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      What Did Stephen Sondheim Really Think of ‘Rent’?

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      The composer served as something of a mentor to Jonathan Larson and spoke frankly about the show after the younger man’s death.Stephen Sondheim appears as a kind of oracle in the movie adaptation of the Jonathan Larson rock monologue “Tick, Tick … Boom!” The film, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, doubles as an artful tribute to Larson, best known as the creator of “Rent.” Onscreen, lesser minds are eager to dismiss the self-proclaimed “future of American musicals,” but Sondheim salutes the younger man’s talent and potential. The depiction is based in fact: The master craftsman of American theater, who died last month at 91, did support Larson’s work, financially and creatively.But when I interviewed Sondheim in 1996, a few months after Larson’s sudden death, his view was complicated.“I think it is a work in progress,” he said of “Rent,” the Broadway sensation that won Larson a Pulitzer and a Tony. “He wanted to put in everything and the kitchen sink, and he did. I think it suffers from that.”In “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Miranda pays tribute to the two theater greats who inspired him to make “In the Heights” and “Hamilton.” As the first writer to go through Larson’s papers after his death, part of my research for the “Rent” book I wrote with Katherine Silberger, I was moved to tears to see his complexity and compassion so creatively honored.It inspired me to revisit my interview with Sondheim. I had spoken with Sondheim on the phone. He generously wanted to honor his sometime protégé for the book that would tell Larson’s story, but he was not overly sentimental. He had been disappointed in the stage version of “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” which at one point was known as “Boho Days” and which chronicled Larson’s efforts to write a show called “Superbia,” originally based on George Orwell’s “1984.”With “Rent,” Larson was getting back on track, Sondheim said. “He was coming back into his own again. Some songs had a confidence and center to them.”Larson had his own complicated relationship to his mentor. One of his goals was to lead the charge of a new generation of playwrights who would provide an alternative to the Sondheims of the world. “It’s the 1990s, it’s time for a change,” he told a friend..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Here is the entire interview with Sondheim, portions of which appeared in the book “Rent”:STEPHEN SONDHEIM I met him at a show called “Superbia.” I don’t remember what brought us together. My guess is he wrote me a letter and asked to meet. I meet a lot of young composers: if they write a letter and the work interests me at all, I will always meet with them. He worked on “Superbia” for a long time while I knew him, which I think was right after the first draft. I thought the show was interesting and that what he was trying to do was interesting. What was wrong with it had to do with the story and how the story was told. Some of the songs were accomplishing things which the story wasn’t. It got less interesting as it went along because there was not enough tension and focus in the way the story was told.What did you think of the compositional work?I thought some of the songs were good and others not. The opening number had some originality to it, whereas the others didn’t. He was still finding a voice and I think he still is. But he had a voice and that was the important thing.There is a story about him wanting to be an actor.Oh, that was constant with him. Whenever he would get discouraged with his writing, that was his riff. I don’t think there was ever any doubt in his mind that he wanted to write primarily. Shakespeare started as an actor.What kind of role did you play in him getting that first grant for “Superbia”?Well, I’m chairman of the committee that gives the grant. I didn’t know him well enough to recuse myself. My relationship with Jonathan was entirely about his work. We had a few personal discussions, but I wasn’t championing a friend, I was championing a person whose work I liked. Everybody on the committee liked it too.Did you see “Boho Days” or “Tick, Tick … Boom”?I saw a tape of “Tick, Tick … Boom” and heard a tape of “Boho Days.”Did you feel the work [on “Tick” or “Boho”] was progressing, and did you identify with the material?Curiously enough I didn’t feel it was progressing and we talked about that. I felt there was more originality in “Superbia.” I worried that he was getting desperate to be accepted and it was starting to show in the work.In what way?It was getting more like everybody else who was afraid of being original.What did you think of the content of the piece in terms of the frustrations of composing and not being produced?Well, everybody does that. Standard operating procedure. Everybody works for years without getting a hearing unless they’re very lucky. One thing I would say is that he was clinging to “Superbia” too long. I was glad when he started working on the other things. I think his approach to the piece made it insoluble. It got a little better each time but it wasn’t solving the basic problem about the story.I heard you also told him the same thing about “Rent.”I think it is a work in progress. Story focus is it. He wanted to put in everything and the kitchen sink, and he did. I think it suffers from that.And you told him he should move on, he’d been working on it too long.Absolutely. Once a piece has reached a certain stage in development, if you can’t get on it, you