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      Juancho Hernangómez Winds Down With Good Wine and the Stars Above Asturias

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      The N.B.A. player and star of the new basketball movie, “Hustle,” talks about his first foray into Hollywood and his cultural interests off the court.The N.B.A. player Juancho Hernangómez, a power forward with the Utah Jazz, lives for basketball — now. But as boys, he and his older brother, Willy, a center with the New Orleans Pelicans, had different aspirations. Despite both of their parents having been professional ballers, “We wanted to be soccer players as every kid in Spain,” he said in a video call from his home in Madrid.But then he grew to 6 feet 9 inches. After which, “I just fall in love with basketball,” he said. “That’s my only goal.”So when his agent suggested he audition for “Hustle,” Adam Sandler’s latest movie, premiering on Netflix on June 8 and in select theaters next month, Hernangómez was understandably hesitant. “I didn’t know if I was going to be good,” he said.Urged on by his brother and sister, Andrea, also a basketball player, he propped up his phone on the kitchen table and had a little fun acting out the script. Several casting rounds later, followed by Zoom calls from Sandler and the movie’s director, Jeremiah Zagar, he’d landed the role.In “Hustle,” Hernangómez plays Bo Cruz, a Spanish street ball phenom in Timberland boots plucked from obscurity by Sandler’s Stanley Sugerman, a bone-tired scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Sugerman recognizes potential in his undiscovered talent, but Cruz, who has a volatile temper and is raising a young daughter, carries some heavy baggage.As for a career in Hollywood, Hernangómez, who considers himself “a normal 26-year-old guy,” has no pretensions. “I cannot say I’m never going to do a movie because that’s not true,” he said. “It’s got to be the right movie.”“But if this is my only movie, I’m going to die so happy,” he said as he described the things that excite him off the court — good wine, street art and classic cars. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Wine Tastings I love to go and know more about wine with my family, with my friends. It’s the connection. It’s the energy. The mood. I can be talking with a glass of wine for hours. And I want to keep learning. I love to ask about the history of the wines, why they do that in that location. Wine is recollection. It is waiting, patience.2. Street Art The father of the director, Jeremiah Zagar, his name is Isaiah Zagar, and he’s an artist in Philly. He started doing that on the streets of Philly, and all of Philly has got something special of him. I feel in Spain they kill the art instinct. The education system is really bad, and they’ve got to change because in America, they develop the talent — singing or painting or playing the guitar, whatever the talent is.3. Experiencing New Cultures Now when I’m going to a city, I try to wake up early to walk around just to see the art or to see the buildings, how the people eat, how the people drink coffee, how the people talk. It’s beautiful. A lot of my teammates, they’ve never been out of America. They told me, “I travel a lot. I went to Mexico.” And I was like, “Brother, but this is not traveling.”4. Local Food Because we are N.B.A. players, we go to fancy restaurants. But I told them, “I’m not going to eat in fancy restaurants. I want to go to the local restaurant.” If I go Italy, I want the dirty restaurant where they’ve been open since 1920 and they were a hundred years doing the best pizza. When I’m going to San Francisco, I eat the seafood there, even if you get dirty doing the crab thing.5. Classic Cars My dream is to have a Mustang from 1968, ’69. I’m still looking because it’s hard to find a good one. When I get to be 70 years old, I’ll give it to my son, his son will give it to his son — three, four, five generations, like a family thing. Classic cars, you take care of them like your kids.6. Following the Economy We’re living in a world where the changes are really quick, so you’ve got to be ready. You see what happened with the cryptocurrencies in the last year. Everybody went crazy. Now it’s going down. I love to read every day what they say, how people predict things that never happen, then the people who [others] say were wrong when they were true. My dad always tells me if you invest in something, believe that you lost it so you don’t regret it.7. The Hermanos Hernangómez Basketball Camp It’s the thing that I’m most proud of. We made a camp, my brother and myself and my sister, for two weeks in Spain, in my hometown, and the kids go to play basketball. But it’s not just for basketball. They go to the swimming pool. They’ve got art. They’ve got English class. They play soccer. We go there every single day. I love kids so much, so I’m playing with them. Parents always tell me, “It was the best week of his life.”8. Country Music I didn’t hear country until I went to Denver [to play with the Nuggets]. I went to Red Rocks and they put on a country concert and it was unbelievable. You see the sunset. It’s just the vibe. There’s something special about Red Rocks that makes that even better.9. Learning About the Film Industry Before I came to Hollywood, I never expected it was going be like that. How hard they work behind the scenes. How many hours, how many efforts. How many quarantines, how many Covid tests. Everybody with a mask. The last day on set, I rented a truck of sushi for all the crew. I was like, “I’ve been working for you two months and I didn’t even see your face.”10. Asturias, Spain I just bought a place there, and it’s probably the place where I was happiest in my life. Asturias is in the north of Spain. It’s in the mountains, and they’ve got the sea, too. There’s no wifi, no connection. You wake up, everybody cooks together. Then we go to see the horses, the cows, the chickens. The food is so healthy, so fresh. We play board games all day. At night we’re sitting outside, and you can see the stars so bright. There’s no pollution, no contamination. It’s another world. More

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      Judge Halts Auction of ‘Wizard of Oz’ Dress Amid Ownership Battle

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      A blue-and-white dress worn by Judy Garland is the subject of a dispute between Catholic University and the family of its former drama chairman.A federal judge on Monday blocked Catholic University from auctioning off a memorable white-and-blue dress worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” after a Wisconsin woman filed a lawsuit claiming she was the rightful owner of the gingham pinafore garment donned by Dorothy.Judge Paul G. Gardephe of U.S. District Court in Manhattan granted a preliminary injunction a day before the dress was scheduled to be auctioned in Los Angeles, where it had been expected to sell for more than $1 million. Catholic University had planned to use that money to endow a new faculty position in the Rome School of Music, Drama and Art.Judge Gardephe ruled that the dress could not be sold by Catholic University until the lawsuit was resolved. Both sides are set to meet in court on June 9.In her lawsuit, filed earlier this month, Barbara Ann Hartke claims the dress belonged to the estate of her uncle, the Rev. Gilbert Hartke, who was once chairman of the university’s drama department and received the dress as a gift in 1973 from the Academy Award-winning actress Mercedes McCambridge, who was also an artist in residency at the university.Ms. McCambridge had “specifically and publicly” given the dress to Mr. Hartke as a demonstration of gratitude for “helping her battle alcohol substance abuse,” the lawsuit states.Mr. Hartke died in 1986, and Ms. Hartke says she is his closest living heir.The lawsuit states that Ms. McCambridge was a “close confidant” of Ms. Garland, but it is unclear exactly how she obtained the dress.The university has contended that the dress was a gift from Mr. Hartke, and that it was his wish for it to be kept within the institution.Shawn Brenhouse, a lawyer for Catholic University, said in a statement on Monday night that the judge’s decision “was preliminary and did not get to the merits of Barbara Hartke’s claim to the dress.”“We look forward to presenting our position, and the overwhelming evidence contradicting Ms. Hartke’s claim, to the court in the course of this litigation,” Mr. Brenhouse said.Anthony Scordo III, a lawyer for Ms. Hartke, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Monday night.The fragile dress has become legend ever since Ms. Garland wore it in the Technicolor classic in 1939, complementing the plaid look with ruby-red slippers sought by the Wicked Witch. Ms. Garland wore several versions of the dress, but only one other is known to still exist. It was sold in 2012 by Julien’s Auctions for $480,000. In 2015, it sold again for nearly $1.6 million.The location of the second dress had been a mystery until it was found by chance last year in a shoe box, inside a bag, sitting on top of faculty mailboxes. Matt Ripa, a lecturer and operations manager at the drama school, found the bag when he was cleaning up the area in preparation for renovations of the Hartke Theater.The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History helped authenticate the dress, which includes a fitted bodice, a high-necked blouse and a full skirt, with a fabric label inside inscribed “Judy Garland 4223.”Ms. Hartke claims in her lawsuit that her family was never made aware of the discovery by the university. They had known a dress existed, and were surprised to read headlines about preparations to auction it off “without any compensation to its rightful owners,” the lawsuit states.“There is no documentation demonstrating that” Mr. Hartke ever donated the dress to Catholic University, according to the lawsuit. More

