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      ‘I Am Not Alone’ Review: Looking Back on an Uprising

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      This documentary offers a play-by-play account of nonviolent protests that shook up politics in Armenia in 2018.In 2018, the president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, facing term limits, sought to stay in power by having members of his party in the country’s parliament elect him as the prime minister; a constitutional referendum in 2015 had transferred most of the president’s powers to that position. Critics of the right-wing Sargsyan saw that as an autocratic move. In protest, Nikol Pashinyan — a Parliament member and former political prisoner and newspaper editor — started what became a nationwide movement.The documentary “I Am Not Alone,” directed by Garin Hovannisian, offers an account of how, in less than a month, Pashinyan’s efforts to prevent Sargsyan from hanging on grew from a march to a nonviolent revolution. (Hovannisian, in a relationship not made clear in the film, is a son of Raffi K. Hovannisian, who challenged Sargsyan for the presidency in 2013.)The movie interweaves footage of the protests — some professionally shot, some drawn from makeshift sources — with post-mortem interviews. It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say how things turned out, or who is currently Armenia’s prime minister. But because the film includes retrospective interviews with both Pashinyan and Sargsyan, it courts a sense of mystery about which one succeeded.The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative. It’s also difficult to watch the parts concerning one of Pashinyan’s early gambits — he wanted protesters to stop the parliamentary session during which Sargsyan’s election as prime minister would occur — without thinking of the Capitol riot in the United States, no matter how much the circumstances differed.I Am Not AloneNot rated. In English and Armenian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. On virtual cinemas. More

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      Pauli Murray Should Be a Household Name. A New Film Shows Why.

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      The lawyer, activist and minister made prescient arguments on gender, race and equality that influenced Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.When the lawyer, activist, author and educator Pauli Murray died in 1985 at the age of 75, no obituary or commemoration could contain all of her pathbreaking accomplishments. A radical and brilliant legal strategist, Murray was named a deputy attorney general in California — the first Black person in that office — in 1946, just a year after passing the bar there. Murray was an organizer of sit-ins and participated in bus protests as far back as the 1940s, and co-founded the National Organization for Women. Murray was also the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. In 2012, she was sainted.Murray has been saluted in legal, academic and gender-studies circles, and in the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But her overarching impact on American life in the 20th and now 21st centuries has not been broadly acknowledged: the thinking and writing that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education; the consideration of intersectionality (she helped popularize the term “Jane Crow”); the enviable social circle, as she was a buddy of Langston Hughes and a pen pal of Eleanor Roosevelt, and worked on her first memoir alongside James Baldwin at the MacDowell Colony in the first year it allowed Black artists.Murray was devoted to feminism and the rights of women even as, it turned out, she privately battled lifelong gender identity issues. She should be a household name on par with Gloria Steinem or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of whom cited her work often. Instead Murray is an insider’s civil rights icon.Now a documentary, “My Name Is Pauli Murray,” aims to introduce Murray to the masses. Made by the same Academy Award-nominated filmmakers behind the surprise hit “RBG,” it uses Murray’s own voice and words as narration, drawn from interviews, oral histories and the prolific writing — books, poems and a collection of argumentative, impassioned and romantic letters — that Murray meticulously filed away with an eye toward her legacy. And the film arrives at a moment when the tenacious activism of people of color, especially women, is being re-contextualized and newly acknowledged, at the same time that many of the battles they fought are still raging.This is especially true for Murray, whose views on gender, race, sexuality and equality were