Amid a production halt during a double strike, major talent agency CAA is undergoing a round of layoffs.

About sixty employees are set to be impacted — including agents, executives and support staff — within the next week, a source tells The Hollywood Reporter. The figure is a relatively small percentage of the thousands of staffers that work at the Century City-based representation giant led by Kevin Huvane, Richard Lovett and Bryan Lourd.

Multiple departments had been evaluating staffing levels even prior to when the Writers Guild of America strike began on May 2. When performer’s union SAG-AFTRA joined the strike on July 13, Hollywood settled in to a long summer as the dealmaking ecosystem ground to a halt.

Several talent agencies have cut staff in the ensuing months as the guilds faced off with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. For instance, Endeavor, the owner of fellow “Big 3” agency WME and fashion-focused IMG, estimated on August 8 that the impact of the actors’ and writers’ strikes would be about $25 million per month in revenue.

Talent and literary agency Verve, which reps many scribes, cut about 60 percent of its assistants and 3 agents in late May. And Big 3 firm UTA had already made a round of cuts, which it described as a single digit percentage of a workforce that totals 2,000 employees, in February.

Hollywood’s agencies went through retrenchment and conducted notable layoffs or furloughs during the COVID-19 shutdowns in the middle of 2020, also at a time of a widespread production halt. At that time, in July 2020, CAA said it cut 90 agents and executives and further furloughed 275 assistants and other staffers.

Since that time, CAA made the most consequential move in the Hollywood talent agency space, acquiring rival firm ICM in a megadeal that closed last June and added 425 of its employees to the payroll, with 105 staffers cut. At the time, the combined company was said to have 3,200 employees in 25 countries.

Deadline earlier reported CAA’s planned cuts on Thursday. 

This article was originally published by THR.com.

Following his 10-year prison sentence this week for shooting Megan Thee Stallion, Tory Lanez took to Instagram late Thursday (Aug. 10) to maintain his innocence and declare that he won’t “stop fighting till I come out victorious.”

Lanez (real name: Daystar Peterson) — who was convicted on three felony counts in December over the 2020 shooting — addressed the note to his “Umbrellas” fan group.

“I have never let a hard time intimidate me,” he wrote. “I will never never let no jail time eliminate me. Regardless of how they try to spin my words, I have always maintained my innocence and I always will.”

He writes that during his sentencing hearing, he took responsibility for “verbal and intimate moments that I shared with the parties involved,” but not for the shooting itself. “In no way shape or form was I apologizing for the charges I’m being wrongfully convicted of. I remain on the stance that I refuse to apologize for something that I did not do.”

Tuesday’s decadelong prison sentence for Lanez — which comes more than three years after the July 2020 shooting — was more than the probation sought by his lawyers but less than the 13 years prosecutors had suggested. The shooting occurred after Lanez, Megan Thee Stallion (real name: Megan Pete) and their friend Kelsey Harris left a party. According to prosecutors, Meg exited the vehicle and Lanez shot at her feet while shouting, “Dance, bi—!” Lanez was charged with the shooting in October 2022.

Read Lanez’s new statement in full below:

To The Umbrellas,

I have never let a hard time intimidate me. I will never never let no jail time eliminate me. Regardless of how they try to spin my words, I have always maintained my innocence and I always will.

This week in court I took responsibility for all verbal and intimate moments that I shared with the parties involved. … That’s it.

In no way shape or form was I apologizing for the charges I’m being wrongfully convicted of. I remain on the stance that I refuse to apologize for something that I did not do.

I’ve faced adversity my whole life and every time it looked like I would lose, I came out on top. This is nothing but another moment where my back is against the wall and I refuse to stop fighting till I come out victorious.

Tough times don’t last, tough people do.

To my family, friends and umbrellas thank you for your continued support.

See you soon.

A 17-year-old was indicted on a hate-crime murder charge in a stabbing that followed taunts and confrontation over a group of men dancing shirtless to Beyoncé as they gassed up their car, prosecutors said Thursday.

Prosecutors concluded O’Shae Sibley’s death was motivated by anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ bias, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said.

“It’s clear to me, under the circumstances of this case, that in substantial part, this attack was caused because people were offended by Mr. Sibley and his friends dancing and celebrating,” Gonzalez said.

The suspect is due in court Friday to answer the charge. It mirrors the charge on which he was arrested last week. If convicted, he faces at least 20 years in prison.

The Associated Press sent a text message to his attorney, Mark Pollard, seeking comment. Pollard’s voicemail box was full. The teen’s grandmother told the Daily News he was defending himself. Prosecutors have not released the suspect’s name.

The chain of events that ended in Sibley’s July 29 death began when he and his friends were dancing at a pump at a Brooklyn gas station, and another group of people began taunting them, authorities said.

Security camera video showed the two groups arguing for a few minutes. Both sides walked away, and then Sibley and a friend returned and confronted one of the others, who had stayed behind recording on his phone.

In the video, Sibley, 28, could be seen following that person and then lunging at him before the two disappeared out of the camera’s frame. A moment later, Sibley walked backward into view, checking his side, then collapsed to the sidewalk.

“What the video shows is that Mr. Sibley was rightfully in a position to speak out and protect himself and his friends from anti-gay and anti-Black slurs, and that what occurred after that was a crime,” said Gonzalez, a Democrat. He noted that Sibley and his friends were unarmed.

