Eliana Willis

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    What’s on TV Tuesday: Jerry Seinfeld and ‘Arde Madrid’

    What’s StreamingJERRY SEINFELD: 23 HOURS TO KILL (2020) Stream on Netflix. If anyone can draw laughs from the mundane — particularly the trivial problems that nagged at us before the coronavirus crisis struck — it’s Jerry Seinfeld. The comedy giant makes something of a comeback in “23 Hours to Kill,” his first original standup special since “I’m Telling You for the Last Time” debuted 22 years ago. Onstage at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, Seinfeld explores the “magic” of Pop-Tarts and argues that “everyone’s life sucks,” including his, although “perhaps not quite as much.”[embedded content]ARDE MADRID: BURN MADRID BURN Stream on MHz Choice. Talk about an escape. This black-and-white limited series transports us to 1960s Madrid. Under the orders of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, Ana Mari (Inma Cuesta), a strait-laced spinster, poses as a maid to spy on the actress Ava Gardner (Debi Mazar of “Goodfellas” and “Entourage”), who spent time in Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra. To get the job done, Ana pretends to marry Ava’s driver, Manolo (Paco León, who also directed the series), a cocky opportunist whose freewheeling lifestyle goes against everything Ana stands for. The mission forces the fake couple to step outside their comfort zone. Manolo gets in touch with his emotions, while Ana, influenced by Ava’s lavish parties and hedonistic lifestyle, slowly starts to let loose and fall for Manolo.GOLD DIGGER Stream on Acorn TV. This six-part romantic thriller questions whether older women have the same sexual freedom as men, particularly onscreen. Sixty-year-old Julia (Julia Ormond) has always placed her family first. But after her husband leaves her for her best friend and her adult children prove to be selfish snobs, she finds happiness in Benjamin (Ben Barnes), an attractive copywriter who is nearly half her age. Their relationship blossoms quickly, but doesn’t sit well with Julia’s children, who criticize the age gap and worry that Benjamin is after Julia’s wealth. The series hints that Benjamin is hiding something throughout, but the truth doesn’t come to the fore until the final episode.What’s on TVNATALIE WOOD: WHAT REMAINS BEHIND (2020) 9 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. In “What Remains Behind,” the documentarian Laurent Bouzereau sets his gaze on Natalie Wood, the “West Side Story” actress who started out as a child star and went on to become a Hollywood icon. Wood’s daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner weighs in heavily here — interviewing friends and family, including her father and Wood’s husband, the actor Robert Wagner, and stars like Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. The movie paints an endearing portrait of Wood through a trove of archival material and addresses her tragic death in 1981, though it does not reveal new findings. The actress was initially said to have drowned off the coast of Catalina Island, but the details surrounding her death — including whether her husband was involved — remain unclear. More

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    Per Olov Enquist, Literary Lion of Sweden, Dies at 85