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      George Miller on ‘Furiosa’ and His New Cannes Film

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      In between screenings and interviews, the 77-year-old director is working on the next film in the “Mad Max” universe, and he seems to be having a ball.CANNES, France — On Tuesday, just a few days after the premiere of his latest movie, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” at the Cannes Film Festival, the Australian director George Miller is heading home to direct “Furiosa,” the fourth installment in his phantasmagoric “Mad Max” series.“The cast is already out there,” he said when I interviewed him Saturday. “They’ve been shooting second unit.” Miller has been working on “Furiosa” in between screenings, interviews and having what looks like a very good time at the festival. “Nowadays, modern communication allows you to be there,” he said, obviously pleased with his multitasking. “It’s really great.”Miller is a Cannes veteran, but while he’s served on three of the festival’s juries in 30 years, only two of his movies have been presented here, both out of competition. The last time was for his masterpiece “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which set the festival afire in 2015. Audiences and critics alike gave the movie plenty of love, and it received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, winning half a dozen statuettes. Predictably, though, it lost best picture to “Spotlight,” which encapsulates the kind of self-flattering, ostensibly serious work the academy has historically embraced.I suspect that “Fury Road” was simply too far out, too uncategorizable and narratively playful, to suit old-guard academy members. It was probably also too much fun. Fun is for kiddie movies, which presumably is why Miller did win an Oscar for “Happy Feet,” a fanciful yet classically Milleresque, technically flawless tale filled with deep feelings and great questions that tethers environmental catastrophe to the story of a cute tap-dancing penguin named Mumble. “When we congregate with strangers in the dark,” Miller once said, “it’s a kind of dreaming.” Sometimes those dreams are nightmares.Hugh Keays-Byrne, center, in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Miller’s masterpiece.Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.It takes about a day to fly between Australia and France. Miller, who turned 77 in March, will be making the trip twice in less than a week, but if he was tired, he didn’t look it. To escape the din of the crowds, we met on the terrace at the office of FilmNation, which is handling the new movie’s international distribution and sales. A colleague had described Miller as professorial and alerted me that he was prone to digressions, a trait that the filmmaker cheerfully volunteered as he issued forth on movies, Einstein, the forces of the universe, Joseph Campbell and how cellphones use relativity to work.Einstein makes a special appearance in “Three Thousand Years,” which is as nearly unclassifiable as its director. As the title suggests, the movie spans millenniums to tell the sweeping story of an ancient djinn (Idris Elba) and a modern-day scholar, Alithea (Tilda Swinton). She’s traveled to Turkey for a conference — Alithea studies narratives, puzzling through them just like Miller does — but her plans take an unforeseen turn when she opens a peculiar blue-and-white-striped bottle that she’s bought, inadvertently releasing the djinn from a long captivity. What follows is a fantastical fable of love and suffering, imprisonment and release, mythology and the material world.The djinn tries to grant her three wishes, but it gets complicated. Instead, he starts recounting episodes from his long life, all involving women and intrigues that led to his repeat captivity. He tells stories, but so does Alithea, who also narrates. As the movie continues, it shifts between the C.G.I.-heavy past and the present, always returning to the djinn and Alithea, who grow progressively close. “Three Thousand Years” is essentially about storytelling, which means it’s about desire: The yearning expressed in the djinn’s tales, the longing awakened in Alithea and the craving the viewer has to find out what happens next.“Three Thousand Years” is based on “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” a story in a collection from the British writer A.S. Byatt. Miller doesn’t read fiction (he did as a kid), but someone rightly sussed that he might like the book. He was especially taken with “Nightingale” — “it kept playing in my mind as stories do” — and secured the rights. Miller said that Byatt was surprised he had singled out this story, which she’d written quickly. But it was also grounded in her own life history. She too had once gone to a conference in Istanbul. Everything in the story is true, she told him, except for the djinn.Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new Miller film that played at Cannes.MGMMiller wrote the script with his daughter, Augusta Gore; his wife, Margaret Sixel, edited the movie. She’s edited several of his other movies, winning an Oscar for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Miller clearly likes creating in a familial setup and has worked with some crew members repeatedly, including the cinematographer John Seale, who shot “Three Thousand Years” and “Fury Road.” Miller has been with one of his collaborators, Guy Norris, for 41 years; Norris was the stunt coordinator on “The Road Warrior” (a.k.a. “Mad Max 2”) and is serving as the second-unit director on “Furiosa.”Norris holds a special place in the “Mad Max” history because of an accident he had while driving a stunt car for “The Road Warrior.” One of the signatures of the “Mad Max” series is the elegantly choreographed, seemingly gravity-defying practical stunts, and this one involved Norris driving into two other vehicles and then into a ditch. It didn’t go as planned and he flew through the air the wrong way, missing his high-tech cushioning (a pile of cardboard boxes) and badly hurting himself — ouch. In the video of the accident (it’s available online), you can see that Miller was among the first to race to Norris’s side. You might expect that from any decent person, except that in this case the visibly worried filmmaker was also a doctor.Miller, who grew up in a small town in Queensland, Australia, attended medical school with his fraternal brother, John. (They have two other brothers.) A movie lover since childhood, Miller made his first film, a short, while in school. By the time he made his first feature, a low-budget wonder called “Mad Max,” he was a doctor. His day job came in handy, he explained, because every time the production ran out of money, he worked as an emergency physician to make money. He practiced for about a decade, only finally quitting when he made “Road Warrior.” Filmmaking, he thought, “was a really interesting thing to do, but there was no real career.”He and his former producing partner Byron Kennedy (who died in 1983) had made “Mad Max” out of what Miller describes as “pure curiosity.” As Miller talks, it’s clear that curiosity remains a driving force for him. One particularly lovely story that he shares hinges on a lecture at school delivered by the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. “He synthesized so much that was rumbling around loosely my mind,” said Miller, who was struck by Fuller’s remark that “I am not a noun, I seem to be a verb.” Suddenly, Miller wasn’t a medical student, he was simply studying medicine — which liberated him.Miller has been going and shooting and moving ever since. He too is a verb, I think, and not a noun, and shows no sign of stopping. Listening to him spin story after story, I suddenly thought I knew why he didn’t read fiction — or at least I thought I did, so I asked if his imagination crowded his head, leaving no room for other’s people’s stories. “Definitely,” he said. “If I’m walking down the street, there’s some story or something going in my head. As I’ve often said to my family, ‘If I’m the guy sitting in the nursing home in a wheelchair staring at the ceiling, probably there’s some sort of story going on.’”For now, though, it’s just go, go, go. More

