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Kennedy Center Voted To Return Trump’s Name To Three Different Spots

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When the board of the Kennedy Center met last week to decide on the future of the complex, they took up a resolution to restore Donald Trump‘s name to the front facade of the complex.

The vote by the Trump-controlled board was not just one designation for the president, but three.

According to a copy of the resolution filed in federal court late on Tuesday, Trump’s name would be returned to the front facade, just below its official name, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Below that lettering, a new one would be added to read, “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

That’s not all. The resolution also provides for another Trump designation, just below “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” Once a $100 million threshold is met for an endowment the board set up for the center, per the resolution, a line would be added to read, “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

So the facade of the Kennedy Center would read:

The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts

Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump

Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund

There’s more. The board resolution also designated “the physical site and grounds upon which the center sits” as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

The board is chaired by Trump and which includes administration figures like Sergio Gor and Dan Scavino and Fox News personalities Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham. In December, they voted to add Trump’s name to the center and, the next day, the facade was changed to read “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the board, sued, and in May U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that only Congress could make such a change to the center’s name.

That forced the center to remove references of the “Trump Kennedy Center” from its website and other materials, and, most prominently, from the front facade. On the night of the deadline to remove Trump’s name from the facade, a crowd gathered and watched as workers installed scaffolding and, in the middle of the night, a tarp. That concealed the actual removal of the lettering for POTUS. The tarp has remained there ever since.

In response to the latest effort to return Trump’s name multiple times to the front of the building, Beatty’s attorneys argued that the board seems intent “on defying the court’s decision.”

Her attorneys, Nathaniel Zelinsky and Norm Eisen, wrote, “Adding the words ‘Restored and Renovated by,’ or ‘Endowed by,’ before President Trump’s name, and renaming the ground on which the building sits, provides no lawful basis to ignore this Court’s decision and impose Donald Trump’s name on a memorial dedicated by the Congress exclusively to a different President.”

They cited a statute that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” The board’s resolution seemed to suggest that renaming the plaza would fall outside of the statute.

The center has committed to forego attempts to install the Trump designations until September 8. Beatty’s attorneys want the judge to rule by then.

As for the tarp, the center’s attorneys cited a declaration from executive director Matthew Floca and wrote that the covering “was and is a necessary element of the ongoing construction activities at the Center—during the removal of the name, it served as a safety barrier for ongoing construction activities and helped safeguard the marble facade of the building in light of reported panel damage.” They added that the center will use the existing scaffolding to “assess, investigate and engineer structural repairs to the overhead soffit.”

“Final removal of the scaffolding and its barrier is contingent upon the scope of any repairs required at present to the marble facade, as well as any other necessary repairs,” the center’s attorneys wrote.

Beatty’s attorneys called the explanation a “pretextual justification.” “Defendants state they intend to use the scaffolding to examine the roof overhang,” the wrote. “But the soffits are some twenty feet or more above the scaffolding. Defendants imply that they will erect more scaffolding around the rest of the Center, presumably to examine other portions of the roof. But Defendants tellingly have not done so for months, leaving only the Center’s iconic name obscured—a strong indication that this structure has nothing to do with the roof and is, instead, meant to defy a return to the status quo.”

In his May ruling, the judge also halted plans to close the center for two years for renovations, concluding that the board had been “derelict” in moving to shutter the complex because they “neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions.” He noted that the board could still move to close the complex, but only after there was a fuller consideration of impacts.

Last week, the board again voted for a two-year closure plan, while keeping limited programming at The Reach, an extension that opened in 2019.

In the latest filing, the center’s legal team argued that it had conducted an independent analysis, with Delta Consulting Group presenting two options: the closure plan that was ultimately approved, and another plan for a partial closure. The analysis concluded that the partial closure would take longer — four years — and would mean that the center “would suffer a reduction in both revenue and fundraising ability” and “reputational damage that would result from the proximity of construction activities to performance venues.”

Beatty’s team, though, argued that the board “fell short by a country mile” in its analysis.

“The only materials that purport to examine the costs and benefits of the closure was a 5- slide PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Delta Consulting Group, which was subsequently displayed at the Board meeting,” they wrote. “Excluding two cover slides and one slide describing the lead consultant’s biography, the substance of the presentation deck is just two slides long.”

Beatty’s team is calling for a discovery process rather than an expedited briefing on a motion to grant summary judgment, which the center wants. The center also is appealing Cooper’s May ruling.

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Wild Horse Nine: Sam Rockwell Movie to Open Mill Valley Film Festival

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Wild Horse Nine is preparing to run free, as the feature is set to open the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh‘s film, starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, will screen as the opening night title on Oct. 1, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. McDonagh, Rockwell and co-star Mariana Di Girolamo are expected to attend the screening. Wild Horse Nine premieres in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival next month.

Rockwell’s career of acclaimed work will be the focus of a Mill Valley tribute on Oct. 2. The actor’s memorable performances include his Academy Award-winning role in McDonagh’s 2017 feature Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, along with his Oscar-nominated role as President George W. Bush in Adam McKay’s 2018 movie Vice. He earned Emmy Award nominations for the series Fosse/Verdon and The White Lotus.

Wild Horse Nine stars Malkovich and Rockwell as two CIA operatives who travel from Santiago, Chile, to Easter Island amid the tense lead-up to the South American nation’s 1973 coup. The mission gets complicated due to one agent’s connection to two young activists, played by Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas. Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey also star in the film that Searchlight Pictures releases in theaters Nov. 6.

Additionally, the festival adds a New Directors Section this year to spotlight first and second features from rising American and international filmmakers.

