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      Norman Lloyd, Veteran Hollywood Hyphenate, Is Dead at 106

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      In his long career as an actor, producer and director, he worked with some of the best-known names in show business, even if his own was barely recognized.He was the young actor who moved the audience as Cinna the poet in Orson Welles’s 1937 theatrical production of “Julius Caesar.”He was the chilly fascist sympathizer who kept audiences on the edge of their seats as he dangled from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 film “Saboteur.”And he was the kindly Dr. Auschlander on the popular 1980s hospital drama “St. Elsewhere.”His face was recognizable to generations of people. But his name? Well, just consider this: When a filmmaker decided to make a documentary about him, he ended up titling it “Who Is Norman Lloyd?”Mr. Lloyd, who died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles at 106, carved out a successful career over seven decades as an actor, producer and director, working with some of the best-known names in the business — even if his own was barely recognized.His death was confirmed by the producer Dean Hargrove, a longtime friend.In addition to acting under Welles and Hitchcock, Mr. Lloyd worked with Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, John Houseman and Jean Renoir. He became good friends with Hitchcock and a frequent tennis partner of Chaplin’s. And he had stories to tell about all of them.“He is a fount of stage and movie lore, full of juice at the age of 93,” The New Yorker wrote when “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” was released in 2007.When Mr. Lloyd spoke, he did so with the sort of delivery that suggested an upper-crust upbringing and impeccable schooling. As it happened, he was born in Jersey City, N.J., on Nov. 8, 1914, and the only social climbing his family did was to move to Brooklyn. The aristocratic voice came later, when it was suggested that he take elocution lessons to erase his accent.“He sounds like he was born in London,” a friend, Peter Bart, the editorial director at Variety, once said. “It’s not an affectation. It’s just the way he sounds.”Mr. Lloyd began performing when he was very young, appearing before ladies’ clubs, he told The Star-Ledger of Newark in 2007. “‘Father, Get the Hammer. There’s a Fly on Baby’s Head’ — that was my big number,” he recalled dryly. “So you can imagine what that act was like.”But the young man was set on an actor’s path, and eventually he began working under Welles at the Mercury Theater in New York. The pay was poor, but it was the Depression, and he was better off than many of the people who crammed the theater in search of a cheap diversion. Mr. Lloyd’s performance as Cinna, in a version of “Julius Caesar” that Welles set in Mussolini’s Italy, brought him acclaim.“By many accounts, the most electrifying moment in ‘Caesar’ was the brief scene in which Cinna the Poet is mistaken for one of the conspirators and is set upon by the mob,” Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2015 in an article about Welles.When Welles moved to Los Angeles in 1940 to make films, the young Mr. Lloyd went with him.Welles’s first movie project fell through, however, and Mr. Lloyd, who was expecting a baby with his wife, Peggy, a fellow performer, decided to look for work elsewhere. Welles’s next project went better: It was “Citizen Kane.”But while Mr. Lloyd missed a chance to have a role in that classic film, he did manage to get cast by Hitchcock in “Saboteur.” His role was a big one: Fry, a fifth columnist bent on attacking American targets during World War II.At the film’s climax, he topples over the edge of the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dangles as the film’s hero (Robert Cummings) tries to pull him to safety by his sleeve. (If a spoiler can be forgiven after all these years, Fry’s fate is less like that of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint as they perch on Mount Rushmore in another Hitchcock film, “North by Northwest,” than that of King Kong on the Empire State Building.)Other roles followed, including in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945), Chaplin’s “Limelight” (1952) and Jean Renoir’s Hollywood movie “The Southerner” (1945). But Mr. Lloyd gradually began to turn to producing and directing.During the Hollywood blacklist period, his work dried up because of his past associations with leftist performers. He credited Hitchcock with reviving his career by insisting that he be allowed to hire Mr. Lloyd to produce and direct episodes of his television shows, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.”Mr. Lloyd took whatever work he could get until almost the end of his life. He had roles in an episode of “Modern Family” in 2010 and in the 2015 Judd Apatow movie “Trainwreck.” He also continued to spend a lot of time on the tennis court.Mr. Lloyd “still plays tennis and still follows the serve to the net, which is daunting,” Mr. Bart said in an interview when his friend was well into his 90s.In 2014, the year he turned 100, the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed Nov. 8, his birthday, “Norman Lloyd Day.”Peggy Lloyd, who was born Margaret Hirsdansky and who was married to Mr. Lloyd for 75 years, died in 2011. She and Mr. Lloyd had met when they co-starred in a play called “Crime,” directed by Elia Kazan.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Matthew Sussman, who directed the documentary about Mr. Lloyd, said its title came late in the game, as he was telling acquaintances what he was working on.“That would be the question,” he said, “almost every time: ‘Who is Norman Lloyd?’”Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      How the Golden Globes Went From Laughingstock to Power Player