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      Angela Lansbury Will Receive Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement

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      The star of stage, film and screen has already won five competitive Tony Awards, and starred in several Stephen Sondheim musicals.Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored this year with a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.Lansbury, 96, who has already won five competitive Tony Awards, will receive the lifetime achievement award on June 12, when this year’s ceremony is set to take place at Radio City Music Hall and to be broadcast on CBS.Lansbury first appeared on Broadway in 1957, in a farce called “Hotel Paradiso,” and in 1964 she starred in her first Broadway musical, “Anyone Can Whistle,” a flop that is remembered mostly because the songwriter was Stephen Sondheim.She was already a three-time Oscar nominee, notably for “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962, when she landed her breakout Broadway role, starring as the free-spirited title character in “Mame” in 1966. She won her first Tony Award for that performance. More

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      Cannes Cameraman Explains How He Shoots Standing Ovations

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      Jean-Baptiste Cortet explains what he focuses on and why (partly to goad the audience) when he’s filming those premiere close-ups.CANNES, France — Imagine a cameraman pointing his camera directly at you.Now imagine it moving closer to your face. No, even closer than that. So close you could almost forget that this moment is shared not just between you and the cameraman, but 2,300 other people who surround you, applaud you and are hanging on your every gesture.That’s what it feels like when you’re caught in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s infamously elongated standing ovations, in which each twitch of your face — whether from pride, embarrassment or boredom — is captured by the cameraman and broadcast to the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s movie screen, where your supersized reactions play instead of the closing credits.Even for celebrities, the scrutiny of the Cannes cameraman can be a lot to withstand. This week, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba teared up in front of the camera after the premiere of “Three Thousand Years of Longing”; last year, long into a sustained ovation for “Annette,” the cameraman panned to a cast member, a bored Adam Driver, as he lit a cigarette. In 2019, as the applause for “Parasite” refused to die down after several minutes, director Bong Joon Ho was even caught on camera leaning over to his lead actor and complaining, “I’m hungry.”We are on Minute 5 of the ANNETTE standing ovation and Adam Driver has begun smoking a cigarette pic.twitter.com/F56r0W0nGL— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) July 6, 2021
      The mechanics of the Cannes standing ovation have long fascinated civilians, but as more clips from those moments go viral on social media, it’s the sustained close-ups that have begun to spur the most debate. “The Cannes standing ovation camera is simply too much to watch,” said one Twitter user, evidently suffering from secondhand embarrassment. “I would honestly just melt if it was on me.”According to Jean-Baptiste Cortet, it isn’t easy to be the one wielding the camera, either. “I can see how uncomfortable they are, and I feel it,” Cortet said. “I would not want to be in their spot in this moment!”Cortet, an excitable, apple-cheeked Parisian who met me on a Cannes terrace wearing a Jeff Koons T-shirt and cuffed bluejeans, has spent three decades working for Cannes and began filming the festival’s standing ovations seven years ago. And yes, he knows what people think. “I saw on the internet that people were making fun of it!” he said, ready to clear the air: He isn’t nearly as close to those celebrities as it looks.By way of demonstrating, Cortet positioned me against the terrace railing and backed a few paces away while brandishing an imaginary camera. “I make sure that I’m as far away as I can, and I zoom in to do the close-up,” he told me, speaking through a translator. He said he would never dare put his camera lens just inches from someone’s face: “Comedians hate that. Especially actresses!”In many ways, Cortet is the standing ovation’s secret weapon. The audience does not simply clap into a vacuum for several minutes: They are guided and goaded by Cortet, who continually searches for new things to shoot and broadcasts those close-ups onto the big screen behind him.“The cameraman has the responsibility to carry the emotion of the room,” Cortet said. And those emotions can run very high at Cannes, especially when the film ends and the lights first go up. “This is the time when I’m able to catch an embrace, a discussion between two people — I can navigate through these different moments,” Cortet said. “I like it more when it’s messy.”A few minutes into those candid moments, Cortet locks into a routine: He will go down the row of actors, filming each one for a surprisingly sustained amount of time, a phase he calls “the eye line.” This is the bit that often extends the standing ovation to record-breaking levels, especially if there’s a large ensemble cast and a famous director present. Then, once everyone has had a solo moment in front of Cortet’s camera, they can pair off in new combinations, a phase that pads the ovation stopwatch even more.And just over Cortet’s shoulder at most of the premieres is the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, who pushes the cameraman even closer to the stars while exclaiming, “Close-up! Close-up!” Shooting the eye line is “a mix of me feeling the emotion and knowing how to film it, and Thierry knowing who to aim at,” Cortet said, adding with a laugh, “I prefer when I’m alone.”Some Cannes regulars, like Spike Lee and David Lynch, are now familiar with Cortet and wink or nod when he goes in for the shot. “These directors, who are usually on the other side of the camera, they recognize the difficulty,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me to see they have empathy for the situation.”But not every director can stand it. During the ovation for “The French Dispatch,” Cantet moved into the aisle to block Wes Anderson when he noticed the auteur eyeing the exits.“I have to refrain the directors from leaving!” he said. “They want to trespass past me.”Cortet doesn’t usually enter the theater until 10 minutes from the ending, so it’s sometimes difficult for him to pick up on how well the film has gone over until the crowd leaps from their seats. “I don’t feel the same emotions as the people in the room,” he said. “I don’t understand the why’s of this raw moment.”Still, he’s a quick learner. At the premiere of “Armageddon Time,” when the director James Gray burst into tears, Cortet got a little misty, too.“It happens many times: I feel such a strength of emotion carry to me that tears fall from my eyes,” he said. “And then I can’t see anything because it’s too blurry! More

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      A Cannes Faux Pas, as Tik Tok Comes to Town.

