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      Meg Ryan on Her New Rom-Com, ‘What Happens Later’

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      Meg Ryan was hurting.Not metaphorically. The actress and one-time rom-com queen was actively sore, having spent the morning, one of many, unpacking and moving herself into a home she’d long been renovating in Montecito, Calif. Persevering through the painful twinge, making order out of the past — really, finding comfort in the present — are the sneaky subcurrents of Ryan’s new movie, “What Happens Later,” a wily rom-com that she co-wrote, stars in and directed. A two-hander opposite David Duchovny, it distills moviedom conventions and plays with a different emotional palette; Ryan grappling with her own cinematic brand. It is only her second foray behind the camera and the first time she has appeared onscreen in seven years.She hasn’t missed the spotlight. “I feel like I had the ride, the Hollywood ride,” she said over a restorative soup lunch on a foggy day. “I kind of went to the moon already. So I don’t have giant ambitions to be back in that.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Vincent Asaro, Mobster Acquitted in Lufthansa Heist, Dies at 86

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      In a stunning verdict, he was found not guilty of participating in the storied 1978 theft, retold in the film “Goodfellas.” Then he went to prison over a road rage incident.Vincent Asaro, a career mobster who was found not guilty of murder and of helping to organize the staggering $6 million Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy Airport — one of the biggest cash heists in American history — only to be sentenced to prison when he was 82 over road-rage revenge, died on Sunday in Queens. He was 86.His death was confirmed by Gerald McMahon, a lawyer who successfully represented him in the Lufthansa case. No cause was given.The brazen theft in 1978 of $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewels from a vault at a Lufthansa hangar at Kennedy Airport figured prominently in the book “Wiseguy” (1985) by Nicholas Pileggi and the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas” (1990).The authorities had suspected the Mafia’s involvement, but the case remained unsolved and the investigation closed until Mr. Asaro was arrested in 2014, linking him and the Bonanno crime family to the robbery.He was also accused of using a dog chain in 1969 to strangle Paul Katz, the owner of a warehouse where Mr. Asaro and James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke, who was suspected of masterminding the Lufthansa theft (and who was portrayed by Robert DeNiro in “Goodfellas”), stored their stolen loot. Mr. Asaro and Mr. Burke had believed that Mr. Katz was an informer after the warehouse was raided by the police.The stolen van that authorities believed was used in the Lufthansa robbery at John F. Kennedy Airport in December 1978.Ken Murray/Associated PressThe indictment implicated Mr. Asaro in a sweeping conspiracy in which he was also accused of robbing FedEx (then Federal Express) of $1.25 million of gold salts, which can be used in medicinal treatments; bullying his way into the pornography business; and seeking, unsuccessfully, to bump off a cousin who had testified about an insurance scam.Mr. Asaro’s 2015 trial was a sensation.Though the robbery had taken place more than three decades earlier, it had been immortalized in the book and film, and even for younger New Yorkers it felt like a coda to the “Godfather” era.Moreover, the key witness against Mr. Asaro was another cousin, Gaspare Valenti, who had been a government informant since 2008 and had secretly recorded Mr. Asaro from 2010 to 2013.Mr. Valenti’s testimony on the stand was a jaw-dropping breach of the Mafia’s code of silence.It also revealed the devolution of a ruthless mobster who in his day job could suggest to customers which fences to buy from his store in Ozone Park, Queens, while in his other life he could impatiently advise a younger mob associate who had asked him how best to collect a debt: “Stab him today.”Mr. Asaro’s acquittal in 2015 was so stunning — not only to the prosecution, but to Mr. Asaro himself — that as he left the courthouse and got into a car, he giddily joked, “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”A jubilant Mr. Asaro leaving court in Brooklyn in 2015 after he was acquitted. As he got into a car, he giddily joked: “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesIronically, the automobile reference returned to haunt him two years later. He was accused of recruiting a mob associate, who in turn recruited John J. Gotti, the grandson of the former Gambino family boss, to torch the car of a motorist who had cut off Mr. Asaro at a traffic light.The driver was pursued at high speed by Mr. Asaro to no avail. The associate used law enforcement sources to track the license plate, after which Mr. Gotti and two other men located the car in Broad Channel, Queens, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze. An off-duty police officer parked nearby witnessed the auto-da-fe and pursued the arsonists, but they sped away in a Jaguar.Surprisingly, after a lifetime of denying culpability in crime, Mr. Asaro not only pleaded guilty but also apologized for what he acknowledged was “a stupid thing I did.”He could have been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The prosecution asked for 15, pointing out that although he had “participated in racketeering, murder, robbery, extortion, loan-sharking, gambling and other illegal conduct, he has served less than eight years in jail.”In December 2017, U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross ordered him to serve eight years — which, at 80, Mr. Asaro described as “a death sentence” — and to pay $21,276 in restitution to the owner of the car.