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    Christopher Coover, Auction Expert in the Printed Word, Dies at 72

    At Christie’s, he managed sales of rare books, manuscripts and documents by the likes of da Vinci, Lincoln and Kerouac. On TV, he lent his eye to “Antiques Roadshow.”Christopher Coover, who made a career out of reading other people’s mail as an expert in rare books and manuscripts at Christie’s Auction House, where he oversaw the authentication, appraisal and sale of documents ranging from the original texts of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to George Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution, died in Livingston, N.J., on April 3, his 72nd birthday.The immediate cause was pneumonia complicated by Parkinson’s disease, his son, Timothy, said.As a connoisseur of curios, Mr. Coover was enlisted as an appraiser for the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow,” where at a single glance he could transform an all-but-forgotten autographed book or letter, retrieved from a starry-eyed guest’s basement or attic into a valuable historical heirloom.“The sense of discovery never fails,” he told The Colonial Williamsburg Journal in 2011. “I like the challenge of seeking out the larger background, the hidden meanings and connections of a given document. This means I am sometimes overworked, occasionally out of my depth, but never bored.”Mr. Coover in 2004 with letter from Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant. “The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he said. Ruby Washington/The New York Times)For 35 years as senior specialist in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at Christie’s in Manhattan, he would authenticate material offered for auction, describe its provenance and history for the catalog, and suggest the opening price.Among his career milestones was assisting in the sale of the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s copy of an early 15th-century scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci — known as the “Hammer Codex” — to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, for a record $30.2 million in 1994.Mr. Coover appraised and managed the sale of the publisher Malcolm Forbes’s collection of American historical documents in six auctions from 2002 to 2007. The sale set records for letters by 15 presidents and generated more than $40.9 million. The sale’s catalog included a manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s last speech; Robert E. Lee’s message to Ulysses S. Grant, in which he said he was ready to discuss the “cessation of hostilities” to end the Civil War; and a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the American effort to build the atomic bomb.Mr. Coover also wrote the catalog for the sale of Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript, typed on a 119-foot-long roll of United Press Teletype paper ($2.4 million); and appraised and managed the sales of Lincoln’s 1864 Election Victory speech ($3.4 million), Washington’s letter on the ratification of the Constitution ($3.2 million), Washington’s personal annotated copy of the 1789 Acts of Congress ($9.8 million) and the original manuscript of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”Christopher Coover was born on April 3, 1950, in Greeley, Colo. His parents left his middle name blank on his birth certificate so that he could choose one later himself. He selected Robin, from his favorite childhood books; his full name became Christopher Robin Coover.The family moved shortly afterward to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where his parents were hired by Vassar College — his father, James Burrell Coover, as a professor and music librarian, and his mother, Georgena (Walker) Coover, as a teacher and specialist in early childhood education.Chris attended Arlington High School in Poughkeepsie before his father took a teaching post at the State University of New York at Buffalo, bringing his family with him. Chris graduated from Kenmore West High School in Buffalo. He earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1973.He subsequently formed a band that played at weddings and other receptions, drove a school bus, worked for The New Grove Dictionary of Music in London and in the rare books room of the Strand book store in Manhattan before he was hired by Sotheby’s in 1978.He left for Christie’s in 1980. While working there, he earned a master’s in library science from Columbia University. He retired in 2016 as senior specialist and vice president of the auction house.Mr. Coover also lectured on American documents and built his own collection of literary and historical books and manuscripts, which he donated to Columbia.Mr. Coover, who died in a hospital, lived in Montclair, N.J. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Lois (Adams) Coover; a daughter, Chloe; and two sisters, Mauri and Regan Coover.In the authentication of documents, Mr. Coover said, most forgeries are readily apparent, typically because the paper cannot be faked. Such was the case with a supposed 1906 first edition of “Madame Butterfly,” purportedly signed and dedicated by the composer, Puccini, which a reader of The Chicago Tribune asked Mr. Coover to authenticate.Sight unseen, he was able to recite the dedication, in Italian (he said he had seen 10 to 15 copies of the score with the same words), and identified the reader’s find as only a photolithographic copy.Then again, he said, ordinary-looking documents can contain surprises.“An otherwise boring diary or series of family letters mainly recording weather and local news may contain a long description of an election campaign, demonstrations against the Stamp Act, the convening of the Confederacy to draft a constitution, or a raid by Pancho Villa,” he told the Williamsburg journal.“The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he added. “I once discovered an exceptional letter of Ethan Allen at the bottom of a pile of old deeds, copies of minor poetry and otherwise uninteresting papers.”Assessing the monetary value of an item is highly subjective, he said.