Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Orlando, My Political Biography’ Takes a Collective Approach to Joy

    The filmmaker Paul B. Preciado shares the title role with 20 trans and nonbinary performers to make a point about the cage of identity.Few movies this year have lived in my head as long and as happily as “Orlando: My Political Biography,” which I’ve been thinking about since I first saw it in September. Written and directed by the Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado — a trans man making his feature directing debut — the movie is, at its simplest, an essayistic documentary about transgender and nonbinary identity that draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography.” Yet trying to squeeze “My Political Biography” into a tidy categorical box is fundamentally at odds with Preciado’s expansive project, which is at once an argument, a confession, a celebration and a road map.It’s also a sharp, witty low-budget experimental work of great political and personal conviction, one that breathes life into Woolf’s novel about a 16-year-old boy in Elizabethan England who, after centuries of trippy adventures, enigmatically ends up as a 36-year-old woman in 1928, the year the novel was published. Woolf dedicated the book to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose son Nigel Nicolson described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” one in which Woolf weaves Vita “in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds.”Don’t expect luxurious trappings here; this isn’t the usual screen waxworks with meticulous details but few ideas. It is instead a pointed, spirited, up-to-the-minute exploration of sex, gender and sexual difference through the character of Orlando, who serves as Preciado’s mirror and avatar. In the novel, Orlando (long story short!) awakes one day to trumpets blaring “Truth!” and finds that he’s become a woman — a development that is, well, complicated.“The change of sex,” the book’s narrator asserts, “did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” As Preciado explains, his own transformation was more complex. “You didn’t know, perhaps,” he says, gently addressing Woolf, “this was not how one became trans.”From the very start Preciado expresses love and admiration for Woolf and her novel, but he also critiques some of her choices; he’s enraged, for one, that Orlando is an aristocratic colonialist. Even so, for the most part he expresses palpable tenderness toward Woolf, a quality that suffuses “My Political Biography” as he loosely re-creates Orlando’s narrative trajectory and plucks characters, episodes and sentences from the book. Along the way, Preciado draws attention to the construction of identity and that of the movie itself, fusing form and subject. While he’s peering behind the scenes (and as crew members drop in and out), he also introduces a chorus of other voices, including that of trans pioneers like the American actress-singer Christine Jorgensen and those of his trans performers.Preciado’s most provocative conceit is that he shares the role of Orlando with 20 other trans and nonbinary individuals of different ages, hues and shapes. While Preciado largely remains offscreen, other Orlandos enter and exit, introducing themselves to the camera, talking about their lives and — with both naturalism and charming, at times goofy, theatrical flourishes — playing out scenes from the novel, their words mingling with Woolf’s. Like her Orlando, his travels widely (if on a shoestring budget), undergoes metamorphoses and weaves through the centuries. One Orlando (Amir Baylly) wears a magnificent headpiece and shows off his legs; another (Naëlle Dariya) preens in a billowy wig festooned with tiny ships.By sharing the role of Orlando, Preciado shifts the story from the individual to the collective, taking it out of the private realm and into the public sphere. This communitarian shift from me to we also allows Preciado to attenuate the familiar documentary binarism (and power dynamic) in which there is one person who films and another who is filmed. Everyone is invited to this party. As Woolf writes, Orlando had “a great variety of selves to call upon”; Preciado similarly calls on a multiplicity of selves, at one point introducing a sweet-faced, pink-haired Orlando (Liz Christin) who visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Queen (Frédéric Pierrot), as other Orlandos chat in the waiting room sharing stories, hormones and laughter.Liz-Orlando’s mother has sent her to Dr. Queen for dressing like a girl and speaking about herself in the feminine. When the doctor asks Orlando how she believed herself “authorized to wear a skirt as a young man,” she answers that she’s not a man. “So you’re a woman?” the visibly confused shrink asks, brow furrowing. “I wouldn’t exactly say that either,” Orlando says with a Mona Lisa smile. The visit to the psychiatrist’s office takes place fairly early on and while the doctor’s bafflement is played for obvious, somewhat uneasy laughs, his inability (or refusal) to truly see Liz-Orlando has a sharp sting that lingers for the rest of the movie.The office face-off comically distills the rigid medical orthodoxies that Preciado challenges in greater detail in his electrifying short book “Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts,” a published version of a speech that he delivered in Paris in 2019 at a conference of 3,500 psychoanalysts. Having been invited to talk about “women in psychoanalysis,” Preciado instead spoke about, as he put it in his speech, “finding a way out of the regime of sexual difference.” For him, that meant a world beyond the cages of masculinity and femininity, an idea that inspired this audience of putative professionals to heckle Preciado, who writes that he was only able to deliver a quarter of his talk.