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He coached the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa, Texas, for four seasons in the 1980s, including the one that became the subject of a best-selling book.Gary Gaines, who coached the high school football team in West Texas that was the subject of “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the best-selling book that inspired a feature film and a television series, died on Monday in Lubbock, Texas. He was 73.The death, at a memory care facility, was confirmed by his wife, Sharon (Hicks) Gaines, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.The Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, were a powerhouse team that had won four state championships by the time Mr. Gaines was hired as its head coach in 1986. He had already coached four other high school teams in Texas and had become renowned for his teaching skills.“He was a quiet leader who trusted his coaches to do their jobs and saw the game from all perspectives, not just one side or the ball or the other,” Don Billingsley, a running back for Permian in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. “He was a great coach and a great mentor.”Permian’s high profile in Texas and its prospects for success in 1988 lured the writer Buzz Bissinger to move temporarily to Odessa, follow the team and write what became “Friday Night Lights,” published in 1990. Mr. Bissinger was fascinated to learn that the team played before as many as 20,000 fans on Friday nights.“Twenty thousand,” he wrote. “I had to go there.”He portrayed Mr. Gaines as a man under great pressure to win, in a state obsessed with high school football and a city whose fans demanded success. When the Panthers lost a game by one point late in the season, Mr. Gaines arrived home to find several “For Sale” signs planted in his lawn — “a not-so subtle hint that maybe it was best for everyone if he just got the hell out of town,” Mr. Bissinger wrote.A knee injury wrecked the season for the team’s star running back, James Miles, known as Boobie, and the Panthers did not win a fifth title, losing in a semifinal game of the state playoffs. After the game, Mr. Gaines gathered his tearful players in a circle and led them in prayer.“Father,” Mr. Bissinger quoted him as saying, “it hurts so much because we did so many things good and came up short.”After “Friday Night Lights” was published, Mr. Gaines said he felt betrayed by Mr. Bissinger, because he had not produced a more positive account of how football brought the Odessa community together. Mr. Gaines admitted that he had not read the book, but based on what he had been told, he said he objected most to its description of racism in Odessa, in particular toward Mr. Miles, who is Black and whom an assistant coach at Permian referred to with a racial slur.Mr. Gaines told The Marshall News Messenger of Marshall, Texas, in 2009 that his wife called him sobbing after she read the book, saying it made the community look like a “bunch of racists.” He added: “There’s rednecks all around here just like there is in Lubbock. You can go anywhere you want and hear the N-word.”Mr. Bissinger, in a phone interview, said, “He thought I had betrayed him because it wasn’t a puff piece, but I’m not the one who said what was said about Boobie.” He added, “It’s a tough place to be a coach, and he handled it with great dignity.”Billy Bob Thornton portrayed Mr. Gaines in the 2004 film “Friday Night Lights,” based on Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name.Ralph Nelson/UniversalWhen “Friday Night Lights” was turned into a film in 2004 by the director Peter Berg, Billy Bob Thornton was cast as Mr. Gaines. In his review in The New York Times, the critic A.O. Scott wrote that Mr. Thornton, in a “sly and thorough performance,” portrayed Mr. Gaines “as “neither a my-way-or-the-highway autocrat nor a rah-rah motivator.”Two years later, when “Friday Night Lights” was adapted as a television series, it was set in a fictional town — Dillon, Texas — and the high school team was coached by a fictional character, Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler). Connie Britton played the coach’s wife in both the film and the series.Gary Alan Gaines was born on May 4, 1949, in Crane, Texas. His father, Durwood, was a superintendent at a Gulf Oil plant; his mother, Dorothy (Burnett) Gaines, was a homemaker. After playing quarterback in high school, Gary moved to wingback at Angelo State University, in San Angelo, Texas, graduating in 1971.He began his long Texas coaching journey as an assistant at high schools in Fort Stockton and Monahans. He became the head coach at high schools in Petersburg and Denver City before moving to Permian, as an assistant, in time to help the Panthers win a state title in 1980. He was subsequently the head coach at Tascosa High School in Amarillo, Monahans High School and Permian.In 1989, Mr. Gaines led the undefeated Panthers to a state championship. In all, he had a 46-7-1 record as head coach at Permian. But he soon left to join Texas Tech University as an assistant coach.“He loved coaching and he loved the kids,” Ms. Gaines, his wife, said in a phone interview, explaining his peripatetic movements. “When we got out of college, he went after his first job. But after that, everybody came after him.”After four seasons at Texas Tech, he returned to coaching high school in Abilene and San Angelo before being named the head coach at Abilene Christian University. Following a subpar 21-30 record, he resigned and spent two years as the athletic director of the school district in Ector, which includes Odessa, and another two as the athletic director of the district in Lubbock.In 2009, he returned to Permian as head coach, but that run was not as successful as the first had been; over four seasons, the Panthers had a 23-21 record, including one playoff victory. Mr. Gaines resigned in 2012 from what would be his final coaching job.“We’re going to give it to someone else and, hopefully, they can make more out of it than we did,” Mr. Gaines told The Associated Press. “We came here to make some deep playoff runs, and we weren’t able to do that.”In 2017, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Nicole Strader; his son, Bradley; his sisters, Dana Howland and Tamra Reidhead; and five grandchildren.Mr. Bissinger said that he visited Mr. Gaines at Abilene Christian University about 20 years after the publication of “Friday Night Light.”“I went into his office and he looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Mr. Bissinger said. “We had a nice 15-minute conversation, and he couldn’t have been nicer.”But, he added: “He kept saying I had betrayed him. He has the right to think what he wants.” More

