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    With Fewer Ads on Streaming, Brands Make More Movies

    As streaming video has gained in importance during the pandemic, advertisers have put more focus on Hollywood-level branded content as a way to reach viewers.When the N.B.A. shut down its season last year because of the pandemic, one of the first phone calls Chris Paul made was to the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer. Mr. Paul, then a point guard with the Oklahoma Thunder, knew he wanted to chronicle what was going on, and he wanted Mr. Grazer’s help.“The idea was, basically, film everything that had taken place in that game that night and what was going to come of it,” Mr. Paul said. “We had no clue what would happen next.”The result was “The Day Sports Stood Still,” a documentary about the shutdown, the N.B.A.’s pandemic bubble and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the league. (Mr. Paul appears in the film and is an executive producer.) It is a portrait of the ways the pandemic convulsed the sports world, but also an example of how Covid-19 has upended the entertainment industry.The film, which debuts Wednesday on HBO and HBO Max, comes from Mr. Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment and a newer entrant to Hollywood: Waffle Iron Entertainment, Nike’s production entity.With more people home and glued to their streaming services, many of which don’t allow advertising, companies are finding they need to be creative about the ways they get in front of audiences no longer seeing 30-second commercials. More are turning to traditional Hollywood production companies like Imagine to partner on feature films like “The Day Sports Stood Still,” which is infused with Nike’s ethos but carries none of the traditional branding audiences are used to seeing.“The best partnership you can have is a marriage where the themes between the company and the story are aligned,” Mr. Grazer said in an interview. “If you’ve got Chris Paul and Nike is part of the marketing, that is an added ingredient why someone will see it. They will feel Nike endorsed it and Nike does good things.”Chris Paul in “The Day Sports Stood Still,” which he helped produce.HBOData from the research firm WARC showed that the amount advertisers spent in broadcast television in 2020 declined 10 percent from the previous year while online video spending rose 12 percent. Much of that money has gone to streaming services like Hulu, YouTube and Peacock that accept advertising. But those that don’t allow commercials, like Netflix, still remain unavailable to traditional marketing.“Streaming is giving less and less opportunity for advertisers to connect with consumers in a meaningful way,” said Justin Wilkes, chief creative officer of Imagine Entertainment. “One of the last ways to do that is through long-form content. It’s all circular. This goes back to the earliest days of advertising and underwriting the great entertainment program.”Brands have linked themselves to movies and television for almost as long as the mediums have existed. Long before he became president, for instance, Ronald Reagan hosted the popular “General Electric Theater” television show from 1954 through 1962. In the past decade, branded filmmaking has only proliferated.Patagonia funded a feature-length documentary about dams, called “DamNation,” in 2014. Pepsi backed the 2018 movie “Uncle Drew,” which showcased the basketball star Kyrie Irving recreating his septuagenarian character from a popular series of Pepsi Max commercials. The film made $42 million and marked one of the first branded entertainment campaigns to be adapted into a major motion picture. “Gay Chorus Deep South,” a documentary produced by Airbnb, debuted on the festival circuit in 2019. And Apple’s acclaimed “Ted Lasso” began its life as an NBC Sports promotion for its acquisition of the broadcast rights to the English Premier League.Kyrie Irving in character as Uncle Drew, the spokesman for Pepsi Max who became the basis for a feature film.Davie Brown EntertainmentImagine Entertainment, the production company founded by Mr. Grazer and Ron Howard in 1985, formed Imagine Brands in 2018 to pair companies with filmmakers, hiring Mr. Wilkes and Marc Gilbar, the creator of the “Uncle Drew” Pepsi campaign and an executive producer on the film, to run the group. The division has produced both feature-length documentaries and narrative films with their partners, which have included Unilever, Walmart and Ford.Imagine is also working with the consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. The company, which effectively created soap operas when it began to sponsor serial radio dramas in the 1930s to help promote its soap products, is cofinancing a feature-length film with Imagine called “Mars 2080.” It will be directed by Eliza McNitt and begin production later this year. The film, which is scheduled to be released theatrically by IMAX in 2022 before moving to a streaming service, focuses on a family resettling on Mars.It grew out of a breakfast in New York in 2019, where Mr. Wilkes, Mr. Howard and Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, discussed technology in the pipeline. The Imagine team later toured Procter & Gamble’s research labs in Cincinnati, seeing examples of its “home of the future” products and meeting its scientists.Kimberly Doebereiner, the vice president of Procter & Gamble’s future of advertising division, said the company hoped to do more long-form storytelling, like “The Cost of Winning,” the four-part sports documentary its shaving brand Gillette produced. It debuted on HBO in November.“We want to be more interesting so consumers are leaning into our experiences and we’re creating content that they want to see as opposed to messages that are annoying to them,” she said. “Finding a way to have content that is in places where ads don’t exist is definitely one of the reasons why we’re leaning into this.”Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, the founders of Imagine Entertainment.Peyton Fulford for The New York TimesIt’s all part of a deliberate shift by brands to try to integrate themselves more fully into consumers’ lives, the way companies like Apple and Amazon have, said Dipanjan Chatterjee, an analyst with Forrester. And they want to do so without commercials, which, he said, have “zero credibility” with consumers.“If the right story has the right ingredients and it becomes worthwhile for sharing, it doesn’t come across as an intrusive bit of advertising,” Mr. Chatterjee said. “It feels much more like a natural part of our lives.”Alessandro Uzielli, the head of Ford Motor Company’s global brand and entertainment division, first met with Imagine Brands in early 2018. He was looking for a way to augment Ford’s advertising campaign for its relaunched Bronco with a piece of entertainment that would reach a younger audience. The result was “John Bronco,” a 37-minute long mockumentary directed by Jake Szymanski (“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”) and starring Walton Goggins (“Justified”) as the greatest fictional pitchman of all time.The short film earned a slot in the Tribeca Film Festival and is now streaming on Hulu. In addition to featuring guest spots from Tim Meadows, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bo Derek, it helped reintroduce the Bronco, a sport utility vehicle that the automaker pulled in the mid-1990s.“This helped us speak to an audience that we probably weren’t going to speak to on our own,” Mr. Uzielli said.“It was Imagine’s project, and we didn’t want to cloud their process, to try to make it feel like too much of a sales job,” he added.A still from “John Bronco,” a 37-minute mockumentary from Imagine that stars Walton Goggins and is augmenting a Ford marketing campaign.Imagine DocumentariesMr. Szymanski, who has directed both feature films and commercials, including ads for the Dodge Durango starring Will Ferrell’s “Anchorman” character Ron Burgundy, said Ford allowed him a great deal of creative freedom. “I think they could have tried to impose a much larger shadow on it than they did,” he said. Now, Imagine, Mr. Szymanski and Mr. Goggins are trying to turn John Bronco into the next Ted Lasso — an effort in the early stages of development.“It’s kind of a win-win,” Mr. Szymanski said of a possible television series based on Mr. Goggins’ character. “I don’t think Ford would have any creative control over it but to have a character named John Bronco in the world, that would be a good thing for them.” More

