The Business
Alice Wu’s ‘The Half of It’
The new Netflix film “The Half of It” is writer-director Alice Wu’s second movie.
By Kim Masters • • 28m ListenThe new Netflix film “The Half of It” is a coming-of-age dramedy that tackles love, friendship, self-discovery and tolerance.
It’s writer-director Alice Wu’s second movie — 15 years after her first. She wanted a deadline, so she wrote a $1000 check to the NRA, an organization she does not support, and told her friends if the script wasn’t done in five weeks, that check was going in the mail.
Wu explains why she picked Netflix as the home for “The Half of It,” despite her love of the old-school theatrical release. And she explains her on-again, off-again relationship with the industry, which started when she quit her job at Microsoft to make the groundbreaking 2005 indie “Saving Face.”
In this episode
2 storiesHollywood news banter: Trouble in TV advertising, ‘Hamilton’ to Disney+
This would usually be the time of year when the big broadcast networks gather in New York City for the upfronts. They’d pitch their shows to companies who would then spend billions of dollars buying TV advertising.
Read the story7 minAlice Wu on her LGBTQ film ‘The Half of It,’ and why she took a break from Hollywood
The new Netflix movie “The Half of It” is a modern-day “Cyrano de Bergerac” — a romance by proxy but with a few twists. Leah Lewis plays Ellie Chu, a bookish high school senior in a small, white town in eastern Washington. Ellie and her…
Read the story21 min
