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      What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

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      A new edit of ‘The French Connection’ removes a racial slur. But nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture.The remarkable thing about the censored scene is how ordinary it feels if you’ve watched a police procedural made before, say, 2010. It’s in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” from 1971. Two narcotics cops — Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, and Buddy (Cloudy) Russo, played by Roy Scheider — are at the precinct, following an undercover operation during which a drug dealer ended up slashing Russo with a knife. The injury has left Russo struggling to put on his coat. “Need a little help there?” Doyle chuckles, then adds an ethnic jab: “You dumb guinea.” Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Here Doyle points a slur at the Black dealer: “Never trust a nigger.” Russo: “He could have been white.” Doyle: “Never trust anyone.” Then he invites Russo out for a drink, and they trade masturbation jokes as they head through the door.But perhaps you should forget I mentioned any of this, because you’re now a lot less likely to see it in the film. In June, viewers of the Criterion Channel’s streaming version noticed that much of the scene had been edited out, without announcement or comment; people viewing via Apple TV and Amazon found the same. It was reported that the version available on Disney+ in Britain and Canada remains unedited, suggesting that whoever authorized the cut imagined the moment to be unfit for American audiences in particular. (Disney owns the rights to the film, having acquired Fox, its original distributor, in 2019.) The domestic market now sees a slapdash sequence that has Russo entering the room, clutching his forearm, followed by a jerky jump to the door, where Doyle waits. The disparaging exchange is, of course, omitted. What remains is a glitch, a bit of hesitation, the suggestion of something amiss. “Never trust anyone,” indeed.Bad jump cuts create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play.The conversation that has surrounded this edit — a belated alteration to the winner of an Academy Award for best picture — is just the latest of many such controversies. In 2011, one publisher prepared an edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that replaced instances of that same racial slur with “slave.” In February, Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company confirmed that new editions of the author’s works, published in 2022, had been tweaked to substitute language that might offend contemporary readers, including descriptors like “fat” and “ugly.” (After a backlash, Puffin said it would keep the original versions for sale, too.) Then, of course, there are the right-wing campaigns to excise passages from instructional texts or simply remove books from public schools and libraries.This particular change to “The French Connection” came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. “The French Connection” was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the “inner city,” dialogue underlining their “good cop, bad cop” dynamic; in certain ways, it’s not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyle’s eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running “alcoholic cop” trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing — another ongoing genre cliché. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, “rough around the edges” — but, of course, we’re ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire”: figures built on the idea that “good cop, bad cop” can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.Attempting to edit out just one of a character’s flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldn’t be using racial epithets. But they’re probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too — like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a film’s legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isn’t to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinema’s great avatar of paranoia — a star in three of this country’s most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Enemy of the State” — then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that. This is a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor.Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into “The French Connection” reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if it’s unclear from which direction it’s reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning — and living — in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained. You can, of course, find the unedited precinct scene on YouTube. (Just as you can find altered scenes from other films, from “Fantasia” to “Star Wars.”) It’s just packaged inside an interview with Hackman about his approach to portraying Doyle, whom he disliked. “The character was a bigot and antisemitic and whatever else you want to call him,” the actor says. “That’s who he was. It was difficult for me to say the N-word; I protested somewhat, but there was a part of me that also said, ‘That’s who the guy is.’ I mean, you like him or not, that’s who he was. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” Turns out you can.Opening illustration: Source photographs from 20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesNiela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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      Andrew Ridgeley on George Michael and Life After Wham!

