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The actor’s victory against his ex-wife Amber Heard in one of the highest profile defamation cases to go to trial could inspire others to try their luck with juries.As the #MeToo movement fueled a public airing of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, defamation lawsuits quickly became a tool for both the accused and accusers to seek retribution and redemption.Men accused of misconduct have increasingly turned to defamation suits to try to clear their names, as have victims accused of making false allegations. But between the high costs of lawyers’ fees and the fears of revealing embarrassing details in open court, many such cases are settled before they ever reach trial.The bitter legal battle between the actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was closely watched in part because it was one of the highest-profile defamation cases to make it to trial recently, and several lawyers said that Mr. Depp’s victory in a Virginia court on Wednesday — when he was awarded more than $10 million in damages — could embolden others accused of abuse or misconduct to try their luck with juries, despite the real risks of airing dirty laundry in public.Ugly charges of physical abuse and lurid testimony came to define the Depp-Heard trial, which included one line of questioning about actual dirty laundry: the couple’s fierce argument over how the sheets in a Los Angeles penthouse where they were staying had become befouled. But the jury found in the end that Ms. Heard had defamed Mr. Depp in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”“Some people will definitely look at this as a playbook for suing your accuser,” said Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer who practices in Fairfax, Va., where the trial played out over six weeks, and who briefly represented the former employer of a witness called in the Depp case. The proceedings were broadcast and livestreamed far beyond the walls of the courtroom.The $10.35 million award to Mr. Depp was offset by a $2 million partial victory for Ms. Heard, who countersued Mr. Depp for defamation after a lawyer representing him made several statements to a British tabloid calling her abuse accusations a “hoax.” The jury did not find two of those statements defamatory, but found that a third — in which the lawyer had accused Ms. Heard of damaging the couple’s penthouse and calling 911 “to set Mr. Depp up” — did defame her.Mr. Depp praised the verdict, saying that “the jury gave me my life back,” while Ms. Heard described it as “heartbreaking.”The outcome differed from that of a case in Britain, where a judge 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. While Britain is sometimes considered hospitable to libel cases, the judge who heard that case, Andrew Nicol, found that there was sufficient proof to conclude that most of the assaults Ms. Heard described had occurred, and he determined that what the newspaper had published was “substantially true.”Several high-profile defamation cases in recent years have been settled before they reached trial. In 2019, seven women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation after they were accused of lying, settled their claims; a spokesman for Mr. Cosby said that his insurance company had decided to settle the cases without his consent. And the casino mogul Steve Wynn recently agreed to a settlement of a defamation suit he had filed against the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who said she would retract a statement accusing him of inappropriate behavior involving a client.In the wake of the Depp verdict, several lawyers and legal experts said, people accused of assault and misconduct may now be more inclined to try to bring defamation cases to trial. And some advocacy organizations and lawyers worry that the case could have a chilling effect on the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, adding to their fears that they could be punished for speaking out.“I do think that well-resourced individuals who feel slighted by speech that embarrassed or criticized them in some way may feel emboldened by this verdict,” said Nicole Ligon, a First Amendment law professor who provides pro bono legal advice for people considering going public with sexual misconduct accusations. “I imagine part of the reason they’ll feel emboldened is beyond the verdict itself but the public reaction to it.”The trial was captured by two cameras in the courtroom that allowed the testimony to be packaged into memes and online commentary — much of which mocked Ms. Heard’s accusations of abuse. In an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, said that the cameras had turned the trial into a “zoo.”Before the trial, Ms. Bredehoft had sought to persuade the judge to block cameras from the courtroom, arguing that Ms. Heard would be describing incidents of alleged sexual violence and predicting that “anti-Amber” networks would take statements out of context and play them repeatedly.“The potential for saturation of an unsequestered jury is a tremendous risk in this case,” Ms. Bredehoft argued, according to a court transcript from February.Judge Penney S. Azcarate ordered that cameras be allowed, maintaining that Ms. Bredehoft’s argument about victims of sexual offenses would only pertain to criminal trials. The judge suggested that allowing cameras could make the make the courthouse “safer” by giving a broader audience of viewers access to the case remotely.Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

