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      SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood Studios Agree to Deal to End Actors’ Strike

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      The agreement all but ends one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry. Union members still have to approve the deal.One of the longest labor crises in Hollywood history is finally coming to an end.SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, reached a tentative deal for a new contract with entertainment companies on Wednesday, clearing the way for the $134 billion American movie and television business to swing back into motion.Hollywood’s assembly lines have been at a near-standstill since May because of a pair of strikes by writers and actors, resulting in financial pain for studios and for many of the two million Americans — makeup artists, set builders, location scouts, chauffeurs, casting directors — who work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films.Upset about streaming-service pay and fearful of fast-developing artificial intelligence technology, actors joined screenwriters on picket lines in July. The writers had walked out in May over similar concerns. It was the first time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union and Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films, that actors and writers were both on strike.The Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and ended its 148-day strike on Sept. 27. In the coming days, SAG-AFTRA members will vote on whether to accept their union’s deal, which includes hefty gains, like increases in compensation for streaming shows and films, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.SAG-AFTRA, however, failed to receive a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Fran Drescher, the union’s president, had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”Instead, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, proposed a new residual for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take.At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history. SAG-AFTRA said in a terse statement that its negotiating committee had voted unanimously to approve the tentative deal, which will proceed to the union’s national board on Friday for “review and consideration.”It added, “Further details will be released following that meeting.”Shaan Sharma, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, said he had mixed emotions about the tentative deal, though he declined to go into specifics because the SAG-AFTRA board still needed to review it.“They say a negotiation is when both sides are unhappy because you can’t get everything you want on either side,” he said, adding, “You can be happy for the deal overall, but you can feel a sense of loss for something that you didn’t get that you thought was important.”Ms. Drescher, who had been active on social media during the strike, didn’t immediately post anything on Wednesday evening. She and other SAG-AFTRA officials had come under severe pressure from agents, crew member unions and even some of her own members, including George Clooney and Ben Affleck, to wrap up what had started to feel like an interminable negotiation.“I’m relieved,” Kevin Zegers, an actor most recently seen in the ABC show “The Rookie: Feds,” said in an interview after the union’s announcement. “If it didn’t end today, there would have been riots.”The studio alliance said in a statement that the tentative agreement “represents a new paradigm,” giving SAG-AFTRA “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.”There is uncertainty over what a poststrike Hollywood will look like. But one thing is certain: There will be fewer jobs for actors and writers in the coming years, undercutting the wins that unions achieved at the bargaining table.Even before the strikes, entertainment companies were cutting back on the number of television shows they ordered, a result of severe pressure from Wall Street to turn money-losing streaming services into profitable businesses. Analysts expect companies to make up for the pair of pricey new labor contracts by reducing costs elsewhere, including by making fewer shows and canceling first-look deals.The actors, like the writers, said the streaming era had negatively affected their working conditions and compensation.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor the moment, however, the agreements with actors and writers represent a capitulation by Hollywood’s biggest companies, which started the bargaining process with an expectation that the unions, especially SAG-AFTRA, would be relatively compliant. Early in the talks, for instance, the studio alliance — Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros. — refused to negotiate on multiple union proposals. “Rejected our proposal, refused to make a counter” became a rallying cry among the striking workers.As the studio alliance tried to limit any gains, the companies cited business challenges, including the rapid decline of cable television and continued streaming losses. Disney, struggling with $4 billion in streaming losses in 2022, eliminated 7,000 jobs in the spring.But the alliance underestimated the pent-up anger pulsating among the studios’ own workers. Writers and actors called the moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era had deteriorated the working conditions and compensation for rank-and-file members of their professions so much that they could no longer make a living. The companies brushed such comments aside as union bluster and Hollywood dramatics. They found out the workers were serious.With the strikes dragging into the fall and the financial pain on both sides mounting, the studio alliance reluctantly switched from trying to limit gains to figuring out how to get Hollywood’s creative assembly lines running again — even if that meant bending to the will of the unions.“It was all macho, tough-guy stuff from the companies for a while,” said Jason E. Squire, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “But that certainly did change.”There had previously been 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood.“The executives of these companies didn’t need to worry about labor very much — they worried about other things,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the Writers Guild negotiating committee, said in an interview after the writers’ strike concluded. “They worried about Wall Street and their free cash flow, and all of that.”Mr. Keyser continued: “They could say to their labor executives, ‘Do the same thing you’ve been doing year after year. Just take care of that, because labor costs are not going to be a problem.’ Suddenly, that wasn’t true anymore.” As a result of the strikes, studios are widely expected to overhaul their approach to union negotiations, which in many ways dates to the 1980s.Writers Guild leaders called their deal “exceptional” and “transformative,” noting the creation of viewership-based streaming bonuses and a sharp increase in royalty payments for overseas viewing on streaming services. Film writers received guaranteed payment for a second draft of screenplays, something the union had tried but failed to secure for at least two decades.The Writers Guild said the contract included enhancements worth roughly $233 million annually. When bargaining started in the spring, the guild proposed $429 million in enhancements, while studios countered with $86 million, according to the guild.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord takes a meaningful step toward stabilization. About $10 billion in TV and film production has been on hold, according to ProdPro, a production tracking service. That amounts to 176 shows and films.The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Because the actors’ union prohibited its members from participating in promotional campaigns for already-finished work, studios pulled movies like “Dune: Part Two” from the fall release schedule, forgoing as much as $1.6 billion in worldwide ticket sales, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant.With labor harmony restored, the coming weeks should be chaotic. Studio executives and producers will begin a mad scramble to secure soundstages, stars, insurance, writers and crew members so productions can start running again as quickly as possible. Because of the end-of-year holidays, some projects may not restart until January.Both sides will have to go through the arduous process of working together again after a searing six-month standoff. The strikes tore at the fabric of the clubby entertainment world, with actors’ union leaders describing executives as “land barons of a medieval time,” and writers and actors still fuming that it took studio executives months, not weeks, to reach a deal.Workers and businesses caught in the crossfire were idled, potentially leaving bitter feelings toward both sides.And it appears that Hollywood executives will now have to contend with a resurgent labor force, mirroring many other American businesses. In recent weeks, production workers at Walt Disney Animation voted to unionize, as did visual-effects workers at Marvel.Contracts with powerful unions that represent Hollywood crews will expire in June and July, and negotiations are expected to be fractious.“It seemed apparent early on that we were part of a trend in American society where labor was beginning to flex its muscles — where unions were beginning to reassert their power,” said Mr. Keyser, the Writers Guild official.Brooks Barnes More

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      A Mixed Mood as Hollywood Strikes Finally End

