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      Marvin Levy, Oscar-Winning Publicist to Spielberg, Dies at 96

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      For 42 years, Mr. Levy strategized behind the scenes to promote Steven Spielberg’s movies and ensure that the director was seen as Hollywood’s de facto head of state.Reporters trying to get interviews with Steven Spielberg would sometimes grouse that his publicist’s job amounted to speaking a single word: “No.”But Marvin Levy, who served as Mr. Spielberg’s publicist for 42 years, was responsible for much more than body blocking the fifth estate (which he usually did with a gentlemanly grace). Mr. Spielberg did not become Mr. Spielberg because of his filmmaking alone: For 42 years, Mr. Levy was behind the scenes — promoting, polishing, spinning, safeguarding, strategizing — to ensure that his boss was viewed worldwide as Hollywood’s de facto head of state.In addition to representing him personally, Mr. Levy helped devise and lead publicity campaigns for 32 movies that Mr. Spielberg directed, including several with sensitive subject matter, like “The Color Purple” (1985), “Schindler’s List” (1993) and “Munich” (2005).Mr. Levy died on April 7 at his home in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 96. His death was announced by Mr. Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment.Mr. Levy with his wife, Carol, and Steven Spielberg in 2014.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Amblin EntertainmentOver Mr. Levy’s 73-year entertainment career — an eternity in fickle and ageist Hollywood — he worked on more than 150 movies and TV shows. He helped turn “Ben-Hur” (1959), “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979) into hits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicky Katt, Actor Known For ‘Dazed And Confused,’ Dies at 54

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      He began his career as a child actor and later played tough guys and henchmen. He was best known for “Boston Public” and “Dazed and Confused.”Nicky Katt, an actor known for playing wild cards and tough guys on TV shows like “Boston Public” and in films like “Boiler Room” and “Dazed and Confused,” has died. He was 54.His death was confirmed by his lawyer, John Sloss, who did not provide any further details.Mr. Katt began his career as a child actor and later became a character actor specializing in unsympathetic henchmen, working with acclaimed directors like Richard Linklater, Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh.Mr. Katt was regularly cast as a pushy, temperamental man whose virtues, if any, were not immediately self-evident.In “Dazed and Confused,” he is a nerd-shoving high school taunter who grits his teeth while pummeling a fellow teen. “I only came here to do two things, man: kick some ass and drink some beer,” Mr. Katt, as Clint Bruno, said with cocky bravado. “Looks like we’re almost out of beer.”In “Boston Public” (Fox, 2000-2004), a show about an urban high school, Mr. Katt played Harry Senate, a geology teacher and charismatic rule breaker who brings his class to attention by firing blanks out of a pistol, but who also successfully disarms a student threatening another teacher with a gun.Mr. Katt, third from left, with the cast of the television show “Boston Public.”Everett CollectionIn a 2002 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Soderbergh described Mr. Katt’s performances as “dangerously out of control” but rigorously studied.“He’s absolutely fearless,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “No idea is too outrageous. He’ll try anything.”Nicky Katt was born in May 1970 in South Dakota. He appeared on several TV shows, including “Fantasy Island” and “CHiPs,” as a preteen.Complete information about his family and survivors was not immediately available.Talking to The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Katt said he found most actors to be either desperate or frustrated. To cope with the vagaries of the profession, Mr. Katt amassed a wide repertoire of quotes and anecdotes from celebrated figures of the past.One piece of advice: “You should never name-drop,” he said. “De Niro told me that.” More

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      ‘The Interview’: Ramy Youssef Is Just Trying to Be ‘Emotionally Correct’