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      CANNES, France — Shorts made on TikTok haven’t been seen on the big screen in the Grand Théâtre Lumière just yet, but last week the video app was still accused of a Cannes faux pas: attempting to influence a jury’s decisions.In March, TikTok announced that it would be an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival this year. Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, was quoted saying that the collaboration was “part of a desire to diversify the audience” of the festival. Billboards that read “ceci n’est pas un film, c’est un vidéo TikTok” loom over the awnings across the street from one of the main movie theaters here.TikTok also announced a competition for short films shot on its app. Although not an official festival event, the competition had a jury headed by the Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime who has been a regular presence at Cannes with films like “The Missing Picture” and “Exile.”But Panh quit as the jury’s president on Wednesday, he said, two days before the awards were to be given out, only to return to his role on Friday morning, hours before the awards ceremony. Panh said by email that he had quit because TikTok had “seemed to want to influence our decision about prize winners,” and that he returned to his post when the company agreed to respect the jury’s verdict.“Their world, it’s not the art world,” Panh said in an interview later on Friday afternoon, sitting on a couch on the deck of the beachfront restaurant where he and his four fellow jurors had just given out the awards.While declining to name names, Panh said some employees at TikTok had wanted to select different winners from the jury’s short list. It was “multiple people from TikTok,” he said. “One or two were very aggressive, very stubborn, very closed minded.”TikTok issued a statement that seemed to attribute any trouble to ordinary disagreements in selecting winners. “As with any creative competition where the selection of a winner is open to subjective interpretation, there may be differences of artistic opinion from the independent panel of judges,” the statement said.Even after receiving a guarantee that the jury’s choices would be honored, Panh said his first instinct was not to return to the jury. But he said he ultimately came back for the filmmakers. Some, he added, had traveled to Cannes from as far away as Japan or New Zealand. “You just can’t break their dream, you know?”The ceremony on Friday was hosted by the social media personality Terry LTAM, who asked the jurors about their experiences watching the shorts. The Sudanese filmmaker Basma Khalifa said the judging process changed her perspective on the platform. “I didn’t give TikTok enough credit, I don’t think, for how much you can do with it,” she said.Filmmakers from 44 countries submitted films to the competition, all between 30 seconds and three minutes in length. The top prize was shared between two directors: Mabuta Motoki, from Japan, whose film showed a man meticulously building a wooden tub, and Matej Rimanic, a 21-year-old Slovenian director who submitted a comedic black and white short in which two people flirt using a paper airplane. Rimanic said that working on social media platforms had sparked his desire to make movies.“I started posting videos on Vine, then I went to Instagram and then TikTok came around, so I started posting on TikTok,” he said in an interview shortly after he received his award, a gold-colored statuette shaped like TikTok’s logo. “Now during this transition of me posting on videos on social media, I discovered my love for filmmaking.”It was his first time at Cannes, either to attend the festival, or to visit the city. “I hope that one day I can come here with my feature film,” he said. “I only make comedies because the world needs more laughter.” More

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      Lawsuit Accusing Bill Cosby of Sexual Assault Heads to Trial

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      A civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of assaulting a teenager in the 1970s, which he denies, will be the first to head to court since his criminal conviction was overturned last year.Judy Huth met Bill Cosby when she was still a teenager, she has recounted in court papers. It was the mid-1970s, and Mr. Cosby had already had his breakthrough on the TV series “I Spy” and become a movie star, but was still years away from his huge success on “The Cosby Show.” Ms. Huth and a friend spotted him on a film set in a park in San Marino, Calif., and ended up meeting him in person, according to her court filings.Days later, she asserts in the filings, she went to Mr. Cosby’s tennis club at his invitation, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, where she accuses him of forcing her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom. Mr. Cosby has described her account as a fabrication since the case was first filed in 2014.This week the job of deciding who is credible will fall to a jury in Los Angeles Superior Court, as the civil trial of Mr. Cosby on Ms. Huth’s accusations that he sexually assaulted her is scheduled to get underway.Ms. Huth’s recollection regarding when the encounter occurred has changed. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16, according to court papers. Since the beginning, she has said in court papers that she recalled Mr. Cosby telling her and her friend to claim they were both 19 if asked at the mansion.The change of dates has led Mr. Cosby’s team to further dispute her account. Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in a statement that Ms. Huth had “made inconsistent statements since the inception of filing this civil suit against Mr. Cosby.” Ms. Huth has said that recently released information supplied by Mr. Cosby’s team had led her to reconsider what year it occurred.Judy Huth, left, in 2015 with her attorney, Gloria Allred.Anthony McCartney/Associated PressThe civil case, one of the last unsettled lawsuits against Mr. Cosby, was largely put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued the criminal case that resulted in his 2018 conviction on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. But the conviction was overturned, and Mr. Cosby was released from prison last year when an appellate panel found that his due process rights had been violated when prosecutors ignored an assurance from a prior district attorney that Mr. Cosby would not be prosecuted.With the criminal case overturned, the significance of Ms. Huth’s suit has risen in the minds of some of the many women who have accused Mr. Cosby of being a sexual predator.“I think that Judy’s trial may be our last stand for justice and seeing accountability come to fruition in our stand against Bill Cosby,” Victoria Valentino, who says Mr. Cosby drugged and raped her in Los Angeles in 1969, said in a text. (Mr. Cosby has denied all allegations of sexual assault, and said any encounters were consensual.) She said she plans to attend part of the trial, which, barring a last-minute settlement, is set to begin with jury selection this week and opening arguments expected June 1.Patricia Steuer, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that she saw the Huth civil trial as a chance to get a measure of justice. “There is no other recourse at the moment,” she said. “It probably is the only avenue available.”Mr. Cosby, now 84, has already faced multiple other civil cases filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation after his legal team dismissed as fictions their accusations of sexual misconduct by him. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements having been agreed to by Mr. Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit is poised to become the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In court papers, Ms. Huth says that in a bedroom at the Playboy Mansion, Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to fondle him.Ms. Huth filed her suit in December 2014, at a time when Mr. Cosby was facing allegations by many women who said he had drugged and sexually assaulted them, in incidents spanning several decades.She also reported her accusation to the police, but the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.Her lawyers argued that the period for a civil claim had not expired, however, because in California it is extended for adults who say they were victims of sexual abuse as minors but repressed the experience. The deadline to file such a suit is determined in part by when the person, as an adult, becomes aware of the severe psychological effect of the abuse, her lawyers said.In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil court.Ms. Huth’s revised timeline, which says Mr. Cosby assaulted her when she was 16 rather than 15, should not affect her ability to pursue the suit since the law views a 16-year-old as a minor, Ms. Huth’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, said.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers argued in legal papers that they felt ambushed by the sudden change in Ms. Huth’s account. They said that their research had been geared toward establishing Mr. Cosby’s and Ms. Huth’s whereabouts in 1974, and said they had prepared evidence to show that the entertainer was not at the Playboy Mansion in the period she suggested in 1974.Log books from the Playboy Mansion for 1974 do not list either Ms. Huth or her friend as having visited, according to Mr. Cosby’s lawyers.At a hearing last week, the judge asked Playboy to produce records for 1975 and agreed that Ms. Huth and the friend who accompanied her should sit for a further deposition before the trial begins.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have also questioned whether she had only remembered the alleged abuse a short time before filing the suit because, they said, she had contacted a tabloid about it 10 years earlier.Mr. Wyatt, the spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in the statement, “We feel confident that the Playboy records along with Ms. Huth changing her timeline of events from 1974 to 1975 in the 11th hour will vindicate Mr. Cosby.”Mr. Cosby acknowledged meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion, and Ms. Huth has produced photographs of them together that she said were taken there, according to court papers. But he has denied that she was a minor when they met.“While defendant does not deny that he socialized with plaintiff at the Playboy Mansion, as he did other women and men who frequented the club,” his lawyers said in court papers, “defendant vehemently denies that plaintiff was underage.”Ms. Huth has said that she changed the timeline of her account in part because she only recently realized, as a result of documents put forward by Mr. Cosby, that the filming of the movie “Let’s Do It Again,” where she says they met, took place later than she had recalled.The trial is expected to last two weeks, and Ms. Huth, who is seeking damages from Mr. Cosby, is expected to testify, along with the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion. Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify. He will not attend the trial, Mr. Wyatt said.During pretrial hearings, Ms. Huth had asked for a bench trial, but the trial will be in front of a 12-person jury, with at least 9 of 12 votes needed for a conviction.Mr. Cosby settled a civil case Ms. Constand brought against him in 2006 for $3.4 million. The other civil cases were settled for undisclosed terms by the insurance carried on Mr. Cosby’s home policy, which provided “personal injury” coverage in a range of circumstances, including lawsuits that accused the policy holder of defamation.The other ongoing civil case against Mr. Cosby was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990, when she was 26. She was able to file the suit, which is still in its early stages, because in 2019 New Jersey overhauled its laws on the statute of limitations for sexual assault cases, extending the time limit for filing suits and creating a special two-year window allowing people to bring cases regardless of how long ago the alleged assaults might have occurred. More

