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      New Books About Hollywood and the Art Industry

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      Books about Viola Davis, Harvey Fierstein, Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward and more take us “into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings.”Millie von PlatenThe one thing we want to know about art is the one thing no one seems to be able to tell us. How, exactly, does the magic happen? It seems to be a site for danger and vulnerability, and the people who do it keep secrets inside them — sometimes biographical ones, certainly creative ones — that they aren’t always able to convey. But still, we read hungrily about them, trying to understand how some eyes see more than ours do.A set of books this season takes us into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings of a career, a character, even the pandemic-as-theater. The ones that go furthest from the present are the most comforting. But perhaps because they’re all written by academics, journalists and actors, they each contain a little shudder of the apocalyptic.Catching at gossamer is what the film critic David Thomson has been doing for decades, in editions of his “Biographical Dictionary of Film” and his more than 20 books, like last year’s elliptical lament about film directing, “A Light in the Dark.” Movies are a memory machine, and Thomson is a master at writing about his own inner screen. The last two years (the last six, the last 30) have been a mess, and Thomson’s DISASTER MON AMOUR (Yale University, 212 pp., $25) carries you backward into them. Of course, film is always his thought-companion, but it is a little surprising that Thomson goes so deep so fast on the Rock schlock “San Andreas.” Still, you cannot fault him; he lives on the West Coast, so thoughts of “the big one” are never far off. This book — chatty, discursive, essayish — is his way of surviving under such shadows.The devastation of a school in Aberfan, South Wales, 1966.Mirrorpix/Getty ImagesOther catastrophes Thomson addresses here include the 1966 Aberfan slag heap disaster, our fast-burning environmental collapse, and, of course, the Covid pandemic and its pre-existing condition, the Trump administration. He makes telling reference to Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” which recorded the plague in 1665; I think Thomson believes his own book, slim and digressive, is just that kind of briskly conducted, pocket-size diary, applicable to our current crisis. After a bracing cold-air quote by Defoe, though, Thomson’s thinking can seem a little less … toothsome. “Sometimes one can think that people are the great disaster, and innocence the essential affectation,” he writes. Lot of qualifiers in that.One of the least pleasant stylistic touches in the book is an ongoing imagined conversation with an old lady, a figure he borrows from Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon,” who sits at the author’s shoulder and asks him questions, congratulates him on his son’s intelligence and makes cracks. “May I share an amusing remark with you?” she asks.Author: It would be most welcome.Old lady: That Dr. Birx — if she knotted together all her scarves and shawls, she might be able to escape from the prison.Author: A Rapunzel?That’s it. The chapter ends there. Thomson knows everything there is to know about film; he has been taking dutiful notes on disasters. He does not, though, know how to write a button.If you dance over that stuff, the short book moves rapidly, like film rewinding through a projector. It’s certainly a record of a mind that runs a bit faster than the rest of ours, one crowded with frames from films and lines from books. The finest section is an in-depth examination of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” first the film, then the novel, and Thomson’s passion for it stirs the book. He demonstrates for us something quite practical: In times of catastrophe, art gives us an object in the near view to focus on. Struck by the glare of a great sentence, our eyes can’t see the horror just beyond the page — and in some blessed moments, the book offers exactly that kind of dazzled respite.The Gravitas and Vulnerability of Viola DavisThe Oscar-winning actress has become one of the bestof her generation, one powerful performance at a time.Inside Out: Viola Davis has faced trauma and grief throughout her life. The painful experiences have left a mark on her performances.By the Book: In an interview, the actress shared what recording the audiobook version of her new memoir, “Finding Me,” was like.An Iconic Character: In “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Davis brings the 1920s blues trailblazer, Ma Rainey, to life. Here is what she had to say about the role.‘The First Lady’: The artist plays Michelle Obama in the Showtime series, which explores the lives and fashion of three U.S. first ladies.What about one of the people who have been on the screen, showing Thomson (and the rest of us) our humanity? There are two things hidden in a performer: their art and everything else. The great actor Viola Davis’s memoir, FINDING ME (Ebony/HarperOne, 291 pp., $28.99), restrains itself to the everything else, plunging us again and again into her childhood, which was a cauldron of pain. The memoir thins when it moves away from trauma, taking on speed and lightness like a runner breaking free of a muddy stretch of track. It means that apart from some thoughtful meditations on her Juilliard experience (How did being trained to play in exclusively European “classics” help or limit her? She weighs it carefully), we can read and read and find very little about how Davis actually achieved her spectacular performances in “Doubt,” in “Fences,” in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”Viola Davis at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty ImagesInstead you read “Finding Me” to discover how she got her courage. She does not need to tell us at the outset that the book originated in her public speaking engagements — each chapter moves toward self-discovery, and even the worst revelations (including sexual assaults, domestic abuse, violence, hunger and a variety of poverty-related humiliations) come with an arrow pointing out of them. Look, each chapter says, I survived and thrived. Davis’s from-the-shoulder prose doesn’t pretty it up: Her father, MaDaddy, was a source of terror. But he changed, and she allowed him to shift his place in her heart. She brings this fierce, cleareyed refusal-to-forget and willingness-to-forgive to her time in the industry, too. She cites the statistics and her own experiences of racism, including some self-abnegating choices to play roles she knew were beneath her. The best parts of the book have this angry clarity; they sound like a call to arms. For fans of her artistry, though, you will have to look elsewhere to understand the mechanisms of her craft.Likewise, you won’t find a key to Harvey Fierstein’s creative mysteries in his kicky memoir, I WAS BETTER LAST NIGHT (Knopf, 384 pp., $30), though you will find boatloads of charm and gossip and some sudden ice-water drops into fury. His playwright’s mind is always keeping notes, and, as Fierstein says, “The jockey never recalls using a whip. The horse never forgets.” He certainly hasn’t forgotten his childhood or time in the 1970s and ’80s downtown theater scene, both of which he describes in lush detail. These unmissable chapters are slick with makeup and sweat: acting in Brooklyn, anonymous sex at the Trucks, a scarifying coming-out experience (do not leave certain kinds of photos around your house), late-night snacks on the Warhol Factory’s tab, his first drag costume, AIDS, love, crushes, grief and the first stirrings of a triumphant talent.Once we reach the greased-rails part of his career — after he broke through, he succeeded fast and young and often — Fierstein assumes a certain amount of familiarity from his reader. So any neo-Harvey-phytes will need to rent “Torch Song Trilogy” and “La Cage aux Folles”; you might want to find a bootleg of his Broadway performances in “Hairspray” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” too, just to fully understand what he’s talking about. He cheerfully addresses frequently asked questions (Why does Arnold have so much bunny paraphernalia in “Torch Song”?), but reader, beware: These might not be universally asked questions.From left, Mary Woronov, Nancy McCormick, Fred Savage and Harvey Fierstein in Ron Tavel’s “Kitchenette,” from “I Was Better Last Night.”Harvey TavelAlso, in his