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      How Much to See a Movie at AMC? It Will Soon Depend Where You Sit.

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      By the end of 2023, the movie theater chain will offer tickets at three different price tiers, with middle seats costing the most. You’ll pay less if you like the front row.Some middle seats at AMC movie theaters will be more expensive than others as part of the company’s new ticket-pricing strategy, announced this week.AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest cinema chain, said in a news release on Monday that this new pricing system, known as Sightline at AMC, would be in place at all of its United States theaters by the end of the year.The seats in the front row of the theater will be the least expensive and seats in the middle of the theater will be the most expensive, the company said. However, new prices will not affect showings before 4 p.m. or tickets sold at a special discount on Tuesdays, AMC said.AMC’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Eliot Hamlisch, said in the news release that the tiered system “more closely aligns” with the reserved seats and pricing models of other types of ticketed events, such as sporting events and concerts.Mr. Hamlisch said that the change would give people “more control over their experience.”Critics of the new system, including the actor Elijah Wood, have said it would give wealthy people an unfair advantage.“The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all, and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income,” Mr. Wood wrote on Twitter.Under the new system, the most common seats available, the Standard Sightline tickets, would be priced as traditional movie tickets, AMC said.If you’re willing to crane your neck to see the screen, you’ll be able to pay less to sit in the “Value Sightline” seats in the front row. Some accessible seating for people with disabilities will also be priced in the value tier. To access the value tier prices, people must register with the AMC loyalty program, which includes one free membership tier.The seats in the middle of the theater will become “Preferred Sightline” tickets. The extra cost of these tickets will be waived for members of AMC’s top-tier loyalty program, A-List.A map outlining seating options will be available when buying tickets online, through the company’s app and at the box office, the company said in its announcement.AMC did not specify what the price differences would be for each ticket or whether prices would be consistent across cities and films.In New York City, the price differences were about to take effect at some locations later this week. At AMC’s 34th Street location in Manhattan, tickets were listed under the new pricing system for Friday’s showings of films, including “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and a 25th anniversary screening of “Titanic.”For the 6:45 p.m. showing of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the front row seats, a space for a person in a wheelchair and a seat for the companion of someone in a wheelchair were described as “Value Sightline” seats and colored blue on the seating map.A key for the map explained that the value tickets were $2 off and that the preferred seats were $1 extra. Those were the five middle seats in each of the four back rows of the theater with gold-colored icons. Discounts for children and older moviegoers remain in effect.The “Standard Sightline” tickets for this showing included the two to three seats on either side of the preferred seats, the second-row seats and the six other seats made available for people in wheelchairs and their companions.Movie theaters have been experimenting with new tactics to boost ticket sales in response to two decades of weakening attendance, shutdowns during the first years of the coronavirus pandemic and the widening availability of digital streaming of first-run movies.In September, Cineworld, the London-based company that operates Regal Cinemas in the United States, filed for bankruptcy.Cineworld is the second-largest theater chain in the world behind AMC, and the company’s chief executive, Mooky Greidinger, said in the bankruptcy filing that “the pandemic was an incredibly difficult time for our business.”AMC said that by the end of the year, its new pricing system would be in place at all of the company’s theaters in the United States. AMC has about 950 theaters and 10,500 screens worldwide. More

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      ‘They Wait in the Dark’ Review: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

