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      Lena Waithe, Gillian Flynn to Become Book Publishers With Zando

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      The two women are joining Zando, an independent publishing company founded last year that plans to work with authors and sell books in unconventional ways.When Gillian Flynn submitted her novel “Gone Girl” to her publisher, Crown, she wasn’t sure what executives would make of the story’s twists and its churlish, unreliable female narrator.“We knew it was weird and complex and risky,” said Molly Stern, who was publisher of Crown at the time. “We also knew that it was a masterpiece.”“Gone Girl” became a blockbuster, selling millions of copies, inspiring a film adaptation starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike and creating a booming market for psychological thrillers featuring unstable women.Now Flynn and Stern, who left Crown three years ago, are teaming up again. Flynn is joining Zando, the publishing company that Stern started last year — not as a writer, but as a publisher with her own imprint, Gillian Flynn Books. Flynn will acquire and publish fiction as well as narrative nonfiction and true crime. (Her next novel, which she is currently writing, will be published by Penguin Random House.)“The industry is a harder place to break into. Everyone wants something that feels like a sure thing,” Flynn said in an interview. “What attracted me was that ability to give people what I got, which was a chance in the market. So now I get a chance to champion writers who are a little bit different.”“What attracted me was that ability to give people what I got, which was a chance in the market,” said the “Gone Girl” author Gillian Flynn, who is starting the imprint Gillian Flynn Books.Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesAlong with Flynn, Zando has brought on the screenwriter, producer and actor Lena Waithe, who will start an imprint dedicated to publishing “emerging and underrepresented voices,” including memoirs, young adult titles and literary fiction. As the company’s first founding publishing partners, Flynn and Waithe will each acquire and publish four to six books over a three-year period, and will be involved in marketing and promoting the books to their own fan bases.Flynn and Waithe both have built considerable followings and shown themselves to be versatile in different mediums. In addition to writing the screen adaptation of “Gone Girl,” Flynn was an executive producer on the adaptation of her 2006 novel, “Sharp Objects” and was the creator and showrunner of the TV show “Utopia.”Waithe is also a Hollywood powerhouse. After winning acclaim for her work as a writer and actor on “Master of None,” becoming the first Black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing, Waithe wrote and produced the movie “Queen & Slim” and created the television series “The Chi” and “Twenties.”Stern and Waithe met in 2017, when Stern asked if she wanted to work on a book.“Molly was trying to get me to write a book, and I just didn’t want to,” Waithe said in an interview.She was more enthusiastic about the possibility of publishing other people’s books. When Stern asked her about working with Zando, Waithe developed the idea for an imprint, Hillman Grad Books, which she will lead with Rishi Rajani and Naomi Funabashi, executives at Waithe’s production company, Hillman Grad.“Our mission is to introduce people to authors they may not have otherwise heard of,” Waithe said.At a moment of accelerating consolidation in the publishing industry, Zando, an independent company, is something of an outlier. It will likely publish fewer than 30 titles a year and invest heavily in marketing those books, rather than acquiring many more and hoping a few break out, as most corporate publishing houses do.“I’m hoping we can have a force multiplier effect on books that would have sold modestly or wouldn’t have been a priority at a large publishing house,” Stern said. “Now there will be air around them.”“Our mission is to introduce people to authors they may not have otherwise heard of,” Lena Waithe said of her imprint, Hillman Grad Books.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesLike Hollywood studios, mainstream corporate publishers are increasingly reliant on blockbusters to drive profits, and have grown more risk averse when it comes to promoting new writers. Those authors are struggling more than ever to find their audience in today’s algorithm-driven marketplace, which favors recognizable brands and books that are already selling.Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager and Emma Watson can provide boosts through their book clubs, but those kinds of plugs are the publicity equivalent of lightning strikes — powerful but rare. Zando’s model attempts to reverse-engineer the process by recruiting cultural influencers to select the books.To combat what she called a “crisis” of discoverability, Stern is bringing on high-profile publishing partners, which will include businesses and brands as well as celebrities, to promote books to their own fans and customers. Zando’s partners will get a cut of the profits, though Stern declined to say how much.Zando received a significant start-up investment from Sister, an independent global studio founded in 2019 by the media executive Elisabeth Murdoch, the film industry executive Stacey Snider and the producer Jane Featherstone. Zando’s print books will be distributed by Two Rivers, a distributor run by Ingram, but Zando also plans to experiment with unconventional channels like direct to consumer sales.In addition to its imprints, Zando has its own editorial team making acquisitions. Its first batch of books, due out next spring, is heavy on fiction, including “The Odyssey,” a novel by Lara Williams that takes on consumer capitalism; Steve Almond’s debut novel, “All the Secrets of the World,” set in 1980s Sacramento; and Samantha Allen’s “Patricia Wants to Cuddle,” about contestants on a dating TV show, which is billed as a “queer Grendel for the Instagram era.” More

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      A New Podcast Rekindles a Box-Office Bomb

