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    Johnny Depp Jury Finds That Amber Heard Defamed Him in Op-Ed

    The jury in Virginia found that Ms. Heard had damaged her ex-husband’s reputation with an op-ed in which she identified herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”For six weeks, the defamation case that the actor Johnny Depp filed against his ex-wife Amber Heard transfixed the nation, offering a rare instance of high-profile #MeToo charges and countercharges, including lurid accusations of physical abuse, being hashed out in the public spotlight of a courtroom.On Wednesday, the seven-person jury in Fairfax, Va., found that Mr. Depp had been defamed by Ms. Heard when she described herself in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Mr. Depp was awarded more than $10 million in damages.During the trial Mr. Depp had fiercely denied Ms. Heard’s accusations that he had subjected her to repeated physical abuse that included punching and head-butting and several instances of sexual assault. In a statement after the verdict Mr. Depp thanked the jury, saying that it “gave me my life back.”Ms. Heard, who was in the courtroom as the verdict was read, said in a statement afterward that she was disappointed “beyond words” by their finding.“I’m heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband,” she said.Ms. Heard did not seem buoyed by the fact that the jury also awarded her $2 million in damages, agreeing that she had been defamed in one instance by a lawyer for Mr. Depp. A spokeswoman for Ms. Heard, Alafair Hall, said she planned to appeal.A jury found that Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard were both defamed.Craig Hudson/Associated PressSuch cases are often settled out of court, in part to avoid public scrutiny. The bitter charges and embarrassing details in this case were aired not only in open court, but also before cameras that beamed every accusation onto televisions and livestreams, where they were turned into memes and debated on social media.The 2018 op-ed that Ms. Heard wrote never mentioned Mr. Depp by name, but he argued that it clearly referred to their marriage, which began in 2015 and fell apart just over a year later, and that it was false. (Early drafts of it were prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union, where Ms. Heard was an ambassador with a focus on women’s rights and gender-based violence.)The jury agreed, and found that it contained several statements that were false, and were made with actual malice.Ms. Heard countersued, claiming that she had been defamed in 2020 when one of Mr. Depp’s lawyers at the time had dismissed her accusations as a “hoax” in statements to a British tabloid. The jury found that Mr. Depp had defamed Ms. Heard in one instance, when the lawyer accused her of damaging the couple’s penthouse and blaming it on Mr. Depp.The verdict came as a surprise to several legal observers, who noted that a judge in Britain had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. The judge in that case had ruled that the defendants had shown that what they published was “substantially true.”Ms. Heard, 36, maintained throughout the trial that everything written in the op-ed was true.Amber Heard leaves the courthouse in Virginia after the jury’s verdict in the libel case brought by her ex-husband.Tom Brenner/ReutersThe combination of star power, sensational details and cameras in the courtroom turned the trial into an internet obsession. Memes and posts attacking Ms. Heard, some created by superfans of Mr. Depp, proliferated online. Ms. Heard testified that she had received thousands of death threats since the start of the trial and called the online mockery “agonizing.”Sometimes breaking into sobs on the stand, Ms. Heard testified about more than a dozen times that, she said, Mr. Depp was violent toward her. In a key incident in Australia in 2015, Ms. Heard said, Mr. Depp became “belligerent” after taking the drug MDMA and attacked her, grabbing her by the neck and, at one point, sexually assaulting her with an object that Ms. Heard later determined to be a bottle.“I’m looking in his eyes and I don’t see him anymore,” Ms. Heard testified. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”Mackenna White, a lawyer who counsels people as to the risks of publishing potentially contested accusations of sexual misconduct, said she worried that the online mockery of Ms. Heard would make some less likely to come forward.“The absolute destruction of Amber Heard is going to have an impact,” Ms. White said. “If you’re someone who’s worried about what could happen if you speak out, this could have the same chilling effect that we’ve been trying to reverse all these years.”Others saw the online reaction as a harbinger of what the jury would decide.