EXCLUSIVE : Grossinger's Catskill Resort, the hotel that inspired Dirty Dancing and Mrs. a Pretty. Maisel gets its own document processing capacity.
A borscht belt resort in upstate New York that caters to a large Jewish clientele will be the subject of a new documentary from Bungalow Media + Entertainment.
More than deadline
This is one of several documentary and unofficial projects by the company founded by Robert Friedman, who is also behind Little Richard .
Grossinger's project is led by Paula Eislett, who directed the 2022 Sundance favorite Aftershock , which was picked up by Hulu. Harrison Solomon is Executive Producer on the project, which recently began production. Private equity investor David Moore, who is a minority investor in the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, funded the presentation.
It will tell about the resort where Elizabeth Taylor married her fourth husband, where Governor Nelson A.
It closed in 1986 and most of the buildings in the complex were demolished in 2018 after a major fire earlier this year.
Friedman, who secured the rights to Grossinger, told Deadline that it's important to tell the story now because "age isn't necessarily on our side with some of the characters." Some of the members, such as Elaine Grossinger Etes, daughter of Jennie Grossinger, who founded the resort with her husband, are still alive.
"It's a very interesting story, especially given what's going on in the world today with anti-Semitism," Friedman said. "It had a huge impact on culture, and it was also one of the few places that African Americans could go out and really have fun back then."
With Amazon's Maisel concluding its upcoming fifth season and the Dirty Dancing sequel starring Jennifer Gray who will reprise her role as a baby in 2024, it's the perfect time to tell the story.
Bungalow wants to take the doctor to a film festival. "We thought it was offensive. In this world we live in, it can be taken, but we want to put it on the festival circuit.”
If so, this will be your last document along the way. Little Richard .
Friedman said that Little Richard's career is "one of the most fascinating and important stories in the history of music and pop culture" and that the film will "reveal Richard's immeasurable impact on music history and ultimately ensure he has his rightful place on the throne." of the skirt occupy ".".".
Former RadicalMedia president Friedman, who was previously co-chairman of New Line Cinema and one of the original MTV groups, founded Bungalow in 2013.
He has produced a mix of documentaries, unscripted TV movies and scripted series. On the literary side, he was involved with Fox dramas APB , Netflix's Insatiable and Amazon's Modern Love , and Clive Owen's feature film The Confirmation.
In the documentary series, he produced the four-part miniseries Surviving Jeffrey Epstein for Life, the five-part miniseries The Preppy Murder for AMC/Sundance, The Panama Papers for Epix, and Rosewell. For the story of the first witness. as well as major documentaries like Discovery+'s The Devil Made Me Do It and Showtime's Spring Broke .
Most recently, he was behind the Discovery+ reality series Serving the Hamptons , about upscale restaurant 75 Main and the "sexy young" staff who serve its celebrity clientele, and True Crime Story: By Hilary Barton Morgan for Sundance TV and AMC+.
Hampton Service , co-produced by Teresa Sorkin, premiered on Discovery+ earlier this year and is available now on HBO Max. The second season will premiere in 2023, although it's unclear whether it will stream on Discovery+ or HBO Max, or maybe even the new combined services. Star Zac Erdem, who owns the restaurant, recently said the series was being picked up for a third season, scheduled to air in 2024, although this hasn't been confirmed.
Friedman said the show was his version of Blow Decks.
"It has quite a bit of foodie DNA, but these young people live at home and work together 24 hours a day," he added. "People are obsessed with the Hamptons, and it's the ultimate top-down .
He said he hopes it becomes a bigger brand. "Hopefully this can be a franchise that we can integrate with other shows with the same DNA."
In fact, the company is also gearing up for Stab That Cake , hosted by Jon Hanson and Jocelyn Delk Adams on December 30th on the Cooking Channel and Discovery+.
About crime True Crime Story. It Can't Happen Here aired for 14 episodes on Sundance and AMC+.
"There will always be great crime stories, whether they're told in Dateline or 48 Hours , but we wanted to tell them differently," he said.
They also have Serial Killer Manifesto , which will air on NBCUniversal Oxygen early in the new year. The series follows two men who kill at least 25 people while pursuing their horrific sexual fantasies in order to enslave young women in a remote cabin in the woods.
Then team up with Vicky Ward, the former Vanity Fair editor who extensively covered the Jeffrey Epstein case, in the new franchise, The Vicky Ward Investigations . "It's not a pure 'oxygen' crime, but a more complex crime that can feel very different," he added.
He also developed a project with actor and director John Leguizamo about God the Father, a cult leader who died in 1965 believing he was God.
Next to Las Vegas. The Story Of Sin City (w/t), another project produced by Bungalow Media + Entertainment for CNN. The four-part series, set to begin in 2023, is Warner Bros. one of the few remaining original series on the network. Epiphany. after recent layoffs. It chronicles the last 70 years of gambling capital through the famous mob businessmen and the figures who risked it.
That mix of genres is important to Friedman, who says documentaries weren't as popular as they are now when he started out.
"I like to think of us as a boutique studio," says Friedman. “About 75% of what we do on-site is unscripted, although my post-MTV experience has been mostly writing feature films. It has docs and follow-up docs that I like, so maybe my cognitive dissonance makes sense as to why this is a good way to go. But I think it's an exciting time to fly our flag with premium documentaries and content, even though we're going to be doing a lot of commercial-level documents and sequel formats, when you reach 50 or 100 episodes, that puts you in a different place .
Bungalow's investors include private equity group Loeb Partners and Jeff Sagansky, who sits on the company's board of directors and made headlines this summer with his vision for a transmission business model.
However, given the current documentary market and the ongoing M&A frenzy surrounding independent production companies, will Friedman sell it? He admitted to having a "preliminary" conversation.
“We will definitely consider strategic collaborations with partners that will allow us to evolve faster than the current scale. We're definitely thinking about it. The question is can we keep this amazing culture while maintaining the margins we have. But there are players I'd like to talk to because I think we're going to bring something to their system as they bring it to us."
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