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      Julie Salamon, the author of a 1991 book about the filming of “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” returns to Hollywood history — and her own.One day last December, Julie Salamon was sorting through stacks of old plastic boxes at a storage unit in Lower Manhattan. Salamon, 68, is a journalist, author and self-described pack rat. The boxes were accidental galleries in the museum of a life’s work, filled with relics — notebooks, clippings, photos and tapes — accumulated for the dozen books Salamon has published since 1988.Salamon had come looking for a box that contained material from her second book, “The Devil’s Candy,” published in 1991. She had recently agreed to adapt the book — a celebrated account of the making of the infamous box-office flop “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” based on Tom Wolfe’s sweeping social satire of 1980s New York — for the second season of “The Plot Thickens,” a Hollywood history podcast from Turner Classic Movies.Salamon was hoping to find a trove of mini cassette tapes, recorded on set over the entire course of the film’s production. Audio from the tapes contained unusually candid interviews with the director, Brian De Palma, his crew and the film’s stars — Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith and Morgan Freeman — and would be a crucial component of the podcast.Melanie Griffith and Tom Hanks were two of the big names cast for the film adaption of “Bonfire of the Vanities.”Warner Bros.But when Salamon eventually found the “Devil’s Candy” box, the tapes weren’t there. Distraught, she returned to her apartment in SoHo and resumed searching. It was there, a couple of frantic days later, that she found several zip-lock freezer bags full of mini cassette tapes in the back of a large home office cabinet. The bags hadn’t been opened for 30 years.Making the podcast, which recently ended its seven-episode run, was a late-career twist for Salamon, affording her the rare opportunity to revisit the story of a lifetime three decades later. But, as the author knew better than anyone, adaptations are never simple — at least not when “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is involved.“Putting this podcast together gave me an extra appreciation for Brian’s dilemma,” Salamon said. “At first you don’t have any idea what you’re doing, but then you just start doing it.”When it arrived on bookshelves in 1991, “The Devil’s Candy” stunned Hollywood. It painted a vivid and well-sourced portrait of an industry few outsiders had seen up close. (Or would see today — armies of studio and personal publicists keep journalists from getting too far close.) Salamon, then a film critic for The Wall Street Journal (she later worked for The New York Times), had befriended De Palma, who, by the late 1980s, had made hits like “Carrie,” “Scarface” and “The Untouchables” but was in something of a career slump. With his participation, her book portrayed the world of big-budget studio filmmaking as a high-stakes battle, in which three mercurial factions — the artists, the executives and the audience — are ever at odds with themselves and each other.At the center of the story was what remains one of the most notorious train wrecks in movie history. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” as written by Wolfe, was a kaleidoscopic account of greed and cynicism in the “Me Decade,” filled with characters who were easy to hate and hard to look away from. The book became an instant best seller and media sensation in 1987, making it all but inevitable that someone would try to turn it into a movie. But its sharp edges didn’t survive in Hollywood. Warner Bros. preemptively defanged the story’s central character, a slithering bond trader and self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe” named Sherman McCoy, by casting Hanks, recently of “Big.” Its memorably pitiless ending also got the ax. In its place was an invented scene, in which Freeman, playing a judge, delivers a discordant moral sermon.Behind the scenes, the project was plagued from the start. Its biggest initial cheerleader, a powerful producer named Peter Guber, left the studio before production began. That set the stage for a showdown between De Palma, a withdrawn and exacting visionary, and executives at Warner Bros., who were anxious to protect a bloated $50 million investment. De Palma, who was uninterested in oversight, shut executives out of key aspects of the production. The executives fired back — at one point, they threatened to hold him personally liable for cost overruns.No one who worked on the film — not even Salamon, who observed the shoot and sat in on meetings — recognized it as a creative failure until it was screened for test audiences. By then it was too late. Critics savaged “Bonfire” — “gross, unfunny” and “wildly uneven,” declared this newspaper — and moviegoers shunned it. It made less than $16 million at the box office.The podcast version of “The Devil’s Candy” maintains the basic narrative of the book but adds new layers. The most potent is the audio, rescued from Salamon’s freezer bags. Throughout the series, retrospective narration gives way to contemporaneous recordings that capture events as they happened. The recordings also transform written characters into living, breathing people. Everything you need to know about the particular breed of difficult movie star Bruce Willis was in 1990 — ever-present bodyguard, rude to assistants — is there in the snotty tone he uses in his interviews with Salamon.“For me, the tapes really add a richness that wasn’t possible otherwise,” Salamon said. “I like to think I’m not a bad writer, but there’s no way that you can write anything that’s as moving as just hearing a person tell their story.”The film version of “Bonfire of the Vanities” bombed at the box office, making less than $16 million.xxxSalamon adapted “The Devil’s Candy” in close partnership with the narrative podcast company Campside Media, which co-produced this season of “The Plot Thickens” with TCM. She needed to break down her 420-page book into seven 40-minute podcast episodes.Natalia Winkelman, 28, a producer at Campside (and a freelance film critic for The Times), was a kind of doula and confidant for Salamon, guiding her through the monthslong process of translating her reporting into podcast scripts. Though Salamon’s career as an author spanned fiction, memoir and children’s literature, she had no experience writing for the ear, a distinct form with unique qualities and constraints.“Clauses don’t work so well in audio, you have to be more direct and conversational,” said Winkelman. “I think there was a bit of a learning curve for Julie at first, but once the two of us got into the recording studio things started to click really fast. If I gave her a note — That’s sounding a little read-y — she would come back with something way better than what I could have come up with.”Salamon also wanted to build on the book by adding new reporting and interviews. Many of the more emotionally compelling moments of the podcast stem from the transitions between then and now, record and memory. One of several indelible figures from the book whom Salamon reinterviews is Eric Schwab, a second-unit director on “Bonfire” and protégé of De Palma’s, who was poised for a breakout career before the movie bombed.“So many people who worked on the film were at a turning point in their careers,” said Angela Carone, the director of podcasts at TCM who edited the season with Salamon. “We get to tell their full stories on the podcast in a way that isn’t in the book.”Not everyone who cooperated with the book returned for the podcast. None of the film’s stars sat for new interviews (TCM said the recordings were legally Salamon’s property and that it notified those whose voices are used in the show). Nor did De Palma, though Salamon said the two remain good friends. (Through a representative, the director and the stars also declined to speak for this story.)The likable Hanks was miscast as Sherman McCoy, a slithering bond trader and self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe.”Warner Bros.In the stars’ absence, the podcast becomes more systemic in its outlook. It shows us the idealistic and overworked strivers — the assistant who dreams of becoming a producer, the location scout guzzling aspirin for breakfast — who collect small victories amid the chaos and terror of the film set.Some of what Salamon documented 30 years ago looks different through a modern lens. The fifth episode zeros in on several women who have invariably more precarious positions on the film than those of their male peers. In that episode, a present-day Aimee Morris — who was a 22-year-old production assistant on “Bonfire” — angrily recalls shooting a scene that doesn’t appear in the novel with the actress Beth Broderick. In the scene, Broderick’s character photocopies her naked crotch; filming it required Broderick, who was then De Palma’s girlfriend, to spend nine hours repeatedly taking off her underwear and climbing up and down a Xerox machine.“It just made me sick to my stomach,” Morris says in the episode. The scene “had nothing to do with anything. It’s just disgusting. It’s just misogynistic.”Salamon, who wrote critically of the Xerox scene in her book, said revisiting it with Morris made her frame the anecdote more pointedly this time around.“It just made me realize how much garbage women just accepted back in the day that we rightfully won’t anymore,” she said.For Salamon, working on the podcast was a strange and emotional experience, forcing her to reflect not only on her characters’ journeys but her own.Working on the podcast was a strange and emotional experience for Salamon, forcing her to reflect not only on her characters’ journeys but her own.Winnie Au for The New York TimesWhen she first considered what would become “The Devil’s Candy,” in 1989, she was a frustrated novelist working full time at The Journal while carrying her first child. The book became an instant classic of its genre (it’s still regularly taught in film schools) and changed the trajectory of her life.“To hear those voices transported me back to that moment,” Salamon said, describing what it was like to listen to the tapes for the first time. “I was starting a new life and becoming a young mother and transitioning into a new profession that I loved. It was overwhelming. I was on an adventure.” More