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      “The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band,” but he is content with the duo’s short career, which is chronicled in a new documentary.If you weren’t a teenager in 1984, it might be hard to understand this, but here goes: There are Gen X-ers who remember where they were the first time they saw the video for the Wham! clap-along pop anthem “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”In it, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, the heartthrob frontmen of Wham!, wear big smiles and beachy short shorts as they perform their infectious bop — titled after a note Ridgeley had once left on his family’s refrigerator — for a small crowd of adoring fans. There were fingerless gloves, neon face paint, white “Choose Life” T-shirts that had nothing to do with abortion: It was a new-wave dance party for cool kids who thought Mötley Crüe sucked.Ridgeley, who turned 60 in January, remembers making it as great fun.“It was our first video with an audience,” he said during a recent video interview from his home in London. “The atmosphere was really quite excitable and exciting.”Ridgeley and his bandmate are the subject of “Wham!,” a new documentary that premieres on Wednesday on Netflix. Directed by Chris Smith, it charts the British group’s climb to pop stardom, beginning with its ferocious appearance on the music show “Top of the Pops” in 1982, through the global success that followed the albums “Fantastic” (1983) and “Make It Big” (1984), and finishing with the 1986 farewell concert in London.The film, which is itself directed like a power-pop video, explains how the duo’s modern mix of disco, funk, pop and soul, in songs like “Young Guns (Go for It),” “Careless Whisper” and “Freedom,” helped make Wham! one of the biggest pop groups of the late 20th century, even though it lasted just four years. Unlike bands that split over artistic or personal disagreements, Wham! didn’t have a rise and fall. “It was just a rise and they called it a day,” Smith said.They didn’t break up either, said Ridgeley, but rather “brought Wham! to a close in a manner of our own choosing.”Michael and Ridgeley at the height of their early popularity.NetflixFans might be disappointed to learn that in the documentary Ridgeley is heard but not seen as he appears today: debonair and patrician, with silver hair and a still-cheeky smile. Smith said it would have thrown the film’s mythic aspirations off balance if Ridgeley were on camera but not Michael, who died seven years ago at 53.After Wham!, Ridgeley told me, he and Michael were “no longer living in each other’s pockets” as they had done since they were kids. But their bond was fixed.If Ridgeley is tired of being known mostly for his friendship with Michael, he didn’t show it. He brightened when chatting about Michael, whose loss left Ridgeley feeling “like the sky had fallen in,” as he said in 2017. But he didn’t seem into talking much about his life now, other than to say he enjoyed cycling.The documentary includes archival media coverage and tons of concert footage, including scenes of groundbreaking shows in 1985, when Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform in China.But it’s Ridgeley’s mother who supplied the most personal treasures. Since her son’s grade-school days making music with Michael, she kept about 50 meticulously organized scrapbooks stuffed with photos, reviews and other ephemera. They include snapshots from the mid-1970s when Ridgeley first got to know Michael as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, the son of a Cypriot father and a British mother.Ridgeley was also the son of an immigrant father — his dad was Egyptian — and a British mother, and he hit it off immediately with the boy he called Yog, a nickname he used often in our interview. The scrapbooks paint a vivid portrait of boys who loved Queen and “Saturday Night Fever” and desired to make music a career.“The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band, write songs and perform,” Ridgeley said with a 14-year-old’s enthusiasm in his voice, adding that fame and celebrity “were never a motivating factor for either of us.”Ridgeley said he and Michael knew Wham! would have a finite life span because Michael’s songwriting began “developing and evolving in a way and at a speed” that Wham! couldn’t accommodate. In November, Michael will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Since Wham!’s heyday, Ridgeley has battled the perception that he’s famous only because he was in a duo with a more talented artist. The documentary makes a case in his favor though, tracing how Ridgeley, a guitarist, collaborated with the composer and performer Michael.Still, Ridgeley acknowledged that his musicianship wasn’t in the same league as Michael’s, “one of the finest, if not the finest, singing voices of his generation,” he said, sounding like a proud brother.Ridgeley said his bond with Michael endured even after Wham! ended.NetflixWhen Michael came out to him after they filmed the video for “Club Tropicana” (1983), 15 years before he did so publicly, Ridgeley said he supported him with love and a shrug. Michael was more freaked out by how his father might react than how the public would, Ridgeley said; had Michael come out during the Wham! years, Ridgeley said he and fans would have had his back.“I didn’t think it was going to affect our success, and in the long term it probably wouldn’t,” he said. “It would have been difficult for a while for him, there’s no doubt about that. It would have required management by us all. But after the initial sensationalism, it’s on the table isn’t it?”After Wham!, Ridgeley released a 1990 solo album that flatlined and he did a short stint as a Formula 3 driver, but he has otherwise stayed out of the limelight. The British tabloids have kept breathless tabs on his love life — including his 25-year relationship with Keren Woodward, a former member of another ’80s pop group, Bananarama — much as they did when they gave him the Wham!-era nickname Randy Andy.Ridgeley didn’t pursue fame further because being in Wham! gave him “everything he wanted,” said Shirlie Kemp, a friend from school and a Wham! backup singer. Not just professionally.“I don’t think I ever met anyone else who was on par with George the way Andrew was, intellectually and with a sense of humor,” said Kemp, whose husband is Martin Kemp of the ’80s band Spandau Ballet. “It was the best relationship I’d ever seen George have with anyone.”Ridgeley said “few stones remain unturned” as he’s worked the past five years on projects that are all-things-Wham! In 2019, he published a memoir, “Wham! George Michael & Me,” and had a cameo that year in the romantic-comedy “Last Christmas,” which was inspired by the group’s eponymous chart-topping holiday single. Later this month comes “Echoes From the Edge of Heaven,” a Wham! singles collection.He still seems to be in awe of what he and his best friend made together.“I could never quite really get that we had achieved the same kind of success as the artists that we revered like gods when we were growing up,” he said. “We were playing Wembley Stadium, the same place Elton John played. You can say, ‘I am the same.’ But in your own mind, you’re never the same.” More