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      In the trailer for the new animated series “#1 Happy Family USA,” which premieres on Prime Video on April 17, there is a tag line that reads: “From the childhood nightmares of Ramy Youssef.” That might seem like a warning, but the show, which tells the story of the fictional Hussein family as they try to fit into a changing America in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is actually very funny. There are big musical numbers and irreverent “South Park”-esque humor (Youssef’s co-creator, Pam Brady, was a “South Park” writer), and the characters’ appearances change depending on whether they are inside their home or out trying to navigate the world.Youssef was 10, growing up in New Jersey in an Egyptian American family, when Al Qaeda attacked in 2001. He often refers to the dislocation and fear he experienced as a child in his stand-up comedy, and it has come up in “Ramy,” the Hulu show he created and stars in about a young first-generation Muslim American guy figuring things out in New Jersey. (Youssef told me he makes work about his own life because “it’s the only thing I can actually account for with genuine insight.”) This new series, though, is his most ambitious attempt yet to examine past events that are still very much with us. Again, it’s a really funny show.Though much of Youssef’s work is rooted in his own experiences and worldview, he has lately been taking on roles in other people’s projects too. He had a part in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film, “Poor Things”; directed a memorable, dreamy episode of “The Bear” (the one set in Copenhagen); and when we spoke, he was in Utah filming “Mountainhead,” the first movie directed by the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, in which he plays a billionaire during a financial crisis. (He couldn’t tell me much about the project, but he did say that “what’s happening and what we’re portraying — it’s been so surreal.”) Our conversation, like much of his work, ranged from the personal to the universal.The creator and comedian discusses his penchant for self-reflection, how politics fits into his work and why he’s not interested in representing anyone but himself.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYour new animated project is called “#1 Happy Family USA,” which is a great name. I found it almost hopeful, that something like this can now be made: a comedy about one of the most terrible days in American history from the perspective of a Muslim American family. Why did you want to make this show now? The thing that compelled me is: The family in this show, they already have a lot going on before 9/11 happens. Pretty much the entire pilot, it’s just this family comedy about a family you’ve never really seen in an animated space. To bring in the events of the early 2000s felt important in the sense that it’s something we talk about all the time. It’s part of what we’re currently experiencing. It’s never gone away. And when I think about how long these themes have been directly a part of my life and the lives of people that I know — to get to step into a period of time that I don’t think has escaped us in any way, unfortunately, and to do it in a style that is familiar in terms of trodding on political things that can feel a little difficult, and undercuts them and doesn’t make them feel so volatile — to give this kind of family that treatment is really exciting. And to go at this through a totally unexpected and very silly lens — maybe that’s where that hope feeling comes from, because it’s so unfiltered. It’s one of the most inappropriate things I’ve gotten to be a part of. Yet there’s a lot of love and care for the subjects involved.Listen to the Conversation With Ramy YoussefThe creator and comedian discusses his penchant for self-reflection, how politics fits into his work and why he’s not interested in representing anyone but himself. More

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      Alex Garland Pairs With a Veteran to Engage in Realistic ‘Warfare’

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      The filmmaker directed his latest picture with Ray Mendoza, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War. They wanted to depict, with a sense of urgency, war as it is really experienced.The climactic sequence in last year’s “Civil War,” a movie about an imagined military conflict in the United States, was unusual — and not only because it depicted insurgents storming the White House, breaching the Oval Office and assassinating the president.It was also action shown in a way that films do not often depict. The gun-toting fighters communicate constantly about needing to reload. They awkwardly trade off shooting down hallways. Their rhythm is observably different than what moviegoers are used to.The movie’s writer and director, Alex Garland, whose previous work includes “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” had given the scene’s reins to Ray Mendoza, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War turned Hollywood military consultant. Mendoza had used combat veterans as extras.“When you saw veterans, in effect, directed by a veteran, something came out of it, which was something that I hadn’t really seen in cinema,” Garland said in a recent interview.It gave Garland an idea. What if, he proposed to Mendoza late into the postproduction of “Civil War,” the two men made a film together, this one entirely depicting combat without typical cinematic trappings like compressed time, character study or traditional plot structure? What if the movie were just 90 minutes of war?Charles Melton, center, is one of the marquee actors in the film.Murray Close/A24We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Rami Malek Explode a Pool in ‘The Amateur’

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      The director James Hawes narrates a sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A glass-bottom pool that straddles two buildings can make for quite a luxurious swim, as long as nobody tries to blow it up.The fate of one high-rise swimmer doesn’t look good in this scene from the spy thriller “The Amateur,” in which Rami Malek plays Charlie Heller, a C.I.A. cryptographer out to avenge his wife’s death. But more than guns and fists, he’s using intelligence and craftiness to get the job done.Here, Charlie encounters one of his targets, Mishka Blazhic (Marc Rissmann), who has been given solo access to a hotel pool for a night swim. Interrogating Mishka, Charlie informs him that he is holding the remote control to a device that is decompressing the air between the sheets of glass at the base of the pool. If he triggers the device, the glass will shatter.Narrating the sequence, the director James Hawes said that there were few locations in the world with pools that sit between two buildings.“We were lucky enough to find a location in London that gave us that,” he said, “but they weren’t going to let us blow it up.”Hawes said that he and his crew used it to shoot a portion of the scene, but then they built a life-size section of the pool in a studio, which allowed them to fill the pool with water and explode it. They even rigged up a stunt person to be sucked back as the bottom gave way.“So a lot of the work is done in camera,” he said, “and only then does VFX start to take over.”Read the “Amateur” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Rami Malek, Professional Outcast, Becomes ‘The Amateur’

