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      Willie Mays Aikens Has His Story Told in ‘The Royal’

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      A film tells the true story of Willie Aikens, a World Series star for the Kansas City Royals whose life was derailed by drugs — and prison — before he pieced it back together.COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The greatest player in the history of the Kansas City Royals slammed his palm onto a conference table at the Baseball Hall of Fame last Friday. George Brett was pretending to be an F.B.I. agent showing off his badge.Just like that, you were not in Cooperstown. N.Y., anymore. You were somewhere with the Royals in the early 1980s, and you might be in serious trouble.“He brings my name up, he brings Jamie Quirk’s name up — and he brings your name up,” Brett said, pointing to his old teammate, Willie Mays Aikens, across the table.“And he brings Vida Blue’s name up, and Jerry Martin’s name up and Willie Wilson’s name up. And he says, ‘You know, we had a meeting earlier about calling up bookies and betting games. Let’s just say George and Jamie are calling some guy we got a wiretap on …’”Brett was shaken and quickly understood: He stopped betting on football games. But the F.B.I. did not care much about him and Quirk. Investigators were trying to signal the others that they were onto their cocaine use.“If we had stopped right then and there, we’d have never had a drug case,” Aikens said. “They tried to warn us, man.”“And you kept doing it,” Brett said.“And we kept doing it,” Aikens replied.Aikens kept doing it for a decade. Like Blue, Martin and Wilson, he served a short prison term after the 1983 season, but that was hardly the worst of it. That is not why Samuel Goldwyn Films has turned Aikens’s life story into a movie, “The Royal,” scheduled for release on July 15. It will be available for streaming and in limited theaters, and it had a premiere last Friday at the Hall of Fame.For Aikens, 67, it was his first trip to Cooperstown, where Brett is enshrined for a career that ended with 3,154 hits in 1993. By then Aikens was deep into his cocaine addiction, which came to consume him during a six-year career in Mexico after eight seasons in the majors as a slugging first baseman with the California Angels, the Royals and the Toronto Blue Jays through 1985.In 1994 he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for selling 2.2 ounces of crack cocaine, on four occasions, to an undercover female officer. Aikens has said he was interested in the woman and complied when she asked him to cook the cocaine into crack.The 2022 M.L.B. Season“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic.”Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good?: For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women’s perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers.The Third Baseman’s Gambit: Manny Machado is the hottest hitter in baseball, and he is coming for your Queen.The Loneliest Team in Baseball: The Oakland Athletics gutted their roster and flirted with Las Vegas. Now their fans appear to be in full revolt.King of Throws: Tom House has spent his life helping superstars get even better. With a new app he wants to fix young pitchers before they develop bad habits.That decision made Aikens — the first player with two multihomer games in the same World Series, in 1980, when the Royals lost to Philadelphia — a public face of the gross disparity in sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenders. A 1986 federal law punished people far more severely for crack; it took until 2010 for Congress to reduce the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1.Aikens was incarcerated for 14 years, and has now been out of prison as long as he was in. “The Royal” mostly chronicles his transition back to society — reconciling with his wife and family, becoming a father again, working on a road crew digging manholes and, with Brett’s help, securing a job as a minor league coach for the Royals.“How many people in this world go through their life on earth and get a movie?” said Aikens, who now serves as a special assistant to the Royals as part of their leadership development team. “Not many people. I’m hoping that the movie will help save some lives.”Aikens is being portrayed in “The Royal” by Amin Joseph, an actor known for his work on the FX series “Snowfall.”The actor Amin Joseph, who plays a crack dealer in the FX series “Snowfall,” portrays Aikens. Joseph, 42, grew up in Harlem and said he remembers crack vials strewn on playgrounds. He was drawn to playing a different kind of figure impacted by drugs.“There are real people in our communities that are dealing with this and still healing, and like Willie often says, not all of them were major league baseball players with the luxury of having friends in powerful places to give them a second chance,” Joseph said. “A lot of these people are lost, forgotten, the underbelly of what we consider society, the people that we judge.”Aikens’s background gave him a pathway to return to baseball, but it was not always smooth. He first had to confront his past and show that he could share his experiences.Aikens was something of an unlikely public speaker, having dealt with a stutter for much of his life. Brett had first encouraged him to tell his story for the athletes at Brett’s son’s high school, a scene loosely depicted in the film. It became a revelation.“When I picked him up at the halfway house and I heard him talk, I had tears in my eyes. I really did,” Brett said. “I was so proud of him.”Phylicia Rashad and Willie Mays Aikens discussed “The Royal” at a screening in Washington, D.C. last week. Brian Stukes/Getty ImagesAikens — who testified before Congress in 2009, urging sentencing reform for drug offenders — has told his story many times since, to Royals prospects and to students at the team’s Urban Youth Academy. The message has stayed all too relevant in baseball; while cocaine was a scourge of the 1980s, the death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, in 2019, revealed the toll of the opioid epidemic on the sport.Four Angels teammates revealed in court this year that they, like Skaggs, had received oxycodone pills from Eric Kay, a former Angels communications director who was found guilty on two charges for his role in the death of Skaggs. Prosecutors argued that Skaggs had died from a pill or pills he received from Kay that were disguised to look like oxycodone but were actually fentanyl, a far stronger opioid.“This drug that they have right now, it’s mixed in with Oxycodone and drugs like that, and it’s a blind killer,” Aikens said, referring to fentanyl. “When I was using drugs, you could sit there for hours or days and just snort or smoke cocaine. But with this drug now, fentanyl, you can take this one pill and it can just knock it out. It doesn’t even give you a chance.”Almost in spite of himself, Aikens survived to get another chance. Now he has taken his story to a theater in Cooperstown — and, soon, far beyond. More

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      Strike First, Strike Hard: How ‘The Karate Kid’ Became a Musical

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      The new production, an adaptation of the classic 1984 martial arts film, is onstage now just outside St. Louis and aiming for a Broadway run.CHESTERFIELD, Mo. — Robert Mark Kamen was through with “The Karate Kid,” his semi-autobiographical 1984 martial arts film that spawned a string of movies, an animated program and the hit Netflix series “Cobra Kai,” until he saw “Hadestown” in 2019. That’s when he realized: He loved musicals.“When you watch a movie, the camera is limited to one dimension,” Kamen, 74, said in early May during a break from rehearsals for “The Karate Kid — The Musical,” which is debuting at the new $25 million Kirkwood Performing Arts Center just outside St. Louis. “With this thing, you can have three dimensions, people doing something [pointing] here, here, here, going up and down, around and around, all at the same time. … It opened up so many possibilities.”Sy, center, rehearsing a number with, clockwise from left: Isidro Rafael, Cardoza and Zachary Downer. The musical puts a greater emphasis on the character of Chojun Miyagi, played by Sy.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesAn inspired Kamen went back to his hotel — and wrote what would become the opening of a new musical, complete with taiko drums and dancing ancestors. He also called the person who’d sent him to New York as a homework assignment, the producer Kumiko Yoshii, who had been campaigning since 2016 for the rights to “The Karate Kid” franchise, which Kamen owned with Sony Pictures.“He was so excited and had so many ideas,” Yoshii said. “But at the heart of it all was still the relationship between Daniel and his mentor, Mr. Miyagi.”The result is a musical adaptation of the classic film about a teenage American boy (Ralph Macchio) who learns martial arts from an Okinawan-born janitor and karate master (Pat Morita, whose performance earned an Oscar nomination) to defeat a high school bully. The musical stars John Cardoza (“Jagged Little Pill”) as Daniel LaRusso, the titular karate kid, and the Canadian actor Jovanni Sy as his mentor, Chojun Miyagi.Ralph Macchio, left, and Pat Morita in the 1984 movie “The Karate Kid.”Columbia PicturesThough the plot closely follows that of the original film — the story is still set in the 1980s — the musical’s cast and creative team of more than 40 artists is markedly more diverse.The director, Amon Miyamoto, was the first — and remains the only — Japanese citizen to direct a show on Broadway (a 2004 revival of the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical “Pacific Overtures”); Keone and Mari Madrid, the married Filipino American choreographers, have worked with Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish and recently directed and choreographed the Britney Spears jukebox musical “Once Upon a One More Time”; and the costume designer Ayako Maeda, has won numerous awards in her native Japan. Kamen wrote the book, and the songwriter Drew Gasparini, known for his work on “Smash,” wrote the music and lyrics.