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      A terrified woman finds her childhood home contains more than bad memories in this loopy horror movie.Made with just a handful of actors and a thimbleful of cash, Patrick Rea’s “They Wait in the Dark” is a gruesome ghost story that plays with our expectations. Filmed in 2021, the movie gathers four mothers — one murdered, two murderous, plus the rageful spirit of a fourth — into a twisted tale of abuse and revenge.The delightfully baroque script, also by Rea, isn’t the most lucid, but it is economical. When we meet Amy (Sarah McGuire) and her adopted eight-year-old son, Adrian (Patrick McGee), they are on the run. Hollow-eyed and haunted, Amy is carrying a burner phone and nursing an unhealed knife wound in her ribs. Having survived an abusive mother, Amy is now fleeing her partner, Judith (Laurie Catherine Winkel), who — as a catcalling trucker learns to his peril — might be even more unhinged.From its succinct opening to its exclamation-point finale, “Dark” delivers a tight, demented look at toxic parenting. With admirable speed, the movie installs Amy and Adrian in a creaky farmhouse in rural Kansas, furnishes her with an empathetic friend (Paige Maria) and introduces an initially invisible supernatural presence. Yet it isn’t the home’s frightful history — or even Judith’s remorseless approach — that concerns us so much as Amy’s darkening moods and growing volatility.More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach. As we watch Amy slowly decompensate, trapped between her boarded-up windows and creepy basement, it’s unclear whether her most urgent threat will come from without or within.They Wait in the DarkNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids

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      The campaign on behalf of Andrea Riseborough is the latest to provoke controversy, but it’s hardly the most memorable.When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.1961Chill Wills, ‘The Alamo’After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”Variety refused to run it, and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company were in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.1974Candy Clark, ‘American Graffiti’Candy Clark with Charles Martin Smith in “American Graffiti.”Universal PicturesThe nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)1975Liv Ullmann, ‘Scenes From a Marriage’The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)1986Margaret Avery, ‘The Color Purple’Margaret Avery with Bennet Guillory in “The Color Purple.”Warner Bros.After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)1988Sally Kirkland, ‘Anna’Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”1991Diane Ladd, ‘Wild at Heart’After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”2011Melissa Leo, ‘The Fighter’Melissa Leo, fourth from right, in a scene from “The Fighter.”Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesUnlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.2013Ann Dowd, ‘Compliance’Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”) More

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      Disney’s Iger Returns to Familiar Stage, but With Different Challenges

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      The company reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday, and Wall Street is expecting it to lay out a new streaming strategy and operating structure.When it comes to reporting quarterly earnings, Robert A. Iger is an old pro. He has done it 58 times as Disney’s chief executive. But the next one, scheduled for Wednesday, will require him to give a performance for the corporate ages.“It has to be an impactful, meaningful, tone-setting, agenda-changing day,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at SVB MoffettNathanson who has followed Disney for 18 years.Another veteran Disney analyst, Jessica Reif Ehrlich of BofA Securities, agreed. “I don’t know that we’re going to see answers to everything, but Iger’s overall messaging is going to be critical,” she said.So, no pressure.On Wednesday, Mr. Iger will publicly face Wall Street and Hollywood for the first time since he came out of retirement to retake the reins of a deeply troubled Disney. In late November, the Disney board fired Bob Chapek as chief executive and rehired Mr. Iger, 71, who ran the company from late 2005 to early 2020. He is also contending with Nelson Peltz, the corporate raider turned activist investor. Mr. Peltz, 80, whose Trian Partners has amassed roughly $1 billion in Disney stock and is fighting for a board seat for himself or his son, wants the world’s largest entertainment company to revamp its streaming business, refocus on profit growth, cut costs, reinstate its dividend and do a much better job at succession planning.Most of those things were in motion at Disney before Mr. Peltz started his proxy battle, and analysts expect Mr. Iger to provide updates on at least some fronts on Wednesday.More on the Walt Disney CompanyLabor Tensions: Unions that represent about 32,000 full-time workers at Disney World said that members had voted overwhelmingly to reject the company’s offer for a new five-year contract.Splash Mountain’s Closure: As Disney takes steps to erase the racist back story of the Walt Disney World ride, some are claiming to be selling water from the attraction online.Return to Office: Starting on March 1, the Walt Disney Company will require employees to report to the office four days a week, a relatively strict policy among large companies.Pricing Policies: After complaints by visitors about the costs at its domestic theme parks, Disney