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      Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Release

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      The star said making the film available on Disney+ at the same time it opened in theaters “dramatically” lowered box office revenue, which could cost her tens of millions of dollars.Never cross a super-assassin: Scarlett Johansson, who has played the Marvel character Black Widow in eight blockbuster films, sued the Walt Disney Company on Thursday over its pandemic-era streaming strategy. The lawsuit marked a sharp escalation in a festering standoff between movie actors and media companies over compensation in the streaming age.The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims that Disney breached her contract when it released “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ earlier this month. Ms. Johansson’s suit said that Disney had promised that “Black Widow” would receive an exclusive release in theaters for approximately 90 to 120 days and that her compensation — based largely on bonuses tied to ticket sales — was gutted as a result of the hybrid release. Simultaneous availability on Disney+, where subscribers could watch the film instantly (and have permanent access to it) for a $30 surcharge, “dramatically decreased box office revenue,” Ms. Johansson said in the suit.“There is no merit whatsoever to this filing,” Disney said in a statement.Over its first three days in theaters, “Black Widow” collected $158 million at theaters worldwide and took in about $60 million on Disney+ Premier Access. Total ticket sales now stand at $327 million, the lowest total for a Marvel Studios release since 2008, when “The Incredible Hulk” collected $265 million (or $341 million in today’s dollars). Disney has not given a running total for Disney+ sales of “Black Widow.”Making “Black Widow” available on Disney+ could cost Ms. Johansson more than $50 million, according to two people briefed on her contract, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private agreement. That is how much Ms. Johansson would have made if “Black Widow” had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; “Captain Marvel” and “Black Panther” both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release.Films released during the pandemic — including those that have received exclusive theatrical releases — have largely disappointed at the box office, with many consumers demonstrating a reluctance to return to theaters. The entire film ecosystem has been hurt as a result: cinema chains, stars, studios.Disney has cited the coronavirus as a reason for releasing movies like “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios, via Disney“First, Disney wanted to lure the picture’s audience away from movie theaters and towards its own streaming service, where it could keep the revenues for itself while simultaneously growing the Disney+ subscriber base, a proven way to boost Disney’s stock price,” the suit, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, claimed. “Second, Disney wanted to substantially devalue Ms. Johansson’s agreement and thereby enrich itself.”Disney’s statement called the lawsuit “especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.” The company added, “Disney has fully complied with Ms. Johansson’s contract and furthermore, the release of ‘Black Widow’ on Disney+ with Premier Access has significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation on top of the $20 million she has received to date.”“Black Widow” was initially scheduled for exclusive theatrical release in May of last year. Disney ended up postponing the film’s release three times as the pandemic dragged on.Disney, citing the ongoing coronavirus threat, ultimately decided to release several major movies simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access. It used the strategy in May for “Cruella,” which starred Emma Stone and took in $221 million worldwide. (Disney has kept Disney+ revenue for “Cruella” a secret.) On Friday, Disney will give the same treatment to “The Jungle Cruise,” a comedic adventure that stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson. It is not known if Ms. Stone, Ms. Blunt or Mr. Johnson renegotiated their contracts with Disney as a result.In December, WarnerMedia kicked a hornet’s nest by abruptly announcing that more than a dozen Warner Bros. movies — the studio’s entire 2021 slate — would each arrive in theaters and on HBO Max. The decision prompted an outcry from major stars and their agents over the potential loss of box office-related compensation, forcing Warner Bros. to make new deals. It ultimately paid roughly $200 million to thwart the rebellion.The deeper question is this: If old-line studios are no longer trying to maximize the box office for each film but instead shifting to a hybrid model where success is judged partly by ticket sales and partly by the number