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      in Theater

      ‘The Outsiders’ Review: Growing Pains Both Brutal and Poetic

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      At La Jolla Playhouse, the musical adaptation of the novel and film has considerable appeal, but is weighed down by too many characters and themes.LA JOLLA, Calif. — No one sings during the rumble scene in “The Outsiders,” a new musical at La Jolla Playhouse adapted from S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel of teenage alienation and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film version. The nine-person orchestra — guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, some mournful strings — stays silent, too. Instead, young bodies, about 20 of them, supply their own percussive music, falling to the cork-covered floor, groaning into their mikes, as stage rain soaks them through.This violence is for show, of course. Those kicks and punches don’t actually connect. But the brawl, at least at first, is not aestheticized. It’s a fistfight, not a dance — brutal, futile, wet, raw and sad.“The Outsiders,” despite its considerable appeal, can’t yet bear too much reality. Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities. Directed by Danya Taymor from a book by Adam Rapp, with gorgeous, mournful music and lyrics from Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, of Jamestown Revival, and Justin Levine, this La Jolla version (and I’m sentimental enough to hope that there will soon be other versions) is a musical with growing pains, currently serving too many characters, too many themes, too many styles. But when it reaches its full height, it might really be something to see.Largely faithful to the book and for better or worse, to the film, which a New York Times critic once witheringly described as “a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters,” the show is set in 1967 Tulsa, Okla. Amid an environment of vacant lots and broken-down cars (the set, inventive and peculiar, is by Amp featuring Tatiana Kahvegian), it maps the increasingly bloody conflict between the Greasers, the East side have-nots who inspire the title, and the Socs, short for “socialites,” the West side haves.In the book and the movie, both gangs are white and all male. Here the Greasers have been effortlessly yet thoughtfully diversified. (Sarafina Bush’s vivid, considered costumes keep the gang distinctions clear.) There is at least one other significant departure, involving the death of a beloved character, but this, too, is purposeful and apt.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.The overarching concern of “The Outsiders” are the ways in which these teenagers, largely abandoned by their elders, misunderstand the world and one another. At the febrile center of the story is Ponyboy Curtis (played here by Brody Grant), an orphaned 14-year-old who lives with his older brothers, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Ryan Vasquez), both of whom have left school to support him.A sweet kid with a poet’s soul, Ponyboy stays up late reading Charles Dickens and glories in sunsets. “Robert Frost is quite talented,” he tells Cherry Valance (Piper Patterson), the Soc goddess he meets at a drive-in. (Frost’s brief ode to youth and decay, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” runs through “The Outsiders” as a leitmotif.) But when a phalanx of drunken Socs attack him and his best friend, Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch), Ponyboy finds himself enmeshed in the local violence.From left, Ryan Vasquez, Brody Grant, Jason Schmidt and Daryl Tofa in the musical, directed by Danya Taymor.Rich Soublet IIThe great allure of the book, and now the musical, are the big feelings that it illustrates and invites. Hinton wrote the book while still in high school and maybe because she was a woman (the S.E. stands for Susan Eloise), she articulated for her male characters rich and ardent emotional lives, which fuel the musical’s plaintive score. Though “The Outsiders” — in every form — argues that it is often easier to hate than to love and understand, it does not hesitate to show the passionate relationships (never erotic, but often with a force that borders the romantic) among the Greasers.The show makes a few correctable missteps. An opening number, directly referencing the opening lines of the book and with projections by Tal Yarden, focuses on Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” an odd distraction (and a tenuous reference for the under-50 crowd) when we haven’t yet met the principal characters.Only in the third number, “Grease Got a Hold on You,” does the story’s engine finally catch. (Given the preexistence of “Grease” and “Hairspray,” an alternate title for the show could have been “Pomade.”) There’s also an incidence of hand-holding, pushing a platonic friendship toward the romantic, that feels strained, especially given Hinton’s stalwart displacement of sexuality. A climactic scene involving a fire is not yet convincingly staged.There are trickier hitches, too. This is Ponyboy’s story, yet he is hardly its most compelling character. And despite Grant’s earnest, lush-voiced performance, the eye moves inexorably toward other figures, like Vasquez’s Darrel and Patterson’s Cherry and Lakota-Lynch’s Johnny and especially Da’Von T. Moody’s Dallas, a muscled hood with a gangster’s pose and a big, wounded heart beneath it, who can twirl a baseball bat like a majorette’s baton.Though Taymor, aided by the design team and the choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, manages some striking and playful images, the relationship between the real and the symbolic remains uneasy. (Are we always in the vacant lot? Is this some junkyard passion play? Why is a car now vertical?) And “The Outsiders” sometimes throttles its own exuberance. Taymor (“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” “Pass Over”) hasn’t yet worked out how to offer a work that feels dangerous and true without flattening the pleasures that a musical can provide.If “The Outsiders” means to steer its muscle cars toward Broadway, which it should, further development will almost certainly smooth these variances in focus and approach. Even now, such discord has a way of receding when the youthful, gifted performers are freed to do what they do best: to move and to sing.Musically, the score is polyglot, borrowing confidently from folk, bluegrass and rockabilly traditions, with occasional gestures toward soul and Broadway balladry. This is a story about conflict, internal and external, but it also allows, in songs such as “Great Expectations” and “Stay Gold,” for luxuriant and surprising concordance. For the hopeless, for the loveless, for the misunderstood, which is all of us, Greaser and Soc, young and old, “The Outsiders” offers the promise of harmony.The OutsidersThrough April 2 at La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, Calif.; lajollaplayhouse.org. Running time: 2 hours and 35 minutes. More