“Defending yourself from the anti-gay or anti-Black comments, arguing back, it’s not a cause for someone to take a weapon and do what was done in this case,” the prosecutor said. He added that he was confident the charges would be proven at trial.

Sibley performed with the dance company Philadanco in his native Philadelphia and in New York and took classes with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Ailey Extension program. He used dance to celebrate his LGBTQ identity in works such as “Soft: A Love Letter to Black Queer Men,” choreographed by Kemar Jewel.

About 200 people attended Sibley’s funeral Tuesday at a historic opera house in Philadelphia. His death has prompted an outpouring of tributes from politicians and celebrities, including Beyoncé and filmmaker Spike Lee.

Robbie Robertson, who died Wednesday (Aug. 9) at the age of 80, was a road warrior, songwriter and guitar hero who helped shape rock’s late-sixties golden age in The Band, provided or curated music for many of Martin Scorsese’s films and made several important solo albums. Over the years, he also emerged as one of rock’s most influential storytellers — myth-maker might be a better word, although he told true stories with dramatic resonance — first in Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz, later in the book Testimony: A Memoir and the Band documentary Once Were Brothers, and throughout his career as one of the most compelling raconteurs in the history of popular music.  

Robertson spent the first part of his career backing up Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan and then, with The Band, writing and playing songs rooted in American mythology. The stories were his, but the characters seemed so entrenched in the landscape that it sounded like they had been waiting for him to sing about them — Carmen and the Devil, Virgil Caine, the man with the stage fright. Many of these songs sketch out whole stories in small details — if you need to ask why Carmen and the Devil are walking side by side, you’re missing the point, but you can see it’s bad news from a mile away. 

Over the course of his time in The Band, Robertson seemed to age into a kind of mythic character in his own right, and in The Last Waltz, made about The Band’s farewell to the touring life and the star-studded concert they played to commemorate it, he started to examine rock’s own myths. “The road has taken a lot of the great ones,” he says in the movie. “It’s a goddamn impossible way of life.” Along with his bandmates, Robertson turned barstool stories about highway hotels and dodgy dive bars into widescreen epics. “Sixteen years on the road is long enough,” he says elsewhere in the movie, all of 33 at the time. “Twenty years is unthinkable.”  

More than any other work of the time, The Last Waltz gives the main characters of rock’s second chapter the chance to take a bow just as punk and disco took the stage. The concert, famously held at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 — complete with a turkey dinner and an orchestra for formal dancing — featured not only Band collaborator Bob Dylan, but also a Beatle (Ringo Starr), a Rolling Stone (Ron Wood), a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter (Joni Mitchell), a New Orleans pianist (Dr. John), a blues great (Muddy Waters) and a rock star who may have been celebrating the seventies in an eighties style (Neil Young, who according to unconfirmed legend had a visible particle of cocaine in his nose that had to be edited out). The film recounted the story of rock, right up to the point when it splintered into sub-genres.  

Robertson understood this vision better than his bandmates, who seemed to have found his concept pretentious. (The fact that he had a magnetic onscreen charisma that they lacked probably didn’t help, either.) “We were in the moment — we were playing songs we had hardly played before with people from Joni Mitchell to Muddy Waters — and all we could think about was trying to rise to the occasion,” Robertson told me in a 2016 interview. Over the years, the movie became its own myth, to the point that there have been tribute concerts commemorating what was essentially meant to be its own kind of tribute concert. (The film resonated so much with me that in 1998 I bought the movie poster, which has followed me to every apartment or office I’ve had since — a reminder of the music I grew up listening to that by then had come to seem a bit old-fashioned.) 

Robertson’s first solo album, released in 1987, also seemed shrouded in myth — both figuratively in songs like “Somewhere Down that Crazy River” and literally in co-producer Daniel Lanois’ haunted, reverb-heavy production. At a time when mainstream rock was growing slicker, Robertson found a way to maintain some mystery, partly thanks to a list of guest musicians that included U2, Peter Gabriel, Maria McKee and two former members of The Band. He followed that with the New Orleans-themed Storyville (in 1991), projects that explored Native American music and what was then called electronica (Music for The Native Americans in 1994 and Contact from the Underworld of Redboy in 1998), and much later two more solo albums (How to Become Clairvoyant in 2011 and Sinematic in 2019). 

In between those last two solo albums, Robertson published one of the best-ever music memoirs, Testimony, partly because he was there more than anyone else who remembers and he remembered more than anyone else who was there. Even this decision he cast in terms that loomed larger than life. “I just couldn’t carry around all of these stories anymore,” he told me in the 2016 interview. “There were too many and they got too heavy.” This sounds true enough, but it’s an unusually dramatic way to talk — you can practically picture the man weighed down by his memories, like a character out of one of the Scorsese movies for which he provided music. 

In the book, Robertson tells his story with the same eye for detail and epic sweep he used in his songwriting. “It’s a cinematic piece of work and I had to structure the scenes so they fold into one another; as opposed to, then in February this happened, and in March that happened,” he said in 2016. When we spoke, he talked about writing a second book, devoted to his later career — and it’s hard not to wish he had lived to complete it.  

Robertson had an incredible memory, and it says a lot about who he was that he even had a mythic — and true — explanation for it. In Testimony, he writes about how his birth father’s mother was a bootlegger who kept addresses and phone numbers in her head for safety. “My birth father,” he told me, “went on to become a gambler and won because he was a card counter.” You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried — and Robertson never needed to.