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      Mike Faist on Playing Riff in ‘West Side Story’

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      He’s the menacing gang leader who fights, frolics and finger-snaps his way through “West Side Story”: that’s Riff, the frontman of the Jets, who commands a cadre of lost boys in their turf battles against the Sharks, and takes center stage in numbers like “Jet Song” and “Cool.”In Steven Spielberg’s remake with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, the role of Riff is played by Mike Faist, a 29-year-old veteran of the New York stage. Faist earned a Tony Award nomination in Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen,” where he originated the role of the title character’s would-be friend, Connor Murphy; he also performed in “Newsies the Musical,” understudying its hero, Jack Kelly.Despite his theatrical pedigree, Faist said it was not so easy to keep calm and collected for this “West Side Story” — he did not necessarily think he had the required dancing skills and wasn’t sure of the project’s intentions.As he explained in a recent video call, “I was nervous going into it, because of the Hollywood of it all. I thought it was maybe going to be this overproduced thing, and I was just going to be told what to do and where to stand and how to say it.” But, Faist said, Spielberg “allowed me the freedom, quite frankly, to run wild and to be liberated.”Faist is garnering strong reviews for the performance and he is considered to be a contender for the coming awards season. He spoke further about the making of “West Side Story,” learning the choreography for “Cool” and being a leader to his Jets both onscreen and off. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Faist leading the Jets in a scene from the film. He didn’t think he had the dancing skills for the part.20th Century StudiosHow did you find out that Steven Spielberg was planning a remake of “West Side Story”?Tony Kushner came to see us Off Broadway at “Dear Evan Hansen” and mentioned it. At the time I just thought, well, that’s cool. Congratulations. Best of luck with that. That was six years ago. Casting wanted me to submit a tape and then another tape and then come into the room and dance. I didn’t really want to. I do remember asking specifically, “Do I have to dance?” And they said, “This is ‘West Side Story.’”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Hadn’t you danced on Broadway?The only dance show that I’d really done in New York was “Newsies.” For the most part, really, I just pushed around sets. I danced as a kid and I like dancing at weddings, that’s fun. But I wouldn’t say that I speak the language.As you started to audition for the film, could you see yourself as Riff?Originally they asked if I could put a tape together for Tony. I sang “Maria” and I read a scene or two. Months later they called me in and said we’d like you to put together a tape for Riff. I got excited. But you can never invest too much. After reading for the part, there was just this energy and this realization that this shoe fits. And, oh crap. [Laughs.] Now I have to do it.Once you had landed the role, did you talk with Kushner and Spielberg about how they envisioned Riff?We talked about the relationship between Tony and Riff. Tony wants to be a different person, someone better than who he was. And it’s nearly impossible for Riff to let go of who Tony was for him. It’s like going home for Thanksgiving. “This is who I am.” And your family’s like, “No, you’re this.” That’s the simpler version of what I’m trying to say.Were you also considered for the film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen”?I was approached about being part of the film. But the truth is that for me, I just felt like I couldn’t do it. I had already given everything I could to that role and I had already left it at that point. I didn’t feel like I could do it justice. It was something that I really grappled with. I came to the realization that you can’t go home again.Faist initially wasn’t sold on a new “West Side Story”: “I thought it was maybe going to be this overproduced thing, and I was just going to be told what to do.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesOnce you started work on “West Side Story,” where did you begin?Early in the rehearsal process, it was just Ansel [Elgort, who plays Tony] and I and handful of Jets, and we started to work on “Cool.” There wasn’t a script yet, for that first month of rehearsals, so it was mostly for them to get Ansel and me into shape — learning this choreo, then explaining the story and the context of that number.Did you film that sequence on a soundstage?That was a set in Sunset Park in Brooklyn over the East River. One of the Jets, Harrison Coll, who’s in that number, his father had passed away recently. We had been rehearsing that number for four or five months at this point, and when we finally finished, on that last day of shooting, Harrison brought his dad’s ashes and we went to the East River right there. We actually sang “Jet Song” and Harrison said a little something and thanked his dad and then he released his dad’s ashes into the East River. It was something that was transcendent and we really valued the experience.“Jet Song” is one of Riff’s iconic numbers. What did that mean to you, particularly as it’s depicted in this version of the film?Where we start with the Jets, they are on the brink of destruction. They are done but they just don’t realize it yet. They’re saying, “When you’re a Jet, you stay a Jet” — on top of a mound of rubble.Did you feel particularly bonded to the other actors who played your fellow Jets?I felt it was my personal obligation that we become a tribe. After the first day of rehearsal, we all went out to the bar down the street. Sans Baby John [the young gang member, played by Patrick Higgins], because he’s not old enough. [Laughs.] And I said, “Look, this one’s ours. This is our story and this is our version. You guys are a part of that.” I handed out assignments; “Jet-tivities” is what I called them. And no matter what it was, we all had to do it. We did a whole bunch of shenanigans that summer.Are there any you can safely discuss?We went to upstate New York and bought a full arsenal of Nerf guns. There’s video of us setting up this relay race in a house, having to shoot all these red plastic Solo cups from different angles. We did LARPing. It’s brutal, man. It looks like something totally nerdy, but then you’re there and you’re getting tackled by someone and shot in the private areas by arrows. We played laser tag once. I wanted them to feel like they were a part of something bigger. That way, when the cameras rolled, they just were there.Did you have the opportunity to confer with Russ Tamblyn, who played Riff in the original film?He did come to set and hung out for a day. He told us anecdotes, what the experience was like for him. But in terms of approaching the work, I’m not Russ Tamblyn. Only Russ Tamblyn is Russ Tamblyn. I can’t try to emulate or mimic what he does. And I didn’t want to. I think it would have done a disservice to try to incorporate him. It would have been an insult to what he brought.The new film’s release was delayed by a year because of the pandemic. How did you feel when you learned it was being postponed?I actually was relieved. Steven and I had a phone conversation last year, around September, when they were deciding whether they were going to release the film. At the time, I said to him, if no one ever saw this movie, it wouldn’t change anything to me. The experience of making the movie was everything. I meant it, but I’m an idiot and I take it all back now. Because if we’re going to show it, you want people to see it. After I had seen the film at the New York premiere, I ran into Steven in the lobby. And I said to him, I got to relive the experience of making the movie. I think when people see this, we give them a taste of that. I think this movie is a real testament to why a theatrical experience is important. More

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      Richard Marcinko, Founding Commander of SEAL Team 6, Dies at 81

