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      Adan Canto, ‘The Cleaning Lady’ and ‘X-Men’ Actor, Dies at 42

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      In a career spanning more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles, including a control-obsessed criminal, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Adan Canto, the Mexican actor known for his roles in TV series such as “The Cleaning Lady” and “Designated Survivor” as well as for playing Sunspot in the film “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” died on Monday. He was 42.His death was confirmed by his publicist, Jennifer Allen, who said the cause was appendiceal cancer. She did not say where he died.In an acting career that spanned more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles including a furious criminal hellbent on having control, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Mr. Canto said in a 2013 interview with Collider that he had “always been fascinated by people, their psychology, what drives them and trying to understand them.”Italia Ricci, left, and Adan Canto were both series regulars in the show “Designated Survivor.”Ben Mark Holzberg/ABCIn “The Cleaning Lady,” which premiered on Fox in 2022, Mr. Canto played the gangster Arman Morales, who recruits a woman, played by Elodie Yung, into his criminal organization after she witnesses a murder. The show is entering its third season this year.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?  More

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      Marisa Pavan, Oscar Nominee for ‘The Rose Tattoo,’ Dies at 91

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      The twin sister of the Italian ingénue Pier Angeli, she attempted to avoid the pitfalls of fame that befell her sister’s career.The Italian actress Marisa Pavan never achieved the fame of her twin sister, Pier Angeli, a film ingénue of the 1950s who graced national magazine covers, and whose romance with James Dean and subsequent marriage to the singer Vic Damone became the stuff of Hollywood lore.Ms. Pavan — analytical, at times defiant and, in her view, less conventionally beautiful than her sister — nevertheless carved out a successful career herself. She appeared in a number of high-profile films throughout the 1950s, including “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress.And she did it her way, bristling at the star-making machine that she believed had turned her sister into a sexualized confection of the silver screen.“The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like, but from this moment on, it was not my sister I had in front of me anymore,” Ms. Pavan said in an interview with Margaux Soumoy, the author of a biography of Ms. Pavan, “Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!” (2021). “She had become a studios’ product.”Ms. Pavan, right, with her twin sister, the actress Pier Angeli, in 1952. “The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like,” Ms. Pavan said of her star-crossed sister.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan died on Dec. 6 at her home in Gassin, a village on the French Riviera, Ms. Soumoy said. She was 91.Maria Luisa Pierangeli, known as Marisa, and her fraternal twin, Anna Maria Pierangeli, were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, to Luigi Pierangeli, an architect, and Enrichetta (Romiti) Pierangeli, who later helped guide the careers of her daughters. (Their younger sister, Patrizia, born 15 years after they were, also became an actress.)The family moved to Rome when the twins were 3 and, during World War II, harbored a Jewish general in the Italian Army who was hiding from the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. His last name was Pavan, which Marisa, who had grown close to him, would eventually adopt as her screen name.Her sister’s career started in her teens, when she was discovered on a street in Rome. When Mr. Pierangeli died in 1950, the family relocated to the United States to further her career.Marisa had no interest in the limelight until a friend of the family, Albert R. Broccoli, an agent who would go on to produce the James Bond film franchise, invited her to visit the set of “What Price Glory” (1952), a film set during World War I starring James Cagney and directed by John Ford.Once she was there, the producer Sol Siegel asked her if she could sing in French. She could, and she did. “I sang a song of Jacqueline François,” Ms. Pavan said in a 2015 interview with Film Talk, an online film journal. She recalled Mr. Siegel responding, “You’re going to test tomorrow!”“I took all of this as a joke,” Ms. Pavan said. But she took the script home, learned the scene and returned the next day.She got the part — a French girl who falls in love with a U.S. Marine, played by Robert Wagner — and discovered a passion for acting.Her career reached its pinnacle three years later with “The Rose Tattoo,” based on a Tennessee Williams play. Ms. Pavan played Rosa, the rebellious daughter of a grief-stricken Sicilian widow (Anna Magnani) whose life in a town on the Gulf of Mexico takes a turn when she meets an ebullient trucker (Burt Lancaster).Ms. Pavan with Robert Wagner in “What Price Glory” (1952), her first film.Paramount Pictures, via AlamyHer sister, who by then went by the name Pier Angeli, had a long-term contract with MGM that limited her freedom to choose her roles and control her image, Ms. Soumoy wrote. But Ms. Pavan wished instead to preserve her independence and worked with various studios.“From the moment I realized that I wanted to build a career as an actress, I kept telling my agents to only find me quality parts that would fit my own personality and tastes,” Ms. Pavan was quoted as saying in Ms. Soumoy’s book. “The last thing I wanted was to be kept prisoner under contract to one studio like Anna was.”Her other notable roles included the noblewoman Catherine de Medici in “Diane” (1956), a romance set in the 16th century that starred Lana Turner; the wartime fling of Gregory Peck’s conflicted suburban husband and father in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956); and the love interest of Tony Curtis in the murder mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957).Ms. Pavan and the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1989. They married in 1956 and remained married until his death in 2001.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan married the French film and stage star Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1956. He died in 2001.Her sister’s life ultimately took a tragic turn as she encountered a faltering career, a series of unhappy relationships and struggles with mental and physical health. In 1971, Ms. Angeli was found dead at 39.Although speculation of suicide has swirled for years, Ms. Pavan remained adamant that her sister’s death was accidental, a reaction to a medication a doctor had given her during a bout of anxiety. It was a loss from which Ms. Pavan never fully recovered.“She felt like she had lost half of herself,” Ms. Soumoy said.Ms. Pavan is survived by her sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick Aumont; her sister Patrizia; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Her eventual parting with the movie business appeared to stem from one clash in particular. While filming the splashy historical romance “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the headstrong Ms. Pavan squared off against a producer after many of her scenes were cut, and threatened to leave the project. The move resulted in her effective blacklisting by studios, according to her biography.Ms. Pavan pivoted to television, making appearances on shows like the police procedural “Naked City,” the snappy private investigator drama “The Rockford Files” and the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” She acted into the early 1990s. Late in life, she expressed no regret over her fate in Hollywood.“It was not in my nature to compromise,” she told Film Talk. “They did change my sister; they made her up like a pinup girl. I could wear a wig to play a certain part, but they could not change me in life.” More

