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    Tony Bennett, Champion of the Great American Songbook, Is Dead at 96

    From his initial success as a jazzy crooner through his generation-spanning duets, his career was remarkable for both its longevity and its consistency.Tony Bennett, a singer whose melodic clarity, jazz-influenced phrasing, audience-embracing persona and warm, deceptively simple interpretations of musical standards helped spread the American songbook around the world and won him generations of fans, died on Friday in New York City. He was 96.His publicist, Sylvia Weiner, announced his death.In February 2021, his wife, Susan Bennett, told AARP The Magazine that Mr. Bennett learned he had Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. He continued to perform and record despite his illness; his last public performance was in August of that year, when he appeared with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall in a show titled “One Last Time.”Mr. Bennett’s career of more than 70 years was remarkable not only for its longevity, but also for its consistency. In hundreds of concerts and club dates and more than 150 recordings, he devoted himself to preserving the classic American popular song, as written by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.From his initial success as a jazzy crooner who wowed audiences at the Paramount in Times Square in the early 1950s, through his late-in-life duets with younger singers gleaned from a range of genres and generations — most notably Lady Gaga, with whom he recorded albums in 2014 and 2021 and toured in 2015 — he was an active promoter of both songwriting and entertaining as timeless, noble pursuits.Mr. Bennett stubbornly resisted record producers who urged gimmick songs on him, or, in the 1960s and early ’70s, who were sure that rock ’n’ roll had relegated the music he preferred to a dusty bin perused only by a dwindling population of the elderly and nostalgic.Mr. Bennett was surrounded by autograph hunters as he left a performance in 1951. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”Associated PressInstead, he followed in the musical path of the greatest American pop singers of the 20th century — Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra — and carried the torch for them into the 21st. He reached the height of stardom in 1962 with a celebrated concert at Carnegie Hall and the release of his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” And though he saw his popularity wane with the onset of rock and his career went through a trough in the 1970s, when professional difficulties were exacerbated by a failing marriage and drug problems, he was, in the end, more than vindicated in his musical judgment.“I wanted to sing the great songs, songs that I felt really mattered to people,” he said in “The Good Life” (1998), an autobiography written with Will Friedwald.It’s hard to overstate Mr. Bennett’s lasting appeal. He was still singing “San Francisco” — which led many people to think he was a native of that city, though he was actually a through-and-through New Yorker — more than half a century later. He sang on Ed Sullivan’s show and David Letterman’s. He sang with Rosemary Clooney when she was in her 20s, and Celine Dion when she was in her 20s.He made his film debut in 1966, in a critically reviled Hollywood story, “The Oscar,” playing a man betrayed by an old friend. And though he did not pursue an acting career, decades later he was playing himself in movies like the Robert De Niro-Billy Crystal gangster comedy “Analyze This” and the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty.” He was 64 when he appeared as a cartoon version of himself on “The Simpsons.” He was 82 when he appeared on the HBO series “Entourage,” performing one of his trademark songs, “The Good Life.”A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.Mr. Bennett and Dianne Feinstein, at the time the mayor of San Francisco, hanging on to one of the city’s cable cars in 1984.Jeff Reinking/Associated PressMr. Bennett also performed for Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, during his state visit to England in 1996. He sang at the White House for John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and at Buckingham Palace at Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th anniversary jubilee.An ‘Elusive’ VoiceHe won his first two Grammy Awards, for “San Francisco,” in 1963, and his last, for the album “Love for Sale,” with Lady Gaga, in 2022. Altogether there were 20 of them, including, in 2001, a lifetime achievement award. By some estimates, he sold more than 60 million records.The talent that spawned this success and popularity was not so easy to define. Neither a fluid singer nor an especially powerful one, he did not have the mellifluous timbre of Crosby or the rakish swing of Sinatra. If Armstrong’s tone was distinctively gravelly, Mr. Bennett’s wasn’t quite; “sandy” was more like it. Almost no one denied that his voice was appealing, but critics strove mightily to describe it, and then to justify its appeal.“The voice that is the basic tool of Mr. Bennett’s trade is small, thin and somewhat hoarse,” John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 1962. “But he uses it shrewdly and with a skillful lack of pretension.”In a 1974 profile, Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz critic for The New Yorker, called Mr. Bennett “an elusive singer.”Performing in the Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall in 1976. Frank Sinatra once described Mr. Bennett as “the best singer in the business.”D. Gorton/The New York Times“He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos,” Mr. Balliett wrote. “He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer.” But, he added, “Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together.”Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience.He had a storyteller’s grace with a lyric, a jazzman’s sureness with a melody, and in his finest performances he delivered them with a party giver’s welcome, a palpable and infectious affability. In his presentation, the songs he loved and sang — “Just in Time,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “Rags to Riches” and “I Wanna Be Around,” to name a handful of his emblematic hits — became engaging, life-embracing parables.Frank Sinatra, whom Mr. Bennett counted as a mentor and friend, once put it another way.