    Per Olov Enquist, an acclaimed Swedish novelist, playwright and journalist who for decades was a leading voice in Scandinavian literary and cultural life, died on April 25 in Vaxholm, Sweden, a village northeast of Stockholm. He was 85.The cause was organ failure after years of declining health, said Hakan Bravinger, the literary director of Norstedts, Mr. Enquist’s publisher.A prolific writer who grew restless when not working on a book, Mr. Enquist, better known to his many readers as P.O., published more than 20 novels, along with plays, essays and screenplays. His work has been widely translated and won numerous literary prizes throughout Europe, including the August Prize, twice, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize.Mr. Enquist was a co-writer of the screenplay for “Pelle the Conqueror,” a father-son story, based on a novel by Martin Andersen Nexo, set in early 1900s Denmark. Starring Max von Sydow and directed by Bille August, it won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1988.Kirkus Reviews once referred to Mr. Enquist as “one of the world’s most underrated great writers.”Many of his novels used historical scenarios or famous figures to explore philosophical, religious and psychological themes. He favored self-questioning, truth-seeking narrators and perfected a semidocumentary storytelling approach that borrowed from journalism.His big breakthrough, “The Legionnaires” (1968), was written in the style of a documentary novel. It was based on true events surrounding a group of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian men who were drafted into the German army during World War II. Although the soldiers surrendered to the Swedish authorities, they were imprisoned and later deported — a lingering wound in Swedish politics that Mr. Enquist probed unreservedly.It was a role he relished: Mr. Enquist became something of a public intellectual, weighing in on issues of the day in his columns for Scandinavian newspapers and on TV.Image“The Royal Physician’s Visit” (1999), a rowdy historical novel about sex and politics, was the Enquist work perhaps best known to American readers.“The Royal Physician’s Visit,” perhaps the Enquist work best known to American readers, is a rowdy historical novel from 1999 about sex and politics in the Danish court of the 1770s, when the rule of young King Christian VII was usurped by his German doctor, who took the queen, Caroline-Mathilde, as his lover.Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Bruce Bawer said Mr. Enquist had “shaped this remarkable story into a gripping, fast-paced narrative,” calling his prose “rich in arresting epigrams and marked by calculated repetitions that give the novel a touch of hypnotic power.”Tiina Nunnally, who translated “The Royal Physician’s Visit” and three other Enquist books, said his writing style was “unlike any other.” She recalled a debate she had with the author’s American publisher, Overlook Press, regarding Mr. Enquist’s use of punctuation.“The editors were a little taken aback because in ‘Royal’ he has hundreds of exclamation marks — sometimes in the middle of a sentence,” Ms. Nunnally said in a phone interview. “They said, ‘Should we normalize it?’ I said, ‘No, it’s his style.’”Mr. Enquist would study a historical subject exhaustively before writing. But he wasn’t interested in just rendering the costumes, furniture or other atmospheric details of the period, Mr. Bravinger said. “He is interested in the psychology, in the characters,” he said. “It’s never a costume drama. It’s a psychology drama.”In his novels, stories and essays Mr. Enquist was equally penetrating in drawing on his childhood in a small village in northern Sweden, his success as a track athlete and his time as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.In his 2008 memoir, “The Wandering Pine,” which he narrated in the third person, Mr. Enquist was unsparing in describing his years spent drinking, which nearly destroyed his writing career and himself along with it. After emerging from alcoholism in the 1990s, he wrote some of his most celebrated books.Mr. Enquist’s work was frequently characterized as dark or melancholic. But it could also be funny and life-affirming, Mr. Bravinger said.Speaking on a radio show in 2009, Mr. Enquist described puzzling over the meaning of life until, finally, he asked his dog, Pelle. In the end, Mr. Enquist said, he and Pelle determined that it wasn’t that complicated: “One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.”Per Olov Enquist was born on Sept. 23, 1934, in the isolated village of Hjoggbole, roughly 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle. As he wrote in his memoir, most villagers never left. His father, Elof Enquist, a laborer, died when Per was an infant. His mother, Maria (Lindgren) Enquist, was a schoolteacher who raised her son in an evangelical community. He wasn’t introduced to the movies until he was 16.Driven to succeed in the world, he earned a degree in literature at Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest university, and published his first novel before he was 30. He lived much of his life in cosmopolitan cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen and Paris.But his insular, pious childhood remained with him. “If you have had an upbringing like mine, you never get away from it,” he