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      Baz Luhrmann Talks ‘Elvis’ With Maureen Dowd

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      Baz Luhrmann dreams big.In a streaming world where, as Norma Desmond predicted, the movies get smaller, the Australian director keeps going bigger.After his 2013 film, “Gatsby,” Mr. Luhrmann is taking on another American icon in “Elvis,” another kaleidoscopic epic with a sizzling soundtrack.Tom Hanks had only met Mr. Luhrmann in passing when the director called to ask him to play Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s infamous manager.Mr. Hanks was game: “I could only think of, ‘Oh my God, Elvis in your hands, well, that would be a nuclear explosion. That would just be bigger than big could be.’”Mr. Luhrmann did not want to make a mere biopic. He wanted to make a wildly ambitious movie about race and sex and class and music in America through three decades, the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. There are three Elvises, the rock ’n’ roll punk, the movie star in the Hollywood bubble, and the drug-addled, divorced Elvis in Vegas who feels “caught in a trap,” as the line from “Suspicious Minds” goes, and shows the fatigue of being stuck as the campy character busting out of the tight white jumpsuit. “I’m just so tired of playing Elvis Presley,” he said, the year before he died.Mr. Luhrmann wanted to restore humanity to Elvis, who became, he said, “like a Halloween costume or wallpaper. He’s so there, he’s not there anymore.”The director’s name evokes the phantasmagoric, or an italicized adventure — not the sort of movie where a sad widow goes on a solo road trip in an old van into the desert and we watch her go to the bathroom in a bucket. Nothing Baz-y about that. His world is full of glamorous characters who reach for the stars and look, often unhappily, for love.“Yes, well, I am a romance addict,” Mr. Luhrmann said, sitting in his romantic Gilded Age house in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square, decorated in jewel-toned Victorian-Moroccan splendor by Catherine Martin, his wife and Oscar-winning creative partner. (She also designed the luxe green wallpaper.)“I’m old enough to know,” the director continued, “I need to be in a heightened romantic state to make a film.”Baz, as everyone calls him, may be from the down-under Oz but his inspiration is the Judy Garland Oz. We conducted our interview with a photo of a crying Garland looking down at us.Over a delectable lunch on elegant china, he told me that he related to “Elvis’s need to metaphorically go down the yellow brick road, constantly searching, absorbing, taking on influences, cross-fertilizing them and making a prism through which he expresses himself in his own way.”2022’s “Elvis”Warner Bros.
      The director is a genre unto himself. You can tell from one frame of his movies that they’re his. He only chooses subjects he’s madly in love with, then fearlessly dives in, just as he did with Shakespeare, setting the story of Romeo and Juliet in Verona Beach, a fictionalized Miami of sorts, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, pink hair, tabloid TV and a hot-dog stand. The dazzle-drenched romance of the Moulin Rouge nightclub in La Belle Époque Paris? Mais oui! What’s more thrilling than Ewan McGregor lusting after a languishing Nicole Kidman as she swings through the air and they sing Madonna and Beatles songs? With “Australia,” Mr. Luhrmann aimed for nothing less than making his country’s version of “Gone With the Wind.”“He’s like a walking opera,” Mr. McGregor said. “He lives in a larger way.”Does Mr. Luhrmann ever feel insecure when he’s creating these surreal extravaganzas?“My more consistent challenge is not insecurity but fear,” he said. “Fear is for me and everyone surrounding me, the enemy of play, and play is what we do professionally for a living. After all, it’s called a screenplay, and actors are players. So, I spend a lot of my time creating environments that keep fear away. It’s kind of my job to suck up the fear at 5 in the morning before I get to the set and take on everybody else’s fear.”There are stressful moments, as with “Moulin Rouge!”, when Mr. Luhrmann and Ms. Martin found a fax someone accidentally left in the machine with an urgent plea to the studio to come and take over because “Baz is out of control.” But if it isn’t impossibly difficult to birth, it isn’t Baz-y.C.M., as Ms. Martin is known, brings her husband’s enchanted worlds to life with opulent sets and costumes. She admitted that the scale of Mr. Luhrmann’s dreams, wanting to find “the best of the best of the best,” can leave her feeling like Harrison Ford running to escape the boulder in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”During the first week in May, Mr. Luhrmann was racing to finish mixing and editing on “Elvis” for its premiere at Cannes this weekend, a month before its wide release on June 24. He was flying from Australia, where the movie was made, to New York to Los Angeles and back to New York before going to France. And he was also helping to direct the Met Gala and walking the red carpet wearing a Prada “Elvis decorative aesthetic” outfit, as he put it, accompanied by Priscilla Presley, uncannily on the arm of the film’s Elvis, the 30-year-old Austin Butler.Mr. Luhrmann, who calls himself a “research nut,” wrote the screenplay with three other writers. He goes into total immersion on his films, surrounding himself with excavations from the world he is creating, from drapes to wardrobe to photos.During “Gatsby,” he said, laughing, “I think we went a bit far with the speakeasy part of it.” He and Ms. Martin also flew to England so they could steam into New York on an ocean liner, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.‘He Makes Coffee Nervous’On the afternoon of our interview, Mr. Luhrmann, whippet-thin at 59, was wearing flared black Celine jeans and Acne Western boots, a Prada sweater in a blue that Elvis favored, a double diamond ring, a copy of Elvis’s “E.P.” ring, a string of pearls and a gold “TCB” necklace with a diamond lightning bolt, a riff on the jewelry worn by Elvis and the Memphis Mafia that signified “Taking Care of Business” fast. And he showed off a replica of the bejeweled belt with gold chains that Elvis wore onstage in the ’70s.“Elvis was fluid before fluid was invented,” the director said. “He was always incredibly masculine, but he was experimenting with makeup and hair color in high school, and he liked to mix lace crop tops tied at the waist and pink bolero jackets with pleated box trousers and pink socks.”It isn’t only movies that bring out the Bazmataz. When the director made a three-minute ad for Chanel No. 5 with Nicole Kidman in 2004, it cost $33 million, making it the most expensive ad in history, a record it still holds.Even when the cameras are not rolling, he has Tom Ford syndrome: He can’t stop arranging the world to be as swank as he wants it to be.When he rented a house opposite Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, in Greenwich Village, and they shared a garden, he redesigned her Halloween party.“We used to throw a few skeletons out there and hope for the best,” Ms. Wintour said. “Baz and C.M. moved in and just turned it into this incredible Halloween fantasy.”“We’re English, we do silly games like murder games and disco night, and the level of detail and amazing costumes they brought to it,” Ms. Wintour continued. “He’ll take an idea and just lift it into a whole other stratosphere.”Luhrmann, lurking.