Edward Buckles Jr.’s intimate documentary sheds light on the experiences of Black children when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.Who gets to use the notion of “resilience”? Survivors? Mental health professionals? People who want to celebrate it but also move on from whatever required that fortitude in the first place?The director Edward Buckles Jr. makes a telling point of these tensions in his first film, the revealing documentary “Katrina Babies,” which features Black people who were children —— some toddlers, others in their early teens — in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. “Since the storm, it seems like everybody just moved on,” Buckles Jr. says. “In America, especially during disasters, Black children are not even a thought.”The director, who is also credited as a writer, knows the subject from his own experience. When he was 13, he and his family evacuated the city before the storm arrived and the levees broke.“Katrina Babies” is deeply personal and thoughtfully political. The filmmaker recounts the pleasures of cousinhood and family before the hurricane. He and his subjects also tussle with the economic and racial inequities that were exposed and exacerbated by the disaster.Buckles Jr.’s cousins — whom he celebrates with evocative mixed-media animation (by Antoni Sendra) and, later, with compassionate interviews — did not get out at the time. And when they did leave, they did not return. So, if you detect in Buckles Jr. a layer of survivor’s guilt, you might be right.But “Katrina Babies” is also the intimate undertaking of a native son creating a space to heal. If the grief (and relief) expressed in the interviews is any measure, Buckles Jr. knows how to listen to people whose experiences may be harrowingly similar but are not identical to his own. He pulls off this dance of self-awareness and empathy with impressive humility.Katrina BabiesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

A lifelong film lover, she stood up to protesters, and to federal and church authorities, to bring challenging movies to the masses.Joanne Koch, the longtime head of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who stared down picketers and, at times, government and church authorities to present controversial works by the likes of Godard, Scorsese and Oshima while presiding over the New York Film Festival, and who oversaw the creation of the center’s own temple for cineastes, the Walter Reade Theater, died on Aug. 16 at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 92.Her daughter, Andrea Godbout, said the cause was aortic stenosis.A lifelong defender of artistic freedom, the Brooklyn-born Ms. Koch (pronounced “coke”) served as the Film Society’s executive director over more than a quarter-century of change and growth, starting in 1977. (She was not related to David H. Koch, the oil magnate whose name adorns the ballet theater at Lincoln Center).In 1973, she helped create the film festival’s New Directors/New Films series, which showcases the work of emerging directors and has included the work of Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders. She also helped produce 19 of the society’s celebrity-studded gala tributes to film luminaries including Fred Astaire, Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn, as well as spearheading the acquisition in 1974 of the influential critical journal Film Comment, where she served as publisher.As the society’s chief financial officer, she helped raise funds and coordinate the design for the Walter Reade Theater, which opened in the center’s Rose Building in 1991 as a sanctuary for independent and foreign films at a time when the VHS revolution was imperiling many repertory film houses.Ms. Koch, center, with Wendy Keys and Richard Peña of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the Walter Reade Theater. Ms. Koch oversaw the creation of the theater, which opened in 1991.courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“Her passion was always to build new audiences for films and provide them superior venues for moviegoing,” said Wendy Keys, a board member and former executive producer of programming for Film at Lincoln Center, as the society is now known. “She wasn’t just a dollars-and-cents person. She was driven by her great love of film.”Her most visible role, however, was managing the prestigious New York Film Festival. At a time when competing film festivals in North America were exploding, she helped it maintain its international prominence — and its strictly curated format.“We would fight like cats and dogs over every film we showed,” Ms. Keys, a former member of the selection committee, said in a phone interview. “We always considered ourselves to be presenting each of our 25 films on a velvet cushion, as opposed to showing more than 350 films, which is what a lot of other festivals do.”Sometimes those decisions came at considerable risk. For example, Ms. Koch and the rest of the society found themselves in a face-off with federal authorities in 1976 when the festival scheduled the North American premiere of Nagisa Oshima’s “In The Realm of the Senses,” an unflinchingly graphic tale of sexual obsession set in Tokyo in 1936. (“‘Senses’ does not show anything that has not been available in hard-core porn houses around Manhattan,” Richard Eder of The New York Times wrote in 1977.)That notorious film created a buzz in New York cultural circles, Ms. Keys recalled, with notables like John Lennon and Yoko Ono scheduled to attend the premiere at Alice Tully Hall. But then federal customs and Treasury officials, after seeing the film at a press screening, threatened seizure