“For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business,” he told Life magazine in 1965. “He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”Mr. Bennett in London in 1972, where he filmed his “Tony Bennett at the Talk of the Town” television show.Associated PressMr. Bennett passed through life with as unscathed a public image as it is possible for a celebrity to have. Finding even mild criticism of him in reviews and interviews is no mean feat, and even his outspoken liberalism generally failed to attract vitriol from the right. (An exception was his call, after the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, for the legalization of drugs, a view loudly denounced by William J. Bennett, the former drug czar, among others.)With the possible exception of his former wives, everyone, it seemed, loved Tony Bennett. Skeptical journalists would occasionally try to pierce what they perceived as his perfect veneer, but they generally discovered that there wasn’t much to pierce.“Bennett is outrageous,” Simon Hattenstone, a reporter for The Guardian, wrote in 2002. “He mythologizes himself, name-drops every time he opens his mouth, directs you to his altruism, is self-congratulatory to the point of indecency. He should be intolerable, but he’s one of the sweetest, most humble men I’ve ever met.”Son of QueensAnthony Dominick Benedetto was born on Aug. 3, 1926, in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in Astoria. His father, Giovanni, had emigrated from Calabria in southern Italy at age 11, departing just two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in April 1906. His mother, Anna (Suraci) Benedetto, was born in New York in 1899, having made the sea journey from Italy in the womb. Their marriage was arranged. Giovanni and Anna were cousins; their mothers were sisters.In New York, where Giovanni Benedetto became John, he was a grocer, but beleaguered by poor health and often unable to work. Anna was a factory seamstress and took in additional sewing to support the family. Anthony was their third child, their second son, and the first of any Benedetto to be born in a hospital. Giovanni, who sang Italian folk songs to his children — “My father inspired my love for music,” Mr. Bennett wrote in his autobiography — died when Anthony was 10.He was an artist, too, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” Here he worked on one in 1969 in his Manhattan apartment. Bob Wands/Associated PressHe sang from an early age, and drew and painted, too. He would become a creditable painter as an adult, mostly landscapes and still lifes in watercolors and oils and portraits of musicians he admired, signing his paintings “Benedetto.” His first music teacher arranged for him to sing alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia at the opening of the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) in 1936.For a time he attended the High School for Industrial Arts (now called the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, but he never graduated. He dropped out and found work as a copy boy for The Associated Press, in a laundry and as an elevator operator.“I couldn’t figure out how to get the elevator to stop at the right place,” he recalled. “People ended up having to crawl out between floors.”At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable films — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.Mr. Bennett at the opening of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 1966.Las Vegas News Bureau, via European Pressphoto AgencyHe returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.The Hits Roll InThe producer Mitch Miller signed Mr. Bennett to Columbia Records in 1950; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was his first single. Miller was known for his hit-making prowess, a gift that often involved matching talented singers with novelty songs or having them cover hits by others, for which he was criticized by more serious music fans and sometimes by the singers themselves.He and Mr. Bennett had a contentious relationship. Mr. Bennett resisted his attempts at gimmickry; Miller, who believed that the producer and not the singer was in charge of a recording, applied his authority. Still, together they achieved grand success.By mid-1951, Mr. Bennett had his first No. 1 hit, “Because of You.” That same year, his version of the Hank Williams ballad “Cold, Cold Heart” also hit No. 1; three years after Williams died in 1953, Mr. Bennett performed it in his honor at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.Other trademark songs followed: “Rags to Riches” in 1953; “Stranger in Paradise,” from the Broadway show “Kismet,” also in 1953; Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “Just in Time,” from the show “Bells Are Ringing,” in 1956. That same year, Mr. Bennett was host of his own television variety show, a summer replacement for a similar show that starred another popular Italian American crooner, Perry Como. In 1958, he recorded two albums with the Count Basie band, introducing him to the jazz audience.Mr. Bennett with his daughter, Joanna, in London in 1972.United Press InternationalIn the 1950s, Mr. Bennett toured for the first time, played Las Vegas for the first time and got married for the first time, to Patricia Beech, a fan who had seen him perform in Cleveland. The marriage would founder in the 1960s, overwhelmed by Mr. Bennett’s perpetual touring, but their two sons would end up playing roles in Mr. Bennett’s career: the older one, D’Andrea, known as Danny, became his father’s manager, and Daegal, known as Dae, became a music producer and recording engineer.In July 1961, Mr. Bennett was performing in Hot Springs, Ark., and about to head to the West Coast when Ralph Sharon, his longtime pianist, played him a song written by George Cory and Douglass Cross that had been moldering in a drawer for two years. Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bennett decided that it would be perfect for their next date, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and it was.They recorded the song — of course it was “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — six months later, in January 1962. It won Mr. Bennett his first two Grammys, for best male solo performance and record of the year, and worldwide fame. In “The Good Life,” he wrote that he was often asked if he ever tired of singing it.“I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” he wrote.Just five months later, Mr. Bennett performed at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Sharon and a small orchestra. He got sensational reviews — though The Times’s was measured — and the recording of the concert is now considered a classic.But as the 1960s proceeded and rock ’n’ roll became dominant, Mr. Bennett’s popularity began to slip. In 1969, he succumbed to the pressure of the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to record his versions of contemporary songs, and the result, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — including the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Something” — was a musical calamity, a record that Mr. Bennett would later tell an interviewer made him vomit.His relationship with Columbia soured further and finally ended, and by the middle of the 1970s Mr. Bennett had formed his own company, Improv Records, on which he recorded the first of two of his most critically admired albums, duets with the jazz pianist Bill Evans. (The second one was released on Evans’s label, Fantasy.) Together the two opened the Newport Jazz Festival, which had moved to New York, at Carnegie Hall in 1976.Improv went out of business in 1977, and without a recording contract Mr. Bennett relied more and more on Las Vegas, then in decline, for regular work. His mother died that year, and the profligate life he had been living in Beverly Hills caught up with him; the Internal Revenue Service was threatening to take his house. His second marriage, a tumultuous one to the actress Sandra Grant, collapsed — she would later say that she would have been better off if she had married her previous boyfriend, Joe DiMaggio — and he had begun using marijuana and cocaine heavily.Mr. Bennett in Las Vegas in 1972. By the middle of the 1970s he had formed his own company, Improv Records, but its success was short-lived.Las Vegas News Bureau, via European Pressphoto AgencyOne day in 1979, high and in a panic, he took a bath to calm down, and nearly died in the tub. In later years he would play down the seriousness of the event, but he wrote about it in “The Good Life,” describing what he called a near-death experience: “A golden light enveloped me in a warm glow. It was quite peaceful; in fact, I had the sense that I was about to embark on a very compelling journey. But suddenly I was jolted out of the vision. The tub was overflowing and Sandra was standing above me. She’d heard the water running for too long, and when she came in I wasn’t breathing. She pounded on my chest and literally brought me back to life.”Mr. Bennett turned to his older son for help. Danny Bennett took over the management of his career, aiming to have the American musical standards that were his strength, and his handling of them, perceived as hip by a new generation.Somewhat surprisingly, the strategy took hold. An article in Spin magazine, which was founded in 1985, declared Mr. Bennett and James Brown as the two foremost influences on rock ’n’ roll, and the magazine followed up with a long, admiring profile.A Career RevivalEncouraged by executive changes at Columbia Records, Mr. Bennett returned to the Columbia fold in 1985. The next year he released the album “The Art of Excellence.” WBCN in Boston became the first rock station to give it regular airplay. Released in the emerging CD format, it spurred the sales of Mr. Bennett’s back catalog as music fans began replacing their vinyl records with CDs.In 1993, Mr. Bennett was a presenter, along with two members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at MTV’s Video Music Awards. The next year he gave an hourlong performance for MTV’s “Unplugged” series, which included duets with K.D. Lang (with whom he would later tour) and Elvis Costello. The recording of the show won the Grammy for album of the year.The revival of Mr. Bennett’s career was complete. Not only had he returned to the kind of popularity he had enjoyed 40 years earlier, but he had also been accepted by an entirely new audience.Mr. Bennett in 1993. He continued touring and recording well into his later years, and collaborated with singers from a range of genres and generations.Wyatt Counts/Associated PressHe recorded albums that honored musicians he admired — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday — and he collaborated on standards with singers half, or less than half, his age. On the 2006 album “Duets: An American Classic,” he sang “If I Ruled the World” with Ms. Dion, “Smile” with Barbra Streisand and “For Once in My Life” with Stevie Wonder, and revisited his first Columbia single, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” with Sting. Five years later, on “Duets II,” his collaborators included Aretha Franklin, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Ms. Winehouse.As the century changed, he was once again touring, giving up to 200 performances a year, and recording prolifically. In 2007 Mr. Bennett married a third time, to his longtime companion, Susan Crow, a teacher four decades his junior whom he had met in the late 1980s. Together they started a foundation, Exploring the Arts, that supports arts education in schools, and financed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Queens. If there was a magical quality to Mr. Bennett’s life, as suggested by David Evanier in a glowing 2011 biography, “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett,” it is encapsulated by a story Mr. Bennett told to Whitney Balliett in 1974.“I like the funny things in life that could only happen to me now,” he said. “Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head and everyone was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said, ‘Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?’ and hung up.” More

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    Searching for Someone to Deliver a Hollywood Ending