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn 2018, when Mr. Luhrmann was a guest at the wedding of Bee Shaffer, Ms. Wintour’s daughter, at the family home in Long Island, he took it on himself to play wedding planner.“He rehearsed my daughter over and over again for her wedding. She said she was probably the bride that slept the best before her wedding because she was so exhausted,” Ms. Wintour said. “He’s talking about the entrances and exits, sightlines, and all from the kindness of his heart.”Mr. Luhrmann offered his philosophy: “I believe, as Leonardo da Vinci did, that parties are an art form. Weddings R Us.”Even when he was in Australia, he helped Ms. Wintour with the Met Gala, calling “to talk about a particular shade of red for the red carpets or whether a blue stripe was right.”He is “meticulous to the extreme,” as Mr. Hanks agreed, “with a degree of enthusiasm and energy that is otherworldly. He makes coffee nervous.”Mr. Luhrmann is so detail-oriented that he even conjures back stories for his extras. All the hundreds of extras at the lavish Roaring Twenties parties at Gatsby’s mansion, and the throngs screaming at Elvis’s appearances, had back stories provided by him and C.M.Mr. Luhrmann was able to reproduce Elvis’s bedroom, which is intact at Graceland; it has always been off-limits to Graceland visitors, and is now home to a cobweb and spider. The movie shows a fish tank, an electric organ, a white Fender guitar stuck in the shag carpet, and two televisions embedded in the ceiling.The director’s way of piling embellishment on embellishment can be discombobulating for those who expect more structure (and of course, to the suits checking the bottom line).“Sometimes it’s infectious, other times, it’s exhausting, but what it always is, is freewheeling,” Mr. Hanks said. “You think, well, are we just not throwing everything in but the kitchen sink, trying everything that enters our heads, and the answer is yes. But he’s a bit of a Pied Piper: ‘Follow me,’ and you do.”From a young age, Mr. Luhrmann seemed destined to become Puck, with a bucket full of fairy dust.Warner Brothers PicturesHe was a bedazzled ballroom dancer when he was little; his mother was a ballroom dance teacher and dress shop owner; at 10, he won a contest dancing the jive to a new single he had bought, Elvis’s “Burning Love.” And he baked in “Cinema Paradiso” fantasy when his father ran the local movie theater, in addition to a pig farm and gas station.Elvis’s father went to jail for altering a check when he was young, and he and his mother barely scraped by. Mr. Luhrmann also had family heartaches: His parents divorced when he was 15 and his mother moved to Sydney, taking his sister and leaving Baz and his two brothers with his father. “Dad rallied around,” he said. “We became his world.”Living in the seven-house town of Herons Creek in New South Wales, what else could a boy do but watch “Lawrence of Arabia” on a black-and-white TV and run off as a teenager to become an artist in the big city of Sydney? (A time to reunite with his mother.)As filming for “Elvis” got underway on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, Mr. Hanks said that he and Mr. Butler nervously huddled. Mr. Butler did not consider himself a singer, except for strumming his guitar and singing for his late mother and girlfriends.“I said to him, ‘Hey, are you as petrified as I am?,’” Mr. Hanks, 65, recalled. “We had two actors going, actually, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off.’”As Mr. Butler recounted, his screen idol then warned him, “Not many people know what Colonel Parker sounds like, but everybody knows what Elvis sounds like and you’re going to have people attacking you from every which way.”Mr. Butler chuckled at the memory. “So I go, ‘Oh, thanks, Tom.’ And then I gave him a big hug.”Mr. Butler was an actor on teen shows on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. His first big movie role was playing Tex Watson, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”He confessed that his initial attempts to sing like Elvis made him feel like a kid wearing his father’s suit. But, he said, “When I felt nerves, I didn’t go, ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this.’ I thought, ‘This is what Elvis felt.’”The tall, lanky Butler (who divided his time at the Met Gala between Priscilla Presley and his girlfriend, the model Kaia Gerber) borrowed his director’s immersion technique; he stayed in Australia during a six-month Covid-19 shutdown from filming and walked on the beach and listened to tapes of Elvis.“Before Austin got the role, when I met him for a workshop in this building three and a half years ago, he had this Southern accent,” the director said. “It wasn’t until four weeks later, someone said, ‘He’s actually from Anaheim.’”When he was deciding whom to cast — runners-up included Harry Styles, Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller — Mr. Luhrmann got a call from Denzel Washington, who had acted with Mr. Butler in 2018 in “The Iceman Cometh” on Broadway.“‘You need to know I have never seen a work ethic like that young actor has,’” Mr. Luhrmann recalled Mr. Washington telling him. “‘He does not stop.’”Mr. Luhrmann has a record label, House of Iona, at RCA, where Elvis had his contract, so he had access to hundreds of recordings of the young Elvis but they weren’t usable because of their format.“I thought, ‘Do I get an impersonator and then mime it?’” he recalled. He asked Mr. Butler to try some songs.“Day 1, he can almost sing like Elvis,” Mr. Luhrmann said. He ended up using Austin’s voice, also a throaty baritone, for the young Elvis songs, blending for a few, and Elvis’s voice for the later iconic moments.Before she saw the movie, Priscilla Presley, 76, said she was nervous because she’d only met with the director a couple of times and “Baz can be, you know, he kind of goes off beat a bit.” But after she saw a screening recently with Jerry Schilling, a member of the Memphis Mafia, she wrote Mr. Luhrmann an email that every breath and every eye movement was perfect, and included a message for Mr. Butler: “If my husband was here today, he would look you in the eye and say, ‘Hot damn, you are me.’”The Carny Who Made the StarMr. Luhrmann became obsessed with the partnership of Colonel Parker and Elvis, easily the most fascinating Svengali-star relationship in entertainment history. (If you don’t count Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, who ran around declaring, “I am Marlene.”)Luhrmann wears a replica of an Elvis belt.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“I believe the word ‘sociopath’ will come into the dialogue when the issue of the colonel comes up,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “Sociopaths can be incredibly entertaining and amazingly enigmatic.”Was Colonel Parker — a native of Holland, using a fake name and honorary military title and pretending to be a good old boy from West Virginia — a captivating snake-oil salesman? Or was he something much darker: a leech, a thief, maybe even a murderer on the lam?Was Elvis strapped for money — mortgaging Graceland to make his payroll — and increasingly bored and dependent on drugs because the colonel, in this country illegally with no passport, squelched lucrative foreign tours?Did the old carny barker play out a shattering real-life version of “Nightmare Alley,” his favorite movie, where he turned the most successful solo recording artist of all time into the geek? Did the carny and animal trainer, whose favorite routine was a chicken hopping to music on a hidden hot plate, turn Elvis into his own dancing chicken?Colonel Parker called himself “the Snowman” because he loved snowing, or fooling, people. In the carnival, he had painted sparrows yellow and sold them as canaries. As a joke, he formed the Snowmen’s League, a fanciful private club that cost nothing to join but $100,000 to leave, according to Mr. Luhrmann; even L.B.J. was a member.