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    ‘Hypnotic’ Review: The Doctor Is Dangerous

    In Netflix’s new thriller, a depressed woman gets more than she bargained for when she starts seeing a charismatic hypnotherapist.In “Hypnotic,” Jenn (Kate Siegel) is a software engineer who has been dealing with depression and loss. She tells her new hypnotherapist, Dr. Meade (Jason O’Mara), that she’d like to “pass” on his specialized form of treatment. Still, he cajoles her into a session, and when she comes back from her hypnosis, he seems eerily pleased.“I think you might be more open to suggestibility than you imagine,” he tells her.Though this happens within the first 20 minutes of the film, directed by Suzanne Coote and Matt Angel and written by Richard D’Ovidio, it is hardly the first red flag against Dr. Meade. He has already courted Jenn at a house party for one of his other clients, allowed someone else to schedule Jenn’s first appointment for her without her consent, and set his therapy sessions in an office that makes the Death Star look like Disneyland. We get it: This guy is bad news, and Jenn is in trouble.While the resulting cat-and-mouse dynamic is predictable, particularly if you’ve ever watched a Lifetime movie, “Hypnotic” takes its cartoonishness to admirable heights. Not only is Dr. Meade an unethical therapist, he is basically a supervillain, his nefarious practices blurring the line between hypnosis and outright mind control. Drop a lovable lead into that mix, and — as long as you don’t take anything too seriously — you’ve got a nice little popcorn flick.And Jenn is certainly lovable. She is self-destructive but self-aware — she wants to sleep more, drink less, be happy. When she first sees Dr. Meade’s hostile office space, she jokingly calls it “cozy.” Siegel, who viewers might know from other Netflix chillers like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Hush,” is notably more winsome here than in past roles. Her accessibility keeps the story from nose-diving into self-seriousness, a necessity in a film that tries to explain its villain’s own impossible powers by name-dropping the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-Ultra experiments.As Dr. Meade terrorizes Jenn and her allies, including her former fiancé (Jaime M. Callica), her best friend (Lucie Guest) and a shrewd detective (Dulé Hill), “Hypnotic” tiptoes on the line between enjoyable and ridiculous. It’s akin to — but definitely nimbler than — “Sightless,” another disempowered-woman thriller that was on Netflix earlier this year.The twists in “Hypnotic” may not be brilliant, but they are abundant, making for the sort of straight-to-streaming treat best enjoyed on a couch, with company who will laugh with you and let you yell at the screen.HypnoticNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Criminal Charges Possible in Shooting on Alec Baldwin Set, D.A. Says

    An inquiry into how a cinematographer was killed with a gun the actor was rehearsing with, which was not supposed to have live rounds in it, could take weeks.SANTA FE, N.M. — The Santa Fe County district attorney said on Tuesday that she was not ruling out criminal charges in last week’s fatal shooting on a film set. The actor Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with a gun that he had been told did not contain live ammunition when it went off, killing the film’s cinematographer and wounding its director.“We haven’t ruled out anything,” the district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said in a telephone interview. “Everything at this point, including criminal charges, is on the table.”Ms. Carmack-Altwies said that the investigation was focusing on ballistics in an effort to determine what kind of round was in the gun that killed Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer — and who had placed the ammunition in the gun.“There were an enormous amount of bullets on this set, and we need to find out what kinds they were,” Ms. Carmack-Altwies said. Detectives said that they recovered three revolvers, spent casings and ammunition — in boxes, loose and in a fanny pack — while executing a search warrant on the set, according to an inventory of the items released on Monday. The inventory did not specify what kind of ammunition was found on the set.Ms. Carmack-Altwies took issue with descriptions of the firearm used in the incident as “prop-gun,” saying that the terminology, which is used in some of the court documents related to the case, could give the misleading impression that it was not a real gun.“It was a legit gun,” she said, without naming specifically what kind of firearm was used. “It was an antique-era appropriate gun.”Detectives from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office are proceeding carefully with the investigation, she said, citing the large number of witnesses and the need to methodically collect ballistics and forensics evidence..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-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.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;}The shooting occurred on Thursday on the set of a church where Mr. Baldwin was rehearsing a scene for “Rust,” a Western where he plays an outlaw. According to affidavits included in applications for search warrants, Dave Halls, an assistant director on the set, had gone outside the church and taken the gun off a cart, where it had been placed by the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. Mr. Halls handed the gun to Mr. Baldwin, who was rehearsing inside the church, according to the affidavit, and said it was a “cold gun,” indicating that it contained no live rounds and was safe for Mr. Baldwin to handle.Mr. Baldwin then rehearsed a scene that involved “cross drawing” a revolver and pointing it toward the camera lens, according to the affidavit, when the gun fired — striking Ms. Hutchins in the chest and killing her, and hitting the director of the film, Joel Souza, in the shoulder, wounding him.Detectives are still interviewing people who were on the set, Ms. Carmack-Altwies said. “It’s probably weeks, if not months, of follow-up investigation that we’re going to need to get to the point of charging.”Ms. Carmack-Altwies said that she was aware of news reports suggesting that crew members had used guns with live ammunition for target practice hours before the fatal shooting, but said that the reports were “unconfirmed.”Mamie Mitchell, the script supervisor who called 911 after the shooting, has hired Gloria Allred as her lawyer, according to a statement from Ms. Allred. The statement said they would be conducting their own investigation into the incident “because there are many unanswered questions.”Ms. Carmack-Altwies, who is expected to speak with reporters on Wednesday morning at a news conference along with Sheriff Adan Mendoza, of Santa Fe County, said that this incident figured among the most challenging cases in Santa Fe County in recent memory.“We have complex cases all the time,” she said. “But this kind of complex case, with these kinds of prominent people, no.” More