should move on and that piece can be picked up later. You need to wait until you have a director in, or a producer interested.Yet you gave him a second grant?Yes. It may have been, my memory is blurred, it may have been that I was cautioning him not to fall into the same rut. I was worried about it.His collaborators were concerned about focusing the story on “Rent.” Do you think it improved?Somewhat.Do you think it was harder for him?No. I know people who have had a harder time than he. At one point I sent three songs from “Rent” to David Geffen, at Jonathan’s request I think, and he got turned down within a week. He said it fell between two stools. Partly showbiz and partly pop.Is this time a harder time to get things produced than when you were starting?No, it’s easier. Providing you don’t want to do it on Broadway, it’s easier with Off Broadway. There was no Off Broadway when I grew up. No producer will take a chance on an unknown unless it has been pretested at Off Broadway or at a regional theater. So it’s much easier with the proliferation of regional and Off Broadway.Do you remember a conversation you had about Jonathan being asked to do another rewrite?I said you have to learn how to collaborate. He learned. He called me back a few days later and said, You were right. I am willing to collaborate.Did you see the workshop production?Yes.Did you have any idea it would be such a success?No. I didn’t know that Jonathan would die, that made it a myth.The last time I’d spoken to him was in December. He felt pleased about the way he was growing up. He felt that way any author does in the middle of rehearsal. It’s terrible, it’s wonderful. I’m ashamed of it, isn’t it great?Did you feel that “Rent” was a progression from “Boho Days”? Did you feel he was getting back on track?Yes. He was coming back into his own again. Some songs had a confidence and center to them. The song with the two lovers was a swell piece of composition. I liked “Santa Fe” a lot. The whole score had somebody responding to a story, it was obviously a story he cared about. More

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      ‘The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe’ Review: Success? That’s a Stretch.

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      This formulaic documentary focuses on the individuals swindled by the multilevel marketing company known for leggings, LuLaRoe.In 2013, Mark and DeAnne Stidham founded LuLaRoe, a multilevel marketing company specializing in the sale of women’s clothing — namely “buttery soft” leggings in bold prints. According to The Wall Street Journal, LuLaRoe grew to a business generating $2.3 billion in retail sales in the span of four years thanks to its ever-increasing team of “retailers” who were mostly mothers seduced by the promise of financial success that could be reaped by buying and selling LuLaRoe merchandise from the comfort of their homes. In short, the company was a pyramid scheme.“The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe” is essentially a documentary version of a 2020 investigative report by the BuzzFeed News writer Stephanie McNeal. Produced in association with BuzzFeed Studios, it’s a redundant effort given Amazon’s recent mini-series, “LulaRich,” though at least it’s less of a time commitment.“LuLaRoe” follows the template of most scandal-laden investigative documentaries, like the competing 2019 Fyre Festival exposes, “Fyre” (Netflix) and “Fyre Fraud” (Hulu), or Alex Gibney’s “The Inventor,” about Theranos and its former CEO Elizabeth Holmes.It begins with a montage that jumps from enthusiastic retailers touting the benefits of the LuLaRoe lifestyle to footage from the 2020 trial of the Stidhams. The rest fills in what comes between these two points, with a particular focus on the individuals victimized and brainwashed by the company, many of whom are interviewed, along with experts on entrepreneurship, linguistics and cults.One could go on about the fraudulent American dream that LuLaRoe represents — a sort of up-by-the-bootstraps mentality with a social media assist and the ideals of women’s empowerment, all of which are taken advantage of by manipulative crooks.But unless you’re really hankering for a visual component and video testimonies, you’d be better off simply reading the article than watching this thoroughly formulaic explainer.The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      Sundance Film Festival Unveils 2022 Lineup

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      Films addressing racism and abortion are among the 82 titles that will screen when the event returns in person in January.When members of the independent film community descend on Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival in January — after experiencing the previous edition virtually — they will bring with them movies that reflect the times from directors as varied as Lena Dunham and Michel Hazanavicius of “The Artist.”Culling from 3,762 feature submissions, the Sundance programmers chose a diverse slate of 82 titles — including 39 by first-time feature directors — in a variety of genres that explore myriad themes, like tackling grief and battling the status quo.