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      Marquee Writers Push for Negotiations, but Their Clout May Not Matter

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      Some showrunners, eager for progress in the Hollywood strike, want the Writers Guild of America to meet with studios. How much sway they still have is in question.With the Hollywood writers’ strike stretching into its fifth month and the financial toll on people across the entertainment industry becoming increasingly grim, A-list showrunners have grown impatient.Some have called union leaders to ask pointed questions about the stalled talks. Why can’t you get in a negotiating room with studio representatives and not come out until you have a deal? Isn’t it time to bring in mediators? Others have pushed for a sit-down to hear their union’s strategy for resolving the strike. Union officials are scheduled to meet with Kenya Barris (“black-ish”), Noah Hawley (“Fargo”), Dan Fogelman (“This Is Us”) and other restless showrunners in the coming days. Whether marquee writers have enough juice to help end the dispute — as they did during the 2007-8 screenwriters’ strike — is an open question, however. The power dynamic has changed inside the union since then, longtime Hollywood observers say, and showrunners no longer hold the same sway.“You’ve seen a weakening of showrunner influence and a resurrection of rank-and-file writer influence,” said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s film school.The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 television and film writers, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains for studios, have not held talks for three weeks. Last month, studios sweetened their offer — and then, in an unusual move, publicly disclosed the details, hoping rank-and-file guild members would be satisfied and pressure their leaders to make a deal.“This was the companies’ plan from the beginning — not to bargain, but to jam us,” guild leaders said shortly afterward. “It is their only strategy — to bet that we will turn on each other.”Union leaders have since insisted that the onus is on studios to keep improving their offer. The studios have rejected that demand, but it is a position supported by many Writers Guild members, including numerous showrunners. On Tuesday in Los Angeles, writers like Alexi Hawley (“The Rookie”) and Scott Gimple (“The Walking Dead”) helped stage a well-attended “showrunner solidarity day” picket at Fox Studios.“I don’t think anybody is really second-guessing and looking for ways to cause some disruption in the leadership of the guild,” Steve Levitan, whose credits include “Just Shoot Me!” and “Modern Family,” told a reporter for an entertainment trade publication at the event. “We’re just always trying to see if there are any ways anybody can help.”Behind the scenes, however, frustration among elite Writers Guild members has been mounting.Ryan Murphy, the writer-producer behind television hits like “American Horror Story” and “9-1-1,” recently had a heated conversation about the strike with Chris Keyser, a senior Writers Guild official, according to two people close to Mr. Murphy, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion. Mr. Murphy set up a financial assistance fund for idled workers on his shows and committed $500,000 as a starting amount. Within days, he had $10 million in requests, the people said.Tyler Perry was among the show creators planning to meet with guild leaders.A spokesman for the Writers Guild declined to comment.At 135 days, the strike is one of the longest in the history of the Writers Guild. (The longest was 153 days in 1988.) The union has called this moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era has deteriorated its members’ working conditions and compensation levels. Studios have defended their proposal as offering the highest wage increase to writers in more than three decades, while also offering “landmark protections” against artificial intelligence.Studios have also signaled a willingness to negotiate with the guild on the sticky matter of staffing minimums in television writers’ rooms. (The studio alliance declined to comment for this article.)In July, tens of thousands of actors represented by SAG-AFTRA joined writers on picket lines, the first time both unions have been on strike at the same time since the 1960s.The result has been a near-complete shutdown in Hollywood production. Writers and actors have lost income, of course. But the collateral damage is also mounting, with crew members and support staff beginning to feel a severe financial squeeze. Hollywood workers have taken $45 million in hardship withdrawals from the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan since Sept. 1, according to a document compiled by plan administrators that was viewed by The New York Times. Workers have been allowed to pull $20,000 each from their retirement funds for the time being.Showrunners like Mr. Murphy and Mr. Fogelman employ thousands of crew members across their productions, putting them in the position of being besieged by people who ask when they can get back to work and having no answers.Conventional wisdom in Hollywood held that the strikes would be resolved by Labor Day. Now time is running out to salvage the year, given the time it takes to reassemble casts and crews, a complex process complicated by the coming holidays. Preproduction (before cameras roll) for new shows can take up to 12 weeks, with movies taking roughly 16 weeks. Even if the Writers Guild and studios can come to an agreement in the coming weeks, studios need to engage with the actors’ union, and no talks in that dispute have been scheduled, either.Showrunners have gotten more involved as studios have suspended first-look deals worth millions of dollars. Last week, Warner Bros. suspended deals with J.J. Abrams, Mindy Kaling, Greg Berlanti and Bill Lawrence.Yet despite the real implications that this strike is having on all ranks of the business, no guild member wants to be seen as agitating against the union’s leadership. Prominent showrunners are concerned about having their names in public and are instead trying to push things forward without looking like elites who aren’t in alignment with guild leaders. The appearance of dissension in the ranks scuttled a meeting this week between showrunners and Writers Guild officials, with both groups subsequently bickering over who canceled on whom.As the 100-day writers’ strike in 2007 wore on, a group of showrunners pushed union leadership to settle with the studios. But several entertainment executives said showrunners were more of a power center within the Writers Guild 15 years ago. For one thing, there were just a few dozen of them.In recent years, as the showrunner pool has expanded to hundreds, some Hollywood observers have argued that their influence within the union has waned. The limits of their power were on display four years ago in a failed attempt to wield influence to end another Hollywood stalemate.In 2019, Writers Guild leaders told thousands of screenwriters to fire their talent agents over what they described as significant conflicts of interest. As months passed, with the agency standoff showing no signs of resolution, some marquee writers went public with objections over the union’s strategy. They said the dispute with the agencies was a worthy one, but they objected to a seeming lack of urgency in returning to negotiating.One of the opposing writers, Phyllis Nagy, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 for her “Carol” screenplay, ran for president of the Writers Guild’s West Coast branch. She was vying to unseat David Goodman (“Family Guy”), who was standing for re-election. A who’s who of showrunners and writers — including Mr. Murphy, Mr. Berlanti, Shonda Rhimes and Ava DuVernay — endorsed Ms. Nagy.But Mr. Goodman won re-election with a strong majority. He is currently a chair of the Writers Guild’s committee squaring off against studios for a new contract.In the fight with agencies, the Writers Guild held firm for nearly two years. Many people in Hollywood have credited that lengthy dispute — ostensibly won by the Writers Guild — as galvanizing union leaders in the current standoff with studios. More

