Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    Alan Cumming on ‘Chimp Crazy’: ‘I Really Do Understand the Deep Love’

    A documentary series by a director of “Tiger King” tells a wild tale about human-chimp relationships. The actor and activist landed right in the middle.In 1997, Alan Cumming appeared in the film “Buddy,” playing an animal handler hired by an eccentric socialite (Rene Russo) who maintained a menagerie in her Long Island home. One of his co-stars was Tonka, a male chimpanzee on the cusp of adolescence. Cumming felt a special bond with Tonka.“He was very gentle,” Cumming, 59, said during a recent video call. “When the other chimps would get a little overwrought, he was a calming influence, a mediator.”Soon after filming ended, Tonka retired. (Once chimps go through puberty, they are considered potentially too strong and sexually aggressive to work on camera.) In 2017, Cumming, a supporter of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a longtime vegan — “I thought if Mike Tyson could do it, I could do it,” he said — learned that Tonka was being held in substandard conditions at a former breeding facility in Festus, Mo.What happened next is the principal subject of the HBO series “Chimp Crazy,” which premiered on Sunday, a wild and occasionally woolly four-part documentary from Eric Goode, a director of “Tiger King.” (The three remaining episodes will air weekly.)PETA secured the release of six chimpanzees from the facility in 2021. Tonka was not among them. Eventually, PETA offered a $10,000 reward for news of Tonka’s whereabouts. Cumming matched that amount.While the twisty four episodes tell several fraught and often violent stories of chimp-human interactions, its permed, lip-plumped focus is Tonia Haddix, the owner of the Festus animals, including Tonka, and an exotic animal broker who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of chimps.” (Given the reputation of “Tiger King” as a series that exposed animal mistreatment, Goode approached her through a proxy, a former circus clown who posed as the series’s director.) Cumming claims to feel sympathy for the women Goode turns his cameras on, even as they failed the animals in their care.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

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    For Nava Mau, ‘Baby Reindeer’ Felt Private. Then It Blew Up.

    Mau is up for an Emmy for her performance in the hit Netflix series, making her the first transgender person to be nominated for a limited series acting Emmy.Voting is underway for the 76th Primetime Emmys, and this week we are talking to several first-time Emmy nominees. The awards will be presented Sept. 15 on ABC.The experience of filming “Baby Reindeer” was so meaningful for Nava Mau, she said, that she would have been fine if it had never come out. But it did in April, and then the seven-episode thriller did what few could have predicted: It became a global phenomenon. The breakout television series of the year so far, “Baby Reindeer” is among Netflix’s most watched shows ever.Its success is even more surprising given the intensity of its central themes: sexual assault, shame, stalking and self-loathing. Based on the real experiences of its creator, writer and star, Richard Gadd, it follows a struggling comedian named Donny who is traumatized by a predatory producer and later stalked by a sad woman named Martha, played by Jessica Gunning. “Baby Reindeer” is one of Martha’s nicknames for Donny.Mau played Teri, a successful therapist and the love interest for Donny, whom she met on a transgender dating site. Teri sees the world more clearly than the other characters but experiences trauma of her own. In July, Mau received her first Emmy nomination, for best supporting actress in a limited series, one of 11 nods for the show. She is the first transgender person to be nominated for a limited series acting Emmy.Mau, who was born in Mexico City and raised in Texas and California, said the story resonated with audiences for the same reasons it resonated with her when she read the script.“Richard demonstrated such courage in portraying these characters as truthfully and beautifully as they possibly could have been,” she said in an interview. “There’s such ugliness in the story and such pain, and yet the humanity of every character is never sacrificed. I think that kind of storytelling allows for people to lower their defenses and really engage with the themes and the emotions that are being presented to them.”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

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? Maybe Francesca Moody Has the Script.

    Francesca Moody has put on some of the Edinburgh Fringe’s biggest breakout hits. This year, she has three shows that she’s hoping will go global.One day in fall 2018, the British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voice mail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.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

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Anonymous’ and the Democratic National Convention

    A new competition show airs on USA and Bravo. And Kamala Harris will be officially nominated as the party’s candidate across networks.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Aug. 19-25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION starting at 6:30 p.m. on various networks. On July 21, President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. By Aug. 6, Vice President Kamala Harris secured the Democratic Party’s nomination, making her the first woman of color to win a major party’s nomination. Through Thursday, the Democratic National Convention will take place in Chicago, culminating in Harris becoming the party’s official nominee — just in time for the first debate between her and former President Donald J. Trump on Sept. 10.THE ANONYMOUS 11 p.m. on Bravo, USA and Syfy. This new competition show involves two universes — the real world and an anonymous one. In the anonymous world, players say and do what they think will get them farther in the game, but under a cloak of anonymity. Each week, players try to guess who each person is in the real world, all in an attempt to win the $100,000 prize.TuesdayFrom left: Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins “The Shawshank Redemption.”Columbia Pictures, via PhotofestTHE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) 8 p.m. on AMC. Based on a Stephen King novella, this movie stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a man sent to prison after the murder of his wife and her lover. Dufresne maintains his innocence and forms a bond with Morgan Freeman’s character, Red. “Without a single riot scene or horrific effect, it tells a slow, gentle story of camaraderie and growth, with an ending that abruptly finds poetic justice in what has come before,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The New York Times.WednesdayMOULIN ROUGE (1952) 8 p.m. on TCM. These days, when “Moulin Rouge” comes to mind, you likely think of the flashy Baz Luhrmann remake with Nicole Kidman’s gaudy elephant suite. But before that, there was this version, which is more of a biopic of the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted the famous scenes from the Moulin Rouge in Paris. “From the fairly intoxicating opening, with dancers swirling in the smoky haze and the overcrowded climate of the wine-colored Moulin Rouge, to the last poignant sequence wherein Lautrec sees these same dancers ghosting through the rooms of his family’s château near Albi as he lies on his painful deathbed, the exquisiteness of the illustration is superlative and complete,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The Times.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

