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    ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Looks at Jewish Life Before Nazi Invasion

    A documentary based on a home movie shot by an American in 1938 provides a look at the vibrancy of a Jewish community in Europe just before the Holocaust.AMSTERDAM — Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.Fewer than 100 would survive it.Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it yields,” Stigter said in an interview in Amsterdam recently. “Every time I see it, I see something I haven’t really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still, I can always see a detail that has escaped my attention before.”Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took before gaining wider exposure. All but forgotten within his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, chief of the film, oral history and recorded sound branch of the museum. “I immediately communicated with him and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.’”The Holocaust museum was able to restore and digitize the film, and it posted the footage on its website. At the time, Kurtz didn’t know where it had been shot, nor did he know the names of any of the people in the town square. His grandfather had emigrated from Poland to the United States as a child and had died before he was born.Thus began a four-year process of detective work, which led Kurtz to write an acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.Glenn Kurtz, who found the original footage shot by his grandfather in his parents’ closet in Florida, later wrote a book about the significance of the film.Stigter relied on the book in completing the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has garnered attention in documentary circles and has been screened at Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival held in parallel with the Venice film fest; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.Nasielsk, which had been home to Jews for centuries, was overtaken on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on Dec. 3, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and expelled. People were forced into cattle cars, and traveled for days without food and water, to the towns of Lukow and Miedzyrzec, in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there, they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.“When you see it, you want to scream to these people run away, go, go, go,” Stigter said. “We know what happens and they obviously don’t know what starts to happen, just a year later. That puts a tremendous pressure on those images. It is inescapable.”Stigter stumbled across the footage on Facebook in 2014 and found it instantly mesmerizing, especially because much of it was shot in color. “My first idea was just to prolong the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “For me, it was very clear, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They really look at you; they try to stay in the camera’s frame.”A historian, author and film critic for a Dutch national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, Stigter worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to produce a short video essay for its Critic’s Choice program. Instead of choosing a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After making a 25-minute “filmic essay,” shown at the Rotterdam festival in 2015, she received support to expand it into a feature film.“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never steps out of the footage. Viewers never see the town of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigter tracks out, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she homes in on the cobblestones of a square, on the types of caps worn by the boys, and on the buttons of jackets and shirts, which were made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still portraits of each of the 150 faces — no matter how vague or blurry — and puts names to some of them.An image from the home movie showing Moszek Tuchendler, 13, on the left, who survived the Holocaust and became Maurice Chandler. He was able to identify many other people in the footage of the town where he grew up.United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumMaurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is in his 90s, is one of the smiling teenage boys in the footage. He was identified after a granddaughter in Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust museum’s website.Chandler, who was born Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; he said the footage helped him recall a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I’m not from Mars.” He was also able to help identify seven other people in the film.Kurtz, an author and journalist, had discovered a tremendous amount through his own research, but Stigter helped solve some additional mysteries. He couldn’t decipher the name on a grocery store sign, because it was too blurry to read. Stigter found a Polish researcher who figured out the name, one possible clue to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.Leslie Swift said that the David Kurtz footage is one of the “more often requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving picture archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as stock footage, or background imagery, to indicate prewar Jewish life in Poland “in a generic way,” she said.What Kurtz’s book, and Stigter’s documentary do, by contrast, is to explore the material itself to answer the question “What am I seeing?” over and over again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information out of this movie as possible,” Stigter said. “What’s interesting is that, at a certain moment you say, ‘we can’t go any further; this is where it stops.’ But then you discover something else.” More

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    Noah Hawley Keeps Changing Lanes