“When the ‘sell’ becomes more powerful than the creative, then tragedy ensues,” said Mr. Luhrmann, who recreates a house of mirrors in the movie. It’s telling that Colonel Parker manufactured both “I love Elvis” buttons and “I hate Elvis” buttons, wanting a stake in both sides of the market. “After all, what’s hate worth if it’s free?” Mr. Luhrmann said sardonically.Some people thought the colonel used his carny mentalist skills to hypnotize Elvis, to control him and make the at-times-insecure star feel like a sex god.After Mr. Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, became what the actor called “the celebrity canaries in the coal mine” by getting Covid in March 2020, filming was delayed for six months. During the hiatus, Priscilla Presley ran into Ms. Wilson in Los Angeles and suggested a dinner. Ms. Presley and Mr. Schilling went to the home of Mr. Hanks and Ms. Wilson, and they had a confab about the colonel.Despite the famous legal battle between Elvis’s heirs and Colonel Parker — he was sued for massive fraud and mismanaging Elvis’s business interests; the parties settled out of court — Priscilla spoke highly of the manager, saying she wished he were still alive. That led to Mr. Luhrmann and Mr. Hanks reworking the colonel into “less of a one-dimensional bad guy,” as the director put it.“I was anticipating hearing horror stories about this venal, cheap crook,” Mr. Hanks said. “Just the opposite. Both Priscilla and Jerry said he was a lovely man.” As to the outrageous deal that gave Colonel Parker half of Elvis’s income, Priscilla told Mr. Hanks that Elvis didn’t care about the 50 percent and was glad that the colonel was handling the business side.“There was an acumen and brilliance to Colonel Tom Parker that is belied by the fact that he was a cheap carny,” said Mr. Hanks, who had to log five hours a day in makeup getting mountainous, mottled and saggy.“Look, Elvis was Picasso,” the actor said. “He was a one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime artist. The colonel understood that. Colonel Tom Parker would have been nothing without Elvis, and Elvis would not have been Elvis without Colonel Tom Parker.”2001’s “Moulin Rouge”20th Century FoxAs Elvis spiraled into drug addiction, the colonel spiraled into a gambling addiction. He needed Elvis to slave away in Vegas and on grueling road tours so the colonel could pay his gambling debts — or gamble free.In one chilling scene in the movie, based on fact, Elvis is in a drug haze with people dunking his face in ice water backstage at Vegas when the colonel comes up and tells a Dr. Feelgood to get the singer onstage, no matter what they have to do.“He did not want the word to get out that the greatest entertainer in the world could not get up onstage,” Mr. Hanks said. “He didn’t want to give back the money or deal with the legal ramifications. It ends up being, is that looking out for the legacy of his client or is that slowly poisoning the guy?”Elvis died in 1977, at 42, after a heart attack. His health had been worn down by the grind of his career — and almost certainly by the 19,000 pills that Dr. George Nichopoulos, his Memphis Dr. Feelgood, prescribed to him, according to “The Colonel,” by Alanna Nash. (Not counting what he got from other star-struck doctors.)Colonel Parker did not miss a beat. He refused to be a pallbearer, wore a Hawaiian shirt to the funeral and said to Elvis’s father, Vernon, that they needed to start printing a lot more records. “Elvis didn’t die, the body did,” the colonel famously said, adding that it would be just like when Elvis was away in the Army in Germany.Mr. Hanks defended the colonel. “He was absolutely right,” the actor said. “Why miss out on that opportunity? Everybody went back and bought Elvis Presley records all over again.”Although he sees the colonel’s “self-serving Machiavellian aspect,” Mr. Hanks does not think the colonel is to blame for Elvis destroying himself with drugs.“Elvis came back from the Army absolutely adoring amphetamines because you could buy them over the counter in Germany,” Mr. Hanks said. “That’s how he got through tank maneuvers.”He sees Colonel Parker not as a con man but more as Falstaff, who taught Prince Hal invaluable populist skills, like how to “drink with any tinker in his own language,” but then got pushed aside when the prince became a king.“Elvis was not kept in a Ball jar by Colonel Tom Parker,” Mr. Hanks said. “Colonel Parker would come in, he would take care of the money, he would say, ‘Here’s what the shows and bookings are going to be.’ If Elvis didn’t say, ‘Yes, help get me off these drugs’ then that wasn’t going to happen.” And, Mr. Hanks said, “If Elvis didn’t want to do all those bad movies, he could have said, ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’”Mr. Hanks and I talked about how much we would have loved to see the version of “A Star Is Born” that Barbra Streisand originally envisioned, with Elvis as her fading, alcoholic husband, before the colonel nixed it.“That would have been the greatest stunt casting on the planet Earth,” Mr. Hanks said.Searching for the Truth About Elvis and RaceWhen Mr. Luhrmann reached out to Lisa Marie Presley and her actress daughter Riley Keough early on, he said, Ms. Keough told him that she was concerned that her grandfather had been maligned on race.After Chuck D of Public Enemy made the hit song “Fight the Power” in 1989, calling Elvis “a straight-out racist,” a generation of kids believed it. Then in 2020, the rapper did an interview where he said he had no specific evidence of racism; he simply made Elvis “the fall guy” because Elvis was crowned the King for a style that Black singers had originated.Mr. Luhrmann set up an office in the back of Graceland and, visiting over three years, did prodigious research with his team, following Elvis from his birth in a shotgun shack in Tupelo, Miss., to a period when his father went to jail and he and his mother ended up in one of the few white-designated houses in the Black community there. The director interviewed Sam Bell, a childhood friend of E.P., as they called him, about their trips to juke joints and Pentecostal tents, where the famous possessed twitching of Elvis the Pelvis began.“Conservatives, this organization of governors, freaked out because they saw that movement as aligned to African American movement,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “That’s why they were so terrified of its effect on young people. It was jumping the race line, basically.” In the film, Mr. Luhrmann uses real headlines about Elvis, like “A White Boy With Black Hips.”“Many in the Black community loved him,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “They thought he was brave for performing their music. He didn’t sit down connivingly and go, ‘I’m going to take Black music and make money out of it.’