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      Dawn Hudson, the C.E.O. of the Motion Picture Academy, will step down in 2023.

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      Dawn Hudson, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is beginning a long goodbye from the job she’s held since 2011.The academy announced Monday that Ms. Hudson, 65, will step down at the conclusion of her current contract. It expires at the end of 2023.In recent years under Ms. Hudson, the Academy has moved aggressively to expand and diversify its membership, a response to the #OscarSoWhite controversy that arose in 2015 after the group nominated only white actors for the Oscars. Since then, the Academy has swelled to 9,362 voting members from 6,446, 33 percent of whom identify as women and 19 percent coming from underrepresented communities. (When Ms. Hudson came aboard, Oscar voters were 94 percent white and 77 percent male.)Ms. Hudson was also integral in the opening of the Academy Museum, which debuted last month after a nearly decade-long slog and budget overruns that totaled close to $100 million.“Dawn has been, and continues to be, a groundbreaking leader for the academy,” the academy’s president, David Rubin, said in a statement. “The diversity and gender parity of our membership, our increased international presence, and the successful opening of a world-class Academy Museum — a project she revived, guided and championed — are already part of her legacy.”Ms. Hudson’s successor will face big challenges. As with all awards shows, the academy has seen the viewers for its annual telecast — which through its licensing deal with ABC generates the majority of the organization’s operating budget — decline precipitously over the years. This year brought a new nadir of only 10.4 million viewers, a decline of 56 percent from 2020. In 2012, the first year of Ms. Hudson’s tenure, 43 million people watched the show, with Ellen DeGeneres as the host.The academy said it would begin looking for Ms. Hudson’s replacement shortly and “she will have a vital role in the transition.” More

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      A Sweeping New History Looks Back at 100 Years of Black Filmmaking

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      The first chapter of Wil Haygood’s elegant and well-made book of history, “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” is titled “Movie Night at Woodrow Wilson’s White House.”The movie was “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), D. W. Griffith’s notorious silent epic, filled with flying white robes, about the noble intent of the Ku Klux Klan. It portrayed Black people as criminals, sex fiends and goggle-eyed fools, in skulking league with Northern carpetbaggers.This was the first such White House screening, and the president had a stake in the film’s success. For one thing, it was based on a popular novel, “The Clansman,” written by his friend Thomas Dixon Jr. For another, the president made cameo appearances, of a sort. Griffith had adapted some of Wilson’s writing for interstitial explanatory frames.“The Birth of a Nation” became a sensation, the first blockbuster, seen by roughly a quarter of the American population. And it became grimly apparent, Haygood writes, that Black people “had yet one more enemy: cinema.”“Colorization” is Haygood’s ninth book. He’s written biographies of Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Sammy Davis Jr.Some prolific nonfiction writers slowly grow bleary; you sense them, in their later books, going through the motions, rounding off corners. Haygood, on the other hand, has become a master craftsman, one whose joinery is seamless..“Colorization” tells the story of Black artists in the film industry, those in front of and behind the camera, over more than a century. Some of these stories are little-known. This is sweeping history, but in Haygood’s hands it feels crisp, urgent and pared down. He doesn’t try to be encyclopedic. He takes a story he needs, tells it well, and ties it to the next one. He carries you along on dispassionate analysis and often novelistic detail.He moves from “The Birth of a Nation” to tell the story of Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), the former Pullman porter, plains farmer and novelist who almost single-handedly created Black filmmaking. Micheaux’s movies played in Black-owned theaters and weren’t reviewed by white publications.Haygood considers “Gone With the Wind” and the stereotype of the Black maid; the making of Douglas Sirk’s last Hollywood film, the daringly interracial “Imitation of Life” (1959); and the obstacle-filled careers of performers like Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge, James Edwards and Lena Horne.There’s a chapter about Otto Preminger’s “Porgy and Bess,” which was dated when it appeared in 1959, nearly 25 years after the premiere of George Gershwin’s opera. The young playwright Lorraine Hansberry said about it: “We object to roles which consistently depict our women as wicked and our men as weak. We do not want to see six-foot Sidney Poitier on his knees crying for a slit-skirted wench.”Haygood writes about Poitier, who seemed to step out of a dream many Americans were planning to have, and Harry Belafonte; the arrival of Melvin Van Peebles, Pam Grier and the so-called blaxploitation genre; the talents, largely wasted by Hollywood, of actors such as Billy Dee Williams; and the disaster that was “The Wiz” (1978).Later chapters hail the careers of directorial stars such as Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen and Jordan Peele, and trace a body of linked influences.This film history plays out against the backdrop of American history, from the Scottsboro Boys and the Tuskegee Airmen through Rodney King, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter.Wil Haygood, whose new book is “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World.”Jeff SaboIt plays out, too, against the ways the Academy Awards ignored Black performances. Federico Fellini, at the 1993 Oscars, unwittingly underlined why this mattered when he remarked, “The movies and America are almost the same thing.”As you read, you may find yourself making lists of films to watch or rewatch: the pre-Code “Baby Face” (1933) starring Barbara Stanwyck and the Black actress Theresa Harris; “Home of the Brave”; “Lilies of the Field”; “Duel at Diablo”; “Sounder”; “Cane River”; “Get on the Bus”; “Love Jones.”I spent an afternoon watching the trailers for these films and many others Haygood mentions. I was reminded that sequential trailer-watching is a vastly underrated pleasure.Cinema, it need not be said, is a unique art form in the sense that many of us become children again in front of a moving image. Our defenses are lowered. We long to watch, often enough, with a child’s simple heart.This fact about movies, Haygood is aware, has made the worst of them especially harmful to Black people across the last American century. It’s a problem that had many aspects. James Baldwin put one of them this way: “It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.” Stale language begins to creep in toward the end. It’s past time for an ambitious young copy editor to invent a search widget called ClicheCatcher™ to routinely run on manuscripts before they go to press.Yet this is important, spirited popular history. Like a good movie, it pops from the start. (Haygood was wise to omit an introduction.) Like a good movie, too, it comes full circle.Haygood recognizes that Wilson was an especially racist president, even by the standards of his time. On the last page of “Colorization,” he notes that in June 2020, Wilson’s alma mater, Princeton, announced that a building bearing his name would bear it no more. More