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      In ‘American Rust,’ Buildings Crumble, Passions Burn

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      The setting is both beautiful and ugly, resplendent and run-down. Green foliage wraps around rusting mills, no longer in use; steep hills drop off to the river, like the plummeting dreams of local residents.This is the Monongahela Valley, home to the new nine-episode Showtime series “American Rust,” debuting Sept. 12. Encompassing parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the Mon Valley, as locals call it, is steel country, which means it has been hit hard in recent decades. Unemployment runs rampant. So does opioid abuse.Based on Philipp Meyer’s debut novel from 2009, “American Rust” tells a story of those who call the Mon home, those who want to leave and those who can’t seem to, no matter how hard they try.“It’s like a gravitational pull,” Jeff Daniels said in a recent video call from his Michigan home. Daniels plays Del Harris, the police chief of the fictional town of Buell, which the book situates about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh in Fayette County, Pa., near the real-life towns of Belle Vernon, Fayette City and Monessen.Maura Tierney plays Grace Poe, whose romance with the local sheriff, played by Jeff Daniels, becomes very complicated when her son becomes involved in a murder.Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesChief Harris lives a complicated life. He is in love with Grace Poe (Maura Tierney), who sews at a local dress factory and lives in a trailer on the verge of foreclosure. Grace’s son, Billy (Alex Neustaedter), who chose to stay in Buell instead of accepting a Division I football scholarship, keeps getting caught up in violent crime, including a murder.You could say the chief is compromised by his circumstances and passions.He isn’t the only one. Billy’s best (and perhaps only) friend, Isaac English (David Alvarez), is also the brother of the woman who broke his heart, Lee (Julia Mayorga) — and that may be the least of their friendship’s complications. Meanwhile, Isaac and Lee have troubles of their own: Their father (Bill Camp) was nearly killed in a mill accident, and their mother committed suicide by walking into the river with pockets full or rocks, like Virginia Woolf.Lee, though married and living in New York — she is the rare character in “American Rust” who has managed to escape — finds herself drawn back to Billy nonetheless. Isaac remains trapped at home, forced to care for an angry, wheelchair-bound father who constantly belittles him.Interior scenes of “American Rust” were filmed at 31st Street Studios, in Pittsburgh, the town once known as Steel City. Today it is a regional hub for the arts and tech. Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesJared Wickerham for The New York Times“Any one of these characters could pack up their car and just leave, but they don’t,” Daniels said. “Maybe they can’t. Maybe they’ve got nowhere else to go. They’re at the bottom.”Daniels’s road to Buell began over 10 years ago when he went to see Meyer read from his novel in New York. Daniels was struck by how Meyer located the humanity of characters who don’t get a lot of cultural shine, characters he knows from having spent most of his life in Michigan.“Nobody’s famous,” Daniels said. “Nobody’s trending. These are just everyday normal people that are in every corner of every county in this country.”Meyer grew up in a blue-collar area of Baltimore in the ’80s, when he watched various industries — textile, shipyards, steel, auto — slowly decline. “Violent crime was super high,” Meyer said from his home in Austin. “But it was also clear that you had this giant population of unemployed young men, guys in their 20s and 30s who had been laid off last year or four years ago or five years ago. The American dream had failed them.”Monessen, like the fictional town of Buell, has struggled since the local steel industry collapsed.  Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesBut for his first novel, he decided Baltimore, with its many industries, was too complicated for what he had in mind. When he visited Pittsburgh, where his brother was in college, Meyer realized, “This is where I put the story.”Soon after Daniels met Meyer, the actor was knee-deep in “The Newsroom” (2012-14) and other projects. But “Rust” never left his mind. His father, Robert Lee Daniels, had been the mayor of Daniels’s hometown, Chelsea, Mich., and owned a lumber yard. Daniels recognized the characters in “American Rust.”“I know these guys,” he said. “I know what they sound like. I know how they talk. I know how they think. I know how they walk. I live around them. This is their world.”So when he found the bandwidth, he sought out two writer-producers with whom he had worked on a TV adaptation of another acclaimed book, “The Looming Tower”: Dan Futterman and Adam Rapp. (They, along with Daniels, are among the executive producers.)Futterman, the showrunner of “Rust,” recalled the question Daniels asked: “‘If you love it, would you remind me what I love about it?’”Charleroi, Pa., is held up in the novel “American Rust” as an example of a Rust Belt town that is beginning to revitalize.Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“I told him that I loved what felt to me like a central theme of the book and something that I have written about before,” Futterman said from his New York home. “Can you both love somebody and use them at the same time?”Put another way, what terrible things are we willing to do in the name of love? And what kinds of things might a police chief overlook?The apple of Chief Harris’s eye, his moral blind spot, is Tierney’s Grace, who loves the chief but also knows he can come in handy.“I don’t know if anyone’s ever loved her, and I think she’s made a lot of choices based on that,” Tierney said in a video call from New York. “That’s an interesting person to try to get inside of.”“She’s had to really make her own way, every which way,” she continued. “Then she’s got this fierce devotion to her child, who I think she’s trying to compensate for somehow, but I don’t know if that’s the smartest thing to do. She’s a flawed person who’s trying to just keep her head above water.”Before the shoot, Daniels sent Tierney an email. “I’m not a big chatter,” he wrote, “but if you want to chat, I’m happy to do that. Or if you want to just jump off the cliff, let’s do that.”She wanted to jump off the cliff. And so did he.The ArcelorMittal coke works near downtown Monessen.Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“I don’t enjoy over-talking things,” she said. “We’ve both been doing this for a really long time. So it’s really enjoyable to just show up and know that your partner in the work is going to be prepared, and we just would let it fly.”As with any adaptation, “American Rust” took some intriguing detours on the way from page to screen. Grace is now a union organizer, quite a challenge in a company town where many workers are immigrants who don’t speak English. Isaac’s personal journey has been rerouted. His and Lee’s Mexican heritage has been more fully fleshed out. The story’s central crime is now a mystery, not only to most of the town but also to the viewers.While Meyer wasn’t involved with the series, he is thrilled with the results.“I don’t know if anyone’s ever loved her, and I think she’s made a lot of choices based on that,” Tierney said of her character. “That’s an interesting person to try to get inside of.”Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesDetails add authenticity to the wall of a set in Pittsburgh designed to look like a Mon Valley bar. Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“I’m pretty overjoyed that it has made it onto the air,” he said. “When people think of the middle of the country, maybe they think of ‘Yellowstone,’ which is a fun show but more fantasy than reality. This is the story of what’s happening to about half of America that we don’t really hear that much about.”There’s a sense in “American Rust” that everyone is doing his or her best, which isn’t always good enough in a land beset by fatalism and inertia. In researching the place and the people, Daniels came to see them for what they are — and aren’t.“They’re not just a bunch of hopeless addicts,” Daniels said. “Much like the people in the series that Danny pulled out of the book, these are good people who have to make bad choices just to either survive or to hold onto their dignity.”Pittsburgh, once known as Steel City, has a population of less than half what it was at its peak in the 1950s. Still, the city has been revitalized in recent decades, having successfully diversified its economy after the steel industry collapsed. Cast and crew shot interiors at 31st Street Studios, a home for dozens of film and TV productions to date. Futterman described a city in the midst of a tech and art resurgence, with a vibrant theater scene.It’s when you travel outside of Pittsburgh that you notice what’s gone. The economic downturn has left towns like Donora, Monessen and Rankin as shells of their former selves. This is where the bulk of “American Rust” unfolds and where much of the show was shot. (As in “Mare of Easttown,” another Pennsylvania gothic drama, the Rolling Rock and ruins abound.)“This is the story of what’s happening to about half of America that we don’t really hear that much about,” said Philipp Meyer, who wrote the novel on which the series is based.Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“There are some places where the steel mills are still going, and some where they’re just gone,” Futterman said. “In the town of Buell, it’s gone. The steel mill is shut down, and you can feel the reverberations of that throughout the town, and through all the people that are affected by it in some way.”And yet, the region retains a haunting beauty.“There are these steep drop-offs down to the river and all these steel bridges,” Futterman said. “There are a lot steel mills, some semi-functional, some rusting back into the ground right on the shores of the river. It’s not like other places I’ve been.”Meyer describes the landscape with stark lyricism in the novel: “The mill itself had been like a small city, but they had closed it in 1987, partially dismantled it 10 years later; it now stood like an ancient ruin, its buildings grown over with bittersweet vine, devil’s tear thumb and tree of heaven. The footprints of deer and coyotes crisscrossed the grounds; there was only the occasional human squatter.”It can seem desolate. But for Daniels, it all boils down to the most basic human emotions.“They’re all seeking love, and they’re capable of hate,” he said. “They’re capable of everything. When they’re backed up against the wall, these people are just trying to survive, doing whatever at that point, and trying to hang onto a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s what makes it interesting to me.” More