“If he had not aged out of a life of crime at the age of 77,” Judge Ross said, referring to his age during the opening phases of the Lufthansa trial, over which she presided, “I have little hope that he will do so.”Two years after the Lufthansa trial, Mr. Asaro was sentenced to eight years in prison over a road rage incident, in which he ordered an associate to torch the car of a motorist who had cut him off at a traffic light.Justin Lane/European Pressphoto AgencyVincent A. Asaro was born on July 10, 1937, in Queens to Joseph and Victoria Asaro, who separated when he was a teenager. His uncle, Michael Zaffarano, owned buildings housing adult theaters, distributed pornography and worked as a bodyguard for Joseph Bonanno, who ran his eponymous crime family for nearly four decades.In 1957, Mr. Asaro married Theresa Myler; they divorced in 2005.Mr. Asaro’s survivors include his son, Jerome. He was arrested with his father in 2014, pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment.Mr. Asaro racked up numerous charges and convictions over the course of his life. Among them, he was convicted in federal court in 1970 and 1972 for the theft of an interstate shipment and burglary of a post office. In 1998, he was sentenced in state court in New York to four to 12 years in prison for enterprise corruption and criminal possession of stolen property.Three decades after the notorious Lufthansa heist, the beggarly but still choleric gangster had, according to prosecutors, squandered his $500,000 share of the loot on gambling and depleted whatever he had collected from his unforgiving manner of pursuing delinquent borrowers. He had hocked his jewelry and was seen shopping at a Waldbaum’s supermarket for orzo and lentils.According to a conversation recorded by Mr. Valenti that was played in court in 2015, he was even unwelcome at the local social club where he had celebrated the heist. “People hate me in there,” Mr. Asaro said. “I don’t pay my dues.”Even his estranged son, whom he had initiated into the Mafia and had by then outranked him, rebuffed him when he desperately sought to borrow money, according to another recording.Mr. Asaro had a stroke during his imprisonment for ordering the arson, which left him partly paralyzed. In 2020, he was granted a compassionate release from the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., because of his age and vulnerability to Covid-19.“He obviously had nine lives,” Mr. McMahon said after Mr. Asaro’s death. “But this must have been the tenth.”Joseph Goldstein More

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      How Truths Are Told at a Liquor Store in ‘The Holdovers’

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      The director Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.Seacia Pavao/Focus FeaturesIn “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.It’s time to come clean in this sequence from “The Holdovers,” a comedy set in 1970 during the holiday break at an all-boys boarding school. One student, Angus Tully (played by the newcomer Dominic Sessa) must stay on campus during the break, and a teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with watching him during this time.At one point, the two leave campus for a trip to Boston where Paul runs into, and lies to, an old college acquaintance. Angus confronts his teacher about the lie in this scene in a liquor store that plays out primarily in one take.“In general, if I have the right actors, I like the idea of doing pages of dialogue in single takes,” the film’s director, Alexander Payne, said in an interview. “I think it’s elegant. It’s a lovely way to work. And even going back to film school, I had a Polish directing teacher who was always trying to instill in us the beauty of the of the fluid master, the long take in which you choreograph your actors to the camera.”Rows of liquor bottles separate the characters during one exchange, helping to punctuate the narrative as Paul confesses an incident with his roommate at Harvard that led to dire consequences.For the scene, which was shot at a liquor store in Cambridge, Mass., Payne did a bit of hyperlocal casting. One comic line is delivered by a cashier played by Joe Howell, who actually worked at the store.Read the “Holdovers” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Martin and Francesca Scorsese, TikTok’s Dynamic Duo