Big Star period, he writes with more caution and delicacy, as he does when he briefly talks about Robin Williams, whom he cherished as a brother. Now, I say “delicacy,” yet there’s a late, hilarious bit about a revival of “Torch Song,” in which he yells at the actor Michael Urie about how to bottom. So there’s delicacy, and there’s delicacy — but “I Was Better Last Night” does ease up in its second half. The last section, after he becomes sober, has a certain tact about it, a refusal to strike hard. I don’t regret this palpable kindness but rather his correspondingly light touch as he talks about his craft. He learned a great deal from Jerry Herman and Arthur Laurents, but what was it, exactly? His accounts of, say, Ron Tavel, an early mentor and dear friend who co-created the Theater of the Ridiculous, are so much more revealing. For some reason, he sees most clearly when he looks back 40 years and more. In other words — it’s an autobiography.If you look further back than that, you start to see different contours — maybe even the big shapes, like landscapes. Mark Rozzo’s EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE WERE CRAZY: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco, 454 pp., $29.99) is a sweeping account of a marriage that lasted only from 1961 to 1969 but nonetheless changed the culture. “Everybody” is written like a novel, appropriately, since Hayward (a talent connected to a tortured performance dynasty) and Hopper (the gonzo actor, director and photographer) could both be the subjects of books all on their own. Together, they were combustible, which is a nice way of saying Hopper (who died in 2010) tended to get very scary on drugs. And together, they were also important collectors in a Los Angeles art scene that was, in those days, as fragile as a plant by a freeway. Their house, a gathering place and refuge for many, became a miniature Pop Art museum — full of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg — and their Hollywood glamour informed and infused the scene.Peter Fonda strums his Gibson 12-string, circa 1965, from “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy.”Dennis Hopper/Hopper Art TrustEven in a busy spring, I have returned to “Everybody” repeatedly since I finished it, eager to sink back into its weird, smoggy, heated atmosphere. Rozzo is a scrupulous researcher and evocative writer — though his descriptions of the artworks too often give way to accounts of their value. (Everything the Hayward-Hopper household bought is now worth a ton, suffice it to say.) Where Rozzo excels is in his description of inner landscape and external geography, whether he’s talking about a beach party at Jane Fonda’s, or Hopper’s upbringing in Kansas (where wheat “shimmered gold like a lion’s mane”), or bitter exchanges in a luxury-stuffed Upper East Side apartment. He takes us cruising along as if we’re in our own road movie — all the emotional abuse and violence safely behind a windshield. Rozzo also comes close to showing us how great art is actually made. Whether it’s a discarded Warhol silk-screen or Hopper’s magnum opus, “Easy Rider,” much of the magic is created by accident, using the things that other people want to throw away. Hayward herself was a devoted trawler of junk shops, her eye careful with treasures ignored in plain sight. Rozzo’s book helps retune our own vision by imparting some of her and Hopper’s art-is-everywhere attitude. You look up from the sensual pleasures of the book, and briefly the ugly old world shocks you — a gallery hung with masterpieces.Now, not every account of the past can contain so much outdoor spirit — a lot of our important American art was made in nightclubs, on the vaudeville circuit (as it broke apart) and on stages where the floor was sticky with beer. In Shawn Levy’s IN ON THE JOKE: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy (Doubleday, 383 pp., $30), a sensitive and vivid study of early female stand-ups, he directs our attention into such dark rooms.Books that aggregate always face one terrible enemy: the introduction. All that research, all that depth, can be flattened so easily by a preface. Levy’s own sounds like a setup for a punchline. Quick: How are Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Moms Mabley, Jean Carroll, Elaine May, Sarah Ophelia Colley (a.k.a. Minnie Pearl) all alike? To simply say they’re women who made their living in comedy can’t satisfy the demands of the introduction. So to account for the way he has assembled his cast of characters, Levy finds himself arguing that each of them left behind something of their “feminine” nature as they achieved success and fame. “For women to be accepted as comedians, they had to be constrained or distorted in such a way that the womanhood was bled out of them,” he writes.Moms Mabley, left, and Pearl Bailey on “The Pearl Bailey Show” in 1971.Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHis own excellent research quickly counters the claim (many were ribald, frank, giggly, maternal, commanding, etc. from the jump) and rubbishes the slippery terms “feminine” and “womanhood” themselves. (When Jim Varney pretended to be a fool, was he bleeding the manhood out of himself? Don’t be a goof.) So it’s best to flip quickly past the awkwardness of those prefatory pages, to dive straight into his accounts of the women themselves. There he shines. His chapters, each one usually dedicated to a single biography, move with different speeds and pressures — his work on Mabley and Phyllis Diller, performers he clearly responds to, is the best at making the women seem to live again. As our painstaking, knowledgeable guide, he only occasionally shows his own hand as a deft comic writer. Describing Carroll’s sartorial conservatism, for instance, he says she was “walking up a down escalator,” a tidy image, perfectly (and tartly) appropriate. For a book about humor, it does this sort of thing too rarely. But the book, because it is really more interested in biography than comedy, must spend a great deal of its time talking about awful marriages, industry pressure and — in every case other than Elaine May’s — death. He’s right; there’s nothing funny about that.But when we look for meaning these days, usually our eyes land on the closest art at hand: television. Maybe it’s because I spend my days reading criticism, but it also seems to be the art that’s under everyone’s microscope at once. Our heads bump over the eyepiece; who will find something new in these much-examined shows? The introduction dilemma also frustrates our first few steps into Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman’s THE NEW FEMALE ANTIHERO: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television (University of Chicago, 265 pp., paper, $26), a book with a more scholarly tone but a more popular (and widely known) set of subjects. The authors have expanded on a talk Hagelin gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, so while the book treats familiar characters from “peak TV” like “The Americans,” “Girls,” “Scandal” and “Broad City,” the piece still retains a sense of the lectern. Essentially, the essays are a series of close readings, and I yearned to be in a classroom with the authors, joining them in their careful appraisals. But that introduction! Again it falls prey to throat-clearing and overclaiming, and they wind up making windy arguments about women’s successes and failures in the workplace, when we can just feel they only want to get into an exegesis of nudity in “Girls.” So, again, I’d say flip on by.Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams filming a scene for “Girls.”Anderson/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesLike that microscope, “Antihero” is strongest when it examines something segment by segment. For instance, in the chapter on “Scandal,” the analysis of an episode from the fourth season, “The Lawn Chair,” contains a deeply felt, and deeply thought, description of a complex set of signifiers. At their best, the authors are connoisseurs of a very specific emotion — shame — and they follow its faint imprint from show to show, body to body. In my experience, though, the chapters on shows I haven’t watched seemed gray and unreadable; only with the ones where I had my own memory of a scene could I fully enter into their argument. As I read, it made me think longingly of “Disaster Mon Amour.” Boy, when Thomson tells you about “The Road,” it rolls out before you. There isn’t comfort in that, necessarily, but there is artistry. I still shudder when I think of it.Helen Shaw is the theater critic at New York magazine. More