    AUSTIN, Texas — Noah Hawley tries never to approach a story the same way twice.When FX asked if he’d like to make an X-Men television series, Hawley came up with “Legion,” a surrealist mind-bender in which the protagonist hears and sees things that aren’t real.He has made four seasons of “Fargo,” a show loosely — very loosely — based on the Coen brothers’ film. Every season, he replaces the characters, picks a new setting and still calls it “Fargo.”His sixth novel, “Anthem,” out this week from Grand Central Publishing, is an exploration of contemporary America laced with magical realism. It features vicious political divisions, climate change, an insurrection and a study of what it’s like to be young in a collapsing world. It also includes a witch who is impossible to kill, a teenager who has regular chats with God and an outbreak of teenage suicides.Hawley, as you see, is busy. An author, show runner and director, he even sang on the soundtracks for “Legion” and “Fargo.” These days, he said, he just calls himself a storyteller.“A big part of what I’m trying to do,” he said over iced tea in Austin last month, “is to bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.”A composed presence, with some salt in his chocolate-colored hair, Hawley, 54, started out wanting to be a musician. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989, he moved to Brooklyn with his band and got a day job as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society. His band, Bass Nation (the name “came off looking like the fish,” he said), played gigs and toured a bit — Hawley played guitar and sang — but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. So he started writing.“What’s it adding up to if I’m playing Limelight on Thursday night at nine o’clock?” he recalled of an old club in New York City. “Am I making progress? Am I not making progress? If you write 10 pages, you’ve got 10 pages. There’s something very literal about it, and I could do it myself. It didn’t involve living in a van with three filthy, penniless men.”“A big part of what I’m trying to do,” Noah Hawley said, “is to bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.”Lauren Withrow for The New York TimesA few years later, when he was living in San Francisco, he sold his first novel, “A Conspiracy of Tall Men.” His mother, Louise Armstrong, was also an author, and through her, Hawley said, he found an agent. (“I asked him once what his accent was,” Hawley recalled, “and he said ‘pure affectation.’”)One of Hawley’s first attempts at a novel, set at a college, had been sent around to editors but never sold. One editor, he was told, felt Hawley was reluctant to make changes. That was news to him.“I will change anything you want!” he remembered thinking. But in the intervening years, that perception about his openness to feedback doesn’t seem to have changed much.“What I’ll hear is, ‘Oh, the network has a note, but they’re afraid to give it to you,’” Hawley said. “Which is so interesting because I never yell at anybody about anything. But that’s good because I don’t necessarily want the note,” he joked — or he seemed to be joking.“I can be difficult to read sometimes,” he said. “But on some level, that can be good, too, because a lot of this is a poker game.”After his first book was published, Hawley wrote a screenplay and an adaptation of his novel, and from there started writing TV pilots. Three of his pilots were bought and never made. In 2004, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job on the procedural series “Bones” so he could learn how to make a show.It was a good move, so good that he didn’t have to stay in L.A. for long. Five years later, Hawley and his family moved to Austin, where they have lived off and on ever since.Today he and his wife, Kyle, live on a sort of mini-compound on a half-acre with their two kids, who are 9 and 14, his wife’s aunt and three dogs. The property originally held four small cottages, built as housing for workers at a lumber company, two of which have been connected to make the main house.Two cottages remain, one of which is Hawley’s office. It has an area that can be transformed into an editing bay, a few instruments (a guitar, a bass and a mini drum set for his son) and a big roll of brown paper mounted near his desk. He started thinking about stories visually a few years ago, he said, and sometimes likes to lay them out using bubbles, arrows and grids.Natalie Portman, who starred in the movie “Lucy in the Sky,” which Hawley directed and co-wrote, said she was struck by how he balanced work and life.“It felt like he was prioritizing his family,” she said in an interview, “in a way that is not very common for directors.” If they weren’t in town during shooting, for example, he’d fly back to Austin over the weekend, she said. His decision to make his home there, she added, helped him to keep a bit of distance from the world of his work.“Even while, obviously, being incredibly successful in Hollywood, he’s been deliberately maintaining an outsider perspective, which is wonderful,” she said. “You feel it. It feels like friends of mine, not like people I work with. He feels very much of the world, and not of the entertainment industry.”“Anthem” is the latest book from Noah Hawley.Despite his many years in TV, Hawley said he has a love-hate relationship with writers’ rooms. “I tend to think of them as a group of very different people with very different brains, and the only common language they speak is plot,” he said. “That’s not necessarily how I tell the story.”People are trained that back story equals front story, he explained. Say a character’s mother left when he or she was very young; traditionally, that’s going to take the wheel of the narrative. But it doesn’t have to. What you want to avoid, he said, is getting to a point where you, as a writer, are just “holding on while the plot plays itself out.”The kernel that became “Anthem” started percolating about five years ago. Hawley had published his previous novel, “Before the Fall,” with Hachette, and Michael Pietsch, the company’s chief executive, was eager to sign him up for another. Hawley’s editor had just left the company, so Pietsch offered to edit the book himself.“You could do worse than the guy who edited ‘Infinite Jest,’” Hawley said of Pietsch.During the summer of 2019, Hawley was planning to work on the book during a two-month family vacation in Europe. At a bookstore in London, he collected a stack of novels that had been “eureka moments” for him, he said, including “The New York Trilogy,” by Paul Auster; “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Milan Kundera; “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel García Márquez; and “Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison.“And now you’re traveling around with a box of books, and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t I just buy two?’” he recalled. “But it felt critical that I get them all.”“Anthem” is woven together using a number of contemporary threads, mostly seen through the eyes of teenagers who are battling to save themselves and one another. One of the main characters, Simon, is the scion of a pharmaceutical fortune made by selling opioids. A culture war descends into armed conflict, in a way that reads like it must be a riff on Jan. 6 — except that Hawley wrote it the previous October.“One of the ideas explored in the book is what unifies us now when there are so many things that tear us apart,” Pietsch said. “Imagine being a kid, hearing that the oceans are dying, that the bees are dying, reading about the opioid epidemic, seeing these political battles and reading about sexual predation. This sense that the world you’re growing into is being destroyed before your eyes, and what’s going to be there for you? What must that be like, and what can you do?”The book feels cinematic and at times fantastical. An insurrectionist points a gun at one of the protagonists and says, “There is no God,” and then a missile explodes behind him. An enchanted Amazon truck magically supplies materials for our heroes’ needs, whether it’s to hogtie an adversary or stitch up a wound.“The magic realism of the book,” Hawley said, “it was a relief, because magic realism has a way of making ugly things beautiful. Think about Márquez and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ and the amount of tragedy in that book that’s offset by the whimsy, and the beauty of just not knowing what could happen next.”Hawley hasn’t started thinking yet about another book, but he has been sketching out ideas for the next season of “Fargo” on those big sheets of brown paper.“I have the luxury of when I have ideas, I think, ‘Well, what is it?’” he said. “‘Is it a show? Is it a movie? Is it a book?’ But for something to be a book, it means you’re going to live with it for three or four or five years. There has to be enough there. It has to be about things — for me — that are more than just: ‘Is he going to get the girl? Are they going to get away?’” More

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    Richard Marcinko, Founding Commander of SEAL Team 6, Dies at 81