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      The acclaimed director’s daughter, a filmmaker herself, has been peppering her feed with videos of her father, showing a rarely seen side of him.Step aside, Leonardo DiCaprio. Martin Scorsese seems to have found a new muse: Oscar, his daughter Francesca Scorsese’s aptly named miniature schnauzer.In a playful video posted to her TikTok last week, the director — just days before the release of his latest epic, “Killers of the Flower Moon” — conducted a very important, very serious audition with Oscar.After mentioning that he had been making films for nearly 50 years with brilliant actors — including with DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Ellen Burstyn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Margot Robbie — he said he was ready for a change.“I need to find something that I could take further and to another level,” he tells the pup who is sitting motionless across from him on a tufted ottoman. “What that is I’m not quite sure, but I’ve heard some extraordinary things about you.”“Oscar, show me fear,” he says. “Oscar, show me sadness, love, show me love, show me transcendence.” When the pup goes from sitting to lying, Scorsese yells out, “Brilliant! You’ve got the role.”Martin Scorsese with his latest film subject — Oscar, the miniature schnauzer.Francesca ScorseseThe tightly composed scene — which toggles between Scorsese and Oscar in a dimly lit study and tells the story from Oscar’s point of view — was imagined and directed by Francesca, an actress and filmmaker whose short dramatic film “Fish Out of Water” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, was shown at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and will screen at New York Film Week, which began Wednesday.The camerawork on the TikTok post was done from a low angle, “because Oscar’s kind of small, we thought it was so funny,” Francesca, 23, who is a graduate of New York University Tisch School of the Arts (which her father also attended), told The New York Times on Thursday. “Then when the reveal happens, it makes it a little bit more successful because we were actually experiencing it from Oscar’s position.” (She convinced him to lie down at the end with a piece of chicken, his favorite.)It’s a heartwarming insight into perhaps the most famous living director when he is not behind the camera. (Martin Scorsese was amazed, she said, at the speed in which the scene was edited and available to watch.) It also might introduce Scorsese, 80, to a younger generation who may not technically be old enough to watch his most famous works like “Taxi Driver” (1976), “Cape Fear” (1991) or “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013).It wasn’t his first appearance on Francesca’s TikTok. Amid posts that would be at home on any 23-year-old’s page — a cute video of her scrunching her nose to “You Wish” by Flyana Boss; another of her and a friend getting small tattoos and ear piercings — are several cameos of the elder Scorsese.A few weeks ago, in a post that has been viewed more than two million times, she tested his knowledge of slang terms. He was pretty spot on explaining the meaning of “tea” (“tell all you know”) and “ick” (“thoroughly repulsed”), but thought a “sneaky link” was a “personal peccadillo.” She corrected him: “It’s like a booty call.”They have worked together before, including on a Bleu de Chanel commercial this year with Timothée Chalamet. And Francesca says her father is eager to participate in these social media projects with her and sees value in the medium. “The people that he surrounds himself with keep him pretty young,” she said. “DiCaprio texts him and calls him the GOAT, calls him bro, you know they’re buddies.”When she originally explained the concept for the slang video to him, she used the expression GOAT as an example. “People keep saying that to me. People keep calling me the GOAT, but I don’t know what that means,” she recalled him telling her. It stands for “greatest of all time,” she replied, to which he said, “No way! I had no idea.”The TikTok video of Martin Scorsese guessing slang has been viewed over two million times.Francesca ScorseseIn July, she posted a compilation in appreciation of her father with the caption “He’s a certified silly goose.” The 22-second video, which has been viewed more than two million times, includes snippets of the director snuggling a tiny puppy and laughing hysterically in a tuxedo alongside De Niro and Harvey Keitel.“Fine, I’ll watch one of his movies,” a commenter wrote. “Omg love seeing this side of him,” wrote another.His lighthearted tone in these videos stands in contrast not only to his films, known for their haunting and violent themes, but also to some reflections he has made in his recent interviews. When GQ asked him about his own mortality in September, Scorsese said that he thought about it all the time. “I was a great collector, a great obsessive glutton for cinema and books, and now they all have to go away,” he said. “Once you know that you got to let go and you’re going to die, everything changes.”Providing a full picture of Martin Scorsese to the public is a significant part of why his daughter incorporates him on social media and why, years ago, she encouraged him to start an Instagram account, so the public could not only see him at work but also glimpse family photos and see him with his dogs. There’s also a lesser-seen part of his life, which is his role in caring for his wife and Francesca’s mother, Helen Morris, who has Parkinson’s. “He’s a lot more private about that stuff,” Francesca said. “People would think it’s this luxurious, glitz and glamour lifestyle. But then on the other hand, he’s in and out of hospital visits with her.”Some of that life experience was channeled into “Fish Out of Water,” her thesis film at N.Y.U., which was about a young mother who has an opportunity to reconnect with her estranged family after she is approached by her father with news of her mother’s failing health.While Martin Scorsese first dipped a toe into social media on Instagram, it was the introduction of TikTok that has allowed Francesca to give the world another perspective on her father, she said.“It’s really awesome to see that one of the most incredible filmmakers, he’s not just this big star that people see — I mean, he is — but he’s also a totally normal person that walks around in his pajamas, plays with his dogs and just helps his daughter with her math homework if he can,” she said. “People love seeing that side of him.” More