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    ‘Ain’t Supposed to Die’ Plans a Broadway Return

    The 1971 Melvin Van Peebles musical, about Black life in a low-income neighborhood, is a dream project for the director Kenny Leon.A half-century after its premiere, Melvin Van Peebles’s musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” is heading back to Broadway.The producer Lia Vollack said Tuesday that she is putting together a revival with the collaboration of the creator’s son, Mario Van Peebles, and under the direction of Kenny Leon. Vollack said she expects to present the revival on Broadway next year.The musical, which began a nine-month run on Broadway in 1971, is constructed as a series of monologues, often vivid and confrontational, about Black life in a low-income neighborhood. Nominated for seven Tony Awards (but winning none), the show seems to anticipate both the confessional and personal style of musicals that followed, and the poetic spoken-word sounds of rap and hip-hop.Melvin Van Peebles wrote the show’s book, music and lyrics. Bill Duke and Garrett Morris were in the original cast, and Phylicia Rashad was a standby.Leon has long been enamored of the musical, which he performed in while a student at Clark Atlanta University.“It was so visceral, and so strong, and so powerful,” he said. “It gives voice to people who we normally don’t hear on a Broadway stage, and if we do hear them, we don’t hear their truth, we just hear their suffering.”Leon said the renewed focus on diversity and equity following a series of deaths of Black Americans in encounters with police catalyzed the production.“Right after everything that happened last year, I talked with Lia, and she said, ‘What do you want to do?’” Leon recalled. “I said, ‘I would love to do “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” — I think it’s my life’s calling to do that play,’ and she said, ‘Let’s do it.’”Leon said the challenge facing his production would be “How do you marry the ’70s to the post-George Floyd moment in an artistic way?” He added, “Nothing about it is going to feel like a museum piece. My goal is to make the audience feel as if the play is new.”Perhaps best known as a film director, Melvin Van Peebles also wrote plays, novels, music and journalism. Mario Van Peebles, an actor who is being billed as the revival’s creative producer, said in an interview that he considers the musical (which he saw on Broadway when he was 14) his father’s best work.“It was a transformational experience — I saw people of all colors coming in, some who had never been to a theater before, and many who had, and some laughed, and some cried, and some applauded, but everyone was somehow changed,” he said.Mario Van Peebles said that throughout his life, people have told him that “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” was ahead of its time, and that he has been eager to revive it while his father, who is now 88, is still alive.“Americans now have better tools to understand each other than we did before,” he said. “In a way, America has caught up, and the language and the tools that were once inner-city are now part of our culture.”The New York Times, for one, gave the original production a mixed review.“Whites can only treat ‘Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death’ as a journey to a foreign country,” the critic Clive Barnes wrote, “and on those terms I think it has the power to shock and excite.” (The paper summed up the show this way in a sub-headline: “Blacks Move Through Gantlet of the Slum.”)The show has occasionally been revisited over the years; in New York, there was an Off Broadway production in 2006, when a New York Times critic wrote, “the series of vignettes explodes like a round of mini-riots.”With racial equity much discussed in the theater industry recently, “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” becomes the eighth new production with a Black writer announced for Broadway when it reopens.The others are a revival of “Trouble in Mind” by Alice Childress; the Michael Jackson biomusical “MJ,” with a book by Lynn Nottage; a “Some Like It Hot” musical with a book co-written by Amber Ruffin; and the plays “Lackawanna Blues” by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, “Skeleton Crew” by Dominique Morisseau, and “Thoughts of a Colored Man” by Keenan Scott II, as well as an untitled play by Nottage.Denzel Washington has told The Daily Mail that he expects a revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” to reach Broadway next year featuring his son John David Washington alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Danielle Brooks and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The producer Scott Rudin, who has the stage rights to “The Piano Lesson,” has declined to confirm the report. More

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    For Eddie Izzard, a ‘99’ Ice Cream and a Waterloo Sunset Are Wondrous Things

