Aurelia Butler

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    How ‘No One Will Save You’ Terrifies Us With Hardly a Word

    For the Hulu hit, the director relied on visual and sound cues to create both the scares and the plot. Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro are fans.The nail-biter “No One Will Save You” quietly materialized on Hulu Sept. 22 and became a streaming darling overnight, an apt entrance for a largely dialogue-free chiller about an alien invasion.Because the heroine, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), is a trauma-ridden outcast living in solitude, the film’s writer-director, Brian Duffield, always knew that talking would be minimal in his sophomore feature. But he didn’t realize until later just how sparse it would be.“I got about halfway through the script and thought Brynn won’t see another person for the rest of the movie,” Duffield, whose writing credits include “Love and Monsters,” said in a recent interview. “So it was a happy accident.”“No One Will Save You” economically establishes Brynn’s world at the start: she lives alone in a lovely but remote house and sells handmade dresses online for a living. The townspeople seems to hate her, but Brynn braves their animosity until, just a few minutes in, a nighttime alien invasion threatens her existence.It’s a relentless, unsettling and wildly entertaining cat-and-mouse game from there, with Duffield revealing the details of Brynn’s harrowing past in measured drips, while giving the aliens their own dimension. Fans include the author Stephen King, who called it “brilliant, daring, involving, scary” on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, while the director Guillermo del Toro posted, “I couldn’t think of a more perfect movie for your weekend,” later adding threads about the film’s religious themes and skillful wordlessness.Duffield was intent on keeping that quietness non-gimmicky, so he encouraged Dever to mutter to herself freely if it felt right. “There was never a moment where I was like, ‘Let’s do a take where you don’t talk.’ But she didn’t need to talk, because she’s Kaitlyn Dever,” he said, describing her as the movie’s biggest special effect. “She can monologue with her eyes.” (Dever couldn’t be interviewed because of the actors’ strike.)The job of articulating as much of the narrative as possible fell to the skilled artisans behind the scenes. The production designer Ramsey Avery filled Brynn’s Louisiana home with clues about her back story. One objective was layering the décor with pieces that suggested generations of her family once lived there. So the rooms were dressed with childhood photos, hand-sewn pillows and window treatments, and little signs about the importance of family — a cottage-core aesthetic augmented by romantic, Sirkian touches that Brynn inherited a taste for. “Since she has nothing else to do,” Avery said, “she finds affordable things online, Etsy shopping and bargain hunting.”Avery also had the idea for the quaint birdhouse village that Brynn gradually builds — a hobby she presumably shared with her mother once, now a perfect metaphor for her caged isolation.The house was made to look as if generations of a family had lived there.Sam Lothridge/20th Century StudiosThe real house was built in the late 19th century and moved to its present location in the ’70s— a history that thematically echoed Brynn’s world. “But the interiors didn’t work, so we had to design our own based on specific action needs,” Avery said. That meant building a set where they could rearrange windows to allow alien light in, conceive a bedroom where the ceiling could press down on Brynn and create an environment that would allow the cinematographer Aaron Morton to fluidly capture all these visual details to advance our understanding of Brynn.For Morton, working on a wordless film felt like a heightened version of his usual trade. “My whole job is the pictures,” he said. “But this put even more pressure on the planning.” Because the film is propelled by set pieces that pit Brynn against the aliens, Morton had to consider how much she or the audience would be allowed to see. “It was about elevating the tension by showing, not telling, things.”To create that alien light, Morton used multiple 50-foot cranes, some with lights attached, others with cameras, all choreographed together while Brynn runs between the house, car and forest. “That gave us an opportunity to show the audience things that Brynn couldn’t see. We’d wash the light over a window in the background to remind people that the threat is still there.”That threat is an extraterrestrial species derived from the archetypal Grays, the elongated aliens familiar from pop culture that Duffield has always loved. “It felt like they had gone missing, so I wanted to bring back what’s become like the emoji alien,” Duffield said. “It never felt like someone did a horror movie with them.” In creating the Grays, the visual effects producer Sarah Miesen took special care to infuse them with consistent but distinctive features and expressions to help the audience both differentiate and feel for them.A sense of alien light was created by mounting beams on 50-foot cranes. 20th Century Studios“We had the main Gray and three different versions of it,” she explained. “We added some blue tattooing on one head and did a crown on another. They all had different personalities.” Wordlessness also meant additional time spent creating alien movements that conveyed their emotions and relatable qualities, like a sense of curiosity, while seeming both scary and realistic. “But not funny, because you don’t want people to laugh when they’re supposed to be afraid.”Varying the Grays’ individual sounds was just as essential. “Not only were we creating a voice for these aliens, but also multiple ones that felt related but unique,” said William Files, a supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer. “They are clearly from a similar species. We wanted to expand on that sonically. If we got the characterizations right, you hopefully have some idea of not only how they’re making Brynn feel, but how they feel as well.”“We were keeping some vulnerability in their language, especially towards the end where they’re feeling for Brynn,” added the sound designer Chris Terhune, who also did sound mixing and editing alongside Files.The duo knew no dialogue didn’t mean no audible feeling from Brynn. “A lot of it is in the little sounds she makes,” Files said. “We did a whole pass with her in the studio, adding little emotional breaths from her.” Mundane sounds like creaky floorboards and chirping crickets were meant to help the audience hear what Brynn is hearing.The sound team collaborated closely with the composer Joseph Trapanese. The three often had to define what would be the more prominent audio element in certain acts: the score or the sound. Trapanese avoided anything too sci-fi, leaning into the idea that Brynn herself was a lonesome alien in her town: “There’s actually more synthesized electronic material in her music than there is for the aliens.” More