revised policies related to ticketing, hotel parking, ride photos and annual passes.How are the content pipelines to Disney’s streaming services (Disney+, Hulu and Disney+) going to be managed? At 6:30 a.m. on his first day back, Mr. Iger ousted Disney’s top streaming executive and ordered a restructuring of a restructuring that Mr. Chapek had put into place.For months, Disney has been talking about cost cutting and layoffs. Where are they? “This can’t drag on,” Ms. Ehrlich said. “It’s not good for company morale.” (Speaking of morale, some Disney employees have been circulating a petition to protest Mr. Iger’s decision last month to require everyone to report to the office four days a week.)Shareholders are increasingly worried about the decline of Disney’s traditional television business, which includes ABC and 15 cable networks, led by ESPN, Disney Channel, FX, Freeform and National Geographic. Disney’s cable portfolio has held up better than those owned by some rival companies (notably NBCUniversal), but Americans have been cutting the cable cord at an alarming pace — total hookups declined by a record 6.2 percent from October to December.“We need an honest and appropriate view of the future of Disney’s television business,” Mr. Nathanson said. “Is there an asset change? Does spending change? Under Chapek, the messaging was never very clear.”Even in decline, traditional television remains Disney’s largest business, delivering $8.5 billion in operating income in the fiscal year that ended in October.Disney and other old-line media companies are facing a simple equation that has proved astoundingly difficult to solve: Profit from traditional television is declining at a faster rate than streaming losses are moderating. In Disney’s case, traditional television earnings are expected to decline by $1.6 billion in 2023, while losses from streaming will abate by only about $900 million, according to Mr. Nathanson.In November, Disney said that losses from its streaming portfolio totaled $1.5 billion from July through September, compared with $630 million a year earlier.But Mr. Chapek, who led the company’s November earnings call, reiterated a promise that Disney+ would turn a profit by next October. Wall Street has been skeptical of that assertion, and Mr. Iger may revise it on Wednesday, along with guidance that Disney+ would have 215 million to 245 million global subscriptions by 2024. Disney+ currently has about 164 million worldwide.Companies always try to put the rosiest spin possible on numbers when talking to analysts, shareholders and the news media on quarterly earnings conference calls. But the upbeat tone struck by Mr. Chapek in the November session did not sit well given the numbers that Disney was reporting. Along with widening losses in streaming, Disney had disappointing profit margins at its theme park business and missed Wall Street’s overall expectations for both revenue and net income, a rarity for the company. (When one senior Disney executive privately told Mr. Chapek before the call that his planned remarks were too positive, he called her Eeyore, the gloomy donkey from “Winnie the Pooh.”)Mr. Iger will undoubtedly highlight some of Disney’s recent achievements. “Avatar: The Way of Water,” released by Walt Disney Studios, has generated $2.2 billion worldwide since it arrived in theaters on Dec. 16. Disney received more Oscar nominations last month (23) than any other company. Over the end-of-year holidays, Disney’s theme parks were gridlocked, easing fears about consumer belt-tightening.“Despite the macro headwinds, the parks still feel incredibly strong,” Ms. Ehrlich said.But Mr. Iger will also need to contend with a lackluster set of overall numbers, at least if analysts’ forecasts are correct. Analysts are expecting per-share earnings of about 79 cents from Disney, down from $1.06 for the same period a year ago, and revenue of $23.4 billion, up from $21.8 billion a year ago.Analysts polled by FactSet estimate that Disney+ will have 163 million subscribers, a slight erosion from the previous quarter.Mr. Iger will probably not directly address Mr. Peltz’s proxy battle, unless an analyst prods him about it. Disney has already made its position clear, saying in a Jan. 17 securities filing that Mr. Peltz had “no strategy, no operating initiatives, no new ideas and no plan.” In a fresh eruption late last week, Trian said there was an “urgent need” for Disney shareholders to drop Michael B.G. Froman from the company’s board and give the seat to Mr. Peltz or his son. In response, Disney aggressively defended Mr. Froman, a senior Mastercard executive and former U.S. trade representative who has been a Disney director since 2018.Some prominent analysts have taken Disney’s side.“He hasn’t made a good enough case for why he needs a seat on the board,” Mr. Nathanson said, referring to Mr. Peltz.Richard Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm, was one of Mr. Iger’s most ardent critics during his previous tenure at Disney — so much so that Mr. Iger blocked him on Twitter and refused to take questions from him on earnings calls. Mr. Greenfield, however, recently published an aggressive defense of Disney titled “Disney Would Be Wise to Keep Peltz Off the Jedi Council.”Perhaps Mr. Iger will take a question from Mr. Greenfield on Wednesday. More