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      ‘Wham!’ Review: They Made It Big, Then Broke Up

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      A new movie documents George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s storming of the pop airwaves as the duo Wham! and laughs past the thorny questions.The new documentary about George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley and the music they made as Wham! — it’s just called “Wham!” — found me in a moment of need for a nostalgic, fantastical elixir, something short, sweet and tangential to my feeling of national blues. For one thing, Wham!, the duo, made soul music that popped. And the movie dances past all of the thorny moral and ethical questions of white people making Black stuff. Those questions don’t exist at all in this movie. That’s the fantasy. And I’m here for it. But also: Wham! didn’t have any thorns.Here were two white boys from England of solid Greek Cypriot (George) and Egyptian (Andrew) stock, born during Motown’s ascent in the early 1960s and, in adolescence, bonded to each other as disco was handing the party baton to new wave and rap. They synthesized it all (plus a little Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury, and some Billy Joel) into a genre whose only other alchemists, really, were Hall and Oates. In every one of the duo’s roughly two dozen songs — including “Everything She Wants,” “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “I’m Your Man,” jams all — there’s influence but, in the movie’s conjuring, no anxiety. Race doesn’t quite exist here.The film doesn’t bother with journalism or criticism or music history. Just a lot of pictures and archival interviews, performance footage, outtakes and music videos. It’s essentially adapted, by the director Chris Smith and some very busy editors, from scrapbooks that Ridgeley’s mother kept, celebrating everything from the duo’s first attempt to storm the airwaves in 1981 to its acrimony-free breakup in 1986. That’s where things end, a year before the release of Michael’s megahit album “Faith,” and decades before his death in 2016 at 53. There’s no mention made, either, of Ridgeley’s misapprehended, out-of-print solo album from 1990, “Son of Albert.”There aren’t even any talking heads. The disembodied voices of Michael and Ridgeley guide the whole thing — rumination and memory as narration. (Most of Michael’s comes from a BBC Radio interview.) They explain how they met as schoolkids in the mid-1970s and took over a mini-block of 1980s culture. You get to hear Ridgeley still warmly call Michael by his nickname, Yog, for he was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, and see both their looks pinball from leather bar to Richard Simmons.Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut. You’re permitted to embrace Michael’s dexterous approach to Black music and Ridgeley’s affable interpretation of Michael’s blueprint as the way — a way — things could be. Easy, frictionless. You hear Michael rhyme on “Wham! Rap” just about as bodaciously as Grandmaster Flash or with some of Kurtis Blow’s humor, and no cold sweats follow. The homework had clearly been done. So, instead you say: He just … had It.I mean, the early 1980s were awash in young white Brits making hits, at least partially, out of slicked-up Motown: ABC, Bananarama, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Soft Cell. I’d say that sound came most naturally to Michael; it seemed most elastic to him. He really could make the most of a “do do do” or a “yeah yeah.” He had a knack for tattoo melodies and chord progressions so juicy that you want to bite into every section of almost every song.Michael learned early on how to shade his singing. He could get it to coo and wail and susurrate; Ridgeley, played a feisty, insinuating, shirt-unbuttoning guitar, an element I can now hear (and thanks to this film, appreciate). They made three albums in as many years, then stopped when the costs of fame became too much for Ridgeley but were barely meeting Michael’s expectations for himself. Wham!, for Michael, was the ground floor. To hear both men tell it, he was the stronger songwriter, and he really knew how to produce a record.My favorite story in the documentary involves a trip to Memphis that Michael took to record “Careless Whisper” with the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section under the supervision of the producer Jerry Wexler, another legend. Michael didn’t like what they did with the song. The movie lets you hear some of it, and the trademark warmth is what seems to be missing. There’s something almost metronomic about it. (If there were a moment for somebody to come in and do some explaining, this would be it. What exactly displeased George and eventually Andrew?) But I love this story because it stars these different generations of white soul musicians with divergent tastes in Black music. Maybe Wexler and the boys didn’t hear “Careless Whisper” the way Michael did. But he had the confidence (and the nerve) to take it home and redo it until it became the screen of silk and smoke we know today.“I’m never gonna dance again, the way I danced with you”? What a work of melodrama! Where’d it come from? Who did Michael do wrong? “Wham!” alludes to personal struggles — Michael with his sexuality; Ridgeley with partying. Michael recounts coming out to Ridgeley early on but to almost no one else. Success becomes his identity. In the film, that identity’s lowest moment happens at the end of 1984, when “Last Christmas,” on its way to being Wham!’s fourth U.K. chart-topper in the calendar year, is kept from the spot by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the all-star charity-for-Africa record, which Wham! is on. Michael is bummed that he keeps himself stuck at No. 2.Michael chose to let ambition define him. But there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet. (The bouncy, blow-dried music videos were always a different story: What closet?) Meanwhile, the movie about the men who made these songs is all bright side. A little desp rarely sounded so good. A pair of more candid, if more conventional, documentaries exist about the darkness and light of Michael’s life. This one? It’s a prequel, one that personifies the Wham! Experience: over before you know it.Wham!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Vietnam Bans ‘Barbie’ Movie Over South China Sea Map

