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    If A.I. Is Coming for Comedy Writers, Simon Rich Is Ready

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    The author of humorous short stories finds emotional connections in tales that engage with tech. But he’s more interested in the ties between humans.The author Simon Rich believes it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence will be able to outwrite any human. Specifically, four years. So, what’s the twist?That’s what you wait for in a Simon Rich story, one of pop culture’s most consistently funny genres, with a foundation built like a classic joke: a tight premise developed in clear language, some misdirection, and then a pivot, delivered as quickly as possible.Rich, whose 10th collection of short stories, “Glory Days,” was released this week, said his dark view of the future was informed by a longtime friendship with an A.I. scientist, who recently showed him a chatbot the public hasn’t seen. It’s more raw, unpredictable, creative.“Even though I don’t know anything about A.I. really, I’ve been processing it emotionally for several years longer than everyone,” he told me in his Los Angeles home office one afternoon in May.He considered the implications of artificial intelligence displacing human creativity in “I Am Code,” a book he helped edit last year that featured A.I.-crafted poetry. The theme is also deeply woven into his new collection, his most mature effort yet, which includes some regular obsessions like “Back to the Future”-style encounters between generations, dystopia and the inner life of video game characters.“The whole book is basically about different types of obsolescence,” he said of “Glory Days,” whose other organizing theme is early midlife crisis. There’s a story about Super Mario turning 40 (Rich just did, too) and a spiky rant from the perspective of New York City itself. It’s about “the great migration when an entire generation discovers they are too old to live in New York,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Robert Gottlieb’s Books Go Up for Sale

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      Robert Gottlieb didn’t just edit books. He voraciously read and collected them.On Saturday, a portion of his personal library — his books on show business — were sold at a fair in the lobby of the Metrograph theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.When Mr. Gottlieb, who died last June at 92, wasn’t heartlessly lancing thousands of words out of Robert Caro’s biographical volumes or marking up the manuscripts of Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, he loved watching movies. Along the course of his career, he built a vast collection of books on Hollywood’s golden age.His family was unsure what to do with the collection until earlier this year, when they started talking with Metrograph, a two-screen cinema that is a pillar of the downtown art house scene.Visitors lined up to buy “My Life with Chaplin,” “Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis,” “Little Girl Lost: The Life & Hard Times of Judy Garland” and hundreds of other books. When they opened them, they found a stamped seal reading “From the Library of Robert Gottlieb.” The books were priced around $15 to $40.Reinaldo Buitron, 28, a documentary filmmaker, flipped through a book about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.“Being able to touch the same books Gottlieb had in his own home is surreal,” he said. “I see we admired the same films, and that makes me think we might have gotten along. That we could have sat for dinner and talked cinema and about his opinions on semicolons.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

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      Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die.“It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?“And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix. More

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      in Television

      Loved ‘Couples Therapy’? Read These 11 Books

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      These stories of relationship dramas and evolving partnerships will fill the “Couples Therapy”-sized hole in your life with wisdom, schadenfreude and humor — and sometimes all of the above.It can be hard when shrinks go on summer vacation — especially in a summer when each news cycle seems to bring more upsetting developments to process. And it doesn’t help that the fourth season of the cult favorite Showtime docuseries “Couples Therapy” has just wrapped, so even affordable, vicarious therapy is off the table. Without our weekly fix of Dr. Orna Guralnik’s deep nods and cathartic sympathy crying — and with the good doctor’s own much-anticipated book still months off — what are we to do?The series, which started airing in 2019, did not seem to have the makings of a hit: real couples, sitting on a Brooklyn sofa, telling a therapist their problems. At worst, thought skeptics, it sounded voyeuristic and upsetting; at best, boring and contrived. Long before Annie and Mau were a twinkle in my eye, or I’d wept over Season 2, or I’d had wildly differing feelings about different strangers named Josh, I, too, was one of those people. “Watch it,” said a co-worker. “Nothing you thought will ever be the same.” Forty-five minutes in, I was hooked.There are many reasons “Couples Therapy” has broken through: the happy surprise of seeing our perceptions change, the age-old distraction of other peoples’ problems, the actual applicable advice, Dr. Guralnik’s glossy mane and teeny tiny braids (a major discussion point on message boards).But even if you aren’t a fan of the show, these shoulder-season reads will get you through August with wisdom, schadenfreude, dysfunction, pain and humor — and sometimes all of the above. It’s not a spoiler that most of these couples could use a session or 10.Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox (1970)Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a childless couple in their early 40s living in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (they’re the gentrifiers). Life seems comfortable — until Sophie is bitten by a feral cat and their carefully ordered existence begins to crumble. There’s even a kitchen renovation in this sharply observed, humane classic of New York marriage. (Read about the book’s legacy.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Test Your Knowledge of Shakespeare Film Adaptations