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      She Wrote the History of ‘Jeopardy!’ Then She Changed It.

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      The reporting of Claire McNear, a journalist who had written a book on the game show, helped end Mike Richards’s hopes of succeeding Alex Trebek as its host.Two days before the journalist Claire McNear published her book, which was billed as a “definitive history” of “Jeopardy!,” its beloved host, Alex Trebek, died of pancreatic cancer, thrusting the game show into a period of uncertainty unlike any its staff had ever seen.McNear’s 2020 book, “Answers in the Form of Questions,” had argued that “Jeopardy!,” a television staple that first premiered in 1964, was on the precipice of significant change, with some key figures who had helped shape the show for decades stepping back.But the loss of Trebek in November raised a new existential question for the show: Could “Jeopardy!” continue to be a success without its trusted, even-keeled captain, who had been its face for more than 36 years?For McNear, one of the most critical chapters in the show’s history had just begun.Nine months later, McNear’s report for The Ringer on the man who had been chosen to succeed Trebek — the show’s executive producer, Mike Richards — would change the course of that history.McNear had listened to all 41 episodes of a podcast that Richards had recorded in 2013 and 2014, when he was executive producer on “The Price Is Right,” and discovered that he had made a number of offensive and sexist comments, including asking two young women who worked on the podcast whether they had ever taken nude photos, and referring to a stereotype about Jews and large noses.Days after the story was published, Richards, 46, resigned from his role as host, saying that the show did not need the distraction. Sony, which produces the show, said he would remain as executive producer. (Mayim Bialik, the sitcom star who had been tapped to host prime-time “Jeopardy!” specials, will temporarily take over weeknight hosting duties.)In an interview, McNear, 32, who writes about sports and culture for The Ringer, discussed her personal relationship to “Jeopardy!,” the impact of her reporting and the show’s future. The conversation has been edited and condensed.McNear Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesEvery “Jeopardy!” fan has their own early memories of the show and a story of what drew them to it. Why did this show become so important to you?I was never one of those superfans who would watch every single night and know all the statistics and the pantheon of all the greatest players. I had watched it with my parents growing up, but I was not one of those hard-core people. It wasn’t until my fiancé and I moved in together, about five years ago, that we got cable — it was the first time I had cable since I was a little kid. And I remember having this light-bulb moment: “Oh my God, we can record ‘Jeopardy!’ every night.” And because of my day job, I started getting to write about it.Two weeks ago, the big hosting announcement dropped: Richards had been chosen. Knowing what you knew about him at the time, what was your reaction to the decision?As I had started to write about “Jeopardy!” more and watch it more seriously, I learned more about the world. I met the fans; I met the people who make the show. And I kept hearing things from people close to the show: that the host-search process might not have been as aboveboard as the way that it was being described publicly, and a number of staff members had fairly grave concerns about him. I wanted to know more about his past and his genesis as a television personality because he had been really open about the fact that, in addition to producing, he wanted to host.What led you to his podcast?He has talked about it in interviews but also, literally, it’s listed — or at least it was — in his official Jeopardy.com bio, that he hosted a comedy news show as a college student called “The Randumb Show.” And I tried to find as much as I could about that show, but it was all taped in the ’90s. It did lead me to the podcast with the exact same name, which is the one that he hosted as the executive producer of “The Price Is Right.”So you’re sitting there listening to these episodes. At what point do you start to become unsettled by his comments?It became extremely clear to me very quickly that those things were kind of dotted throughout the episode: He uses sexist language; he uses ableist language; he uses ugly slurs and stereotypes. There’s a lot of stuff that we did not transcribe in the story that is in there and paints this broader picture of what “The Price Is Right” was like as a workplace. And he was the co-executive producer at the time — he was the boss, and he was mostly just talking to his employees.How long did it take to listen to all 41 episodes?What I will say is it was not a terribly glamorous reporting process. I live in Washington, D.C., and there was one point a couple weeks ago where my air-conditioning broke overnight. And so I spent the whole next day sitting in my living room with an ice pack on my stomach, listening to Mike Richards’s podcast episodes. It was not like what they show in the movies.You wrote in your book that when Trebek first started as host in 1984, fans were actually wary of him following Art Fleming’s run. Do you think fans would accept any new host of “Jeopardy!” with enthusiasm right now?I think Sony was always going to be in a difficult place because it’s not going to be Alex Trebek. Fleming was this sort of genial, affable, friendly guy who was very upfront about not knowing the answers to any of the clues and he was just happy to be there and he needed the sheet in front of him. And then of course, Alex Trebek cultivated this image that he could probably beat all the contestants on any given night. He was this very erudite figure who got all his pronunciations just so. There were fans that didn’t like that at first because they loved the Art Fleming version of the show. I think that does speak to the fact that “Jeopardy!” fans might struggle with a new host — any host — but there’s certainly a history of people coming to admire even a very different host of “Jeopardy!”Trebek always said that it’s the game, not him, that kept viewers coming back. With all you’ve seen over the past eight months, do you think that’s proving to be true?It’s important to note that as much as there has been all this change at “Jeopardy!,” there are also a lot of things that are exactly the same as they have been for years. A lot of the people who work there have been there for decades and spent their entire professional life making “Jeopardy!”The “Jeopardy!” machinery is mostly intact and unchanged. But I think there is a great amount of sadness and fear among “Jeopardy!” fans and among the “Jeopardy!” staff that this whole episode with Mike Richards has damaged this universal appeal that it’s had for all these decades, that it was this totally neutral space that was not partisan. It was never flashy; it was never trying to get in the headlines or be the thing that you debated over dinner. And now it very much is, and it’s possible that when they do bring in a permanent host, people will talk about it a bunch at the beginning, and then it will just kind of settle back down to being the same old “Jeopardy!” But it’s possible that it’s lost that sheen of being unimpeachable. More

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      Michaela Coel Puts Herself Together in ‘Misfits’