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      Celebratory feelings are competing with resentment over the work stoppage and worries about the business era that is coming.It should be a rapturous time in Hollywood.Writers have been back at their keyboards for a month, having negotiated a strike-ending deal so favorable that it seemed to leave even them a bit gobsmacked. On Wednesday, the actors’ union said it had negotiated a tentative contract of its own, all but ending its 118-day strike and clearing a path for the film and television business to roar back to life for the first time since May.Champagne for everyone!Instead, the mood in the entertainment capital is decidedly mixed, as celebratory feelings compete with resentment over the work stoppage and worries about the business era that is coming.“People are excited — thrilled — to be getting back to work,” said Jon Liebman, co-chief executive of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, a venerable Hollywood management firm. “But they are also mindful of some sobering challenges that lie ahead.”Analysts estimate that higher labor expenses will add 10 percent to the cost of making a show, and studios are expected to compensate by cutting back on production.“Companies are not going to increase their budgets accordingly,” said Jason E. Squire, editor of “The Movie Business Book” and host of a companion podcast. “They will compensate by making less. The end.”Hulu, for instance, expects the number of new shows it makes in 2024 to fall by about a third from 2022.The Directors Guild of America also has a new contract that guarantees raises. And two more union contracts, both covering crews, come due in the next few months. Studios will either have to pay up or risk another shutdown. “READY for our contract fight next year,” Lindsay Dougherty, lead organizer for Teamsters Local 399, recently said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Her branch represents more than 6,000 Hollywood workers, including truck drivers, location managers and casting directors.Even before the strikes, Hollywood was swinging from boom times to austerity. Peak TV, the glut of new programming that helped define the streaming era, ended last year as Wall Street began pressuring streaming services to put a priority on profit over subscriber growth. TV networks and streaming platforms ordered 40 percent fewer adult scripted series in the second half of 2022 than they did in the same period in 2019, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm.Put another way, 599 adult scripted series were made last year. Some analysts predict that, by 2025, the annual number will be closer to 400, a roughly one-third decline. Even the most modest series employs hundreds of people, including agents, managers, publicists and stylists, who in turn fuel the broader economy.“With the strike over, we’re all staring down the barrel of a painful structural adjustment that predates the strike,” Zack Stentz, a screenwriter with credits like “X-Men: First Class” and “Thor,” wrote on X. “A lot of careers and even entire companies are going to go away over the next year.” (He added, on a glass-half-full note: “This is also a time for clever little mammals to survive and even thrive in the new landscape. Your job is to be a clever mammal.”)The streaming profitability problem remains largely unsolved. Netflix and Hulu make money, and Warner Bros. Discovery has said its Max service will turn a profit by the end of the year. But Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock and others continue to lose money. Peacock alone will bleed $2.8 billion in red ink in 2023, Comcast said last month.Most analysts say that there are too many streaming services and that the weakest will ultimately close or merge with bigger competitors.The entertainment industry’s underlying cable television and box office problems also remain dire, in some cases growing worse during the five months it took to restore labor peace.Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite television by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to PwC, the accounting giant. In July, Disney announced that it was exploring a once-unthinkable sale of a stake in ESPN, the cable giant that has powered much of Disney’s growth over the past two decades. Paramount Global’s once-venerable cable portfolio, centered on Nickelodeon and MTV, has also been pummeled by cord cutting; Paramount shares have dropped nearly 50 percent since May.The film business is also unsettled. Movies now arrive in homes (either through digital stores or on streaming) after as little as 17 days in theaters, compared with about 90 days, which had been the standard for decades.Audiences have finally started to tire of Hollywood’s prevailing movie business strategy — endless sequels, each more bloated than the last — with lackluster results for the seventh “Mission: Impossible” film, the fifth “Indiana Jones” installment and 11th “Fast & Furious” chapter as evidence.Movies now arrive in homes (either through digital stores or on streaming) after as little as 17 days in theaters, compared with the decades-old standard of about 90 days.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTheaters are not dead, as blockbuster turnout for “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” has shown. But ticket-buying data suggests a worrisome trend: People who were going to six to eight movies a year before the pandemic are now going to three or four. Even the most ardent fans of big-screen entertainment are paring back.Cinemas in North America sold about $7.7 billion in tickets this year though October, a 17 percent decline from the same period in 2019.There is more competition for leisure time; TikTok has 150 million users in the United States, a majority of them younger than 30, and the average time spent on the app is growing quickly.Everywhere you look in Hollywood, or so it seems, businesses are trying to cut costs. Citing the strikes and “volatile larger entertainment marketplace,” Anonymous Content, a production and management company, laid off 8 percent of its staff last month. United Talent Agency also trimmed its head count, as did several competing agencies.DreamWorks Animation recently eliminated 4 percent of its work force, while Starz, the premium cable network and streaming service, is reducing head count by 10 percent. Netflix is restructuring its animation division, which is expected to result in layoffs and fewer self-made films.Consider what is happening at Disney, which is widely considered the strongest of the old-line entertainment companies, partly because it is the largest.Before the strikes, Disney had about 150 television shows and a dozen movies in production. But worries about streaming profitability and the decline of cable television have battered Disney’s stock price. Shares have been trading in the $80 range, down from $197 two years ago. Sorting out ESPN’s future is Disney’s first priority, but the company is also selling holdings in India and weighing whether to part with assets like ABC; the Freeform cable channel; and a chain of local broadcast stations.Disney is so vulnerable that the activist investor Nelson Peltz has made it known to The Wall Street Journal that he intends, for the second time in a year, to push for board seats. Disney fended off Mr. Peltz in February, partly by saying it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs. On Wednesday, Disney said that, in the end, it had cut $7.5 billion and more than 8,000 jobs. It added that it would continue to tighten its belt.Phil Cusick, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, said of Disney in a note to clients in late September, “The company plans to make less content and spend less on what it does make.”Nicole Sperling More

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      ‘You Were My First Boyfriend’ Review:

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      In this documentary, Cecilia Aldarondo relives her high school trauma by directing cinematic re-enactments of her adolescent years.Cecilia Aldarondo takes the process of reliving adolescent trauma to a literal degree in “You Were My First Boyfriend,” her feature that falls somewhere between documentary and diaristic re-enactment. Spurred by her 20-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Fla., Aldarondo pulls back layers of memories and old home-movie footage to investigate the significant relationships of her formative years: her first intense crush, her bullies, and her childhood best friend and fellow outsider, Caroline.To face down her demons, Aldarondo enlists a cadre of child actors to recreate scenes from her time in high school — both memories of real events and fantasy sequences — in which Aldarondo portrays her own teenage self. The film documents the making of these scenes as much as the final product, a process that can be equal parts touching and awkward. When Aldarondo gets in touch with the now grown-up Joel, the boy she had a crush on for six years, she chooses to read a poem she wrote about him during the peak of her obsession — a decision that makes even her current partner, Gabe, cringe with embarrassment.However, despite its title, “You Were My First Boyfriend” is at its most effective when Aldarondo moves beyond teen lust and into the more complicated aspects of her upbringing. Her Puerto Rican heritage made her an easy target for bullying at her predominantly white high school, but Aldarondo was not exempt from acting cruel to those around her to fit in. She rehashes those nuances through, among other things, creating a shot-for-shot remake of Tori Amos’s “Crucify” music video with her sister Laura. It’s just zany enough to work.You Were My First BoyfriendNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘The Marvels’ and the Back Story