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      ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Musical to Open on Broadway This Winter

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James will reprise the roles they played Off Broadway earlier this year.“Days of Wine and Roses,” a musical adaptation of a midcentury story about a loving marriage destroyed by alcoholism, will come to Broadway early next year starring the acclaimed stage performers Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James.The production had a 10-week run earlier this year at the Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes called it a “jazzy, aching musical,” and praised its “glorious sound.”O’Hara is a seven-time Tony Award nominee who won the award in 2015 for her performance in a revival of “The King and I.” James is a four-time nominee, most recently for last season’s revival of “Into the Woods.”The Broadway production, directed by Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”), is scheduled to begin previews Jan. 6 and to open Jan. 28 at Studio 54 for a 16-week run. The lead producers are Kevin McCollum, Mark Cortale, Lorenzo Thione and Joey Monda.“Days of Wine and Roses” began its life as a teleplay in 1958; it was then adapted into a film in 1962. The musical features a score by Adam Guettel and a book by Craig Lucas; they previously collaborated on the 2005 musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and both of them have spoken about their own struggles with substance abuse.Guettel said he’s not sure when he first encountered the film, but that it immediately resonated. “I was really streaming tears at that point,” he said. “I had a sense of how alcohol and drugs had affected my life, and even though I had escaped the clutches of all that, the vivid recognition of it really spurred me on, not to create some sort of cautionary tale, but to depict how being addicted affects your life and the people around you.”The musical, like many, has had a long and bumpy road to Broadway. Guettel said he first discussed the idea with O’Hara two decades ago, when the two were working on “The Light in the Piazza,” and that he had developed the score for her.“It seemed like the right role for her, even then, in terms of the tenderness and the strength,” he said.James joined the project in the earliest days as well; he and O’Hara are friends who performed together in “Sweet Smell of Success.”There have been others who have come and gone — at one point, John Logan was the writer; at one point, Scott Rudin was the producer; at one point, Lincoln Center Theater was going to stage the show.“The fact that it is coming through the steeplechase intact is incredible,” Guettel said. More

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      ‘Moonlight’ Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney to Lead Geffen Playhouse