of streaming subscriptions sold, what does that mean for how stars are paid — and where they make their movies?The traditional model, the one that studios have used for decades to make high-profile film deals, involves paying small fees upfront and then sharing a portion of the revenue from ticket sales. The bigger the hit, the bigger the “back end” paydays for certain actors, directors and producers.The streaming giants have done it differently. They pay more upfront — usually much, much more — in lieu of any back-end payments, which gives them complete control over future revenue. It means that people get paid as if their projects are hits before they are released (or even made).Ms. Johansson’s suit also took direct aim at Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, and Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chairman, by citing the stock grants given to them as rewards for building Disney+, which has more than 100 million subscribers worldwide. “Disney’s financial disclosures make clear that the very Disney executives who orchestrated this strategy will personally benefit from their and Disney’s misconduct,” the complaint said.According to the suit, Ms. Johansson’s representatives approached Disney and Marvel in recent months with a request to renegotiate her contract. “Disney and Marvel largely ignored Ms. Johansson,” the suit said. More

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      ‘The Boy Behind the Door’ Review: Best Friends in Peril

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      Tween boys attempt to escape mysterious abductors in this thriller borrowing from the slasher-horror genre.Bobby and Kevin are bound and gagged in a car trunk. After Kevin is pulled out and whisked away, Bobby is left inside, but he manages to get rid of his restraints and wiggle out. Instead of running for his life, though, Bobby heads toward the sprawling house where Kevin is held prisoner: “Friends til the end,” the buddies had sworn to each other.You know that promise is going to hold, because 12-year-old boys like these two take these matters seriously.Bad, bad things happen to Bobby (Lonnie Chavis, Randall on “This Is Us”) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey) in the horror-tinged abduction thriller “The Boy Behind the Door.” And, it must be said, for the most part they happen onscreen. This is not common in American releases, where violence toward kids tends to be suggested, metaphorical or cartoonishly abstract. David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s movie steers clear of exploitation, though, because while the camera does not look away from Bobby and Kevin’s woes — there is gore — it does so in a clinical, almost neutral manner that, again, we are not used to seeing applied to children. (Some viewers may find this very detachment distasteful.)“The Boy Behind the Door,” which is streaming on Shudder, leaves no room for anything besides brutally direct suspense mechanics: Bobby spends the entire movie trying to free Kevin while evading their captors, who include Kristin Bauer van Straten, from “True Blood,” as an opaque embodiment of capricious evil.We do not know why the two were kidnapped, or what their world is like aside from their playing on a softball team — the movie never cuts to, say, anxious parents. Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus.This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling. Especially when a couple of puzzling, attention-grabbing flourishes needlessly slip in, most notably a scene that borrows from an ultra-famous one in “The Shining.” And why, exactly, pan over a Make America Great Again bumper sticker on the kidnappers’ car? The real world intrudes on the stylized suspense with a thud rather than a bracing jolt.The Boy Behind the DoorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      Dev Patel, Starry Knight

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      “The Green Knight” offered the actor a movie-star moment unlike anything he’s done before. Could he conquer his insecurities and take the lead?Horses know, Dev Patel told me.“A horse can tell if you’ve only slept two hours the night before,” he said. “If you’re anxious, the horse can feel it. Armani definitely could.”Armani is one of Patel’s most significant co-stars in the new medieval fantasy “The Green Knight,” in which the 31-year-old actor plays Sir Gawain, a would-be warrior who embarks on something of a suicide mission. Parts of his quest take place on horseback and Patel, who’d never ridden before, tried to win Armani’s favor by sneaking him apples pilfered from the hotel lobby in Dublin.Still, appealing to a horse’s stomach can only do so much. If Patel couldn’t summon enough leading-man authority to embody Gawain, surely Armani would be the first to sense it. After all, they would spend their first shoot day together in an Irish wilderness where the wind blows so strong that Patel