Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Jay Kanter, Agent for Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 97

      by

      Later a studio executive, he was among the last of the power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century.Jay Kanter, whose long career as an agent to the stars — including Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly — and later as an influential studio executive made him one of the last of the generation of power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the late 20th century, died on Aug. 6 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 97.His son Adam Kanter confirmed his death.An acolyte of the superagent Lew Wasserman, Mr. Kanter was renowned as much for the career he led as for the stories people told about him.He was a junior agent at MCA, Mr. Wasserman’s agency, in 1948 when he was asked to retrieve Mr. Brando from the train station.Mr. Kanter took Mr. Brando to his aunt’s house, and the next morning to a meeting with the director Fred Zinnemann, who wanted to cast Mr. Brando in his next movie, “The Men.” Apparently Mr. Kanter made a good impression, because when he suggested that they proceed to MCA to meet some of its agents, he recalled, Mr. Brando replied: “I don’t have to meet anybody. You’re my agent.”Mr. Brando’s Hollywood career was on the verge of stardom. And now, so was Mr. Kanter’s.“Suddenly I was getting all these calls from these heads of studios,” he recalled in a 2017 interview, and within a few years he represented a long line of A-list talent.The Kanter-Brando story became a bit of Hollywood lore, so much so that it provided the inspiration for a 1989 sitcom, “The Famous Teddy Z,” about a Hollywood star who picks out a mailroom clerk (played by Jon Cryer) as his agent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Cailee Spaeny of ‘Alien: Romulus’ Is Learning How to Be a Star

      by

      The actress Cailee Spaeny, the seventh of nine children born to committed Southern Baptists, left school in Missouri at 13. She had found work at a theme park, Silver Dollar City, in the Ozark Mountains, which allowed her to strike out on her own.“I was just so ready,” she said. “I definitely had a feeling that I needed to experience something else really early on. I wanted out of this Midwestern box.” Silver Dollar City was that first step.The next year, she took another one, convincing her mother to drive her across the country to Los Angeles, where she quickly secured an agent and a manager. More trips followed, more nights sleeping in the spare rooms of friends of friends or families met at church. Finally, when she was 17, she booked a role in the action movie “Pacific Rim Uprising.”Casting directors noticed her then. Wryly, Spaeny narrated what happened next. “This fresh-faced little girl comes to town,” she said. “She’s from the Midwest, she’s got a bit of an accent, bright-eyed, bushy tailed. They jump on that opportunity.”Spaeny, now 26, is still reasonably bushy tailed. She has wide-set eyes, an open countenance suggestive of some Great Plain and an unfussy femininity that she can ratchet up or way down as a role demands. There’s also an intensity to her, a tinge of the steeliness that had her paying her own way when she was barely a teenager. Hollywood jumped on that, too.Coming off “Uprising,” she booked four roles in a single week, and then she booked more, moving briskly from teen fare (“The Craft: Legacy”) to auteur-driven films like Alex Garland’s “Civil War” and Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” in which Spaeny played the lead. Now she is starring as Rain in “Alien: Romulus” (in theaters Aug. 16), the latest entry in the space horror franchise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      9 Great Songs Recorded at Electric Lady Studios