“It’s an American film,” the director, Miyamoto, 64, said in Japanese via an interpreter during a rehearsal break in early May. “But we’ve added Japanese elements.”Those elements include putting a greater emphasis on Mr. Miyagi by framing the story as his recollection of events, which Kamen said was his original vision for the film before the filmmakers decided to focus on Macchio’s Daniel. There is also a score by Gasparini that blends pop, rock and Okinawan music; costumes featuring traditional Japanese attire, including a kimono, by Maeda; and a dance-heavy production that fuses the Madrids’ hip-hop choreography style with karate.“If we’re doing exactly the same thing as the film, there’s no reason we have to create this for the stage,” Robert Mark Kamen said of his approach to writing the book for the new musical.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times“There has to be a reason to adapt it into a musical,” Kamen said. “If we’re doing exactly the same thing as the film, there’s no reason we have to create this for the stage.”INSIDE A FORMER CHURCH in Chesterfield, Mo., on a Saturday morning in early May, ribbons of light shone through stained glass windows as a line of dancers fanned out like peacock feathers on both sides of Sy, who was singing the song “Bonsai,” which extols the power of patience and focus.“Needles start to bend,” he sang as the dancers undulated up and down, raising and lowering their arms in sync. Eventually, they would be backlit to look like a bonsai tree.Kamen, among the creative team at the rehearsal that day, thanked Keone Madrid, calling the scene “beautiful.”“Then you’re going to see ‘Strike First. Strike Hard.’ and want to run through a wall afterward,” a smiling Keone Madrid said, referring to the musical’s next song, a pulsing anthem with pounding drums and frenetic kicks and punches.Kamen, at first, had been less than keen on musicalizing his signature franchise. But after a few months of meeting requests from Yoshii, his agent persuaded him to have dinner with her in Los Angeles in January 2017.Not knowing he was a vineyard owner and wine enthusiast, she let him choose the wine (an expensive bottle of Burgundy) at dinner. “To him, the fact that I let him select the wine was important,” she said. “After that, his response to every idea I had was, ‘OK, let’s give it a shot.’” (Kamen confirmed this, adding he was won over by his fourth glass.)“The character of Mr. Miyagi spoke to me a great deal growing up,” said Yoshii, who was a high school exchange student in Bozeman, Mont., when the film was released in theaters in 1984. “Because of Miyagi, kids talked to me about the Japanese karate element.”The choreographer Mari Madrid demonstrating the crane kick.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesBecause “The Karate Kid” is Kamen’s story, he was the natural choice to write the book, Yoshii said. There was just one problem: He didn’t know anything about musicals. “I called my agent, Jack Tantleff, and I said, ‘Now what the [expletive] do I do?’ I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “He said, ‘You’ll learn.’”Kamen and Gasparini, began meeting up in New York, where they would see four shows a week. Then Gasparini, who is from California, would spend time at Kamen’s guesthouse in Sonoma, with a portable piano, working on the score.Drew Gasparini, who wrote the show’s music and lyrics, is known for his work on the TV series “Smash.”Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesGasparini decided on a blend of pop, rock and Okinawan music, which included traveling to Okinawa, Japan, in October 2019 to study with two musicians. Two songs for Mr. Miyagi feature a sanshin, a three-stringed instrument made of snake skin. (For the war-hardened John Kreese, played by Alan H. Green, the antagonist and leader of the Cobra Kai dojo, he went with Metallica-inspired electric guitars.)Capturing the essence of the characters from the film, who also include Ali Mills (Jetta Juriansz), Daniel’s love interest, and his mother, Lucille LaRusso (Kate Baldwin), is also the approach that Miyamoto said he tried to adopt in his direction. “With Kreese and Mr. Miyagi especially, we delve into what makes them who they are, and how they got that way,” he said.Kreese, for instance, is a Vietnam veteran grappling with the lingering trauma of his experiences, and Yoshii said they wanted the cast to understand what that meant.Sheet music and other items in the rehearsal space.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesSo they had, among others, a Marine veteran and a World War II historian (Mr. Miyagi is a World War II veteran) speak to the cast about the two wars that come into play in the story.“Robert’s script goes a little deeper in the musical than the movie,” Yoshii said. “So it was like if we’re going to do that, we have to talk to these guys, so the actors aren’t just doing what they think or what their imagination conjures up about what experiences are.”But for the added gravity of both men’s wartime experiences, the film’s lighthearted center remains. The secret weapon, Kamen said, is the choreography.“The dance will be the thing that takes people by surprise,” said Cardoza, 28, who was a fan of the film growing up. “You think ‘Karate Kid, combat fighting.’ You don’t think ‘dance.’”Alan H. Green, as John Kreese, with some of the ensemble members playing students of the Cobra Kai dojo.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesDuring rehearsals last month, those two elements blended as 14 dancers playing Cobra Kai students, clad in shorts and kneepads, emerged from behind a semicircle of rolling mirrors. Green, stone-faced in a black tank top and sweats, prowled their ranks.“Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?” he shouted.“No, sensei!” they answered.“Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?”“No, sensei!”“What is our motto?”“Strike first! Strike hard! No mercy!”They launched into a rock number, kicking, pumping their fists then turning outward and stutter-stepping forward like synchronized robots, all in a matter of seconds.Mari Madrid said they approached the musical realizing that they were not going to make black belts out of the cast over a monthlong rehearsal period. “It was about giving inspiration to the essence of it,” she said. “Can they punch properly? Can they block properly?”That’s not to say some cast members didn’t come prepared. Sy earned a brown belt in karate, and Cardoza, who does indeed do the crane kick, was a competitive figure skater for 15 years. (Sakura Kokumai, who represented the United States in the women’s kata event at the 2020 Olympics, was also brought in to teach foundational moves.)Keone and Mari Madrid are also responsible for choreographing the movements of five new characters, the spirits of fire, water, earth, tree and metal, who symbolize the tradition of karate. They shadow Mr. Miyagi’s movements, in a nod to the kuroko of Japanese Kabuki theater — actors clad in all black who the audience see but are trained to ignore, who magically make things happen onstage.“Keone and Mari are able to infuse something that is invisible into their visible dance,” Miyamoto said, adding that in Japan “we’re used to seeing reality onstage that way — he’s there, but I’m not seeing him. So it’ll be interesting to see how an American audience reacts to that.”Ensemble members including Justice Moore, top, and Sangeetha Santhebennur, second from top, practicing Keone and Mari Madrid’s choreography.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesIN A BLACK POLO AND TROUSERS during rehearsals, Sy was an unassuming presence — until he began practicing a scene.“DANIEL SAN!!” he thundered.“What?” a resentful Cardoza asked.“Show me ‘Wax on.’”He moved his right hand in a semicircle.“Wax off.”He repeated the motion with his left.“Now you.”Cardoza imitated him.“Wax on.” Sy did a slow-motion chest punch. Cardoza blocked it.“Wax off.”Cardoza’s eyes lit up with understanding.Moments like this one, immediately recognizable to any “Karate Kid” fan, are as much a part of the musical as the fleshed-out story lines and infusion of dance, Kamen said.“No one is coming to see this who doesn’t know ‘The Karate Kid,’” he said. “But they have no idea how far out to the edges we’ve taken the song and dance.”Among the first to witness those changes will be some of the original film’s cast members, who are planning to be at opening night on Wednesday. They include Macchio and William Zabka, who played Johnny Lawrence, Cobra Kai’s top student and Daniel’s rival. Yoshii said there are plans to take it to Broadway next season.“It’s Christmas morning once again for ‘The Karate Kid,’” Macchio said in a phone interview in mid-May. “It’s like unwrapping another version of this gift. I want to be humming Drew Gasparini’s tunes on the way to the parking lot.” More

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      Ted Sarandos Talks About That Stock Drop, Backing Dave Chappelle, and Hollywood Schadenfreude