generations ahead of their time. In 2020, the A.C.L.U. won an anti-discrimination case that built on Murray’s work. “She challenged racism, sexism, heterocentricism, colorism and elitism,” Anita Hill, the lawyer and educator, wrote in an email. “It has taken me 20 years to discover the extraordinary breadth of her contributions to law and social justice.”When the directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen decided to pursue a documentary about Murray, the first interview they booked, in 2018, was with Ginsburg, whose work had introduced them to the weight of Murray’s achievements. In the film, Ginsburg smilingly calls Murray “feisty.” Roosevelt, Murray’s longtime friend, chose “firebrand.” The more the filmmakers learned, the more astounded they were that Murray was not better known.“We just thought, why didn’t anybody teach us about this person?” West said.“We really think of this documentary as the beginning of the conversation,” Cohen added. “This is a starting point, because there’s so much to say.”Laverne Cox and Chase Strangio in a scene from the documentary. Strangio credited Murray’s work with laying the groundwork for an A.C.L.U. case against L.G.B.T.Q.  discrimination.Amazon StudiosIn some ways, the central tension of Murray’s life was the degree to which Murray’s ideas were dismissed, and her unyielding belief that they would eventually be accepted. Murray’s law school thesis strikingly argued against “separate but equal.” A decade later, Thurgood Marshall borrowed from its framework to win Brown v. Board before the Supreme Court. “What I say very often,” Murray quips in the film, under a broad, impish smile, “is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.”Though she lived humbly, Murray, who called her preferred method of persuasion “confrontation by typewriter,” was long aware of her own exceptionalism. She published a memoir in 1956 about her family’s complicated, multiracial history, and held teaching positions across the country and in Ghana, advancing views on how to attain equity. But each step toward a broader audience, a bigger platform, was hard-won. Like Hill, Murray was a professor at Brandeis University — but Murray had to fight for tenure, the documentary shows, even though she was the first Black person to receive Yale Law School’s most advanced degree, doctor of juridical science.In 2017, Yale named a residence hall after Murray, but Hill noted that when she herself was at Yale Law in the late 1970s, she couldn’t recall Murray’s name even being mentioned. “I chalk the near erasure of her contributions as an activist, author, scholar — of law, African studies, African American studies, and gender studies — to sexism and racism combined and separately,” Hill said.Murray was a nomad. She went “wherever her cause took her,” said Karen Rouse Ross, her great-niece. After college, Murray, who often dressed androgynously, hopped trains, then joined the labor movement. Settling into life as an itinerant activist and lawyer, Murray transported enough books and papers to fill floor-to-ceiling shelves and a wall of filing cabinets. In her 70s, living in an apartment in Baltimore, Murray kept up the habit of typing away on her Remington into the wee hours, books piled on the floor. “She had a white coffee mug like you would get at a diner somewhere, constantly filled with black coffee, and she smoked unfiltered cigarettes,” Ross said. “That’s who she was, all night long.” When Murray’s papers were donated to Harvard, they filled 141 boxes.Talleah Bridges McMahon, a producer of the film, was shocked when she started sorting through them. Instead of the drafts of speeches and other public-facing documents she thought she’d find, there was a trove of private correspondence between Murray and her inner circle, including doctors. “There were complete conversations,” she said, and decades of journals. Some had pages ripped out or words blacked out. “These are curated records,” McMahon said. “The more I saw that, the more I understood that everything we were seeing is what Pauli wanted people to see.”Murray’s great-niece Karen Ross, left, the producer Talleah Bridges McMahon, the filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West and Ross’s daughter, Kyrah Boyce. Amazon StudiosThat included Murray’s nearly lifelong sense of being misgendered. Among the letters were those to doctors imploring them for help. “My life is unbearable in its present form,” she wrote, according to the film. Murray sought out hormone treatment, which was denied, and even underwent exploratory surgery because she was convinced (wrongly) that she had undescended testes.But this anguish was largely hidden. Murray’s romantic life also existed almost entirely