It Got Better will look at the other side of Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign
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In addition to reuniting on HBO’s The Comeback, Dan Bucatinsky and Lisa Kudrow have teamed up for a new inspiring web series, It Got Better, which will look at the other side of Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” viral campaign.
In parternship with Savage and L/Studio, the series will run for six episodes and feature a diverse group of LGBT celebrities, including Jason Collins, Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, and recent GLAAD Media Awards honorees George Takei and Laverne Cox.
“The series is a real passion project for me and Kudrow and Dan Savage,” Bucatinsky says of the series, which will run for the next six weeks.
The first episode stars Glee‘s Jane Lynch, who talks about overcoming her “affliction” and how New York’s piano-bar scene changed her life.
“My desire to play is stronger than my fear of rejection,” says Lynch. “Dealing with my sexuality as a young person started that balling rolling.”
An incredible new docuseries has hit the web that interviews out lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) celebrities as they share their journey to living freely and authentically as a reminder to the rest of us that it really does get better.
Launched by Lexus in collaboration with the It Gets Better Project, the “It Got Better” docuseries is a collaborative effort between actress Lisa Kudrow and actor and HuffPost Blogger Dan Bucatinsky with celebrities such as Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei, Laverne Cox and Jason Collins. This first episode in the six-part series features actress Jane Lynch and is hosted through the broadband channel L/Studio.
“I believe people come into our life — we draw our people to us,” Lynch shares in the above video. “Always keep your mind open, your heart open for those like-minded, like-hearted others. It doesn’t even have to be somebody else who is gay going through this, just somebody who is sympathetic. And they will come your way — you will find your people. And now I live in a world where I don’t give a shit if you have a problem with who I am.”
Check out the first episode in this incredible series above or head here to visit the L/Studio broadband channel.
Jane Lynch plays strong and confident Sue Sylvester on Glee, but she wasn’t always as self-assured as the cheerleading coach she portrays on TV.
“For me, to be ostracized would have been the worst thing,” Lynch says in the new webseries It Got Better of struggling to accept her sexual orientation as a teen. “To be thought of as different and not accepted was a fate worse than death.”
Lynch admits that she felt different long before she realized she was a lesbian.
“I enjoyed doing boys things. The boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to be about 10 and I had to fight to play baseball,” she says of growing up in a suburb just south of Chicago. “Every day, I didn’t know how I was going to be received because I would just hang out until I got to play. Deep down inside I knew that something else was going on.”
Eventually, when Lynch was 14, she learned the term “gay” and says she realized, “I’m the female version of that.” But she still struggled to come to terms with what she was feeling.
“It was almost like I had a disease I had been diagnosed. I had a journal and … I remember I wrote, ‘I am gay. No one can ever know this.’ And I went four blocks away and threw it out in somebody else’s garbage,” she says. “It led to a life of secrecy that I had to unravel.”
Now 53, Lynch looks back on her conflictions as a teen and uses her hard times to fuel her passions today.
“That persistence that kept me on the baseball field even when the boys didn’t want to let me play has served me,” she says in the webseries, which will also feature the stories of Tim Gunn, Orange Is the New Black‘s Laverne Cox, Tegan & Sara, George Takei and basketballer Jason Collins.
And Lynch hopes others can learn from her journey to self-acceptance.
“You are going to find something in you that is going to help you move on and make you a more extraordinary person,” she says. “And you’ll use that all through your life.”
Team One and Lexus have launched a new series on Lexus’ broadband channel L/Studio, entitled “It Got Better.”
“It Got Better” is a six-episode docuseries telling “the inspiring personal stories of a diverse group of LGBT actors, athletes and musicians including Jason Collins, Jane Lynch, Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei and Laverne Cox.” A collaboration between Team One, executive producers Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky, and the It Gets Better Project (executive producers Dan Savage and Brian Pines), the docuseries just launched with its first episode, featuring Jane Lynch, star of Glee and, more importantly, Party Down. Lynch tells her story of growing up identifying more with boys, discovering her sexuality and treating it as something she was afraid her peers would discover, to finally embracing and accepting it and finding a supporting community. It makes for compelling viewing, well worth the time if you have six minutes or so to spare (yes, this runs a bit long), and a promising start to the “It Got Better” series, which has the potential to do a lot of good for struggling teens. We look forward to upcoming installments (especially from George Takei).
In a new web series, It Got Better, Jane Lynch described her personal journey from closeted gay kid to highly visible gay celebrity. It wasn’t easy.
Lynch grew up in Dolton, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, and says she was considered different from a very young age.
