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      in Music

      Britney Spears Timeline, From the Conservatorship to Her Memoir

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      Before the pop star releases her memoir next week, here’s a look back at her life since the guardianship controlling her affairs was terminated in 2021.In June 2021, Britney Spears spoke to a Los Angeles courtroom, giving an impassioned 23-minute statement about her struggles under the conservatorship that had controlled her personal and business decisions for 13 years.“I’ve been in denial,” she said. “I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized. I just want my life back.”It was the first time the pop star, who rose to fame in the late 1990s, had provided a window into her realities of the legal arrangement that her father, James P. Spears, had petitioned for in 2008, citing her public mental health struggles and possible substance abuse. During the decade-plus that Spears was restricted by the guardianship, she performed a Las Vegas residency and released four albums; behind the scenes, she said, she lived in terror and shame, unable to make decisions about her work or her own body.Five months after Spears’s speech, Judge Brenda Penny terminated the conservatorship.Spears embraced her sudden freedom to speak freely, unloading about family betrayal and years of isolation on her Instagram, her main outlet for communication with her fans. Now, Spears, 41, is making her biggest statement yet with “The Woman in Me,” a memoir that will be officially released on Tuesday. In it, she says that since the end of the conservatorship she has tried to “rebuild my life day by day.”“I’m trying to learn how to take care of myself,” she writes, “and have some fun, too.”Here’s what’s happened since the end of the conservatorship — in the public sphere, at least.Spears’s personal lifeWhen Spears gave her emotional speech to the Los Angeles judge, she said that two of the conservatorship’s restrictions that pained her the most were limitations on getting married and having another baby.Several months after the arrangement ended, she married her boyfriend, Sam Asghari, whom she met when he was in her music video for the song “Slumber Party.” The marriage lasted just over a year; he filed papers asking for a divorce in August. (The book does not get as far as the split, mentioning their relationship only in positive terms.)In April 2022, Spears announced that she was pregnant, but the next month, the couple said that she had had a miscarriage. It would have been her third child, after two sons with her ex-husband Kevin Federline.“I’d been so thrilled to be pregnant that I’d told the whole world,” she writes in the book, “which meant I had to un-tell them.”In the immediate aftermath of the conservatorship’s end, Spears was outspoken on her Instagram about the ways she felt her family had wronged her, but earlier this year, she signaled in an Instagram post that she may be softening, at least toward her mother. Lynne Spears — who, she writes in the book, supported the creation of the conservatorship — showed up at her doorstep, and her daughter appeared to embrace a reconciliation. “Time heals all wounds !!!” she wrote.Tensions between Spears and Federline over their teenage children spilled into public view last year, when the singer’s ex-husband gave an interview in which he said their sons had been unwilling to see their mother. Spears responded by criticizing Federline’s decision to speak publicly about their children; in her memoir, she writes about the highs and lows of motherhood but does not discuss any estrangement with her sons.Her careerSpears last released an album, “Glory,” in 2016; the final date of a limited tour supporting it was in 2018.In her book, Spears says she’s hesitant to jump into making music again, but one person who did entice her back into the studio was Elton John. She says the 76-year-old rocker sent her a video message asking her to collaborate on “Hold Me Closer,” a duet that remixes some of his hits, including “Tiny Dancer.” The recording session took a few hours in the basement of a producer’s Beverly Hills home, she writes, describing the track, which was released in 2022, as the first new song made on her own terms in a long time.“Mind Your Business,” a song with a former collaborator, Will.i.am, was also released this past summer. And a long-gestating Broadway musical about fairy tale princesses fighting for their emancipation that featured her music opened in June, closing a little over two months later. (The singer offered some support to the show in an Instagram post, but she did not attend, and some fans remained leery of a project instigated amid the conservatorship.)In courtSince the termination of the conservatorship, there has been an ongoing legal battle around wrapping up the arrangement that long managed the fortune that Spears had made as an international pop sensation.A judge rejected a request from Spears’s father, known as Jamie, that she be deposed, but he was ordered to sit for a deposition; its details have not been made public. There has been ongoing legal wrangling over some of the accounting from the conservatorship years, as well as over who will pay Jamie Spears’s legal fees.One specific area of dispute involves Jamie Spears’s attempts to secure documents from an investigative firm that accused him in court papers of directing a surveillance apparatus over his daughter’s activities, including placing a “secret recording device” in her bedroom. The singer’s father denied authorizing such a device in a court filing, and he has said for years that his intentions in the conservatorship were always to protect his daughter.Still, the biggest issue at the heart of the case — whether Spears should be in charge of her personal life and estate — remains resolved.“Her civil liberties were stripped away and now they are back, and I think that’s what anyone would want,” Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, said in a statement this week.Moments in the spotlightPerhaps Spears’s most widely discussed public debacle in the past two years involved a rising N.B.A. rookie named Victor Wembanyama.In July, according to Spears’s account, the singer tried to greet Wembanyama outside of a hotel in Las Vegas when a member of the player’s security team backhanded her in the face. She demanded an apology, but the security team denied that she had been hit directly, saying that a guard had pushed her hand off Wembanyama. No charges were filed.The most consistent magnet for attention in Spears’s life, however, has been the singer’s unfiltered and often eccentric Instagram account. Tabloids regularly seize on photos and videos of Spears dancing in her home and posing in various outfits, at times in the nude.In her memoir, she seeks to explain her instinct toward revealing her inner life to fans.“I know that a lot of people don’t understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or in new dresses,” she writes. “But I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture.”Since the end of the conservatorship, the posts have regularly stirred up debate among fans and observers about whether she has the support she needs post-conservatorship. Earlier this year, fans called the police to check on Spears after her Instagram account disappeared, and last month, another call was put in to the police after she posted a video of herself dancing with a pair of what appeared to be kitchen knives. She clarified on Instagram that the knives were, in fact, props.“So unacceptable for cops to listen to random fans and come in to my home unwarranted,” she wrote on Instagram. “I’ve been bullied in my home for so long now…ITS ENOUGH!”In her book, she writes, “Freedom means taking a break from Instagram without people calling 911.”As some fans fret on social media about how the pop star is handling the effects of being suddenly released from intense, long-term oversight, others insist that this is exactly what the #FreeBritney movement had been working toward: uninhibited free expression.“We always said that we wanted Britney to live her life on her own terms, whatever that may look like,” said Kevin Wu, who started organizing within the #FreeBritney movement in 2019, when fans began to coalesce in opposition to the conservatorship. “I’m trying to live by that and leave Britney alone because I think that’s what she would want.” More