The director Joseph Kosinski narrates a sequence from the film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.“Want Mach 10? Let’s give ’em Mach 10.”That line, delivered by Maverick (Tom Cruise) in the long-anticipated, and already quite popular, sequel to “Top Gun,” may help to prepare audiences for the fact that things have become a little bit more updated in the sky since the 1986 original.This early sequence has Maverick arriving to discover that the hypersonic flight test he was meant to perform has been canceled by an admiral (Ed Harris), who would prefer to spend on drones.But “canceled” is not in Maverick’s vocabulary, and he proceeds with the test as planned, aiming to reach Mach 10 speeds.Discussing the scene, the director Joseph Kosinski said that he and his crew designed the sleek aircraft in conjunction with Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed Martin.It is based on an aircraft “that may or may not exist,” he said. The shots of it in the hangar are “a full-scale mock-up that we built with their cooperation.”Kosinski said the scene was meant to “take a turn and take ‘Top Gun’ into the future. Here we see Maverick on the very cutting edge of aviation.”Pay close attention to the final shot of the scene, where Maverick takes off. It had to be done by one of the few Navy pilots cleared to fly what is called a low-altitude transition maneuver. The pressure wave the maneuver created destroyed a piece of the set, which meant the crew was only able to do the shot once.Read the “Top Gun: Maverick” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

In his latest shocker, David Cronenberg prophetically reads the signs while Léa Seydoux performs surgeries on a beatific Viggo Mortensen.Few filmmakers slither under the skin and directly into the head as mercilessly as David Cronenberg. For decades, he has been unsettling audiences, derailing genre expectations and expanding the limits of big-screen entertainment with exploding heads, gasping wounds and desiring, suffering, metamorphosing bodies. A modern-day augur, he opens up characters — psychically and physically — with a detached cool and scalpel-like cinematic technique, exploring what lies (and festers) inside as he divines prophetic meaning.His latest, “Crimes of the Future,” is very tough and creepy, yet improbably relaxed; it’s a low-key dispatch from the end of the world. Set in an indeterminate future, it centers on a pair of artists — Viggo Mortensen as Saul, Léa Seydoux as Caprice — who mount surgeries as performances. With Saul lying supine in a biomorphic apparatus as viewers gaze from the sidelines, Caprice — using a multicolored controller — delicately probes Saul’s viscera, removing mysterious new organs that have grown inside his body. The audience members are quiet, attentive, respectful (moviegoers might yelp); for his part, Saul looks ecstatic.The movie takes place in a depopulated waterfront city where the carcasses of rusted, barnacle-covered ships languish on the shore. There, in shadowy streets and derelict buildings, men and women roam, often without apparent purpose, as if heavily medicated or perhaps blasted by that collective devastation called reality. There’s a disconcerting, characteristically Cronenbergian lack of affect to most of them — few experience pain anymore — even when they’re carving one another up in dark corners or in performances. Times have changed, but the human appetite for violence and spectacle remain intact.The story emerges incrementally in scenes that seem to drift even as they lock into place. In between performances and shoptalk, Saul and Caprice are drawn into overlapping intrigues involving a dead child and an inner-beauty pageant. An amusing Kristen Stewart shows up with Don McKellar in a decrepit office that once could have been used by Philip Marlowe, but now has the disquieting words “National Organ Registry” inscribed on the front door. There’s also a cop (Welket Bungué) who skulks around with Saul in the shadows, where the dead child’s father (Scott Speedman) lurks enigmatically.For the most part, the world in “Crimes of the Future” resembles what you imagine everyday life might look like in a not-too-distant future, one defined by need, decay, violence, extreme entertainment and environmental catastrophes of our own wretched making. It is terrible, and eerily familiar. But Cronenberg doesn’t pass judgment on it or shake his fist at the sky. Instead, with visual precision, arid humor, restrained melancholia and a wildly inventive vision of tomorrow that puts those of most movie futurists to shame, he reveals a world that can be agony to look at, exposing its pulpy innards much like Caprice opens up Saul.Mortensen and Seydoux are the conjoined heart and soul of “Crimes of the Future,” and they imbue the movie with waves of feeling, appreciably warming the overall chill. His eyebrows seemingly shaved and face often obscured by a scarf, Saul presents a curious figure, one who’s at once an artist, ninja and religious ascetic. Although his hands and feet look undamaged, the placement of the cables on his appendages — as well as the many cuts that Caprice makes on his body during their performances — evoke stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ. And Saul does suffer, clearly, but for whom? For him, Caprice, us?