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      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

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      in Movies

      A New Norman Mailer Documentary Explores His Thorny Legacy

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      “How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer” hits on an ingenious structure that avoids hagiography even as it includes friends and family.Given the hagiographic bias of most celebrity documentaries, “How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer” (in theaters) sails into choppy waters. The director Jeff Zimbalist had to figure out a way to sum up one of the 20th century’s most admired, and most notorious, cultural figures. Mailer’s legacy as a novelist, speaker, filmmaker and pop culture icon — the movie reminded me how often he’s mentioned in “Gilmore Girls” — is full of bad behavior and also brilliant work, and making a film about such a person seems nearly impossible in our nuance-averse climate.The key is to play with the documentary’s structure, eschewing the usual soup-to-nuts setup. “How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer” is admittedly designed as a roughly chronological recounting of the writer’s life, covering all the highlights: six wives (one of whom he famously, horribly stabbed with a penknife), nine children, a stint in the military, best-selling novels, a fascination with brawling, combative TV appearances, opinions about God and machines and Americans’ midcentury impulse toward conformity.But Zimbalist hits on a great idea: arrange the film in terms of what Mailer’s friends, enemies and acquaintances believe his “rules for coming alive” might be. The author’s life and legacy can thus be traced through those rules, and his evolution as a person — and he did evolve, constantly, insatiably — starts to make more sense. What emerges is a portrait of a man as often at war with himself as with his family, friends and countrymen, driven relentlessly toward machismo and always spoiling for a fight. This is not a person you can present neutrally to an audience.There are seven rules, announced in intertitles, including, “Don’t Be a Nice Jewish Boy,” “Be Wrong More Than You’re Right” and “Be Willing to Die for an Idea.” It’s an appealing structure, and the many interviewees discuss the ways Mailer embodied them, supported by archival film and interviews with the man himself. There’s a lot of footage to work with. By midcareer, Mailer was ubiquitous on camera; as one person notes, he seemed to never turn down an opportunity to be interviewed or share his views publicly.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 Television

      Book Review: ‘Cue the Sun!’ by Emily Nussbaum

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      CUE THE SUN! The Invention of Reality TV, by Emily NussbaumThere are times when Emily Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story, “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV,” feels like something of a Trojan horse.Her expansive analysis begins with a simple proposition: an argument for why a genre that includes series like “The Dating Game” and “Alien Autopsy” deserves a book-length history in the first place.For Nussbaum, industry terms like “unscripted series” don’t quite encompass all the pop culture ground these shows negotiate. Instead, she settles on the phrase “dirty documentary” to cover a wide swath, describing a history that kicks off with the pioneering prank show “Candid Camera” in the 1940s, progresses to irreverent TV series like “The Gong Show” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and eventually explodes into modern TV megahits like “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and “The Bachelor.”With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, Nussbaum, a staff writer for The New Yorker, outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent concoction, ranging from “celebreality” soap opera to grand social experiments that explore romance, competition and ethics. Their secret sauce: placing people in contrived situations to spark entertaining, telegenic, revelatory behavior — often through conflict or embarrassment.“It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect,” Nussbaum writes. The result is “a powerful glimpse of human vulnerability, breaking taboos about what you were allowed to say or see.”The book culminates in one of America’s most persistent rule breakers, Donald Trump, documenting how the creator and executive producer Mark Burnett built NBC’s “The Apprentice” into a success that burnished the reputation of the playboy tycoon, resulting in “the most sinister outcome.”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

      The Folger Library Wants to Reintroduce You to Shakespeare

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      After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.Social media is awash with pictures of jaw-dropping libraries, elaborately styled home bookshelves and all manner of drool-worthy Library Porn. But for understated dazzle, it’s hard to compete with a wall in the new basement galleries of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.For decades, the library’s 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio — the largest collection in the world — were locked away in a vault, with access granted only to select scholars. But now, anyone can enter the public galleries and see them displayed in a special wall case, laid flat with spines out.In the dim, curatorially correct lighting, they glow like some kind of mysterious dark matter. But during a preview of the building, which reopens this weekend after a four-year, $80 million expansion, the Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, reached for a sunnier metaphor.Six of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies of the First Folio. The library has placed all 82 of its First Folios — the largest collection in the world — on permanent display.Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesThe Folio — a collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, published by his friends in 1623, seven years after his death — is “the ultimate message in a bottle.”“And the miracle is that every generation opens up the bottle and it turns out the plays, the message, was addressed to them,” Witmore 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

      Do You Recognize This Film (and Book) From a Movie Still?

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      Can you identify a book title just by looking at a photo from its film adaptation? (Or maybe if you had just a little hint?) That’s the challenge in this week’s installment 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 movies, 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 books and their screen adaptations. More

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      in Television

      How Matt Williams, the Creator of ‘Roseanne,’ Spends His Sundays

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      Mr. Williams loves people-watching and pasta with his wife. But when he’s writing on Sundays? No judgment allowed.Over the past four decades, Matt Williams has been intimately involved in many of America’s most successful television programs.He is credited as a writer, showrunner, producer or creator on “The Cosby Show,” “A Different World” and “Home Improvement,” among others. “Roseanne,” which he created, transplanted his family from New York to Los Angeles, where they lived until the Northridge earthquake in 1994. After the earthquake, Mr. Williams relocated to Manhattan with his wife, the actress Angelina Fiordellisi, and their two young children. From then, Mr. Williams lived a bicoastal life, commuting weekly between New York and Los Angeles for almost 20 years as he worked on movies and TV shows.In 2018, he closed his production company and began living, once again, full time on the East Coast.“It was really time to make New York City my home again,” he said. “My wife and I especially enjoy Sundays in New York. After all that hustle and bustle of Monday through Saturday, the city sits back and relaxes a little on Sunday, so you can enjoy New York in a different way.”His first book, “Glimpses: A Comedy Writer’s Take on Life, Love, and All That Spiritual Stuff,” was published this year.Mr. Williams lives in a three-story townhouse in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan with Ms. Fiordellisi and their black Labrador, Nova.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

      Book Review: ‘The Playbook,’ by James Shapiro

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      In “The Playbook,” James Shapiro offers a resonant history of the Federal Theater Project, a Depression-era program that gave work to writers and actors until politics took center stage.THE PLAYBOOK: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War, by James ShapiroA week before Election Day 1936, when a landslide vote would keep Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House for a second term, the antifascist play “It Can’t Happen Here” opened nationwide: 21 productions in 18 cities, from Los Angeles to New York. Adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel of the same name, the show became a hit for the Federal Theater Project, a jobs-for-artists division of Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration.But it was a chaotic scramble to get the play onstage. Long before the advent of email or even fax machines, the show’s text was still evolving as opening night approached, the script changes mailed cross-country to the various companies. The Federal Theater, meanwhile, was so nervous about being perceived as partisan that it had prohibited the play and its publicity materials from directly mentioning fascism or real-world political figures. Posters in Detroit depicting a military man resembling Hitler were ordered, by telegram, to be destroyed. Ambitious, civic-minded and self-sabotaging, the whole enterprise moved fast, fast, fast. The Federal Theater, which lasted just four years, spent its brief life in that mode. Its final months were devoted to trying to fend off the wild accusations of a Communist-hunting congressman, who in headline-grabbing hearings smeared it baselessly, ruinously, as un-American.With the American theater struggling to regain the vitality it had before Covid-related shutdowns, some creators and critics have called for a new version of the Federal Theater to come to the rescue. The U.S. government is hardly a spendthrift with arts dollars, but what if it were to pony up for the industry again?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