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      in Movies

      Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

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      A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

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      in Music

      Takeaways from Britney Spears’s Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’

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      The pop star’s new book, “The Woman in Me,” recounts her rise to fame, struggles that became tabloid fodder and her efforts to escape a conservatorship that long governed her life.There came a point during the 13 years that a conservatorship strictly governed Britney Spears’s life and career that she gave up fighting it, the singer recalls in her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which is being released on Tuesday.Her father, James P. Spears, had been put in charge of her affairs in 2008 after she was twice hospitalized for involuntary psychological assessments. At times over the years that followed, she pushed back privately, but ultimately her exhaustion and fear of losing access to her two young sons won out, she recalls in the book.“After being held down on a gurney,” the memoir reads, “I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. And so I went along with it.” Spears adds, “My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”In the much-awaited 275-page memoir, which The New York Times obtained from a retail store in advance of its authorized release, Spears writes about her career as a teen idol, her struggles that became tabloid fodder, her time under the conservatorship and her eventual push for its termination in 2021, when she regained the right to make her own decisions.Throughout, she describes the feeling of being too much in the public eye, too scrutinized, whether by her parents or the paparazzi, or even by the doctors who she says “took me away from my kids and my dogs and my house.” But the story is, by nature, incomplete, referring cheerily to Spears’s post-conservatorship marriage to Hesam Asghari, known as Sam, who filed for divorce in August after a little more than a year.Below are other notable moments from the book.Rise to fameFrom performing her first solo — the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” — at her mother’s local day care to auditioning with Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” in rooms full of record executives, Spears tracks her rapid ascent to fame as a child and teenager.When she was 10 years old, she recalls, she was on the show “Star Search,” where the host, Ed McMahon, asked her if she had a boyfriend. After she replied that she didn’t, because they were “mean,” McMahon responded, “I’m not mean! How about me?” She “kept it together” until she left the stage, Spears writes, “But then I burst into tears.”After appearing on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Spears writes, she decided that she wanted to live a “normal life” back in Kentwood, La., until Larry Rudolph, a lawyer whom her mother met on the audition circuit, suggested that she record a demo. She won a record deal at 15, and Rudolph became her longtime manager.Spears performing in 1999 during her … Baby One More Time Tour.Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMounting fame, and attentionSpears quickly rose from a teenager performing at malls to a 16-year-old pop princess with a hit single: “ … Baby One More Time.” She went on tour with the boy band ’N Sync, and had a high-profile romance with Justin Timberlake.She writes that she “couldn’t help but notice” that talk show hosts asked Timberlake different kinds of questions from the ones that she was asked: “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts,” the book says, “wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.” The pressure only grew as she became a fixture on MTV, and the public criticism ultimately led her to start taking Prozac, she recalls.Spears describes a loving relationship with Justin Timberlake but says she was pained by what she describes as his unwillingness to have a child together when she became pregnant. She had an abortion, she writes.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressBreaking up with TimberlakeSpears recounts her connection with Timberlake as magnetic and describes their breakup — which she said he initiated over text message — as leaving her “devastated” and fantasizing about quitting show business.She recalls her reaction to the release of Timberlake’s music video “Cry Me a River,” in which, as she describes it, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.” She viewed the media as portraying her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she writes, when in reality: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”As first revealed in excerpts released by People magazine earlier this week, Spears recounts in detail the decision to get an abortion after she became pregnant while in the relationship with Timberlake. She said she didn’t view the pregnancy as “a tragedy,” but that he thought they were too young, leading her to agree “not to have the baby.”After the breakup, Spears says, she felt forced by her father and her management team to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer, during which Sawyer pressed her on what she did to Timberlake that caused him “so much pain.” (In the book, Spears confirms a longtime rumor when she says she kissed the choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she suggests that her behavior was related to rumors of Timberlake’s unfaithfulness.) Spears recalls that interview as a “breaking point” for her. “I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “set up in front of the whole world.”Relationship to drugs and alcoholTackling the peak years of her notorious stint as a paparazzi and tabloid fixture, Spears writes about her early adulthood forays into partying and nightlife with a sense of disbelief about how they were portrayed in the media.Of her time being photographed alongside celebrity peers like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Spears writes, “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be,” saying that she had no interest in hard drugs and “never had a drinking problem.” Instead, Spears describes her “drug of choice” as the ADHD