Aurelia Butler

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    The Tribeca Festival, Beyond the Spotlight

    From the ticket booth and the red carpet to a restaurant and a theater, here are stories from people not in the spotlight.When it comes to who gets the most attention during the Tribeca Festival, the actors, the directors and the celebrities who walk the red carpet are foremost.But behind the scenes, there are many people who aren’t under the spotlight, yet are integral to the event nonetheless. Without them, the festival, which runs Wednesday through June 16, would not happen.These players include the attendees and the employees — more than 600 of them, according to the festival’s chief executive, Jane Rosenthal, who co-founded the festival with Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff. This staff works across 18 departments, ranging from security and box office to production and operations.Rosenthal calls them the festival’s invisible figures. “As a guest and supporter, you, of course, want to have a great time, but the team who brings it to life ensures that you have it,” she said. “They keep guests happy and the schedule running.”Here are four snapshots of people who are hidden from the spotlight’s glare, but key to the festival.Angela Robinson, a customer service manager of the call center for the festival’s ticket sales. She has gotten to know repeat visitors and said, when they return, “we pick up exactly where we left off.”Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    L.G.B.T.Q. Movies and Documentaries That Celebrate Pride

    From “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” to “Gay USA,” seven movies that will fill your screen with joy, history and rainbows.Pride Month is here, which means queer people and their allies will be taking to the streets for parades and protests and parades that look a lot like protests. There are dance parties, cultural events and unexpected gay histories to have fun with too.But while boozy drag brunches and silent discos under the stars are fun and all, Pride can also happen onscreen and from the comfort of your couch. Tearful romances, family-friendly comedies, revelatory documentaries: Pride Month is a ripe time for discovering how the movies mirror queer lives as they were and still can be.In these seven films, Pride comes out in all its messy, sexy, lovely glory.‘The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.Murder or suicide? That’s the heartbreaking question that fuels David France’s documentary about Marsha P. Johnson, the trailblazing transgender activist, performer and high-profile elder of the Stonewall uprising who was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992. Yet embedded among the investigative elements of the film is a treasure trove of archival footage of Johnson, described in a 2018 obituary in The New York Times as “a fixture of street life in Greenwich Village.” To watch Johnson resiliently parade down Christopher Street during Pride, her beaming smile accentuated by her signature glossy lip, is to see a revolution in heels.‘Gay USA’ (1977)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Darryl Hickman, Prolific Child Actor of the 1940s, Dies at 92

    He was in “The Grapes of Wrath” and other films. As an adult, he was seen often on TV. He later oversaw daytime programming at CBS and taught acting.Darryl Hickman, who worked with top directors as a child actor in the 1940s, shifted to television roles in the ’50s, and succeeded Robert Morse as the star of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” in the early ’60s, died on May 22 at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 92.His wife, Lynda (Farmer) Hickman, confirmed the death.Mr. Hickman viewed himself as a character actor, never a star, during his childhood in Hollywood.“I was happy doing what I did,” he said on a panel discussion moderated by Robert Osborne on TCM in 2006 with three former child actors, Dickie Moore, Jane Withers and Margaret O’Brien, all of whom he acknowledged had been stars, unlike himself. “I knew I wasn’t in their category.”In 1940, when he was 8, he beat out dozens of other actors for the part of Winfield Joad, a brother of Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda), in “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Ford’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel about an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family of tenant farmers who join a fraught journey to California.Mr. Hickman recalled being on a darkened set watching Mr. Fonda shoot his farewell scene with Jane Darwell, who played Ma Joad, in which he tells her, “Wherever you can look — wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.”“I knew I was watching great acting,” Mr. Hickman said in an online interview. “It was so simple and so real and so honest and so truthful and not acted at all.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    J. Lo Cancels ‘This Is Me … Live’ Tour This Summer

    The singer and actress said she was “heartsick and devastated” about the decision, which comes on the heels of a hit Netflix movie and persistent rumors about her marriage.Jennifer Lopez announced on Friday that she has canceled her “This Is Me … Live” summer tour. In a message on her website she said she was “heartsick and devastated” about the decision.“Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary,” she continued, promising her fans that they’d be “together again.”An accompanying statement from Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, said that “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” and that tickets bought through Ticketmaster would be refunded automatically.The tour, scheduled for arenas across the country, appeared to be struggling with ticket sales; earlier this year, a handful of dates had been canceled and several shows appeared to have a number of unsold seats, Variety reported in March.The cancellation comes during a time when Lopez, 54, has been in the spotlight for both her work and her personal life. She currently stars in the sci-fi action thriller “Atlas,” which has been the No. 1 film on Netflix in the United States since its debut last week.And in February, she released an expansive, ambitious project, which she had poured $20 million of her own money into. It included a studio album, “This Is Me … Now”; an accompanying musical film, “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”; and a making-of documentary, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” which stars her husband, the actor and director Ben Affleck, 51. The pair also appeared together in an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts that debuted during this year’s Super Bowl.Despite the recent collaborations, rumors have been swirling for weeks that their marriage is in trouble, with tabloids offering reports almost daily on the state of their union. Lopez and Affleck were famously minted as “Bennifer” when they dated from about 2002 to 2004, a period that included a brief engagement. They reunited in 2021 and married in July 2022.A representative for Lopez did not immediately respond on Friday to questions about the tour cancellation or the reports about her marriage to Affleck. More