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      Meet the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast

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      From trying not to vomit in flight to oiling up for a beach scene, the actors playing pilots got a crash course in the Tom Cruise school of action filmmaking.Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar took to the skies in “Top Gun,” a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters are suiting up in “Top Gun: Maverick.”This time, the aviators are recent graduates of the Navy’s elite fighter school, a.k.a. Top Gun, and they’re tasked with a near-impossible mission overseen by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the brash pilot played by Tom Cruise. Flying alongside Rooster, the son of the original film’s ill-fated Goose, are Hangman, Phoenix, Bob, Coyote, Fanboy and Payback, who must help destroy a foreign enemy’s uranium plant and get out alive. (Though the characters all have actual names, they’re introduced by their aviator call signs, and that’s how they’re known.)The intensive tutelage began offscreen: Cruise monitored the actors’ progress during a grueling five-month training program that culminated in the cast shooting their own action sequences from the back of real F/A-18 jets flown by Navy fighter pilots.Here’s a peek at the new generation of actors behind the call signs.Glen PowellThe actor initially auditioned for the role that went to Miles Teller.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 33“Maverick” role: HangmanWhere you’ve seen him before: “Set It Up,” “Hidden Figures,” “Scream Queens”‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Tom Cruise: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry is betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters.A New Class: Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar, a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters have suited up for the sequel.Filming Challenges: The aerial feats on show in “Top Gun: Maverick” look like the result of digital wizardry. They aren’t.Powell originally auditioned to play Rooster (then called Rascal) but lost out to Miles Teller. Then, when Powell was offered the role that would become Hangman, he turned it down for fear it would be a copy-and-paste take on Val Kilmer’s antagonistic Iceman in the 1986 film. Cruise persuaded Powell to sign on, and they worked together to make the character distinctly Powell’s own. Still, the cocky, confrontational pilot shares more than a few traits with Iceman — as does Powell with Kilmer. When Powell moved out of the San Diego hotel where he had stayed during filming, he bumped into Kilmer, who had just arrived to shoot his scene. “The last things that I moved out of my room were protein powder, weights and tequila,” Powell said. “I’m literally wheeling them on a luggage cart into the elevator, and as the doors are about to close, Val steps in. He looks at me. Then he looks at the luggage cart. And he just started dying laughing. He’s like, ‘This is ‘Top Gun’ right here.’”Monica BarbaroThough the actress could change her character’s call sign, she had good reason to stick with it.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 32“Maverick” role: PhoenixWhere you’ve seen her before: “The Good Cop,” “Chicago Justice,” “UnREAL”The military did not allow women to fly in combat until 1993, and in the first “Top Gun,” all of the Navy fighter pilot characters were men. Barbaro’s role in the sequel is a reflection of the service’s inclusive shift, and her filmed flights were all handled by female Navy fighter pilots. “When I found out I got the part, I was like, ‘Mom, I got it! And guess what? I get to play a pilot. I’m not a love interest!’” the Northern California native said. “We used the women that we got to fly with as role models for how we designed the character.” And while the actors were allowed to change their characters’ call signs, it quickly became clear during the cast’s downtime together that “Phoenix” was a good fit for Barbaro: “Let’s just say, we had one pretty wild night, and the next morning they were surprised that I arose from the ashes.”Greg Tarzan DavisHe was a schoolteacher not long before turning to acting.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 28“Maverick” role: CoyoteWhere you’ve seen him before: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Good Trouble,” “Chicago P.D.”Not long before landing “Maverick,” Davis was an elementary schoolteacher in his home state of Louisiana. “I’m a big believer in following your dreams. I would preach that to my students,” Davis said. “But I realized I wasn’t doing that — because my dream was to be an actor. So I decided to give it a shot.” In a role reversal, Davis, who has gone by Tarzan since his own “wild” youth, said he felt like a kid throughout production, enthralled by the aviation toys and tasked with learning new things. While “Maverick” was in postproduction, he got a call from Christopher McQuarrie, the writer-director of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”; the frequent Cruise collaborator was asking him to join the cast, no audition required. “I put the phone on mute and jumped up and down and screamed,” Davis said. “That was my first offer, and having an offer is an actor’s dream.”Lewis PullmanThe back story for his character’s call sign didn’t make it into the movie.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: BobWhere you’ve seen him before: “Outer Range,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” “Catch-22”Of all the call signs, Pullman’s “Bob” (also his character’s first name) is the most mysteriously straightforward. “Bob is reclusive and quiet and a hard nut to crack,” Pullman said. “One of the original drafts had this moment where he kind of earned his stripes, and Hangman says, ‘I think I know what Bob stands for: Big Ol’ Balls.’ They didn’t end up using that, but it gave me a reference for Bob’s trajectory. He starts out as this unassuming guy, who then finds his strength.” Pullman needed strength of his own when Cruise walked into the first table read. Despite being the son of the actor Bill Pullman, Lewis was star-struck. “Tom basically ripped through the doors. His motorcycle in the background. He’s got his helmet on. The sun is glistening. He takes his helmet off, and his hair is perfect,” he said. “Tom is like Cary Grant and Buzz Aldrin and Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel all woven into one man.”Jay EllisAs a boy, the actor saw the original “Top Gun” with his father on an Air Force base.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 40“Maverick” role: PaybackWhere you’ve seen him before: “Insecure,” “Escape Room,” “The Game”Ellis distinctly recalls the day his father, who was then a mechanic in the Air Force, took him to see the first “Top Gun” in a theater on base in Austin, Texas. “I remember just looking up at the screen thinking, ‘I want to do that. Whatever those guys are up there doing, I want to be a part of that somehow,’” he said. Rather than enlist, Ellis became an actor. Fast forward three decades, and he found himself shooting “Maverick” and paying homage to the original’s beach volleyball scene with a game of beach football as the camera panned over the cast’s glistening muscles for a sun-dappled montage. “We probably went through five different types of oil because the makeup team was trying to figure out what wouldn’t soak into everyone’s skin so quickly,” Ellis said. “We started out with baby oil, then we moved on to argan oil, coconut oil, avocado oil. We switched to glycerin at one point. They were spraying us down with Evian bottles. It made for a very slippery game.”Danny RamirezHe thought he wouldn’t have to worry about his fear of flying. He was wrong.Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: FanboyWhere you’ve seen him before: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “On My Block,” “Assassination Nation”Before signing on, the actors had to check a box attesting they weren’t afraid of flying. “I lied,” Ramirez said with a laugh. “I was like, What’s the worst that could happen? It’s a Tom Cruise movie, that means he’ll be the one doing the stunts.” Without his usual commercial-flight routine of wine and noise-canceling headphones, Ramirez found himself struggling not to vomit as his F/A-18 rolled and dove through the air. The actors each had their own tricks to cope with motion sickness: Davis relied on Dramamine. Pullman preferred a preflight diet of rice and fresh ginger. For Ramirez, slowly building tolerance in incrementally smaller and faster planes was key. Adding to the degree of difficulty: They not only had to deliver their lines, but also set up the shots and adjust the cameras themselves once in the air. “I was like, ‘Are we going to get some kind of camera operator credit or what?’” he said. “Having to line up another jet going 500 miles an hour to stay within the frame was an experience I’m probably never going to have again.” More

