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      Study Shows Disability Representation Onscreen Is Increasing, but Still Falls Short

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      The study published Tuesday also showed that television continues to lag behind film when it comes to representation of characters with disabilities.“CODA,” a film about the hearing child of deaf parents, won this year’s Academy Award for best picture, and one of its stars, Troy Kotsur, became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar when he took home the award for best supporting actor. Lauren Ridloff became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first deaf superhero in “Eternals.” The Hulu mystery-comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” won acclaim for an almost entirely silent episode that highlighted the perspective of a deaf character (played by James Caverly).Even with these prominent examples of disability representation onscreen, relative to the approximately 26 percent of adults in the United States who have a physical or psychological disability, representation continued to lag behind, a new study released Tuesday by Nielsen found. The report, whose release was timed to the 32nd anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, analyzed the representation of disabled characters on film and TV shows released from 1918 to 2022.The titles came from a Nielsen database that included about 164,000 films and TV shows that premiered over the past century. Of those, about 4.2 percent, or 6,895 titles, were tagged as having significant disability themes or content.Disability inclusion was highest, the study found, in 2019, when 518 productions with disability themes were released.Across the board in this year’s report, films again fared better than television — of the 6,895 titles that featured significant disability themes or content, about 59 percent (4,066) were feature films, and 18 percent (1,209) were regular series. (The remaining depictions were in other categories like short films, limited series, TV movies or specials.)Those numbers represent a slight shift toward television from last year, when a Nielsen report showed that 64 percent of depictions of disabled characters were in feature films, and 16 percent were in regular television series.A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users on disability representation in media conducted in the first quarter of 2022 also found that people with disabilities were much more likely to take issue with portrayals of disabled characters. Viewers with disabilities were 34 percent more likely to say there was not enough representation of their identity group in media, and they were 52 percent more likely than those who did not identify as having a disability to characterize a TV portrayal of their identity group as inaccurate.Lauren Appelbaum, a vice president at RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that participated in the Nielsen study last year, told The Times then that though the number of disabled characters continued to increase, approximately 95 percent of those roles were still portrayed by actors who did not have disabilities.But there have also been positive representations, as on the HBO series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which features a character who uses a wheelchair (played by Lauren Spencer, known as Lolo), a confident student who attends the show’s iconic nude party. Alaqua Cox also won acclaim for her performance as Maya Lopez/Echo, a deaf Cheyenne woman who has the ability to imitate other people’s movements, in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” More

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      Paul Sorvino, Master of the Mild-Mannered Mobster, Dies at 83

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      A would-be singing star, he found success in Hollywood playing a variety of roles, but they were often quiet, dangerous men, like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas.”Paul Sorvino, the tough-guy actor — and operatic tenor and figurative sculptor — known for his roles as calm and often courteously quiet but dangerous men in films like “Goodfellas” and television shows like “Law & Order,” died on Monday. He was 83. His publicist, Roger Neal, confirmed the death, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. No specific cause was given, but Mr. Neal said that Mr. Sorvino “had dealt with health issues over the past few years.”Mr. Sorvino was the father of Mira Sorvino, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995). In her acceptance speech, she said her father had “taught me everything I know about acting.”“Goodfellas” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Mafia epic, came along when Mr. Sorvino was 50 and decades into his film career. His character, Paulie Cicero, was a local mob boss — lumbering, soft-spoken and ice-cold.“Paulie might have moved slow,” says Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, his neighborhood protégé in the film, “but it was only because he didn’t have to move for nobody.” (Mr. Liotta died in May at 67.)Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role because he couldn’t fully connect emotionally, he told the comedian Jon Stewart, who interviewed a panel of “Goodfellas” alumni at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. When you “find the spine” of a character, Mr. Sorvino said, “it makes all the decisions for you.”Mr. Sorvino with Ray Liotta in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s mob epic “Goodfellas” in 1990. Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role.That didn’t happen, he recalled, until one day when he was adjusting his necktie, looked in the mirror and saw something in his own eyes. When he saw what he called “that lethal Paulie look,” Mr. Sorvino told The Lowcountry Weekly, a South Carolina publication, in 2019, “I knew at that moment I had embraced my inner mob boss.”He had made his mark onstage as a very different but perhaps equally soulless character in “That Championship Season” (1972), Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tragicomedy about the sad reunion of high school basketball players whose glory days are decades past. In the original Broadway production, Mr. Sorvino played Phil Romano, a small-town strip-mining millionaire arrogantly having an affair with the mayor’s wife.Mr. Sorvino received a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play and reprised the role in a 1982 film adaptation.Paul Sorvino (1939-2022)The tough-guy actor, who was best known for his role as the mobster Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas,” died at 83.Obituary: A would-be opera singer, Paul Sorvino found success in Hollywood playing quiet but dangerous men.Remembering ‘Goodfellas’: In 2015, we asked the cast to reflect on the film’s production 25 years later. Here’s what Mr. Sorvino recalled.An Operatic Soul: “Singing allows me to be me,” Mr. Sorvino told The Times ahead of his New York City Opera debut in 2006.Paul Anthony Sorvino was born on April 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sons of Fortunato Sorvino, known as Ford, and Marietta (Renzi) Sorvino, a homemaker and piano teacher. The elder Mr. Sorvino, a robe-factory foreman, was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated to New York with his parents in 1907.Paul grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and attended Lafayette High School. His original career dream was to sing — he idolized the Italian American tenor and actor Mario Lanza — and he began taking voice lessons when he was 8 years old or so.In the late 1950s, he began performing at Catskills resorts and charity events. In 1963, he received his Actors Equity card as a chorus member in “South Pacific” and “The Student Prince” at the Theater at Westbury on Long Island. That same year, he began studying drama at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.Acting jobs were elusive. Mr. Sorvino’s Broadway debut, in the chorus of the musical “Bajour” (1964), lasted almost seven months, but his next show, the comedy “Mating Dance” (1965), starring Van Johnson, closed on opening night.Mr. Sorvino worked as a waiter and a bartender, sold cars, taught acting to children and appeared in commercials for deodorant and tomato sauce. After his first child, Mira, was born, he wrote advertising copy for nine months, but the office job gave him an ulcer.“Most of the time I was just another out-of-work actor who couldn’t get arrested,” he told The New York Times in 1972. “I had confidence in my ability, and I was angry as hell when other people didn’t recognize it.”Mr. Sorvino, second from left, with other cast members of “That Championship Season,” which started Off Broadway before moving to Broadway. With him, from left, were Walter McGinn, Richard Dysart, Michael McGuire and Charles Durning.Leo FriedmanThen his luck changed. He made his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), a dark comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in a small role as a retirement-home owner. Then “That Championship Season” came along, starting with the Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.The film role that first won him major attention was as Joseph Bologna’s grouchy Italian American father in “Made for Each Other” (1971). Mr. Sorvino, almost five years younger than Mr. Bologna, wore old-age makeup for the role.He appeared next as a New Yorker robbed by a prostitute in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1972) but did not fall victim to the cops-and-gangsters stereotype right away. In 1973. he was George Segal’s movie-producer friend in “A Touch of Class” and a mysterious government agent in “The Day of the Dolphin.”Mr. Sorvino later played an egotistic, money-hungry evangelist with a Southern accent in the comedy “Oh, God!” (1977) and God Himself in “The Devil’s Carnival” (2012) and its 2015 sequel. He was a down-to-earth newspaper reporter in love with a ballerina in “Slow Dancing in the Big City” (1978). In “Reds” (1981), he was a passionate Russian American Communist leader just before the Bolshevik Revolution.Mr. Sorvino in 2000 with castmates in “Law and Order.” With him, from left, were Chris Noth, Michael Moriarty and Richard Brooks.NBCHe was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, complete with German accent, in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995). And he played Fulgencio Capulet, Juliet’s intense father with an ancient grudge, in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996).But in a half-century screen career, Mr. Sovino’s characters were often on the wrong side of the law. He played, among others, Chubby de Coco (“Bloodbrothers,” 1978), Lips Manlis (“Dick Tracy,” 1980), Big Mike Cicero (“How Sweet It Is,” 2013), Jimmy Scambino (“Sicilian Vampire,” 2015) and Fat Tony Salerno (“Kill the Irishman,” 2011).And in at least 20 roles, he played law officers with titles like detective, captain or chief. For one season (1991-92), he was Sgt. Phil Cerreta on NBC’s “Law & Order,” but he found the shooting schedule too demanding — and difficult on his voice.Mr. Sorvino continued to sing professionally, making his City Opera debut in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” in 2006.His personal life sometimes reinforced his tough-guy image. Most recently, in 2018, when the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was on trial for criminal sexual acts — and Mira Sorvino had accused him of harassment — Mr. Sorvino predicted that Mr. Weinstein would die in jail. “Because if not, he has to meet me, and I will kill the [expletive deleted] — real simple,” Mr. Sorvino said in a widely aired video interview. Four months later, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.Mr. Sorvino’s final screen roles were in 2019. He played a corrupt senator in “Welcome to Acapulco,” a spy-comedy film, and the crime boss Frank Costello in the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.” Mr. Sorvino with his daughter Mira Sorvino in 2007. Kathleen Voege/Associated PressHe married Lorraine Davis, an actress, in 1966, and they had three children before divorcing in 1988. Mr. Sorvino’s second wife, from 1991 until their 1996 divorce, was Vanessa Arico, a real estate agent. He married Dee Dee Benkie, a Republican political strategist, in 2014.Mr. Sorvino began making bronze sculpture in the 1970s and considered his nonperforming arts work particularly satisfying. “That’s why I prefer it,” he told The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, in 2005. “No one really tells you how to finish something.”“Acting onstage is like doing sculpture,” he said. “Acting in movies is like being an assistant to the sculptor.”Mr. Sorvino is survived by his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino; three children, Mira, Amanda, and Michael; and five grandchildren.Johnny Diaz More

