Aurelia Butler

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    Sofia Coppola Makes It Look Easy. It Isn’t.

    Sofia Coppola is so drawn to the idea of becoming that she sometimes finds it hard to grasp that she became. Over eight feature films — including her latest, “Priscilla,” about the young Priscilla Presley’s tumultuous relationship with Elvis — she has delved deeply into the liminal stage that is a young woman’s coming-of-age. So you can hardly blame Coppola that after staying in that head space for so long, it comes as a surprise that 25 years have passed since filming her debut feature, “The Virgin Suicides.”“It’s weird to reflect back at having a body of work,” she told me. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a grown-up now and actually established, not just starting off.’”It was a sunny October afternoon in Los Angeles, and we were sitting on a restaurant terrace at the Academy Museum, where the 52-year-old director had come to tout “Priscilla” and autograph copies of “Sofia Coppola Archive,” a new art book assembled from the boxes of letters, photographs and reference images she had collected throughout her career. After the signing, she participated in a conversation moderated by members of the academy’s teen council, who asked Coppola questions about screenwriting and style as a form of self-expression.Teenagers and young women are still her demographic sweet spot, and Coppola, who is now the mother of two teenage daughters, met the young moderators’ queries with encouragement. “These are such good questions from the teen council, right?” she said to the audience. Many of the people attending the panel had come dressed to impress her, though Coppola was simply attired in a navy T-shirt with black trousers and ballet flats, her fingernails painted the same light-pink hue as the cover of her book.The director has released an art book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” that compiles letters, photos and reference images. She herself has become an inspiration for younger artists.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn a profession where so many directors are chatty, high-strung neurotics, Coppola is the picture of placidity. But her even keel shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of caring. In a letter to Bill Murray included in “Archive,” Coppola describes a low moment when it seemed Murray couldn’t be reached to star in “Lost in Translation” (2003) and friends coaxed her out to dinner to consider other options. They soon found that her personal investment in Murray’s casting was more fraught than they could have known. “I broke down in tears at the restaurant (something I never do),” Coppola wrote.This is all to say that Coppola is so serene — and her films, at their best, so sublime — that people may assume it all comes easily to her. (That she hails from a filmmaking family led by a titanic father, Francis Ford Coppola, can only further that notion.) But over the course of our lunch, Coppola was candid about the issues she faces this far into her Oscar-winning career. Making movies the way she wants remains so difficult that all the recent genuflection — like the moment early in our lunch when a young fan with a “Virgin Suicides” shoulder bag came over to praise Coppola for being “such a light” — can still catch her off guard.“To be treated with that kind of respect, it’s surreal,” Coppola said. “Maybe that’s why I’m surprised when I’m in this context, because I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut. I don’t think I’m professionally treated in the way that I am when I encounter these young people.”Early in her career, she was told that while women would go to a film starring men, the reverse wasn’t true. Though the prevailing attitude in Hollywood has evolved somewhat since then — or at least executives have learned to stop saying the quiet part out loud — Coppola still faces plenty of skepticism when trying to budget any female-fronted project. “The people in charge of giving money are usually straight men, still,” she said. “There’s always people in lower levels who are like myself, but then the bosses have a certain sensibility.”On the press tour for “Priscilla,” young women keep telling Coppola that they plan to be filmmakers, too. Their ambition gives her hope, though it’s tempered by two and a half decades of experience, including the tough battles she fought to save her new movie.“If it’s so hard for me to get financing as an established person, I worry about younger women starting out,” she said. “It’s surprising that it’s still a struggle.”Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley. The movie’s budget was cut at the last minute and Coppola had to adjust.Sabrina Lantos/A24COPPOLA FIRST THUMBED through Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me,” as a vacation read years ago. Expecting little more than a fun page-turner, she found herself unexpectedly riveted by Priscilla’s predicament: Like the title character of Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” she was a teenager who married into royalty, then found herself trapped in a palace that offered everything and nothing. To Coppola, who was just 18 when she gave a harshly criticized performance in her father’s film “The Godfather Part III,” Priscilla’s feeling of being scrutinized by an entire country at such a formative age was all too relatable.Still, it took some time for the story to click into place. Coppola had gone into 2020 readying her biggest project ever, an adaptation of “The Custom of the Country,” Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, as a five-hour limited series for Apple TV+. But though the streamer has a reputation for spending big on prestige projects, Coppola said executives there weren’t keen on the lead character, the ambitious social climber Undine Spragg, and began to tighten their purse strings accordingly. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment.)“The idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing,” Coppola noted. “But that’s what I’m saying about who’s in charge.”A friend prodded her to find something new to direct, and while laid up in bed for a week with Covid, Coppola took another look at “Elvis and Me” and suddenly saw with crystal clarity how it could work as a film. Even though Baz Luhrmann had just gone into production on the glitzy biopic “Elvis,” Coppola was undaunted: She figured if his version became a hit — and it did, grossing $288 million worldwide and earning eight Oscar nominations — then it would only juice interest in Priscilla’s side of the story.Coppola called up Presley, who had been a fan of hers since “Lost in Translation,” and after careful wooing, the 78-year-old came aboard the project as an executive producer. On the advice of her frequent collaborator Kirsten Dunst, Coppola hired Cailee Spaeny, best known for “Mare of Easttown” and “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” to play Priscilla from ages 14 to 28. Casting Elvis was harder: The real-life icon left impossibly big shoes to fill, and Luhrmann’s leading man, Austin Butler, was about to be Oscar-nominated for his robust spin on the role. Coppola wanted her film to show Elvis’s darker, domestic side, and to play him, she selected the fast-rising Australian actor Jacob Elordi from the HBO series “Euphoria.”