medication Adderall, which “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”Spears writes that during some of her most widely known public episodes — shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car — she was “out of my mind with grief” following the death of her aunt and a custody fight with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. “With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom,” she writes. “Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”Spears adds: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”Spears with her parents. She says in her book that her father, Jamie, became so controlling of her career while running her conservatorship that at one point he declared, “I’m Britney Spears now.”Denise Truscello/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe conservatorshipIn early 2008, amid her public struggles, the singer’s father, known as Jamie, was appointed conservator of her finances and personal life by the state of California, an arrangement that lasted in various forms until 2021. Even as she returned to work as an entertainer, Spears writes that her every action was monitored, including who she could date or spend time with.“I know I had been acting wild, but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Nothing that justified upending my entire life.” She describes the decision as being made by her father along with support from her mother and a business manager, Louise Taylor, known as Lou, who has denied being an architect of the conservatorship. (Jamie Spears has long defended his involvement as an effort to protect his daughter from financial exploitation.)“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears writes, adding of her father: “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.” Elsewhere, Spears recalls her father saying, “I’m Britney Spears now.”“I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears writes. “Security guards handed me prepackaged envelopes of meds and watched me take them. They put parental controls on my iPhone. Everything was scrutinized and controlled. Everything.”Any pushback by Spears was frowned upon, ignored or minimized, she writes: “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”Fans in the #FreeBritney movement often showed up outside court proceedings where they urged that she be released from the conservatorship. Spears writes of how much that lifted her spirits. Chloe Pang for The New York TimesFighting back and #FreeBritneyWhile Spears had intermittently pushed back against the conservatorship behind closed doors to no avail, she traces the beginning of the end of the arrangement to disputes with her father near the end of 2018, when she was made to undergo further mental health evaluations and then spend more than three months in rehab.“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears writes, adding that he threatened to make her look like an “idiot.”In addition to being prescribed lithium at the facility, Spears says, she was allowed only an hour of television before a 9 p.m. bedtime. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she writes. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”It was there, in a $60,000-per-month Beverly Hills rehab, that Spears says a nurse showed her clips of fans representing the viral #FreeBritney movement that was questioning the need for the singer’s conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”She writes that “it felt like every day there was another documentary about me on yet another streaming service” (including one, “Framing Britney Spears,” by The New York Times). “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough,” she writes. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first.” She adds, “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”When her father was removed as her conservator, not long before the arrangement was ended entirely, “I felt relief sweep over me,” Spears writes. “The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life.” When she received the call from her new lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, that the conservatorship was officially over, Spears writes, she was at a resort in Tahiti.But Spears remains raw about the aftermath of the conservatorship, writing of her continued estrangement from much of her family. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship,” she writes. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage that they did.”The memoir is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA return to music?While some say the conservatorship saved Spears’s life, she writes, “No, not really. My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul.”Throughout her time performing a revue in Las Vegas, Spears writes, she was not allowed to update the show. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs, like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she writes. “It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than let me give my fans the best possible performance.”Now that she has the opportunity to create freely again, the singer writes, she does not feel motivated to do so, although she mentions a one-off collaboration with one of her musical heroes, Elton John, released last year. “Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears says. “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”Sarah Maslin Nir and Chris Kuo contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Glasgow: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Browse Scandi home goods and woolly Scottish knitwear
      Glaswegians have an appetite for sustainable shopping and for secondhand goods of all stripes. Hoos, next to the Botanic Gardens, stocks chic Scandi home goods, while the Glasgow Vintage Co., farther along Great Western Road from Papercup, has a thoughtful selection of second-hand Scottish knitwear alongside show-stopping coats and dresses from the 1970s. Up the hill on Otago Street, above Perch & Rest Coffee, Kelvin Apothecary sells a nice range of gifts including handmade Scottish soaps and wooden laundry and cleaning tools. In the cobbled Otago Lane is the chaotic Voltaire and Rousseau secondhand bookshop, with teetering, vertical book piles. Unlike many Glasgow shops, this store isn’t the most dog-friendly, because of the resident cat, BB, who supervises from his perch at the till. More