    The star of “Six Minutes to Midnight,” opening Friday, tells why Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, “Great Expectations,” David Bowie and London landmarks hold meaning for her.Eddie Izzard, the British comedian-actor-writer-activist-endurance runner, tends to push herself to the limit. And then some.“I do find — because I had my sort of 10 wilderness years before things took off — that I’ve tried very hard to stay four steps ahead of where I need to be,” Izzard, who is transgender, said in a video interview from London.She performs stand-up in English, French, German and Spanish. She channels 21 characters in a one-person show of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” She runs multiple marathons for charity — clocking 32 in 31 days in January, each followed by a comedy routine, for her Make Humanity Great Again campaign, which supports global unity and tolerance.And still, Izzard found time to co-write, executive produce and star in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” set in 1939, about a teacher at a finishing school in the south of England whose students include the daughters of high-ranking Nazis. The film, out Friday, based on a true story she learned about from a museum curator in Bexhill-on-Sea, where her family is from, was a 10-year process: five to develop the characters and five to get her acting to a level where she could play a lead, alongside stars like Judi Dench.Catch her while you can: Izzard hopes to go into politics in the near future as a member of Parliament for the Labour party, during which she’ll take a hiatus from performing.With her career in high gear, the timing may not be perfect, but she’s not worried. “There’s the critical momentum you need when you’re going in,” she said, “but that will stick around for when you come out.”Izzard channeled her trademark whimsy into her list of 10 cultural essentials — from the fantasy world of the Narnia books to the simple delights of an ice cream cone — which she wrote herself. KATHRYN SHATTUCK1. Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations My mum used to love to listen to classical music. My mum and dad were married in ‘Adan (Aden) in Yemen and Dad talked of her liking to go up onto the roof of a local hotel and play classical music from a gramophone record as the sun set. I think that, amongst others records, she would have played Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, as it was one of the classical albums that was often played in the house. My mum died when I was only 6 years old, but I do remember hearing different albums played at home in the years she was alive, and this one stuck with me from an early age. The fact that he was called Edward, and so was I, didn’t hurt.2. “30 Rock” “30 Rock” is just gold dust. If you have a brain and a sense of humor, just buy the first episode. If it grabs you then just do what I did and download the whole box set. The height of great comedy is to be as intelligent as it is bonkers, and this is it. It’s the kind of sitcom that probably only could exist in a post-“Seinfeld” America, and it probably had to fight just as hard as “Seinfeld” did for its own existence over its first few seasons.3. “David Bowie: Finding Fame” The key thing in this documentary to take home to your brain is that it shows the 10 wilderness years before Bowie took off with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. One needs to know that he was in his first band in 1962, when the Beatles were just taking off. So the stamina that 10 years adrift taught him, and also the few times when it looked like things were taking off but then didn’t, must have informed the rest of his career. I didn’t realize until I watched this that he was at times, in the early days, way off course but he kept regrouping and coming back.4. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C.S. Lewis It is a great mystical adventure story to feed the imagination of kids. You have to understand that I’m dyslexic and so read very few books, but I read all of the seven Narnia ones when I was young. I later found out that Lewis was lacing in religion to the series, and this made every feel a little hoodwinked about the whole thing. But later, I realized you could just ignore the symbolism if you wanted to.5. “The Great Escape” A classic war film and one I’ve watched many times. The fact it is based in truth, when a lot of war films in those days were not, makes it even better. I like the film so much, I’ve even watched it in German. As I do my stand-up in German, I was playing Berlin, and I bought the DVD of the film there. If you switch on the German audio track and just have English subtitles, it is a different film. Suddenly they’re all talking German, and so it just becomes a battle between an extreme right regime and people fighting for a return to humanity.6. “Waterloo Sunset” Written by Ray Davies of the Kinks and performed by them. It’s a song that I’ve always thought was accidentally perfect for me as I knew exactly where to see a Waterloo sunset. Waterloo Bridge is my favorite London bridge (we have many). When I was a street performer at Covent Garden, I used to walk across the bridge to perform in front of the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. And at some point soon after Covid, I will perform inside the Festival Hall. And then I’ll watch another sunset and I will play “Waterloo Sunset” again.7. “Pogles’ Wood” If you search for “Pogles’ Wood: Honey Bees” on YouTube, you can see an episode of this early animated TV series that I was mesmerized by when I was about 5 years old. Normally if you watch back at TV shows that you found entertaining at that age, you will find them tired and old-fashioned in modern times. But “Pogles’ Wood” still holds up with its mixture of animated characters, weirdly beguiling music and short pieces of live-action documentary that showed and taught you things from the real world.8. The “99” Ice Cream What did people do before ice cream? Nobody knows. But the “99” is a staple of the British ice cream world. It is just a basic wafer cone with soft white vanilla ice cream swirled on top of it, but the crowning difference that makes it a thing of genius is a chocolate Flake stuck diagonally (always diagonally) into the side of the vanilla ice cream.Once you buy your “99,” experienced users will have their own eating ritual to perform. Mine is always to push the chocolate Flake with one finger so that you push it down into the center of the cone. Then you close the hole in the ice cream over with your tongue and carry on eating the cone as if it never had a chocolate Flake. Then, when you are down to the final handle part of the cone, you have a heady mixture of wafer, vanilla ice cream and flaky chocolate to feast upon.9. “Great Expectations” Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, and slightly bizarrely, I was born on Feb. 7, 1962, 150 years later. Having never read a great work of literature, I thought I should start with a work of Dickens due to the weird link. I chose “Great Expectations” to firstly read and record it to become an audiobook (which I have now done), and then I thought I should turn it into a solo show. So I commissioned my older brother, Mark, to adapt it down from over 20 hours of book into a 90-minute solo performance.Apart from it being one of Dickens’ more mature books and a great story of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella, “Great X” is also interesting for me as it starts off down to the South East of London, along the river Thames towards the mouth of the river. This is the Chatham, Kent area of England and was where Dickens grew up, and the book starts here in about the 1820s, which is when he was there as a child. So you hear about “the marshes” direct from his childhood, a place that was barren in the winter and glorious in the summer.10. The Parks of London I do find them a joy. Are they culture? I think so, for they can inspire. Two of our biggest are slap bang in the center of London. They are Hyde Park and Kensington Park. They are essentially one large park, but they have West Carriage Drive running between that separates them. The ancient Serpentine River runs through them, which was long ago turned into a boating lake. Speakers’ Corner, where anyone can pull up and hold forth on any subject, is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park — which is right by the beginning of the old Roman road of Watling Street. I encourage anyone to take a walk from the bottom corner of one park to the top corner of the other park on a warm and sunny day, and it will feel like a walk in the countryside. More