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      Bob Rafelson, Director of ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ Dies at 89

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      A central figure in the New Hollywood movement, he was also the co-creator of the TV pop group the Monkees and featured it in a movie, “Head.”Bob Rafelson, an iconoclastic director and producer who was a central figure of the New Hollywood movement that jump-started American cinema in the wake of the 1960s counterculture upheavals, died on Saturday at his home in Aspen, Colo. He was 89.He had lung cancer, his wife, Gabrielle Taurek Rafelson, said in confirming the death.As a director, Mr. Rafelson was best known for “Five Easy Pieces,” his melancholic 1970 road movie about a classical pianist, played by Jack Nicholson, who spurns the bourgeois life to drift through California working as an oil rigger.Nominated for four Academy Awards, the film embodied the era’s downbeat, anti-establishment ethos and cemented Mr. Nicholson’s position as a Hollywood leading man.More than a filmmaker, Mr. Rafelson was also a skilled navigator of the rapidly shifting pop-culture and media landscapes of the 1960s. For a television series he co-created the pop group the Monkees and later featured it in the subversive feature film “Head” (1968), Mr. Rafelson’s directing debut.Looking to the cinematic new waves that had galvanized younger filmmakers and audiences in France, Japan and elsewhere, he saw an opportunity for a similar renaissance in the United States, where the old studio system was in disarray.In 1965, with his friend and business partner Bert Schneider, Mr. Rafelson established Raybert, a Los Angeles production house that they envisioned as a breeding ground for up-and-coming risk-takers. “I said to Bert that I felt America had extraordinary talent, but that we lacked the talent to appreciate that talent,” Mr. Rafelson told the entertainment site The A.V. Club in 2010.Raybert became BBS Productions with the addition of another partner, Steve Blauner, and the trio scored an outsize success with Dennis Hopper’s generation-defining “Easy Rider” (1969), which recouped more than 100 times its budget at the box office.Mr. Rafelson and Jack Nicholson on location during the filming of “Five Easy Pieces,” Mr. Rafelson’s best-known film.Bettmann via Getty ImagesDespite producing eight films in its seven-year existence, BBS was an influential model of artistic and economic independence. A trailblazing company that doubled as a cool-kid clubhouse for what was also called the American New Wave, BBS remains today a romanticized symbol of the freedom once permissible at the edges of Hollywood.Robert Rafelson was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in New York City. His father was a hat manufacturer who expected his sons to enter the family business. But Mr. Rafelson found inspiration in his uncle, the screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who worked with the director Ernst Lubitsch on many films, including “Trouble in Paradise” and “The Shop Around the Corner.”Rebelling against his comfortable Upper West Side upbringing, Mr. Rafelson left home as a teenager to work at a rodeo in Arizona and to play with a jazz band in Acapulco, Mexico. He returned to the U.S. to study philosophy at Dartmouth College and on graduation was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan, working as a D.J. for the Far East Network of military radio and television stations. He was court-martialed twice, once for striking an officer and once for uttering an obscenity on the air.Mr. Rafelson, an avid moviegoer as a child, had been exposed to foreign films at a young age, and while in Tokyo he worked as a consultant for the Japanese studio Shochiku. Back in New York, he got his start as a story editor on the “Play of the Week” TV anthology series.After moving to Los Angeles in 1962 with his first wife, Toby Carr, a production designer, he continued to work in television, but the strictures of the format were a poor fit for his ambitions and eclectic tastes.He lost his job at a television arm of Universal Pictures when he got into an argument with the Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman over a casting choice. Mr. Rafelson knocked everything on Mr. Wasserman’s desk to the floor and was escorted off the premises.At Screen Gems, then the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, he met Mr. Schneider, a kindred spirit whose father, Abraham, was a top Columbia executive. The two well-connected young producers sought to capitalize on the success of Beatlemania with a show about an invented pop group. Their ads seeking “4 insane boys, 17-21” yielded the Monkees, and the heartthrobs became bona fide chart-toppers.While the group continued to record and perform, the series, which aired on NBC and won two Emmy Awards, lasted only two seasons, from 1966 to 1968.The promotional poster for the film “Head,” starring the Monkees, a group Mr. Rafelson helped create for a television series.Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesMr. Rafelson and Mr. Schneider bid a perverse farewell to the project with the self-reflexive feature “Head,” which expanded on the concept of the band as “a manufactured image with no philosophies,” as the movie’s rewrite of the Monkees’ theme song put it. With Mr. Schneider as executive producer, Mr. Rafelson co-wrote the script with Mr. Nicholson, who was then a B-movie actor as well as the writer of the psychedelic Roger Corman film “The Trip” (1967).A freewheeling media satire full of visual tricks and topical references to the Vietnam War and the media guru Marshall McLuhan, “Head” tanked at the box office. But the success of the Monkees allowed BBS to bankroll Mr. Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” in which Mr. Hopper and Peter Fonda played road-tripping bikers who, as the tag line put it, “went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.”