behind closed doors; even some family members were not aware of her relationships. She never lived with her longtime partner, Irene Barlow, whom she met at a law firm where both worked. But the letters show a deep connection and a sense of playfulness around their secret love: They used code names, and Barlow sometimes signed her missives “007,” with the 0s drawn as eyeglasses.As private as Murray was, “there was a certain faith or trust that we would eventually understand what was happening,” McMahon said.Some activists in the film use “they” pronouns for Murray because even though that language wasn’t in use then, it opens up possibilities for Murray’s identity and preferences now. “I do think it’s important to not confine Pauli to the time Pauli was living,” McMahon said.Family members, including Ross, the executor of Murray’s estate and founder of the Pauli Murray Foundation, use she/her pronouns for their relative; Murray used them, too. Born in 1910 as Anna Pauline, Murray later chose the neutral nickname Pauli — another moniker the filmmakers rely on. In this article, The New York Times is using Murray’s name as much as possible, and adhering to the family’s choice for pronouns.Some scholars feel that it was Murray’s sense of in-betweenness that shaped her then-radical thinking about the intersection of race, gender and more. It helped ignite the realization that race and gender norms are socially constructed, and “made her increasingly critical of boundaries,” as one biographer, Rosalind Rosenberg, says in the film.For Murray, there was an urgent need to be understood in all she encompassed. “Most of her life was, ‘You will see me, you will hear me!’” Ross says in the film. Some of that fervor, Ross added in an interview, shifted after Murray made the surprise decision, late in life, to become an Episcopalian priest. Murray’s focus moved from agitating for change, to listening for healing.But Murray remained committed to creating equality: Preaching in Baltimore, she had a service full of girls as acolytes, which was not typical then. She would say to them, “Ladies, are we living up to our full potential?” her niece recalled. “That was very important to her, that she inspired other women to be all that they could be.”For the filmmakers and others who followed in Murray’s footsteps, that legacy shone brightly. “I think of her courage in the face of disappointments,” Hill said, quoting a line from Murray’s poem “Dark Testament”: “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”“Even though Murray knew that the odds were often against her success, she kept fighting for what she believed was right,” Hill continued. “It takes a lot of courage to be hopeful.” More

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      ‘Nightbooks’ Review: A Fairy Tale Horror Fit for Kids

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      Genuine scares elevate this modern take on Hansel and Gretel, which follows a bright boy who is held captive in an evil witch’s apartment.In the children’s horror movie “Nightbooks,” a preteen boy is held hostage by a malevolent witch. Alex (Winslow Fegley) is a bright kid whose passion lies in writing scary stories. At the start of the movie (on Netflix), Alex renounces the hobby, fearing it makes him a freak show. On his way to burn his notebooks, however, he is lured into the enchanted apartment of Natacha (Krysten Ritter), who threatens to kill Alex unless he spins her a new tale every evening.For Alex, Natacha’s home is a dark and sinister prison, but it is also a Victorian wonderland. Venture through the right door and you might find a vast library, a magic garden or a unicorn forest. Alex soon befriends Yasmin (Lidya Jewett), another child held captive in the space, and together the Hansel and Gretel pair plot their escape.Several moments in “Nightbooks,” directed by David Yarovesky and based on a book by J.A. White, are genuinely frightening. During some sequences, particularly those that center a creepy-crawly menace called a Shredder, I was tempted to cover my eyes. The director David Yarovesky has a knack for tricks of light — shadows, neon night vision and motion cast in silhouette — and the movie is at its most deliciously chilling when it favors visual flair over jump scares.In its balance of kid-centric themes and unsettling images, “Nightbooks” follows a path paved by horror standouts like “Coraline” and the early works of Tim Burton. Yarovesky’s fairy tale spookfest ultimately doesn’t measure up to the moody ingenuity of those reference points, but its devotion to frights makes it memorable.NightbooksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Here’s Why Norm Macdonald Was Comedy Royalty. It’s Not ‘S.N.L.’

