By Thuy Ong, Bloomberg

AFTER THE adults were gone and the blood had dried, the children still had to keep a safe distance from one another. Move too close, and a shout rang out: “Airplane arms!” Then the young stars of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn reboot would raise their arms in a “T” and spread apart from their neighbors.

“It worked so well,” said Jon Heaney, the dedicated COVID-19 safety supervisor for the shoot. A remake of the 1984 cult horror flick, Children of the Corn features child actors as young zealots who rid their rural town of its adults. “We’d just yell it out if we thought people were getting too close, and the kids would do it straight away. The crew started doing it too.”

The film was still shooting in and around Sydney during the pandemic, a prime example of Australia’s efforts to get its growing movie industry up and running again. In mid-July the government added A$400 million ($285 million) in “location incentive” grants to the two-year-old program of tax breaks and enticements that first targeted Hollywood’s movie makers. Australia remains closed to international travelers, but the country’s carved out an exemption for movie cast and crew members.

Film and television production generated A$9.1 billion to Australia’s economy in the 2017-18 fiscal year, up 15% from five years previous. Now, as the country confronts its first recession in 29 years, the pandemic presents an opportunity. Along with New Zealand and a handful of European countries, Australia’s one of the few places to make a movie these days, according to research firm Olsberg SPI. And while Australia’s southeastern state of Victoria is fighting a new resurgence of COVID-19 cases, the country has largely avoided the massive outbreaks that have characterized global hot spots.

“What that really does say is how much of an opportunity there is for us,” said Kate Marks, chief executive officer of AusFilm, the government’s liaison to the film industry. “The spotlight’s been put on us because we are being looked at by other parts of the world as a safe place to do business.”

Australia released specific guidelines for filming during the pandemic in May. Actors who are sharing living quarters during the shoot are allowed to have physical contact on screen, like a hug between friends at the pub. Scripts have also been rewritten to minimize the risk of contagion, and face masks are used whenever possible when social distancing isn’t feasible. Bollywood films have also adopted similar measures.

Shooting for Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is about to resume after a four-month hiatus. Nicole Kidman’s new series, Nine Perfect Strangers, is due to start filming in Byron Bay, about 760 kilometers north of Sydney, this week. Cast and crew have been in quarantine, as New South Wales requires of all interstate travelers. The latest in the Thor franchise — Thor: Love and Thunder — is expected to go into preproduction before the end of the year.

Before the pandemic hit, 2020 was on track to be the biggest year in Australia for productions, according to Screen Australia, the government liaison to the film and TV industry. That seems unlikely now, but the sector is still a bright spot for the economy. Ausfilm estimates they’ve received A$1.2 billion worth of production inquiries over the past few months on a range of US-backed projects.

Filming in Queensland has also started up again. The Warner Bros. biopic Elvis was in production there until it was halted by the pandemic.

“We’re all getting inundated with calls, people saying how can we come down and film,” CEO of Screen Australia, Graeme Mason, said in an interview. MGM is looking at filming George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing in Sydney, long planned prior to COVID-19, but the start date is still to be determined. The sequel to James Cameron’s Avatar is currently filming in New Zealand.

Even with the government’s encouragement, filming Children of the Corn mid-pandemic wasn’t exactly easy, said Heaney. “You’re dealing with an entire crew who were on edge constantly, the pressures were never ending, and dealing with government bodies that were asking what are you doing to stay safe,” he said.

On top of that, Heaney also had to keep the mood light. “We had to make it a safe and friendly environment for the kids,” he said. “It was good for the crew’s morale as well.”

LOS ANGELES — Singer-actress Selena Gomez has been cooking up a storm during the coronavirus lockdown and is now ready to share her hilarious and sometimes embarrassing efforts with the rest of the world.

Selena + Chef, a 10-episode unscripted series in which famous chefs appear remotely to teach Gomez to cook dishes ranging from omelets to octopus, gets its debut on the HBO MAX streaming platform on Aug. 13.

It was shot using remote cameras inside Gomez’s kitchen in her Los Angeles area home where the “Lose You to Love Me” singer was in quarantine with her grandparents and three friends.

“I thought this would be something lighthearted, because I was getting definitely down,” Gomez, 28, told television reporters during a preview on Wednesday.

“This was an opportunity to make people smile. I hope they are going to laugh because I look like a fool,” said Gomez, whose 185 million Instagram following is one of the largest in the world. “I love cooking, I just don’t know how to do it all the time.”

Spills, burns, and sometimes inedible dishes emerge as chefs including Antonia Lofaso, Ludo Lefebvre, and Roy Choi appear on screen from their own kitchens to teach the former Disney Channel star how to tackle pasta, tacos, cookies and other meals.

The octopus did not go so well. “People really didn’t like that,” Gomez recalled. And the French omelet turned out to be more complicated than she envisaged. “It was really difficult because I am so used to doing it the American way,” said Gomez.

Gomez said she has made several of the dishes again since filming ended, but asked what she was best at whipping up fast she kept to her old favorites.

“I can kill PB and J,” she said of her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. — Reuters

THE press group that organizes the annual Golden Globe awards was accused of excluding journalists that might compete with its members.

The importance of the Golden Globes to the entertainment industry allows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose members vote on the awards, to monopolize access to junkets and interviews with “hot” actors and directors, cutting out non-members, Norwegian entertainment journalist Kjersti Flaa said in an antitrust lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Los Angeles.

Flaa says the group’s exclusionary practices are inconsistent with its status as a tax-exempt organization, which she says obligates it to protect the interests of all foreign entertainment reporters in Southern California, whether members or not. According to the lawsuit, applicants seeking to join the group are almost always rejected because most of its 87 members are unwilling to share or dilute the “enormous economic benefits” they receive as members.

“The HFPA is so focused on protecting its monopoly position and tax-free benefits that it has adopted by-law provisions that exclude from membership all objectively qualified applicants who might possibly compete with an existing member,” Flaa said.

The relatively obscure membership of the group that picks the Golden Globes and rumors that the process is rife with corruption are a staple of jokes during the awards ceremony. In 2016, host Ricky Gervais joked that stars wouldn’t want to miss a chance to win a Golden Globe, “particularly if their film company has already paid for it.”

The association said it hadn’t yet been served with the complaint.

“The HFPA takes seriously its obligations as an organization and its dedication to foreign journalism and philanthropy, and it will vigorously defend against these baseless claims,” the group said in an e-mailed statement.

The case is Flaa v. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, 20-CV-06974, US District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). — Bloomberg