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      What Makes Katt Williams Great? It’s Not the Jokes, It’s the Performance

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      His new special, “World War III” on Netflix, underlines the showmanship and drama that make him the finest arena stand-up of the moment.Katt Williams understands the importance of an entrance.In “World War III,” his new hour of stand-up on Netflix, you first see him racing across the stage like Tom Cruise hustling to save the world. His previous specials have been just as cinematic, with Williams strutting in wearing a massive fur coat and flanked by beautiful women or walking through the crowd in a cape while a voice-over tells you his thoughts.But his most spectacular introduction had to be from “Priceless” in 2014 when the curtain dropped to reveal a smoky stage with two women dancing on either side of a cage containing a lion. Not a sleepy one, mind you. This beast was jumpy. After a shot of the audience, a clever piece of misdirection by the director Spike Lee, the focus returned to the stage where one of the women opened a cage door slowly enough to let your mind wander to worst-case scenarios. Then a different Katt emerged.It’s the kind of showmanship (not to mention punning) you can expect from Katt Williams. In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall, Williams, a prolific performer, said his legacy would be not as the greatest comic, but as the most original. He’s got a case. In a landscape filled with stand-ups straining to go against the grain, carving out brands as renegades, Williams is a genuine eccentric.What other superstar would open his first special on Netflix, a famously global platform, with 10 minutes of local material about Jacksonville, Fla., the town he was performing in? Or say with such conviction that there is no such thing as cancel culture. (“I’m on my fifth second chance,” he once quipped.) Or find himself in so many beefs with amiable peers. He’s called out Cedric the Entertainer and Tiffany Haddish, but his fiercest feud is with Kevin Hart. The substance of their conflict is hard to figure out, but in terms of style, Williams always comes off with more flair: He once used a video any boxing promoter would appreciate to challenge Hart to a comedy battle for $5 million.But his distinctiveness starts with his cadence, a swaggering high-pitched voice that evokes the flow of Easy-E more than it does any comic. His delivery has a rhythm, a quickening beat that, once you clue into it, can make anything funny. Along with his live-wire physicality, this is what makes him the finest arena comic of the moment. His act is not about carefully honed jokes. In his new special, which is not one of his better ones, his take on Joe Biden is that he’s old and the world war of the title is a vague battle between truth and lies that never entirely coheres into a complete thought. He pokes fun at Anthony Fauci and makes some half-baked jokes about Adam and Eve being incestuous. Williams has said he stopped performing in clubs and instead develops jokes in front of thousands of people. You can tell.The tepidness of his material here seems almost like a challenge, as if he’s saying: Watch how I can make even these jokes work.The first 10 minutes of his new hour have maybe two good punch lines, and both are about chicken wings. The remarkable part is that they are completely unconnected. Most comics would have at least used a transition to tie them together and build momentum. But whereas there are many comics who can write a tight joke, there’s only one Katt Williams. He tosses ideas out and then, through force of charisma and performance chops, makes them amusing in a way no one else could.In the first chicken wing joke, the setup leans into his preacher voice, adopting a tone of religious solemnity to explain that the world is in serious trouble, convincing you he’s about to go deep before pivoting to a punchline that delivers the news with apocalyptic exasperation: “Taco Bell’s selling chicken wings.”In the other chicken wing bit, the setup and punchline are almost incidental to what comes in between, which he delights in stretching out: He repeats lines like incantations, asks the audience to imagine a chicken, does an imitation of a chicken, and throws out disclaimers (“Look, I’m not a farmer”) and tangents. Part of what makes this so much fun is the improvisational sense he creates, the way he works off the crowd’s response, but it’s also how quickly Williams moves from silly to serious. As wonderfully goofy as his chicken impression may be, what’s really unusual about Williams is his gravity. Even in his funniest moments, he has an intensity that makes comedy dramatic. Donald Glover clearly saw this when he cast Williams in a dramatic role in “Atlanta,” for which he won an Emmy.In a typical special, the comic spends time warming up the crowd, digs in to race and racism, pokes fun at whatever president occupies the Oval Office and tells some elaborate sex jokes. Williams, who perspires as much as any comic who has ever gesticulated, attacks sex jokes with his entire body. In one of my favorite bits from “It’s Pimpin’ Pimpin’” (2008), he describes his signature sexual move as a try-anything maneuver, pantomiming a sort of one-man Rube Goldberg device.Last year, attending my first arena show since the pandemic, I saw Williams at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doing much of the same material that is in his new special. It hit harder live. That may be because no comedian is better suited to remind you of the joys of laughing together.Like only a few other comics alive, Williams knows how to turn a huge crowd into a family affair. He buttered us up, then pushed buttons, gushing about having successfully mounted a show this size during a pandemic: “They said it couldn’t happen in New York,” Williams said. Of course, no one said that, but it felt good to hear and we all cheered ourselves.Katt Williams can seem ill at ease with the collegial small talk of show business, coming off as shy in interviews and seeming a bit awkward hosting a roast of Flavor Flav. (In a later special, he did a very funny and searching bit about feeling implicated in the racism of some of the jokes written for him.) But onstage alone, talking to a crowd, he’s smooth as can be. A seductive presence, he has that ineffable quality of stardom: a preternatural ability to connect. More

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      Which Cannes Films Have the Best Oscar Odds?