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      The prominent Los Angeles nonprofit chose the playwright to oversee its artistic programming at a time of crisis for American theaters.Tarell Alvin McCraney, an acclaimed playwright who won an Oscar for writing the story that became the 2016 film “Moonlight,” has been named the next artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse, a prominent nonprofit theater in Los Angeles.The Geffen, like many regional theaters in the United States, has been hit by a downturn in the field — as of this spring, its subscriptions were 40 percent below prepandemic levels. But it was among the more innovative theater companies when theaters were closed during the pandemic, producing some popular virtual shows, and it is now in better shape than many.McCraney, 42, said he was fully aware of the crisis facing the field, which he said was the impetus for him to decide to step into leadership.“We’re at a place where, if I really love this, if I really want to effect change, I have to get in,” he said. “I can’t just sit on the sidelines. Across entertainment and across the arts there is a strong shift for everybody. Everybody is feeling this new something — that something else is coming — and I could wade through it, or I could be helpful by being in leadership.”McCraney, an important figure in the American theatrical landscape, won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013, and he recently wrapped up six years as chairman of the influential playwriting program at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. He is also a member of the ensemble at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, and an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain.His play “Choir Boy,” about a gay adolescent at an elite prep school, was staged on Broadway in 2019 and has been performed in theaters around the country, including at the Geffen. Among his other plays are “The Brothers Size” (a part of his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy), which has been discussed for a possible Broadway production, and “Head of Passes.”“Moonlight” was adapted from a script McCraney wrote called “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue”; in 2017 he and Barry Jenkins shared the Academy Award for adapted screenplay.McCraney said he would keep writing his own work, for the Geffen and for other theaters, even as he assumes this new role, in which he will choose the productions staged at the Geffen and oversee their artistic development.Stepping into a leadership role, he added, is not as much of a swerve as it might seem. “It’s been something that’s been with me for a long time,” he said. “As a young person in Miami, I always imagined I would run the Coconut Grove Playhouse, which has been shuttered for years.”The Geffen, founded in 1995, has two stages — the 512-seat Gil Cates Theater and the 149-seat Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater. The Geffen has 45 full-time staffers (and another 150 part-timers) and a $12 million annual budget. McCraney succeeds Matt Shakman as artistic director; Gil Cates Jr., whose father founded the theater, serves as its executive director and chief executive.McCraney currently lives in Miami, which is where he grew up; he said he would relocate to Los Angeles. He has worked in Los Angeles, not only on “Moonlight,” but also in the writers room for the television show “David Makes Man,” and for a variety of other projects, including a production of “Head of Passes” at the neighboring Center Theater Group.“Los Angeles is a city that is reminiscent of Miami,” he said, “and it has a theater scene that is often thought of as secondary, but I always thought it had a rich community of artists who were hybrid, and that’s exciting for me to connect to folks who have those multi-hyphenate careers.”Building stronger relationships with U.C.L.A., which is across the street from the Geffen, will be among his priorities, he said, as well as nourishing playwrights in a way that he felt nourished by nonprofit theaters early in his career.“We don’t necessarily take care of our artists,” he said. “I want to be more intentional about that.” More

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      Talking Heads Reunite for Restored ‘Stop Making Sense’

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      Appearing together for the first time since 2002, the band celebrated the film in a Q. and A. with Spike Lee at the Toronto International Film Festival.The hottest ticket at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was not for the new auteur film from Hayao Miyazaki or Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the latest vehicle for Kate Winslet or Sean Penn, or grand prizewinners at Cannes and Venice. No, the most feverishly in-demand screening was for a 39-year-old movie that everyone in its sold-out audience could have watched at home, at the push of a button.But this isn’t just any 39-year-old movie. “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme, is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of the form, a joyful documentation (and celebration) of Talking Heads’ 1983 tour supporting their album “Speaking in Tongues.” The Toronto festival screening marked the debut of A24’s new restoration of the film ahead of its theatrical and IMAX rerelease later this month.But the real draw in Toronto was the band’s reunion for a Q. and A. conducted by Spike Lee after the screening (and simulcast to IMAX theaters across the globe). “This is the greatest concert film ever!” he