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      The group that was once assailed by the F.C.C. steadily gained influence in Hollywood over the years until scrutiny of its practices and lack of diversity led NBC to say it would not air its show in 2022.LOS ANGELES — The Golden Globes were created by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1944 and quickly developed a reputation as unserious and slippery. More

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      Hollywood Has a New Way to Dramatize Addiction

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      Recent films dive into the profound grief experienced by so many families. What do they still get wrong?The first words in the film trailer, spoken over ominous piano, come from a doctor with a grim prognosis. “I’m going to level with you, Molly,” he says. “Opioids have a 97 percent relapse rate.” This is an exaggeration, but it has its effect on Molly and her mother, Deb. Deb is a deer in headlights, eyes wrinkled from years of worryand mistrust. Molly looks like Kurt Cobain in zombie makeup: unbuttoned flannel, skeletal frame, sunken eyes, bleached hair, pallid complexion. “You have gone through this 15 times,” the doctor says, and then there’s a fast cut to Molly in a twin bed, twitching in the fetal position, withdrawing from opioids.Next comes the premise. There is a monthly injection, the doctor explains, that “essentially makes you immune to getting high,” locking the brain’s opioid receptors behind a chemical cage not even heroin can penetrate. But there’s a catch. Before getting this injection of naltrexone, Molly must remain opioid-free for a week; otherwise, it could precipitate a severe sickness. Molly dreads this trial: “Four more days? Seriously?” We see a series of tense vignettes between mother and daughter, with Molly, played by Mila Kunis, screaming at Deb, played by Glenn Close: “I’m so sorry that my drug addiction is so incredibly difficult on you!”According to the C.D.C.’s provisional data, more than 90,000 Americans died from drug overdoses between October 2019 and September 2020, the highest rate ever recorded. Dramas about the addictions behind that number may not be fun to watch, but they do feel necessary, given the profound real-world grief they represent. Statistics make us aware of a crisis; art can help us metabolize it.And yet: When this trailer for Hollywood’s newest addiction drama — Kunis and Close in “Four Good Days” — emerged, and my Twitter feed lit up with commentary, most of it was biting. “There are a lot of bad movies about addiction, and this one seems ready to blow them all out of the water,” tweeted an emergency-​medicine physician in Ohio. “I watched this on mute and my god … the camera angles and lighting are every addiction movie cliché ever,” another advocate replied.That was Twitter. In the YouTube comments, I found a parallel universe. “The trailer had me in tears, spot on if you or anyone you love has dealt with any type of addiction,” one commenter wrote. “Them first 4 days are literally the worst,” another said. “This is such a good concept.” Hollywood has produced many vivid tales of druggy debauchery, especially about heroin. In the 1990s, “The Basketball Diaries” and “Trainspotting” showed audiences characters who injected heroin in the seedy underworlds of New York and Glasgow. In the 1970s, you had stories like “The Panic in Needle Park,” in which Al Pacino plays a Manhattan heroin user who falls in love with an innocent young woman and gets her addicted too.Today, many films about drugs have a different vibe. They take place not in cities but in upscale suburbs or in rural areas, and they tell their stories not from the perspective of drug users but of their terrified loved ones. Like “Ben Is Back,” “Beautiful Boy” and “Hillbilly Elegy” — some of Hollywood’s other swings at the