“Easy Rider” landed BBS a six-picture deal at Columbia Pictures that gave the partners final cut and a 50-50 split on profits, provided they kept budgets under $1 million. The company set up an office on North La Brea Avenue, and it became “a hangout for a ragtag band of filmmakers and radicals of various stripes,” as Peter Biskind described it in his New Hollywood chronicle “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.”BBS followed “Easy Rider” with Mr. Rafelson’s second feature as director, “Five Easy Pieces,” which had its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1970. With Mr. Nicholson as Bobby, an alienated antihero who flees his patrician clan, along with its famously ambiguous ending, the film came to be enshrined as a touchstone of ’70s American cinema. Written by Carole Eastman from a story by Mr. Rafelson, “Five Easy Pieces” is perhaps his most personal film.Its themes — American self-invention, the traps of family and class — would recur throughout Mr. Rafelson’s films, including another BBS production, “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972), a story of two estranged brothers, played by Mr. Nicholson and Bruce Dern, in Atlantic City. Mr. Rafelson’s working relationship with Mr. Nicholson would span four decades.True to the spirit of the times, BBS functioned as a collective of sorts: Mr. Nicholson, Mr. Dern and Karen Black appeared in multiple BBS films; the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs shot several of them.The company also produced Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” (1971), which was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and the first features by Henry Jaglom (“A Safe Place”) and Mr. Nicholson (“Drive, He Said”).Outside his BBS endeavors, Mr. Rafelson was an uncredited producer on “The Mother and the Whore,” a classic of 1970s French cinema by Jean Eustache.After winning an Oscar for the Vietnam War documentary “Hearts and Minds” (1974), BBS ceased operations, as Mr. Schneider shifted his focus to political activism and Mr. Rafelson to directing.Mr. Rafelson during the filming of “Five Easy Pieces.”Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesWhile his later films never matched the acclaim of “Five Easy Pieces,” many of them were instrumental in launching or relaunching acting careers. The cast for his 1976 bodybuilding comedy “Stay Hungry” included Sally Field, then known only as a TV star, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first significant role.Mr. Rafelson’s 1981 remake of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” — which featured the first screenplay by David Mamet — helped revive Jessica Lange’s career, which was floundering after her panned debut in “King Kong.”Even by the standards of New Hollywood — a scene dominated by self-styled bad boys and hotheads — Mr. Rafelson had his share of notable blowups.“I was one of those guys that took on all comers,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997. Some of his outbursts came with a price; he was fired from the prison drama “Brubaker” a few days into the shoot for getting into a physical altercation with a studio executive.Mr. Rafelson worked across a range of genres. His films include the erotic thriller “Black Widow” (1987), with Debra Winger and Theresa Russell, and the old-fashioned adventure epic “Mountains of the Moon” (1990), about the Victorian-era explorer Richard Francis Burton, a childhood hero of Mr. Rafelson.He teamed again with Mr. Nicholson and Ms. Eastman, his co-writer for “Five Easy Pieces,” for the 1992 romantic comedy “Man Trouble.” Mr. Nicholson also appeared in Mr. Rafelson’s 1996 heist movie “Blood and Wine.”In his later years, Mr. Rafelson lived full time in Aspen.Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, Peter, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and two sons, E.O. and Harper, from his second. His daughter, Julie, died of injuries from a gas stove explosion in 1973Mr. Rafelson’s final film was the 2002 neo-noir “No Good Deed,” based on a Dashiell Hammett short story.Even after he retired from moviemaking, he was often called upon to reminisce about the mythic days of the New Hollywood. In a 2010 video interview for a DVD box of BBS titles, Mr. Rafelson described BBS as “a company that could go out and say, all right, now let’s get the maddest creatures we can find on the planet.”He added: “They turned out to be some really first-grade wackos.”Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      Marvel Studios Unveils ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

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      The studio announced news of the film’s release on Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego.Marvel Studios has unveiled a trailer for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — the long-awaited sequel to its hit film “Black Panther” — which it said would open in cinemas in the United States on Nov. 11.The teaser, screened on Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego, features several cast members from the first film, as well as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who played one of the protagonists, King T’Challa. Boseman, whose image appears on a mural in the teaser, died from colon cancer at age 43 in 2020.The film follows Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), General Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the elite women warrior group Dora Milaje (including Ayo, played by Florence Kasumba) as they “fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s death,” the studio said on Saturday in a news release.“As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, the heroes must band together with the help of War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda,” the studio added.The trailer — a visually dazzling glimpse of the future world of Wakanda — is set to a cover of the Bob Marley song “No Woman, No Cry.” Ludwig Goransson, the film’s composer, described it as “an aural first glimpse of Wakanda Forever.”The “sound world” for the film, he said in the statement, was created during trips to Mexico and Nigeria, where he and others worked with traditional musicians to learn about the “cultural, social and historical contexts of their music.”Then, they built a catalog of instrumental and vocal recordings together with those artists, and “began to build a musical vocabulary for the characters, story lines and cultures of Talocan and Wakanda,” Goransson said, adding that the idea was to create “an immersive and enveloping sound world for the film.”The film’s release was announced by the president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, who also noted the upcoming release of several other films and shows, including “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” starring Tatiana Maslany; “Secret Invasion,” featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn; and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”Speaking at the Comic-Con event on Saturday, Nyong’o said that it felt “monumental” to return to Wakanda. “The universe of Wakanda is expanding,” she said. “You guys have a lot to look forward to.”Gurira, who plays Okoye, the general of Wakanda’s elite female bodyguards and the head of armed forces and intelligence, said that when she was growing up in Zimbabwe she always looked up to the way America “made superheros onstage and on the big screen.”To the crowd, she added: “You’re taking in that culture, and you’re celebrating it. That, to me, is everything.” More