“We’ve been through a lot these past two years and I think that has had a huge influence on what artists are concentrating on,” Sundance’s director of programming, Kim Yutani, said. “Some of that is fighting the system, really calling into question institutions, corporations. We saw a lot of films that are looking at the fight for democracy.”Examples include Rory Kennedy’s documentary “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” from Netflix, which investigates the two Boeing 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people; “The Exiles,” a nonfiction film centering on three dissidents after the Tiananmen Square massacre; and two films that examine the Jane Collective — an underground group of women from Chicago who between 1969 and 1973 helped women secure safe, illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade was handed down. One, the documentary “The Janes,” was directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, with HBO producing. The other, “Call Jane,” is a fictional feature from Phyllis Nagy (the screenwriter of “Carol”) with a cast that includes Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver.“It’s kind of the hallmark of independent work, isn’t it? A resistance to the status quo,” said the festival director, Tabitha Jackson. “This year, it’s reflecting on the fact that we are in this age of reckoning, this age of accountability.”Three films take on that reckoning, examining the insidious nature of racism and privilege through the lens of Black women: “Alice,” a complex take on slavery, stars Keke Palmer and Common, and was written and directed by Krystin Ver Linden. “Master,” a film from Mariama Diallo starring Regina Hall, focuses on three women trying to find their place at an elite New England university. (Amazon will distribute.) And “Nanny,” by the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, follows an undocumented woman from Senegal who works for a well-off couple in New York City; Anna Diop (“Titans”) and Michelle Monaghan star. All three films, part of the U.S. dramatic competition, hail from first-timers.Of the submissions to Sundance this year, only 28 percent were from women. Yet among all the features selected, 52 percent were directed by women. When asked whether the programmers decided to boost women auteurs over men, they steered around the question, saying they are always looking to promote female filmmakers. Jackson added: “The slightly depressing fact is that the figure of 28 percent submissions from women has remained pretty static across the years. It is a figure that we would wish to see higher because of what it indicates about the state of the industry. It’s surprising that so few are submitting.”Kristine Froseth and Jon Bernthal in the Lena Dunham film “Sharp Stick.”Sundance InstituteThe majority of the films at the festival, which runs Jan. 20-30, will arrive without distribution, a fact that Jackson calls “kind of cool.” But they’re also debuting at a time when theatrical distribution is still depressed amid consumers’ fears about returning to the movies. Though the market was held virtually in 2020, Apple paid a festival record $25 million to acquire “CODA,” the drama about a hearing daughter and her deaf family that was just named one of the American Film Institute’s 10 best films of the year. The industry will be watching the Sundance sales titles closely in January for clues to the health of both the streaming and theatrical markets.While sales are always dependent on how a film plays in the snowy confines of Park City, buyers may be leaning toward the better-known directors and actors, like Dunham, who is returning to the independent film scene 12 years after “Tiny Furniture” with “Sharp Stick,” about a naïve young Hollywood outsider who has an affair with her older boss. Dunham plays a supporting role in the film alongside Jon Bernthal and Jennifer Jason Leigh.Hazanavicius is making his Sundance debut a decade after he won the best director Oscar for his black-and-white silent dramedy. His new “Final Cut” is a horror film featuring his wife and “Artist” star, Bérénice Bejo, in the story of a small crew attacked by real zombies while shooting a low-budget zombie movie.Both the Dunham and Hazanavicius titles will debut in the Premieres section, which is usually reserved for more high-profile work. That includes Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directing debut, “When You Finish Saving the World,” which stars Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard of “Stranger Things” and was produced by the indie label A24.Other buzzy titles include “Am I OK?,” starring Dakota Johnson in the feature directing debut of Tig Notaro and her partner, Stephanie Allynne; “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” with Emma Thompson as a retired educator who hires a young sex worker to teach her his ways; and “Fresh,” an Adam McKay-produced film directed by Mimi Cave about a young woman (Daisy Edgar-Jones of “Normal People”) trying to survive the unusual appetites of her boyfriend (Sebastian Stan).Kanye West in the documentary “jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy.”NetflixDocumentaries are always a popular draw at Sundance, and this year looks strong with Netflix debuting “jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy” (directed by Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, and Chike Ozah), with new footage of Kanye West covering 21 years, and Showtime premiering “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” W. Kamau Bell’s examination of the age-old question of whether you can or should separate the art from the artist.Two actresses-turned-directors are taking on the nonfiction genre for the first time. Amy Poehler is bringing the Amazon documentary “Lucy and Desi” and Eva Longoria Bastón has “La Guerra Civil,” about the rivalry between the boxers Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez.“These are two pleasant surprises in our programming,” Yutani said of the those two titles. “Eva’s is such an interesting project for her to be involved in, and Amy Poehler is the perfect person to tell that story.” More