    The Navy asked Commander Marcinko, a larger-than-life soldier who often flouted rules, to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises.Richard Marcinko, the hard-charging founding commander of Navy SEAL Team 6, the storied and feared unit within an elite commando force that later carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, died Saturday at his home in Fauquier County, Va. He was 81.The cause was believed to be a heart attack, a son, Matthew Marcinko, said.Commander Marcinko climbed the ranks to command Team 6 and wrote a tell-all best seller that cemented the SEALs in pop culture as heroes and bad boys. Though the highly decorated Vietnam veteran led Team 6 for only three years, from 1980 to 1983, he had an outsize influence on the group’s place in military lore.After a failed 1980 mission to rescue 53 American hostages seized in the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran, the Navy asked Commander Marcinko to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises. The name itself was an attempt at Cold War disinformation: Only two SEAL teams existed at the time, but Commander Marcinko called the new unit SEAL Team 6, hoping that Soviet analysts would overestimate the size of the force.He flouted rules and fostered a maverick image for the unit. (Years after leaving the command, he was convicted of military contract fraud.) In his autobiography, “Rogue Warrior,” Commander Marcinko describes drinking together as important to SEAL Team 6’s solidarity; his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats in bars.For years, SEAL Team 6 embraced its rogue persona and was assigned some of the military’s toughest operations. Only Team 6 trains to chase after nuclear weapons that fall into enemy hands. And the team’s role in the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden — the Qaeda leader who 10 years earlier had overseen the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 — spawned a wave of books and movies, elevating the unit to even higher heights of fame.Young officers were sometimes run out of Team 6 for trying to clean up what they saw as a culture of recklessness. Adm. William H. McRaven, who rose to lead the Special Operations Command and oversaw the bin Laden raid, left Team 6 during the Marcinko era after disagreements about leadership.After retiring from the Navy in 1989, Commander Marcinko embarked on a career as a best-selling author, motivational speaker and military consultant, relying heavily on his authenticity as a military veteran. He also appeared on the cover of several of his books, presenting an imposing image of muscular forearms, bearded jaw and piercing eyes staring out at readers.Some SEALs over the years have said that Commander Marcinko invented his own legend. Of his 1992 book, “Rogue Warrior,” written with John Weisman, David Murray wrote in The New York Times that “his story is fascinating” but the method of telling it “is not.” In the book, Commander Marcinko “comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”The book sold millions of copies. Readers apparently wanted more, and Commander Marcinko obliged. His 1995 novel, “Rogue Warrior: Green Team,” also with Mr. Weisman, has “so much action that the reader scarcely has time to breathe,” Newgate Callendar, another Times reviewer, wrote.Richard Marcinko was born on Nov. 21, 1940, to George Marcinko and Emilie Teresa Pavlik Marcinko in his grandmother’s house in Lansford, Pa., a tiny mining town. In his autobiography, he described his mother as “short and Slavic looking” and his father as dark and brooding, with a “nasty temper.”All the men in the family, Commander Marcinko wrote, were miners. “They were born, they worked the mines, they died,” he wrote. “Life was simple and life was hard, and I guess some of them might have wanted to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but most were too poor to buy boots.”He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy in 1958. He was deployed to Vietnam with SEAL Team 2 in 1967, according to the National Navy SEAL Museum, which announced the death on its Facebook page.He received many honors for his service, including four Bronze Stars, a Silver Star and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, according to the museum. After completing two tours in Vietnam, he was promoted to lieutenant commander and then took the reins of SEAL Team 2 from 1974 to 1976, according to the museum.Commander Marcinko is survived by his wife, Nancy; four daughters, Brandy Alexander, Tiffany Alexander, Hailey Marcinko and Kathy-Ann Marcinko; two sons, Matthew and Ritchie Marcinko; and several grandchildren. An earlier marriage to Kathy Black ended in divorce.On Sunday night, Admiral McRaven called Commander Marcinko “one of the more colorful characters” in Naval special warfare history.“While we had some disagreements when I was a young officer, I always respected his boldness, his ingenuity and his unrelenting drive for success,” Admiral McRaven wrote in an email. “I hope he will be remembered for his numerous contributions to the SEAL community.”Dave Philipps More

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    Five Joan Didion Movies You Can Stream Right Now