and legal action if the film society showed it.The film was cleared in court, and Ms. Koch invited the original audience, which had been turned away, to a screening at the Museum of Modern Art a few months later. “She thought that nothing should be avoided, whether it was too violent or explicitly sexual or anti-religious,” Ms. Keys said. “That was very deep to her core. She was a provocateur.”The firestorm was far greater in 1985, when the festival scheduled a premiere of “Hail Mary,” a film by Jean-Luc Godard that imagined the Virgin Mary as a modern-day young woman who worked at a gas station. More than 5,000 protesters, some toting candles, turned out at the screening, according to an essay by the philosopher Stanley Cavell in the 1993 anthology “Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film.” The rector of a seminary in Connecticut warned, “When the bombs fall on Manhattan, one will especially fall on the cinema where this film is being shown.”Ms. Koch in an undated photo with her husband, Richard A. Koch, and the playwright David Mamet. Among her accomplishments at Lincoln Center was helping to create the New Directors/New Films series. courtesy Film at Lincoln Center“The film is not anti-Catholic,” Mr. Cavell quoted Ms. Koch as saying. “We don’t mean to offend — certainly that was not our intent — but we feel strongly that art has to be respected as art.”Picketers again swarmed Lincoln Center for the festival’s premiere of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film portraying Jesus as a man caught in a struggle between the earthly and the divine.Joanne Rose Obermaier was born on Oct. 7, 1929, in Brooklyn, the only child of John Obermaier, an electrical engineer, and Blanche (Ashman) Obermaier, a professor of elementary education at New York University. As a teenager at Midwood High School, she “used to sneak into the Loew’s Kings movie theater on Flatbush Avenue through a side door for matinees,” Ms. Godbout, her daughter, said.She graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., with a degree in political science, and in 1950 she took a job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, eventually becoming a technical director working on film preservation.In 1949 she married Oscar A. Godbout, a journalist who covered Hollywood for The New York Times in the 1950s and later wrote about the outdoors as the newspaper’s “Wood, Field, and Stream” columnist. The couple divorced in 1967, and later that year she married Richard A. Koch, the director of administration for MoMA.Mr. Koch died in 2009. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three stepsons, Stephen Jeremy and Chapin Koch, and two grandsons.In 1971, Ms. Koch took a job at the Lincoln Center Film Society, where she ran a program called “Movies in the Parks.” She ascended to the society’s top post six years later.Not all her battles there amounted to artistic crusades. In 1987 she found herself embroiled in a different sort of controversy when she and Alfred Stern, the society’s president, were reported to have led a campaign to oust Richard Roud, a respected cinephile and the longtime director of the festival, in a dispute that erupted after Ms. Koch overruled the festival’s selection committee to include two films by Federico Fellini.“I think Joanne wanted more power,” David Denby, then the film critic for New York magazine and a member of the selection committee, was quoted as saying in The Times. “It became obvious this summer when she started strong-arming the committee on the selections.”Ms. Koch told The Times that the move “had nothing to do with film selection,” but rather involved longstanding administrative differences.Even so, it was a difficult chapter. “It was horrible,” Ms. Koch recalled in a 1992 oral history. “I was put on the cover of The Village Voice as ‘The Terminator.’”But she was unrepentant. “It really did change the way I look at myself professionally,” she said. “Realistically, I’m not such a nice person all the time. You can’t be, in this kind of a job.” More

The streaming media device company wants to attract more viewers and advertisers to its channel. A coming biopic of “Weird Al” Yankovic is its most ambitious project to date. The gray, rainy weather of an early March day was no match for the joy emanating from a rented bungalow on the campus of the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona.Accordion music wafted over a production set that was tucked into a tree-lined street and teeming with crew members wearing Hawaiian shirts. Welcome to the set of “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” the unconventional biopic of the beloved parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, featuring Daniel Radcliffe in the titular role.It was Mr. Radcliffe’s last day shooting — and Julianne Nicholson stood in front of the camera portraying Mr. Yankovic’s mother, a woman much more interested in discussing her son’s dietary issues than his burgeoning career. In the scene, Al has called to tell her he just landed a 25-night residency at Madison Square Garden. (Mr. Yankovic never actually landed a 25-night engagement at the arena.) She wants to know if he’s eating enough bran.“The script is kind of ridiculous,” said Mr. Yankovic, who is a co-writer on the film. He was reluctant to reveal plot details but appeared giddy about the whole experience. “It’s just fun having these top-notch actors doing this silly material,” he said. “I just can’t believe that we’re actually getting to do this.”The reason the film exists is Roku, the streaming media device company with more than 63 million active accounts in the United States. In the past year, Roku has moved into original programming, acquiring the library of the short-lived Quibi app and paying $97.8 million in cash for This Old House Ventures, the company behind the long-running home improvement show.Roku Originals has since made a two-hour movie adaptation of the canceled NBC show “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” greenlit second seasons of Quibi content, like Kevin Hart’s action-comedy show “Die Hart,” and the odd home renovation show “Murder House Flip,” where notorious crime scenes are turned into sparkly remodels. It has also signed deals with Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and Jessica Alba for unscripted content and is planning a broadcast next month of a live-captured performance from London’s West End of “Heathers: The Musical.”Roku paid almost $98 million in cash to buy This Old House Ventures.This Old House Ventures“Weird” is the company’s most ambitious programming move. The film, produced by the comedy studio Funny or Die, cost around $12 million to make. “Weird” will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, before becoming free on Roku in November.