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      Melinda Dillon, 2-Time Oscar Nominee, Is Dead at 83

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      She was a Broadway star at 23 and then quit acting, but later re-emerged in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “A Christmas Story.”Melinda Dillon, who shot to Broadway stardom at 23, withdrew from acting after a mental breakdown, and then, in her late 30s, staged a comeback, receiving best supporting actress Oscar nominations for her roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice,” died on Jan. 9. She was 83.Her death, which was announced by a cremation service, came to public notice in recent days. The announcement did not specify the cause or location of her death.Ms. Dillon was best known for playing mothers coping with grave or silly problems in popular movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In “Close Encounters,” the enduring Steven Spielberg hit from 1977, she played an artist and single mother living on a rural farm who watches her son get abducted by aliens.She played more explicitly archetypal mothers in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), a family comedy about having Bigfoot as your pet, and “A Christmas Story” (1983), a series of vignettes depicting an all-American Christmas in midcentury Indiana.The latter film, long a classic of the holiday season on television, inspired a 2020 tribute in The New York Times, which hailed Ms. Dillon’s character, a frazzled Everymom, as a “damn hero.”In “Absence of Malice” (1981), Ms. Dillon played against maternal type as a Catholic woman who must admit to having an abortion.Her star turn of that era came late for an actress — in Ms. Dillon’s late 30s and 40s — and it constituted an unexpected re-emergence, following a crisis that seemed to halt her promising career.Ms. Dillon in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” with, clockwise from left, Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella and Darren McGavin.PictureLux, via AlamyMelinda Ruth Clardy was born in Hope, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1939. Her father, Floyd, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Noreen, was a volunteer at a U.S. Army hospital. Noreen fell in love with Wilbur Dillon, a wounded veteran, and Melinda’s parents divorced when she was 5.She took her stepfather’s surname and had the peripatetic upbringing of a child of the military, living for a while in Germany. She left home at 16 and soon began pursuing an acting career.She moved to New York City in 1962, fresh out of acting school. In just a matter of weeks, she landed one of four parts in the Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”She played Honey, the wife in a young couple invited to the home of an older couple for a drink. The premiere, on Oct. 13, fell on her 23rd birthday.“Critics unanimously hailed her performance as superb,” The Daily News announced in a profile published that month that described Ms. Dillon’s “overnight rise from obscurity to stardom.”Her agent, Peter Witt, told The News, “What has happened to her is a one in a million shot paying off the first time out in the theater.”In a 2014 New York Times review of a recording of the play’s original cast, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the production “one of the seminal theatrical events of the 20th century” and said the actors’ performances, including Ms. Dillon’s, “still feel fresh, fierce and definitive.”But as time went on, the pressure bore down on Ms. Dillon. Sometimes she would perform in a three-hour matinee in the afternoon, then study acting with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and then do another three-hour performance in the evening. Talking to sophisticated, powerful people in the New York theater world terrified her.Ms. Dillon in 1998. After suffering a breakdown, she said: “I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”CBS, via Getty ImagesAfter nine months, she left the play and checked into the mental ward of Gracie Square Hospital in New York, where she found herself feeling suicidal.“I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”After her release from the hospital, she took a few acting roles but then sought safe harbor in marriage, to the actor Richard Libertini, and in motherhood, raising their son, also named Richard.But she did not find contentment in life away from the spotlight. By the mid-1970s, she was single and being cast in multiple major Hollywood productions, including “Slap Shot,” a 1977 film starring Paul Newman.“I spent 10 and a half hours naked in bed with Paul and absolutely loved it,” she told People magazine in 1978.After the apex of her Hollywood career, she continued acting, and into the 21st century she occasionally made appearances on television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dillon sang in the choir of a Methodist church as an adult, and she threw herself into film roles as mothers. But she came to reject what she had once sought in the life of a traditional suburban housewife.“I left home so early that when I found somebody who wanted to take care of me, I just stopped everything; I could have soared ahead — I really know that — and I chose not to,” she told The Times. In marriage, “I got buried alive,” she continued. “That’s what got me to act again.” More

