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Ted Sarandos Talks About That Stock Drop, Backing Dave Chappelle, and Hollywood Schadenfreude
by Aurelia Butler 31 May 2022, 14:59
The Netflix executive says he — and the company he helped build — will survive a bout of bad earnings numbers.Maybe it was the tower of seafood sitting before us. Or the Potomac River flowing next to us. Or the fact that Ted Sarandos proposed to his wife, Nicole, on a “touristy booze cruise” under Fourth of July fireworks right in front of where we were sitting on the Georgetown waterfront in Washington.Whatever the reason, the Netflix co-C.E.O. had seafaring adventures on his mind.When I asked Mr. Sarandos how it felt when Netflix lost $54 billion in the blink of an eye on a single bad stock-market day in April, he talked about reading Joseph Conrad’s novella “Typhoon,” once as a younger man and again recently.The first time, he considered the captain who steered straight into the eye of a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean “a terrible leader” who “made a mistake and got people into a very bad situation.” But reading it a couple of decades later, Mr. Sarandos saw the complexity of leadership it takes to get through the storm, as the captain summons all his willpower to dominate a superior force.In this metaphor, the streamer is the steamer, which, Conrad writes, is lurching and pitching and going sideways in the gale “as if taking a header into the void.” And Mr. Sarandos is the skipper who has to swiftly steer the company out of danger, after the stunning news that Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year — without spending too much time rehashing how they got there.“We make decisions based on the best information we have at the time,” the 57-year-old said. “They are not always going to be right, but how you help navigate the outcomes, and the urgency you bring to it, is what gets folks through the storm. And the storms will come.”He recalled the Netflix squall of 2011, when Reed Hastings — the founder who now shares the C.E.O. job with Mr. Sarandos — created a separate company, Qwikster, to handle the DVD business. The move helped accelerate an already falling stock price, culminating in a 75 percent drop.“It was horrifying, disappointing and embarrassing,” recalled Mr. Sarandos, who was then the chief content officer. But he feels that they spent too long “sunshining,” to use the Netflix argot for openly examining failures. “How much time do you spend licking your wounds?” he said, adding: “Let’s have that burned into our memory, but we’ve got to move on and move fast.”He conceded that during the pandemic, when Netflix was Icarus, “there were probably a lot of underlying things in the business” that they could have gone “much deeper” on and been “more curious about if we weren’t doing so well.” (The company added 10 million subscribers in the first three months of the pandemic alone.) He added, “We could have been much more questioning of the success and saying, ‘Are you sure?’”It is certainly a wild plot twist worthy of Hollywood: The swaggering company that revolutionized the way Hollywood does business has stalled, with its stock down over 70 percent over six months.The Netflix Lobby MetricOver a three-hour dinner, Mr. Sarandos was charming and upbeat, dressed down in Levi’s and sneakers. You would never know he had been through a Job-level run of bad fortune in the last few months. First, his father, with whom he was very close, died. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Avant, with whom he was also very close, was shot to death when she encountered a burglar in the middle of the night at her Beverly Hills home. Ms. Avant, renowned in Hollywood for her elegance, art collecting, philanthropy and community organizing in Watts, Calif., was the wife of Clarence Avant, a music mogul known as the “Black Godfather.”Then, on top of Mr. Sarandos’s personal woes, Netflix skidded from rapid growth to grind-it-out. (Its stock peaked above $700 a share in November 2021 and has now fallen below $200.)The rise of Mr. Sarandos, a community college night-school dropout, from a video store clerk in Arizona to the pinnacle of Hollywood, is legendary.“He’s had more singular influence on movies and television shows than anyone ever had,” Barry Diller told me. “He has denuded the power of the old movie companies that had held for almost 100 years. They are now irrelevant to setting the play and rules of the day. If there is still a Hollywood, he is it.”Only a few years ago, the Netflix lobby was the coolest place on earth. Now it’s suddenly gloomy. In her “Saturday Night Live” monologue last weekend, Natasha Lyonne, the star of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” sarcastically cracked that the “two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix.”After winning the pandemic, Netflix now finds itself in its own version of its survival drama “Squid Game.” The company hit a ceiling, for now, of some 220 million subscribers, after thinking it could get to a billion with its global empire, and that has thrown a wrench into the future of Netflix and streaming in general. Wall Street suddenly turned a cold shoulder on its former darling, telling Netflix, Guess what, guys, you’ve got to make money, not just grow subscriptions.The company recently announced 150 layoffs, with more sure to come; shows in development, even by big names and a certain Montecito royal, are being dropped. Mr. Sarandos talked about the advertising option, something the company had resisted, so if people want a lower price subscription with ads, they could have it. “For us, it was all about simplicity of one product, one price point.” But, he said, “I think it can now withstand some complexity.”The Netflix hit “Squid Game.”Netflix, via Associated PressAnd how did Hollywood react to this bad news? With a blast of glee. Mr. Sarandos and Mr. Hastings, unassuming men of enormous chutzpah and vision, are being dunked in a vat of schadenfreude, subjected to the sort of vicious backbiting that characterized “House of Cards,” the David Fincher show that helped propel the network to success. As one Hollywood savant said with a shrug, “Nice doesn’t play in this town.”Old-school Hollywood types privately celebrated the news that the new streaming services they had scrambled to create (like HBOMax, Disney+ and NBC’s Peacock) were now disrupting the disrupter. Netflix is a victim of its own success; Ted and Reed pointed the way, but now they have to share their dog bowl. And during inflationary times, people are going to cut back on the number of streaming services they have.Until just recently, Netflix seemed too big to fail, even too big to hate — although some did, anyway. Backed by an ebullient Wall Street, the company was able to outmoney everyone, spending exorbitant sums, poaching talent and executives and muscling into Oscar campaigns with its “Monopoly money,” as one disgusted competitor called it, or “drunken sailor spending,” as another said.“We were trying to build a library to make up for not having 90 years of storytelling,” Mr. Sarandos said.Once talent gorged on Netflix money, like geese destined for foie gras, some became cranky.“Everything was completely amazing up until it wasn’t,” said Janice Min, the C.E.O. of Ankler Media, whose buzzy newsletter circulates through Hollywood C suites. “It’s hard to destroy the ecosystem and try to become king at the same time.”Netflix was an occupying army. “It was Vichy Netflix in Hollywood for the past decade,” Ms. Min said, “where the whole town was forced to adopt their customs and language. Now the traditionalists believe that the interlopers have had a comeuppance.“The schadenfreude set are licking their chops that this is William Holden facedown in the swimming pool. But this is a company that forced Hollywood to move forward 20 years faster than it would have. The burning question in town is, do the executives at the top stay the same now that they’ve hit a massive speed bump?”I asked Mr. Sarandos a version of that question. Could he survive a Keeper Test? (That’s part of the “radical candor,” as it’s called, in Netflix culture, a constant re-evaluation of whether an employee is a star.)“I hope so,” Mr. Sarandos said. “I mean, I think so. We hold each other and the board holds us both to a pretty high bar,” he said, referring to Mr. Hastings. “And I don’t think there’s a place where he’d say, ‘Hey, where’s your accountability for this?’ We’re pretty on top of both the successes and the failures. And if we were not, I think that we would fail the Keeper Test, yeah.”When I asked Mr. Hastings if Mr. Sarandos would pass, he was brisk: “Ted has passed the Keeper Tests for the last 22 years.” The big picture, he said, is that Netflix “is continuing to have some of the most popular shows in America and around the world. We can always pick it up and, you know, we want to do that.”Despite his low-key manner and folksy expressions like “holy moly,” Mr. Hastings is perfectly capable of icing anyone, if he decides it’s in the best interest of the company. He does not think of employees as family, but as a sports team that has to win trophies. Mr. Hastings fired one of his best friends and original employees, Patty McCord, the human resources chief. They drove to work together and she helped him create the controversial culture.I’m also curious about the future of Mr. Sarandos’s top executives, Scott Stuber, the head of the film division, and Bela Bajaria, who oversees original content. So I press, referring to all of the top brass generally: “So, you don’t think any heads are going to roll?”“Um, the way we are organized, no one gets to make that assumption,” Mr. Hastings said. “Everyone has to continue to raise their game throughout the company.”He continued: “I would say we are always reaching for the highest performance, but our content is not why the current slowdown is happening.”‘Everything’s Not Going to Be for Everybody’Mr. Sarandos loves comedy, something that was his North Star when he found himself smack in the middle of the culture wars. There was a backlash last year to Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, “The Closer,” over his jokes about transgender people, and some Netflix employees walked out of the Los Angeles headquarters in protest.But Mr. Sarandos said that, while he was taken by surprise at the kerfuffle, he did not agonize over supporting Mr. Chappelle. He said that the only way comedians can figure out where the line is, is by “crossing the line every once in a while. I think it’s very important to the American culture generally to have free expression.”He continued: “We’re programming for a lot of diverse people who have different opinions and different tastes and different styles, and yet we’re not making everything for everybody. We want something for everybody but everything’s not going to be for everybody.”Netlix employees and activists protest the company’s handling of the Dave Chappelle controversy outside the company’s headquarters.