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      in Television

      ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ Casts Blind Actresses

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      In a new Netflix mini-series, the two actresses playing the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel’s protagonist, are blind, just like the character.On a set on the outskirts of Budapest, as the crew reset cameras for the next take, Nell Sutton, 7, sat up in bed and asked her director, Shawn Levy, a question:“How will you make it look like night?”Levy explained that the blue lights, set up around the room, would convey nighttime onscreen. Sutton was satisfied, and settled back into position, headphones on, to start a scene in which her character, Marie-Laure, is listening to the radio way past her bedtime. Her father, played by Mark Ruffalo, comes in and catches her. She tells him that she is learning about the magic of radio waves. “The most important light is the light you cannot see,” she says.Sutton, cast as the young Marie-Laure in “All the Light We Cannot See,” Netflix’s four-episode adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is blind. The actress playing the character 10 years later, Aria Mia Loberti, is also blind.In some ways the set, which took over a site next to an abandoned brewery last year for a few weeks over the summer, seemed like any other: People with walkie-talkies strode past equipment and craft services. But this production was the first time that blind lead characters in a major television show were being played by actors who were themselves blind, and the attention that went into accommodating those actors, and making the show as true as possible to the experiences of people who are blind, was significant.In the show, Daniel (Mark Ruffalo) catches his young daughter Marie-Laure (Nell Sutton) up past her bedtime listening to the radio.Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix“All the Light We Cannot See” is set in occupied France during World War II and follows Marie-Laure, an amateur radio enthusiast and the daughter of a master locksmith at Paris’s Museum of Natural History, and Werner (Louis Hofmann), a young German radio engineer who is drafted into a Nazi Wehrmacht squad to trace a radio signal that is broadcasting resistance messages. Marie-Laure is behind the signal, which she sends from Saint-Malo, a town on the northern coast of France, where she and her father moved while Paris was occupied.The book’s title refers to radio signals, and its protagonist’s sightlessness, but also to moral blindness, Doerr said in an interview on set. “In many ways, Marie-Laure is a much more capable-sighted character than Werner for much of the book,” he added.The adaptation was directed and produced by Levy (“Stranger Things”), and co-produced by Dan Levine (“Arrival.”) When the book came out in 2014, the producer Scott Rudin snapped up the adaptation rights to develop a feature film. Years later, when Levy learned that Rudin intended to let the rights lapse, he approached Doerr and proposed making a limited TV series instead. “That was much more exciting to me,” Doerr said. “The novel is like 500 pages; it would be hard to go for 120 minutes.”Levy said that he and Levine agreed early on that Marie-Laure, both as a child and as an adult, should be played by blind actors. It was a risk for several reasons, Levine said, not least because studios like to cast big names in lead roles. The show has big names — Ruffalo as Marie-Laure’s father, and Hugh Laurie as her uncle, Etienne — but the actors playing Marie-Laure would have to be unknowns.The director Shawn Levy, right, approached Anthony Doerr, left, to adapt Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a limited series.Chloe Ellingson for The New York TimesThe bigger issue was how to find them, since there are very few working blind actors. The producers and the casting directors did a global, open casting call, contacting schools and communities for the blind. “I thought, once we go down this road, we can’t go back,” Levine said. “We couldn’t say, ‘Well, we can’t find anyone.’”First, they cast Sutton, who was from a small town in Wales and who had starred in a campaign for a British charity, but had no other acting experience. Finding the older Marie-Laure took more time, and the production team saw hundreds of auditions before a tape from Loberti, a Ph.D. student at Penn State University who had no acting experience at all.The production’s secret weapon, Levy said, was their blindness consultant, Joe Strechay. Strechay has been legally blind since he was 19, and described himself in an interview in his trailer as now being “totally blind.” He previously worked with Netflix on the “Daredevil” series, and with Steven Knight, the writer of “All the Light,” on the Apple TV+ series “See.” “Having a lead character played by a person who’s legally blind, this is what we’ve been working for for a long time,” Strechay said.Strechay consulted on all of the adjustments the production made to the set, including adding tactile marks to the floor that Loberti and Sutton could feel to establish their positioning, giving the actors time on set ahead of shooting to acclimate, and writing the series title in Braille on the directors’ chairs and trailers.Joe Strechay worked as the blindness consultant on set, helping to make it accessible to the blind actors. Atsushi Nishijima/NetflixHe was also involved in a directorial capacity. Strechay watched all of the rushes with his seeing assistant, Cara Lee Hrdlitschka, who described the scenes to him in minute detail so that he could give feedback on how Marie-Laure’s blindness was being conveyed onscreen. “If someone who’s blind or low-vision does something over and over again, it becomes easy,” Strechay said. “So if it’s supposed to be them arriving in a place they’ve never been before, we look at all those little movements to make sure they’re accurate for that moment, for that character, in the story.”This led to frequent alterations, including to a scene in which Daniel teaches young Marie-Laure how to use a cane while walking down a busy street. Levine thought Daniel ought to be standing next to the curb, for Marie-Laure’s safety, but on set Strechay corrected him. Daniel would want it the other way around, he said, so Marie-Laure could orient herself by the sound of the traffic and feel the curb with her cane.These details mattered to Strechay, he said, because he has been generally unimpressed by media representations of blind people. Ruffalo played a blind person in the 2008 film “Blindness,” and remembered mentioning this to Strechay when they first met. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, I saw that. Nice try,’” Ruffalo said in an interview between takes.Sutton and Ruffalo in a scene from the show. Sutton, who is from a small town in Wales, had starred in a campaign for a British charity before the show, but had no other acting experience. Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix, via Associated PressStrechay has also helped the sighted actors understand how to interact with a blind person respectfully. In the scene in which Marie-Laure listens to late-night radio, Ruffalo, as Daniel, removed a pair of headphones from Sutton’s ears. Because of the headphones, she couldn’t hear Ruffalo when he entered the room.“I know not to startle her, to just give her a little touch to tell her I’m there,” he said, adding that onscreen, Daniel alerting Marie-Laure to his presence this way is also more authentic to the relationship between a blind child and her father. “It was important to me that we approach it this way,” Levy said, not only because it seemed right, but because it ultimately made for a better show.Working on this production has made the producers think differently about the primacy of sight in their work. One of the novel’s strengths is how it immerses the reader in Marie-Laure’s experience of the world: through smell, sound and touch. TV is a visual medium, but there are ways it can bring those other senses to the fore.“It’s so easy as a director to get image obsessed, shot by shot,” Levy said. “And there’s still that, because this is ultimately a television series that people will watch. Creating beautiful images is important to me, but my awareness of the tools that I have as a director is more 360.”He gave the example of the objects Marie-Laure has on her bedroom windowsill. “They wouldn’t be items chosen for prettiness, they’d be chosen for the sound they make in a breeze, or the texture against the fingertips,” Levy said. In several episodes, shots of Marie-Laure focus on her feet — walking over broken glass, navigating the streets of Saint-Malo with her cane — and so heightening the viewer’s sense of how she perceives the world through senses other than sight.Strechay said he hoped Sutton’s and Loberti’s performances would open the door for more blind actors. Sutton shared this hope, she said in an interview on set, adding that she was excited for other blind children to watch the series.“Sometimes I say your gift is your blindness,” she said. “And I say, even if you’re blind, you can still do anything.” More