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      in Music

      Book Review: ‘The Farewell Tour,’ by Stephanie Clifford

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      In her second novel, “The Farewell Tour,” Stephanie Clifford follows a veteran singer who’s wrapping up a long career on her own terms.THE FAREWELL TOUR, by Stephanie Clifford“The Farewell Tour,” by Stephanie Clifford, is the story of Lillian Waters, a fictional country music singer in the vein of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. I loved Clifford’s debut novel, “Everybody Rise,” a vibrant explosion of a book set among graduates of elite prep schools in 2006 Manhattan, so I was eager to follow Clifford into the world of what one character calls “hillbilly music.”As the novel opens, Lillian (also known by her stage name, “Water Lil”) is hitting the road one last time, planning a summer tour through “the county-fair circuit” and ending up in the town she fled as a child, Walla Walla, Wash. Unbeknown to her fans and band members, Lillian has a polyp on her vocal cord and plans to retire for good after Walla Walla; she’s not interested in treatments that could prolong her career. “As for surgery,” she says, “I knew one gal with the prettiest voice, sweet and clear as a flute, who went under the knife and sounded like Orson Welles afterward.”Lillian is 56 years old in 1980 and washed up — her life full of struggles, mistakes and unrequited love, without much hope on the horizon. But as we follow Lillian’s farewell tour, we are also given alternating chapters that bring us back in time, starting in 1924. Water Lil’s rise to stardom is breathtaking; I enjoyed being immersed in a world of suede and fringed costumes, cowboy boots and giant wigs. I appreciated the look into the process of songwriting and one woman’s struggle to earn a place in the man’s world of Nashville in the late 1960s and ’70s, not to mention the even steeper hills faced by Lillian’s nonwhite friends and fellow musicians.“The Farewell Tour” is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford’s gift for description. Of Bakersfield, Calif., in 1960, Lillian says, “In the day, the light was harsh and flat and brought out the scuffs and dust.” At night, though, “When the heat receded and the sky grew dim, Bakersfield came alive in neon and rhythm guitar.”An account of Water Lil’s early shows reads like a found poem: “We played the Hidy-Hody Ranch Bar, and the Circle-M Saloon, the Round-Up Rodeo and the Boiler Room, the Gunshot Lounge and Gunshot Bar and Gunshot Club.” When she checks in with her manager Coy Roy via pay phone, he reminds her to sing about topics like “lost love,” which put her in a sympathetic light. “That meant: no songs about the road, about ambition, about men I tumbled into hotel beds with when I was drunk enough.”Even as her tour stops leap off the page, Water Lil herself remains a cipher. Perhaps this is inevitable — she has spent her life dressing up in costumes and writing songs about a false persona, one created for commercial appeal and stripped of agency and messy desires. But something breaks loose when she visits Tule Lake, Calif., where the parents of Lillian’s Japanese American fiddle player, Kaori, were interned during World War II. When Kaori asks why Lillian didn’t do anything to protest the internment camps, she responds, “I didn’t know what to do.” And thinks: “I didn’t have a good answer for her. My generation didn’t protest like hers did, but I wasn’t sure if it was because we weren’t aware that we could, or because we were scared to risk what we had, or we — I — just didn’t care enough to get involved.”In the final pages of the novel, Lillian dares to acknowledge that her beloved West is an imperfect place: “It has been flawed since Juan Pérez and Charles William Barkley thought it needed to be discovered. Since Vancouver and Gray sailed in, and Lewis and Clark came overland and started naming things in their own language, after their own people.” And so on, all the way to Kaori’s parents’ internment, to the stories of “all-Black regiments and redlined neighborhoods.”With only two shows left, Water Lil begins to find her purpose: “I could brush the snow from the crevasses, and show how we, imperfect, broken, lost, gone, silenced, were always part of the story.” Water Lil may be saying farewell, but after she performs the song she has written about her own life, she has an epiphany: “And then I knew where I would go, what I would do. For in the end, I had sung my song.”Amanda Eyre Ward is the best-selling author of “The Jetsetters” and “The Lifeguards.” Her new novel, “What We Did for Love,” will be published in 2024.THE FAREWELL TOUR | By Stephanie Clifford | 352 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $29.99 More