enthused with the musicians sitting next to him. “I can say that! You might not want to, but for me, I’m going on record, around the world: this is the greatest concert film ever.”The 25-minute chat was the first time the band members had appeared together since they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. That reunion was an event in itself, following what the frontman David Byrne recently described, with characteristic understatement, as an “ugly” breakup in 1991. His former bandmates haven’t been quite so delicate. In 2020, the drummer Chris Frantz published a memoir in which he accused Byrne of frequently diminishing the contributions of his fellow musicians, while the bassist Tina Weymouth referred to him as, among many other slurs, “a vampire.” (Byrne has since granted that he was “more of a little tyrant” in those early years.)But in Toronto, it was all good vibes for Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth (who are married) and the keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison. “I’m very grateful to be here tonight, and to be able to watch this and to enjoy it so much,” Frantz said warmly at the beginning of the conversation. Byrne concurred: “When I was watching this just now, I was thinking, this is why we come to the movie theaters. This is different than watching it on my laptop!”And indeed it was. From the opening image — of Byrne’s scuffed-up white sneakers striding onto the stage, as he sets down a boombox and announces, “Hi, I got a tape I wanna play” — seeing “Stop Making Sense” in IMAX was like seeing it anew. The image, blown up from the original 35-millimeter negatives, was crisp and rich; the sound, an early digital audio recording, felt like it had been laid down last night. The restless, roving, participatory nature of Demme’s cameras make it much more than a standard concert documentary. It’s an exhilarating record of a group of talented people, at the peak of their considerable powers, having a great time making groundbreaking music that you can still dance to.A scene from “Stop Making Sense,” which was restored from the original negatives and shown in IMAX on Monday in Toronto.via A24Demme, who died at 73 in 2017, was attracted to the material, Byrne recalled, because the show they’d assembled told a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The picture starts, quite literally, with the forming of the band, as Byrne is joined by each additional member, one by one, and their show is built out from the bare stage on which it begins. By the midpoint, this odd little man and his friends have become a family, and when Byrne sings the kind and welcoming lyrics of “This Must Be the Place” (“Home/is where I want to be/but I guess I’m already there”), it’s as heartfelt and moving an emotional beat as you’ll find in any narrative film.Byrne recalled realizing that Demme, working with the editor Lisa Day, was actually making an ensemble film. “Like, you would have a bunch of actors in a location and you get to know each character, one by one,” Byrne explained, adding, “You get familiar with them, and then you watch how they all interact with one another. And I thought, I’m in my own world. But he saw that, he saw what was going on there.”The sheer visceral impact of the filmmaking, when shown at IMAX proportions, was staggering as well. Demme’s striking, out-of-the-box lighting choices and close-up compositions are jaw-dropping on the big screen, and Byrne comes across as even more like a (seemingly impossible) movie star, from his first reveal in the iconic Big Suit (“It was really big tonight,” Frantz quipped) to his serpentine slithering during “Life During Wartime.” He’s aware of the camera and plays to it savvily — not just singing the band’s songs, but performing them (and understanding the difference).But he’s far from the only attraction, and the detail of the IMAX restoration (coupled with Demme’s preference for long takes and wide shots) provides the viewer with plenty of opportunities to observe the dynamics, throughout the frame, between the group, additional musicians like the keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and the crew. The cameras capture their nonverbal communication, the little cues and asides and flashes of encouragement they’re throwing at one another through the entire show.“There’s all these moments that he caught, where one of us looks at the other, looks over at Bernie or Bernie looks at us, all those little quick interactions,” Byrne marveled. “And I thought, that stuff is amazing.”From left, Frantz, Weymouth, Harrison and Byrne reunited on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival.Shawn Goldberg/Getty ImagesHarrison said that “one of the reasons for the lasting power of the film is you see that we are having so much fun onstage,” adding that “the audience is brought right into it. We say, you’re part of this too. And I think that every time anybody watches it, it brings back that wonderful emotion.”That was certainly the case in Toronto. The rowdy crowd applauded every number, cheered for the band’s introductions and clapped along with the breakdown in “Take Me to the River.” One guy hollered, “Encore!” when the movie ended.Both “Once in a Lifetime” and “Burning Down the House” brought audience members to their feet, just like their onscreen counterparts, to dance in the aisles. To be fair, they’re very hard songs to not dance to. In the seventh row, at his aisle seat, David Byrne was on his feet with them, bobbing his head and rocking back and forth, once more, for old times’ sake. More