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      Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth

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      A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia’s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit.A Russian actress and a film director landed safely on Earth early Sunday after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first feature-length drama made with scenes shot in space.Yulia Peresild, the actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, launched to space with a Russian astronaut on Oct. 5 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They used the orbital laboratory as one of the main sets for their movie, “The Challenge,” a drama in which Ms. Peresild plays a surgeon embarking on an emergency mission to save the life of an ailing cosmonaut.The 12-day journey, backed by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, was the latest act in a race among spacefaring countries to generate public excitement about human spaceflight and demonstrate that destinations like the space station aren’t exclusive to government astronauts. The mission also adds another superlative to Russia’s spaceflight record over the United States: beating Hollywood to orbit.Ms. Peresild, Mr. Shipenko and Oleg Novitsky, a Russian astronaut who’s been on the station since April and played the role of the film’s ailing cosmonaut, bid farewell to the station’s crew of seven on Saturday. The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft that carried them back to Earth undocked at 9:14 p.m. Eastern time. The crew’s trip home took about three hours before landing at 10:35 a.m. local time in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan’s Karaganda Region.In live footage streamed by Russia’s space agency, helicopters from search and rescue teams circled the area where the astronauts were to set down, and mission controllers urged the crew to “get ready” and brace themselves for landing. Under a large parachute, the capsule touched down, sending up a cloud of dust.“They landed vertically, awesome guys,” said a mission controller from Russia, suggesting the capsule had not landed in a way that could add some difficulty to the crew’s exit.The Russian space agency said that the crew felt well ahead of their exit from the Soyuz, and would undergo a 10-day rehabilitation to help recover from the effects of living in the microgravity environment of low-earth orbit.The filming began as the movie crew arrived in space. Mr. Shipenko filmed scenes using hand-held cameras inside the capsule of another Soyuz module as it approached the station. When it docked, Pyotr Dubrov, one of the space station’s Russian astronauts, was waiting behind a large digital cinema camera as the crew emerged from their capsule and floated into the station for the first time. And on Saturday, the filming continued as the crew exited the station and boarded their capsule. Few details about the plot of “The Challenge” have been announced.But drama on the station turned real on Friday when it was tilted out of its position in orbit during a test of the thrusters on the capsule that ferried the film crew home to Earth. Mr. Novitsky had been testing out the engines, Roscosmos said, but they fired longer than expected, according to a NASA statement. The station, which is the size of a football field, was tilted 57 degrees out of position, according to Russian mission control officials quoted by Interfax, a Russian news agency.The incident sprang Russian and NASA officials into action, and they corrected the station’s positioning within 30 minutes. It was the second such emergency since July, when Russia’s new Nauka module erroneously fired its thrusters, shifting the station one and a half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before it came to a stop upside down.Whatever caused the problems with the spacecraft’s thruster on Friday did not recur as the film crew and Mr. Novitsky departed the station Saturday night.“The Soyuz is in good shape, was declared ready to support undocking and landing this evening, and everything is in order for the departure,” said Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, during a livestream of the process.Russia’s space agency announced its intention last year to send an actress to the space station shortly after plans emerged that Tom Cruise would trek to space as part of an action-adventure film directed by Doug Liman. Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA’s administrator under President Donald Trump, confirmed the plans on Twitter at the time, but no updates on the film project have emerged since that time. Other entertainment projects centered on the International Space Station may occur in the years to come, including a Discovery Channel reality TV competition called “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?” More

