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      in Television

      Michael Crichton’s Estate Calls New Show an Unauthorized ‘ER’ Remake in Lawsuit

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      The best-selling author’s estate has filed suit over “The Pitt,” an upcoming series, claiming that it is an unauthorized reboot of the hit hospital drama.The estate of Michael Crichton filed suit against Warner Bros. Television on Tuesday, claiming that its upcoming Max series, “The Pitt,” is an unauthorized “ER” reboot that fails to credit him and compensate his heirs.The suit accused Warner Bros. and R. Scott Gemmill, the showrunner of “The Pitt,” of breaching a contract that requires Crichton’s consent for any remakes of the hit hospital drama. The estate also sued John Wells, an executive producer, and Noah Wyle, set to star and serve as an executive producer.“The lawsuit filed by the Crichton Estate is baseless,” Warner Bros. Television said in an emailed statement, calling “The Pitt” a “new and original show.” The company said it would “vigorously defend against these meritless claims.”The complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claims that in 2020, Warner Bros., Gemmill, Wells and Wyle began developing a reboot of the show without informing Sherri Crichton, the author’s widow and the guardian of his estate. Gemmill and Wells were executive producers on “ER,” and Wyle was a star of that show.When they told her about the project, nearly two years into development, Crichton’s estate was prepared to approve a reboot based on the condition that he would be credited as a creator, in addition to a set of financial terms. But Warner Bros. later walked back on many of its promises, the lawsuit said.After negotiating for nearly a year, the parties did not reach an agreement, according to the suit. But Warner Bros. “simply moved the show from Chicago to Pittsburgh, rebranded it ‘The Pitt’ and has plowed ahead without any attribution or compensation for Crichton and his heirs,” the complaint said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      7 Days in the Cultural Life of an Artistic Director

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      Violaine Huisman, who leads programming for the Crossing the Line festival, takes in dance on Little Island, a world premiere at Asia Society and “invigorating” translation projects.Bastille Day felt a little bit different this year than others, said Violaine Huisman, the artistic director of New York’s annual Crossing the Line festival. L’Alliance, the French cultural center in Midtown, throws a party every July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. This year, the celebration took place just one week after a surprising snap election left President Emmanuel Macron — and France — in a state of flux.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” recalled Huisman, who had just been in the country to witness the upset in the streets. (Many participants in this year’s festival opted to carry blank placards in homage to a demonstration created by the choreographer Anna Halprin during the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s.)During these times of uncertainty, many look to art for clarity and guidance. Huisman, 45, is certainly one of those people, as she has been hard at work curating programming for the next Crossing the Line, which kicks off several weeks of art, dance and theater on Sept. 5.Ahead of the festival, Huisman tracked a few days of her cultural life, noting some of the performances, books and music, mostly from her native France, that inspired her. Here are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.“I overheard onlookers wondering out loud whether it was a French tradition to demonstrate with blank signs on that day,” Huisman said.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSunday: Placards for PeaceWe celebrated Bastille Day at L’Alliance with a street fair and an amazing piece of performance art, in which two dozen volunteers carrying blank placards engaged in a procession through Midtown, trailed by a marching band. It was a re-enactment by Anne Collod of Anna Halprin’s “Blank Placard Dance.” Volunteers asked audience members what they would march for. “Peace” was the overwhelming response.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Charles R. Cross, Biographer of Cobain and Hendrix, Dies at 67

