Comedian Ramy Youssef and screen legend Sharon Stone will star in Martha & Muhammad, an of-the-moment comedy being produced and financed by A24.

The standup comedian wrote the script and will make his directorial debut on the feature, which tackles several hot button flashpoints as it tells the story of a white widowed socialite in New York who develops a relationship with a young Muslim man. Class, religion, immigration and age are on the table on what promises to be a showcase for both Youssef and Stone.

Youssef is producing via his Cairo Cowboy banner alongside Eli Bush, Ronald Bronstein, and Josh Safdie of Central, Christopher Storer and Tyson Bidner for American Light & Fixture, and A24.

Production is looking to begin this fall.

The feature is being made at a critical moment in American culture as Middle Eastern representation and the American-Muslim experience gain new levels of prominence. Much of that is being fueled on the political level, with figures such as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed currently on the frontlines of many conversations on those topics.

Youssef has been tackling the Muslim-American experience for years within his stand-up comedy as well as his Hulu series, Ramy, which earned him a Golden Globe and a Peabody award, as well as a pair of Emmy Award nominations, for acting and directing.

Martha & Muhammad is the latest collaboration between Youssef and A24, which has proven a potent partnership. The team-up birthed Ramy as well as Youssef’s two critically acclaimed comedy specials, Feelings and More Feelings, both of which were nominated for Critics’ Choice and Writers Guild Awards. And the two were also behind Happy Family USA, Prime Video’s hit animated series which is returning for a second season.

Stone is the Hollywood legend who starred with Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct and earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 crime saga Casino. The actress has been enjoying a resurgence of late and appeared in HBO’s third season of Euphoria. On the feature side, she recently wrapped David Mamet’s Speed the Plow alongside Ben Mendelsohn and has several other movies in the can, including Marc Maron’s ensemble feature In Memoriam as well as AGC Studios’ feature Babies in which she appears with Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick.

Youssef, who earlier this year released his third HBO stand-up special, Ramy Youssef: In Love, is repped by WME, Entertainment 360 and Yorn Levine.

Stone, who was last seen on the big screen as the scene-stealing villainess in Nobody 2, is repped by IAG, The Artists Partnership, Link Entertainment and Brecheen Feldman.

EXCLUSIVE: Select Management Group has added nine reality stars to its roster: Chelley B and Parmida Keshani from Peacock’s Love Island USA; Leah Barrs, Mitchell Bienvenue, Tamaya Denae and Taylor Hayward from Freeform/Hulu’s Million Dollar Nannies; Bri Davis and Ashleigh Pease from Hulu’s upcoming The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County; and Jimmy Sotos from Netflix’s Perfect Match.

From Love Island USA, Chelley B has built a loyal following around relationships, personal growth and community, while also bringing her Haitian heritage and personal experiences to her content. Her connection with fans has led to opportunities across lifestyle, beauty, fashion and relationship-focused brands. Keshani’s background in kinesiology and professional coaching has led to opportunities at the intersection of wellness, fitness and women’s lifestyle partnerships.

Signees from Million Dollar Nannies include Barrs, the founder of a nanny-led agency known for her work with high-profile families, which has given her a unique platform at the intersection of luxury childcare, family, travel and lifestyle; Bienvenue, a lifestyle creator whose content centers on outdoor adventures, travel and an active lifestyle; Denae, a fashion and lifestyle creator whose content sits at the intersection of wellness, beauty and fashion; and Hayward, a nanny and content creator who offers an inside look at childcare and family life.

Australian lifestyle creator Pease, one of the stars of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County, shares a candid look at life as a mom of four in Orange County, with content spanning family, relationships, lifestyle and everyday life. Nurse and lifestyle creator Davis brings a clinical background to content spanning beauty, wellness, women’s health, travel and everyday life.

Then, there’s Perfect Match‘s Sotos, a former Ohio State basketball player who made the leap from college athletics to reality TV amid his search for love in Perfect Match Season 4.