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesHe said he believes this deeply, so his decision about Mr. Chappelle “wasn’t hard in that way. And rarely do you get the opportunity to put your principles to the test,” he said. “It was an opportunity to take somebody, like in Dave’s case, who is, by all measure, the comedian of our generation, the most popular comedian on Netflix for sure. Nobody would say that what he does isn’t thoughtful or smart. You just don’t agree with him. ”Mr. Chappelle was attacked onstage in May at the Hollywood Bowl during the “Netflix Is a Joke Festival,” by a man who said he was “triggered” by the comedian’s jokes about the L.G.B.T.Q. community and homelessness. Days later, Netflix released a new corporate culture memo, which had been workshopped among company employees for six months, and attracted 10,000 comments. The memo underscored Mr. Sarandos’s response: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”Conservatives celebrated. “Netflix Puts Its Woke Employees On Notice With Blunt Memo,” read a Daily Caller headline. When I asked Mr. Sarandos how he felt about turning into a conservative hero, he said, “It used to be a very liberal issue, so it’s an interesting time that we live in.”He added, “I always said if we censor in the U.S., how are we going to defend our content in the Middle East?”After the Ricky Gervais comedy special went up on Netflix Tuesday, a similar brush fire started about his transgender jokes, with Variety’s Daniel D’Addario writing a story headlined “Ricky Gervais Anti-Trans Special Proves Netflix Is On No One’s Side But Its Own.” I asked Mr. Sarandos about it. He said his remarks about Mr. Chappelle applied to Mr. Gervais.‘Are You the Netflix Guy?’In a town where executives and especially agents are often illiterate about the history of TV and movies, Mr. Sarandos is an unabashed fan. He told me that if he had a free day to do anything, he would watch a movie in the nine-seat screening room in his house, converted from a guest bedroom. The Netflix honcho can wax eloquent on the great shows he’s watching on HBO Max, Showtime, Disney+ and Peacock just as easily as the ones he loves on Netflix.Asked who would be at his dream dinner party, past or present, he said Ernie Kovacs, Carole Lombard, Orson Welles, Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. “I used to see the words ‘Created by Norman Lear’ so often, I didn’t think it was a real person,” he said. “I thought it was like ‘In God We Trust.’” One of the “blessings” of his life, he said, is that he has met many of his idols.“That thing about ‘Don’t meet your heroes,’ I think that’s silly,” he said. “The first time I got to go to the Oscars, we were sitting directly behind Francis Ford Coppola, and I was, like, giddy. So I tapped Nicole and whispered to her, and she goes ‘You’re a terrible whisperer, you know that?’ So the first break comes and he turns around and says, ‘Are you the Netflix guy?’ That was pretty wild.”Mr. SarandosDevin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesHe fell for the 54-year-old Nicole, a film producer who started in the music industry and Democratic politics, the night he met her at an event for Barack Obama in Los Angeles in 2008. She was the Southern California finance co-chair for the Obama campaign and became President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas. Mr. Sarandos said he knew she was the one after she showed her chops on old movies such as “Now, Voyager” and “Cabin in the Sky,” with Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong, and documentaries like “Eyes on the Prize,” about the American civil rights movement.His wife said his belly laugh, his “authentic” kindness, his desire to live life to the fullest and the fact that he’s a “really good egg” who jumps out of his car to help a motorist in trouble without thinking twice, are the reasons she fell in love with him. It certainly wasn’t his old Banana Republic jacket. (She upgraded him to a navy Brunello Cucinelli suit one Christmas.) Or his 1996 Acura MDX with the tear in the seat. (As a birthday gift to Nicole, he said he “put it out of its misery” and traded it for a 2016 black Porsche Cayennne S.U.V.)“I was never drawn to this for the trappings,” he said.Of the tragedy they went through with her mother, while Mr. Sarandos was still grieving his father, Ms. Avant said, “It would have torn many families apart. But Teddy doesn’t deflect. He sees a tragedy or crisis, takes it in and says ‘We are going to get through this.’ That’s what I love about him. He’s the calm in the storm.”Mr. Sarandos grew up in a lower-middle-class home in Phoenix in a family of five with young, “hippie Catholic” parents. His father was an electrician. “They started having kids at 17,” he told me. “Neither finished high school. My dad had this philosophy that if there’s leftover food, you could have more kids, I guess. My memories of growing up in that house are that it was chaotic all the time. Nothing was ever on a schedule. We didn’t have a bedtime. We didn’t have a dinner time.”He said TV gave him structure, and he dreamed of going up onto the screen, “The Purple Rose of Cairo” style, to be part of the Cunningham family on “Happy Days.”Ted Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe utilities and phone would often be cut off, he said, but his mother always made sure they had cable TV and she got a V.C.R. and a little dish on the roof to get HBO.“It was this crazy luxury for a family who could barely afford to keep the lights on,” he told me. Somehow, he thinks, his late mother had a vision for his future.The family didn’t go to movies unless it was a drive-in because his father couldn’t go two hours without a smoke. Their cultural high point was going to see Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons every year at the Arizona State Fair.When things got crazy at home, he went to his grandmother’s and it was “paradise.” “It was very structured, very calm,” he said. “She would watch a lot of TV, and she had all the magazines about movies. She always called movie stars by their first names like she knew them, like Mac and Glen for Mac Davis and Glen Campbell. They were friends, and I don’t know who stole whose wife but it was a very big deal for her.”And then, he said, “the universe” offered up the second video store in the state of Arizona around the corner. “When I walked into that store, it was a life changer,” he said. He worked his way up from clerk to managing eight video stores to one of the top jobs for West Coast Video, which at its peak had nearly 500 stores.‘It’s Not Like We Invented the Bidding War, You Know’Netflix resentment has been simmering for a while. Speaking in 2019 at CinemaCon, Helen Mirren told the crowd, “I love Netflix,” but then she flung a vulgarity at the streaming service, adding “There’s nothing like sitting in the cinema.”“She sent an immediate apology text,” Mr. Sarandos told me, smiling. “I think she was caught up in the moment. I mean, you’re talking to a roomful of small theater owners who were feeling they were under assault.”He said he understands “why people would be snickering a bit” now and notes: “Remember, I was in a business that was totally disrupted, too. I was in the video rental business.”Mr. Sarandos became so conversant with the 900 videos in the video stores he ran that he was the pre-algorithm, able to recommend films to people based on what they had previously watched.“I’ve always and I continue to be a very optimistic watcher,” he said. “I hardly ever turn off anything I’m watching because I think the good parts are coming.”As Ms. Min said, “Ted may be the only executive who has come within a million miles of an actual consumer of entertainment during his career.”Netflix’s co-CEOs, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressMr. Sarandos is philosophical about the town vibrating with joy at his troubles. “Nobody wants to have their foundations challenged or their conventions challenged and we definitely did all that.” He points out that it is, after all, a very competitive business. “It’s not like we invented the bidding war, you know.”Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose movies “Kindergarten Teacher” and “The Lost Daughter” were acquired by Netflix, evokes the Medicis in the way Netflix supports art that might get lost, art that is dark and painful to watch. “Not once was I pushed to make a change I didn’t want to make,” she said.Mr. Sarandos said that when he met Reed Hastings in 1999, he was driven by the desire to help great storytellers reach people around the world.“There were some movies that never came to Phoenix, and it always made me crazy,” he said. “I thought that video rental never really solved the promise because it just became a repeat of the same distribution problem, very hit driven.”Mr. Sarandos often brings up the idea of democratization. “Netflix did diversity and inclusion better than anyone in Hollywood ever had or will,” Ms. Min said. “One of their first shows was ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ a female prison drama, with a transgender character, that no one would touch.”When I talk to other executives and talent around town, they have glowing things to say about Mr. Sarandos behind his back.“It sounds so boring but this guy is incredibly friendly, kind, gregarious and warm,” said Jason Bateman, the star of Netflix’s “Ozark.” “If Marty Byrde were to describe him, he might say, he has all the power of a cartel boss and none of the frown.”Many rivals do question Netflix’s business model, which they think was overvalued by Wall Street and outran financial logic for a long time. Some say royalties have been replaced by front-loaded, bloated contracts, making flops all the more costly and obscuring creators’ ability to see just how successful their works are. Those rivals wonder if the quality of Netflix’s content needs upgrading — given that it made 70 movies in 2021 — so that, as one rival executive put it, they have filet at the buffet as well as vegetables and mashed potatoes.“Tiffany’s became a Sears overnight,” sniffed one Hollywood player who has dealt with the company.And they wonder about the wisdom of writing gazillion-dollar checks to sign up celebrities with no filmmaking experience, like the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who were given producing deals. (Barack Obama is also signed up to narrate a National Geographic-style nature documentary.)