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Marc Maron plays a great actor in “In Memoriam,” but the comedian and podcaster worried he didn’t have the chops to pull off a key moment in the new movie.

“I had to cry, but I didn’t know if I had that kind of control as an actor — I didn’t know if I can do that,” Maron remembers. “I really freaked out. I went back to my trailer and was full on DiCaprio in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’ I’m like, ‘I suck. What am I doing here?’”

It fell to Sharon Stone, Maron’s scene partner, to help him find his way through the emotional gauntlet. When Maron came back to set, Stone grabbed his hand and encouraged him to draw on the grief he feels over the 2020 death of his girlfriend, filmmaker Lynn Shelton.

“Why don’t you do the scene to Lynn, and I’ll make sure she’s here,” Stone told Maron.

It worked.

“Sharon’s kind of a mystical being,” Maron says. “She’s a powerful force. She said that, and it brought me to a space where I realized that Lynn was my biggest champion as an actor. She loved to direct me. I don’t know that I would have continued pursuing acting if it weren’t for her. So by doing it for Lynn, I got to that place emotionally that I think lands.”

“In Memoriam” debuts at this year’s Tribeca Festival, and Stone is thrilled with the experience of working with Maron, whom she first met during a 2018 interview for his podcast “WTF With Marc Maron.”

“We genuinely partnered in a very profound way on the scene,” Stone says. “In my career, I’ve been put up against the big dogs. They would always bring me in to put me up against the biggest, toughest guys, and oftentimes guys who were kind of a handful, but they knew that I could take it. But it was so different to work with someone like Marc, who was so open and so honest in their real feelings and emotions, and so available to be sincere with me. He was available to be my true partner, not my adversary.”

In the film, Stone plays Maron’s ex-wife, a fellow actor whom he met on a film set. Both have terminal illnesses, and their diagnosis has left them reassessing their lives and work in different ways. Maron’s character is obsessed with making it into the Oscars “in memoriam” segment; Stone’s is more reflective and resigned. Their tender encounter takes place in a grand setting with Stone resting in a chaise lounge in her mansion, outfitted in a robe and turban, looking like Norma Desmond.

“It’s a fulcrum point in the movie, because I have to take this moment to snap Marc out of this place he’s in, where he’s not living in reality,” Stone says.

Stone formed a bond with Maron during her spot on “WTF” and kept in touch with him over the years. She wrote him a condolence note when Shelton died of an undiagnosed blood disorder, which touched Maron greatly.

“It was a terrible tragedy,” Stone says. “He lost her so early, and she was so important to him.”

Even though their scene was complicated to navigate, Stone is thrilled with the finished film.

“Marc is remarkable,” she says. “He’s a real contender in this movie. I was completely blown away. Rarely do I see films that are this amazing anymore, that are about the human condition, and are so brilliant and so beautifully made.”

Going forward, Stone, who has shown she can nail a punchline in films like “The Muse,” hopes to do more comedy.

“I don’t know how many more villains I can really spit out,” she says. “I want to go back to my roots…I started in improv, and I did comedies like ‘Irreconcilable Differences.’ Being a comedic actress was my bag, and then I did ‘Basic Instinct,’ and everybody forgot I could be funny.”

Just don’t expect Stone to dust off her ice pick any time soon. She makes it clear she won’t be reprising her role as femme fatale Catherine Tramell in the reboot of “Basic Instinct” that Joe Eszterhas is reportedly writing for Amazon MGM Studios.

“How old is Joe Eszterhas?” Stone asks as she Googles the screenwriter’s age. “Oh, he’s 81. So I bet he’s really an expert on what’s sexy.”

Correspondents at “60 Minutes” in past years have tried to win an interesting challenge: Could they leave the show for a summer vacation with one story already in the can?

Doing so now is no longer a game.

In the wake of a massive ouster of the top staff of the venerable newsmagazine, serious questions have been raised about whether CBS News will be able to launch the 59^th season of “60 Minutes” on time in the fall. Getting the show off to a good start in mid-to-late September is crucial because the program uses the network’s Sunday-afternoon football games as massive generator of audience. “60 Minutes” has for years been the nation’s most-watched news program.

Now the question is whether the show will have enough on-air correspondents and production staff willing to assign, report, write, fact-check and edit three in-depth documentary-style vignettes of 12 minutes to 13 minutes length to show to football fans and news aficionados. Staffers are demoralized by the recent moves and questioning the motives of CBS parent Paramount Skydance, which has been eager to curry favor with the Trump administration as executives work to consummate a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.

“There’s not enough people,” says one person with knowledge of the inner workings of “60 Minutes.” This person says new episodes will provide tangible on-screen evidence of whether CBS News management was able to get production in gear. If “60 Minutes” offers an unusual number of “two parters,” or stories that take up two segments during the show, this person says, it’s a tell-tale sign there’s not enough content in the pipeline.

“I feel badly for the people there,” this person says. “They really don’t have anyplace else to go that’s at the same level, and they have to hang on” in an era of extreme tumult.

