Yesterday, Meryl Streep presented her friend and long-time collaborator Ann Roth at the Director Guild of America Honors in New York City. Roth created costumes for 14 of Streep’s projects, from Mike Nichols’ “Silkwood” in 1983 to Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” earlier last year. Pictures from the event have been added to the photo gallery.

Today, more than 98 million adolescent girls around the world are not in school. That’s a lot of empty desks—and a lot of dreams that are being cut short. When girls get the opportunities they deserve, amazing things start to happen; poverty goes down, economies grow, families get stronger, and babies are born healthier. And the world, by all accounts, gets better. Join the Global Girls Alliance to take action to help adolescent girls and the grassroots leaders working to educate them. As they write on their website, “It’s simple: when girls go to school, the world gets better. Hear from some of our friends—Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, John Legend, Natalie Portman, David Beckham, and more—about why they’re excited to be a part of the Obama Foundation’s Global Girls Alliance, a program that will engage people around the world to take action to help adolescent girls and the grassroots leaders working to educate them”. To learn more, visit globalgirlsalliance.org.

According to Deadline, Netflix has committed to finance and release The Laundromat, the Steven Soderbergh-directed drama about the Panama Papers scandal. David Schwimmer has just joined a killer cast that is led by Gary Oldman, Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas. Other cast circling include Will Forte and Riley Keough. The film has a script by Scott Z. Burns, based on the Jake Bernstein book Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite. Schwimmer will play Matthew Quirk, an attorney who speaks on behalf of one of the insurance companies after twenty elderly passengers die on a boating excursion. The boating company learned its insurance isn’t the large company it thought it was, but merely just a P.O. box in Nevis. Quirk would eventually kill himself after seeing no way out of the liability situation, but the incident triggers lawyers, government officials, and more to track down these shell companies. Those investigations lead to the laundering geniuses at the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, who created hundreds of thousands of ‘companies’ to help the wealthy avoid paying taxes. The scandal drew in several world leaders, including former UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Iceland Prime Minister Sigmunder Gunnlaugsson, the latter of whom resigned on April 5, 2016, after it was revealed he and his wife set up an offshore shell company in 2007 in the British Virgin Islands; he then sold his half of the company to his wife for $1 on the last day of 2009 to shield them from a new law that would have required him to declare his ownership as a conflict of interest. Among the swarms of famous people named in the leaked documents was current President of the United States Donald Trump — already embattled over charges his empire was built by avoiding taxes — and director Pedro Almodovar, Jackie Chan and Emma Watson. Bernstein was part of a team of journalists who formed the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to break the Panama Papers story. The leak of data — 11 million records revealed — was the largest in corporate and government history.

Bustle has an in-depth article on “Mary Poppins Returns”, Rob Marshall’s work behind the scenes and news on which songs will be performed – brace yourself for a musical number with Meryl Streep: Mary Poppins Returns is Blunt’s “third film with Meryl Streep,” the actor says, referencing The Devil Wears Prada and Into the Woods. “What a stalker she is.” In the film, Streep plays a character named Topsy, adapted from P.L. Travers’ books, who is an Eastern European distant cousin of Mary’s and lives in a fixit shop that turns upside down every Monday. Sounds a bit like Uncle Albert and his penchant for levitation, doesn’t it? The movie’s production designer teased some fun instrumental moments in Streep’s big “Turning Turtle” musical moment, because Topsy is more apt to turn a broken instrument into something else rather than fix it. When Meryl was here,” Platt recalls of the actor’s time on set, “she turned to me and said ‘it feels like we’re giving a gift to the word.'” That’s the joy that everyone involved with the movie seems to be taking in telling this new story and singing these songs. You can read the full article at Bustle with many thanks to Glenn for the heads-up!

A couple of wonderful new magazine scans have been added to the photo gallery, with many thanks to Alvaro, Maria and Chan for their generous contributions. A full list of all added scans can be found below. Enjoy!

Although Meryl Streep was in the news this year for a variety of reasons – including her response to the allegations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein – as an actress, she did what she always does and threw her weight behind a story she believed in. For her role as publisher Katharine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s The Post – the true story of The Washington Post’s attempts to publish the Pentagon Papers and expose a massive government cover-up in 1971 – Streep earned a record 21st Oscar nomination. In playing the part, Streep endorsed a timely message – namely that a rigorous, free press is an essential part of a healthy democracy, which we should not only support, but celebrate and defend. Here, she writes an exclusive letter for PORTER about why we need good reporters now more than ever.

