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CAIRO — An Egyptian filmmaker imprisoned over a music video that mocked President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi died at a maximum-security facility on Friday after two years in detention without trial, his lawyer said.The cause of death of the filmmaker, Shady Habash, 24, was not immediately clear. But it brought new scrutiny to conditions in Egypt’s notoriously crowded prisons, where the death of an American this year caused a rare rift with the Trump administration, and which have been the subject of growing calls for a mass release of prisoners to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.Mr. Habash was imprisoned in March 2018 after he directed a music video by an exiled musician, Ramy Essam, that mocked Mr. el-Sisi as a “date.” When the video spread widely on social media, Mr. Habash was arrested and jailed, said his lawyer, Ahmed el-Khawaga.The writer of the song, Galal el-Behairy, was also arrested and charged, as was a third man who set up Mr. Essam’s Facebook page. In August 2018, a military court sentenced Mr. el-Behairy to three years’ imprisonment.Although Mr. el-Sisi has amassed greater power than any other Egyptian leader in decades, he has consistently shown little tolerance for those who dare to mock him. In 2015, a 22-year-old student was jailed for three years after posting a cartoon on Facebook that depicted the president as Mickey Mouse.In 2016, a comedian who played a prank on the police in Tahrir Square, the site of the Arab Spring protests in 2011, was arrested and remains in jail. Numerous other Egyptian actors, writers, satirists and sports stars have fled into exile to avoid Mr. el-Sisi’s wrath, and some have been prosecuted in absentia.Mr. Essam, the singer, became popular during the Arab Spring, but later fled to Sweden after he was briefly detained. He hired Mr. Habash, who had worked with other musicians, to make his video about Mr. el-Sisi.In a letter from prison in October that was later published by friends on Facebook, Mr. Habesh spoke of his despair. “Prison doesn’t kill, loneliness does,” he wrote, describing what he called his struggle to “stop yourself going mad or dying slowly because you’ve been thrown in a room two years ago and forgotten.”Political prisoners in Egypt are often held for years without trial, frequently in what rights groups say are dirty, overcrowded conditions with poor medical treatment. In March, Amnesty International called on Mr. el-Sisi to release thousands of prisoners who are vulnerable to an outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.Mr. el-Sisi released 4,000 prisoners last month, in a traditional gesture of clemency for Sinai Liberation Day, marking Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1982. But those released were convicted criminals, and political prisoners were not included.Lawyers, lawmakers and translators are among those who have been arrested by the security services in recent months, including Kholoud Sayed Amer, the head of translation at the prestigious Library of Alexandria.Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent political prisoner, started a hunger strike on April 12 to protest what he called his unjust detention. He is subsisting on water and tea, said his aunt, the writer Ahdaf Soueif, who was herself arrested in March for protesting about his conditions.Although President Trump has generally offered unstinting praise to Mr. el-Sisi, the death of an imprisoned American, Moustafa Kassem, in January caused a rare chill in relations between the two countries.Mr. Kassem died after six years in prison and despite pleas from Vice President Mike Pence for his release. He had been on a hunger strike at the time of his death, and the State Department later considered cutting military aid to Egypt in retaliation for the death.Egypt sent a planeload of medical aid to the United States in late April, in what many analysts viewed as a gesture of coronavirus diplomacy. But the issue of prison conditions remains an American priority.In a call on April 23 with Egypt’s foreign minister, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “emphasized that detained U.S. citizens be kept safe and provided consular access during the Covid-19 pandemic,” a State Department spokeswoman said.Nada Rashwan contributed reporting. More

Matty Simmons, who helped launch National Lampoon magazine and was instrumental in bringing into being its most famous side project, the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.His son Michael confirmed his death.In his 2012 book, “Fat, Drunk and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Simmons gave a succinct version of his unusual career path: “The Diners Club begat Weight Watchers Magazine, which begat the National Lampoon, and that begat ‘Animal House.’”Mr. Simmons was a press agent in New York, with clubs and restaurants among his clients, when, in 1949, Frank McNamara, a businessman, and Ralph E. Schneider, a lawyer, asked him if he wanted to help them bring an idea they had to fruition. They envisioned a card that people could use instead of cash to pay for restaurant meals.Their Diners Club Card helped usher in the era of credit cards. Diners Club International calls it “the world’s first multipurpose charge card,” and Mr. Simmons was at the lunch with Mr. McNamara and Mr. Schneider in February 1950 when a Diners Club Card was used for the first time, at Major’s Cabin Grill in Midtown Manhattan.Mr. Simmons rose to vice president for sales of the new company and started The Diners Club Magazine. Publishing came to interest him more than sales did, so in the late 1950s he left the