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      Brian Goldner, Hasbro Executive With Hollywood Vision, Dies at 58

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      He turned a traditional maker of toys and games into an entertainment company with its own TV and movie studio.Brian Goldner, who transformed Hasbro, a traditional maker of toys and games, by rethinking its many brands as properties that could become films, television series and online games, died on Monday at his home in Barrington, R.I. He was 58.Hasbro announced the death but did not give a cause. Mr. Goldner received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2014 and took a leave of absence from the company the day before he died.Mr. Goldner, who was named Hasbro’s president in 2008, oversaw a company whose brands include My Little Pony, Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, Power Rangers and Nerf.One of his most notable successes was persuading Hollywood executives that Hasbro toys and action figures like Transformers and G.I. Joe were as film-worthy as Batman or Spider-Man.“We had relegated these brands to an experience that was limited to the playroom floor or the kitchen table,” Mr. Goldner told The New York Times in 2009. What he envisioned for the company was something more expansive.The Transformers — toy robots that can turn into vehicles or beasts, which Hasbro introduced in 1984 — were adapted into six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide since the release of “Transformers” in 2007. Mr. Goldner was an executive producer on all those films and a producer on two G.I. Joe movies.Since 2007, Optimus Prime and the other Transformers, which began life as Hasbro action figures, have starred in six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide.HasbroTo coincide with the opening of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (2014), the fourth film in the franchise, he challenged his design team to recapture the toys’ original magic by making them less complex so that they could transform with the push of a button rather than in a dozen steps.“We’ve made incredibly sophisticated robots, but it can be like a 1,000-piece puzzle,” he told The Times in 2014.For much of his time at the company, which is based in Pawtucket, R.I., Mr. Goldner espoused a brand blueprint that reimagined Hasbro as a play and entertainment company.“He came into a traditional toy company that was making stuff, and he believed we weren’t in the business of making things but in the business of storytelling,” Rich Stoddart, the interim chief executive of Hasbro, said in a phone interview.But, he added, Mr. Goldner encountered some skepticism with his plans.“Some people said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it sounds nice,’” Mr. Stoddart said, but Mr. Goldner had to keep pushing to bring his vision to reality. “He didn’t waver, because he believed to his toes that it was the right strategy.”Mr. Goldner’s effort to tell stories using Hasbro brands went even further in 2019 with the $3.8 billion acquisition of Entertainment One, a Canadian production studio that is also known by the shorthand name eOne. At the time, it was producing the popular children’s series “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”The purchase of eOne gave Hasbro the ability to produce its own programming, rather than make it only in partnership with Hollywood studios, which it had done with its Transformers and G.I. Joe movies as well as with its movie “Battleship” (2012). The film was part of an ultimately failed deal with Universal Pictures that was to have included movies based on the games Monopoly and Candy Land.“What we’ve found is that as all of the big studios have streaming services, they are increasingly holding on to their own I.P.,” Mr. Goldner told CNBC this year, referring to intellectual property. “Therefore, it gives us the opportunity as an independent to go out and present world-class, powerful brand I.P. to these streaming services like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and several others who used to have access to other people’s content and are now looking for great brands.”Mr. Goldner, left, and Adam Goldman, the president of Paramount Pictures, at the premiere of the movie “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” in Los Angeles in 2013.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBetween 2022 and 2023, he added, eOne would produce two to three movies and three or four streamed programs every year.Among the projects in development are Power Rangers and Dungeons & Dragons films and TV series based on Transformers and the board games Risk and Clue. The animated film “My Little Pony: A New Generation,” based on that Hasbro line of toys, had its premiere on Netflix last month.Eric Handler, an analyst at the equity trading firm MKM Partners, said by phone that Mr. Goldner had taken “the Disney approach to creating a virtuous circle and monetizing brands beyond the toy aisle.”He added: “Toys are still the core of Hasbro’s business, at least for now. But Brian recognized that you can do so much more with its brands and build them across franchises that cut across toys, consumer product licensing, movies, TV shows and theme park attractions.”Under Mr. Goldner, Hasbro also became a toy and game licensee for the Walt Disney Company’s Marvel universe of characters, including Iron Man and Spider-Man, and continued its licensing of “Star Wars” characters, which began in the 1970s.Brian David Goldner was born on April 21, 1963, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. His mother, Marjorie (Meyer) Goldner, was an investment adviser. His father, Norman, worked at Eaton, a power management company.After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in government, Mr. Goldner was hired as a marketing assistant at a health care company. He then worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he rose to director in charge of entertainment before leaving to become an executive vice president of Bandai America, a subsidiary of a Japanese toy company.He became chief operating office of Bandai but left in 2000 to join Hasbro as executive vice president and chief operating officer of its Tiger Electronics subsidiary, which makes the Furby robotic toy and many other products. He climbed quickly, becoming Hasbro’s chief operating officer in 2006. The success of the first “Transformers” movie helped lead to Mr. Goldner’s appointment in 2008 as president and chief executive. He was named chairman in 2015.He is survived by his wife, Barbara (Genick) Goldner; their daughter, Brooke Goldner; his mother; and a brother, Bradford. A son, Brandon, died of a heroin overdose in 2015.In 2018, Hasbro acquired the Power Rangers television and toy brand (originally the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) from the billionaire Haim Saban for $522 million. For Mr. Goldner, it was a reunion: He had worked with Mr. Saban when Bandai had been the Power Rangers’ global master toy licensee.“From time to time,” Mr. Saban said when the acquisition was announced, “Brian would say to me, ‘So when are you coming to Hasbro?’”It took a while, but Mr. Goldner finally added the Power Rangers to Hasbro’s ever-widening constellation of merchandising, television and movies. More