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    Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Up, Dies at 94

    A self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy, he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social issues.Mort Sahl, who confronted Eisenhower-era cultural complacency with acid stage monologues, delivering biting social commentary in the guise of a stand-up comedian and thus changing the nature of both stand-up comedy and social commentary, died on Tuesday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., near San Francisco. He was 94.The death was confirmed by Lucy Mercer, a friend helping to oversee his affairs.Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”“The Future Lies Ahead,” released in 1958, was Mr. Sahl’s first official album, although he had previously recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record.”J.P. Roth CollectionBut more than anything else, it was politicians who were the fuel for his anger. For that reason he was often compared to Will Rogers, whose death in 1935 had left the field of political humor essentially barren, though Mr. Sahl had none of Rogers’s homeyness and detested the comparison.“I never met a man I didn’t like until I met Will Rogers,” he once said, turning the famous Rogers line against him, despite never having met him. He described Rogers as a man who pretended to be “a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government,” whereas Mr. Sahl himself pretended to be “an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.”In December 1953, when Mr. Sahl first took the stage at the hungry i — the hip nightclub in San Francisco that he helped make hip, where he would routinely be introduced as “the next president of the United States” — American comedy was largely defined by an unadventurous joke-book mentality. Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Henny Youngman may have been indisputably funny, but the rimshot gag was the prevailing form, the punch line was king, and mother-in-law insults were legion. It was humor for a self-satisfied postwar society.“Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny,” his book-length 2003 study of comedy in the 1950s and ’60s. “When he arrived, the revolution had not yet begun. Sahl was the revolution.”Blazing a TrailMr. Sahl was a shock to the comedy system. Other groundbreaking comedians — Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among them — would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for challenge rather than palliation. And for social commentators who took to the airwaves in the half-century after he began to speak his mind — from Dick Cavett to Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart — Mr. Sahl was their flag bearer as well.(If a younger generation of comedians considered Mr. Sahl an inspiration, he did not return their love. He said in a 2010 interview that he found their comedy “kind of soft” and urged them to “take more chances.”)“He just doesn’t bring to mind any other performer in the history of show business,” Mr. Cavett said after watching Mr. Sahl perform in 2004.In 1973 Mr. Sahl, left, visited the New York radio talk-show host Don Imus, one of many people who considered him an influence, to promote his album “Sing a Song of Watergate.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFor one thing, he looked different from other comics of the time, eschewing the expected jacket and tie in favor of a more collegiate, informal look in an open-necked shirt and a V-neck sweater. And he peppered his routines with the language of youth and jazz — he was bugged, he dug this or that, he dated a lot of chicks. He took the stage carrying a rolled-up newspaper, a prop that was also a prompt; in Mr. Sahl’s performances, he talked about, anguished over and ranted at the news, spinning it with sardonic digressions, cryptic asides and blistering zingers.“I’m for capital punishment,” he declared. “You’ve got to execute people — how else are they going to learn?”In a vitriolic riff on the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States — Mr. Sahl was virulently anti-Soviet — he spoke of an encounter between Mr. Khrushchev and Adlai Stevenson: “Khrushchev said to Stevenson, ‘If you want to be president, I want to tell you how to seize power,’ and Stevenson admonished him and said to him, ‘You know, that’s not the way we do things in this country,’ but several members of the Democratic advisory council who were present admonished Stevenson to keep quiet and listen to this man!”Over the years he directed a venomous wit against Democrats and Republicans alike, famously supporting Kennedy in his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon and then lampooning him after his election: In choosing Kennedy, he said, the country was “searching for a son figure.”His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.“Are there any groups I haven’t offended?” he was wont to ask from the stage. If nothing else he was a pure iconoclast.