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      Movies from Park Chan-wook, Lukas Dhont and Hirokazu Kore-eda could be what academy voters are looking for. But don’t count out “Top Gun: Maverick.”CANNES, France — Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, there was one question on everybody’s lips: “What’s the next ‘Parasite’?” You can see why people wondered, since that Bong Joon Ho film had used its Palme d’Or win to jump-start a historic Oscar campaign.But if last year’s festival had an heir to “Parasite,” it proved to be a very unlikely one.Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s talky drama “Drive My Car” didn’t win the Palme d’Or (it settled for a best-screenplay honor) and wasn’t anyone’s idea of the biggest contender coming out of Cannes. Still, after year-end critics’ groups went for it in a major way, “Drive My Car” picked up huge Oscar nominations for picture, directing and adapted screenplay in addition to one for best international film, the category it won.So as this year’s Cannes nears its end with no one film standing head and shoulders above the rest, I think that rather than searching for the next “Parasite,” it would be wiser to ask: What’s the next “Drive My Car”? In other words, which movie from this year’s Cannes crop could keep on building buzz and capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major Oscar nominations?I see three notable contenders. Foremost among them is “Close,” which is hotly tipped to pick up a major award at the fest on Saturday. It’s the second feature from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and it follows two 13-year-old boys as their intense friendship begins to unravel. Some crucial reviews in Variety and IndieWire have been notably mixed, calling out one of the film’s melodramatic plot twists, but Oscar voters have never minded melodrama — in fact, they often crave it, and the most ardent fans of “Close” consider it to be the four-hankie entry of the festival. A24 bought the film on the eve of its premiere, so expect a robust fall push.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook deserved Oscar notice for his twisty 2016 masterpiece “The Handmaiden,” and though his new Cannes film “Decision to Leave” isn’t quite on that level, it’s still a well-directed affair that could see plenty of awards attention. A Hitchcockian romantic thriller, “Decision to Leave” stars Park Hae-il as a detective investigating a murdered man’s widow (Tang Wei) who, in her own femme fatale way, seems to welcome the stakeout. After the explicit sex scenes of “The Handmaiden,” it’s surprising how chaste the director’s follow-up is, but that may actually work to the movie’s favor with older Oscar voters.Our Coverage of the Cannes Film Festival 2022The Cannes Film Festival returns with its typical glitz, glamour and red-carpet looks, and with nearly 50 movies projected for the event.Politics and Grace: In Cannes, politics and polemics are always part of the movie mix. But there is still room for scenes of lyrical beauty.Oscar Odds: Which movie from the Cannes crop could capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major nominations? There are three top contenders.David Cronenberg: The body-horror auteur shared some thoughts on aging and his new film “Crimes of the Future,” which premiered at the festival.‘Elvis’: Baz Luhrmann brought the King to Cannes with a hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged biopic.Ask a Cameraman: The festival is known for its elongated standing ovations. One of the men tasked with filming them explained what it takes to capture those moments.Hirokazu Kore-eda scored the Palme d’Or in 2018 for his sensitive drama “Shoplifters,” which went on to compete for the international-film Oscar; though it lost to the Netflix-funded juggernaut “Roma,” I suspect a film like “Shoplifters” would play better today and contend for more nominations across different categories. Keep an eye on Kore-eda’s “Broker,” then: This affectionate character study stars “Parasite” lead Song Kang Ho as one of two good-natured criminals who try to sell an abandoned baby. At times, the movie is so sweet that it verges on gooey, but I doubt the “CODA” wing of the academy will complain.Some other Cannes entries could pop up throughout awards season, including “Armageddon Time,” from the director James Gray, about a middle-class Jewish family whose progressive attitudes mask a willingness to climb a few rungs at the expense of those less privileged. Gray is well-liked in France and may pick up a trophy here, but Oscar voters have yet to break for him in any significant way. Stars Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and Anthony Hopkins will at least attract attention.Vicky Krieps should already have one Oscar nomination under her belt for “Phantom Thread”: since she was snubbed then, perhaps voters could make it up to her for “Corsage,” in which she’s fun and spiky as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. I’d also be pleased if critics’ groups rally behind Léa Seydoux as a single mother attempting a tricky romance in Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning,” my favorite entry of the festival.Seydoux is also quite good in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” where she stars opposite Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart, but the film may prove too out-there for awards voters; ditto “Triangle of Sadness,” from “The Square” director Ruben Ostlund, though that class comedy does provide some of the most gonzo gross-out sequences of the year and contains a memorable supporting turn from Woody Harrelson.Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen in “Crimes of the Future.”Nikos Nikolopoulos/NeonWhat about the expensive Hollywood movies that premiered at Cannes? “Elvis” hails from the director Baz Luhrmann, who managed an Oscar breakthrough with “Moulin Rouge” but whose last film, “The Great Gatsby,” earned nominations only for its costumes and production design. The glittery “Elvis” seems likely to continue that trend: Reviews have been polarizing, and though up-and-comer Austin Butler impresses as Elvis Presley, young hunks usually face an uphill battle in the lead-actor category. (And the less said about the misbegotten supporting performance from Tom Hanks as Elvis’s manager, the better.)The last time George Miller was at Cannes, he premiered “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations (including picture and director) and ultimately picked up six statuettes. Action movies rarely fare that well with Oscar, but Miller broke the mold, and he’s made something else unique with “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” his new film about a djinn (Idris Elba), a scholar (Tilda Swinton) and the unique love that blooms between them. It’s got drama, fantasy, romance, comedy … and you’ll either thrill to all of that, or find it a bit overstuffed. The tech elements of the film deserve notice, but other categories could be a long shot.And then there’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” which launched on the Croisette with a flyby from fighter jets and an opaque conversation with star Tom Cruise. This long-in-the-making sequel is earning stellar reviews and it’s expertly directed. If the academy really wants to push well-done blockbuster material into the best picture race, this could be the summer’s strongest hope. “Drive My Fighter Jet,” anyone? More

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      Big Mess on Campus: Making ‘Emergency’