“A lot of those movies didn’t get seen,” Coppola said, referring to her earlier work, “and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe project was coming together quickly, but on a tight budget that allowed little room for error. Luhrmann had made “Elvis” for $85 million and Coppola had less than a quarter of that to spend on a lavish period piece that would span a decade and a half and recreate 1960s Memphis in wintry Toronto. Then, just before the film’s start date last October, a key piece of financing fell through. To save “Priscilla,” which was now $2 million short of its budget, Coppola and the producer Youree Henley were faced with an impossible task: An entire week would have to be cut from the film’s already slim shoot. With so little to work with, would “Priscilla” fall apart just as Coppola’s Apple series had?“We were like, ‘If we hold hands and jump out of the plane together, we’ll just figure it out as we’re descending,’” said Henley, who huddled with Coppola to slash 10 pages from the script.“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Coppola said about the mad scramble to make “Priscilla” work in just 30 days. Though the completed film feels refined and delicate, the shoot was anything but, since key locations were only briefly available and hairstyles, clothing and character ages changed radically between scenes. On the first day of shooting, Spaeny played Priscilla as a teenager graduating from high school; on the second, she shot the final scene as a single mother in her late 20s emerging from the gates of Graceland.It’s a wonder any of it tracks, except that Coppola’s sensibility is so specific, and her actors so eager to please her, that each scene feels distinctly of a piece. At its Venice Film Festival premiere in early September, the film received strong reviews and secured Spaeny the Volpi Cup for best actress, while an emotional Priscilla Presley told Coppola, “You did your homework.”“I still can’t believe our movie came together,” Coppola said now. And though mounting it was difficult, she recalled that while on set, she was in her element like never before.“In the beginning, I was just kind of figuring it out,” she admitted, speaking of her career. “And now, making this film ‘Priscilla,’ I felt like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this.’ All the years of experience start to gel.”LATER IN THE LUNCH, we were interrupted by a 25-year-old who hoped that Coppola would sign her book. She had on the sort of frilly dress that Marie Antoinette would have gone gaga for, with a constellation of arm tattoos that snaked out from underneath her lace sleeves.“My name is Sofia,” the fan said shyly. “I’m named after you.”With a quavering voice, the young woman explained that when her parents immigrated from Panama, Coppola’s movies were among the first they watched. That’s how she got her name and accrued, over time, the desire to follow her idol into filmmaking. “You have no idea the impact you’ve had on my life,” the second Sofia said, a tear running down her cheek.Coppola, who said she lived and worked in a “little bubble,” is always surprised when she meets people who connect this strongly to her work. “A lot of those movies didn’t get seen, and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them,” she told me.She remembered that Paramount Classics was cautious about releasing “The Virgin Suicides” in the spring of 2000 — “They thought girls were going to kill themselves if they saw it” — and that for a while after it came out, she watched her male contemporaries (including her then-husband, Spike Jonze) book plenty of jobs she wasn’t getting.“I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut,” Coppola said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMaybe it took the world some time to catch up. Though “Archive” is full of photos that Coppola has used for inspiration, Coppola’s own work now seems like the mood board for any number of artists, from the photographer Petra Collins to the singer Lana Del Rey. On television, you can detect the influence of her anachronistic take on “Marie Antoinette” in high-spirited historical remixes like “Bridgerton” and “The Great,” while Coppola often trends on TikTok, much to the annoyance of her daughters, Romy and Cosima, the only teenage girls who aren’t especially impressed by her oeuvre. “They think I’m lame,” Coppola said, though when 16-year-old Romy posted a clever viral TikTok this year, many wondered if she might follow in her mother’s footsteps as a filmmaker.A line can also be drawn from Coppola’s early work to the films of Greta Gerwig. They are two of only seven women to be nominated for the best director Oscar, and both got those nods early in their careers: Coppola was nominated at 32 for “Lost in Translation,” which won her the Oscar for original screenplay, while Gerwig got her directing nomination at 34 for “Lady Bird” (2017). Does Coppola think the blockbuster success of Gerwig’s “Barbie” could help more female-fronted projects find financing?“I’m sure it’ll make things easier, but that’s a very specific kind of filmmaking with, I would imagine, a lot of executives involved,” she said. “So that’s a different thing.”Coppola isn’t especially interested in directing blockbusters, though she once tried to mount a big-screen take on “The Little Mermaid” for Universal and was briefly courted for the final “Twilight” film. “I’ve never expected to be mainstream,” she said. “The culture that I always liked growing up was the side culture.” All she really wants is the ability to tell her stories with the budgets that befit them, and with people around who support her sensibility.But in the era of the comic-book tentpole, even that modest ask can be rejected as too much. Coppola meets frequently with the director Tamara Jenkins — she calls their friendship a “two-person ‘women in film’ coffee group” — to compare the battle scars they’ve earned from trying to get movies made: “We’re like, ‘It’s so hard. Why do we do this?’”Maybe that’s a question with no answer. Or maybe it’s an answer Coppola just has to keep relearning.“When you finish a project, you’re like, oh,” she said, as a Mona Lisa smile appeared on her face. “You have to do it, because it bugs you until you do.” More

