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      Christopher Nolan Leads Directors Guild Nomination

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

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

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

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      Mel Brooks and Angela Bassett Feted at the Governors Awards

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

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      SAG Award Nominations 2024: The Complete List

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

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      Tina Fey on ‘Mean Girls’ Then and Now

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

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      Herman Raucher, Screenwriter Best Known for ‘Summer of ’42,’ Dies at 95

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      His screenplay, based on his own youthful experience, was nominated for an Oscar. His other films included “Sweet November,” based on his own unproduced play.Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, which included a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, Conn. He was 95.His daughter Jenny Raucher confirmed the death, in a hospital.Mr. Raucher spent the 1950s and ’60s writing scripts for anthology television series and advertising copy for the Walt Disney Company and various agencies.But recollections of his own summer of ’42 lingered. So did the memory of one of his close friends, Oscar Seltzer, a medic who was killed on Mr. Raucher’s 24th birthday, in 1952, while caring for a wounded soldier during the Korean War.“Summer of ’42” tells the story of three 15-year-old friends — Hermie, Oscy and Benjie — and their early exploration of girls and, tentatively, sex, during a summer vacation on a Nantucket-like island early in World War II.Hermie (played by Gary Grimes) becomes infatuated with Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill), a woman in her early 20s. In one scene, he visibly trembles on a ladder as she hands him boxes for him to place in her dusty attic. Their tender lovemaking occurs after she receives a telegram telling her that her husband was killed in the war.The scene parallels Mr. Rauch’s real-life experience at age 14 with a woman on Nantucket, Mass.“I was in love with her before the incident ever happened,” Mr. Raucher told The Stuart News of Florida in 2002.In “Summer of ’42,” Hermie, a teenage character based on Mr. Raucher and played by Gary Grimes, falls in love with an older woman, played by Jennifer O’Neill.Warner Bros.“Summer of ’42” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $32 million (or about $245 million in today’s dollars) at the box office.Herman Raucher was born on April 13, 1928, in Brooklyn. His Austrian-born father, Benjamin, was a traveling salesman who had been a soldier, a boxer, a bouncer and, Mr. Raucher said in an interview, possibly a gun runner in Cuba. His mother, Sophie (Weinshank) Raucher, was a homemaker.Mr. Raucher graduated in 1949 from New York University, where he majored in marketing and created cartoons for a campus newspaper and magazine. He was soon hired by 20th Century Fox as a $38-a-week office boy. He was drafted into the Army in 1950 and served two years stateside during the Korean War.After being discharged, he got a call from Disney — he did not know how the company discovered him — and he worked in the company’s advertising department. He also wrote for ad agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, and was hired by Gardner Advertising as a vice president in 1964.He had begun writing for television and the stage in these years, including scripts for the anthology shows “Studio One,” “The Alcoa Hour” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” as well as a play, “Harold,” starring Anthony Perkins and Don Adams, that opened on Broadway in 1962 but closed after 20 performances.Mr. Raucher adapted his unproduced play, “Sweet November,” into a romantic melodrama starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis in 1968. He then collaborated with Mr. Newley on the script for “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” (1968), which was a notorious failure. Mr. Newley, who was also the star and director, plays a singing star simultaneously making and showing a movie about his self-indulgent life.Mr. Raucher’s next film, “Watermelon Man” (1970), starred the comedian Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance salesman who overnight turns Black. Critics were not kind; writing in The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said the “script is so uninspired and the direction so inept that ‘Watermelon Man’ runs out of gas long before the end is in sight.”Mr. Raucher told the film website Cinedump in 2016 that the director Melvin Van Peebles turned “Watermelon Man” into “more of a Black power film than I’d wanted.”Then came “Summer of ’42,” his biggest cinematic success. He had written the screenplay in 1958, but movie companies had rejected it, by his count, 49 times by the time Warner Bros. acquired it in 1970 and put it in the hands of Robert Mulligan, who had been nominated for an Oscar for directing “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).“Bob fell in love with the screenplay,” Mr. Raucher told Cinedump. “They asked how big a budget it was, he said a million dollars,” he added, referring to Warner Bros. executives. “They said go make it; they never read the script, they left us alone.”The studio did, however, ask that Hermie be 15, not 14 as Mr. Raucher had been.After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay. It was published before the film was released.During the filming, on the coast of Mendocino in Northern California, Mr. Mulligan told The San Francisco Examiner, “The story deals rather simply with the process of growing up, not unlike Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ which has some of the same comic spirit.”In the film, Dorothy leaves the island after her romantic interlude with Hermie and writes him a farewell note. The same thing happened to Mr. Raucher.Sometime after the film’s release, Mr. Raucher said, he received a letter, with no return address, from a woman in Ohio who he believed was the widow.“She wrote that the ghosts of that time were better left alone,” he told The New York Times in 2001 when a stage musical version of “Summer of ’42” was being performed in Connecticut.Mr. Raucher wrote several more screenplays, including “Class of ’44” (1973), a sequel to “Summer of ’42”; “Ode to Billie Joe” (1976), which was inspired by Bobbie Gentry’s song of the same name and directed by Max Baer Jr.; and “The Other Side of Midnight” (1977), based on Sidney Sheldon’s novel about love and vengeance set in Washington, Paris, Athens and Hollywood.He also wrote the novels “A Glimpse of Tiger” (1971), about two con artists; “There Should Have Been Castles” (1978), about a playwright and a dancer in the 1950s; and “Maynard’s House” (1980), about a troubled Vietnam veteran who is bequeathed a house in Maine by a slain comrade.Besides his daughter Jenny, Mr. Raucher is survived by another daughter, Jacqueline Raucher-Salkin, and two granddaughters. His wife, Mary Kathryn Martinet-Raucher, a dancer, died in 2002.After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, it was in postproduction for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay.“As fate would have it, the book comes out and becomes a best seller,” he told Cinedump. “So when the movie is finally released, the ad line is ‘Based on the national best seller.’ Which is absurd, because the book was written after the movie!” More

