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Pam Bondi details charges against pipe bomb suspect

admin - Latest News - December 4, 2025
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Pam Bondi details charges against pipe bomb suspect



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Dec. 4, 2025, 3:11 PM ESTBy Rebecca KeeganHollywood is feeling the lure of Saudi Arabian money. The stars are taking it, with many set to receive checks for attending this week’s Red Sea Film Festival. Studios are interested in it, with their executives traveling to the kingdom to meet about potential deals. And at the highest levels, Saudi money could end up helping to finance a massive media merger.For the entertainment industry, Saudi financing has become more appealing as other sources of money have dried up in the aftermath of the 2020 Covid pandemic, the 2023 dual actors’ and writers’ strikes, and shifting audience habits away from film and TV to social media. “Money is good, that’s Hollywood’s perspective,” said entertainment attorney Schuylar (Sky) Moore at Greenberg Glusker. “For the Saudis, it’s all about building their own film industry, and they’re trying to get the expertise and the people there.” But Saudi Arabia’s controversial human rights record makes the relationship an uneasy one for some in the West — and a sensitive topic to talk about in Hollywood, where more than a dozen insiders including agents, producers, executives, bankers and publicists declined to go on the record about the inrush of potential Saudi cash.For more on this story, tune in to Hallie Jackson NOW at 5:00 p.m. ET/2:30 p.m. PT on NBC NEWS NOW.This week, many of them are headed to the kingdom’s coastal city of Jeddah for the Red Sea Film Festival, which runs through Dec. 13. In recent years, the festival, a nonprofit organization financed by Saudi government money, has paid talent up to $2.5 million to attend at least part of the event, according to two sources with knowledge of the deals who were not authorized to speak on the record about them. A spokesperson for the Red Sea Film Festival contested the figure, calling it “inaccurate, and not representative.”“The festival does not disclose the details of any of its commercial arrangements, but we on occasion engage with talent on a contractual basis for work we ask them to do at the festival which includes labs, in conversations, mentorship sessions with emerging regional talent,” the festival said in a statement. “The Foundation is first and foremost committed to nurturing talent in underrepresented markets — as evidenced by our programme and the filmmakers we support year round.”This year, festival organizers announced that the nine-day event will feature a jury with Oscar-winning “Anora” director Sean Baker and actor Riz Ahmed; stage conversations with actors including Ana de Armas, Dakota Johnson, Kirsten Dunst, Jessica Alba and Adrien Brody; and tributes to actors Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine. Many of the stars are being touted on the festival’s official Instagram page. A diverse slate of films is set to screen including “Couture” starring Angelina Jolie, Paramount’s “The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants,” and Jordan’s Oscar submission, “All That’s Left of You,” which received financial support from the Red Sea Foundation.Saudi money is also behind a portion of Paramount Skydance’s more than $60 billion bid this week for Warner Bros Discovery, according to Variety, which cites multiple sources, and Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the discussions. A spokesperson for Paramount declined to comment.Additionally, the kingdom is backing a $1 billion new independent content studio called Arena SNK launched in October by former Lionsgate executive Erik Feig, and a $55 billion deal for video game maker Electronic Arts announced in September. A representative for Feig declined to comment. Executives from Sony traveled to Saudi Arabia this fall for meetings, a spokesperson confirmed. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts also traveled to the country this fall to attend a conference and view a potential theme park site in Qiddiya, a tourism megaproject in Riyadh province, according to a source with knowledge of Roberts’ trip who was not authorized to speak on the record about it. (Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is the parent company of NBC News.) While there are many deals in discussion, Moore noted that a major Hollywood studio has yet to actually close one with Saudi financing. If they do, the entertainment attorney said he suspects the deal will be contingent upon shooting in the region, to help build up the kingdom’s local production infrastructure. Hollywood’s not alone in its attempts to muster up funding from the Middle East — both the sports and gaming worlds have tapped into Saudi money. Critics, including Human Rights