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      Documentary on New York City’s 1970s Fiscal Crisis Wins Film Prize

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      A documentary about the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, co-directed by the son of one of its saviors, wins the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.On Oct. 29, 1975, Mike O’Neill, the editor of The Daily News, and Bill Brink, the managing editor, returned from lunch and asked whether President Gerald R. Ford, while addressing the National Press Club in Washington, had agreed to help New York City avoid bankruptcy.The editors were read the definitive sentence from Ford’s address: “I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”As I recall — I was a reporter and editor at The Daily News at the time — Brink initially summed up the president’s rejection with what was sometimes quaintly described back then as a two-word barnyard epithet. Then they refined the hulking front page tabloid headline, a cri de coeur that encapsulated Washington’s response to the city’s plight and that would help cost Ford the presidential election the following year, ultimately becoming a metaphor for New York’s resilience: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”Those days of urban desolation, despair and painful recovery a half century ago are captured in the forthcoming documentary “Drop Dead City — New York on the Brink in 1975,” which on Monday was awarded the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.“Drop Dead City” was directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn, a filmmaker and musician who had a unique perspective: It was Michael’s father, Felix G. Rohatyn, an investment banker, who was recruited in 1975 by the heroic Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York to help stave off the state’s municipal bankruptcy.Michael Rohatyn was only 12 when his father helped save the city. Perusing the old footage from that time and filming 200 additional hours, he said in an interview, “I was very moved to see his charm and his intellect right there on the surface. I think he would be really proud of the film. He might think there’s not enough of him in it, and he might be right.”Felix G. Rohatyn, who helped rescue New York City from insolvency in the 1970s, was the father of one of the filmmakers.William E. Sauro/The New York TimesThe prize, awarded by The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation, and funded by Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, includes a $200,000 grant for final production and distribution of the film, a sum that, the award-winning documentarian Ken Burns recalled, was more than the entire budget for his first film, on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982.“Drop Dead City” serves as a vivid reminder for today’s negativists of how bad the bad old days were. The contrasting scenes are poignant: a theater poster for “Man of La Mancha” — the Impossible Dream — and streets clogged with cabs juxtaposed with the carcasses of burned-out buildings, abandoned skeletal public works, graffiti-shrouded subway cars, and mobs of justifiably choleric municipal workers whose promise of lifetime civil service job security was suddenly jeopardized. Its protagonists were mostly men with long sideburns in smoke-filled rooms, palpably fearful over the uncharted consequences if the city could no longer fool some of the people all of the time to pay its bills.Who would have first claim? The bondholders from whom the city had borrowed? Or the police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers and teachers on whom New Yorkers depended every day? Or the beneficiaries of public assistance who depended on the city?And who would bear the blame? Former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, whose worthies conceived of “moral obligation” bonds to enable more borrowing for good causes? Former Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who was re-elected in 1961 after granting the unions collective bargaining rights? His successor, John V. Lindsay, undone by the cost of good intentions? Or his successor, Abraham D. Beame, who had warned against fiscal gimmickry when he was the city’s comptroller but sanctioned it anyway by voting for the unbalanced budgets, only to find that the buck stopped with him when he was elected mayor?And who should bear the brunt of the sacrifice? Public officials had long maintained low mass transit fares, free tuition at City University and other services, and had granted organized labor generous benefits not only to get re-elected, but to preserve the city’s legacy as a global beacon of opportunity. Bankers should have known that the city was selling tax anticipation notes without having the slightest notion of how much tax revenue was anticipated, even as they reaped hefty commissions on each borrowing that sent the city deeper into debt.“They made the accounting sexy,” Burns said of the filmmakers. “They made the people who get dismissed human and dimensional. The headline became the haiku of the fiscal crisis.”Hundreds of films were submitted to the Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to educate Americans about their history through documentaries. It winnowed the submissions to six and presented two to Burns and to Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The runner-up was “The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” directed by Nicole London, which recounts the story of the jazz pianist and civil rights pioneer Hazel Scott, who went into exile during the Red Scare of the 1950s.The mid-1970s evoked by “Drop Dead City” are even more distant from today’s audiences than the ancient history of the 1929 stock market crash was from New Yorkers who lived through the city’s fiscal crisis. But, as Hayden explained, what gives the film vitality and relevance is that “it puts history at the forefront.”“Drop Dead City” deftly melds archival footage of frustrated and gravely conflicted negotiators, ordinary New Yorkers and aggrieved rank-and-file union members with candid reflections by the surviving protagonists. Unfortunately some, like former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, didn’t survive long enough to be interviewed on video. (Zuccotti died a day after the filmmakers spoke with him off-camera.)Viewers might also have welcomed more of Felix Rohatyn’s pithy observations. (He once likened default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen.”)The city came so close to default that a declaration was signed by Mayor Beame’s shaky hand, but never invoked; it later hung in the home office of the New York corporate lawyer Ira Millstein.Asked at the time, though, whether an agreement with the municipal unions and the State Legislature to fend off bankruptcy would survive, Felix Rohatyn replied: “I don’t give odds any more. I think it has to work.”But Rohatyn was aware of the costs, predicting that the sacrifices inflicted to satisfy the banks and the Ford administration would mean that even if New York survived, “this city will be a much lesser place.”Yost, the film’s co-director, explained why, even though New York remains very much alive, “Drop Dead City” is still very relevant.“Intellectually, it’s resonant at a time when we’re all at each other’s throats,” he said. “That was a moment when it could have gotten ugly and rude like New York, but seemingly irreconcilable things came together to keep the city from going over a cliff. To me that holds a lot of lessons for us today.” More

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      Rachel McAdams to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Mary Jane’

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      The play, by Amy Herzog, is about a mother caring for a chronically ill child.The film star Rachel McAdams will make her Broadway debut next spring in an acclaimed and heart-wrenching play about a mother caring for a small child with a serious illness.McAdams will star in “Mary Jane,” a drama by Amy Herzog that debuted at Yale Repertory Theater in 2017 and was followed by an Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop that same year. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the play “a heartbreaker for anyone human” and “the most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.”McAdams, who became famous playing Regina George in the 2004 movie “Mean Girls,” performed regularly onstage while growing up in Canada and studied theater at York University in Ontario. But she has not performed onstage professionally since she was a student. In a telephone interview, she said her initial career aspirations were to perform as a theater actor.“I had dreams of going to the Stratford Festival in Canada, and hadn’t really entertained Broadway — that was so far off, and even now I’m pinching myself,” she said. “I’ve been looking for a play forever, but kind of casually — not fully committed to it — and this came along, I read it, and I just was so taken with it.”She said she found the play “beautifully written” and “couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was already inside of me.”“It’s shedding light on the difficulties, but also the resiliency, of families with children with special needs,” she added. “There’s actually a lot of comedy to the piece as well — she’s drawn an amazingly positive, resilient character in Mary Jane, and really well-drawn, supporting characters around her.”McAdams was nominated for an Academy Award for the 2015 film “Spotlight.” She also starred in the 2004 film adaptation of “The Notebook”; a musical adaptation of that same story is scheduled to open on Broadway in March.McAdams said her decision to come to Broadway was not related to the dual strikes by screenwriters and actors that have largely idled Hollywood. She said she had committed to “Mary Jane” before the strikes began. And though apprehensive about returning to the stage, McAdams is also looking forward to it.“There’s no editor — you’re really so naked and vulnerable,” she said. “I hope my training will support me, but it was such a long time ago.”“I think it might be like riding a bike,” she added. However, she said, “there’s a little bit of the unknown about it. And I think also just having emotional stamina — you really don’t know until you’re there if you’re going to be able to fill your vessel up enough to keep you going. So it’s just all those ‘I won’t know until I get there’ things, but I’m excited to do the work.”The Off Broadway production won three Obie Awards, for Herzog’s playwriting, for direction by Anne Kauffman, and for a lead performance by Carrie Coon. There have since been several productions at regional theaters; one is now running in Santa Rosa, Calif.The nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club will present the Broadway production, also directed by Kauffman, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Previews are scheduled to begin on April 2; an opening date and the names of the other cast members have not yet been announced.Herzog, whose play “4000 Miles” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, has recently turned her attention to revising classic works: She adapted Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” for a Broadway production starring Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed that ran earlier this year, and she is adapting Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” for a Broadway production planning to open next spring with Jeremy Strong in the title role. More