opioid era — “Four Good Days” is ultimately a family drama about the power, and the limits, of a mother’s love.Close and Kunis’s family dynamic has the kind of raw verisimilitude only talented actors can recreate. But if anything here were to be praised for realism, it wouldn’t be the drama; it would be the boredom. In between scenes both poignant and preachy, Molly languishes in her mother’s suburban home, smoking unenjoyed cigarettes in a plastic chair in the garage. Kicking heroin involves skull-crushing levels of boredom, tired but wide awake, no hope of feeling comfortable; they call it “kicking” because of the way your legs grow cramped and restless. When Molly’s not smoking in the garage, she’s twiddling her thumbs, biding her time.Hollywood still needs to reduce a complex illness into something like a sports movie or boxing match.But a Hollywood movie cannot just be about boredom. It requires a meaty emotional conflict, preferably one that can be resolved in a couple of hours. Deb, for instance, says she blames doctors who overprescribed painkillers for Molly’s addiction, but the audience later learns that she left her family and that Molly grew up in a volatile, loveless home. A daughter’s feeling abandoned by her mother, the mother’s blaming herself for her child’s addiction — here is something we can chew on.The demands of mass-market Hollywood dramas seem almost engineered to prevent honest portrayals of addiction. The films now conceive of it as a medical illness instead of a moral failing, which is positive. But Hollywood still needs to reduce a complex illness into something like a sports movie or boxing match. Molly either wins or loses, gets high or not. Her illness must ultimately be conquered by valiant displays of will. She must survive a cold-turkey withdrawal while her mother, whom she has burned one too many times, musters her last ounces of support and compassion.The harrowing withdrawal, with its days of hellish sweats, is the most obvious aspect of addiction to dramatize: a trial of grit from which the character emerges transformed. Perhaps this is why naltrexone seems to be a favorite among some of America’s drug-court judges, who may view withdrawal as its own form of redemptive punishment. Maintenance treatments are arguably more effective and don’t require patients to be sick for a week, but they do not follow the dramatic path in which a character must reach a gripping, life-altering crisis point. Addiction, however, does not follow defined dramatic arcs. For some, treating it is a repetitive, yearslong process of trial and error. For others, it’s even more anticlimactic, and therapy and medication do the trick. Yes, some do recover after a cathartic breakthrough. But those stories tend not to bring viewers closer to addiction; if anything, they create distance, reducing tangles of human desire into melodrama and pity. You come away thinking, At least I’m not like that.In stories about “Four Good Days,” critics have marveled at how Kunis is “unrecognizable” in her “transformation” into what Hollywood thinks a heroin user looks like. Molly is gaunt, with rotting teeth and scabs dotting her face — a severe case. The film implies that this is her make-or-break shot at recovery, that it all comes down to this one moment. You’re unlikely to see less sensational arcs in today’s Hollywood dramas: say, people who make their progress slowly, who falter, who benefit from harm reduction, who learn that recovery is about more than their own will to endure suffering, whose addiction isn’t even their biggest problem in life. Such stories could surely be interesting ones. But in order to tell them, Hollywood would need to kick a very old habit. Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube More

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      ‘Titanic’ Is My Favorite Movie. There, I Said It.