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      in Movies

      Richard Anobile, Chronicler of the Marx Brothers, Dies at 76

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      He produced many books about film. But Groucho Marx tried to stop distribution of one collaborative effort because he didn’t like seeing his salty and insulting remarks in print.Richard Anobile, a prolific creator of film books whose friendly collaboration with the anarchic comedian Groucho Marx on a project called “The Marx Bros. Scrapbook” turned sour when Mr. Marx sued to stop its distribution after reading his unedited quoted remarks in print, died on Feb. 10 in Toronto. He was 76.His wife, Elizabeth (Golfman) Anobile, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Anobile (pronounced a-NO-buh-lay) first entered the world of Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo Marx with the publication in 1971 of “Why a Duck?” (the title is based on wordplay between Groucho and Chico over the word “viaduct” in the 1929 movie “The Cocoanuts”). The book combined blowups of frames from scenes in eight of the comedy team’s films with the dialogue that accompanied them. Groucho Marx wrote the introduction.“The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” published two years later, was a more ambitious project, and it brought Mr. Anobile into closer contact with Groucho, then in his 80s, through an introduction by his agent.In addition to excerpts from his many hours of interviews with Mr. Marx, the book included photographs and illustrations, as well as playbills, reviews, advertisements, family scrapbook entries and pages from film scripts. Mr. Anobile also interviewed the other two surviving Marx brothers, Gummo (who left the group long before they started making movies) and Zeppo, as well as friends like the comedian Jack Benny.The film critic Roger Ebert called “The Marx Bros. Scrapbook” “the all-time definitive work on the subject.”Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, the film critic Roger Ebert called the book “the all-time definitive work on the subject.”But Mr. Marx regretted the publication of his raw opinions of people like his brother Chico (“All he could do was shoot the piano keys”); Noël Coward and Truman Capote (whom he tarred with gay slurs); George M. Cohan (“a no-good Irish son of a bitch”); S.J. Perelman, who contributed to the scripts of two Marx Brothers films (“I hated the son of a bitch and he had a head as big as my desk”); and Marilyn Monroe, who had a small role in “Love Happy” (1949), the brothers’ last film.In late 1973, Mr. Marx sought an injunction in New York State Supreme Court to stop the distribution of the book, although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter” and that Mr. Anobile had assured him that he was going to turn his raw language into respectable prose.Whatever it was he had said — to paraphrase a song he had sung in “Horse Feathers” (1932) — he was against it.To prove that Mr. Marx said what he had said, Mr. Anobile brought the tapes of their interviews into court. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1974, he recalled cautioning Mr. Marx not to say anything during the interviews that he did not want to see published.He added, “He signed a jacket of the book, ‘This is a wonderful book, Richard, thanks to you.’”Mr. Marx — who staged one of his depositions in a Manhattan hotel suite wearing a shirt patterned with the titles of Marx Brothers films and bearing the slogan “Money talks” — never got the injunction or the $15 million in damages that he had demanded.Mr. Anobile told the blog Brain Dead and Loving It in 2018 that the case was settled after Mr. Marx’s death in 1977.Groucho Marx in 1964. He sought an injunction in 1973 to stop the distribution of “The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter.”W. Breeze/Evening Standard, via Getty ImagesRichard Joseph Anobile was born on Feb. 6, 1947, in the Bronx. His father, Joseph, was a government worker; his mother, Isabella (Lanzella) Anobile, was a homemaker who sometimes worked in a bakery. He grew up watching old comedies on television and studied film at the City College of New York; he said he directed one film there but grew disenchanted with the courses and got a job in the paid obituaries department of a newspaper.Another job, with the film collector Raymond Rohauer, led him to work on retrospectives of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy at the supermarket heir Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art in Manhattan. In 1969, he published his first book — “Drat: Being the Encapsulated View of Life by W.C. Fields in His Own Words” — about the comedian with the bulbous nose and misanthropic screen persona who starred in films like “It’s a Gift” (1934) and “The Bank Dick” (1940).It was the start of an unusual publishing career. Mr. Anobile went on to combine movie frames and dialogue in books that ambitiously reconstructed complete films, including “Casablanca,” “Psycho,” Stagecoach,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Frankenstein” and “Play It Again, Sam.” He used the same formula to describe “verbal and visual gems” in the films of W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.He continued to publish into the 1980s, when he realized that people were more likely to watch a film on videocassette than experience it through a book-length, frame-by-frame reconstruction.He soon moved into television production — where he had wanted to be since he was in college — and worked largely as a postproduction supervisor on movies like “Liberace: Behind the Music” (1988) and “Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story” (2004), and series including “Murdoch Mysteries.” He was also the associate producer of some TV projects and, last year, a producer of episodes of “The Kings of Napa,” a series about the wine business on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN channel.In addition to his wife, Mr. Anobile is survived by his stepdaughter, Tamara Kruger. His two previous marriages ended in divorce.When Mr. Anobile began work on “Why a Duck?,” he recalled, he envisioned creating a short, simple book, like “Drat,” filled with quotations and stills from Marx Brothers films. Instead, it became a detailed 288-page book, with scenes matched to their dialogue.“I became so involved with their comedy that I began having guilt feelings about hatcheting my way through their films, plucking one line here and one line there and pawning it off as representative of their humor,” he wrote in “Why a Duck?” “So, faced by the bulk of what I had already accumulated, I decided to do what no one had tried — compile as complete a volume as possible by attempting a literal translation from celluloid to paper.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ and the Ballad of Making Rock ’n’ Roll TV