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      Shonka Dukureh, Actress Who Sang ‘Hound Dog’ in ‘Elvis,’ Dies at 44

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      She made her Hollywood debut as Big Mama Thornton, giving a performance that one castmate called “a spiritual experience.”Shonka Dukureh, who made her Hollywood debut as the celebrated blues singer Big Mama Thornton in the new Baz Luhrmann film, “Elvis,” was found dead on Thursday in Nashville. She was 44.The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department confirmed the death but did not provide a cause, saying only that no foul play was evident. One of Ms. Dukureh’s two young children found her unresponsive in her bedroom on Thursday morning and ran to alert a neighbor, who called 911, the police said.“Elvis,” Mr. Luhrmann’s highly anticipated movie about the life of Elvis Presley, with Austin Butler in the title role and Tom Hanks as Presley’s manager, Tom Parker, opened in June. Big Mama Thornton, who recorded the original version of “Hound Dog” in 1952, a year before Presley had a hit with it, was Ms. Dukureh’s first major acting role. In Thornton, she found a role that melded her booming voice with her apparently emerging acting chops.Her rendition of “Hound Dog” especially captivated audiences. She had been planning to release a studio album, titled “The Lady Sings the Blues,” according to her website.Ms. Dukureh said she was from Nashville “by way of Charlotte, N.C.,” where she was born on Sept. 3, 1977. She originally planned to become a teacher and held a master’s degree in education from Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, according to her website (which says she also held a bachelor’s degree in theater from Fisk University, also in Nashville). She instead pursued the arts. Her powerful voice was heard on international tours with Jamie Lidell and the Royal Pharaohs, and was a featured vocalist on several albums.Her performance in “Elvis” rapidly earned her fans; among them her fellow cast members. Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla Presley in the film, told Entertainment Weekly that watching Ms. Dukureh “was a spiritual experience.”“To watch a star essentially be born, to have something in her sort of break free, was just — it was insane to watch,” Ms. DeJonge said.Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      The Gag Is: Keke Palmer Is a Movie Star

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      The roads of Universal Studios’ backlots are named for exemplars of the company’s old star system: Kirk Douglas, Jimmy Stewart, Nat King Cole, Gregory Peck. One road is called Louise Beavers Avenue, after the character actor best known for her role in 1934’s racial-passing melodrama “Imitation of Life.” Her first onscreen performance was in the 1927 Universal production “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in which she made an uncredited appearance as an enslaved person at a wedding. When Beavers died in 1962 in her early 60s (her birth year is in question), she had played more than 150 roles, most of them maids, servants, slaves and mammies. At some point, as a show of appreciation, Universal Studios named one of its streets after her.At the corner of Canopy Street and Louise Beavers, Keke Palmer relinquished her head to the hair and makeup artists who rotated around her. Her hairstylist, Ann Jones, tweaked the curls in her short Afro. Assistants and publicists darted in and out of the room. Palmer was enthusiastic yet ambivalent about the hoopla surrounding “Nope,” the writer-director Jordan Peele’s latest film. She was at Universal Studios for the film’s “content day,” doing interviews and filming a behind-the-scenes featurette. “This is probably one of the craziest next-evolution points of my career, doing this movie,” she told me. “And all I want to do is submerge into the wind. You know?” she chuckled. “Because, I don’t even know what could or couldn’t happen after this — what the vibe would be. I ain’t never had that many people look at my work at once.”Keke Palmer with Daniel Kaluuya (left) and Brandon Perea in “Nope.”Universal PicturesShe spoke with rhythmic razzle-dazzle, emphasizing certain words and rendering them magical. To her makeup artist, Jordana David, Palmer said, “I want bold brows, a big lash and a soft lip,” in a stage whisper. She’s like a millennial vaudevillian, right down to her speaking cadence. When she’s excited, she sounds like someone in an old tale about Hollywood who just got off a bus in the big city.But Palmer, 28, is a consummate entertainment veteran. This year marks her 20th year in show business. She was recruited for the 2003 “American Idol” spinoff “American Juniors” — Palmer, cast as an alternate, never made it to air. She went on to a career as a child actor on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, starring in three seasons of “True Jackson, VP,” a show about a kid boss, and “Jump In!” a beloved TV movie about hopefuls in a jump-rope tournament. Since then she has done every kind of entertainment job you can imagine: appearing in “Hustlers” (2019) and Ryan Murphy’s camp horror series “Scream Queens”; a stint as a co-host on ABC’s “Good Morning America”; starring on Broadway in “Cinderella”; and recording her own pop/R.&B. albums. Despite her success in adulthood, to some viewers, she is frozen as a child star. Palmer’s leading role in “Nope,” with its auteur director, ambitious narrative and blockbuster projections, seems poised to shift her story.