Epstein for Lifetime, a five-part mini-series Preppy Murder For the AMC/Sundance Film Festival, panama papers Epix and Rosewell: The History Channel’s First Witness and Featured Documents, Including the devil made me do this For Discovery+ and spring break At Showtime.
Recently, it lagged behind serving the hamptonsDiscovery+’s reality series about exclusive restaurant 75 Main and its “young and sexy” staff serving celebrity clients, and True Crime Story: It Couldn’t Happen Herethe true crime series starring Hilary Burton Morgan for Sundance Television and AMC+.
serving the hamptons, which includes executive producers including Teresa Sorkin, premiered earlier this year on Discovery+ and is now available on HBO Max. A second season will air in 2023, but it’s unclear if it will air on Discovery+ or HBO Max or the newly merged service. The restaurant’s owner, Star Zach Erdem, recently said the show has confirmed a third season for 2024, though that has yet to be confirmed.
Friedman says the show is its version below deck.
“It has a bit of the DNA of food as a way of getting in, but it’s these young people who live in a house and work together 24 hours a day,” he added. “People are obsessed with the Hamptons, it’s high end Upstairs and downstairs“
He said he wanted it to become a bigger brand. “We hope it can become a franchise that we can also introduce into other shows that have the same DNA.”
In fact, the company is also preparing stab that cakeHosted by John Henson and Jocelyn Delk Adams, it will be available on The Cooking Channel and Discovery+ on December 30.
in terms of crime, True Crime Story: It Couldn’t Happen Here 14 episodes aired at Sundance and AMC+.
“There will always be great crime stories, whether in date line either 48 hoursbut we want to tell them differently,” he said.
it also has serial killer manifesto Start the new year with Oxygen live on NBCUniversal. The series explores the story of two men who killed at least 25 people in pursuit of their horrific sexual fantasies to enslave young women at a remote cabin in the woods,
Next, it’s teaming up with former Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward, who closely covered the Jeffrey Epstein case, on a new series — Vicky Ward Survey“It’s not a pure crime in the Oxygen sense, it’s a more complex crime that can feel very different,” he added.
It is also developing a project with actor and director John Leguizamo about Father Divine, a cult leader who believed he was God and died in 1965.
Neighbor is Vegas: A Sin City Story (w/t), another project by Bungalow Media + Entertainment for CNN. The four-part series, due out in 2023, is one of the few original series on the Warner Bros. Discovery Channel following the recent cut. It tells the story of the gambling capital over the past 70 years through businessmen and notorious mafia figures.
This mix of genres is important to Friedman, who says documentaries were not as popular when he started his business as they are now.
“I like to think of us as a boutique studio,” Friedman said. “About 75% of what we do is in the unscripted space, although my post-MTV background is mostly in the scripted form of feature films. That includes docs and follow-up docs that I like, so maybe it’s cognitive dissonance, I guess Come up with an excuse to explain why this is a good approach. But I think it’s an interesting time to plant our flag with documentation and quality content, even though we’re going to go away and do a bunch of follow-up documentation and formatting, at On a business level, once you get 50 or 100 episodes of something, it puts you in a different place.”
Bungalow’s investors include private equity group Loeb Partners and Jeff Sagansky, who sits on the company’s board and made waves this summer with his views on the streaming business model.
But, given the current documentary market and the continued merger frenzy surrounding independent production houses, will Friedman be for sale? He admitted he had had “preliminary” conversations.
“We would definitely look at strategic partnerships with partners that would allow us to scale up faster than we currently have. That is certainly something we are thinking about. The challenge will be, can we maintain this wonderful culture , while maintaining the kind of margins that we have? But there are definitely some players that I would consider talking to because I do think we will bring something to their working system as much as they have brought us,” he said. added.
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