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      Norma Barzman, Blacklisted Screenwriter, Dies at 103

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      After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in self-exile overseas.Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died on Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death.Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups.The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman told The Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we were a little silly, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there was a chance of making a better world.”Mrs. Barzman with her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, in Madrid in 1961. When the opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London in 1949, they expected to be there for six weeks. They ended up living abroad until 1976.via Barzman familyFor a time in the 1930s and ’40s, being a Communist, or just sympathetic to the cause, was considered de rigueur among the Hollywood left. But with the onset of the Cold War, attitudes began to shift. Rumors of a government crackdown percolated.The couple were sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman in a convertible stopped to talk. After a guarded introduction — her name was Norma, too — she told them that there was a police car at the bottom of the hill, stopping anyone turning onto the street to ask them about the Barzmans. Years later, they would realize that the other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.That fall, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a group of screenwriters, directors and producers to testify about their connections to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer questions, and each was later found in contempt. Though the Barzmans were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten, they feared they would be subpoenaed soon.A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives released the so-called Waldorf Statement, which declared that the 10 witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their relationship to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the industry.Work for the Barzmans quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, an opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London, where the blacklist didn’t reach. They set sail on the Queen Mary, expecting a six-week trip.They would not return to the United States until 1965, and they would live abroad until 1976.After several years in London, they moved to Paris; they eventually settled in Provence. They became local celebrities of a sort — the family that defied the blacklist — and made friends with the likes of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.An undated photo from the Cannes Film Festival. From left, Mr. Barzman, Mrs. Barzman and the Italian filmmaker Basilio Franchina.via Barzman familyMr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European productions, though often without credit. Mrs. Barzman got some work, too, but it was harder, especially since she also was raising seven children.Another friend, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek one day and called me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she said in an interview for the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film industry and the community around it had changed significantly, and they never managed to restart their careers.“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically, she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became known for his work in computational linguistics.They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland at the start of World War II.The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the progressive people I liked and who were politically active were Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”Norma Barzman with her father, Samuel Levor, in Nice, France, in about 1930.via Barzman familyShe met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, yet another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern movies were too complex for women to write. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.Mrs. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946: “Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman is survived by another daughter, Luli Barzman; five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).She also became outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the role many in the industry played in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who has written extensively about the blacklist, called her the era’s “keeper of the flame.”In 1999 she joined some 500 other people outside the Academy Awards ceremony, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan.To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified before the House committee, identifying several friends and colleagues in the industry as former Communists and earning long-lasting enmity from many in Hollywood.Mrs. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, carried a sign that read “Kazan Is a Fink.” More