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      From ‘The Exorcist’ to ‘Bambi,’ These Movies Messed Us Up as Kids

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      Our first horror movie is often a memory imprinted on our brain and, for some of us, our heart.How young is too young to watch a scary movie?With Halloween approaching, we asked you, the reader, to share your experiences of this rite of passage. Nearly 1,000 people responded with indelible memories; for some, watching a scary movie at a young age inspired a lifelong love of horror movies.Among those we heard from, the most common ages to be exposed to a hair-raising movie seemed to be from 7 to 10, peaking at age 8. But many were also freaked out as teenagers and even as adults.You watched them at the local movie theater; on a black-and-white television; at your neighbor’s house when your parents thought you were being closely supervised; with an older sibling who let you tag along; or with a grandparent who thought the PG-rated “Poltergeist” was a great choice for movie night.“The Exorcist,” William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece that turns 50 this year, was mentioned most frequently as your first scary movie, followed by “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Birds” and “Psycho.” But even Disney’s 1942 animated film “Bambi” traumatized many.You also had us looking up lesser-known, eerie cinematic moments: the “wheelers” in “Return to Oz” (1985); the creepy hearse driver’s smile in “Burnt Offerings” (1976); the haunted organ music in “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966); and Large Marge’s jolting transformation in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985). We also appreciated the crisp, black-and-white splendor of Gort the robot in “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951) and the unexpectedly heart-wrenching ending to the Japanese Kaiju movie “Rodan” (1956).Here are some of our favorite responses.‘The Exorcist’ Still Haunts You”The Exorcist” was mentioned most frequently as your first scary movie.Warner Bros.“My parents were watching it, and it was back when TV only had like five or six stations over the airwaves. This was in a cabin in rural Michigan on a B&W set. I remember my parents telling me it was better to watch it to the end and see the resolution. Later that night, my father got food poisoning and was throwing up a lot. After watching that movie, I thought he was possessed.”— Bill Lester of Long Beach, Calif., on seeing the film at age 7.“My parents did not know and would not have approved. I am now 53 years old so we did not even own a VCR. A babysitter brought one over for the weekend, and we watched not only ‘The Exorcist’ but also ‘Deliverance’ (was our babysitter Hannibal Lecter?).”— Jeff Knops of Seattle, on seeing the film at age 9.“I was so frightened that I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head so that I didn’t have to watch it. It didn’t work. The sounds of the movie scared me just as much. I couldn’t sleep for months. Later I snuck into it a second time in order to overcome my fear. It was equally traumatic.”— Jay Frisch of New York, who sneaked into a theater to watch it at age 13.“My mother’s boyfriend would take me and my 5-year-old sister to horror movies. This was in the ’70s, when you could take kids to terrible movies at second-run theaters, apparently. He told us we were going to see “Benji,” the dog movie. This was not recognized as abuse back then. Many things were not. My sister still has nightmares about it — she’s 51 now.”— Jodi Peterson of Central Illinois, Ill., on seeing the film at age 8.Sketchy SupervisionDon’t let the Blob touch you!Paramount Pictures“One girl of 14 who had been tasked with watching me for the day suggested we all watch ‘The Ring.’ She called my mom to ask for permission, but my mom had misunderstood and thought I’d be watching ‘Lord of the Rings.’”— Holly of Arlington, Mass., on seeing “The Ring” at age 9.“My parents had absolutely forbidden me to watch this movie. Uncharacteristically, they forgot to tell the babysitter. In my memory, I barely slept a wink. I could not go to my parents for comfort, because they had forbidden me to watch the film. I could not go to my sister for comfort because she would certainly inform my parents. So there I lay, rigid, hypervigilant and terrified.”— Tess Tyson of Gig Harbor, Wash., on seeing “The Birds” at age 6.“My mother was out and my 10-year-old cousin was watching me. ‘The Blob’ was on the Friday Night Frights. He made the judgment call I could watch it with him, rather than risk missing any of it by putting me to bed.”— Eric Gansworth of Tuscarora Nation Indian Territory, Tuscarora, N.Y., on seeing “The Blob” at age 5.