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      It was the 36th day of what was supposed to be a 30-day shoot in New Orleans, but the cast and crew of the rock drama “Daisy Jones & the Six” were still at it.They were filming a scene, set in 1977, in which the actors Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, as the lead singers of the band Daisy Jones & the Six, unwind backstage after performing on “Saturday Night Live” for the first time. Half-empty liquor bottles, wood paneling, smoke-machine haze and framed photos of the Coneheads and Gilda Radner surround them.Claflin, who plays Billy Dunne, asks Keough, in the title role of Daisy Jones: “How’d it feel?”“It felt good, yeah,” she says, “I mean, not as good as cocaine.”Before New Orleans, the cast and crew had filmed for 69 days in the Los Angeles area, and afterward some of them headed to Athens and the Greek island of Hydra for a key episode. Production on “Daisy Jones & the Six” was initially scheduled to begin in April 2020, and even after it was postponed because of Covid for about 18 months, it had to be suspended a few more times. Despite daily testing protocols and mask mandates, the reality of filming concerts with hundreds of extras, hookup scenes and booze-and-Quaalude-fueled bacchanals had taken a toll.“Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll is hard to do in a pandemic,” said Lauren Neustadter, who with Reese Witherspoon executive-produced the series.“Daisy Jones & the Six” tells the story of a band’s rise to sold-out-stadium-level fame thanks to a hit album, “Aurora.” The musicians make and promote “Aurora” as Daisy, Billy and his wife, Camila Dunne (Camila Morrone), try to navigate the sharp edges of a love triangle.It’s based on a 2019 novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid that has sold more than 1 million e-book and print copies, according to NPD BookScan, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Part of its appeal is the storytelling approach: Reid creates an oral history that reads like nonfiction, populating it with musicians and record producers who reminisce against the backdrop of beater vans, tour buses and Sunset Strip stages.“Daisy Jones & the Six” begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 3.Amazon StudiosTo answer many Google searches: The Six is not a real band, though it’s inspired by Fleetwood Mac and others. Still, that uncertainty — as well as the will-they-or-won’t-they tension between Keough’s and Claflin’s characters — is something Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, and Amazon Studios hope will grip viewers when “Daisy Jones & the Six” begins streaming its 10 episodes on Amazon Prime Video, starting March 3.For Hello Sunshine, “Daisy Jones” could affirm its book-to-screen dominance after its successes with the film “Where the Crawdads Sing” and the Netflix series “From Scratch.” For Reid, whose books have become coveted source material in Hollywood, this will be the first adaptation to reach audiences, so its popularity is likely to influence the market for her material. For the up-and-coming actors in the cast, many of whom sidelined other projects to stick with “Daisy Jones” amid its realigned shooting schedule, it’s a chance to break out.The built-in fan base that the book provides will be a boon for the series but also brings its own anxieties. “There is for me a desire to make the fans happy and bring to life this book that has lived in their hearts and in all of our hearts for so long,” Morrone said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a project that has this many eyes on it.”It is one of the first projects that the head of Amazon Studios, Jennifer Salke, ordered after Jeff Bezos hired her in 2018. “You have to make noise,” she said, discussing her early days at the company and her reaction to the “Daisy Jones” pitch. “You have to be able to do something that is different. It can’t feel like a show that you could just get everywhere.”“Daisy Jones” promised to deliver that, she said, and Amazon stood by the production as it waited out the restrictions of the pandemic.Covid delays provided a significant benefit: more than a year for the actors to take music lessons. Before then, the most noteworthy musical credential any of them had was that Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter.‘I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow’If streaming-television economics are under pressure, as layoffs at Disney, Netflix and other companies indicate, you would not know it from Amazon’s investment in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”The 1970s-era sets are designed to shag-carpeted verisimilitude. For a week, the production took over the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, using vintage pornography as a visual reference when they transformed the Viper Room into the seedy Filthy McNasty’s. The principal characters alone required 1,500 wardrobe changes in the first half of production. With other characters and extras, the production sometimes needed 250 outfits a night.About 25 original songs have been written by Blake Mills, who wrote some in collaboration with others, including Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford and Chris Weisman. Eleven of those songs make up “Aurora,” which Atlantic Records will release when the series begins streaming. The first track, “Regret Me,” dropped earlier this month and by mid-February had garnered about 2 million streams on Spotify.Even the show’s P.R. efforts hark back to the era of big-studio budgets: More than 30 publicists were involved (or hoped to be involved) in the reporting, photographing and fact-checking of this article. The photo shoot drew multiple entourages.But the TV version of “Daisy Jones” started small, with a wife and husband in Los Angeles.The husband is Scott Neustadter, a screenwriter whose credits include the 2009 movie “500 Days of Summer,” which he wrote with Michael H. Weber.From left, Scott Neustadter, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Lauren Neustadter.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOne day in 2017, Neustadter’s representatives got a call from Brad Mendelsohn, Reid’s manager, asking if the screenwriter might want to take a look at a manuscript about a fictional 1970s rock band whose trajectory and interpersonal drama resembled Fleetwood Mac’s. Neustadter, a fan of that era’s music, started reading it that morning.He got in touch later that day with his wife, Lauren Neustadter, who had just been hired by Witherspoon to lead Hello Sunshine’s film and TV division. He reminded her that he and Witherspoon had once talked about being captivated by Stevie Nicks. “I knew this was a passion of Reese’s,” he said.Lauren spent a few hours reading Reid’s manuscript. Then she interrupted her boss’s vacation. “I need you to bring your iPad to the beach tomorrow morning,” she remembered emailing Witherspoon, “because this book is so good, and it’s going to be so competitive.”The next morning, she said, Witherspoon replied: “I’m obsessed.”‘I have prepared my whole life to write this’Days later, the Neustadters hatched a plan.Lauren took Reid to breakfast at Hugo’s, in the San Fernando Valley. As she was praising the book, her phone rang.“I think this is for you,” Neustadter said, handing it to Reid, who by then had achieved modest success as an author. She maintained her chill, at least on the outside, as she listened to Witherspoon tell her how much she loved her book.That afternoon, Scott took Reid to lunch at a coffee shop on Larchmont Avenue. “I told her I have prepared my whole life to write this,” meaning a film or TV version of “Daisy Jones,” he said.Reid decided she wanted Hello Sunshine to spearhead the screen version, with Scott and his writing partner Weber attached as creators. She ultimately sold the “Daisy Jones” manuscript to Penguin Random House.In May 2018, Lauren Neustadter and Witherspoon met Salke for lunch at Tavern, a restaurant in Brentwood. Salke, a former NBC executive, told them she was looking for big, ambitious projects that could benefit from the breadth of Amazon, including its ability to market and sell books, audiobooks, music and merchandise.