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      The Netflix executive says he — and the company he helped build — will survive a bout of bad earnings numbers.Maybe it was the tower of seafood sitting before us. Or the Potomac River flowing next to us. Or the fact that Ted Sarandos proposed to his wife, Nicole, on a “touristy booze cruise” under Fourth of July fireworks right in front of where we were sitting on the Georgetown waterfront in Washington.Whatever the reason, the Netflix co-C.E.O. had seafaring adventures on his mind.When I asked Mr. Sarandos how it felt when Netflix lost $54 billion in the blink of an eye on a single bad stock-market day in April, he talked about reading Joseph Conrad’s novella “Typhoon,” once as a younger man and again recently.The first time, he considered the captain who steered straight into the eye of a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean “a terrible leader” who “made a mistake and got people into a very bad situation.” But reading it a couple of decades later, Mr. Sarandos saw the complexity of leadership it takes to get through the storm, as the captain summons all his willpower to dominate a superior force.In this metaphor, the streamer is the steamer, which, Conrad writes, is lurching and pitching and going sideways in the gale “as if taking a header into the void.” And Mr. Sarandos is the skipper who has to swiftly steer the company out of danger, after the stunning news that Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year — without spending too much time rehashing how they got there.“We make decisions based on the best information we have at the time,” the 57-year-old said. “They are not always going to be right, but how you help navigate the outcomes, and the urgency you bring to it, is what gets folks through the storm. And the storms will come.”He recalled the Netflix squall of 2011, when Reed Hastings — the founder who now shares the C.E.O. job with Mr. Sarandos — created a separate company, Qwikster, to handle the DVD business. The move helped accelerate an already falling stock price, culminating in a 75 percent drop.“It was horrifying, disappointing and embarrassing,” recalled Mr. Sarandos, who was then the chief content officer. But he feels that they spent too long “sunshining,” to use the Netflix argot for openly examining failures. “How much time do you spend licking your wounds?” he said, adding: “Let’s have that burned into our memory, but we’ve got to move on and move fast.”He conceded that during the pandemic, when Netflix was Icarus, “there were probably a lot of underlying things in the business” that they could have gone “much deeper” on and been “more curious about if we weren’t doing so well.” (The company added 10 million subscribers in the first three months of the pandemic alone.) He added, “We could have been much more questioning of the success and saying, ‘Are you sure?’”It is certainly a wild plot twist worthy of Hollywood: The swaggering company that revolutionized the way Hollywood does business has stalled, with its stock down over 70 percent over six months.The Netflix Lobby MetricOver a three-hour dinner, Mr. Sarandos was charming and upbeat, dressed down in Levi’s and sneakers. You would never know he had been through a Job-level run of bad fortune in the last few months. First, his father, with whom he was very close, died. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Avant, with whom he was also very close, was shot to death when she encountered a burglar in the middle of the night at her Beverly Hills home. Ms. Avant, renowned in Hollywood for her elegance, art collecting, philanthropy and community organizing in Watts, Calif., was the wife of Clarence Avant, a music mogul known as the “Black Godfather.”Then, on top of Mr. Sarandos’s personal woes, Netflix skidded from rapid growth to grind-it-out. (Its stock peaked above $700 a share in November 2021 and has now fallen below $200.)The rise of Mr. Sarandos, a community college night-school dropout, from a video store clerk in Arizona to the pinnacle of Hollywood, is legendary.“He’s had more singular influence on movies and television shows than anyone ever had,” Barry Diller told me. “He has denuded the power of the old movie companies that had held for almost 100 years. They are now irrelevant to setting the play and rules of the day. If there is still a Hollywood, he is it.”Only a few years ago, the Netflix lobby was the coolest place on earth. Now it’s suddenly gloomy. In her “Saturday Night Live” monologue last weekend, Natasha Lyonne, the star of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” sarcastically cracked that the “two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix.”After winning the pandemic, Netflix now finds itself in its own version of its survival drama “Squid Game.” The company hit a ceiling, for now, of some 220 million subscribers, after thinking it could get to a billion with its global empire, and that has thrown a wrench into the future of Netflix and streaming in general. Wall Street suddenly turned a cold shoulder on its former darling, telling Netflix, Guess what, guys, you’ve got to make money, not just grow subscriptions.The company recently announced 150 layoffs, with more sure to come; shows in development, even by big names and a certain Montecito royal, are being dropped. Mr. Sarandos talked about the advertising option, something the company had resisted, so if people want a lower price subscription with ads, they could have it. “For us, it was all about simplicity of one product, one price point.” But, he said, “I think it can now withstand some complexity.”The Netflix hit “Squid Game.”Netflix, via Associated PressAnd how did Hollywood react to this bad news? With a blast of glee. Mr. Sarandos and Mr. Hastings, unassuming men of enormous chutzpah and vision, are being dunked in a vat of schadenfreude, subjected to the sort of vicious backbiting that characterized “House of Cards,” the David Fincher show that helped propel the network to success. As one Hollywood savant said with a shrug, “Nice doesn’t play in this town.”Old-school Hollywood types privately celebrated the news that the new streaming services they had scrambled to create (like HBOMax, Disney+ and NBC’s Peacock) were now disrupting the disrupter. Netflix is a victim of its own success; Ted and Reed pointed the way, but now they have to share their dog bowl. And during inflationary times, people are going to cut back on the number of streaming services they have.Until just recently, Netflix seemed too big to fail, even too big to hate — although some did, anyway. Backed by an ebullient Wall Street, the company was able to outmoney everyone, spending exorbitant sums, poaching talent and executives and muscling into Oscar campaigns with its “Monopoly money,” as one disgusted competitor called it, or “drunken sailor spending,” as another said.“We were trying to build a library to make up for not having 90 years of storytelling,” Mr. Sarandos said.Once talent gorged on Netflix money, like geese destined for foie gras, some became cranky.“Everything was completely amazing up until it wasn’t,” said Janice Min, the C.E.O. of Ankler Media, whose buzzy newsletter circulates through Hollywood C suites. “It’s hard to destroy the ecosystem and try to become king at the same time.”Netflix was an occupying army. “It was Vichy Netflix in Hollywood for the past decade,” Ms. Min said, “where the whole town was forced to adopt their customs and language. Now the traditionalists believe that the interlopers have had a comeuppance.“The schadenfreude set are licking their chops that this is William Holden facedown in the swimming pool. But this is a company that forced Hollywood to move forward 20 years faster than it would have. The burning question in town is, do the executives at the top stay the same now that they’ve hit a massive speed bump?”I asked Mr. Sarandos a version of that question. Could he survive a Keeper Test? (That’s part of the “radical candor,” as it’s called, in Netflix culture, a constant re-evaluation of whether an employee is a star.)“I hope so,” Mr. Sarandos said. “I mean, I think so. We hold each other and the board holds us both to a pretty high bar,” he said, referring to Mr. Hastings. “And I don’t think there’s a place where he’d say, ‘Hey, where’s your accountability for this?’ We’re pretty on top of both the successes and the failures. And if we were not, I think that we would fail the Keeper Test, yeah.”When I asked Mr. Hastings if Mr. Sarandos would pass, he was brisk: “Ted has passed the Keeper Tests for the last 22 years.” The big picture, he said, is that Netflix “is continuing to have some of the most popular shows in America and around the world. We can always pick it up and, you know, we want to do that.”Despite his low-key manner and folksy expressions like “holy moly,” Mr. Hastings is perfectly capable of icing anyone, if he decides it’s in the best interest of the company. He does not think of employees as family, but as a sports team that has to win trophies. Mr. Hastings fired one of his best friends and original employees, Patty McCord, the human resources chief. They drove to work together and she helped him create the controversial culture.I’m also curious about the future of Mr. Sarandos’s top executives, Scott Stuber, the head of the film division, and Bela Bajaria, who oversees original content. So I press, referring to all of the top brass generally: “So, you don’t think any heads are going to roll?”“Um, the way we are organized, no one gets to make that assumption,” Mr. Hastings said. “Everyone has to continue to raise their game throughout the company.”He continued: “I would say we are always reaching for the highest performance, but our content is not why the current slowdown is happening.”