movies
Martin Short On ‘OMITB’ Season 6 And Documentary ‘Marty, Life Is Short’
Actor Martin Short is hotter than ever – literally. He has been sweltering in London this summer where the temperatures have soared to extraordinary levels: Thursday’s forecast calls for a high of 97°F (36°C), the latest furnace blast in a succession of UK heat waves.
“What’s amazing is that London is not used to it,” Short says of the brutal temps. “We’re working with the biggest stars and they’ll say, ‘We don’t have air conditioning.’”
Short has been in the British capital shooting season 6 of Only Murders in the Building, the hit Hulu series that recently earned him two more Emmy nominations – one for Outstanding Comedy Series, where he’s recognized as part of the show’s producing team, and another for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, for his role as Oliver Putnam. One more measure of just how molten his career has become — he also scored a nomination as Outstanding Host for a Game Show for his emcee role on Match Game.
And the Emmy love doesn’t end there: Marty, Life Is Short, the Netflix documentary about him directed by the actor’s close friend Lawrence Kasdan, has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for Kasdan’s work. For director and subject, their match game began decades ago.
“We made a film together, Cross My Heart, in 1987 that he executive produced, but he was very hands-on. It wasn’t like one of those things where you just sign a deal and walk away. He was on the set every day,” Short explains. “Sometimes when you work with people, you kind of go, ‘I don’t want to lose that person. I like that person.’ So, we continued a friendship all these years.”
Fortunately for Kasdan the filmmaker, Short has been compiling a sort of archive of his life, going back to childhood.
“I always recorded things. My brother Michael used to say — this is in the days of the cassette tape recorders – ‘Marty will record the first half of his life and the second half he’ll just listen to it,’” he tells Deadline. “My father was a steel executive, and I remember he brought home an early tape recorder and I was just fascinated. I was like 9 or something… I recorded everything.”
Later, he graduated to video cameras. “I was someone who always picked up a camcorder and filmed everything. And I never looked at it. You just transferred to a DVD, put it on a shelf. So I had 30 years of that. And then my close friend Steven Spielberg kind of does the same thing. And because I trusted Larry [Kasdan], I gave him everything and Steven sent over everything he had on me, which was a lot. And so, Larry had lots to work from.”
The film examines Short’s upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario as the youngest of five siblings, showered with love and attention from his earliest days (perhaps the only dark cloud in those blue skies being his father’s alcohol problem). He gravitated towards performing from a young age and by his teen years could credibly imitate the singing voice of Frank Sinatra. Short got his big break in show business – as so many other future greats did – in the 1972 Toronto production of Godspell (explored in-depth in the 2025 documentary You Had to Be There). His big break in TV, of course, came when he joined the cast of SCTV, where he satirized Jerry Lewis, played a pugilistic Mister Rogers boxing Julia Child, and introduced the world to Ed Grimley, the teeth-baring, triangle-striking manchild with irrepressible energy and an oddly endearing awkwardness.
On SCTV, he co-starred with John Candy (coincidentally, the focus of another Emmy-nominated documentary this year, John Candy: I Like Me), his pal Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin, and Catherine O’Hara. Short and O’Hara shot an interview together for Marty, Life Is Short, not long before her passing earlier this year.
“That’s the thing that’s so moving is to see that brilliant, perfect person,” Short says of O’Hara. “There was no one funnier and there was no one sweeter.”
The way he expresses his affection for his friends – like O’Hara, Kasdan, Spielberg and many others who appear in the film – says something about the man and his capacity for love. Short and his wife, actress and singer Nancy Dolman, became devoted parents to three adoptive children. And the sheer delight Dolman and Short shared in each other’s company – they met while working on the Godspell production – became an object of admiration in Hollywood (especially among people who perhaps couldn’t say the same of their own marriages).
But as if fate wished to balance all the joy, love and laughter Short has experienced in his 76 years, he has faced recurrent losses and tragedies – his eldest brother dying in an auto accident when Martin was just 12, his parents dying by the time he was 20, his wife Nancy taken by cancer in 2010 at the age of 58. Earlier this year, Short’s daughter Katherine took her own life.