“It was almost like I had a disease I had been diagnosed. I had a journal and … I remember I wrote, ‘I am gay. No one can ever know this.’ And I went four blocks away and threw it out in somebody else’s garbage,” she says. “It led to a life of secrecy that I had to unravel,” the actress and comedienne admits.
“I identified more with boy things. I enjoyed dressing like a boy,” she says. “The boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to be about 10 and I had to fight to play baseball.”
Is Jane Lynch the greatest creature living or dead e’er to walk the earth INCLUDING JOHN GOODMAN? It’s possible. It certainly seems possible. And I do not joke about John Goodman.
The emotional videos feature lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) celebrities sharing their journeys of accepting their sexual orientation to let others know it does get better.
Lynch grew up in Dolton, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, and says she was considered different from a very young age.
“It was almost like I had a disease I had been diagnosed. I had a journal and … I remember I wrote, ‘I am gay. No one can ever know this.’ And I went four blocks away and threw it out in somebody else’s garbage,” she says. “It led to a life of secrecy that I had to unravel,” the actress and comedienne admits.
“I identified more with boy things. I enjoyed dressing like a boy,” she says. “The boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to be about 10 and I had to fight to play baseball.”
She knew something was going on. But it wasn’t until she was 14 that she realized she was a lesbian.
After high school and college, she moved to New York to attend grad school at Cornell University, and started to be more open about her sexuality.
Now 53, the Glee star hopes her journey can inspire others to accept themselves.
The move allows the management company for Jared Leto, Penelope Cruz and Naomi Watts to step up its developing, packaging and producing for TV.
Untitled Entertainment, the management company behind Jared Leto, Penelope Cruz and Naomi Watts, is teaming with TV production company Matador to form Untitled/Matador.
The joint venture will enable both companies to develop, package and produce material for TV and digital outlets — an increasingly important area of the business for management companies.
Untitled has one of the top talent client lists, including Simon Baker, Elizabeth Banks, Connie Britton, David Caruso, Chris Cooper, Rosario Dawson, Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson, Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Lange, Melissa Leo, Ray Liotta, Madonna, Demi Moore, Mike Myers, Chris O’Donnell, Jeremy Renner, Sam Rockwell, Ian Somerhalder, Marisa Tomei, Uma Thurman, Sofia Vergara and Olivia Wilde.
The management company founded by Jason Weinberg and Stephanie Simon also has a stable of TV writers and directors including Ernest Dickerson, Scott Ellis, Tony Goldwyn, David Marshall Grant, Gabriele Muccino, Jeremy Podeswa and Mark Verheiden.
Jason Weinberg
Matador was co-founded by Jay Peterson and Todd Lubin in early 2013, and the company already boasts a slate of 14 TV series and specials in production in New York and Los Angeles. Veteran producer Jack Turner was recently brought on to head up Matador’s scripted department. Under the joint venture, Turner will work closely with the Untitled’s staff in Los Angeles, New York and London to develop, package and produce material.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity for us,” Peterson said. “Combining our production, development and financing capacity with Untitled’s incredible roster of talent as well as their top-notch management and production team essentially gives us the capabilities of a studio that inevitably will result in high-quality content across all platforms.
Attorney Jeanne Newman and Eric Wattenberg of CAA negotiated the deal on behalf of Matador. Attorney Jeff Bernstein repped Untitled.
The benefits of being an early bird have been understood by researchers for a while. Early risers are famously more likely to be successful, and there’s even evidence that they’re all-around better humans than night owls.
A recent study, for example, found that night owls are more likely to have higher rates of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and even psychopathy than their morning lark brethren. But however much morning people look down on those whose inner clock is set a little later, there’s an emerging understanding that there are some bright sides to sleeping in, too.
Night owls are more creative and smarter. Daylight-based schedules are a convention, andit takes a high IQ to think of a new way of structuring each day, posits a 2009 paper from the London School of Economics. According to that report’s logic, the earliest humans used the daylight hours to get stuff done, and trying a routine that’s evolutionarily a little different — like staying up late to work, or even to goof off — is the kind of thing more intelligent people tend to do. Innovation takes smarts, in other words.
Night owls are more relaxed. Early risers have higher levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with stress, according to British research from the late 1990s. People who woke earlier than 7:21 a.m. had the highest cortisol levels, and they stayed elevated as the day went on.
Night owls get better with time. Early risers may be up and at it the moment they spring out of bed, but give it some time and late risers will catch up: About an hour and a half after waking up, both early birds and night owls are equally alert and attentive. And in the early evening — or about ten and a half hours after waking up — late risers get a boost of energy and alertness; research has shown that night owls performed better at a reaction-time task later in the day than their early-bird counterparts, who often fell into an afternoon-slump brain-fog.