Watch, an international nongovernmental organization, and the Atlantic Council, a research institute, have accused the Saudi government of so-called “sportswashing,” investing in golf and soccer to improve its international image.Kirsten Dunst, Vin Diesel, Michael Caine, and Ana de Armas at the Red Sea Film Festival on Thursday.Daniele Venturelli / Getty Images for The Red Sea International Film FestivalIn 2027, WrestleMania will be held in Riyadh, marking the first time the WWE will hold its signature pay-per-view match outside North America. In a statement announcing the deal in September,Paul “Triple H” Levesque, WWE’s chief content officer, said that the General Entertainment Authority (GEA) in Saudi Arabia and its chairman, Turki Alalshikh, “have made a massive impact on the world of sports and entertainment.” He described them as “phenomenal partners to WWE.”Video gaming giant Electronic Arts announced in September that it will be acquired for $55 billion in an all-cash deal by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners (the investment company run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner).From the Saudi perspective, the entertainment industry spending is a way to reduce the country’s economic dependence on oil and to improve their image globally, which is all part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s modernization plan for the kingdom called Vision 2030. In September, the Saudi Film Fund rebranded as Riviera Content, with a mandate to finance and produce movies with major global studios, bolstered by a 40% tax incentive for production in the kingdom.“A lot of it is driven by a feeling in Saudi that their story isn’t being told well,” said one entertainment industry dealmaker who has done business in Saudi Arabia, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.In 2018, the Saudi/Hollywood collaboration was just beginning to get underway when, according to U.S. intelligence services, Crown Prince Mohammed approved an operation to assassinate Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a fierce critic of his government. In the months before the murder, the crown prince had ended a 35-year ban on movie theaters and traveled to Los Angeles to meet with News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch and Disney CEO Bob Iger. The Saudi Film Council had delivered a splashy pitch at the Cannes Film Festival, handing out guides to Saudi film locations and a book with data on the young, digitally savvy Saudi audience. The Khashoggi murder chilled the nascent cultural relationship and led Endeavor Content, the film and TV company behind shows like “Severance” and “Killing Eve,” to back out of a $400 million deal with the Saudi government in 2019.Trump defends Saudi crown prince over journalist’s murder02:18Hollywood’s difficult financial environment and the reelection of President Donald Trump, who has a close relationship with Saudi Arabia, have reopened the door to conversations. In November, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison attended a White House dinner for Crown Prince Mohammed, the Saudi leader’s first visit to the White House since the Khashoggi murder. For Western talent, however, the Saudi money still brings deeper questions. In September, American comedians like Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart and Pete Davidson faced backlash from fans, human rights activists and fellow comics for performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.Human Rights Watch accused the Saudi government of using the event “to deflect attention from its brutal repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations.”In October, late night host Jimmy Kimmel pressed comedian Aziz Ansari about his decision to perform at the festival. “People, a lot of comedians especially, are very upset, because the people who paid the comedians to come to this are not good people,” Kimmel said. “It’s a pretty brutal regime. They’ve done a lot of horrible, horrible things.”“There’s people over there that don’t agree with the stuff that the government’s doing, and to ascribe like the worst behavior of the government onto those people, that’s not fair,” Ansari said of his decision, noting he asked his aunt who used to live in Saudi Arabia. “Just like there’s people in America that don’t agree with the things the government is doing.”The talent that is expected to attend the Red Sea Film Festival in the coming days have not publicly commented on their upcoming plans. Despite the stars in the lineup, many of the actors with films screening at Red Sea this year have declined to attend. That includes Jolie, whose representative did not say why she’s skipping the event, and Pierce Brosnan and Jude Law, whose representatives both cited scheduling issues.Rebecca KeeganRebecca Keegan is the senior Hollywood reporter for NBC News Digital, where she covers the entertainment industry.