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      Lina Wertmüller, Italian Director of Provocative Films, Dies at 93

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      She established an idiosyncratic reputation for blending tragedy, farce, politics and sex. She was the first woman nominated for a best director Oscar.Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.The culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement that Ms. Wertmüller’s “class and unmistakable style” had left its mark on Italian and world cinema. “Grazie, Lina,” he said.She was the first woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for best director, for “Seven Beauties” (1975).Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name, burst onto the cinematic scene with a series of idiosyncratic films that propelled her to the front rank of European directors. All the movies had screenplays written by her, and most relied on the talents of her two favorite actors: Giancarlo Giannini, usually cast as a hapless male chauvinist victimized by the injustices of Italian society and baffled by women, and Mariangela Melato as the always difficult and complicated love interest.In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were. A lively sense of human limitations tempered her natural bent toward anarchy. Struggle was noble and the social structure rotten, but the outcome was always in doubt.Lina Wertmüller on the set of “Summer Night” on the island of Sardinia.New Line CinemaAntiquated codes of honor undo the title character in “The Seduction of Mimi,” a dimwitted Sicilian laborer, played by Mr. Giannini, whose neglected wife stages a sexual revolt. In “Swept Away” (1974), Ms. Wertmüller upended the Italian power structure by giving the humble deckhand Gennarino (Mr. Giannini again) absolute power over the rich and arrogant Raffaella (Ms. Mercato) after a shipwreck.After being dominated and abused, Gennarino turns the tables, and Raffaella becomes his adoring slave — until the two are rescued, and the old order reasserts itself. Feminists objected. With a characteristic bit of obfuscation, Ms. Wertmüller explained that since Raffaella embodies bourgeois society, “therefore she represents the man.”Giancarlo Giannini as Gennarino and Mariangela Melato as Raffaella in “Swept Away.”Kino LorberIn “Seven Beauties” (1975), Ms. Wertmüller again courted outrage by using a German concentration camp as the setting for a grim comedy, with farcical overtones. This time, Mr. Giannini played Pasqualino Farfuso, a craven Neapolitan deserter and two-bit charmer who, determined to survive at all costs, seduces the camp’s sadistic female commandant and, directed by her, murders other prisoners. Critics were divided over the merits of the film, but it earned Ms. Wertmüller the Oscar nomination. Not until 1994, when Jane Campion was nominated for “The Piano,” would another woman be nominated for directing.Ms. Wertmüller’s reputation, always more elevated in the United States than in Europe, remained uncertain. With “Seven Beauties,” the critic John Simon wrote, she ascended “into the highest regions of cinematic art, into the company of the major directors.” The critic David Thomson, on the other hand, ascribed her American popularity in the 1970s as “probably inevitable in a country ravenous for a female purveyor of smart cultural artifacts.”And her brand of sexual politics encountered hostility from critics like Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell and Ellen Willis, who called Ms. Wertmüller “a woman-hater who pretends to be a feminist.”Shirley Stoler as the Nazi commandant in “Seven Beauties.”Tiny and voluble, with a fierce smile and instantly recognizable white-framed eyeglasses, Ms. Wertmüller disarmed criticism by unleashing verbal torrents of explanation in a gravelly alto. Vincent Canby, after listening to her hold forth during a publicity tour for her first English-language film, “The End of the World in Our Usual Bed on a Night Full of Rain” (1978), wrote in The New York Times that she spoke “with enthusiasm and at such length and so articulately that (to vary an old Hollywood joke) it seems Warner Brothers might do better to scrap the film and distribute the director.”Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spañol von Braueich was born in Rome on Aug. 14, 1928, to a family of noble Swiss ancestry. Her mother was the former Maria Santamaria-Maurizio; her father, Federico, was a successful lawyer and a domestic tyrant with whom she quarreled constantly. After obtaining a teaching certificate, Ms. Wertmüller hedged her bets by enrolling simultaneously in law school and a Stanislavskian drama academy in Rome. Theater won out.During the 1950s, she toured with a puppet theater, wrote musical comedies for television and worked as an actress and stage manager. Her best friend, married to Marcello Mastroianni, introduced her to Federico Fellini, who hired her as an assistant director on “8½,” a life-changing experience that opened the world of film to her.Ms. Wertmüller with Mr. Giannini, who starred in many of her films, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in 1975.