“If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you,” he once said. “That’s my job.”The Barbs BeginMorton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11, 1927. His father, Harry, ran a tobacco shop, though he had grown up in New York as an aspiring playwright, and by the time Mort was 7, Harry Sahl had moved the family to Los Angeles and found work as a clerk for the Department of Justice. At 15, Mort joined the R.O.T.C. and left high school, lying about his age to join the Army; after two weeks, his mother, Dorothy, got him out.After high school, he enlisted again and served in the Army Air Forces in Alaska, where his anti-authoritarian impulse first flowered. He edited a base newspaper called Poop From the Group, which needled military structure and routine and which earned him, he said, 83 straight days of mess-hall duty.Following his discharge, he attended Compton Junior College and the University of Southern California, earning a degree in city management, and then followed a young woman — Sue Babior, whom he would eventually marry — to Berkeley. Prompted by Ms. Babior, he approached the owner of the hungry i, Enrico Banducci, for a performing gig, though it was mostly a music club. He got a tryout.“I didn’t tell anyone, but I didn’t think he was so great,” Mr. Banducci recalled in “Seriously Funny.” He added: “I really looked at him and said, ‘Poor kid, he looks so skinny.’ I thought for 75 bucks a week he can’t hurt the place.”Mr. Sahl’s early performances stayed away from politics. But within weeks he was commenting on the national scene, and that’s when his audience began to build.He twitted Dwight D. Eisenhower for his dullness. Senator Joseph McCarthy became a favorite target: “Joe McCarthy doesn’t question what you say so much as your right to say it.” Lines from his act began appearing in newspaper columns, and when Herb Caen, the powerful San Francisco Chronicle columnist, gave Mr. Sahl’s act his imprimatur, his popularity took off.He made record albums. He played college concerts. He appeared on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar.Mr. Sahl in costume for a sketch in the 1962 television special “The Good Years.”United Press InternationalIt was after Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 election that Mr. Sahl’s career first veered off track. He wrote barbed political one-liners for Kennedy the candidate, but when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family’s money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably cool.On the occasion of Kennedy’s presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Mr. Sahl remarked slyly to a crowd estimated at 100,000 that Nixon had sent a congratulatory telegram to Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s father: “You haven’t lost a son, you’ve gained a country.”Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame — he bickered with producers and missed a number of engagements, and he was fired from a starring role in a 1964 Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” — gigs were fewer and farther between in the 1960s. In 1966, his attempt to open his own nightclub in Los Angeles failed when, he said, backers vanished after press previews.“My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,” he said from the stage at one preview. “The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.”Sahl the ‘Disturber’Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”Mr. Sahl in performance at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley, Calif., in 2014. He continued to perform there regularly until last year.Josh Edelson/ReutersMr. Sahl was married and divorced four times, first to Ms. Babior; then to China Lee, the first Asian American model to be a Playboy centerfold, from whom he was divorced for the second time in 1991; and finally to Kenslea Motter, from whom he was divorced in 2009. Mr. Sahl and his second wife had a son, Mort Jr., who died in 1996 of a drug overdose. No immediate family members survive.Though he never reclaimed his central place in the entertainment firmament, Mr. Sahl was somewhat resurgent in the 1970s, partly because Watergate had reinvigorated the public appetite for derision aimed at politicians. He recorded an album, “Sing a Song of Watergate”; was booked by television hosts like Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost; and continued to do college concerts.“I’m not 18 anymore,” he lamented in “Heartland,” “but I’m the angriest man on any campus I visit.”Indeed, Mr. Sahl never lost his fervor for pointing out life’s ironies and the hypocrisies of public figures. In 1987, in the wake of Jackie Mason’s successful one-man show, “The World According to Me!” he reappeared on Broadway in one of his own, “Mort Sahl on Broadway,” and he continued to perform in clubs long after that.In recent years, feisty as ever despite deteriorating health, he had been performing one night a week in Mill Valley, where he had moved after four decades in Beverly Hills. His performances, at the Throckmorton Theater, were also streamed online and continued until the onset of the pandemic.Mr. Sahl with his fellow comedian Robin Williams backstage at the Throckmorton Theater in an undated photo.Reuters“I work as a disturber,” Mr. Sahl said in a Times interview after a 2004 performance, a reminder of lines from other decades and how little he had changed.Even at the height of his fame, in 1960, he was sardonic, bitterly ironic, unsparing.“I’m the intellectual voice of the era,” he said to Time magazine, “which is a good measure of the era.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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    5 Movies to Watch for Halloween