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      Britney Spears Writes of Having Abortion While Dating Justin Timberlake

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      The pop star included the detail in her upcoming memoir “The Woman in Me”; Timberlake did not immediately respond.Britney Spears wrote in her much-awaited memoir that she had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake, according to excerpts released Tuesday by People Magazine.“Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy,” the excerpt reads, according to People. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”Representatives for Timberlake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Spears and Timberlake dated for a few years starting when she was 17 and he was 18, generating a tabloid frenzy as they made their ascents as two of the defining pop stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s.Their relationship became subject to public scrutiny again in 2021, after a New York Times documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” included a re-examination of the world’s reaction to their breakup, which was framed in the media as being Spears’s fault — partly because a music video by Timberlake implied that Spears had cheated on him. Without going into detail, Timberlake apologized to Spears in an Instagram post, saying that he had “failed” her.The memoir, called “The Woman in Me” and slated for release next week, is Spears’ first in-depth account of her life and career and is being published in the aftermath of her release from a legal conservatorship that governed her life for more than 13 years.The collection of excerpts released so far recall the heady days leading up to her getting a record deal at 15, her inner monologue as she held a live snake in the famous moment at the 2001 Video Music Awards, and her loss of passion for performing while under the strictures of the conservatorship, which was instituted amid a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008.“I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” the excerpt read. “As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.”The end of the conservatorship nearly two years ago was preceded by waves of outrage from fans who called themselves the #FreeBritney movement and held rallies in Los Angeles for the end of the legal arrangement, which was largely overseen by her father, James P. Spears.Since it ended, Spears, 41, has gotten married, separated from her husband and released two singles; she has shared bits of her rage about the conservatorship in Instagram posts, but her memoir will include the most significant — and organized — insights yet into her thoughts on the ways in which the minutiae of her life were under others’ control even as she worked as an international pop star.In the excerpts released so far, Spears rewinds back to her days as a preteen in “The Mickey Mouse Club” — recalling a truth-or-dare kiss with Timberlake, a fellow cast member — and to coming close to being cast as the lead opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook,” a role that ultimately went to Rachel McAdams.She recalls her childhood growing up with parents that she would later blame for exerting too much control over her life, telling a story about how her mother, Lynne Spears, would let her drink cocktails as an eighth grader. And she discusses the constant pressures surrounding her body, writing how, during the conservatorship years, her father “repeatedly” told her that she “looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it.”“I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,” one excerpt said. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”Spears had privately pushed for years to end the conservatorship, but she left no doubts about her position in 2021, when she told a judge in Los Angeles that the arrangement was “abusive,” saying that she was forced to work when she didn’t want to and prevented from removing her birth control device when she wanted to have more children. Her father has long maintained that the conservatorship had always been intended to protect his daughter from exploitation.The memoir pushes back fiercely on the idea of that the conservatorship was for her own good: She writes, according to an excerpt, that the arrangement made her into a kind of “child-robot,” a shadow of her former self, asserting that male artists had mismanaged their money and dealt with substance abuse problems without being treated as she had.“There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl,” one of the excerpts said, “but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.” More

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      Jada Pinkett Smith on Will Smith, Chris Rock and Her New Book, ‘Worthy’