“I can’t say there was a bidding war,” Mr. Yankovic said with a laugh, before adding that other parties were interested. “Roku was the only company that whipped out their checkbook. Because of them, this movie is getting made.”The film is part of Roku’s effort to persuade those who use the device to access paid apps like Netflix and Disney+ to spend more time perusing the free content offered on the Roku Channel, which now includes 40,000 movies and television shows and 150 linear channels. Keeping viewers on the platform longer is a way to bolster its advertising revenue for a business that has come to rely more heavily on ad spending and content distribution than device sales. Currently, device sales contribute just 12 percent to the company’s bottom line. Keeping users on the Roku Channel is imperative to its success.David Eilenberg, Roku’s head of originals, said in an interview that the company’s strategy in this early phase of creating new content was to assure the creative community that when Roku takes on a new project, it will be willing to spend the money to support it properly.“The spending strategy has always been surprise and delight rather than shock and awe,” he said. “‘Weird’ is a nice indicator of that, which is the sort of the thing nobody knew they wanted until it existed. That’s a very tricky thing to commission, but when you get one of those, you put both arms around it and support it to the best of your ability.”Roku became a trending topic on Twitter at the end of July when it released the trailer for “Weird” as part of its upfront presentation, which the company says resulted in $1 billion in commitments from the seven major advertising agency holding companies for the upcoming television season.Yet Roku’s expansion into originals comes at a difficult time for the company. During its second-quarter earnings call last month, the company pulled its full-year guidance because of the challenging advertising environment and lowered its third-quarter estimates to only 3 percent growth in total net revenues. (The analyst firm MoffettNathanson previously estimated growth for that quarter could reach 29 percent.)The company has sought to assure investors that it won’t be laying off employees or changing its business strategy as it deals with the advertising slowdown. That hasn’t stopped some analysts from lowering their price targets for the stock, but most remain bullish on the company’s future as the connected television market continues to grow and consumers are increasingly interested in finding all their different streaming channels in one place (much like traditional cable).MoffettNathanson detailed the challenges facing the company in a recent investor note, calling Roku’s hurdles a “three-sided war.” On the connected TV side, Roku is fighting against Amazon, Alphabet and others. For audience, it is up against “nearly every streaming platform under the sun.” And for advertising dollars, its competitors now include Netflix, Disney, Amazon, YouTube, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global.“Obviously this is not an ideal market structure,” the firm said in the report.A scene from “Weird.” Mr. Yankovic said working with Roku made him feel like “a big fish” because of the attention the company was giving the production.RokuFor Rob Holmes, the head of the Roku Channel, the strategy has always been to rely primarily on licensing content with a smattering of new originals — the company has yet to find another project with “Weird”-level enthusiasm — to pique consumers’ interests. It recently announced the revival of ABC’s “The Great American Baking Show,” with Ellie Kemper (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) and Zach Cherry (“Severance”) set to host. The show, which will bow in 2023, is intended as a companion to all 12 seasons of the long-running “The Great British Baking Show,” which will become available on the Roku Channel at the end of this year.Reports suggest that the annual amount the company spends on content is $1 billion, far beneath Netflix’s $17 billion content budget or the $30 billion Disney will spend across all its divisions for 2022. (Roku declined to confirm its annual budget.)“One of the things about ad-supported streaming versus SVOD is if I watch one thing on SVOD, that month I still sign up and pay,” said Mr. Holmes, referring to subscription video on demand services like Netflix and Disney+. “But from an AVOD standpoint” — that’s advertising video on demand — “you need that engagement to generate that volume that allows you to support that advertising business.”Complicating matters is the fact that Roku’s competitors are also its partners. Mr. Eilenberg admitted that when he is pursuing new content his primary competitors are often other advertising VOD services like Amazon’s Freevee, Fox’s Tubi and Paramount’s Pluto. But there’s significant overlap: The Roku Channel is available on Amazon Fire devices, for example, while Tubi is a popular channel on Roku. Paramount+ will be joining the Roku Channel later this month.But Roku can also find itself competing against Netflix. What’s the pitch when facing such a behemoth, albeit one that’s been knocked down a bit recently?“The very fact that we’re actually not doing a zillion shows, allows us to sort of credibly say to creators, ‘Your show will have its day in the sun,’” Mr. Eilenberg said. “There’s only one Roku Originals slate. Creators are going to be attended to.”Mr. Yankovic certainly feels that way.“I think we’re sort of like — what’s the saying? — a big fish,” he said. “We’re not going to get lost in somebody’s lineup. They’re very invested in having this be successful, as we all are. It’s nice that we’re all on the same team.” More