“You have now millions of Americans weighing in as evidence unfolds in court — you can take that as an indication of how the case is going,” said Imran Ansari, a lawyer representing Alan Dershowitz in defamation suits involving Virginia Giuffre, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation and accused Mr. Dershowitz of being part of it, which he denies.Spectators outside the Virginia courthouse, many of them fans of Mr. Depp, reacted after the verdict was announced.Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Depp, 58, gave a vastly different account of their relationship — and of the trip to Australia — in which Ms. Heard was the aggressor. Ms. Heard, he testified, had once been a girlfriend who seemed “too good to be true,” but turned into a partner who would taunt him, call him demeaning names, punch him and throw objects at him.In Australia, he testified, she threw a handle of vodka that exploded on his hand and severed his finger. (She denies throwing the bottle at him and said she only ever hit him in self-defense or in defense of her sister.)Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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    ‘My Dead Dad’ Review: Learning the Ropes, Thanks to an Inheritance

    A young man heads to Los Angeles and sees his estranged father’s life through the eyes of his tenants.“My Dead Dad” is something of a calling-card picture for its male lead, Pedro Correa, who also co-wrote and co-produced the movie. While the actor has a lengthy filmography, it’s mostly in shorts, including a parody trailer of a nonexistent sequel to “Drive,” directed by Fabio Frey, who also handles that job here.The premise for this feature is not so antic. Correa plays Lucas, a skateboarding burnout who’s been living in Reno, Nev., since his mom took him out of Los Angeles — and far from his dad — before his teenage years. Now in something like his early twenties, he learns from his mom that Augusto, said dad, has died. Taking a long drag from a cigarette, Lucas asks how his old man died. Mom answers, “Lung cancer”; Lucas mulls this over a second and says, “Nice.”That’s as close to an honest laugh as the movie earns, but it’s not about laughs, it’s about learning, sort of. Lucas has inherited the Los Angeles apartment building that Augusto owned, and he drives out to size it up and maybe sell it off. There he meets an overenthusiastic uncle (Steven Bauer), a sage building superintendent (Raymond Cruz), a beguiling and artistically inclined young woman (Courtney Dietz) and other underdeveloped characters, none of whom serve much of a function beyond placing themselves before Correa and spouting banalities while he makes doleful eyes at them.The gear-grinding tedium of the movie’s taking-responsibility scenario is occasionally broken up by not-quite-lyrical sequences of Los Angeles sunsets seen from car windows. “Being an adult sucks,” the building superintendent observes at one point. “My Dead Dad” doesn’t present any compelling counterarguments to that.My Dead DadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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    The verdict in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial is in. Here’s what to know.

    The jury deciding the outcome of the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has reached a verdict, but when the court convened Wednesday afternoon, the judge returned the verdict forms to the jury to fill in the amount of damages they thought were warranted.Judge Penney S. Azcarate’s instruction seemed to indicate that the jury had found that someone had been defamed, but it was not clear whether it was Mr. Depp or Ms. Heard. The jury returned to the deliberation room.“It has to be at least a dollar for compensatory damages and up to whatever you feel the damages should be,” Judge Azcarate said.The six-week trial in Fairfax County Circuit Court turned into a contentious battle between the two Hollywood stars over the truth of what happened in their relationship and marriage, which fell apart in 2016. Both Ms. Heard and Mr. Depp accused each other of repeated physical abuse throughout their relationship.Mr. Depp, 58, sued Ms. Heard, 36, for her 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” After more than a year of legal sparring, Ms. Heard then filed a countersuit against Mr. Depp in 2020, alleging that he defamed her when a lawyer representing him released statements calling her allegations of abuse a hoax.Mr. Depp claimed that Ms. Heard’s op-ed “devastated” his career and reputation. Ms. Heard claimed that the statements by the lawyer harmed her ability to work and caused her emotional distress and humiliation.The seven-person jury, which started deliberating on Friday but took a break over the long holiday weekend, has been tasked with determining whether Ms. Heard defamed Mr. Depp and whether he defamed her. To deliver a victory to either of them, the jury must find that a greater weight of the evidence shows they were defamed, and that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that it was done with “actual malice.” More