Kasdan finds a way to acknowledge painful moments in Short’s life while emphasizing his incredible vitality and resilience.
“I’m glad that people react emotionally to [the documentary] because it is emotional material and he’s a good guy, so you’re really invested in him,” Kasdan tells us. “The thing that amazed me about him, that made me do this film, was that spirit that goes through anything.”
Short seems blessed with an unusual degree of equanimity, which has helped him keep going amid devastating loss. The level head has also served him well in handling fame. After making an appearance on a late-night talk show, for instance, he studies clips online, not to bask in his own image but to analyze how bits went over.
“Because sometimes you’ll love these jokes that you did, but for time they’ve trimmed them. So you look at the last Kimmel and say, ‘Oh, what did I…?’ And then you’re seduced by the comments below. And you’ll read, ‘He’s great. Oh, I love that guy.’ Then there’s, ‘I’ve hated that guy my whole life. He’s desperate and needy. He pushes. I don’t find it funny.’ And all I think is comedy is subjective. But what I do know is that if I had dinner with you, the hater, I would be bored to death. So, I don’t really worry. That’s not what fueled me. I’ve always had a joyful experience. I’ve never worked with nightmare people. I think if I did work with a prick director, I think I’d be fired because I’d tell him he was an asshole and I’d be fired. And there goes me. But I could never hold it in. I’m very easygoing except my Achilles heel is rudeness and mean people.”
Those values, it seems, carry over to the filming of Only Murders in the Building. “I’m proud of lots of things about Only Murders. But one of the things I’m proudest of is the perception of it,” he says. “It’s one of the loosest, happiest sets that any guest star guests on. And we get these reviews from all these famous people endlessly like, ‘Oh my God, I had the best time.’”
Short gave us a scoop on some of the big names joining the London-based season of Only Murders in the Building, including an Oscar winner.
“What’s crazy is the level of the British actors we’re working with. It’s insane. I mean, one day it’s Olivia Colman,” he shares, “and then David Tennant, and then it’s Martin Freeman, and then it’s Jennifer Saunders. It’s just, as Harry Shearer once said, ‘The crème de la cream.’”
The runaway success of Only Murders has propelled his career to new heights. But even that he appears to keep in perspective.
“I would say my career has been 80 percent failure,” Short observes in the documentary. “And I would say those are pretty good odds.”
“I use that word tongue-in-cheek,” he explains during our conversation, “because I do think failure is not if the critics don’t like it or if the box office doesn’t like it. I think failure is you don’t like it, this is not the piece of quote unquote ‘art’ you wanted to create… When I call failure, I am talking about commercial failure. But I consider real failure is if your film could make a hundred million dollars and the critics love it, but you go, ‘I don’t think it’s very good.’ That’s real failure.”
By that standard, his success rate is much closer to 100 percent. Characters he’s created, from the petite (the boy Clifford) to the XXL (Jiminy Glick), have become signatures along with Ed Grimley, Father of the Bride’s Franck Eggelhoffer, and Ned Nederlander — one of Three Amigos – and now Only Murders in the Building’s Oliver Putnam. And that’s just in comedy on screen — there’s also his dramatic roles and Tony Award-winning work on Broadway. Again, he keeps it in perspective.
“I’m 76. I am not on social media. I’ve never been on social media. I will say honestly, I’ve never done this for the admiration of strangers. I never have,” he insists. “I just do this because I love doing it.”
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movies
‘Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse’ Trailer Leaks Online, Co-Writer Chris Miller Says He’s “Not A Fan Of Leaks Of Unfinished Footage”
Leaked footage of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse has made its way online and co-writer Chris Miller is putting them on blast.
A trailer for the third installment of the animated movie starring Miles Morales, which is set to hit theaters on June 18, 2027, was leaked on social media and Miller has already made his thoughts clear on the matter.
“Not a fan of unfinished, not fully rendered footage,” Miller posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter.
Sony Pictures and Marvel have not made a statement regarding the leak but Deadline has reached out for comment.
Earlier this year, Paramount faced a similar situation when a full version of The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender leaked online by a fan. The fan was seemingly frustrated by Paramount’s decision not to release the film in theaters and opting for a streaming release.