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    Mr Eazi’s Anthem of Gratitude, and 12 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Silvana Estrada, Old Dominion, Nadine Shah and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.​​Mr Eazi featuring Soweto Gospel Choir, ‘Exit’Mr Eazi — born in Nigeria and long based in Ghana — has been releasing singles and mixtapes for a decade, becoming one of Africa’s major hitmakers. But he considers his new album, “The Evil Genius,” his official studio debut, tracing a narrative that reaches its finale with “Exit.” The track, produced by the Nigerian studio mastermind Kel-P, merges Nigerian Afrobeats and South African gospel, as Mr Eazi sings about how the paranoia of success — “I’ve seen things go bad/When my family turns to demons around me” — gets overcome by gratitude and faith. The Soweto Gospel Choir harmonizes with worshipful, call-and-response thank yous. JON PARELESNadine Shah, ‘Topless Mother’Loud guitars over a pounding Bo Diddley beat propel Nadine Shah’s vocals through “Topless Mother,” a burst of determined, free-associative, syllabically perfect semi-sequiturs. “I told you all/That I have heard,” she sing-chants. “And do you promise not to breathe a word.” She also blurts out three-syllable rhymes: “Sinatra, Viagra, iguana.” Both words and music are all about brusque momentum and a determination to connect. PARELESFlyte featuring Laura Marling, ‘Tough Love’“This could be real — tough love,” the not-exactly folky duo Flyte sings, in a track from its self-titled new album that starts out with typical folk-rock strumming and harmonies and grows into an avalanche. Will Taylor and Nick Hill sing about self-contradictory behavior — “How do we start healing if we can’t keep out the dark” — while the track swells in a giant crescendo. An intimate conflict becomes an existential struggle. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Qué Problema’The problem in “Qué Problema” (“What a Problem”) is a rapturous infatuation, verging on the mystical, that may never be fulfilled. “Your skin has the color of time,” sings the Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada. “When you smile, the wind stumbles.” A swaying, flickering rhythm, with a six-beat undercurrent that’s sometimes only implied, carries a vocal that radiates affection, no matter how things turn out. PARELESLulu. featuring the Joy, ‘Yesterdays’Lulu. — a Nigerian-British songwriter, Lulu Ayodele, who’s unlikely to be confused with the 1960s Scottish hitmaker Lulu — works her way from self-doubt to cautious optimism in “Yesterdays.” She sings, “I know I’m changing/I know there is beauty where pain is.” Subdued Afrobeats percussion and diffident guitar picking captures her uncertainty, but the Joy — a South African vocal group, singing in English and Zulu — coaxes her to move ahead, insisting, “Now I found a better place.” PARELESSheherazaad, ‘Mashoor’Sheherazaad, an Indian-American songwriter from San Francisco, draws on microtonal South Asian vocal inflections, Minimalism and hints of flamenco in “Mashoor” (“Fame”), which was produced by another South Asian hybridizer, Arooj Aftab. Singing in Hindi, accompanied only by a meditative classical guitar and hand percussion, Sheherazaad interrogates unearned fame, pondering, “Have you climbed too high?/Where is my reflection in the mirror?” PARELESOld Dominion, ‘Beautiful Sky’Smokey Robinson — who co-wrote “The Way You Do the Things You Do” — might appreciate “Beautiful Sky,” which hijacks standard honky-tonk images into self-pitying analogies for a failed romance: “The way you go to my head, you’d make a really good tequila/The way you’re always on, you’d make a damn good neon light.” Fingerpicked acoustic and electric guitars gather behind Old Dominion’s close-harmony vocals, and of course that “Beautiful Sky” feels blue. PARELESThe Third Mind featuring Jesse Sykes, ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’Dave Alvin from the Blasters, Victor Krummenacher and David Immerglück from Camper Van Beethoven and Michael Jerome from Better Than Ezra get together as the Third Mind to enjoy psychedelic jams. They found an ideal vehicle with “Sally Go Round the Roses,” the mysterious one-hit wonder by the Jaynetts, who sang, “The saddest thing in the whole wide world/is to see your baby with another girl.” The song has also been picked up by Grace Slick, Tim Buckley and the English folk-jazz group Pentangle. It’s a modal, Celtic-flavored tune, mostly a drone, and the Third Mind’s guitar colloquies connect it to Appalachia, the Byrds and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jesse Sykes’s vocals sound frayed and knowing; the guitars tease, probe, tangle and palpitate. PARELESHauschka, ‘Altruism’Volker Bertelmann, the composer who performs as Hauschka — and who won an Academy Award for the score of “All Quiet on the Western Front” — plays piano both on the keyboard and inside on the strings directly. He also uses a prepared piano, with damping and resonating objects on the strings, along with other acoustic and electronic sounds. In “Altruism,” from his new album “Philanthropy,” Hauschka layers terse little riffs and plinking, clanking, rattling tones into something like funk, with a marchlike melody emerging briefly before the track calmly disassembles itself. PARELESRoy Nathanson featuring Nick Hakim, ‘All the Bones Had Names’During the pandemic, the saxophonist, poet, educator and activist Roy Nathanson, 72, convened jam sessions in front of his Brooklyn home for 82 straight days with whichever musicians assembled on the sidewalk that evening. He has funneled the experience into “82 Days,” a scruffy and enchanting new record. “All the Bones Had Names” began with a poem, written when he was getting a somber drumbeat of news about death: of family members, close friends and essential workers living in the neighborhood. Over a droning electric bass and splatters from an un-fancy keyboard, Nathanson reads the poem while the vocalist Nick Hakim, his frequent musical partner, adds a smokescreen of ad-libs. “All the bones had names/no one claimed,” the poem begins. But by the end, Nathanson is refusing to see death as an endpoint. “The bones were stars,” he says, “that had yet/to be discovered.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJ.D. Allen, ‘The Knight of Swords’Since 2011, the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen has released an album a year, typically with a trio. But don’t confuse habit with stillness. His most recent LP, “This,” is Allen’s first full-on encounter with electronics, and it is the sound of a burly toned, bop-steeped saxophonist pushing beyond the familiar. On “The Knight of Swords,” two independent histories seem to circle each other, seeking common ground, as Allen’s spiraling, bittersweet blues meets the ghostly swell of Alex Bonney’s electronics. RUSSONELLOKevin Sun, ‘After Depths’The saxophonist Kevin Sun has been making his mark on the New York scene of late by way of studiousness and subtlety. Sun is not shy about his appreciation for Mark Turner, a shadow-dwelling tenor great one generation his senior, and one way to hear his double LP “The Depths of Memory” is as a callback to the sort of bendable postmodernism that Turner was playing with his Fly Trio back in the early 2000s (and that he’s continued making for ECM Records, in other formats). But Sun has something original going on, too: his own feeling of loose coil and terse freedom, and a personal approach to disrupting time. Leading a quintet here, Sun concludes the album with “After Depths,” a slow-motion action painting with a melody that could almost pass for spontaneous — if it weren’t being doubled with such precise imperfection by the trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. RUSSONELLO More