told The Guardian in 2016. “You get to be 80 and read the Bible again. It’s an upbringing that marks you like a branding iron.”On his 70th birthday, in 2004, the journal Swedish Book Review devoted an entire supplement to Mr. Enquist. “This Northern Swedish environment, with its strong evangelical influences, has turned out to be not only the background for much of Enquist’s fiction, but also the stimulus for his lifelong search for truth,” Ross Shideler a professor of comparative literature and Scandinavian at U.C.L.A., wrote in his introduction.But, Mr. Enquist told The Guardian, “I wouldn’t want to change it if I could.” Being free of distractions and steeped in life’s big questions, he said, was good training for a writer.After establishing himself as a journalist and novelist, Mr. Enquist discovered that he had a gift as a playwright. His first play, “The Night of the Tribades,” written in 1975, examined the chauvinism of another Swedish literary star, August Strindberg. It had a brief run on Broadway in 1977 and led to several more plays, as well as a lucrative side career writing for film and television.Mr. Enquist was married three times. His wife, Gunilla Thorgren, a journalist, survives him, along with a son, Mats, and a daughter, Jenny, from a previous marriage.Mr. Enquist’s other novels include “Hess” (1966), about the German politician and Nazi party member Rudolf Hess; “Lewi’s Journey” (2001), about the Pentecostal movement in Sweden; and “The Story of Blanche and Marie” (2004), about Marie Curie. His last novel was “The Parable Book,” published in 2016.Long before he was a literary lion, Mr. Enquist was a champion in the high jump. By some accounts he nearly qualified for the 1960 Olympics in Rome. And he brought that sense of competitiveness to his writing, even to matters like page counts, Mr. Bravinger said.“It would need to be more than 450 pages,” Mr. Bravinger recalled of one Enquist book. “You would think, Who cares? But it was a mind-set. He was always trying to top the last book. And the novel was always the pinnacle.” More

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    What’s on TV Monday: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ and ‘Cane River’

    What’s on TVMY BRILLIANT FRIEND 10 p.m. on HBO. Elena and Lila began their lives in the same poor neighborhood of Naples but over the course of two seasons of television their paths have diverged significantly. Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) has put some distance between herself and her humble origins by successfully pursuing education while Lila (Gaia Girace), despite her intelligence and will, remains largely stuck. The distance between the two has complicated but not diminished their deep connection. This season they traveled together to the island of Ischia for vacation. The time away was supposed to help Lila relax enough to get pregnant by her husband but during the sojourn she connected with Nino, a young man that Elena was drawn to first. After the summer, Elena departed Naples for university and Lila eventually returned to her husband.BULL 10 p.m. on CBS. As the legal drama genre has evolved, producers and writers have started looking beyond lawyers, judges and law enforcement officers for stories. This series focuses on Jason Bull (Michael Weatherly), a psychologist whose firm helps lawyers manipulate the jury selection process and concoct appealing arguments. During the fourth season, which wraps tonight, Bull became a father with his ex-wife, Isabella (Yara Martinez), and rebuilt his relationship with Benny (Freddy Rodríguez), Isabella’s brother and Bull’s colleague.What’s StreamingCane River (1982) Stream on the Criterion Channel. When a negative of this film by Horace B. Jenkins was discovered several years ago, many cineastes rejoiced. The movie was Jenkins’s only fictional feature and it had hardly been seen since it debuted in 1982. Since then, it has been screened in theaters to critical acclaim. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott described the film, which he designated a Critic’s Pick, as “relaxed, reflective and sweet, a romance shadowed by the complexities of history, race and politics that manages to be both modest and ambitious.” The couple at the center of the film, Peter (Richard Romain) and Maria (Tommye Myrick), are African-Americans whose different backgrounds give “their relationship a Romeo-and-Juliet quality,” Scott wrote.Song of the Sea (2014) Stream on Netflix. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YoutTube. The director Tomm Moore mines a Celtic folk tale for this story about an Irish family reckoning with a painful loss. The main characters, Ben and Saoirse, are siblings living on an island with their widowed father. Ben resents his younger sister because he holds her responsible for the apparent death of their mother. But when they’re taken by their grandmother to live in the city and Saoirse falls ill, Ben resolves to save her by bringing her home. On their journey back, he learns that Saoirse is a selkie, an aquatic shape shifter that can temporarily assume human form. To regain her health, she must be reunited with a magic heirloom that she inherited from their mother. More

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    Rap Soundtracks the Michael Jordan Doc. The N.B.A. Wasn’t Always That Way.