“Family bibles and birth and death records are valuable for their genealogical information, but they have very little commercial value,” he was quoted as saying in Marsha Bemko’s book “Antiques Roadshow: Behind the Scenes” (2009), “and I think it is a shame to see little old ladies waiting in line for hours while hefting a 40-pound Bible that is worth very little monetarily.”“You have to trust your innate instincts and perception of the size of the potential market,” he said. “The value of some letters and documents can only be determined by letting the free market operate, at auction.”Mr. Coover recalled that in 1992 he was asked by the grandson of a woman who had recently died to appraise her collection of books. He visited her Manhattan apartment and immediately realized that the books were not very valuable, but as he was leaving, the grandson asked him to look at some papers in a tattered Manila envelope.Inside, Mr. Coover told The Times in 2004, he found an old black leather book with the word “autograph” embossed in gold on the cover. On the very first page, he recognized Lincoln’s signature, followed by the last handwritten paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address. He told the young man that that one page alone was worth at least $250,000. When it finally went to auction, it sold for $1.2 million. More

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    A Duchess Brought Low by ‘A Very British Scandal’

    In a new show on Prime Video, Claire Foy plays a British aristocrat whose sex life became the subject of salacious tabloid stories in the 1960s.LONDON — Everybody loves a sex scandal, and a posh one is even better. The great and the good brought down in disgrace: That’s a story people want to hear.In “A Very British Scandal,” a three-part series streaming on Prime Video from April 22, Claire Foy plays the Duchess of Argyll, a real-life aristocrat whose sex life was pored over in a 1960s court case that created a media frenzy and riveted the nation. When the BBC aired “A Very British Scandal” this past December, nearly 7 million people tuned in.The show is a companion to “A Very English Scandal,” another hugely popular Amazon-BBC coproduction in which Hugh Grant played an upper-crust politician who suffered a similar fate.These stories, Foy said in a recent interview, appealed to elements of Britain’s national character. “We’re perverts, aren’t we?” Foy said. “Deep down, all British people love it: We love gossip and love the titillating things other people are getting up to,” she added. “Anything that happens behind closed doors, we’re all completely obsessed with.”In the show’s final episode, one of the duchess’s aristocratic friends bemoans the British public’s desire to know what the upper classes are up to. “The little people in their grubby pits look up to us, because we are not them,” says the friend, played by Julia Davis. But stories about the duchess’s sex life, she says, “are dragging us down so we look just like them.”Foy’s character was never one of “the little people,” but she wasn’t always an aristocrat, either. She was born Margaret Whigham, in Scotland, in 1912. Her father, a self-made textiles millionaire, moved the family to New York when she was a child, and she lived there until she was 14. Back in Britain, she became a much-photographed debutante with a fancy trans-Atlantic sheen, and a fixture of newspaper society pages. After a string of high-profile relationships and a first marriage that ended in divorce, she became the Duchess of Argyll in 1951 when she married the duke, Ian Campbell (played by Paul Bettany in the show), whose family had been part of the Scottish aristocracy since the 1400s.A glamorous A-lister who counted society columnists as her friends, the duchess cultivated a chic media image. And she realized early on she could make money from what we would now call her “personal brand,” taking cash from tabloid newspapers to appear in fawning articles. (“Beautiful! Rich! Distinguished!” read a teaser for a 1961 Daily Mirror splash. “This is the Duchess of Argyll the world knows.”)The duchess, photographed in 1955 for magazine coverage of the London social season. She initially had a symbiotic relationship with the British press. Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut when her marriage to the duke broke down, she lost control of the story. The couple’s nasty divorce case — in which the duchess’s intimate photos were presented in court — made her the subject of salacious newspaper articles and gossipy anecdotes, and later, “A Very British Scandal” and even an opera.During the trial, the duke submitted a list of 88 men he said the duchess had slept with during their marriage, as well as Polaroids he had stolen from her that showed the duchess performing oral sex on an unknown man whose head was not in the frame.Ruling in the duke’s favor to grant the divorce in 1963, the judge said the duchess was a “completely promiscuous woman” who had indulged “in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite.” The details of the “headless man” photos were gleefully written up in British newspapers, which raked over the case for months. Margaret the glittering socialite became Margaret “the dirty duchess.”Over the rest of her life, she frittered away the fortune she inherited from her father on a series of unsuccessful law suits and dubious investments. Her personal relations didn’t fare much better: She fell out with a daughter from her first marriage, and many of her friends. The duchess died in penury, at 80, in a London retirement home. The first hymn at her funeral, in 1993, began, “Dear Lord and father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.”Sarah Phelps, who wrote the script for “A Very British Scandal,” said that the duchess’s case and the media furor around it represented “the end of an era.” It was “the birth of a different kind of journalism, and a way of writing about sex and scandal in a very, very prurient way,” she said. And it paved the way for later media depictions of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Meghan Markle — “that viciousness and anger that is directed at women in the public eye,” she said.When the initial outrage faded, the duchess remained the subject of snickering innuendos for decades. Grinning men would pose for photos beside the boarding sign for a Scottish boat that shared her name: “Queue here for the Duchess of Argyll.” Today’s TV audiences will have more sympathy for the duchess, who now looks like a victim of “slut-shaming,” and the nonconsensual sharing of her photos like “revenge porn.” It’s unlikely many viewers will judge her for a sex act that some women’s magazines now offer tips on performing. Yet they might still find it hard to warm to the duchess, who Foy plays as an arrogant, scheming snob.