‘Everything’s Not Going to Be for Everybody’Mr. Sarandos loves comedy, something that was his North Star when he found himself smack in the middle of the culture wars. There was a backlash last year to Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, “The Closer,” over his jokes about transgender people, and some Netflix employees walked out of the Los Angeles headquarters in protest.But Mr. Sarandos said that, while he was taken by surprise at the kerfuffle, he did not agonize over supporting Mr. Chappelle. He said that the only way comedians can figure out where the line is, is by “crossing the line every once in a while. I think it’s very important to the American culture generally to have free expression.”He continued: “We’re programming for a lot of diverse people who have different opinions and different tastes and different styles, and yet we’re not making everything for everybody. We want something for everybody but everything’s not going to be for everybody.”Netlix employees and activists protest the company’s handling of the Dave Chappelle controversy outside the company’s headquarters.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesHe said he believes this deeply, so his decision about Mr. Chappelle “wasn’t hard in that way. And rarely do you get the opportunity to put your principles to the test,” he said. “It was an opportunity to take somebody, like in Dave’s case, who is, by all measure, the comedian of our generation, the most popular comedian on Netflix for sure. Nobody would say that what he does isn’t thoughtful or smart. You just don’t agree with him. ”Mr. Chappelle was attacked onstage in May at the Hollywood Bowl during the “Netflix Is a Joke Festival,” by a man who said he was “triggered” by the comedian’s jokes about the L.G.B.T.Q. community and homelessness. Days later, Netflix released a new corporate culture memo, which had been workshopped among company employees for six months, and attracted 10,000 comments. The memo underscored Mr. Sarandos’s response: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”Conservatives celebrated. “Netflix Puts Its Woke Employees On Notice With Blunt Memo,” read a Daily Caller headline. When I asked Mr. Sarandos how he felt about turning into a conservative hero, he said, “It used to be a very liberal issue, so it’s an interesting time that we live in.”He added, “I always said if we censor in the U.S., how are we going to defend our content in the Middle East?”After the Ricky Gervais comedy special went up on Netflix Tuesday, a similar brush fire started about his transgender jokes, with Variety’s Daniel D’Addario writing a story headlined “Ricky Gervais Anti-Trans Special Proves Netflix Is On No One’s Side But Its Own.” I asked Mr. Sarandos about it. He said his remarks about Mr. Chappelle applied to Mr. Gervais.‘Are You the Netflix Guy?’In a town where executives and especially agents are often illiterate about the history of TV and movies, Mr. Sarandos is an unabashed fan. He told me that if he had a free day to do anything, he would watch a movie in the nine-seat screening room in his house, converted from a guest bedroom. The Netflix honcho can wax eloquent on the great shows he’s watching on HBO Max, Showtime, Disney+ and Peacock just as easily as the ones he loves on Netflix.Asked who would be at his dream dinner party, past or present, he said Ernie Kovacs, Carole Lombard, Orson Welles, Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. “I used to see the words ‘Created by Norman Lear’ so often, I didn’t think it was a real person,” he said. “I thought it was like ‘In God We Trust.’” One of the “blessings” of his life, he said, is that he has met many of his idols.“That thing about ‘Don’t meet your heroes,’ I think that’s silly,” he said. “The first time I got to go to the Oscars, we were sitting directly behind Francis Ford Coppola, and I was, like, giddy. So I tapped Nicole and whispered to her, and she goes ‘You’re a terrible whisperer, you know that?’ So the first break comes and he turns around and says, ‘Are you the Netflix guy?’ That was pretty wild.”Mr. SarandosDevin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesHe fell for the 54-year-old Nicole, a film producer who started in the music industry and Democratic politics, the night he met her at an event for Barack Obama in Los Angeles in 2008. She was the Southern California finance co-chair for the Obama campaign and became President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas. Mr. Sarandos said he knew she was the one after she showed her chops on old movies such as “Now, Voyager” and “Cabin in the Sky,” with Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong, and documentaries like “Eyes on the Prize,” about the American civil rights movement.His wife said his belly laugh, his “authentic” kindness, his desire to live life to the fullest and the fact that he’s a “really good egg” who jumps out of his car to help a motorist in trouble without thinking twice, are the reasons she fell in love with him. It certainly wasn’t his old Banana Republic jacket. (She upgraded him to a navy Brunello Cucinelli suit one Christmas.) Or his 1996 Acura MDX with the tear in the seat. (As a birthday gift to Nicole, he said he “put it out of its misery” and traded it for a 2016 black Porsche Cayennne S.U.V.)“I was never drawn to this for the trappings,” he said.Of the tragedy they went through with her mother, while Mr. Sarandos was still grieving his father, Ms. Avant said, “It would have torn many families apart. But Teddy doesn’t deflect. He sees a tragedy or crisis, takes it in and says ‘We are going to get through this.’ That’s what I love about him. He’s the calm in the storm.”Mr. Sarandos grew up in a lower-middle-class home in Phoenix in a family of five with young, “hippie Catholic” parents. His father was an electrician. “They started having kids at 17,” he told me. “Neither finished high school. My dad had this philosophy that if there’s leftover food, you could have more kids, I guess. My memories of growing up in that house are that it was chaotic all the time. Nothing was ever on a schedule. We didn’t have a bedtime. We didn’t have a dinner time.”He said TV gave him structure, and he dreamed of going up onto the screen, “The Purple Rose of Cairo” style, to be part of the Cunningham family on “Happy Days.”Ted Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe utilities and phone would often be cut off, he said, but his mother always made sure they had cable TV and she got a V.C.R. and a little dish on the roof to get HBO.“It was this crazy luxury for a family who could barely afford to keep the lights on,” he told me. Somehow, he thinks, his late mother had a vision for his future.The family didn’t go to movies unless it was a drive-in because his father couldn’t go two hours without a smoke. Their cultural high point was going to see Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons every year at the Arizona State Fair.When things got crazy at home, he went to his grandmother’s and it was “paradise.” “It was very structured, very calm,” he said. “She would watch a lot of TV, and she had all the magazines about movies. She always called movie stars by their first names like she knew them, like Mac and Glen for Mac Davis and Glen Campbell. They were friends, and I don’t know who stole whose wife but it was a very big deal for her.”And then, he said, “the universe” offered up the second video store in the state of Arizona around the corner. “When I walked into that store, it was a life changer,” he said. He worked his way up from clerk to managing eight video stores to one of the top jobs for West Coast Video, which at its peak had nearly 500 stores.‘It’s Not Like We Invented the Bidding War, You Know’Netflix resentment has been simmering for a while. Speaking in 2019 at CinemaCon, Helen Mirren told the crowd, “I love Netflix,” but then she flung a vulgarity at the streaming service, adding “There’s nothing like sitting in the cinema.”“She sent an immediate apology text,” Mr. Sarandos told me, smiling. “I think she was caught up in the moment. I mean, you’re talking to a roomful of small theater owners who were feeling they were under assault.”He said he understands “why people would be snickering a bit” now and notes: “Remember, I was in a business that was totally disrupted, too. I was in the video rental business.”Mr. Sarandos became so conversant with the 900 videos in the video stores he ran that he was the pre-algorithm, able to recommend films to people based on what they had previously watched.“I’ve always and I continue to be a very optimistic watcher,” he said. “I hardly ever turn off anything I’m watching because I think the good parts are coming.”As Ms. Min said, “Ted may be the only executive who has come within a million miles of an actual consumer of entertainment during his career.”Netflix’s co-CEOs, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressMr. Sarandos is philosophical about the town vibrating with joy at his troubles. “Nobody wants to have their foundations challenged or their conventions challenged and we definitely did all that.” He points out that it is, after all, a very competitive business. “It’s not like we invented the bidding war, you know.”Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose movies “Kindergarten Teacher” and “The Lost Daughter” were acquired by Netflix, evokes the Medicis in the way Netflix supports art that might get lost, art that is dark and painful to watch. “Not once was I pushed to make a change I didn’t want to make,” she said.Mr. Sarandos said that when he met Reed Hastings in 1999, he was driven by the desire to help great storytellers reach people around the world.“There were some movies that never came to Phoenix, and it always made me crazy,” he said. “I thought that video rental never really solved the promise because it just became a repeat of the same distribution problem, very hit driven.”Mr. Sarandos often brings up the idea of democratization. “Netflix did diversity and inclusion better than anyone in Hollywood ever had or will,” Ms. Min said. “One of their first shows was ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ a female prison drama, with a transgender character, that no one would touch.”When I talk to other executives and talent around town, they have glowing things to say about Mr. Sarandos behind his back.