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      Directors of ‘Skinamarink’ and ‘The Outwaters’ on Horror Experiments

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      Kyle Edward Ball, the filmmaker behind “Skinamarink,” and Robbie Banfitch, who made “The Outwaters,” talk about their creepy, buzzy movies.Universal’s evil robot movie “M3gan” is one of the first big hits of 2023. But two new indie horror films are generating buzz too, even though they were made for next to nothing and are driven by distorted audio, disorienting cuts and other defiantly experimentalist techniques.Kyle Edward Ball’s “Skinamarink” is about two children who encounter a sinister entity in their darkened home. (It’s currently in theaters and streaming on Shudder.) The film channels CreepyPasta videos and experimentalists like Takashi Ito, whose 1984 short film “Ghost” looks like “Skinamarink” on uppers. Ball’s film, which had a $15,000 budget, has made more than $1.8 million at the North American box office.Robbie Banfitch’s “The Outwaters” is about a group of friends who encounter a bloodthirsty force during a trip to the desert. (It opens in theaters on Feb. 9 and will later stream on Screambox.) Also made for about $15,000, it starts as a found footage film but pivots into a sustained, confrontational barrage of blood-soaked fast cuts and panicked sound design. For horror fans this is a love language.Critics have been mostly positive. Writing in The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said “Skinamarink” is “as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.” Early reviews for “The Outwaters” are glowing but sound like police reports, with words like “an assault” and “suffocating.” Again, for horror fans these are come-ons.Who are these two directors, and why are their experimental movies getting noticed? Instead of interviewing them myself, I asked them to interview each other. I listened as they spoke over video: Ball, 31, was at home in his native Edmonton, Alberta, and Banfitch, 37 and originally from New Brunswick, N.J., was in Los Angeles. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.ROBBIE BANFITCH Kyle, if you were a collage, what would you be made of?KYLE EDWARD BALL It would be like a 90s high school girl style collage. But also my favorite movies: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Black Christmas,” “The Shining,” “The Birds,” “Woman in the Dunes.” I’d put in movies I watch as comfort: the 1931 “Dracula,” “Black Sabbath” by Mario Bava.OK, so Robbie, what made you want to go into filmmaking?A scene from “Skinamarink.”IFC Films/ShudderBANFITCH I knew I wanted to make movies around 7 or 8. What made me want to get into it was “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park,” Steven Spielberg’s films. They exhilarated me.BALL Why did you want to go into experimental horror territory?BANFITCH I never thought of “The Outwaters” as experimental as I was making it. The logic of the story — what would be filmed or not in the situation — makes it experimental in parts. But that was never the plan.All right. Tell me about your influences during high school.BALL I went to a fairly L.G.B.T.-friendly public school in Edmonton called the Victoria School of the Arts. I also discovered a video store called the Alternative Video Spot that has since closed. I gravitated toward edgier stuff: Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, John Waters. But David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick are the two guys I want to emulate. They pushed boundaries without being pretentious and still reached an audience. You can do that as long as you give them something worthwhile.Growing up, did you look up to gay filmmakers?BANFITCH I don’t know that I did. But I did look up to the character David in “Six Feet Under.” In the beginning, he’s still in the closet, living with his mom. I was watching “Six Feet Under” while closeted, living with my mom and watching the show with her. He came out to his mom and then right after, my mom asked me if I was gay but I said no. But I believe she’d already found my “Queer as Folk” box set under my bunk bed. She knew, but she was letting me take my time.What’s at the heart of “Skinamarink”?BALL I have a canned answer that evolved out of doing interviews: I had a YouTube channel where people would comment on things that scared them. But as I kept giving that answer, I realized there are a lot of things that inspired this movie that I’m not even comfortable to say. At the heart of it is pain and sadness and a little bit of anger.Do you think your movie would have been better or scarier if you had a multimillion-dollar budget?BANFITCH I don’t think it would have. The whole point was to feel raw and unfinished.A scene