“My Political Biography” is lighter and certainly funnier than “Can the Monster Speak?,” though the two work as companion pieces. The movie is serious, which you would expect given the political and personal stakes that one after another Orlando — with open faces and feeling — express. This is, on the one hand, a movie made by a philosopher who studied with Michel Foucault. At the same time, Preciado’s lightness of touch and intellectual nimbleness buoys the movie, lifting both it and you. There is nothing tragic other than the world that insists on policing bodies. Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.Orlando, My Political BiographyNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Killer’ Review: He’s a Deadly Bore

    Michael Fassbender stars as a loquaciously dull hit man in David Fincher’s latest film about bloody exploits.David Fincher can’t get enough of that murderous stuff — his filmography bleedeth over with miscreants (“Alien 3”), home invaders (“Panic Room”) and multiple maniacs (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl”). During one of his periodic breaks from painting the big screen red, Fincher served as a producer and director on the Netflix show “Mindhunter,” another of his visually impeccable, morgue-cold creep-outs. This one was about F.B.I. agents profiling serial killers like Edmund Kemper, a ghoul whose silkily insinuating manner resonated more deeply than the show, which ended after two seasons.“Mindhunter” was easier to admire than to love, which is habitually true of Fincher’s work and was certainly true of his last movie, “Mank,” an Old Hollywood exhumation about powerful people who kill dreams and souls. In Hobbesian terms, life in a Fincher film tends to be solitary and poor, nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short. That’s the case again in his most recent movie, “The Killer,” about a nameless hit man — played by Michael Fassbender — a chatty loner first seen waiting for a victim to show up. In time, the mark appears, the Killer shoots but misses, and spends the remainder of the story trying to clean up the mess.“The Killer” is based on a French comic book with the same title written by Alexis Nolent (who goes by Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. The protagonist is an outwardly ordinary-looking hit man who’s as physically unassuming as he is inevitably nihilistic: Other people are awful, the world is hopeless, “we’re living on a pile of corpses,” etc. He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts. What makes him ostensibly interesting isn’t his job or body count; what’s intriguing, at least before your eyes finally glaze over, is that he’s dull.The idea of an anti-Bond type with an illegal license to kill is, yes, an idea, one that flickers weakly on the page amid a mass of genre clichés. What’s most distinctive about the comic is the contrast between its protagonist and Jacamon’s cinematic illustrations, with their rich hues, canted angles and interplay between realism and expressionism. You keep reading only to keep looking. Fincher’s visual approach in the movie is relatively muted by contrast. He bathes the screen with sulfurous yellow, throws in a few showy shots — an unblinking eye seen through a gun scope — and, as he likes to do, goes dark and then darker, as in one extended fight sequence that’s so dimly lit it sometimes hovers on the threshold of visibility.Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the movie ditches a lot of the comic’s gasbag observations, shaves the plot to the bone, folds in some pop-culture yuks (the Killer uses sitcom aliases) and takes a jab at WeWork. Fassbender’s character still prattles on a lot, mostly in voice-over, both when he’s on the job and off, but much of what he says is repetitive and on occasion near-affirmational. “Forbid empathy,” he murmurs. “Trust no one.” On occasion, he sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself or just settle his mind so he can focus on the violent task at hand; at other times, he sounds as if he’s dispensing avuncular advice to students of slaughter: “This is what it takes if you want to succeed.”One problem with the movie is that without the Killer’s anti-humanist rants, his historical references and political entanglements, there isn’t much left other than Fincher’s virtuosity, Fassbender’s tamped-down charisma and the thorny pleasures of watching evil people commit evil with great finesse. What this Killer has are a lover (Sophie Charlotte), who’s merely a plot contrivance, a luxe beachfront house and a storage unit kitted out with the tools of his trade (guns, passports). What he doesn’t have is much of a personality or a code, a way of being that complicates the violence, as in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and his admirers. So what is the Killer? Mostly, it seems, he is a way for Fincher to kill time.After the first job in the movie goes bad, the Killer finds that he’s now a target, which adds a bit of tension and mystery as he dodges threats amid the bang-bangs — the gunfire is more polyrhythmic than the metronomic editing — and the splashy entrances and exits from the other generic types: the Lawyer (Charles Parnell), the Client (Arliss Howard), the Expert (Tilda Swinton), the Brute (Sala Baker). Throughout, Fassbender holds the center with his lissome, controlled physicality and near-unmodulated voice. The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.The KillerRated R for ultraviolence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ Named CMA Awards Song of the Year