“She lied and she cheated, and she did all sorts of really awful things,” Foy said. “In her defense, they were also done to her.”As a person in the public eye, she sympathized with the duchess and her treatment by the press. “She was one thing, and then they decided she was something else,” Foy said. “Journalists dictate the public perception of you in my industry,” she added. “You are completely in the hands of the people who write the story.”Allison Cook portrayed the duchess in a 2013 production of the opera “Powder Her Face,” staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara krulwich/The New York TimesAnother author of the duchess’s story is the British composer Thomas Adès, whose 1995 opera “Powder Her Face” casts her as its antiheroine. First presented at the Cheltenham Festival in England, when Adès was just 24, “Powder Her Face” has since been performed over 300 times across Europe and the United States, according to Faber, its publisher.Adès said he started out by looking for a classic operatic plot: “someone in a grand position, who’s outwardly very strong and impressive, who is dismantled and brought low by forces from the outside.” Philip Hensher, the opera’s librettist, remembered the Argyll divorce case, Adès said: The duchess fit the bill perfectly.Whereas “A Very British Scandal” ends with the courtroom judgment, “Powder Her Face” picks up at the end of the duchess’s life, when she was broke and holed up in a hotel she couldn’t afford. In a series of dreamy flashbacks, Adès recreates some key vignettes from the story of her life, including the liaison with “the headless man” as an aria from the duchess that begins with words and ends with humming.“You can’t really pretend that she’s an entirely sympathetic character, that she’s Mimì,” said Adès, referring to the fragile seamstress who dies of tuberculosis in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “as much as I think she’s such a tragic figure.” The duchess, he added, was “formidable, and did plenty of things that were pretty questionable.”Paul Bettany, center left, plays the duke in “A Very British Scandal,” alongside Foy’s duchess.Alan Peebles/Amazon Prime VideoDespite a persistent whiff of scandal, the duchess continued to lead an active life in London high society for most of the rest of her life, said Lady Colin Campbell, a relative by marriage. “She was certainly a notoriety, but she was never a pariah. People would gossip and say, ‘Oh, look who’s here: Margaret Argyll,’” said Lady Campbell, 72. “But she rose above it, as simple as that. She simply ignored it,” she added.In her later years, when money was running low, the duchess tried again “to convert her fame into income,” Lady Campbell said. In 1986, Margaret published “My Dinner Party Book,” a guide to entertaining, aimed at housewives, that nonetheless included advice like “never invite the Lord Chancellor and two ambassadors to your dinner party at the same time.” (The book did not sell well, Lady Campbell said.)Two years later, at 76, the duchess appeared on “Wogan,” the BBC’s flagship chat show. The presenter, Terry Wogan, trod carefully around the incident that had made her most famous, gently asking, “What about your own story? Your own story was extremely colorful — do you think it would make a good plot?”“Oh, let’s pray not,” the duchess replied. “Let’s not even think about that.” More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’: There Will Be (Way More) Blood

    The “Breaking Bad” prequel is back for its final season. Here’s what to remember about where we left off, as Jimmy’s transformation into Saul nears completion.It’s been two years since anyone watched a new episode of “Better Call Saul,” but the characters presumably haven’t aged a minute.So before the Season 6 opener, which debuts on Monday, let’s take a moment to remember exactly what was happening to this menagerie of sociopathic drug kingpins and morally compromised lawyers as the closing credits rolled on Season 5. And let’s take it one burning question at a time.Where was Lalo Salamanca headed in that last scene of the finale?Toward revenge. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) just survived the world’s most incompetent home invasion-cum-assassination attempt, having outmaneuvered a handful of heavily armed men using little more than a frying pan of boiling oil, borrowed weapons and the artful use of his own underground escape tunnel. He knows who sent these guys — the rival meth wholesaler and fried chicken entrepreneur Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).Gus has been a few steps ahead of Lalo ever since this newest Salamanca showed up in Season 4. It was Gus who engineered Lalo’s arrest and imprisonment for murder — a crime Lalo did, in fact, commit — then promptly got him sprung when the mustachioed villano proved he could wreak plenty of havoc from behind bars.Having lost his beloved cook, and apparently everyone else on his staff, Lalo will now be looking for maximum retribution. We know this will not involve killing Fring — he is alive and well in “Breaking Bad,” this show’s sequel — but he can presumably cause chaos and damage. At minimum, he can forestall the opening of the meth super lab, which is arguably the cause dearest to Gus’s heart and most important to his bottom line.Don Eladio and Nacho Varga (Steven Bauer, left, and Michael Mando) had what may prove to have been a very meaningful tête-à-tête in the Season 5 finale.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures TelevisionIs Nacho Varga doomed?Seems like it! Nacho (Michael Mando) let those Mexican assassins into Lalo’s fortress, then split as the mayhem began. Now that Lalo has survived the carnage, it will be pretty obvious to him that Nacho played a role in it.