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    Celine Dion ‘Siren Battles’ Prompt Complaints in New Zealand City

    A subculture has developed among Pacific Islander communities based on who can blast music — often Ms. Dion’s songs — the loudest. Some call it too disruptive.Imagine it’s the middle of the night and you’re jolted awake by the crescendo of a Celine Dion song that is blasting out of loudspeakers affixed to moving cars or bicycles.For residents of Porirua, New Zealand, the scenario is not hypothetical. About a year ago, people there began gathering for so-called siren battles — a homegrown subculture in which members of Pacific Islander, or Pasifika, communities in New Zealand compete to see who can play music the loudest.Members of the “siren clubs” who organize the battles have described them as expressions of identity and community. But some residents say the events, which can run into the early morning hours and feature piercing frequencies, should be scaled back because they are far too loud and disruptive.The mayor and the City Council are under pressure to act; police officers are exploring alternative venues for the contests; and the controversy has caught the international news media’s attention. But there are no quick solutions or compromises in sight.Porirua, New Zealand, where people host noise competitions using mainly Celine Dion songs. The city’s valley topography carries the blaring music into communities uphill.Jill Ferry/Getty Images“At the moment, there’s no answer on how we’ll fix it,” Anita Baker, the mayor of Porirua, said in a telephone interview.She added that while some organized siren clubs have agreed to stop blasting music by 10 p.m., other “breakaway groups” have not.“We’re in a catch-22 at the moment, trying to work out who’s responsible — and each person blames the next person,” she added. “But the residents just want an answer, and they want some sleep.”Multiple efforts to reach siren club organizers were unsuccessful.The subculture was born about a decade ago in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and is often practiced by young men from the country’s Samoan, Tongan and other communities. During the pandemic, a so-called siren jam by a young South Auckland artist, Jawsh 685, became an international smash hit on TikTok.In Porirua, siren battles are usually held on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes people gather in a train station parking lot near the harbor to blare music from their cars or bicycles. Sometimes they cruise through the city.Practitioners say part of the pleasure of a siren battle is hand-wiring audio equipment to make the sound as loud and clear as possible, and that the gatherings are a positive social outlet.“That’s what we do to stay out of trouble,” Soni Taufa, the team leader of a siren club in Auckland called Noizy Boys, told an Auckland radio station last year.Ms. Baker said siren battles began in Porirua last year and were led by residents cheering on teams in the Rugby League World Cup. She said Celine Dion songs are a particular favorite, apparently because they are so high-pitched. (A publicist for Ms. Dion, a French Canadian vocalist who is best known for singing “My Heart Will Go On” and other ballads, did not respond to a request for comment.)Siren battles continued in Porirua after the rugby tournament ended in November, and they have prompted complaints ever since. Ms. Baker said that from October 2022 to March 2023, the City Council fielded 106 complaints.But Ms. Baker said there was nowhere in the city of about 61,000 people where the events could be held in a non-disruptive way. That is partly because Porirua lies north of Wellington, the capital, in a valley where the sound from siren battles carries easily up the hills into residential areas.The police have also received dozens of reports related to noise control violations — 40 since February, according to data provided by the national police headquarters in Wellington. The police said in an emailed statement that while siren battles are not illegal per se, some can be a public nuisance or a road policing offense.A representative for the City Council declined to comment, referring a reporter to a statement saying in part that the council “understands and sympathizes with the frustration” caused by the battles, and that it is “doing what it can to address the issue.”The police said that among other measures, sound testing was being completed at various locations around the city, and that the authorities were working with siren clubs to explore alternative venues for their sonic battles.Some residents are growing impatient, saying that the battles are keeping young children and seniors up at night — and destroying the quality of life in otherwise peaceful communities. A petition demanding that the City Council and the mayor take action against siren clubs had more than 300 signatures as of Friday evening.“Many, many people are being held to ransom because of their hobby,” said Gerie Harvey, 75, who now makes a point of wearing earplugs so she can sleep and closes her windows at night. “People are getting really fed up with it.” More