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      Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film has been banned in the country for its use of a map depicting territory that both China and Vietnam claim as their own.There will be no “Barbie” world in Vietnam this summer.The Southeast Asian nation has banned the release of “Barbie,” the upcoming film directed by Greta Gerwig, because of a scene that includes the so-called nine-dash line, a U-shaped dotted line on a map showing territory in the South China Sea that both China and Vietnam claim as their own.The nine-dash line is used in Chinese maps to mark its claim over as much as 90 percent of the South China Sea.While an international tribunal at The Hague ruled in 2016 that China had no legal basis for its claims, Beijing has yet to concede to the ruling and has instead sought to dominate the waters, carrying out aggressive incursions and developing military installations.Vietnam, with its long-held acrimonious ties to China, said on Monday that the new film would not be released in the country because of its use of the line, according to Vi Kien Thanh, the head of the Vietnam Cinema Department. The decision was made by the National Film Appraisal and Classification Board, which is responsible for licensing and censoring foreign movies in Vietnam.Responding to state media on Monday, Mr. Thanh confirmed that “Barbie” was banned because of “the illegal image of the ‘cow’s tongue line’ in the film,” using the common Vietnamese phrase for the nine-dash line.Vietnam Plus, a state newspaper, wrote that the decision to include the line “distorts the truth, violates the law in general and violates sovereignty of Vietnamese territory in particular.”China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all have territorial claims in the South China Sea, which include islands and other strategic maritime features.“Barbie,” which stars Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and a host of other celebrities, was scheduled to be released in Vietnam on July 21. Some moviegoers in the country welcomed the government’s ban. Hoang Xuan Bach, a 23-year-old university student, said the producers should have known better than to include the map.“I hope this movie will flop,” he said.This is not the first time Vietnam has banned films for including scenes with the nine-dash line. “Uncharted,” a 2022 action film by Sony featuring the actor Tom Holland, and DreamWorks’ 2019 animation “Abominable,” were both dropped from the nation’s box offices for the same reason.Vo Kieu Bao Uyen More

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      Paul Justman, Who Shed Light on Motown’s Unsung Heroes, Dies at 74