“You have to bet early on storytellers,” Mr. Sarandos said. My experience with Barack and Michelle is they are phenomenal storytellers.”But Netflix is not going forward with Meghan Markle’s cartoon show about a 12-year-old girl, “Pearl.”How does it feel to drop a semi-royal?“We’re all optimistic when we go into these projects,” Mr. Sarandos said, “and sometimes they do or don’t materialize.”What’s So Bad About Being CBS?Mr. Sarandos’s 2020 decision to oust Cindy Holland, his vice president of original content who had developed expensive hits like “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Stranger Things,” “The Crown” and “The Queen’s Gambit” and signed off on big checks — $100 million to Shonda Rhimes (recruited by Mr. Sarandos) and $300 million to Ryan Murphy — continues to rankle in some quarters. Ms. Holland was seen as an exemplar of more curated chic and less mass appeal, and as Kim Masters wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, she clashed with Mr. Sarandos about the demand for ever more volume, the lavish Oscar campaigns and giving Mr. Chappelle more specials.Mr. Sarandos said that he and Ms. Holland got the business to where it was, but he wanted to give Ms. Bajaria, formerly Netflix’s head of unscripted and international content, the top slot because she had international experience, which he thought could help the company to grow. She also had a gift for picking hits like “You.”Some rivals contend that Netflix started out boldly but then became Walmart or CBS, with too much “Emily in Paris” and not enough “Stranger Things.”The Netflix hit “Emily in Paris.”Netflix, via Associated Press“CBS is one of the most successful TV networks in history,” Mr. Sarandos responded imperturbably. “So, yeah.” He also thinks “Emily in Paris” is high-quality television, adding “Peyton Manning goes on ‘S.N.L.’ and is talking about ‘Emily in Paris.’”“We’re trying to satisfy multiple tastes,” he said. “This year, we had two best picture nominees, ‘Power of the Dog’ and ‘Don’t Look Up,’ and they couldn’t be any more different.”And he brags about “Squid Game,” which he calls “the biggest entertainment story in a century.” He said his team in Korea found the story, which had been pitched as a movie for 10 years, and asked the creator to conceptualize it as a series.“This is where the algorithm is your friend,” he said. “The algorithm is an advocate for the audience trying to find that thing you never heard of that you’re going to love. And it kept recognizing very quickly that this thing was happening in Korea and ‘Oh, my God, it’s happening in Japan.’ ‘Oh, it’s happening in France.’”He’s sanguine that Netflix hasn’t hit its ceiling. After all, according to Nielsen, streaming accounted for a little more than 30 percent of TV viewership in the United States in April. Netflix had the most viewers of any streamer, but accounted for just 6.6 percent of all TV viewership in the United States.One way that Netflix will keep growing, Mr. Sarandos said, is that the company will work to tighten password control, or figure out a way people can pay to share their password. “About a third of American households are borrowing the password to someone else’s account,” Mr. Hastings said.Mr. Sarandos doesn’t agree with criticism that Netflix needs to stop greenlighting so many projects and embrace a more selective approach, even though, as Scott Galloway, a tech guru and New York University marketing professor, said dryly, “They’re spending the defense budget of Sweden on content.” (Actually, Netflix spends far more. Sweden spent about $7 billion on defense in 2021, and Netflix said it spent $17 billion on content that year.)“I don’t think that we’ve done anything so willy-nilly that we should rethink it,” Mr. Sarandos said, adding: “While many competitors and pundits talk about volume being a negative, I think it is a tremendous positive for consumers who all have a different view of what ‘quality’ is. I think that, while they kick us around about it, they are starting on the same path — HBO with Discovery programming on the same shelf, Disney broadening their brand with Fox content, and even FX’s radical expansion of output to 22 shows.”Does he think that Netflix not diversifying its revenue strategy has exacerbated recent obstacles?“I think it’s the trade-off of simplicity and complexity,” he said. “And to do what we did in the last 10 years, I think we benefited much more from simplicity.”Many artists at Netflix are happy to defend the company in this moment of churn.“Decisions are not made by an algorithm,” said Guillermo del Toro, who is making “Pinocchio” for Netflix. “What’s really important about Ted is that he’s in the room, not just his body. He’s completely engaged with you.”Jerry Seinfeld waves off the schadenfreude. “People are just yapping away at their lunches, like they always do,” the comedian said. “They come after you if you’ve got the ball. Ted’s got the ball.”Shonda Rhimes, flush with “Inventing Anna” and “Bridgerton” success, is rosy about the future: “I live in this space and I wouldn’t bet against Netflix.”“Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings are A-Rod and Barry Bonds,” Mr. Galloway said, adding that while they may have been beaned in the face, “You don’t want to bet against these guys.”Mr. Sarandos, of course, is optimistic. “We’re 90 years behind all of our current competitors in what we do today, and they’re just entering into our space,” he said. “We have to have content that people like better on Netflix than anywhere else. I know it seems like it should be more complicated than that, but it almost isn’t.”Mr. Sarandos.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You were a better video store clerk than Quentin Tarantino.Ted Sarandos: I don’t know how great a video store clerk he was, but I was probably nicer to the customers who forgot to rewind the tapes.If media executives recreated “Squid Game,” Rupert Murdoch would be the guy who tricks everyone, Reed Hastings would be the frontman, and Bob Chapek would get killed in the first round.(Laughing) Plausible. And you could scramble them in any way.Let’s play MFK (Marry, “Fornicate,” Kill): Hulu, HBO and Disney+.I would say “M” all three and I would “F” all three. The jury is out on “K.”Barack is much more fun to party with than Michelle.Deny.You named your son after Tony Bennett long before you met him.That is true. Anthony Bennett Sarandos. Tony is an unbelievable singer, obviously, but also a civil rights activist, a great painter, a super-well-rounded human being. We got to be good friends and one day, Tony goes “Why would you name your kid Tony Bennett?” I go, “Well, first of all, I never thought I’d have to explain it to you.”After the Netflix subscriber news broke, you turned on Merle Haggard’s hit “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”I’m a huge fan.Executives at media companies make too much money.No comment. More
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Kevin Spacey to Face Sexual Assault Charges in Britain
by Aurelia Butler 31 May 2022, 13:32
The actor said in a statement to “Good Morning America” that he will seek to prove his innocence against the charges.The actor Kevin Spacey said on Tuesday that he will voluntarily travel to Britain to face criminal sexual assault charges, allowing the authorities there to formally charge him without having to pursue extradition proceedings.Last week, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced that law enforcement had authorized the charges, of four counts of sexual assault against three men, as well as one charge of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.” But Mr. Spacey, 62, cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales.A representative for Mr. Spacey told the ABC News show “Good Morning America” in a statement that he would travel to Britain to defend himself.“While I am disappointed with their decision to move forward, I will voluntarily appear in the U.K. as soon as can be arranged and defend myself against these charges, which I am confident will prove my innocence,” the statement said.The charges concern three complainants. The alleged incidents date from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013. During those years, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England. The Metropolitan Police said that one of the men was now “in his 40s” and that the other two were now in their 30s, but did not provide their exact ages.A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment on Tuesday.In his statement, Mr. Spacey also said, “I very much appreciate the Crown Prosecution Service’s statement in which they carefully reminded the media and the public that I am entitled to a fair trial, and innocent until proven otherwise.”The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old. Mr. Spacey is currently defending himself in a lawsuit filed by Mr. Rapp in New York.After Mr. Rapp’s allegations were made public in a BuzzFeed article, 20 people who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior. The theater, which said last week that it could not comment on ongoing criminal proceedings, commissioned an independent investigation, which Mr. Spacey did not take part in, and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.” More
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Heddy Honigmann, Whose Films Told of Loss and Love, Dies at 70
by Aurelia Butler 29 May 2022, 17:15