“They teased me with something, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” Salke said. “They were like, ‘We might have something right up your alley.’”On a Friday in July, Neustadter sent her the “Daisy Jones” manuscript, a series overview and a script for the pilot episode, written by her husband and Weber, and said Salke had the weekend to consider it before Hello Sunshine would shop the series to others. Salke ordered it to series on Monday. “We just were really invested from the get-go,” she said.The following March, the novel came out and was named the pick for Witherspoon’s book club. It sailed onto the New York Times best-seller list, as did one of Reid’s earlier books, “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” That novel’s paperback version has now spent more than 100 weeks on the list, and Netflix said last year that it is planning a screen adaptation.‘I was put on this earth to be Daisy’A few months later, the producers began to think about casting. Lauren Neustadter received a call from Alexandra Trustman, one of Hello Sunshine’s agents at C.A.A., who suggested one of her other clients, Riley Keough, for the role of Daisy.Keough had recently finished filming Janicza Bravo’s film “Zola,” in which she played a stripper, when she met in May 2019 with the Neustadters, along with Will Graham, who shared the job of being the showrunner of “Daisy Jones” with Scott Neustadter; and Mendelsohn, an executive producer of the series.“I was put on this earth to be Daisy,” Keough told them.Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, plays the title character in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesKeough declined an interview request in the weeks after the death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, but in an email, she said that it was the character’s combination of strength and vulnerability that moved her. “Daisy is complicated,” she wrote. “I didn’t identify with Daisy’s desire to sing and write songs, because that’s something I had never done. What I connected with was Daisy’s artistry and how she felt, not being taken seriously as a young woman.”She was one of several actors playing musicians who first came to the roles without much musical training. Suki Waterhouse, a novice pianist when she was cast, plays the keyboardist Karen Sirko. Will Harrison, who was in a band in college, plays the lead guitarist Graham Dunne. Sebastian Chacon, who had drummed a bit, plays the drummer Warren Rojas (in the book, his last name is Rhodes). Josh Whitehouse, who actually knows how to play guitar, was cast as Eddie Roundtree, the bassist.Claflin, as Billy Dunne, was the final band member cast. He had never played guitar. As part of an audition, he began to sing Elton John’s “Your Song,” before the musical supervisor urged him to stop. When Tony Berg — the veteran producer who has worked with artists including Bob Dylan, Aimee Mann and Phoebe Bridgers, and who is the show’s music consultant — asked Claflin to sing a Beatles song, the actor couldn’t think of one.“Out of everyone involved in this project, my knowledge of ’70s music, ’70s L.A., ’70s anything — especially in America and especially in the music sphere — was very, very, very lackluster,” Claflin said in an interview.The producers were determined to make it work. “We were going to lean on movie magic,” Lauren Neustadter said.After the pandemic upended the 2020 production schedule, the actors threw themselves into music. “I was incredibly into the idea of having three hours of piano lessons every single day,” Waterhouse said. “This is something that nobody gets a chance to do.”‘They sounded like a real band’The work of transforming actors pretending to be in a band into a band became the professional preoccupation of the music supervisor Frankie Pine. She oversaw a monthslong “band camp” consisting of one-on-one instruction and group rehearsal, in addition to taking and reviewing video footage of practice sessions so they could listen to their pitch and timing and watch their comportment.“I wanted to really try to create a sense that this is a real band,” Pine said. “When you’re a real band, you hang out together, you eat together, you drink together, you bitch to each other. You go through the normal motions of a group of people that are constantly together. So I was really trying to create this camaraderie that a true rock ’n’ roll band has.”“I don’t think I’ve ever done a project that has this many eyes on it,” said Morrone, bottom, with her co-stars Claflin and Keough.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAs the production prepared to start shooting in Los Angeles in September 2021, Lauren Neustadter felt it was important for the band to put on a live concert, performing songs from the show. They rented a Hollywood studio with a stage and, still limited by Covid, invited about 40 people who were working on the series.In attendance was Tom Wright, a veteran actor (“Tales From the Hood,” “Sunshine State”) who plays Teddy Price, the Berry Gordy-Quincy Jones-esque record producer. He was prepared to be underwhelmed.As a young actor, Wright lived in New York in the 1970s and had a roommate in the music business. “I got to know and hang out with people like Ornette Coleman and Chet Baker and Jim Hall — you know, some great jazz musicians. And I got to see them perform live, so I kind of have a high bar,” he said.At the friends-and-family concert, “I was shocked,” Wright said. “They sounded like a real band. It was incredible.”If this was the band’s smallest-scale concert, the largest was in New Orleans, where the production design team refitted the 26,500-seat Tad Gormley Stadium to appear, on camera at least, as if it were Soldier Field in Chicago, where the story’s biggest concert occurs.This was the accomplishment of the show’s production designer Jessica Kender, who said that because the look of the 1970s is so recognizable, details mattered. A scene at a gas station, for example, required them to remove ethanol warnings on the pumps that wouldn’t have been there decades ago.When Nzingha Stewart, who directed four episodes, envisioned a montage in which Billy and Daisy visited dozens of radio stations, the production design crew built one radio broadcasting booth that Kender remade over and over again with decals and details summoning Tulsa, Dallas and Fort Worth. In a concert scene, merch stands are piled with band T-shirts, like one with a sepia photo of Keough that reads, “Daisy Jones and the Six: Amsterdam, the Netherlands 5 Jun 1976.”Denise Wingate, the costume designer, once traveled with the 1980s band the Bangles. When she read “Daisy Jones,” she said, “I was like, ‘I have to do it.’” During the pandemic delay, she spent hours every day searching eBay and vintage sites. Once lockdowns eased, she said, “I went to flea markets every weekend for a year.”And she fielded requests. When Keough asked for “Stevie Nicks vibes” for the Soldier Field performance, Wingate found a Halston caftan in gold lamé that she cut up the front to turn it into a cape and paired with a vintage metallic crochet dress. (“Daisy’s wardrobe was a true highlight of my life,” Keough wrote.)To find inspiration for the “Aurora” album cover, Wingate made a mood board featuring Nicks in a billowing white dress. In the cover that resulted, Billy is in a denim shirt and Daisy wears a dress similar to the one Nicks wore, which Wingate had made. Just as it is described in the book, the rock stars are staring into each other’s eyes, but a space exists between them.For Reid, who imagined this story and took it from her head to paper starting in 2016, it’s hard to believe it’s all happening. “If your book is like your baby,” she said, “then the adaptation is like my grandchild. I don’t really get to take credit, but boy am I so proud of them.”She is thrilled by the show, she said. “When I think of Daisy now, I see Riley’s face. When I think of Billy, I think of Sam.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” by Craig Seligman