    How one experiences “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part documentary series about Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, depends largely on the viewer’s relationship with the man commonly regarded as the most famous — if not best — player to professionally dribble a basketball.But one element has received near-universal praise: the music. Beyond the dramatic strings and moody transitions typically found in documentaries, the makers of “The Last Dance” have assembled a soundtrack that not only snapshots the music of Jordan’s era — particularly hip-hop — but organically accentuates both the documentary footage and the actual basketball being played.“Been Around the World,” the opulent 1997 Puff Daddy track featuring Mase and the Notorious B.I.G. that opens the documentary, perfectly captures the cultural glamour the Bulls had attained by the late ’90s. A montage of Jordan’s 63-point playoff game against the 1985-86 Celtics is perfectly synchronized to the booming percussion and braggadocious rapping of LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad” — marvel at how Jordan eyes the opening tipoff as LL’s voice builds in pitch and intensity.“I was blown away,” LL Cool J said of the sync in an interview. “I’m not just saying that because it’s my song, either — I just thought it worked.”Rudy Chung, the music supervisor of the series, said the filmmakers considered incorporating contemporary music, “But I think we pretty quickly realized that the best thing was to tell the story with songs from the era.” Jason Hehir, the series director, said he met with the label Interscope to discuss the possibility of current-day rappers like Kendrick Lamar covering hip-hop classics, but the project proved too time-consuming given the responsibilities of making the documentary.“The Last Dance” is not exclusively a sightseeing tour through hip-hop’s golden years, which loosely coincide with both Jordan’s early career and the N.B.A.’s rise to cultural prominence. Prince’s delirious “Partyman” anoints Jordan’s informal crowning by the late ’80s as the league’s most magnificent player, and “I Feel Free,” a heady track by the psychedelic rock band Cream, takes us through the wild and woolly years of Phil Jackson, the Bulls’ hippie Svengali. Some tracks split the difference: “The Maestro,” a raucous number by the Beastie Boys that falls somewhere between punk rock and rap, provides a perfect accompaniment to Dennis Rodman’s chaotic playing style and colorful public life.But hip-hop is by far the dominant influence. “The entire story of the Bulls for someone like me, who’s 43 years old, is grounded in nostalgia,” Hehir said. “I really wanted to reflect the music of the times in telling the story of the ’80s and ’90s and the world the Bulls were living in.”Securing these songs wasn’t always simple. Hip-hop from that period often incorporated sampling, a technique that was legally straitjacketed by 1991. Much of Chung’s work involved jumping through legal hoops. “A lot of these songs are insanely difficult to clear,” he said. “There was so much music we were interested in, but couldn’t get because of sample issues and legal issues.”For example, Eric B. and Rakim’s “I Ain’t No Joke” wasn’t the first choice to score an early montage of Jordan highlights: Initially, Hehir sought to use the duo’s “I Know You Got Soul,” but couldn’t get permission. “I vividly remember hearing that song on my brother’s radio for the first time and it sounded nothing like any rap song I’d heard up until that point,” Hehir said. “Michael, at that point, looked nothing like any player the N.B.A. had ever seen. But it’s an embarrassment of riches when your second place is ‘I Ain’t No Joke.’”Basketball’s relationship to hip-hop is now firmly established, maintained by rappers who reference players contemporary and retired, and formally embraced by the N.B.A., which frequently books rap acts for the halftime show at its annual All-Star Game, itself a legendary party setting for the broader hip-hop community. A generation of basketball fans has grown up watching thousands of homemade compilation videos of N.B.A. highlights set to rap music, uploaded to YouTube — an aesthetic freely echoed throughout “The Last Dance.”This relationship, and its codification by the league, has been a gradual evolution from Jordan’s early playing days. “I think it developed over time,” LL Cool J said. “Obviously, you have to be successful enough to come to the attention of people.”Older basketball fans may recall “Come Fly With Me,” a 1989 documentary released by N.B.A. Entertainment that followed Jordan’s career from his childhood to the league, and features some of the same archival footage found in “The Last Dance.” The film’s soundtrack, however, is almost exclusively music by smooth jazz artists such as Yanni, Najee and David Benoit. “N.B.A. Superstars,” a 1990 VHS release that set highlights of then-active stars to popular music, syncs a montage of Jordan soaring through the air to Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” primarily known as the ballad from “Top Gun.” (Try to imagine a licensed N.B.A. documentary setting LeBron James highlights to something like Adele’s “Someone Like You.”)There are some throughlines linking past and present: The sole rap song on “N.B.A. Superstars” is Kool Moe Dee’s “How Ya Like Me Now,” which scores a piece about the Houston Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon. “It was a perfect match of lyrics and music for Hakeem, who really was totally coming into his own in the N.B.A.,” said Gil Kerr, who helped oversee the production of “Come Fly With Me” and “N.B.A. Superstars.” “How Ya Like Me Now” is used to roughly the same effect in Episode 4 of “The Last Dance,” where it accompanies a celebratory sequence after Jordan’s first playoff triumph over the hated Detroit Pistons. The team is briefly seen watching a lighthearted video from 1988, where several players — including Jordan — danced and lip-synced to Kool Moe Dee’s hit.The “How Ya Like Me Now” we hear in “The Last Dance” is actually not the 1987 original, but a rerecorded take that removes an impossible-to-clear James Brown sample. Speaking over the phone, Kool Moe Dee said the producers had incorporated “the wrong version.” Still, he thought they had done “a very good job in terms of using hip-hop music as a storytelling mechanism.” He noted the contrast between today and the late ’80s, when he stood relatively alone as a mainstream hip-hop artist. “I was absolutely the guy that when people didn’t like hip-hop, they’d always say, ‘I don’t like hip-hop but I like Kool Moe Dee.’”Today, it’s difficult to imagine the N.B.A. without hip-hop. Roddy Ricch’s “The Box,” which topped the Billboard singles chart for several weeks this year, references an iconic Vince Carter dunk. Drake is the designated “global ambassador” of the Toronto Raptors, and a frequent courtside presence. (During the 2019 N.B.A. playoffs, he was unofficially reprimanded by the league for trash-talking Toronto’s opponents.) Roc Nation, an entertainment agency founded by Jay-Z, represents multiple players, including the superstars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets.“I think the popularity of basketball as a cultural sport — not just as an athletic sport — is a testament to that connection,” LL Cool J said.The N.B.A.’s growing comfort with rap music mirrored rap’s own absorption into — and later domination of — mainstream culture, where by the turn of the millennium, it wasn’t just the players who were devoted listeners. “The executives behind it are growing up with hip-hop,” Kool Moe Dee said of the league. “They’re way more comfortable making those kinds of choices. It’s very hard to understate the racial tones that go on in every aspect of business in America.”Balancing those demands remains an ongoing process. In 2005, the league instituted a dress code that some saw as targeting the influence of hip-hop style on players. “The Last Dance” was jointly produced by multiple companies, and Hehir said “there were certain partners who thought there was too much hip-hop in this.”Judging by the final product, he prevailed, and the predominance of rap in the series further revises not just the N.B.A.’s legacy with the music now inseparable from its culture, but Jordan’s personal relationship with the genre, as well.In 1997, just before the events of “The Last Dance” took place, the hip-hop journalist Bobbito Garcia interviewed Jordan for a recurring feature in Vibe magazine where he played music for celebrities and asked their opinion. One of his selections was Eric B. and Rakim’s “In the Ghetto,” from the duo’s 1990 album “Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em.” Jordan’s response? “You got me on this one. I don’t listen to rap at all.”Garcia, who called the interaction “my most memorable exchange” (it seems to go viral on social media every few years) said in an interview that he wasn’t surprised that Jordan didn’t listen to rap: He was born in 1963, which would’ve made him a young adult when hip-hop was just taking off. By comparison, today’s players have never known a world where rap music wasn’t fully integrated into pop culture. Still, “The fact that he had never heard of Rakim, I just thought that was surprising,” Garcia said. “I would’ve imagined that at some point he was at a party that was playing ‘Paid in Full,’ or one of his teammates was nodding along to the chorus at some point in the locker room.”Then again, Garcia noted Jordan was a single-minded winner, “So it’s highly believable he didn’t pay any attention to anything but his stats and his win-loss column and winning a championship.” Hehir, for his part, said Jordan, who offered feedback on the documentary, “never commented on the music.” More