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      He tracked the rise of grunge as the editor of the Seattle music magazine The Rocket. He also wrote acclaimed books about two of the city’s most celebrated rock luminaries.Charles R. Cross, a Seattle music writer who edited The Rocket, a local rock bible, during the city’s grunge-era flowering in the 1990s, and who wrote acclaimed biographies of two of the city’s most venerated musical figures, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, died on Aug. 9 at his home in Shoreline, Wash., He was 67.His death was announced in a statement from his family. No cause was given.Mr. Cross was the editor of The Rocket, a biweekly magazine, from 1986 through 2000, a period when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam redefined rock. It was considered a must-read for musicians looking to join the wave.It would be “impossible to imagine the music or community of Seattle in the 80s and 90s without charles r. cross,” Chris Walla, a former member of Death Cab for Cutie, the critically acclaimed alternative rock band from Bellingham, Wash., wrote on social media.Mr. Cross was also a well-known sage to fans of Bruce Springsteen: He turned his self-produced fanzine into Backstreets Magazine, a trove of Springsteen arcana that was well known to the artist himself.At a concert in Pittsburgh on Sunday, Mr. Springsteen paid tribute to Mr. Cross, telling the audience that his “help in communicating between our band and our fans will be sorely missed” before launching into his song “Backstreets.”Mr. Cross published the first of his nine books, “Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music,” in 1989, followed two years later by “Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell,” an illustrated history that he wrote with Erik Flannigan, with photographs by Neal Preston.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Book Review: ‘The Instrumentalist,’ by Harriet Constable

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      In her debut novel, “ The Instrumentalist,” Harriet Constable paints a vivid and nuanced portrait of the groundbreaking 18th-century violinist and conductor Anna Maria della Pietà.THE INSTRUMENTALIST, by Harriet ConstableThough plenty of talented women have performed and composed music in Europe over the last several centuries, few are enshrined in the classical canon. Why have their names and works disappeared from history?There are many explanations. Women were rarely allowed to perform in public; they lacked the kind of alone time, free of child care and housework, that enabled men to pursue their craft wholeheartedly; they had limited musical options, since women were prohibited from playing certain instruments, like the cello (lascivious) and the flute (unflattering); and in some cases, they were denied adequate recognition for their musical contributions, labeled “muses” to male artists rather than being credited as collaborators.In her debut novel, “The Instrumentalist,” Harriet Constable offers her own answers to this question through a complex and vivid portrait of Anna Maria della Pietà, an 18th-century Venetian violinist and conductor, and a favorite pupil of the composer Antonio Vivaldi.Born in Venice in 1696, della Pietà was handed over as an infant to the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage where girls were given a home and an education, including in music. There, she met Vivaldi, who led the Pietà’s widely celebrated orchestra, the figlie di coro. Centuries before major orchestras began hiring women, the orphans of the figlie di coro earned incomes, acquired jewels and commanded the adoration of kings and queens. Even among these stars, della Pietà shone, and eventually, she became the master of music at the orphanage.Beyond these details, little is known about della Pietà’s life. Though she was a renowned musician during her time, she was eventually forgotten. With “The Instrumentalist,” Constable fills in the gaps, giving this remarkable figure the kind of nuanced origin story that has rarely been afforded by history to female artists.The book opens with della Pietà as baby Anna Maria, and right away Constable sets up the first glimmers of her relentless character. In a harrowing scene, her teenage mother, a sex worker lost in a daze of postpartum anguish, attempts to drown herself and her child. The baby, Constable writes, “is a raging firestorm of a thing, and she cannot hold it back.” Anna Maria’s fervor causes her mother to change course and drop the baby off at an orphanage instead of killing her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Hypocrite,’ by Jo Hamya