A documentarian, she liked to engage her subjects — Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, survivors of genocide — in conversations.Heddy Honigmann, the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker whose humane and gently paced documentaries of Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, disabled people and their service dogs, Dutch peacekeepers and the widows of men who had been murdered in a tiny village near Sarajevo, were stories of loss, trauma and exile — and the sustaining forces of art and love — died on May 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 70.Jannet Honigmann, her sister, confirmed the death. She said Ms. Honigmann had been ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.In the economic chaos of Peru in the 1990s, when the government nearly bankrupted the country and inflation soared, many middle-class people began moonlighting as taxi drivers, slapping a “Taxi” sticker on their Volkswagen Beetles or battered Nissans to signal that they were on call.Ms. Honigmann collected their histories in the 1995 film “Metal and Melancholy,” riding in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs whose drivers included a teacher, a police officer, an actor and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. (She took more than 120 taxi rides to find her subjects.)The stories that unspooled included a devastating tale from a man whose 5-year-old daughter had leukemia and who was driving to pay for her costly medical care. When he tells Ms. Honigmann that he encourages his daughter, whom he describes as a fighter, by saying “Life is hard, but beautiful,” it’s a maxim not just for this film but for all of Ms. Honigmann’s work.In “The Underground Orchestra” (1999), musicians busking in the Paris metro — including a disc jockey from Zaire who has escaped a forced labor camp and an Argentine pianist whose torture at the hands of his government nearly destroyed his hands — describe the refugee odysseys that have brought them there. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an open-ended celebration of human tenacity and life force that builds up a compelling personal vision in an offhanded, roundabout way.”Ms. Honigmann rode in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs to collect the stories of cabdrivers in Lima, Peru, for her film “Metal and Melancholy” (1995).Icarus FilmsDespite stories of terrible trauma, the movie is also a celebration of the culture these artists have left behind — a “world-music primer,” as Mr. Holden put it, “featuring some astonishingly beautiful sounds.”The cultural critic Wesley Morris, in his Times review of “Buddy,” Ms. Honigmann’s 2019 film about people with disabilities and their service dogs, called Ms. Honigmann a humanist who “listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.”But she was more of a gentle interlocutor than an insistent interrogator. There were no narrators in her films, no propulsive music or quick cuts to tell viewers how to experience what they were seeing. Her pacing was almost languid; she allowed her subjects to tell their stories in their own way and in their own time. And she hated the word “interview.”“‘Interviews were for subjects,’ she would say,” said Ester Gould, who was a co-writer, researcher and assistant producer on many of Ms. Honigmann’s films. “‘I have conversations with people.’”In an interview at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2002, Ms. Honigmann said: “I think the only rule for me is that when I hear the stories, if they keep my attention, they will also keep the attention of the spectators.” She added: “I lost myself in conversations. And conversations, if they are interesting, they are never boring.”Ms. Honigmann was primarily a documentarian, but she also made narrative films — notably “Goodbye” (1995), about the doomed, highly charged affair between a young preschool teacher and a married man.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, all of which had been published after his death in 1987 because he worried that they would be seen as pornographic. Ms. Honigmann’s readers took to their roles with gusto and often confided their own erotic histories. Graphic, sensual, tender and at times very funny, the film is a rumination on desire, memory and age.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.Film ForumMs. Honigmann’s films have won awards at film festivals all over the world and been shown in retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Paris Film Festival, among other venues.In 2013 she was given the Living Legend Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Yet she may be the most famous filmmaker Americans have never heard of, according to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum in New York, which has presented the premieres of many of Ms. Honigmann’s movies.“As Americans, we live in a bubble in terms of film, because Hollywood is so dominant that documentary filmmakers don’t get the same kind of attention that narrative fiction film receives,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “In this country, among documentary filmmakers, Heddy was a star. In Europe, she was a superstar. In the Netherlands, she’s a national treasure.”Heddy Ena Honigmann Pach was born on Oct. 1, 1951, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were European Jewish refugees.Her father, Witold Honigmann Weiss, an artist and illustrator who created a popular comic strip, was born in Vienna and had been interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria before he escaped in 1942, making his way to Peru by way of Russia and Italy. Her mother, Sarah Pach Miller, an actress and homemaker, had left Poland with her family for Peru in 1939. (In Peru, it is the custom to use the surnames of both parents. Heddy dropped the name Pach as a filmmaker.)Heddy studied biology and literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Her father wanted her to be a doctor. She first wanted to be a poet — she loved Emily Dickinson — but decided filmmaking was a better medium for her. She left Peru to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and she did not return to her home country for nearly two decades.An early marriage in Lima to Gustavo Riofrio ended in divorce. In the 1970s she married Frans van de Staak, a Dutch filmmaker she met in Rome, and the couple moved to Amsterdam; she became a Dutch citizen in 1978. Their marriage also ended in divorce.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her son, Stefan van de Staak; her husband, Henk Timmermans; and her stepson, Jaap Timmermans.Ms. Honigmann’s film “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), told of the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces killed the men there. Pieter Van Huystee FilmOne of Ms. Honigmann’s most harrowing films was “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), about the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces had murdered the men and burned the place to the ground in 1992. Ms. Honigmann captured the women’s loss by drawing out their memories of their loved ones, and by showing the photographs and belongings the women had saved as mementos.She said she tried to show that the most terrible thing about war is not the numbers of the dead, which she called an abstraction: “The catastrophe is, for instance, seeing that a whole town has lost all the craftsmen, that people who were in love were separated forever, that children who loved to play football and loved music cannot hear it anymore.”“When you are born from immigrants you are educated in melancholy,” Ms. Honigmann said in her 2002 talk at the Walker Center. “You hear all the time of stories of people leaving. That’s in my films. People are left, or they are leaving, or losing their memory.”When Michael Tortorello, her interviewer, asked her what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Peru, she answered promptly: “I would have a been a taxi driver.” More
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‘The Triangle of Sadness’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes
by Aurelia Butler 28 May 2022, 20:51
CANNES, France — The satire “Triangle of Sadness,” from the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival at a ceremony here on Saturday. A blunt, ugly sendup of class politics, the movie had sharply divided critics.The awards ceremony ran a relatively painless 90 or so minutes, another reminder that the emphasis at Cannes remains on the movies themselves, not the accompanying circus. Held inside the magnificent Grand Lumière Theater inside the festival’s headquarters — with the nine-person jury watching from the stage — the awards confer critical legitimation and generate much-needed public relations for movies that, years into the pandemic, are headed into a still-difficult world for art cinema.The Grand Prix — the festival’s second prize — was split between “Close,” from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and “Stars at Noon,” from the French auteur Claire Denis. “Stars at Noon” was brutalized by critics, but it wasn’t wholly a shock that it won an award: Vincent Lindon, the president of this year’s jury, has appeared in several of Denis’s movies. “Close,” a critical and audience favorite about two 13-year-old boys whose friendship is tragically tested, drew warm applause from the Lumière audience.The Jury Prize, the third prize, was split between two very different dramas: “EO,” a heartbreaker about a donkey from the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski, and “The Eight Mountains,” a coming-of-age story from the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Skolimowski, 84, began his acceptance speech by thanking (and naming) all six of his donkeys — including a little beauty called Taco. For her part, Vandermeersch seemed to surprise her co-director and partner by repeatedly kissing him right before he started his acceptance speech.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook won the director prize for “Decision to Leave,” an entertainingly twisty thriller (which riffs on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”), which was a critical favorite. “This is so cool,” Park said in English on taking the stage, though he also added an expletive.The screenplay award was given to the engrossing (and chatty) drama “Boy from Heaven,” from the Swedish director Tarik Saleh. The film traces the political intrigues swirling around a young Egyptian student, a Sunni Muslim, soon after he begins studying at a powerful religious university. After accepting his award, Saleh dedicated his prize to young Egyptian filmmakers: “Raise your voices, and tell your stories.”In one of the bigger surprises of the evening, the best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the widely disliked true-crime drama “Holy Spider,” from the Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi. She plays a journalist who faces the indifference and misogyny of the police as she tracks down a serial killer. The best actor prize was given to Song Kang-ho, the brilliant South Korean actor (“Parasite”), for his sensitive, soulful performance as a baby trafficker in “Broker,” the latest from the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda.A special prize to commemorate the festival’s 75th anniversary was given to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were in competition again with “Tori and Lokita,” about two undocumented African immigrants in a cruel, profoundly inhospitable Belgium. The Dardennes are among the most justly honored filmmakers in the history of Cannes, having won the Palme twice (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “The Child” in 2005). This award was richly deserved. More