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      He may have been best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” but he should be really remembered for decades of club sets and you-can’t-miss-this clips.My favorite Norm Macdonald joke — and trust me, there’s serious competition — is one he told as anchor of Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1990s. Papers in front of him, he reported with a cheer: “Yippie! Jerry Rubin died this week.” Looking down, he apologized for his mistake and tried again: “That should read: ‘Yippie Jerry Rubin died this week.’”Silly, dark, ruthlessly concise, this gem is a model of craft, and like many of Macdonald’s bits, it proves how the smallest change in tone, language or, in this case, exclamation mark can radically shift meaning, providing the kind of jolt of surprise that produces belly laughs.Macdonald, who died Tuesday of cancer, maintained a studied modesty about his work. He said that his act had no substance, that it was all “gossip and trickery.” And he claimed without self-pity that he would be remembered only for his few years at “Saturday Night Live,” not his decades of stand-up, which he referred to as “a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny.”He described his life as a sprint to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy. “They caught and devoured me years ago,” he wrote in his 2016 quasi-memoir, “Based on a True Story.”Whether he believed this about himself doesn’t matter (Macdonald was a very skillful liar) and there is some merit to his points about stand-up and his credits, but the ornate way he beats himself up hints at a deeper truth: Macdonald was not only one of the funniest comics of his generation, but also a sneaky aesthete who elevated stand-up, helping shift its cultural prestige over the past few decades into an art deserving respect.His legacy is not clear from his level of stardom or even his list of television shows and specials, although he has some signal accomplishments, including an early stint as a writer on “Roseanne” and one of the best Netflix specials of the past decade, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” Macdonald’s greatness is not on his IMDb page so much as in the number of you-have-to-see-this moments, the kind that friends tell you about at parties and then send you the clip the next day.Many of these came from talk shows, where he was a hall-of-fame guest. He told one of the most justly revered jokes in late-night history on Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight” show, a preposterous masterpiece of literary suspense-building about a moth in a podiatrist’s office. Another moment on the couch from the same show went viral decades later: He interrupted an interview with the actress Courtney Thorne-Smith to savagely insult Carrot Top, the star of the movie she was promoting, a brutally hilarious act of sabotage.Macdonald had other talents. When it comes to parodies of roasts, he stood alone, turning intentionally awful jokes at the roast of Bob Saget into disorienting performance art that remains one of the funniest bits of anti-comedy you will ever see. And on “Saturday Night Live,” he may have been at his best on the Weekend Update desk (ultimately getting fired after his jokes about O.J. Simpson), but he also delivered several singular impressions, including a version of David Letterman that was both accurate and far too bizarre to be realistic.Letterman proved to be a key figure in Macdonald’s career, a champion of the stand-up’s work (the talk-show host said no one was funnier) who booked the comic on his show’s final week. Macdonald, breaking from his trademark acerbic style, ended on a surprisingly moving tribute, displaying an emotional side that usually only lurked under the surface of his comedy.In a column from 2017, I argued that what distinguished Macdonald’s comedy was his sensitivity to language, his peculiarly poetic brand of plain talk. He made stylish turns of phrase and folksy flourishes seem conversational and offhand. A lover of Bob Dylan, Macdonald was also a sponge for influences, borrowing and repurposing figures of speech or unusual words to create funny-sounding sentences.But describing him as merely a master of joke writing misses his quickness, wryly deadpan delivery and, most of all, a unique level of commitment. He did not bail out of jokes and never pandered. You see this in his Bob Saget roast: the conviction to push through despite the confusion of the response. He pleased the crowd without being a crowd-pleaser. And no one had a nimbler and more assured sarcastic voice, which he used to find humor in ambiguity. There was a wonderfully odd moment on David Spade’s talk show a few years ago when Macdonald told Jay Leno he was maybe the best talk-show host ever, and no one, including Leno, seemed to be able to tell if he was being sincere.There’s a lot of fun to be had in this liminal space between earnestness and just kidding. One of Macdonald’s most impressive feats is writing an entire memoir that remains there. It’s one of the greatest comedian memoirs but also a pointedly frustrating mix of fact and fiction, cliché and originality. It’s very