The actor, 78, was a featured guest at Monster-Mania Con in Cherry Hill, N.J. He was charged with two counts of criminal sexual contact, among other counts, the police said.The actor Gary Busey faces charges of criminal sexual contact and harassment related to incidents that occurred at a horror film fan convention in New Jersey, the police said on Saturday.The charges were filed on Friday after the authorities responded to reports of a sexual offense at the convention, Monster-Mania Con, the Cherry Hill Police Department said in a statement.Mr. Busey, 78, who lives in Malibu, Calif., was scheduled to be a featured guest at the event, which took place from Aug. 12-14 at the Doubletree Hotel in Cherry Hill, a Philadelphia suburb.Mr. Busey was charged with two counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual contact, one count of fourth-degree attempted criminal sexual contact and one count of harassment. The police said the investigation was continuing. Additional details about the charges were not immediately available.The police did not immediately respond to calls and emails on Saturday, and the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office referred questions to the police. Mr. Busey’s manager did not respond to emails, and a representative for the hotel could not immediately be reached.A lawyer for the convention, Nikitas Moustakas, said the convention company was “assisting authorities in their investigation into an alleged incident involving attendees and a celebrity guest at its convention” in Cherry Hill last weekend.“Immediately upon receiving a complaint from the attendees, the celebrity guest was removed from the convention and instructed not to return,” he said. “Monster-Mania also encouraged the attendees to contact the police to file a report. The safety and well-being of all our attendees is of the utmost importance to Monster-Mania, and the company will not tolerate any behavior that could compromise those values.”Mr. Busey, who earned an Oscar nomination for his role in the 1978 film “The Buddy Holly Story,” has struggled with substance abuse in the past, even appearing in “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.”In 1988, he was badly hurt after losing control of his motorcycle near downtown Los Angeles while riding without wearing a helmet. He sustained severe head injuries and underwent intensive surgery.Mr. Busey has appeared in numerous movies, including “Lethal Weapon,” (1987) and “Under Siege” (1992), as well as the television series “Entourage.” In 2019, he starred in “Only Human,” an Off Broadway musical in which he played the role of God. More

A tough guy who got beaten up by the likes of John Wayne, he had a bottom-line view of his job: “The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are.”One day in 1966, the stuntman Gene LeBell was called to the set of the television series “The Green Hornet” to deal with Bruce Lee, the future martial arts superstar, who played Kato, the crime-fighting Hornet’s sidekick. Mr. Lee, it seems, was hurting the other stuntmen.The stunt coordinator asked Mr. LeBell — a former national judo champion and professional wrestler — to teach Mr. Lee a lesson, perhaps with a headlock.Mr. LeBell would later recall in many interviews that he went further: He picked Mr. Lee up, slung him over his back and ran around the set as Mr. Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you!” When Mr. LeBell relented, he was surprised that Mr. Lee didn’t attack him. Instead they came to appreciate their different skill sets, and Mr. LeBell became one of Mr. Lee’s favorite stuntmen.They also trained together, with Mr. LeBell’s expertise as a grappler meeting Mr. Lee’s fist-flashing kung fu brilliance.Mr. LeBell never became as famous as Mr. Lee, who died in 1973, but into his early 80s — when he played, among other roles, a corpse falling from a coffin in an episode of the TV series “Castle” — he remained busy as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after stuntmen.At 20, he was walloped by John Wayne in “Big Jim McLain” (1952).Nine years later, he was kicked by Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii.”And he was knocked around a few times by James Caan.Mr. LeBell, left, with George Reeves, who played the title role on the television series “Adventures of Superman,” and Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane. The three made a series of live appearances in the 1950s, with Mr. LeBell playing a villain.Gene LeBell’s personal collection“Every star in Hollywood has beaten me up,” Mr. LeBell told AARP magazine in 2015. “The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are. The man who enjoys his work never goes to work. So I’ve had a lot of fun doing stunts.”Mr. LeBell died on Aug. 9 at his home in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 89. His death was announced by Kellie Cunningham, his trustee and business manager, who did not specify the cause.Ivan Gene LeBell was born on Oct. 9, 1932, in Los Angeles. His mother, Aileen (Moss) LeBell, promoted boxing and wrestling matches at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles; his father, Maurice, was an osteopath and diet doctor who died after being paralyzed in a swimming accident in 1941. His mother later married Cal Eaton, with whom she promoted fights.Gene started to learn to fight at 7, when his mother sent him to the Los Angeles Athletic Club.“I went up to Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis and said, ‘I want to be a wrestler,’” Mr. LeBell was quoted as saying by the Slam Wrestling website in 2005. Mr. Lewis, he recalled, asked him: “Do you want to roll? Do you want to do Greco-Roman? Do you want to do freestyle? Or do you want to grapple?”“What’s grappling?” Gene asked.