    5 Movies to Watch for HalloweenErik PiepenburgIn Manhattan, watching with the lights out 👻 [embedded content]Cult: ‘Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker’Starring ’70s teen hearthrob Jimmy McNichol, this movie is one of the few classic slasher films to feature a positive portrayal of a gay character. But it’s Susan Tyrrell who turns it into a camp showpiece.Find where to stream it. More

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    Netflix Eyes New Jersey Army Base for Major Production Hub

    The streaming service said it would bid for a nearly 300-acre chunk of Fort Monmouth and it has the support of Gov. Phil Murphy.Netflix wants to turn a crumbling Army base in New Jersey into one of the largest movie and television production hubs in the Northeast, a plan that has at least one important proponent: Gov. Phil Murphy.On Tuesday, Netflix said it would bid for a 289-acre chunk of Fort Monmouth, about 50 miles south of New York City in the boroughs of Oceanport and Eatontown. The 96-year-old base — used by the United States to develop radar technology and where a civilian engineer, Julius Rosenberg, infamously began his espionage career — was closed by the Pentagon in 2011 as the military cut spending.Bids for the site are due Jan. 12, and Netflix would not discuss the price it planned to offer. The Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority has appraised the site at $54 million, but several developers previously offered more than $100 million for just 89 acres of the land in consideration. (Those plans fell through.) Netflix said in a statement that it would transform Fort Monmouth into a “state-of-the-art production facility,” indicating a mix of soundstages, postproduction buildings and backlot filming areas.“Governor Murphy and the state’s legislative leaders have created a business environment that’s welcomed film and television production back to the state, and we’re excited to submit our bid,” Netflix’s statement said.At nearly 300 acres, the Jersey Shore site would be Netflix’s second-largest production complex behind ABQ Studios in New Mexico. Netflix bought that complex in 2018 and committed to spend $1 billion in the state, announcing plans in 2020 to expand and invest an additional $1 billion. ABQ Studios will have more than 15 soundstages when complete.Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey is offering tax credits for production and studio construction.Al Drago for The New York TimesSpeculation about Netflix’s interest in Fort Monmouth has swirled since July, when The Two River Times reported that Netflix had been in contact with Mr. Murphy’s office about building opportunities.New Jersey officials began playing up their state as economically and politically friendly to Netflix in 2019, when a delegation from Mr. Murphy’s administration visited various Hollywood companies in Los Angeles. In April, Mr. Murphy took a swipe at Georgia, which had just passed a law restricting voter access, leading activists, stars and others to demand that companies like Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. boycott the state. In a letter to all of the major studios, Mr. Murphy highlighted his incentives for the film and television industry — tax credits on up to 30 percent of eligible production costs, on par with Georgia, and “a subsidy for brick and mortar studio development of up to 40 percent.”“I am incredibly excited to hear about Netflix’s proposed investment,” Mr. Murphy said in a statement on Tuesday. “While there is an objective process that any and all applications will have to go through, this is yet more evidence that the economic plan my administration has laid out is working and bringing high-quality, good-paying jobs to our state.”New Jersey has a long relationship with Hollywood. Thomas Edison started what is considered to be the nation’s first film studio in West Orange in 1893. The state’s political winds, however, have not always been favorable to the entertainment industry.Throughout the 2010s, former governor Chris Christie was so disgusted with MTV’s “Jersey Shore” and its depiction of Jersey residents as binge-drinking blowhards that he made sure the state maintained a hard line on providing tax credits to film and television productions. In 2009, when HBO went to find production space for “Boardwalk Empire,” set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, the network chose to shoot the series in New York, which has long offered tax breaks. “Only New Jersey’s high taxes can make building a replica boardwalk in Brooklyn cheaper than filming on the real Boardwalk in Atlantic City,” a New Jersey state senator railed.In recent years, production in the state has started ramping back up, in part to meet the content needs of fast-growing streaming services. Netflix alone has filmed more than 30 projects in New Jersey since 2018, including “Army of the Dead,” Zack Snyder’s zombies-in-Vegas extravaganza. Coming up, Apple TV+ will shoot “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” a movie starring Russell Crowe, Zac Efron and Bill Murray. The CBS drama “The Equalizer” has been among the other shows to tape episodes in the state.The CBS drama “The Equalizer,” starring Queen Latifah, is one of many projects to film in New Jersey recently.Barbara Nitke/CBS Entertainment, via Associated PressA Netflix spokesman said the company would continue to shoot in states like New York, Georgia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and North Carolina even if the Fort Monmouth plans come to fruition. Last month, the streaming service opened a new 170,000-square foot studio converted from a former steel factory in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The new studio includes six soundstages and office space.On a recent afternoon outside the Bushwick studio, there were half a dozen crew and craft service trucks, as well as a number of crew members milling in and out of the building. Signage around the studio indicated that two series were already in production: “The Watcher,” a Ryan Murphy-produced limited series starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale, and “Jigsaw,” a new drama. More