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    Next From Taylor Mac: A Post-Pandemic Pandemic Play — Set in 1918

    “Joy and Pandemic” is slated to be performed this fall before an in-person audience at the Magic Theater in San Francisco.What kind of art the coronavirus pandemic will inspire remains an open question. But the playwright and performer Taylor Mac has spent much of the past year of theatrical shutdown creating a work about the last Big One.“Joy and Pandemic,” set during the influenza pandemic of 1918, will have its premiere in September at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. And if all goes according to plan, it will be with an in-person audience.“The pandemic has taught me to be skeptical of certainty,” Sonia Fernandez, the Magic’s interim artistic director, said in an email confirming the production. “That said, we are optimistic that we will be able to ensure a safe environment to produce the play with the artistic rigor it deserves.”Mac is best known for “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a marathon 24-hour performance piece that took in all of American history through song, refracted through a radical queer lens (and involving some exuberant audience participation). “Joy and Pandemic,” inspired in part by some of Mac’s research for that show, had actually been commissioned by the Magic, a 144-seat nonprofit theater with which he has a long association, before the current pandemic hit.“At first, I thought about dropping the flu aspect,” Mac said in a phone interview last week. “It seemed maybe too on the nose. But then I thought it will be nice to ritualize this experience by making a play that’s not necessarily about this flu, but is about this moment in time.”“Joy and Pandemic” is set in Philadelphia in September 1918, at the tail end of World War I, on the day of the huge Liberty Loan Parade that became an infamous super-spreader event, though it also bounces forward in time to 1951. It takes place in a children’s art school (inspired by one Mac’s mother ran), and it deals in part with Christian Science, in which Mac was raised.“It’s so much about what our beliefs are, what somebody else’s reality is, and how those two things match up,” Mac (who will not appear in the play) said.Mac’s work, even more than most live theater, is based on the opposite of social distancing. Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which was in previews at the Flea in New York when the coronavirus hit, featured audience seating inside a giant ball pit, where the actors metaphorically mud-wrestled.During the past year of shutdown, Mac has been developing “Joy and Pandemic” with the director Loretta Greco, via Zoom. Mac (who at the start of the pandemic also created an artist-led mutual aid effort called The Trickle Up) missed the normal in-person process of “hanging out with everybody and talking about ideas and surprising each other,” and then inviting the audience in.“Being in a room together with other people, that’s the whole point,” Mac said. “I’m in it for the hang.”And “The Hang,” as it happens, is also the title of another upcoming Mac world premiere, scheduled for January 2022, at the Here Arts Center in New York City. Mac, who will perform in the show, would describe it only as “a musical theater piece,” but not a musical per se, created in collaboration with the composer and musical director Matt Ray, the costume designer Machine Dazzle, the director Niegel Smith and others from the “24-Decade” team. More

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    Stephen Colbert Breaks It Down for Spring Breakers