“That’s a combination of everything,” Mr. Lewis said. “You can hit ’em, eye-gouge ’em.”He was sold.Mr. LeBell’s opponents in the wrestling ring included Victor, a 700-pound Canadian black bear.Gene LeBell’s personal collectionHe started learning judo at 12 (although his mother told The Los Angeles Times in 1955 that he had been inspired a little later, in high school, when he was beaten up by a smaller teenager who knew judo), and by 1954 his proficiency had grown to an elite level: He won both the heavyweight class and the overall title in that year’s national American Amateur Union championships. He successfully defended his title the next year at the Olympic Auditorium, in front of his mother.During one of the bouts, he said, he heard his mother’s voice above the din of the crowd shouting: “Gene! Watch out! Choke him!”“The announcer observed, ‘I think Gene LeBell’s mother is prejudiced,’” Mr. LeBell recalled to The Los Angeles Times. “Was I embarrassed!”His mother’s connections to Hollywood brought Mr. LeBell early stunt work with John Wayne and a friendship with George Reeves, the star of the television show “Adventures of Superman.”Realizing that judo was no way to make a living, he shifted to professional wrestling later in 1955.Mr. LeBell never became a big name in the ring or even a great wrestler, either under his own name or in a mask as “the Hangman.” But he gained notice in his role as an enforcer, in which he compelled other wrestlers to stick to the script, even when they didn’t want to.Mr. LeBell, right, wrestling Vic Christy, whom he considered a mentor, in Southern California in the mid-1950s.Gene LeBell’s personal collection“Gene would choke me out for saying wrestling was a performative art,” Bob Calhoun, who collaborated with Mr. LeBell on his autobiography, “The Godfather of Grappling” (2005), said in a phone interview. “But he was old school — he wouldn’t say wrestling wasn’t on the up and up.”While not a star, Mr. LeBell was nonetheless honored in 1995 by a fraternal organization of wrestlers, the Cauliflower Alley Club, with its Iron Mike Mazurki Award, for achieving success in a field beyond wrestling, as the award’s wrestler-turned-actor namesake did. Mr. LeBell was inducted into the National Wrestling Alliance’s Hall of Fame in 2011.His work as a stuntman began in earnest in the 1960s and continued on TV series like “Route 66,” “I Spy,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “The Fall Guy,” in which Lee Majors starred as a film stuntman. He also appeared in movies like “Planet of the Apes” (1968), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the Steven Seagal crime drama “Out for Justice” (1991).Mr. LeBell had a long list of acting credits as well, mostly in bit parts. He often played referees and sometimes a thug, a henchman, a bartender or, as in “Raging Bull” (1990), a ring announcer.Mr. LeBell with the wrestler-turned-movie-star Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock, in 1999. Gene LeBell’s personal collectionOutside of his film and television work, in 1963 he took part in a preview of today’s mixed martial arts fights when he faced a middleweight boxer, Milo Savage, and defeated him in the fourth round with a choke hold that rendered Savage unconscious. It took time to wake him up, and as the crowd grew angry, a spectator tried to stab Mr. LeBell.“It was a tough night, but ‘Judo’ Gene had defended the honor of his sport against the boxer,” Jonathan Snowden wrote in “Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling” (2012).In 1976, Mr. LeBell refereed a match in Tokyo between Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion, and the wrestler Antonio Inoki. In what was billed a “world martial arts championship,” the two ended up kicking each other for 15 rounds — Ali landed only two punches — and the fight was ruled a draw.Mr. LeBell said Mr. Inoki would have won the bout had he not been penalized one point for a karate kick to Ali’s groin.In 1976, Mr. LeBell was the referee in a match between Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion, and the wrestler Antonio Inoki. It was declared a draw.Associated PRessLater that year, Mr. LeBell was arrested and charged with murder, along with a pornographer, Jack Ginsburgs, in the killing of a private detective. Mr. LeBell was acquitted of the murder charge but convicted of being an accessory, for driving Mr. Ginsburgs to and from the murder scene. His conviction was overturned by the California Court of Appeals.Mr. LeBell also worked over the years with many wrestlers, including Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ronda Rousey, and trained with Chuck Norris, the martial artist and actor.More recently the director Quentin Tarantino used Mr. LeBell’s initial encounter with Mr. Lee on the set of “The Green Hornet” as the basis for a scene in his 2019 film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Brad Pitt, as a stuntman, threw the Lee character into a car.Mr. LeBell is survived by his wife, Eleanor (Martindale) LeBell, who is known as Midge and whom he married twice and divorced once; his son, David; his daughter, Monica Pandis; his stepson, Danny Martindale; his stepdaughter, Stacey Martindale; and four grandchildren. His brother, Mike, a wrestling promoter, died in 2009. His first marriage ended with his wife’s death; he also married and divorced two other women.Although Mr. Calhoun said that “in any situation, with Bruce Lee or anyone else, Gene was the toughest guy in the room,” Mr. LeBell offered a pragmatic view of his reputation.“People saying you’re the toughest guy is great,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1995, “but it still doesn’t add up to one car payment. Now I get beat up by every wimp in Hollywood and make thousands of dollars. You tell me which is better.” More

Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