    Thanks to a changing culture and differing business models, the entertainment industry lacks power brokers with the stature to bring on labor peace.The 1954 Hollywood classic “On the Waterfront” ends with unionized longshoremen on a dock. They’re fed up and standing idle, staring at a bloodied Marlon Brando. All of a sudden, an authoritative man in a fancy suit and a natty hat arrives. “We gotta get this ship going,” he barks. “It’s costing us money!”Over the last week, as TV and movie actors went on strike for the first time in 43 years, joining already striking screenwriters on picket lines, Hollywood started looking around for its version of that figure — someone, anyone, to find a solution to the standoff and get America’s motion picture factories running again.But the more the entertainment industry looked, the more it became clear that such a person may no longer exist.“Back in the day, it was Lew Wasserman who would enter the talks and move them along,” said Jason E. Squire, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, referring to the superagent turned studio mogul. “Today, it is different. Traditional studios and the technology companies that have moved into Hollywood have different cultures and business models. There is no studio elder, respected by both sides, to help broker a deal.”At the moment, no talks between union leaders and the involved companies are happening and none have been scheduled, with each side insisting the other has to make the first move.Two federal mediators have been studying the issues that led to the breakdown in negotiations. Agents and lawyers are engaged in a flurry of back-channel phone conversations, encouraging union leaders and studio executives to soften their unmovable positions; Bryan Lourd, the Creative Artists Agency heavyweight, asked the Biden administration and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California to get involved, according to three people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the labor situation. A spokesman for Mr. Lourd declined to comment.Emotions must cool before talks restart, said one entertainment lawyer who has been working in the background to bring the sides together again. When does that happen? He said it could be next week or it could be-mid August.Starting in 1960, the last time both actors and writers were on strike, and continuing into the 1990s, the person who could break an impasse was the feared Wasserman. He commanded the respect of both labor and management and could push beyond the colorful personalities in each camp.It was an era when the entertainment business, for the most part, was much less complicated. Studios had not become buried inside conglomerates and beholden to lucrative toy divisions, not to mention having to deliver quarterly growth.Bob Daly, who ran Warner Bros. in the 1980s and ’90s, said he thought it was troubling that the labor strife had gotten personal.Valerie Macon/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBob Daly, who ran Warner Bros. in the 1980s and ’90s, picked up the mantle from Wasserman, who died in 2002. Mr. Daly, who went on to run the Los Angeles Dodgers, said by phone that he was no longer involved in Hollywood’s labor strife. But he had some advice.“One thing that has troubled me is that it has become personal, which I think is a mistake,” Mr. Daly said. “The only way this is going to get solved is for both sides to get in a room and talk, talk, talk until they find compromises. Neither side is going to get everything it wants. You can yell and scream inside that room — I did myself many times — but don’t come out until you have a deal.”The last Hollywood strike took place in 2007 and 2008. The Writers Guild of America walked out over a variety of issues, with compensation for shows distributed online a major sticking point. It was resolved after 100 days (the current writers’ strike was 81 days old on Thursday) when Peter Chernin, then president of News Corporation, and Robert A. Iger, Disney’s relatively new chief executive at the time, took a hands-on role in solving the stalemate. Barry M. Meyer, who was chairman of Warner Bros., and Jeffrey Katzenberg, then the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, also played roles.All those men, with the possible exception of Mr. Chernin, are now busy with other matters or viewed as villains by actors.Mr. Iger, who returned to run Disney in November after a brief retirement, became a picket line piñata last week after telling CNBC that, while he respected “their right and their desire to get as much as they possibly can,” union leaders were not being “realistic.” The backdrop of his interview, a meeting of elite media and technology executives in Sun Valley, Idaho, poured gasoline on the moment.Mr. Katzenberg largely left the entertainment business in 2020 after the collapse of Quibi, his streaming start-up. In April, Mr. Katzenberg was named a co-chair of President Biden’s re-election campaign.Mr. Meyer retired from Hollywood in 2013 after a celebrated 42 years and went on to sit on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “I’ve had nothing to do with the negotiations this year,” he said in an email. “That being said, it doesn’t stop me from feeling sad about the way things are stuck right now.”Peter Chernin was instrumental in ending the last writers’ strike when he was president of News Corporation. He left Hollywood’s corporate ranks in 2009.Annie Tritt for The New York TimesThat leaves Mr. Chernin. He left Hollywood’s corporate ranks in 2009 and founded an independent company that includes a film and television production arm — he has a deal with Netflix — and a sprawling investment portfolio focused on new technology and media companies. In recent days, Mr. Chernin told one senior associate that he had not been approached for help in the strikes, but that he would be hard-pressed to say no if asked.A spokeswoman for Mr. Chernin declined to comment.The studios that now must figure out how to appease actors and writers are wildly different in size and have diverging priorities. They all say they want to resolve the strikes. But some are more willing than others to compromise and immediately restart talks. The willing camp includes WarnerBros. Discovery, while Disney, which owns Disney+ and Hulu, has taken a harder line, according to two people involved in the negotiations. WarnerBros. Discovery and Disney declined to comment.Some people in Hollywood have been looking to elected officials to help smooth a path, but so far direct involvement, if any, has been unclear. The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, last week called the actors’ strike “an urgent issue that must be resolved, and I will be working to make that happen.” A spokesman did not respond to queries about what she was specifically doing.Mr. Newsom said in May that he would intervene in the writers’ strike “when called in by both sides.” He has not commented on the actors’ walkout, and a spokesman did not respond to queries.With two unions on strike, it could be months before new contracts can be negotiated and ratified. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the biggest studios, has decided to first focus on resolving differences with SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union is known, according to the two people involved in the negotiations.Cameras may not begin rolling again until January, given the time it takes to reassemble casts and crews, with the end-of-year holidays as a complication, executives at WarnerBros. Discovery and other companies told staff members this week.SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America are striking largely because, they say, entertainment companies — led by Netflix — have adopted unfair compensation formulas for streaming. This was the biggest sticking point at the negotiating table, much more so than union demands for guardrails around artificial intelligence, according to three people briefed on the matter. (The companies defended their proposed improvements to the contract as “historic.”)Under the now-expired contracts, streaming services pay residuals (a form of royalty) to actors and writers based on subscriber totals in the United States and Canada. The actors’ union, in particular, has made it clear that a new contract must go back to a version of the old way — with streaming services using pay formulas that are based on the popularity of shows and movies, the way traditional television channels have done for decades, with Nielsen as an independent measuring stick.Streaming companies refuse to divulge granular viewership data; secrecy is part of Big Tech’s culture. Independent measuring companies, including Nielsen, have tried to fill the gap, but they have provided only vague information — what is generating a lot of views, what is not. Nobody except the companies knows if a streaming show like “Stranger Things” is watched by 100 million people worldwide or 50 million.Netflix signaled on Wednesday that it saw the data it discloses as sufficient. The company posts weekly top-10 lists on its site; the rankings are based on “engagement,” which Netflix defines as total hours viewed divided by run time.“We believe sharing this engagement data on a regular basis helps talent and the broader industry understand what success looks like on Netflix — and we hope that other streamers become more transparent about engagement on their services over time,” Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders.John Koblin More

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    ‘Barbenheimer’ and a Film Critic’s Perspective, in Review

    Manohla Dargis, the chief film critic for The New York Times, shares her thoughts on the movie event of the year and an industry still reeling from the pandemic.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Manohla Dargis’s notebooks are full of illegible words and phrases.The chief film critic for The New York Times, Ms. Dargis takes note of memorable scenes while watching films she intends to review. In the darkness of a movie theater, her notes are rarely coherent, she admits, and distractions are inevitable.“Every so often when I’m watching a film, my pen drifts onto my shirt and I ruin it,” she said. “This is one of the great tragedies of being a movie critic.”This week, Ms. Dargis reviewed two much-talked-about movies new to theaters, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — nicknamed the “Barbenheimer” movie event of the year on the internet.This highly anticipated film pairing comes at a fractious time for the American film industry, as 160,000 actors represented by SAG-AFTRA went on strike last week. They joined the thousands of television and film screenwriters already on the picket line over issues including pay and the use of artificial intelligence in creative capacities. The strikes have brought Hollywood productions largely to a standstill.In an interview, Ms. Dargis shared her thoughts on the industry’s recovery from the pandemic and what the strikes may bode for the imminent future of film. This interview has been edited.How does one begin to cover two of the most highly anticipated movies of the year?I’ve been at The New York Times for about 20 years, so I’ve experienced similar moments when two huge movies open on top of each other. Around Christmas time, movie studios release their big, so-called prestige movies, for example.I try to avoid reading about the movies before I write about them, but I do background research. I just want to have my own experience with a movie and know that a review is made up of my thoughts.How do you decide which films to write about?I try to find a balance that works for readers and what they expect from a film critic. I also have to be interested in the film. I reviewed an array of movies the other week, like the new “Mission Impossible,” a big studio movie, and “Earth Mama,” a smaller independent film.That week in some ways represents my ideal mix, where I’m really covering the field. I think if you only cover the spectacle blockbusters, you’re really missing out on the splendor of cinema.Can you take me through your review process?I try to see movies about a week in advance of their release date. I go to screenings; some are called all media screenings, where there are several hundred people in a big room at a commercial movie theater or at a movie studio. There are also smaller private screening rooms