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      The book, adapted from a speech by the creator and star of “I May Destroy You,” codifies her efforts to achieve transparency in her work and in her life.The city of Edinburgh was the epicenter of a powerful energy pulse on Aug. 22, 2018 — not the kind that precise scientific equipment can detect, but one whose ripples would be felt by sensitive human instruments in the weeks and months that followed.That evening, Michaela Coel, a rising British TV star, was invited to address her colleagues at the prestigious Edinburgh International Television Festival. Speaking to a few thousand industry peers in a lecture hall and countless more viewers watching her online, she shared stories from her ascent, a narrative that was by turns wryly comic and devastating.Coel talked about growing up a member of one of only four Black families in a public housing complex in East London. She described her time at drama school, where a teacher called her a racial slur during an acting exercise. She discussed her surprise, after achieving some professional success, at being sent a gift bag that contained “dry shampoo, tanning lotion and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for.” She recounted how she had gone out for a drink one night and later realized she had been drugged and sexually assaulted.She spoke of resilience gained from a life spent “having to climb ladders with no stable ground beneath you,” and she classified herself as a misfit, defined in part as someone who “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Three years later, Coel — now 33 and the celebrated creator and star of the HBO comedy-drama “I May Destroy You” — regards this speech as a satisfying moment of personal unburdening.As she said in a video interview a few weeks ago, “We go in and out of working with people and we never quite know who they are, and no one ever quite knows who you are. There’s something quite liberating about just letting everybody know.”A misfit, Coel said during her 2018 speech, “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Ken Jack/Corbis via Getty ImagesWith its explicit calls for greater transparency, Coel’s address (known formally as the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture) resonated across the entertainment industry and provided a narrative and thematic foundation for “I May Destroy You.” Next month, the speech will be published by Henry Holt & Co. as a book titled “Misfits: A Personal Manifesto.”To an audience that is still discovering Coel, her life and her work, “Misfits” may seem like an artifact preserving the moment that its author became the fullest version of herself.But to Coel, it represents a particularly validating episode in a career where she has always felt empowered to speak her mind.“I’ve always been annoying people about these things,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this. But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”To this day, Coel is relentlessly candid about the choices that go into her work, even when it comes to the decision to call “Misfits” a “manifesto,” which she said was foisted upon her by her publishers.As she explained, “I was like, ‘But it’s so small, it’s not really a book.’ They were like, ‘A book is a binding of papers.’ OK, fine, can we call it an essay book? ‘Mmm, no.’”Coel’s book “Misfits” is out on Sept. 7.She was more circumspect about discussing where on the planet she was while we had our video conversation. Despite a report in Variety that Coel had joined the cast of the Marvel superhero sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she said, “I’m in America. I don’t know why I’m here. I have a feeling that I’m not supposed to say.” (A spokesman for Marvel declined to comment.)The actor Paapa Essiedu, a co-star on “I May Destroy You” and a longtime friend of Coel’s, said that since their time together as students at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he had known Coel to be a courageous, forthright person.“Her voice was always very clear,” Essiedu said. “She always felt like she was unperturbed by what was expected of her, and she was able to think and speak independently.”Even so, Essiedu said, “Remember that she is just a normal person,” who talks trash with her friends “and can be funny and can be really annoying. Her day-to-day life is not her espousing how to make the world a better place.”In the speech, Coel described frustrations she had endured on her breakthrough comedy series, “Chewing Gum,” which ran on the E4 channel in Britain and on Netflix in America. She spoke about crying into an unpurchased pair of tights at a drugstore following a phone call where she it was suggested that she would have to hire co-writers to help her on the series.She also talked about turning down an offer to make “I May Destroy You” with Netflix when the streaming service declined to let her keep any ownership rights for the series. (In the lecture, she told this story with an allegorical flair, imagining it as a negotiation with a fictional stepmother she called “No-Face Netanya.”)“I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this,” Coel said. “But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”Wulf Bradley for The New York TimesAmy Gravitt, an executive vice president at HBO who oversees its original comedy programming, said that she was moved by Coel’s lecture when she watched it online.