“It sounds so boring but this guy is incredibly friendly, kind, gregarious and warm,” said Jason Bateman, the star of Netflix’s “Ozark.” “If Marty Byrde were to describe him, he might say, he has all the power of a cartel boss and none of the frown.”Many rivals do question Netflix’s business model, which they think was overvalued by Wall Street and outran financial logic for a long time. Some say royalties have been replaced by front-loaded, bloated contracts, making flops all the more costly and obscuring creators’ ability to see just how successful their works are. Those rivals wonder if the quality of Netflix’s content needs upgrading — given that it made 70 movies in 2021 — so that, as one rival executive put it, they have filet at the buffet as well as vegetables and mashed potatoes.“Tiffany’s became a Sears overnight,” sniffed one Hollywood player who has dealt with the company.And they wonder about the wisdom of writing gazillion-dollar checks to sign up celebrities with no filmmaking experience, like the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who were given producing deals. (Barack Obama is also signed up to narrate a National Geographic-style nature documentary.)“You have to bet early on storytellers,” Mr. Sarandos said. My experience with Barack and Michelle is they are phenomenal storytellers.”But Netflix is not going forward with Meghan Markle’s cartoon show about a 12-year-old girl, “Pearl.”How does it feel to drop a semi-royal?“We’re all optimistic when we go into these projects,” Mr. Sarandos said, “and sometimes they do or don’t materialize.”What’s So Bad About Being CBS?Mr. Sarandos’s 2020 decision to oust Cindy Holland, his vice president of original content who had developed expensive hits like “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Stranger Things,” “The Crown” and “The Queen’s Gambit” and signed off on big checks — $100 million to Shonda Rhimes (recruited by Mr. Sarandos) and $300 million to Ryan Murphy — continues to rankle in some quarters. Ms. Holland was seen as an exemplar of more curated chic and less mass appeal, and as Kim Masters wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, she clashed with Mr. Sarandos about the demand for ever more volume, the lavish Oscar campaigns and giving Mr. Chappelle more specials.Mr. Sarandos said that he and Ms. Holland got the business to where it was, but he wanted to give Ms. Bajaria, formerly Netflix’s head of unscripted and international content, the top slot because she had international experience, which he thought could help the company to grow. She also had a gift for picking hits like “You.”Some rivals contend that Netflix started out boldly but then became Walmart or CBS, with too much “Emily in Paris” and not enough “Stranger Things.”The Netflix hit “Emily in Paris.”Netflix, via Associated Press“CBS is one of the most successful TV networks in history,” Mr. Sarandos responded imperturbably. “So, yeah.” He also thinks “Emily in Paris” is high-quality television, adding “Peyton Manning goes on ‘S.N.L.’ and is talking about ‘Emily in Paris.’”“We’re trying to satisfy multiple tastes,” he said. “This year, we had two best picture nominees, ‘Power of the Dog’ and ‘Don’t Look Up,’ and they couldn’t be any more different.”And he brags about “Squid Game,” which he calls “the biggest entertainment story in a century.” He said his team in Korea found the story, which had been pitched as a movie for 10 years, and asked the creator to conceptualize it as a series.“This is where the algorithm is your friend,” he said. “The algorithm is an advocate for the audience trying to find that thing you never heard of that you’re going to love. And it kept recognizing very quickly that this thing was happening in Korea and ‘Oh, my God, it’s happening in Japan.’ ‘Oh, it’s happening in France.’”He’s sanguine that Netflix hasn’t hit its ceiling. After all, according to Nielsen, streaming accounted for a little more than 30 percent of TV viewership in the United States in April. Netflix had the most viewers of any streamer, but accounted for just 6.6 percent of all TV viewership in the United States.One way that Netflix will keep growing, Mr. Sarandos said, is that the company will work to tighten password control, or figure out a way people can pay to share their password. “About a third of American households are borrowing the password to someone else’s account,” Mr. Hastings said.Mr. Sarandos doesn’t agree with criticism that Netflix needs to stop greenlighting so many projects and embrace a more selective approach, even though, as Scott Galloway, a tech guru and New York University marketing professor, said dryly, “They’re spending the defense budget of Sweden on content.” (Actually, Netflix spends far more. Sweden spent about $7 billion on defense in 2021, and Netflix said it spent $17 billion on content that year.)“I don’t think that we’ve done anything so willy-nilly that we should rethink it,” Mr. Sarandos said, adding: “While many competitors and pundits talk about volume being a negative, I think it is a tremendous positive for consumers who all have a different view of what ‘quality’ is. I think that, while they kick us around about it, they are starting on the same path — HBO with Discovery programming on the same shelf, Disney broadening their brand with Fox content, and even FX’s radical expansion of output to 22 shows.”Does he think that Netflix not diversifying its revenue strategy has exacerbated recent obstacles?“I think it’s the trade-off of simplicity and complexity,” he said. “And to do what we did in the last 10 years, I think we benefited much more from simplicity.”Many artists at Netflix are happy to defend the company in this moment of churn.“Decisions are not made by an algorithm,” said Guillermo del Toro, who is making “Pinocchio” for Netflix. “What’s really important about Ted is that he’s in the room, not just his body. He’s completely engaged with you.”Jerry Seinfeld waves off the schadenfreude. “People are just yapping away at their lunches, like they always do,” the comedian said. “They come after you if you’ve got the ball. Ted’s got the ball.”Shonda Rhimes, flush with “Inventing Anna” and “Bridgerton” success, is rosy about the future: “I live in this space and I wouldn’t bet against Netflix.”“Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings are A-Rod and Barry Bonds,” Mr. Galloway said, adding that while they may have been beaned in the face, “You don’t want to bet against these guys.”Mr. Sarandos, of course, is optimistic. “We’re 90 years behind all of our current competitors in what we do today, and they’re just entering into our space,” he said. “We have to have content that people like better on Netflix than anywhere else. I know it seems like it should be more complicated than that, but it almost isn’t.”Mr. Sarandos.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You were a better video store clerk than Quentin Tarantino.Ted Sarandos: I don’t know how great a video store clerk he was, but I was probably nicer to the customers who forgot to rewind the tapes.If media executives recreated “Squid Game,” Rupert Murdoch would be the guy who tricks everyone, Reed Hastings would be the frontman, and Bob Chapek would get killed in the first round.(Laughing) Plausible. And you could scramble them in any way.Let’s play MFK (Marry, “Fornicate,” Kill): Hulu, HBO and Disney+.I would say “M” all three and I would “F” all three. The jury is out on “K.”Barack is much more fun to party with than Michelle.Deny.You named your son after Tony Bennett long before you met him.That is true. Anthony Bennett Sarandos. Tony is an unbelievable singer, obviously, but also a civil rights activist, a great painter, a super-well-rounded human being. We got to be good friends and one day, Tony goes “Why would you name your kid Tony Bennett?” I go, “Well, first of all, I never thought I’d have to explain it to you.”After the Netflix subscriber news broke, you turned on Merle Haggard’s hit “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”I’m a huge fan.Executives at media companies make too much money.No comment. More

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      Kevin Spacey to Face Sexual Assault Charges in Britain

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      The actor said in a statement to “Good Morning America” that he will seek to prove his innocence against the charges.The actor Kevin Spacey said on Tuesday that he will voluntarily travel to Britain to face criminal sexual assault charges, allowing the authorities there to formally charge him without having to pursue extradition proceedings.Last week, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced that law enforcement had authorized the charges, of four counts of sexual assault against three men, as well as one charge of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.” But Mr. Spacey, 62, cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales.A representative for Mr. Spacey told the ABC News show “Good Morning America” in a statement that he would travel to Britain to defend himself.“While I am disappointed with their decision to move forward, I will voluntarily appear in the U.K. as soon as can be arranged and defend myself against these charges, which I am confident will prove my innocence,” the statement said.The charges concern three complainants. The alleged incidents date from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013. During those years, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England. The Metropolitan Police said that one of the men was now “in his 40s” and that the other two were now in their 30s, but did not provide their exact ages.A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment on Tuesday.In his statement, Mr. Spacey also said, “I very much appreciate the Crown Prosecution Service’s statement in which they carefully reminded the media and the public that I am entitled to a fair trial, and innocent until proven otherwise.”The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old. Mr. Spacey is currently defending himself in a lawsuit filed by Mr. Rapp in New York.After Mr. Rapp’s allegations were made public in a BuzzFeed article, 20 people who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior. The theater, which said last week that it could not comment on ongoing criminal proceedings, commissioned an independent investigation, which Mr. Spacey did not take part in, and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.” More