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    Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Here to Pump You Up (Emotionally)

    Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a part of the American landscape for so long that the improbability of his story is all too easy to take for granted: An immigrant bodybuilder from Austria with a long and unwieldy name, a heavy accent and a physical appearance unlike that of any other major movie star became one […] More

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    Nancy Van de Vate, Composer and Advocate for Women in Music, Dies at 92

    An American who settled in Vienna, she had a prolific career in contemporary classical music and broke gender barriers in her field.Early in her career, Nancy Van de Vate, a celebrated modernist composer, would tell people about her work and sometimes be met with dismissive questions like “Do you write songs for children?” And though she often won competitions that she had entered anonymously, her daughter Katherine Van de Vate said, she rarely won when she entered them under her own name, a dynamic she attributed to gender discrimination.Ms. Van de Vate refused to let such barriers slow her down. In 1968, she became only the second woman to receive a doctorate in music composition in the United States, according to “Journeys Through the Life and Music of Nancy Van de Vate” (2005), by Laurdella Foulkes-Levy and Burt J. Levy.Ms. Van de Vate would go on to compose more than a hundred compositions in a seven-decade career, including seven operas, many orchestral works and a large body of chamber music.She died on July 29 at 92 at her home in Vienna, where she spent the final 38 years of her life, her daughter said. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Van de Vate created a distinct musical voice, tinged with dissonance, that drew from a variety of genres and global influences, including traditional Indonesian music, and from a wide array of composers, including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Penderecki and Varèse.“When you’re at a smorgasbord,” Ms. Van de Vate said in an interview with the music writer Bruce Duffie in the 1990s, “do you head for the dishes you like, or do you make a conscious choice that you should sample everything there? I go to enjoy the variety.”Even working at the conceptual frontiers, Ms. Van de Vate composed music to be listened to, not to be dissected by theorists.Ms. Van de Vate in 2020. Her work drew on many musical styles and influences, among them traditional Indonesian music, as well as a variety of composers.via Van de Vate family“While no stranger to modernism, she had a deep desire to connect with her audience,” the composer David Victor Feldman, a friend, said in an email. “She didn’t see the tropes of modernism as a deal breaker, so they’re definitely in her mix. But so is infectious rhythm, color and the sounds of music coming from beyond the West.”Among her best-known pieces was her orchestral work “Chernobyl,” a haunting rumination on the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, which had its world premiere in Vienna in 1995 and its U.S. premiere in Portland, Maine, in 1997.She also earned critical acclaim for “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a searing antiwar opera based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque about trench warfare during World War I, which premiered in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2003.A prominent feminist in a male-dominated field, Ms. Van de Vate led by example. In 1975, she founded an advocacy organization called the League of Women Composers, later renamed the International League of Women Composers and now part of the International Alliance for Women in Music.In 1990, she and her husband, Clyde Smith, founded Vienna Modern Masters, a small label dedicated largely to recording new orchestral music, including many works by female composers.Though progress was made, she believed far more was needed. “There have always been one or two women in the American musical establishment,” she told Mr. Duffie. “I don’t see that as progress,” she added. “It’s like saying we have Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court now, so therefore all women have equal rights.”Nancy Jean Hayes was born on Dec. 30, 1930, in Plainfield, N.J., the second of three children of John Hayes, who ran an insurance company, and Anna (Tschudi) Hayes, a secretary.A gifted pianist since childhood, she studied piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., for a year after graduating from North Plainfield High School in 1948. She transferred to Wellesley College, where she majored in music and received a bachelor’s degree in 1952. She earned her pioneering doctorate from Florida State University in 1968.In addition to her daughter Katherine, Ms. Van de Vate’s survivors include another daughter, Barbara Levy; a son, Dwight; and six grandchildren. Her marriage to Dwight Van de Vate Jr., a philosophy professor, ended in divorce in 1976. She married Mr. Smith, a career naval officer, in 1979. He died in 1999.Ms. Van de Vate was also a committed music educator; she taught at Memphis State University, the University of Tennessee and other institutions through the 1960s and ’70s. While teaching in Hawaii in the mid-’70s, she organized music appreciation courses for sailors stationed at the Pearl Harbor naval base.“My mission as a teacher was to do as much as I possibly could to bring people to an understanding and, if possible, a liking for contemporary music,” she said in a 1986 interview with Ev Grimes, a radio producer. “And I found that if they understood it, they almost always liked it.”“I want my music to communicate,” she added. “I don’t care to write for the shelf.” More