    “Hot tip for Miami authorities: If you want young people to stop partying, don’t instate a curfew, just invite a few dads,” Colbert joked. 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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Spring Breaking the RulesCollege students celebrating spring break descended on Miami Beach over the weekend and flouted regulations about social distancing and wearing masks. On Monday night, Stephen Colbert chastised the city’s mayor, Dan Gelber, for saying those partyers were not “following the rules.” “Yes, he wants a spring break that’s not chaotic or disorderly, like in those famous videos, ‘Girls Gone Mild,’” Colbert said.“Things got so out of hand that on Saturday, the city was forced to declare a state of emergency and an 8 p.m. curfew. And, surprise, it didn’t work. Hot tip for Miami authorities: If you want young people to stop partying, don’t instate a curfew, just invite a few dads.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yup, now there’s a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. so spring breakers will have to return to their motel rooms. The best way to guard against Covid is forcing drunks into small, confined spaces, that’s what I’ve always heard.” — JIMMY FALLON“You know things are out of control when Florida is worried about Covid.” — JIMMY FALLON“College kids were like, ‘It’s a shame, ’cause I flew to Miami during a pandemic to party very responsibly.’” — JIMMY FALLON“[imitating partyer] Wooo! I’m with you, my fellow younglings. The virus can’t catch us if we don’t stop dancing! I’m never going to die!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is what’s going to happen after Florida’s governor called the state a ‘freedom oasis.’ Like if I put a Starbucks sign above my apartment door, I can’t be mad when people show up and try to take a [expletive] in my bathroom.” — TREVOR NOAH“But let’s be clear here: Covid is not over, all right? Some random dude can’t declare the end of the pandemic by dressing up like the Joker and making it rain. It’s not a thing. Only Anthony Fauci can declare the end of the pandemic by dressing up like the Joker and making it rain.” — TREVOR NOAH“But still, there’s no reason that you can’t celebrate spring break and wear a mask. It could be part of the fun. I mean, just think how sexy a wet mask contest could be, hmm? I mean, we haven’t seen mouths in a year — what’s under there?” — TREVOR NOAH“And if we learned anything from Miami, this is just a preview of how much everyone is going to get loose once the pandemic is truly over. People have been locked up for too long. Once it ends, everyone’s going to be drinking and partying, hooking up with everyone. It’s going to be so much that it’s going to create the next worldwide virus. Yeah, guys are going to be waking up in bed next to a bat like, ‘Uh-oh, I think I did it again.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Biden’s Trip Edition)“Our new president is on a roll, baby. Nothing can stop him now — except stairs.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He’s facing a lot of challenges in his first 100 days — the vaccine rollout, the crisis at the border, and what happened to Ms. Frizzle. Whew. But over the weekend, he faced his biggest challenge yet: staying upright.” — TREVOR NOAH“I’m sorry, guys, I honestly can’t believe that this happened. The president got knocked over by wind. This is going to be the first president where the Secret Service needs to carry around paperweights: ‘Hold on, sir, hold on. We got you, we got you — someone sneezed.’“ — TREVOR NOAH“He’s fine! Can we blame it on his dog, Major? No? Do it anyway.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s not like this just happened to Joe Biden, all right? It happens all the time. Biden tripped, Obama tripped, Mike Pence tripped. And the reason isn’t because they’re old — the reason is because they were running up and down stairs. You shouldn’t do that.” — TREVOR NOAH“That would never happen in Africa. I mean, mostly because our presidents fly commercial and they have to wait for their boarding group to be called, but you get what I mean.” — TREVOR NOAH“The point is we don’t think about it because we use stairs so much, all right? Nobody thinks about it, but stairs are basically an obstacle course. You take one wrong step and you’re going to eat [expletive]. And that’s one thing — one thing that my man Trump understood. You love him or hate him, but you’ve got to treat stairs with respect. He understood that. You walk up slowly, you hold the banister and you swear to God that if he lets you survive this, you will never walk up stairs ever again.” — TREVOR NOAH“It’s interesting — I feel like they’re the opposite with stairs and Covid. Like with Covid, Trump took no precautions; Biden took every precaution. But on stairs or ramps, Trump’s super careful, always holding the railing, going real slow. Whereas Biden throws caution to the wind, trips upstairs three times. So it’s interesting, you know? It just shows we all contain multitudes.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingTrevor Noah looked into the gender disparities taking place as part of this year’s March Madness basketball tournament.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightMegan Mullally and Nick Offerman will catch up with Seth Meyers on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutPep band players can be some of the biggest basketball fans in the arena.Harry How/Getty ImagesOne noticeable difference for March Madness this year: no live bands. More

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    Filmmaker’s Suit Says A&E Networks Suppressed ‘Watergate’ Series

