Aurelia Butler

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    Lynda Obst, Producer, Dies at 74; Championed Women in Hollywood

    She helped make films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.” She also wrote widely about the industry, for The Times and other publications.Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).Ms. Obst excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She was an executive producer of the hit Nora Ephron comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, seen here with Ross Malinger.TriStar PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Menendez Brothers: How True Crime Is Re-Examining Old Cases

    A thriving genre built on podcasts and documentaries, coupled with younger generations’ more skeptical worldview, helped revitalize interest in this case and others like it.There’s a montage during the new Netflix documentary “The Menendez Brothers” in which comedians, late-night hosts and other pop culture figures of the 1990s mock Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers had recently delivered testimony at their first murder trial, detailing their accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Jose Menendez, whom they had gunned down and killed in 1989, alongside their mother, Kitty.There was a 1993 “Saturday Night Live” skit that had John Malkovich and Rob Schneider mimicking the brothers in the courtroom, weeping dramatically and sarcastically. On the “Late Show,” the comedian Sandra Bernhard told David Letterman, “These two arrogant brothers are gonna fry,” to whoops and laughter from the audience.“I called Jay Leno’s show once, to protest them making fun of them,” Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, says in the documentary. “That’s all they did. They just made fun of them.”Some 30 years later, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when the murders were committed, have gone from pariahs and punchlines to something approaching sympathetic figures in the eyes of a growing number of people.They’ve also gone from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison to having a chance at freedom after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced on Thursday that he would recommend a resentencing that would make the brothers eligible for immediate parole.Gascón cited the work the brothers have done to improve the lives of their fellow inmates. “I believe they have paid their debt to society,” Gascón said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Zaho de Sagazan Won Over Iggy Pop

    Zaho de Sagazan went viral for her performances at the Cannes Film Festival and the Paris Olympics. Next, she’s coming to America.On the Verge showcases emerging talent from the worlds of fashion, food, music, art and design.When the French singer-songwriter Zaho de Sagazan, 24, was a teenager she earned the nickname Petite Tempête — “Little Storm.” “I was crying all the time,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do with all my angst.” But after her twin sister introduced her to the work of the English singer-songwriter Tom Odell — with which she quickly became obsessed, learning all his lyrics and teaching herself to play his songs on the piano — she realized that music could be a means of processing her dark emotions. By 2020, she was sharing videos of her original songs, which blend elements of synth-pop, electronica and chanson Française, on Instagram. Her expressive, sometimes husky voice caught the attention of Warner Chappell/Virgin Music, which released her first album, “La Symphonie des Éclairs” (“The Symphony of Lightning”) in spring 2023. It went platinum in 2024 and earned four awards at Victoires de la Musique, the French version of the Grammys. Tomorrow, a reissued edition will hit streaming platforms with new material, including “Old Friends,” which de Sagazan recorded with Odell. “I basically slid into his DMs,” she says. “We’ve been friends since. Singing with him is one of the few things I dreamed of for myself.”De Sagazan was born and raised in the working-class shipyard town of Saint Nazaire, on France’s Atlantic coast, reared in a family of artists and free spirits with few rules and plenty of encouragement. Her father, Olivier de Sagazan, is a painter, sculptor and performer who has collaborated on immersive exhibitions and videos with musicians including FKA Twigs. During her adolescence, de Sagazan spent hours holed up in her room, alone at the piano, writing about themes including self-doubt, addiction (she recently quit smoking weed, a decade-long habit), climate change and romantic love — though she says she hasn’t yet experienced it herself. She moved to Nantes at 17 and attended university for a while to appease her mother, a schoolteacher, though her ambition was to make music or start a label. To earn money, she worked as a home health aide. “I thought I’d become a nurse or work in a hospital,” she says. “I wanted to care for people. Music is another way of doing that.”Amélie Ambroise and music courtesy of Disparate / Warner Chappell Music FranceWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Met Opera and Singer Injured in Onstage Fall Settle Decade-Old Lawsuit

    Wendy White, a veteran mezzo-soprano, was performing when she fell in 2011. Her suit, which claimed negligence, had been one of the company’s longest-running court cases.More than a decade after she was injured in a fall from a platform on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera while singing in a production of “Faust,” the veteran mezzo-soprano Wendy White has settled her lawsuit against the company.Ms. White, who says she suffered nerve and muscle damage that prevented her from singing professionally after the accident in 2011, had been expected to return to court this month. But she recently reached a deal with the Met and a scheduled trial was called off. Neither side disclosed details.“Under the terms of the confidential agreement we’re not permitted to comment,” the Met said in a statement. A lawyer for Ms. White declined to comment.The settlement brings to an end one of the longest-running legal disputes in the Met’s 141-year history. The case dragged on amid rounds of legal filings and appeals — and efforts by New York State lawmakers to help Ms. White. She was injured during the Dec. 17, 2011, performance of Gounod’s opera about selling one’s soul to the devil while singing the role of Marthe.Ms. White was walking from a backstage staircase to an elevated platform onstage when a piece of scenery broke and the platform collapsed. She fell eight feet. She did not break any bones, but was taken to the hospital for injuries.The Met said at the time that her injuries did not initially appear to be serious. But Ms. White, who sang more than 500 performances at the Met after making her debut as Flora in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in 1989, never appeared on its stage again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Conclave’ Review: Serpents and Doves Amok in the Vatican