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.Season 6 ​​Premiere: The new season began with back-to-back episodes. Read our recaps of “Wine and Roses” and “Carrot and Stick.”A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.But consider this. In the last episode, Nacho had a lengthy discussion with the cartel leader Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) about how he would manage the business in New Mexico now that there isn’t a Salamanca around to replace Lalo. Was that a waste of viewers’ time? It is if Nacho never runs operations in Albuquerque.However this pans out, it’s safe to assume that Nacho will retain his title as the Most Tormented Character in this series. Pound for pound, no one has endured more physical and psychological abuse.How bad is Kim Wexler breaking?Very bad. At the end of the last season, Kim (Rhea Seehorn) was persuading Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) to help frame her former mentor and boss, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), in some kind of career-ending act of fraud or malfeasance. The contours of this plot are unclear, but Kim is adamant that Howard deserves the worst that she and Jimmy can conjure.One obvious motive here is money. With Howard sidelined in a scandal, she and Jimmy will collect about $2 million from a long-percolating class action lawsuit against a retirement home. It’s more than that, though. Kim loathes the guy in a way that even Jimmy — no fan either — finds excessive.The hatred is complicated and worth an essay of its own. Suffice to say, Howard has a history of patronizing and demeaning Kim — he once made her toil in a poorly lit room with first-year associates back when she was an up-and-comer at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, essentially punishing her for Jimmy’s sins. But Kim and Howard had good years, too, and he forgave her student loan debt when she quit the firm.Kim (Rhea Seehorn) turned out to be a better liar under pressure than her shifty husband.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures TelevisionNot to mention the other side of their ledger. Kim gut-punched Howard, figuratively speaking, when she and Jimmy found a very underhanded way to steal a blue-chip client from H.H.M. So they have issues, and it brings to mind the truism that you can deeply hate only the people you once liked.Kim is shaping up as one of the most intellectually rich characters on this show. (Gus is her only rival.) In her exit scene from Season 5, she was dreaming of opening a law firm to help the poor, which is about as altruistic a career move as an attorney can imagine. She was also conniving to destroy a man because, as she put it, he needed to be taken a peg.Watch your back, Howard. Watch your front, too.What’s next for Jimmy?Therapy, one hopes. When last seen, Jimmy had endured the roughest 48 hours of his life, starting with a horrifically botched effort to transport $7 million in cartel money from Mexico to Albuquerque — bail for his client, Lalo. Instead of a simple handoff, Jimmy came within a millisecond of an execution-style death, then watched his would-be killer get shot, the start of a deadly spree orchestrated by Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), who turned in his finest sniper performance to date.That was the easy part. Jimmy and Mike then hoofed it through the desert overnight, dragging heavy sacks of $100 bills and barely escaping death by dehydration. Then Lalo decided that Jimmy’s version of his bagman travails — that he simply had car trouble and then walked all night — had holes in it. Specifically, bullet holes, which he discovered on Jimmy’s car when he examined it during his bail-skipping drive to the Mexican border. Lalo visited Jimmy and Kim at their apartment to confront Jimmy and was saved only by Kim’s gift for improvised lying.Whither Gus and Mike?Expect some rage from the usually even-tempered Mr. Fring over the Lalo fiasco. Expect also some countermeasures to thwart whatever vengeance Lalo has in mind, especially if it means delaying the already delayed super lab.Things were a little tense between Gus and Mike (Giancarlo Esposito, left, and Jonathan Banks) when we last saw them. But it could have been worse. Greg Lewis/AMCMike, his favorite in-house heavy, will surely provide the muscle and close combat skills needed in the coming battle. Mike and Gus have been through a rough patch. Mike took a few orders he despised, most notably shooting the heartsick super-lab engineer, Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock), for the German’s verboten efforts to briefly reunite with his wife.Maybe this is why Mike came close to an act of disobedience that verged on career suicide. He had a rifle scope trained through a window on Lalo during that confrontation in Jimmy and Kim’s apartment. If he had actually shot the guy, he would have wrecked Gus’s plans and been forced to run for his life.Better call Gene?Let’s talk about the story set after “Breaking Bad,” in which Jimmy lives in Nebraska under the assumed name Gene Takavic.The previous five seasons of “Better Call Saul” have started with a brief visit to Omaha, where a post-Saul Jimmy lives and works at a Cinnabon in a mall, having fled Albuquerque as a fugitive. (In a clever inversion of the norm, scenes set in the show’s future are shot in black and white.) In the Season 5 opener, Jimmy is confronted by a guy who seems to recognize him, suggesting that his cover has been blown.In flash-forwards to the time after “Breaking Bad,” Jimmy is hiding out as Gene Takavic, a Cinnabon employee in Nebraska.Warrick Page/AMCIt’s worth noting that the promotional poster for this new season shows Jimmy as the milquetoast Takavic — mustache, close-cropped hair, glasses. It’s possible that far more than a few minutes of the coming season will happen in Nebraska. There could be whole episodes. We may see him blackmailed. Or pursued by the feds. Or running, again.And, given that nobody knows Kim’s future, it’s at least possible that the two will meet in this time period, assuming she survives the machinations of the show’s present tense. Which is not a safe assumption.Which actor’s name should viewers be most stoked to see in the opening credits?Norbert Weisser. He plays Peter Schuler, the hyper-anxious executive — who in the future commits suicide — running a division of Madrigal Electromotive, a German conglomerate, and helping Gus build the meth super lab. He has been in exactly one episode of “Breaking Bad” and one of “Better Call Saul,” and both were exceptional.Anything else?The show is gradually docking with the starting moments of “Breaking Bad.” So Jimmy will soon fully embrace his alter ego, Saul Goodman, who has made only fleeting cameos thus far. We might get reacquainted with some old friends, too. Like the libertarian and obscure music aficionado Gale Boetticher (David Costabile), who helps set up the super lab. And producers have hinted that Walter White and Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul) could turn up.If we meet Mr. White in his pre-“Breaking Bad” incarnation, he’ll be a nebbishy chemistry teacher with plenty of unrealized ambition — and the world’s most famous pair of Wallabees. More