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Sept. 23, 2025, 2:00 PM EDTBy Max GaoCanadian comic Mae Martin knows their new Netflix limited series — which blends light-hearted comedic elements with the anxiety-inducing horror and thriller genres — may feel like a dramatic departure for anyone who is familiar with their stand-up routines and their semi-autobiographical show, “Feel Good.”“It’s funny because it doesn’t feel like a departure for me,” Martin, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, told NBC News. “It feels thematically in the same universe as everything I do. It’s introspective, and there’s themes about processing adolescence and identity.”“Wayward,” which premieres Thursday, stars Martin as Alex Dempsey, a police officer who has just moved to the seemingly picturesque small town of Tall Pines with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon). During one of his first days in the city, where his wife grew up, Alex crosses paths with two students from the local academy for “troubled teens” who are desperately trying to plot their escape. As he begins investigating a series of unusual incidents, Alex suspects that Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette) — the school’s enigmatic leader who shares a troubling personal connection with Laura — might be at the center of all the town’s problems.“Alex is sort of the eyes of the audience and trying to piece it all together. It’s so seductive to be in a town that is so accepting and progressive on the surface and is offering him everything he’s always dreamed of,” Martin explained. But over the course of eight episodes, Alex, who is a transgender man, “is grappling with his moral compass and also his intense yearning to have that nuclear family and mainstream acceptance that he’s always wanted.”After Martin rose to fame internationally during the Covid-19 pandemic for co-creating the romantic dramedy series “Feel Good,” in which they played a fictionalized version of themselves, some viewers may have expected the writer to create a new project that would feel similarly autobiographical. But Martin said they have been wanting to make a show for decades set against the backdrop of the “troubled teen industry,” a term used for the broad range of controversial youth residential programs aimed at struggling teenagers.“My best friend Nicole got sent to a troubled teen institute in the States, and she was gone for about two years,” said Martin, who grew up in Toronto. “That sparked my interest in some of the shadier practices and the really strange origins of that industry, which all trace back to self-help cults in the 1970s and this really theatrical behavioral modification.”At first, Martin thought the series would be more of a classic, coming-of-age story in the vein of “Stand By Me” or “Holes.” But after hearing about their best friend’s harrowing experiences at one of those unregulated schools — where she recalled being starved, sleep deprived and forced to dig and stand in her own grave overnight — Martin could tell that a tale about troubled teens being held against their will would be much more in line with classic horror and thriller films such as “Fargo,” “Get Out” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”Over time, Martin said, they became more interested in looking “directly at how many young people are pathologized at such a young age, just for having a pretty normal reaction to a sick society.” “When you take kids who are in crisis and your reaction is punitive, you take away their opportunity to go through all the normal milestones of development, and you ascribe labels to them that really affect how they see their own potential,” they said. Mae Martin and Toni Collette in “Wayward.”Michael Gibson / NetflixMartin said they have found themselves increasingly thinking about “the state of the world that we’re passing down to young people, and about intergenerational conflict.”“As we get older, we suppress so much of our sensitivity and our critical thinking and even our empathy just in order to survive in the world,” Martin said. “So we can’t help but kind of gaslight young people out of their very correct observation that the world is insane, and that there’s a lot of hypocrisy out there.”From the outset, Martin said, they knew they wanted to play Alex. While his gender identity is only explored in passing, “a lot of his inner yearning is connected to that and how he sees himself and wants to be seen in the world,” especially as a husband and an expectant father, Martin explained.“The show’s set in 2003, and I think there wasn’t a lot of fluency around nonbinary identity then and not a lot of they/thems,” Martin noted, adding that playing a man “just made sense” to them. “Who knows where I’ll end up on that spectrum? But it felt pretty natural to me as an actor — more natural than it would’ve been to play a woman.”As the creator and co-showrunner of “Wayward,” Martin is one of the few LGBTQ writers in Hollywood who are shepherding their own mainstream projects. While they said they try not to think too much about their public profile when creating their projects, Martin said it is “scary” to be a queer creative at a time when President Donald Trump and conservatives have been actively targeting and rolling back legal protections for the queer community, especially trans and nonbinary people.Toni Collette and Joshua Close in “Wayward.”Netflix“What makes things difficult is when things are charged politically, like they are now, it makes it seem like even having a trans character or a gay character is a political statement and immediately puts your project in a niche category,” said Martin. “It’s crazy that your career can be affected by political swings like that.”Martin said they see their visibility as a prominent nonbinary comedian in the current climate as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they want to tell stories that will reach the widest audience possible and, hopefully, in turn, create more empathy for the LGBTQ community. But at the same time, Martin said, they know that their mere existence can be seen as a kind of political statement.They said they would welcome an environment where an LGBTQ character’s identity was “just incidental,” rather than a defining feature of the project, “and the focus is actually on these hugely universal themes and storylines.”In “Wayward,” for instance, “there are nuances that are specific to the queer experience that I think queer people will pick up on and relate to, but those things are pretty relatable to anyone who’s experienced any kind of otherness,” Martin said.Martin speculated that the heightened backlash against the trans community is connected to depictions of trans people that have disproportionately focused on transphobia, bigotry and trauma. “It is a part of the trans experience, but it’s just one small part of a human experience,” they said. “The more we can have diverse characters who are flawed, funny, weird and relatable, who make mistakes, who have relationships — I think that would be more helpful.”Martin acknowledged there’s been a contraction in the output of diverse stories, but they plan to keep “sneaking subversive things” into more mainstream projects.“I’ll just keep my head down, keep inundating people with scripts, and hope to ride it out and do my part,” Martin said.Max GaoMax Gao is a freelance entertainment and sports journalist based in Toronto. He has written for NBC News, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Beast, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Men’s Health, Teen Vogue and W Magazine. 
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