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      The Navy asked Commander Marcinko, a larger-than-life soldier who often flouted rules, to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises.Richard Marcinko, the hard-charging founding commander of Navy SEAL Team 6, the storied and feared unit within an elite commando force that later carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, died Saturday at his home in Fauquier County, Va. He was 81.The cause was believed to be a heart attack, a son, Matthew Marcinko, said.Commander Marcinko climbed the ranks to command Team 6 and wrote a tell-all best seller that cemented the SEALs in pop culture as heroes and bad boys. Though the highly decorated Vietnam veteran led Team 6 for only three years, from 1980 to 1983, he had an outsize influence on the group’s place in military lore.After a failed 1980 mission to rescue 53 American hostages seized in the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran, the Navy asked Commander Marcinko to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises. The name itself was an attempt at Cold War disinformation: Only two SEAL teams existed at the time, but Commander Marcinko called the new unit SEAL Team 6, hoping that Soviet analysts would overestimate the size of the force.He flouted rules and fostered a maverick image for the unit. (Years after leaving the command, he was convicted of military contract fraud.) In his autobiography, “Rogue Warrior,” Commander Marcinko describes drinking together as important to SEAL Team 6’s solidarity; his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats in bars.For years, SEAL Team 6 embraced its rogue persona and was assigned some of the military’s toughest operations. Only Team 6 trains to chase after nuclear weapons that fall into enemy hands. And the team’s role in the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden — the Qaeda leader who 10 years earlier had overseen the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 — spawned a wave of books and movies, elevating the unit to even higher heights of fame.Young officers were sometimes run out of Team 6 for trying to clean up what they saw as a culture of recklessness. Adm. William H. McRaven, who rose to lead the Special Operations Command and oversaw the bin Laden raid, left Team 6 during the Marcinko era after disagreements about leadership.After retiring from the Navy in 1989, Commander Marcinko embarked on a career as a best-selling author, motivational speaker and military consultant, relying heavily on his authenticity as a military veteran. He also appeared on the cover of several of his books, presenting an imposing image of muscular forearms, bearded jaw and piercing eyes staring out at readers.Some SEALs over the years have said that Commander Marcinko invented his own legend. Of his 1992 book, “Rogue Warrior,” written with John Weisman, David Murray wrote in The New York Times that “his story is fascinating” but the method of telling it “is not.” In the book, Commander Marcinko “comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”The book sold millions of copies. Readers apparently wanted more, and Commander Marcinko obliged. His 1995 novel, “Rogue Warrior: Green Team,” also with Mr. Weisman, has “so much action that the reader scarcely has time to breathe,” Newgate Callendar, another Times reviewer, wrote.Richard Marcinko was born on Nov. 21, 1940, to George Marcinko and Emilie Teresa Pavlik Marcinko in his grandmother’s house in Lansford, Pa., a tiny mining town. In his autobiography, he described his mother as “short and Slavic looking” and his father as dark and brooding, with a “nasty temper.”All the men in the family, Commander Marcinko wrote, were miners. “They were born, they worked the mines, they died,” he wrote. “Life was simple and life was hard, and I guess some of them might have wanted to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but most were too poor to buy boots.”He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy in 1958. He was deployed to Vietnam with SEAL Team 2 in 1967, according to the National Navy SEAL Museum, which announced the death on its Facebook page.He received many honors for his service, including four Bronze Stars, a Silver Star and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, according to the museum. After completing two tours in Vietnam, he was promoted to lieutenant commander and then took the reins of SEAL Team 2 from 1974 to 1976, according to the museum.Commander Marcinko is survived by his wife, Nancy; four daughters, Brandy Alexander, Tiffany Alexander, Hailey Marcinko and Kathy-Ann Marcinko; two sons, Matthew and Ritchie Marcinko; and several grandchildren. An earlier marriage to Kathy Black ended in divorce.On Sunday night, Admiral McRaven called Commander Marcinko “one of the more colorful characters” in Naval special warfare history.“While we had some disagreements when I was a young officer, I always respected his boldness, his ingenuity and his unrelenting drive for success,” Admiral McRaven wrote in an email. “I hope he will be remembered for his numerous contributions to the SEAL community.”Dave Philipps More

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      Jean-Marc Vallée, Director of ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ Dies at 58

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      Known for his naturalistic approach, the Canadian-born filmmaker transformed true stories into acclaimed dramas.Jean-Marc Vallée, the award-winning Canadian director of the film “Dallas Buyers Club” and the hit HBO show “Big Little Lies,” was found dead this weekend at his cabin outside Quebec City. He was 58.His publicist, Bumble Ward, said his death had been unexpected. The cause and further details were not immediately available. Mr. Vallée was known for a naturalistic and generous approach to filmmaking that colleagues said brought out the best in those he worked with. He avoided artificial lighting — and even rehearsals. Mr. Vallée also became known for helming several films and TV series with strong female leads.His debut feature film, “Liste noire” (“Black List”), a 1995 thriller that follows the trial of a judge, was nominated for several Genie Awards in Canada, including for best picture. He went on to co-write and direct “C.R.A.Z.Y.,” a coming-of-age film, in 2005. That helped catapult him to Hollywood.In 2009, Mr. Vallée directed “The Young Victoria,” which starred Emily Blunt and explored the early years of Queen Victoria’s rule. The film received several major awards and nominations.He took on the critically acclaimed “Dallas Buyers Club” in 2013, a drama based on the true story of Ron Woodroof, a Texas electrician and rodeo rider. After receiving a diagnosis of H.I.V. in 1985, the Texan fought to get medication (illegal in the United States at the time) for himself and others with the virus.Matthew McConaughey said he dropped 50 pounds ingesting nothing but vegetables, egg whites, fish and tapioca pudding — and “as much wine as I wanted to drink” — to lose weight to play Mr. Woodroof. The film was nominated for six Oscars, winning three, including Best Actor for Mr. McConaughey and Best Supporting Actor for Jared Leto.In a Vanity Fair article adapted from “Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism,” the activist Peter Staley recounted his long battle to make sure homophobia and AIDS denialism did not make it into the film. He said he put Mr. Vallée “through hell and back.” But he said the director “kept the promise he’d once emailed me: that in all his films, he tries to ‘capture humanity and reveal the beauty behind it.’”The following year, Mr. Vallée directed “Wild,” another film based on a true story, which starred Reese Witherspoon as the author Cheryl Strayed during a solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. That film was also nominated for several major awards, including an Oscar nod for Best Actress.“Big Little Lies” won several Emmys and an award from the Directors Guild of America. The cutting tale of violence and class in the wealthy beachside town of Monterey, Calif., starred Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Meryl Streep.Later, he took viewers into the world of small-town Missouri with the series “Sharp Objects,” which starred Amy Adams as a troubled reporter, and was nominated for eight Emmy Awards.“It’s true that my last projects were featuring mainly female characters,” Mr. Vallée said in an interview published by HBO in 2018. “So, am I the lucky guy? Maybe — maybe I am. I’m not afraid of intelligent, strong women. You got to create a space where they’re going to feel respected and comfortable.”“We pushed the envelope in order to capture something that feels real and authentic,” he added. There were no storyboards, shot lists or reflectors used in making “Sharp Objects” because he preferred to allow the actors to express themselves.“I’m reacting to what they’re doing, instead of being active and telling them, this is what I’ll do with the camera,” he said, adding: “I love it. You know, I’m like a kid on a set, a kid playing with a huge toy and having fun.”Mr. Vallée was born on March 9, 1963, in Montreal. He studied filmmaking at the Collège Ahuntsic and the Université du Québec à Montreal. Two sons, Alex Vallée and Emile Vallée; and his siblings Marie-Josée Vallée, Stéphane Tousignant and Gérald Vallée survive him.In a statement, Nathan Ross, Mr. Vallée’s producing partner and close friend, described him as a “true artist” who stood for “creativity, authenticity and trying things differently.”“The maestro will sorely be missed,” he said, adding, “It comforts knowing his beautiful style and impactful work he shared with the world will live on.”Mr. Vallée was set to direct and executive-produce another show for HBO, “Gorilla and the Bird,” a limited series based on a memoir of the same name about a public defender who suffers a psychotic break.In an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Mr. Vallée described his work as attempting to expose the flaws and imperfection in human nature.“I see that I seem to be attracted to these stories and to underdog characters,” Mr. Vallée said. He added: “The humanity, the beautiful humanity, is dark.” More