“Crimes of the Future” is about a lot of things, including desire and death, pain and pleasure, transformation and transcendence. Saul is its centerpiece. You first see him at home in bed, a structure that hangs from the ceiling like a suspended cradle. It’s striking, but what really catches the eye are the bed’s cables, medical tubing that look like elephant trunks and are attached to Saul’s pale, bare hands and feet. The bottom of each cable resembles a small webbed hand, a distinctly anthropomorphic vision that makes it seem as if he were being cared for by an extraterrestrial nanny.The attentiveness of Saul’s care, including from Caprice, makes a painful contrast with the horrific indifference shown to the movie’s one child (Sotiris Siozos). “Crimes of the Future” begins with the murder of this child; it’s a visceral, distressing jolt that will drive at least some moviegoers out of the theaters. Opening a story with a shock of violence is an obvious way to kick-start events, create intrigue, hook the audience. We are used to it. The murder of a child, though, is more unsettling than most screen violence. That’s partly because of its horror, but also because — while movies show us many ghastly things — they like to package violence, sex it up, make it cinematic. They resist showing us at our real and abject worst.In strictly functional terms, the murder serves as a red flag — a kind of trigger warning for the movie audience — an announcement of intent or at least narrative limits. Cronenberg is, I think, telegraphing what kind of movie you’re about to watch: He will not be taking any prisoners or blunting the story’s edges. The murder is genuinely awful and it rocks you to the core, creating a low, unwavering thrum of deep unease that remains intact through the disparate narrative turns and tone shifts. Most movies that deploy violence tidy it up with empty outrage and vacuous moralizing; here, the violence haunts you.In its themes, body work and convulsions of violence, “Crimes of the Future” evokes some of Cronenberg’s other films, notably “Videodrome,” a shocker about (among other things) a man who loses his mind. This new movie feels more melancholic than many of the earlier ones, though perhaps I’m the one who’s changed. Once again, people are evolving and devolving, mutating into something familiar yet also something different and terrifying. Yet despite the morbid laughs and the beatific smile that can light up Saul’s face like that of St. Teresa of Ávila, “Crimes of the Future” feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.Crimes of the FutureRated R for filicide, surgeries and power-drill violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

He left his job as an agent in the 1970s to guide the careers of Jerry Seinfeld, Carl Reiner and other comics.George Shapiro, an ebullient Hollywood talent manager who nurtured and oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in the Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 91.His family announced the death in a statement.Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Mr. Seinfeld, whom he signed as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980. He lobbied NBC to build a series around him and was an executive producer of the hugely popular “Seinfeld” sitcom.“He was the only person to read every draft of every episode of the series and was very critical as they went from first draft to shooting draft,” Mr. Seinfeld said in a phone interview. “He was the only one who really knew what we were doing.”He added: “The bond between George and I was, we thought show business was the greatest thing invented by man, and we couldn’t get enough.”Mr. Shapiro was also an executive producer of Mr. Seinfeld’s Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” which is on hiatus.A schmoozer who loved to be on sets, Mr. Shapiro was a partner for more than 40 years with his childhood friend Howard West in their talent management firm Shapiro/West & Associates.As managers, they oversaw and protected their clients interests by being executive producers of various projects, including “The Last Remake of Beau Geste” (1977), starring and co-written by Marty Feldman; “Summer Rental” (1985) and “Sibling Rivalry” (1990), which Mr. Reiner directed; and two TV specials starring Mr. Kaufman.Mr. Shapiro first watched Mr. Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in 1978, despite the comedian’s reluctance.