found himself gripping Armani tightly just to stay upright.As those gusts of cold air pierced the metal mesh of Patel’s chain mail in a way no sword could, did Armani know that his rider was more neophyte than knight? And could the horse sense some of the other things making Patel anxious, like his natural tendency to overthink his career — what Patel calls “paralysis by analysis” — or the way he wondered what people would make of a British-Indian actor playing King Arthur’s nephew?OK, maybe some of those concepts are a little too complicated for a horse to suss out. (Though Armani could not be reached for comment, so who’s to say?) But Patel still had a lot on his mind that first day, and I haven’t even gotten to the matter of his food poisoning yet.“All this talk of representation,” he groaned, “and I’m here on top of a horse in chain mail, in the freezing cold, hoping I don’t get diarrhea.’”Patel as Gawain in “The Green Knight.” His director, David Lowery, said, “From the moment I met him, I was very aware that he was going to be the thing that makes the film epic.” Eric Zachanowich/A24 FilmsPatel was video-chatting with me from Adelaide, South Australia, where he’s busy editing his directorial debut, a martial-arts movie called “Monkey Man,” as well as keeping an eye on the “The Green Knight,” which was originally meant to come out last summer and will now debut in theaters on July 30. Directed by David Lowery, “The Green Knight” adds a welcome swerve to Patel’s résumé of straightforward crowd-pleasers: Unlike “Slumdog Millionaire” or “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Lowery’s film is artsy, mysterious and a little sexy.Or, let me put it more plainly: “The Green Knight” understands that Dev Patel is a heartthrob now.The once-gawky actor has grown into a leading man with romance-novel hair, empathetic eyes and a well-kept beard, and though photo shoots of Patel routinely earn big numbers on social media, no movie till this one has really capitalized on his status as an internet crush. Patel wasn’t even on Lowery’s initial casting list for “The Green Knight,” but after the director saw a Zegna fashion spread with Patel looking suave and regal, he found himself so taken with Patel’s potential that he started drawing a picture of the actor on horseback.“From the moment I met him, I was very aware that he was going to be the thing that makes the film epic,” Lowery said. “If we couldn’t move to an epic location, if we weren’t able to find the right vista, I could always fall back on him because he will give us that in a close-up.”Sir Gawain is a bit of a cad when we first meet him, a drunken layabout who’d rather woo than fight. Still, he feels that it’s his destiny to be known for something great, and when a treelike creature called the Green Knight issues a challenge to King Arthur’s court, Gawain too eagerly accepts, beheading the monstrous figure.Unfortunately, the Green Knight survives his own decapitation and promises to return the blow to Gawain in one year’s time. This means that though Patel is introduced as a romantic rogue — and Lowery steers into that idea, outfitting him in a series of low-cut blouses — it’s the rest of the movie, in which Gawain finds himself humbled by the Green Knight’s looming deadline, that is truly meant to test his mettle as a man.Patel could relate to Sir Gawain: “As a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success and fame. That’s the same quest this young man goes on.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times“I’m certainly aware of all of the fans of Dev Patel’s hair and beard — I’ve seen those memes,” Lowery said. “But I don’t think people understand exactly what he’s going to be doing as an actor and ‘The Green Knight’ just scratches the surface of it.”Lowery’s film is enigmatic enough to mean different things to different viewers, and it’s sure to spawn a thousand subreddits devoted to decoding its dreamlike logic. But to Patel, the main point of “The Green Knight” is clear: Gawain thinks he is entitled to fame even when he has done nothing to prove it’s deserved. His quest, then, is a journey toward integrity that comes with some present-day parallels.“Whether you’re an Instagram model or a YouTuber, there’s this thirst to be recognized, to have your legend spoken about, to get the likes,” Patel said. “And for me as a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success and fame. That’s the same quest this young man goes on to be a known knight. All of that, I related to.”NONE OF THIS was originally in the cards for Patel, who grew up in the London borough of Harrow as the younger of two children. Both his parents had emigrated from Nairobi in their teens. His father, Raju, is quiet and introverted, while his mother, Anita, is the family’s force of nature. “She’s a big personality, and she can have the whole room laughing,” Patel told me. “I think my love of playing all these characters came