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      Christopher Nolan Leads Directors Guild Nomination

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      Greta Gerwig is also nominated for “Barbie.” Most but not all of the nominees for this prize often go on to Oscar nominations.The Directors Guild of America announced the nominations for its feature-film award on Wednesday, lending further momentum to nominee Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”), who won the Golden Globe for directing on Sunday.The four other directors nominated for the top DGA Award were Greta Gerwig (“Barbie”), Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”), Alexander Payne (“The Holdovers”) and Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”).Four of the five nominees will typically go on to receive an Oscar nomination for best director. Last year, DGA nominee Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”) was the only man to miss out, supplanted at the Oscars by Ruben Ostlund (“Triangle of Sadness”), while the year before, DGA nominee Denis Villeneuve (“Dune”) was cut for Ryusuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”).Since the Oscars often favor international auteurs over big-studio filmmakers, directors like Justine Triet (“Anatomy of a Fall”) and Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”) still have a strong shot at making the Oscar lineup. But the DGA snub of Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) is more concerning for his candidacy, especially since Cooper did make the DGA lineup five years ago for his directorial debut, “A Star Is Born.”Here is a rundown of the nominees in the major film and television categories. For the complete list, including reality shows and children’s programming, go to dga.org. The winners will be announced Feb. 10.FilmFeatureGreta Gerwig, “Barbie”Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things”Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”Alexander Payne, “The Holdovers”Martin Scorsese, “Killers of the Flower Moon”First-Time FeatureCord Jefferson, “American Fiction”Manuela Martelli, “Chile ’76”Noora Niasari, “Shayda”A.V. Rockwell, “A Thousand and One”Celine Song, “Past Lives”DocumentaryMoses Bwayo, Christopher Sharp, “Bobi Wine: The People’s President”Mstyslav Chernov, “20 Days in Mariupol”Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia”Davis Guggenheim, “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie”D. Smith, “Kokomo City”TelevisionDrama Series“The Last of Us,” Peter Hoar (for the episode “Long, Long Time”)“Succession,” Becky Martin (“Rehearsal”)“Succession,” Mark Mylod (“Connor’s Wedding”)“Succession,” Andrij Parekh (“America Decides”)“Succession,” Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman (“Tailgate Party”)Comedy Series“Ted Lasso.” Erica Dunton (“La Locker Room Aux Folles”)“Barry” Bill Hader (“wow”)“Ted Lasso,” Declan Lowney (“So Long, Farewell”)“The Bear,” Christopher Storer (“Fishes”)“The Bear,” Ramy Youssef (“Honeydew”)Television Movies and Limited Series“All the Light We Cannot See,” “Shawn Levy“Lessons in Chemistry,” Tara Miele (“Introduction to Chemistry”)“Lessons in Chemistry,” Millicent Shelton (“Poirot”)“Lessons in Chemistry,” Sarah Adina Smith (“Her and Him”)“Daisy Jones & the Six,” Nzingha Stewart (“Track 10: Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”) More

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      ‘The Beekeeper’ Review: Sting Like a, You Know