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      For decades, Jada Pinkett Smith has been plagued by misconceptions: about the dynamics of her marriage to Will Smith, about her bond with Tupac Shakur and, most recently, about the Slap at last year’s Oscars. But in her revelation-heavy 400-page memoir, “Worthy,” these discordant threads, and others, will be pinned to the ground in no uncertain terms.Even devotees of her hugely popular web series “Red Table Talk” — where she and her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, delved into all manner of personal, social and cultural issues — will realize how little they know of Pinkett Smith. The book, out Tuesday from Dey Street, offered her a chance to provide context for a layered, complex journey that can’t be mined in 45 minutes at the Red Table, she told me in September at the headquarters of Westbrook, the entertainment company she founded with Will Smith in 2019.“How do you captivate people, people who think they already know your story?” said Pinkett Smith, who turned 52 a few days after we sat there sunk into couches, looking out over an atypically drizzly Southern California sky.In the book’s second to last chapter, titled “The Holy Joke, The Holy Slap, and Holy Lessons,” Pinkett Smith chronicles that infamous Oscars night, one of the most surreal of her life — when Smith stunned the world by marching onstage and slapping Chris Rock after Rock made an unscripted joke about Pinkett Smith’s closely cropped hair. She has alopecia, a hair-loss condition, which Rock has said he was unaware of. (It was not his first joke at her expense from the Oscars stage.) After returning to his seat, Smith yelled up to Rock: “Keep my wife’s name out of your [expletive] mouth!” Minutes later, Smith won the best actor Oscar for his role in “King Richard.”She, like millions of TV viewers, scrambled to grasp what had happened. But part of her surprise came from a different place than those who’d tuned into Hollywood’s big night — it was at hearing Smith call her his wife. “Even though we hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time, I said, ‘I’m his wife now. We in this.’ That’s just who I am,” she told me, adding: “That’s the gift I have to offer, like, ‘Hey, I’m riding with you.’”Smith and Rock had decades of disrespect between them, starting in the late 1980s, before either of them knew her, Pinkett Smith points out. “I didn’t judge Chris, I didn’t judge Will,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a spiritual clash.’”“It didn’t have anything to do with Jada,” Banfield Norris told me during a video interview. “That was really Will’s pain.”And he was in tremendous pain, and fragile, Pinkett Smith said. He had recently finished filming “Emancipation,” a hellish Civil War-era drama that was psychologically tormenting for Smith, who plays an enslaved man. (Smith has said that he “got twisted up” in the role, and “lost track of how far I went.”) “I knew in my heart that he needed me by his side more than ever,” Pinkett Smith said.Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith at the Oscars ceremony in 2022. In her book, she writes, “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife.”Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesAs for Rock’s Netflix special earlier this year in which he mocks Smith and Pinkett Smith, she said she isn’t bitter, but she was hurt. “I remember my heart piercing, my heart cracking, and I remember my feelings being so hurt,” she told me. “And then I remember being able to smile and wish him well at the same time.” (Among the many tidbits shared by Pinkett Smith in her book was that Rock had asked her on a date when he thought she and Smith had split. She corrected him, and they shared a laugh, she writes. Rock’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)Pinkett Smith also unpacks the vitriol she received for rolling her eyes at Rock’s joke — a reaction that some suggested spurred Smith to storm the stage — to illustrate how women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife,” she writes. “Blaming the woman is nothing new.”“How is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and culpable at the same time?” she asks. “I had to think about the narrative out there of me as the adulterous wife, who had now driven her husband to madness with the command of one look. I had to take responsibility for my part in aiding that false narrative’s existence. I also had to chuckle at the idea that the world would think I wielded that amount of control over Will Smith. If I had that amount of control over Will, chile, my life would have been entirely different these damn near three decades. Real talk!”By adulterous, Pinkett Smith is referring to her relationship with August Alsina, which she called an “entanglement” on a 2020 episode of “Red Table Talk” where — after the information surfaced, becoming a public spectacle — she and Smith hashed out the already years-old chapter of their lives. The conversation ended with laughter and a fist-bump to their slogan: “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”The truth is the Smiths weren’t together in the traditional sense when she was with Alsina, nor are they now. But they are not in an open marriage, nor are they uncoupled, polyamorous or divorced. They are something else altogether: life partners in family and business, long maintaining an agreement they call “a relationship of transparency.” In recent years, they’ve lived separately. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she bought her own place, moving out of their Calabasas compound.In a way, her new home, also in Calabasas, closes the loop on a dream that started before they dated, when she was renovating an “old-world tiny” farmhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore that sat on an expanse of land that she envisioned filling with rescue dogs and cats, and a horse for her mother. During that time, she’d gotten a phone call from Will Smith, who’d recently split from his first wife. “You seeing anybody?” he’d asked her. “Uhm, no,” she replied. “Good,” he said. “You seeing me now.”Ultimately, it’s family that anchors their union. It’s the reason they married in 1997, while she was pregnant with their son, Jaden. “We wanted to create a family we never had, and we did that. And we enjoy our family,” she said. “For us, our marriage is like a cornerstone of that for now. Who knows in 10 years.”“We’ve tried everything to get away from each other, and we just don’t,” she added, laughing.From left, Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, Trey Smith, Will Smith and Jaden Smith in a family portrait from the early 2000s.via The Jada Pinkett Smith ArchiveShortly after that 2020 episode, Pinkett Smith, in pursuit of “clarity and emotional sobriety,” became what she calls an “urban nun of sorts.” She meditates and reads texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran or the Bible daily, and abstains from sex, alcohol, violent entertainment and unnecessary spending.Pinkett Smith is centered and self-assured, yet being hitched to Smith’s bullet train has made it almost impossible for her trajectory not to be affected by his.