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      ‘Poor Things’ Takes Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

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      The film, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, stars Emma Stone as a woman who goes on a sexual and philosophical journey. The announcement of its win was met with a roar of applause.“Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on Saturday by a competition jury led by Damien Chazelle. The film stars Emma Stone in a virtuoso performance as a woman with an initially childlike understanding of the world who comes into her own through a sexual and philosophical journey.Bella Baxter, the main character in the film, “wouldn’t exist without Emma Stone,” Lanthimos said. “This film is her, in front of and behind the camera.” Stone previously collaborated with Lanthimos on “The Favourite,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the festival in 2018.Like many other actors in films screened at the festival, Stone was not in attendance, as the strike by SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents television and movie actors, continued.Set in a partly fantastical 19th-century Europe, “Poor Things” follows Bella (Stone) on her eye-opening adventures in Tony McNamara’s adaptation of the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel. The film also stars Willem Dafoe as Bella’s father who is a doctor, Ramy Youssef as his assistant and her suitor, and Mark Ruffalo as a lascivious lawyer.Lanthimos said that the film took “quite a few years” to bring into being, before “the world, or our industry,” was ready for its story. The award announcement was met with a roar of applause.The 80th edition of the festival opened with “Comandante,” a historical drama about an Italian submarine that rescued Belgian sailors during World War II. Other prominent films included “Maestro,” “Priscilla,” “The Killer,” “Ferrari,” “Hit Man,” “Origin,” “El Conde,” “Aggro Dr1ft,” “Coup de Chance,” “Dogman” and William Friedkin’s final film, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.”The latest edition received wide acclaim despite advance speculation that the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes in Hollywood might affect the festival’s impact. Stars were largely absent. However, there were exceptions, including Adam Driver and Jessica Chastain, thanks to interim agreements secured with SAG-AFTRA; both actors expressed support for the strikes. But the filmmakers did not disappoint: Before the awards ceremony, crowds chanted “Yorgos! Yorgos!” when the director walked onto the red carpet.The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to “Evil Does Not Exist,” the new film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose film “Drive My Car” won an Academy Award. His latest feature centers on a small town in Japan trying to fend off a planned glamping site.Immigration was a recurring theme among the prizewinners. The Silver Lion for best director went to Matteo Garrone for the immigration drama “Me Captain.” The Special Jury Prize went to Agnieszka Holland for “Green Border,” her multifaceted look at immigration to Poland.The Volpi Cup for best actress was awarded to Cailee Spaeny, who played the titular role in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” the story of Priscilla Presley’s relationship with Elvis Presley. The best actor award went to Peter Sarsgaard for his role as a man with dementia who is accused of past abuse in Michel Franco’s “Memory.” In his acceptance speech, Sarsgaard spoke movingly against the threat of artificial intelligence. Seydou Sarr won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, given to an outstanding emerging actor, for “Me Captain.”The best screenplay honor was given to “El Conde,” a vampiric reimagining of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, written by Guillermo Calderón and Pablo Larraín, who also directed. “Love Is a Gun,” directed by Lee Hong-Chi, received the Lion of the Future award for best debut feature. “Thank You Very Much,” a playful look at Andy Kaufman, won the Venice Classics award for best documentary on cinema.For the Orizzonti section, another competition slate in the festival, the top prize went to “Explanation for Everything,” an expansive work from the Hungarian director Gabor Reisz. “El Paraiso,” a mother-daughter drama, also won two awards in this section: Margarita Rosa de Francisco won for best actress, and Enrico Maria Artale won for best screenplay. Notably, a Mongolian film, “City of Wind,” was honored for best actor (Tergel Bold-Erdene).This year’s Golden Lions for lifetime achievement went to Tony Leung Chiu-wai, a star of Hong Kong cinema, and to the director Liliana Cavani, whose film “The Order of Time” played out of competition. The Glory to the Filmmaker Award went to Wes Anderson, whose short film “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” played out of competition. More