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      Five Horror Films to Stream Now

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      The month’s picks include a contagion film, an ’80s throwback, an unnerving tale of siblings, a faux documentary and a slow-burn thriller.Halloween is around the corner and already I’m up to my eye sockets in horror, whether it’s the marquee monster “Halloween Kills” or the daredevil Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 21. So to maximize your movie-watching hours this witching season, three of this month’s picks clock in at no longer than 90 minutes. You’re welcome, boo.‘Hall’Rent or buy on Amazon.This taut Canadian horror-thriller, about hotel guests attacked by a deadly virus, never mentions Covid. But — and maybe this is the fate of contagion films now — it’s hard to read a movie about viral spread that turns people into gasping ghouls as being about anything else.The film opens on Naomi (Yumiko Shaku), a pregnant woman on the run from her husband in Japan, sitting in a hotel hallway with other people gulping for air. She crosses paths with Val (Carolina Bartczak), a mom whose plan to take her daughter and escape her abusive husband gets a little easier when he turns into a weak, wheezing monster. Turns out it’s no conspiracy theory: The outbreak has sinister origins.I don’t want to say more, because in just 79 minutes the director Francesco Giannini, in his solo feature debut, fronts his film with strong central female characters and packs it with ferocious twists.It’s too early to tell to what extent coronavirus horror movies will influence horror. “Hall” and the demonic Zoom-call picture “Host” — the scariest movie ever, according to a new study — makes me think it will. The jury’s out on “Corona Zombies.”‘Censor’Stream it on Hulu.You don’t need to remember the 1980s to appreciate Prano Bailey-Bond’s creeping-dread drama, her feature debut about the Video Nasties scare in Britain. The honest-to-God moral panic swept the country, leading to the banning of 72 films.Enid (Niamh Algar) spends her days watching extreme movies, not for pleasure but for the British government. She’s a censor and it’s the 1980s, which means it’s her job under a Thatcher-era law to cut or ban films she considers beyond the pale.But an emotionally taxing job isn’t a great fit for Enid, who’s struggling to cope with the disappearance of her sister, Nina (Amelie Child Villiers), when they were kids. Enid thinks Nina is still alive, a conviction that gains traction when Enid sees an actress in a movie who could pass for her grown sister. As fact, fiction and her horror movie assignments collide, Enid’s grasp on reality takes a bloody, surreal turn.The film is an 84-minute jackpot of VHS-age style, from Annika Summerson’s gritty cinematography to Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s pulsing score. Even better, as an eerie exploration of a woman’s emotional unraveling, it’s a story of heartfelt substance.‘Woe’Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Charlie (Adam Halferty) just wants the world outside his house — his dead father’s house, actually — to go away. He ignores his sister, Betty (Jessie Rabideau), when she shows up at the front door with her fiancé, Benjamin (Ryan Kattner) and a plan to sell their father’s old Crown Victoria, the one in which he took his life.But Charlie does pay attention to the strange letters slipped under his door that lead him to his Uncle Pete (James Russo), who Charlie thought was dead. Even weirder is Pete’s message to his nephew: “This thing is going to destroy you just like it did your father.”What does it mean to let go of grief, and what if grief won’t let you go? What if grief is a monstrous figure in a black robe who watches you with red eyes? Those are the questions that in 85 weird minutes consume Matthew Goodhue’s deeply unnerving movie about siblings and memory. This is compact, intense and affecting horror storytelling. Too bad the bumbling Benjamin elbows his way to the front of the finale.‘The Medium’Stream it on Shudder.The horror faux-documentary has fallen out of favor since the found-footage golden age of the ’90s. That’s a shame, because a fictional scary story told through the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking can be, like “Hell House LLC,” extra terrifying.Here to fill that gap is this spooky Thai film directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun. It follows a film crew traveling to a rural village to document Nim (Sawanee Utoomma), a female shaman whose body hosts a good spirit worshiped by locals.The crew members start by shooting beautiful scenes of religious ceremonies, but things take a dark turn when they catch Nim’s niece Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) attacking people and spontaneously bleeding. That’s when Nim realizes the source of her niece’s extreme behavior isn’t defiance. It’s demonic.This is a film that simmers, a welcome relief from the tendency to go big with stories that fuse religious belief, family bonds and the supernatural. At over two hours, it eventually overstays its welcome, finishing with excessive chaos. But the final scene, just an interview with Nim, is chilling.‘The Secret of Sinchanee’Rent or buy it on Vudu.When police find Will (Emmett Spriggs) hiding at his grandfather’s house the morning after his mother and sister are murdered, it’s clear something terrible also happened to the terrified young boy. Why did Will look into the police-station security camera and say “spirit of death” in Mohican? And who was the Native American man accompanying him through the snowy woods that night?Fast forward and the grown Will (the writer-director Steven Grayhm) returns to his childhood home after his father’s death. When homicide detectives (Nate Boyer and Tamara Austin) come to town to look into a series of murders, Will’s past starts to manifest itself in ways no human investigator stands a chance of conquering.Despite a title that makes it sound like the Hardy Boys are on the case, Grayhm’s feature debut is a slow-burn thriller that deftly weaves issues of mental illness and family traumas into a cautionary tale set on sacred land. Logan Fulton, the director of photography, makes rural Massachusetts look simultaneously like a winter wonderland and a hellscape. More