“I was spending the night with my friend Matt. His mom was at a party so it was just the two of us in the house. Matt’s house had HBO, which meant scary movies in all their R-rated glory. Ten-year-old machismo made us eager to watch. So we watched it. Jiffy Pop and Coke were consumed. Super fun! But THEN when it was time to go to bed, Matt said, “I’m going to sleep in my mom’s bed and wait for her to come home,” leaving me alone in his room in a sleeping bag. I was petrified. Absolutely petrified.”— Jason Heck of Belton, Mo., on seeing “Halloween II” at age 11.You Call These Children’s Movies?!The Wicked Witch of the West, played by Margaret Hamilton, fueled many of your nightmares.MGM“My earliest and most vivid encounter with sheer terror took place in a movie theater when I was 3 years old. It was at the Fresh Pond Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., not during a showing of ‘Cujo’ or ‘It,’ but another dog and clown horror classic (masquerading as a kids’ movie), ‘Air Bud.’ Still indelible in my memory is a particular scene in which the sottish, spiteful clown re-emerges intent on snatching Buddy, our endearing, basketball-dunking dog pal, away from his newfound, but kind, young companion. Even now, I’m not sure what was scarier: watching the clown reappear on the screen, or the deafening, collective cry of fear that erupted from me and the rest of the audience of toddlers.”— Clare Goslant of Cambridge, Mass., on seeing “Air Bud” at age 3.“The wicked witch was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. I screamed and shut my eyes every time she appeared. That same year, after I had watched ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ I was cast as a wicked witch in my second-grade play. I cried and cried when I came home. I had wanted to play the fairy princess. My mother taught me how to cackle. And she said I’d be the star of the show. She was right.”— Cathy Arden of New York, on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 7.“It was supposed to be a children’s movie, but the scene of Bambi’s mother dying in a forest was something I found terrifying!”— Carter Bancroft of Huntington, N.Y., on seeing “Bambi” at age 5.“My older sister and I were dropped off at the big movie theater for the Saturday matinee. She left me all by myself and went off with her girlfriends. This was before parental helicopter-ing. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would later be broadcast annually on TV. Kids were able to cuddle with grown-ups in the safety of their own home, with the happy songs, cute little Munchkins and Dorothy’s funny friends. There’s no place like home. That’s a whole different process than I experienced, and it was a whole different picture for me. It was not so much my young age, but watching a family movie in that wild setting, having such a powerful effect on my senses, made it my first scary movie. I was scarred for life.”— Don Feiler of Mattituck, N.Y., on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 5.‘Innocent’ FearJamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in “Halloween II.”Universal Pictures“The menacing, manic Caligari with his long white hair and elongated hat terrified me as he danced around the tilted landscape and jagged windows. I could not wait for it to be over and for the threatening nonsense to stop. When it was, and my heart stopped racing, I realized I just had my first experience of art.”— Kathleen Brady of New York, on seeing “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” at age 14.“I’m sure I played it cool in front of my friends, but I laid in bed that night filled with dread, fear and regret. Michael Myers was coming for me. I finally went into my parent’s bedroom and woke up my mom and told her what was necessary at the moment — I wasn’t feeling well and needed her help. She took my temperature and tucked me back into bed and I think could tell I just really needed her right then. She sat on my bed and read me stories from a book she kept at her own bedside until the screams of Jamie Lee Curtis were replaced by the laughter of Erma Bombeck, and I was able to drift off to sleep. To this day I’ve never told my mom the truth of why I needed her that night. Maybe she knew all along. But I’m sure it was the last night of her soothing one of her babies to sleep.“My mother is now 90 years old and her senior living facility is showing Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ this weekend. I’m planning to go watch it with her and perhaps afterward we will drink hot tea, finally tell this story, and read her Erma Bombeck book to distract us from any lingering fear. And isn’t that why we watch scary movies? They play out our fears and anxieties on the screen and remind us to find safety in those people and places who make us feel loved.”— Beth Martinez of Austin, Texas, on sneaking into a showing of “Halloween II” at age 14.“The sheer volume of spiders haunts me to this day. I am now a horror cinephile, but that movie wrecked me. The climax has spiders pouring out of the walls, the pipes, the television screen. And when it ended, I experienced this crazy sense of euphoria and pride at having survived something so terrifying. Unfortunately, it also instilled a lifelong fear of all things creepy and crawly — but honestly? I’ve been chasing the high of that first horror movie my whole life.”— Andrew Gombas of Queens, N.Y., on seeing “Arachnophobia” at age 8.“Being frightened by things that can’t really happen is both thrilling and teaches you perspective. Now that I’m grown up, I have a hard time watching scary movies because of all of the scary things that have happened to me in real life. I miss that ‘innocent’ fear.”