    The writer, working with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, saw Hollywood as a way to make cash to support her art. It did and didn’t work out.“This place makes everyone a gambler,” Joan Didion sniped of Hollywood, nine years after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne left Manhattan to make their fortunes as a screenwriting team.When the newlywed magazine writers rolled the dice on a career change in 1964, neither had even read a script, let alone written one. Luckily, one tipsy night in Beverly Hills, they spotted a TV actor hurling one at his girlfriend. They stole it, diagramed how its story was pieced together, and resolved that unlike that drunken louse — and unlike the drunks they admired, such as Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been jaded about the dream factory — they would never let Los Angeles make them lose their cool.How hard could Hollywood be? Didion had a steady gig as a film critic for Vogue, where she championed teeny-bopper beach flicks (“All plot is incidental; the point is the surf”) and panned “The Sound of Music” for being a musical, a genre she found insulting. (“Think you can get me with some fat Technicolor chrysanthemums, just think again.”) Meanwhile, Dunne’s clinical interest in the movie industry would soon result in his landmark nonfiction book, “The Studio,” which covered, among other things, how a 20th Century Fox publicist flogged the 1967 “Doctor Dolittle” in an awards race where it earned nine Oscar nominations despite middling reviews.Yet, Didion and Dunne’s get-rich scheme wasn’t as easy to pull off as they had hoped. In 25 years, the couple saw their names credited on the big screen just six times. Didion vowed to protect her heart from Hollywood. She never wagered more optimism than she could afford to lose. But screenwriting was supposed to afford her the freedom to write serious art, not waste her time on endless unpaid draft revisions.Worse still were the movies they didn’t write. Over repetitive lunches of white wine and broiled fish, producers pitched the pair a disco-era remake of “Rebel Without a Cause,” a reworking of Fitzgerald’s tragedy “Tender Is the Night” with a happy ending, a U.F.O. flick for the ’80s blockbuster titans Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and this three-word brainstorm: “World War II.”“What do you want to do with it?” Dunne asked.“You’re the writers,” the producer replied.The irony is that the more the couple mocked Hollywood in essays, the higher their script fees rose. Slamming the businessmen in suits could have made Didion and Dunne personae non grata at the Polo Lounge. Instead, cynicism made them look savvy. Here were two smart people who knew exactly what they’d signed up for. They got it, or as Dunne joked, “I have never been quite clear what Going Hollywood meant exactly, except that as a unique selling proposition, it’s a lot sexier than Going University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”It’s hard to argue that Didion and Dunne’s films are palpably them any more than one can touch an actor onscreen as he coils his tongue around Didion’s diction. (Or at least, the traces of her sharp precision that remain after being massaged into studio submission.) Yet, in honoring Didion’s creative life, it’s worth making time for the work that fills out our image of her as not only an uncompromising prose stylist, but also an ambitious artist who knew exactly when to compromise in service of her greater goals.Here is a look at five films by or about Didion that are available to stream.1972‘Play It as It Lays’Available on YouTubeBefore Didion and Dunne learned to play the Hollywood game, the fledgling screenwriters made the rookie mistake of optioning books that they found interesting — not John Q. Public. With James Mills’ heroin-addled paperback “The Panic in Needle Park,” Didion explained, “It just immediately said movie to me.” The film, with its mediocre box office receipts, served as a launching pad for the star Al Pacino’s career, but didn’t do much for hers. (It’s not available to stream.) At least the paycheck let Didion complete her own hazy, dispassionate novel, “Play It as It Lays,” about an actress untethering herself from a cold and callous Los Angeles by taking drugs, having sex and speeding down the highway in a convertible that functions as a motorized fugue. When the novel was a minor hit, Didion and Dunne turned it into their second film, with Tuesday Weld as the lead and “The Swimmer” director Frank Perry at the helm. Critics liked the film; Didion (and audiences), less so. “Everything was different,” she said, “even though I wrote the screenplay.”1976‘A Star Is Born’Stream it on HBO MaxIt was time to make some real dough. So for their third film, the pair pitched a rock ’n’ roll refresh of “A Star Is Born” featuring Carly Simon and James Taylor. The truth was Didion and Dunne had never seen the previous versions. They just wanted to go with musicians on the road, where their research included talking to groupies about injecting adrenaline and following Led Zeppelin to Cleveland, where they amused themselves by calling a for-a-good-time number scrawled on the dressing-room wall. When Barbra Streisand announced her interest in the project, the couple was finally forced to watch the 1937 original at the recording star’s house while their daughter, Quintana Roo, played with Streisand and Jon Peters’s pet lion cub. Neither writer was passionate enough about the project to stick with it once Streisand seized the reins. Their draft was reworked by 14 subsequent screenwriters before the star was satisfied she had an awards contender. Streisand took home a Golden Globe for the film, making her the third actress in a row to win a prize for a role that Didion originated on the page. (Weld won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for “Play It as It Lays,” while Kitty Winn claimed best actress at Cannes for “Panic.”)1981‘True Confessions’Rent it on major platforms.For 15 years, Didion and Dunne took turns trying to squeeze money out of studios. One would do the first draft of a script; the other would edit and revise. Now it was Dunne’s turn to adapt one of his novels, his best-selling crime noir, “True Confessions,” inspired by the Black Dahlia murder. Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro play siblings: Duvall is a detective; De Niro, a Roman Catholic monsignor whose future in the church depends on how his brother handles the case. While reviewers mostly enjoyed the thriller, some found the plot vague and confusing. The mixed response echoed the feedback on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” before it was later deemed a classic, which might have made Didion smile. After all, not only did she buy her wedding dress at Ransohoff’s, the same shop where Jimmy Stewart made over Kim Novak, she and Dunne even got married at Mission San Juan Bautista under the bell tower where Novak leapt to her death.1996‘Up Close and Personal’Rent it on major platforms.There was only one reason Didion and Dunne signed on to adapt a biography of the NBC News anchor Jessica Savitch, who died in a car accident in 1983 shortly after broadcasting a segment in which she appeared intoxicated: They needed the Writers Guild health insurance. The trade-off might not have been worth it given the stress of writing 27 drafts until Disney, the financier of the film, was satisfied that all traces of Savitch’s drug use, divorces, abortions and suicide attempts had been scrubbed out of what was now a wholly fictional Michelle Pfeiffer workplace romance about a successful journalist who survives through the end credits. “Up Close and Personal” took eight years to complete, and the best thing about it is the brutal memoir Dunne wrote about the ordeal, titled “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.” Savitch never got her biopic, but a documentary about her struggle to be taken seriously in a mostly male workplace — a struggle Didion understood as studio executives’ assistants would frequently refuse to patch through phone calls from their boss without Dunne on the line — did inspire Will Ferrell to make his own film about chauvinism in local news, “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”2017‘Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold’Stream it on Netflix.Even though Didion and Dunne escaped Hollywood to move back to New York, the movie business remained the family business. Her brother-in-law Dominick, a film and TV producer, raised a family of actors, including the“Poltergeist” star Dominique Dunne and the actor-director Griffin Dunne, who in 2017 convinced his famous aunt to let him film an interview with her for a documentary about her life. Their familiarity allows them both to speak candidly. Dunne thanks Didion for not laughing when his testicles fell out of his swimsuit as a boy; Didion confesses to him that stumbling across a 5-year-old girl on LSD, an encounter that led to one of the darkest scenes in her book “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” gave her a thrill. Didion admits: “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” The moment isn’t comforting, but it’s honest — a truly Didion-esque revelation finally immortalized on film. More

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    The Peerless Imagination of Greg Tate

