Illustrator/storyboard artist Janet Kusnick will be presented with an Art Directors Guild (ADG) Lifetime Achievement Award by the Illustrators and Matte Artists (IMA) Council. The celebration will take place at the 27th Annual ADG Awards on Saturday February 18, at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown. Making the announcement was Guild president Nelson Coates, ADG and Awards producers Michael Allen Glover, ADG and Megan Elizabeth Bell, ADG.
Kusnick, who is known for her creative storyboards for Silverado, George of the Jungle and Kill Bill 2, was selected by ADG’s Illustrators and Matte Artists (IMA) Council. She is one of four artists who will receive Lifetime honors, one for each ADG Council: Art Directors (AD); Set Designers and Model Makers (SDMM); Illustrators and Matte Artists (IMA); and Scenic, Title, and Graphic Artists (STG).
Said ADG Illustrators & Matte Artists Council Chair Tim Wilcox, “For over three decades, forty-four films and TV shows (and counting), Janet has been drawing storyboards and set sketches to visualize the script. As a formally trained artist in painting and sculpture, she discovered storyboarding while painting planets for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and 2010: The Year We Make Contact. As there were no formal classes for live-action storyboarding at that time, she taught herself, and learned on the job. We are thrilled to be able to showcase Janet and her amazing career by honoring her with this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Kusnick’s extensive resume includes Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, F. Gary Gray’s The Italian Job, Scott Derrickson’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and John Hillcoat’s The Road. Like many of her colleagues, Kusnick was self-taught, falling in love with storyboarding after training in sculpture and painting. Her first significant motion picture credits were Silverado, directed by Lawrence Kasdan, and George of the Jungle, from director Sam Weisman. Kusnick served as treasurer of the Art Directors Guild, IATSE Local 800’s Illustrators’ Craft Council and was a member of the Guild’s Scholarship Committee.
As previously announced, Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Baz Luhrmann (Elvis) and his producing partner and collaborator Academy Award- winning Catherine Martin will receive the Cinematic Imagery Award. Multi- Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) will be honored with the William Cameron Menzies Award, celebrating his visually striking and emotionally rich body of work.
The STG Council will present Michael Denering (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Batman Returns, Jurassic Park) with an ADG Lifetime Achievement Award. Two additional awardees from the AD and SDMM Councils will be announced shortly.
The Art Directors Guild’s Excellence in Production Design Awards honor excellence in production design in theatrical motion pictures, television, commercials, music videos and animated feature films.
ADG Awards are bestowed upon productions filmed in the U.S. by producers signatory to the IATSE agreement and upon foreign entries without restrictions.
Weinstein defense urges acquittal as prosecutors seek to revive a #MeToo-era rape conviction
Harvey Weinstein's defense urged jurors Tuesday to acquit him and put an end to a #MeToo-era rape case that has gone to trial three times, while prosecutors pressed to restore a onetime conviction that got unwound.
Weinstein, the former Hollywood honcho who has been imprisoned on various sex crime convictions since 2020, watched quietly as the two sides made their closing arguments about whether he raped hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann in a New York hotel in March 2013.
"She has taken on a false narrative about all of this," Weinstein lawyer Marc Agnifilo said.
"She has absolutely no motive to lie. None," prosecutor Nicole Blumberg countered, noting that Mann went through five days of grueling, deeply personal testimony.
Jurors, who are expected to start deliberating Wednesday, will have to sift through the complexities of a yearslong relationship between Weinstein, 73, and Mann, 40.
They met in early 2013, when she was trying to make it big in Hollywood. She testified that she anticipated a professional connection, was taken aback when he started making sexual advances but decided to have a relationship with the then-married, Oscar-winning producer.
A few weeks later, according to Mann, Weinstein abruptly took a room at a Doubletree hotel where she and a friend were staying. When she accompanied Weinstein upstairs to tell him she didn't want a sexual interlude, she testified, he trapped her in the room, grabbed her arms, insisted she undress, went into the bathroom for a time, and then raped her.
"He just treated me like he owned me," she testified last month.
Weinstein didn't testify, but his defense contends the encounter was consensual and part of a caring relationship that Mann fostered and leaned on... Read More