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      A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; this is mine.A year ago, I went on a date, and the guy asked me what my favorite movie was. A simple question, but I stammered. His brow furrowed. “Didn’t your profile say that you love movie quotes?” I didn’t want to reveal the truth — not so soon, at least — so I hid behind the Criterion Collection (“ ‘La Strada,’ ‘Rebecca,’ etc.”). Then a scene flashed in my head — a swell of music, an enormous hat: “You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic!” A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; my secret is that I love “Titanic.” This has been true since I was a 10-year-old in a darkened theater, weeping uncontrollably on my mother’s lap. Like the children onscreen waving farewell to the doomed steamer, I marveled at the grandeur of what was passing before my eyes: a sweeping history lesson and a devastating romance between a first-class passenger named Rose (Kate Winslet) and a below-decks dreamboat named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). Until then, my cultural diet had consisted of Rodgers and Hammerstein singalongs and the Disney canon. “Titanic” — rapturous, tragic, real — was an awakening. In just over three hours, the film colored all my notions of grown-up life: love, loss, the female struggle, the unbreakable bond of a string quartet.To my child’s mind, “Titanic” was impossibly vast: It felt as though the movie encompassed the entire mysterious range of human life. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10. I couldn’t fully understand this feeling of transcendence, so I just kept rewatching. I saw the movie three times when it was released in 1997. The following year, when it came out on VHS — a fat brick of a box set, neatly split into two acts of happy and sad — I routinely popped in the pre-iceberg tape to enjoy with my after-school snack. I began fixating on unlikely features of the film, delighting in its ancillary characters’ banal dialogue: the clueless graybeards (“Freud? Who is he? Is he a passenger?”); the poetry of the bridge (“Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch. Let’s stretch her legs”); the snobbery of Rose’s mother (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they’re not too crowded”). As I matured, I stopped my regular viewings, but the movie continued playing in my mind. I was a melancholy indoor girl myself, and Rose perfectly articulated my teenage ennui: “the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter.” Even in the face of more complex ideas and challenges — like the travails of gender politics or problems of class — I found myself leaning on its casual wisdom and glossy sentimentality. The film’s unsubtle gender commentary began to feel revolutionary. (“Of course it’s unfair,” the chilly matriarch says while tightening the strings of her daughter’s corset. “We’re women.”) In the late ’90s, everyone I knew adored “Titanic,” but I felt in my heart that my own love affair with it was something special. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10.Two decades’ worth of late-night jokes and revisionist hot takes, however, have coated my feelings of affection in deep shame. (Just last month, “the iceberg that sank the Titanic” appeared in a bit on “Saturday Night Live,” lamenting, “Why are people still talking about this?”) The older I grew, the more my enduring admiration felt like some sort of clerical error in my development, a box I had accidentally checked on my application to adulthood. I told myself it was just a guilty pleasure. How could it be anything else? Saying “Titanic” is my favorite movie would be like saying my favorite painting is the “Mona Lisa”: It suggests a lack of discernment. But for me, the movie’s broadness is kind of the point. What snarky critics don’t appreciate is that the movie is a meme because it is a masterpiece. The film has become a cultural shorthand, a way of talking about ideas that are bigger than ourselves — mythic themes of hubris, love and tragedy — while also making a joke. (Has any line captured our collective quarantine mood more than that old chestnut, “It’s been 84 years …”?) It also won 11 Oscars. This past January, I decided, for the first time in a decade, to watch the movie from start to finish. When I was young — in my Tape 1 years — I was dazzled by the film’s spectacle. And yes, watching again, I fell for it in all the old ways: Jack’s good looks, Rose’s Edwardian walking suit, the allure of a real party. But as the camera panned over the sleeping elderly Rose, I broke into sobs seeing the pictures of her post-Titanic life — riding horses on the beach, climbing onto a flying machine dressed in Amelia Earheart cosplay, posing in an on-set glamour shot. After a year of great loss, the pathos of that moment hit me differently. Never mind her heart — her life went on. She survived a disaster and ended up living a life so full that the experience became just a memory. It was the message in a bottle I needed, one of many that “Titanic” has sent my way over the years. I imagine I’ll be receiving these messages forever — even as an old lady, warm in her bed.Jessie Heyman is executive editor of Vogue.com. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘144’ and ‘Pride’

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      An ESPN documentary looks at life inside the W.N.B.A. bubble. And a mini-series about L.G.B.T.Q. rights in America debuts on FX.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, May 10-16. Details and times are subject to change. More

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      Tawny Kitaen, Star of 1980s Music Videos, Dies at 59