    For four decades, he set the critical standard for elegantly intricate assessments of music, art, literature and more, writing dynamically about the resilience and paradoxes of Black creativity and life.There are sentences, and then there are the writings of Greg Tate, who died on Tuesday at the age of 64. A critic and historian of music, art and so much more for over four decades, he was a singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life.His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones. It contained uncanny, elevated descriptions of sound and performance, offered grounded philosophical inquisitions and sprinkled in wink-nudge personal asides. It could have the cadence of smack talk, or a conspiratorial whisper. And it was patient, unfurling at exactly the pace of gestation, while somehow containing turns of phrase that appeared to be moving at warp speed.It doesn’t matter which page you open to in his crucial 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” — just open it. Eruptions of style — of pure intellectual vigor and unhurried swagger — are everywhere.Page 123, leading into a review of Public Enemy: “Granted, Charlie Parker died laughing. Choked chicken wing perched over ’50s MTV. So? No way in hell did Bird, believing there was no competition in music, will his legacy to some second-generation be-boppers to rattle over the heads of the hip-hop nation like a rusty sabre.”Page 221, on Don DeLillo: “DeLillo’s books are inward surveys of the white supremacist soul — on the run from mounting evidence that its days are (as the latest in Black militant button-wear loves to inform us) numbered.”“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” Tate said in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. “I was trying to literally approximate music on the page.”To read Tate was to be awed by a gift that verged on the extraterrestrial. But he was as meaningful and influential for the words he wrote as for the possibilities he made room for. Aspiring critics, this one included, understood: You almost certainly could not do what Tate did, but what a revelation nonetheless to learn about all the available space between the ground where mortals pecked away at keys and wherever he resided. There were whole galaxies of possibility to explore, so many fertile places you might land.Fearless isn’t exactly the word for how Tate approached his subjects — that would imply that to honor one’s own intellectual truth was in some way contingent on, or mindful of, the acquiescence of others. Maybe boundless is better. He rightly understood that the scope of criticism extended far beyond the borders of the subject work. The subject was the pretext, the intro, the foyer to a whole house.Tate began writing in the late 1970s, and began contributing in The Village Voice in 1981. He moved to New York from Washington, D.C., soon after, and sought out the city’s creative spasms: jazz, art, literature, newly emergent hip-hop.In that era, the alt-weekly was the medium most comfortable publishing writing with high stakes, open ears, indelible flair, infinite possibility. And in that ecosystem, Tate was the lodestar. Take “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” a visionary essay which appeared in The Voice in 1986 that called for a “popular poststructuralism — accessible writing bent on deconstructing the whole of Black culture.” It was a call to critical arms to rise to the “postnationalist” output of the time — in short, Tate wanted peers as ambitious and wild-minded as the culture he was covering..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When he loved something, he was bracing. On Miles Davis: “‘Bitches Brew’ is an orchestral marvel because it fuses James Brown’s antiphonal riffing against a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and Jimi’s concept of painting pictures with ordered successions of electronic sounds.”When he was frustrated by something, he was bracing. In a roasting of Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” and in a way, of Jackson himself: “Jackson’s decolorized flesh reads as the buppy version of Dorian Gray, a blaxploitation nightmare that offers this moral: Stop, the face you save may be your own.” (When Jackson died, in 2009, Tate’s memorial tribute loudly affirmed Jackson’s place in the soul pantheon while still agonizing over the personal choices Jackson made, especially in his later years.)And he planted flags early. Critics before Tate had written about rap music, of course, but his early pieces on Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul and others stand as the definitive critical engagements of their day. They also made the case not just for a hip-hop canon but for hip-hop as canon.Not long after “Flyboy” came out in 1992, Tate brought his pen to Vibe magazine, which in its infancy was underpinned by a downtown New York cosmohemian sensibility that he helped shape with his mere presence.His column, “Black-Owned,” was a staple and a megaphone trumpeting the most progressive creators across disciplines. In the October 1993 issue, one of the magazine’s first, he wrote a dynamic full-page poem called “What Is Hip-Hop?”: “Hip-hop is inverse capitalism/Hip-hop is reverse colonialism.”In 1995, he sat with Richard Pryor: “You literally have to go to Shakespeare, James Joyce, or James Baldwin to find readings of human folly as incisive as Pryor’s. Yet Pryor has it one up on those masters of the word: He didn’t need exclamation points — his body movement was his punctuation.”On D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” in 1999: “There are times when the music on this disc sounds so raw, so naked and exposed, you’ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones.” On TV on the Radio, in 2006: “Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe has a wandering tenor wail that seems undecided between Catholicism’s four-part chorales, doo-wop’s street-corner symphonies and New Wave’s girly-man blues.”Full disclosure — I assigned the TV on the Radio review, one of my first decisions when I joined the magazine as music editor. The opportunity to bring Tate back into those pages was a gift. (He also was a relentless mentor and connector — he introduced me to one of the first people I hired there.) By that point, Tate’s sui generis brilliance was widely acknowledged in our circles, and still barely touched by others. Showcasing his critical pirouetting was meant to serve as a beacon, and also a simple acknowledgment of the way he affected every writer I cared about and learned from — we’re all Tate’s children. I still buy “Flyboy” every time I see it in a bookstore. I never want to be too far away from it, lest I forget how vast the cosmos is. More

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    ‘The Snowy Day,’ a Children’s Classic, Becomes an Opera