— Erin Walla of Norway, Mich., on seeing “Horror of Dracula” at age 7.What Were My Parents Thinking?“Here’s Johnny!” is one of the classic phrases spoken by Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.”Warner Brothers“I actually watched this with my dad. Forty-three years later, I continue to jokingly ask, ‘Why did you think this was a good idea?’”— Derik Frederiksen of Seattle, on seeing “The Shining” at age 6.“The fact that no one in the room thought it was a bad idea for a child to be watching gave me true Gen X cred.”— Lynwood Lord, Media, Pa., on seeing “Alien” at age 9.“Why the title didn’t give them pause, I’ll never understand. I had my eyes covered through most of it, so I didn’t see much of the film; the soundtrack was scary enough. When the movie ended, the lights came up in the theater, and still, the stunned crowd sat silent, no one moving. I couldn’t understand why no one was running out of there, and in my little-kid, high-pitched voice, I yelled out, ‘Let’s get out before it starts again!’”— Joey Moskowitz of Paradise Valley, Ariz., on seeing “Psycho” at age 5.Skeptical, but Still ScaredSadako in “Ringu,” the Japanese original of “The Ring.”Basara Pictures“I remember being scared but also dubious of the entire premise of the movie. I just didn’t believe it was plausible for you to run for your life and the guy to catch up with its leisurely stroll.”— Eva Edith of Wasco, Calif., on seeing “Halloween IV” at age 8.“I remembered the scene of Sadako crawling out of the television set very vividly. The only scene that I covered my eyes was when they played the ‘cursed video’ that would give you a call after you’d seen it. Funnily enough, my mom also looked away from the screen. We were a superstitious Asian family, so we weren’t taking any chances.”— Ryan Oquiza, Ashburn, Va., on seeing “Ringu” at age 7.“I remember trying to act cool and not scared, surrounded by my newfound middle school peers. I still had to hide my eyes sometimes. The scene where the demon pops up behind the dad scarred me for life. I had to keep my bedroom door open with the TV on in the next room for the next six months. I swore my house was haunted after that movie.”— Sheridan Posschelle of Denver, on seeing “Insidious Part 1” at age 13. More

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      Sofia Coppola Makes It Look Easy. It Isn’t.

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      Sofia Coppola is so drawn to the idea of becoming that she sometimes finds it hard to grasp that she became. Over eight feature films — including her latest, “Priscilla,” about the young Priscilla Presley’s tumultuous relationship with Elvis — she has delved deeply into the liminal stage that is a young woman’s coming-of-age. So you can hardly blame Coppola that after staying in that head space for so long, it comes as a surprise that 25 years have passed since filming her debut feature, “The Virgin Suicides.”“It’s weird to reflect back at having a body of work,” she told me. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a grown-up now and actually established, not just starting off.’”It was a sunny October afternoon in Los Angeles, and we were sitting on a restaurant terrace at the Academy Museum, where the 52-year-old director had come to tout “Priscilla” and autograph copies of “Sofia Coppola Archive,” a new art book assembled from the boxes of letters, photographs and reference images she had collected throughout her career. After the signing, she participated in a conversation moderated by members of the academy’s teen council, who asked Coppola questions about screenwriting and style as a form of self-expression.Teenagers and young women are still her demographic sweet spot, and Coppola, who is now the mother of two teenage daughters, met the young moderators’ queries with encouragement. “These are such good questions from the teen council, right?” she said to the audience. Many of the people attending the panel had come dressed to impress her, though Coppola was simply attired in a navy T-shirt with black trousers and ballet flats, her fingernails painted the same light-pink hue as the cover of her book.The director has released an art book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” that compiles letters, photos and reference images. She herself has become an inspiration for younger artists.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn a profession where so many directors are chatty, high-strung neurotics, Coppola is the picture of placidity. But her even keel shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of caring. In a letter to Bill Murray included in “Archive,” Coppola describes a low moment when it seemed Murray couldn’t be reached to star in “Lost in Translation” (2003) and friends coaxed her out to dinner to consider other options. They soon found that her personal investment in Murray’s casting was more fraught than they could have known. “I broke down in tears at the restaurant (something I never do),” Coppola wrote.This is all to say that Coppola is so serene — and her films, at their best, so sublime — that people may assume it all comes easily to her. (That she hails from a filmmaking family led by a titanic father, Francis Ford Coppola, can only further that notion.) But over the course of our lunch, Coppola was candid about the issues she faces this far into her Oscar-winning career. Making movies the way she wants remains so difficult that all the recent genuflection — like the moment early in our lunch when a young fan with a “Virgin Suicides” shoulder bag came over to praise Coppola for being “such a light” — can still catch her off guard.