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      The latest superhero installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is arriving with some baggage. Here’s a look at the rocky lead-up to the release.The long-awaited superhero sequel “The Marvels” is finally reaching multiplexes this weekend, but the tumultuous back story behind the film makes this release something different.The movie, opening Friday and starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers (a.k.a. Captain Marvel), is facing projections of lower-than-usual ticket sales for Marvel Studios along with chatter about the uncertainty of Larson’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.Box office analysts have predicted an opening weekend haul of $75 million to $80 million, which would be a disappointment for a studio that historically has seen its superhero films regularly debut above the $100 million mark. The release comes in the same year as another shaky Marvel Studios debut, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” which, with a $476 million worldwide gross after its February premiere, recorded one of the M.C.U.’s worst performances at the box office.“The Marvels” continues the story of “Captain Marvel” (2019), one of the studio’s best-performing titles ($1.1 billion worldwide). That film’s release, though, was positioned favorably between “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame,” the gold standards of the superhero era and two of the highest-grossing films of all time (not adjusted for inflation).Directed by Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”), “The Marvels” in particular, appears to be a tough project to break through the fog of so-called superhero fatigue. Promotion around the film has been affected by the SAG-AFTRA strike. Even so, the film is billed as an ensemble movie in which two of its central trio of stars — Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan (or Ms. Marvel, the M.C.U.’s first Muslim superhero) — are, to the wider world, relative unknowns.The film’s release may also be affected by the biases of some fans who are uninterested in a project featuring female superheroes. Earlier this year, when the first trailer for “The Marvels” was released, news reports noted that many fans had appeared to “dislike-bomb” the video: Within hours of its posting on YouTube, the trailer received hundreds of thousands of dislikes along with negative comments about the cast. (The site removed the dislike counter in 2021, though online tools make the number viewable to users.)As for Larson, speculation has swirled over her possible disillusionment with the M.C.U. as a result of the intense and often sexist backlash she has received from audiences. In October, Joanna Robinson, the co-author of “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” claimed that Larson “doesn’t want to play Carol Danvers anymore.” Larson herself addressed the online hate that led to fans review-bombing the original film on RottenTomatoes.com. Many of the negative reviews, which were removed by the site, referred to Larson’s prerelease comments about wanting to ensure greater diversity among journalists covering the movie. When Variety asked last year in a red carpet interview how long she planned to play Danvers, she responded pointedly, “I don’t know. Does anyone want me to do it again?”Additionally, getting “The Marvels” to the finish line required four weeks of reshoots and a premiere date that was pushed back multiple times. Those delays prompted DaCosta to complete postproduction remotely in London while she began work on her next film, a move that has fueled gossip about trouble behind the scenes.DaCosta, though, dismissed the speculation in a recent interview with the YouTuber Jake Hamilton. “Actually at the time that I left to go to London to start prep on my next film, everyone was so clear about what the film was, what we wanted, everyone knew what I wanted,” she said. “So it really wasn’t the dramatic sort of thing that I think people are feeling like it is.”So how is Marvel feeling about its future? Earlier this year, in an interview with the Movie Business Podcast, the studio’s longtime head, Kevin Feige, appeared unfazed about the idea of superhero fatigue, saying that people have been asking about that since his second year on the job. Instead, he emphasized the importance of narrative, saying that if their filmmakers were able to tell the story right, they could make “any type of movies that share two things: the Marvel Studios logo above the title and a seed of an idea from our publishing history.” More

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      ‘How to Have Sex’ Considers Assault Survivors

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      In new films, including “How to Have Sex,” female British directors emphasize the impact of sexual trauma, rather than portraying the act itself.When Molly Manning-Walker was a teenager, her favorite film was Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible.” In a recent interview, she remembered being impressed by the film’s infamously brutal, nine-minute rape scene, and how “immersive” it was.But now 30, and a director herself, she questions Noé’s approach to that scene. With such graphic — and prolonged — violence onscreen, she said, “you’re almost abusing the audience.” When it came to depicting sexual assault in her debut feature, “How to Have Sex,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Manning-Walker resolved to do things differently.“How to Have Sex,” which opens in theaters in Britain and Ireland on Nov. 3 and in the United States in February, follows three British teenagers on a party vacation in Greece. Manning-Walker said that, like Tara, the film’s protagonist, she was sexually assaulted when she was 16 (though in a different scenario), and that she wanted the audience to understand what was happening “through Tara’s face and her reaction,” rather than putting the act onscreen.Manning-Walker’s debut is one of several new films directed by British women that offer fresh perspectives on sexual assault by focusing on its varied impacts. Adura Onashile’s “Girl,” which opens in theaters in Britain later this month, asks what happens when women don’t talk about their experiences. And in the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” which recently played at the London Film Festival, Chloe Abrahams discovers her family’s buried history of sexual abuse and domestic violence, which triggers a revelation about herself.These movies arrive as violence toward women and girls continues making headlines in Britain. Recently, the comedian Russell Brand denied accusations of sexual assault from four women. In January, a London police officer admitted to 49 charges of sexual abuse. Around a quarter of women in England and Wales have experienced sexual assault since the age of 16, according to the Office for National Statistics.Déborah Lukumuena as Grace, and Le’Shantey Bonsu as her daughter, Ama, in “Girl.”via Studio SohoIn an interview, Onashile described this climate of violence against women as “an epidemic.” Her film, “Girl,” centers on a young immigrant mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena), and her 11 year-old daughter, who live in a Glasgow tower block. Grace’s erratic behavior implies a traumatic past, but Onashile doesn’t make this explicit. As part of her research for the film, Onashile said she learned from social workers that you can spot sexual assault survivors by their body language, which gives the “sense that something is held, and tight, and wound up.” In the film, Lukumuena plays Grace with stooped shoulders and a downcast gaze.Abrahams said that the act of recording her family members gave her the courage to ask difficult questions about long-hidden abuse. With “The Taste of Mango,” she was seeking to heal divisions between her mother, Rozana, in England, and her maternal grandmother, Jean, in Sri Lanka, but along the way she learned that Rozana is suspected to have suffered at the hands of her stepfather.The movie pairs audio of her mother’s testimony with poetic images, including the moon and a road rushing by, glimpsed from a car window. Its meditative pacing was designed to allow the audience “to breathe, and not get sucked down by the heaviness of it,” Abrahams said.But equally, she added, she wanted to show how her mother “finds joy in life” — including in country music and manicures — so Rozana isn’t defined by the things that were done to her.In the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” Chloe Abrahams, right, discovers her own family’s history of sexual abuse and domestic violence.Chloe AbrahamsAll three filmmakers considered the impact of the subject matter on the people making their movies and had support on hand from therapists during production. Manning-Walker, who also works as a cinematographer, recalled filming an assault scene for someone else’s film, in which there was no acknowledgment of the toll it might take on the person behind the camera. On her film, she said, her team could stop filming if they felt uncomfortable, which they did several times.Manning-Walker said she didn’t want the character of Tara, who goes on vacation intending to lose her virginity and flirts her way into an unwanted scenario, to be a helpless victim. At the end of “How to Have Sex,” she picks herself up and carries on. But that doesn’t mean she’s not affected by what happened, Manning-Walker added.Sexual assault “happens everywhere, and in all situations,” she said. By making a film that confronted it, she said she hoped to challenge a culture of shame and silence around a common experience. All three filmmakers described tearful, post-screening encounters with male and female audience members who saw elements of their lives reflected onscreen.After one screening, Manning-Walker recalled, a woman in her 70s had told her that watching “How to Have Sex” had made her reconsider a teenage sexual encounter: “‘I just realized that I’ve been assaulted, from watching your film,’” Manning-Walker remembered the woman saying.There was “a lack of conversation around female pleasure and what sex is for women,” Manning-Walker said, which also meant a lack of education about consent. If people aren’t taught that sex is an act of negotiation, she said, “of course it’s going to go horribly wrong.” More

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      Barbra Streisand Is Ready to Tell All. Pull Up a Seat.