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    Stream These 11 Titles Before They Leave Netflix This Month

    A lot of great movies and TV shows are expiring for subscribers in the United States in June. Here are the ones worth finding time for.Big, beloved Oscar winners from the 1960s through the 2010s populate the slate of titles leaving Netflix in the United States at the end of the month, as well as a family favorite, a sci-fi smash and two coming-of-age classics (one for boys, one for girls). But the must-see for movie buffs is a hysterically funny puncturing of documentary conventions, so we’ll start there. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Documentary Now!’: Seasons 1-3 (June 2)When the “Saturday Night Live” writer-stars Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers created this series with their frequent “S.N.L.” director Rhys Thomas, it seemed safe to bet they would attempt to extend that show’s brand of wild satire. In fact, they created something far more niche (and funnier, perhaps because of it): a charmingly niche spoof of documentary styles and specific nonfiction movies, in the kind of hyper-specific detail that only film nerds can fully appreciate. It’s funny and surprisingly heartfelt as its creators both skewer and shine up their subjects. Standout episode: “Original Cast Album: Co-Op,” from Season 3, a parody of D.A. Pennebaker’s “Original Cast Album: Company” that was so on target it was included in the bonus features of the original film’s recent Criterion Collection release.Stream it here.‘Lady Bird’ (June 2)The actor-turned-filmmaker Greta Gerwig made her solo feature directorial debut with this poignant and funny 2017 coming-of-age movie, which was nominated for five Academy Awards. Two of those were for its stars: Saoirse Ronan is the title character, a Sacramento teenager desperate to find a way out of her suburban surroundings. Laurie Metcalf co-stars as her perpetually put-upon mother, trying her very best to ease her daughter’s bumpy transition into adulthood. Gerwig’s perceptive screenplay digs into the stickiness of this complex dynamic, and her energetic direction honors the characters’ emotional woes without getting bogged down in them.Stream it here.‘Silver Linings Playbook’ (June 17)Jennifer Lawrence won the Academy Award for best actress for this tricky exploration of love, loss and ballroom dancing from the writer-director David O. Russell. Adapting the novel by Matthew Quick, Russell tells the story of Pat (Bradley Cooper), recently released from a mental institution and trying to recalibrate his life after divorce from a tricky vantage point: his old room in the attic of his childhood home. His parents (Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver) prove not quite the steadying influences one might hope; for that, he finds himself drawn to Tiffany (Lawrence), a young widow who implores him to join her in a dance competition. Their rehearsals form the heart of the movie, and in those scenes, the careful blend of pathos, tough talk and self-delusion casts a delicate spell.Stream it here.‘Desperado’ (June 30)The director Robert Rodriguez is best known these days for family entertainment like the “Spy Kids” franchise and sci-fi efforts like “Alita: Battle Angel.” But he broke through as a master of hyperkinetic action, first on the self-financed indie “El Mariachi,” and then with this follow-up, which injected that film’s Spaghetti Western style and filmmaking bravado with studio resources and the stars Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek. Banderas is an enigmatic musician, strolling from one border town to the next with a guitar case full of guns, looking for the man who killed the woman he loved; Hayek is a bookstore owner who bandages his wounds and steals his heart. Their chemistry is off the charts, the action beats are rip-roaring and the cameos are delightful.Stream it here.‘The Exorcist’ (June 30)Very few films can be said to have “changed everything,” but William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of the novel by William Peter Blatty is certainly one of them — a box office smash, a critical success and a certified cultural phenomenon. A haunted Ellen Burstyn stars as a Georgetown actress whose daughter (a powerful Linda Blair) seems controlled by evil forces. Once a sensitive priest (Jason Miller) determines she has been possessed by the devil, a specialist (Max von Sydow) is brought in to rescue her soul. So many of the film’s big moments — the green vomit, the devil voice, the incantations of the exorcism — have been recycled and satirized that you’d think the film would lose its bite, but “The Exorcist” has lost none of its ability to scare and shock.Stream it here.‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ (June 30)The actor turned screenwriter Jason Segel and his “Muppets” and “Five Year Engagement” collaborator Nicholas Stoller first teamed up for this 2008 romantic comedy from the producer Judd Apatow. Segal is Peter, a sad-sack composer in a perpetual funk after his breakup with the title character (Kristen Bell), a famous TV actress. In an attempt to escape his depression, he takes a Hawaiian vacation — only to find Sarah at the same resort with her new beau (Russell Brand), a pretentious British pop star. Mila Kunis co-stars as the resort receptionist who presents a new opportunity for love; Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, and Jack McBrayer turn up in small but uproarious supporting roles.Stream it here.‘Her’ (June 30)The idea of falling in love with a virtual assistant might have seemed like pure science fiction when this comedy-drama from the writer and director Spike Jonze hit theaters in 2013; today, the growing ubiquity and sophistication of Siri and Alexa are perhaps making it inevitable. The assistant here is named Samantha and voiced by Scarlett Johansson; her “user” is Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), who is particularly wounded because of a pending divorce. Jonze’s touching script bypasses the easy, cheap jokes for a penetrating exploration of loneliness and companionship, and Phoenix’s performance is an astonishing symphony of vulnerability and pain.Stream it here.‘How to Train Your Dragon’ (June 30)This 2010 adaptation of the book by Cressida Cowell was one of the family franchise success stories of the decade, spawning two sequels, a TV series, video games and even a live “arena spectacular.” But it is, at its heart, a simple story — something like the “boy and his dog” stories of old, in which the meek young Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), intimidated by his dragon-slaying dad (Gerald Butler) teaches himself how to tame the beasts instead. Kids will appreciate the gorgeous animation and the “be yourself” messaging; grown-ups will enjoy the comic supporting cast, which includes Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Kristen Wiig.Stream it here.‘Looper’ (June 30)When the family of Bruce Willis announced his retirement from acting in March, fans took to social media to share their favorite Willis performances: the gun-toting snark of “Die Hard” was oft-invoked, as was the sensitivity of “The Sixth Sense.” But this 2012 hit from Rian Johnson was one of the few films to successfully meld those personas, allowing Willis to emote and kick butt in equal measures. As Joe, a one-time hit man who (through a complicated combination of double-crosses and time travel) must face his 20-years-younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), in a world where there’s only room for one of them. The sci-fi and action are tiptop, but “Looper” excels most in its quiet moments, which allow Willis to do some of his most finely-tuned acting since his ’90s heyday.Stream it here.‘My Fair Lady’ (June 30)George Cukor’s 1964 adaptation of the Broadway hit by Alan Jay Lerner (itself a reconfiguration of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”) remains one of the most widely beloved movies of its era, though it’s not an obvious slam-dunk — after all, it’s a nearly-three-hour musical starring two people who can’t sing. (Audrey Hepburn’s vocals were dubbed; Rex Harrison does a kind of rhythmic lyric-reading.) But the story is timeless, the songs are memorable, and the production is handsomely mounted. It won an astonishing eight Oscars (including best picture, best actor and best director), and that sounds just about right.Stream it here.‘Stand by Me’ (June 30)Rob Reiner’s early directorial career is a mind-boggling display of adept genre-surfing, moving with ease from broad comedy (“This Is Spinal Tap”) to road movie (“The Sure Thing”) to fantasy (“The Princess Bride”) to rom-com (“When Harry Met Sally”) to suspense (“Misery”) to courtroom drama (“A Few Good Men”). In the middle of that astonishing run, he took a shot at coming-of-age dramas and proved he could do that too. This modest but memorable adaptation of the Stephen King novella “The Body” digs into its time and place (a small town in Oregon, circa 1959), shows a remarkable ear for the way boys communicate and boasts top-notch leading performances by Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix.Stream it here.ALSO LEAVING: “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce”: Seasons 1-5 (June 13), “Criminal Minds”: Seasons 1-12 (June 29), “Corpse Bride,” “Eagle Eye,”“Happy Gilmore,” “Into the Wild” and “Midnight in Paris” (all June 30). More