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      Hollywood Turns Up Star Power in Search of Audiences

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      Boldface names have always mattered at the movies, but a number of recent casts have been full of them. That hasn’t always helped at the box office.LOS ANGELES — On Friday, Netflix began streaming “Don’t Look Up,” a big-budget satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Tyler Perry, Ariana Grande, Jonah Hill, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Timothée Chalamet.It sure seemed like a must-watch event, mixed reviews be darned. Casts so ultra-celestial — embarrassments of celebrity riches — don’t come along every day.Except that now they do.One star playing Spider-Man? How quaint. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” released in theaters on Dec. 17, has three A-listers in Spidey spandex: Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire. “No Way Home,” a runaway hit at the global box office, taking in $1.05 billion for Sony Pictures Entertainment as of Sunday, also stars Zendaya, Jamie Foxx, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Willem Dafoe and Jon Favreau. About 43 percent of opening-weekend viewers in the United States cited the cast as the reason they bought tickets, according to PostTrak surveys. Twenty percent specifically cited Zendaya.Guillermo del Toro’s latest art film, “Nightmare Alley,” stars Bradley Cooper, Ms. Blanchett, Toni Collette, Mr. Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Mary Steenburgen and David Strathairn. (They have 22 Oscar nominations for acting and three wins among them.) Other recent examples of star ensembles include “The French Dispatch,” “Red Notice,” “House of Gucci,” “The Harder They Fall” and the superhero story “Eternals,” which Disney marketed with 11 names above the title. (Angelina Jolie! Kumail Nanjiani! Salma Hayek!)Angelina Jolie was one of the 11 actors whose names were above the title when Disney marketed “Eternals.”Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images For DisneyIn the months ahead, Universal will release “The 355,” a spy thriller anchored by five female stars, including Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz and Jessica Chastain. Disney will roll out a starry “Death on the Nile” remake, and Focus Features is preparing “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” which reassembles the franchise’s ensemble cast. Netflix is working on “The Adam Project,” a science-fiction adventure (Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Catherine Keener), and “The Gray Man,” a thriller starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Ryan Gosling, Billy Bob Thornton and Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame.“Someday, someone will decide to make one movie with two Batmans — oh, wait, it’s happening,” Terry Press, one of Hollywood’s top marketers, said with signature dryness. She was referring to “The Flash,” a superhero movie from Warner Bros. that is scheduled for late next year; Ben Affleck’s Batman will appear alongside Michael Keaton’s Batman.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and television series continues to expand. ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: The web slinger is back with the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series.‘Hawkeye’: Jeremy Renner returns to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in the Disney+ mini-series.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.‘Eternals’: The two-and-a-half-hour epic introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hopping back and forth through time.Taken one film at a time, star amassment is nothing new. “Grand Hotel” (1932), “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963), “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the entire “Ocean’s 11” franchise come to mind, not to mention Marvel’s recent “Avengers” movies.All of a sudden, though, they are everywhere.Why?“Thousands Cheer,” from 1943, is one in a long line of Hollywood films with a host of stars.Warner Bros. Archives“Stars matter — always have, always will — and Hollywood retreats to them, leans harder on them, when it gets nervous about a wandering audience,” said Jeanine Basinger, a film scholar and the author of Hollywood histories like “The Star Machine,” which examines the old studio system. “Stars are insurance — for studio executives who want to keep their jobs, certainly, but also for viewers: ‘Is this movie going to be worth my time and money?’”Describing Hollywood’s customer base as “wandering” is rather kind. AWOL might be more apt.The pandemic seems to have hastened a worrisome decline at the box office for bread-and-butter dramas, musicals and comedies — everything except leviathan fantasy franchises and the occasional horror movie. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” collected $260 million in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend. Total ticket sales for the two countries totaled $283 million, according to Comscore. That means “No Way Home” made up 92 percent of the market. “Nightmare Alley,” which was released on the same weekend, played to virtually empty auditoriums. It took in $2.7 million.The vast majority of opening-weekend ticket buyers for “No Way Home” were under the age of 34, according to Sony.Between Friday and Sunday, the Spider-Men remained the biggest domestic draw, taking in roughly $81.5 million. The animated “Sing 2” (Universal-Illumination) was second, with $23.8 million in ticket sales. Warner Bros. failed to generate much interest in “The Matrix Resurrections,” which took in a feeble $12 million in third place; it was also available on HBO Max.“The King’s Man” (Disney), the third movie in Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy series, collected $6.4 million, a result that one box office analyst described as a franchise “collapse.” (“American Underdog,” a faith-based sports drama from Lionsgate and Kingdom Story Company, managed $6.2 million on Saturday and Sunday alone.)“Spider-Man: No Way Home” collected $260 million in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend.Jordan Strauss/InvisionStreaming services have picked up a big portion of the audience, particularly older people. But competition among the services has grown extreme, with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, Hallmark Movies Now, BritBox and dozens more fighting for subscriber growth. Stars help: Netflix is writing megachecks for A-list actors ($30 million to Mr. DiCaprio for “Don’t Look Up”) and ensemble franchises ($465 million for two “Knives Out” sequels).“Stars matter more than ever,” said Bryan Lourd, the Creative Artists superagent who orchestrated the “Knives Out” deal. “When stars meet material that is their fastball, it cuts through all the noise.”There are other explanations for the barrage. In a severely disrupted marketplace, stars are seeking safety in numbers; no one person can be held responsible for failing to deliver an audience, as with “Nightmare Alley.” Movie marketing has also changed, becoming less about carpet-bombing prime-time TV with ads and more about tapping into social media fan bases. Ms. Grande has 284 million Instagram followers. (Pity Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Holland, with only about 50 million apiece.)Ms. Basinger, who founded Wesleyan University’s film studies department, noted that individual star power has faded. Studios have become fixated on intellectual property — pre-existing franchises and characters. As a result, there has been less of a need to manufacture new stars and keep the older ones burning hot; Iron Man, Dominic Toretto, Wonder Woman and Baby Yoda are the stars now.“In the old days, movie stars were the brands,” she said. “They reached the whole audience. Not a slice of the audience. Everybody. But that all fell apart. Now, it’s about adding up niches.”In other words, few stars remain bankable in and of themselves, requiring Hollywood to stack casts with an almost absurd number of celebrities. Flood the zone.And don’t forget Hollywood’s favorite game: Follow the leader. “The Avengers: Endgame,” which packed its cast with Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Jeremy Renner, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Olsen and a dozen other boldface names, became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time in 2019. On a much different scale, an all-star remake of “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2017 was also a box office winner.“It’s trendy at the moment,” Tim Palen, a producer and former studio marketing chief, said of what he called an “all skate” approach to casting. “Not new but certainly symptomatic of the battle for attention that’s raging.” More