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    Kanye West and Adidas: How Misconduct Broke a Lucrative Partnership

    A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade. B35309 2015 AQ4832 AQ2659 AQ4830 AQ4831 AQ4829 AQ4828 AQ4836 AQ2660 BB1839 AQ2661 BB5350 […] More

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    A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

    The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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    Inside Kanye West’s Fraught Relationship With Adidas: 7 Takeaways

    The runaway success of the Yeezy collaboration between Kanye West and Adidas came at a price as the company tolerated misconduct by him for nearly a decade.When Adidas cut ties with Kanye West a year ago, ending their wildly lucrative shoe deal, the breakup appeared to be the culmination of weeks of his inflammatory remarks about Jews and Black Lives Matter. But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the partnership was fraught from the start.Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, subjected employees to antisemitic and crude sexual comments and routine verbal abuse. As Adidas executives doubled down on a partnership that boosted company profits and made Mr. West a billionaire, they scrambled for ways to cope with the star’s demands and provocations.Interviews with current and former employees of Adidas and of Mr. West, along with hundreds of previously undisclosed internal records, including contracts, text messages and financial documents, provide the fullest accounting yet of the relationship. Here are seven takeaways.For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past Mr. West’s misconduct as profits soared.Mr. West’s first contract with Adidas, in 2013, had the most generous terms it had ever offered to a non-athlete. In the next one, three years later, Mr. West got more money, and Adidas got a morals clause — allowing it to end the partnership if he did anything that led to “disrepute, contempt, scandal,” according to a copy obtained by The Times.As the partnership earned billions of dollars, Mr. West’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. But it is not clear whether the brand ever considered invoking the morals clause before terminating the deal last year.Both Adidas and Mr. West declined interview requests and did not comment on The Times’s findings.Mr. West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler in the partnership.Shortly after signing with Adidas, he met with designers at company headquarters in Germany to discuss ideas. He was so offended by their sketches, he drew a swastika on one, shocking employees.He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. He informed a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own employees who accused him of repeatedly praising Hitler.Mr. West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda. He also expressed a belief that Jews had special powers allowing them to amass money and influence.He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace.Weeks before the swastika incident in 2013, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. He continued showing pornography to Adidas employees at work. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film.Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship.Mr. West contended repeatedly that Adidas was exploiting him. He sought more money and power, even suggesting that he should become chief executive.His complaints were often delivered amid severe mood swings, creating whiplash for employees. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved his Yeezy operation to remote Cody, Wyo., ordering the Adidas team to relocate. He used “terms like ‘believer’ and ‘pilgrimage’” to describe those who would follow him there, an Adidas executive told colleagues in a group text chain. In a meeting with Adidas’s leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.Adidas adapted to Mr. West’s behavior: ‘We are in a code red.’Managers and top executives started the group text chain, the “Yzy hotline,” to address issues involving Mr. West.The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist. “We are in a code red,” the team’s general manager texted colleagues in 2019. “The first line is completely exhausted and don’t feel supported.”The company assigned a human resources official to the unit and gave new hires a subscription to a meditation app. The staff regularly gathered for something akin to group therapy.Mr. West on tour in 2016, the year he and Adidas renegotiated their deal.A J Mast for The New York TimesAs the brand grew more reliant on Yeezys, it sweetened the deal for Mr. West.Under the 2016 contract, he received a 15 percent royalty on net sales, with $15 million upfront along with millions of dollars in company stock each year.The “biggest issue,” an Adidas document from contract negotiations noted, was “putting CASH in Kanye’s pocket to show him we VALUE him.” The partnership would propel him to Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.And in 2019, Adidas agreed to another enticement: $100 million annually, officially for Yeezy marketing but, in practice, a fund that Mr. West could spend with little oversight.He still stands to make money from the Adidas deal.After the relationship ruptured a year ago and Yeezy sales came to a halt, both Adidas and Mr. West were hit hard. The company projected its first annual loss in decades. Mr. West’s net worth plummeted.But they had at least one more chance to keep making money together. In May, the company began releasing the remaining $1.3 billion worth of Yeezys. A cut of the proceeds would go to charity. But most of the revenue would go to Adidas, and Mr. West was entitled to royalties. More