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      Talking Heads on the Return of ‘Stop Making Sense’

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      The 40th-anniversary restoration of a great concert film is a funk spectacle. It has also united the band, which split in 1991, to discuss a landmark achievement.Four decades after it was filmed, “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert documentary, is still ecstatic and strange. “It stays kind of relevant, even though it doesn’t make literal sense,” David Byrne, the band’s leader and singer, said in a recent interview.The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, has been restored from its long-lost original negatives and this new version will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, then play in regular and IMAX theaters later this month. An expanded audio album, out Sept. 15, now includes the entire concert set, with two tracks omitted from the movie: “Cities” and a medley of “Big Business” and “I Zimbra.” Refreshing its peak performance, the band hopes to draw one more generation of fans to its irresistible funk grooves and youthful ambitions.“Stop Making Sense” is both a definitive 1980s period piece and a prophecy. Its staging helped reshape pop concerts in its wake. The music hot-wired rock, funk and African rhythms, while the fractured, non sequitur lyrics glanced at, among many other things, disinformation (“Crosseyed and Painless”), evangelicalism (“Once in a Lifetime”), authoritarianism (“Making Flippy Floppy”) and environmental disaster (“Burning Down the House”).“Sometimes we write things and we don’t know what they’re about until afterwards,” Byrne said. “There’s a sense of a premonition. I’ve looked at things I’ve written and I go, ‘Oh. That’s about something that happened in my life after I wrote the song.’”There had been choreographed soul revues and big-stage concert spectacles long before Talking Heads mounted their 1983 tour supporting the album “Speaking in Tongues.” But Byrne envisioned something different: a performance influenced by the stylized gestures of Asian theater and the anti-naturalistic, avant-garde stage tableaus of Robert Wilson. (Talking Heads hired Wilson’s lighting designer, Beverly Emmons.)Talking Heads and the “Stop Making Sense” live band. From left: Steve Scales, Bernie Worrell, Jerry Harrison, Ednah Holt, David Byrne, Lynn Mabry, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Alex Weir.Sire Records/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesByrne storyboarded each song. The first part of the show demystified the production, with backstage equipment visible and a stage crew wheeling in instruments and risers as the band expanded with each song. Then, with everyone in place, the concert turned into a surreal dance party, capped by Byrne’s appearance in an oversized, squared-off, very floppy suit — an everyday American variation on the geometric costumes of Japanese Noh theater.Demme’s cameras were poised to catch every goofy move and appreciative glance between musicians. Now that most big concerts are video-ready extravaganzas, that might seem normal. In 1983, it was startling.Only a few years earlier, Talking Heads were unlikely candidates to mount a tautly plotted rock spectacle. When the band made its reputation playing the Bowery club CBGB, its members dressed like preppies and looked self-conscious and nervous.Formed in the art-school atmosphere of the Rhode Island School of Design, Talking Heads always had conceptual intentions. In a video interview from his studio, the keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison said, “When I joined the band, I knew that we were going to be an important band, and that we would be artistically successful. I had no idea what kind of commercial success we’d have. All of us were pretty familiar with the art world, where there are painters who never in their lifetime were financially secure. And that was our goal at that point.”Byrne was purposely stiff and twitchy onstage. “When the band started, I was not going to try and use the movement vocabulary from rock stars or R&B stars,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can’t do that. They’re better at it. They’ve established it. I have to come up with my own thing that expresses who I am: a slightly angsty white guy.’”“Looking at my younger self is a really strange experience,” Byrne said. “He’s doing things that are profoundly odd, but kind of inventive.”via RhinoBut in the fast-forward downtown New York culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s — punk! disco! minimalism! hip-hop! art! theater! world music! — Talking Heads rapidly evolved from a thumping, yelping, skeletal pop-rock band into something more rhythmic, funky and far-reaching.Byrne and the band equally appreciated the Southern roots and deep eccentricity of the Memphis soul singer Al Green — who wrote the band’s first radio hit, “Take Me to the River” — and the calibrated repetitions of James Brown, Philip Glass and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The band enlisted the equally open-eared Brian Eno as a producer and collaborator to extend its sonic palette and songwriting strategies — which, in turn, led Talking Heads to add musicians onstage.If there’s a narrative to “Stop Making Sense,” it’s of a freaked-out loner who eventually finds joy in community. The concert starts with Byrne singing “Psycho Killer” alone, to a drum-machine track, with a sociopathic stare. By the end of the show, he’s surrounded by singing, dancing, smiling musicians and singers, carried by one groove after another.