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      Nicole Kidman on Lucille Ball in ‘Being the Ricardos’

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      There are valuable lessons Nicole Kidman has learned each time she plays a real-life figure: How that person was misapprehended by society at the time. How that era of history is more like the present day than she realized. And, crucially, how to maintain her balance while traipsing barefoot through a vat of grapes.Recounting her preparations to play Lucille Ball, the star of “I Love Lucy,” Kidman suggested that her methodical efforts to learn Ball’s enduring 1956 grape-stomping routine were not fully sufficient when it came time to re-enact it on camera.“I had only practiced on a floor,” Kidman said with a gentle earnestness. “The one thing I didn’t count on was that there were going to be real grapes. They’re actually really slippery, just so you know.”In “Being the Ricardos,” a comedy-drama written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Kidman plays Ball in a story spanning a week at “I Love Lucy,” where she and her husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) fight to incorporate Ball’s pregnancy into the series, fend off accusations that Ball is a Communist and arrive at a fateful point in their marriage.The movie, which is in theaters and on Amazon Prime, includes some recreations of famous “I Love Lucy” scenes. But it is ultimately a story of discovery, for the TV star and for the woman playing her.Kidman, 54, is an Academy and Emmy Award-winning actress, and she is once again a contender for year-end accolades for her performance in “Being the Ricardos.” But she tends to second-guess herself and said she had scant confidence in her comedic abilities.Through her approach to “Being the Ricardos,” Kidman has found more connection than she expected to Ball, another actress who was pigeonholed and underestimated in her day. Their life stories and talents may not fully overlap, but they both understood the necessity of humor to fulfilling their individual goals.As Kidman said, “I’ve got to be funny, and funny’s hard.”A scene from “Being the Ricardos” with, from left, Alia Shawkat (as an “I Love Lucy” writer), Kidman and Nina Arianda (as co-star Vivian Vance).Glen Wilson/AmazonOn a visit to New York earlier this month, before the Omicron surge, Kidman was sitting in a downstairs lounge at a boutique Soho hotel, her fingers ornamented with intricate rings as she sipped a ginger shot.Kidman said that “I Love Lucy” reruns were a hazy background element from her childhood, and that she leaned toward shows like “Bewitched’ and “The Brady Bunch.”What to Know About ‘Being the Ricardos’The Aaron Sorkin-directed drama looks at one very bad week in 1953 for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, played by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem.Review: The not-so-funny side of the “I Love Lucy” stars is the focus of Sorkin’s lively, chatty, somewhat odd and insistently depoliticized biopic.Remembering Lucille: How does Nicole Kidman’s Lucy compare to the real Lucille Ball? A writer recalls his first disorienting meeting with the comedian.Best-Picture Race: ​​Our columnist thinks “Being the Ricardos” is among six contenders with the strongest chances to win the Oscar.Failure on Broadway: In 1960, Lucille Ball fulfilled an old dream: a stint on Broadway. It did not go well.She could point to the occasional comic performance on her résumé, in a dark satire like “To Die For” or a family film like “Paddington,” though she had to be reminded that there was some physical clowning in “Moulin Rouge,” too. (“There was, that’s right!”) Even on a somewhat sardonic series like HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” Kidman said, “It’s Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern who are very funny. I just say to them, I’ll be your straight woman.”And she has no illusions that she was the most logical candidate for the role of Ball or even the first actress sought to play her.At its inception several years ago, “Being the Ricardos” was contemplated as a TV mini-series, according to Lucie Arnaz, the actress and daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and an executive producer on the movie.Cate Blanchett was attached, but by the time Sorkin became involved and the project was set up at Amazon as a film, the actress was no longer available. “It just took too long and we lost her,” Arnaz said in an interview. “I was devastated.” (A press representative for Blanchett declined to comment.)As other stars were contemplated, Arnaz said, “None of them made me happy. It was always like, who’s the flavor of the month? Who’s got the hot movie of the minute?”But when Kidman emerged as a possibility, Arnaz said, she was intrigued. “I thought that’s good — we should only be looking at Australian actresses for this,” she joked.Kidman said that Blanchett’s previous involvement did not diminish her interest. In show business, Kidman said, “I feel like there’s a sacred pact among us all — whoever gets something, that’s where it was meant to land.”She was aware of a backlash online from fans who opposed her casting, some of whom wanted the role to go to the “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing. “I’m not on the internet and I definitely don’t Google myself,” Kidman said. “But things trickle through.”