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      Maybe it’s her grandkids, maybe it’s being 81, but Barbra Streisand is open to new stuff. Take sharing. Well, take sharing herself. “My Name Is Barbra,” her first memoir, is upon us. It’s 970 pages and billows with doubt, anger, ardor, hurt, pride, persuasion, glory and Yiddish. I don’t know that any artist has done more sharing.And yet, last month, after lunch at her home in Malibu, Calif., Streisand shared something else, a treasure she guards almost as much she’s guarded the details of her life. And that’s dessert. There’s a lot in this book — tales of film and television shoots, clashes and bonds with collaborators, a whole chapter on Don Johnson (it’s short) and another called “Politics,” her unwavering preference for big blends of the masculine and the feminine. But food is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a love of Streisand’s life, especially ice cream.So when it’s time for dessert at Streisand’s, despite any choice you’re offered, there’s truly only one option. And that’s McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream. She writes about it with an orgasmic zeal comparable only, perhaps, to her stated zests for Modigliani and Sondheim. How much does Streisand love Brazilian Coffee? In the book, she’s in the middle of a sad story about a dinner with her buddy Marlon Brando at Quincy Jones’s place, when she interrupts herself to rhapsodize over its flavor and reminisce on the lengths she has gone to get some. So I wanted to have what she’s having.“Okaaayyyy,” Streisand said. She gave her longtime assistant, Renata Buser, a deep, knowing look.“We’ll trade. You give a good review.”Panic, panic, panic. Stammer, stammer, stammer.She was grinning. Buser was smiling.“I love to laugh right now,” said Streisand, who said she’s been in a funk over the state of the planet.Buser agreed: “You really needed a laugh.”But Streisand wasn’t entirely kidding — well, about the good review she was. But not about the ice cream.See, sometimes, they explained, like two girls talking about an ornate but dire piece of cafeteria gossip, there’s a situation with how available it is. (Basically, McConnell’s sometimes takes Brazilian Coffee off the market, leaving Turkish Coffee and sometimes just … “Coffee.”) When she gets her hands on some, she all but password-protects it. “My husband happens to like Turkish Coffee. Thank God,” Streisand says of the actor James Brolin, her spouse of 25 years. “So he doesn’t take my stash.”To be clear: They’re not the same?“Noooo,” Streisand and Buser said together. Streisand was shrugging that “are you serious right now?” shrug: “Turkey is not Brazil.”It goes on like this for another minute until something crucial suddenly occurs to Streisand.“Are you a fan of coffee ice cream?”Crickets …She didn’t have time for this. “We have vanilla.” More kidding. “I’ll give you a scoop — well, how about half a scoop? He’ll have half a scoop. I’ll take the other half.”Eventually, Buser arrives with a bowl, and I get it.If Loro Piana made dessert, this is how it would taste, like money. Buser had lodged Streisand’s demiscoop inside a wafer cone just the way she likes. Mine was gone in about 90 seconds. Streisand, though — she made the eating of this ounce of ice cream a discreet aria of bliss. Little nibbles of cone, then one spin around her mouth. Nibble, nibble, spin. I’ve seen one other person make love to a dessert this way, and she gave birth to me. Otherwise, no one will ever quite have what they’re having.THIS MEMOIR OF STREISAND’S encompasses her girlhood in working-class Brooklyn in the 1940s, her big break on Broadway in “Funny Girl” in 1964, a movie career that made her the biggest actress of the 1970s, her popular albums and top-rated TV specials, the awards, the snubs, her hangups, terrors and passions, her close girlfriends, the men she’s loved and, yes, the foods she might adore more. “My Name Is Barbra” is explanatory and ruminative and enlightening. It’s shake-your-head funny and hand-to-mouth surprising. The lady who wrote it is in touch with herself, loves being herself. Yet she disliked memoir-writing’s ostensible point. “I’ve been through therapy many, many years ago, trying to figure these things out,” she told me. “And I got bored with that. Trying to get things out. I really didn’t want to relive my life.”Streisand in her dressing room when she starred in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.”John Orris/The New York TimesWriting the book forced Streisand not only to relive it, but to do the synthesizing between the present and the past. For instance, she frequently reckons with how losing her father at a young age and living for decades with her mother’s glass-half-empty approach to maternity set her up for a journey of approval.Those 970 pages also turn the book into a piece of exercise equipment. Streisand doesn’t like the heft. “I wanted two volumes,” she said. “Who wants to hold a heavy book like that in their hands?”Rick Kot, an executive editor at Viking who oversaw production on the book, told me, “Publishing books in two volumes is difficult just as a commercial venture. And nobody seems to have any issue with how long” Streisand’s is.The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains. Streisand is poring over, pouring out, her life. She’s feeling her way through it, remembering, sometimes Googling as she types. It’s not a book you inhale, per se. (Unless, of course, you’ve got a pressing lunch date with the author.) Nor does it inspire the “five takeaways” treatment that juicy new memoirs by Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith have. Not that there weren’t requests for spicier material. Streisand said that Christine Pittel, her editor, told her “that I had to leave some blood on the page.” So feelings are more deeply plumbed; names are named.And she did do some hemming and hawing. “I was very late in delivering the book,” she said. “I think I was supposed to deliver it in two years.” It took her 10. And as she went, she thought about her legacy. “If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words. These are my thoughts.” She also considered those other Streisand titles, the ones by other people. “Hopefully, you don’t have to look at too many books written about me. You know, whenever I was told about what they said, certain things, I thought, like, who are they talking about?”There are takeaways. But they’re too chronic to qualify as “current.” Mostly, they involve Streisand’s hunger for work and her endless quest to maintain control over it. Singing and acting made her famous. This insistence on perfection made her notorious. Sexism and chauvinism are on display throughout the book. But what becomes apparent is that the woman who has a “directed by” credit on just three films (“Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces”) had been a director from the very start of her career. Here is the book’s grand revelation — for a reader but for the author, too. “I didn’t know about it,” she said, of this proclivity for management, planning, vision, authority and obeying her instincts. “But writing the book, I discovered it. Basically, I was doing that, you know, when I was 19 years old — or even showing my mother how to smoke.”Streisand is unsparing about the treachery she faced at work, collaborating with men. Sydney Chaplin (one of Charlie’s kids) played the original Nick Arnstein during her “Funny Girl” Broadway run; they shared a flirtation that Chaplin wanted to consummate and that Streisand wanted to keep professional. (For one thing, she was married to Elliott Gould.) So, she writes, Chaplin did a number on her. In front of live audiences, he’d lean in to whisper put-downs and profanity. When it came time to shoot “Hello, Dolly!,” Streisand couldn’t understand why her co-star Walter Matthau and their director, Gene Kelly (yes, the Gene Kelly) were so hostile toward her. She confronts Matthau, and he confesses: “You hurt my friend,” meaning Chaplin, his poker buddy. Throughout her career, she’s up against what one surly camera operator, on the set of “The Prince of Tides,” boasts is a boys’ club.That’s the sort of blood that gives this book its power — not the prospect of a bluntly louche Brando and a doting Pierre Trudeau being honest-to-God soul mates, not whatever her byzantine thing with Jon Peters was about. It’s that Barbra Streisand endured a parade of harsh workplaces yet never stopped trying to make the best work. That experience with Chaplin left her with lifelong stage fright. But what if it also helped sharpen her volition to get things — in the studio, on a film set, before a show — exactly, possibly obsessively, right?