scattered across Los Angeles, where I live. I like seeing movies with other people. There’s something very special about the kind of energy that you have from being with others, particularly when you’re watching a comedy or horror movie and there’s a crowd dynamic.I always bring a notepad and a pen and write in the dark. Writing helps me remember things later because I try to absorb as much as possible while watching a film.You wrote in January about your optimism about women in film amid a range of movies centered on female characters. Are there other trends you are seeing in film right now?I mentioned that I reviewed a film called “Earth Mama” by a woman named Savanah Leaf; it’s her first feature film. It’s exciting to me that she’s one of a number of Black women filmmakers. We’re nowhere near where it needs to be, but there is a diversity of women who are making movies.Has there ever been moment like this in the movie industry?One of the funny things about the American movie industry is that it has lurched from crisis to crisis over time. Part of my optimism and hope is hanging onto the idea that the industry has managed to survive its transition to movies with sound, for example. Then TV came along and everyone thought it was the end. And then the internet happened.The American movie industry is built on crises. Right now, the streaming bubble has passed. We don’t know what happens next. That’s my greatest concern.Which film did you screen first, “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer?’I saw “Barbie” first; I saw them a few days apart, so I could be in the right head space. “Barbie” is enjoyable, but it didn’t linger with me. It wasn’t something where I came back home and said to my husband, “I just need to talk about ‘Barbie’ and its deep impression on me,” because it didn’t have one. I enjoyed it and then I had to figure out how to write about it.After a heavy film like “Oppenheimer,” do you need a film palate cleanser? How do you come down?Right after a movie, I often don’t want to talk to anyone about it. Except maybe my husband. When you leave a movie that really affects you, you’re still in the bubble of the movie for a while. That can be a joyous experience sometimes. I remember seeing a “Fast and Furious” movie and really enjoying it. But I also remember driving home a little too fast that night.A film like “Oppenheimer” — a smart, thoughtful movie talking about profound issues of great philosophical meaning — is pretty damn special. Even though I was shocked by the movie, I was happy to say that the film made me think about life. I am grateful for that experience. More

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    Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’

    A new Broadway musical tells the disturbing story of Imelda Marcos by putting her, and the audience, in a disco.It’s the applause — including my own — I find troubling.Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. The infernally catchy songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, performed by a tireless and inspired all-Filipino cast, will have you clapping whether you want to or not. Their chunky beats, abetted by insistent dance motivators, may even prompt you to bop at your seat — if you have one.Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. Opened in 1924 as a movie palace, more lately the home of “King Kong” and “West Side Story,” the Broadway has now been substantially gutted, its nearly 1,800 seats reduced to about 800, with standing room for another 300 in the former orchestra section and a 42-inch disco ball dead center.The folks upstairs, if not the mostly younger standees below, will surely recognize the visual reference to Studio 54, the celebrity nightclub where Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, danced away the last decade of her reign while impoverishing her people. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer — is, however, equivocal praise.For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.Is it for Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the beauty queen who rose from “hand-me-downs and scraps” to become the fashion-plate wife of the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos? Is it for the ruthless Ferdinand himself (Jose Llana)? (His landslide election in 1965 elicited some Pavlovian cheers the night I saw the show.) Or is it for Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), the opposition leader who was Imelda’s former beau? (Having spurned her in their youth, he was later assassinated by forces thought to be close to Ferdinand’s regime.) All get equivalent star treatment here.Seating at the Broadway Theater was reduced from 1,800 to about 800, with standing room for another 300, to create a Studio 54-like atmosphere, complete with a 42-inch disco ball in the center of the house.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe confusion of sympathies is just where Byrne and the director Alex Timbers want us. Avoiding the near-hagiography of “Evita” and yet unwilling to bank a commercial production on a totally hateful character, they aim for a middle ground that doesn’t exist, yet mostly hit it anyway. Their Imelda is a victim of poverty and mistreatment, dim despite her cunning and innocent by reason of inanity. When Filipinos fully turn against her during the People Power revolution of 1986, she is more mystified than crushed. “Why don’t you love me?” she sings.We know the answer: The string of her outrages, even apart from her husband’s, seems literally endless. She did not retire from public office until 2019, and her son, Bongbong, is now president.But “Here Lies Love” — the title taken from an epitaph she proposed for herself — tempers the atrocities with the pleasure of its songs. Jacobs, a Broadway Jasmine in “Aladdin,” gets the catchiest ones, and delivers them well, if without the emotional nuance Ruthie Ann Miles brought to the role a decade earlier when the show had a developmental run at the Public Theater.To be fair, the material steers as far from emotion as possible, no matter how many times the word “love” is used. Byrne’s characteristic idiom — which feeds disco, folk and pop through an art rock filter — is too cool for