{"id":437942,"date":"2026-01-30T01:51:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T01:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/437942\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T01:51:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T01:51:08","slug":"safdie-rumors-and-mudslinging-begins-as-oscars-heat-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/437942\/","title":{"rendered":"Safdie Rumors and Mudslinging Begins as Oscars Heat Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFor the past year, rumors have swirled surrounding the nature of the professional split of Benny and Josh Safdie<\/a>, brothers and directors who together made defining A24<\/a> films of the 2010s, like Good Time and Uncut Gems. They found themselves in an unusual situation for 2025: Each came out with a major, unusually pricey film for the expanding studio that the other was not involved in, toplined by a huge star (Dwayne Johnson<\/a> in Benny\u2019s The Smashing Machine<\/a> and Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet<\/a> in Josh\u2019s Marty Supreme<\/a>, respectively), and expected to figure prominently into the awards conversation. Their releases were only a few months apart. They spoke carefully and respectfully of moving on from one another in their filmmaking careers.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEmotionally, it was different \u2014 you spend so much time directing with one person \u2014 but it felt natural in some ways,\u201d Josh told me in October<\/a>. A few months before that, I\u2019d asked Benny<\/a> about having their own movies premiering a few months apart from each other. He called the moment \u201cexciting\u201d: \u201cIt was just fun to know that we were both doing something at the same time at separate moments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe tone there is strikingly at odds from the cover headline for Monday\u2019s inaugural California Post edition: \u201cOscar Wild: Shocking truth behind Safdie brothers\u2019 mystery split.\u201d The story<\/a> argues that an incident on the set of 2017\u2019s Good Time precipitated the break-up. The formerly incarcerated Buddy Duress, brought in as part of the Safdies\u2019 and casting director Jennifer Venditti\u2019s street-casting process, allegedly exposed himself to and lewdly propositioned a 17-year-old girl making her screen-acting debut in the movie, with Josh directing from the monitor and continuing to roll cameras while Benny was operating the boom mic. The situation had previously been reported<\/a> by the Post story\u2019s writer, Tatiana Siegel (formerly of The Hollywood Reporter), who wrote that Josh knew of the girl\u2019s age later that day (following the incident), but Benny did not \u2014 until her initial reporting surfaced a few years ago. \u201cIt was the final straw for Benny,\u201d the story asserted.<\/p>\n

\n\tSources close to the brothers acknowledge they currently have a \u201ccomplicated relationship,\u201d but insist that the situation is far more nuanced than the fallout of a years-old incident, even if it did play a part. They attended each other\u2019s premieres last year and also spent Thanksgiving together. They have different styles of working, I\u2019m told, and both have also previously spoken of a creative motivation for going their separate ways. \u201cI was like, What do I want to do?\u201d Benny told me last summer of the thinking behind making Smashing Machine on his own. \u201cIt was literally like, \u2018What about the thing you haven\u2019t stopped thinking about for four years? That\u2019s it!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMarty Supreme was nominated for nine Oscars last week<\/a>, including best picture, actor (Chalamet), director (Josh Safdie), and original screenplay (Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, who also co-wrote Good Time and Uncut Gems). Where Marty Supreme is A24\u2019s highest-grossing film ever in North America with $86.2 million to date, The Smashing Machine struggled at the box office and, despite strong reviews for Johnson (he was nominated for a Golden Globe), received only a make-up and hairstyling nomination from the Academy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Post story has sparked speculation around town and online, with several veteran insiders unaffiliated with either movie raising an eyebrow at the timing and nature of the story. Yet its reported details, however in the past, remain disturbing. Josh and Benny Safdie declined comment for this story.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJosh and Benny Safdie accepting the 2020 Spirit Award for best director for Uncut Gems<\/p>\n