“When I was younger, I think they had a preconception, you know, because maybe I was aloof or something, because I was a singer but I wanted to be an actress. And then as an actress, I wanted to be a director,” she said to me. “In other words, take another step. Be the actress as well as the singer. To me, it was so much easier to look at the whole. But even when I was an actress, I would care about the whole.” Like that scene in Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were,” from 1973, where Streisand touches Robert Redford’s hair while he’s sleeping, a personal choice she made by instinct.Over and over again — with TV specials, live concerts, musical arrangements — she was executing ideas. The execution earned her a permanent reputation. And she knows it. In the book, she tells a story about making some staging suggestions for her 1980 Grammys performance with Neil Diamond and muses, “This kind of incident may be why I’m called ‘difficult.’”Streisand directed and starred in “Yentl” (1983) with Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Difficult” is in the work. Streisand’s characters constitute this cocktail of “mercurial” and “determined” with a couple squirts of “feral.” They’re multitaskers, consumed with both busyness and learning how to do something. She was perfect for romantic comedies during second-wave feminism: Her drive drove men nuts. My favorite performance from this ’70s run of hers is in “The Main Event,” a frothy, filthy, solidly funny screwball hit from 1979. She’s in high expressive form and at peak curls, playing Hillary Kramer, a fragrance mogul forced to sell her company after her accountant runs off with all her money. But she discovers a surprise asset: a terrible boxer, Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon (Ryan O’Neal), whose career she tries to turn around. The movie, which Howard Zieff directed, sums up the Streisand experience: her tenacity; her outrageous comfort as both a comedic actor and as a version of herself; her exasperation with men who exploit her and count her out.Eddie doesn’t want to work with Hillary and bets that the sight of his battered face will disgust her right out of boxing management. The violence of boxing does send Hillary vomiting during the drive home from one of his fights. What it doesn’t do is deter her. “I hope this taught you a lesson,” says Whitman Mayo, who plays Eddie’s pal and trainer, Percy. “It has,” Streisand says. “Get him in shape.”The two men share a sinking feeling, seemingly typical when it comes to Streisand. “She’s not giving up, Percy,” Eddie says to his trainer, who must concur: “That’s a problem.” People who’ve negotiated with her probably recognize the look of worry and fatigued resignation on O’Neal’s face. He’s going to lose.It’s reasonable to suspect that Tom Rothman, the head of Sony Pictures, knows the feeling. When the company was planning to release an anniversary edition of “The Way We Were” this year, Streisand argued for him to include two scenes that, she was pained to discover, had been omitted from the original. For Rothman, the trouble with granting Streisand her wish was that, as “a filmmaker’s executive,” as he put it in an interview, he didn’t want to change anything without Pollack’s input. But Pollack’s been dead for 15 years. They agreed to release two versions: Pollack’s and, essentially, Streisand’s extended cut.This, she writes, is a triumph of her relentlessness. “The word she uses in the book, that’s 100 percent accurate,” Rothman told me. “She’s relentless.” Her being right about the scenes didn’t matter to his bottom line, which required him to do justice to Pollack’s memory while assuaging Streisand’s worries over creative injustice. “She would say: ‘This is better, this is better! This is why it’s good!’ And I would say: ‘But Sydney Pollack didn’t want it!’”The reason Rothman wanted to land at a happy solution was because of the person he was negotiating with. “Barbra broke a lot of not just artistic boundaries but boundaries for female artists in the movie business, in Hollywood, in terms of taking control of her career,” he said. “I have boundless respect for her.”“If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words,” Streisand said. “These are my thoughts.”Harry Benson/Express, via Getty Images)Streisand’s boundlessness, her capaciousness — the lack of precedent for her whole-enchilada ambitions, the daffiness, the sexiness, the talent, orchestration, passion, originality; her persistence and indefatigability; the outfits; the hair — were a watershed. She was always adapting, if not to what was cool or “current,” per se, then certainly to whom she felt she was at a given moment. “You know me,” she writes, late in the book. “I’m the version queen.”The line is straight from Streisand to Madonna, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift — version queens of different kingdoms. That’s just a list of the obvious people who followed her into showbiz and makes no mention of the less famous folks whom Streisand inspired into a thousand other achievements. She’s “to thine own self be true” in neon. This might be the real Streisand Effect. And now she can take a step back and appreciate it.“That gives me real joy, that I affected some people into doing what they wanted to do,” Streisand said. “That I gave them some sort of courage. Or if they felt different, you know, I was somebody who felt different. That’s a reward for me. That makes me feel great.”THIS HOME OF STREISAND’S has been called a compound. But even with the ocean overlook, it’s too rustic, cozy and deceptively modest for the geologic or ego-logical footprint that “compound” connotes. There’s an active farm and enough rose varieties to hijack a flower show. It’s neither Xanadu nor Neverland Ranch. There’s some reality to Streisand’s place, some soul.This is to say that paintings are everywhere, outside the bathroom, up the main staircase, in the bathroom. There are oils by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Hart Benton, portraits by Ammi Phillips and Mary Cassatt. A wall holds one of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washingtons. She loves Klimt and adores Tamara de Lempicka and Modigliani, adores them with an awe the world reserves for her. Some of the paintings are by Streisand, including a portrait of Sammie, her late Coton de Tulear, whose fur is affixed to the canvas. One, her son, Jason Gould, did.Streisand’s fans know what’s on her property and the labor she personally devoted to realizing it — that there’s a mill with a functioning waterwheel, that she’s dedicated a room to her collection of dolls and that another’s maintained for the display and storage of her stage and screen costumes. They’d know because, in 2010, Streisand put it all in a book called “My Passion for Design.” Nevertheless, people have concluded that Streisand lives at her own personal Grove. They’ll ask: Are you going to see the mall? But there is no mall to see. Nothing’s for sale, nothing is open to the public.Streisand at home in 2018.