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The Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard Libel Case Is in the Jury’s Hands
by Aurelia Butler 27 May 2022, 21:31
After closing arguments, the judge asked a jury in Virginia to decide a defamation trial that focused as much on domestic abuse as damaged reputations.After 23 days of testimony that painted conflicting pictures of a tumultuous Hollywood marriage, lawyers for Johnny Depp and Amber Heard delivered their closing arguments on Friday, seeking to persuade the jury that their client had been the person who was abused and defamed.Mr. Depp’s lawyers asserted that their movie star client had been falsely disparaged in a Washington Post op-ed in which Ms. Heard referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”The accusations of spousal abuse that she was referencing, the lawyers argued, had ruined Mr. Depp’s life.“We ask you to give Mr. Depp his life back by telling the world that Mr. Depp is not the abuser Ms. Heard said he is,” a lawyer for Mr. Depp, Camille Vasquez, said, “and hold Ms. Heard accountable for her lies.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers countered that not only were the accusations and the op-ed entirely true, but during legal proceedings in 2020, the actress was unfairly maligned when a lawyer, who represented Mr. Depp at the time, called her abuse accusations a hoax.“In Mr. Depp’s world, you don’t leave Mr. Depp, and if you do, he will start a campaign of global humiliation against you,” argued a lawyer for Ms. Heard, Ben Rottenborn.Now, the case is in the hands of seven jurors who deliberated until Friday evening and left the Fairfax County Circuit Court with instructions to return on Tuesday.The trial has drawn widespread attention because the proceedings have been both televised and livestreamed through a pair of cameras in the courtroom, a rarity in Virginia. On one YouTube channel streaming the proceedings, called Law & Crime Network, more than one million users were reported to be watching.There has been stiff competition to fill the public seats in the courtroom, with observers — most of them fans of Mr. Depp — lining up in the middle of the night to secure a spot. On Friday morning, about 150 people waited in line to get into the courtroom, with hundreds more lining a nearby road, some of them dressed as Mr. Depp’s movie characters.Peyton Elmendorf, a 27-year-old Depp fan, said that when she first heard about Ms. Heard’s accusations, she had misgivings about defending the actor given the #MeToo movement. But now, after hearing other of the actor’s romantic partners speak positively about him, she said she felt confident voicing her support.Our Coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard TrialA trial between the formerly married actors has become a fierce battleground over the truth about their relationship. What to Know: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are suing each other with competing defamation claims, amid mutual accusations of domestic abuse.Stan Culture in the Courtroom: The closely watched trial is a case study in what happens when complex claims are filtered through the lenses of extreme fandom. TikTok’s Hate Machine: The online commentary about the trial quickly turned into an internet-wide smear campaign against Ms. Heard. Dressing to Suggest: Both litigants appeared notably sober in their fashion choices. That is no coincidental thing.“I knew he didn’t do it,” she said.Outnumbered outside the courthouse, but unpersuaded, Dan Kim, 26, quietly held a sign nearby that said “I stand with Amber.” He called it “crystal clear” that Mr. Depp had abused Ms. Heard.Supporters of Mr. Depp outside the courthouse on Friday.Craig Hudson/Associated PressUltimately, the jury must consider the veracity and reputational impact of a narrow set of statements. But the six-week trial has encompassed testimony about a vast array of alleged incidents from Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard’s marriage.Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp of repeated physical abuse that she said often coincided with drug and alcohol use and began with his accusing her of infidelity. She has also alleged several instances of sexual assault — including an accusation that he assaulted her with a bottle in Australia in 2015.Amber Heard, talking to one of her lawyers during the proceedings on Friday.Pool Photo via Steve Helber/ReutersMr. Depp has denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting Ms. Heard and has portrayed her as the aggressor in the relationship, recalling violence from her throughout their relationship, as well as angry tirades and demeaning name-calling. Ms. Heard has denied hitting Mr. Depp except in defense of herself or her sister.Testimony about the incidents often involved sensational details: disputed affairs with celebrities, graffiti written in blood and a missing chunk of Mr. Depp’s finger that forced the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie to pause production.In laying out the highlights of their evidence, Mr. Depp’s lawyers reminded the jury of witnesses who said they did not see injuries on Ms. Heard around the times she reported having them, showed a photo of him with a “shiner” that he said she gave him and replayed audio of arguments between the estranged couple in which Ms. Heard admits to having hit Mr. Depp. In one audio clip, Ms. Heard can be heard saying, “I did start a physical fight,” challenging her claim that she only hit Mr. Depp as a defense. (Ms. Heard testified that in those instances, she hit him in response to his own aggression.)His team also pointed to instances where there were no medical records or photographs to corroborate her allegations of abuse.“The ‘mountain of evidence’ that Mr. Depp abused Ms. Heard is simply not there,” Ms. Vasquez argued. “What we have is a mountain of unproven allegations that are wild, over the top and implausible.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers described witnesses who said she had told them about the abuse. Mr. Rottenborn played a video of Mr. Depp angrily slamming kitchen cabinets and showed jurors a text in which the actor told Ms. Heard’s father he had gone “too far in our fight.” He then showed the jury a photo of Ms. Heard with a red mark on her face after, she said, Mr. Depp hurled a phone at her. Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, another of her lawyers, reminded the jury about a forensic psychologist who testified to reviewing a therapist’s notes — which were not entered into evidence — that reflect contemporaneous reports from Ms. Heard where she complained of sexual abuse.“A ruling against Amber here sends a message that no matter what you do, as an abuse victim, you always have to do more,” Mr. Rottenborn said. “No matter what you document, you always have to document more. No matter whom you tell, you always have to tell more people.”Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More
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James Wong Howe: A Gutsy Cinematographer Finally Gets His Due
by Aurelia Butler 27 May 2022, 21:09
A retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image looks at a career filled with sublime images made at a time of strong anti-Asian sentiment in Hollywood.The Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe was an industrious, peripatetic youngster. In modern parlance, he was a hustler, but so was everyone in the early, exploratory years of cinema, when the fledgling film industry churned out dozens of titles every week. During the 1910s, the silent film directors who won acclaim — like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille — seemed to rise through shrewd business acumen, false confidence and good luck.Wong Howe had all of those things, but he was gutsier — he had to be. It was clear in the boundless, reckless innovation of his work; his reputation as a supreme perfectionist; and his success and respected status in an industry that saw virtually no place for artists of Asian descent. James Wong Howe was defiance personified.His decades-long career, which spanned the silent era, Hollywood’s golden age and the New Hollywood renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s, was emblematic of a creative spirit that persisted despite changing fashions, industry upheavals and discriminatory practices. He revolutionized the way films communicated visually, developing new techniques that could convey feelings without the need for words or even performers — like the expressionistic use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses in John Frankenheimer’s body-swapping science-fiction drama, “Seconds” (1966); or one of the earliest aerial shots in the final moments of Joshua Logan’s Technicolor romantic comedy “Picnic” (1955).Rock Hudson in “Seconds,” which Wong Howe shot in part using wide-angle and fish-eye lenses.Paramount Pictures/Photofest via MoMIThese and other examples of Wong Howe’s photographic prowess can be seen in a continuing series dedicated to his work that runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, in 1899. In the early 1900s, he was whisked away to Pasco, Wash., by his entrepreneurial father. There, he experienced racism, learned to box and began tinkering with cameras before his father’s death, in 1914, set off a period of drifting. Not unlike Charlie Chaplin’s classic character the Tramp, Wong Howe was a game outsider stumbling from misadventure to misadventure. He went to Oregon, San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, where the 18-year-old Jimmie Howe eventually finagled a job on the janitorial staff of Lasky Studios.DeMille took a liking to Jimmie; he was amused by the young man’s floral shirts, the contrast between his small stature and the outsize cigars he smoked on set. Wong Howe was not passive; he seemed to take the matter of his skin color as a challenge. In his free time, he began familiarizing himself with the studio’s equipment and practiced taking pictures with a still camera. Soon, he was promoted to assistant cameraman.No one at the time was what we might today consider a bona fide camera expert. People learned on the job, improvised and experimented with the new technologies, so the crew members who distinguished themselves were the ones who found creative solutions to the problems that arose on set. This was Wong Howe’s forte and the source of his first big break. The actress Mary Miles Minter, impressed by Wong Howe’s still portraits of her, insisted he shoot her next film. He had devised a