funny, sometimes tedious, occasionally wise. The title, “Based on a True Story,” isn’t just a gag. It’s rooted in his faith that, as he puts it, “there is no way of telling a true story. I mean a really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.”Just because you can’t tell a really true one doesn’t mean that art can’t get closer to the truth. In an interview with New York magazine, Macdonald balked at the trend toward confessional art, saying he thought art was supposed to be about concealment. That was revealing.The fact that he struggled with cancer for a decade was something he certainly didn’t advertise in his work. His death came as a shock to many. But clues were everywhere. Death has been among his favorite subjects in recent years. In a great viral moment, he delivered one of the earliest and best comedy club sets about the coronavirus. It was at the Improv in Los Angeles in March 2020 right before venues were shutting down. “It’s funny that we all now know how we’re going to die,” he said. “It’s just a matter of what order.”At the start of his memoir, he tells a story about reading on his Wikipedia page that he had died. Then he imagines if it were true, laughing until a thought stops him cold. “The preposterous lie on the screen before me isn’t that far off,” he wrote. This seemed like jokey melodrama when I first read it, but now it hits differently.Macdonald once talked about an uncle dying of cancer, skewering how we now describe people suffering from that disease as “waging a battle” because that means the last thing you do before you die is lose. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that if you die, then the cancer also dies at the same time,” Macdonald said on Comedy Central. “That to me is not a loss. That’s a draw.” More

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      Art Metrano, Actor and Comic Once Felled by an Accident, Dies at 84

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      He had built a career in stand-up comedy and in film and TV, but a fall from a ladder left him with a personal struggle.Art Metrano, a comedian and actor who appeared in more than 120 television shows and films, including the “Police Academy” movies, before a fall from a ladder left him severely injured, an ordeal he turned into a one-man show he performed all over the country, died on Sept. 8 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 84.His son Harry confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Metrano first gained attention with a spoof magic act. Introduced as the Amazing Metrano or with some equally grandiose appellation, he would come out and perform a series of tricks that weren’t really tricks. He’d present each hand to the audience, index finger raised, then bang his hands together behind his back and present them again — now, two fingers on one hand would be raised, none on the other.The schtick got him appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and assorted other programs in the early 1970s. By then he was also building an acting career, having landed small parts on “Mannix,” “Bewitched” and other series in the late ’60s; that run continued in the ’70s with “Barney Miller,” “Movin’ On,” “Starsky and Hutch” and dozens of other shows.The 1980s brought more acting work, including a recurring role on “Joanie Loves Chachi” and, in 1985, a part in “Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment,” a follow-up to the hit 1984 comedy. He played Mauser, a career-driven officer who becomes a captain and is the butt of jokes; in one scene, he shampoos his hair with epoxy resin. He reprised the role in 1986 in “Police Academy 3: Back in Training.”Carol Rosegg/Everett CollectionBut Mr. Metrano’s career was interrupted one September day in 1989. He and his wife at the time had put a house up for sale, and he stopped by to check on it in advance of a showing by a real estate agent. They had work done on the pool, and he noticed that as a result there was gray cement spray all over the back walls and balcony. He decided to hose the gunk off.“I grabbed the ladder that was leaning against the wall and set it firmly against the balcony,” he wrote in a memoir, “Twice Blessed” (with Cynthia Lee, 1994, later retitled “Metrano’s Accidental Comedy”).Something went wrong, and Mr. Metrano fell from the ladder, hitting the ground head first and snapping his neck. He couldn’t move. He lay there, imagining the scene if he were still lying there when the real estate agent showed up.“I’d look up and say, ‘Hi, I’m the owner,’” he wrote in his book. “‘I just broke my neck, but not to worry. House looks great, eh? Nice gourmet kitchen!’”The humor was characteristic of the way he later told the story in print and onstage (a neighbor eventually came to his aid before the real estate agent arrived), but the injury was serious. He had broken several vertebrae, and permanent paralysis was a possibility.