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    Alec Baldwin Shooting: What Detectives Found at the Movie Set

    Court papers did not specify what kind of ammunition detectives recovered from a movie set where the actor had fatally shot a cinematographer with a gun he was told did not contain live rounds.Detectives found three revolvers, spent casings and ammunition — in boxes, loose and in a fanny pack — when they searched the New Mexico film set where the actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer last week with a gun he had been told did not contain any live rounds, according to an inventory of the items seized that was released on Monday.The new details emerged four days after Mr. Baldwin shot the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, while rehearsing a scene in which he draws a revolver from his holster and points it at the camera, according to an affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search the set. The inventory, filed in Santa Fe County Magistrate Court, did not specify what kind of ammunition was seized, and whether it included regular bullets, blank cartridges or dummies.Taken together, the guns, ammunition and blood from the scene where the movie “Rust” was being filmed did not answer the central question of how Ms. Hutchins was killed with a gun that was not supposed to contain live ammunition.Mike Tristano, a veteran professional armorer based in Los Angeles, said the inventory was vague and gave scant information about the type of guns or bullets found. But he did point to the reference to loose ammunition and spent casings as unusual. Typically, ammunition would be kept in a clearly labeled box, he said. “The fact that there is loose ammunition and casings raises questions about the organization of the armory department,” he said.According to an interview with the movie’s director, Joel Souza, used in an affidavit released on Sunday by the Santa Fe County sheriff’s department, Mr. Baldwin had been sitting in a wooden pew in a set depicting a church, explaining how he would draw the gun, when it suddenly discharged. Mr. Souza told a detective that he remembered Ms. Hutchins grabbing her midsection and starting to stumble backward before noticing that he was bleeding from his shoulder.Reid Russell, a cameraman who was present at the scene, told a detective he remembered Ms. Hutchins saying that she “couldn’t feel her legs.”The details, from Detective Joel Cano, provide a chilling account of the fatal shooting on a production set that had been beset by accidental gun discharges and labor disputes between producers and crew members..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-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.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;}The exact safety protocol that played out before the shooting on Thursday remained unclear. Mr. Souza said in the affidavit that typically, firearms had been checked by the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, then the first assistant director, Dave Halls, before Mr. Halls would hand the weapons to actors. Before the shooting, the affidavit said, Mr. Halls had grabbed the revolver from a cart outside the building that had been prepared by Ms. Gutierrez-Reed — on which three guns sat — and declared it to be a “cold gun,” which on a film set usually refers to an unloaded firearm.Although the inventory did not stipulate what kind of ammunition was recovered, live bullets are generally forbidden on film sets.Mr. Halls, an industry veteran who worked on films including “Fargo” and “The Matrix Reloaded,” has been the subject of complaints about safety on previous productions. On Monday, a production company, Rocket Soul Studios, said in a statement that Mr. Halls had been fired from the set of a movie, “Freedom’s Path” in 2019 after a gun unexpectedly discharged, causing a minor injury to a crew member. The statement was reported earlier by CNN.“Halls was removed from set immediately after the prop gun discharged,” the statement said. Mr. Halls did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that situation.Mr. Souza said the filming of the scene inside the church that day had been interrupted by a lunch break for the production. Neither Mr. Souza nor Mr. Russell knew whether the revolver had been inspected after the crew returned from the lunch break, according to the affidavit.The sheriff’s office and the Santa Fe district attorney’s office are planning to hold a news conference on Wednesday to discuss the investigation. More