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      The works of William Shakespeare have inspired countless performances and interpretations over the centuries, but some films show their Shakepearean roots more clearly than others. The challenge here is to identify a handful of those movies in this week’s edition of Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books and stories that have gone on to find new life in the form of films, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the plays and their screen adaptations.3 of 5“The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare’s controversial comedy about gender roles, has been adapted multiple times for the stage and screen, with the 1999 teen rom-com “10 Things I Hate About You,” the 1948 Broadway musical “Kiss Me, Kate” and the 1986 “Atomic Shakespeare” episode of the television series “Moonlighting” all tapping into the storyline of a volatile couple and their relationship. Which of these films is also based on the play? More

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      in Theater

      A Queer Mountain Lion Leaps From the Page to the Little Island Stage

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      Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” narrated by an animal in peril in the Hollywood Hills, is adapted for a staged reading.The concept behind Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” is an eyebrow-raising one: It’s a story about overdevelopment and climate change narrated by a mountain lion who muses on the lives of hikers and loved ones.Hoke was loosely inspired by the mountain lion known as P-22 whose regular sightings in the hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, successful crossing of two freeways and eventual death captured the public’s attention in 2022. In “Open Throat,” according to the book’s publisher, the animal identifies as queer, and uses they and them pronouns.The book is “what fiction should be,” the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her review for The New York Times, and it made several end-of-year best-of lists and awards shortlists.With an internal monologue that has poetically broken stanzas and a fluid sense of time and reality, “Open Throat” does not immediately call for theatrical adaptation. Yet a staged version of the work is premiering Wednesday as part of Little Island’s ambitious summer series of live performances at its outdoor amphitheater.The narration is divided among three performers, including Chris Perfetti, who is holding the book, and Calvin Leon Smith. “I think the beauty of it, and the reason we’re intentionally having three different voices, is making it universal,” Perfetti said.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It reads beautifully,” Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, said of the book. “The way it’s placed on the page is visually interesting. The way the voice exists is not like anything else. I kept thinking that it being so voice-driven would make an amazing show, and I didn’t know how to do it, which is the greatest thing in the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Most Intriguing Animated Films You’ll Never See

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      A digital book, “Drawing for Nothing,” highlights some of the best art from canceled animation projects like “Me and My Shadow.”Among fans of canceled animated film projects — and yes, there is such a fandom, and it’s enormous — “Me and My Shadow” is perhaps the most popular cartoon feature that never was.Greenlighted in 2010 by DreamWorks Animation, the film boasted a strong voice cast, including Bill Hader, Kate Hudson and Josh Gad, and a team of some of the industry’s top artists and animators. The filmmakers combined computer-generated and hand-drawn animation to create a lead character whose shadow had a mind and physicality all his own, at a time when few studios, including DreamWorks, were doing hand-drawn at all.“For a long time, whenever I had visitors at DreamWorks, I would pull up sequences from ‘Me and My Shadow’ and other things I was working on, like ‘Kung Fu Panda,’” said Rune Brandt Bennicke, a supervising animator on the film. “Without fail, it was the ‘Me and My Shadow’ stuff where they went, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’”Five years later, production was halted. “The reason we were given for canceling it was that the studio felt that its potential for box office was not what they wanted,” said Bennicke.Since then, however, interest in the phantom film has only grown. Would-be fans scour the internet for concept art and clips, post their own fan art and fan-made trailers, and discuss — and grouse about — what might have been. There are numerous YouTube shorts and supercuts about the film; a short collection of unfinished clips and concept art — titled “The CANCELLED DreamWorks Masterpiece …” — has garnered more than 3.5 million views.Shadow Dan, the timid hero’s outgoing alter ego in “Me and My Shadow,” had a mind and physicality all his own. DreamWorks, via Rune Brandt BennickeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Shay Youngblood, Influential Black Author and Playwright, Dies at 64