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    in Movies

    The Comedy Club Was as Intimate as a Living Room. Actually, It Was One.

    At Apartment Fest, audiences piled into a Harlem home for four nights of jokes from comedians who have to fight for stage time elsewhere.When Eitan Levine, who’s been doing comedy for about 15 years, announced to his roughly 20,000 followers on Instagram that he would be holding a four-night stand-up comedy event called Apartment Fest in his two-bedroom Harlem home, he wasn’t too surprised when 157 applicants submitted audition tapes.“Good stage time is very hard to come by and bad stage time is also very hard to come by, so you take all of it,” said Levine, 34, who was offering peers a highly coveted 10 minutes each. “I’ve applied to worse shows for less time.”The event, which on some nights featured two 90-minute shows, complete with a headliner and six comedians, took over his apartment. Last Thursday, as Levine pushed back a large sectional sofa, set up some 25 chairs and made sure there was enough beer and water for guests paying up to $25 apiece, he worried about train delays and whether audiences would even show up. “All of those stressors are amplified 5,000 percent because the show is literally in my living room,” Levine explained. He needn’t have worried. The shows were all sold out.This D.I.Y. spirit is reminiscent of the New York’s music scene in the early 2000s, when bands like the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were getting their starts in grimy apartments on the Lower East Side. Just as those groups were to the left of the mainstream at the time, today many early-stage comedians have to create their own spaces to be heard. And just like back then, an apartment works perfectly.Eitan Levine, the organizer, pushed a sofa against the wall to make room for the audience.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesBrittany Starna helped with the audio for Apartment Fest.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLevine’s open-plan living area is painted from floor to ceiling in bold stripes that range from orange to bright teal. A window spans much of the back wall, and the space is open enough to snugly accommodate the crowd that faced a microphone stand.Chloe Radcliffe, 32, worked as a staff writer on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” has a studio comedy feature in development and most recently appeared in a mini-series directed by Steven Soderbergh called “Command Z.” On Thursday, she biked from Ridgewood, Queens, to Harlem to perform at Apartment Fest. She touched up her makeup in Levine’s bathroom and prepped her set from a bench in his bedroom, which was strewn with pizza boxes and was serving as a green room.Radcliffe opened with a bit about the birthmark on her cheek: “I was on the sidewalk and somebody dropped their AirPod and I picked it up and gave it to him and said, ‘Have a good day.’ He smiled, looked at my birthmark and said, ‘Get well soon.’”The crowd responded with uncontrollable giggles. “I would love to find that guy in a couple of years and be like, ‘It won’t go away! I don’t know how to get rid of it!’” she continued.Despite Levine’s nerves, this wasn’t the first time he had held comedy shows in his apartment. He originally got the idea after a rejection in 2019.“I was applying to a bunch of comedy festivals and one day I got an email from a festival rejecting me and I realized I never even applied to it,” Levine said, adding that he “came to stand-up from the improv and sketch communities where it’s very D.I.Y. — you can put a show on anywhere — so I just took that idea.”The idea for Apartment Fest was borrowed from the D.I.Y. spirit of the New York music scene in the early aughts.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesBrandon Barrera, 27, host of the first show on Saturday night, agreed with the D.I.Y. label and described the event as Levine “basically throwing a house party with the people who make him laugh the hardest.”Because of the many comedy clubs in New York, the city is one of the only places in the country where stand-ups can get onstage multiple times in one night. But even then, they can hope to end the evening with 15 minutes of total stage time. Radcliffe, for instance, had two more shows on the docket later Thursday.But bars and club owners can be picky, resulting in more pressure on comedians. Barrera, who moved from Los Angeles when his friend offered him a job as a golf caddy and a place to live in the nearby caddyshack in New Jersey, records multiple podcasts in addition to performing live. Other comedians at Apartment Fest also regularly appear on or produce podcasts, all while constantly posting material on social media, which is often where club and festival bookers find their work.Social media wasn’t as much of a consideration for Levine as he put together Apartment Fest’s bills. Though many of the performers who made the cut were his friends and had thousands of followers on social media, he also included younger comedians who were just starting to share their work online.“The minimum buy-in to some other festivals is 15,000 Instagram followers and 50,000 TikTok followers,” Levine said. “Other festivals are trying to sell something or they’re trying to be a festival that makes money. This festival is literally just the funniest people that submitted videos.”Brandon Barrera was the host of the first show on Saturday night.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLevine was worried that audiences wouldn’t show up, but every set was sold out.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesRadcliffe has a significant following on social media, and while she understands it can be limiting for comedians, she said such platforms have “broadened access by orders of magnitude: underrepresented voices get noticed; more people are tangibly able to participate; comedians can build their own audience and the monetary exchange is more direct,” Radcliffe said.Festivals often pay only in potential exposure. Even as pop-up shows in unexpected places around the city have become more popular, it’s common for bookers to take home the bulk of the money while splitting meager amounts among the comedians.For Levine’s show, the host was paid $30, the featured acts were paid $20 and the headliners were paid $75. The money left over from the ticket proceeds — $1,500 — was donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.Levine chose the organization after first encountering it at age 10 when he was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma. It’s also how he found his way into comedy. After his first wish, a BattleBot, was denied, “I ended up asking them to put me on a comedy show in New York,” said Levine, who grew up in Springfield, N.J. “So they put me up on a show at Caroline’s” comedy club.Levine filmed his sets for use in a special later.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesHe currently appears on an Amazon sports comedy show, “Game Breakers,” and plans to cut a special from sets of his performances that were filmed at Apartment Fest.As for the other comedians, the stage time in a homey apartment offered a chance to connect with an audience in a low-pressure setting.Stef Dag, 28, was quick to point out that while she may be “staring at Domino’s on the floor and clothes everywhere,” she wasn’t nervous. “It almost feels like I’m at a sleepover party — not that sleepovers haven’t been the most traumatizing nights of my life.”“Festivals, especially when you first start doing them, there is like a certain amount of — pressure is a little strong, but you want to do well,” says Ryan Thomas, a 32-year-old comedian from Brooklyn. “Here, the scale is so much smaller, and it makes it so much more fun because everyone is in on the weirdness of the situation and it makes it way more fun to play with the audience.“I just did my set and there was a joke that they didn’t really like, and I got to just talk them through. You’re actually able to look people in the eye.” More