from “The Outwaters.”CinedigmBALL I feel the same. It works because it’s small and contained. Horror is one of those examples where the glossier something is the less scary it is.Do you like delving into what people say about your film online?BANFITCH I’m interested to know what people think but I’m happy with the movie as it is. The only thing that annoys me is when people make an assumption that’s not true but state it as fact. For example: This is obviously a rich kid who used his parents’ money. It’s like no, I worked at Greenpeace and the movie was made on a budget after I paid my rent and ate from my nonprofit paycheck.BALL Both of our movies are polarizing. How do you process hate your movie gets?BANFITCH I read it and think about it. But it doesn’t bother me.BALL You’re pretty thick-skinned. I take everything personally.BANFITCH I’m thin-skinned about plenty of things but not this movie.BALL The only thing I don’t super take personal are the professional reviews because they plead their case fairly well. Except the one from The New Yorker because it felt like, oh, a poor made a movie. I may have been taking that the wrong way.Truth be told, the other day I said to my boyfriend, oh, The New Yorker didn’t like it and then I thought, even that’s incredibly privileged. Five months ago I would have been aghast that I was saying, oh, The New York Times liked it but The New Yorker didn’t, like I’m Scorsese or something. More

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      Reflections on Star Quality From a Golden Age of ‘Junk TV’

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      In a new memoir, a longtime casting director revels in memories of a bygone Hollywood, matching actors with the roles that made them stars.Stop to consider the movie and TV characters that are most permanently seared into the American psyche, and their impact is rarely a function of screen time. Usually, the effect on audiences is immediate: Think Tim Curry’s first appearance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” or Stockard Channing breezing into Rydell High alongside her fellow Pink Ladies.Whether they were memorable because of their abrasiveness (Danny DeVito in “Taxi”), their rebellious streak (Ms. Channing in “Grease”) or their ability to solve a crisis with a slice of cheesecake (the titular golden girls of “The Golden Girls”), every actor who eventually went on to make Hollywood history first had to clear the hurdle of a casting department. And for many of the biggest movies and TV shows of the last half century, Joel Thurm was a central part of those teams, handpicking the actors whose performances would resonate for decades to come.In his newly released memoir, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,” Mr. Thurm, 80, details what he saw in stars like John Travolta, whom he cast in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”“I knew he wasn’t Vinnie Barbarino,” Mr. Thurm said of managing to look past the actor’s biggest role to date, on the ABC sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”Being able to spot the je ne sais quoi that many refer to as star quality is a skill, one that Mr. Thurm has capitalized on throughout his 35-year career.“The best example I have is when someone walks into a room and has something special that you haven’t seen in other people,” Mr. Thurm said in an interview this week. “Are they astoundingly beautiful? Are they so incredibly good-looking? They could be bad-looking! It’s individual; you can’t really explain it.”Mr. Thurm had a hand in casting some of the biggest hits of film and TV, including “The Love Boat,” “The Golden Girls,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Airplane!”Charles Sykes/Getty ImagesThat “it” factor is the common denominator among all the stars who go on to become household names, according to Mr. Thurm, who said he had seen it immediately in Farrah Fawcett when she auditioned for the role of a stewardess on “The Bob Newhart Show.” She didn’t get the part, but Mr. Thurm said he had known “there was something special about her.” He also instantly saw it in a 17-year-old John Travolta when he met him in New York.“He had a presence, and you can feel it,” Mr. Thurm said. “They had that little extra something.”At the time, Mr. Travolta was most popular for his role on “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and producers would not move ahead with “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a TV movie, unless a big star signed on to the project, Mr. Thurm said. He spent a lot of time with Mr. Travolta’s manager sitting on his “back deck getting melanoma and reading scripts,” Mr. Thurm said. When the script came up, they both lobbied Mr. Travolta, who agreed to sign on. Mr. Thurm later cast Mr. Travolta in “Grease,” and the rest is Hollywood history.Mr. Thurm, who retired from a full-time casting position with NBC in 1990, hasn’t kept especially close tabs on the stars of today, but he does know enough to recognize that they tend to skew young.