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      After establishing himself as a leading music video director in the 1980s, he found acclaim with his 2002 documentary about session musicians.During the filming of a climactic scene in his critically acclaimed documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a celebration of the unheralded session musicians behind countless 1960s hits, Paul Justman could have found himself foiled by Detroit’s harsh winter.Arriving at the city’s MacArthur Bridge one morning to interview the guitarist Eddie Willis about Motown’s fateful move to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Justman and his crew found the bridge blanketed with fresh snow, seemingly impenetrable. But the director was undeterred.“To Paul, this was an opportunity,” his brother, the musician Seth Justman, said by phone. “The glistening snow helped accentuate the feeling of loss.”Throughout his career, Mr. Justman blended a photographer’s eye with a musician’s feel for the pulse of pop as a prominent director of music documentaries and videos.He died on March 7 at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 74. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his brother.While Mr. Justman enjoyed a long and varied career, he is best known for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” That film, released in 2002, brought to light the lasting contributions made to pop music by the session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers, who fueled countless era-defining Motown hits despite working in obscurity.“This salute to the literally unsung and underrecognized studio heroes of Motown is so good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment,” Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote in a review. “And it is one of the few nonfiction films that will have you walking out humming the score, if you’re not running to the nearest store to buy Motown CDs.”Among Mr. Justman’s other documentaries were “The Doors: Live in Europe 1968” (1990) and “Deep Purple: Heavy Metal Pioneers” (1991). He also made features, including the 1983 battle-of-the-bands tale “Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel,” which he directed with Richard Baskin, and “Gimme an ‘F,’” a romp about cheerleaders, released the next year.Still, none of his films could match the ubiquity of the music videos he made in the 1980s, capturing the era’s Day-Glo look and Pop Art sensibility as MTV reshaped the pop landscape.Mr. Justman brought a quirky sense of deadpan to videos like the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone,” Diana Ross’s “Muscles” and Rick Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” as well as the MTV staple “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band — for which his brother happened to play keyboards.Some of the studio musicians behind the Motown sound got back together for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” among them, from left, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina. Joe Hunter and Bob Babbitt.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoPaul Evans Justman was born on Aug. 27, 1948, in Washington, the second of three children of Simon Justman, a government systems analyst, and Helen (Rebhan) Justman, a school drama teacher.Growing up in Washington, in Newton, Mass., and in Margate City, N.J., Mr. Justman was drawn to music (he played drums and guitar in rock bands as a teenager) and dance (at 9, he choreographed his own routines for courses at the Boston Conservatory). He also fell in love with photography.After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he moved to New York City and took a job with a team making short films about American culture for Swedish television.He soon started working as an assistant to Robert Frank, the lauded documentary photographer and filmmaker. He eventually served as an editor on Mr. Frank’s notorious warts-and-all documentary about the Rolling Stones’ raucous 1972 North American tour, which became famous, in part for its obscene name, although it was never officially released.Mr. Justman, who moved to Los Angeles in 1980, was also a fixture behind the scenes with the J. Geils Band as it was climbing from the clubs of Boston toward fame. In the mid-1970s, he made a short documentary, “Postcards,” about the high-energy blues-rock band’s frenzied life on the road. That film, which featured appearances by the rock critic Lester Bangs, was broadcast on PBS.In addition to his brother, Mr. Justman is survived by his wife, Saundra Jordan, and his sister, Peggy Suttle Kligerman.Not all Mr. Justman’s work with the J. Geils Band was behind the camera. He often collaborated on songs with his brother, and he contributed lyrics for all the songs on the band’s final studio album, “You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd” (1984), recorded after the kinetic frontman, Peter Wolf, left the band. (Seth Justman handled most of the lead vocals.)But, his brother said, it was Mr. Justman’s ever-present videos that helped break the band into the pop stratosphere. His “Freeze Frame” video, featuring band members dressed in white and splattering one another in paint as if they were human Jackson Pollock canvases, received heavy airplay on MTV. The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart in 1982.But it could not match “Centerfold,” from the previous year, in ubiquity. The video for that song, featuring models marching around a high school classroom in teddies and, famously, a snare drum filled with milk, become a token of Generation X pop culture, and the song became the band’s first and only No. 1 hit.“MTV was really starting to cook,” Seth Justman said of “Centerfold,” “and that cinematic and energetic approach, along with splashes of humor, resonated and lit the fuse. The song, and the video, shot like a rocket.” More

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      With Indiana Jones’s Return, Looking Back at the Opening Scene of ‘Raiders’