“Nope” is a mystery-thriller starring Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya as sibling horse trainers who are the fictional descendants of the real Black jockey who appears in Eadweard Muybridge’s late-19th-century photos of horses in motion. These photographs, once traced by hand onto glass discs, could be viewed in a device called a “zoopraxiscope” that gave the quickly spinning frames the illusion of motion. The resulting sequences were an early form of moving pictures. The real-life jockey in the photos has never been identified; he and the horse go on galloping, anonymously, forever. His anonymity inaugurates a lasting tension between Black people and the movies: To be in front of the camera means to risk, at worst, cruel caricature and anonymity. “Nope” feels like a refusal of that fate and an elaborate tribute to an enigmatic man Emerald describes as “the very first stuntman, animal wrangler and movie star all rolled into one.”Palmer with Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.”Glen Wilson/Universal PicturesIn “Nope,” he’s given a name, Alasdair Haywood. His descendants, including Emerald, her older brother, O.J., and their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), run a horse-wrangling operation and train horses for Hollywood productions on the desert outskirts of Los Angeles. From their ranch, they want to reclaim their family’s centrality to the history of the movies. After Otis dies in a mysterious incident, the siblings discover what they believe is a U.F.O. and decide to film it with a makeshift crew that includes the tech wiz Angel (Brandon Perea). As they try to capture the spectacle on camera — they’re looking for what Emerald calls “the Oprah Shot” that will make them famous — they start to wonder: What is the value of attention?Amid all this, Palmer’s brash Emerald swaggers through the film. In a scene in which Em and O.J. are wrangling on the set of a commercial and she’s giving a safety talk, she digresses and begins advertising her own skills, playing up the fact that she “directs, acts, produces, sings and does craft services on the side.” Palmer improvised that line, showcasing her effortless creativity and indefatigable hustle. “Emerald is a lot like Keke if Keke had never broken through and found so much success when she was younger,” Peele told me. That difference highlights the tightrope so many Black performers — like Muybridge’s Black jockey, like Beavers — walk between renown and oblivion, work and exploitation.“We like to say since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game,” Emerald says on the set of the commercial. Both meanings of Emerald’s phrase could apply to Palmer; her 20-year investment in showbiz means she has lots of skin in the game, even if people haven’t always noticed the sly virtuosity she has been developing. “I’ve been acting all the years leading up, you know, whether someone watched or not. So it’s interesting, which is also what this movie is about as well — how people are so attracted to a spectacle.”Palmer with William H. Macy in the television movie “The Wool Cap” (2004). At 10 years old, she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance.TNT, via Everett CollectionPalmer was born in Harvey, Ill., and raised in nearby Robbins, a small community 30 minutes south of Chicago that was one of the earliest all-Black enclaves incorporated in the state; a 1918 article in The Denver Star heralded Robbins as “the first and only village which will be controlled entirely by Negroes.”Her parents, Sharon and Lawrence Palmer, were actors who met in a drama class at Chicago’s Kennedy-King College in the summer of 1986. Sharon worked on the Kennedy-King drama school’s lighting crew and acted in “The Wiz.” Lawrence appeared in a production of Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger,” a play that was first performed by the legendary Negro Ensemble Company. Later, when the Palmers were newly married, the couple worked as professional actors. Eventually, though, they had a small family to raise and put their dreams aside. Sharon Palmer taught drama in high schools and after-school programs. Her husband worked at a polyurethane company.Naturally, Palmer grew up loving show business. At 3, her parents took her to see the musical “The Jackie Wilson Story” at the Black Ensemble Theater, and that show mesmerized her. She would watch her mom sing in church and remix what she’d heard into performances in kindergarten plays. In her book for young adults, “I Don’t Belong to You,” she describes her family watching and studying movies at home (“Claudine,” from 1974, with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, and “Let’s Do It Again,” from 1975, with Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby, for example), essentially providing their own DVD commentary by tracing the trajectory of different actors and directors. Soon Palmer was singing and acting in school productions and auditioning for “The Lion King.” “When we noticed she had talent, then we both were able to help her to learn lines and to understand scripts,” Sharon Palmer told me. “When I would get tired, he would do it, and vice versa. That was a huge advantage for her, that both of her parents were actors.”Palmer and Laurence Fishburne in “Akeelah and the Bee” (2006).Lions Gate, via Everett CollectionPalmer’s steadfastness — she would rehearse lines by herself for hours — signaled to her parents that her dream was worth investing in. Then came the “American Juniors” audition and a role in the 2004 movie “Barbershop 2.” Later that year, Palmer appeared as a neglected child in a television movie, “The Wool Cap,” with William H. Macy. At 10, she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for that performance, losing out to Glenn Close. To support Palmer’s career, her parents sold their new house, took leave from their jobs and moved the family to Pasadena, Calif. Her breakout role was in “Akeelah and the Bee” in 2006, alongside Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, in which Palmer played the titular character, an 11-year-old from South Los Angeles who hopes to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Akeelah’s intelligence and moxie amid limited circumstances sealed Palmer’s popularity.Palmer told me that ever since she was a child working in the ecosystems of Nickelodeon and Disney, she observed how those networks took the “MGM standard” in finding talent they could use across the board, from sitcoms to movies to music to touring shows. Palmer cultivated her singing and dancing alongside her