\n\tThere was also the matter of a separate story about Marty Supreme that had been published the week prior, on the day that Oscar nominations were announced \u2014 and that also took aim at its campaign. The Daily Mail headline<\/a>: \u201cUgly row threatens to cloud Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s bid for Oscar glory.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe family of Marty Reisman, the late table-tennis champion whose story inspired Safdie to make Marty Supreme, told The Daily Mail that they did not bless the film and argued the producers \u201cprofited while externalising harm, and invoked Marty\u2019s name without attribution or compensation.\u201d (Chalamet\u2019s character is named Marty Mauser.) With an original narrative and various invented character details \u2014 though Reisman and Mauser do share certain physical traits and biographical notes, including a stint performing for the Harlem Globetrotters \u2014 Josh Safdie and his colleagues have argued they wrote a fictional story.<\/p>\n

\n\tJosh grew up surrounded by table tennis, with several generations of players in his family, and committed to making a film set in the world once his wife, Sara Rossein (executive producer and researcher for Marty Supreme), picked up a copy of Reisman\u2019s autobiography, The Money Player. \u201cIt had this kind of funky-looking guy on the cover,\u201d Safdie told me in the fall. \u201cI showed it to Timmy because he and I were talking at the very beginning of all of this. I said to him, \u2018I want to do a movie in this world. Check out what this player looks like.\u2019 He\u2019s like, \u2018Holy shit, that looks like me.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJosh called Reisman\u2019s biographical notes in the film points of \u201chomage,\u201d explaining, \u201cHe was my entry point into the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tA few days after the Daily Mail article was published, several journalists from various outlets (including myself) received an email linking to a story aggregating its contents. \u201cNever reward any screenwriter, producer, or filmmaker who embellishes the truth especially when it reprehensibly profits off of one who is no longer alive along with their beleaguered families,\u201d the conclusion of the email read, before being signed off by a person named Sal Davis. The email was screenshotted on X <\/a>by The Bulwark\u2019s culture editor and critic, Sonny Bunch, who wrote, \u201cBetween this and the California Post story on the Safdie split, someone\u2019s really running an old-school Weinstein Company-style smear campaign.\u201d It\u2019s a sentiment I\u2019ve been hearing a lot over the last few days.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe are beyond the era of old-school Oscars smear campaigns, of course, and now firmly navigating the murkier waters of the social-media era. Just take last year\u2019s big awards-season big scandals. Hateful old X (then Twitter) posts from Emilia P\u00e9rez star Karla Sof\u00eda Gasc\u00f3n were uncovered by the writer Sarah Hagi, and promptly derailed that movie\u2019s campaign; the kerfuffle around The Brutalist<\/a>\u2019s use of AI for Hungarian dialogue began after editor D\u00e1vid Jancs\u00f3 discussed it in an interview with the video-tech publication Redshark News \u2014 not exactly a typical awards-promotion destination.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYet Marty Supreme finds itself in a more traditional spotlight, taking up inflammatory Page Six and Daily Mail headlines, even as it\u2019s considered a longshot to win any Oscars beyond best actor, for which Chalamet remains the front-runner, and original screenplay, where it\u2019s a player in a competitive race (its flag was planted early with a win for the New York Film Critics Circle prize). Real people and their loved ones speaking out against fictional films either directly or loosely inspired by them is also a longstanding tradition in this game. Other original-screenplay contenders to have faced this range from T\u00e1r<\/a> to Selma<\/a>. In the former\u2019s case, there was little impact; in the latter\u2019s, after all was said and done, its final nomination tally surely took a hit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for the impact on Marty Supreme? That remains to be seen, but one unaffiliated insider put it to me best: \u201cHere we go again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story has been updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the past year, rumors have swirled surrounding the nature of the professional split of Benny and Josh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[17979,4224,195911,88,56101,76819,56102,79986,74423,56103],"class_list":["post-437942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-a24","tag-dwayne-johnson","tag-emilia-perez","tag-entertainment","tag-josh-safdie","tag-karla-sofia-gascon","tag-marty-supreme","tag-the-brutalist","tag-the-smashing-machine","tag-timothu00e9e-chalamet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}