(Arnaz said Messing “just wants to be that person so bad,” but added, “We weren’t doing that. We weren’t trying to be that person.” A press representative for Messing declined to comment.)She was not deeply versed in Ball’s life when she was first approached, but Kidman said she could imagine the freedom in portraying that slapstick queen: “The way she moves and falls, every part of her physicality, you go, oh, I can be an absolute doofus playing her.”Kidman said the role of Lucy interested her because “the way she moves and falls, every part of her physicality, you go, oh, I can be an absolute doofus playing her.”Jody Rogac for The New York TimesStill, after signing onto “Being the Ricardos” with some gusto, Kidman said she began to get cold feet. Her reluctance, she said, was partly about the pace of Sorkin’s dialogue-dense screenplay and partly about making the movie during the pandemic.But on a fundamental level, Kidman said that comedies do not come easily to her — not as a genre and not as acting opportunities. “I don’t get cast in them,” she said. That might be the result of a career spent in dramas, or, “it might be my personality, too.”Reflecting on her upbringing in Australia, Kidman said, “I was the kid that was not allowed to go on the beach during the middle of the day, because I was so fair and I was going to burn. So I would sit in a room and I wouldn’t watch TV — I’d read.” A youth spent with Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and Tolstoy “doesn’t necessarily make you a comedian,” she said.If she’s going to take on a role with any comic qualities now, Kidman said, “I need to be pushed and cheer-leaded in that area.”Sorkin was persuasive, Kidman said, and she was buoyed by past experiences landing a funny line in stage plays here and there. “It’s pretty wow when you say something and a whole theater laughs,” she said. “I can understand getting addicted to that.”What the film really required, Kidman said, was for her to play Lucille Ball (as depicted in Sorkin’s script) and not Lucy Ricardo. “Lucy’s a character — that’s not Lucille,” she explained. “Lucille is extraordinary because she was knocked down, got back up and just doggedly kept at things.”The more she reflected on the screenplay and learned about Ball’s life, Kidman said, the more she saw a multifaceted person who gave her many emotions to play.In Ball’s marriage to the philandering, alcoholic Arnaz, Kidman said, “She loved a person who loved her but couldn’t give her want she wanted most.” Pointing to the fizzled film career that eventually led Ball to “I Love Lucy,” she said, “She was really funny but she wanted to be a movie star.”Kidman stopped short of drawing direct parallels between Ball’s life and her own, but Lucie Arnaz wholeheartedly embraced the comparisons.Arnaz said that like her mother, Kidman “had been married before — she understood divorce and trying to raise your children in the spotlight. She understood a husband who had an addiction problem.” (Kidman’s husband, the singer Keith Urban, has been treated in the past for drug and alcohol abuse.)Kidman threw herself into the physical preparations for the role and worked closely with a dialect coach, Thom Jones, to develop the voices she would use for Lucille Ball and Lucy Ricardo.As Jones explained, “Lucy is Lucille extreme. When Lucille played Lucy, she did a broad, exaggerated version of herself and pitched her voice higher.”Lucie Arnaz said her mother and Kidman had some things in common, like being divorced and trying to raise children in the spotlight. Glen Wilson/AmazonBall’s natural speaking voice was deeper and huskier from years of smoking, though Kidman was not necessarily striving for perfect mimicry. “We wanted her to grab at the essence of Lucille and get that across,” Jones said. “If you’re doing an impersonation, you’re going to be too aware of your outside and not be able to fill your inside as an actor.”Kidman ran lines with her mother, a lifelong “Lucy” fan, though it’s not clear how helpful this was to her overall process. “She’d say, ‘You got this word wrong,’ and I’d go, ‘Mom, just let me get to the end of the sentence before you correct me.’ Rule No. 1, don’t learn lines with your mom.”She also studied personal audio recordings that Arnaz shared with her, and worked with a movement coach while learning to duplicate several “I Love Lucy” routines, though only a handful appear in the film.Kidman has already received nominations for several honors, including a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award, for “Being the Ricardos,” but her performance remains an occasional source of insecurity for her.She seemed surprised to be told about an October teaser trailer for the film that only fleetingly showed her face in a span of about 75 seconds, and that prompted some viewers to ask why Amazon appeared to be hiding Kidman.Asked if she was aware of the teaser or the strategy behind it, Kidman said, “I don’t know how to answer that, you know? I don’t handle the promotional part of it. Maybe they were just scared of showing me.”She drew a breath before adding, “Bummer.”Whatever other notices she receives for “Being the Ricardos,” Kidman will always have the experience of standing on a facsimile of the “I Love Lucy” set, performing Ball’s material from the show and hearing the laughter of scores of extras hired to play the show’s studio audience.Kidman offered a single word to describe how she felt in that moment: “Fantastic.” Then, as if to demonstrate some of the skills she’d picked up on the film, she waited a beat and said: “They were made to laugh, by the way.” More

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      Five Joan Didion Movies You Can Stream Right Now