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesIn 1963 she directed her own film, “The Lizards,” a study of provincial life in the vein of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni.” It was followed by the quirky “Let’s Talk About Men” (1965), a study of sexual politics that foreshadowed her later explorations of the subject.Ms. Wertmüller’s long collaboration with Mr. Giannini began in television, when she directed him in the musical “Rita the Mosquito” (1966) and its sequel “Don’t Sting the Mosquito” (1967), whose art director, Enrico Job, she married in 1968.Mr. Job died in 2008. Ms. Wertmüller adopted Maria Zulima Job, her husband’s child with another woman, shortly after Ms. Job’s birth in 1991. Her daughter survives her.The 1970s presented Ms. Wertmüller with two of her richest subjects: the changing sexual politics brought about by feminism, and increasing political turbulence in Italy, as old social structures and attitudes buckled under the pressures of modernity. “The Seduction of Mimi,” chosen as an official entry at the Cannes festival in 1972, immediately established her as an important new filmmaker. “Love and Anarchy” (1973), with Mr. Giannini playing a bumbling country boy who tries to assassinate Mussolini, and the social satire “All Screwed Up” (1974) solidified her reputation for idiosyncratic political films blending tragedy and farce.Somewhat paradoxically, her career went into steep decline after the Academy nomination, although in 2019 she received an honorary Oscar for her work, and in 2016 she was the subject of a documentary, “Behind the White Glasses.”“The bubble seemed to burst,” the British critic Derek Malcolm told The Guardian, adding that “she could do nothing right.”The titles of the films grew even longer, and the critical response more uniformly hostile. “The End of the World,” with Candice Bergen as an American photographer and feminist engaged in marital struggle with an Italian communist played by Mr. Giannini, was roundly dismissed as raucous and incoherent. Each succeeding film seemed to bear out Michael Wood’s observation, in The New York Review of Books, that Ms. Wertmüller’s work displayed “a stunning visual intelligence accompanied by a great confusion of mind.”Ms. Wertmüller during filming of the documentary “Behind the White Glasses.” Emanuele Ruiz/Kino LorberBy the early 1990s she had qualified for inclusion in Variety’s “Missing Persons” column. “Ciao, Professore” (1994), about a schoolteacher from northern Italy mistakenly transferred to a poor school near Naples, suggested a return to form, but on a small scale, and with an unexpected sweetness. For perhaps the first time in her career, Ms. Wertmüller faced the charge of sentimentality.To this, as to all criticism, she responded by invoking the ultimate authority: herself. Her films, she liked to say, were made to please an audience of one, and her methods were intuitive.“I am sure of things only because I love them,” she said. “I am born first. Only then do I discover.” More

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      What a Times Journalist Learned From His ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment

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      A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago.One of the thus-far theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just wandered into Earth’s path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.In the new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover that a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the news.It doesn’t go well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned with her poll numbers. Television talk show hosts ridicule the scientists. Rich oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” may be the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the End of the World since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”Watching it brought back my own experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”Brian Marsden, the astronomer who calculated that in 2028 the asteroid 1997 XF11 would come within 30,000 miles of Earth.Evan RichmanThe source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is the International Astronomical Union’s clearinghouse for cosmic discoveries, as well as its Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028 — and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.“In more than 40 years of computing orbits, I had never seen anything like that before,” Dr. Marsden later said. He felt he had a duty to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.The front-page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from newsroom colleagues who wanted to know whether they should continue to pay their mortgages, and responding to queries and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a fuzzy dot in the darkness. I was having an adrenaline-fueled crash course in the scrutiny a front-page story receives in the newsroom before it can be published.I didn’t want to go home that night but eventually did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already all over. Pictures of the asteroid from several years earlier had turned up overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated the orbit and found that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe for civilization.An image of the asteroid 1997 XF11, now minor planet 35396, taken on March 11, 1998, over an interval of 30 minutes by the astronomer Bernadette Rodgers of the University of Washington.Bernadette Rodgers/University of Washington/Astrophysical Research ConsortiumIn the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly scolded by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who had made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before blindsiding the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.Dr. Marsden apologized for generating such a scare, but noted that he had helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that for us not to make the announcement as we did would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness,” he said.I felt bad for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I had known for 20 years of reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the possible end of the world after only a month on the job? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!,” I took it personally.The New York Times’s front-page article of March 12, 1998, and The New York Post’s cover of March 13.But the incident was indeed a kind of turning point, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on “Don’t Look Up.”In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?Humor helps, Dr. Mainzer added: “We’re saying it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to go down this path.”Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world. More