    Based on the popular 1962 children’s book, the show aims to celebrate Blackness and attract new audiences to the art form.In the first scene of “The Snowy Day,” a new opera based on the popular 1962 children’s book, a Black mother sings an aria as her young son, Peter, prepares to go outdoors alone to explore the snow.“Oh, how Mama’s eyes are watching this world,” she says.The moment conveys the anxiety that every parent feels sending a child into the unfamiliar. But in our times, the scene takes on a more painful specificity, speaking to the fear and trauma experienced by many Black families, in particular.“He’s a Black boy in a red hoodie going out into the snow alone,” said Joel Thompson, the composer of the work, which premieres at Houston Grand Opera on Thursday. “That’s Tamir Rice; that’s Trayvon Martin. And we wanted to focus on Peter’s humanity and his childlike wonder.”“The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats, has long been a favorite, celebrated as one of the first mainstream children’s books to prominently feature a Black protagonist. It is the most checked-out book in the history of the New York Public Library.“The Snowy Day” (with McMillon, left, and Karen Slack as Peter’s mother) shows a Black family that is happy and intact, to counter stereotypes of dysfunction and despair in Black communities.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesThis adaptation aims to help change perceptions about Black identity and attract new audiences to opera at a time when the art form faces serious financial pressures and questions about its future.“We are waking up to the idea that opera is for everyone,” said Andrea Davis Pinkney, a children’s book author who wrote the libretto. “We are waking up to the fact that, yes, this is your story, and your story, and my story, and our story.”Since their first meeting about four years ago at a deli near Carnegie Hall, Thompson and Pinkney have been working to recreate the book’s sense of enchantment and its nuanced portrayal of race.The opera, like the book, tells the story of Peter, who awakens one day to see the world outside his window covered in a fresh blanket of snow. He ventures into the cold, making snow angels, watching a snowball fight, meeting a friend and sliding down a hill.McMillon, left, with Andrea Davis Pinkney, the children’s book author who wrote the libretto.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesJoel Thompson, center, the opera’s composer, conferring with Jeremy Johnson, Houston Grand Opera’s dramaturg.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesWhile Thompson and Pinkney tried to stay true to the spirit of Keats’s work, they also took liberties. Several new characters are introduced, including Amy, a Latina friend of Peter’s who teaches him some words in Spanish.The creators wanted the work to show a Black family that was happy and intact to counter stereotypes in popular culture of dysfunction and despair in Black communities. They added a father, who is featured in later books by Keats but not in “The Snowy Day,” to avoid any suggestion that Peter was being raised by a single mother. They reworked the libretto several times, choosing to describe Peter as a “beautiful boy” rather than to explicitly mention his race. (An early draft described him as a “brown sugar boy.”)“It’s about a loving family who happens to be a family of color,” Pinkney said. “That is the universal nature of ‘The Snowy Day.’”Thompson has long had an interest in connecting music to social issues. He is best known for “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which premiered in 2015. That choral piece sets to music the final words of seven Black men killed during encounters with the police..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“The Snowy Day” was a different kind of challenge, giving Thompson a chance to focus on a world of wonder and whimsy. But he also sees parallels to his previous work.The creators added a father (played by Nicholas Newton), who is featured in later books by Keats but not in “The Snowy Day,” to avoid any suggestion that Peter was being raised by a single mother.Annie Mulligan for The New York Times“It has the same mission of centering Black humanity and the complex interiority of Blackness in America,” he said. “I had to let go of all of the lenses of fear that I had sort of put over my eyes as just being a Black man in this world, and really look at the world through Peter’s eyes.”He chose to ground the score in a four-note motif that appears throughout the opera, which lasts about an hour. Some passages evoke hymns; others, like the snowball fight, take a jazzy, irreverent turn.Because there is no dialogue in the book, much of the libretto is invented. When Peter sees the snow outside his window at the start of the opera, he sings:Morning promise, rising.Surprising me with its splendoron the sidewalks and streets.Omer Ben Seadia, the director of the production, said she hoped the work would resonate with people, even if they had never read “The Snowy Day” or seen an opera before.“There are a lot of people who are stepping in for the first time,” she said. “Our challenge is to make the opera as magical as possible.”She added: “If you don’t know the book; if you, like me, didn’t grow up with snow; if you’ve never seen an opera, there are so many things that make this opera so accessible and familiar.”The production is notable for its efforts to showcase Black and Latino artists — especially women — who historically have been severely underrepresented in classical music. The idea to adapt the book originally came from the soprano Julia Bullock, who was set to play the role of Peter but withdrew because of travel restrictions related to the pandemic, which also forced the cancellation of the scheduled premiere last year.Peter is now played by Raven McMillon, and the cast also includes the soprano Karen Slack as Mama, the bass-baritone Nicholas Newton (Daddy) and the soprano Elena Villalón (Amy). Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera’s artistic and music director, conducts.The effort to bring more diversity to opera has grown increasingly urgent in recent years as companies across the country have seen declining attendance and an aging subscriber base.Omer Ben Seadia, the production’s director, gives notes to the cast.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesKevin Miller, an assistant conductor on the production, leads an ensemble backstage.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesSome institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, have found success with productions like Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which debuted at the Met this fall, the first work by a Black composer in the company’s 138-year history. (Following the success of “Fire,” the company said on Tuesday it would stage Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” next season.)Khori Dastoor, who starts next month as Houston Grand Opera’s general director and chief executive, said that presenting works that reflect a broad range of experiences and perspectives was essential to the future.“Our mission centers on advancing opera as an art form and building the diverse audiences of tomorrow,” Dastoor said.Members of the cast said they were pleased to be part of a work that is challenging stereotypes.“It’s important for Black people to not always have to watch something that is filled with trauma in order to see themselves onstage,” McMillon said. Annie Mulligan for The New York Times“People can see themselves in it,” McMillon said. “It’s important for Black people to not always have to watch something that is filled with trauma in order to see themselves onstage.”Thompson said he has been inspired by Peter’s ability to see the world through a prism of wonder rather than fear.“Fear and wonder are two sides of the same coin,” he said. “If I can stop for a moment and breathe and choose to look with wonder instead of fear, it’s healing for me.” More

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    Mel Brooks Keeps It Very Light in ‘All About Me!’

