Franklin Leonard had a job in Hollywood reading scripts to find suitable projects to move forward. Fifteen years ago, he sent around an anonymous email to other people with the same job asking them for the best scripts they had, promising to send anyone who contributed the consolidated list. He got some good scripts, he …

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“Ad Astra” director James Gray’s conversation with New York Magazine critic Bilge Ebiri about filmmaking as as (maybe more) fascinating as the film itself. Ebiri writes: Gray himself is among the sincerest of interview subjects, a man who will openly discuss what he was trying to accomplish with certain scenes in his pictures, as well …

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Producer Gareth Neame explains how he came up with the original idea for the “Downton Abbey” series, what went into adapting it for a feature film, why Americans and British fans see it differently, and why it is that fans respond to it so strongly, and confesses, at last, which is his favorite character. What …

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Tonight on TCM, “Cinemability: The Art of Inclusion” tells the story of disability representation in films, followed by some classic, if not consistent with current standards, examples, including “Freaks” (“You’re one of us now!”), “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and “Johnny Belinda,” with Oscar-winner Jane Wyman as a young deaf woman. For many years, it seemed …

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