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      The writer, working with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, saw Hollywood as a way to make cash to support her art. It did and didn’t work out.“This place makes everyone a gambler,” Joan Didion sniped of Hollywood, nine years after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne left Manhattan to make their fortunes as a screenwriting team.When the newlywed magazine writers rolled the dice on a career change in 1964, neither had even read a script, let alone written one. Luckily, one tipsy night in Beverly Hills, they spotted a TV actor hurling one at his girlfriend. They stole it, diagramed how its story was pieced together, and resolved that unlike that drunken louse — and unlike the drunks they admired, such as Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been jaded about the dream factory — they would never let Los Angeles make them lose their cool.How hard could Hollywood be? Didion had a steady gig as a film critic for Vogue, where she championed teeny-bopper beach flicks (“All plot is incidental; the point is the surf”) and panned “The Sound of Music” for being a musical, a genre she found insulting. (“Think you can get me with some fat Technicolor chrysanthemums, just think again.”) Meanwhile, Dunne’s clinical interest in the movie industry would soon result in his landmark nonfiction book, “The Studio,” which covered, among other things, how a 20th Century Fox publicist flogged the 1967 “Doctor Dolittle” in an awards race where it earned nine Oscar nominations despite middling reviews.Yet, Didion and Dunne’s get-rich scheme wasn’t as easy to pull off as they had hoped. In 25 years, the couple saw their names credited on the big screen just six times. Didion vowed to protect her heart from Hollywood. She never wagered more optimism than she could afford to lose. But screenwriting was supposed to afford her the freedom to write serious art, not waste her time on endless unpaid draft revisions.Worse still were the movies they didn’t write. Over repetitive lunches of white wine and broiled fish, producers pitched the pair a disco-era remake of “Rebel Without a Cause,” a reworking of Fitzgerald’s tragedy “Tender Is the Night” with a happy ending, a U.F.O. flick for the ’80s blockbuster titans Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and this three-word brainstorm: “World War II.”“What do you want to do with it?” Dunne asked.“You’re the writers,” the producer replied.The irony is that the more the couple mocked Hollywood in essays, the higher their script fees rose. Slamming the businessmen in suits could have made Didion and Dunne personae non grata at the Polo Lounge. Instead, cynicism made them look savvy. Here were two smart people who knew exactly what they’d signed up for. They got it, or as Dunne joked, “I have never been quite clear what Going Hollywood meant exactly, except that as a unique selling proposition, it’s a lot sexier than Going University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”It’s hard to argue that Didion and Dunne’s films are palpably them any more than one can touch an actor onscreen as he coils his tongue around Didion’s diction. (Or at least, the traces of her sharp precision that remain after being massaged into studio submission.) Yet, in honoring Didion’s creative life, it’s worth making time for the work that fills out our image of her as not only an uncompromising prose stylist, but also an ambitious artist who knew exactly when to compromise in service of her greater goals.Here is a look at five films by or about Didion that are available to stream.1972‘Play It as It Lays’Available on YouTubeBefore Didion and Dunne learned to play the Hollywood game, the fledgling screenwriters made the rookie mistake of optioning books that they found interesting — not John Q. Public. With James Mills’ heroin-addled paperback “The Panic in Needle Park,” Didion explained, “It just immediately said movie to me.” The film, with its mediocre box office receipts, served as a launching pad for the star Al Pacino’s career, but didn’t do much for hers. (It’s not available to stream.) At least the paycheck let Didion complete her own hazy, dispassionate novel, “Play It as It Lays,” about an actress untethering herself from a cold and callous Los Angeles by taking drugs, having sex and speeding down the highway in a convertible that functions as a motorized fugue. When the novel was a minor hit, Didion and Dunne turned it into their second film, with Tuesday Weld as the lead and “The Swimmer” director Frank Perry at the helm. Critics liked the film; Didion (and audiences), less so. “Everything was different,” she said, “even though I wrote the screenplay.”1976‘A Star Is Born’Stream it on HBO MaxIt was time to make some real dough. So for their third film, the pair pitched a rock ’n’ roll refresh of “A Star Is Born” featuring Carly Simon and James Taylor. The truth was Didion and Dunne had never seen the previous versions. They just wanted to go with musicians on the road, where their research included talking to groupies about injecting adrenaline and following Led Zeppelin to Cleveland, where they amused themselves by calling a for-a-good-time number scrawled on the dressing-room wall. When Barbra Streisand announced her interest in the project, the couple was finally forced to watch the 1937 original at the recording star’s house while their daughter, Quintana Roo, played with Streisand and Jon Peters’s pet lion cub. Neither writer was passionate enough about the project to stick with it once Streisand seized the reins. Their draft was reworked by 14 subsequent screenwriters before the star was satisfied she had an awards contender. Streisand took home a Golden Globe for the film, making her the third actress in a row to win a prize for a role that Didion originated on the page. (Weld won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for “Play It as It Lays,” while Kitty Winn claimed best actress at Cannes for “Panic.”)1981‘True Confessions’Rent it on major platforms.For 15 years, Didion and Dunne took turns trying to squeeze money out of studios. One would do the first draft of a script; the other would edit and revise. Now it was Dunne’s turn to adapt one of his novels, his best-selling crime noir, “True Confessions,” inspired by the Black Dahlia murder. Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro play siblings: Duvall is a detective; De Niro, a Roman Catholic monsignor whose future in the church depends on how his brother handles the case. While reviewers mostly enjoyed the thriller, some found the plot vague and confusing. The mixed response echoed the feedback on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” before it was later deemed a classic, which might have made Didion smile. After all, not only did she buy her wedding dress at Ransohoff’s, the same shop where Jimmy Stewart made over Kim Novak, she and Dunne even got married at Mission San Juan Bautista under the bell tower where Novak leapt to her death.1996‘Up Close and Personal’Rent it on major platforms.There was only one reason Didion and Dunne signed on to adapt a biography of the NBC News anchor Jessica Savitch, who died in a car accident in 1983 shortly after broadcasting a segment in which she appeared intoxicated: They needed the Writers Guild health insurance. The trade-off might not have been worth it given the stress of writing 27 drafts until Disney, the financier of the film, was satisfied that all traces of Savitch’s drug use, divorces, abortions and suicide attempts had been scrubbed out of what was now a wholly fictional Michelle Pfeiffer workplace romance about a successful journalist who survives through the end credits. “Up Close and Personal” took eight years to complete, and the best thing about it is the brutal memoir Dunne wrote about the ordeal, titled “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.” Savitch never got her biopic, but a documentary about her struggle to be taken seriously in a mostly male workplace — a struggle Didion understood as studio executives’ assistants would frequently refuse to patch through phone calls from their boss without Dunne on the line — did inspire Will Ferrell to make his own film about chauvinism in local news, “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”2017‘Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold’Stream it on Netflix.Even though Didion and Dunne escaped Hollywood to move back to New York, the movie business remained the family business. Her brother-in-law Dominick, a film and TV producer, raised a family of actors, including the“Poltergeist” star Dominique Dunne and the actor-director Griffin Dunne, who in 2017 convinced his famous aunt to let him film an interview with her for a documentary about her life. Their familiarity allows them both to speak candidly. Dunne thanks Didion for not laughing when his testicles fell out of his swimsuit as a boy; Didion confesses to him that stumbling across a 5-year-old girl on LSD, an encounter that led to one of the darkest scenes in her book “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” gave her a thrill. Didion admits: “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” The moment isn’t comforting, but it’s honest — a truly Didion-esque revelation finally immortalized on film. More

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      Dave Draper, Bodybuilding’s ‘Blond Bomber,’ Dies at 79