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      Dave Chappelle Isn’t Canceled. He Just Likes to Talk About It.

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      In Netflix’s “The Closer,” he returns to views about transgender people that drew anger in his last special. With his popularity partly built on courting outrage, it’s no surprise he’s doubling down.The first time Dave Chappelle wanted to quit a TV show, he didn’t do it. After shooting the pilot of his soon-to-be-forgotten 1996 ABC sitcom, “Buddies,” an amiable comedy about an interracial friendship, the network fired his co-star Jim Breuer, which led Chappelle to tell his manager he wanted to quit.He was talked out of it, and the show got poor reviews and was canceled after five episodes. When I interviewed one of the co-creators, Matt Williams, several years ago for an e-book about Chappelle, he told me he wished he had built more conflict between the leads. “Then you could capitalize on the charisma of Chappelle,” he said. “But he was different then. He was impish. He was playful, innocent. No danger.”As controversy boils over Chappelle’s latest special, “The Closer,” I have been thinking about what lessons he might have learned from this early failure. At Comedy Central, he famously did quit and returned with a new mystique. In his current incarnation, he leans hard into conflict, and part of his enduring popularity is his ability to manufacture a sense of danger.In his last special, “Sticks and Stones,” Chappelle took aim at the audience and cancel culture, made many jokes about transgender people and defended Kevin Hart, who had lost the job of hosting the Oscars because of protests over old homophobic tweets. Chappelle earned backlash, negative reviews and the sympathies of the right-wing media, which has become invested in issues of comedy and free speech in the Trump era.OK, so what did Dave Chappelle do for his next act? Take aim at cancel culture, mock trans people and bring up the same trans friend he mentioned in the last special. By the time he defends Hart again (even if losing the Oscars was the worst injustice known to man, does it deserve two specials’ worth of protest?), you might be feeling a sense of déjà vu.A few days before “The Closer” premiered, Chappelle predicted he would be canceled; a few days later, he appeared at the Hollywood Bowl at the premiere of his new documentary and talked again about being canceled. The fact that no one thinks Dave Chappelle will be canceled, whatever that means to you, is beside the point.This rollout was a performance of danger. Of course, what is dangerous is an open question. “The Closer” courts outrage with dopey attacks on #MeToo, and jokes linking Asian people to Covid, but mostly with the subject he has been fixated on for years: transgender people.When Jaclyn Moore, a showrunner for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” announced she would no longer work with the company while it produces “dangerously transphobic content,” the statement was a reference to the numbers of hate crimes against transgender people and the statistics about mental health and suicide.There is a tendency these days to quickly conflate language and violence in discussions about controversial art, especially comedy. A punchline, even an offensive one, is not the same as a punch. And yet, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who has attended middle school (or seen a Martin Scorsese film) would not understand that jokes can contribute to a culture of bullying and abuse.In defending Chappelle, Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, waded into the issue of the consequences of cruel jokes by arguing that he doesn’t believe there is a relationship between art and harm. It’s a rickety platform to stand on when your company consistently puts out work that hopes to raise awareness, increase representation or move the culture. If art can do good for the world, then isn’t it possible the reverse could be true?The fallout from “The Closer” is in some ways the most interesting thing about the special. A group of trans employees has planned a walkout on Wednesday to protest. And anger within Netflix led to a rare and fascinating leak of internal viewing numbers, revealing just how little we understand success in the era of minimal transparency by entertainment companies. According to Bloomberg, based on Netflix’s measurement of efficiency, which balances a show’s reach with its price tag, Bo Burnham’s “Inside” (which earned the comic $3.9 million) performed significantly better than “The Closer” (which cost $24.1 million).Chappelle remains a gifted yarn-spinner who shifts from gravitas to irreverence as deftly as anyone. But judged purely by originality and construction of jokes, he’s a star in decline. There are some startlingly hack jokes, like a well-worn one about Mike Pence’s sexuality, and others about pedophilia and Covid that badly need the shock of offensiveness to make an impact.Why has he been so fixated on transgender people for so many years now? It may be that he believes deeply that gender is a fact. Maybe he passionately wants to let us know he’s “Team TERF,” as he says in “The Closer” — an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Neither of those points come with punch lines. It could also be that he sees pushing these hot buttons as the easiest way to make a big fuss.One of the major developments in comedy over the past decade has been the rise of comics animated by opposition to left-wing dogma and cancel culture. I have seen struggling comics boost their careers by pivoting right — or, more precisely, anti-left. There’s no question that there is a market for it. While he has lost some fans, Chappelle is a hero to this group now. In middle age, Chappelle acts less like a comic and more like a pundit. He’s far more comfortable than most of his peers in going long stretches without jokes. His recent monologues about George Floyd and the way streaming services have not compensated him for showing his sketch show were both righteous and largely without humor.In 2006, after he left “Chappelle’s Show,” which made better arguments that jokes should be able to punch in any direction than anything he says in these specials, he proclaimed in an interview, “I feel like I’m going to be some kind of parable.” Then he said he was going to be either a legend or a tragic story.Give Chappelle credit for this: In a climate in which people seem to get more excited about culture wars than culture, he has figured out a way to be both.Still, I suspect the long-term impact of the last few specials will not flatter his reputation. Comedy moves fast. And right now, there are more funny transgender stand-ups getting hours ready at comedy shows in the city than ever before. The legacy of “The Closer” might be less in the jokes it makes than in the ones it inspires. More