    The director, Charles Ferguson, said in a lawsuit that an executive was concerned about the “negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump administration.”“Watergate,” a four-hour documentary examining the scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, had its world premiere in 2018 at the Telluride Film Festival, an event known to foretell future Oscar nominations. It went on to be shown at the New York Film Festival and several others, collecting positive reviews that highlighted allusions the series made to the Trump presidency.It aired on the History Channel over three days in early November, just before the 2018 midterm elections. To the filmmaker’s surprise, it was never broadcast on American television again.The writer and director of the documentary, the award-winning filmmaker Charles Ferguson, is now suing the company that owns the History Channel, A&E Networks, asserting it suppressed the dissemination of his mini-series because it was worried about potential backlash to allusions the documentary makes to the Trump White House.In the lawsuit filed Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Ferguson accuses the company of attempting to delay the documentary until after the 2018 midterm elections because a History Channel executive feared it would offend the White House and Trump supporters.“He was concerned about the impact of ‘Watergate’ upon ratings in ‘red states,’” the lawsuit said of the executive, Eli Lehrer, “as well as the negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump administration.”Mr. Ferguson resisted that plan, and the mini-series ultimately aired shortly before Election Day. But the filmmaker contends the documentary was given short shrift, despite acclaim in the film industry and previous assurances that it would receive “extremely prominent treatment.”The lawsuit describes the treatment of the documentary as part of a “pattern and practice of censorship and suppression of documentary content” at A&E Networks, and cites several others that it says were subject to attempted manipulation for political or economic reasons.A&E called the lawsuit meritless and the assertion that the documentary was suppressed “absurd,” saying its decision to not rebroadcast it additional times was based on lower than expected ratings.In a statement, the company said it has routinely given a platform to storytellers “to present their unvarnished vision without regard for partisan politics.” It pointed to its partnership with former President Bill Clinton, formed during the Trump administration, to produce a documentary series about the American presidency and the fact that a subsidiary, Propagate, had produced the four-part docu-series “Hillary,” on the life of Hillary Clinton.“A&E invested millions of dollars in this project and promoted it extensively,” the company said of “Watergate” in its statement. “Among other efforts, we hired multiple outside PR agencies, provided advance screeners to the press, and submitted it to film festivals and for awards consideration.”Charles Ferguson, whose film “Inside Job” won an Oscar in 2011, says that A&E Networks did not fulfill a promise to fully promote his documentary on the Watergate scandal.Associated PressMr. Ferguson’s “Watergate” is a deep dive into events set off by the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the cover up by the Nixon administration. It includes interviews with people who were involved in the events — such as John Dean, President Nixon’s White House counsel — as well as reporters who covered them, including Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Lesley Stahl. The New York Times’s co-chief film critic, A.O. Scott, wrote that the documentary tells a story that is “part political thriller and part courtroom drama, with moments of Shakespearean grandeur and swerves into stumblebum comedy,” though other reviews panned the film’s re-creations by actors.Mr. Ferguson, who is best known for his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary “Inside Job,” said that when he started pitching the project in 2015, he imagined it as a straightforward “historical detective story.” But, the suit says, a drumbeat of events involving the Trump administration made him realize the documentary’s renewed political relevance. In 2017, he watched as Mr. Trump fired his F.B.I. director, as the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, and as the potential for impeachment loomed.The series — which Mr. Ferguson said cost about $4.5 million to produce — does not mention Mr. Trump’s name, but the documentary’s subtitle, “How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President,” was a nod toward his administration.The lawsuit hinges on a conversation between Mr. Ferguson and A&E executives in June 2018, before the film was released. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Lehrer, executive vice president and head of programming at the History Channel, said at that meeting that he would seek to delay the premiere of “Watergate” and “sharply lower” its publicity profile, expressing concern about its relevance to the politics of the moment and the reaction it would provoke from the Trump administration and Trump supporters.Mr. Ferguson has worked to collect pieces of evidence to support his contentions, among them an email he provided to The New York Times in which Mr. Lehrer acknowledged discussing the bipartisan nature of the network’s audience. In the email, Mr. Lehrer also denied the network was trying to suppress the documentary, writing that the rationale for exploring different airdates was to avoid the series getting swallowed up by heavy sports programming and election coverage.Mr. Ferguson’s contract did not specify how many times the network would show the documentary or whether it would receive theatrical distribution, though successful ones are typically broadcast multiple times.Nielsen ratings from the time show that “Watergate” earned only 529,000 viewers when it aired, including seven days of delayed viewing, compared to History Channel’s other multi-episode documentaries like “Grant” which bowed in May to 4.4 million viewers, or “Washington,” which drew an audience of 3.3 million in February 2020.Had the ratings been stronger, A&E says, it would have broadcast the series multiple times and it would have had a greater chance of securing additional licenses either with a streaming service or with international distributors.“The fact is that Watergate, which premiered in prime time on Mr. Ferguson’s desired date, drastically underachieved in the ratings, which was disappointing to all of us,” the company said in its statement.Mr. Ferguson’s documentary chronicles the aftermath of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, which started the downfall of the Nixon presidency.  Associated PressBut the lawsuit says A&E Networks damaged Mr. Ferguson financially by, among other things, failing to make any “meaningful” distribution deals or arrange for advertising outside of the network. It says Mr. Ferguson traded a lower-than-normal director’s fee in his contract for a higher cut of the royalties, believing that if the documentary was successful, the majority of the viewership revenue would stem from sales to streaming services, foreign cable channels and other customers.One of the A&E executives named as a defendant, Michael Stiller — the vice president of programming and development at the History Channel — had told Mr. Ferguson that there would be rebroadcasts and required him to make slightly shorter versions of the episodes for daytime slots, but those never occurred, according to the lawsuit.The company noted the documentary is available on several services, which include iTunes, Amazon Prime Video and Google Play, including its own video-on-demand platform, History Vault.Mr. Ferguson’s lawsuit argues that the company executives interfered with his contract, and defamed him by telling industry executives he was difficult to work with, thereby costing him work. In addition to Mr. Lehrer and Mr. Stiller, the other named defendants include Robert Sharenow, the network’s president of programming, and Molly Thompson, its former head of documentary films. Ms. Thompson declined to comment. Mr. Lehrer, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Sharenow did not respond to requests for comment.The lawsuit cites several examples where Mr. Ferguson said he learned about conflicts between A&E executives and documentary filmmakers, including a dispute concerning “Gretchen Carlson: Breaking the Silence,” a 2019 documentary on Lifetime about sexual harassment in working-class industries. The suit says A&E executives questioned including information about McDonald’s, an advertiser. The information was ultimately included after the producers fought for it, but the episode was only aired once, on a Saturday at 10 p.m., the lawsuit said. A spokeswoman for Ms. Carlson declined to comment.The lawsuit also says Mr. Ferguson learned about a dispute regarding a 2019 A&E documentary called “Biography: The Trump Dynasty” that examines Mr. Trump’s life and family history. According to the lawsuit, A&E executives wanted the production company behind the documentary, Left/Right Productions, to add in the voice of a “Trump apologist” who could “justify” aspects of Mr. Trump’s background, a request that the suit says generated “significant tensions” between the network executives and the production company executives.Left/Right, which works with The New York Times on some documentary productions, did not respond to requests for comment. The Times did not have a role in any of the programming cited in Mr. Ferguson’s suit.Jack Begg contributed research. More

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    in Television

    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Coded Bias’ and ‘Tina’