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      Jewish Group Assails Film Academy’s Diversity Efforts

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      An open letter signed by notable actors and producers criticized the organization for not including Jews as an underrepresented group as part of a new initiative.More than 260 Jewish entertainment figures — including the actors David Schwimmer, Julianna Margulies and Josh Gad, and the producers Greg Berlanti and Marta Kauffman — signed an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Tuesday, criticizing the organization for excluding Jews as an underrepresented group in its diversity efforts.In 2020, the academy issued a set of standards as part of its diversity initiative that recognized a number of identities as “underrepresented,” including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or those with cognitive or physical disabilities.Religion is not one of the categories considered.These initiatives will become part of the standards required for a film to compete in the best picture category beginning this year. For a film to be eligible, at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. The academy has said that includes actors who are Asian, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.“An inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands antisemitism,” said the letter, which was organized by the Hollywood Bureau of the group Jew in the City. “It erases Jewish peoplehood and perpetuates myths of Jewish whiteness, power, and that racism against Jews is not a major issue or that it’s a thing of the past.”The letter added that Judaism was not just an issue of faith, but also an ethnicity.This is not the first time in recent years that the academy has faced criticism from the Jewish community. When the organization opened its long-awaited museum in Los Angeles in 2021, the contributions of Jewish immigrants like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer, who were largely responsible for the founding of the Hollywood studio system, were barely acknowledged. In response, the academy said it would open a permanent exhibition dedicated to the birth of Hollywood and the Jewish filmmakers who established it. Called “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” the exhibit will debut on May 19.According to Allison Josephs, the founder and executive director of Jew in the City, the letter has been in the works since the summer, months before the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, as the new academy standards were being discussed.“It feels like a very big mistake to not recognize that we are maybe the most persecuted group throughout all time,” she said in an interview.The academy declined to comment. More

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      Golden Globes 2024 Draws 9.4 Million Viewers

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      The number of viewers was higher than last year, but still down significantly compared with prepandemic audience totals.The Golden Globes averaged 9.4 million viewers on Sunday night, according to Nielsen, an increase over the 2023 ceremony ratings but still significantly lower than the audience totals of just a few years ago.Until 2020, the Globes regularly drew 17 million to 20 million viewers. In 2019, the Globes was narrowing the viewership gap with the Oscars so significantly that it appeared the telecast could become the most-watched awards show.And then disaster struck.First came the pandemic, which deprived the 2021 Globes of its usual booze-soaked freewheeling ceremony, sending the ratings tumbling. Then came a scandal for the organization that administers the Globes, which led NBC to refuse to broadcast the 2022 ceremony. Last year, NBC gave the Globes a one-year chance, and the audience figures were still low: just over six million people watched.For months, there was speculation that a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon could pick up the rights to the Globes. That did not happen. In November, CBS picked up the rights for another one-year arrangement. (In a statement announcing the deal, George Cheeks, the CBS president, said that the Globes could help promote scripted programming that had been delayed by last year’s strikes in Hollywood. Those shows premiere next month.)CBS announced a host — a relatively unknown Jo Koy — only a few days before Christmas.Reviews for Mr. Koy were harsh, with critics taking particular issue with the comedian’s bizarre mid-monologue pivot, in which he blamed other writers for some of his dull jokes. “Yo, I got the gig 10 days ago, you want a perfect monologue?” he said. “Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down. I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”Critics were not kind to the telecast, either. Vanity Fair called it a “near-total disaster” and a critic at The Hollywood Reporter said it was “the dullest awards show” he had ever seen. The Ankler likened it to the “RC Cola of award shows.” More