“They already had the character of Latka. And, of course, Andy did this Foreign Man character, so it was a perfect match,” Mr. Shapiro told Newsday in 1999. “Taxi,” too, was a hit.Mr. Shapiro and Mr. West were executive producers of “Man on the Moon” (1999), which starred Jim Carrey as Mr. Kaufman. (Mr. Kaufman died in 1984 at 35.) Danny DeVito, a producer of the film, played Mr. Shapiro, and Mr. Shapiro had a role as a club owner who had once fired Mr. Kaufman.Early in the film, Mr. DeVito tells Mr. Carrey, “You’re insane, but you also may be brilliant.”Mr. Shapiro’s other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”George Larry Shapiro was born on May 18, 1932, in the Bronx. His father, Ira, was a furrier. his mother, Sylvia (Lebost) Shapiro, was a social activist. George’s time at P.S. 80 in the Bronx, where he met Mr. West, was the subject of two documentaries, “The Bronx Boys,” in 2003, and “The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80,” 10 years later.As a youngster, he loved comedies, including those made by Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. “I sat in the theater and felt like someone was tickling me,” Mr. Shapiro said in a Television Academy interview in 2007.He got a stronger whiff of show business as a teenager while working as a summer lifeguard at the Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where writers like Neil Simon; actors like Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett and Pat Carroll; and the director and choreographer Herb Ross created revues and other shows. Agents traveled from Manhattan to scout talent on weekends — the sort of future that appealed to Mr. Shapiro.“I said, ‘This is your job?” he said in the Television Academy interview. “To watch the show, to have a nice dinner, to come to a resort with a lake? I have to look into that.”After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree from what is now New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration, Mr. Shapiro served in the Army for two years. He considered a career in social work and sales — his older brother, Don, was a salesman in Texas and offered him a job — but got a mailroom position at the William Morris Agency in Manhattan with help from Mr. Reiner, his uncle.He was soon promoted to agent, with a salary of $38 a week, before eventually moving to the company’s Los Angeles office, where he specialized in packaging mid-1960s TV series like “Gomer Pyle — USMC” and “That Girl” with the actors, writer and directors represented by William Morris.But Mr. Shapiro disliked being responsible for so many clients, and so in 1973 he started his own management firm to focus on a few preferred ones. Mr. West, with whom he had worked at William Morris, soon joined him, and they ran Shapiro/West & Associates until Mr. West’s death in 2015.To push for a sitcom for Mr. Seinfeld, Mr. Shapiro sent numerous letters to Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment. The nudging eventually led to a meeting with Mr. Tartikoff and other network executives at which Mr. Seinfeld laid down a firm rule.“Jerry made one thing clear,” Mr. Shapiro told the Television Academy. “He said, ‘I’m not going to play a shoe salesman or an accountant or a father with a job.’ And he came up with the premise of the series, that he would play himself.”In recent years, Mr. Shapiro produced “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” (2017), a documentary in which Mr. Reiner talked to nonagenarians like Betty White and Dick Van Dyke, and “The Super Bob Einstein Movie” (2021), about the comic actor and writer known for his ongoing television portrayal of Super Dave Osborne, a hapless parody of a daredevil.Mr. Shapiro is survived by his former wife, Melody (Sherr) Shapiro, from whom he was divorced; his daughters, Carrie Shapiro Fuentes and Stefanie Shapiro; a son, Danny; five grandchildren; and his brother. His marriage to Diane Barnett ended with her death in 2005.Mr. Reiner’s son Rob Reiner, the actor and director, said Mr. Shapiro had been a nurturer, professionally and personally.“He loved my dad, he looked up to him — he was like a father to him,” said Mr. Reiner, whose company, Castle Rock Entertainment, produced “Seinfeld.” “George loved being around my dad, and when he started getting older, he’d come over to the house and walk him around the block. That’s the thing you need to know about George: He took care of everybody.” More

Inspired by Maurice Flitcroft’s stunningly bad results at the 1976 British Open, this comedy plays with a genre in which underdogs so often triumph.The British comedy “The Phantom of the Open” — about a working man’s dreams of golf glory — features a few dreamlike sequences that suggest the director, Craig Roberts, is a fan of the 1946 fantasy romance, “Stairway to Heaven,” especially when a tiny golfer circles a golf ball the size of the moon.Inspired by Maurice Flitcroft’s attempts to qualify for the British Open in 1976, this comedy is also the sort of good-hearted movie the director Frank Capra would have liked to have taken a swing at.The actor Mark Rylance brings a mix of sorrow and optimism to his portrayal of Flitcroft, the shipyard crane operator who, encouraged by his wife, Jean (Sally Hawkins), to finally follow his dreams, enters the British Open. The rub: Neither of them knows anything about golf.A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.