    She is the first Black songwriter to receive the honor from the Country Music Awards. Her 1988 hit reached a new generation of fans as a cover by Luke Combs.Tracy Chapman won song of the year at the Country Music Awards on Wednesday for “Fast Car,” a folk ballad that topped the country charts more than three decades after it was first released thanks to a cover by the singer Luke Combs.Chapman, 59, is the first Black songwriter to win that award, Rolling Stone Magazine reported. She did not attend the awards ceremony in Nashville but thanked the crowd in a statement that was read onstage by Sarah Evans, a co-presenter of the award.“It’s truly an honor for my song to be newly recognized after 35 years of its debut,” Chapman’s statement said. “Thank you to the C.M.A.s and a special thanks to Luke and all of the fans of ‘Fast Car.’”Combs, an unassuming star known for his irrepressibly catchy and relatable country anthems, also won single of the year for “Fast Car.” He began his acceptance speech on Wednesday by thanking Chapman for writing “one of the best songs of all time.”“I just recorded it because I love this song so much,” he said. “It’s meant so much to me throughout my entire life.”The original version of the song reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1988. It won Chapman three Grammy Award nominations in 1989, including for song of the year. She won for best female pop vocalist.Combs’s cover climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart in September, after 19 weeks in the No. 2 spot. It also reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 chart over the summer.As covers go, the vocals and acoustic guitar riffs on Combs’s version hew relatively closely to those on the original “Fast Car.” But other elements, including his North Carolina twang and a pedal steel guitar, give it more of a country feel.Combs was not the first artist to cover the song by a long shot, but the success of his version this year has been a catalyst for many young people to discover Ms. Chapman’s music.Nominations for the Grammy Awards, the premiere prize for popular music, will be announced on Friday, and industry watchers are waiting to see if Chapman will be among the nominees for “Fast Car” because of the cover. More

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    SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood Studios Agree to Deal to End Actors’ Strike

    The agreement all but ends one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry. Union members still have to approve the deal.One of the longest labor crises in Hollywood history is finally coming to an end.SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, reached a tentative deal for a new contract with entertainment companies on Wednesday, clearing the way for the $134 billion American movie and television business to swing back into motion.Hollywood’s assembly lines have been at a near-standstill since May because of a pair of strikes by writers and actors, resulting in financial pain for studios and for many of the two million Americans — makeup artists, set builders, location scouts, chauffeurs, casting directors — who work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films.Upset about streaming-service pay and fearful of fast-developing artificial intelligence technology, actors joined screenwriters on picket lines in July. The writers had walked out in May over similar concerns. It was the first time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union and Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films, that actors and writers were both on strike.The Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and ended its 148-day strike on Sept. 27. In the coming days, SAG-AFTRA members will vote on whether to accept their union’s deal, which includes hefty gains, like increases in compensation for streaming shows and films, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.SAG-AFTRA, however, failed to receive a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Fran Drescher, the union’s president, had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”Instead, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, proposed a new residual for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take.At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history. SAG-AFTRA said in a terse statement that its negotiating committee had voted unanimously to approve the tentative deal, which will proceed to the union’s national board on Friday for “review and consideration.”It added, “Further details will be released following that meeting.”Shaan Sharma, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, said he had mixed emotions about the tentative deal, though he declined to go into specifics because the SAG-AFTRA board still needed to review it.