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      The first time the world got a good look at Rami Malek, computer screens were reflected more often than not in his distinctive peepers. As the star of “Mr. Robot,” Sam Esmail’s zeitgeisty TV series about a psychologically damaged hacker’s fight against the billionaire class, Malek seemed a creature of zeros and ones, shrinking into the omnipresent black hoodie of the show’s protagonist, Elliot Alderson, even as his actions as a keyboard warrior shook the globe.But in his most famous role to date, Malek rocked the world in a very different way. He earned an Oscar for his performance as the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the blockbuster rock-star biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But underneath the glitz, the glamour and the mustache, Freddie was much like Elliot: an underestimated outsider who thrust himself into the spotlight through sheer force of will.“I know I’m a very unique individual,” Malek said. “My mannerisms are unique. My speech is unique. There’s a certain flicker behind my eyes that you can’t necessarily compare to anyone else — that’s what I’ve been told, at least. The camera has an ability to capture every essence of that.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesAt first glance, Malek’s new film, “The Amateur,” feels like a return to the world of digital skulduggery he inhabited in “Mr. Robot.” In this action thriller adapted from Robert Littell’s novel and directed by James Hawes, Malek stars as Charlie Heller, a C.I.A. cryptographer who takes matters into his own hands when his compromised superiors refuse to arrest the mercenaries who murdered his wife. Lacking the killer instinct to get up close and personal with his targets, he instead uses his intellectual know-how to devise a series of elaborate booby traps that take them down one by one.But Malek sees a through line that connects all three characters: They’re outsiders who prove their doubters, including themselves, wrong. “It may be an action movie, but one of the themes is personal transformation,” Malek said. “Sometimes we go to the cinema to see someone race to a telephone booth and don a cape in order to do so. Freddie put on his own cloak onstage. Elliot famously had a hoodie. I’ve had moments of personal transformation throughout my life — we all have. For Charlie, it’s a willingness to take matters into his own hands.”In a video call from New York, Malek talked about putting his own inimitable spin on the action hero. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Pets’ Is the Rare Documentary for Children, About Children

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      The movie, directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, celebrates animals while planting a seed of interest in rescue operations.Most documentaries are not really aimed at children. The film world seems to think they are only interested in animated movies about, frequently, talking pets. If a documentary is for families, on the other hand, there’s a good chance it involves wildlife.But “Pets” (on Disney+) remixes all of that: It’s a documentary about the title subjects and their humans, aimed at and largely populated by children. Directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, it’s a sweet-tempered film that celebrates the animals we love and seems to have a secondary purpose, too: to convince viewers to support and even develop a love for animal rescue.Howard accomplishes this by taking a kind of segmented approach. Adorable children give studio interviews about their own pets — their names, their characteristics, the ways they seem to understand the children’s emotions. These are interspersed with home videos, largely the kind of vertical ones you might catch on a social media feed: dogs doing tricks, cats smirking, pigs waddling around and so on. Then there’s a series of mini-documentaries about people who work with animals, especially rescues or otherwise traumatized creatures. Among those subjects are Sterling “TrapKing” Davis, a rapper who is a contagiously enthusiastic cat guy; Rodney Stotts, a master falconer who dedicates his work to both the birds and local children; and Shinobu Takahashi, who runs the no-kill shelter Dog Duca in Nagoya, Japan.I don’t think anyone inclined to watch “Pets” really needs convincing that animals are cool and that we should like them. But this focus on rescuing those that are, for whatever reason, in harm’s way is rather lovely. And to Howard’s credit, the theme is integrated seamlessly into the celebration of life alongside animals, which might broaden the viewership but certainly will plant a seed of interest in youthful viewers.What struck me about the movie was an influence I have not often considered when thinking about documentaries. The segmented structure and varied style in “Pets” felt familiar, and about halfway through I realized I was thinking of “Sesame Street,” on which generations of kids have been raised. That show also has its own varied style and structure, broken up by different types of filmmaking, like interviews with children, fun kid-on-the-street clips and short documentaries about ordinary things that are somehow fascinating, including observational footage from factories that make crayons or saxophones.Kids are actually interested in the real world around them, the ordinary things they encounter, and curious about how everything works. Documentaries are good at feeding that curiosity, at giving children a peek into worlds they can’t necessarily access on their own. “Pets” is engineered to make a child not just want a pet if they don’t have one, but also want to find one that needs a home and some love. And in that way, “Pets” serves up both entertainment and something for its young audience to consider. More