Three months before he died, the actor Michael K. Williams spent all day at a block party in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. In some ways it had the vibe of any block party — a D.J. making people move, kids riding bikes in the street, smoke billowing out of an oil-drum grill. But this wasn’t just another summer day in Brownsville. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists had persuaded seven of the politicians hoping to be New York’s next mayor to show up, granting them a forum to explain why they deserved the support of a Black community that was used to being ignored.One by one, the candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block and fielded tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there. Some of those young people belonged to a gang. Many had lost friends and family members to gun violence, and few had faith in the government’s ability to protect them. Mr. Williams sat at the table, too, listening intently.When Eric Adams arrived, wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We Can End Gun Violence,” Mr. Williams expressed concern over his use of the term “law and order” at a recent debate. He chose his words with care, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together in concentration.“Do you think putting more police on the streets is the way to deal with the violence in our community right now?” Mr. Williams asked.Mr. Adams assured him that he didn’t. “We don’t need an overproliferation of cops,” Mr. Adams said. “People commit crimes,” he added, because “a lack of resources came from the city.”Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series “The Wire,” he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life,” which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.Mr. Williams at an event at the Howard Houses in Brownsville in October 2020. Toward the end of his life, he devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer.Sue KwonToward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Teenage activists would engage their neighbors in conversations about the political process and register them to vote. The group deliberately chose blocks that the police regarded as gang strongholds, while persuading the police, remarkably, to stay out of the way. “It was a way to say we can take care of our own,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir. None of these events, as he noted, were ever disrupted by violence.Last summer, We Build the Block took on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a Black police captain who was interested in unconventional approaches to crime reduction, they began planning to pay a group of young people touched by gang violence to take part in “healing circles” — weekly conversations led by a therapist. In August, one of Mr. Williams’s collaborators, Dana Rachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Mr. Williams that one of their requests for funding was out “in the universe.” Mr. Williams replied, “Damn right it is!”That was the last time she ever heard from him. One week later, on Sept. 6, Mr. Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in his apartment in Williamsburg. He was 54.Dana Rachlin, who helped found We Build the Block with Mr. Williams.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesThe healing circles began the next month. At the first session, a facilitator used singing bowls in an attempt to get the kids to meditate. It didn’t go well. As the kids horsed around and mocked the activity, Ms. Rachlin thought about Mr. Williams. If he’d been there, she thought, the kids would have followed his lead. Lying on a yoga mat, she began to cry. And then she thought about ‌one of the reasons Mr. Williams had been so good at connecting with people: his sensitivity to the pain of others. These boys, she knew, had lost friends too.Mr. Williams’s interest in community organizing can be traced to his mother. He describes her in the memoir as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a day-care center in their building, and cultivated a network of relationships with community leaders. He loved and admired her. He also feared her. After his father left, when he was 11, his mother tried to protect him from the violence that surrounded them by forbidding him from fighting, a rule that she enforced, as he pointed out, by inflicting violence on him herself. Frustrated by his defiance, she would sometimes tell him that he was unworthy of God’s love.Remembering Michael K. WilliamsThe actor, who starred in the pioneering HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Obituary: Williams brought a hard-edge charisma to his portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s five-season epic. Tributes: Following news of his death, co-stars, musicians and authors shared their thoughts on the beloved actor. Best TV Performances: Throughout his career, Williams explored provocative intersections of race, crime, sexuality and masculinity. A Legacy Interrupted: To complete the new season of Williams’s series “Black Market,” the producers enlisted the help of some famous friends.He grew to be sensitive and insecure — “the softest kid,” he writes, “in the projects.” After two older men molested him, he “fell into a dark, empty state.” His willingness to venture back into that state, to conjure up his most painful memories for the sake of an acting role, was the quality that would most clearly define him as an artist. The scar across his face, sustained in a razor attack outside a bar on his 25th birthday, seemed to tell of deeper wounds. “We are all broken,” he notes in the book. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the community-organizing campaign, in Brownsville at a We Build the Block event in June 2021.Sue KwonMr. Williams at a graduation ceremony at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn.Sue KwonHe was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. A fan of “The Wire” might have assumed that the guy playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, its outrage at the drug war, but he still knew “close to zero” about politics when the fifth and final season aired. That began to change when an African-American senator from Chicago, running for president that year, declared Omar Little to be his favorite character on his favorite show.Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested on drunken-driving charges twice in six months. He had struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder, since he was a teenager. Ordered to do community service, he offered to talk about addiction to high-school kids. What began as an obligation became a passion. While Barack Obama’s praise sparked an interest in the political forces affecting his community, the school visits awakened him to the possibility that he could “redeem” himself by working with young people. But it would still be years before this would become the guiding insight of his life.In 2016, he appeared in “The Night Of,” an HBO drama about the moral rot of New York’s criminal-justice system. Playing a charismatic former boxer confined on Rikers Island, he often thought about his nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. Serving 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Dupont started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Mr. Williams’s nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. He started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York Times“The Night Of” told a less redeeming tale, and the performance took Mr. Williams to a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Mr. Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters that people loved the most.” After years of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set, which was an actual prison in upstate New York. It got so bad, his memoir revealed, that the shoot had to be shut down for a day.While promoting the series, Mr. Williams realized he wanted to learn more about the mass incarceration of young people from neighborhoods like his. This led him to make “Raised in the System,” a documentarythat captures the vulnerability and neglect of incarcerated children. Ms. Rachlin, who met him as he was finishing the film, helped him organize a series of screenings for police officers, correction officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted the power holders to bring compassion and empathy to the youth before them, their families and communities,” she said.Ms. Rachlin was in some ways an unlikely ally. She had grown up in a conservative Staten Island household. As a teenager, she made campaign calls for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, while working as an advocate for crime victims in the Staten Island courthouse, she found herself, for the first time, spending time around young people who had been arrested and jailed. It was eye-opening. She soon began working with adolescents who had been getting into trouble, eventually starting a nonprofit.As Mr. Williams became an increasingly prominent advocate for criminal-justice reform, Ms. Rachlin continued working closely with him, connecting him with nonprofit groups in the field, teaching him about the inner-workings of government, prepping him for meetings with elected officials. Mr. Williams, for his part, used his fame to attract attention to her work, and served as a personal mentor — “Uncle Mike” — to kids in her organization.Capt. Derby St. Fort with Mr. Williams at a We Build the Block event in Crown Heights in 2020. Captain St. Fort would collaborate with the organization on healing circles.Sue KwonThen, in the summer of 2020, as protests over police violence surged through New York and the rest of the country, Mr. Williams began talking to Ms. Rachlin about how to bolster the role that Black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public-safety policies. With the radio host Shani Kulture and five high school students from Brooklyn, they started We Build the Block, the community-organizing campaign.Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the initiative, recalled how down-to-earth Mr. Williams always seemed at their block activations. “He was outside at every event,” he said, “no security, no nothing, talking with the old people and the people rolling dice and smoking weed, getting to know where their head’s at, spreading the word about how to make the community safer.”“He was unique,” Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s reform-minded district attorney, said. “A lot of people with his celebrity, they do social media or they donate money to causes, but he kept it on the ground.”Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.”Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesIn 2019, Ms. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams to Derby St. Fort, the police captain who would collaborate with them on the healing circles. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.” When he told Mr. Williams about a group of young men who were causing harm in his precinct, Mr. Williams said he could imagine how they felt — unworthy of love, incapable of change. “He looked at the pain of those who caused pain,” Captain St. Fort said. Arresting them wouldn’t change their perspectives. So the three of them developed a strategy that they hoped would.This was how the healing circles came about. Despite skepticism inside the police department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even participated in the circles himself. He found it hard to imagine that the kids would ever trust him, but he was open with them, acknowledging that he had made mistakes in his life. Slowly, he said, the teenagers began to open up too. “A lot of times they felt they had done so much harm in their lives that they weren’t deserving of support,” Captain St. Fort said. “We had to challenge that. I told them, ‘You deserve it.’”Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, now volunteer as community organizers. One recent afternoon, they met with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Rachlin, along with representatives of the Public Advocate’s Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups in the basement of a public library, where they were leading an effort to plan a back-to-school event for younger kids in their neighborhood. They’d both gotten steady jobs through the program, and neither had been arrested since the sessions began.They’d never met Mr. Williams, but Ms. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the guy with the scar they’d seen on TV — how he made people feel like they mattered, like somebody cared. “That’s something that I definitely want to do,” Mr. Garrett said, “because the stuff that I experienced, I don’t want that for the younger generation.” He wanted those kids to know something. “I’m here, and they are loved.”Mr. Williams at a voter registration in Brooklyn in 2020. “We are all broken,” he wrote in his memoir. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Sue Kwon More