The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender was originally slated to premiere in theaters on October 10, 2025, but it was later pushed back to January 30, 2026. In December 2025, Deadline reported that the film, greenlit by the previous Paramount Animation administration, would not get a theatrical release after all. Instead, the film would stream on Paramount+ on October 9, 2026.
Following the leak, animator Julia Schoel, who worked on the film, took to X to express her thoughts, saying, “We worked on the aang movie for years with the expectation that’d we’d get to celebrate all of our hard work in theaters, just to see people unceremoniously leak the film and pass our shots around on twitter like candy.”
Paramount investigated the leak and arrested an individual in Singapore who gained illegal access to the film and if found guilty, the suspect could face up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to $50,000 or both.
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Mark Rydell, the director of Cinderella Liberty and The Rose who received an Oscar nomination for guiding Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, the final film from the iconic actor, has died. He was 97.
Rydell died Thursday at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, his daughter, Amy Rydell, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Rydell also was an actor who played one-half of a young couple that drove the CBS daytime soap As the World Turns to No. 1 in the ratings in the 1950s. He later portrayed a brutal mobster in Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye (1973), the real-life mob accountant Meyer Lansky in Sydney Pollack’s Havana (1990) and an agent, Al Hack, in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending (2002).
Fonda received the only competitive Academy Award of his legendary career for his performance as the crusty Norman Thayer Jr. in On Golden Pond (1981), while co-star Katharine Hepburn won the last of her four best actress Oscars for her turn as his wife. Fonda’s daughter, Jane, played their daughter and was nominated as well.
During editing after shooting had been completed, Rydell said he received a phone call from Jane. “She said, ‘Mark, you have to show [the film] to Hank. He’s ill, and I’m afraid he won’t be alive to see this performance,’ ” he recalled. “So I said, ‘Of course, send him down [to the studio] this afternoon and I’ll run it for him. The limousine arrived, and this guy, who had been so vigorous during shooting, barely got out of the car, and he was shaking and trembling.”
He left Fonda in the theater to watch On Golden Pond on his own. When the director returned, he said Fonda walked toward him and stumbled, falling into his arms. “He felt like a bird, I could feel his bones,” Rydell said, getting emotional. “He whispered to me in my ear, ‘Thank you for the best thing that’s ever happened in my life.’ “
Fonda died on Aug. 12, 1982, about five months after he won the Oscar.
Rydell directed five other actors to Oscar noms: Rupert Crosse in The Reivers (1969), Marsha Mason in Cinderella Liberty (1973), Bette Midler in The Rose (1979) and For the Boys (1991), Frederic Forrest inThe Rose and Sissy Spacek in The River (1984).
Rydell collaborated with James Caan for the first time in Cinderella Liberty, then reteamed with the actor in Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) and (also with Midler) in For the Boys.
Mortimer H. Rydell was born in the Bronx on March 23, 1929. His father was a stock broker on Wall Street who insisted he attend the Bronx High School of Science, but that wasn’t a fit with what he wanted to do for a living: play the piano in a jazz group.
After studying at the Juilliard School of Music, Rydell in 1948 met songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who suggested he try acting. They brought him to Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where McQueen and Kim Stanley would be among his classmates.
Rydell made his Broadway debut in 1952 in the Navy comedy Seagulls Over Sorrento, then appeared on several TV shows and in the Don Siegel drama Crime in the Streets (1956), starring John Cassavetes.
In late 1956, Rydell joined As the World Turns as Jeff Baker, a college kid with a wild streak who had his problems with alcohol. Jeff would get romantically involved with Penny Hughes (Rosemary Prinz), and their wedding ceremony, airing on Christmas Eve in 1958, attracted huge ratings.
When Rydell decided to exit the show in 1962, his character was killed off in a car crash, leaving viewers crushed.
With the help of good friend Pollack, Rydell got a job helming episodes of Ben Casey, then directed for other shows including I Spy,The Wild Wild West, The Fugitive and Gunsmoke. Warner Bros. then hired him to make his feature bow on The Fox (1967), a drama that starred Sandy Dennis and Keir Dullea and was based on an erotic D.H. Lawrence novella.