“They say a negotiation is when both sides are unhappy because you can’t get everything you want on either side,” he said, adding, “You can be happy for the deal overall, but you can feel a sense of loss for something that you didn’t get that you thought was important.”Ms. Drescher, who had been active on social media during the strike, didn’t immediately post anything on Wednesday evening. She and other SAG-AFTRA officials had come under severe pressure from agents, crew member unions and even some of her own members, including George Clooney and Ben Affleck, to wrap up what had started to feel like an interminable negotiation.“I’m relieved,” Kevin Zegers, an actor most recently seen in the ABC show “The Rookie: Feds,” said in an interview after the union’s announcement. “If it didn’t end today, there would have been riots.”The studio alliance said in a statement that the tentative agreement “represents a new paradigm,” giving SAG-AFTRA “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.”There is uncertainty over what a poststrike Hollywood will look like. But one thing is certain: There will be fewer jobs for actors and writers in the coming years, undercutting the wins that unions achieved at the bargaining table.Even before the strikes, entertainment companies were cutting back on the number of television shows they ordered, a result of severe pressure from Wall Street to turn money-losing streaming services into profitable businesses. Analysts expect companies to make up for the pair of pricey new labor contracts by reducing costs elsewhere, including by making fewer shows and canceling first-look deals.The actors, like the writers, said the streaming era had negatively affected their working conditions and compensation.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor the moment, however, the agreements with actors and writers represent a capitulation by Hollywood’s biggest companies, which started the bargaining process with an expectation that the unions, especially SAG-AFTRA, would be relatively compliant. Early in the talks, for instance, the studio alliance — Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros. — refused to negotiate on multiple union proposals. “Rejected our proposal, refused to make a counter” became a rallying cry among the striking workers.As the studio alliance tried to limit any gains, the companies cited business challenges, including the rapid decline of cable television and continued streaming losses. Disney, struggling with $4 billion in streaming losses in 2022, eliminated 7,000 jobs in the spring.But the alliance underestimated the pent-up anger pulsating among the studios’ own workers. Writers and actors called the moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era had deteriorated the working conditions and compensation for rank-and-file members of their professions so much that they could no longer make a living. The companies brushed such comments aside as union bluster and Hollywood dramatics. They found out the workers were serious.With the strikes dragging into the fall and the financial pain on both sides mounting, the studio alliance reluctantly switched from trying to limit gains to figuring out how to get Hollywood’s creative assembly lines running again — even if that meant bending to the will of the unions.“It was all macho, tough-guy stuff from the companies for a while,” said Jason E. Squire, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “But that certainly did change.”There had previously been 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood.“The executives of these companies didn’t need to worry about labor very much — they worried about other things,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the Writers Guild negotiating committee, said in an interview after the writers’ strike concluded. “They worried about Wall Street and their free cash flow, and all of that.”Mr. Keyser continued: “They could say to their labor executives, ‘Do the same thing you’ve been doing year after year. Just take care of that, because labor costs are not going to be a problem.’ Suddenly, that wasn’t true anymore.” As a result of the strikes, studios are widely expected to overhaul their approach to union negotiations, which in many ways dates to the 1980s.Writers Guild leaders called their deal “exceptional” and “transformative,” noting the creation of viewership-based streaming bonuses and a sharp increase in royalty payments for overseas viewing on streaming services. Film writers received guaranteed payment for a second draft of screenplays, something the union had tried but failed to secure for at least two decades.The Writers Guild said the contract included enhancements worth roughly $233 million annually. When bargaining started in the spring, the guild proposed $429 million in enhancements, while studios countered with $86 million, according to the guild.