“When you’re lying paralyzed in a hospital bed,” he said during the stage show, “your past becomes your constant companion because your future is a question mark.”At first he could neither move nor speak, but he was eventually able to talk again, and to walk, sometimes with the help of a crutch. Within a few years he was telling his story in a one-man show written with Ms. Lee that was performed, under various names, across the country.When it played in Manhattan in 1996 at the Union Square Theater under the title “The Amazing Metrano: An Accidental Comedy,” Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, said that Mr. Metrano “gives new meaning to the term stand-up comedy: it isn’t the comedy that amazes, but the fact that Mr. Metrano is standing up.”“‘The Amazing Metrano’ is therapeutic, inspirational theater,” Mr. Canby wrote. “Mr. Metrano is now publicly working through his trauma, finding resources in himself he never knew he possessed.”Arthur Mesistrano was born on Sept. 22, 1936, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bensonhurst section of that borough. His father, Aaron, worked in the garment industry, and his mother, Rebecca (Russo) Mesistrano, was a homemaker.He played football at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and attended the College of the Pacific in California on a football scholarship, but left college to return to New York to study acting and work on his stand-up comedy. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting in 1958.In his book, he told of trying to worm his way into show business by taking a job selling a phone system that enabled busy people to speed-dial numbers; that got him onto studio lots.“That was the plan,” he wrote, “sell the product, make some money, meet producers and directors, and then show them my 8×10 glossy and phony résumé.”It appeared to work, because by 1960 he was getting small roles. In 1971, he landed a leading role in a CBS sitcom, “The Chicago Teddy Bears,” though the show was short-lived. He had another leading role in a 1986 sitcom, “Tough Cookies,” but that show too didn’t last, either.Mr. Metrano in a publicity photo with the actor Craig T. Nelson in 2001. Mr. Metrano was a guest star on the CBS crime drama “The District,” starring Mr. Nelson. Tony Esparza/CBSAfter his accident, he continued to get occasional TV roles, including on “L.A. Law,” “The District” and “Party of Five.”Mr. Metrano married Rebecca Chute in 1972; they divorced in 2005. His survivors include his wife, Jamie Golder Metrano; two children from his first marriage, Harry and Zoe Bella Metrano; a daughter from an earlier relationship, Roxanne Elena Metrano; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In 1977, Mr. Metrano reached out to a son he had fathered when younger but who had been given up for adoption. That son, Howard Bald, now a rabbi, performed a memorial service for him over the weekend in Florida. More

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      Kaycee Moore, Actress in Black Directors’ Seminal Films, Dies at 77

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      She explored her characters’ inner lives in movies like “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” independent works that grew out of the L.A. Rebellion movement.Kaycee Moore, whose nuanced acting documented Black American life in movies by a group of young, Black independent directors in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Aug. 13 at her home in Kansas City, Kan. She was 77.The death was confirmed by the Watkins Heritage Funeral home. No cause was given.Ms. Moore made only a handful of movies, but they had an outsize impact on American cinema. Her portrayals defied the traditional roles for Black women of her era, in action-packed or trauma-filled blockbusters, and instead laid bare the interior lives of her characters.Her debut came in “Killer of Sheep” (1978), the director Charles Burnett’s first feature. (It was his thesis for the film program at the University of California, Los Angeles.) Mr. Burnett was a member of the community of independent filmmakers that would later become known as the L.A. Rebellion.Their movies, unlike many mainstream Hollywood pictures, humanized Black characters and celebrated Black family life, though they did not shy away from hardship. Ms. Moore’s characters in “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” (1983) were both struggling wives who wanted the best for their children and husbands in a system portrayed as designed to keep Black Americans down and out.“Killer of Sheep” follows a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker whose leading of lambs to their death takes on biblical resonance. Ms. Moore played the worker’s unnamed wife as she raises their family in the blighted Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Critics lauded the film’s stark visual style, and The Sacramento Bee called Ms. Moore’s performance “incandescent.”Upon the film’s rerelease in 2007, the critic Stuart Klawans, writing in The Nation, praised the “profoundly moving” work of Ms. Moore and Henry G. Sanders, who played her husband. “Their lives are denuded in many ways, materially impoverished and spiritually numbed,” he wrote, “but for all that, they have the grandeur of unchallengeable fact.”