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      Denis O’Brien, Force in Ex-Beatle’s Film Company, Dies at 80

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      He and George Harrison created Handmade Films to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” Other successes followed, but the partnership ended badly.Denis O’Brien, who with George Harrison, the former Beatle, founded a production company that made several audacious hit movies, beginning with “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in 1979, before the partnership and the company’s fortunes soured, died on Friday in Swindon, west of London. He was 80.His daughter Kristen O’Brien said the death, in a hospital, was caused by intra-abdominal sepsis.Mr. O’Brien became Mr. Harrison’s business manager in 1973, hired to bring some stability to Mr. Harrison’s financial affairs, which had been muddled since the Beatles broke up four years earlier. And when Mr. Harrison’s friend Eric Idle, of the Monty Python comedy troupe, went to Mr. Harrison with a problem in 1979, it was Mr. O’Brien who nudged Mr. Harrison into producing movies.Monty Python had begun work on a follow-up to its 1975 hit, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The new movie was a satire about a man who is mistaken for the Messiah. Mr. Idle’s problem was that EMI, the entertainment conglomerate that had been financing the new movie, had gotten cold feet and pulled out just as production was gearing up. He asked if Mr. Harrison could help financially, and Mr. Harrison in turn consulted Mr. O’Brien.“Denis called me back a few days later and said, ‘OK, I think I know how to do it: We’ll be the producers,’” Mr. Harrison told The Advertiser of Australia in 1986. “He was laughing because he knew that my favorite movie was ‘The Producers’” — the Mel Brooks comedy — “which I’d watched over and over.”Mr. Harrison, putting up as collateral his estate in Henley-on-Thames, England, provided some $4 million to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” It was the first release of Handmade Films, the production company that he and Mr. O’Brien created. As Mr. Idle told the story, Mr. Harrison had a simple reason for financing the film: He wanted to see the movie.“At $4 million, this is still the most anyone has ever paid for a movie ticket,” Mr. Idle wrote in an essay in The Los Angeles Times in 2004.In his telling, Mr. O’Brien had actually structured the project assuming that the film would lose money and that it could be a tax write-off; instead, it became a hit and a beloved entry in the annals of comedy films. Time Out recently ranked it No. 3 on its list of the 100 greatest comedy movies of all time, trailing only “Airplane!” and “This Is Spinal Tap.”With “Brian,” Handmade Films was off on a run of quirky critical and often financial successes, including “The Long Good Friday” (1980), a crime drama with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren; “Time Bandits” (1981), directed by Terry Gilliam of the Python troupe and featuring other Pythons; the noir drama “Mona Lisa” (1986), another vehicle for Mr. Hoskins; and the comedy “Withnail & I,” which became a sort of cult classic and was ranked No. 7 on that Time Out list.Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Harrison were executive producers on these and numerous other Handmade films, and their early successes were credited with helping to revive the moribund British film industry. They shared a taste for offbeat scripts.“We tend to do movies that come to us because no one else wants to make them,” Mr. Harrison told Newsweek in 1987.That was certainly the case with “Time Bandits,” a hard-to-categorize movie about time-traveling dwarves that they had trouble getting distributed, securing a deal with the independent Avco Embassy Pictures only after the major studio distributors had declined.“There were any number of majors who walked out of the screenings,” Mr. O’Brien told The Los Angeles Times in November 1981, just after the film had enjoyed a robust opening weekend.But Handmade’s Midas touch didn’t last. Some of its movies were costly bombs, most famously “Shanghai Surprise” (1986), a widely panned adventure yarn that starred Madonna and Sean Penn.By the 1990s the company was in financial trouble, and Mr. Harrison soon turned on his longtime partner, accusing him in a 1995 lawsuit of mishandling his money. A court later awarded Mr. Harrison more than $11 million. When Mr. O’Brien sought to declare bankruptcy, Mr. Harrison tried to block that declaration.In 2001, when Mr. Harrison, by then ill with cancer, did not show up to give a deposition in that court challenge, a bankruptcy judge dismissed the case. Mr. Harrison died later that year at 58.In the years since, Mr. O’Brien took most of the criticism for the collapse of Handmade, which was sold in 1994 to a Canadian concern. In a rare interview, with The Belleville News-Democrat of Illinois in 1996, Mr. O’Brien, who lived in the St. Louis area at the time, gave his own interpretation.