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    Willie Mays Aikens Has His Story Told in ‘The Royal’

    A film tells the true story of Willie Aikens, a World Series star for the Kansas City Royals whose life was derailed by drugs — and prison — before he pieced it back together.COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The greatest player in the history of the Kansas City Royals slammed his palm onto a conference table at the Baseball Hall of Fame last Friday. George Brett was pretending to be an F.B.I. agent showing off his badge.Just like that, you were not in Cooperstown. N.Y., anymore. You were somewhere with the Royals in the early 1980s, and you might be in serious trouble.“He brings my name up, he brings Jamie Quirk’s name up — and he brings your name up,” Brett said, pointing to his old teammate, Willie Mays Aikens, across the table.“And he brings Vida Blue’s name up, and Jerry Martin’s name up and Willie Wilson’s name up. And he says, ‘You know, we had a meeting earlier about calling up bookies and betting games. Let’s just say George and Jamie are calling some guy we got a wiretap on …’”Brett was shaken and quickly understood: He stopped betting on football games. But the F.B.I. did not care much about him and Quirk. Investigators were trying to signal the others that they were onto their cocaine use.“If we had stopped right then and there, we’d have never had a drug case,” Aikens said. “They tried to warn us, man.”“And you kept doing it,” Brett said.“And we kept doing it,” Aikens replied.Aikens kept doing it for a decade. Like Blue, Martin and Wilson, he served a short prison term after the 1983 season, but that was hardly the worst of it. That is not why Samuel Goldwyn Films has turned Aikens’s life story into a movie, “The Royal,” scheduled for release on July 15. It will be available for streaming and in limited theaters, and it had a premiere last Friday at the Hall of Fame.For Aikens, 67, it was his first trip to Cooperstown, where Brett is enshrined for a career that ended with 3,154 hits in 1993. By then Aikens was deep into his cocaine addiction, which came to consume him during a six-year career in Mexico after eight seasons in the majors as a slugging first baseman with the California Angels, the Royals and the Toronto Blue Jays through 1985.In 1994 he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for selling 2.2 ounces of crack cocaine, on four occasions, to an undercover female officer. Aikens has said he was interested in the woman and complied when she asked him to cook the cocaine into crack.The 2022 M.L.B. Season“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic.”Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good?: For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women’s perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers.The Third Baseman’s Gambit: Manny Machado is the hottest hitter in baseball, and he is coming for your Queen.The Loneliest Team in Baseball: The Oakland Athletics gutted their roster and flirted with Las Vegas. Now their fans appear to be in full revolt.King of Throws: Tom House has spent his life helping superstars get even better. With a new app he wants to fix young pitchers before they develop bad habits.That decision made Aikens — the first player with two multihomer games in the same World Series, in 1980, when the Royals lost to Philadelphia — a public face of the gross disparity in sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenders. A 1986 federal law punished people far more severely for crack; it took until 2010 for Congress to reduce the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1.Aikens was incarcerated for 14 years, and has now been out of prison as long as he was in. “The Royal” mostly chronicles his transition back to society — reconciling with his wife and family, becoming a father again, working on a road crew digging manholes and, with Brett’s help, securing a job as a minor league coach for the Royals.“How many people in this world go through their life on earth and get a movie?” said Aikens, who now serves as a special assistant to the Royals as part of their leadership development team. “Not many people. I’m hoping that the movie will help save some lives.”Aikens is being portrayed in “The Royal” by Amin Joseph, an actor known for his work on the FX series “Snowfall.”The actor Amin Joseph, who plays a crack dealer in the FX series “Snowfall,” portrays Aikens. Joseph, 42, grew up in Harlem and said he remembers crack vials strewn on playgrounds. He was drawn to playing a different kind of figure impacted by drugs.