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      After being named Mr. America, Mr. Universe and Mr. World, he left competitive bodybuilding in 1970. But he kept lifting weights until a year before he died.Dave Draper, a popular bodybuilder of the 1960s who won three major titles before dropping out of competition at age 28, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Aptos, Calif., near Santa Cruz. He was 79.The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Laree Draper, said.Mr. Draper — who stood six feet tall, had a 54-inch chest and competed at 235 pounds — emerged as a force in bodybuilding in 1962 with his victory at the Mr. New Jersey competition. He soon moved to Southern California, where he continued to sculpt his body at the Dungeon, a gym on the fabled Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, and at Gold’s Gym, in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles.He loved lifting weights for its physical and spiritual benefits. But he disliked the preening and posing required of bodybuilders at competitions and exhibitions.“For a reasonable season of my life, it seemed like the thing to do,” Mr. Draper said in an interview in 2009 with T-Nation, a strength training and bodybuilding website. “But competition stood between me and the relief of hoisting the iron — the private exertion, the pure delight and the daily fulfillment of building muscle and strength.”Despite that ambivalence, Mr. Draper, who became known as the Blond Bomber, was a star on the bodybuilding scene of the 1960s. He was named Mr. America in 1965, and Mr. Universe in 1966 — before Arnold Schwarzenegger had arrived from Austria — and won the Mr. World title in 1970.“Dave trained harder than anybody else and always wore jeans to the gym,” Frank Zane, a three-time Mr. Olympia, said in a phone interview. “He loved to train, and he was very strong. He just didn’t like competing.”Mr. Draper’s spectacular physique found an occasional home in Hollywood. He had roles in sitcoms like “The Beverly Hillbillies” (as Dave Universe, a date for Elly May Clampett) and “The Monkees” (as a character named Bulk). He was also in a few films, including “Don’t Make Waves” (1967), in which he played Sharon Tate’s boyfriend.“In Austria, I kept his cover of Muscle Builder magazine on the wall above my bed for motivation,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said in a statement after Mr. Draper’s death, “and when I saw him starring in ‘Don’t Make Waves,’ I thought, ‘My dreams are possible.’”Mr. Draper, who was also a skilled woodworker, became one of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s training partners and built some furniture for his home in Santa Monica. “I learned his heart was as big as his pecs,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said.Even as he was competing, Mr. Draper was abusing alcohol, marijuana and angel dust. (He said he also used steroids, sparingly, under a doctor’s supervision.) He continued to have problems, chiefly with alcohol, until 1983, when he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.Ms. Draper — who met her future husband at a gym in Capitola, Calif., near Santa Cruz — attributed his alcohol and drug use to the tensions brought on by competing and dealing with the demands of Hollywood.“He got caught up in it, and I guess he couldn’t handle it,” she said in an interview.Mr. Draper “loved to train, and he was very strong,” a fellow bodybuilder said. “He just didn’t like competing.”via Laree DraperDavid Paul Draper was born on April 16, 1942, in Secaucus, N.J. His father, Dan, was a salesman; his mother, Anne (Simsek) Draper, was a homemaker.Dave, who did not excel at team sports, got his first set of weights at age 10. By 12 he was fervently working out with barbells and dumbbells.“They were my solid steel friends that I could trust,” he said in his book “A Glimpse in the Rear View” (2020), a compilation of columns from his website. “When the going got tough, when I kept missing the baseball, and when girls were far too cute to talk to, the weights were there and they spoke my language.”He bought his gear at Weider Barbell in Union City, N.J. — part of Joe Weider’s empire of muscle magazines, fitness equipment, supplements and competitions — and at 19 became the weekend manager of a gym in Jersey City. He also got a part-time job in the Weider Barbell warehouse, where he worked out with the other shipping clerks. Mr. Weider, who was known as the Master Blaster, gave Mr. Draper his Blond Bomber nickname.“He had the fire in the belly, don’t kid yourself,” Mr. Weider told GQ magazine for a profile of Mr. Draper in 2000. “He wouldn’t have gotten the kind of body he did without hard work.”After winning Mr. New Jersey, Mr. Draper moved to Santa Monica, where he continued to work for Mr. Weider. As Mr. Draper’s profile in bodybuilding rose, he appeared on the covers of magazines published by Mr. Weider, like Muscle Builder and Mr. America, and in ads for his equipment.Reflecting on his victory in the Mr. America event, held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Mr. Draper wrote that he took pride in being a “muscle-building original.”“I invented, improvised and rooted about, along with a small, disconnected band of rebels with a cause: to build solid muscle and might through the austere, hard labor of love — the lifting of iron,” he wrote in a column included in “A Glimpse in the Rear View.”Mr. Draper with Tony Curtis in the 1967 movie “Don’t Make Waves.” “When I saw him starring in ‘Don’t Make Waves,’” Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “I thought, ‘My dreams are possible.’”via Laree DraperIn 1972 Mr. Draper sued Mr. Weider for not paying him for his endorsement of Mr. Weider’s gym and bodybuilding products. He settled for $17,500 before the jury was to deliver a verdict.Mr. Draper did not stop lifting weights until a year before he died.Once sober, he was hired as a special programmer at a gym in Santa Cruz. He married Laree Setterlund in 1988 and opened two World Gyms with her in the 1990s, which they owned and ran into the 2000s.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Dana Harrison and Carla Scott; his brothers, Don and Jerry; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. His daughter, Jamie Johnson, died in 2016. His marriage to Penny Koenemund ended in divorce.In one column, Mr. Draper contemplated what his life would have been like without weight lifting. The thought, he said, was unbearable.“No sets? No reps? No cunning determination of how to bombard the delts or blast the biceps?” he wrote. “Days on end without pursuing extreme pain through maximum muscle exertion?” He added: “Full body, full strength, full breath and fulfillment are lost, gone, no more: nary a remnant to remind, disappoint or shame. Shoot me!” More

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      What Is ‘West Side Story’ Without Jerome Robbins? Chatty.