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    Zev Buffman, 89, Prolific Producer From Broadway to Florida, Dies

    Zev Buffman had been a prominent Broadway producer for two decades when he met Elizabeth Taylor in 1980 at the opening night of his revival of “Brigadoon,” the Lerner and Loewe musical, at the National Theater in Washington.Ms. Taylor, the epitome of screen glamour since the mid-1940s, had almost no stage experience. But Mr. Buffman, a brash Israeli-born impresario, asked her if she would act in a play. Smitten by talking to the actors at the backstage party that night and hoping to recover from a career lull, he recalled, she quickly agreed.In May 1981, eight months after their encounter, Ms. Taylor opened at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway in Mr. Buffman’s revival of “The Little Foxes,” Lillian Hellman’s drama about a wealthy Alabama family. It was a hit.“From the moment I persuaded Elizabeth to do a Broadway show, I became her shepherd, her keeper, her doctor, her shrink, her best friend,” Mr. Buffman told The Tampa Bay Times in 2011.Bringing Ms. Taylor to the stage was a signature moment in a career that started in the 1950s with bit parts in Hollywood films and blossomed when Mr. Buffman turned to producing shows on Broadway and elsewhere.He died on March 31 at a hospital in Seattle, near Whidbey Island, where he had moved from Florida in 2018. His wife, Vilma (Greul) Buffman, said the cause was pancreatic cancer. He was 89.Mr. Buffman’s fascination with show business began in Tel Aviv, where he was born Ze’ev Bufman on Oct. 11, 1930. His father, Mordechai, ran two movie theaters, and his mother, Clara (Torbin) Bufman, was a homemaker. Both had immigrated from Ukraine.As a youngster, Ze’ev watched movies from the theaters’ projection booths, riveted by films like “Gunga Din” (1939), which he said he saw 78 times, and the fast-patter comedy of Danny Kaye. Already fluent in German, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish, he learned English by listening to Hollywood stars. (He later changed the spelling of his surname to Buffman to keep people from mispronouncing it “Boofman.”)After serving as a commando in Israel’s Defense Forces during its War of Independence in 1948, he got a student visa and moved to Los Angeles in 1951, fixated on a Hollywood career. He enrolled at the two-year Los Angeles City College, where a talent scout from Paramount Pictures spotted him in a production of “Stalag 17.”That led to a small role as an Arab guard in “Flight to Tangier” (1953), where, during a fight scene, Jack Palance accidentally dropped him on a concrete floor, knocking him out cold.Early in the production of “The Ten Commandments” (1956), in which Mr. Buffman played two different Hebrew slaves, he saw a sign that had been written for a scene in modern and not ancient Hebrew lettering. He tried to fix the error from the set, his nephew Alan Fox said in an email, by shouting, “Hey, Ceece!” to the director, Cecil B. DeMille, who remonstrated him for not addressing him as Mr. DeMille. But he also asked Mr. Buffman to keep offering advice.Frustrated at being cast only in minor roles, he turned to producing in the late 1950s. He bought the old Hollywood Canteen, which had provided entertainment to servicemen during World War II, and converted it to a dinner theater.In 1960 he produced a musical revue, “Vintage ’60,” at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood, which became his first Broadway show when he and the producer David Merrick moved it to the Brooks Atkinson Theater that September. It closed after eight performances.The experience did not deter him. He would produce or co-produce dozens of shows on Broadway until 2009, among them “Jimmy Shine” (1968), a comedy starring Dustin Hoffman, and revivals of “Peter Pan,” “Oklahoma!,” “West Side Story” and “A View From the Bridge.” His last Broadway credit was as one of many producers of a revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”In 1969 he presented a memorable flop, “Buck White,” a musical set at a meeting of a black militant group. It closed after seven performances. The star was the former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his title for his refusal to enter the draft.“I was amazed at his ability to carry a tune,” Mr. Buffman told The New York Times in 2019. But Ali was lackluster on opening night, following a bravura performance in the final preview.Afterward, Mr. Buffman asked Ali what had happened.“He said, ‘I fought my fight yesterday at the preview,’” Mr. Buffman said. “‘I came to fight again tonight, but I was done.’”Mr. Buffman’s relationship with Ms. Taylor continued after “The Little Foxes.” They collaborated on an ill-fated venture to produce three Broadway plays. The first, Coward’s “Private Lives” (1983), starring Ms. Taylor and her ex-husband, Richard Burton, was a critical and box-office flop, as was “The Corn Is Green,” also in 1983, with Cicely Tyson.Unable to cast their third play, “Inherit the Wind,” Mr. Buffman and other producers instead staged “Peg,” an autobiographical one-woman show starring Peggy Lee. It closed quickly.Recalling his time with Ms. Taylor, Mr. Buffman told The Tampa Bay Times: “In the beginning my relationship with her was wonderful. Later it got more difficult with the drugs and booze.”Mr. Buffman was even busier in Florida than on Broadway. Starting in 1962, he produced shows at the Coconut Grove Playhouse (which he owned) in Miami; the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale; the Jackie Gleason Performing Arts Center in Miami Beach; the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center in Orlando; and Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater.“He had a great sense of what the general public, who would fill his seats, would like,” Arnold Mittelman, the former producing artistic director of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, said by phone. “He also had the vision to add a 300-seat mezzanine that extended over the 800-seat orchestra.”Some shows that opened at the Florida theaters, like “The Little Foxes,” at the Parker Playhouse, moved to Broadway; others toured the country. Mr. Buffman was also a general partner and producer at the Chicago Theater in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and helped renovate the Saenger Theater in New Orleans.He briefly detoured from theater to sports in 1988 when he became part of the original ownership group of the expansion National Basketball Association team the Miami Heat.“He didn’t know anything about basketball,” Vilma Buffman said, “but he used to say it’s like going to the theater. You go to a game, you go to theater.”He sold his interest in the team in 1992.Theater remained his focus. For eight years, starting in 2003, he was president of the RiverPark Center, a performing arts center in Owensboro, Ky. In 2011, at 81, he became president of Ruth Eckerd Hall. He retired two years ago.In addition to his wife, Mr. Buffman is survived by his son, Gil Bufman; a stepdaughter, Denise Auld; and seven grandchildren. His marriage to Debby Habas ended in divorce.Ms. Buffman said that her husband’s proudest achievement was producing a revival of “Oklahoma!,” because of its subject matter.“He said it was like Israel,” she said. “They came to a new area, developed it and it became a state.” More

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    ‘Hollywood’ Offers Alternate History, and Glimpses of a Real One