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      Heddy Honigmann, Whose Films Told of Loss and Love, Dies at 70

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      A documentarian, she liked to engage her subjects — Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, survivors of genocide — in conversations.Heddy Honigmann, the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker whose humane and gently paced documentaries of Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, disabled people and their service dogs, Dutch peacekeepers and the widows of men who had been murdered in a tiny village near Sarajevo, were stories of loss, trauma and exile — and the sustaining forces of art and love — died on May 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 70.Jannet Honigmann, her sister, confirmed the death. She said Ms. Honigmann had been ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.In the economic chaos of Peru in the 1990s, when the government nearly bankrupted the country and inflation soared, many middle-class people began moonlighting as taxi drivers, slapping a “Taxi” sticker on their Volkswagen Beetles or battered Nissans to signal that they were on call.Ms. Honigmann collected their histories in the 1995 film “Metal and Melancholy,” riding in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs whose drivers included a teacher, a police officer, an actor and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. (She took more than 120 taxi rides to find her subjects.)The stories that unspooled included a devastating tale from a man whose 5-year-old daughter had leukemia and who was driving to pay for her costly medical care. When he tells Ms. Honigmann that he encourages his daughter, whom he describes as a fighter, by saying “Life is hard, but beautiful,” it’s a maxim not just for this film but for all of Ms. Honigmann’s work.In “The Underground Orchestra” (1999), musicians busking in the Paris metro — including a disc jockey from Zaire who has escaped a forced labor camp and an Argentine pianist whose torture at the hands of his government nearly destroyed his hands — describe the refugee odysseys that have brought them there. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an open-ended celebration of human tenacity and life force that builds up a compelling personal vision in an offhanded, roundabout way.”Ms. Honigmann rode in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs to collect the stories of cabdrivers in Lima, Peru, for her film “Metal and Melancholy” (1995).Icarus FilmsDespite stories of terrible trauma, the movie is also a celebration of the culture these artists have left behind — a “world-music primer,” as Mr. Holden put it, “featuring some astonishingly beautiful sounds.”The cultural critic Wesley Morris, in his Times review of “Buddy,” Ms. Honigmann’s 2019 film about people with disabilities and their service dogs, called Ms. Honigmann a humanist who “listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.”But she was more of a gentle interlocutor than an insistent interrogator. There were no narrators in her films, no propulsive music or quick cuts to tell viewers how to experience what they were seeing. Her pacing was almost languid; she allowed her subjects to tell their stories in their own way and in their own time. And she hated the word “interview.”“‘Interviews were for subjects,’ she would say,” said Ester Gould, who was a co-writer, researcher and assistant producer on many of Ms. Honigmann’s films. “‘I have conversations with people.’”In an interview at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2002, Ms. Honigmann said: “I think the only rule for me is that when I hear the stories, if they keep my attention, they will also keep the attention of the spectators.” She added: “I lost myself in conversations. And conversations, if they are interesting, they are never boring.”Ms. Honigmann was primarily a documentarian, but she also made narrative films — notably “Goodbye” (1995), about the doomed, highly charged affair between a young preschool teacher and a married man.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, all of which had been published after his death in 1987 because he worried that they would be seen as pornographic. Ms. Honigmann’s readers took to their roles with gusto and often confided their own erotic histories. Graphic, sensual, tender and at times very funny, the film is a rumination on desire, memory and age.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.Film ForumMs. Honigmann’s films have won awards at film festivals all over the world and been shown in retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Paris Film Festival, among other venues.In 2013 she was given the Living Legend Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Yet she may be the most famous filmmaker Americans have never heard of, according to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum in New York, which has presented the premieres of many of Ms. Honigmann’s movies.“As Americans, we live in a bubble in terms of film, because Hollywood is so dominant that documentary filmmakers don’t get the same kind of attention that narrative fiction film receives,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “In this country, among documentary filmmakers, Heddy was a star. In Europe, she was a superstar. In the Netherlands, she’s a national treasure.”Heddy Ena Honigmann Pach was born on Oct. 1, 1951, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were European Jewish refugees.Her father, Witold Honigmann Weiss, an artist and illustrator who created a popular comic strip, was born in Vienna and had been interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria before he escaped in 1942, making his way to Peru by way of Russia and Italy. Her mother, Sarah Pach Miller, an actress and homemaker, had left Poland with her family for Peru in 1939. (In Peru, it is the custom to use the surnames of both parents. Heddy dropped the name Pach as a filmmaker.)Heddy studied biology and literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Her father wanted her to be a doctor. She first wanted to be a poet — she loved Emily Dickinson — but decided filmmaking was a better medium for her. She left Peru to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and she did not return to her home country for nearly two decades.An early marriage in Lima to Gustavo Riofrio ended in divorce. In the 1970s she married Frans van de Staak, a Dutch filmmaker she met in Rome, and the couple moved to Amsterdam; she became a Dutch citizen in 1978. Their marriage also ended in divorce.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her son, Stefan van de Staak; her husband, Henk Timmermans; and her stepson, Jaap Timmermans.Ms. Honigmann’s film “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), told of the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces killed the men there. Pieter Van Huystee FilmOne of Ms. Honigmann’s most harrowing films was “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), about the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces had murdered the men and burned the place to the ground in 1992. Ms. Honigmann captured the women’s loss by drawing out their memories of their loved ones, and by showing the photographs and belongings the women had saved as mementos.She said she tried to show that the most terrible thing about war is not the numbers of the dead, which she called an abstraction: “The catastrophe is, for instance, seeing that a whole town has lost all the craftsmen, that people who were in love were separated forever, that children who loved to play football and loved music cannot hear it anymore.”“When you are born from immigrants you are educated in melancholy,” Ms. Honigmann said in her 2002 talk at the Walker Center. “You hear all the time of stories of people leaving. That’s in my films. People are left, or they are leaving, or losing their memory.”When Michael Tortorello, her interviewer, asked her what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Peru, she answered promptly: “I would have a been a taxi driver.” More

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      ‘The Triangle of Sadness’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes

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      CANNES, France — The satire “Triangle of Sadness,” from the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival at a ceremony here on Saturday. A blunt, ugly sendup of class politics, the movie had sharply divided critics.The awards ceremony ran a relatively painless 90 or so minutes, another reminder that the emphasis at Cannes remains on the movies themselves, not the accompanying circus. Held inside the magnificent Grand Lumière Theater inside the festival’s headquarters — with the nine-person jury watching from the stage — the awards confer critical legitimation and generate much-needed public relations for movies that, years into the pandemic, are headed into a still-difficult world for art cinema.The Grand Prix — the festival’s second prize — was split between “Close,” from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and “Stars at Noon,” from the French auteur Claire Denis. “Stars at Noon” was brutalized by critics, but it wasn’t wholly a shock that it won an award: Vincent Lindon, the president of this year’s jury, has appeared in several of Denis’s movies. “Close,” a critical and audience favorite about two 13-year-old boys whose friendship is tragically tested, drew warm applause from the Lumière audience.The Jury Prize, the third prize, was split between two very different dramas: “EO,” a heartbreaker about a donkey from the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski, and “The Eight Mountains,” a coming-of-age story from the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Skolimowski, 84, began his acceptance speech by thanking (and naming) all six of his donkeys — including a little beauty called Taco. For her part, Vandermeersch seemed to surprise her co-director and partner by repeatedly kissing him right before he started his acceptance speech.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook won the director prize for “Decision to Leave,” an entertainingly twisty thriller (which riffs on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”), which was a critical favorite. “This is so cool,” Park said in English on taking the stage, though he also added an expletive.The screenplay award was given to the engrossing (and chatty) drama “Boy from Heaven,” from the Swedish director Tarik Saleh. The film traces the political intrigues swirling around a young Egyptian student, a Sunni Muslim, soon after he begins studying at a powerful religious university. After accepting his award, Saleh dedicated his prize to young Egyptian filmmakers: “Raise your voices, and tell your stories.”In one of the bigger surprises of the evening, the best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the widely disliked true-crime drama “Holy Spider,” from the Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi. She plays a journalist who faces the indifference and misogyny of the police as she tracks down a serial killer. The best actor prize was given to Song Kang-ho, the brilliant South Korean actor (“Parasite”), for his sensitive, soulful performance as a baby trafficker in “Broker,” the latest from the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda.A special prize to commemorate the festival’s 75th anniversary was given to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were in competition again with “Tori and Lokita,” about two undocumented African immigrants in a cruel, profoundly inhospitable Belgium. The Dardennes are among the most justly honored filmmakers in the history of Cannes, having won the Palme twice (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “The Child” in 2005). This award was richly deserved. More

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      The Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard Libel Case Is in the Jury’s Hands

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      After closing arguments, the judge asked a jury in Virginia to decide a defamation trial that focused as much on domestic abuse as damaged reputations.After 23 days of testimony that painted conflicting pictures of a tumultuous Hollywood marriage, lawyers for Johnny Depp and Amber Heard delivered their closing arguments on Friday, seeking to persuade the jury that their client had been the person who was abused and defamed.Mr. Depp’s lawyers asserted that their movie star client had been falsely disparaged in a Washington Post op-ed in which Ms. Heard referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”The accusations of spousal abuse that she was referencing, the lawyers argued, had ruined Mr. Depp’s life.“We ask you to give Mr. Depp his life back by telling the world that Mr. Depp is not the abuser Ms. Heard said he is,” a lawyer for Mr. Depp, Camille Vasquez, said, “and hold Ms. Heard accountable for her lies.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers countered that not only were the accusations and the op-ed entirely true, but during legal proceedings in 2020, the actress was unfairly maligned when a lawyer, who represented Mr. Depp at the time, called her abuse accusations a hoax.“In Mr. Depp’s world, you don’t leave Mr. Depp, and if you do, he will start a campaign of global humiliation against you,” argued a lawyer for Ms. Heard, Ben Rottenborn.Now, the case is in the hands of seven jurors who deliberated until Friday evening and left the Fairfax County Circuit Court with instructions to return on Tuesday.The trial has drawn widespread attention because the proceedings have been both televised and livestreamed through a pair of cameras in the courtroom, a rarity in Virginia. On one YouTube channel streaming the proceedings, called Law & Crime Network, more than one million users were reported to be watching.There has been stiff competition to fill the public seats in the courtroom, with observers — most of them fans of Mr. Depp — lining up in the middle of the night to secure a spot. On Friday morning, about 150 people waited in line to get into the courtroom, with hundreds more lining a nearby road, some of them dressed as Mr. Depp’s movie characters.Peyton Elmendorf, a 27-year-old Depp fan, said that when she first heard about Ms. Heard’s accusations, she had misgivings about defending the actor given the #MeToo movement. But now, after hearing other of the actor’s romantic partners speak positively about him, she said she felt confident voicing her support.Our Coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard TrialA trial between the formerly married actors has become a fierce battleground over the truth about their relationship. What to Know: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are suing each other with competing defamation claims, amid mutual accusations of domestic abuse.Stan Culture in the Courtroom: The closely watched trial is a case study in what happens when complex claims are filtered through the lenses of extreme fandom. TikTok’s Hate Machine: The online commentary about the trial quickly turned into an internet-wide smear campaign against Ms. Heard. Dressing to Suggest: Both litigants appeared notably sober in their fashion choices. That is no coincidental thing.“I knew he didn’t do it,” she said.Outnumbered outside the courthouse, but unpersuaded, Dan Kim, 26, quietly held a sign nearby that said “I stand with Amber.” He called it “crystal clear” that Mr. Depp had abused Ms. Heard.Supporters of Mr. Depp outside the courthouse on Friday.Craig Hudson/Associated PressUltimately, the jury must consider the veracity and reputational impact of a narrow set of statements. But the six-week trial has encompassed testimony about a vast array of alleged incidents from Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard’s marriage.Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp of repeated physical abuse that she said often coincided with drug and alcohol use and began with his accusing her of infidelity. She has also alleged several instances of sexual assault — including an accusation that he assaulted her with a bottle in Australia in 2015.Amber Heard, talking to one of her lawyers during the proceedings on Friday.Pool Photo via Steve Helber/ReutersMr. Depp has denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting Ms. Heard and has portrayed her as the aggressor in the relationship, recalling violence from her throughout their relationship, as well as angry tirades and demeaning name-calling. Ms. Heard has denied hitting Mr. Depp except in defense of herself or her sister.Testimony about the incidents often involved sensational details: disputed affairs with celebrities, graffiti written in blood and a missing chunk of Mr. Depp’s finger that forced the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie to pause production.In laying out the highlights of their evidence, Mr. Depp’s lawyers reminded the jury of witnesses who said they did not see injuries on Ms. Heard around the times she reported having them, showed a photo of him with a “shiner” that he said she gave him and replayed audio of arguments between the estranged couple in which Ms. Heard admits to having hit Mr. Depp. In one audio clip, Ms. Heard can be heard saying, “I did start a physical fight,” challenging her claim that she only hit Mr. Depp as a defense. (Ms. Heard testified that in those instances, she hit him in response to his own aggression.)His team also pointed to instances where there were no medical records or photographs to corroborate her allegations of abuse.“The ‘mountain of evidence’ that Mr. Depp abused Ms. Heard is simply not there,” Ms. Vasquez argued. “What we have is a mountain of unproven allegations that are wild, over the top and implausible.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers described witnesses who said she had told them about the abuse. Mr. Rottenborn played a video of Mr. Depp angrily slamming kitchen cabinets and showed jurors a text in which the actor told Ms. Heard’s father he had gone “too far in our fight.” He then showed the jury a photo of Ms. Heard with a red mark on her face after, she said, Mr. Depp hurled a phone at her. Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, another of her lawyers, reminded the jury about a forensic psychologist who testified to reviewing a therapist’s notes — which were not entered into evidence — that reflect contemporaneous reports from Ms. Heard where she complained of sexual abuse.“A ruling against Amber here sends a message that no matter what you do, as an abuse victim, you always have to do more,” Mr. Rottenborn said. “No matter what you document, you always have to document more. No matter whom you tell, you always have to tell more people.”Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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      James Wong Howe: A Gutsy Cinematographer Finally Gets His Due