    This film, based on Robert Harris’s 2016 thriller of the same title, centers on a British cardinal (a sensational Ralph Fiennes), and a campaign for a new pope.There are no Kamala Harris or Donald Trump bumper stickers embellishing the vans that occasionally zip through “Conclave.” The current presidential race is the far greater, more consequential nail-biter, yet there’s still much riding on the contest in this sly, sleek election potboiler about the selection of a new Catholic pope. With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.Vatican stories are Hollywood catnip; see, or maybe don’t, the Dan Brown adaptations (“The Da Vinci Code,” etc.) featuring a worried-looking Tom Hanks racing through conspiratorial thickets. It’s easy to see the attractions of the minuscule city-state, beyond the untold masterpieces crowding it. The movies love stories about shadowy — to outsiders, at any rate — patriarchal, deeply hierarchical, unimaginably wealthy organizations with strict codes of conduct and tremendous power. That may sound a lot like a thumbnail portrait of the Mafia, but it also describes Hollywood. And what the movies especially love are lightly cynical, self-flattering and finally myth-stoking stories that, like this one, evoke the industry itself.“Conclave,” based on Robert Harris’s 2016 Vatican intrigue of the same title, centers on a British cardinal, Lawrence (a sensational Ralph Fiennes). A cleric of uncertain faith if unwavering convictions about everything else, Lawrence has droopingly sad eyes and refined sensitivities, and serves as the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group charged with selecting the pope, who’s just died. Lawrence is on the move when the story opens, hurrying through dark streets and into a brisk drama filled with whispering, scurrying men, one of whom who will be anointed as the new earthly head of the Catholic Church. There are women, too, though mostly there’s Isabella Rossellini, giving great side-eye as Sister Agnes.The cardinals keep whispering and scurrying as the story quickly revs up. Lawrence has been enduring a personal crisis — Harris calls it “some kind of spiritual insomnia” — and had asked the pope (Bruno Novelli) if he could leave Rome for a religious retreat. The pope denied him, telling Lawrence that while some are chosen to be shepherds, others need to manage the farm. With the pope dead, the reluctant Lawrence steps up and begins managing, a duty that involves herding scores of cardinals through the intricacies of the conclave, Latin for a room that can be locked. First, everyone needs to be sequestered until the announcement of “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”), but until then, it’s every cardinal for himself.The story coalesces around the lead candidates, a nicely balanced group of sincere, stealthy and smooth operators who soon circle Lawrence, their silver tongues wagging and hands wringing as they make their moves. The director Edward Berger and his team (the casting directors very much included) have stuffed the movie with a Daumier-esque collection of smooth and bearded, guarded and open faces. The juicy main cast includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and a wonderful Sergio Castellitto, who plays a wolfish smiler who fulminates about the church’s liberal faction and yearns for the days of Latin Masses. The story could have used more of him and much more of his ominous rage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Netflix Wanted ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Margot Robbie Wanted a Theatrical Release.