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    Review: U2 Was in Las Vegas Limbo on Sphere’s Opening Night

    In the inaugural show at Sphere, a $2.3 billion venue, a band unafraid of pomp and spectacle was sometimes out-pomped and out-spectacled.Perhaps the true gift of Las Vegas is how it renders the extraordinary as mundane. A place where the simulacrum of glamour available to everyone ensures no one gets the real thing. A city responsible for billions of dollars of commerce that has the texture of a Fisher-Price play set. A hub for some of the country’s most beloved performers that blurs the lines between superstar D.J.s, cheeky magicians and bona fide vocal heroes.And so there was Bono on Friday night, onstage, tantalizingly close, freakishly accessible and, in some moments, perhaps just a tad lost. His band, U2, was inaugurating Sphere, a hyperstimulating new performance venue in which the whole exterior is a screen, and essentially the whole interior as well. Friday’s concert was the first of a 25-show residency, titled U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, that runs through the end of the year.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, no band played with the aesthetic of grandiosity more than U2, and no band made a philosophy of futurist communication so central to its visual presentation. So the choice of U2 to show off what Sphere was capable of made sense — a messianic band for a messianic venue.For two hours, the group — Bono, the Edge on guitar, Adam Clayton on bass and Bram van den Berg, filling in for Larry Mullen Jr., on drums — wrestled with a venue equally as obsessed with hugeness, pomp and spectacle as U2 is. The setting was lavish, and the gestures were often colossal. And yet for all the vividness of the setting, there was still something not quite complete about this performance, which at times was winningly small, at others winningly huge, and at still others a futile ramble.For this show, U2 leaned heavily on its 1991 album “Achtung Baby,” from the tail end of its commercial high point — an album that found the band, which excelled at earthen anthems, reaching for more ambitious and unexpected sounds. But playing it in full (though not in order) meant peaks and valleys. Meshed in vocal harmony on “Mysterious Ways,” Bono and the Edge sounded vibrant. Bono, who throughout the night performed his signature contortions that recall a person who just received an electric shock, was largely delivering his pleading howls with commitment, at least in the show’s first half. Throughout, Clayton was dutiful and stoic, and van den Berg brought a raw fervor that Mullen doesn’t quite approach.But some of this era’s indelible songs were, here, something less than that: Both the signature ballad “One” and the dreamily tragic “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” felt tentative and less invested than usual. (The same went for the curiously dry version of “Desire” that appeared later in the show.) And a batch of “Achtung Baby” songs that appeared just after the show’s midpoint, including “So Cruel,” “Acrobat” and “Love Is Blindness,” verged on grim and asphyxiating, rendering the huge room inert.From left, the Edge, Bono, Bram van den Berg (filling in for Larry Mullen Jr.) and Adam Clayton. The venue’s stage itself is strangely vulnerable, and the band at times felt tantalizingly close, our critic writes.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live NationThere were a few lovely flourishes where U2 referred to other musicians — sprinkles of “Purple Rain” and “Love Me Tender” at the end of “One”; throaty nods to “My Way” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” late in the night.In truth, the performance peaked at the end, with a majestic run: “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You,” “Beautiful Day.” And it was here that the band used the venue to most potent effect. Suddenly, the room was bright, as if a nightclub performance had been yanked out into nature — you could really see the audience, consisting largely of 40- and 50-somethings, including huge smatterings of loyalists in vintage U2 shirts and Vegas bros in tight Dan Flashes get-ups.It was a welcome and thoughtful recalibration of band to room, and audience to band. Just before then, during the new song “Atomic City,” the entire screen was an uncannily clear street view of Las Vegas, with the buildings being slowly dismantled through the course of the song, a clever visual gimmick. (For some parts of the show, the band hardly used the sphere at all, or only to display building-high videos of themselves.)For some parts of the show, the band hardly used the screens at all, or simply displayed building-high videos of themselves.