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      A retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image looks at a career filled with sublime images made at a time of strong anti-Asian sentiment in Hollywood.The Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe was an industrious, peripatetic youngster. In modern parlance, he was a hustler, but so was everyone in the early, exploratory years of cinema, when the fledgling film industry churned out dozens of titles every week. During the 1910s, the silent film directors who won acclaim — like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille — seemed to rise through shrewd business acumen, false confidence and good luck.Wong Howe had all of those things, but he was gutsier — he had to be. It was clear in the boundless, reckless innovation of his work; his reputation as a supreme perfectionist; and his success and respected status in an industry that saw virtually no place for artists of Asian descent. James Wong Howe was defiance personified.His decades-long career, which spanned the silent era, Hollywood’s golden age and the New Hollywood renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s, was emblematic of a creative spirit that persisted despite changing fashions, industry upheavals and discriminatory practices. He revolutionized the way films communicated visually, developing new techniques that could convey feelings without the need for words or even performers — like the expressionistic use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses in John Frankenheimer’s body-swapping science-fiction drama, “Seconds” (1966); or one of the earliest aerial shots in the final moments of Joshua Logan’s Technicolor romantic comedy “Picnic” (1955).Rock Hudson in “Seconds,” which Wong Howe shot in part using wide-angle and fish-eye lenses.Paramount Pictures/Photofest via MoMIThese and other examples of Wong Howe’s photographic prowess can be seen in a continuing series dedicated to his work that runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, in 1899. In the early 1900s, he was whisked away to Pasco, Wash., by his entrepreneurial father. There, he experienced racism, learned to box and began tinkering with cameras before his father’s death, in 1914, set off a period of drifting. Not unlike Charlie Chaplin’s classic character the Tramp, Wong Howe was a game outsider stumbling from misadventure to misadventure. He went to Oregon, San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, where the 18-year-old Jimmie Howe eventually finagled a job on the janitorial staff of Lasky Studios.DeMille took a liking to Jimmie; he was amused by the young man’s floral shirts, the contrast between his small stature and the outsize cigars he smoked on set. Wong Howe was not passive; he seemed to take the matter of his skin color as a challenge. In his free time, he began familiarizing himself with the studio’s equipment and practiced taking pictures with a still camera. Soon, he was promoted to assistant cameraman.No one at the time was what we might today consider a bona fide camera expert. People learned on the job, improvised and experimented with the new technologies, so the crew members who distinguished themselves were the ones who found creative solutions to the problems that arose on set. This was Wong Howe’s forte and the source of his first big break. The actress Mary Miles Minter, impressed by Wong Howe’s still portraits of her, insisted he shoot her next film. He had devised a solution that could keep her blue eyes from turning white on camera, a problem caused by the blue-sensitive orthochromatic film used at the time. From then on, his reputation as a formidable cameraman was assured.Wong Howe, left, on the set of “The Glory Guys” (1965). His career ran from silents to the New Hollywood renaissance.United Artists/Photofest, via MoMIWong Howe wasn’t the only Asian artist hanging out on the studio back lots. There was the Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa. Hollywood’s onscreen enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws restricted him to playing forbidden-lover roles or sadistic Svengali types, but his popularity among white women viewers made him a bankable presence. Then there was the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, a go-to supporting performer as the film industry began to mount bigger, more spectacular productions in “exotic” settings. Wong Howe, in fact, would shoot her in one of her first major roles, as the Indigenous princess Tiger Lily in Herbert Brenon’s “Peter Pan.”But renewed anti-Asian sentiment and the Production Code of the 1930s, which put a chokehold on the depiction of interracial relationships, further diminished the industry’s willingness to work with performers of Asian descent. Wong Howe initially floundered during this period, but his work — particularly his penchant for dramatic, high-contrast lighting, which earned him the nickname “Low-key Howe” — spoke for itself. His split-screen shot allows Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelgänger in John Cromwell’s “The Prisoner of Zenda,” (1937), and the fight scenes he filmed in Busby Berkeley’s “They Made Me a Criminal” (1939) are so visceral you can almost feel the boxing gloves jabbing.Though he was adored by the press — what a novelty that an Asian man could be so talented and so full of personality — and respected by his collaborators, Wong Howe was often scorned by the white crew members under his command. He dealt with laws and prejudices that relegated him to second-class citizenship all of his life. During World War II, he wore a button that read “I am Chinese” to ward off harassment should anyone think he was Japanese. Though he had been living in the United States for nearly four decades, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited him from gaining citizenship; without it, he was forced to turn down exciting creative opportunities, like joining John Ford’s wartime documentary crew.Wong Howe’s split-screen shot allowed Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelganger in “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937).Warner Bros.Most devastating perhaps was his marriage to the novelist Sanora Babb; the couple tied the knot in Paris in 1937, but California’s anti-miscegenation laws and the studios’ morality clause prevented them from going public until decades later. For his suspected association with Hollywood Communists, he was put on the “graylist” by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; Wong Howe kept out of politics for the most part, but it didn’t help that China had become a Communist state.Still, he carried on during the precarious ’40s, working with Fritz Lang on the provocative war thriller “Hangmen Also Die!,” and capturing Ida Lupino in all her shades of ambition and vulnerability in Vincent Sherman’s pitch-black melodrama “The Hard Way.”Wong Howe’s images are sublime, his expressive interplay of light and shadow summoning moral conflicts out of thin air. He re-envisioned New York with a bleak, otherworldly flair with “Sweet Smell of Success,” Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 drama about a vicious newspaperman, a work that many consider to be Wong Howe’s chef d’oeuvre. He coated interior-set walls in oil to give them a surreal shimmer, and used long-focus lenses to make buildings look clustered together, emphasizing a sense of claustrophobic delirium.Walter Brennan in “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943), which Wong Howe shot for the director Fritz Lang.Cohen Media GroupThere are few individuals whose work so comparably ushered in cinema’s transition from mere dime-ticket spectacle to art form. Still, Wong Howe was hungry. Since the 1920s, he had wanted to direct, and though he was given the opportunity in the form of commissioned documentaries and “B” movies, his real ambitions were too often denied. There was a project about rickshaw pullers in China, as well as a script he wrote with Babb about San Francisco’s Chinatown, but both ideas were ultimately dropped for lack of financing. If you can catch only one screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, make it Wong Howe’s sole directorial feature, “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), which stars a fresh-faced Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in a drama about the Harlem Globetrotters. It is a bare-bones production, but the grit and spirit of something even greater was just beneath the surface, like Wong Howe himself.Wong Howe didn’t deny his Chinese roots. For a time, he ran a popular Chinese eatery that was frequented by Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney and Tyrone Power. And in his final years, he took to wearing traditional Chinese clothes. In Todd Rainsberger’s 1981 study of the cinematographer, it becomes clear that Wong Howe, who died in 1976, longed to create a more expansive portrait of Americanness, one that felt true to him, if not his employers. He was one of the great American cinematographers and a two-time Oscar winner, but he wanted more because he knew he deserved it. Such was his defiance.“How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More