Trump Announces Kennedy Center Honorees. Applause Pending
Traditionally, the announcement of the Kennedy Center Honors is a low-key affair — recipients are normally revealed each summer with a no-frills press release. Not this time. Shattering precedent (yet again), President Trump — who earlier this year anointed himself chairman and fired much of the center’s advisory committee, replacing them with allies like ex-spy chief Richard Grenell and MAGA publisher Sergio Gor — staged an Apprentice-style spectacle, unveiling his picks with an unwieldy, nearly hourlong press conference that, as usual, raised more questions than it answered.
For starters, will Trump, as he sort of hinted, really be hosting the ceremony in December? (“I used to host The Apprentice finales, and we did rather well with that,” he noted modestly.) Was he serious when he claimed to be “98 percent involved” in the selection process? Does that mean each of the 2025 recipients — ’80s country music star George Strait, ’80s action hero Sylvester Stallone, ’80s Broadway tenor Michael Crawford, ’80s disco diva Gloria Gaynor and ’80s glam-rock group Kiss — was handpicked by the president himself? Is he about to issue an executive order mandating parachute pants and giant shoulder pads?
And what about the artists who didn’t make the cut because Trump deemed them “too woke” for a Kennedy Center medallion? Who exactly were these alleged “wokesters”? Was Trump perhaps referring to that famously radical social justice warrior Tom Cruise, who, according to reports, turned down the honor over “scheduling conflicts”? (But come on.)
The biggest unanswered question, though, is who among the chosen will actually show up for the ceremony. Because at this writing, very few of Trump’s honorees have publicly accepted the award or commented in the press on being selected — not even Stallone, a longtime supporter and one of Trump’s recently appointed “ambassadors to Hollywood.” In fact, the only RSVPs so far have been from Crawford (who tells THR that he is “thrilled and humbled”) and Kiss frontman Gene Simmons — who in the recent past has been scorchingly critical of Trump, calling him “abhorrent” and accusing him of normalizing racism — proclaiming in a statement that his band was “deeply honored.”
Fifteen Years Since His Death, McQ Is Still a Drama Queen
The short, flamboyant and ultimately tragic life of Alexander McQueen has inspired fashion retrospectives, documentaries — and now, off-Broadway drama. House of McQueen, a new play about the late designer, will open Sept. 9 at The Mansion at Hudson Yards, kicking off New York Fashion Week with a flourish of theatrical tailoring.
The McQueen brand itself isn’t involved, but the production has a notable family connection: creative director Gary James McQueen — now a visual artist — who once worked in his uncle’s menswear department and credits him with sparking his artistic sensibilities. “He taught me how to build stories in a structured way,” Gary tells Rambling. Also backing the project is sculptor and documentary filmmaker Rick Lazes, who executive produced the show, written by playwright Darrah Cloud.
Playing McQueen — known to intimates as “Lee” — is Bridgerton breakout Luke Newton, with a freshly shaved head and trading Regency-era charm for haunted-genius intensity. His co-star will be up-and-coming actress Catherine LeFrere, who’ll play Isabella Blow, the late British fashion editor who discovered McQueen and helped launch his career, only to be cut off and left reeling. Blow died by suicide in 2007, two years before McQueen took his own life — and has lately been the subject of a growing Isabella Blow mini-boom, with two films about her in the works.
Still want more McQueen? Thirty of his original dresses will be exhibited in a separate Hudson Yards venue, where the play’s afterparty will also be held — for ticket holders only. Here in L.A., you’ll have to wait until January, when an “immersive McQueen experience” will fill a warehouse in DTLA with videos, photos and holograms celebrating his fashion shows from the 1990s and 2000s.
How might McQueen himself have reacted to all this attention? Says a former staffer who worked closely with him, “He would have scowled on the outside, secretly loved it — then skipped opening night.” — MERLE GINSBERG
AI Woos Skeptical Filmmakers at Closed-Door Summit
GPT-5 wasn’t the only AI model to get middling reviews this month. On Aug. 9, more than 200 filmmakers and content creators gathered at Dan Lin’s Rideback Ranch in Filipinotown for an off-the-record, daylong presentation by video-generating AI companies hoping to gain purchase in Hollywood, amid fears that the tech will replace huge swaths of the industry. The gathering was put together by the nonprofit Rideback Rise, a “content accelerator” aiming to boost mid-career creators of color. “It’s the Wild West out there with AI, and we have to think about how we educate but also how we expose people to the big players,” says Rise CEO Diana Mogollón. “We wanted to get people in the sandbox a little bit. We want to keep the momentum going.”
“I was intrigued,” says one attendee, “because I thought it was going to be, ‘How could indie filmmakers use Gen AI tools to do things that you can’t do without, like, a $10 million to $15 million budget?’ ” To his disappointment — and somewhat to his relief — there was little sense that the tools were ready to create the next Sex, Lies, and Videotape at the push of a button. After a morning session during which questions were not permitted, the participants were given credits to create 60-second short films with some of the leading models, including those by Luma AI and Asteria. The companies “bent over backward to talk about ‘ethical AI,’ ” adds the attendee. “Obviously, we still had to put in our credit cards, and I have to cancel that before I get charged.”
The so-called “Gen Jam” afternoon play session served mainly to illuminate the limitations of the tech, such as the near impossibility of maintaining character continuity from shot to shot. (“Give them a hat or something,” one of the presenters suggested.) And there were other disconnects: “Someone generated a ‘Fuck ICE’ video about the ICE raids terrorizing Los Angeles, and the AI generated masked ICE goons who were actual ice cubes.”
This story appeared in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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