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    Dave Chappelle Responds to Netflix Controversy in Instagram Post

    Dave Chappelle responded to the controversy over his Netflix standup special “The Closer” — which has been criticized as promoting bigotry toward transgender people — by posting a five-minute video clip to Instagram on Monday in which he denied that he had been invited to speak to transgender employees of the streaming service and refused.“That is not true,” he said in the video, which was taken during a weekend performance in Nashville. “If they had invited me, I would have accepted. Although I am confused about what we would be speaking about. I said what I said, and boy, I heard what you said. My God, how could I not? You said you want a safe working environment at Netflix. It seems like I’m the only one who can’t go to the office anymore.”The controversy over Mr. Chappelle’s special has put Netflix at the center of a conversation involving transphobia, free speech and employee activism. Last week, a group of Netflix employees in Los Angeles staged a walkout. Some employees working virtually also shut their laptops in solidarity.Hours before the protest, Netflix released a statement saying that it understood “the deep hurt that’s been caused,” and that it recognized “we have much more work to do both within Netflix and in our content.”In his video, Mr. Chappelle addressed the transgender community, saying, “I’m more than willing to give you an audience but you will not summon me. I am not bending to anybody’s demands.”Mr. Chappelle said he had three conditions for any meeting: those involved must watch “The Closer” in its entirety, he would choose the time and place, and “you must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.”Ms. Gadsby, a comedian whose specials have been successful on Netflix, criticized Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos this month for defending Mr. Chappelle. Mr. Sarandos had invoked Ms. Gadsby in a statement in which he defended Mr. Chappelle’s right to artistic expression.Mr. Chappelle also said that a documentary he made chronicling a series of stand-up shows he hosted during the summer of 2020 from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, could not find distribution because of the controversy over “The Closer.” Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, the film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, for the reopening of Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Chappelle said he would release the documentary himself in 10 American cities over the next month. (Ten dates in different cities were listed on the Instagram post.)“You have to answer the question, am I canceled or not?” he said before dropping the microphone and walking off the stage. More

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    The ‘Halloween’ Franchise and the Problem With Its Sequels