    Mel Brooks has been responsible for so much in the American comedic canon, for so long, it sometimes seems he is, if not 2,000 years old like one of his most indelible characters, maybe 200. He’s actually 95. A baby! (Another one of his indelible characters, from “Free to Be…You and Me.”)Your favorite Brooks work might be “The Producers,” which — in a feat of dizzying creative refraction and exponential profit — he made first as a movie about a musical in 1967, then as a musical based on that movie in 2001, and then as another movie based on the musical in 2005. Or you may prefer “Blazing Saddles,” a Western spoof; or “Young Frankenstein,” a horror spoof; or the self-explanatory “Silent Movie,” in which the only character to speak was Marcel Marceau, the famous mime. Personally I most adore “High Anxiety,” an Alfred Hitchcock spoof; and reading Brooks’s new memoir, the product of an extrovert who must have found lockdown torturous, only amplified that affection.When invited to a lunch of roast beef with Yorkshire pudding by Hitchcock, one of his idols, to discuss the film project, Brooks replied, “Yes, sir, I’ll be there with bells on.” Then he showed up with some jangling around his ankles — the kind of broad comic gesture that by then, in midcareer, was his calling card in both art and life. Given the Master of Suspense’s blessing, Brooks went on to re-enact the shower scene from “Psycho,” with newsprint pouring rather presciently down the drain in lieu of blood; and broke character as a nervous psychiatrist to sing his movie’s title song in the manner of Frank Sinatra. But it was his exaggerated enactment of that shrink’s fear of heights, à la Scottie Ferguson in “Vertigo,” that feels most resonant and telling.Brooks himself reads as the opposite of acrophobic: scaling the icy pinnacles of Hollywood without anything more than a pang of self-doubt, using humor as his alpenstock. Fear of heights is closely related to fear of falling; falling (not failing) was a measure of achievement for Brooks and his cohort. Before it was an acronym, they embodied ROFL, forever collapsing to the ground in mirth.The youngest of Kate Kaminsky’s four sons, Melvin grew up poor in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was coddled and adored, especially after his father died of tuberculosis. “I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again,” he writes. “Until I was 5, I don’t remember my feet touching the ground.” Despite the “brush stroke of depression” that resulted from losing a parent, he appears to glide right over life’s inevitable vicissitudes. When something goes wrong, he wonders “what to do, what to do?” — and then solves the problem. If it goes really wrong? “I’ll spare you the details.”Mel BrooksBrooks started as a drummer, and percussiveness, driving toward the “rim shot,” would become another comedic signature. Enlisted in the Army during World War II, he grabbed a cuff of Bob Hope’s trousers to get an autograph and parodied Cole Porter in a Special Services show at Fort Dix. (“When we begin to clean the latrine….”) After discharge he started writing for Sid Caesar’s variety shows, where the brotherly atmosphere of his youth was reenacted with staff that included Neil “Doc” Simon and Woody Allen. The troubled, intense Caesar once dangled Brooks outside a hotel window in Chicago. “I was very calm,” Brooks writes.In his epic “History of the World, Part I” (Hulu just ordered Part II), he plays Torquemada, a fearsome leader of the Spanish Inquisition, darting down a spiral stone staircase — like “Vertigo” in reverse — and bursting into a song-and-dance number with full chorus. Later in the sketch, nuns strip to bathing suits, synchronize-swim with the devout Jews they’re trying to convert and then rise up — Happy Hanukkah! — balancing on the prongs of a giant menorah, sparklers on their heads. If Porter, another idol, wrote “you’re the top / you’re the Colosseum,” Brooks went over the top and smashed the pillars.Hitler is the villain the author most daringly appropriated, from the work-within-a-work of “The Producers” to the disguise in “To Be or Not to Be,” a remake of the Ernst Lubitsch film, in which Brooks starred with his second wife, Anne Bancroft. This still offends some people. “Blazing Saddles” does, too. Brooks, who gave the now-controversial comedian Dave Chappelle an early break, casting him in “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” does not concern himself in these pages with changing norms in the industry that has rewarded him so handsomely. Perhaps named for “All About Eve” but less of a bumpy night than a joy ride, “All About Me!” takes humor as an absolute value, something that “brings religious persecutors, dictators and tyrants to their knees faster than any other weapon,” something that can win over a classy lady like Bancroft. Its 460 pages rattle along like an extended one-liner.Humor can also, of course, be a defensive scrim for difficult emotions. Brooks doesn’t name his first wife, Florence Baum, though their marriage lasted nine years and produced three children; he and Bancroft, who died in 2005, had a fourth. He would prefer to kvell over the talents of his frequent collaborators Madeline Kahn, Gene Wilder and Carl Reiner, than linger on, or even mention, their departures from this crazy world. As the old song goes, he accentuates the positive. “Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye,” he writes. And there’s probably already a prank planned for his own inevitable ascent to heaven. More

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    Book Review: ‘Tinderbox,’ by James Andrew Miller