“Bless Their Little Hearts” came next for Ms. Moore. She played Andais, the wife of the protagonist, Charlie (Nate Hardman). The film, directed by Billy Woodbury and written by Mr. Burnett, charts Charlie’s struggle to find permanent work and the temptations he faces to turn to crime, all set against the backdrop of a newly begun extramarital affair.Looking back at the L.A. Rebellion films in an essay in The New York Times in 2020, the critic Ben Kenigsberg found Ms. Moore’s performance naturalistic. “She is shown in contrasting scenes riding the bus: in one, she nods off from fatigue; later, having discovered that Charlie is having an affair, she is wide-awake,” he wrote. “When the two finally fight about the fling, the scene, staged in a single take, feels utterly extemporaneous.”Acting in “Bless Their Little Hearts” was not always easy for Ms. Moore. She recalled in the production notes for the film that the climactic argument scene, filmed in one take, included actual physical violence. But “for the most part,” she said, “it was a film set that was full of love.”Her acting style, Mr. Woodberry, the director, said in an interview, was not naturalistic but realistic, informed by small expressions and actions and drawn from personal experience. “She’s a person who knew a lot about life,” he said of Ms. Moore, “and she could bring that to the character.”Ms. Moore later joined an ensemble cast of Black actors in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), which is generally considered the first film by a Black woman to achieve a wide release in the United States. In the film, Ms. Moore played Haagar Peazant, a discontented member of the insular Gullah community in the islands off South Carolina during the Jim Crow era. Ms. Moore imbued the character, who wants to leave the community, with an iron will.“The film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians,” The Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in 1992.L.A. Rebellion movies have entered the pantheon of American film. “Daughters of the Dust” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” were made part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, and “Killer of Sheep” was one of the first 50 films introduced into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990.Kaycee Collier was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Feb. 24, 1944. Her mother, Angie Mae (Sandifer) Aker, was an activist and advocate for Black Americans with sickle cell disease. Kaycee had seven siblings, two of whom died of sickle cell anemia, inspiring her mother’s devotion to the cause, according to “Kansas City Women of Independent Minds,” a 1992 book by the Kansas City historian Jane Fifield Flynn. Kaycee’s father, Andrew Collier, died shortly after her birth, Ms. Flynn wrote.She married John Moore Jr. in 1959 and later married Stephen Jones. She is survived by the two children of her first marriage, John Moore III and Michelle Moore Swinton; her siblings Margaret Hall, Angie Ruth Wesley, Frances Collier and Jimmie Collier; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.It was in the 1970s that Ms. Moore headed west to audition for Hollywood roles and met Mr. Burnett, the filmmaker who would cast her in “Killer of Sheep.” Her last major film role was in “Ninth Street” (1999), by the writer-director Kevin Willmott.After her mother died in the 1990s, Ms. Moore took over her role as executive director of the Kansas City chapter of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. More

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      Head of Paramount Pictures is ousted as ViacomCBS focuses on streaming.

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      In 2017, Viacom turned to one of Hollywood’s most seasoned and respected executives, James N. Gianopulos, to revive its flatlining Paramount Pictures operation. Mr. Gianopulos quickly stabilized the 1910s-era studio — repairing relationships with filmmakers and producers, building a thriving television division from near-scratch, and restoring Paramount to profitability.He was ousted on Monday, with his status as the consummate Hollywood insider having curdled into a liability, at least to ViacomCBS, the conglomerate that owns Paramount, where streaming, streaming, streaming is the new currency of the realm.Brian Robbins, 58, who runs Viacom’s children’s television business, will succeed Mr. Gianopulos, 69, as chief executive of Paramount Pictures, ViacomCBS said. Emma Watts, 51, the president of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, was notably passed over for the job.The reversal of fortune for Mr. Gianopulos, who had two years left on his contract, did not shock the movie capital, where speculation about his standing inside ViacomCBS had been gossiped about for months. Shari Redstone, who controls the company, had signaled in private that Mr. Gianopulos had become a frustration. In particular, he had, at times, resisted a ViacomCBS effort to prioritize the Paramount+ streaming service at the expense of ticket sales and theaters. Big-screen releases remain of crucial importance to studio partners like Tom Cruise, who stars in Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible” series and coming “Top Gun” sequel.Shari Redstone, the chair of ViacomCBS, in July. She has been pushing the company to prioritize streaming.