“That’s not unique to me,” she stressed. “That’s just a patriarchal construct.” Not to say that it hasn’t irked her, particularly when it’s interfered with her professional identity: Harvey Weinstein, for example, once wouldn’t pursue a project of hers unless Smith attached his name to it, she said. “I’m like, pause, I’ve been doing this before,” she remembered thinking. “That’s when it would bother me. It was like, I’ve been doing stuff before I married this dude.”On that Friday morning last month, Pinkett Smith seemed to be channeling her younger self, when she was a regular at Baltimore clubs like Fantasy and Signals in the 1980s, earning a reputation as a formidable battle dancer — mixing hip-hop and house, the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. With pink hair, Girbaud baggy jeans and fresh white Reebok Princess sneakers, she was “considered tomboy-cute,” she writes. “They didn’t see me coming.” When we met, she was still rocking white Reeboks, though well worn; a hot pink Telfar tracksuit; a cropped blonde pixie and an assortment of earrings framing her makeup-free face. Small in size, with an expansive presence.“Worthy” documents an eventful life, which she recounts chronologically, book-ended by a harrowing story. “This isn’t going to be a fluffy journey,” she wants readers to know. “I’m going to drop you right into one of the darkest moments of my life, and then we’ll backtrack.” In despair after her 40th birthday, in 2011, she began scouting California cliffs that might be suitable to drive off, something higher and steeper than what she’d seen on Mulholland Drive. Somewhere that would appear accidental. She’d tried to adhere to the rules of life but was empty: “Those boxes I’d been checking had not delivered the gifts that had been promised.”“There’s been so much that has gone on in Jada’s life that she kept close to the chest,” Banfield Norris said. “Most people just had no idea what was going on and the pain that she was suffering. I had no idea.”“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that,” Pinkett Smith said. “So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesA conversation with the father of two of Jaden’s friends presented Pinkett Smith with a potential new way to heal. He told her of his life-changing experience on ayahuasca, and she’d soon set out on a four-night trip. The potent psychedelic presented her with a vision of a panther that would lead her deep into the jungles of her mind. At a critical juncture, she was plunged into a pit of sneering snakes who taunted her. “Mother Aya,” she writes, “is showing me all the unloved parts of myself needing light and love.” After that experience, she’d never again contemplate suicide, she writes. Pinkett Smith continues to integrate ayahuasca into her life. About a year after the 2022 Oscars, she held a friends-and-family session — Smith included. “You’ll have to cut off your spirit’s wrist to break free of our Divine handcuffs,” he told her as it wound down.The memoir, Smith said in an email, kind of woke him up. She had lived a life more on the edge than he’d realized, and she is more resilient, clever and compassionate than he’d understood. “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life,” he wrote, “a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”The situation seems ripe for a vulnerability hangover, I suggested to Pinkett Smith.“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that. So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true,” she said.“What people think of me as putting myself out there, I don’t think of it that way,” she added, after some contemplation. “After you’ve had two [9] millimeters to your head, and you survive that, your capacity totally just …” she paused to make an explosion sound.Pinkett Smith writes of a few brushes with death early in her life when, as a teenager in Baltimore, she found success selling drugs, with aspirations to become a “queenpin.” It was a “distorted reality,” she writes.Pinkett Smith eventually moved away from dealing and her hometown. She attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to Hollywood, where she’d become best known as an actress, starring in the “Cosby Show” spinoff “A Different World” (a role Debbie Allen wrote for her) and in movies like “Set It Off,” “Menace II Society” and “Scream 2,” then later “Collateral,” the “Matrix” sequels and “Girls Trip.”The memoir introduces people who populated her world along the way: her grandmother Marion, a world traveler and freethinker who significantly shaped young Jada; her absentee father, Robsol Pinkett, a poet and addict who zigzagged through her life; Banfield Norris, a nurse who had Jada as a teenager and would struggle with heroin addiction; and a bevy of friends, especially Tupac Shakur, whom she met at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Their friendship would be the deepest of her life, and his murder in 1996 was one in a string of sudden losses that would contribute to Pinkett Smith’s depression.She has never talked extensively about her relationship with Shakur before. People have long assumed that it was romantic, but it wasn’t. In “Worthy,” she playfully recollects a time when they’d tried to kiss as teenagers: They’d both recoiled in disgust and dissolved into laughter.A 16-year-old Jada Pinkett, right, with her friends Keesha Bond and Tupac Shakur. “We were both orphans in a certain manner,” she said of Shakur.via The Jada Pinkett Smith Archive“We were both orphans in a certain manner, and we really tried to compensate for that with one another in our relationship and really take care of each other the best we knew how,” she told me, just weeks before an arrest was made in his death. “We just had a deep loyalty.”“Pac’s whole thing was because I knew him when — when he wasn’t Tupac,” she added. “The guy who was poor, the conditions that he lived in. And I was rocking with him anyway.”In “Worthy,” she reveals that he’d proposed to her in a letter while incarcerated at Rikers in the mid-1990s for groping a fan. “Did Pac love me?” she asked. “Yeah he loved me! But I promise you, had we got married, he’d have divorced my ass as soon as he walked through them damn gates and got out.”He just needed someone to do time with him, she said, and Pinkett Smith’s ride-or-die mentality is carved in her bones. It’s the same instinct that kicked in during the Oscars debacle.Threads of loyalty, protection and safety wind their way throughout the memoir, and Pinkett Smith implores readers to learn from her hard-fought lessons. Each chapter ends with what I started to call “guidance pages.” Look inward, she urges, and ask yourself questions like: “Can you recognize patterns in your life and relationships that stem from inherited trauma cycles?” Each of these pages opens with a quote meaningful to Pinkett Smith, whether it be from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” a defining book for her; the poet Ntozake Shange; the psychoanalyst Carl Jung; or the actor Steve Martin.“My biggest hope for the book is that it’ll just be oxygen for people who need it,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in, because it’s intense stuff.”“I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in,” Pinkett Smith said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAs we prepared to say goodbye, the sun broke though, transforming the gray vista below into a California postcard. She was reminded of perhaps the wisest words passed to her, about 15 years ago, from the actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee: “Laugh now, because you are going to laugh later.”“When she said it to me, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about,” Pinkett Smith recalled. “I was like, laugh now? This [expletive] ain’t funny.”But lately, the meaning of those words hits hard. “Ruby was right,” Pinkett Smith said. “A lot of dark times that I can look at and smile at.”“At the end of the day, when you’re on your deathbed — or Chris is on his deathbed or Will is on his deathbed or whoever — all this doesn’t matter,” she said, gesturing to something beyond what was in the room. “And so just learning how to exist in that pocket right now. Not waiting until I’m on my deathbed. Let’s just do it right now.” More