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLess known is how it might feel to stand here, in a living room at Streisand’s house, to gaze over her shoulder at the ocean and stop yourself from saying out loud, “On a clear day you really can see forever.” It’s strange to move from the bulk of her book to the lightness of the woman who wrote it, to the one-of-a-kind incandescence that’s kept her a star. No memoir can quite contain that. An odd effect of that stardom is how that person can start to seem an uncanny sort of familiar. One of the mightiest, most Olympic performers we Americans have ever experienced, is, on a Tuesday at lunchtime — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — just some lady. The one behind you at a Gelson’s, maybe, who might notice the cottage cheese in your cart and get moony over how creamy it is. (“I love going to the supermarket,” she told me.)After lunch, Streisand was ready to relax and needed to stretch her back, which lately has been acting up. Relaxing meant letting loose her three Cotons de Tulear, dogs as white as snowflakes, whiter in fact, like bleached teeth. It meant retreating to the family room. So off I went down a wallpapered hallway paneled with more framed art and into another section of the house that felt different from the airs of presentation and preservation that typify the rest of the home. The kitchen was here, for one thing. For another, hunched over a round table was James Brolin. Streisand calls him Jim, and Jim was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, cross-referencing information on an iPad with what he was writing on a sheet of paper. He was jotting down film titles to watch later for movie night. They had just had a Scorsese marathon.There’s life all over the property. But here in the family room is where everybody lives, including that portrait of Sammie, which, at the moment, was propped up on the floor because “I don’t have any places to hang anything anymore,” she said. This way she can see it from the sofa while she watches TV. This part of the house seems like the only place where anything gets strewn. “It’s not that orderly,” she told me. “Meaning, I have the things I need around me.” Like her pets, like Jim. “It’s a playroom. We watch TV, we have the dogs on our laps. It’s more disordered.”It felt, in many ways, like a secret, the comfy chaos of this zone feeling preferable to the control on display everywhere else. Streisand seemed at home here because she was. She took a seat and proceeded to ply the dogs, Fanny and Sammie’s lab-bred clones, Scarlet and Violet, with a treat. They looked up at her with expectant patience. I’ve seen scores of dogs anticipate a treat. It’s as if Streisand’s had heard about the bonkers approach of those other dogs and zigged, sitting patiently as Streisand doled a morsel or two to each. Even she seemed impressed. Here is another of stardom’s odd effects. Without us, it’s Tuesday. More

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      Book Review: ‘My Name is Barbra,’ by Barbra Streisand

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      MY NAME IS BARBRA, by Barbra StreisandHello, enormous.Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach “Power Broker” proportions.For one thing, she is — fits of insecurity notwithstanding — a bona fide power broker: tearing down barriers to and between Broadway, Hollywood, the recording industry and Washington, D.C., like Robert Moses on a demolition bender.For another, as Streisand writes in “My Name Is Barbra,” a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process.After adding back material to her version of “A Star Is Born” for Netflix in 2018 — “I think I made it better. But did I? I’m never quite sure”— she fantasized about new, fuller cuts of both “Funny Girl,” which made her a movie star on arrival, and “Yentl,” her debut as director. Planning her wedding to the actor James Brolin in 1998, she tried to winnow down a long list of desserts before deciding “We’ll just have them all … why not?”It doesn’t take a psychiatrist — though Streisand, 81, has consulted many, played one in “The Prince of Tides” and even incorporated the therapeutic framework into one concert tour — to figure out why she has taken such a big bite out of life. As recounted before in a flotilla of biographies, none authorized (and at least one tell-all by an early roommate, who was promptly ghosted), she grew up deprived both economically and emotionally in a housing project in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Instead of a doll she carried a hot-water bottle — “I swear it felt more like a real baby than some cold doll” — for which a sympathetic neighbor knitted a pink hat and sweater.Such details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame — “a hollow trophy,” she assures us — but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table, talking about fabrics and fellows who got fresh and “my first fur coat, sold to me as ‘Zorina,’ a.k.a. ‘Alaskan sable,’ but in reality … skunk.”Her father, an educator from an Orthodox Jewish background, died at 35 after a head injury when Barbara, as they spelled it then, was 15 months old and her brother was 9. (She still has her father’s copy of “Tales From Shakespeare” for children on her bedside table: “Who knows? Maybe he had bought it to read to me.”)Her mother remarried a man named Kind who was anything but, gave birth to another little girl, and had distinct Madame Rose undertones, crooning into a broomstick microphone and so forth. “Where are my presents?” she screamed at a Christmas gathering in 1964, by which time her older daughter had released the Top 40 hit “People” and appeared thrice in Vogue. “I’m the mother! She’s nothing without me!”That the film rights to “Gypsy” have slipped from Streisand’s grasp after a prolonged tease seems one of showbiz’s prosecutable crimes. (She even gobbles egg rolls, Mr. Goldstone!) Another: This book, which is adorned with more boldface names than there were sequins on the Arnold Scaasi pantsuit she wore to the Oscars in 1969, has no index. You kind of want to resurrect Spy magazine to make one, as it did for “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Streisand in 1968 on the set of “Funny Girl” with the film’s director, William Wyler.Columbia/Kobal/ShutterstockLittle Barbara suffered from undiagnosed tinnitus, possibly a bug God planted in her ear urging her to run the hell away from her family’s dysfunction. She vowed to become a performer after seeing Susan Strasberg, the Method guru Lee’s daughter, in “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the Cort Theater, later contriving a meeting with Strasberg Sr., who didn’t intimidate her in the slightest. (“He reminded me of my uncle Irving.”)She also was swooning at the movies near Erasmus Hall High, where she was an honors student; her schoolmate Bobby Fischer, the future chess prodigy, “looked like some sort of deranged pilot from a 1940s movie,” she presciently noted.Streisand collected mentors who introduced her to books and records, and scratched up the money for classes in acting, pantomiming a chocolate chip and reading from Jean Anouilh’s “Medea”: “Why have you made me a girl?” Though she hates to fly, she longed to escape, and would become an expert criss-crosser of centuries and cultures onscreen.But it was her shimmery, almost wholly intuitive singing, first at a gay bar and then at the Bon Soir supper club in Greenwich Village, that would first dazzle the public. She found the spotlight “warm and comforting,” quickly lopped off that second “a” from her first name, and reminds us now that the second “s” in Streisand is soft, telephoning Tim Cook to get the pronunciation corrected on Siri.The author salts “My Name Is Barbra,” the title recycled from her 1965 TV special that itself cribbed the name of a Leonard Bernstein song, with Yiddishisms: tchotchkes (she likes pig ones); gonif, or thief (her ex-boyfriend Jon Peters); fakakta (what her then-agent David Begelman called the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story that was the basis for “Yentl”).Then there are the generous dollops of chutzpah. Besides sassing Strasberg, she somehow managed to resist all the advisers who told her to bob her long nose, ditch the thrift-store clothes and choose more standard numbers than, say, Harold Arlen’s “A Sleepin’ Bee,” with lyrics by Truman Capote.Streisand on the set of “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” which she directed and starred in.David James/Tri-Star/Phoenix via Kobal/ShutterstockNobody put Barbra in a corner. She clashed early with the prickly playwright and director Arthur Laurents, insisting she perform the secretary Miss Marmelstein’s eponymous solo in “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” from a swivel chair.