    There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip in “Tinderbox,” James Andrew Miller’s mountainous new oral history of HBO, to fill an Elizabethan drama. Yet the book’s tone is largely fond.The people who created HBO made something they’re proud of. They’re glad to have been there, to have had a piece of it, in the early, freewheeling decades. Most know they’ll never have it so good again.HBO went live on Nov. 8, 1972, broadcasting to a few hundred houses in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. The first thing you saw on the screen (cue screaming from future Time Warner shareholders) was Jerry Levin, sitting on a sofa. He welcomed viewers, then kicked it over to a hockey game from Madison Square Garden, which was followed by Paul Newman in “Sometimes a Great Notion.”Levin was an ambitious young lawyer who had been brought in by a cable company, Sterling Communications, to run HBO’s start-up programming. “Tinderbox” explains how Sterling eventually ran wires to all those buildings in Manhattan and elsewhere, sometimes via sublegal methods.Levin, of course, would become the architect of the most ill-judged merger in media history. At the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, he tried to combine Time Warner, of which HBO was a subsidiary, with Steve Case’s already sinking AOL. In the ruinous wake, Levin resembled the proverbial hedgehog, the one who climbs off the hairbrush while sheepishly muttering, “We all make mistakes.”If you’re going to read “Tinderbox,” prepare for a landslide of corporate history. Students of power will find much to interest them. HBO had many stepparents over the years. Following these deals is complicated, like following the lyrics to “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.”In reverse order, Miller describes how HBO — the fly, more or less, in this scenario — has been sequentially consumed from 1972 through today: “Warner Bros. Discovery rescued it from AT&T, which had gobbled it up from Time Warner, which had saved it from Time Warner AOL, which had somehow abducted it from Time Warner, which had shrewdly outplayed Time Inc. for it, after Time had outflanked Sterling Communications long ago.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Miller, who has previously compiled oral histories of “Saturday Night Live,” ESPN and Creative Artists Agency, digs into the machinations and bruised egos behind these deals.These guys (they were mostly guys) all seemed to want to flex-cuff one another and throw enemies into the back of a van. Miller gets good quotes: “The only way I was going to sit across a table from Jerry was if I could jump across it and grab him by the throat”; “He’s a dog, he’ll follow whoever feeds him.”HBO’s famous bumper — the static, the celestial choir — didn’t debut until 1993. But the channel had an aura long before that. It began to make its mark on popular culture in the late 1970s and early ’80s, around the time I was in my teens.My family didn’t have HBO, but a friend’s did. It was where you clicked to see George Carlin say the seven words you couldn’t say on television, to watch movies with naked people in them and to laugh your ribs loose seeing comedians (Robert Klein, Bette Midler, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams) do material they’d never get away with on Carson.HBO was so sexy people went to hotels to watch it. The channel had no advertisers, and thus no one to complain about brash or steamy content.Before HBO, television in the hands of the big three networks was a wasteland — “a vast exercise in condescension,” as Robert Hughes put it, “by quite smart people to millions of others whom they assume to be much dumber than they actually are.”James Andrew Miller, whose latest oral history is “Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers.”Robert BomgardnerAn important early hire was Sheila Nevins, stolen from CBS to run HBO’s now-storied documentary unit. A Barbra Streisand concert was an early hit. Boxing was vital to the early growth of HBO, as were midweek broadcasts of Wimbledon. The channel launched a million comedy clubs. If you were a comic without an HBO special, you weren’t on the map.HBO branched out into original movies, some of which I was happy to see recalled: “Gia,” with Angelina Jolie; “Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story,” with Ben Kingsley and “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” based on the Walter Mosley novel, with Laurence Fishburne, among others.“Tinderbox” slows down and lingers purposefully on the turn of the century, when the so-called golden age of television began to come into view. With shows like “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and especially “The Sopranos,” HBO changed notions of what television could be, and pickpocketed the cultural conversation from film.“The Sopranos” was not an immediate hit, but it was beloved internally. “We were putting a husky guy with a hairy back wearing a wife-beater in the lead role,” says Jeff Bewkes, a former Time Warner C.E.O. “Nobody else would do that.”HBO had good luck with its early executives. These were the kind of guys who knew what a debenture was yet had a feel for programming and knew enough to hire good people and leave them alone. HBO gave people room to run.Often the only direction given to directors and producers was: Don’t make anything you’d see anywhere else. Winning awards was more important than ratings. Before HBO, elite actors wouldn’t go near a television show.Staffers at HBO sometimes found it hard to define what HBO was, but they knew what it wasn’t. A planned Howie Mandel special was killed.HBO’s luck held for a while after “The Sopranos” signed off. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and “Game of Thrones” were in the wings. But the souk that is the modern television world was growing crowded.HBO was no longer the brash insurgent. It passed on shows — “Mad Men,” “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Crown” — that went on to become crucial hits for Netflix and other cable and streaming services.Oral history is a strange form. It gives you a staccato series of micro-impressions, as if you were looking through a fly’s compound eyes. George Plimpton, who helped edit the best-selling oral biography “Edie,” was a fan. He liked it that “the reader, rather than editor, is jury.”Elizabeth Hardwick loathed the form. She thought oral histories were full of irresponsible drive-by shootings. The result, she wrote, was that “you are what people have to say about you.”Increasingly I’m a fan of the genre. I have a special fondness for Lizzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011,” and I await the oral histories of Chez Panisse, Balthazar, Death and Company (the bar), n+1, Anna Wintour’s tenure at Vogue, Monster Energy drinks, the making of “Dusty in Memphis” and this newspaper’s Styles section.Miller is a good interviewer, but a corny writer. His interstitial material is mugged by phrases like “oodles of ambition” and words like “ginormous.” These really bugged me at the start. But this book is so vast that, by the weary end, these pats of cold margarine slapping me in the face were the only things keeping me awake.There are a lot of winning moments in “Tinderbox.” But wading through its nearly thousand pages I often felt spacey and exhausted, as if it were 4 a.m. on the third night of one of those endurance contests and I had to keep my hand on the pickup truck.HBO has retained much of its magic. “Succession”: what a treat. The sound of that bumper — the static, the choir — remains Pavlovian in its promise. But our over-entertained eyeballs have more options, and the channel’s competitors, Miller makes clear, have the long knives sharpened. More