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      Book Review: ‘MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,’ by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards

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      “The Reign of Marvel Studios” captures how movies based on comic-book properties came to dominate pop culture. At least until now.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin EdwardsHollywood doesn’t believe in immortals. From Mary Pickford to the MGM musical, Golden Age cowboys to teenage wizards, the city worships its gods only until their box-office power dims. So it feels audacious — if not foolhardy — to open “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” and find its authors, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards, declaring that it’s difficult to imagine a future where the Disney-owned superhero industrial complex “didn’t run forever.” Even Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, has yet to engineer a perpetual motion machine.Yet the three veteran pop culture journalists behind this detailed accounting of the company’s ascendancy have the numbers to support it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a constellation of solo superhero tales mixed with all-star team-ups, including four installments of “The Avengers,” is Hollywood’s most successful movie franchise of all time — 32 films that have grossed a combined $29.5 billion. By comparison, the book points out that the “Star Wars” series, Marvel’s nearest rival, has notched only 12 films and $10.3 billion.Turning the pages — which are devoid of the usual, and unnecessary, glossy photo spreads — one realizes that superheroes are an X-ray lens into the last decade and a half of Hollywood disruption. Every upheaval gets a mention: corporate mergers; profit-losing streaming services; Chinese censorship; digitally scanned actors; social media cancellations; #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; the resurgence of a production-to-distribution vertical pipeline that hadn’t been legal since the 1948 Paramount Decree. Pity there’s no room to examine each in depth.First, the origin story. In the ’90s, the former overseer of Marvel Enterprises, Ike Perlmutter (let’s give him the comic book nickname “The Pennypincher”), empowered his entertainment division to license its biggest stars for cheap, scattering Spider-Man, Hulk and the X-Men across other studios in service of selling more toys. (“MCU” familiarizes us with the marketing term “toyetic.”)The saga of who and what changed the company’s direction involves chancy gambles, pivotal lunches at Mar-a-Lago, rivalrous committees and the waning of Perlmutter’s influence, amid the waxing of Kevin Feige, the book’s hero, a five-time U.S.C. Film School reject who started his production career teaching Meg Ryan to log in to AOL for the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” To establish their independence, the writers mention at the top that Disney, now Marvel’s parent company, asked people not to give them an interview. Many already had, or chose to anyway, although most shy away from on-the-record quotes about the really salacious stuff. No one will say that the rumored $400-million-plus Robert Downey Jr. earned across nine films factored into the decision to kill off Tony Stark, but the innuendo is thicker than Iron Man’s armored exoskeleton.Signs that the Marvel era is nearing the end of its cultural dominance are everywhere, including in this book. Despite the authors’ rah-rah intro (there are no bad Marvel films, they claim, only “a mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces”), they wisely sense that the library’s cinema history section will eventually file Feige next to John Ford as filmmakers who defined the spirit of a moment.“MCU” concedes that three of Marvel’s worst-reviewed films were all made in the last three years, just as one of the studio’s cornerstone creatives, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn, decamped to run DC Studios, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.Meanwhile, the churn of faster, cheaper superhero content for Disney+ has led the studio’s weary visual-effects workers (whose exhaustion is well documented here) to vote to unionize. Fandom has become a Sisyphean labor as never-ending spinoff series force a once-rapt audience to pick and choose which story lines they’ll bother to follow.To those seismic grumbles, I’ll add another: Today’s teenagers were toddlers when Marvel first seized the zeitgeist. What generation wants to dig the same stuff as their parents?Marvel’s inescapable obsolescence is the best argument for “MCU”; the genre should be studied with the same rigor as film noir. The book’s admiration for Marvel movies works in its favor, freeing the writers to skip straight to the gossip, like the relative who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving to whisper about your cousin’s divorce. If you didn’t understand the plot of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” before, they’re not wasting space explaining it here.Instead, the book will satisfy your appetite for Marvel’s endless contract negotiations with Sony over the character rights for Spider-Man, which is easy when one encounter climaxes with the former Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal hurling a sandwich — and an expletive — at Feige. Battles over screenplay credits are even juicier. That’s where you’ll find the most inventive insults.Elsewhere, one has to read several paragraphs past a doctor willing to estimate that “50 to 75 percent” of Marvel’s stars are Hulked-out on performance-enhancing drugs to learn that he has not, in fact, treated any of the studio’s actors. While the hustle to wrap things up before the tome turns into “Captain America: Civil War and Peace” means racing through the most recent projects in a blur, earlier chapters are able to dish the dirt, like whose script notes triggered the collapse of Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” and why Feige refused to continue collaborating with the original Bruce Banner, Edward Norton.After all, the authors know a saga is only as exciting as its villain.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios | By Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards | 528 pp. | Liveright | $35 More