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      Ms. Kitaen gained fame for her carefree spirit and sultry dancing in music videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt and her role in the movie “Bachelor Party.”Tawny Kitaen, an actress who gained fame in the 1980s for her roles in rock music videos and who starred with Tom Hanks in the movie “Bachelor Party,” died on Friday at her home in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 59.Ms. Kitaen’s death was confirmed by a daughter, Wynter Finley, who said the cause was not known.Ms. Kitaen became a mainstay on MTV in the 1980s when the network was at its peak cultural influence with music videos playing all day.With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the Whitesnake music video “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”Julie Kitaen was born on Aug. 5, 1961, in San Diego. She studied ballet and gymnastics until she was 15. After appearing in a Jack LaLanne commercial, and in television shows and movies, she gained wider exposure as Mr. Hanks’s fiancée in the 1984 comedy “Bachelor Party.”But it was her appearance in music videos that solidified her image in Generation X’s imagination as a free-spirited beauty having the time of her life.She once described working with Paula Abdul on the set of one video.Ms. Abdul, then a choreographer, asked her what she could do. Ms. Kitaen said she showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” She then left, Ms. Kitaen said.“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”She married the Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale in 1989 and the couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a major-league baseball pitcher. They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.Later, Ms. Kitaen appeared on reality shows and spoke openly about her struggles with addiction to cocaine and painkillers.In a 2010 interview with The Daily Pilot, she described her volunteer work at a shelter for women who had left abusive relationships and said she herself was a survivor of domestic violence. Ms. Kitaen said that after her divorce from Mr. Finley, she became involved with a man who was physically and verbally abusive.“You don’t want to tell anybody because you feel like a complete fool for staying — you protect them,” she said. “You do everything you can so other people don’t find out that he’s abusing you.”Michael Goldberg, Ms. Kitaen’s agent, said in recent years she appeared on various podcasts and radio shows and relished talking about her time as a figure in rock history.“People still love to hear those stories because the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is something we all fantasize about, isn’t it?” he said. “And she lived it. And had so much to say about it.”Ms. Kitaen is survived by her two daughters and a brother and a sister. More

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      ‘Wrath of Man’ Review: ‘H’ Has Some Fury

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      Jason Statham plays H, a movie tough guy you don’t want to mess with, in Guy Ritchie’s action film.The filmmaker Guy Ritchie has long shown an eagerness to take a whack at almost any blockbuster format a given studio is willing to offer him. Witness the noisome “Sherlock Holmes” period pictures he’s made with Robert Downey Jr., or his more recent live-action consideration of Disney’s “Aladdin.” But his most enjoyable movies remain the tough, nasty crime thrillers with which he kicked off his career back in 1999 with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”His new “Wrath of Man” is such an item, although it’s more somber and less rollicking than the likes of “Lock.” It’s also a remake, of the 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur.” Ritchie fares better here with secondhand material than he did with “Aladdin,” not to mention “Swept Away” (2002).Jason Statham plays Hill, a mysterious, taciturn tough guy who takes a job at an armored car company that recently was hit by murderous robbers. His trainer, called Bullet, shortens Hill’s name to “H.” “Like the bomb,” Bullet explains to a co-worker.H proves his mettle by single-handedly putting down a truck hijacking, during which, in an inordinately satisfying moment, he takes out a punk played by the pop musician Post Malone. H’s co-workers hail him as a hero, but other characters wonder who exactly this guy is, and what he’s doing at this job.As Kirk Douglas in “The Fury” and Liam Neeson in “Taken” have shown, there are certain men with whose family one ought not to mess with. Here Statham is one of them. The gravity of H’s true mission accounts for the movie’s tone. Ritchie reveals crucial story points with clever time-juggling editing, and keeps up the tension well into the movie’s climax, which delivers exactly what the viewer will have come to hope for.Wrath of ManRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      The Film That Made ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ Possible

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      Melvin Van Peebles had to go to France to make “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” the tale of a Black soldier on leave that’s full of bold directorial choices.I don’t think anyone who sees the title “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” forgets it. The eye-popping film made Melvin Van Peebles a pioneer of 1970s American cinema and pure independent hustle. But a few years earlier, Van Peebles directed his first trailblazer in France: “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” his feature debut, which was released commercially in 1968 and is opening at Film Forum on Friday in a new restoration. More