that, and his lyrics, perhaps because they are based on public utterances of the real-life figures, reject psychology almost entirely. They are often thus too banal to serve the usual purpose of songs in musicals; instead of developing character internally they suggest it externally with a torrent of catchphrases. “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” Imelda sings blankly upon assuming power from the sickly Ferdinand.Without a vivid inner life to inflect such clichés, it’s hard to wring anything from them except a cringe. The beamish Ricamora and the scowling Llana, returning from the earlier production, get around the problem with their charisma, and Lea Salonga, in the cameo role of Aquino’s mother, turns “Just Ask the Flowers,” sung at Ninoy’s funeral, into a powerful if perplexing anthem through sheer vocal bravura.Conrad Ricamora, center, as Ninoy Aquino, performing on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while sweeping the audience into new configurations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, a musical not centered on feelings is a strange thing. Where another show might attempt to squeeze the relationship between Imelda and Ninoy for drama, it is merely a lump of undigested fact here. And Imelda’s infamous collection of state-financed shoes goes unmentioned, which is like mounting “Evita” without the Dior dress.To compensate, or double down, Timbers emphasizes pure pageantry in his staging. The actors often perform on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while incidentally sweeping the standees into new configurations. (Guides in pink jumpsuits with airport-style light wands keep them from getting mowed down.) You are left to draw your own conclusions about how crowds, whether in Manila or Manhattan, respond to being pushed around for too long and for apparently arbitrary reasons. There’s a reason affiliations and uprisings are often called movements.No surprise then that the most expressive element in “Here Lies Love” (along with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which also move beautifully) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and large traffic patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the otherwise narrowly focused and sometimes mechanical production achieves.Is it wrong to seek that engagement more fully? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to love too much?”) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Here Lies Love” finesses the question, preferring to be treated as anything — an art object, a dance party — besides what it is. In that way, it recalls Byrne’s Broadway concert “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson also collaborated. But that show, which had no story, needed only to be sleek and enjoyable to score its points.“Here Lies Love” bets that glamour can make up for narrative — or, rather, that in a show about the dangers of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of form follows function into the fire. We are drawn to cultural and political excitement in much the same, often dangerous way.Perhaps the irony of making a musical about that is more viscerally appreciable down on the dance floor. It was for me at the Public, where almost everyone had to stand and be part of the story, not observers of it. (There were only 42 seats.) And perhaps, 10 years later, with our own politics looking a lot more like the Marcoses’, no one can afford to keep a distance.In any case, on Broadway, it’s not until the gorgeous last song, “God Draws Straight,” that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes — the Philippine people — in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.Here Lies LoveAt the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    AMC Theater Chain to Stop Charging for Better Seats

    The contentious initiative will be abandoned next month, though the company will roll out a new one involving lounge-style seating in the front rows.AMC is abandoning plans to charge more for movie seats depending on their location. But higher prices for center-middle seats at theaters where AMC has been testing the concept will remain in effect this weekend, when “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” are expected to draw significant crowds.AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater chain, said on Thursday that it would “pivot away” from a contentious initiative called Sightline, in which seats at evening screenings had three tiers of pricing, ending the long-held cinema custom of charging the same amount for any seat in a theater. (Discounts of $1 to $2 were offered for the neck-craning front row, increases of $1 to $2 for the center-middle and the status quo for the rest.)The concept was rolled out in March at theaters in New York, Illinois and Kansas to howls of protest from some moviegoers. AMC always labeled it as a test.The experiment will end sometime in August, an AMC spokesman said. But the company plans to start a new trial involving front-row seats, which often go unsold. Later this year, AMC said it would pull out traditional front-row seats and replace them with “large, comfortable, lounge-style seating areas that will allow guests to lay all the way back.”AMC and other theater chains, after steadily raising prices at their concession stands, have started to focus more intently on seats for revenue growth. Increasingly, for instance, multiplexes have been pushing customers toward premium-priced tickets for screenings that feature extra-extra-large screens or enhanced sound systems.Adding to the pressure, attendance has still not recovered from the early pandemic, when many theaters were closed for months. So far this year, ticket sales are running roughly 20 percent behind the same period in 2019.AMC said Sightline did not pan out as it had hoped. In particular, the company saw “little or no incremental lift in front-row attendance, even with a price reduction applied to those seats.” About three out of every four customers who previously sat in center-middle seats paid the surcharge to continue doing so, AMC said. Some of those people moved to other seats. A small percentage stopped buying tickets at AMC.Notably, competitors did not follow AMC in re-pricing seats, making the company less competitive in the test markets.AMC’s plans to stop the initiative were reported earlier by Bloomberg News. More