“As long as we were successful, we had a wonderful relationship,” he said of Mr. Harrison.“The money is not the important aspect here,” he added. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it were a dollar or a million dollars. It’s George not knowing how to accept failure or take responsibility for it.”Ms. O’Brien, his daughter, used to visit Mr. Harrison’s estate with her father as a child, playing in the elaborate gardens that were Mr. Harrison’s pride and joy. The falling-out, she said by email, was painful for her father.“I know he felt just as hurt and betrayed as I am sure Harrison felt,” she said.Eric Idle, center, in a scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979). A satire about a man who is mistaken for the Messiah, it was the first movie produced by Handmade Films.Python (Monty) PicturesDenis James O’Brien was born on Sept. 12, 1941, in St. Louis. His father, Albert, worked for Ralston Purina, where he rose to president; his mother, Ruth (Foster) O’Brien, was office manager for an interior-decorator shop as well as a homemaker.Mr. O’Brien played basketball at Webster Groves High School, near St. Louis, before earning a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and a law degree at Washington University in St. Louis.He worked with the Paris law firm Coudert Frères from 1967 to 1969, then held finance positions at N.M. Rothschild & Sons and the EuroAtlantic Group, working out of London.In 1971 he began advising the comic actor Peter Sellers, who recommended Mr. O’Brien to Mr. Harrison, a friend.Mr. Harrison was known to enjoy Pythonesque humor, but Mr. O’Brien also had a sense of impishness. Michael Palin, one of the Pythons, recalled by email that Mr. O’Brien used to call him up and pretend to be Mr. Sellers. Funny accents were a favorite gag — Kristen O’Brien said that when she or her sister, Laura, would call their father, they would sometimes find themselves speaking to “Fritz the German.”On “Life of Brian,” Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Harrison let the Pythons do the filmmaking, but Mr. O’Brien later became more involved in the creative side of movies he was financing. His detractors said this had contributed to the company’s downfall; however, the screenwriter Stephen Rivele (“Ali,” “Nixon”), who with his writing partner, Chris Wilkinson, wrote seven scripts for Handmade in its later years (though none were produced), said his experience with Mr. O’Brien had been positive.“On every draft, he gave careful, handwritten notes, which were always as perceptive as they were polite,” Mr. Rivele said by email. “He had very keen insights and original ideas which invariably made the scripts better.”Mr. O’Brien moved back to England in 2008 after living near St. Louis for a time. At his death he lived in Little Somerford. He was married four times, most recently to Phyllida Riddell O’Brien, who died in 2019. In addition to his daughters — who are from his first marriage, to Karen Lazarus — he is survived by a brother, Douglas.Ms. O’Brien said that in the last year her father had been showing signs of dementia, which seemed to alter his memory of his relationship with Mr. Harrison.“He seemed to have forgotten there was ever a falling-out,” she said, “and in this last year he loved to hear George’s music, and it would transport him back to some really good times in his life. He had nothing but good memories left.” More

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      ‘A Son (Un Fils)’ Review: The Pain of Others

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      In this Tunisian drama, a terrorist attack sends a husband and wife into a spiraling crisis, opening a world of hurt and understanding.A tense emotional bloodletting, “A Son (Un Fils)” opens on a deceptively peaceful note. A group of men and women on the younger side of middle age have gathered together for a picnic, perhaps for a celebration. Convening in a pretty spot under a canopy of trees, they chatter and raise glasses, laughter and drinks freely flowing as children play nearby. And while the location is unclear, the geographic possibilities narrow when the picnickers speak Arabic with smatterings of French. The smiles keep coming, even when one reveler jokes about an imam and another says they’ll laugh less when the Islamists take over.Set in the summer of 2011, “A Son” unfolds in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, though never directly engages with the upheaval. (In January of that year, after mass protests, the authoritarian president fled the country, leading to the creation of a new government.) Instead, the writer-director Mehdi M. Barsaoui takes fairly oblique approach to the country’s turmoil. Without waving flags or voicing explicit politics, he emphasizes faces and feelings and specifically what happens when one of the families at the picnic — this joyous gathering, with its laughter and bare heads, contemporary clothing and ties to the modern world — blunders into a violent Islamist ambush.Fares (Sami Bouajila) and Meriem (Najla Ben Abdallah), a sexy, attractive, warmly affectionate couple, are first seen driving to the picnic in a Range Rover. Sometime later, they and their 11-year-old son, Aziz (Youssef Khemiri), are on the road again, this time headed south on a business trip for Fares. Their destination is Tataouine, a location bounded by desert and a few hours from Libya, then in the midst of civil war. There, the family