“Phantom” opens with Maurice nervously awaiting a television interview years after his first try at the Open. The scene plays with a genre in which underdogs so often triumph. Maurice, it turns out, is stunningly bad. Simon Farnaby based the screenplay on his and the sports journalist Scott Murray’s biography, “The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, The World’s Worst Golfer.”Maurice’s personal mantra is “practice is the road to perfection.” Even so, it may not get him there. His persistence will, however, aggravate golfing elites and mortify his stepson Michael (Jake Davies), who has been promoted by the shipyard higher-ups. The twins Christian and Jonah Lees bring a silly buoyancy to this already offbeat tale as Maurice and Jean’s championship, disco-dancing sons. (That, too, is based on fact.)The Phantom of the OpenRated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

In this post-#MeToo moment, misogyny and celebrity go hand in hand.The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial was, from gavel to gavel, a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle. Now that it has ended with the jury finding in favor of Depp on all questions and in favor of Heard on only one, it’s clear that the confusion was the point.Why did Depp, who had already lost a similar case in Britain, insist on going back to court? A public trial, during which allegations of physical, sexual, emotional and substance abuse against him were sure to be repeated, couldn’t be counted on to restore his reputation. Heard, his ex-wife, was counting on the opposite: that the world would hear, in detail, about the physical torments that led her to describe herself, in the Washington Post op-ed that led to the suit, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”Even before the verdict came in, Depp had already won. What had looked to many like a clear-cut case of domestic violence had devolved into a “both sides” melodrama. The fact that Heard’s partial victory, which involved not Depp’s words but those spoken in 2020 by Adam Waldman, his lawyer at the time, can be spun in that direction shows how such ambiguity served Depp all along. As one commenter on The New York Times site put it, “Every relationship has its troubles.” Life is complicated. Maybe they were both abusive. Who really knows what happened? The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy. And so we found ourselves in the familiar land of he said/she said.The Depp-Heard trial was a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle, both inside the courtroom and out. Craig Hudson/Associated PressWe should know by now that the symmetry implied by that phrase is an ideological fiction, that women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault have a much harder time being listened to than their assailants. I don’t mean that women always tell the truth, that men are always guilty as charged, or that due process isn’t the bedrock of justice. But Depp-Heard wasn’t a criminal trial; it was a civil action intended to measure the reputational harm each one claimed the other had done. Which means that it rested less on facts than on sympathies.In that regard, Depp possessed distinct advantages. He isn’t a better actor than Heard, but her conduct on the stand was more harshly criticized in no small part because he’s a more familiar performer, a bigger star who has dwelled for much longer in the glow of public approbation. He brought with him into the courtroom the well-known characters he has played, a virtual entourage of lovable rogues, misunderstood artists and gonzo rebels. He’s Edward Scissorhands, Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, Gilbert Grape.We’ve seen him mischievous and mercurial, but never truly menacing. He’s someone we’ve watched grow up, from juvenile heartthrob on “21 Jump Street” to crusty old salt in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. His offscreen peccadilloes (the drinking, the drugs, the “Winona Forever” tattoo) have been part of the pop-cultural background noise for much of that time, classified along with the scandals and shenanigans that have been a Hollywood sideshow since the silent era.Depp is someone audiences have watched grow up onscreen, in movies like (clockwise from top left) “Edward Scissorhands,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”Clockwise from top left: 20th Century Studios; Paramount Pictures, via RGR Collection/Alamy; Universal Pictures, via TCD and Prod.DB/Alamy; Disney, via Moviestore Collection Ltd/AlamyIn his testimony, Depp copped to some bad stuff, but this too was a play for sympathy, of a piece with the charm and courtliness he was at pains to display. That he came off as a guy unable to control his temper or his appetites was seen, by many of the most vocal social media users, to enhance his credibility, while Heard’s every tear or gesture was taken to undermine hers. The audience was primed to accept him as