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      WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, by Craig SeligmanFrom wee-hours cabaret to prime-time reality TV to fiercely contended children’s story hour at the local library, the American drag queen’s journey has been a long and bumpy one.For Doris Fish, alter ego of Philip Clargo Mills, it began not in America but Manly Vale, an apt-sounding suburb of Sydney, Australia,and ended in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco, 1991 — with resurrection, one source maintains, as a ghost composed variously of golden sparks and Evian water.I had not known of Fish before reading the journalist Craig Seligman’s minutely observed new biography of him (though some friends used the female pronoun, “he never wanted to be a woman — he never even wanted to seem like a woman,” the author writes). I finished it persuaded this was a life well worth examining, if only because his peers are so often celebrated, or excoriated, in aggregate.Most of Fish’s performances are unrecoverable, but those that can be scratched up are indelible. Best known, in a limited way, is probably “Vegas in Space,” a posthumously released and deeply weird 1991 sci-fi comedy about male earthlings who undergo sex-change operations so they can travel to a female-only planet (something about recovering stolen jewels…).Promoting the movie during its production period on a Pittsburgh morning show in 1986, Fish gamely endures being treated like a talking zoo animal by the gawking hosts and awkwardly grinning housewives. There’s also a choppy video out there of his swan song, “This Is My Life,” fervidly performed in a caftan and satin gloves at the benefit from which the book takes its name. He was months from death.Born in 1952, Philip was the middle child of six in a tolerant Catholic family that permitted a marijuana plant on the premises. He played a high-kicking chorus girl under a priest’s tutelage at his all-boy school’s year-end musical with more enthusiasm than most of his classmates. Remarkably indifferent to the prospect of arrest or social censure, he joined a local troupe called Sylvia and the Synthetics whose outré antics had me scrawling exclamation points in the margins.One female impersonator’s considerable male member was tucked through his legs to simulate a tail. Another pinned back her hair with swastikas. Another bit into a dripping sheep’s heart to punctuate a lovelorn ballad, blood dripping onto her ball gown like one of the less tasteful Valentine’s Day bitmojis. There were flash mobs of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and teetering pyramids of performers on quaaludes. “Everything was permitted,” Seligman writes dryly, “including ineptitude.”After working for the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper factory, from which he filched metallic powders for his cosmetics, Philip/Doris moved to San Francisco, money sewn into his pockets by his loving mother, Mildred, and found his true calling. Mostly this was what was then called prostitution, though in Fish’s hands it seems more like a kind of sexual nursing. He specialized in relations with those society often rejected, the obese or infirm. (There was a green-card marriage to a lesbian, one of the few survivors of his circle who declined to be interviewed here.)He acted as “comedy model” for a greeting-card company called West Graphic, portraits that Seligman compares to the work of Cindy Sherman. He wrote a popular column for The San Francisco Sentinel, then an essential gay weekly. And he performed in a group called Sluts a-Go-Go, emulating faded stars of the ’30s and ’40s while occasionally brushing up against rising ones of the period (Robin Williams, Lynda Carter). The Sluts and their associates were equal-opportunity offenders, doing racial as well as gender impressions, spewing double entendre and sometimes seeming to positively assault their audiences with sensory overload, exaggerated glamour and flagrant disregard for safety codes.Though revolutionary in his in-your-faceness, Fish was not particularly political; the sincerity such activity requires was anathema. One of the more intriguing aspects of his foreshortened life was an attitude described here as Romantic Cruelism: a pose of complete indifference or dark humor even in the face of tragedy.Fish displays it when his parents divorce; when a younger sister dies after a mysterious illness; and when one Synthetic, who had been a childhood friend, perishes in a fire: “Burnt to a cinder in a room full of exotic drag. All they found was a tooth,” as Spurt!, a local punk zine, callously memorialized. “The young don’t know what to do with endings,” Seligman writes, and there were so many more to come.“Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” revisits and draws from a 1986 profile of Fish that Seligman wrote for skittish editors at Image magazine, a weekend section of The San Francisco Examiner. Aside from overuse of the words “notoriety” and “notorious,” it is confidently written, wistful and quite personal; Seligman’s now-husband, Silvana Nova, was part of Fish’s scene.The author of a previous book comparing Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Seligman diverts here and there to Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” but spends most of his time simply retracing Fish’s footsteps. At times these seem akin to the old Hans Christian Andersen version of “The Little Mermaid,” whose heroine is granted the power to walk out of the water, but only with the pain of swords going through her. (In one parade, Fish’s elaborate costume included fiberglass “legs” that drew blood from his own, covering the stains with black tights.)Seligman’s own stance is mostly one of wary wonderment, that drag queens have gone from “totally beyond the pale” to mainstream acknowledgment, “from feared freak into object of fascination,” from the shaky spotlight to — however contentiously — the kindergarten rug. He piles a lot of historical weight on Fish’s shoulders, but his subject carries it like Joan Crawford in a padded Adrian frock.WHO DOES THAT BITCH THINK SHE IS? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag | By Craig Seligman | Illustrated | 352 pp. | PublicAffairs | $29 More