“There are real people in our communities that are dealing with this and still healing, and like Willie often says, not all of them were major league baseball players with the luxury of having friends in powerful places to give them a second chance,” Joseph said. “A lot of these people are lost, forgotten, the underbelly of what we consider society, the people that we judge.”Aikens’s background gave him a pathway to return to baseball, but it was not always smooth. He first had to confront his past and show that he could share his experiences.Aikens was something of an unlikely public speaker, having dealt with a stutter for much of his life. Brett had first encouraged him to tell his story for the athletes at Brett’s son’s high school, a scene loosely depicted in the film. It became a revelation.“When I picked him up at the halfway house and I heard him talk, I had tears in my eyes. I really did,” Brett said. “I was so proud of him.”Phylicia Rashad and Willie Mays Aikens discussed “The Royal” at a screening in Washington, D.C. last week. Brian Stukes/Getty ImagesAikens — who testified before Congress in 2009, urging sentencing reform for drug offenders — has told his story many times since, to Royals prospects and to students at the team’s Urban Youth Academy. The message has stayed all too relevant in baseball; while cocaine was a scourge of the 1980s, the death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, in 2019, revealed the toll of the opioid epidemic on the sport.Four Angels teammates revealed in court this year that they, like Skaggs, had received oxycodone pills from Eric Kay, a former Angels communications director who was found guilty on two charges for his role in the death of Skaggs. Prosecutors argued that Skaggs had died from a pill or pills he received from Kay that were disguised to look like oxycodone but were actually fentanyl, a far stronger opioid.“This drug that they have right now, it’s mixed in with Oxycodone and drugs like that, and it’s a blind killer,” Aikens said, referring to fentanyl. “When I was using drugs, you could sit there for hours or days and just snort or smoke cocaine. But with this drug now, fentanyl, you can take this one pill and it can just knock it out. It doesn’t even give you a chance.”Almost in spite of himself, Aikens survived to get another chance. Now he has taken his story to a theater in Cooperstown — and, soon, far beyond. More

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    Strike First, Strike Hard: How ‘The Karate Kid’ Became a Musical

    The new production, an adaptation of the classic 1984 martial arts film, is onstage now just outside St. Louis and aiming for a Broadway run.CHESTERFIELD, Mo. — Robert Mark Kamen was through with “The Karate Kid,” his semi-autobiographical 1984 martial arts film that spawned a string of movies, an animated program and the hit Netflix series “Cobra Kai,” until he saw “Hadestown” in 2019. That’s when he realized: He loved musicals.“When you watch a movie, the camera is limited to one dimension,” Kamen, 74, said in early May during a break from rehearsals for “The Karate Kid — The Musical,” which is debuting at the new $25 million Kirkwood Performing Arts Center just outside St. Louis. “With this thing, you can have three dimensions, people doing something [pointing] here, here, here, going up and down, around and around, all at the same time. … It opened up so many possibilities.”Sy, center, rehearsing a number with, clockwise from left: Isidro Rafael, Cardoza and Zachary Downer. The musical puts a greater emphasis on the character of Chojun Miyagi, played by Sy.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesAn inspired Kamen went back to his hotel — and wrote what would become the opening of a new musical, complete with taiko drums and dancing ancestors. He also called the person who’d sent him to New York as a homework assignment, the producer Kumiko Yoshii, who had been campaigning since 2016 for the rights to “The Karate Kid” franchise, which Kamen owned with Sony Pictures.“He was so excited and had so many ideas,” Yoshii said. “But at the heart of it all was still the relationship between Daniel and his mentor, Mr. Miyagi.”The result is a musical adaptation of the classic film about a teenage American boy (Ralph Macchio) who learns martial arts from an Okinawan-born janitor and karate master (Pat Morita, whose performance earned an Oscar nomination) to defeat a high school bully. The musical stars John Cardoza (“Jagged Little Pill”) as Daniel LaRusso, the titular karate kid, and the Canadian actor Jovanni Sy as his mentor, Chojun Miyagi.Ralph Macchio, left, and Pat Morita in the 1984 movie “The Karate Kid.”Columbia PicturesThough the plot closely follows that of the original film — the story is still set in the 1980s — the musical’s cast and creative team of more than 40 artists is markedly more diverse.The director, Amon Miyamoto, was the first — and remains the only — Japanese citizen to direct a show on Broadway (a 2004 revival of the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical “Pacific Overtures”); Keone and Mari Madrid, the married Filipino American choreographers, have worked with Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish and recently directed and choreographed the Britney Spears jukebox musical “Once Upon a One More Time”; and the costume designer Ayako Maeda, has won numerous awards in her native Japan. Kamen wrote the book, and the songwriter Drew Gasparini, known for his work on “Smash,” wrote the music and lyrics.