“Opening night is always the moment this festival comes alive, and this year is no exception,” says Mill Valley Film Festival founder and executive director Mark Fishkin. “Bringing Wild Horse Nine to our audience first, with a filmmaker as bold as Martin McDonagh and a cast featuring a fearless performance by Sam Rockwell, is exactly the kind of moment Mill Valley exists to create. It’s a night that reminds us why we do this work, and a fitting start to our 49th year and the next seminal decade.”

The 2026 Mill Valley Film Festival runs Oct. 1-11 in Marin County and Berkeley, California.

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Dutch Kids TV Classic ‘De Fabeltjeskrant’ Gets International Revival

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EXCLUSIVE: De Fabeltjeskrant, the classic Dutch kids TV program set in the Great Animal Forest, is being given a new lease of life and a fresh international rollout.

Some 1,600 episodes of the puppet show will be restored, as a CGI incarnation of the property enters development and will be shopped to buyers at MIPCOM in October. The restored episodes are due to be released on the De Fabeltjeskrant YouTube channel.

 Three-time Tony Award-winning producer Robin de Levita Productions has partnered with the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, Monks and JVDB Studios on the restoration initiative, which is working from original 16mm film elements preserved for more than half a century.

The business case is that producers and distributors are continuing to look toward established family IP with multigenerational recognition for their content, and that streaming and digital platforms have created new opportunities for extensive TV libraries that were previously difficult for international audiences to access. De Fabeltjeskrant is designed to tap into both notions, restoring and distributing the original programming for the audiences who grew up with it and simultaneously rebuilding the property for children encountering its characters for the first time.

Spot-motion puppetry show De Fabeltjeskrant, created by Leen Valkenier, first broadcast in 1968 and went on to become a cultural phenomenon in the Netherlands and Belgium. With a title translating as The Fables Newspaper, the show took place in a forest filled with anthropomorphic animals where the main character, an owl named Meneer de Uil read headlines from a daily paper.

The show used humor as a mechanism to explore frienship, community, curiosity and respect. Running for more than 1,600 episodes it became a cultural touchstone for Dutch audiences, and was sold into 40 countries.

“Thanks to the extraordinary work of the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, these original films have survived for more than half a century,” said producer Robin de Levita. “Together with our partners, we can finally restore them with the care and precision they deserve and share them with audiences around the world. The world has changed enormously since 1968, but people haven’t. The stories of the Great Animal Forest are perhaps even more relevant today than ever before.”

CGI series

The new animated version is being billed as a “new creative future for the franchise,” and will see the Great Animal Forest and its inhabitants reimagined, while keeping the same underlying values as the original show.

Monks is working with Robin de Levita Productions on the new incarnation, using current-generation animation and digital production technology.

“Great entertainment brands are timeless,” said Victor Knaap of Monks. “Together we are combining heritage, creativity and cutting-edge technology to build a new international future for this extraordinary brand.”

Jordi van den Bussche of JVDB Studios added: “Technology should help great stories reach more people. By combining AI, digital production and global distribution, we can introduce one of Europe’s most iconic children’s series to new generations around the world.”

The new CGI show will be presented to buyers in Cannes for MIPCOM in October.

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Nicolas Cage To Battle Cannibals In Action-Thriller ‘Parish’

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EXCLUSIVE: Here’s a fun one. Nicolas Cage is set to play one of the last known survivors of a nuclear apocalypse who must do battle with a horde of vicious cannibals in new action-thriller Parish.

Concourse Media is launching world pre-sales on the project ahead of the TIFF market.

Set 30 years after a nuclear apocalypse, Parish stars Oscar winner and action vet Cage as “a hardened survivor who has managed to stay alive with his highly trained attack dogs by following one unbreakable rule: never let anyone through the gate. That rule has kept him alive for three decades. But when a desperate woman carrying an infant appears outside his sanctuary, Parish is forced to choose between compassion and survival. His decision exposes the refuge he has spent years building and puts him in the crosshairs of a vicious band of cannibals closing in from the wasteland. With his highly equipped compound under siege and his past finally catching up with him, Parish is forced into a brutal fight to protect everything he has left.”

The project heralds from writer-director Adam Sigal, writer-director of Simon Pegg comedy-thriller Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose and producer on 2024 sci-fi Slingshot with Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne. Filming is being lined up for October in Minnesota.

Joel Shapiro of MagiCity Studios (Gunner, Killerman) is producing along with Steven Tyler Sahlein (The Devil’s Advocate). Matthew Shreder’s Concourse Media will executive-produce and finance alongside its sister company Archetype Media Finance.

Big-budget veteran DoP David Tattersall, known for Star Wars: Episodes I, II & III, The Green Mile, Tomb Raider and Cage starrers Con Air and Next, will serve as cinematographer.

“There’s a scale and pedigree to Parish that immediately separates it from the pack, with all the ingredients of a real theatrical event,” said Matthew Shreder, CEO of Concourse Media. “Nic Cage is an incredible and fearless actor, with an extraordinary group of filmmakers around him who are all setting out to make a sophisticated survival thriller that’s a cinematic event built for a global audience.”

Producer Joel Shapiro added: “Adam has created a world that is savage, cinematic and incredibly visceral, but what drew us to Parish was the humanity underneath it. Nick Cage brings an unpredictability and emotional intensity that makes him perfect for this character. And to be building this world alongside artists like David Tattersall is incredibly exciting. We’re approaching this as a big-screen experience from the ground up.”

Cage is repped by Stride Management, WME, and GGSSC.

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