      by

      A new documentary spotlights the Greenwich Village creative hub. Listen to tracks by Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Frank Ocean and more that were recorded there.Patti SmithVagabond Video/Getty Images.Dear listeners,I’m a sucker for any documentary that features scenes of people at a recording studio’s mixing board, isolating tracks from a great, intricately layered song.* Over the weekend, I watched a new film that, I am happy to report, features plenty of such footage: “Electric Lady Studios — A Jimi Hendrix Vision,” a recently released documentary that charts the origins of the famed, still vital Greenwich Village landmark.Located at 52 West 8th Street and formerly an avant-garde nightclub, the property that would become Electric Lady was purchased by Jimi Hendrix and his manager in 1968. Over the next two years, they poured somewhere around $1 million of their own money into its construction. (When the cash flow dried up, Hendrix would go play some live gigs and return with enough dough to pay the contractors.) Hendrix initially dreamed up Electric Lady as his own personal recording studio, a place where he and his friends could experiment freely without incurring exorbitant hourly rates. But, tragically, Hendrix did not live long enough to use it much at all. Construction was finally completed in August 1970; Hendrix died, at 27, on Sept. 18 of that year.Word had already gotten out that Electric Lady was special, combining state-of-the-art technology with a groovy atmosphere that made it a more comfortable place to hang out than most cramped, sterile recording studios. Thanks to some early bookings by marquee artists like Carly Simon, Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, Electric Lady managed to stay afloat in those precarious first years after Hendrix’s death. More than 50 years later, it has survived ownership changes, gentrification and huge shifts in recording technology, remaining a crucial link between popular music’s past and present. Today, it’s arguably as busy as it’s ever been: Taylor Swift, Zach Bryan and Sabrina Carpenter are just a few stars who have recently laid down tracks there.Today’s playlist traces Electric Lady’s decades-long history via nine very different songs recorded within its hallowed walls. I’ve arranged them in chronological order, so you can gradually hear the way the sounds of pop music have changed over time. I hope that you’ll also hear certain echoes between now and then — similarities in the soft-rock confessions of Simon and Swift, or the genre-blurring explorations of Wonder and Frank Ocean.These are, of course, just a sampling of the thousands and thousands of songs that have been recorded at Electric Lady throughout the years. Next time you find yourself scouring a favorite LP’s liner notes or Wikipedia credits, don’t be too surprised if you see that familiar address.This is our place, we make the rules,Lindsay* (The Fleetwood Mac episode of “Classic Albums” where Lindsey Buckingham pulls up individual vocal and instrumental tracks from “Rumours” is my personal gold standard.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Scarface’ Actor Ángel Salazar Dies at 68

      by

      He first made his mark doing stand-up in New York, but he was best known for his role as Chi Chi opposite Al Pacino in the hit 1983 movie.Ángel Salazar, a dynamic stand-up comedian who became well known for his wild routines and an actor best known for his role in the hit 1983 film “Scarface,” died on Sunday at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. He was 68.His death was confirmed by a representative, Roger Paul, who said Mr. Salazar had an enlarged heart and was found unresponsive.Mr. Salazar built his career in New York City comedy clubs after fleeing Cuba when he was young.As an actor, he was seen onstage, on television and in films including “Carlito’s Way” in 1993. But none of these roles would surpass the renown he achieved in “Scarface” as Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino. In that film, directed by Brian De Palma and loosely based on the 1932 movie of the same name, Chi Chi backs Montana, a fellow Cuban refugee, on his violent campaign to reach the top of Miami’s cocaine trade.More than 30 years later, in 2017, after the film had secured generations of fans, Mr. Salazar told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., that he still answered to “Chi Chi” and didn’t mind when people brought copies of the “Scarface” DVD to his comedy shows to be signed.Ángel Salazar was born on March 2, 1956, in Cuba. He acted in plays there before fleeing the country in the early 1970s, swimming across Guantánamo Bay to reach the U.S. naval base there, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. From there, he was flown to Miami and then moved to New York, where he was placed in a foster home in the Bronx.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Salazar, left, with Al Pacino in the 1983 film “Scarface.” He played Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony Montana, played by Mr. Pacino. Photo 12/Alamy Stock PhotoIn New York, he had trouble finding acting jobs, but he could make people laugh and at age 18 decided to test how far that could get him by performing at a comedy club’s open mic night.“I had 10 minutes,” Mr. Salazar told The Inquirer. “And I think I had one joke. The rest of the time I said, ‘Check it out,’ over and over again.”He eventually became a comedy club regular, and “Check it out” was a staple of his high-energy routines, which included costumes, props and impersonations of celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Tina Turner.Mr. Salazar lived between New York and Florida. Earlier this month he performed at the Laugh Factory in Reno, Nev., and Mr. Paul, his representative, said that they had talked last week about a possible show in Chicago.In Vanity Fair’s 2016 oral history of the famed New York City club the Comedy Cellar, the comedian Jim Norton said: “Auditions were typically done during the Friday late show, which meant you could get stuck following Ángel Salazar or some other guy who killed so hard the walls would shake.”Mr. Salazar at an event celebrating the release of “Scarface” on Blu-ray in Los Angeles in 2011.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Haley Joel Osment, ‘Sixth Sense’ Star, Is Content 25 Years Later