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    ‘Macbeth’ Goes Onstage After Actor Tests Positive for Virus

    Daniel Craig was back in the title role after testing positive earlier. But when the virus kept another actor out, the play’s director, Sam Gold, went on.A new Broadway production of “Macbeth,” determined to keep going even as cast members continue to test positive for the coronavirus, came up with an unusual solution Thursday night: The director went on to replace an absent performer.The director, Sam Gold, played the role of a Scottish thane named Lennox, as well as another role played by the same actor. He stepped in because all of the show’s understudies were already onstage, filling in for other absent actors.The production, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, is scheduled to open on April 28, which is the deadline to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. That will make “Macbeth” the last show to open this season.But the play has faced serious coronavirus challenges throughout its preview period.“Macbeth” got through only three performances when, just half an hour before the curtain was to rise on April 1, a cast member tested positive for the coronavirus. The show canceled that performance, and the next day Craig, too, tested positive.The show wound up being closed for 11 days, restarting on April 12. On Thursday night, the house was sold out. When another member of the cast tested positive, Gold took to the stage himself to prevent having to send all those ticket holders home.A similar rescue happened last December, when Keenan Scott II, the writer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man” stepped in to save a performance of that show after several actors tested positive for the coronavirus.“Macbeth” is the ninth production directed by Gold on Broadway over the last decade. In 2015 he won a Tony Award as the director of the musical “Fun Home.”“Macbeth” is also one of four productions that has been forced to cancel performances by the coronavirus this month. The play “Plaza Suite” resumed performances Thursday (although one of its stars, Sarah Jessica Parker, remains out until Saturday); the new musical “A Strange Loop” held its delayed first preview that same night. The musical “Paradise Square” remains shuttered, and is planning to restart performances on April 19. More

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    Late Night Isn’t Thrilled About Elon Musk’s Attempted Twitter Takeover

    “He is super smart, definitely, but he admits that he also loves dumb jokes, so we don’t know how this could turn out,” Trevor Noah said of the Tesla C.E.O.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Musk Eyes TwitterAfter becoming a major shareholder of Twitter last week, Elon Musk made an offer to buy the social media site for $43 billion on Thursday.Trevor Noah bemoaned the fact that Musk’s offer was anything but normal.“No, he offered to pay 54.20 per share. Yeah, not 54 dollars exactly — no, 54.20. And that’s how you know that you’re too rich — when you’re spending an extra few million dollars just to slip a weed joke into your takeover bid,” Noah joked.“A week ago, Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder, after buying $2.89 billion worth of the company. OK, did no one tell him you can read all the tweets for free?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“After his big investment, he spent the week sitting down with experts to plan a long-term business strategy, by which I mean he posted a bunch of troll-y nonsense, like a meme of himself smoking weed with the caption ‘Twitter’s next board meeting is gonna be lit,’ and a poll suggesting they change the name to ‘Titter.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Oh my god. He could do so much with that money: address world hunger, fix climate change, get a decent haircut.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But that is the thing with Elon Musk — nobody knows what he is going to do. He’s super smart, definitely, but he admits that he also loves dumb jokes, so we don’t know how this could turn out. This could turn Twitter into the best version of itself or he could just rename tweets ‘farts’ and retweets ‘refart.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Are You Still Suing? Edition)“But one of the American companies that has suspended service in Russia is Netflix, which has made subscribers in Russia so mad, they’re suing Netflix. They want 60 million rubles in compensation, which is about 80 bucks, I think, right?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Now, Russian Netflix subscribers launched a class-action lawsuit for loss of service. Then, after a few hours, a screen popped up saying ‘Are you still suing?’ and you had to click ‘yes.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“How great would it be if this war ends because Russians didn’t get to watch ‘Is It Cake?’ on time?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s not just the viewers who are mad, because Netflix also halted the development and acquisition of all Russian-made TV shows and films. That is rough news for anyone — sure, it’s the right thing to do. But it’s rough news for anyone excited about the new season of ‘Bridgertato.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingMichelle Yeoh visited “Desus & Mero” to talk about her role in the hit film, “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”Also, Check This OutMads Mikkelsen in “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.”Warner Bros.Mads Mikkelsen plays an evil wizard with political talent in the latest “Harry Potter” spinoff movie, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.” More