Select Management Group is a next-generation talent management and media company whose clients include The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives franchise’s Jennifer Affleck, Mikayla Mathews, Mayci Neeley, Jessi Ngatikaura, Aspyn Ovard and Layla Taylor, as well as other unscripted talent such as the Love Island universe’s Jeremiah Brown and Taylor Williams. The company sees unscripted as one of the creator economy’s strongest pipelines for next-generation talent and has been at the forefront of efforts to bridge that gap.

Select Management is part of the Propagate Content family of companies, which also includes Artists First, Authentic Talent & Literary Management, Parker Management and Sway Social, among others. Other recent unscripted signings include Love Island USA‘s Sean Reifel and Love Overboard stars Leela J Ambrose-Fleck, Sadé Idera and Bella Palk.

The firm’s production arm, Select Entertainment, produces Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, as well as its Orange County spinoff.

You might assume that “Spider-Noir,” the streaming series that takes Nicolas Cage’s character from the Oscar-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and plops him into a flesh-and-blood mystery, would lack the visual oomph of its animated counterpart. After all, that film had a unique texture that emphasized its comic-book origins. You could practically smell the ink coming off the screen. How could the comparatively tame live-action landscape ever hope to compete? 

But “Spider-Noir” — which recounts the story of Ben Reilly aka The Spider (Cage), a World War I veteran coaxed back into super-heroics in Depression-era New York after a wave of strange villains enters the criminal underworld — had a trick up its well-tailored sleeve. When the series premiered earlier this year on MGM+ and Prime Video, it was presented in two separate, distinct formats: a black-and-white version, emphasizing the inky shadows of the film noirs that inspired it, and a color version (dubbed Tru-Hue Full Color) with a bold, jazzy look influenced by the Technicolor films that would follow film noir’s heyday. 

This, it turns out, was more than simply colorizing black-and-white footage (or vice versa), as Ted Turner did on his cable stations so many years ago. Instead, it was an all-consuming, hyper-specific process that fell to the show’s cinematographer, Darran Tiernan. 

Tiernan is a talented DP who knows his way around both moody noirs, having photographed HBO’s excellent, damnably short-lived “Perry Mason” revival and comic-book adaptations including the Emmy-winning HBO Max limited series “The Penguin,” an extension of Matt Reeves’ “The Batman.” Not that anything prepared him for the challenges of “Spider-Noir.”

Initially, Tiernan said, the plan was to shoot the series only in black and white. But an hour into his first day of prep, an edict came down from on high: Could they ready a color version at the same time? This led to a meeting of the minds with Tiernan, showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot, costume designer Trayce Gigi Field, production designer Warren Alan Young and director Harry Bradbeer (who oversaw the first two episodes).

“That began a research-and-development process to see how we could do it,” Tiernan explained. Uziel insisted that they would only make a color version if they were as excited about it as they were about the B&W version, but finding a plan that thrilled them took months and involved all departments. 

“As we were moving through the process of discovering what colors worked for black and white and color, I supplied them with cameras with the same color science and monitors that we were going to use while shooting, so they could check their own work and compare,” Tiernan said. This allowed the teams to “constantly have evolving conversations about, Does this look right? Does that look right? Will that work?”

The process, he said, was “incredibly collaborative” and integrated, which helped him assuage any concerns that attacking both the black-and-white and color versions simultaneously would water down one or both “Spider-Noir” variations. 

“I didn’t think about it too much because we were all striving to find the solution,” Tiernan said. He was aware that lighting in film noir was distinct and “wanted to be truthful and authentic to that,” while also imagining the scene in color. Instead of picking a color image and seeing how it would look in black and white, Tiernan said, the process was reversed. The color version had to be supported by the black-and-white one. 

“Everybody having that thought process really helped us get to the point where we were confident when we were shooting that we were doing the right thing for both versions,” he said.

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.