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord takes a meaningful step toward stabilization. About $10 billion in TV and film production has been on hold, according to ProdPro, a production tracking service. That amounts to 176 shows and films.The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Because the actors’ union prohibited its members from participating in promotional campaigns for already-finished work, studios pulled movies like “Dune: Part Two” from the fall release schedule, forgoing as much as $1.6 billion in worldwide ticket sales, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant.With labor harmony restored, the coming weeks should be chaotic. Studio executives and producers will begin a mad scramble to secure soundstages, stars, insurance, writers and crew members so productions can start running again as quickly as possible. Because of the end-of-year holidays, some projects may not restart until January.Both sides will have to go through the arduous process of working together again after a searing six-month standoff. The strikes tore at the fabric of the clubby entertainment world, with actors’ union leaders describing executives as “land barons of a medieval time,” and writers and actors still fuming that it took studio executives months, not weeks, to reach a deal.Workers and businesses caught in the crossfire were idled, potentially leaving bitter feelings toward both sides.And it appears that Hollywood executives will now have to contend with a resurgent labor force, mirroring many other American businesses. In recent weeks, production workers at Walt Disney Animation voted to unionize, as did visual-effects workers at Marvel.Contracts with powerful unions that represent Hollywood crews will expire in June and July, and negotiations are expected to be fractious.“It seemed apparent early on that we were part of a trend in American society where labor was beginning to flex its muscles — where unions were beginning to reassert their power,” said Mr. Keyser, the Writers Guild official.Brooks Barnes More

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    A Mixed Mood as Hollywood Strikes Finally End

    Celebratory feelings are competing with resentment over the work stoppage and worries about the business era that is coming.It should be a rapturous time in Hollywood.Writers have been back at their keyboards for a month, having negotiated a strike-ending deal so favorable that it seemed to leave even them a bit gobsmacked. On Wednesday, the actors’ union said it had negotiated a tentative contract of its own, all but ending its 118-day strike and clearing a path for the film and television business to roar back to life for the first time since May.Champagne for everyone!Instead, the mood in the entertainment capital is decidedly mixed, as celebratory feelings compete with resentment over the work stoppage and worries about the business era that is coming.“People are excited — thrilled — to be getting back to work,” said Jon Liebman, co-chief executive of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, a venerable Hollywood management firm. “But they are also mindful of some sobering challenges that lie ahead.”Analysts estimate that higher labor expenses will add 10 percent to the cost of making a show, and studios are expected to compensate by cutting back on production.“Companies are not going to increase their budgets accordingly,” said Jason E. Squire, editor of “The Movie Business Book” and host of a companion podcast. “They will compensate by making less. The end.”Hulu, for instance, expects the number of new shows it makes in 2024 to fall by about a third from 2022.The Directors Guild of America also has a new contract that guarantees raises. And two more union contracts, both covering crews, come due in the next few months. Studios will either have to pay up or risk another shutdown. “READY for our contract fight next year,” Lindsay Dougherty, lead organizer for Teamsters Local 399, recently said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Her branch represents more than 6,000 Hollywood workers, including truck drivers, location managers and casting directors.Even before the strikes, Hollywood was swinging from boom times to austerity. Peak TV, the glut of new programming that helped define the streaming era, ended last year as Wall Street began pressuring streaming services to put a priority on profit over subscriber growth. TV networks and streaming platforms ordered 40 percent fewer adult scripted series in the second half of 2022 than they did in the same period in 2019, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm.Put another way, 599 adult scripted series were made last year. Some analysts predict that, by 2025, the annual number will be closer to 400, a roughly one-third decline. Even the most modest series employs hundreds of people, including agents, managers, publicists and stylists, who in turn fuel the broader economy.“With the strike over, we’re all staring down the barrel of a painful structural adjustment that predates the strike,” Zack Stentz, a screenwriter with credits like “X-Men: First Class” and “Thor,” wrote on X. “A lot of careers and even entire companies are going to go away over the next year.” (He added, on a glass-half-full note: “This is also a time for clever little mammals to survive and even thrive in the new landscape. Your job is to be a clever mammal.”)The streaming profitability problem remains largely unsolved. Netflix and Hulu make money, and Warner Bros. Discovery has said its Max service will turn a profit by the end of the year. But Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock and others continue to lose money. Peacock alone will bleed $2.8 billion in red ink in 2023, Comcast said last month.Most analysts say that there are too many streaming services and that the weakest will ultimately close or merge with bigger competitors.The entertainment industry’s underlying cable television and box office problems also remain dire, in some cases growing worse during the five months it took to restore labor peace.Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite television by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to PwC, the accounting giant. In July, Disney announced that it was exploring a once-unthinkable sale of a stake in ESPN, the cable giant that has powered much of Disney’s growth over the past two decades. Paramount Global’s once-venerable cable portfolio, centered on Nickelodeon and MTV, has also been pummeled by cord cutting; Paramount shares have dropped nearly 50 percent since May.The film business is also unsettled. Movies now arrive in homes (either through digital stores or on streaming) after as little as 17 days in theaters, compared with about 90 days, which had been the standard for decades.Audiences have finally started to tire of Hollywood’s prevailing movie business strategy — endless sequels, each more bloated than the last — with lackluster results for the seventh “Mission: Impossible” film, the fifth “Indiana Jones” installment and 11th “Fast & Furious” chapter as evidence.Movies now arrive in homes (either through digital stores or on streaming) after as little as 17 days in theaters, compared with the decades-old standard of about 90 days.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTheaters are not dead, as blockbuster turnout for “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” has shown. But ticket-buying data suggests a worrisome trend: People who were going to six to eight movies a year before the pandemic are now going to three or four. Even the most ardent fans of big-screen entertainment are paring back.Cinemas in North America sold about $7.7 billion in tickets this year though October, a 17 percent decline from the same period in 2019.There is more competition for leisure time; TikTok has 150 million users in the United States, a majority of them younger than 30, and the average time spent on the app is growing quickly.Everywhere you look in Hollywood, or so it seems, businesses are trying to cut costs. Citing the strikes and “volatile larger entertainment marketplace,” Anonymous Content, a production and management company, laid off 8 percent of its staff last month. United Talent Agency also trimmed its head count, as did several competing agencies.DreamWorks Animation recently eliminated 4 percent of its work force, while Starz, the premium cable network and streaming service, is reducing head count by 10 percent. Netflix is restructuring its animation division, which is expected to result in layoffs and fewer self-made films.Consider what is happening at Disney, which is widely considered the strongest of the old-line entertainment companies, partly because it is the largest.Before the strikes, Disney had about 150 television shows and a dozen movies in production. But worries about streaming profitability and the decline of cable television have battered Disney’s stock price. Shares have been trading in the $80 range, down from $197 two years ago. Sorting out ESPN’s future is Disney’s first priority, but the company is also selling holdings in India and weighing whether to part with assets like ABC; the Freeform cable channel; and a chain of local broadcast stations.Disney is so vulnerable that the activist investor Nelson Peltz has made it known to The Wall Street Journal that he intends, for the second time in a year, to push for board seats. Disney fended off Mr. Peltz in February, partly by saying it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs. On Wednesday, Disney said that, in the end, it had cut $7.5 billion and more than 8,000 jobs. It added that it would continue to tighten its belt.Phil Cusick, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, said of Disney in a note to clients in late September, “The company plans to make less content and spend less on what it does make.”Nicole Sperling More

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    Lucky Find at Auction Identifies Man on Cover of ‘Led Zeppelin IV’

    It’s not a painting. It’s a picture of a Victorian artisan taken in the English countryside in 1892.On Nov. 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released its iconic fourth studio album, which was untitled but is widely known as “Led Zeppelin IV.” It features the band’s major hit “Stairway to Heaven,” and the wordless cover shows the image of a bearded, older man with a large bundle of sticks on his back against the backdrop of a decaying wall.Now, 52 years later to the day, a minor mystery about that cover has been solved.Sometimes thought to be a painting, the image, it turns out, was a Victorian-era photograph of a man who made thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwestern England. His name was Lot Long and he was 69 at the time, according to Brian Edwards, a researcher who found the photo.Mr. Edwards, a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, stumbled upon the picture in March while scouring the internet for new releases at auction houses that might be interesting for his research, which includes the area’s well-known landmark Stonehenge.As he was looking through a Victorian photo album full of landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards noticed a photo he had seemingly seen before.