“In a culture that’s so much about the individual, and the self, and my rights,” Byrne said, “to find a parallel thing that is really about giving, losing yourself and surrendering to something bigger than yourself is kind of extraordinary. And you realize, ‘Oh, this is what a lot of the world is about — surrendering to something spiritual, or community or music or dance, and letting go of yourself as an individual. You get a real reward when that happens. It’s a real ecstatic, transcendent feeling.”The band filmed a rehearsal and three live concerts at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Then they chose the best audio and video takes.via Rhino“Stop Making Sense” has been released on multiple iterations of home video technology — VHS, DVD, Blu-ray — but their sound and video were often lacking. For the new restoration, the production and distribution company A24 employed a forensic film expert to track down the film’s original negatives. They were stored, inexplicably, at an Oklahoma warehouse owned by MGM, a company that never had business dealings with Talking Heads. The images have gained clarity, contrast and depth.“I noticed you can see things that you couldn’t see even in the original version,” said Chris Frantz, the band’s drummer, in a video interview from his home studio. “Now you can see every little detail of the back of the stage.”When “Stop Making Sense” was first released, in 1984, audiences treated it like a concert, applauding between songs and getting up to dance. The band and Demme chose to dispense with the concert-film convention of cutting to interviews or backstage interactions or, especially, to happy, well-lighted audience members; they only show up in the last few minutes. Demme avoided that, Byrne said, because “it’s telling the film viewer what they’re supposed to be feeling.”The band and Demme filmed a rehearsal and three live concerts at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Then they chose the best audio and video takes. They weren’t always the same ones, but the timing each night was almost exact. “Chris was very consistent, even though he never played to a click track,” said Tina Weymouth, the band’s bassist, in an interview from the home she shares with Frantz, her husband.“The sync is not perfect,” Harrison said. “We could go digitally now and make this perfect. But would we want to disturb the historical quality to update it with what technology can do now? And we, of course, decided not to.”via RhinoThe tour’s technology was primitive by modern standards. The rear-screen visuals came from slide projectors; the lights were unfiltered. The show didn’t have a choreographer; Byrne and the backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, had worked out some moves while dancing around his loft before the tour, while others emerged as it progressed. The show didn’t have a costume designer, either; the musicians were instructed to find clothes in neutral tones, mostly grays. But according to Weymouth, Frantz’s laundry hadn’t come back in time for the first show at the Pantages, and he ended up wearing a blue shirt all three nights for continuity.Yet the band had the foresight to record the music on digital equipment, then in its early stages. Digital recording meant the sound quality could stay intact through the multiple generations involved in mixing for film, and it’s one reason the movie has aged so well.But the main reason “Stop Making Sense” has maintained its reputation as one of the greatest concert movies is the nutty jubilation of the performances. The musicians in the expanded band — Alex Weir on guitar, Steve Scales on percussion and Bernie Worrell on keyboards — are anything but self-effacing sidemen; they’re gleeful co-conspirators. And the sheer physicality of the concert, the performers’ sweat and stamina, comes through onscreen; in “Life During Wartime,” Byrne runs laps around the 40-by-60-foot stage at full speed.“Looking at my younger self is a really strange experience,” Byrne said. “He’s doing things that are profoundly odd, but kind of inventive. But also, he’s very serious and intent on what he’s doing.” He pointed out that until the last third of the movie, he doesn’t smile much. “The joy is not visibly apparent, but it’s there,” he said. “I mean, I have enough memory to remember that.”Jerry Harrison said that Talking Heads “had the ability to become one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, touring bands.”via RhinoFor all its artistic importance, the tour was not profitable. “We made zero,” Weymouth said. There was a large crew and three semi trucks full of equipment; some tour proceeds cofinanced the movie. It also turned out to be the final Talking Heads tour. “I also think that we had the ability to become one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, touring bands,” Harrison said. “I think there was a lost opportunity that would have been fun for all of us.”He added, “There also might be the element that once ‘Stop Making Sense’ came out so great, it was like, ‘How do we top this? Is the next thing going to seem like a disappointment?’ I don’t know if that was what was going through anybody’s minds, but I know that we ended up not touring ever again.”Talking Heads made three more albums, the Americana-flavored “Little Creatures” and “True Stories” and the Afro-Parisian-tinged “Naked.” After Byrne dissolved the band in 1991 — “an ugly breakup,” he told People magazine — the other three members made an album, “No Talking Just Head,” billed as the Heads. Byrne sued over the name, though the suit was eventually dropped.The band did regroup to perform in 2002 when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the 40th anniversary of “Stop Making Sense” has helped further mend fences; the band members will appear together to discuss the movie in Toronto on Monday.“Divorces are never easy,” Byrne said. “We get along OK. It’s all very cordial and whatever. It’s not like we’re all best friends. But everybody’s very happy to see this film coming back out. We’re all united in the fact that we really love what we did here. So that kind of helps us talk to one another and get along.” More