“It’s an American film,” the director, Miyamoto, 64, said in Japanese via an interpreter during a rehearsal break in early May. “But we’ve added Japanese elements.”Those elements include putting a greater emphasis on Mr. Miyagi by framing the story as his recollection of events, which Kamen said was his original vision for the film before the filmmakers decided to focus on Macchio’s Daniel. There is also a score by Gasparini that blends pop, rock and Okinawan music; costumes featuring traditional Japanese attire, including a kimono, by Maeda; and a dance-heavy production that fuses the Madrids’ hip-hop choreography style with karate.“If we’re doing exactly the same thing as the film, there’s no reason we have to create this for the stage,” Robert Mark Kamen said of his approach to writing the book for the new musical.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times“There has to be a reason to adapt it into a musical,” Kamen said. “If we’re doing exactly the same thing as the film, there’s no reason we have to create this for the stage.”INSIDE A FORMER CHURCH in Chesterfield, Mo., on a Saturday morning in early May, ribbons of light shone through stained glass windows as a line of dancers fanned out like peacock feathers on both sides of Sy, who was singing the song “Bonsai,” which extols the power of patience and focus.“Needles start to bend,” he sang as the dancers undulated up and down, raising and lowering their arms in sync. Eventually, they would be backlit to look like a bonsai tree.Kamen, among the creative team at the rehearsal that day, thanked Keone Madrid, calling the scene “beautiful.”“Then you’re going to see ‘Strike First. Strike Hard.’ and want to run through a wall afterward,” a smiling Keone Madrid said, referring to the musical’s next song, a pulsing anthem with pounding drums and frenetic kicks and punches.Kamen, at first, had been less than keen on musicalizing his signature franchise. But after a few months of meeting requests from Yoshii, his agent persuaded him to have dinner with her in Los Angeles in January 2017.Not knowing he was a vineyard owner and wine enthusiast, she let him choose the wine (an expensive bottle of Burgundy) at dinner. “To him, the fact that I let him select the wine was important,” she said. “After that, his response to every idea I had was, ‘OK, let’s give it a shot.’” (Kamen confirmed this, adding he was won over by his fourth glass.)“The character of Mr. Miyagi spoke to me a great deal growing up,” said Yoshii, who was a high school exchange student in Bozeman, Mont., when the film was released in theaters in 1984. “Because of Miyagi, kids talked to me about the Japanese karate element.”The choreographer Mari Madrid demonstrating the crane kick.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesBecause “The Karate Kid” is Kamen’s story, he was the natural choice to write the book, Yoshii said. There was just one problem: He didn’t know anything about musicals. “I called my agent, Jack Tantleff, and I said, ‘Now what the [expletive] do I do?’ I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “He said, ‘You’ll learn.’”Kamen and Gasparini, began meeting up in New York, where they would see four shows a week. Then Gasparini, who is from California, would spend time at Kamen’s guesthouse in Sonoma, with a portable piano, working on the score.Drew Gasparini, who wrote the show’s music and lyrics, is known for his work on the TV series “Smash.”Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesGasparini decided on a blend of pop, rock and Okinawan music, which included traveling to Okinawa, Japan, in October 2019 to study with two musicians. Two songs for Mr. Miyagi feature a sanshin, a three-stringed instrument made of snake skin. (For the war-hardened John Kreese, played by Alan H. Green, the antagonist and leader of the Cobra Kai dojo, he went with Metallica-inspired electric guitars.)Capturing the essence of the characters from the film, who also include Ali Mills (Jetta Juriansz), Daniel’s love interest, and his mother, Lucille LaRusso (Kate Baldwin), is also the approach that Miyamoto said he tried to adopt in his direction. “With Kreese and Mr. Miyagi especially, we delve into what makes them who they are, and how they got that way,” he said.Kreese, for instance, is a Vietnam veteran grappling with the lingering trauma of his experiences, and Yoshii said they wanted the cast to understand what that meant.Sheet music and other items in the rehearsal space.