“There was something familiar about it straight away,” he said in a phone interview. (Mr. Edwards was the proud owner of a “Led Zeppelin IV” LP from the year the album was released, he said, and he listens to it to this day, albeit on a CD.)After a quick call to his wife for a “sanity check,” he concluded: This was indeed the image on the cover of one of the most epic musical releases of his teenage years. He then called the Wiltshire Museum, where he curated an exhibit in 2021.The museum bought the photo album for 420 pounds (about $515), according to the auctioneer’s website.The photo album’s first page states, “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury,” and is made out as “a present to Auntie from Ernest.”Based on that information, Mr. Edwards researched the origins of the photo album and was able to conclude that the photographer was a man by the name of Ernest Howard Farmer.“It sounds like good detective work, but in truth there was a lot of luck involved,” Mr. Edwards said. “I caught a few good breaks.”As for how that photo ended up on the album cover: Legend has it that Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s vocalist, and his bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, where they spotted a colorized version of the photograph that will be on view in the Wiltshire Museum.Because the photographer, Mr. Farmer, was also a teacher, Mr. Edwards said, one plausible theory is that he used the picture to teach colorizing to his students. One of those versions may have ended up in a frame in an antique shop. That colorized version of the picture seems to have been lost.The photo album included about 100 photos showing architectural views and street scenes together with a few portraits of rural workers, according to the Wiltshire Museum, where the photos will be on display.“We will show how Farmer captured the spirit of people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset, an adjoining county, that were so much of a contrast to his life in London,” the museum said in an announcement about the exhibit.“Even if this Led Zeppelin photograph wasn’t in there, this would be a very interesting exhibition about the quality of Victorian photographs,” Mr. Edwards said. More

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    Taylor Swift Reporter Faces Criticism Online

    Bryan West landed a much-coveted job. Then came the internet.Everything has changed for Bryan West.Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, announced on Monday that Mr. West would fill a much-coveted job as the company’s first-ever Taylor Swift reporter, covering all things related to the international pop sensation for USA Today and Gannett’s network of more than 200 other papers across the country.But before Mr. West, 35, had the chance to file his first story on his new beat, he was getting criticism from two sides: journalism watchdogs and Ms. Swift’s fans.The objections started rolling in shortly after Variety broke the news of his hiring on Monday. The article included an interview with Mr. West, which provided newsroom ethicists and Swifties alike with grounds for complaint.Mr. West, who was formerly a TV news reporter in Phoenix, raised hackles by describing himself as “a fan of Taylor.” That remark caused some journalists to question whether or not he could be unbiased when it came to his new beat. At the same time, the singer’s fans debated whether he was a big enough Swiftie to capture their beloved star. Some people in both camps said the job was better suited to a woman.In the Variety interview, Mr. West likened himself to a sports reporter in making the case that he could maintain his neutrality. “I would say this position’s no different than being a sports journalist who’s a fan of the home team,” he said. “I just came from Phoenix, and all of the anchors there were wearing Diamondbacks gear; they want the Diamondbacks to win.”That remark did not sit well with a number of sportswriters, including Frankie de la Cretaz, a Boston-based sports and culture journalist.“Any sports journalist will tell you the No. 1 rule of sports journalism is no cheering in the press box,” Mx. de la Cretaz, 38, said. “It’s one of the hallmarks of the profession. It’s one of the first things you learn. The idea, of course, being that if you are a fan of the team, that you can’t be an unbiased reporter.”“I don’t know that I necessarily think that’s true,” they continued, “but I think the fact that he is making that comparison shows to me a fundamental misunderstanding of what the role of a sports journalist is.”Benjamin Goggin, an editor at NBC News, criticized the hiring of Mr. West on X, writing that Gannett had given the job to “a full stan, rather than someone who is capable of being critical of one of the most powerful people in all of pop culture.”“Haters gonna hate,” Lark-Marie Antón, Gannett’s chief communications officer, wrote in an email, replying to the criticism from journalists. The spokeswoman added Mr. West’s credentials “made him the best candidate for this role.” (Mr. West, who is now based in Nashville, at a Gannett daily, The Tennessean, declined to be interviewed for this article.)April Glick Pulito, a Swift fan who works in political communications, posted lyrics from a Taylor Swift song in response to the hiring: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man?,” Ms. Pulito, 35, wrote on X, quoting “The Man,” which reimagines the singer’s life had she been born a man.