The ranks of “60 Minutes” senior leadership have been gutted. Over the past week, CBS News fired correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega; executive producer Tanya Simon; executive editor Dragaan Mihailovich; and two senior producers, Guy Campanile and Matthew Polevoy. A third correspondent, Anderson Cooper, announced his departure in February. The show has been rocked anew by the ouster of correspondent Scott Pelley,  who was fired Tuesday night after challenging Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, and Nick Bilton, a former technology reporter and documentary maker who has been installed as the new top producer at the newsmagazine.

The staff “is just unmoored,” says another person familiar with CBS News. “They want to know what’s going on” and how the show will have to change to accommodate Weiss’ vision.

CBS News declined to make executives available for comment. There is a sense that others will pick up some story duties, says one person familiar with the situation. Norah O’Donnell, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor, is expected to contribute stories, and CBS News personnel like Major Garrett have done segments for the program in recent weeks. Such an arrangement would likely help CBS News cut some of the costs of the newsmagazine, which are substantial.

Since Weiss’ arrival last year, information of that sort has been harder to get, according to three people with knowledge of the Paramount Skydance news operation. Weiss, a former opinion writer who left The New York Times to launch The Free Press, a digital site that often pokes at “woke” attitudes. Paramount paid a reported $150 million to acquire the site and has melded it with some CBS News operations, while Weiss holds sway over editorial and newsgathering personnel.

At a town hall meeting held in January, Weiss told CBS News personnel reporting the news that they should stop thinking “about which show will pick it up” or “what hour it will air on linear television,” said Weiss, but rather about: “how can we produce the most revelatory stories for an audience that expects the news immediately and on demand. And for younger generations for whom ‘streaming’ and ‘social” are simply: TV and the news.”

And yet, the TV shows continue to air.

Weiss’ interactions with many producers and reporters since that time have not been frequent, these people say. There appears to be a lot of enmity between the people Weiss has hired to form a CBS News “masthead” and the people tasked with making sure programs like “CBS Evening News” and “48 Hours” run as they should – and generate profits, to boot.

Pelley’s dramatic exit this week will no doubt create a new sense of camaraderie at “60 Minutes,” says one of the people familiar with CBS News. If Weiss and her team could make new outreach to the group and help them understand her vision for the task at  hand, and what Bilton would like to do, this person says, the two sides may find common ground in getting the show ready for the fall.

But many are skeptical Weiss can foment a spirit of cooperation after such a wholescale ejection of top personnel at the newsmagazine, which, despite assertions to the contrary, continues to win massive crowds – even without football – and has a healthy digital presence.

In the fall, says one of the people familiar with CBS News, “we will see pretty quickly how all of this actually affected ’60 Minutes’.”

Jordanian director Zaid Abu Hamdan is set to launch the follow up to his female empowerment drama “Daughters of Abdulrahman,” the gritty crime thriller “Boomah,” set to soon bow from the Shanghai International Film Festival that is becoming an increasingly prominent launching pad for Arab cinema.

Shot in Jordan during an especially challenging period for the war-torn region, “Boomah” segues from Hamdan’s dramedy about four semi-estranged sisters who join forces to contend with the Jordanian patriarchy with what is being described in promotional materials as “a raw, emotionally charged crime thriller about survival, motherhood and the people society leaves behind” that captures a side of Jordan rarely seen on screen.

With “Boomah” the Jordanian helmer continues to explore the female empowerment space with this tale of a notorious and knife-savvy female gang member, the film’s titular character, who becomes embroiled in a power struggle between street thugs and religious extremists while battling the traumas of her harrowing orphaned past.

Leading “Boomah” is Jordanian actress Rakeen Saad, known for her central roles in Netflix hit original series “AlRawabi School for Girls” and “The Giza Killer” and who also has a part in Terrence Malick’s long-gestating biblical drama “The Way of the Wind.” Saad is joined by Majd Eid (“Once Upon a Time in Gaza”), Joanna Arida (“AlRawabi School for Girls”), and Hanan Hilo (“Daughters of Abdulrahman”).

“Boomah was born from very local wounds, but its heart is universal: the need to belong, the pain of being unseen, and what happens when survival and pain become a language,” said Zaid Abu Hamdan in a statement for Variety. “I was inspired by stories of real women in Jordan who were feared, judged, and misunderstood, but rarely truly seen. To have the film meet the world for the first time at the Shanghai International Film Festival is a profound honor,” he added.

“Boomah” is about people at the very bottom of the food chain, the ones society ignores until it needs them, uses them or punishes them,” noted the film’s producer Gianluca Chakra. “These are people surviving on the margins, trying to force their way into a system that was never built for them.”

“Crime here is not glamour. It is labour, currency and survival. What drew us to the film was not the violence, but the humanity underneath it. Beneath the crime thriller is a story about motherhood, belonging and people fighting to carve out a place for themselves in a world that has already decided they don’t matter. That is why the film travels beyond Jordan. These people exist everywhere,” Chakra continued.

“Boomah” was produced by Chakra’s Front Row Productions, the production arm of Front Row Filmed Entertainment, in collaboration with Bounce Productions. The film received support from the Red Sea Fund and the Royal Film Commission – Jordan. Front Row Filmed Entertainment holds global rights to “Boomah” and place to release the film across the MENA region in the fourth quarter of this year.