solution that could keep her blue eyes from turning white on camera, a problem caused by the blue-sensitive orthochromatic film used at the time. From then on, his reputation as a formidable cameraman was assured.Wong Howe, left, on the set of “The Glory Guys” (1965). His career ran from silents to the New Hollywood renaissance.United Artists/Photofest, via MoMIWong Howe wasn’t the only Asian artist hanging out on the studio back lots. There was the Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa. Hollywood’s onscreen enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws restricted him to playing forbidden-lover roles or sadistic Svengali types, but his popularity among white women viewers made him a bankable presence. Then there was the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, a go-to supporting performer as the film industry began to mount bigger, more spectacular productions in “exotic” settings. Wong Howe, in fact, would shoot her in one of her first major roles, as the Indigenous princess Tiger Lily in Herbert Brenon’s “Peter Pan.”But renewed anti-Asian sentiment and the Production Code of the 1930s, which put a chokehold on the depiction of interracial relationships, further diminished the industry’s willingness to work with performers of Asian descent. Wong Howe initially floundered during this period, but his work — particularly his penchant for dramatic, high-contrast lighting, which earned him the nickname “Low-key Howe” — spoke for itself. His split-screen shot allows Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelgänger in John Cromwell’s “The Prisoner of Zenda,” (1937), and the fight scenes he filmed in Busby Berkeley’s “They Made Me a Criminal” (1939) are so visceral you can almost feel the boxing gloves jabbing.Though he was adored by the press — what a novelty that an Asian man could be so talented and so full of personality — and respected by his collaborators, Wong Howe was often scorned by the white crew members under his command. He dealt with laws and prejudices that relegated him to second-class citizenship all of his life. During World War II, he wore a button that read “I am Chinese” to ward off harassment should anyone think he was Japanese. Though he had been living in the United States for nearly four decades, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited him from gaining citizenship; without it, he was forced to turn down exciting creative opportunities, like joining John Ford’s wartime documentary crew.Wong Howe’s split-screen shot allowed Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelganger in “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937).Warner Bros.Most devastating perhaps was his marriage to the novelist Sanora Babb; the couple tied the knot in Paris in 1937, but California’s anti-miscegenation laws and the studios’ morality clause prevented them from going public until decades later. For his suspected association with Hollywood Communists, he was put on the “graylist” by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; Wong Howe kept out of politics for the most part, but it didn’t help that China had become a Communist state.Still, he carried on during the precarious ’40s, working with Fritz Lang on the provocative war thriller “Hangmen Also Die!,” and capturing Ida Lupino in all her shades of ambition and vulnerability in Vincent Sherman’s pitch-black melodrama “The Hard Way.”Wong Howe’s images are sublime, his expressive interplay of light and shadow summoning moral conflicts out of thin air. He re-envisioned New York with a bleak, otherworldly flair with “Sweet Smell of Success,” Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 drama about a vicious newspaperman, a work that many consider to be Wong Howe’s chef d’oeuvre. He coated interior-set walls in oil to give them a surreal shimmer, and used long-focus lenses to make buildings look clustered together, emphasizing a sense of claustrophobic delirium.Walter Brennan in “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943), which Wong Howe shot for the director Fritz Lang.Cohen Media GroupThere are few individuals whose work so comparably ushered in cinema’s transition from mere dime-ticket spectacle to art form. Still, Wong Howe was hungry. Since the 1920s, he had wanted to direct, and though he was given the opportunity in the form of commissioned documentaries and “B” movies, his real ambitions were too often denied. There was a project about rickshaw pullers in China, as well as a script he wrote with Babb about San Francisco’s Chinatown, but both ideas were ultimately dropped for lack of financing. If you can catch only one screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, make it Wong Howe’s sole directorial feature, “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), which stars a fresh-faced Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in a drama about the Harlem Globetrotters. It is a bare-bones production, but the grit and spirit of something even greater was just beneath the surface, like Wong Howe himself.Wong Howe didn’t deny his Chinese roots. For a time, he ran a popular Chinese eatery that was frequented by Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney and Tyrone Power. And in his final years, he took to wearing traditional Chinese clothes. In Todd Rainsberger’s 1981 study of the cinematographer, it becomes clear that Wong Howe, who died in 1976, longed to create a more expansive portrait of Americanness, one that felt true to him, if not his employers. He was one of the great American cinematographers and a two-time Oscar winner, but he wanted more because he knew he deserved it. Such was his defiance.“How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More
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New Books About Hollywood and the Art Industry
by Aurelia Butler 27 May 2022, 20:30
Books about Viola Davis, Harvey Fierstein, Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward and more take us “into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings.”Millie von PlatenThe one thing we want to know about art is the one thing no one seems to be able to tell us. How, exactly, does the magic happen? It seems to be a site for danger and vulnerability, and the people who do it keep secrets inside them — sometimes biographical ones, certainly creative ones — that they aren’t always able to convey. But still, we read hungrily about them, trying to understand how some eyes see more than ours do.A set of books this season takes us into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings of a career, a character, even the pandemic-as-theater. The ones that go furthest from the present are the most comforting. But perhaps because they’re all written by academics, journalists and actors, they each contain a little shudder of the apocalyptic.Catching at gossamer is what the film critic David Thomson has been doing for decades, in editions of his “Biographical Dictionary of Film” and his more than 20 books, like last year’s elliptical lament about film directing, “A Light in the Dark.” Movies are a memory machine, and Thomson is a master at writing about his own inner screen. The last two years (the last six, the last 30) have been a mess, and Thomson’s DISASTER MON AMOUR (Yale University, 212 pp., $25) carries you backward into them. Of course, film is always his thought-companion, but it is a little surprising that Thomson goes so deep so fast on the Rock schlock “San Andreas.” Still, you cannot fault him; he lives on the West Coast, so thoughts of “the big one” are never far off. This book — chatty, discursive, essayish — is his way of surviving under such shadows.The devastation of a school in Aberfan, South Wales, 1966.Mirrorpix/Getty ImagesOther catastrophes Thomson addresses here include the 1966 Aberfan slag heap disaster, our fast-burning environmental collapse, and, of course, the Covid pandemic and its pre-existing condition, the Trump administration. He makes telling reference to Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” which recorded the plague in 1665; I think Thomson believes his own book, slim and digressive, is just that kind of briskly conducted, pocket-size diary, applicable to our current crisis. After a bracing cold-air quote by Defoe, though, Thomson’s thinking can seem a little less … toothsome. “Sometimes one can think that people are the great disaster, and innocence the essential affectation,” he writes. Lot of qualifiers in that.One of the least pleasant stylistic touches in the book is an ongoing imagined conversation with an old lady, a figure he borrows from Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon,” who sits at the author’s shoulder and asks him questions, congratulates him on his son’s intelligence and makes cracks. “May I share an amusing remark with you?” she asks.Author: It would be most welcome.Old lady: That Dr. Birx — if she knotted together all her scarves and shawls, she might be able to escape from the prison.Author: A Rapunzel?That’s it. The chapter ends there. Thomson knows everything there is to know about film; he has been taking dutiful notes on disasters. He does not, though, know how to write a button.If you dance over that stuff, the short book moves rapidly, like film rewinding through a projector. It’s certainly a record of a mind that runs a bit faster than the rest of ours, one crowded with frames from films and lines from books. The finest section is an in-depth examination of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” first the film, then the novel, and Thomson’s passion for it stirs the book. He demonstrates for us something quite practical: In times of catastrophe, art gives us an object in the near view to focus on. Struck by the glare of a great sentence, our eyes can’t see the horror just beyond the page — and in some blessed moments, the book offers exactly that kind of dazzled respite.The Gravitas and Vulnerability of Viola DavisThe Oscar-winning actress has become one of the bestof her generation, one powerful performance at a time.Inside Out: Viola Davis has faced trauma and grief throughout her life. The painful experiences have left a mark on her performances.By the Book: In an interview, the actress shared what recording the audiobook version of her new memoir, “Finding Me,” was like.An Iconic Character: In “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Davis brings the 1920s blues trailblazer, Ma Rainey, to life. Here is what she had to say about the role.