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    Doug Ingle, the Voice of Iron Butterfly, Is Dead at 78

    His biggest hit, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” was a 17-minute psychedelic journey that epitomized 1960s rock indulgence. But after just a few years in the limelight, he walked away.Doug Ingle, the lead singer and organist of Iron Butterfly, the band that turned a purportedly misheard lyric into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” the 17-minute magnum opus that propelled acid rock into the outer reaches of excess in the late 1960s, died on May 24. He was 78.His death was confirmed in a social media post by his son Doug Ingle Jr. The post did not say where he died or specify a cause.Mr. Ingle was the last surviving member of the classic lineup of Iron Butterfly, the pioneering hard rock act he helped found in 1966. The band released its first three albums within a year, starting with “Heavy” in early 1968, and, after a lineup shuffle, cemented its place in rock lore with its second album, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” released that July.“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” spent 140 weeks on the Billboard album chart, peaking at No. 4, and was said to have sold some 30 million copies worldwide. A radio version of the title song, whittled to under three minutes, made it to No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.But it was the full-length album version — taking up the entire second side of the LP in all of its messy glory — that became a signature song of the tie-dye era. With its truncheonlike guitar riff and haunting aura that called to mind a rock ’n’ roll “Dies Irae,” the song is considered a progenitor of heavy metal and encapsulated Mr. Ingle’s ambition at the time:“I want us to become known as leaders of hard rock music,” Mr. Ingle, then 22, said in a 1968 interview with The Globe and Mail newspaper of Canada. “Trend setters and creators, rather than imitators.”A psychedelic dirge but also a love song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” captured a 1960s spirit of yin-yang duality — much like the band’s name itself. There have been varying origin stories regarding its mysterious title, with its overtones of Eastern mysticism; the band’s drummer, Ron Bushy, said in a 2020 interview with the magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby that it grew out of an inebriated garble.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Revisiting the Women Who Defined Lilith Fair’s Sound

    Hear songs by Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, Meredith Brooks and more.Sarah McLachlan onstage at Lilith Fair.Susan Farley for The New York TimesDear listeners,Every once in a while, it’s good to be reminded that Sarah McLachlan is more than just the voice behind that depressing pet commercial that makes me look away from my TV. (You know the one, for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I’m getting a lump in my throat just thinking about it.) The writer Grayson Haver Currin provided just such a reminder, in an incisive profile of McLachlan published by The New York Times this week.McLachlan is also, among other things, the leader of a school that provides free musical education to children, an avid surfer (which I learned from the article!) and, of course, one of the founders of Lilith Fair, a highly successful if unjustly stereotyped late-90s concert tour that celebrated female artists.Lilith Fair came during a period of critical and commercial prosperity for female artists in a number of traditionally male-dominated genres like rock, folk and that wide-ranging radio format called “alternative.” But as often happens when women gain power and visibility in a certain space, it also provoked a backlash. Even as it was raking in millions, Lilith Fair was the butt of many a late-night TV joke. As the critic Rob Sheffield put it in a 2019 oral history of Lilith Fair for Vanity Fair, “Certainly nobody on late-night TV comedy in 1997 felt obligated or encouraged to make jokes about Ozzfest or the Horde tour.”Lilith Fair wasn’t perfect and is not beyond scrutiny. Most of the performers booked in its first year were white, though the bills in its second and third years became more diverse. And I’m not here to argue that every act who played Lilith Fair has stood the test of time.Still, many have: Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris … I could go on and on. But instead, I made a playlist.For brevity’s sake, I limited myself to artists who played on Lilith Fair’s inaugural 1997 tour. That still gave me plenty of great songs to choose from, as you’ll hear. I’ve included some obvious choices (did you really think I would leave off a certain karaoke classic by Meredith Brooks?) and some deeper cuts you may have forgotten about (that Tracy Bonham song still rips). Although an attempt to revive the tour in 2010 didn’t quite work, I do hear the influence of Lilith Fair artists in this current generation of pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Haim and, yes, even Taylor Swift, which means it’s an especially interesting time to look back at the artists who defined the so-called Lilith Fair sound.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How the ‘Furiosa’ War Rig Was Built

    Members of the creative team explain what it took to turn the War Rig into “a beautiful chrome stage.”Chrome and polished steel have some great qualities. They look sleek, sexy and powerful. Onscreen, they really pop.But talk to the team that built the War Rig — the menacingly dazzling, steel-and-chrome 12-wheeler that carries a crucial action scene in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” — and you’ll learn that these materials can at times be something else: a royal pain in the tailpipe.“Metal gets hot in the Australian sun,” said Guy Norris, the movie’s action designer.That became a challenge for the stunt performers, who, to execute the director George Miller’s vision, threw their bodies every which way around the tractor-trailer as it sped down a stretch of road near Hay, a rural town in southeastern Australia.“They’d get blown up or shot and they’d fall,” Norris said. “And we had restraining cables on them, so they wouldn’t hit the ground, but they’d do a full fall, hit the side of the tanker and dangle.” Even worse: “they were all bare-chested.”Shirtless skin. Sizzling metal. And surfaces so shiny, the crew’s reflection could often be seen in shots of the truck. This is how the team behind “Furiosa” created the War Rig, and how they worked with its idiosyncrasies.Anya Taylor-Joy in action on the War Rig.Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More