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesBut the ouster rattled the film business nonetheless. It was seen by some as barbarous — tradition holds that senior statesmen get to write their own endings. And it added to a changing of the guard: Ron Meyer, a longtime film power at Universal, left last year amid a sex scandal, and Alan F. Horn, the chief creative officer at Walt Disney Studios, is widely expected to retire in the coming months.Bob Bakish, the chief executive of ViacomCBS, said in a statement that the leadership change would “build on Paramount’s strong momentum, ensuring it continues to engage audiences at scale while embracing viewers’ evolving tastes and habits.” He said Mr. Robbins was an “expert” at developing franchises by “leaning into the unique strengths of new and established platforms.”Mr. Bakish called Mr. Gianopulos “a towering figure in Hollywood” and thanked him for revitalizing Paramount. In the same statement, Mr. Gianopulos recounted a list of major changes he had successfully navigated over his nearly 40-year career — such as the introduction of VCRs and online film rentals — and wished Mr. Robbins “all the very best success.”For many film industry stalwarts, Mr. Robbins is an affront to their identities; he comes from television, said while holding one’s nose. Mr. Robbins has experience as a movie producer and director. But much of the Hollywood establishment also looks down on that part of his résumé, which includes “Norbit,” a commercially successful but critically reviled Eddie Murphy vehicle from 2007. Not exactly Oscar bait.Mr. Robbins gained fame as a young actor in the 1980s by playing a mulleted rebel on the ABC sitcom “Head of the Class.” In the 1990s and 2000s he worked as a television producer (“Kenan & Kel” on Nickelodeon, “Smallville” on the WB) and a film director (“Norbit,” “Varsity Blues”).By 2009, however, Mr. Robbins started to become disillusioned with Hollywood. Younger audiences — his specialty — were living online. He began experimenting with low-budget films starring YouTube personalities like Lucas Cruikshank (a.k.a. Fred Figgelhorn) and started a YouTube channel, AwesomenessTV, aimed at teenage girls. In 2013, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then running DreamWorks Animation, bought AwesomenessTV for about $33 million. (Mr. Katzenberg remains a mentor.)“There is no movie business anymore!” Mr. Robbins was quoted by Fast Company as saying in 2013. “The model’s broken, and I see that as an opportunity.”Mr. Robbins was named president of Nickelodeon, which is also owned by ViacomCBS, in 2018. He has become known inside Viacom as a plain-spoken, never-say-die futurist who believes that Paramount+, the company’s relatively small streaming service, must be supercharged. Mr. Robbins has eagerly rerouted new children’s programming toward Paramount+ and away from Nickelodeon’s traditional cable channels. One such show, a reboot of “iCarly,” has been a hit for the streaming service.Mr. Gianopulos, or “Jim G” as everyone in Hollywood refers to him, will remain a consultant until the end of the year, ViacomCBS said. “Jim is nothing less than legendary in this business, and I am humbled and grateful to him for his years of mentorship and friendship,” Mr. Robbins said in a statement.Mr. Robbins will continue to lead Nickelodeon, ViacomCBS said. But he will not get all of Mr. Gianopulos’s portfolio; Paramount Television Studios will now report to David Nevins, the chairman and chief executive of Showtime Networks. More

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      ‘Beetlejuice’ Will Return to Broadway in April

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      It was pushed out of the Winter Garden to make way for “The Music Man.” Now this fan-favorite musical is getting a second life at the Marriott Marquis.“Beetlejuice” is coming back from death’s door — and taking up residence on Broadway.The fan-favorite musical comedy, which tells the story of a goth girl and a pushy poltergeist and overcame a sluggish start to win audience’s hearts, will open at the Marquis Theater on April 8, producers announced Monday.The musical, which starred Alex Brightman as the titular ghoul in a striped suit, played its last performance on March 11, 2020, at the Winter Garden Theater before being shuttered with the rest of Broadway and the city’s other live performance venues. It had performed well in its initial run, but was set to be forced out of the Winter Garden in June 2020 as the Shubert Organization made way for “The Music Man,” a heavily promoted project that stars one of Broadway’s most reliable audience draws: Hugh Jackman. (That musical is now set to begin preview performances on Dec. 20.)The ouster of a show that was a box-office success — “Beetlejuice” grossed nearly $1.6 million over Thanksgiving week in 2019, setting a record for the Winter Garden — was unusual, and a sign of the booming demand for limited theater space.“It’s sad and a shame, and also, in its own way, historic,” Hal Luftig, a “Beetlejuice” co-producer who has been working on Broadway for 30 years, said at the time. “I don’t think there’s ever been a case when a show has turned itself around in such a fashion and then has to leave its theater.” More