Saturday Night Live cast member Heidi Gardner is a diehard Chiefs fan, and she worked for years to get Travis Kelce on the show. In a recent interview on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Gardner explained that executive producer Lorne Michaels had a pretty important condition before he would let Kelce host.
“The biggest swing I ever did in that department, and it did work, but it took a couple [of] years, was Travis Kelce,” Gardner explained. “I don’t want to take full credit from the show and the talent department, but I’m just, obviously, a big Chiefs fan, and I had seen him do like other little acting gigs and appearances, and I was like, ‘He’s funny, he’s charming.’ I had done the ESPYs with him, announcing something together.”
After years of continued pressure on the casting department, Gardner said that Lorne made himself clear. “Lorne was like, ‘Well, he has to win the Super Bowl.’ I was like, ‘That is so much pressure to ask!’ And then he won the Super Bowl!” she explained.
Gardner also explained that her campaign to get Kelce on the show was “pre-Taylor,” meaning it was before he was publicly dating Taylor Swift. That relationship made an entire new audience aware of the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, but he hosted the show in March 2023, months before the two started dating in September of that year.
“All my family came in for the show, all my friends. I got BBQ. We tailgated in the dressing room before the show,” the comedian said. She also added that Kelce joined her family for the tailgate, making him quite possibly the “only host in SNL history that’s ever tailgated before hosting the show.”
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?