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    Marvin Chomsky, Director of ‘Roots’ and ‘Holocaust,’ Dies at 92

    A four-time Emmy Award winner, he directed landmark historical TV dramas and the movie “Inside the Third Reich.”Marvin Chomsky, an Emmy Award-winning director renowned for his work on historical dramas, including the blockbuster mini-series “Roots” and “Holocaust,” died on March 28 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.His son Eric confirmed the death, in hospice care in a retirement community.Mr. Chomsky had been directing episodic television for many years when he was hired as one of the four directors of “Roots,” the groundbreaking 12-hour series based on Alex Haley’s book tracing his family’s origins from an African village to enslavement in the United States. Shown on eight consecutive nights in January 1977, it drew spectacular ratings and won nine Emmys.The “Roots” cinematographer Joseph Wilcots said in a Television Academy interview in 2007 that Mr. Chomsky was “a brilliant director” who “always thought his shots out very clearly,” in particular one in which Tom Harvey, the Black character played by Georg Stanford Brown, was whipped.Louis Gossett Jr., who played the enslaved musician Fiddler, told the syndicated columnist Cleveland Amory in 1977 that Mr. Chomsky and another director, John Erman, who were both white, were “very sensitive” and “let each of us do what we thought was best for our particular role.”Mr. Chomsky was nominated for an Emmy for “Roots” but lost to David Greene, another “Roots” director. He won his first Emmy a year later for directing “Holocaust” (1978), a four-part series, starring Meryl Streep and Michael Moriarty, that focused on two families in Nazi Germany: one Jewish, the other headed by an SS officer.Before filming a scene in which Mr. Moriarty, who played Erik Dorf, the SS officer, broke into tears, Mr. Chomsky showed him photographs of Nazi atrocities.“What you saw was Michael Moriarty’s response to those pictures,” Mr. Moriarty told The Fort Lauderdale News shortly after the series premiered. “The horror of what Dorf had done, the level of guilt — it was very close.”Eric Chomsky said in an interview that his father had been “traumatized” by the experience of filming in Germany and Austria, which included directing one scene in the former gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp and another in which a large group of extras, portraying Jewish prisoners, were forced to strip naked and machine-gunned in a ravine.One young cameraman, Mr. Chomsky said, did not believe that the scene could have been based on reality.“Mr. Marvin, you are making this up for the movie,” Mr. Chomsky recalled the man telling him in a 2007 Directors Guild of America interview. “This didn’t really happen.”Mr. Chomsky called on a German crew member to attest to its veracity.When Mr. Chomsky accepted the Emmy for “Holocaust,” he said he had mixed feelings about winning an honor for a series that “depicted events that never should have happened at all.”But, he added, “They did happen, and I’m proud to have been able to tell that story to those who didn’t know, like my sons David, Eric and Peter, and possibly to remind some of those who forgot.”Marvin Joseph Chomsky was born on May 23, 1929, in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, Harry, and his mother, Gloria (Yarmuk) Chomsky, both immigrated from what is now Belarus and owned a candy store.While Mr. Chomsky was attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, his deep voice brought him to the attention of an all-city radio workshop. That led to his appearing on a local radio station and, soon, working on a TV show for teenagers in the medium’s early days.He graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in speech in 1950 and earned a master’s in drama at Stanford University a year later. Following his Army service, Mr. Chomsky spent the next decade as an art director and scenic designer for TV shows, including “Captain Kangaroo,” “Arthur Godfrey Time” and the anthology series “Studio One.”While working as an art director on the series “The Doctors and the Nurses” in the early 1960s, Mr. Chomsky was asked by the show’s executive producer, Herbert Brodkin, if he wanted to become a producer. Mr. Chomsky declined, saying he’d rather be a director. He went on to direct three episodes of the show, followed by a long run of work on series like “The Wild Wild West,” “Star Trek,” “Gunsmoke,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Mannix.”After “Roots” and “Holocaust,” Mr. Chomsky won Emmys for directing “Attica” (1980), a TV movie about the bloody prison riot in upstate New York, and “Inside the Third Reich” (1982), a two-part film based on the autobiography of Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production.He won his fourth Emmy as a producer of “Peter the Great” (1986), a mini-series about the Russian czar Peter I, starring Maximilian Schell, which Mr. Chomsky also co-directed with Lawrence Schiller.His last credits include “Strauss Dynasty” (1991), a mini-series about the Austrian musical family, and “Catherine the Great” (1995), a TV movie starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.In addition to his son Eric, Mr. Chomsky is survived by his other sons, Peter and David, and a granddaughter. He was separated from his second wife, Christa Baum-Chomsky. His marriage to Tobye Kaplan ended in divorce.Eric Chomsky said his father had wanted the facts in his work to stand up to scrutiny:“I worked with him on ‘The Deliberate Stranger’” — a 1986 mini-series about the serial killer Ted Bundy — “and my whole job was to read the trial transcripts to make sure the script was accurate.” More

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    Alexander Skarsgard’s Viking Dream