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      Haile Gerima Is Having a Hollywood Moment. It’s Left Him Conflicted.

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      The director, an eminence of American and African indie cinema, is being recognized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Netflix. But he has long rejected the industry.Haile Gerima doesn’t hold back when it comes to his thoughts on Hollywood. The power games of movie producers and distributors are “anti-cinema,” he put it recently. The three-act structure is akin to “fascism” — it “numbs, makes stories toothless.” And Hollywood cinema is like the “hydrogen bomb.”For decades, Gerima, the 75-year-old Ethiopian filmmaker, has blazed a trail outside of the Hollywood system, building a legacy that looms large over American and African independent cinema.But as he spoke with me recently on a video call from his studio in Washington, D.C., Gerima found himself at an unexpected juncture: He was about to travel to Los Angeles, where he would receive the inaugural Vantage Award at the opening gala of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which is also screening a retrospective of his work this month. A new 4K restoration of his 1993 classic, “Sankofa,” debuted on Netflix last month.After 50 years, Hollywood has finally come calling. “I’m going with a lump in my throat,” Gerima said with his typical candor. “This is an industry I have no relationship with, no trust in, no desire to be a part of.”Gerima tends to speak directly and without euphemism, his words propelled by the force of his conviction. The filmmaker has been at loggerheads with the American film industry since the 1970s, when he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles. There, he was part of what came to be known as the L.A. Rebellion — a loose collective of African and African American filmmakers, including Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep”), Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), Larry Clark (“Tamu”) and others, who challenged the mainstream cinematic idiom.Gerima’s first project in film school was a short commercial called “Death of Tarzan.” An exorcism of Hollywood’s colonial fantasies, it provoked a response from a classmate that Gerima still remembers fondly: “Thank you, Gerima, for killing that diaper-wearing imperialist!”The eight features he has since directed bristle with the same impulse for liberation, employing nonlinear narratives and jagged audiovisual experiments to paint rousing portraits of Black and Pan-African resistance. In a phone interview, Burnett described Gerima’s work as coursing with emotion: “People have plots and things, but he has energy, real energy. That’s what characterizes his films.”The stark, black-and-white “Bush Mama” (1975) charts the radicalization of a woman in Los Angeles as she navigates poverty and the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of welfare. “Ashes and Embers” (1982) — which opens with the protagonist driving into Los Angeles with dreams of Hollywood before being abruptly stopped by the police — traces the gradual disillusionment of a Black Vietnam War veteran. In “Sankofa,” one of Gerima’s most acclaimed films, an African American model is transported back in time to a plantation, where she’s caught up in a slave rebellion. Other films, like “Harvest: 3,000 Years” (1976) and “Teza” (2008), explore the political history of Gerima’s native Ethiopia.Nick Medley and  Alexandra Duah in “Sankofa,” which has been restored and is now available on Netflix.Mypheduh FilmsFor the filmmaker and his wife and producing partner, Shirikiana Aina, these visions of fierce Black independence are as much a matter of life as art. Most of Gerima’s movies have been produced and distributed by the couple’s company, Mypheduh Films, which derives its name from an ancient Ethiopian word meaning “protector of culture.” Mypheduh’s offices are housed in Sankofa, a bookstore and Pan-African cultural center across the street from Howard University, where Gerima taught filmmaking for over 40 years. This little pocket of Washington is Gerima’s empire — or his “liberated territory,” as he likes to call it.