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    in Music

    A Britney Spears Book Tour: No TV, No Podcasts, Lots of Instagram

    The singer, who has not given a face-to-face interview since 2018, has avoided traditional public appearances for “The Woman in Me,” which is still finding audiences.In the run-up to the release of his blockbuster autobiography earlier this year, Prince Harry sat down with “60 Minutes” — and “CBS Mornings,” “ABC News Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and others. Paris Hilton did “The View” and spoke with the BBC. Kerry Washington appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Good Morning America.” Arnold Schwarzenegger opted for Kelly Clarkson and Howard Stern.But for Britney Spears, the endlessly sought after and speculated about pop star who released her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” this week, there was mostly Instagram.To gin up excitement about one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the year, there were prerelease excerpts in People magazine, but no face-to-face interviews, which Spears has avoided since 2018, when she was still in the conservatorship that strictly controlled her life and career. (In the book, Spears writes of mentioning the arrangement in a 2016 interview, only to have it edited out.)Now legally cleared to do and say what she pleases, however, Spears has held back, essentially throwing out the playbook for promoting a celebrity tell-all. The singer and her team are instead letting the book do the talking, with its gossipy nuggets and condemnations of the 13-year conservatorship feeding a steady churn of press coverage and social media chatter.Her reluctance to be interviewed, stemming in part from a distrust sowed by decades of insensitive coverage, does not seem to have affected early sales: The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list; complete sales data will not be available until next week. But the lack of any significant promotional or public appearances by Spears, 41, has been obvious to professionals in the worlds of publishing and public relations.In seeking a less public life, Spears has spoken about the constant attention of the paparazzi. Bauer-Griffin/GC Images, via Getty Images“This is completely out of the ordinary,” said Eleanor McManus, a former booking producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live” who now works as a crisis manager. McManus said she was watching TV on Monday morning to find out which shows would be teasing a conversation with Spears. “I was thinking, ‘Who got the first interview?’” she said, before realizing that the answer was “no one.”“The only time you recommend not doing interviews is if you can’t control what the subject would say, or if what he or she would say would damage their brand,” she added.But some experts suggest Spears’s robust social media following may be all she needs for a successful book launch. At a time when celebrity memoirs are booming, subjects may not need to engage with traditional media as they once did if they have a substantial audience of their own, said Madeleine Morel, an independent literary agent who represents ghostwriters.“The whole thing is about the size of your platform,” Morel said. “Can you bring an audience to a book?”Spears is indeed known for communicating these days almost exclusively through her free-associative and often cryptic social media posts. Her most significant commentary on “The Woman in Me” has come not in Vogue, with Oprah or even a cheeky appearance on “Saturday Night Live” but via social media, where she has shared messages about the book that were alternately grateful, scarred and conflicted to her more than 100 million followers across platforms.It’s not like the traditional media was not interested. Spears said in a since-deleted voice message posted to Instagram last year that after her conservatorship was terminated in late 2021, she had been approached by all manner of outlets.“I have offers to interviews with Oprah and so many people, lots and lots of money, but it’s insane,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”A representative for Spears declined to comment and the memoir’s publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, did not respond to requests for comment about their nontraditional strategy to secure promotion.So far, Spears’s traditional media engagement has been limited to the excerpts in People magazine — including the bombshell that Spears had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake — accompanied by emailed quotes attributed to the singer and a cover photo, which captured Spears smiling on a beach in Tahiti, sourced to “Britney Brands” rather than a photographer for the magazine.The publisher also helped to organize an international rerelease of the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears. That rollout has featured interviews by its director, Tamra Davis, who has generated her own wave of news tidbits about Spears.A scene from the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears.In Spears’s own recent comments on the book, she has chided the media for focusing on her past, though the memoir is essentially a retelling of her life story.