company and started his own, 21st Century Communications.Weight Watchers asked him to help turn their corporate publication into a general-interest magazine, which he did in 1968, to considerable success. His company, he said, had a half-share stake in the new magazine, and with the profits he began looking to invest in other magazine projects. The president of a magazine distribution company introduced him to three young men from the student publication The Harvard Lampoon: Henry Beard, Robert Hoffman and Douglas Kenney.Mr. Simmons helped them put out a parody of Life magazine, then a parody of Time. Then came National Lampoon, with Mr. Simmons as chairman. As National Lampoon grew more successful, it turned into a franchise, with stage shows, comedy albums and eventually “Animal House.”The movie, directed by John Landis (who was then largely unknown) and produced by Mr. Simmons and Ivan Reitman, involved a troublemaking fraternity, Delta Tau Chi, and its ensemble cast featured John Belushi, who had become well known from “Saturday Night Live.”“Animal House” became a cultural touchstone of sorts.“I must have had 1,000 people say to me, ‘That was based on my fraternity,’” Mr. Simmons told the Postmedia Network in 2013. “It wasn’t; it wasn’t really anyone’s fraternity. But it’s everyone.”Martin Gerald Simmons was born on Oct. 3, 1926, in Brooklyn. His father, Irving, was a sign painter, and his mother, Kate (Shapiro) Simmons, was a homemaker.He graduated from Textile High School in Manhattan in 1942 and attended the City College of New York but dropped out. He worked briefly for The New York World-Telegram and Sun before being drafted into the Army. From 1944 to 1946 he served in the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J., where he produced entertainment shows.Mr. Simmons began working as a press agent after his discharge. He acknowledged that when he first heard the pitch from Mr. McNamara and Mr. Schneider about the Diners Club charge card, he wasn’t impressed.“I told them I thought it was the worst idea I’d ever heard,” he told Adweek in 1990. “I never charged anything. In those days, most people didn’t.”But the men won him over, and he embarked on the path that led to the founding of National Lampoon.The first issue of the magazine appeared in April 1970. The Lampoon, which at its peak had a circulation of more than one million, was a defining force in satire during the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to a collection of writers and editors that included P.J. O’Rourke, Bruce McCall, Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, Anne Beatts and Michael O’Donoghue.“It was the greatest collection of humorists, over a 20-year period, since perhaps the days of the Algonquin Round Table,” Mr. Simmons wrote in “Fat, Drunk and Stupid.”The magazine soon branched out into stage shows like “National Lampoon’s Lemmings,” a 1973 revue that packed the Village Gate in Greenwich Village and featured Mr. Belushi and his future “S.N.L.” cast mate Chevy Chase. There was also “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” as well as several record albums. In 1979 came “Delta House,” a short-lived TV series based on “Animal House”; Mr. Simmons was an executive producer.He was often at odds with some of the key figures on the creative side of the National Lampoon enterprise. In 1978, for instance, he dismissed Mr. Kelly as editor of the magazine.“After ‘Animal House’ came out, Matty Simmons decided this particular goose could lay larger, better-quality gold eggs if it emulated what he saw as ‘Animal House,’ by which he meant adolescent,” Mr. Hendra complained to The New York Times in 2005.The magazine’s popularity began to wane in the 1980s. But the franchise’s movies, with Mr. Simmons as a producer or executive producer, often did well, especially “National Lampoon’s Vacation” in 1983 and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” in 1989, both starring Chevy Chase.Mr. Simmons sold his stake in the magazine in 1989.His marriages to Korky Kelley in 1945 and Lee Easton in 1952 ended in divorce. His third wife, Patti Browne, died in 2017. In addition to his son Michael, who is from his second marriage, he is survived by another son, Andrew, and a daughter, Julie Simmons-Lynch, from that marriage; a daughter from his third marriage, Kate Simmons; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.Mr. Simmons wrote several other books, including “If You Don’t Buy This Book, We’ll Kill This Dog: Life, Laughs, Love and Death at National Lampoon” (1994). (The title was a reference to an especially notorious Lampoon cover.)In “Fat, Drunk, and Stupid,” he recalled driving around Manhattan in July 1978 marveling at the long lines of people waiting to buy tickets to “Animal House.” Outside one theater he saw Walter Garibaldi, National Lampoon’s treasurer, poking at a calculator, and stopped to ask what he was doing.“I’m just figuring out how much money we make every time somebody buys a ticket,” came the answer.Mr. Garibaldi, he wrote, was still standing there hours later. “Animal House,” which was made on a budget of about $3 million, eventually raked in about $140 million. More