from her.”Patel was a hyperactive child, and his parents signed him up for years of martial-arts classes to channel that excess energy. Still, he always had something more to give, and when his mother saw a casting advertisement for “Skins,” a teen drama that would supercharge the careers of young actors like Nicholas Hoult and Daniel Kaluuya, she prodded him to audition for the role of sex-crazy Anwar.The show was a hit, but the neighbors were horrified. “It felt like suicide in the community to put your kid into a TV show and let him drop out of school at 16,” Patel said. “While everyone else’s kid is off becoming a doctor or a dentist, I’m here on this TV show,” he said, “simulating sex and taking drugs.”He had never acted on camera before, and “Skins” was a trial by fire. The money was good enough to improve his family’s situation — with his first paycheck, Patel bought his sister a new bed — but the show’s large online following cut both ways.Patel in “Skins” with, from left, Nicholas Hoult, Larissa Wilson and April Pearson.Company Pictures“I was a young kid going on these chat rooms and it was quite brutal,” Patel said. “There were all these lists of who’s the favorite character on the show or who was the best-looking character, and I was always the ugliest, the least attractive. No one liked Anwar. It really took a toll on me personally.”Maybe that’s why he still mistrusts compliments 15 years later, or why he makes fun of himself before anyone else might get the chance. When I bring up the fan base that’s rooting for him on social media, I can’t even finish the sentence before Patel interjects: “All three members of that fan base?” Even when “Slumdog Millionaire” won best picture at the Oscars in 2009 or when, eight years later, Patel himself received a supporting-actor nomination for the drama “Lion” (he lost to Mahershala Ali), all that attention made him uneasy.“I didn’t feel worthy,” he said. “That kind of speaks to my natural low self-esteem: You’re there with really impressive creatures, the best of the best, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what I have to offer in this space.’”He said his agents still get frustrated with him for turning down major studio blockbusters. “Maybe it’s a fear of how I would fit into that world,” Patel said. Sheepishly, he begins to talk about “one of the worst movies I’ve ever done, and I shouldn’t even bring it up, but do a quick IMDb search and you’ll know what it is.” (He’s referring to M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender,” the Razzie-winning adaptation of the animated action series.)On that production, he was surrounded by green screen and special effects, and the artifice proved too difficult to wrap his head around. “I didn’t really flourish in that position,” he said. “I take my hat off to all those incredible actors that do Marvel movies where it’s, like, big, noisy fans and green screen and tennis balls and whatnot.”Authenticity is Patel’s watchword; if he can’t make a movie feel real to him, it’s not worth doing. By way of explaining, Patel told me a story about landing the role of the teenage striver in “Slumdog Millionaire,” an audition he booked because the daughter of the director, Danny Boyle, was such a fan of “Skins.”Patel in the best-picture-winning “Slumdog Millionaire.” Ishika Mohan/Fox Searchlight PicturesPatel was full of manic energy during the audition, using every trick he could think of to earn laughs in the room. But afterward, Boyle took the young actor aside and told him that if he were hired to lead the movie, he’d have to learn to be still. Could he leave enough room for the audience to enter the film through his eyes?“At the time, I was 17,” Patel said, “and I was like, ‘Well, that’s not acting. That’s just lazy!’” But over the course of his career, he has begun to understand what Boyle meant: All you really have to do is be present. A movie star knows that’s enough.That’s why the most exciting thing for Patel now is when he plays a role that lets him simply be. With its long, meditative scenes set in real locations, “The Green Knight” delivered that feeling in spades: Even when he was astride Armani and the rain hurled by the wind felt like bullets hitting his skin, Patel wouldn’t have traded the truth of that moment for anything. It’s the reason he does what he does, when all that’s left is him, the camera, and something powerful and innate that commands attention. (Horses can sense that sort of thing. Maybe audiences can, too.)“There’s a moment between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ that is like a drug,” Patel told me. “If you’re with the right filmmaker on the right set with the right script, everything just dissolves away.” He likened it to the flow state reached by great athletes, or even to Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic: “And there’s a metaphorical DiCaprio behind me,” he said, extending his long arms and grinning. More