“They’re all 12-year-olds,” he said. “I have only seen them once they are already stars. Ariana Grande, she’s already a star.”Whether or not star quality has changed since Mr. Thurm started his career, Hollywood itself certainly has. In addition to snippets of back-room scenes detailing how some of TV’s most beloved characters came to appear on some of America’s favorite sitcoms, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season” is also filled with personal anecdotes that would — at minimum — raise eyebrows in a world reshaped by the #MeToo movement.It’s difficult — painful, even — to imagine a world in which Tim Curry never put on the chunky pearl necklace of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. In that sense, the most essential duty of a casting director is to save us all from what might not have been.United Archives/Getty ImagesAs a gay man living in Hollywood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Mr. Thurm often found himself in situations that almost certainly wouldn’t fly today — like massaging the actor Robert Reed’s back after he had to undergo several hair treatments for his role “The Boy in The Plastic Bubble.”“I started to rub his back, then I rubbed, you know, started rubbing a little lower,” Mr. Thurm said of Mr. Reed, best known for playing Mike Brady in “The Brady Bunch.” “He was just miserable on the set because he was not used to not being the center of attention.”In his memoir, Mr. Thurm also details an encounter with his teenage idol, Rock Hudson. At a party with other gay men in Hollywood, Mr. Hudson motioned to Mr. Thurm to follow him to a room upstairs.“I was so anxious and nervous that my body below the waist could not cooperate,” Mr. Thurm wrote.It was a moment he has never forgotten.“I saw every single movie that he ever did and so even to find myself at that party, I thought was amazing,” Mr. Thurm said. “This is my introduction to Hollywood.”Besides detailing his sexcapades, Mr. Thurm also takes full accountability for “the damage you may have suffered while watching David Hasselhoff,” he wrote. He initially cast Mr. Hasselhoff as Snapper Foster on “The Young and the Restless” in 1975. He later cast him in “Knight Rider” — a high-water mark in what he described as an era of “junk TV” — after a contentious standoff with producers, who originally wanted Laurence Olivier. (“Yes, David Hasselhoff and Laurence Olivier on the same list,” he wrote.)The memoir is not just about Mr. Thurm’s dealings in Hollywood but his upbringing: growing up on a kosher milk farm in East New York. Attending Hunter College in Manhattan when it was nearly an all-girls school. Hanging out in Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday. Flunking out of college and traveling through Italy in his early 20s.“To me, it was just my experiences — you know, growth going through life and growing up,” Mr. Thurm said. “I have no regrets. Nobody died.” More

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      Claudia Cardinale Gets MoMA Tribute for Film Career

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      Ahead of a MoMA retrospective, the actress reflected on her career, which includes over 100 films and many classics of Italian cinema.On a recent afternoon in Rome, Claudia Cardinale recalled the many heartthrobs she worked with during her more than six-decade movie career, and let out a full-throated laugh.“And they also wanted to make love with me,” she said, “but I always refused.”Over the years, the fresh-faced beauty — who David Niven, her co-star in an early “Pink Panther” movie, once described as Italy’s best invention besides spaghetti — had given the cold shoulder to more than one famous screen Casanova, Cardinale said in an interview. “They tried,” she added. “I turned down seducers.”Then she laughed her mischievous laugh again.Cardinale, 84, was in Rome last month for the Italian presentation of a newly restored version of Luigi Comencini’s 1963 film “La ragazza di Bube” (“Bebo’s Girl”), about a small-town girl who stands by her man, even after he is convicted of a crime and goes to jail.“Bebo’s Girl,” which earned Cardinale her first prestigious acting award, Italy’s Nastro d’Argento for best actress, will be shown on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first in a 23-film retrospective honoring the Tunisian-born Italian actress that runs through Feb. 21. It is one of a handful of times that the museum has presented a tribute to a living actor in its more than 90-year history.