    LONDON — In Alexander Skarsgard’s telling, the idea for what eventually became his latest film, “The Northman,” has its roots on a long, slender island off the coast of Sweden called Oland, where his great-great grandfather built a wooden house a hundred years ago.“Some of my earliest memories are from walking around with my grandfather on Oland and him showing me these massive rune stones and the inscriptions,” he explained on a recent rainy Monday over lunch at a hotel tucked away in central London. “Telling tales of Vikings that sailed down the rivers, down to Constantinople.“So, in a way,” he continued, “you could say that the dream of one day making or being part of a Viking movie was born in that moment.”Wearing a gray crew-neck sweater and dark jeans, he was centuries away from the bloody, muddy berserker he plays in “The Northman,” the much-anticipated action-adventure that marks the director Robert Eggers’s leap into big-budget filmmaking.Six-four, blond and indisputably handsome, Skarsgard would seem a no-brainer to launch a Viking film, but getting this film made took awhile. Skarsgard said he spent years working with the Danish film producer Lars Knudsen trying to determine what shape the project would take. Then, in 2017, he met with Eggers, who had fallen in love with Iceland during a visit two years earlier, to talk about another project.Skarsgard and Eggers both describe that meeting as “fated,” and it eventually led Eggers, along with the Icelandic poet and author Sjon, to write “The Northman.” Eggers, who said he had $70 million to make the film, took some inspiration from the 1982 “Conan the Barbarian,” which he watched as a kid.The actor in full Viking mode in “The Northman.”Aidan Monaghan/Focus FeaturesSkarsgard’s character is a Viking prince, Amleth, bent on vengeance after his father is murdered. Skarsgard is a producer of the new film, which opens on April 22 and also features Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman and Björk, among others.“It was a real treat as an actor to be part of the project from the genesis,” Skarsgard said. “To be part of that journey and to be able to continuously have these conversations with the screenwriters as they are shaping the story, talk about the arc of Amleth, the story, the essence of it — that was very inspiring to me.”The star, 45 and unfailingly polite, has played a Viking before. In fact, he’s played a Northman before: Eric Northman, the proudly undead, ultrasexy Viking vampire on the HBO series “True Blood.” But the title character of “The Northman” is a Viking after Skarsgard’s own heart — one faithful to the medieval lore of the Icelandic sagas, one who doesn’t question fate or faith. And one who, by design, doesn’t have a lot to say.The sagas on which the film is based are “very laconic,” he said. And the characters “don’t really speak unless absolutely necessary.”Skarsgard himself is open, with an easy smile. He’s aware of the world around him, including being up-to-date on the latest news from Ukraine and knowing that asparagus season is upon us. He gave questions his full attention, pausing to gather his thoughts before answering — and not once glancing at a cellphone.Though he grew up hearing Viking stories, Skarsgard read books and watched lectures on them to prepare for his role. He said the most interesting thing he learned was that Vikings believed each person had a female spirit guiding them.“I thought that was quite fascinating, the juxtaposition between that and the brutality you see when you first meet Amleth,” Skarsgard said. He added, “That he would have believed that there’s a female spirit inside of him that guides him, I really liked that idea.”Though he grew up hearing Viking stories, Skarsgard read books and watched lectures on them to prepare for his role.Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesHis preparation complete, it looked as if everything was coming together on the film. Just as shooting was set to begin, the pandemic hit.“For about 48 hours we were still moving forward, but everyone was like, ‘Is this happening? Are we doing this? What’s going on?’ And then finally, they pulled the plug and said we have to break and that we’re going home.”Though Skarsgard considers New York his base, going home meant heading to his hometown, Stockholm.He holed up with his large family at his mother’s country house. He’s the oldest son of the actor Stellan Skarsgard and his first wife, My, and one of eight siblings. Three of his brothers are also actors, including Bill Skarsgard, who played Pennywise, the creeper clown in the “It” movies; another brother is a doctor who kept them apprised of developments in the Covid crisis. Skarsgard said that despite the frightening circumstances, he enjoyed getting to spend time with his family.“We cooked dinners and hung out, worked in the garden,” he said, adding that gathering the whole family can be difficult because work gets in the way. “I really enjoyed it. Then I felt almost guilty because it was a pandemic and people were dying.”Family and Sweden, where Skarsgard grew up and spent some time in the military, are important themes in his life.“We’re all a very tight group,” he said. “Everyone lives within two blocks of each other in South Stockholm and we see each other all the time when I’m home.” (He is not married but answered with a resounding “no” when asked if he was single.)He started out as a child actor but took a break beginning in his early teens before fully embracing an acting career in his 20s. He has said in the past that he didn’t like the attention acting brought him when he was young.His path to “The Northman” runs through dozens of roles in film and TV, some seemingly different sides of the same coin. He’s played an Israeli spy (“The Little Drummer Girl”) and a German man coming to terms with life after World War II (“The Aftermath”). A young Marine who helps the United States invade Iraq (“Generation Kill”) and a sadistic Army sergeant who leads young recruits astray in Afghanistan (“The Kill Team”). An abusive husband (“Big Little Lies”) and an achingly sweet stepdad who steps in to care for his neglected stepdaughter (“What Maisie Knew”).Skarsgard won several awards, including an Emmy, for his turn as an abusive husband opposite Nicole Kidman in “Big Little Lies.”HBOHe also snagged a small but pivotal role in HBO’s prestigious dramedy “Succession,” playing Lukas Matsson, a Swedish tech billionaire.Mark Mylod, an executive producer on the show who directed Skarsgard in two of the three episodes in which he appears, said the actor “was really the only choice for the character because of the intelligence of his work.”The makers of “Succession” had envisioned a character with “that kind of Elon Musk” charisma but not necessarily based on the Tesla chief executive. The Matsson character had to have the gravitas to be a genuine rival to the family behind Waystar Royco, the fictional company at the heart of “Succession,” Mylod said.