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      ‘Sabaya’ Review: Light Breaking Through Darkness

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      This intrepid, immersive documentary follows the men and women who rescue Yazidi girls kidnapped and held by Islamic State fighters in a Syrian refugee camp.In the black of night in northeastern Syria, two men drive their rickety jeep deep into Al Hol, a refugee camp for families of fighters for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. The men rifle through tents and argue with hostile residents before finding their target: a Yazidi teenage girl kidnapped years ago and held as a “sabaya” or sex slave. As the rescuers make their way out of the camp with her, they dodge speeding cars and bullets.All of this happens in the first 20-or-so minutes of Hogir Hirori’s “Sabaya.” Mahmud and Ziyad, volunteers at the Yazidi Home Center in Syria, will make several more such trips over the course of the film, and hundreds more after the cameras stop rolling. Their task is enormous, and it demands a stoicism that Hirori’s intrepid, immersive filmmaking mirrors.Shooting with a hand-held camera, Hirori (who also edited the film) stitches together glimpses of the men’s daily lives at the Center — smoke breaks, meals with family, endless phone calls with relatives of the captured girls — into a portrait of unsentimental routine. This is in part a protective tactic: To dwell on the tragedy of the 7-year-old rescued after six years in captivity, or the girl whose family refuses to accept her son because his father is an ISIS fighter, is to open up to debilitating horror.Which makes the courage of the former sabayas who embed themselves in the camp as informers all the more remarkable. As I watched them enter the camp in niqabs, Hirori following closely with his camera, my heart fluttered with both fear and hope. In a film about the light that breaks through the darkest of darknesses, these women shine the brightest.SabayaNot rated. In Kurdish and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fauna’ Review: Narcomythologies

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      This lean meta-drama tackles the fictions typically associated with Mexican culture with droll humor and bold conceptual play.In “Fauna,” the Mexican Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda teases with and deconstructs the fictions typically associated with contemporary Mexican culture in a lean 70-minute running time that abounds in droll humor and bold conceptual play.At first, the film starts out like a deadpan indie comedy heavy on the cringe: Luisa (Luisa Pardo) and her boyfriend Paco (Francisco Barreiro) drive out to a depopulated town in the Mexican hinterlands to visit Luisa’s parents for the weekend. Once they’ve reached their destination, they encounter Luisa’s churlish brother, Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez), unfolding a tense, awkward dynamic that only worsens when Luisa’s father and mother arrive.When Luisa’s father (José Rodríguez López) takes the two men out for a beer, Paco — who plays an actor in the Netflix series, “Narcos: Mexico” — is asked to reprise his role right then and there, pitting his nervous disbelief against dad and Gabino’s stoic entreaties. Barreiro, who in real life acted in the drug trade drama, is eventually pushed to perform a monologue drawn directly from the finale of the first season, resulting in one of the most exciting, and wonderfully mortifying bits I’ve seen in quite a while.Pereda then deftly reorients the film by bringing to life the plot of a hard-boiled novel that Gabino is midway through reading. The actors from the first half of the film are recycled in this nested narrative, playing detective story archetypes involved in narco-adjacent intrigue ripped straight from the original characters’ dreams.Brimming with postmodern flourishes, “Fauna” calls attention to the slippery nature of performance and identity, lodging a complex, yet highly engrossing critique of narco culture’s influence on Mexican storytelling — and it does so without a drop of that pesky didacticism.FaunaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Tailgate’ Review: Retribution for Road Rage