      by

      Haley Joel Osment’s childhood memories are not like other people’s. He remembers the kindness with which Tom Hanks treated him, when he was 5 and playing Hanks’s son in “Forrest Gump.” And the time Russell Crowe adjusted his bow tie at an awards show when Osment, not yet 12, was Oscar-nominated for his breakout performance in “The Sixth Sense.” The in-depth conversations he had with Steven Spielberg about the future as they were filming “A.I.” that same year.A phalanx of Osment clones, made for that movie, are still floating around — he heard they might have ended up stockpiled in Peter Jackson’s trove of memorabilia in New Zealand. If the apocalypse happens, Osment jokes, that preteen version of him will survive.It is, in any case, the form in which many fans know him best — especially as the notably named Cole Sear, the teary-eyed center of “The Sixth Sense,” M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster supernatural thriller from August 1999. Osment’s indelibly whispered line, “I see dead people,” went from the trailer to the canon of cinema to pop culture infamy long before memes even existed to codify it (though they have now). It was a phrase so potent that, 25 years after its arrival, it is a Kendrick Lamar lyric — on a Drake diss track, no less.With its final-act twist, “The Sixth Sense” also, some cineastes argue, started “spoiler culture” — meaning that mass moviedom as we know it, with entire publicity campaigns and prickly fan bases fiercely safeguarding plotlines, sprang from that moment. A 10-year-old paired with an action star (Bruce Willis), playing against type as a child therapist, spooked audiences into repeat views, and today we scour the screen for Easter eggs and hope for the thrill of a shock.Osment with Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense.” When the boy auditioned, M. Night Shyamalan recalled, “I turned to the casting director and said, ‘I don’t think I want to make this without him.’”Buena Vista PicturesOsment is now 36; he has been a working actor for nearly nine-tenths of his life, in drama, comedy, fantasy, animation, period pieces, video games and oddball stuff. He has enough credits that when a cast was made of his arm for the Amazon superhero series “The Boys,” he was able to use it again, seasons later, to beat someone in the FX vampire satire “What We Do in the Shadows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      What ‘It Ends With Us’ Says About the Blake Lively Brand

      by

      The images onscreen are informed by the actress’s offscreen businesses, making the movie a fascinating study in the uses of star power.Blake Lively’s hair is like a character unto itself in the new romantic drama “It Ends With Us.”Her thick mane shapeshifts with her role, Lily Bloom, a flower shop owner who falls in and out of love with an abusive neurosurgeon. Lively’s hair, dyed a soft ginger, is artfully messy when she gets her hands dirty starting up the store. The camera follows a mass of buoyant curls when she struts into a party dressed to impress the man who will ultimately betray her. When she wakes up post-coitus, her hair is perfectly tousled. When she is sad, it droops as if by magic.You could say Blake Lively’s hair is a tool she uses to sell her performance, but her performance is also a tool she uses to sell her hair. Those who are impressed with her locks in “It Ends With Us” can learn from her Instagram that she recently debuted a line of hair-care products called Blake Brown. (Brown is her father’s last name.)In many ways “It Ends With Us” is a brand-building exercise for Lively. Yes, the film, directed by Justin Baldoni, is an adaptation of a popular novel, meant to lure fans of the best-selling author Colleen Hoover, but it also serves as an advertisement for the world of Lively — not just her talent but her celebrity and her other significant role, mogul, making the film a fascinating study in the various forms star power can take.On the most readily understandable level, “It Ends With Us” makes a convincing case for Lively as an actress. Her particular je ne sais quoi was evident back in the 2007 pilot of “Gossip Girl,” which opened with a tribute to her allure. Her character — Serena van der Woodsen, the rich girl with a troubled past — arrives at Grand Central, back in New York after a mysterious absence, and everyone turns toward her. As she looks around the train station’s vast hall, she looks gorgeous and wistful, every flip of her hair (that hair!) seems imbued with greater meaning.Lively as Serena van der Woodsen in the opening scenes of “Gossip Girl.”KC Bailey/CWLike every young star on that prime-time soap, Lively made a bid for a film career. “Green Lantern” (2011) didn’t win her a franchise, but it did introduce her to her future husband, Ryan Reynolds. The dark comedy “A Simple Favor” (2018), in which she played a martini-stirring psychopath, was a surprise box office success and garnered a fervent enough fan base to earn a sequel. But Lively seemed to struggle to find her niche in movies, and while she received some praise for performances in the romance “The Age of Adaline” (2015) and the survival thriller “The Shallows” (2016), nothing propelled her to the next level of fame on the big screen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Monet, Taylor Swift, ‘Moana’: What Got Readers Through Their Grief