“When I think of Haile’s cinema, I think of the cinema of the maroon,” Aboubakar Sanogo, a friend of Gerima’s and a scholar of African cinema at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, said in an interview, invoking a term for runaway slaves who formed their own independent settlements. “It’s very much a cinema of freedom. Hollywood is the plantation from which he has escaped.”If Gerima is now ready to dance with the academy (which, incidentally, has never awarded a best director Oscar to a Black filmmaker), it’s because of the involvement of a kindred soul: Ava DuVernay.The “Selma” filmmaker, who co-chaired the Academy Museum’s opening gala, has been the driving force behind the Haile-ssance of 2021. Array, DuVernay’s distribution and advocacy collective, spearheaded the restoration of “Sankofa.” The company also rereleased “Ashes and Embers” on Netflix in 2016, in addition to distributing “Residue,” the debut feature by Gerima’s son Merawi, last year.Speaking by phone, DuVernay said that in collaborating with Gerima, she felt she had come full circle: Years ago, she modeled Array on the example set by Gerima and Aina’s grass-roots distribution initiatives.“I was very influenced by this idea that your film is an extension of you, and it does not have to be given away to someone else to share with the world,” DuVernay said. “The self-determination of self-distribution, that was a radical idea to me. I didn’t have to go around begging studios — I could make my film and be in conversation with an audience independently.”It was a strategy Gerima and Aina forged during the initial release of “Sankofa.” The film gives galvanizing form to an idea that courses through all of Gerima’s work: that Africans are not the victims of history, but its heroes. “I always felt that slavery is not about brutal white people,” he said. “Slavery is about Black Africans refusing to be slaves. The consequences of that cannot be the dominant aspect of a film; otherwise, you participate in creating Hollywood victims.”But getting this film — born of unprecedented co-productions with Ghana, Burkina Faso and other African countries — seen by Black audiences in America required its own kind of fearless independence. When a well-received premiere at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival did not lead to any American distribution deals, Gerima and Aina did what they knew best: They turned to their community.Gerima’s ideas about self-distribution influenced Ava DuVernay and other filmmakers. Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThey rented a local cinema in Washington, and held screenings and meetings to spread the word. The response was overwhelming: The theater was packed for 11 weeks, and soon they were raising money for a second print to show in Baltimore, where it ran for 21 weeks. As community and cultural groups started reaching out from Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, California and elsewhere, Gerima and Aina slowly established what they call the “Sankofa family.”“They were our airport in every state,” Gerima said. “Underclass Black people put this movie on the map of the world.”Now, nearly 30 years later, a pristine restoration of “Sankofa” is streaming on Netflix in multiple countries. There’s something poetic about the movie introducing new audiences to Gerima’s legacy: Its title derives from a Ghanaian term that translates loosely to “retrieving the past while going toward the future.”The phrase was on my mind as I spoke with Gerima. He was in his editing “cave,” as he described it, and a picture of his father was on the computer screen behind him, the image zoomed into the man’s ear, as if he were listening in. A writer of political plays, Gerima’s father figures prominently in “Black Lions, Roman Wolves,” a documentary about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 that the filmmaker has been editing throughout the pandemic. Gerima said it’s been stuck in postproduction because of “surrealistic” negotiations with Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Italy’s state-owned film company, over newsreel footage from the war.He recalled that when he premiered “Adwa” — his documentary about the 1896 victory of Ethiopian forces against Italian invaders — at the Venice Film Festival in 1999, the press had criticized Istituto Luce for not participating in the production. “So they wrote me a letter saying, ‘In your next film, we will participate.’ But every time a bureaucrat changes, the policy changes. And I have to start the A-B-C-D of everything again.”It is experiences like these that make him wary of institutional support. “I don’t trust eruptive social discourse,” he said. “The well-meaning people at the Academy Museum — what happens when they are not there anymore? Who comes in? And what happens to the inclusiveness idea, then? This is the anxiety I have.”Aina, who joined us for the tail end of our interview, seemed more cautiously optimistic as she spoke of the museum’s Vantage Award. “I hope that it means that our work can get a little easier,” she said simply. “We just want to be able to have the capacity to make our movies, and to leave something in place that future filmmakers can incorporate into their new visions.” More