“There was so much that she said in that speech that resonated as a woman working in this industry,” said Gravitt, who first met with Coel in 2017 following the success of “Chewing Gum.”“When she talked about her desire to see another person’s point of view represented onscreen, that resonated deeply with me as a programmer,” Gravitt said.Far from feeling reluctant to work with someone so outspoken, Gravitt said, “I feel like I only want to work with people who feel comfortable speaking their mind.”Coel ultimately ended up making “I May Destroy You” for HBO and the BBC. When I asked her if Netflix must cry itself to sleep every night for losing out on the show, she answered, “Well, melatonin works a charm.”A press representative for Netflix said in a statement said, “Michaela is an incredibly talented artist who we were thrilled to work with on ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Black Earth Rising’ among others, and who we hope to work with again in the future.”Coel said she never hesitated to tell her lecture audience about having been sexually assaulted. “I never had that thing where I kept it to myself and was afraid to say it because of what people thought,” she said. “And because I never had that incubation period for shame and guilt to make a home inside of me, it never did.”Talking about the assault now was like “looking at a scar,” she said.“I look at the scar, and it’s like, whoa, that happened,” Coel said. “But now I’m alive to look at this scar, which means that I’ve come around the bend.”At the time she gave the lecture, Coel was already writing what would become “I May Destroy You,” in which her character, a young writer named Arabella, is served a spiked drink and sexually assaulted.“I May Destroy You” is up for nine Emmys, including outstanding lead actress.HBO, via Associated PressTo this day, Coel said, she encounters people who are fans of the show but do not realize it is based on her experience. Other viewers approach her, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.“I May Destroy You” became a pandemic-era staple when it ran last spring and summer, and it has inspired its fans in other ways.In February, the series received no nominations for Golden Globes, prompting an outcry from its audience. Deborah Copaken, an author and memoirist (“Ladyparts”) who was a writer on the first season of the gauzy Netflix comedy “Emily in Paris,” wrote in an essay for The Guardian that the snub “is not only wrong, it’s what is wrong with everything.”In an interview, Copaken praised Coel for putting “people on the screen you’ve never seen on TV except as extras or others,” in a series that encompassed topics such as sexual consent and the assimilation of immigrants.“It doesn’t do the thing of making people who aren’t white and Western into paragons of virtue,” Copaken said. “These are interesting people with messy lives. At every turn, it challenges viewers’ assumptions.”Coel herself said she was too enchanted with the broader reaction to her series to worry about the Golden Globes controversy. “I was on this cloud of gratitude,” she said, “and I could hear there was something happening. I was like, guys, I don’t know how to come down from the cloud and deal with this.” Last month, “I May Destroy You” was nominated for nine Emmy Awards, including limited or anthology series. Coel and Essiedu both received nominations as actors, and Coel was also nominated as a director and as a writer on the series.Now Coel faces the happy challenge of figuring out a follow-up to “I May Destroy You,” and she is emphatic that the series has concluded.“To me, it’s very clearly finished, isn’t it?” she said. “Imagine if there was a Season 2? I just think guys, come on, it’s done. Unless somebody has this amazing idea for Season 2 that doesn’t destroy Season 1, for me it is closed and finished.”Coel said she faced no external pressures to deliver her next project. “HBO and BBC were very kind,” she said. “They said, ‘Hey, Michaela, you’ve done a great thing for us. You can just chill out, take as long as you need.’ But I’m not like that.”She quickly pointed her camera at a whiteboard on which she had started to map out a new story arc, but she turned the camera back at herself before any words were legible. She would say no more about the new series except that the BBC had committed to making it.Viewers of “I May Destroy You” sometimes approach Coel, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times(Gravitt, the HBO executive, said that her network was “in the early stages of talking to Michaela and the BBC and various artists who are all a part of the team of ‘I May Destroy You,’ and excited at the prospect of having this new project to work on together.”)Essiedu said that Coel had not been changed much by reaching a new echelon of fame, and that she remained an artist who was motivated more by the work more than by the celebrity.“She deserves the credits and the plaudits,” he said. “She’s not going to shy away from that, which is something that us Brits are very good at doing. She’s maybe a bit more like you Americans in that approach.”But having twice experienced the satisfaction of feeling that her viewers truly and fully received what she was saying — with her MacTaggart lecture, and with “I May Destroy You” — Coel said she could hardly ask for much more.“As a writer, sometimes I’m fraught, I’m frazzled,” she said. “I’m trying to be clear, piece by piece, and the audience valued me and listened to me.”With a mixture of relief and delight, she exclaimed, “The way that people listen to me in this life! All I’ve learned is to be heard.” More

