The Business

Filmmakers and married couple Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton planned to release their film about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs before the 2016 presidential election. Then their star, Emma Stone, signed on to make La La Land and Battle of the Sexes got pushed back. Now their film -- about a battle against misogyny, gender discrimination and homophobia both on the tennis court and off -- suddenly has more resonance than they expected.

When Will & Grace co-creator Max Mutchnick went to his long-time writing partner David Kohan with the idea of reuniting the cast for a one-off web video, Kohan humored him. Little did he know the reunion would end up going far beyond that one short video. Will, Grace, Karen and of course, just Jack -- are now coming back to NBC for two new seasons.

In writer-director Mike White's new movie Brad's Status, Ben Stiller plays a man consumed with jealousy of friends from college, based on their social media. White tells us why he wanted to make a movie about ambition in the age of Instagram, and the challenge of making humanist movies when the studios only want the next superhero franchise.

When David Simon started shopping his new show The Deuce--about the rise and legalization of the porn industry--he quickly realized a lot of networks didn’t quite grasp his seriousness of purpose. The creator of The Wire and Treme tells us how The Deuce ended up back at his longtime TV home, HBO, and why he ended up making a show about porn in the first place.

Director Shawn Levy built a career on the Night at the Museum franchise, but wanted to break out of his box. He set out to produce, and this past year scored with the Netflix mega-hit Stranger Things, now up for 18 Emmys. He tells us how he went about getting the industry to reconsider him.

TV writer-producer Chuck Lorre has created some of the most successful multi-camera broadcast sitcoms ever, including Two and a Half Men, and The Big Bang Theory. Now he's entering a new stage in his career with two projects -- the Netflix pot comedy Disjointed and the single camera show Young Sheldon for CBS--that are pushing him outside his previous purview.

Billy Eichner has had recent roles in Hulu's Difficult People, Netflix's Friends from College, and in the upcoming season of American Horror Story on FX. But it's through his truTV game show, Billy on the Street, that he's in the Emmy race. He tells us about the evolution of his person-on-the-street antics and why not every celebrity is a good fit for the show.

Gigi Pritzker didn't plunge headlong into the movie business -- her original life plan was to run an NGO in Nepal. An accidental journey to film school set her on a path to producing lots of films, including the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water. But she'd never done television until Genius, on the life of Albert Einstein, demanded to be made as a series. The first season of the National Geographic anthology series is now up for 10 Emmys.

Bryan Fogel's original plan for his documentary Icarus was to investigate pervasive doping in cycling by becoming a human guinea pig. He recruited chemist Grigory Rodchenkov in Moscow to guide him. Then Rodchenkov was revealed as the architect of Russia's state-run doping program -- and he was ready to blow the whistle. Fogel helped Rodchenkov flee, and then things got really scary.

Actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish is having a star-is-born moment with the raunchy comedy Girls Trip. Haddish says the movie has already changed her life, and she has big plans for where her career goes from here. Haddish and Girls Trip director Malcolm D. Lee tell us about filming during the actual Essence Festival and yes, a certain scene involving a grapefruit.