“Beautiful actresses come and go,” Joshua Siegel, a MoMA curator, said in video message shown at the Rome screening. “But they usually don’t endure over a period of some 60, 65 years.”Cardinale with Fabio Rinaudo at the opening night of “8 ½,” in Rome, in 1963. Archivio Luce CinecittàCardinale said she would not be in New York for the retrospective; she no longer travels like she used to. It tires her — she now uses a cane to get around — and she prefers to stay out of the limelight.Cardinale was in the public eye long enough, starring in more than 100 films since 1956. For many film buffs, she is best remembered for her roles in Italian cinema classics: as the young wife Ginetta in Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers”; as Angelica, a commoner whose vitality and beauty seduces Sicilian aristocracy in Visconti’s “The Leopard”; as the enigmatic Claudia in Federico Fellini’s “8 ½,”; or as the feisty Jill, the widow with a ranch to protect in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”She also has boasting rights from her star turn in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” a legendarily difficult movie that was shot in the Peruvian jungle and described in The New York Times as a favorite of “connoisseurs of production disasters,” and the movie and its making as “fables of daft aspiration.”Cardinale has said that “Fitzcarraldo” was the adventure of her life, but during an interview last month, she said she had no particular favorites. “My God, I’ve done some many, I don’t know which one I prefer,” she said, and laughed again. “Maybe ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’” she said, “and then so many others.”Cardinale in “Once Upon a Time in The West.”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe MoMA tribute, organized with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, includes some of Cardinale’s better known performances. But for the occasion, Cinecittà also restored three works less likely to be known to American audiences: “Bebo’s Girl,” but also Marco Ferreri’s 1972 “The Audience,” about a man’s obsession with meeting with the pope, and Pasquale Squitieri’s 1990 “Atto di Dolore,” about a widow whose son is a drug addict.Though Cardinale’s name will forever be associated with classics of Italian cinema, she spoke little Italian when she first set foot there in 1957.Cardinale was born in Tunisia in 1938, into a family of Sicilian immigrants that had settled there decades before. “I still feel a little bit Tunisian,” Cardinale told the news agency ANSA in May at a ceremony to name a street in her honor in the port town La Goulette, near Tunis.In 1957, she won the Most Beautiful Italian in Tunisia contest, which came with what turned out to be her ticket to stardom: a trip to the Venice Film Festival.Cardinale on the set of the film “Austerlitz” by Abel Gance (1960).Archivio Luce CinecittàIn “Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute, the author and critic Masolino D’Amico recalls being at that festival and seeing Cardinale for the first time, “splendid in all her youthfulness,” wearing an emerald green bikini and posing for the paparazzi.“She seemed to think that small shower of camera clicks was like a game,” Masolino writes. “She was not — I understand this clearly now — trying to be sexy, and maybe not even attractive. She was simply happy to be there.”In Venice, she caught the eye of Franco Cristaldi, at the time one of Italy’s most important producers, who, in Pygmalion fashion, transformed the young ingénue into an in-demand movie star. He also became her life partner, adopting her son, Patrick Cristaldi. Now 64, he was initially passed off as her brother so as not to crack her “virginal feel and glow,” or to scandalize society, Cardinale’s daughter, Claudia Squitieri said.Stardom had a price. Cristaldi demanded hard work and discipline, and in 1962 drafted a contract that oversaw every aspect of the actress’s life, professional and private. She accepted, if reluctantly: Her family depended on her, and she had a child to raise.That life ended when she met the director Pasquale Squitieri in 1973 on the set of “I guappi,” (“Blood Brothers”) and the two fell madly in love. Their careers took a hit: Cristaldi was a powerful producer in Italy whom industry people feared crossing.“Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute. via Puntoe VirgolaCardinale would make nine films with Squitieri, even after she moved to Paris and he remained in Rome. Never married, they eventually split, but remained close.Claudia Squitieri and Patrick Cristaldi now live with their mother in a house near Fontainebleau, France, where Cardinale has created a foundation to support two causes close to her heart: women’s rights and the environment. Cardinale has been a UNESCO good will ambassador since 2000, for campaigning work to improve the status of women and girls, and she is the honorary president of Green Cross Italy, an environment advocacy group that sponsors an award for sustainable films at the Venice Film Festival. The foundation is “something to continue her shine,” said Squitieri, who runs the organization for her mother.Cardinale said she was very close to Squitieri. “I am lucky to have this daughter, who I adore,” she said. “She looks after me; she looks after everything.”Because Cardinale won’t be in New York this week, Squitieri will do the honors. On Friday, the “Bebo’s Girl” screening will be followed by “Un Cardinale donna” (“A Woman Cardinal”), a whimsical short featuring the actress, produced for the retrospective by Manuel Maria Perrone.Speaking at the film’s Rome premiere, Perrone said that “dealing with an idol, with such a strong icon, is something extremely difficult, even fragile.”“She’s been doing this her whole life,” he said. “Being an icon is her job.”Claudia CardinaleFeb. 3 through Feb. 21, at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. More