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      Solomon Perel, Jew Who Posed as a Hitler Youth to Survive, Dies at 97

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      His masquerade — a tale recounted in a memoir and in the film “Europa Europa” — saved his life. But “to this day,” he said, “I have a tangle of two souls in one body.”Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.Marco Hofschneider portrayed Mr. Perel in the critically acclaimed German movie “Europa Europa.” Delphine Forest played his teacher. Orion ClassicsSolomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”Mr. Perel at his home in Israel. He lectured widely about his wartime experiences, condemning racism in any form. Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, via Associated PressAs the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world.“He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Up With the Sun,’ by Thomas Mallon

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      In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway actor Dick Kallman.UP WITH THE SUN, by Thomas MallonAlfred Hitchcock liked to talk about the MacGuffin, a plot device of great interest to the characters onscreen that keeps the story moving along, yet turns out to be of little consequence. “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace,” he said, “and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” (Famous MacGuffins: Rosebud, from “Citizen Kane”; the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction”; the Maltese Falcon.)In Thomas Mallon’s nostalgic new showbiz novel “Up With the Sun,” the MacGuffin is a fraternity pin: a prop from a real, if forgotten, 1951 Broadway musical called “Seventeen,” worn by an actor who was a success in it (and not much else): Dick Kallman. Kallman presses a fine-jewelry version on his cast crush, the male lead, who refuses the gift. The pin will also pop up as a tie clip worn in friendship; a token of love on a lapel; a tool of sadomasochistic sex; and — most Hitchcockishly — an object of value sought by murderous thieves. Mallon specializes in animating imagined versions of historical figures, and ambitiously so; he recently wrapped up a Washington trilogy about three different Republican presidencies. Unlike Nixon or Reagan or George W. Bush, Kallman clears the bar of “historical” only because the internet, as they used to say of elephants, never forgets. In 1975, his acting career on the rocks, Kallman was quoted in The New York Times’s fashion column advising women to wear terry-cloth dresses designed by a business partner. The next time he was mentioned, five years later on the front page of the paper’s Metropolitan report at age 46, was not because he’d switched to dealing art and antiques. It was because he and a “business assistant” 20 years his junior had been killed in cold blood while in various states of undress in a luxury apartment off Central Park.Mallon swipes the story of Kallman’s short life and shocking end and runs with it like Cary Grant under the crop duster in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (where the MacGuffin was the government microfilm hidden in a Tarascan warrior statue). Grant doesn’t make a physical cameo in “Up With the Sun” — even in death, he’s maybe too major for this, a book that’s about making one’s peace with minorness.But many other celebrities of all gradations do, including Grant’s ex-wife Dyan Cannon, her ring finger smashed into a piece of scenery after Kallman felt she was upstaging him on the tour of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “You sick bastard,” she hisses at him when he’s seat-filling at the Golden Globes years later.The recreated Cannon is onto something: In Mallon’s well-researched imagining, Kallman is, if not a sociopath, a doomed cipher on whom “ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience’s complete belief in almost any character he was playing.” He’s good-looking, like “a less perfect Tony Curtis,” but has a belligerent, possibly misogynistic streak that puts off casting directors and colleagues.In a short-lived TV show, “Hank,” he plays an orphan sneaking college classes (the novel’s title is taken from a lyric in Johnny Mercer’s theme song). It’s canceled after he becomes what his agent calls “the first person in history to be the subject of a takedown profile in TV Guide.”“Did he have a soul?” wonders Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter, in whose workshop Kallman unfruitfully participated. One pit musician imagines the actor beating the female lead of “Seventeen” to death with her parasol.His foil is that production’s (so far as I can tell wholly fictional) pianist Matt Liannetto, whose story Mallon counterposes to Kallman’s in alternating chapters rendered in sans-serif typeface. A divorced father who’s slowly emerging from the closet, Liannetto is also, in his way, doomed — a cough, diminished appetite and night sweats hint why — but morally secure, a walking indictment of fame. “I’d been glad to be quite good at the little thing I did,” he thinks, comparing himself to Salieri in “Amadeus,” “rather than mediocre at something bigger that I tried to do.”As a drive down the highway of old-style entertainment (theater, movies, books, music, TV) — with gossip columns on the shoulder — “Up With the Sun” is an unqualified success. It’s replete with amusing walk-ons, most notably the underused actress Dolores Gray, Kallman’s partner in a décor concern called Possessions of Prominence; with knowing, affectionate references (Hal Hastings! “They’re Playing Our Song”! Manhattan Plaza!); and with sidelong observations of cultural change.Kallman, for example, hates “A Chorus Line,” disgusted by the “backstage sweat-stink and poor-me agonizing put out in front of the audience. No more hitting your mark with a big grin and singing, full-out, a joyful lyric.” Liannetto, more deeply as is his wont, mourns the “eternal orbits” of an analog watch. We time-travel to Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and Billy Rose’s funeral. Who could ask for anything more?A coherent crime story, maybe. The man convicted IRL of Kallman’s killing, Charles Lonnie Grosso — whatever happened to him, I found myself wondering, tilting inexorably back toward fact. The perpetrators here are given other names, and so many stock characters tromp through in the investigation and courtroom scenes — a Columbo-like detective, a “no-nonsense” judge — it’s hard to understand the particulars or why the main character met his untimely end, other than getting mixed up with a bad drug crowd. The murder was lurid; the motive seems mundane and not fully explained, and Liannetto’s relationship with a police assistant a little too neat.What he and the antihero Kallman have in common is that they’re both “throwbacks,” he soliloquizes. “All my life I’ve loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world, sleeping and finished, that can’t push you around.”“Up With the Sun” raises the drapes on a weird corner of this past, rousing and rummaging through. We’re left rubbing our eyes.UP WITH THE SUN | By Thomas Mallon | Illustrated | 353 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