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesSo they had, among others, a Marine veteran and a World War II historian (Mr. Miyagi is a World War II veteran) speak to the cast about the two wars that come into play in the story.“Robert’s script goes a little deeper in the musical than the movie,” Yoshii said. “So it was like if we’re going to do that, we have to talk to these guys, so the actors aren’t just doing what they think or what their imagination conjures up about what experiences are.”But for the added gravity of both men’s wartime experiences, the film’s lighthearted center remains. The secret weapon, Kamen said, is the choreography.“The dance will be the thing that takes people by surprise,” said Cardoza, 28, who was a fan of the film growing up. “You think ‘Karate Kid, combat fighting.’ You don’t think ‘dance.’”Alan H. Green, as John Kreese, with some of the ensemble members playing students of the Cobra Kai dojo.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesDuring rehearsals last month, those two elements blended as 14 dancers playing Cobra Kai students, clad in shorts and kneepads, emerged from behind a semicircle of rolling mirrors. Green, stone-faced in a black tank top and sweats, prowled their ranks.“Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?” he shouted.“No, sensei!” they answered.“Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?”“No, sensei!”“What is our motto?”“Strike first! Strike hard! No mercy!”They launched into a rock number, kicking, pumping their fists then turning outward and stutter-stepping forward like synchronized robots, all in a matter of seconds.Mari Madrid said they approached the musical realizing that they were not going to make black belts out of the cast over a monthlong rehearsal period. “It was about giving inspiration to the essence of it,” she said. “Can they punch properly? Can they block properly?”That’s not to say some cast members didn’t come prepared. Sy earned a brown belt in karate, and Cardoza, who does indeed do the crane kick, was a competitive figure skater for 15 years. (Sakura Kokumai, who represented the United States in the women’s kata event at the 2020 Olympics, was also brought in to teach foundational moves.)Keone and Mari Madrid are also responsible for choreographing the movements of five new characters, the spirits of fire, water, earth, tree and metal, who symbolize the tradition of karate. They shadow Mr. Miyagi’s movements, in a nod to the kuroko of Japanese Kabuki theater — actors clad in all black who the audience see but are trained to ignore, who magically make things happen onstage.“Keone and Mari are able to infuse something that is invisible into their visible dance,” Miyamoto said, adding that in Japan “we’re used to seeing reality onstage that way — he’s there, but I’m not seeing him. So it’ll be interesting to see how an American audience reacts to that.”Ensemble members including Justice Moore, top, and Sangeetha Santhebennur, second from top, practicing Keone and Mari Madrid’s choreography.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesIN A BLACK POLO AND TROUSERS during rehearsals, Sy was an unassuming presence — until he began practicing a scene.“DANIEL SAN!!” he thundered.“What?” a resentful Cardoza asked.“Show me ‘Wax on.’”He moved his right hand in a semicircle.“Wax off.”He repeated the motion with his left.“Now you.”Cardoza imitated him.“Wax on.” Sy did a slow-motion chest punch. Cardoza blocked it.“Wax off.”Cardoza’s eyes lit up with understanding.Moments like this one, immediately recognizable to any “Karate Kid” fan, are as much a part of the musical as the fleshed-out story lines and infusion of dance, Kamen said.“No one is coming to see this who doesn’t know ‘The Karate Kid,’” he said. “But they have no idea how far out to the edges we’ve taken the song and dance.”Among the first to witness those changes will be some of the original film’s cast members, who are planning to be at opening night on Wednesday. They include Macchio and William Zabka, who played Johnny Lawrence, Cobra Kai’s top student and Daniel’s rival. Yoshii said there are plans to take it to Broadway next season.“It’s Christmas morning once again for ‘The Karate Kid,’” Macchio said in a phone interview in mid-May. “It’s like unwrapping another version of this gift. I want to be humming Drew Gasparini’s tunes on the way to the parking lot.” More

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    Ted Sarandos Talks About That Stock Drop, Backing Dave Chappelle, and Hollywood Schadenfreude

    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

    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