“To be treated with that kind of respect, it’s surreal,” Coppola said. “Maybe that’s why I’m surprised when I’m in this context, because I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut. I don’t think I’m professionally treated in the way that I am when I encounter these young people.”Early in her career, she was told that while women would go to a film starring men, the reverse wasn’t true. Though the prevailing attitude in Hollywood has evolved somewhat since then — or at least executives have learned to stop saying the quiet part out loud — Coppola still faces plenty of skepticism when trying to budget any female-fronted project. “The people in charge of giving money are usually straight men, still,” she said. “There’s always people in lower levels who are like myself, but then the bosses have a certain sensibility.”On the press tour for “Priscilla,” young women keep telling Coppola that they plan to be filmmakers, too. Their ambition gives her hope, though it’s tempered by two and a half decades of experience, including the tough battles she fought to save her new movie.“If it’s so hard for me to get financing as an established person, I worry about younger women starting out,” she said. “It’s surprising that it’s still a struggle.”Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley. The movie’s budget was cut at the last minute and Coppola had to adjust.Sabrina Lantos/A24COPPOLA FIRST THUMBED through Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me,” as a vacation read years ago. Expecting little more than a fun page-turner, she found herself unexpectedly riveted by Priscilla’s predicament: Like the title character of Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” she was a teenager who married into royalty, then found herself trapped in a palace that offered everything and nothing. To Coppola, who was just 18 when she gave a harshly criticized performance in her father’s film “The Godfather Part III,” Priscilla’s feeling of being scrutinized by an entire country at such a formative age was all too relatable.Still, it took some time for the story to click into place. Coppola had gone into 2020 readying her biggest project ever, an adaptation of “The Custom of the Country,” Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, as a five-hour limited series for Apple TV+. But though the streamer has a reputation for spending big on prestige projects, Coppola said executives there weren’t keen on the lead character, the ambitious social climber Undine Spragg, and began to tighten their purse strings accordingly. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment.)“The idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing,” Coppola noted. “But that’s what I’m saying about who’s in charge.”A friend prodded her to find something new to direct, and while laid up in bed for a week with Covid, Coppola took another look at “Elvis and Me” and suddenly saw with crystal clarity how it could work as a film. Even though Baz Luhrmann had just gone into production on the glitzy biopic “Elvis,” Coppola was undaunted: She figured if his version became a hit — and it did, grossing $288 million worldwide and earning eight Oscar nominations — then it would only juice interest in Priscilla’s side of the story.Coppola called up Presley, who had been a fan of hers since “Lost in Translation,” and after careful wooing, the 78-year-old came aboard the project as an executive producer. On the advice of her frequent collaborator Kirsten Dunst, Coppola hired Cailee Spaeny, best known for “Mare of Easttown” and “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” to play Priscilla from ages 14 to 28. Casting Elvis was harder: The real-life icon left impossibly big shoes to fill, and Luhrmann’s leading man, Austin Butler, was about to be Oscar-nominated for his robust spin on the role. Coppola wanted her film to show Elvis’s darker, domestic side, and to play him, she selected the fast-rising Australian actor Jacob Elordi from the HBO series “Euphoria.”“A lot of those movies didn’t get seen,” Coppola said, referring to her earlier work, “and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe project was coming together quickly, but on a tight budget that allowed little room for error. Luhrmann had made “Elvis” for $85 million and Coppola had less than a quarter of that to spend on a lavish period piece that would span a decade and a half and recreate 1960s Memphis in wintry Toronto. Then, just before the film’s start date last October, a key piece of financing fell through. To save “Priscilla,” which was now $2 million short of its budget, Coppola and the producer Youree Henley were faced with an impossible task: An entire week would have to be cut from the film’s already slim shoot. With so little to work with, would “Priscilla” fall apart just as Coppola’s Apple series had?“We were like, ‘If we hold hands and jump out of the plane together, we’ll just figure it out as we’re descending,’” said Henley, who huddled with Coppola to slash 10 pages from the script.