‘The First Lady’: The artist plays Michelle Obama in the Showtime series, which explores the lives and fashion of three U.S. first ladies.What about one of the people who have been on the screen, showing Thomson (and the rest of us) our humanity? There are two things hidden in a performer: their art and everything else. The great actor Viola Davis’s memoir, FINDING ME (Ebony/HarperOne, 291 pp., $28.99), restrains itself to the everything else, plunging us again and again into her childhood, which was a cauldron of pain. The memoir thins when it moves away from trauma, taking on speed and lightness like a runner breaking free of a muddy stretch of track. It means that apart from some thoughtful meditations on her Juilliard experience (How did being trained to play in exclusively European “classics” help or limit her? She weighs it carefully), we can read and read and find very little about how Davis actually achieved her spectacular performances in “Doubt,” in “Fences,” in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”Viola Davis at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty ImagesInstead you read “Finding Me” to discover how she got her courage. She does not need to tell us at the outset that the book originated in her public speaking engagements — each chapter moves toward self-discovery, and even the worst revelations (including sexual assaults, domestic abuse, violence, hunger and a variety of poverty-related humiliations) come with an arrow pointing out of them. Look, each chapter says, I survived and thrived. Davis’s from-the-shoulder prose doesn’t pretty it up: Her father, MaDaddy, was a source of terror. But he changed, and she allowed him to shift his place in her heart. She brings this fierce, cleareyed refusal-to-forget and willingness-to-forgive to her time in the industry, too. She cites the statistics and her own experiences of racism, including some self-abnegating choices to play roles she knew were beneath her. The best parts of the book have this angry clarity; they sound like a call to arms. For fans of her artistry, though, you will have to look elsewhere to understand the mechanisms of her craft.Likewise, you won’t find a key to Harvey Fierstein’s creative mysteries in his kicky memoir, I WAS BETTER LAST NIGHT (Knopf, 384 pp., $30), though you will find boatloads of charm and gossip and some sudden ice-water drops into fury. His playwright’s mind is always keeping notes, and, as Fierstein says, “The jockey never recalls using a whip. The horse never forgets.” He certainly hasn’t forgotten his childhood or time in the 1970s and ’80s downtown theater scene, both of which he describes in lush detail. These unmissable chapters are slick with makeup and sweat: acting in Brooklyn, anonymous sex at the Trucks, a scarifying coming-out experience (do not leave certain kinds of photos around your house), late-night snacks on the Warhol Factory’s tab, his first drag costume, AIDS, love, crushes, grief and the first stirrings of a triumphant talent.Once we reach the greased-rails part of his career — after he broke through, he succeeded fast and young and often — Fierstein assumes a certain amount of familiarity from his reader. So any neo-Harvey-phytes will need to rent “Torch Song Trilogy” and “La Cage aux Folles”; you might want to find a bootleg of his Broadway performances in “Hairspray” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” too, just to fully understand what he’s talking about. He cheerfully addresses frequently asked questions (Why does Arnold have so much bunny paraphernalia in “Torch Song”?), but reader, beware: These might not be universally asked questions.From left, Mary Woronov, Nancy McCormick, Fred Savage and Harvey Fierstein in Ron Tavel’s “Kitchenette,” from “I Was Better Last Night.”Harvey TavelAlso, in his Big Star period, he writes with more caution and delicacy, as he does when he briefly talks about Robin Williams, whom he cherished as a brother. Now, I say “delicacy,” yet there’s a late, hilarious bit about a revival of “Torch Song,” in which he yells at the actor Michael Urie about how to bottom. So there’s delicacy, and there’s delicacy — but “I Was Better Last Night” does ease up in its second half. The last section, after he becomes sober, has a certain tact about it, a refusal to strike hard. I don’t regret this palpable kindness but rather his correspondingly light touch as he talks about his craft. He learned a great deal from Jerry Herman and Arthur Laurents, but what was it, exactly? His accounts of, say, Ron Tavel, an early mentor and dear friend who co-created the Theater of the Ridiculous, are so much more revealing. For some reason, he sees most clearly when he looks back 40 years and more. In other words — it’s an autobiography.If you look further back than that, you start to see different contours — maybe even the big shapes, like landscapes. Mark Rozzo’s EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE WERE CRAZY: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco, 454 pp., $29.99) is a sweeping account of a marriage that lasted only from 1961 to 1969 but nonetheless changed the culture. “Everybody” is written like a novel, appropriately, since Hayward (a talent connected to a tortured performance dynasty) and Hopper (the gonzo actor, director and photographer) could both be the subjects of books all on their own. Together, they were combustible, which is a nice way of saying Hopper (who died in 2010) tended to get very scary on drugs. And together, they were also important collectors in a Los Angeles art scene that was, in those days, as fragile as a plant by a freeway. Their house, a gathering place and refuge for many, became a miniature Pop Art museum — full of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg — and their Hollywood glamour informed and infused the scene.Peter Fonda strums his Gibson 12-string, circa 1965, from “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy.”Dennis Hopper/Hopper Art TrustEven in a busy spring, I have returned to “Everybody” repeatedly since I finished it, eager to sink back into its weird, smoggy, heated atmosphere. Rozzo is a scrupulous researcher and evocative writer — though his descriptions of the artworks too often give way to accounts of their value. (Everything the Hayward-Hopper household bought is now worth a ton, suffice it to say.) Where Rozzo excels is in his description of inner landscape and external geography, whether he’s talking about a beach party at Jane Fonda’s, or Hopper’s upbringing in Kansas (where wheat “shimmered gold like a lion’s mane”), or bitter exchanges in a luxury-stuffed Upper East Side apartment. He takes us cruising along as if we’re in our own road movie — all the emotional abuse and violence safely behind a windshield. Rozzo also comes close to showing us how great art is actually made. Whether it’s a discarded Warhol silk-screen or Hopper’s magnum opus, “Easy Rider,” much of the magic is created by accident, using the things that other people want to throw away. Hayward herself was a devoted trawler of junk shops, her eye careful with treasures ignored in plain sight. Rozzo’s book helps retune our own vision by imparting some of her and Hopper’s art-is-everywhere attitude. You look up from the sensual pleasures of the book, and briefly the ugly old world shocks you — a gallery hung with masterpieces.Now, not every account of the past can contain so much outdoor spirit — a lot of our important American art was made in nightclubs, on the vaudeville circuit (as it broke apart) and on stages where the floor was sticky with beer. In Shawn Levy’s IN ON THE JOKE: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy (Doubleday, 383 pp., $30), a sensitive and vivid study of early female stand-ups, he directs our attention into such dark rooms.Books that aggregate always face one terrible enemy: the introduction. All that research, all that depth, can be flattened so easily by a preface. Levy’s own sounds like a setup for a punchline. Quick: How are Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Moms Mabley, Jean Carroll, Elaine May, Sarah Ophelia Colley (a.k.a. Minnie Pearl) all alike? To simply say they’re women who made their living in comedy can’t satisfy the demands of the introduction. So to account for the way he has assembled his cast of characters, Levy finds himself arguing that each of them left behind something of their “feminine” nature as they achieved success and fame. “For women to be accepted as comedians, they had to be constrained or distorted in such a way that the womanhood was bled out of them,” he writes.Moms Mabley, left, and Pearl Bailey on “The Pearl Bailey Show” in 1971.Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHis own excellent research quickly counters the claim (many were ribald, frank, giggly, maternal, commanding, etc. from the jump) and rubbishes the slippery terms “feminine” and “womanhood” themselves. (When Jim Varney pretended to be a fool, was he bleeding the manhood out of himself? Don’t be a goof.) So it’s best to flip quickly past the awkwardness of those prefatory pages, to dive straight into his accounts of the women themselves. There he shines. His chapters, each one usually dedicated to a single biography, move with different speeds and pressures — his work on Mabley and Phyllis Diller, performers he clearly responds to, is the best at making the women seem to live again. As our painstaking, knowledgeable guide, he only occasionally shows his own hand as a deft comic writer. Describing Carroll’s sartorial conservatism, for instance, he says she was “walking up a down escalator,” a tidy image, perfectly (and tartly) appropriate. For a book about humor, it does this sort of thing too rarely. But the book, because it is really more interested in biography than comedy, must spend a great deal of its time talking about awful marriages, industry pressure and — in every case other than Elaine May’s — death. He’s right; there’s nothing funny about that.But when we look for meaning these days, usually our eyes land on the closest art at hand: television. Maybe it’s because I spend my days reading criticism, but it also seems to be the art that’s under everyone’s microscope at once. Our heads bump over the eyepiece; who will find something new in these much-examined shows? The introduction dilemma also frustrates our first few steps into Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman’s THE NEW FEMALE ANTIHERO: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television (University of Chicago, 265 pp., paper, $26), a book with a more scholarly tone but a more popular (and widely known) set of subjects. The authors have expanded on a talk Hagelin gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, so while the book treats familiar characters from “peak TV” like “The Americans,” “Girls,” “Scandal” and “Broad City,” the piece still retains a sense of the lectern. Essentially, the essays are a series of close readings, and I yearned to be in a classroom with the authors, joining them in their careful appraisals. But that introduction! Again it falls prey to throat-clearing and overclaiming, and they wind up making windy arguments about women’s successes and failures in the workplace, when we can just feel they only want to get into an exegesis of nudity in “Girls.” So, again, I’d say flip on by.Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams filming a scene for “Girls.”Anderson/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesLike that microscope, “Antihero” is strongest when it examines something segment by segment. For instance, in the chapter on “Scandal,” the analysis of an episode from the fourth season, “The Lawn Chair,” contains a deeply felt, and deeply thought, description of a complex set of signifiers. At their best, the authors are connoisseurs of a very specific emotion — shame — and they follow its faint imprint from show to show, body to body. In my experience, though, the chapters on shows I haven’t watched seemed gray and unreadable; only with the ones where I had my own memory of a scene could I fully enter into their argument. As I read, it made me think longingly of “Disaster Mon Amour.” Boy, when Thomson tells you about “The Road,” it rolls out before you. There isn’t comfort in that, necessarily, but there is artistry. I still shudder when I think of it.Helen Shaw is the theater critic at New York magazine. More