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live NationEarlier in the set, U2 had used the screen just as aggressively but to less potent effect, making it plain how daunting a blank slate of this size can be. At one point a long rope — perhaps a nod to a magician’s endless handkerchief — was strung from the floor up to the peak of the dome, where it intersected with a balloon illustration. A young woman came onstage to walk with Bono as he, and then she, held the bottom of the rope. For a time she sat in it like a swing, awkwardly and perhaps not terribly safely. It was confusing and distracting.When the screen was full, it was often cluttered — with Barbara Kruger-esque phrases, during “The Fly,” or with digitally crisp art that could have been cooked up on an A.I. generator like Midjourney. (The illustrated endangered animals that appeared in the sky near the end of the show were an exception.) Sometimes things delved into the realm of discomfort: During “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” the screen filled with Vegas iconography and characters from films based in the city (Elvis Presley, but also Don Cheadle and Nicolas Cage). The collage streamed downward, as if it were falling behind the stage, which in turn made the stage appear as if it were tilting slightly upward, lending the whole affair the air of seasickness.Moments like these underscored that, as much as U2 was playing a concert, it was providing a soundtrack for Sphere’s technological wizardry. And also its technological quirks. The four spotlights behind the stage were mobile. A drone whizzed around, gnat-like, though it was unclear where the footage it was presumably filming was destined for. This isn’t quite a conceptual spectacle like the Zoo TV Tour, the original “Achtung Baby” showcase.Sphere is the brainchild of James Dolan, a broadly reviled New York sports and real estate magnate, who spent $2.3 billion bringing the space to life. It looks prescient, a glimpse of what even ordinary architecture might resemble a few decades hence. The entire outside surface is an LED screen — always on, and always changing (though it repeats). Watching it from the windows of a landing airplane, say, or a taxicab the night before this show, you might have seen it as a pumpkin, or a yellow emoji face, or a moist eye, or an ocean with creatures swimming through it.Impressively detailed and lightly shocking, Sphere registers in intensity if not scale — at 366 feet, it is not even one of the 40 tallest buildings in Las Vegas. But on some level, its power is grounded simply in the novelty of the shape, even in a town that already has a pyramid and a palace and a castle. (Dolan has already indicated plans to build similar structures in other cities.)The entire exterior of Sphere is a video screen, and essentially the entire interior as well.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesBut inside it is, simply, a concert venue, albeit one with distinct advantages and challenges. In dry stretches, when the space between the band and the huge screen and the crowd was palpable, the result paralleled the airy emptiness of a corporate convention gig. In a stadium show, you can almost obscure a low-enthusiasm performance — here there was nowhere to hide.That’s because, despite the visual ambition the space demands, little of that burden falls on the band itself, which is largely confined to the size of stage one might find in any regional theater across the country (augmented by a Brian Eno-inspired turntable structure, though it wasn’t used terribly effectively). It is a strangely vulnerable and inelegant setup for what is essentially a sinecure gig for a still-craved band.At the end of the night, Bono began cataloging his thanks. “I’ll tell you who’s one hard worker — Jim Dolan,” Bono said. “You’re one mad bastard.” He also thanked Irving and Jeffrey Azoff, Michael Rapino, Guy Oseary, Jimmy Iovine and other executives. Earlier, he’d acknowledged some special guests: Paul McCartney, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg. (Also in the audience, though not acknowledged: Flavor Flav.)It was a folksy way to spotlight the sheer extent of the labor, visible and invisible, that had just been performed. And it also highlighted the tension that remained, even at the end of the night, unresolved: Was this a big show or a small one? Was it selling intimacy or grandeur? Was it extraordinarily mundane, or mundanely extraordinary? More