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      in Music

      Dolly Parton and James Patterson Are Working On a Novel, 'Run, Rose, Run'

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      “Run, Rose, Run” is set for publication in 2022, along with a Parton album whose 12 new songs were inspired by the book.In February 2020, James Patterson flew to Nashville to visit Dolly Parton.She was a fan of his “Alex Cross” thrillers, and he had a proposal for her: Would she work with him on a novel about an aspiring country singer who goes to Nashville to seek her fortune and escape her past? More

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      in Movies

      ‘Misha and the Wolves’ Review: Fuzzy Memories

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      Did an ostensible Holocaust memoirist really spend her childhood running with wolves? This documentary has answers.The documentary “Misha and the Wolves” revisits a semi-infamous episode in Holocaust appropriation. In a 1997 book, an author named Misha Defonseca claimed that, as a child during World War II, she had trekked through the woods living with a pack of wolves.The spoiler-averse will want to stop reading. But about a decade later, her story was exposed as a fraud. The film, directed by Sam Hobkinson and streaming on Netflix, recounts how various people — a publisher, Jane Daniel; a genealogist, Sharon Sergeant; and a Holocaust survivor, Evelyne Haendel, who tirelessly researched the case in Belgium — uncovered information about Defonseca’s real wartime experiences.The movie also tries to illustrate the nature of deception, to the point of lying to the viewer. A person labeled by name as an ordinary talking head turns out to be a performer on a set; at a critical moment, we see her wig removed. But “Misha and the Wolves” is most absorbing when it deals with the search for truth. Haendel, who spent her own childhood during the Holocaust hiding as a Catholic, recalls how she pored over old phone books and other records.“Misha and the Wolves” plays best on first viewing, with its surprises intact. The current documentary “Enemies of the State” deals more provocatively with verification issues in a less publicly settled case. Still, “Misha and the Wolves” shows how, in certain situations, people too polite to demand evidence can be hoodwinked. The film’s late efforts to portray Defonseca as at least some sort of victim don’t wash.Misha and the WolvesRated PG-13 for lies. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Television

      Cecily Strong Is Starting a New Conversation

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      The “Saturday Night Live” star shares the story of her pandemic experience and a life touched by grief in “This Will All Be Over Soon.”RHINEBECK, N.Y. — It’s hard to think of Cecily Strong and not be reminded of the effusive television characters she plays. If you’re a “Saturday Night Live” fan, you immediately conjure up her exuberant performance as a soused Jeanine Pirro crooning “My Way” while she dunks herself in a tank of wine. Or if you’ve been watching her on the Apple TV+ musical comedy “Schmigadoon!,” you think of her belting out modern-day show tunes praising the pleasures of corn pudding or smooching with a suitor. More