“You’re never going to make it, you know,” he snarled at her, though the audience went wild for the sequence. “Never!” (They’d reunite later, on the massively successful picture “The Way We Were.”)A lot of men seemed to resent her drive. “I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body!” Walter Matthau told her on the set of “Hello, Dolly.” Mike Wallace called her “totally self-absorbed” and made her cry on “60 Minutes.”But many more fell at her feet, including Marlon Brando, who rubbed them. The king of England has sipped Constant Comment from her cup. Pat Conroy, the “Prince of Tides” author, compared her to the goddess Athena. (Athena on Conroy’s dancing: “Boy, he could really fling that tush around!”) Stephen Sondheim rewrote lyrics for her.Tabulating all the boyfriends and admirers — “I thought we were going to have an affair,” the married Mandy Patinkin tearily implored her during “Yentl,” she writes — might require a second index.Though she has a reputation for being controlling (basically the definition of being a director), Streisand here stresses, convincingly if somewhat exhaustively, her spontaneity. Contra Ethel Merman, who famously declared herself Miss Bird’s Eye when presented with new lyrics in rehearsals of “Call Me Madam,” she believes “to freeze something is to kill it.” She wanted to print the words “this is a work in progress” on the back of her 1976 lieder album — Glenn Gould loved it! — an example of her dogged refusal to stay in one lane. “Come to think of it, I should put it on this book, too….”Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers, like the one purportedly from Tennessee Williams collected by an interviewer whose veracity was questioned by Helen Shaw in The New Yorker. Not to get too Laurents about it, but Streisand maybe could have used a trusted collaborator, a J.R. Moehringer or even a J.J. Hunsecker, to rein in some indulgences, like long lists of boldface friends at later-career concerts.There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.There are just so many scintillating Streisands to contemplate over so many years: singer, actress, director, producer, philanthropist, activist, lover, mother, wife, friend, autobiographer. “I would make a very good critic,” she suggests at one point, and as I struggle to put a button on this, all I can reply is: Barbra, be my guest.MY NAME IS BARBRA | More

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      Nicolas Cage on ‘Dream Scenario’ and Fame

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      Nicolas Cage is not afraid to go big. This is, after all, a man who channeled the grandiose gestural acting of German expressionist films while starring in “Moonstruck” and was nearly fired from “Peggy Sue Got Married” for using a voice he had modeled on the Claymation sidekick Pokey from “Gumby.” Even the decision to change his name — born Nicolas Coppola, he traded his filmmaking family’s famous moniker for the comic-book superhero Luke Cage’s — allowed him to invent a personal mythology in line with his outsize ambitions.“When you think of ‘Nic Cage,’ I wanted people to think you were going to see something just a little bit unpredictable, a little bit scary,” he told me last month on the balcony of a Beverly Hills hotel. “It’s not going to be the same old, same old.”But at some point, that bigness is exactly what audiences came to predict from him. Over the last decade, YouTube supercuts emerged that combined Cage’s most go-for-broke moments into one marathon meltdown, while popular memes — like the “You Don’t Say” image that is based off his wide-eyed expression from “Vampire’s Kiss”— made it seem like pure outlandishness was his stock-in-trade. Cage could sense that shift but felt powerless to stop it: How should a star react when the public’s changing perception starts to turn like a tidal wave?Cage sent up his persona by playing a heightened version of himself in last year’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” but found even more to mine in “Dream Scenario,” which has its limited release next Friday. The A24 film, which is produced by Ari Aster and written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, casts Cage as Paul Matthews, a mild-mannered college professor who inexplicably starts to turn up in people’s dreams. For Paul, who has spent years yearning for the same level of renown as his more published peers, this sudden surge of viral stardom is unexpected but not entirely unwelcome. Still, once those collective dreams become nightmares, the hapless professor is helpless against the public backlash.“For me, this movie is an interesting analysis about the experience of fame,” said Cage, who called “Dream Scenario” one of the five best scripts he’s ever read. (The others are “Leaving Las Vegas,” which won him the Oscar for best actor, “Raising Arizona,” “Vampire’s Kiss” and “Adaptation.”) And though Paul is a well meaning but ineffectual academic — “Some folks would call him a ‘beta male,’” the actor said — this is Nicolas Cage we’re talking about: His version of boring can’t help but be fascinating, and it’s a hoot to watch Paul plod through his scenes in hiking boots and an oversized parka, meeting each new indignity with objections raised in a fussy, pinched voice.Cage as a professor who goes viral in “Dream Scenario.”A24The film earned strong reviews at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, and taken in tandem with his praised lead performance in “Pig” (2021), the 59-year-old Cage certainly appears to be on a critical upswing. Just don’t call it a renaissance, as some pundits have: Yes, Cage’s career has zigged from Oscar-winning dramas to action tentpoles, with a recent zag to direct-to-video thrillers that helped pull him out of debt. But all along, he was making indies — like the hallucinogenic “Mandy” (2018) — that still allowed him unfettered access to the big swings he does best.“I’m a little conflicted, because is it a renaissance?” Cage wondered. “I’m still approaching the material with the same process that I’ve always been approaching it with.” He thought about it for a moment. “Perhaps it’s more of a rediscovery,” he said.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did you end up in “Dream Scenario”?I was a huge admirer of Ari Aster, “Midsommar” and “Hereditary” in particular. I had wanted to work with him, and we were talking about maybe doing something episodic on television, but it wasn’t quite right for me. Then he sent me this script. I guess they had some other actors in mind at first, but I read it and right away, I responded to what I could inform Paul Matthews with.And what was that?All the feelings that I went through around 2008, 2009 when I stupidly Googled my name online and I saw, “Nicolas Cage Losing [It].” Somebody had cherry-picked all these freakout scenes and cobbled them together without any regard for how the character got to that level of crisis. And then it started going viral, exponentially growing, and became memes.I was confused, I was frustrated and I was stimulated. I thought, “Maybe this will compel someone to go look at the actual movie and see how the character got to that moment,” but on the other hand, I was like, “This isn’t what I had in mind when I decided to become a film actor.” I had that feeling of weight for years, and when I read “Dream Scenario,” I said, “Finally I can do something with these feelings, and I can apply them to Paul Matthews.”Paul isn’t sure why he’s gone viral in people’s dreams, but at first, he’s flattered by the attention. When you first started experiencing fame, was it that same sort of thrill?Gosh, it’s been so long. I started acting professionally, I think, when I was 15. I wasn’t into film performance for fame or accolades, so the first few times it started to happen with autographs, I was confused how to receive it. I almost felt ashamed of being happy that someone wanted my autograph, like, “Well, that’s a pride thing. That’s not why I’m in it.”Cage knows what it’s like to go viral. When a supercut of his freakout scenes was posted online, he recalled thinking, “This isn’t what I had in mind when I decided to become a film actor.