    PBS will air a documentary that examines the biases embedded in algorithms and other technology. And HBO to debut a documentary about Tina Turner.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, March 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: CODED BIAS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Shalini Kantayya (“Catching the Sun”) examines the ways biases and inequities have become embedded in algorithms and other technology in this, her latest documentary. Kantayya focuses on the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who has done prominent work on the subject. (Buolamwini was a witness at a congressional hearing on facial-detection technology in 2019, an event that the documentary covers.) Kantayya also looks at how these digital biases play out in the real world using examples in the United States and abroad, where algorithms can determine who qualifies for certain housing or who gets stopped by law enforcement. The documentary “tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs,” Devika Girish wrote in her review for The New York Times last year. She added that the movie “moves deftly between pragmatic and larger political critiques, arguing that it’s not just that the tech is faulty; even if it were perfect, it would infringe dangerously on people’s liberties.”AFRAID: FEAR IN AMERICA’S COMMUNITIES OF COLOR 9 p.m. on CNN. Just days after killings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors amplified fears about the recent rise of violence against Asian-Americans, the CNN anchors Amara Walker, Anderson Cooper, Victor Blackwell and Ana Cabrera will host a discussion about the state of hate in America, and how crimes like last week’s terrorize communities of color.TuesdayBUGSY MALONE (1976) 8 p.m. on TCM. Pinstripe suits and potty-mouth language come together in this bizarre mobster musical satire, which casts a group of young actors (including Jodie Foster and Scott Baio) in a prohibition-era gangster story. The movie’s writer and director, Alan Parker, replaces bullets with whipped cream and Model Ts with toy pedal cars; and his story is injected with musical numbers by the songwriter Paul Williams. The results, Vincent Canby wrote in his 1976 review for The Times, are “wildly uneven but imaginative and stylish.”WednesdayA scene from “Fast-Forward: Look Into Your Future.”FLX Entertainment/Twin Cities PBSFAST-FORWARD: LOOK INTO YOUR FUTURE 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Hollywood makeup artists might get jealous of the technology used in this documentary, which follows several families who experiment with suits designed by M.I.T. researchers that allow their wearers to get a preview of what their bodies might feel like in old age. Narrated by Rosario Dawson, with original music by Andrew Bird, the documentary uses the technology as a tool to encourage the families to plan for the future.ThursdayCASINO (1995) 6 p.m. on VH1. If the whipped-cream Tommy guns in “Bugsy Malone” (airing Tuesday) are too childish for you, consider instead this over-the-top Scorsese mob movie, where the bullets are real and the liquor is consumed legally. The story, based on a nonfiction book by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi, spans years. It revolves around a mobster (Robert De Niro) whose gig managing a Las Vegas casino leads to murder and betrayal. “Scorsese has been here and done this already in ‘Goodfellas,’ but not with his new film’s blistering bitterness or its peacock extravagance,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1995 review for The Times. “The long, astonishing Copacabana sequence in ‘Goodfellas,’” she added, “was only a warm-up for this.”FridayDanny Glover in “To Sleep With Anger.”SVC Films, via Kobal CollectionTO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) 10 p.m. on TCM. The filmmaker Charles Burnett paints a surreal portrait of a family in this poetic drama, which was Burnett’s third feature. Paul Butler and Mary Alice play a mother and father in Los Angeles. The couple’s relationship, and more, start to waver after an old friend, Harry (Danny Glover), who they haven’t seen in years, arrives at their doorstep out of the blue. When “To Sleep with Anger” was reissued by the Criterion Collection in 2019, The Atlantic’s David Sims referred to it as “one of the best movies of the 1990s, an American masterpiece that remains relatively unheralded almost 30 years after its release.”SaturdayA scene from “Tina.”Rhonda Graam/HBOTINA (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The life of Tina Turner — her rise to stardom, her escape from an abusive relationship, her cementation as a figure of rock resilience — is revisited in this new documentary from Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”). The film combines archival footage with present-day interviews, including with Angela Bassett, Oprah Winfrey and the playwright Katori Hall, who was the lead book writer for the recent musical “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” Expect Turner herself, who is also interviewed, to bring her legendary persona down to earth. “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person,” she told The Times in 2019. “I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come.”THE 52ND N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET and CBS. You’d be hard pressed to find an awards season event more wide-ranging than the N.A.A.C.P.’s Image Awards, which honor film, television, music and writing all at once. Nominees this year include Regina Hall, who is up for the best actress in a comedy series prize for “Black Monday”; Delroy Lindo, a best actor in a motion picture nominee for his performance in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”; and the writer Brit Bennett, whose novel “The Vanishing Half” is up for the top literary-fiction prize.SundayGREAT PERFORMANCES: MOVIES FOR GROWNUPS AWARDS WITH AARP THE MAGAZINE 8 p.m. on PBS. At 59, George Clooney probably isn’t quite old enough to qualify for senior discounts at his local multiplex yet, but he was still on the cover of AARP’s magazine earlier this year. He’s also slated to receive a career achievement award at this year’s edition of the AARP’s awards show, which recognizes films and TV programs. The NBC anchor Hoda Kotb will host. More

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    in Theater

    Go or No? An Indoor Theater Invitation (at Last!) Needs an R.S.V.P.