flawed, vulnerable, human, and to view her as monstrous.Because he’s a man. Celebrity and masculinity confer mutually reinforcing advantages. Famous men — athletes, actors, musicians, politicians — get to be that way partly because they represent what other men aspire to be. Defending their prerogatives is a way of protecting, and asserting, our own. We want them to be bad boys, to break the rules and get away with it. Their seigneurial right to sexual gratification is something the rest of us might resent, envy or disapprove of, but we rarely challenge it. These guys are cool. They do what they want, including to women. Anyone who objects is guilty of wokeness, or gender treason, or actual malice.Of course there are exceptions. In the #MeToo era there are men who have gone to jail, lost their jobs or suffered disgrace because of the way they’ve treated women. The fall of certain prominent men — Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves, Matt Lauer — was often welcomed as a sign that a status quo that sheltered, enabled and celebrated predators, rapists and harassers was at last changing.A few years later, it seems more likely that they were sacrificed not to end that system of entitlement but rather to preserve it. Almost as soon as the supposed reckoning began there were complaints that it had gone too far, that nuances were being neglected and too-harsh punishments meted out.This backlash has been folded into a larger discourse about “cancel culture,” which is often less about actions than words. “Cancellation” is now synonymous with any criticism that invokes racial insensitivity, sexual misbehavior or controversial opinions. Creeps are treated as martyrs, and every loudmouth is a free-speech warrior. Famous men with lucrative sinecures on cable news, streaming platforms and legacy print publications can proclaim themselves victims.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

The stage adaptation, with book and lyrics by Cameron Crowe and music and lyrics by Tom Kitt, will begin previews Sept. 13.“Almost Famous,” Cameron Crowe’s rock ’n’ roll coming-of-age story, will make its pandemic-delayed trip to Broadway this fall.A musical adaptation of the beloved 2000 film, the show had an initial run in San Diego in 2019, and its creative team then continued to work on the project while theaters were shut down by the coronavirus pandemic and as Broadway began to rebound.The musical is now scheduled to begin previews on Sept. 13 and to open Oct. 11 at an unspecified Shubert theater. It is the 11th show to announce performance dates for the new Broadway season, and at least two dozen more are circling.“Almost Famous” is Crowe’s semi-autobiographical story, set in 1973, about a teenage music journalist and his relationships with members of the band he is chronicling as well as the young women who follow it. Crowe wrote and directed the film, and won an Oscar for the screenplay; he has written the book and is a co-author of the lyrics for the musical.In an interview, Crowe described himself as “exuberant” about the Broadway transfer, saying, “I’m ready to share it with people.”“Every time I see the play I go back to being 15 years old,” he added.Crowe said he grew up seeing Shakespeare plays at the Old Globe in San Diego, where the musical began its life, and that he has found working in theater more “personal and soulful” than working in the film industry. And, he said, “something about telling a story about loving music draws music-loving people.”The Old Globe production garnered strong reviews, particularly from the critic Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times, who called it “an unqualified winner.”The score is mostly original, with music by Tom Kitt (“Next to Normal”) who collaborated on the lyrics with Crowe; the musical also features a number of pop songs, including Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Joni Mitchell’s “River.”The show is being directed by Jeremy Herrin (“Wolf Hall”) and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby.The lead producers are Lia Vollack, a former Sony executive who is also the lead producer of “MJ,” the Michael Jackson musical, and the Michael Cassel Group, an Australian production company that has become increasingly active on Broadway. The show is being capitalized for up to $18 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The role of the young journalist, named William Miller, will be played by Casey Likes, who also played the role at the Old Globe in San Diego; this will be his Broadway debut. (“He still looks young,” Crowe promised.)Chris Wood, best known for CW television shows including “Supergirl” and “The Vampire Diaries,” will make his Broadway debut as the band’s lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (played by Billy Crudup in the film). Anika Larsen (“Beautiful”) will take on the role of the protagonist’s mother, Elaine (played by Frances McDormand in the movie), and Solea Pfeiffer (“Hamilton”) will portray Penny Lane, Kate Hudson’s character in the film. The cast will also include Drew Gehling (“Waitress”) as the band’s lead singer, Jeff Bebe. More