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      She wrote memorably about her upbringing by a circle of maternal elders and the life lessons they imparted, and of her yearning for the mother she lost.Shay Youngblood, a novelist and playwright whose works about her upbringing by a churchgoing cohort of “Big Mamas” and her adventures in Paris as a young aspiring writer inspired a generation of young Black women, died on June 11 at the home of a friend, Kelley Alexander, in Peachtree City, Ga. She was 64.Ms. Alexander said the cause was ovarian cancer.Ms. Youngblood, whose mother died when she was 2 years old and whose father was not in her life, grew up in a housing project in Columbus, Ga., where she raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, along with a close circle of eccentric and adoring maternal stand-ins.The Big Mamas — stoic, arthritic and wise — had much to impart to the young Shay: their dim view of most men; their love of music, dancing and church; their often bawdy humor; their dignified, powerful resistance to the indignities and horrors visited upon them by the racist white employers for whom they worked as maids.Ms. Youngblood said that she prayed often for her mother to return, but that as she grew older, she appreciated the richness of her upbringing and turned the experience into her first book, “The Big Mama Stories” (1989), which before being published was adapted into her first play, “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery.” First produced by the Horizon Theater Company in Atlanta in 1988, it has since been staged all over the world, in schools and local theaters.“The simple act of centering on the stories of Black women, with barely any references to the men (white or Black) in their lives, is itself an act of resistance,” Kerry Reid wrote in a review for The Chicago Tribune when “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery” was produced in Chicago in 2017, 20 years after its first staging there. “And the women we meet in Youngblood’s unapologetically fierce, funny and ultimately hopeful memory-play-with-music might make you want to jump up at the curtain call and ask all of them to run for office.”Lisa Adler, Horizon’s longtime co-artistic director, recalled that when Ms. Youngblood gave her the play in its original raw form in the early 1980s, when they were both in their early 20s, she thought: “This isn’t quite a play, but it’s something. I’ve got to do something!” She convened the director Glenda Dickerson and the dramaturgs Gayle Austin and Isabelle Bagshaw, and together they shaped the work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      5 Places to Visit in Baltimore, Maryland, With John Waters

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      The writer and director, famous for making theatergoers squirm in their seats, says he feels most at home wherever the outsiders gather in his native city.The 1998 John Waters film “Pecker” ends with an unlikely crowd carousing in a seedy basement bar/impromptu photo gallery in Baltimore. Strippers and one busty, enthusiastic art collector dance on tables as a talking Virgin Mary icon watches. It’s a jubilant, chaotic and naughty party open to anyone with a sense of humor, just the way the director likes it.Mr. Waters, 78, gained a cult following in the 1970s with delightfully shocking films like “Multiple Maniacs,” “Female Trouble” and, of course, the raunchy “Pink Flamingos” before breaking big with “Hairspray,” in 1988.Since then, Mr. Waters has built an empire of camp, now comprising more than a dozen films, spoken-word shows and numerous books, including his 2022 debut novel, “Liarmouth,” which has been optioned for a movie that Mr. Waters hopes will star Aubrey Plaza.Mr. Waters, a Baltimore native, grew up in Lutherville, Md., a suburb he described in a recent phone interview as “upper-middle-class everything.” Yearning for escape, he had his mom drop him off at a Baltimore beatnik hangout called Martick’s, even though he was underage. “She said, ‘Maybe you’ll meet your people here,’” he recalled.“I did find my people — bohemia!” he said.Since those days, Mr. Waters has become an unofficial spokesman for all things Baltimore, which was one of The New York Times’s 52 Places to Go in 2024. The city has embraced him, too. It honored him with an official day, Feb. 7, 1985 (it was a one-off), and the all-gender restrooms at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the institution to which he has bequeathed his sizable art collection, are named for him.Though Mr. Waters has apartments in San Francisco and New York and spends summers in Provincetown, Mass., he lives primarily in North Baltimore and has no plans to change that. “If I had to give up everywhere,” Mr. Waters said, “this is where I’d live.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More