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      A talk with the director Carey Williams and the screenwriter KD Dávila about their college dark comedy streaming on Amazon.Comedies about wild times in high school and college have long scattered the movie landscape like red cups on a frat house porch. The antics of “Animal House” in the late 1970s gave way to a string of zany ‘80s movies like “Porky’s,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Revenge of the Nerds.” The ’90s brought “American Pie” and “Can’t Hardly Wait.” But historically, often either missing, put to the sidelines or made the punch lines in these films, were characters of color.Spike Lee’s “School Daze” (1988) was a rare exception of one that focused on a nonwhite cast. But the college comedy “Emergency” (streaming on Amazon), hopes to add something fresh to the genre, making race, and the perceptions that come from being a person of color in certain environments, a central plot point. Its lead characters experience a wild night, but not in the way they would have hoped.The film stars Donald Elise Watkins and RJ Cyler as two buddies who want to become the first Black men on their campus to complete a college party circuit called the legendary tour. But plans go south when they find a young white woman passed out in their house. They must try to figure out, with their other roommate (Sebastian Chacon) what to do, because for three men of color, calling the cops in this situation is a risky option.The makers of “Emergency” understand this tricky calculus. The film was written by KD Dávila, who is Mexican American, and directed by Carey Williams, who is Black. Their feature emerged from their 2018 short, which won prizes at the South by Southwest and Sundance film festivals. In a video interview, the two discussed building humor out of an intense situation, and how British comedies came to be an influence on the film.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The director Carey Williams and the screenwriter KD Dávila on the set of “Emergency.”Quantrell ColbertWere there specific elements you wanted to reference from the high school and college comedy genre for this film?KD DÁVILA On the writing side, definitely. In many ways, it was an opportunity to subvert a lot of those tropes. I think we all grew up watching things like “Superbad” and “Booksmart” and everything. But it always struck me as funny how the stakes in those movies are emotional, primarily. They’re never very high. And so this movie was an opportunity to take a lot of things very seriously.Our characters wish that they were in one of those party comedies, like they wish they were going to be in “Superbad” or something, but they ended up in a kind of a thriller instead.What do you think is at the heart of the film?DÁVILA We wanted to do a movie that was about perception and the burden that people of color have of having to anticipate how you’re being perceived at all times. And that’s where a lot of the humor and the drama comes from in the movie: that they have to keep anticipating how they’re being perceived at any given moment.How did you work at striking that tonal balance between comedy and drama here?CAREY WILLIAMS For me, the film was always really like a love story about these two guys and their friendship. And so that was the entry point into balancing the tone of this film through the course of this night. In focusing on this friendship, the humor was going to come from how they interacted with each other, about their differing world views of how to handle the situation.Did you have film references in your mind when making this?WILLIAMS I purposely tried not to watch anything that I felt like would be held in conversation with this film because I didn’t want to be influenced in that way. I did feel the essence of Spike Lee’s work in my mind when making this. But I wanted it to feel not like a college comedy movie. I wanted to have it feel very authored, cinematically. Movies that feature young Black people don’t get that cinematic treatment as much as they should in this world, especially the college comedy. But you know, it’s funny because after I made the movie, I keep thinking about “Y Tu Mamá También” as something I feel like this movie has synergy with. But I don’t think I was thinking about that when I made the movie.DÁVILA When I hit college, I started watching a ton of British comedies. And I think that British comedies operate almost like horror thrillers. Like it’s like the horror of being embarrassed or something. And you are always thinking of how this looks. And so I think that watching so many just British comedies influenced this movie a lot, which sounds probably very strange considering the subject matter of the film and what it ended up being.What is your favorite high school or college comedy?WILLIAMS “Weird Science.” That movie’s ridiculous, but I’ve watched it so many times.DÁVILA This is not a high school or college comedy, but it’s definitely a late-bloomer coming-of-age story: “Shaun of the Dead.” I love it so much. It works on so many levels. More

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      Your Burning Questions About ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Answered

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      How similar is it to the original? Who’s back? Who’s absent? We have answers.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.“Top Gun: Maverick” turns and burns its way into theaters this week, landing 36 years after the 1986 original. That’s a lot of time to form a lot of questions about the new film and its relationship to its predecessor — and we’ve got answers.Didn’t this already come out?You would think! Thanks to its complex production, the Covid-19 pandemic and Paramount’s insistence on holding out for a proper theatrical rollout, “Top Gun: Maverick” has set and missed five previous release dates: July 2019, June 2020, Christmas 2020, the 2021 Fourth of July weekend, Thanksgiving of 2021, and then finally, its current Friday berth.How similar are the stories?Very. Both films begin with Maverick (Cruise) engaging in a display of hot-dogging that gets him called on the carpet — but not really, since he’s sent to Top Gun, essentially promoted, by its conclusion. (This time, he’ll instruct a class of hotshot young fliers for a dangerous mission.) The goings-on at the Navy flight school include dogfight exercises, philosophical conflicts and a love story. Plus, a devastating loss is followed by a crisis of conscience before the eventual triumph.The original film’s primary conflict was between Maverick, the cocky risk-taker, and Iceman (Val Kilmer), a by-the-book pilot who finds Maverick’s rule-breaking dangerous. In the sequel, that dynamic is replicated between adrenaline junkie Hangman (Glen Powell) and the more conservative Rooster (Miles Teller), whose tendency to play it safe in the air is rooted in the premature death of his father: Maverick’s old flying buddy Goose (Anthony Edwards).Miles Teller as Rooster.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesWho’s back?Only one actor, aside from Cruise, returns: Val Kilmer’s Iceman, now the commander of the Pacific fleet. Teller did not play little Rooster in the original film, but the character was present, bouncing on a bar piano as Maverick and his old man sing and play “Great Balls of Fire”; here, Rooster leads a piano singalong of the same tune, and the director Joseph Kosinski flashes back to that scene (just in case Rooster’s costume, mustache and aviators, identical to Goose’s, aren’t enough of a giveaway).And, as the film critic Alison Wilmore noted, Maverick’s love interest, Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), while not seen in the first film, was mentioned in an early scene.Who’s noticeably absent?That new love interest means that Kelly McGillis, who played the instructor Charlie Blackwood in the original, does not appear — she’s not even mentioned. Nor does Meg Ryan, whose brief but memorable turn as Goose’s widow was an early career highlight, or Rick Rossovich, who played Iceman’s fly buddy Slider to memorable effect.Do we hear “Danger Zone”?Do we ever. The opening minutes are a painstaking recreation of the same stretch in “Top Gun”: Harold Faltermeyer’s distinctive “bong” and synthesizer score accompany the exact same opening text explaining what Top Gun is and what it does (with one notable alteration: it now notes that the school trains a “handful of men and women”), before we see planes taking off from Navy carriers and roaring into the sky as the score gives way to Kenny Loggins’s pulse-pounding hit “Danger Zone.”The detail of the replication is meticulous, approaching the level of Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot “Psycho” remake. But it turns out to be a head-fake, framing “Maverick” as exactly the kind of empty nostalgia play that it turns out not to be.Jennifer Connelly as Penny, Maverick’s love interest.Paramount PicturesWhat about “Take My Breath Away”?Surprisingly, Berlin’s love ballad (the soundtrack’s other big hit) is nowhere to be found, though Cruise and Connolly’s love scene initially apes some of the compositions of the original scene when it was used. But their foreplay ends quickly for a tasteful cut to the afterglow, as Kosinski seems more interested in (gasp) what they have to say to each other than what they want to do to each other.This is true to the picture’s general approach to romance, replacing the entirely physical attraction of the first film with a solid, complicated relationship between two adults, who’ve lived a life and shared a history. But yes, she rides on the back of his Kawasaki, and her hair looks great blowing in the breeze.How homoerotic is it?Barely, sadly. The guy-on-guy overtones of the original film were so pronounced that they became part of the picture’s lore, articulated by no less a pop culture expert than Quentin Tarantino (in a cameo appearance in the 1994 comedy “Sleep With Me”). But this one mostly plays it straight, so to speak.OK, but is there at least a beach volleyball scene?There is a beach football scene, but it’s comparatively chaste — skin is bared and muscles are flexed, but it feels like the sequence is actually about the game they’re playing, and not, y’know, other stuff.From left, Jay Ellis, Monica Barbaro and Danny Ramirez in the film.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesHow propagandistic is it?The original “Top Gun” was such an effective piece of rah-rah flag-waving that Navy recruiting officials notoriously posted up outside screenings to field inquiries from would-be Mavericks. The new film isn’t quite as jingoistic (though it was again made with the full cooperation of the Department of Defense), emphasizing personal over political conflict. But the central mission, to bomb an unnamed enemy’s “unsanctioned uranium plant” that threatens “our allies in the region,” has some troubling historical analogues.Will I like it if I loved the original?Probably. The culture-war inclined may decry the film’s inclusivity (beyond the opening text alteration, the flying crew is more racially and sexually diverse), but “Maverick” checks all the expected boxes: thrilling action, shades and leather jackets aplenty, and Cruise at his coolest.Will I like it if I hated the original?Speaking as part of this demographic: yes. Cruise and the screenwriters make the deliberate (and frankly risky) choice of making Hangman, the character most reminiscent of Maverick in the first film, the most unlikable character in this one. It proves a genuinely thoughtful and effective method of grappling with what “Top Gun” was, what it said and what it represented at that moment in history — and in this one.Audio produced by More