“I don’t like the headlines I am reading … that’s exactly why I quit the business 4 years ago !!!,” she wrote on Instagram. “My motive for this book was not to harp on my past experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and silly !!! I have moved on since then !!!”She went on to briefly deactivate her account, only to return soon after with a picture of a cake that said “See you in hell.” On the book’s release day, she shared a single promotional post reading: “My story. On my terms. At last.” (She later deleted the post from Instagram.)Most celebrities with books to sell still combine more old-fashioned media appearances, like the “Today” show and the late-night circuit, with a dedicated social media strategy and newer, friendly outlets like the podcasts Armchair Expert and On Purpose With Jay Shetty, the lifecoach and influencer.The actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who released a memoir this month, did all of the above, plus more. Her deluge of media appearances even became the subject of a joke on “S.N.L.”“Sorry if I seem a little tired,” said the comedian Ego Nwodim, who played Pinkett Smith. “I’ve been on the ‘Today’ show 14 times in three days.”The writer Neil Strauss, who has worked on books with Mötley Crüe, Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, said that celebrities could run the risk of making themselves bigger than the book with overexposure. “Sometimes by talking about it, you can only hurt it,” he said, adding that Spears “seems like she has a lot of trauma around the media.”In her memoir, Spears describes the press as having been unfairly focused on her body as a rising pop sensation and on her fitness as a mother during a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008 that ultimately led to her father, James P. Spears, being granted control of her personal life and finances.She wrote that she felt exploited in 2003, when her father and her management organized an interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with Timberlake. “It was completely humiliating,” Spears writes. “I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing.”Spears, left, in an interview with Diane Sawyer. The singer writes in her memoir that the conversation, which focused on her breakup with Justin Timberlake, was “humiliating.”ABCStrauss, the celebrity collaborator, said, “She’s just analyzed and scrutinized beyond the level that any human should have to be.” Still, he acknowledged, echoing others in the industry, it was “highly unusual” for someone of Spears’s stature to do no interviews. Even Bob Dylan, a notorious media antagonist for most of his career, promoted his memoir in 2004.Paul Bogaards, a veteran book publicist who has led campaigns for best-selling memoirs by Bill Clinton and Andre Agassi, said that the power of a celebrity speaking publicly about their book tends to be greater than the media mining it for a news story.“Once they’re out there in the world talking about their book, it becomes a 24-7 coverage-palooza,” Bogaards said, adding that most publishers required contractual agreements about promotion. “You want them to be visible in a significant way,” he added. “It’s hard to defend taking on a multimillion dollar advance in the absence of those kinds of agreements.” (Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir, which was announced last year, between $12.5 million and $15 million.)Another major selling point for celebrity memoirs tends to be the subject’s own voice on the audiobook edition, but in this case, Spears has largely opted out as well. In a short introduction to the audiobook version of “The Woman in Me,” Spears said she had chosen to read only a short snippet of her 275-page book because the process of reliving its contents had been “heart-wrenching.” Apart from a minute and a half, the rest of the book’s five-plus hours is read by the actress Michelle Williams.Spears’s most loyal fans see no issue in her letting the work speak for itself. For years, the mantra for many supporters has been “leave Britney alone,” especially after the singer upbraided fans earlier this year for calling the police with concerns about her well-being when she temporarily deactivated her Instagram account. She voiced her objections again last month when another emergency call was made in response to a video of her dancing with what appeared to be kitchen knives. (Spears said they were props.)“A lot of the sentiment in the book are these instances where she was forced to do things against her will,” said Jordan Miller, the founder of the Spears fan site BreatheHeavy.com, which helped start the “Free Britney” campaign that brought more public attention to conservatorship.“It’s cool that she’s going in the opposite direction of what the status quo is in terms of conventional promotion,” he added. “It’s like, ‘Here are my words, you can read these. Here are the photos that I want you to see. I’m going to have approval of all of this.’ In the context of everything that’s gone on, that is super refreshing.”But a celebrity memoir with an eye-popping purchase price may need to reach more than just superfans in order to be seen as a phenomenon worth its investment, experts said.“It’s going to be a major release, but I think that they could be doing more to make it a real moment that sticks around,” said Anthony Bozza, an author who has written books with Slash, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.If not, he added, “You’re just going to be a blip in the cycle.” More