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      Justin Peck takes over choreographic duties in the Steven Spielberg adaptation of the 1957 musical in which words, not bodies, rule the screen.It’s been days since I watched the Steven Spielberg reboot of “West Side Story,” and I still can’t get a scene out of my head: The fateful meeting of Tony and Maria at the gym.In the 1961 film, the pair lock eyes and move closer and closer as bodies spin around them, and the background, a rich red, envelops them. When they stop, they’re face to face swaying softly. Suddenly, their arms lift to either side and they begin to dance. In the new movie, they spot each other in the gym and meet behind the bleachers. Tony (Ansel Elgort), staring hard at Maria (Rachel Zegler), casually drapes an arm on the metal structure. But before he can speak, Maria stretches her arms out and gives a little snap.This dance — Justin Peck’s reframing of the original choreography by Jerome Robbins — may not be as luminous, but it is a surprise: a slice of unexpected loveliness that speaks to the subtle power of movement. Tony raises an eyebrow, but joins Maria fluidly without questioning the strangeness of it all.“You don’t like dancing?” Maria (Rachel Zegler, center) asks Tony (Ansel Elgort, left). “I like it,” he says. “I like it a lot.”20th Century StudiosHere, in a rare instance, they communicate without words. Yet throughout this film, when there is a right turn, a wrong one tends to follow. More than movement, words are the dominant language of this “West Side Story.” So, brace yourself. Something’s coming — a conversation.“I wasn’t planning on showing up tonight,” Tony says.“You don’t like dancing?” Maria asks.“No, I mean, yeah,” he says. “I like it. I like it a lot. Dancing with you. It’s just you’re— —”Maria interrupts his thought with an observation. Staring up at him wistfully, she says, “You’re tall.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}You’re tall? It’s as if “Riverdale” met “The Bachelor” — or “The Bachelorette” — and you know there’s plenty more drama to come. “West Side Story,” an updated “Romeo and Juliet,” used to be a musical told through movement. Now it is a musical, full of back stories, told through words. So many, many words.For this “West Side Story,” the screenplay, originally by the playwright Arthur Laurents, is by Tony Kushner. Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are still here to guide the Sharks and the Jets along as they war it out in the streets of New York City. And then there are Peck’s dances, which have their own life, yet can come off as breezy excursions from the story — and sometimes as reminiscent of numbers from “In the Heights” or “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — instead of being authoritatively knitted into the whole.The dance at the gym.20th Century StudiosWith so much emphasis on dialogue and character development, the tension — the very glue of “West Side Story” — seeps away. Tony, we learn, is on parole for almost killing a kid. Who cares? He talks about how he first saw the Cloisters, where he takes Maria on a date, while being carted off to prison. It’s hard to imagine how that could have happened, yet again, who cares? It’s like watching dancers with lead in their shoes.It’s not as if back stories weren’t important to Robbins, who conceived, directed and choreographed the stage musical. (He choreographed the 1961 film and directed it, with Robert Wise.) He wanted his actors and dancers to flesh out their characters’ pasts in order to give them greater dimension. But in the new version, there’s another war raging as action and sensation battle a continual need for context.In a 1985 symposium with the four collaborators — Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein and Sondheim — the subject of Cheryl Crawford came up. She was a producer who ultimately dropped out of the original stage production because, Sondheim said, “She wanted us to explain more why these kids were the way they were, and the more we tried to explain to her that this was not a sociological treatise,” but rather “a poetic interpretation of a social situation, the less she understood what we were saying.”She wanted, he said, for “West Side Story” to be more realistically grounded. “If we had gone that way,” Sondheim added, “we would’ve killed the piece.”The new movie hasn’t killed “West Side Story,” but it has muted it considerably — and packed it full of starts and stops. Now when the dances come, they’re less a part of the show’s fabric than an escape.At least they’re there. But how could they not be? Robbins has always been an influence on Peck, the resident choreographer and artistic adviser of New York City Ballet, where, as a dancer, he performed Robbins’s works — including the role of Bernardo in “West Side Story Suite.” In an interview Peck said the experience of working on the film made him realize “how much dance is built into the DNA and the structure of this musical.”Peck, photographed in New York, said working on the film he realized “how much dance is built into the DNA and the structure of this musical.”Lia Clay Miller for The New York Times“You can’t really derail that,” he added. “It’s like dance has to be a part of it. And I think that really speaks to his belief in it and his innovation with it.”But in Spielberg’s film the choreography doesn’t drive the action with the same force. So where does the dancing fit in? Certainly, there are moments of beauty and energy in Peck’s contributions, yet often the impetus behind the dances seem to be more about camerawork than choreography. It’s out of his control.One of the biggest changes is confusing. It was critical to Robbins that the Jets had a different dance language than the Sharks. He even enlisted the choreographer Peter Gennaro — he was credited as co-choreographer — to help create the Latin numbers. In the new film, it’s hard to put a finger on just how the Sharks move differently than the Jets. Peck brought on Patricia Delgado, his wife and a former principal at Miami City Ballet, and Craig Salstein, a former soloist at American Ballet Theater, as associate choreographers. Delgado helped with the Latin influence, but as the groups dance together, what’s clear is that they are dancing together — it’s one language, not two.Peck said he was more interested in creating a cohesive company of dancers, to build camaraderie among them. And if you know Peck’s work that makes sense. The group aesthetic of “West Side Story” reflects the dance communities that Peck builds onstage, too, at City Ballet and beyond. (Peck is an in-demand choreographer who makes works for many ballet companies and won a Tony for “Carousel.”) This is “West Side Story” as seen through the eyes of a choreographer who started out making dances on his friends.They want to be in America: Ariana DeBose, center, as Anita.Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosThat brings a different kind of velocity to “West Side Story.” Sometimes the dancing is so joyful, so light, that the performers seem to forget who they are. As the brooding Bernardo, David Alvarez is spectacular. Yet when he is dancing, should his expression be so full of bliss? He is the leader of a gang — and, sigh, here reimagined as a boxer.Watching the back stories unfold — and, later, trying to keep track of them — made me think of the way this movie could really have leaned into dance. What if the dream ballet, part of the original musical, had been included? In it, Tony and Maria sing “Somewhere” in her bedroom until the walls open up and the room disappears; now members of both gangs unite, dancing together in harmony “in a world,” as the script reads, “of space and air and sun.”The dream ballet probably never stood a chance. To most, the language of dance can be trusted only to a point. But what if it had been included — and updated? Now that would have been a thrill, a progressive act.That sense of harmony echoes how many of Peck’s dances look on the stage. When they work — the two I love are “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes” and “The Times Are Racing” — they rise beyond steps and structure to land in a place of feeling, sweep and scope. That is what you think of when you think of the poetic, elusive “Somewhere.”But there’s another scene that follows in the stage musical, which is even more rarely performed: The dream turns into a nightmare. Riff and Bernardo appear, their deaths are re-enacted and Maria and Tony are separated amid chaos and violence. They end up back in the bedroom, where they sing together: “Hold my hand and we’re halfway there. Some day, Somehow, Somewhere!” I would have voted for the dream ballet — all the way to the nightmare. It had so much more to say. Maria and Tony, after all, are desperate. They’re holding onto air, and that calls for a dance. More