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    Conducting Lessons: How Bradley Cooper Became Leonard Bernstein

    On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s then-president and chief executive. “We were really impressed.”Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.Cooper as Bernstein.Jason McDonald/NetflixBernstein as Bernstein, in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York Times“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer of renown, whose works include not just “West Side Story” but music for the concert hall.He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film “A Star Is Born,” which he also directed.But “Maestro,” in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style at the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct, but also to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”Cooper with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Ely Cathedral, in England, where Nézet-Séguin coached Cooper for the film’s re-creation of a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra.NetflixCooper, who wrote “Maestro” with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in “Tár” (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.”He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms.“My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in “Looney Tunes” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show” last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct “Maestro,” was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home.”After a screening of “A Star Is Born,” Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand “Maestro” over to Cooper, with whom he shares a love of classical music.“It only took me 15 minutes to realize this brilliant actor is equaled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (“Maestro” beat out a rival Bernstein project by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)Jamie Bernstein said that Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story.” He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, like placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Conn., admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.“Channeling a supernova”: Cooper with Gustavo Dudamel at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.Kazu Hiro/Netflix“He was just like a sponge soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to his children. (They defended him recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute,” a nickname that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in “Maestro”; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.Cooper was eager to approach “Maestro” less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled.While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart.”The film, shot largely on location, recreates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for the ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, the Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.Cooper in the pit at the Metropolitan Opera where he observed Nézet-Séguin during a performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaIn his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors’ union.)Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Schumann’s “Manfred” overture, which opened the Carnegie program in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of “Candide,” during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.Last fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to recreate a 1973 performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.Cooper, who chose the music in “Maestro,” had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.“He would watch the videos,” Nézet-Séguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?”Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an eight-minute section of the piece with a recording.When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nézet-Séguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.When Cooper took the podium, Nézet-Séguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold onto a moment or let go.The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”Throughout his work on “Maestro,” Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village townhouse for screenings of “Maestro.” The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut program.“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channeling a supernova.” He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”Audio produced by More

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    Ed Begley Jr. Can Tell You the 3 Best Comedies of All Time