checks into a luxury hotel, and you wait for the worst.It arrives shortly thereafter with narrative economy, gunfire blasts and a shock of visceral terror. One minute the family is singing along to a pop tune; an eye-blink later, Fares is racing down the road in reverse with shattered windows and a severely wounded Aziz, and you’re abruptly watching a new movie. Fares and Meriem rush him to a hospital, where Barsaoui begins thwarting your assumptions about what to expect. And as the tone, vibe and storytelling parts shift and shift again — the movie is by turns a hospital drama, a marriage melodrama, a black-market intrigue — Meriem and especially Fares draw you near, push you away and prompt you to choose sides.Barsaoui folds in a lot of narrative turns in the compressed time frame and in the cramped spaces of the main locale, the rundown regional hospital where Fares and Meriem worriedly wait as doctors tend to Aziz. Although the focus remains on the parents, their anguished faces and blood-soaked clothing, Barsaoui takes laps around the rest of the hospital, where watchful women in head scarves also wait. The silence of these other visitors — some accompanied, others alone — thickens meaningfully as Fares and Meriem’s relationship is tested and their voices grow louder, angrier. What, Barsaoui seems to ask, do these other women — emissaries from another Tunisia that Fares and Meriem share but don’t inhabit — think, hope and want?What Barsaoui wants is for you to notice these women and see how they look at this couple, who rarely return their gaze, a blinkeredness that’s understandable if also revealing. If this were a certain kind of European art film, Fares and Meriem might be punished for living in a bourgeois, secular echo chamber. But Barsaoui doesn’t brutalize his characters, even when he shows them (and you) the depths of human depravity. Their child may be dying and their marriage might be too, and that is pain enough. But there’s more to life than one’s own sorrow, as Barsaoui underscores with another child, an unloved boy who enters late and brings the horrors of the larger world with him.A Son (Un Fils)Not rated. In French and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘France’ Review: When the Journalist Becomes the Story

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      Léa Seydoux plays a star television anchor whose life comes unraveled in Bruno Dumont’s new film.Very often in Bruno Dumont’s “France” — so often that I gave up trying to count — he zooms slowly in on Léa Seydoux’s face, sometimes capturing a tear making its way from one of her blue eyes down the sculpted planes of her cheek.For cinephiles of a certain temperament, the shot will evoke exalted moments in movie history, for instance the silent images of Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc.” Falconetti’s silent, tear-streaked visage has been taken as evidence of the spiritual power of film. In exploring the beauty and singularity of a face, the camera can also disclose the anguish of a soul.But some of Dumont’s zooms have a more profane, or at least a more worldly connotation. Seydoux’s character, France de Meurs, is a popular television anchor and correspondent who hosts a nightly news show that ends, as such broadcasts typically do, with a close-up. To some extent, “France” — the movie and its possibly allegorical heroine alike — is structured around the tension between the banality of television and the sacredness of cinema, and around the difficulty of telling them apart.“You’re becoming an icon,” France’s producer — a chain-vaping, scene-stealing comic foil named Lou (Blanche Gardin) — enthuses, using the word in the usual secular way, as a synonym for celebrity. But Dumont is also interested in an older, overtly religious meaning. An icon is more than a picture: It’s a pictorial incarnation of holiness.The irruption of the divine into ordinary life — sometimes sublime, sometimes violent, sometimes absurd — has preoccupied this director for much of his career. In addition to two historical features about Joan of Arc, he has made films set in contemporary France (including “The Life of Jesus,” “Humanité” and “Hadewijch”) that vibrate with metaphysical implications. They can be brutal, unnerving and also puzzling.“France” is all of those things, but also curiously slack, especially as France spirals through a series of personal and professional crises. The first of these — the least dramatic but also, for her, the most consequential — occurs in the midst of a Parisian traffic jam, when her car strikes a deliveryman’s motor scooter. He is knocked down, and something is knocked loose in her. Desperate to atone, she gives money to the man’s family that they never asked for, and buys him a new scooter once he has recovered from his injuries.It isn’t enough. Or maybe her emotional turmoil has another source. France is married to a dour novelist (Benjamin Biolay), and lives with him and their obnoxious young son (Gaetan Amiel) in a pretentiously decorated Paris apartment. For a while, she leaves them, and her job, for an old-fashioned rest cure at an Alpine spa. There, she meets a mopey young man (Emanuele Arioli) who claims to be a professor of Latin.In the second part of the movie, dramatic incidents pile up, as France suffers danger on the job, romantic betrayal, tabloid scandal and devastating tragedy. The close-ups continue to accumulate, the discreet tears sometimes blossoming into full, face-contorting sobs. But while France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.FranceNot rated. In French, German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters. More