I’m Joe Robert Cole, writer/director of All Day and a Night. So in this scene, we’re following our main character, Jahkor, played by Ashton Sanders, his girlfriend, Shantaye, played by Shakira Ja’nai Paye, and his best friend, TQ, played by Isaiah Johns. The sequence takes place during a distinctly Bay Area gathering called a sideshow. Authenticity was big for me. So I tried to incorporate elements, like the BART train that just passed and local people, as much as possible. The guy on the bike we’re following is an example. Even the banter and the slang in the background I tried to make specific to Oakland. The film is crafted to root the audience in an intimate way in Jahkor’s journey. But I wanted to do something a little bit different here. I wanted our three leads here to feel swept up in the whirlwind of people, cars, and culture, and music. So this tracking shot becomes more about how it feels to be at a sideshow than keeping up with them. [OVERLAPPING RAP] I worked out the placement and the camera route with little model cars and people on a schematic in my office. [OVERLAPPING RAP] But I think that the biggest challenge of the scene was figuring out how to safely get our camera between these two moving cars. So as we move into the center coming up here, the car that just passed us ducks out through the crowd. And so we stay focused on this one car here with the ladies in it. And it feels as if the other car is still behind us, when actually, it’s not there. So at real sideshows, people actually try to hit the cars with their hands when they go by. Where we going to be able to put people that close? The answer to that is no. So we had a lovely VFX house that helped us to place our folks without putting anybody in danger. More

Here are a few of the best events happening Friday through Sunday and how to tune in (all times are Eastern Daylight).200 Stars, 24 Hours: Oprah, Julia Roberts and MoreFriday at 8 p.m. on all major social media platformsStarting Friday evening, and running for 24 hours, more than 200 celebrities and leaders — including Oprah, Julia Roberts, Quincy Jones, Yo-Yo Ma, Naomi Campbell, Alanis Morissette and President George W. Bush — will gather virtually for “The Call to Unite,” an event to raise money for Covid-19 relief efforts. Participants will offer messages in their own ways, whether through a performance, story or prayer.When: Friday at 8 p.m. through Saturday at 8 p.m.Where: The Call to Unite’s website and its Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter pages, as well as SiriusXM Stars channel 109. Spotify will have segments available on demand during and after the event.Laughs With Will Ferrell, Chelsea Handler, Bryan Cranston and MoreFriday at 8 p.m. on YouTubeWe’re all in need of a little levity right now, and Friday’s “Covid Is No Joke” virtual comedy benefit might just do the trick. Will Ferrell, Chelsea Handler, Patton Oswalt, Bryan Cranston, Kerry Washington, Elizabeth Banks, Jack Black and Tenacious D, Mindy Kaling and many others will put on sketches, perform stand-up sets and more, as well as offer personal messages, to raise money for the Americares Covid-19 efforts. Sia will close the show, which is hosted by Tony Goldwyn. The first $100,000 in donations received during the event will be matched by an anonymous donor.When: 8 p.m.Where: The Americares YouTube channel and the “Covid Is No Joke” website.Sting Rocks Out From HomeFriday at 3 p.m. on InstagramRolling Stone continues its “In My Room” series on Instagram with an at-home, stripped-down performance by the rock star Sting. The series has featured Joan Jett, Brian Wilson, Lucinda Williams and Jim James. Past streams are archived on Rolling Stone’s website.When: 3 p.m.Where: The Rolling Stone Instagram page. More

In the early moments of “All Day and a Night,” a gut-wrenching drama now streaming on Netflix, comes an emotional courtroom scene. Jahkor Lincoln (Ashton Sanders) sits with a look of stoic resignation in a room packed with the loved ones of the two people he has murdered. Before the judge delivers Jahkor’s life sentence, the mother of one of the deceased stands to speak. “My granddaughter is only 10 years old,” she says. “You took away her whole family and never even given a reason why. That’s all I want to know. Why?”The rest of the film tries to answer that question by chronicling the conditions — both immediate and long-term — that led Jahkor to commit homicide. The movie hops through time to capture three different periods in Jahkor’s life, revealing that as a child he faced bullies both inside and outside of his home. His father, JD (Jeffrey Wright), abused him in the name of “tough love.” “It’s dog eat man out there,” JD says to Jahkor’s mother, Tommetta (an affecting Regina Taylor), after he finds out someone stole the boy’s toy on the playground. “If he don’t learn that in here, he ain’t going to make it.”The idea of “making it” haunts the second period, which follows Jahkor navigating a turf war between rival gangs and the trials of young adulthood, all while attempting to pursue a career in music and maintain a relationship with his girlfriend (Shakira Ja’nai Paye, in a compelling performance). The third period sees him in prison, coming face-to-face again with his father who is also serving time, and embarking on a journey of belated self-discovery.[embedded content]Growing up in Oakland wasn’t easy — for Jahkor, his family or his friends — and, Joe Robert Cole, who wrote and directed the film, effectively shows how certain systems in the United States prime its black citizens for failure. A high rate of incarceration, coupled with chronic divestment in entire communities, means that cycles of poverty become nearly impossible to break. Choice, for many, is an illusion. This message repeats itself throughout the film, and while at times it feels clumsy, it is never tedious. Sanders especially shines among a formidable cast, and in his portrayal, excellently reflects on the herculean task his character faces: How do you believe in yourself when it seems like no one else does? The answer, we eventually learn, is that it’s complicated.All Day and a NightRated R. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More