    The actor and environmentalist considered hiring a ghostwriter for help with his memoir, then realized as he was writing things down, “This is too much fun.”Is there anyone in Hollywood that Ed Begley Jr. doesn’t know?“I think there’s a publicist at Paramount I need to have lunch with soon, and there’s a dolly grip at Fox,” he quipped. “I’m going to clear that up by the week’s end.”Readers of Begley’s new memoir, “To the Temple of Tranquility … and Step on It!,” might suspect that even that list is stretching it. In the book, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Christopher Guest, Cass Elliot, John Belushi, Tom Waits, the Beatles and even Charles Manson make appearances. As do memories from his work on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “St. Elsewhere,” “A Mighty Wind” and “She-Devil.”Begley, 74, had been considering writing a memoir for a year or two when his younger daughter, Hayden, asked him to spill his stories into her smartphone. His wild 20s, when he drank a quart of vodka a day, took pills and did cocaine. His transformation into an outspoken advocate for sustainable living. The Parkinson’s diagnosis he received in 2016.He took about 45 pages of notes, ostensibly for a ghostwriter, but realized he was enjoying the process. “I don’t want any ghostwriter touching it,” he recalled thinking. “This is too much fun.”In a video interview from his Los Angeles home, Begley spoke about practicing what he preaches and gave some much-needed love to the city’s Metro system. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1My BikeThere’s no doubt in my mind that the high point of my 8th year was getting a bicycle. A beautiful blue Schwinn. Later to be replaced by a white Peugeot, then a brown Nishiki, then a titanium Klein, and finally by a fat-tire American Flyer with electric assist — a compromise that my age and physical condition dictate, but I’m still riding!2‘Midnight Run’This is one of those perfect films. There’s not one misstep in the whole two hours and six minutes. Bob De Niro is great, as always, and though Charles Grodin is no longer with us, he was, and remains, a national treasure. It’s a brilliant script by George Gallo and flawlessly directed by Martin Brest. I would argue that it is one of the three best comedies of all time. The other two being “Bridesmaids” and “The In-Laws” — a self-serving selection, admittedly, but true nonetheless.3My LEED Platinum HomeTwelve-inch-thick walls, passive solar design, a 10,000-gallon rainwater tank, a gray-water system for the fruit trees, steel construction to avoid taking down trees to build a home. Not to mention the fire hazard when building homes out of sticks. Six raised beds and four compost bins allow me to grow a good deal of my own food. All of it proving that living more sustainably is certainly possible.4‘Loves of a Blonde’Milos Forman certainly made a good many fine films, several of them big hits like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.” But there is an extraordinary early film of his, made [in Czechoslovakia] in 1965. If you haven’t seen it, please try to find it somewhere. It is a gem.5The L.A. MetroI know what you’ve heard, and most of it’s true. Things fell apart during Covid, and we haven’t been able to fix a good many serious problems that got worse during 2020. But I’m not giving up my senior pass, and I’m not giving up on public transportation in Los Angeles! Given the future that we’re facing with climate change, we must get people out of their polluting cars. And public transportation offers people a cost-effective way to do so.6Fryman Canyon ParkThere’s a precious tract of open space, a miniature Griffith Park, right in the middle of Studio City. It’s called Fryman Canyon. I’ve been in the valley my whole life and in Studio City since 1971, and I’ve been enjoying hiking this trail for over half a century. And I’m not done.7Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’No further discussion is necessary.8Paula PoundstoneI’ve seen her perform countless times, and it never ceases to bring me amazement and pure joy. It is certainly humbling to watch her work a crowd, but my more immediate problem is often catastrophic respiratory failure. I have more than once laughed so hard that I thought it would be the end of me. But what a way to go!9H.O.P. E. Healthy Organic Positive EatingA vegan restaurant in Studio City that is my go-to dining experience. It is a Thai restaurant, family-owned and delicious. One of the biggest contributions we can make to reducing the threat of climate change is to eat more plant-based food.10‘The Heart of Saturday Night’Though Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have put out countless brilliant albums like “Mule Variations” and “Bad as Me,” “The Heart of Saturday Night” is the soundtrack for my life in the ’70s, and I always like paying a visit there. More

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    How Tupac Shakur Remained a Defining Rap Figure After His Death