“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Coppola said about the mad scramble to make “Priscilla” work in just 30 days. Though the completed film feels refined and delicate, the shoot was anything but, since key locations were only briefly available and hairstyles, clothing and character ages changed radically between scenes. On the first day of shooting, Spaeny played Priscilla as a teenager graduating from high school; on the second, she shot the final scene as a single mother in her late 20s emerging from the gates of Graceland.It’s a wonder any of it tracks, except that Coppola’s sensibility is so specific, and her actors so eager to please her, that each scene feels distinctly of a piece. At its Venice Film Festival premiere in early September, the film received strong reviews and secured Spaeny the Volpi Cup for best actress, while an emotional Priscilla Presley told Coppola, “You did your homework.”“I still can’t believe our movie came together,” Coppola said now. And though mounting it was difficult, she recalled that while on set, she was in her element like never before.“In the beginning, I was just kind of figuring it out,” she admitted, speaking of her career. “And now, making this film ‘Priscilla,’ I felt like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this.’ All the years of experience start to gel.”LATER IN THE LUNCH, we were interrupted by a 25-year-old who hoped that Coppola would sign her book. She had on the sort of frilly dress that Marie Antoinette would have gone gaga for, with a constellation of arm tattoos that snaked out from underneath her lace sleeves.“My name is Sofia,” the fan said shyly. “I’m named after you.”With a quavering voice, the young woman explained that when her parents immigrated from Panama, Coppola’s movies were among the first they watched. That’s how she got her name and accrued, over time, the desire to follow her idol into filmmaking. “You have no idea the impact you’ve had on my life,” the second Sofia said, a tear running down her cheek.Coppola, who said she lived and worked in a “little bubble,” is always surprised when she meets people who connect this strongly to her work. “A lot of those movies didn’t get seen, and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them,” she told me.She remembered that Paramount Classics was cautious about releasing “The Virgin Suicides” in the spring of 2000 — “They thought girls were going to kill themselves if they saw it” — and that for a while after it came out, she watched her male contemporaries (including her then-husband, Spike Jonze) book plenty of jobs she wasn’t getting.“I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut,” Coppola said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMaybe it took the world some time to catch up. Though “Archive” is full of photos that Coppola has used for inspiration, Coppola’s own work now seems like the mood board for any number of artists, from the photographer Petra Collins to the singer Lana Del Rey. On television, you can detect the influence of her anachronistic take on “Marie Antoinette” in high-spirited historical remixes like “Bridgerton” and “The Great,” while Coppola often trends on TikTok, much to the annoyance of her daughters, Romy and Cosima, the only teenage girls who aren’t especially impressed by her oeuvre. “They think I’m lame,” Coppola said, though when 16-year-old Romy posted a clever viral TikTok this year, many wondered if she might follow in her mother’s footsteps as a filmmaker.A line can also be drawn from Coppola’s early work to the films of Greta Gerwig. They are two of only seven women to be nominated for the best director Oscar, and both got those nods early in their careers: Coppola was nominated at 32 for “Lost in Translation,” which won her the Oscar for original screenplay, while Gerwig got her directing nomination at 34 for “Lady Bird” (2017). Does Coppola think the blockbuster success of Gerwig’s “Barbie” could help more female-fronted projects find financing?“I’m sure it’ll make things easier, but that’s a very specific kind of filmmaking with, I would imagine, a lot of executives involved,” she said. “So that’s a different thing.”Coppola isn’t especially interested in directing blockbusters, though she once tried to mount a big-screen take on “The Little Mermaid” for Universal and was briefly courted for the final “Twilight” film. “I’ve never expected to be mainstream,” she said. “The culture that I always liked growing up was the side culture.” All she really wants is the ability to tell her stories with the budgets that befit them, and with people around who support her sensibility.But in the era of the comic-book tentpole, even that modest ask can be rejected as too much. Coppola meets frequently with the director Tamara Jenkins — she calls their friendship a “two-person ‘women in film’ coffee group” — to compare the battle scars they’ve earned from trying to get movies made: “We’re like, ‘It’s so hard. Why do we do this?’”Maybe that’s a question with no answer. Or maybe it’s an answer Coppola just has to keep relearning.“When you finish a project, you’re like, oh,” she said, as a Mona Lisa smile appeared on her face. “You have to do it, because it bugs you until you do.” More

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      A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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      The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More