      by

      After our series on how artists have been affected by loss, we asked readers what helped them when they experienced it. These are 15 of their answers.Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, we published The Grief Project, a series of interviews with artists who discussed the ways that loss affected their work and creativity. We also asked readers about the art and culture — whether it was a book, a movie, a song or anything else — that helped them remember or cope with losing a loved one. Hundreds responded. Here is what some of them said.Music‘As’ by Stevie WonderLike Stevie Wonder, Nancy Hanks wrote, her mother “was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with.”Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesI’m not sure if it’s the melody or lyrics, but this song deeply captures the deep feelings of love and profound grief that I feel for the loss of my mother. Throughout the song Stevie Wonder professes all the ways and lengths that the depth of his love reaches. He notes “did you know true love asks for nothing / her acceptance is the way we pay.” I often am reminded of this. The grief that I carry is a tax on the lifetime of unconditional love I’ve experienced from my mother. Like Stevie, she was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with. We couldn’t have the proper celebration we wanted for her because of Covid, but I imagine if we did, we would have played this song along with so many more of her favorites and danced all night. I can’t hear the song anymore without feeling a deep sense of longing for her. I’m so grateful for her life and legacy, and I miss her terribly. —Nancy Hanks, AtlantaFilm‘School of Rock’It was less than a week after we lost our 4-year-old daughter Laila to cancer, in 2004. A neighboring couple, who had been supportive throughout Laila’s illness, brought over a VHS tape of “School of Rock.” In those very early days of bereavement, as far as I knew, I would never laugh again. But we popped in the videocassette, and before long I found myself laughing out loud, along with the family and friends gathered with us. Although my sadness filled my entire soul, there was somehow still room for humor. The wondrous physics of hope, in a lesson delivered by Jack Black with his electric guitar. As a family, we rewatch “School of Rock” every now and then, and it never fails to uplift. To me, it will always be a symbol of resilience. —Mary Janevic, Ann Arbor, Mich.SportsThe New York RangersWatching the Rangers “offered tremendous comfort to my family,” wrote Pam Poling, whose sister was a fellow fan.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images/Getty ImagesOur sister died in December after an incredibly brief illness. She was our go-to person for all things hockey, especially our beloved Rangers. Watching them skate so beautifully this season offered tremendous comfort to my family. Whether they win or lose, we often text each other, “Joanie would have loved this.” It really helps. —Pam Poling, Fairfield, Conn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Ariana Greenblatt on the ‘Stupid’ Movie That Inspires Her

      by

      “It’s a big part of my personality,” admitted the actress, who broke through in “Barbie” and is now in the sci-fi film “Borderlands.”After playing America Ferrera’s defiant daughter in “Barbie,” Ariana Greenblatt has lots of mentor options. There’s Margot Robbie (“so cool”). Michael Cera (“I love him so much”). Greta Gerwig (“yeeessss”).But her go-to vibe check? That remains her older brother, Gavin, who is studying fashion design.“All my looks are approved by him,” Greenblatt, 16, said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs, Luna and Foxy. “He has such great style.”He also served as the vetter on another important project: “Borderlands,” a film adaptation of the sci-fi video game in which Greenblatt plays the demolitions expert Tiny Tina.“I called him to fact-check: ‘Is this video game cool?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I play it all the time,’” Greenblatt said. “That was my green light to move forward.”While she watched her dogs try to catch a squirrel, Greenblatt, who is now filming “Now You See Me 3” in Budapest, discussed the item that’s her must-have on the road, why she thinks everyone should read “The Outsiders” and her dream writing project. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘The Outsiders’At first I was mad that I had to read it in school, but I really connected with it. My favorite character is either Darry or Sodapop — he was so cute in the movie! When Dally got shot at the end, it made me sob. Wait, there’s a musical? Now I have to see it!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More