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      The Velvet Underground Meets Its Match in Todd Haynes

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      In the director’s hands, music subjects are as much about their cultural moment as about their sound — a good description of the band led by Lou Reed.Todd Haynes said his music-related films are really about how “the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture.”By Mark Sommerfeld For The New York TimesTodd Haynes’s new documentary, “The Velvet Underground,” summons that band’s essence by being a feast for … the eyes. The screen is almost constantly split into self-contained images that are in conversation with each other, at times creating a dizzying sensory overload. Some of the most striking scenes use images shot by Andy Warhol, who was a crucial presence in the band’s life and art.“We licensed two and a half hours of moving images for a two-hour-long movie,” Haynes said, laughing, “and I think 45 minutes of that is probably Warhol movies alone.”Evoking a sound world by relying heavily on visuals might feel counterintuitive, but Haynes, 60, has never followed the predictable path. His 1991 feature debut, “Poison,” was a linchpin of that era’s New Queer Cinema movement, and since then he has maintained a stubbornly independent streak, from the prescient psychological horror of “Safe” (1995) to the lush lesbian romanticism of “Carol” (2015).Haynes’s queering is particularly effective in music-centric movies, a field that has often been dominated by a straight-male point of view.He burst on the scene in 1987 with the 43-minute-long biopic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which was cast with dolls. In 2007 he made “I’m Not There,” with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan, or at least versions of Dylan. Even Haynes’s contribution to the HBO omnibus “Six by Sondheim” (2013) departed from convention: Whereas an older female performer usually handles the “Follies” number “I’m Still Here,” he had the former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker croon it to a dimly lit cabaret full of women, a neat reversal of the male gaze.“The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said. “They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture. Or they set up an example of a unique — and usually in my mind radical — experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.”The Velvet Underground members John Cale, left, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed in a scene from the documentary.  Nat Finkelstein/Apple TV+The Velvet Underground, the wildly influential 1960s-70s quartet led by Lou Reed, is a perfect illustration of that confluence. The problem is that unlike, say, the Beatles, the band did not leave much footage behind. Haynes turned that handicap into an artistic asset by zooming out instead of in. “I immediately made a decision that I wanted to focus on the time and place in New York City,” he said.The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin. Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019.Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.”This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued.The Velvet Underground’s John Cale — who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker — was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Cale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. But his formally rigorous films are roiled by tempestuous feelings and emotions. If “Superstar” — which cannot be shown commercially because of a cease-and-desist order by the music rights’ holders — has a cult following, it is not because of its gimmick but because it is so unexpectedly affecting.On that project, “I was thinking about how to make a film that would follow narrative conventions so closely that an audience would find itself caught up emotionally,” Haynes said. “But it wouldn’t be because an actor is doing those things — it would be a doll.”Jonathan Rhys Meyers in “Velvet Goldmine,” one of several music-centric films Haynes has made.Peter Mountain/Miramax FilmsHe has explored the formation (and transformation) of identity in his music-related work, but also fandom and its attendant heightened expectations. Haynes has always been very conscious of such hopes — especially when they are based on gender and sexuality, an area in which rock has been simultaneously groundbreaking and retrograde.Maybe that’s why the musicians in Haynes’s movies draw heated responses from real-life viewers and other characters. The Carpenters were still widely derided as milquetoast soft rock for girls and housewives when “Superstar” came out, and the film helped lead a critical reappraisal of the duo in the early 1990s. Admiration and rejection partly based on the scrambling of gender roles feature prominently in “Velvet Goldmine” via the knotty relationship involving a journalist and a pair of flamboyant rockers — one inspired by David Bowie and the other an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.It would be hard to find a more complicated figure than Reed, who left the Velvet Underground in 1970 and embarked on the fruitful solo career evoked in “Velvet Goldmine.” He was the kind of wildly creative, mercurial figure who is catnip to documentarians, and he is everywhere in the new film: a voice, either singing or heard in interviews; an unsmiling face staring us down; at times a presence felt more than seen.And yet even after those two hours, Reed, who died in 2013, remains an enigma, much like the Velvet Underground itself. Haynes did not call on critics or historians to venture theories or explain the band’s importance, and the closest we come to a musicological analysis is delivered by the eccentric Velvets protégé Jonathan Richman.Haynes said this was all by design. “There’s generations of people who could tell you how great the Velvet Underground are, how meaningful they were to my career as a musician or my career as an artist or whatever,” Haynes said. “But I thought, ‘Where do you stop? I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then you figure that out.’” More