    “Let me guess,” Patti LuPone says as she plinks olives into a martini. “You came here to be a movie star.”Here, of course, is Hollywood, where dreams are made, faked, defeated and deferred. In Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood,” a seven-episode limited series that comes to Netflix on Friday, LuPone plays Avis Amberg, a former actress married to the head of Ace Studios. Ace Studios, while fictional, looks like Paramount Pictures, walks like MGM and green-lights pictures more progressive than any the Golden Age birthed. Set in the late 1940s as the studio system began to wane, “Hollywood” enjoys this dizzy cocktail of history and hopeful make-believe.As a kid, Murphy watched Hollywood oldies with his grandmother and became particularly attached to three actors: Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel and Rock Hudson — all of them, he felt, stifled by the studio system.“I was attracted to the idea of lost potential,” he said in a telephone interview last week. “And maybe worried about it myself, that I was not going to be allowed to be who I wanted to be because of who I was.”After completing the first season of his series “Feud,” set in 1960s Hollywood, he mulled a more factual series honoring the system’s victims. “But ultimately, it was just too fragmented and also, to be honest, too depressing,” he said.He began to think along revisionist lines, instead, imagining what might have happened if people of color had been offered work commensurate with their talent, if the industry had allowed its queer members to live openly. Happy endings all around.“Hollywood,” which he created with Ian Brennan, mingles actuality and what-if. Real people — like Hudson (Jake Picking), Wong (Michelle Krusiec) and McDaniel (Queen Latifah) — rub elbows and more with invented ones like David Corenswet’s Jack, an aspiring actor and sometime gigolo, and Darren Criss’s Raymond, a biracial director who passes for white. Others merge fact and fictions, like LuPone’s Avis, inspired by David O. Selznick’s wife, Irene Selznick, or Joe Mantello’s Dick, a homage, at least in part, to the movie whiz Irving Thalberg.To help sort entertainment history from fantasy, here is an introduction to the real-life figures who populate this counterfactual “Hollywood” and the inspirations for several of the series’s fictional characters. Action!PrincipalsRock HudsonAn actor who would ride the beefcake craze of the 1950s, Hudson, born Roy Harold Scherer Jr., came to Hollywood in the late 1940s.“He knew how he looked,” said Picking, who wore facial prosthetics to play Hudson, a former Navy aircraft mechanic. “He would stand out in front of the studio gates in his uniform hoping to bump into someone influential.”A bit player in the ’40s, Hudson, who signed with the talent manager Henry Willson, graduated to westerns, adventure pictures and melodramas, earning an Oscar nomination for his work in “Giant.” In 1959, he starred opposite Doris Day in “Pillow Talk,” a comedy in which his character briefly masquerades as gay. “He projected an attractive yet unthreatening masculinity,” said Steve Cohan, an author and film historian.Willson thwarted tabloid attempts to out Hudson as gay and Hudson later married Willson’s secretary, Phyllis Gates, in what was possibly a “lavender marriage” meant to further allay suspicion. (Gates denied this. “We were very much in love,” she told a biographer.) In 1985, Hudson’s publicist confirmed a diagnosis of AIDS, and two months later, Hudson became one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS-related complications.Henry WillsonA serial abuser and a starmaker with an impeccable eye for brawny, unformed talent, Willson helped rename and introduce actors such as Hudson, Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue, as well as women like Natalie Wood and Lana Turner. “For a while there, he understood how to make his own little factory of these strapping all-American men and plug them into the movies,” said Jim Parsons, who plays Willson in “Hollywood.” “That doesn’t excuse the despicable behavior by any means.”The well-documented behavior included demanding sex from his male clients and various forms of psychological abuse, even as he protected his roster from hostile press and blackmailers. “He ranks right up there with Harvey Weinstein as one of the town’s greatest monsters of all time,” Murphy said. Deserted by his clients in later life, he died destitute.Anna May WongHollywood’s first Asian-American star, Wong, a third-generation Chinese-American, grew up in Los Angeles, where her parents ran a laundry, and went on to appear in dozens of silent and sound films.“She was captivating,” said Emily Carman, a film professor at Chapman University. “Her presence radiated charisma and elegance.”A fashion plate and a publicity darling, she rarely won principal parts (her later B movies are an exception) or unexoticized roles. As Wong, played by Michelle Krusiec, says in the series, “They don’t want a leading lady who looks like me.”The role of O-Lan in “The Good Earth,” the film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s China-set novel, seemed made-to-measure for Wong. But the production code, a self-censoring charter major studios adopted, prohibited romantic scenes between actors of different races. Since Paul Muni, a white actor, had been cast as O-Lan’s husband, the part instead went to Luise Rainer, a white actress who played O-Lan in yellowface and won an Oscar for it. “The Good Earth” producers offered Wong the role of a seductress, the movie’s villain, but she refused it.An alcoholic who experienced periods of depression, she died in 1961 at the age of 56. “Her lonely death, that for me was very sad to discover,” Krusiec said.Hattie McDanielThe first person of color to win an Oscar, McDaniel, the daughter of former slaves, began her career in vaudeville, as did several of her siblings. She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1930s and soon found screen work playing maids.“She was a scene stealer,” Carman said. “She knew how to mobilize that stereotype to her advantage.”She fought for the role of Mammy in “Gone With the Wind,” arriving for her screen test in a real maid’s uniform. She won an Oscar for it, though at the ceremony itself she was relegated by the event’s organizers to a segregated table. While she hoped the award might unlock a broader away of roles, Hollywood only saw her as a maid.Later in her career, some African-American activists attacked McDaniel for accepting regressive roles. Her stock response: “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7.”“A woman had to make a living,” said Queen Latifah, who plays McDaniel. “But it was a waste of her talent. She was a powerhouse. She could sing. She could dance. She could act. She was smart. She was funny. She had timing. She was brilliant.”Supporting ActorsGeorge Cukor, Vivien Leigh and Tallulah BankheadIn the third episode of “Hollywood,” the film director Cukor (Daniel London) throws a wild party with an elite guest list, including Leigh and Bankhead, and a crew of sex workers to provide postprandial entertainment. Cukor, who directed “The Philadelphia Story” and “Gaslight,” did host louche parties, many of them all-male. Leigh (Katie McGuinness), who played Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” and Bankhead (Paget Brewster), who tested for the role, were both close friends of Cukor’s. In the late ’40s, Leigh was about to appear in the stage version of “A Streetcar Names Desire” and was experiencing episodes of bipolar disorder. Bankhead, known as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished seducers of women (including McDaniel, according to a persistent rumor) as well as men, had recently had a hit with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat.”Background PlayersScotty BowersThough Murphy disclaims any interest in Bowers, Dylan McDermott’s Ernie runs a service station that doubles as an anything-goes bordello. This dovetails with Bowers’s claims, aired in a controversial 2012 memoir, that he spent decades providing sexual services to the Hollywood elect, first as a pump jockey then as a party bartender.“Whatever folks wanted, I had it. I could make all their fantasies come true,” he wrote in the introduction to “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.” The book alleges that Bowers arranged liaisons for the likes of Hudson, Cole Porter and Leigh (who all appear in the series as clients), as well as Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (The stars he wrote about were already dead but the families of some of them, like Cary Grant, disputed the claims.)Peg EntwistleWithin “Hollywood,” Jeremy Pope’s screenwriter character, Archie Coleman (glancingly inspired by James Baldwin’s Hollywood experience), sells a script about Entwistle, a 23-year-old aspiring actress who finally achieved brief fame by jumping from the “H” of the Hollywood sign, back when the sign still spelled Hollywoodland.Born in Wales, she moved with her father to New York and began acting as a teenager, including a tour with the New York Theater Guild and in a number of Broadway plays. In the spring of 1932, she came to Los Angeles with a play and stayed to shoot her only film. Her contract was not renewed. After telling her uncle she planned to visit friends, she disappeared. A hiker discovered her body at the foot of the sign. More