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      A shot-by-shot breakdown of the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” sequence that became a defining one in adventure movies.“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (now in theaters) is the first film in that franchise not directed by Steven Spielberg, who developed the character all those years ago with George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, as well as the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. Yet the handoff of directorial duties to James Mangold doesn’t feel like a strain, because Spielberg established the character of the globe-trotting archaeologist and the style of his cinematic escapades so adroitly over the first four films.In fact, he set them in stone in the very first sequence of the very first movie — as we can see in a shot-by-shot look that classic sequence today.We first see Indiana Jones less than 30 seconds into 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — but it’s a carefully prepared hero entrance, holding back Harrison Ford’s distinctive visage as long as possible. Instead, we first see him from the back, in a frame that nevertheless introduces the character and his distinctive iconography (his hat, bullwhip and jacket).Paramount PicturesThis continues for a few minutes; we only see Indiana Jones from behind, in shadow or in disembodied close-ups, like when he uses his bullwhip to snatch a pistol from the local who is about to betray him. “That’s when you first see him with the bullwhip,” Lucas explained in a 1978 story conference that was tape-recorded, transcribed and made available a few years ago. “That’s where the plot comes alive.” After that move, we finally see his face as he steps into the light.By Paramount PicturesOur first look inside the cave is creepily atmospheric — dark and torchlit, with our view of our hero initially blocked by cobwebs. “This is the first scene in the movie,” Spielberg, at the time still best known as the director of “Jaws,” strategized. “This scene should get at least four major screams.”Paramount PicturesPart of the M.O. of the Jones movies is how sequences constantly top themselves. We get a prime early example of that here, when Satipo (future “Doc Ock” Alfred Molina) is alarmed by a sprinkling of spiders on Indy’s back — only to turn and reveal his own back covered in spiders.Paramount PicturesFew filmmakers are as aware of their audience as Spielberg, and he uses Satipo as an audience surrogate; he reacts as we do, registering shock and fear at the various dangers, booby traps, and skeletons they encounter along their way.Paramount PicturesYet the director always plays fair. We see all of the dangers of the cave, at normal speed, on their way in — so we’re prepared for Indy and Satipo to face them, at top speed, on the way out.Paramount PicturesWith both his good looks and lightning-fast reflexes established, we also quickly get a sense of Dr. Jones’s intelligence. He sees every potential trap and carefully sidesteps it: where he walks, the light his body crosses, the careful replacement of the idol with the sand bag.Paramount PicturesSpielberg cuts tautly, back and forth, between Indy attempting the switch and Satipo watching in fear (again, the audience surrogate), building tension that seems to deflate when he successfully manipulates the swap.By Paramount PicturesAnd then all bets are off.In their breakdown of the sequence, Spielberg voiced three different variations of one idea: “What we’re just doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland.” (There would, subsequently, be an immensely popular Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland.) And that’s what they do, creating a lightning-fast, whiplash-inducing series of ascents and dips, traps and saves, fake-outs and tight squeezes. Indy finally seems home free … and then comes the topper.Paramount PicturesThe most memorable image in a scene full of them plays out just as Lucas described it in 1978. “There is a 65-foot boulder that’s form- fitted to only roll down the corridor coming right at him,” he explained. “And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder. “Paramount PicturesAnd shockingly, he does. He ends up covered in cobwebs and escaping empty-handed, but at least he escapes …Paramount Pictures… using a conveniently-placed vine to make a skin-of-his-teeth getaway, accompanied by, for the first time, John Williams’s unforgettable main theme. And then, once in the plane, we find out that (the previous sequence notwithstanding) there is one thing Indiana Jones is afraid of: snakes.Paramount Pictures“In the end all it is a teaser,“ Lucas said of this opening, as they mapped it out years in advance. And he’s right; it’s a marvelous preview of the thrills, chills and laughs of the film that will follow. But the “Raiders” opening did more than that: it set a template for the “Indiana Jones” series — and for the thrill-ride blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond. More

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      Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Great ‘Indiana Jones’ Adventure

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      There’s a photo of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, taken at an Emmys afterparty in 2019, that captures, better than any other contemporary celebrity photo I’ve seen, the enduring allure and glamour of Hollywood success. In it, the British writer-actress is wearing a glittering low-cut dress, sitting in a high-back chair, a cigarette in one hand, a vodka […] More