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      Inside the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Flying Sequences

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      The makers of the “Top Gun” sequel discuss the challenges of filming practical aerial stunts.Before Tom Cruise signed on to star in the original “Top Gun,” he asked to take a test flight in a jet. Cruise wasn’t yet world famous, so when he arrived at the hangar, his long hair still in a ponytail left over from “Legend,” the pilots, according to one of the film’s producers, Jerry Bruckheimer, decided to give this Hollywood hippie the ride of his life. Zipping at 6.5 G’s — more than twice the G-forces some astronauts endure during rocket launches — Cruise felt the blood drain from his head. He vomited in his fighter-pilot mask.He agreed to make the film.Cruise continued to fly so fast, and so frequently, that he learned to squeeze his thighs and abs to stay conscious. His stomach adjusted to the speed. When the director Tony Scott put a camera in the cockpit, Cruise could smile for his close-ups. His castmates weren’t as prepared.“They all threw up and their eyes rolled back in their heads,” Bruckheimer said in a phone interview. The original footage “was just a mess,” he admitted. “We couldn’t use any of it.”“Top Gun” made Cruise a superstar — and the experience of shooting it stuck with him so much, he was convinced he needed to lead a three-month flight course for the cast of “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel, now in theaters, that has had 35 years to build up suspense. In the new movie, Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell (known as Maverick) readies a dozen young pilots for a dangerous mission to destroy an underground uranium plant in an enemy land. Behind the scenes, Cruise did roughly the same thing, gradually raising the actors’ aerial tolerance, and confidence, from small prop planes to F-18 fighter jets. “He’s got every kind of pilot’s license that you could possibly imagine — helicopters, jets, whatever,” Bruckheimer said.In essence, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a 450 mile-an-hour flying-heist caper. The mission leaders devise a difficult set of challenges for the pilots: zoom low and quick, vault a steep mountain, spin upside-down, plummet into a basin and survive a near-vertical climb at 9 G’s while dodging missiles.Cruise, a contender for the most daredevil actor since Buster Keaton, was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans.“You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.”From the safety of theater seats, the audience faces its own challenge: unlearning the computer-generated complacency that’s turned modern blockbusters into bedazzled bores. The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t.Cast and crew members on the set of “Top Gun: Maverick.”Paramount PicturesThe movie’s aerial coordinator, Kevin LaRosa II, and its aerial unit director of photography, Michael FitzMaurice, filmed from above using three aircraft: two types of jets with exterior cameras mounted on wind-resistant gimbals, and a helicopter, which proved best at capturing the speed of actors whizzing by. One specialized jet could film the same scene using two different lens focal lengths to double the footage captured on a single flight. Once LaRosa heard that the long-anticipated sequel was finally going to become a reality, he also developed his own aircraft, a shiny black plane with cameras that can withstand up to 3 G’s.“That had never been done before,” LaRosa said in a video interview. As he flew next to the cast, LaRosa dodged trees while keeping an eye on the monitors to make sure FitzMaurice, controlling the cameras from the back of the plane, had gotten the shot.Kosinski, the director, also spent 15 months working with the Navy to develop and install six cameras in each F-18 cockpit, which meant passing rigorous safety tests and securing the military’s all-clear to remove its own equipment. Luckily, Kosinski said, there were “Top Gun” fans among the commanding officers. “All the admirals that are in charge right now were 21 in 1986, or around there when they signed up,” he said. “They supported us and let us do all this crazy stuff.”Usually, the Navy forbids pilots from flying below 200 feet during training. One of the film’s most staggering images is of Cruise in an F-18 whooshing just 50 feet above the ground, a height roughly equal to its wingspan. The plane flew so close to the earth that it kicked up dust and made the ground cameras shake. The pilot landed, turned to Cruise, and told the superstar that he’d never do that again.The actor Monica Barbaro didn’t know how nervous she should be when she agreed to play the pilot Natasha Trace (nickname: Phoenix).“When I met Joe in my callback, first thing he had me sign a waver saying that I didn’t have a fear of flying,” Barbaro said by phone. “I just got goose bumps. I was so excited.”Monica Barbaro as Natasha Trace (known as Phoenix) in the film.Paramount PicturesEach flight day kicked off with a two-hour briefing for the pilots and film crew to go over every upcoming shot, movement and line of dialogue. Next, that sequence’s actors and pilots would rehearse the maneuvers in a wooden mock-up of the jet cockpit until the motions were ingrained. Then, they took to the sky to film as many takes as possible before the jet, or the performers, ran out of fuel. In the afternoon, they did it again.Soaring above the crew, Barbaro and the rest of the cast took on a Swiss Army knife of skills. Instead of hitting her mark on the ground, she had to hit it in the air. The sun was her spotlight. A pilot’s kneeboard on her lap displayed her script, her movements and her necessary coordinates, plus reminders to check her parachute and shoulder straps, fix her hair and makeup, adjust her flight visor, flip on the bright red switch that controlled the cameras, and note down the time codes. Finally, Barbaro had to do her actual job: act.“Tom just really encouraged everybody, if you are going to throw up, just learn how to do it and move past,” Barbaro said. “We would applaud when anyone threw up, so it became celebrated.” Glen Powell (he plays the hot shot Lt. Jake Seresin, who is called Hangman) even brandished his barf bag while gliding upside-down and flashing a thumbs up.Barbaro held onto her lunch. But after her first dailies, she said, her face appeared so calm, it gave the impression that the clouds whooshing behind her were simply a green screen. Cruise’s training had prepared her too well.She was sent back into the sky for a retake. More