acting, co-writing and singing the “True Jackson, VP” theme song for Nickelodeon and making singles and music videos for Disney’s “Jump In!” soundtrack. “And so for me, also working in those spaces, that taught me to keep things very business and to just show up, do the job, do the thing, you know, be professional, and go home and then have a life,” she said.Historically, Black Hollywood pioneers found it difficult to leave a set and then have a life. The light of fame also generated the shadow of racial clichés that stalked them. They were given roles that turned their talents into mere content: stereotypical images, like Beavers’s beatific and smiling maids, that circulated outside the theater, long after the projectors went quiet.Palmer with Jamie Lee Curtis in Season 1 of “Scream Queens” (2015).Patti Perret/Fox, via Everett CollectionIn “Nope,” Palmer plays up her unabashed joviality but avoids the specter of minstrel imagery. She plays Emerald as a woman searching for something: In her name, there’s a hint of the colorful capital city in “The Wizard of Oz,” a home for seeking souls; and in the flavor of her portrayal, a glint of “The Wiz.” If Kaluuya is Peele’s Robert De Niro, as the director has said in a recent interview that likened their partnership to that between Martin Scorsese and De Niro, then Palmer, in this first collaboration, might be his Joe Pesci. She brings to her part an emotional maximalism that distills the too-muchness of mundane feelings.Palmer admires multitalented performers like Carol Burnett, Eddie Murphy and Elaine May, whose acts call back to American vaudeville. At their worst, vaudevillians and minstrel performers reinforced anti-Black iconography. At their best, they manipulated stereotypes — the straight man, the fool, the punchline artist — reinhabiting stock characters in order to make us see them anew. You can trace their influence in Palmer’s acting. A scene in which Emerald dances at the Haywood homestead epitomizes her onscreen charm. She cranks up the music on the family’s record player and quite literally tunes out despair, pop-locking with goofiness and fluidity. Emerald’s dancing is juxtaposed with shots of a sinister force skulking outside the house: Emerald is oblivious, and Palmer grounds the moment by performing the opposite of gravitas, endowing her body with a blithe buoyancy.Pop-locking is the perfect move for an actor like Palmer: It simulates a human body’s attempt to function within restraints, and the restraint is what produces the dance’s elegance. If Emerald dancing amid disaster is not a snapshot of the function of Black art in America, I don’t know what is. Close-ups on Palmer’s face show her mix of Kabuki theatricality and understated grace. This is her trademark. “She’s able to capture joy in a really natural way,” Kaluuya told me.Palmer (second from right) with Lili Reinhart, Jennifer Lopez, and Constance Wu in “Hustlers” (2019).Barbara Nitke/STX Entertainment, via Everett CollectionHer effervescence is straightforward and contagious: You smile when she does. That’s not to say that she lacks subtlety; Palmer, who likens dialogue to music, infuses her lines with rhythm and verve and the delicacy required of a great jazz scatter riffing on — and stylistically ripping up — the American songbook. “Keke is a brilliant improviser,” Peele said. Kaluuya concurred: “She’s amazing off-top.” In “Nope,” she swings and swerves.Back on Beavers Avenue, it was lunch time in Palmer’s dressing room. We sat on the floor and took our high heels off, getting comfortable for the first time all day. Before we started the interview, Palmer turned to me and apologized, because she needed to send an email before we began our chat. As we sat in silence, the din of the lot sometimes filtered in, and then, distracted by a production assistant’s or publicist’s voice, I chanced a glance Palmer’s way. Her face was illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen, and I saw her adjust her expressions subtly, from sweet mien to the mean mug of deep concentration, as she typed. She had the elegance, flip-book flamboyance and heightened physicality of a silent-film star. Then, Palmer finished her email, turned to me with GIFy ebullience and began the performance of being famous again. She told me: “I’m usually, more often than not, around energy that needs me to sustain it. Like, not needs me, but expects it. That’s maybe the better word.”With some of the characters she has been given — including a hackneyed character in Peele’s “Key and Peele” sketch show known as Malia Obama’s “Anger Translator” — it’s possible to think of Palmer as a version of vaudeville-era performers like Nina Mae McKinney or Ethel Waters, upgrading thin material. I have a feeling that Palmer’s pop-lock will be turned into a GIF, like many bits from Palmer’s public performances. In a viral one, she is a guest on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” Palmer turns to the audience, contorts her mouth stagily and says her famous tagline, “But the gag is …” She states a premise and then comically refutes it with a haughty-voiced explanation: “I just sent my ex-boyfriend 100 text messages and he didn’t reply,” she said, “but the gag is he still loves me.”In a way, Palmer’s appearances in popular memes and funny GIFs makes her a kind of descendant of the unnamed jockey in the Muybridge photos or of Beavers. GIFs encapsulate emotional reactions, broadening and flattening real feelings and impulses so that others can make use of them. Pluck a GIF of the “Real Housewife” NeNe Leakes and you are momentarily manipulating her image, along with all the racist assumptions (sassiness, bullying, sexual availability) that accrue to a Black woman’s body. Some critics have asserted that they allow Black women’s likenesses to become too easily appropriated and used as shorthand — even calling it “digital blackface.” But Palmer embeds her caricature with awareness of how it will be used. She injects some knowingness into the image, winking at those who would pass it around in God-knows-what fashion. She pushes up against the limits of images from the inside, resisting exploitation, digital and otherwise.Djeneba Aduayom for The New York TimesPalmer has written about choosing her roles carefully, not taking everything offered to her despite her ambition. I wonder if this factored into her decision to appear in “Nope,” which is a movie partly about refusal. It will not let