“He was a spiritual guy. He loved gospel music. It was his safe place. He was about bringing people together, not pulling them apart. Did he do dumb things when he was trapped? Did he get high on drugs and go down to see Nixon and shake his hand and say, ‘I want to become a federal drug agent’? Yes. But at his core he was empathetic and profoundly vulnerable.”Luhrmann and assistants take a phone call.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesA story circulated at the start of Elvis’s career that he had made a racist crack, either in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s show, but those who looked into it said that Elvis had never appeared in Boston or on Mr. Murrow’s program.In 1957, Elvis told a reporter from Jet,“I never said anything like that and people who know me know that I wouldn’t have said it.” He reiterated his debt to Black musicians for rock ’n’ roll and gospel, saying: “Let’s face it, I can’t sing like Fats Domino can.”Mr. Luhrmann believes the story about a racist remark was made up by anti-Elvis conservatives who wanted to bring him down. He engaged Nelson George, a Black music historian who had been critical of Elvis, to seek the truth.“He didn’t say that,” Mr. George said. “He was timid at times when the moment required boldness. But he wasn’t ill willed toward Black people.”The director learned that Elvis was friends with many Black artists. He said that James Brown dedicated a song to his “Brother, Elvis,” and was present at Elvis’s funeral, and that in the period when Elvis first got successful, he had a friendship with B.B. King and was often the only white face at Club Handy, a nightclub on Beale Street in Memphis where many Black artists performed.But the movie makes it clear that this was one more area where Elvis was cowed by the colonel, who did not want his star involved in the civil rights movement, feeling it was bad for business. It was drummed into the singer that, when he was asked about politics or religion, he should deflect, saying, “I’m just an entertainer.”The director believes that the colonel ushered Elvis into the Army, thinking, “We’ll send him away until this rock ’n’ roll thing cools down. He’s too much in with this Black culture.” The colonel stifled Elvis’s desire to go for prestigious movies like “West Side Story” and pushed him to make white-bread girls-in-paradise pop musicals that got worse and worse.Austin Butler as Elvis.Warner Bros.As Peter Guralnick, an Elvis biographer, wrote in The New York Times, Elvis was seen “as something of a hero in the Black community in those early years.” The African American newspapers in Memphis hailed him as a “race man,” Mr. Guralnick said, “not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions,” going to the Memphis Fairgrounds on a night designated for Black visitors.Mr. Luhrmann is bracing for an intense reaction on everything from his take on Elvis and race to his portrayal of the star’s romance with the 14-year-old Priscilla.“But this is not someone hanging around schoolyards, like some famous people we know, serially picking up 14-year-olds,” he said. “They do fall in love and have a child, and they did consummate the marriage only when they were married. That is true.”So, I wonder, is Elvis ever leaving the building?“Elvis is still in our lives and he will continue to be,” the director replied as he sped off to his next big adventure.Confirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You paint your toenails with black polish.Baz Luhrmann: That’s true. It’s actually blue-black. I paint and have painted since I was about 18, my left big toe.You were greatly inspired by the Netflix game show “Is It Cake?”No. But it is true that there’s always usually in my movies a red dress — or in this one, Elvis’s red pirate shirt — and a cake.Your hair goes frizzy if you’re not vigilant.Yes, I have very curly hair and I straighten it now. I was called Baz because of Basil Brush, the British cartoon fox.You replaced Natalie Portman with Claire Danes in “Romeo + Juliet” because Ms. Portman made 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio look too old, which made it a bit pervy.She was 14. And when you see Leo in the flesh, he’s a tall, young man and you just realized, she was too young. Natalie was amazing in the footage, but it was too much of a burden for her at that age.When you worked with Jay-Z on “Gatsby,” he was always late.If he said he’d be there at 9 p.m., he was there at 9, even if you just saw him on TMZ. As a collaborator, absolutely fantastic.You and Hugh Jackman both started in Australia as gas pump jockeys.We had a gas station on our farm.Leo became a diva after “Titanic.”No weirdness because Leonardo, his father and I are so very close. I see them almost every time I’m in L.A. In fact, I never miss the opportunity to go for a walk with George, Leo’s dad — one of the wisest and most interesting men I know. The only thing fraught with Leonardo, and it’s just part of why he’s so successful, is he puts as much energy into making a decision into what to act in as he does into his acting.Leo’s entourage is too small.I deny. When I wanted to make “Romeo and Juliet,” nobody wanted to do it. I convinced Leo to come out. I got two business class tickets against the studio’s wishes, for him to come out with his dad to workshop. You know what he did? He cashed the tickets in and brought all his friends with him. I put them all in videos acting all the different roles.Luhrmann at home in Gramercy Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesYou used your high school as Gatsby’s mansion.Yes, the building connected to the school. It was a seminary.You bought a green light for your dock.I don’t have a dock. I went out in Long Island with Anna Wintour and I found the dock with the green light.No matter what country or city you’re in, you put away your underwear in exactly the same pattern.I do lay things out exactly the same way, and the reason I have a system is because I’m dreaming. I’m thinking of the film. If I’ve already made decisions on where things are, I can get ready with my eyes closed.You played a pig seller turned hearse driver in an Australian soap opera.Yes, I was called Jerry. I was this teenage kid who sold the pig and then I become the funeral cabdriver. I used the money I earned to fund my theater company.You now realize that it was a tragic mistake not to include Ann-Margret, Ed Sullivan and fried peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches in your Elvis movie.Everything you can imagine, we wrote it at some point. But that would have been a four-hour version. I always wanted Nicole [Kidman] to play Ann-Margret, actually, not in this movie, but she’s so Ann-Margret in so many ways.If Elvis were alive, he would be hanging out at Mar-a-Lago.I would say no. I just don’t think he would socialize.The greatest party you ever gave was for the turn of the millennium, in the middle of making “Moulin Rouge!”Nicole was there with Tom Cruise. We found an old, small ocean liner and we brought it up from Tasmania. We had it parked and every single cabin was a scene. One was like a desert, one was like a porn room, one was like a tropical island, one was a jungle. Then, we themed the whole thing. That party, anyone who was there talked about it in almost mythological terms. The deal was that we’d keep the photographs from the party unreleased until we’re all gone. More