“It wasn’t a statement on the chops of this reporter,” Ms. Pulito said in an interview. “He seems extremely qualified. But as someone who works in communications, I think the optics of the choice are kind of undeniable.” She would have preferred to see the role go to a female applicant, “someone so many Taylor fans could look up to and see themselves in,” she said.The Gannett spokeswoman said the company “does not discriminate.”In a year when seemingly anything having to do with the singer has drawn media scrutiny, Gannett’s announcement that it planned to hire a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter generated plenty of headlines and online comments.The chosen candidate, the company said when it launched the search in September, would “identify why the pop star’s influence only expands” and “what her fan base stands for in pop culture.” (The company also announced a search for a similar role to cover Beyoncé.)As part of his application, Mr. West submitted a five-minute video listing the reasons he should be hired. The first was his journalism experience. Mr. West previously worked as a broadcast reporter and producer at an NBC affiliate in Phoenix and said he had won several awards.His second reason was that he had met Ms. Swift. The opportunity to meet her arose after he reported several stories about Ms. Swift while working in Phoenix, he said. Mr. West included a photo of him with the singer in the video.In his application, Mr. West added that, though he might be a fan, he was able to report on Ms. Swift without bias. He listed three songs he “can’t stand” as evidence, including the track “It’s Nice to Have a Friend.”Initially, Variety quoted Mr. West as having named the song as “It’s Good to Have a Friend,” a mistake on the publication’s part, which alarmed a number of Swifties, who inferred that he wasn’t up to the task.Mr. West also noted that he was five years sober. “I’ll never fail a drug test,” he said in his video application. On his personal website, Mr. West posted an essay that goes into detail about leading Phoenix police officers on a car chase and serving jail time for a drunken-driving charge in 2018. “Bryan has been forthcoming disclosing his personal journey,” the Gannett spokeswoman wrote in an email.Lauren Lipman, 32, was one of the applicants who didn’t get the job. Ms. Lipman, a Los Angeles-based content creator, has made a career out of posting videos predominantly about Ms. Swift. In September, Ms. Lipman received an email from a Gannett recruiter to discuss the role further, but ultimately was not called for additional interviews. (Gannett declined to comment on Ms. Lipman’s application process.)While she was disappointed to lose out on the role, Ms. Lipman wished Mr. West the best of luck. “I’m bummed, but I’m honestly, truly so excited that this position even exists. Like, go, Bryan,” she said.Though critical of Mr. West’s reference to how sports journalists go about their jobs, Mx. de la Cretaz said they had sympathy for Gannett’s splashy hire.“This is a brutal fan base, and I don’t think there was ever going to be any winning for whoever they hired into this role,” Mx. de la Cretaz said. “Either he doesn’t get respect from the general public because he’s a fan and seen as biased or he doesn’t get respect from the fandom itself because he’s not the right kind of fan.”Bill Grueskin, a professor and former dean at Columbia Journalism school, said that Mr. West’s passion for his subject could yield fine reporting. He also threw some cold water on Mr. West’s critics within the field.“I think expecting journalists to completely suspend any kind of personal liking for a pop star or a baseball team is probably unworkable,” he said. “The key is kind of how you go about covering it.”Gannett has yet to announce who will be covering the Beyoncé beat. More

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    in Movies

    ‘You Were My First Boyfriend’ Review:

    In this documentary, Cecilia Aldarondo relives her high school trauma by directing cinematic re-enactments of her adolescent years.Cecilia Aldarondo takes the process of reliving adolescent trauma to a literal degree in “You Were My First Boyfriend,” her feature that falls somewhere between documentary and diaristic re-enactment. Spurred by her 20-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Fla., Aldarondo pulls back layers of memories and old home-movie footage to investigate the significant relationships of her formative years: her first intense crush, her bullies, and her childhood best friend and fellow outsider, Caroline.To face down her demons, Aldarondo enlists a cadre of child actors to recreate scenes from her time in high school — both memories of real events and fantasy sequences — in which Aldarondo portrays her own teenage self. The film documents the making of these scenes as much as the final product, a process that can be equal parts touching and awkward. When Aldarondo gets in touch with the now grown-up Joel, the boy she had a crush on for six years, she chooses to read a poem she wrote about him during the peak of her obsession — a decision that makes even her current partner, Gabe, cringe with embarrassment.However, despite its title, “You Were My First Boyfriend” is at its most effective when Aldarondo moves beyond teen lust and into the more complicated aspects of her upbringing. Her Puerto Rican heritage made her an easy target for bullying at her predominantly white high school, but Aldarondo was not exempt from acting cruel to those around her to fit in. She rehashes those nuances through, among other things, creating a shot-for-shot remake of Tori Amos’s “Crucify” music video with her sister Laura. It’s just zany enough to work.You Were My First BoyfriendNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More