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      Reflections on Star Quality From a Golden Age of ‘Junk TV’

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      In a new memoir, a longtime casting director revels in memories of a bygone Hollywood, matching actors with the roles that made them stars.Stop to consider the movie and TV characters that are most permanently seared into the American psyche, and their impact is rarely a function of screen time. Usually, the effect on audiences is immediate: Think Tim Curry’s first appearance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” or Stockard Channing breezing into Rydell High alongside her fellow Pink Ladies.Whether they were memorable because of their abrasiveness (Danny DeVito in “Taxi”), their rebellious streak (Ms. Channing in “Grease”) or their ability to solve a crisis with a slice of cheesecake (the titular golden girls of “The Golden Girls”), every actor who eventually went on to make Hollywood history first had to clear the hurdle of a casting department. And for many of the biggest movies and TV shows of the last half century, Joel Thurm was a central part of those teams, handpicking the actors whose performances would resonate for decades to come.In his newly released memoir, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,” Mr. Thurm, 80, details what he saw in stars like John Travolta, whom he cast in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”“I knew he wasn’t Vinnie Barbarino,” Mr. Thurm said of managing to look past the actor’s biggest role to date, on the ABC sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”Being able to spot the je ne sais quoi that many refer to as star quality is a skill, one that Mr. Thurm has capitalized on throughout his 35-year career.“The best example I have is when someone walks into a room and has something special that you haven’t seen in other people,” Mr. Thurm said in an interview this week. “Are they astoundingly beautiful? Are they so incredibly good-looking? They could be bad-looking! It’s individual; you can’t really explain it.”Mr. Thurm had a hand in casting some of the biggest hits of film and TV, including “The Love Boat,” “The Golden Girls,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Airplane!”Charles Sykes/Getty ImagesThat “it” factor is the common denominator among all the stars who go on to become household names, according to Mr. Thurm, who said he had seen it immediately in Farrah Fawcett when she auditioned for the role of a stewardess on “The Bob Newhart Show.” She didn’t get the part, but Mr. Thurm said he had known “there was something special about her.” He also instantly saw it in a 17-year-old John Travolta when he met him in New York.“He had a presence, and you can feel it,” Mr. Thurm said. “They had that little extra something.”At the time, Mr. Travolta was most popular for his role on “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and producers would not move ahead with “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a TV movie, unless a big star signed on to the project, Mr. Thurm said. He spent a lot of time with Mr. Travolta’s manager sitting on his “back deck getting melanoma and reading scripts,” Mr. Thurm said. When the script came up, they both lobbied Mr. Travolta, who agreed to sign on. Mr. Thurm later cast Mr. Travolta in “Grease,” and the rest is Hollywood history.Mr. Thurm, who retired from a full-time casting position with NBC in 1990, hasn’t kept especially close tabs on the stars of today, but he does know enough to recognize that they tend to skew young.“They’re all 12-year-olds,” he said. “I have only seen them once they are already stars. Ariana Grande, she’s already a star.”Whether or not star quality has changed since Mr. Thurm started his career, Hollywood itself certainly has. In addition to snippets of back-room scenes detailing how some of TV’s most beloved characters came to appear on some of America’s favorite sitcoms, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season” is also filled with personal anecdotes that would — at minimum — raise eyebrows in a world reshaped by the #MeToo movement.It’s difficult — painful, even — to imagine a world in which Tim Curry never put on the chunky pearl necklace of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. In that sense, the most essential duty of a casting director is to save us all from what might not have been.United Archives/Getty ImagesAs a gay man living in Hollywood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Mr. Thurm often found himself in situations that almost certainly wouldn’t fly today — like massaging the actor Robert Reed’s back after he had to undergo several hair treatments for his role “The Boy in The Plastic Bubble.”“I started to rub his back, then I rubbed, you know, started rubbing a little lower,” Mr. Thurm said of Mr. Reed, best known for playing Mike Brady in “The Brady Bunch.” “He was just miserable on the set because he was not used to not being the center of attention.”In his memoir, Mr. Thurm also details an encounter with his teenage idol, Rock Hudson. At a party with other gay men in Hollywood, Mr. Hudson motioned to Mr. Thurm to follow him to a room upstairs.“I was so anxious and nervous that my body below the waist could not cooperate,” Mr. Thurm wrote.It was a moment he has never forgotten.“I saw every single movie that he ever did and so even to find myself at that party, I thought was amazing,” Mr. Thurm said. “This is my introduction to Hollywood.”Besides detailing his sexcapades, Mr. Thurm also takes full accountability for “the damage you may have suffered while watching David Hasselhoff,” he wrote. He initially cast Mr. Hasselhoff as Snapper Foster on “The Young and the Restless” in 1975. He later cast him in “Knight Rider” — a high-water mark in what he described as an era of “junk TV” — after a contentious standoff with producers, who originally wanted Laurence Olivier. (“Yes, David Hasselhoff and Laurence Olivier on the same list,” he wrote.)The memoir is not just about Mr. Thurm’s dealings in Hollywood but his upbringing: growing up on a kosher milk farm in East New York. Attending Hunter College in Manhattan when it was nearly an all-girls school. Hanging out in Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday. Flunking out of college and traveling through Italy in his early 20s.“To me, it was just my experiences — you know, growth going through life and growing up,” Mr. Thurm said. “I have no regrets. Nobody died.” More