“He found a way to make that character so fantastic and watchable and totally credible,” Mylod said. “With a small number of scenes, he made such an impact.” (Mylod wouldn’t say if Matsson is returning in Season 4.)Rebecca Hall, an actor who had worked with Skarsgard on “Godzilla vs. Kong,” said she had struggled to get financing for her own passion project, “Passing,” her adaptation last year of the 1929 Nella Larsen novel about the friendship between two Black women in New York, one of whom is passing as white.While working on “Kong,” Hall got up the courage to ask Skarsgard to read her script. He did and agreed to play the part of a racist husband. “I got the sense that he cares about good art being in the world and will do what he can to support that,” Hall said in an interview, adding that the character was the kind he had played well. “He’s no stranger to complicated characters who do bad things.”For Skarsgard, “there is zero strategy or plan” to his career. “The sweet spot is when I’m intrigued by the character, and I understand aspects of him and he makes me curious to learn more,” he said. “That’s superfun because then that means that I’ll probably enjoy diving in and exploring that a bit deeper.”On “The Northman,” diving in meant bulking up. He is also reunited in the film with Kidman, who played his wife in “Big Little Lies,” for which he won an Emmy, a SAG Award and a Golden Globe. This time she’s his mother.The two actors traveled with the rest of the cast to Northern Ireland, Ireland and Iceland for the grueling “Northman” shoot. Skarsgard described it as “seven months in the mud.”Eggers, an exacting and meticulous director, said that he was “not a sadist to be a sadist,” but that he was dead serious about detail and accuracy, which will come as no surprise to viewers of his earlier films, like “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.”Skarsgard has spoken in interviews about being shackled and dragged through the muck. But Eggers said that, like him, Skarsgard wanted the best result. “When we embarked on this together, he was after nothing but perfection.”Eggers added, “Alex has sort of talked about me driving him to the edge, but there were many times that I can remember him asking for another take because he’s just as much of a perfectionist as I am.”The director acknowledged that the working conditions were difficult. “I am not trying to make things hard for us,” he explained, “but when you’re telling the story of the Viking Age in Northern Europe, you’re going to seek punishing locations, with extreme weather and terrain. And that’s just what it needs to be to tell this story.”When shooting was delayed, Skarsgard returned to Stockholm, where he enjoyed time spent with his family. “I felt almost guilty because it was a pandemic and people were dying.”Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesWorking with such a large budget and cast were perks, Eggers said, but also meant a great deal of pressure. “If this movie doesn’t perform, that will be a problem,” he said.After all of the work, Skarsgard said, “I just want people to see the movie, that’s it,” adding, preferably on the big screen.As is pretty standard fare for a Skarsgard project, he’s naked in parts of “The Northman,” including during a fight scene in a volcano.Does he ever just say no to taking off his clothes? He said he had recently done just that at a photo shoot after being asked to take his shirt off, saying, “I think there’s enough nudity in the movie.”Skarsgard, who had spent the morning doing press by Zoom and had traveled around Europe promoting in the days before we talked, had by the end of the interview kind of slid down the banquette, resting his head against the cushion. He said he realized his films tend to be heavy. “I might have to do a comedy soon,” he said, adding that he would like to work with the satirist Armando Iannucci or the British comic actor Steve Coogan.“The Northman,” he said, “was so intense. It was the greatest experience of my career but, God, it was intense.” More

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    Frank Langella Fired From Netflix Show After Misconduct Investigation

    The actor was removed from his leading role in the mini-series “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The production plans to reshoot the scenes in which he had appeared.The actor Frank Langella was fired from his leading role in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a Netflix mini-series based on Edgar Allan Poe works, after a misconduct investigation.His firing was reported by Deadline. Netflix declined to comment, but a person familiar with the matter, who was granted anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the investigation, confirmed the account on Thursday.Langella was removed from the series, which is in the middle of production, after officials determined that the actor had been involved in unacceptable conduct on set, Deadline reported. The production plans to recast Langella’s role as Roderick, the reclusive patriarch of the Usher family, and reshoot the scenes in which he had already appeared. The series also stars Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell and Mark Hamill, among others.A spokeswoman for Langella and the show’s creator, Mike Flanagan, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Langella, 84, known for his performances both onscreen and onstage, shot to fame in the title role of the 1979 film “Dracula” after starring in a Broadway production as the count. He also played President Nixon in both the stage and screen versions of “Frost/Nixon,” earning an Oscar nomination as well as a Tony Award for best actor in a play in 2007. Recently, Langella appeared as the judge in the Netflix film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” More