    Two critics, hungry for live performance, weigh whether they’re ready to take a health risk for “Blindness,” which opens in New York next month.On Monday afternoon, theater critics in and around New York City received something they hadn’t seen in more than a year: an invitation to an in-person, indoor performance at an Off Broadway house. “Blindness,” Simon Stephens’s adaptation of the novel by José Saramago, directed by Walter Meierjohann and prerecorded by Juliet Stevenson, would open at the Daryl Roth Theater on April 6.The production, which played in London in August, involves no live actors, but it does invite live, masked, temperature-checked audience members to attend in pods of two. And if you are a theater fan still waiting on a vaccine, it also invites conflicting emotions — excitement, indecision, eagerness, fear — because any social interaction involves risk. Is theater (and particularly a show without actors) worth it? Two New York Times critics took to Twitter, and then to email and a Google doc, to try to sort it out. Here is their edited conversation.LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES Alexis, when you saw the invitation, what went through your mind?ALEXIS SOLOSKI Panic, basically. I’d heard about the show and I am breathlessly (wrong word, I know) excited for the return of in-person theater, but I won’t be vaccinated for months and I don’t feel ready to make this moral/professional/hygienic calculus. You?COLLINS-HUGHES When I think about returning to indoor theater, there are things that scare me and things that make me feel safe. I am terrified by anything involving poor air quality, or people eating and drinking, or people singing or playing wind instruments or otherwise breathing hard, like from dancing. “Blindness” has none of those. And when I think about the Daryl Roth Theater, I think about how airy it is. That’s huge for me.SOLOSKI I mostly think about “De La Guarda,” the longtime show it hosted, which was one big, sweaty upskirt shot. But to your point, “Blindness” involves no human actors. Why would I want to take on the associated risks of subway and lobby and the mask habits of other patrons for something that doesn’t even offer the energetic flow between performer and audience?COLLINS-HUGHES Fair point. I’m not vaccinated yet either and have no idea when I will be. To me, taking what feels like a minimal risk is partly about gathering, partly about theater design being a strong lure for me — and designers have been left out of a ton of online work. But I sensed when you raised the subject on Twitter and we started chatting (and it took our editor all of three minutes to intervene, suggesting we have that conversation here instead) that you weren’t feeling comfortable yet.SOLOSKI I wasn’t alone. A lot of our colleagues voiced mixed feelings, too, though some had already R.S.V.P.’d. And a London acquaintance piped up to say that he had seen it at the Donmar Warehouse and found the safety protocols impressive. But when I read that invitation, I felt nauseated. Which came as a huge surprise. Because I thought I’d be desperate to go. I dream about theater most nights. And even though this will probably sound insufferable, it’s something I actively mourn. I also miss the me who went to the theater, who put on hard pants and lipstick (remember lipstick?) and left my home as a functional adult who did professional stuff in the company of other apparently functional adults. I miss that almost as much as I miss the transport that theater offers. But no, I don’t feel comfortable. And then I feel like a wimp for feeling that discomfort.COLLINS-HUGHES One valuable lesson we learned right away, a year ago, is that it can be very brave to follow your gut and not do the thing that’s reflexive — like going to the theater, like keeping a show running — if it doesn’t feel safe. Theater does not work when the audience, or the artists, have to sit there and worry about something other than the show.SOLOSKI Yeah, but does it work when you’re at home and children are yelling and the temptation to check your phone or fold laundry is just overwhelming?COLLINS-HUGHES Wait, I thought you got into the online stuff?SOLOSKI I did. I do. Particularly when there’s a participatory or a gaming element. I am extremely competitive! But not when it doesn’t feel live. Then again, will something like “Blindness,” in which you listen on headphones to a prerecorded voice, feel live anyway?Signs promoting “Blindness” in New York include review excerpts of last summer’s well-received London production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES I just hunger for the in-person element, even if there are no in-person actors. The way I think about the safety of indoor theater is that it has to have what makes outdoor theater relatively safe: people in masks (“Blindness” requires them, and mine will be doubled), at a distance from one another, in a space with excellent ventilation. But I am surprised to see, when I check on the websites for “Blindness” or the Shed, for example, that there’s no mention of contact tracing, like they have at the Park Avenue Armory or at “Frozen” in Australia. [Note: After this article was published, publicists for “Blindness” said that a fuller description of safety protocols, including contact tracing and a medical questionnaire, was on the Daryl Roth Theater’s website.]SOLOSKI Laura, why didn’t we become critics in Australia? I guess I would feel more comfortable if audience members had to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative test, like the one I had to show when I visited a television soundstage recently.COLLINS-HUGHES The Armory is requiring on-site rapid testing as well as a health questionnaire in advance, and the Shed has a testing requirement and a questionnaire. Those make me feel a little better than a temperature check.SOLOSKI Temperature checks are basically useless.COLLINS-HUGHES Over the summer, I went to a tiny indoor show, where the guy at the door asked where I’d traveled lately, and specifically inquired about a few virus hot spots in New York City. That felt reassuring.SOLOSKI What do you make of the edict that no single seats are available for “Blindness” and that people have to arrange to come in twos or purchase the extra seat?COLLINS-HUGHES I’m wildly opposed to that. I’ve spent the past year by myself, am ravenous for anything resembling ordinary life and am not thrilled to feel unwelcome as a single person at the theater. There has to be a way to make the economics of socially distanced audiences work less cruelly. But have you decided for certain not to go to “Blindness”? What would make you feel OK about going back to indoor theater?SOLOSKI I’ve mostly decided, at least insofar as my natural and wild ambivalence allows. Rapid tests would help, but the vaccine seems so close now and for an indoor performance, especially this indoor performance, I’d rather wait. I can turn off the lights and put on headphones right here at home. You’re going?COLLINS-HUGHES I am. And I will report back.SOLOSKI Good luck. Don’t get Covid! Even Juliet Stevenson isn’t worth it. More