    A star during his lifetime, he became an almost mythical figure in the decades since his 1996 killing.Tupac Shakur has been dead for longer than the 25 years he lived. During his lifetime, he rose to levels of stardom matched by few other rappers, rocketing quickly from a Digital Underground backup dancer to a chart-topper and movie star, all while courting controversy with law enforcement and presidential administrations. In the decades since his 1996 murder in Las Vegas, he has endured as one of the genre’s defining figures, in no small part because of the mystery surrounding his death.The Friday arrest of Duane Keith Davis in connection with Shakur’s killing — he was indicted on a murder charge — is a step in solving one of hip-hop’s greatest tragedies and longest mysteries. Nearly two years before his death, Shakur had been ambushed and shot in New York. The assault instigated a visceral feud between Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., a New York rapper who was slain nearly six months after Shakur, forever linking the rivals and the coastal feud that hung over ’90s hip-hop.Shakur’s breadth as a rapper included enduring anthems like “Dear Mama,” “Keep Ya Head Up” and “California Love,” while also featuring songs laced with misogyny and vengeance. He poignantly rapped about social activism and the oppression of Black Americans, which helps his music resonate just as strong today as it did in the ’90s.“His death caused people to really magnify what he was doing musically and when they saw it, they were like, ‘Oh my Lord,’” said Greg Mack, a radio programmer who helped bring hip-hop music into the mainstream on the West Coast. “We didn’t know that’s who we had.”Shakur at the MTV Video Music Awards just days before his death in 1996. ReutersPart of Shakur’s staying power is because his murder investigation stayed open longer than he lived, allowing fans to offer up theories about what may have happened. Almost immediately after his Sept. 13, 1996, death was announced, rumors circulated that Shakur was actually alive and well, recording in solitude on some far-off island. These wild theories continued with regularity over the years.(In one 2011 example, hackers gained access to the PBS website and wrote that Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. were living together in a small New Zealand town. The story spread quickly on social media even after PBS removed it.)Shakur often prophesied an early death in lyrics and interviews. He recorded a trove of music during his lifetime, and much of that material saw the light of day after his death. Over the course of a decade, Shakur’s estate released several albums that culminated with 2006’s “Pac’s Life.”His posthumous output extends beyond his own albums. A holographic image of Shakur memorably performed at 2012’s Coachella festival. Kendrick Lamar used excerpts from a rare 1994 Shakur interview for the two to engage in a conversation on his influential album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” In June, Shakur received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Actors including Anthony Mackie and Demetrius Shipp Jr. have portrayed him in films.More than a dozen documentaries, plays and books have been shot, acted and written to display and dissect Shakur’s short life, including 2003’s “Tupac: Resurrection,” which earned an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature.This year, the director Allen Hughes released “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” a five-part docuseries that examines Shakur’s relationship with his mother, Afeni Shakur. (Tupac Shakur once assaulted Hughes for firing him from the movie “Menace II Society.”) Next month, Staci Robinson, who knew Shakur in high school, will publish the first estate-approved biography on Shakur, a book she worked on for more than 20 years.“Tupac Shakur no longer belongs to Tupac Shakur,” Neil Strauss of The New York Times wrote in 2001. “Soon he won’t even belong to Afeni Shakur. He will belong to playwrights, filmmakers, novelists, television executives and other modern-day mythmakers. ” That prediction has largely rung true. More

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    Duane Keith Davis Is Charged With Murder in Tupac Shakur Case