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesWhat’s interesting is I don’t wake up in the morning and say to myself, “Oh, I’m famous.” I sometimes still meet people and they’re acting a bit different, and I think, “What’s wrong? What did I do?” And I go, “Oh, they saw me in a movie.” But more than ever, I know not to go out now if I’m not in a good mood. I just stay home. I don’t want to blow somebody’s day because I was in a bad mood and didn’t sign every autograph.Paul isn’t necessarily looking for the limelight, but there is a part of him that wants to be published and validated. The desire to be recognized somehow motivates a lot of people — including actors, I would think.If you want to be famous, make money, get an award, that’s OK, but that’s only going to get you so far. Sure, it’s nice to be regarded. Like Gary Oldman said, the sound of applause is never to be taken lightly, and gosh knows I’ve had enough tomatoes. But the point of it all is telling a story and having it connect with your audience, where they’re in on that secret with you, where they felt like they had an experience.As Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, you grew up adjacent to fame. What was your impression of fame before you experienced it yourself?I remember once going to the theater in San Francisco to see “All That Jazz” with my uncle. As he was walking down the street, I was lagging, and everyone was saying, “Francis Coppola. Francis Coppola. Francis Coppola.” I thought, “OK, that’s what’s fame is: People whisper your name when you pass.”Do you still think fame is like that?Well, when my first son was really little, he used to call me “Nicolas Cage,” so he must have heard it from people. He didn’t call me “Dad.”Can you relate to Paul’s experience going to a restaurant, where he can sense that people are staring at him and trying to snap covert pictures?I’ll take every picture. I wouldn’t go to a restaurant unless I was able to meet people well and be thankful that they liked the movie. I’m comfortable with it now, but when I was a kid, I had to learn how to get there.Scenes from a career: clockwise from top left, Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas” (with Elisabeth Shue), “Vampire’s Kiss,” “Raising Arizona” (with Holly Hunter) and “Adaptation.”Clockwise from top left: United Artists; MGM, via Alamy; 20th Century Fox; Columbia PicturesPeople are eager to pull out their phones around Paul, hoping to catch a viral moment that could help them piggyback off his own notoriety. That’s a very new wrinkle on fame.And very real. I’ve had things happen to me where I go to a bar in Sin City on a Saturday, and I have no idea that someone’s videotaping me and it goes on TikTok. It’s like, “OK, no more bars for me, man.” But it’s a new world. And that’s another reason I like this movie: It’s relevant. This is the way it is in the 21st century. This isn’t the way it was when Bogart was making movies.I wonder if we aren’t accelerating toward a point where people say, “Look, there’s just too much information in too many of our heads at too many moments of the day.” Certainly, “Dream Scenario” is addressing that sort of collective subconsciousness, but the desire to unplug from it sometimes feels so overwhelming.Alan Moore, the great graphic novelist, said we’re going to a place where information is going to be deployed so fast that eventually we’re all just going to become steam. But the thing is, Kyle, we have to evolve, we have to progress. This is the way it is, and it’s staying. I shudder to think what’s next. Is it going to be in a chip in our brains? I don’t know. But whatever it is, we’re evolving, and I want to find a way to work with it.You’ve been working lately with a lot of emerging filmmakers, like Kristoffer Borgli and Michael Sarnoski, who directed “Pig.”That, I am so grateful for. I always knew that it would take a young filmmaker who would have grown up with me in some way saying, “I want to try this,” and I have the humility to say, “You’re half my age and you’re twice as intelligent, I’m going to give you the controls.” But it’s interesting to be rediscovered by someone from a different generation. I think they haven’t had their dreams whipped out of them yet. They’re still full of potential and imagination of what they can accomplish, and that keeps me fertile.When you were starring in blockbuster studio films, were your representatives keen to keep you there instead of indies?That was the deal, that I was always going to go back to the well of independent drama, my roots. With the bigger movies, there’s too many cooks in the kitchen, too many people giving you notes. But with an experience like “Dream Scenario,” I’m with my director and we have the floor and we’re experimenting together. It’s important to have that intimacy to get to the really truthful expression of film performance. That’s harder to do on a big movie.What did you get out of your blockbuster leading-man era?It was a dream come true. I was told, “You can’t do it. You don’t look like one of those guys. What makes you think you can pull it off?” I said, “Well, I’m a student and I think I can try this and learn something from it. It’s going to be a challenge. Let’s see if it works.” Well, it worked maybe a little too well, and I got in that cycle. But at the time when I was doing these adventure films, it was considered not the done thing. My agent was saying, “You’re an actor’s actor. Why do you want to do that?” Because I never did it before! Keep it eclectic, keep it challenging.Cage is so mindful of his effect on fans that he prefers to stay home rather than “blow somebody’s day because I was in a bad mood and didn’t sign every autograph.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesSomething you’re not keen to do, though, is engage with social media.I’m not on any social media. I don’t want to tweet, I don’t want to be on Instagram or TikTok. That’s largely because I feel like that’s the only way I could stay close to a certain golden-age idea of what a film actor should maybe be, where you didn’t have that much access. Jack Nicholson refused to go on talk shows.You’re not afraid of going on talk shows.I personally think talk shows are a great interview, because you can get the tone, you can get the flavor, you can get the nuance expressed. You don’t have to worry that it’s going to be misinterpreted. That now is the danger, clickbait: You say something and then that gets transmogrified into something you didn’t say, and then suddenly that becomes your truth.I don’t want to walk on eggshells and keep editing myself because I want to give you an authentic interview, and I want that to be enjoyable for your readers. But there’s a dance there. I know something’s going to get cherry-picked and cobbled together, and they’re going to take it and say I said something I didn’t say. But can you imagine if John Lennon gave an interview today, what would happen?If you reread magazine interviews from a few decades ago, it’s astonishing how candid celebrities were willing to be.I do think people genuinely enjoy authenticity, just like they feel a connection with a performance that feels real to them. But again, we’re in this time where it will get repurposed. That sometimes happens to me, and we know the reason behind it: The clickbait sells. But I am going to choose to stay authentic, and I’m not going to let it get in the way of us having a conversation that is stimulating in some way. I just can’t let that happen. I don’t want to live in fear of that. More