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      In this action thriller, Jason Statham plays a man who will do whatever it takes to protect his hive.“To bee or not to bee?” That is a question asked to Jason Statham in “The Beekeeper,” a delirious entry in the thriving genre of action flicks about gunslingers who list a different career on their LinkedIn. (See also: “The Painter” and “The Bricklayer,” both released just last week.) The director David Ayer’s previous shoot-em-up, “The Tax Collector,” was woefully short on quips about audits. He and the screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have not made that mistake here. Take a swig of mead every time Statham vows to protect the hive — by which he means society — and you’ll have a fine time. Either way, you won’t remember a thing about the plot.Statham (“The Mechanic,” “The Transporter”) plays Adam Clay, an honest-to-goodness beekeeper who opens the film jarring honey. (Kudos to the costumer Kelli Jones for designing a slim-cut quilted beekeeping suit that gives Statham the panache of a fencer.) In the first minutes, his landlord, a kindly retiree named Eloise (Phylicia Rashad) loses her life savings to a network of internet scammers who prey on the older and the naïve. This cabal of techno thieves rakes in millions every day and boasts the political connections to use the Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 as bodyguards. They’re still no match for a guy who can wipe out a hornet’s nest with a stun gun. As a corrupt former C.I.A. head (Jeremy Irons) sighs, “If a beekeeper says you’re going to die, you’re going to die.”The script’s ridiculous rationale — which our hero repeatedly intones like he’s hypnotizing us to believe it — is that certain beekeepers have pledged to prevent colony collapse, both apoidea and homo sapien. Sure, that’ll do. No less a scribe than William Shakespeare claimed that bees “teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”Really, Statham is simply the embodiment of death. There’s no hesitation, no heightened escalation, just kill kill kill. The fight choreography and editing are bludgeoning, though there’s a nifty cut where a goon gets flung over the camera and the cinematographer Gabriel Beristain flips around to watch the man’s body tumble down the stairs. When a marvelous heavy (Taylor James) slides on brass knuckles, the sound of a punch was so startling that I jumped (and giggled).Things drag whenever “The Beekeeper” goes through the motions of being sensible. There’s endless scenes of panicky phone calls and a go-nowhere moral debate between outsider justice and civilized law featuring Eloise’s daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), a heavy-boozing, monomaniacal F.B.I. agent who I suspect was funnier on the page. I’d forgo her subplot for more of Ayer’s giddy villains: the call center creepazoids Mickey (David Witts) and Rico (Enzo Cilenti), their skateboarding tech bro boss, Derek (Josh Hutcherson), and a rival bee freak, Anisette (Megan Le), who enters screaming and exits far too soon.Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama. Yet, Ayer makes it plain that he’s in on the joke. As Statham lays waste to a camo-clad squadron, the shoulder patches on their uniforms read: BS.The BeekeeperRated R for stinging language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Mel Brooks and Angela Bassett Feted at the Governors Awards

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      The academy honored Mel Brooks, Angela Bassett, the recently widowed editor Carol Littleton and Sundance’s Michelle Satter, whose son died in a shooting.Despite the chockablock ballroom full of Hollywood’s best and brightest, a jovial emcee in the comedian John Mulaney and honorees the audience seemed thrilled to celebrate, a pall of sadness was cast over the Governors Awards — an event created 14 years ago by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to shorten the Oscar telecast by relegating the honorary Oscars to its own untelevised confab.Held Tuesday night, the ceremony — which was delayed two months because of the Hollywood strikes — honored two women who had just experienced remarkable losses. The editor Carol Littleton’s husband of 51 years, the cinematographer and former academy president John Bailey, died in mid-November. Just two weeks later, Michelle Satter, the Sundance Institute’s founding director and the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, learned that her son, Michael Latt, 33, had been shot dead at his home in Los Angeles.“We need to talk through a broken heart,” the filmmaker Ryan Coogler said during his presentation to Satter, who had guided him through the making of his first feature, “Fruitvale Station.”Still, as they say, the show must go on. And with Oscar nomination voting set to begin Thursday, A-listers of all stripes were in full campaign mode, working valiantly to try to ensure their spot on the ballot when nominations are announced on Jan. 23.Boldfaced names mingling in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood included Christopher Nolan, Margot Robbie, Robert Downey Jr., Greta Gerwig, Leonardo DiCaprio, Colman Domingo, Ava DuVernay, Florence Pugh and scores of others.The first award of the night went to 97-year-old Mel Brooks, who the presenter Matthew Broderick said was older than penicillin, FM radio, polyester and the academy itself.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?  More

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      SAG Award Nominations 2024: The Complete List

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      The summer blockbusters each garnered four nominations. Notable snubs included Leonardo DiCaprio of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Box office behemoths “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” led this year’s nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which were announced Wednesday morning. Each film picked up four nominations, including ones for the guild’s top ensemble prize.In addition to that nomination, “Barbie” earned additional nods for lead actress Margot Robbie and supporting actor Ryan Gosling, as well as for its stunt ensemble. The other three nominations for “Oppenheimer” were for lead actor Cillian Murphy and the supporting performers Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt. Both Murphy and Downey prevailed in their categories during Sunday’s Golden Globes.Other nominees for the top award included “American Fiction,” “The Color Purple” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Still, the latter movie was dealt one of the morning’s biggest snubs when star Leonardo DiCaprio failed to crack the best-actor lineup. “May December” received the coldest shoulder, going zero for three with contenders Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton.Rarely do actors win the Oscar without first scoring a nomination from their own guild. Last year, the entire quartet of SAG winners went on to repeat at the Oscars, while the SAG ensemble winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” also took the Oscars’ best picture prize.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?  More