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    Can Street Artists Survive a City in Lockdown?

    LONDON — One recent Friday, Nathan Bowen, a graffiti artist, was spray painting a boarded-up storefront in East London.He was wearing a reflective vest, hoping any police officers who drove by would mistake him for a builder. But he still stood out. He was the only person on the whole street.In March, the British government ordered everyone to stay inside, only allowing people out for daily exercise, to buy food or if they were an essential worker. A month later, the lockdown is still in force.Mr. Bowen was not an essential worker, he acknowledged, but he said he was providing a necessary service, of sorts. “In this time, you need people like me to go out,” he said. “If no one’s doing it, the city has no vibe.”Before the pandemic, London teemed with street artists and performers: Buskers sang to commuters on the Underground, street magicians entertained tourists, graffiti artists covered the city’s walls.But now — with a few exceptions like Mr. Bowen — they are all gone. What has happened to the artists who used to add so much life? And when the pandemic is over, will they be able to go back out?The ArtistThe day that London went into lockdown, Mr. Bowen, 35, had a different reaction to the news from most others in the city. He was walking home from a friend’s house, he said, when he saw a storekeeper boarding up their windows.“I just saw that blank board and thought, ‘Yeah! There’s going to be so many opportunities to paint,’” he said.“For me, this lockdown works in reverse,” he added. “Everyone’s left the city now, so it’s time for the underworld to come through.”The next day, he went to the store he’d seen and painted the boards with a construction worker in a face mask, holding open his jacket to reveal a thank-you message for the National Health Service.Mr. Bowen has been going out every couple of days since, he said, and has been shocked to find that he appeared to be the only street artist out. “This lockdown’s a true test,” Mr. Bowen said. “You get all these graffiti guys going on about how they’re so anti-system, so radical, yet this comes around and I haven’t seen one bit of ‘graf.’ ”Frontline, a British graffiti magazine, has been urging its readers to “stay home, stay safe,” since the lockdown began. Even Banksy, perhaps Britain’s most famous street artist, has resisted the urge to go out and paint an attention-grabbing mural. In April, he posted a picture on Instagram of some stencils he’d done around his bathroom with the message, “My wife hates it when I work from home.”Mr. Bowen said that during the pandemic, he was only painting work with supportive messages for the National Health Service, Britain’s beloved state health care provider. He wanted to give hospital workers a boost at this time, he said, and he felt that pieces on other subjects would open him up to criticism for breaking the lockdown.“This is proper street art, as it’s about communication — promoting positive messages that raise the spirits,” he said.On a recent Friday afternoon, nobody stopped Mr. Bowen as he painted. A handful of joggers ran past, giving him a wide berth. Two police cars drove past.The owner of the building did appear, Mr. Bowen said, but rather than chasing him off for property damage, the owner just asked him to add some balls to the painting to reflect the fact the building had been, before lockdown, an adult ball pit.It looked like Mr. Bowen would finish the piece without a hitch, until he encountered a common problem for street artists in London: It started to rain. Mr. Bowen swore and huddled under an awning with his dog Klae (who also wore a reflective vest). He’d just have to come back and finish it tomorrow, he said.The BuskerThe last time that Kirsten McClure was busking in a London Underground station, in early March, she could feel a change was coming.“People were wearing face masks for the first time,” the 52-year-old singer-songwriter said, in a telephone interview. “People in face masks don’t give you much money,” she added.On March 21, Transport for London, the city’s public transportation agency, banned all buskers from its network.“I was really surprised,” Ms. McClure said. “I didn’t think they’d shut it off. I had this fantasy that I’d go and play all these nice soothing tunes for medics going off shift. It was just that weird denial everyone’s had.”Ever since, Ms. McClure, who said she usually made half her income from busking, has been staying at home with her husband and son. She was lucky that she still had income from her second job as an illustrator, she said. Some buskers she knew had started claiming unemployment benefits, she added.She had seen one busker’s desperation at first hand when she went out to exercise and saw an accordionist playing next to a line of shoppers outside a grocery store. “It was pointless — absolutely pointless,” Ms. McClure said, “But that’s the busker’s mentality: You go where the footfall is.”She threw the accordionist a coin, maintaining the recommended distance of two meters, or about six feet, she said. But the coin hit the ground and rolled straight back to her. “I thought, ‘This is awful! How do you actually give someone money without going in two meters?’”Ms. McClure said that she had considered busking online — performing on a livestream and asking for donations — but had felt that it would be difficult to drum up enough attention. Instead, she has started teaching herself violin in case she is forced to wear a face mask when she returns to busking. “I thought it might be easier to play instrumentals, than sing with a mask,” she said.She was optimistic, though, that the ban would not last long. Over recent weeks, Transport for London, which regulates busking on the subway, has sent its licensed buskers several emails telling them how to apply for emergency support from charities and saying that the service hoped to have them back soon, she said. Busking was also a vital component of the city, “a sign of it being happy and healthy,” she added.“It’s going to be really good for people to see buskers out again, just to take their mind off things,” she said. “That’s what we do: distract and cheer them up.”The MagicianNathan Earl had two tricks in his routine before lockdown.One was a staple of magic shows worldwide. He’d take solid silver rings and smash them into each other so that they suddenly linked. He liked to perform the trick with the help of a child from the audience drafted in to hold the ring, who would often look on with wonder at the feat.The other was a card trick, in which he would pull a spectator’s chosen card from a deck set in an animal trap. He’d grab the card just before the trap’s jaws slammed shut.Both tricks involved audience interaction, Mr. Earl, 24, said in a telephone interview. For the card trick, he’d stand alongside someone as they picked a card from the deck. “Obviously, people will be afraid of touching after the pandemic,” he said. “That’s what all street magicians are worried about.”Social distancing could also have an impact on his street shows in another way, he said. “Magic relies on being a spectacle. If people are standing apart, it just looks like a rubbish show, and people walk through the gaps as well.”“It’d be a mess,” he added.Mr. Earl was not alone in his concerns about social distancing, according to Jay Blanes of the Westminister Street Performers’ Association. Some performers feared for their livelihood if they were banned from gathering crowds or if fewer tourists visited the city. “I think some people are being too optimistic,” Mr. Blanes said in a telephone interview, though he expressed hope that things would improve.Mr. Earl said he hoped he could just get out on the streets as normal, and soon. He lived with his parents, he said, and was financially OK for now. “But if it goes on like this for a while, I’ll have to look at other options,” he said. He didn’t really want to contemplate stopping street magic, he added. He loved the freedom, he explained, and the feeling of community among the street magicians.“It’d be really sad to stop,” Mr. Earl said. “The streets would be quite sterile without performers.” More