We need to protect, defend and thank the current crop of journalists around the world, because they, their scruples and their principles are the front-line defense of free and informed people.

EXCLUSIVE: Meryl Streep's open letter in defence of the free presshttps://t.co/03Q3No7a3h pic.twitter.com/B9f2yNXnpX

— PORTER magazine (@PORTERmagazine) 26. September 2018

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Meryl Streep is the latest star to join the ‘Late Show’ host for an evening to raise money for the organization that presents the New Jersey film festival. Stephen Colbert will be joined by Meryl Streep for this year’s edition of his annual Montclair Film benefit set for Dec. 1. The Late Show star will host an evening with the three-time Oscar winner onstage at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in downtown Newark. All proceeds from the evening will benefit Montclair Film, the nonprofit that presents the annual Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey, which Colbert has long supported. Past editions of the annual Montclair Film benefit have featured Colbert in conversation with Jonathan Alter, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Steve Carell, J.J. Abrams, John Oliver and Samantha Bee. The 2019 edition of the Montclair Film Festival will run May 3-12. Many thanks to Glenn for the heads-up!

On Friday, Meryl Streep broke some new ground by serving as questioner, conducting a Q&A with real-life longtime pal Tracey Ullman after a New York screening of the season premiere of the latter’s HBO sketch-comedy show “Tracey Ullman’s Show”. Hosted by Tribeca TV, the Q&A began with Tribeca founder Jane Rosenthal introducing Streep as “Tracey Ullman’s very best dearest friend,” with Streep and Ullman engaging in an enlightening chat. As Streep recalled, the two met when they were cast in the 1985 film “Plenty”, when Ullman was just 21. “I met you when I was 32,” Streep said, “and I said to my husband, ‘I think I’ve made a new friend.’ It’s hard to make a new friend when you’re old and famous.” Since then, the pair have remained close. “We had babies at the same time, shared life experiences,” Ullman said. “People ask me, ‘Do you and Meryl talk about acting when you get together?’ Are you kidding me?” The conversation, as it inevitably does these days, eventually turned to politics, with Streep praising Ullman’s uncanny impressions of such political figures as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British PM Theresa May. “I found that the most interesting women I could impersonate were politicians,” Ullman explained, admitting that Merkel is one of her favourites — both to impersonate and simply in general. “Could you imagine being her, the only girl in the room with Putin and Berlusconi and George W. Bush?” Responded Streep: “She holds her own.”

London’s most magical nanny is back, over half a century since she first arrived on our screens, and by the looks of it, she hasn’t aged a day since. Emily Blunt takes over Julie Andrews’ iconic titular role in the first full trailer for Mary Poppins Returns, a delightful and welcome throwback to the 1964 original. The trailer promises that the style of Mary Poppins Returns will be a strong throwback to the original, bringing back elements like musical numbers and 2-D animation that have fallen out of favor since the 1960s. Mary Poppins Returns is directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, from a screenplay by David Magee, and screen story by Magee & Marshall and John DeLuca, and is based upon The Mary Poppins Stories by PL Travers. Hamilton founding father Lin-Manuel Miranda takes his best shot at an English accent playing Poppins’ friend Jack in the trailer, an optimistic street lamplighter helping bring light and life into the streets of London. (Rest assured, he also gets the chance to do a little dancing, and Blunt the chance to sing a few bars, as this, like the original, is a musical.) Also starring are Angela Lansbury, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, a redheaded Meryl Streep and a returning Dick van Dyke. Mary Poppins Returns arrives in theaters Dec. 19. Screencaptures from the trailer have been added to the photo gallery, alongside the new poster for the film.

There’s no denying that the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have had a significant impact on Hollywood. But does that mean that the industry is in for a long overdue sea change? Not without taking the right action, and not without raising the right awareness. In “This Changes Everything”, director Tom Donahue and actress Geena Davis — who also founded the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media — reveal just how gender-biased the film industry really is, by laying bare the raw statistics and providing essentially irrefutable, numerical evidence as to how female filmmakers, actors and even behind-the-scenes crew members have been systematically discriminated against going back decades. The result is eye-opening, to say the least, but as the film makes abundantly clear, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Also featuring interviews with some of Hollywood’s biggest names — including Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain and Natalie Portman – “This Changes Everything” isn’t just a telling exposé of the dark side of the industry. It’s also an affirming look at how people are willing to come together to change the situation for the better. “This Changes Everything” makes its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Its runtime is 1 hr. 37 min. Many thanks to Glenn for the heads-up.