the Black jockey become a footnote, a trivial presence in photographic history, without commenting on the loss and attempting to reclaim him. The film puts her in a lineage of Black actors and filmmakers who have done their own version of this kind of work. Think of Oscar Micheaux’s melodramas featuring middle-class strivers, which were meant to counteract minstrel characters; the Blaxpoitation films that turned stereotypes of violent, oversexualized Blackness on their heads; or the filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion who made poetic departures from traditional depictions of Black people.Palmer’s performance in “Nope” is its own act of resistance, casting a different light on how her likeness and expressivity might circulate in our culture. She enlivens the screen, exuding a deep sensitivity. Playing against Kaluuya’s stoic, quietly grieving O.J., Palmer evokes other ways to register grief. She bargains with her brooding brother and herself, joking and glad-handing through scenes. She grooves and puffs a vape pen to get through her depression. She moves on, and on, and you get whipped up in the tornado of her personality just as storm clouds drift on the ranch’s horizon. Like an outstanding improviser, Palmer says both “yes, and” (the improv credo) by bustling with a trouper’s brio, and “no,” resisting the blotting of Black subtlety and subjectivity. In this movie, when her character says, “Yeah, nah,” and runs away, that negative response works on multiple levels. Her role in “Nope” allows her to be what Louise Beavers couldn’t be: a Black woman in Hollywood whose skin is not mere spectacle.At the end of her work day, on another stage, Palmer recorded ads for Universal Studios theme-park rides, networks like E! and foreign markets. The sound bell rang one final time, and black-clad crew members dispersed. “All right, that is a cut, and that is a wrap on Keke Palmer,” the stage manager said, and everyone cheered. Palmer shimmied in place, doing air guns with her hands, eventually blowing one out and finally breaking character.Niela Orr is a story producer for Pop-Up Magazine and a contributing editor at The Paris Review. She will be a story editor for the magazine starting in August. Djeneba Aduayom is a photographer whose work is informed by her various cultural backgrounds and her past work as a performer. She is based in Southern California. More

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      ‘Alone Together’ Review: Finding Love in a Pandemic Retreat

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      Katie Holmes writes, directs and stars in this minor-key rom-com set in 2020.The minor key romance “Alone Together” is a modest affair, which credibly depicts the kinds of conversations about relationships that many people were confronted with during the early days of the pandemic. Its simplicity and lack of cinematic fancy strikes a tone of surprising relief.The movie, written and directed by Katie Holmes, who also stars in it, follows two strangers who fall in love after they both are booked in the same Airbnb in March 2020.June (Holmes) intends to weather the pandemic’s early days upstate with her boyfriend, John (Derek Luke). But her plans are thwarted when John elects to stay home in New York City. Her hopes for a quiet retreat meet another roadblock upon arrival: The rental house turns out to be occupied by another traveler, Charlie (Jim Sturgess).Both characters are initially annoyed to encounter each other. But finding themselves together during a period of global isolation provides a reason to connect. Attraction develops quickly, and the characters fall in love as they discuss how the pandemic has changed their life plans.The movie’s strongest appeal is in the resonance between what the characters experience and what the world looks like now. But Holmes also finds grace notes as a director. She stages painterly angles for upstate interiors and keeps the mood mellow, allowing her characters to converse without pushing for laughs or sentimental theatrics. Her film is a quiet achievement: a movie that isn’t running from reality.Alone TogetherRated R for language and brief nudity. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Art of Love’ Review: An Erotic Male Fantasy in Puerto Rico

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      A disillusioned college professor develops a relationship with a young Chinese woman, in a familiar and worn-out narrative.You know the story: A disenchanted writer and college professor is seduced by a younger woman, snapping him out of an existential lull and helping him reconnect with his creativity. It’s a narrative that lands clumsily in 2022, romanticizing a problematic power dynamic and casting women as mere accessories to a man’s personal growth.“Art of Love,” directed by Betty Kaplan, is a male fantasy. Called only the Writer (Esai Morales), the film’s lead is an enigmatic older man surrounded by women who fawn over him, despite his apathy. When he starts receiving cryptic messages from an admirer — slipped to him by a young woman on a skateboard, etched on the sidewalk in chalk or hidden in the pages of a book — the Writer is seemingly invigorated for the first time. He soon finds out the messages are from a young Chinese immigrant named Li Chao (Kunjue Li), eager to escape the confines of her situation. The two set off on a giggly, disturbing and confusing journey through the city, placing art installations, having pseudo-deep talks and eventually becoming physical, despite Li’s early proclamation that she is a lesbian.The film is rife with tropes and stereotypes: Li’s character is a model of demureness and subservience who serves as a mouthpiece for problematic beliefs, at one point noting that her “irregular choice” to read makes her an anomaly in her insular Chinese community. Lesbianism is treated as a matter of circumstance rather than a full identity.And the film reinforces the fiction that it is often younger women who seduce older men and not the other way around. The writing, which leaves much to be desired, underscores these issues. Tortured by Li’s elusiveness, the Writer ponders during one of his solipsistic reflections why Li “was so insistent in possessing me.” It’s a tired and male-serving narrative one wishes might be retired.Art of LoveRated R for graphic sexual content, nudity and some language. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More