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      In this Dutch thriller, a man puts his family in danger by refusing to apologize to a serial killer with a pious streak.If you’ve ever been the victim of another driver’s road rage, you might sympathize with the killer stalking “Tailgate,” a Dutch thriller from the writer-director Lodewijk Crijns. The Exterminator, played by Willem de Wolf, is a clean-cut, eerily tall man who kicks things off by murdering a cyclist. As the biker pleads for his life, sputtering apologies, the menacing figure puts an exterminator’s spray gun in the biker’s mouth and pulls the trigger, poisoning him to death.Not getting the sympathy angle yet? Enter Hans (Jeroen Spitzenberger), a loathsome man rushing his family to a weekend trip at his parents’ house. Hans snaps at his wife, gleefully teaches his daughters that women are terrible drivers and — most importantly — rides The Exterminator’s bumper for a long stretch of highway. When Hans is confronted and an apology is demanded, he becomes even ruder, despite his wife’s misgivings. In response, The Exterminator methodically works to track down and eliminate Hans.The killer is plenty horrible in his own right, but it can be difficult not to root for him. This is a predator-stalks-prey narrative, and Hans has the charisma of a cockroach. As The Exterminator’s van creeps down the road, it invokes the same tantalizing suspense as seeing a fin above the water during “Jaws.” But here, the potential victim is a total cretin, not a skinny-dipping ingénue or a fearsome fisherman. This well-choreographed hunt is chilling, sure — particularly because of de Wolf’s terrifying performance and unconventional choice of weapon — but it’s also a little bit fun.TailgateNot rated. In English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and on Film Movement. More

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      No Lion, the Skipper Is the Real King of the Jungle Cruise

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      Bad jokes and puns are part of a Disneyland job that has been immortalized in a new film. Those who’ve held the role at the theme park never really leave it behind.In 1916 Brazil, Skipper Frank Wolff runs the cheapest jungle cruise on the Amazon. And undoubtedly the cheesiest, as he introduces tourists to the river’s wondrous sights with a spiel overflowing with doozies.“If you look to the left of the boat, you’ll see some very playful toucans. They’re playing their favorite game of beak-wrestling. The only drawback is, only two can play.”“The rocks you see here in the river are sandstone. But some people just take them for granite. It’s one of my boulder attractions.”And the highlight of the tour: “Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for the eighth wonder of the world,” he says, building toward the climax, as his rickety steamboat passes behind a makeshift waterfall. “Wait for it … the backside of water!”Frank’s guests may groan and roll their eyes at his droll banter in Disney’s “Jungle Cruise,” starring Dwayne Johnson as the swaggering skipper and arriving July 30 on Disney+ and in theaters. But the skippers and their spiels — corny jokes and bad puns, the cringier the better — have been the real stars of the Jungle Cruise attraction since the first one opened at Disneyland in 1955. Take them away and the seven-minute fantasy boat trip along rivers in South America, Asia and Africa, inspired in part by “The African Queen,” might be just another ride down a fake waterway with fake scenery.It’s also one of the rare performing jobs at a Disney theme park where the skippers can weave their own personalities into the script — from dry and geeky to animated and flamboyant — and get guests in on the action. “It’s this alchemy that happens” that few attractions can replicate, said Alex Williams, a former skipper who now works for the Disney fan club D23.With the new movie as well as the ride’s freshly reimagined story line, the Jungle Cruise is in the spotlight now, and no one is feeling it more than the skippers themselves.“We’re all just really excited about being able to share this experience with everyone and being the inspiration for the movie,” said Flor Torres, a “lead” on the attraction.“Once a skip, always a skip.” That’s the motto of skippers who’ve held a job requiring them to maneuver a boat while performing a stand-up routine dozens of times across an eight-hour day.Puns and jokes about the “backside of water” abound on the ride at Disneyland.Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images“People really take that to heart,” Torres added of the motto. “I know skippers that have worked here maybe 20, 30 years ago, and they still come by and talk to us like they were just here yesterday.”A handful have wisecracked their way to bigger stages, like Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary for President Richard M. Nixon; the filmmaker John Lasseter; Steve Franks, a screenwriter and the creator of the TV series “Psych”; and, it’s said, the actor Kevin Costner. (Alas, stories that Robin Williams and Steve Martin honed their humor at the helm are apparently only myths.)Other former skippers have recounted their experiences on podcasts like “Tales From the Jungle Crews” and “The Backside of Water,” or provided pandemic uplift in Freddy Martin’s “World Famous Jungle Cruise” video and its sequel.And a bold few have revealed some not-Disney-approved antics in books like “Skipper Stories: True Tales From Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise,” a compilation of six decades of anecdotes from former skippers, including the