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Meet the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast
by Aurelia Butler 27 May 2022, 19:06
From trying not to vomit in flight to oiling up for a beach scene, the actors playing pilots got a crash course in the Tom Cruise school of action filmmaking.Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar took to the skies in “Top Gun,” a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters are suiting up in “Top Gun: Maverick.”This time, the aviators are recent graduates of the Navy’s elite fighter school, a.k.a. Top Gun, and they’re tasked with a near-impossible mission overseen by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the brash pilot played by Tom Cruise. Flying alongside Rooster, the son of the original film’s ill-fated Goose, are Hangman, Phoenix, Bob, Coyote, Fanboy and Payback, who must help destroy a foreign enemy’s uranium plant and get out alive. (Though the characters all have actual names, they’re introduced by their aviator call signs, and that’s how they’re known.)The intensive tutelage began offscreen: Cruise monitored the actors’ progress during a grueling five-month training program that culminated in the cast shooting their own action sequences from the back of real F/A-18 jets flown by Navy fighter pilots.Here’s a peek at the new generation of actors behind the call signs.Glen PowellThe actor initially auditioned for the role that went to Miles Teller.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 33“Maverick” role: HangmanWhere you’ve seen him before: “Set It Up,” “Hidden Figures,” “Scream Queens”‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Tom Cruise: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry is betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters.A New Class: Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar, a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters have suited up for the sequel.Filming Challenges: The aerial feats on show in “Top Gun: Maverick” look like the result of digital wizardry. They aren’t.Powell originally auditioned to play Rooster (then called Rascal) but lost out to Miles Teller. Then, when Powell was offered the role that would become Hangman, he turned it down for fear it would be a copy-and-paste take on Val Kilmer’s antagonistic Iceman in the 1986 film. Cruise persuaded Powell to sign on, and they worked together to make the character distinctly Powell’s own. Still, the cocky, confrontational pilot shares more than a few traits with Iceman — as does Powell with Kilmer. When Powell moved out of the San Diego hotel where he had stayed during filming, he bumped into Kilmer, who had just arrived to shoot his scene. “The last things that I moved out of my room were protein powder, weights and tequila,” Powell said. “I’m literally wheeling them on a luggage cart into the elevator, and as the doors are about to close, Val steps in. He looks at me. Then he looks at the luggage cart. And he just started dying laughing. He’s like, ‘This is ‘Top Gun’ right here.’”Monica BarbaroThough the actress could change her character’s call sign, she had good reason to stick with it.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 32“Maverick” role: PhoenixWhere you’ve seen her before: “The Good Cop,” “Chicago Justice,” “UnREAL”The military did not allow women to fly in combat until 1993, and in the first “Top Gun,” all of the Navy fighter pilot characters were men. Barbaro’s role in the sequel is a reflection of the service’s inclusive shift, and her filmed flights were all handled by female Navy fighter pilots. “When I found out I got the part, I was like, ‘Mom, I got it! And guess what? I get to play a pilot. I’m not a love interest!’” the Northern California native said. “We used the women that we got to fly with as role models for how we designed the character.” And while the actors were allowed to change their characters’ call signs, it quickly became clear during the cast’s downtime together that “Phoenix” was a good fit for Barbaro: “Let’s just say, we had one pretty wild night, and the next morning they were surprised that I arose from the ashes.”Greg Tarzan DavisHe was a schoolteacher not long before turning to acting.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 28“Maverick” role: CoyoteWhere you’ve seen him before: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Good Trouble,” “Chicago P.D.”Not long before landing “Maverick,” Davis was an elementary schoolteacher in his home state of Louisiana. “I’m a big believer in following your dreams. I would preach that to my students,” Davis said. “But I realized I wasn’t doing that — because my dream was to be an actor. So I decided to give it a shot.” In a role reversal, Davis, who has gone by Tarzan since his own “wild” youth, said he felt like a kid throughout production, enthralled by the aviation toys and tasked with learning new things. While “Maverick” was in postproduction, he got a call from Christopher McQuarrie, the writer-director of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”; the frequent Cruise collaborator was asking him to join the cast, no audition required. “I put the phone on mute and jumped up and down and screamed,” Davis said. “That was my first offer, and having an offer is an actor’s dream.”Lewis PullmanThe back story for his character’s call sign didn’t make it into the movie.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: BobWhere you’ve seen him before: “Outer Range,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” “Catch-22”Of all the call signs, Pullman’s “Bob” (also his character’s first name) is the most mysteriously straightforward. “Bob is reclusive and quiet and a hard nut to crack,” Pullman said. “One of the original drafts had this moment where he kind of earned his stripes, and Hangman says, ‘I think I know what Bob stands for: Big Ol’ Balls.’ They didn’t end up using that, but it gave me a reference for Bob’s trajectory. He starts out as this unassuming guy, who then finds his strength.” Pullman needed strength of his own when Cruise walked into the first table read. Despite being the son of the actor Bill Pullman, Lewis was star-struck. “Tom basically ripped through the doors. His motorcycle in the background. He’s got his helmet on. The sun is glistening. He takes his helmet off, and his hair is perfect,” he said. “Tom is like Cary Grant and Buzz Aldrin and Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel all woven into one man.”Jay EllisAs a boy, the actor saw the original “Top Gun” with his father on an Air Force base.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 40“Maverick” role: PaybackWhere you’ve seen him before: “Insecure,” “Escape Room,” “The Game”Ellis distinctly recalls the day his father, who was then a mechanic in the Air Force, took him to see the first “Top Gun” in a theater on base in Austin, Texas. “I remember just looking up at the screen thinking, ‘I want to do that. Whatever those guys are up there doing, I want to be a part of that somehow,’” he said. Rather than enlist, Ellis became an actor. Fast forward three decades, and he found himself shooting “Maverick” and paying homage to the original’s beach volleyball scene with a game of beach football as the camera panned over the cast’s glistening muscles for a sun-dappled montage. “We probably went through five different types of oil because the makeup team was trying to figure out what wouldn’t soak into everyone’s skin so quickly,” Ellis said. “We started out with baby oil, then we moved on to argan oil, coconut oil, avocado oil. We switched to glycerin at one point. They were spraying us down with Evian bottles. It made for a very slippery game.”Danny RamirezHe thought he wouldn’t have to worry about his fear of flying. He was wrong.Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: FanboyWhere you’ve seen him before: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “On My Block,” “Assassination Nation”Before signing on, the actors had to check a box attesting they weren’t afraid of flying. “I lied,” Ramirez said with a laugh. “I was like, What’s the worst that could happen? It’s a Tom Cruise movie, that means he’ll be the one doing the stunts.” Without his usual commercial-flight routine of wine and noise-canceling headphones, Ramirez found himself struggling not to vomit as his F/A-18 rolled and dove through the air. The actors each had their own tricks to cope with motion sickness: Davis relied on Dramamine. Pullman preferred a preflight diet of rice and fresh ginger. For Ramirez, slowly building tolerance in incrementally smaller and faster planes was key. Adding to the degree of difficulty: They not only had to deliver their lines, but also set up the shots and adjust the cameras themselves once in the air. “I was like, ‘Are we going to get some kind of camera operator credit or what?’” he said. “Having to line up another jet going 500 miles an hour to stay within the frame was an experience I’m probably never going to have again.” More

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