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    What’s on TV Friday: ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Prop Culture’

    What’s StreamingHOLLYWOOD Stream on Netflix. Hollywood’s golden era is viewed through a gilded but piercing lens in this soapy new mini-series, from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, both of “Glee.” Set in a sumptuous version of 1940s Los Angeles, “Hollywood” imagines a more inclusive version of that era’s Tinseltown. Many characters are people to whom the real Hollywood would have been hostile. They include Archie (Jeremy Pope), an aspiring screenwriter who is black and gay, and has a movie to sell. He teams up with a young director (Darren Criss) to make that dream a reality. “The bid to make Archie’s movie starts as a glitzy, funny, gimlet-eyed dissection of bigotry and power,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Then it lurches, halfway through, into a pep talk about what some kids can accomplish if they gather up their moxie and put on a show.”PROP CULTURE Stream on Disney Plus. Where is the snow globe from Disney’s original “Mary Poppins” movie? Find out in this new series, in which Dan Lanigan, a prop collector, tracks down Disney artifacts. (Note to viewers: A tolerance for corporate self-promotion is required.) Lanigan spends the first episode revisiting props from “Mary Poppins,” and speaking with some of the members of that film’s creative team. Among them are the costume and set designer Tony Walton and the songwriter Richard M. Sherman, who describes Walt Disney asking Sherman and his brother and songwriting partner, Robert B. Sherman, to come to his office and play their song “Feed The Birds,” from “Mary Poppins,” for Disney. “He would say, you know, ‘play it, play it for me,’” Sherman says.SAVING FACE (2005) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In a recent interview with The Times, the filmmaker Alice Wu described her intention when she made her first feature. “I was trying to make the biggest romantic comedy I could on a tiny budget,” she said, “with all Asian-American actors, and half of it in Mandarin Chinese.” The result? “Saving Face,” which revolves around a young Chinese-American surgeon, Wil (Michelle Krusiec). Set primarily in Flushing, Queens, the plot involves a romance between Wil and Vivian (Lynn Chen), a dancer. Wil hasn’t come out to her mother (Joan Chen), which complicates her relationship — as does the discovery that her mother is pregnant. While “Saving Face” proved influential (Last year, The Los Angeles Times named it one of the 20 best Asian-American films of the last 20 years), Wu’s new movie, “The Half of It,” out this week, is her first film since.What’s on TVIT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. An alien spaceship slams to Earth at the beginning of this sci-fi horror movie, based on material by Ray Bradbury. The story that follows may be less frightening to contemporary cable viewers than it was to the film’s original movie-theater audiences, who got to experience it with early 3-D effects. More