author, David John Marley.To wit: The ritual of becoming a “real skipper” by peeing in the river at night. The Jungle Justice inflicted on skippers who abused their break time (they found themselves suddenly scheduled for upward of 90 minutes of nonstop cruises without water or a bathroom stop). The off-hours party where $2,000 was spent on alcohol and condoms.A good skipper is an extrovert, a nut and somewhat of a rogue. At least that’s how Bill Sullivan, who joined the Jungle Cruise in 1955, once put it. His own skipper colleagues included a man who arrived one morning with chameleons around his neck.They didn’t have much of a script in the beginning so the men wrote their own, Sullivan, who eventually became vice president of the Magic Kingdom, recalled in 2008. (Women didn’t become skippers until the mid-1990s.)Johnson with Emily Blunt in the film, which now incorporates a bit of the ride patter.DisneyThe spiel had been repeatedly fine-tuned by the time Franks landed his gig in the late 1980s. And venturing from it was ill-advised.“You would hear these stories about supervisors hiding in the jungle, listening for people going off-book, but if that was true, they would have canned me on Day 2,” he said. “I knew I wanted to make movies, and I was doing stand-up at the time. And as soon as we got around the first corner, I was working in material.”Franks stayed at Disneyland for eight and a half years, writing the script for Adam Sandler’s “Big Daddy” while monitoring the Enchanted Tiki Room.Crews may have been rowdier back in the day, but “today we’re much more conservative, a little less the Wild West,” said Kevin Lively, one of two skippers chosen to represent Disneyland at Tokyo Disney Resort’s 25th anniversary celebration in 2009. (There’s also a Jungle Cruise at Walt Disney World and Hong Kong Disneyland.)Lively now works as a Disney Imagineer, developing skipper spiels and contributing “gnu” magic to the attraction, which has replaced racist elements like spear-throwing African “headhunters” with a story about Felix Pechman XIII, “the unluckiest skipper on the dock.”And when the “Jungle Cruise” movie needed an injection of humor, Lively was on it.“I shotgun-blast puns and references and Easter eggs to them, and let them kind of just run amok,” he said. “There’s stuff in there that I think all these skippers will get, which just makes me over-the-moon happy. They really showed their love of the attraction in that film.”Skipper Frank’s ersatz Amazon tour wasn’t in the original script, said Jaume Collet-Serra, the movie’s director. But once the filmmaker had ridden the actual Jungle Cruise and witnessed reactions to that “backside of water” joke, he knew what he had to do.Treat the audience to a mini-Jungle Cruise experience.“I was like, let me give them what they want for two minutes and then I’ll give them more, but at least they’ll be happy early,” he said. “You know, ‘Here is what you came for — now let the movie begin.’” More

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      ‘The Evening Hour’ Review: Heart of the Country

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      In this drama, a wholesome young man in an Appalachian town tries to do right by friends and family but gets caught up in a side hustle dealing pills.A colleague of mine once floated a memorable thought experiment: if you could visit the picturesque fictional towns portrayed in 1940s Hollywood dramas in the present day, they might be ravaged by the opioid epidemic. The idea traces a thread of continuity in American life, which I believe is partly what “The Evening Hour” is trying to do.Set in a small Appalachian town, Braden King’s luminous second feature centers on a wholesome nursing aide, Cole (Philip Ettinger), who moonlights as a drug dealer. His daily rounds of checking on seniors — including his grandmother — also entail picking up and dropping off pills. He’s a peacemaker with a casual girlfriend (Stacy Martin), a clingy old friend (Cosmo Jarvis), another pal (Michael Trotter), who’s also a client, and an absent mother (Lili Taylor), who suddenly shows up when his grandfather dies.King works to portray a tight mesh of relationships around Cole, directing Elizabeth Palmore’s valiant adaptation of the sensitively rendered Carter Sickels novel. But lacking a strong central performance from Ettinger — who gets stuck on a half-pained, half-exasperated setting — much of the movie feels like a series of comings and goings, entrances and exits. And from the moment that a ruthless dealer in town gives Cole a hard look, there’s no question where his side hustle will lead.In flashbacks, Cole longs for time spent with his grandfather and at religious gatherings. The movie opens and closes with appreciative pans of the verdant hills that suggest the heartland will live on. But what comes in the middle doesn’t quite hold together.The Evening HourNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More