    In the end, Ms. Robbie got what she wanted, signing a deal with Warner Bros.In the latest Hollywood movie bidding war, the battle between a theatrical and a streaming release could not have been more stark.And in this case, theaters won out.The project is an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” seen through the warped mind of Emerald Fennell, the writer and director whose previous projects, “Promising Young Woman” and last year’s “Saltburn,” were viral, transgressive hits. The film will star Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi from “Saltburn” as the rageful Heathcliff. Based on Ms. Fennell’s past work, the R-rated film promises to be sexy, gothic and excessively modern.Netflix was willing to pay $150 million to have it.But Ms. Robbie, who is producing the film with her husband, Tom Ackerley, and their business partner Josey McNamara, wanted to maintain her track record of making movies for traditional studios that put them into theaters. Think “Barbie 2.0” with less pink and much more sex.Ms. Robbie’s company and its partner, MRC, an independent studio, have instead been won over by Warner Bros., the studio said on Thursday. The company offered them around $80 million plus a significant marketing commitment, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. (It helps that her company, LuckyChap, also has a multiyear first-look deal with the studio.)“From the moment we were introduced to Emerald’s vision for the film, and with an incredible cast led by Margot and Jacob, we were instantly committed to forging a partnership with this team to ensure the movie was brought to theaters around the world,” Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, said in a statement.The decision to go with Warner Bros. is a blow to Netflix. Getting the film would have been viewed as a feather in the cap of the company’s new film chief, Dan Lin.Yet Mr. Lin found himself up against the same restrictions as his predecessor: his boss’s reluctance to take films to theaters to appease filmmakers, most of whom want their films to debut on the big screen before heading to a streaming service.Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, restated his uninterest in theatrical releases just last week during his earnings call. “I’m just going to reiterate we are in the subscription entertainment business,” he said before adding, “I’m sure that we can continue to pierce the zeitgeist and have those moments in the culture, even when those moments begin on Netflix.”Ms. Robbie is one of the few A-list stars who have not starred in a film released by a streaming service. The actress, who headlined “Barbie” and produced it, has seen her power in Hollywood only rise on the back that film, which was the highest-grossing film of 2023. “Wuthering Heights” will be her next film, and production is set to begin in the first quarter of next year. More

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    Investigation of Georgia Movie Set Crash Finds No Violations

    Eight people were injured, three of them seriously, in a crash on the set of “The Pickup” in April. A federal investigation found no health or safety violations.An investigation into a crash that injured several crew members on the set of the movie “The Pickup” this year found no safety violations, federal officials said.A spokeswoman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said in a statement this week that the agency’s “thorough” investigation of the production company, Armored Film LLC, “did not result in violations of workplace safety and health regulations.”The investigation into the crash, which occurred at a small airport outside Atlanta on April 20, was closed last week, she said.A spokeswoman for Amazon MGM Studios declined to comment.Eight crew members were taken to hospitals after the crash, including two who were treated for life-threatening injuries after they were ejected from a vehicle, the authorities said at the time. A third person was treated for serious injuries.People with direct knowledge of the episode said at the time that none of the actors in the film, including Pete Davidson, Eddie Murphy and Keke Palmer, were involved in the crash.Amazon MGM Studios has not disclosed the plot of the film, which Deadline has described as a heist comedy. No release date has been announced.Video of the crash obtained by The New York Times shows a red armored truck, a GMC C6, pulling up alongside a BMW X5 S.U.V. before swerving into it.The vehicles then veer off the road and onto the grass, where the armored truck flips on top of the BMW. Both land upright, with the back door of the armored truck swinging open, causing one person to tumble out of it and spreading debris onto the field.Several crew members were injured when two vehicles collided during filming.The police said that the BMW had one occupant, the driver, while the armored truck was carrying seven people: a driver, a front-seat passenger and five crew members who were secured in the back with belt restraints attached to the walls.While the collision was planned, the armored truck’s brush guard became entangled in the smaller vehicle’s wheel well, the authorities said.In the days after the crash, there was no consensus on whether emergency workers or an ambulance had been on the set during filming, although an ambulance was called to the scene. It is fairly standard practice to have an ambulance on set for dangerous stunts, experts said.Sean Miller, a spokesman for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said in a statement on Thursday that the organization appreciated the work by OSHA’s Atlanta office.“IATSE members are the best in the industry and work hard to ensure their safety and the safety of those around them,” he said. “This incident is a reminder that all workers deserve to earn a living in a safe environment.” More

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    Review: ‘Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’

    At 75, Springsteen is doggedly committed to live performance. This documentary chronicles how he keeps up on tour, and why.While it was Lou Reed who coined the adage that one’s life could be saved by rock ’n’ roll, Bruce Springsteen embodies it. It may be paradoxical, to assert that the performer transcends the genre for which he relentlessly waves the flag, but at this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.The movie’s full title is “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” and many of the current members of that group have been with Springsteen since they were barely out of their teens. The most colorful and funny member, Steven Van Zandt, who also works as an actor (“The Sopranos”), is a prominent talking head because he’s a born raconteur.More than the funny stories, the movie is about Springsteen’s artistic mission.He sings about the things that make life worth living: friendship, love, community and the sense of a higher calling.Seeing Frank Sinatra at the beginning of his Diamond Jubilee World Tour, when he was 75 and in good health, one could see that he seemed bored by the whole thing. Springsteen turned 75 last month, and never seems bored for even a moment. He’s a man on a mission.The tour chronicled here is ongoing; Springsteen plays in Montreal next week. The punchline of this engaging movie is one that Springsteen lifts from his early influence: Van Morrison. Addressing the camera on his way to another stage, he cheerfully yells, “It’s too late to stop now.”Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street BandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu and Disney+. More