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    ‘Bawaal’ Review: Getting Some Perspective

    In this Bollywood production, a narcissistic history teacher reconnects with his wife on a trip through Europe.“Bawaal” is a sensationally absurd Bollywood production that tells a simple moral story about what it means to be a Real Man. Directed by Nitesh Tiwari (“Dangal”), this globe-trotting romance is, like many Bollywood movies, willfully over the top. But this one’s not very fun.Ajay (Varun Dhawan), a grade-school history teacher, is only interested in one thing: looking good. Impeccably groomed and chiseled, he doesn’t seem to care that his students aren’t learning, nor that his wife, Nisha (Janhvi Kapoor), is desperately unhappy.Ajay keeps Nisha out of sight and at home with his parents — she has epilepsy, and he fears tarnishing his image should she have a seizure in public. When Ajay is suspended from work for slapping a student, he cooks up a scheme to prove his pedagogical worth. He heads to Europe, where he delivers video lectures from various historical sites to his students back home in small-town India.Nisha tags along, despite Ajay’s protests, and proves herself, too. In Europe, she’s much more capable — and, of course, more beautiful — than Ajay had cared to realize, while he, in sleepy comic-relief segments, suffers through travel’s minor hardships: lost luggage, pickpockets and a dastardly exchange rate.Ajay becomes more compassionate with each leg of the trip. Monochrome fantasy sequences plunge him and Nisha into battle on the shores of Normandy; in another, they’re victims inside an Auschwitz gas chamber. It’s an egregious metaphor for the dire state of their relationship, and one of the film’s many unearned pivots to high drama.Dhawan (too convincing a narcissist to pull off a change of heart) and Kapoor (devoid of charisma) don’t have chemistry, and you’re never truly rooting for Ajay so much as you’re hoping Nisha makes a run for it. The film’s macho, save-the-marriage traditionalism will seem icky to some viewers — especially because, absent genuine laughs or stakes, there’s little else to take in.BawaalNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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    ‘Fear the Night’ Review: Party Raid

    Neil LaBute’s new thriller, starring Maggie Q, feels stapled together from a pile of threadbare tropes.One rarely roots for the bad guys in a home-invasion shocker, but, as the majority of the victims in Neil LaBute’s “Fear the Night” are either insufferably stupid or gratingly snippy, their survival is perhaps not the priority it ought to be.In any event, most of them will be slaughtered before we can tell them apart in a movie that appears not so much written by LaBute as stapled together from a pile of threadbare thriller tropes. The plot could fit on a pistol barrel (or, in this case, an arrowhead): Eight women descend on a remote farmhouse for a bachelorette party, only to find their stripper-and-sex-toy revelries interrupted by leering louts who favor artisanal over mechanical weaponry. Bloody chaos ensues as the ladies bemoan their inability to sprint in high heels and struggle to memorize a three-count knock signal that differentiates friend from foe.“What is happening to us?” one distraught partygoer inquires, echoing my bewilderment. Like her cohort, she will turn hopefully — and, in the case of Mia (Gia Crovatin), longingly — to the one guest that no one else seems to like: Tess (a valiant Maggie Q), a super-serious military veteran and recovering addict. Tess has suffered. Tess has seen things. Tess will use her very particular skills to rally these nitwits or die trying.Pausing mid-murders to allow for a touching reconciliation and a romantic confession (not the time, Mia!), the back-of-napkin script stumbles forward. As for LaBute, a once incisive chronicler of male cruelty and ineptitude, his continued dabblings in genre are lamentable. Perhaps the kindest thing to do is pretend this dud never happened; it certainly worked for the Farrelly brothers’ “Dumb and Dumber To.”Fear the NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘The Deepest Breath’ Review: A Perilous Drop Into the Ocean

    Astonishing underwater footage elevates this documentary about two people drawn to the extreme sport of free diving.While watching “The Deepest Breath,” a documentary that palpably conjures the mystery and menace of the deep sea, I found it difficult not to think of the Titan submersible disaster last month. But this film, on Netflix, invites viewers to submerge alongside thrill-seekers unconfined by a vessel: Its subject is the extreme sport of free diving, in which competitors plunge into the depths for minutes at a time without scuba gear.The story centers on the Italian champion Alessia Zecchini and the Irish diver Stephen Keenan, who met at a 2017 competition in the Bahamas, began training together and engaged in a brief romance. Using astonishing underwater footage and videos from their travels, the film profiles the two adventurers before looking at a cataclysmic tragedy that rocked the free diving community.As the film’s director, Laura McGann, relays these stories, she deliberately withholds certain material to keep audiences in suspense about whether a death occurred. Extreme risks attend free diving; during their training, Zecchini and Keenan grew accustomed to experiencing blackouts. The film opens with alarming footage of one such incident, using the life-threatening scenario for narrative tension.This approach might have passed muster had the film matched its apprehensive mood with an equally compelling, clearer window into Zecchini and Keenan’s psychology. But despite hearing from their fathers and friends, we learn precious little about the personal lives of these impressive individuals. When it comes to what drove them, how they associated with others or how they dealt with danger, “The Deepest Breath” offers only surface-level observations.The Deepest BreathRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More