“The wise producers at the time would seek out hot television directors because you didn’t have to pay them very much,” Rydell told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “I was a very successful TV director. I had a lot of awards. I was sent this script because they couldn’t afford a major director.”
Rydell then tackled The Reivers, a William Faulkner adaptation that starred McQueen, and The Cowboys (1972), which starred John Wayne.
(The Cowboys was the first film from Rydell and Pollack’s production company, Sanford Productions, which went on the make other movies including Jeremiah Johnson and the Palme D’Or-winning Scarecrow.)
Rydell had his critical breakthrough with the romantic drama Cinderella Liberty, with Caan starring as a sailor on leave in Seattle who falls for a pool-playing prostitute (Mason) who has a young son born out of wedlock. “The idea of them falling very deeply in love was quite touching to me,” he said.
Rydell insisted that Midler — then an untested actress known for her prowess as a nightclub singer — be cast as the Janis Joplin-like rocker Mary Rose Foster in The Rose. Without a big star as the lead, Fox then cut his budget in half. Rydell, though, was sure Midler was the right call; he had seen her perform in a New York club, and “I thought, this is a miracle, this woman, she’s capable of doing anything.”
He got the chance to direct On Golden Pond when Pollack passed. Rydell said the Fondas were estranged and “hadn’t talked for a year” before rehearsals began, he told interviewer Michael Levine.
“The picture was about a woman desperate to reconnect with her father,” he said. “It worked perfectly. The picture was fed by life experience.”
Rydell went on to direct other films like Intersection (1994) and Even Money (2006) and the 2001 TNT biopic James Dean, starring James Franco. (Rydell portrayed studio head Jack L. Warner in that telefilm.)
Later, Rydell and actor Martin Landau served as the West Coast artistic directors at The Actors Studio; he had studied with Elia Kazan at the original New York outpost many years earlier.
Rydell was married to actress Joanne Linville and documentary producer Esther Rydell and had three children. Both of his marriages ended in divorce.
His last effort as a director was a 2007 episode of the ABC series Masters of Science Fiction, hosted by Stephen Hawking.
“All the pictures I made … I don’t think I could get any of them made today,” he said in 2009. “The market is so different; they’re not interested in substantial, human dramas. That’s what attracted me to become a director in the first place: the dramatic interaction between people. Now it’s about spectacle, and explosions, and special effects — I’m waiting for people to get fed up with all that.”
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EXCLUSIVE: 20th has rounded out the cast of its sequel to cult classic comedy Romy and Michele‘s High School Reunion with the addition of St. Denis Medical‘s Wendi McLendon-Covey.
Character details are being kept under wraps, as is the plot of the sequel, which began shooting in Los Angeles in June.
Released in 1997 by Disney’s Buena Vista, the original film follows two inseparable friends (Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino) who attempt to reinvent themselves as successful career women — the inventors of the Post-it note, specifically — to impress former high school classmates at their 10-year reunion in Tucson.
The sequel, starring Kudrow and Sorvino, will stream as a Hulu Original in the U.S.
Cast set to reprise alongside the duo includes Alan Cumming, Janeane Garofalo, Camryn Manheim and Julia Campbell.
Others set for new roles include Keegan-Michael Key, Rob Huebel, Breckin Meyer, Patrick Warburton, Nathan Lee Graham, Anna Baryshnikov and Sofia Wylie.
Tim Federle is directing from a script by Robin Schiff, who penned the original 1997 film. He’s also producing alongside the original film’s Laurence Mark, with Barry Kemp, Sorvino, Kudrow and Schiff exec producing, Kimberly McCullough co-producing, and Sarah Shepard overseeing for 20th.
McLendon-Covey currently stars in NBC’s hit workplace comedy St. Denis Medical, which returns for its third season on November 2. Previously, she starred in and exec produced ABC’s sitcom The Goldbergs, which completed a 10-season run in 2023. The comedic multi-hyphenate got her start in improv and sketch comedy at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. She is repped by UTA, manager Gladys Gonzalez and attorney David Krintzman.
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