    The follow-ups took the wrong lessons from the 1978 film. But we keep giving the franchise second chances, in hopes a new one will live up to the original.The astonishing opening-weekend grosses for “Halloween Kills,” the 12th film in the durable “Halloween” franchise, may have surprised some observers — after all, audiences are still hesitant to visit theaters, and reviews for this installment were not kind.And they’re not wrong: it’s truly a mess, a whiplash-inducing attempt to fuse straight horror, sideways comedy and socially relevant themes. But just as you can’t kill Michael Myers, the knife-wielding psychopath at its center, you can’t kill “Halloween,” which has outlasted other horror franchises from the same era like “Friday the 13th” (dormant since 2009) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (since 2010).So what is it about this series that has proved so durable? What keeps fans — and I count myself among them — coming back, forever granting the series second chances at greatness, fully aware of the inevitability of disappointment? A look back at the first five films in the series (available in new Blu-ray collector’s editions from Shout Factory but also streaming on major platforms) provides some answers.It’s impossible to overstate the impact of John Carpenter’s 1978 “Halloween,” a film now treated as a sacred text among horror aficionados — and for good reason. The thriller was innovative, quite literally from the first frame: it opens with a lengthy sequence in which we see a brutal murder through the killer’s eyes. It’s easy to understand what the film’s imitators lifted from this: the heavy-breathing point-of-view framing, the gratuitous nudity, the prurient moralizing (the victim is killed after a casual sexual encounter). Few bothered to replicate Carpenter’s technical wizardry — that four-minute introductory shot, clearly inspired by the opening of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” plays out as an unbroken take — or use it as ingeniously as “Halloween” does: to delay, for as long as possible, the moment of shock when Carpenter finally reveals that the murderer is the 6-year-old Michael Myers, who has slain his own sister.In stark contrast to the slasher movies it spawned, and even to its own sequels, barely a drop of blood is shed in “Halloween.” Carpenter and his co-writer and producer, Debra Hill, spend much of the film’s first hour crafting distinct, memorable characters, particularly Myers’s final would-be victim, the bookworm babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and his psychiatrist and antagonist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence).So rather than reveling in guts and gore, the original film’s emphasis is on suspense, terror and mood. Carpenter’s elegant direction makes inventive use of negative space and darkness (particularly when moving Michael’s ghostly white mask in and out of the cinematographer Dean Cundey’s inky night spaces), and of foregrounds and backgrounds, which frequently reveal the killer’s presence to the viewer before he is seen by his potential victims. Carpenter also masterfully manipulates the pace, which rises and falls in waves through the first and second acts, casually accumulating dread and fear, before moving into the relentlessly scary closing scenes.“Halloween” was a commercial sensation, grossing roughly $47 million on a budget of $325,000. That tremendous return on investment prompted a slew of quick, cheap imitations — after all, the logic went, you didn’t need stars or production values, just some attractive young unknowns and a guy with a knife. None of the successors was more transparent, or more successful, than the “Friday the 13th” series. Its makers couldn’t replicate Carpenter’s stylistic flair, so they invested in elaborate, intricate killing scenes and blood by the bucket.“Friday” and its first follow-up had already come and gone by the time “Halloween II” hit theaters, in October 1981, but that series’s influence is keenly felt in this sequel. Though Carpenter and Hill wrote and produced again (with directorial duties handed off to Rick Rosenthal), the violence is much more extreme and the body count is higher, as is the volume of jump scares, a sure sign that the filmmakers didn’t believe their audience had the patience for the slow builds of the initial installment.But “Halloween II” still has moments of visceral terror that rival the first film, and compositions that are breathtaking in their ingenuity. At their best, these films can tap into a primal fear: of being chased, of running for our lives, of realizing too late that we don’t have a way out. It’s why the scene of Laurie seemingly trapped in a closet in the first film has lodged itself so firmly in our collective memories; it’s why the sequel’s basement chase is so similarly effective. Throughout the series, characters and dialogue return to the idea of “the boogeyman,” a relentless force of evil whom you, of course, cannot kill; “Halloween” works on our subconscious, to a great extent, because it is rooted in childhood fears. (The fears of “Friday the 13th” are teenage concerns: getting caught, either having sex or doing drugs or both.)“Halloween III: The Season of the Witch” was closer to science fiction than horror.Universal PicturesThe “Halloween” movies’ willingness to take risks, at least early on, is more pronounced in the next installment. The first sequel ends, perhaps hopefully, with the death of Michael Myers; the next year, Carpenter and Hill produced “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” an effort to rebrand the series as a horror anthology, telling a completely different story in a completely different style. This tale of an evil plan to murder kids en masse via killer Halloween masks is closer to 1950s science fiction (or, at the very least, ’70s riffs on the genre like the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake) than anything that was happening in horror in the 1980s — and, perhaps as a result, audiences rejected the attempt to rethink “Halloween.”That was, in retrospect, the last time the series tried to break new ground rather than follow current trends. But that’s probably the other explanation for the longevity of “Halloween”: its malleability. When the producer Moustapha Akkad resurrected the series in 1988 with “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers,” he gave the fans what they wanted — more of the same — though that film, and its quickie follow-up a year later, “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers,” felt more like “Friday the 13th” sequels than anything Carpenter and Hill had made. Both films have moments of genuine fright and a handful of affecting performances, but they feel like the series reacting to trends rather than setting them, a pattern that continued through the next entries: the winking, “Scream”-influenced “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” (1998); the extreme horror of Rob Zombie’s 2007 mash-up of remake and origin story; and the gestures of social relevance in the current iterations.These efforts to rethink, rebrand and reboot that original, comparatively simple exercise in suspense have failed and succeeded in roughly equal measure. Yet we’ll plunk down our ticket money, no matter how sour the word of mouth, no matter how dire the reviews, because we’ve grown up with these movies.Part of it is sheer nostalgia, plain and simple: “Halloween” movies remind us of sneaking contraband videotapes into sleepovers and scaring each other silly late at night, after the parents were asleep. The series will probably never scale those heights again, and we know it. But we’ll keep showing up, like die-hard fans of a baseball team that hasn’t nabbed a pennant in years, but can still win a big game every now and then. More