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      Tina Fey on ‘Mean Girls’ Then and Now

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      With a new version of Regina George and the Plastics headed to theaters, she reflects on how different generations have reacted over the years.Tina Fey spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 hunched over an old desk in the mildewy back room of a Fire Island rental home. Fueled by coffee and Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts, Fey, at the time the head writer for “Saturday Night Live,” cracked the script that became “Mean Girls” on her laptop.“She would old-school just sit and eat doughnuts and drink coffee, like a secretary from the ’50s or something,” said her husband, the composer Jeff Richmond. “Not glamorous but very conducive to creativity.”In the two decades since, Fey has turned her first and only released screenplay into an empire. The original Paramount film, based on Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction book “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” earned $130 million during its 2004 theatrical run and helped make superstars of its cast, which included Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. In 2018, a musical stage adaptation with a book by Fey and music by Richmond, opened on Broadway. In June, that show will begin its West End run. And this week, a movie musical adapted from the past iterations, and written by Fey, arrives in theaters.(Last March, Wiseman criticized Fey and Paramount for not involving her in the subsequent versions. When asked about the criticism, Fey said she had no comment.)But beyond the commercial success of “Mean Girls,” Fey’s endlessly quotable script — “You can’t sit with us”; “The limit does not exist”; “I’m a cool mom”; “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” — has embedded itself in our culture.“It became part of my vernacular, every single sound bite,” said Samantha Jayne, who directed the newest “Mean Girls” with her husband, Arturo Perez Jr., and was a teenager when the 2004 original came out. “It was in my DNA.”The 2024 movie mostly follows the characters and story that audiences know by heart, with the addition of singing and dancing: New kid Cady (Angourie Rice) teams up with outsiders Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) to take down the vicious Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and the Plastics, until Cady, too, gets swept up in their hurtful ways. Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their original roles as Ms. Norbury and Mr. Duvall, and there are still Mathletes, a Spring Fling and pink shirts on Wednesdays.“High school is the one remaining American experience that everyone has,” said Lorne Michaels, a producer of the new film along with Fey and others. He and Fey have worked on every version of “Mean Girls,” apart from a widely panned 2011 TV film. “It’s just a central, iconic thing.”But high school, and the nature of comedy itself, has evolved, onscreen and off. Now, rumors spread on social media. Viral videos are uploaded to TikTok. In the film, Coach Carr (Jon Hamm) no longer has sexual relationships with underage students, and North Shore High doesn’t have cafeteria cliques defined by race. With each “Mean Girls” iteration, Fey has tried to keep her script razor-sharp yet relevant and palatable to new generations and zeitgeists.“As long as I don’t accidentally make Monkey Jesus out of it — you know, like when that lady tried to fix that painting — then we’ll be in good shape,” Fey said.In a recent video interview, Fey discussed her more-than-20-year journey with the material and what’s next. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Bebe Wood, left, Rapp and Avantika in the new film, which has evolved to reflect how new generations spread rumors.Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesWhat was your original vision for what a “Mean Girls” movie could be when you read that 2002 article about Wiseman’s book and teenage relational aggression?I first imagined, Oh! It’s going to be about this teacher. It’s going to be like “Stand and Deliver.” And the more I read the book, the more research I did, [I realized] the girls were the most interesting part. The true stories of the way young women behaved were insidious, but they were also kind of funny in their vicious cleverness.How has your technical writing process changed over the years?The rookie mistake I made was, I asked to adapt a nonfiction book that did not have a story. I had these amazing behaviors and anecdotes, but I didn’t have characters or story. So, I literally read Syd Field, read “Save the Cat,” had a million index cards. And then the switch to the stage, on a technical level, you’re taking a three-act thing, and you have to break it into two acts. You don’t have voice-over, you don’t have close-ups. Things have to play in the balcony. Now, with the movie musical, you can have all the things in your arsenal: You can play things with just people’s eyes. You can have people sing about their emotions. Jokes can be big and visual, or they can be Easter eggs.As someone who was in high school in 2004, seeing the tagline “This isn’t your mother’s ‘Mean Girls’” in the musical movie trailer was a shock.That came from the Paramount marketing department. I want to comfort millennials by telling them that’s just an expression in the English language. And also, when the movie came