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    Perry Kurtz, Comedian Who Appeared on ‘America’s Got Talent,’ Dies at 73

    Mr. Kurtz, who was killed in a hit-and-run on Thursday, honed his routine over decades and eventually became a recognizable face at comedy institutions.Perry Kurtz, who worked stand-up comedy circuits for decades and appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” died on Thursday night in a hit-and-run in Los Angeles. He was 73.A daughter, Zelda Velazquez, confirmed his death. Mr. Kurtz was crossing Ventura Boulevard when he was struck by a car, according to the authorities. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and the driver was later arrested.Mr. Kurtz was a familiar face in long-established comedy halls, such as the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, but rose to prominence on the national stage with an appearance on “America’s Got Talent” in 2013 in which he performed a rap wearing a silver suit that gleamed like a disco ball.The performance did not go over well with the judges, who eliminated him from the competition, but it fit a campy persona that Mr. Kurtz embraced.On “The Late Late Show With James Corden” in 2018, Mr. Kurtz walked onstage wearing thick suspenders and a Hawaiian shirt, a keytar hanging around his neck. He proceeded to play “Louie Louie,” made famous by the Kingsmen, using his tongue.“In 1979 I moved to San Francisco to pursue my dream,” Mr. Kurtz said in a 2022 interview with Shoutout LA. “Since then, the only job I’ve had is making people laugh.”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

  • 88 Shares109 Views

    in Theater

    A Project That Celebrates Collaboration and Cooperation

    For T Magazine, Kate Guadagnino set out to identify the many people involved in creating a single object or artistic work, including a luxury handbag, a performance piece, a pizza and more.The price tag on a particular Bottega Veneta leather bag is eye-popping: $15,000.But when you consider the number of people (more than 30), the amount of time (more than a year) and all the fair and exhibition visits (dozens) behind the creation of the bag, “it’s easier to accept it being expensive,” said Kate Guadagnino, a contributing writer for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.Ms. Guadagnino recently spent about two months chronicling the resource- and labor-intensive processes to make five objects or artistic works, including a plant-based chair, a nine-hour stage performance and a potato pizza. The resulting project, which was published online last week, appears in T Magazine this Sunday.Like the items whose production Ms. Guadagnino documented, the series also required a team effort: It took more than 20 editors, researchers, photographers and others over three months to produce. Nick Haramis, an editor at large at T Magazine who spearheaded the project, said that the five items were whittled down from 47 initial ideas.“The ones that were most compelling were either exceptionally intricate — like the ‘Spirited Away’ puppets — or seemingly simple, like Dan Barber’s slice of pizza,” he said. “The goal was that by including those extremes we might land on something unexpected and fun.”In an interview, Ms. Guadagnino reflected on what she learned from her reporting and how it changed the way she thinks about pricing. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You interviewed 18 people for this project. With so many people involved in the production of these items and works, where did you begin?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

  • 150 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    Judge Blocks Joint Streaming Service from Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery

    The planned service from Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery was slated to cost $42.99 a month and aimed at fans who had abandoned cable TV.A judge issued a preliminary injunction against Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday over a planned sports-focused streaming service from the companies, saying the joint venture would most likely make the market for sports viewership less competitive.The 69-page ruling from a federal judge in New York’s Southern District effectively halts — at least for the moment — the companies’ ambitious plans for the service, called Venu, which was aimed at sports fans who had abandoned cable television.The service, which had been expected to become available this fall and cost $42.99 a month, promised to offer marquee games from the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball.But the idea raised alarms with rivals, most notably a sports streaming service called Fubo, which sued to block the new service’s formation after it was announced this year. In a statement accompanying its complaint, filed on Feb. 20, Fubo alleged that Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery had “engaged in a long-running pattern” of trying to stymie its business through anticompetitive tactics.The complaint led to a hearing this month that focused on whether Fubo should be able to obtain a preliminary injunction against Venu, essentially stopping the sports-media venture from proceeding.In her ruling, Judge Margaret Garnett said Fubo was likely to prevail in its claim that the new service would “substantially lessen competition and restrain trade.” She added that refusing to grant the injunction could limit the effectiveness of any court order reached after a trial.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

  • 150 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    The Pain of Matthew Perry’s Last Days as He Relied on Ketamine

    Court papers show that Mr. Perry, the “Friends” star who had long struggled with addiction, was increasingly taking ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, in the days before he died.On the day Matthew Perry died, his live-in personal assistant gave him his first ketamine shot of the morning at around 8:30 a.m. About four hours later, while Mr. Perry watched a movie at his home in Los Angeles, the assistant gave him another injection.It was only about 40 minutes later that Mr. Perry wanted another shot, the assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, recalled in a plea agreement that he signed.“Shoot me up with a big one,” Mr. Perry told Mr. Iwamasa, according to the agreement, and asked him to prepare his hot tub.So Mr. Iwamasa filled a syringe with ketamine, gave his boss a third shot and left the house to run some errands, according to court papers. When he returned, he found Mr. Perry face down in the water, dead.Mr. Iwamasa was one of five people who the authorities in California said this week had been charged with a conspiracy to distribute ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, to Mr. Perry. The defendants also included two doctors, a woman accused of being a dealer and an acquaintance who pleaded guilty to acting as a middleman.Mr. Perry, a beloved figure who rose to fame playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom “Friends,” had long struggled with addiction. Court papers filed in the case shed light on the desperate weeks leading up to Mr. Perry’s death on Oct. 28 at the age of 54.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