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      Remembering Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’

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      His performance as Henry Hill includes many touches that weren’t in the script. But the producer didn’t want to cast him originally.There’s a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic “Goodfellas” that always tugs at my heartstrings. Scorsese’s movie is brutal and cleareyed and unsentimental, yes. But Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the viewer’s docent into the criminal world, injects a note of tenderness that’s all the more effective for coming out of the mouth of a slick sociopath. (The movie is based on the true-crime book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi; the real Hill attained some celebrity in the wake of the picture’s release.)It’s during the voice-over when Henry recalls as a boy envying the wiseguys who hung out at the pizza parlor and taxi stand across the street from his home. The guy who runs the pizza joint is Tuddy Cicero, brother of the mob underboss Paulie Cicero, for whom Henry will be working soon. Narrator Henry says the gangster’s full name and pauses. Then, in an exhalation that has low but strong notes of love and nostalgia, he adds, “Tuddy.”Now mind you, Tuddy is eventually revealed to be as ruthless and coldblooded a gangster as they come. It is he who puts the bullet in the back of the head of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) at the fraudulent ceremony at which Tommy is to become a “made man.” But here is Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, clearly still besotted with a childhood idol and the life he shared with the man. Liotta, who died this week at 67, fills Scorsese’s movie with dozens of equally revelatory touches.When I was researching “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas,’” my 2020 book about the film, I asked about that moment in the movie several times. The pause and the repetition of Tuddy’s name was not in the script drafts I saw. It was Liotta’s own touch. No one I spoke with remembered whether Liotta suggested it during the voice-over recordings or just added it himself. In any event, it works. Maybe too well, for people who believe that depiction is endorsement. In a movie that relentlessly examines the lure and transgressive thrill of amorality, Liotta’s depiction of Hill is the hook that draws the viewer in.If you saw Hill on television or listened to any of his appearances on Howard Stern, you were likely to get the impression that Henry Hill was what your grandmother might call a schnook. While he did commit acts of violence both gang-related and domestic, he wasn’t intimidating. Edward McDonald, the prosecutor who got Hill and family into the witness protection program, and who plays himself in “Goodfellas,” told me that Hill was more a mob court jester than any kind of master criminal.But Scorsese’s movie isn’t just about real-life gangsters — it’s also about how we mythologize them. “Movie stars with muscle” is how Hill characterizes his crew. And Liotta was a perfect Henry, able to turn on a dime from dry charm to deadly rage. In one of the movie’s famed tracking shots, when Henry escorts his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), into New York’s Copacabana nightclub by way of a side entrance, Liotta concocted all the bits of charming business a guy like Henry would use: tip a doorman here, shout out to a cook there, steer your date by the elbow lightly, act like it’s just what you’re due when the waiter flies out from the wings and sets a personal table at the side of the stage. Liotta got suggestions from Hill himself — and more from audiotapes of Hill speaking with Pileggi. But the research Liotta did into Hill’s world, and the inner work he did, was crucial.The part came at a point when he might have been headed for a career as a character actor. He was unforgettable in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” as an ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s whose possessiveness explodes in still-shocking violence. And in “Field of Dreams” he played a reincarnation of the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson. Sometimes the crinkle in his eye reminded the viewer of the man’s corruption, but his portrayal was mostly of an awe-struck love of the game he could now play forever in a Midwestern cornfield turned ballpark.When “Goodfellas” was announced, more than one of its eventual cast members told me that it was the movie every New York and Los Angeles actor wanted in on. And Liotta was no exception. Everyone liked him for the part save the producer Irwin Winkler. He did not see the actor’s charm. In his book “A Life in Movies,” Winkler recalls Liotta coming to his table at a Santa Monica restaurant and asking for a word. “In a 10-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill,” the producer wrote. When I interviewed Winkler, he said, rather sheepishly, “You heard the story of me not wanting Ray?” I told Winkler I had and said, “I can’t see anyone else doing it.” Winkler responded “Nor can I.”As it happened, I was not able to interview Liotta himself for my book. Early talks with his publicist were promising. It was possible that I could get some time with him when he was in New York promoting “Marriage Story” at the New York Film Festival; then it wasn’t. We were both represented by the same agency; no dice. He was in a film on which a few close friends of mine were crew members. Can’t go there. And as I worked on the book, I heard several accounts of an intense, serious actor who, upon deciding he wasn’t going to do something, kept to that.He had spoken about “Goodfellas” in other interviews, including an oral history that ran in GQ in 2010. The shoot had its challenges: He suffered the death of his mother halfway through and felt at least slightly shut out by male castmates like Robert De Niro and Pesci. Going through De Niro’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across a thank-you card from Liotta, and inside was a handwritten note: “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the best. Hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it!” Liotta’s eagerness is palpable. The two did work together again, in “Copland.”But “Goodfellas” was irreproducible. Because it did show off his range, and it is a landmark film. Liotta’s signature role is one any actor would hope to be remembered by.Glenn Kenny is a critic and the author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas.’” More