    The man, a former gang leader named Duane Keith Davis, has said the four shots that killed the rapper in 1996 came from the vehicle he was riding in.Officers said the investigation into the killing was reinvigorated in 2018 after the self-described gang member, Duane Keith Davis, admitted to multiple media outlets that he was involved.Getty Images/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesMore than 25 years after the killing of Tupac Shakur became a defining tragedy in hip-hop, a self-described gang member who has repeatedly proclaimed that he participated in the drive-by shooting was indicted on a murder charge, Las Vegas prosecutors said on Friday, reviving a blockbuster investigation that had long stalled.The man, Duane Keith Davis, has said in interviews and a memoir that he was in the front passenger seat of the white Cadillac that pulled up near the vehicle holding Mr. Shakur after a 1996 prizefight between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon in Las Vegas.The 25-year-old rapper was shot four times and died in a hospital less than a week later.A grand jury in Clark County indicted Mr. Davis on one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon, plus a gang enhancement, a prosecutor said in court on Friday. Mr. Davis, whose arrest was earlier reported by The Associated Press, is in custody without bail.Despite plentiful speculation, evidence and reporting across nearly three decades, no charges had ever been filed in the shooting of Mr. Shakur, who was one of the most popular artists of the 1990s, with tracks that brought poetic gravitas to confrontational gangster rap. But talk of the case was revived in July, when the Las Vegas police executed a search warrant at a home in Henderson, Nev., connected to Mr. Davis.Sheriff Kevin McMahill, who leads the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, at a Friday news conference about Duane Keith Davis’s indictment.John Locher/Associated PressMarc DiGiacomo, a chief deputy district attorney in Clark County, said in court on Friday that Mr. Davis was the “on-ground, on-site commander” who “ordered the death” of Mr. Shakur and the attempted murder of Marion Knight, the rap mogul known as Suge, who was driving the car holding the rapper.It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Davis had a lawyer.In his 2019 memoir, Mr. Davis, who goes by the name Keffe D, recounted a gang dispute that escalated after Mr. Shakur and his associates beat up Mr. Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, following the boxing match at the MGM Grand hotel.“Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something,” Mr. Davis said in the memoir, “Compton Street Legend.” “Tupac chose the wrong game to play.”According to a copy of the indictment filed in Clark County District Court, prosecutors accused Mr. Davis of obtaining a gun “for the purpose of seeking retribution against” Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight, and of handing off the weapon either to his nephew or someone else in the Cadillac with “the intent that this crime be committed.” Mr. Davis is the only person in the car who is still alive.Mr. DiGiacomo acknowledged in court that the broad outlines of what had occurred that night were known to the police as far back as 1996.“What was lacking was admissible evidence to establish this chain of events,” the prosecutor said, noting that Mr. Davis then began to describe his role publicly. “He admitted within that book that he did acquire the firearm with the intent to go hunt down Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight.”At a news conference on Friday, the Las Vegas police confirmed that Mr. Davis’s own words reinvigorated their case, starting with a television appearance he made in 2018. “We knew at this time that this was likely our last time to take a run at this case,” Lt. Jason Johansson of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said.Mr. Davis had avoided directly naming the person who opened fire in recent interviews. But in a taped confession released by a former Los Angeles Police Department detective who investigated Mr. Shakur’s murder, Mr. Davis told the police that it had been Mr. Anderson, his nephew, who was known as Baby Lane.Mr. Anderson was questioned by officers investigating Mr. Shakur’s death but was killed in a shooting in 1998.In his memoir, Mr. Davis, who has also been known as Keefe D, said that after the shooting, the men abandoned the car and walked back to the hotel, picking the vehicle up the next day and taking it back to California. It was cleaned and painted before it was returned to the rental agency days later, Mr. Davis said. By that point it was “too late for any forensics to be accurate and reliable,” he noted.Duane Keith Davis wrote in his memoir, “Compton Street Legend,” that “Tupac chose the wrong game to play.”Immediately after Mr. Shakur’s death, there was a flurry of activity in the investigation. More than 20 people were arrested in connection with shootings that the police said were suspected to be related gang attacks.But as the years went on without any charges, Shakur’s killing — and the death of the Notorious B.I.G., his friend turned rival, six months later — fueled conspiracy theories and accusations that the police had not worked hard enough to bring his killers to justice. The Las Vegas police have cited a lack of cooperation from people close to Mr. Shakur as a reason for the stalled investigation.The killings became the subjects of books, podcasts, TV series and films, further elevating Mr. Shakur — known for albums such as “Me Against the World,” on which he rapped about a life imperiled by violence, and “All Eyez on Me,” one of the genre’s first double albums — to a mythic role in hip-hop.The investigation into the death of the Notorious B.I.G. was revived by the Los Angeles Police Department in the mid-2000s, ultimately leading to a re-examination of the Shakur killing. Greg Kading, one of the detectives involved in the inquiry, later wrote a book that detailed how investigators convinced Mr. Davis to cooperate with them through a proffer agreement, meaning he could not be charged with a crime based on any incriminating statements he might make in those interviews.“I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted,” Mr. Davis wrote in his memoir.On the night of the shooting, Mr. Shakur had been traveling in a BMW driven by Mr. Knight toward a postfight after-party at Club 662, a new venue backed by their record label, Death Row Records.Mr. Davis, a self-described member of the Crips, wrote in his memoir that he, Mr. Anderson and others had armed themselves and waited in the nightclub parking lot, hoping to confront Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight, who were associated with the Bloods, about the earlier violence.When the rapper failed to materialize, Mr. Davis said, the group waiting for him left for its hotel, only to encounter Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight talking to fans at a red light. “As they sat in traffic, we slowly rolled past the long line of luxury cars they had in their caravan, looking into each one until we pulled up to the front vehicle and found who we were seeking,” Mr. Davis wrote.Mr. Davis said Mr. Shakur’s crew had committed “the ultimate disrespect when they kicked and beat down my nephew” — an attack thought to be retribution for an earlier robbery of one of Mr. Shakur’s friends. In his memoir, Davis described the “strict code” of the streets that its participants “live, kill and die by.”“Tupac’s and Biggie’s deaths were direct results of that code violation and the explosive consequences when the powerful worlds of the streets, entertainment and crooked-ass law enforcement collide,” he wrote.Mr. Davis added that he had been considered a “prime suspect” in both killings, and called writing about the events for his book “therapeutic.”Sitting for an interview with a rap chronicler known as DJ Vlad this year, Mr. Davis was asked whether he was concerned that his disclosures could lead to a prosecution. Mr. Davis, who was incarcerated for roughly 15 years, in part because of federal drug charges, said he was not scared of prison.“They want to put me in jail for life?” he said. “That’s just something I got to do.”Joseph B. Treaster More