out, some people who were older than you also went to it. Some people as old as 26 or 27 may have been in the theater with you.Much of the comedy in the original “Mean Girls” has held up incredibly well. But there are some jokes and story lines about race, sexuality and pedophilia that haven’t, and they were altered for later versions. How do you approach updating your writing?I was writing in the early 2000s very much based on my experience as a teen in the late ’80s. It’s come to no one’s surprise that jokes have changed. You don’t poke in the way that you used to poke. Even if your intention was always the same, it’s just not how you do it anymore, which is fine. I very much believe that you can find new ways to do jokes with less accidental shrapnel sideways.The original film, with Amanda Seyfried, left, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert and Lindsay Lohan, reflected Fey’s experience as a teenager in the ’80s.Paramount PicturesName calling is central to “Mean Girls,” and the way that they throw these barbs — —If we really had people speak to each other the way they spoke to each other in 1990, everyone would go to the hospital. People were really rough. People are still horrible, they’re just more likely to anonymously type it. I would like to take but not teach a graduate school class on the ways in which people are just as divisive and horrible as they ever were, but now they couch it in virtue.There are specific word changes throughout the new script. Like in the Burn Book, Dawn Schweitzer is now called a “horny shrimp” instead of a “fat virgin.” What goes into choosing those terms?I know that even Regina would know what wouldn’t fly. She’s going to find a way to inflict pain on people, but she’s not going to get herself in trouble. For example, there’s a joke in the original movie when Janis gets up on the table and Regina says, “Oh my God, it’s her dream come true: diving into a huge pile of girls.” It was mine and Sam Jayne’s feeling that Regina wouldn’t try that now because she knows the kids around her would be like, “That’s homophobic.” She would know not to be homophobic, and hopefully, truly would not be homophobic.I was waiting for Ms. Norbury’s speech telling the girls to stop calling each other “sluts” and “whores,” and it didn’t happen. But I realized they weren’t calling each other those words much in this script anyway.Some of that was just needing to go faster to make room for songs. That one is not necessarily a moral edit.Gen Z has seen body positivity and body neutrality movements. When Regina gains weight in the movie musical, the other students’ initial reaction is positive — but then she’s still shamed. Why was it important to have weight still be an issue here?Look at the famous people that influence Gen Z, and we’re still always talking about their bodies. We’re either attacking other people for talking about it, or commending people for being a size, or we’re questioning how they got to a different size. It felt like a line to figure out. We still want to be talking about how weird and messy everything is for girls, while acknowledging that these standards aren’t mandatory — but a lot of people are still signing up for them.Were there any cultural shifts that you saw in updating the script from the 2018 stage show to now?If anything, these behaviors have jumped way beyond just young women. It’s in our politics. It’s in everything. People now like to candy-coat and be very virtuous pointing out why you’re a problem, but it’s the same behavior. It’s still, “Don’t look at me. Look at them. I’m doing great. I might not have nice hair, but she’s fat.”We learned so much with the [stage] show that there doesn’t have to be rigidity in the casting of these roles, in terms of what they look like and how they identify. This story works in many interesting permutations. Anyone with charisma is a good Regina. Anyone who looks like they might come apart can be a great Gretchen.How do you stay in tune to what the teens are doing today? Is that through your daughters, Alice, 18, and Penelope, 12?I did poll some young people I know, including some young people that live in my house. Things like, “Should the Burn Book be a physical book or does it have to be a Snapchat or something?” They were like, “No, don’t pander to us. It’s a book. Tell the story. We get it.”Have you toyed with the idea of doing a sequel that brings back the original cast to play their characters as adults?I have a feeling Paramount would love that. I have not really thought much about that. To me, part of why the stakes are so high in the story is because everyone’s so young and feelings are huge, love is huge and friendship is huge in a way [that it isn’t with] middle-age moms. I love writing about middle-aged people, but I don’t know.There were reports that you tried to get all four of the original main actresses back in small roles in this film. What would that have looked like?We’ll never know. They’re busy people, so it didn’t come together, but we tried, and we all love each other.What’s the appeal of going back to this material again versus doing something different?I have other things that I’d like to do. But I have so much gratitude that this movie seemed to stick with people. When I look at it, I am reminded of how hard I worked on it in the first place. I feel like the bricks and mortar of it were the absolute best possible job I was capable of at the time. It’s not perfect, but it holds water. More