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      In Jo Hamya’s second novel, “The Hypocrite,” a 20-something playwright puts her absent, aging writer dad on blast.THE HYPOCRITE, by Jo HamyaEven bad, absent daddies can set aside ego to appreciate the trappings of a classic. In “The Hypocrite,” Jo Hamya’s sharp and agile new novel, an unnamed, aging writer admits the brilliance of a nearly 10-minute sex scene to open his daughter’s latest play. It’s a shame the actor thrusting onstage is a venereal, self-regarding avatar of the writer himself, otherwise he’d tell his daughter how clever she was.We are in London, in the summer of 2020. The city is cautiously stirring to life after months of lockdown. The play has been warmly received by critics, and its 20-something playwright, Sophia, is unquestionably talented. Also: wounded, blinkered, petulant.Her father is a middle-aged novelist of moderate renown who is said to “offend people for a living,” and whose views aren’t quite prehistoric but are premodern enough that I’d prefer not to hear his feelings about women breastfeeding in public. At a glance, he resembles Martin Amis during a low moment. He saw Sophia only intermittently during her childhood, hasn’t published a book in years, hasn’t navigated the shifting cultural tides terribly well. Settling into his seat at the theater, he had no idea what he was in for.Their longest stretch of time together, a Sicilian vacation a decade earlier in which Sophia took dictation for his novel-in-progress, is the play’s subject. Her memory is ferociously loyal, but unsparing: She nails precise details of the dill-scented kitchen where they worked, his cherished purple shirt, the sexual encounters he thought he’d kept secret. Within moments, the humiliation sets in — he is reduced to a version of himself that had sex “like a pig and wrote like a dictator,” as the audience howls with laughter.Still, there are crumbs of mercy. Thank God Sophia hasn’t cast someone who can replicate the sputtering of his orgasms.And thankfully, nobody in this appropriately claustrophobic story emerges the clear hero. No one is that doomed L-word, likable. Hamya bats our sympathies between characters: Sophia, the neglected child who craves both her father’s approval and his artistic toppling; her father, who seems baffled by how quickly he’s encountered irrelevance; and Sophia’s mother, who is justifiably fed up after loving two self-engrossed yet profoundly un-self-aware writers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      A Newly Translated Oral History Reveals Krautrock’s Antifascist Roots

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      Christoph Dallach’s book explores how Nazism, a postwar German identity crisis and anti-authoritarian youth movements spurred some of the most daring experiments of 1970s music.“We had to start from zero.” “We wanted to start over at zero.” “It wasn’t an intellectual approach, more an anarchic one: just starting over at zero.”Spoken by the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, the composer Irmin Schmidt and the guitarist Lutz Ludwig Kramer, these assertions from the newly translated oral history “Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock” explain the high stakes driving Germany’s counterculture in the decades following World War II.After the unthinkable, Germany’s youth inherited a “country in ruins, and thus a ruined culture” (says Schmidt), a partition between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, a global fear of all things German, an identity crisis and a question: how to respond to the crimes of their parents?All easily forgotten when you’re listening to the buoyant and life-affirming music that generation produced in the 1970s. Kraftwerk, Can, Popol Vuh and their peers — a diverse movement often reductively called krautrock — raised the bar for electronic experiments and collaborative democracy in popular music, and helped set the stage for punk, industrial music and techno.But oral histories convince through mutual witness, and many of the 66 players and observers that Christoph Dallach interviewed for this book achieved their neu klang — their “new sound” — by fleeing Germany’s authoritarian past. First published in German in 2021, a translation of “Neu Klang” by Katy Derbyshire reveals to Anglophone listeners a generation of musicians wading through the legacy of fascism.“When I started school we still had to say ‘Heil Hitler’ for two days — and all of a sudden it turned into ‘Guten Morgen,’” says the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. For the drummer and electronic music pioneer Harald Grosskopf, whose father had been a Nazi officer, “My fight with him became the major conflict of my life” and “was probably what ended up taking me to krautrock.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Monet, Taylor Swift, ‘Moana’: What Got Readers Through Their Grief

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      After our series on how artists have been affected by loss, we asked readers what helped them when they experienced it. These are 15 of their answers.Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, we published The Grief Project, a series of interviews with artists who discussed the ways that loss affected their work and creativity. We also asked readers about the art and culture — whether it was a book, a movie, a song or anything else — that helped them remember or cope with losing a loved one. Hundreds responded. Here is what some of them said.Music‘As’ by Stevie WonderLike Stevie Wonder, Nancy Hanks wrote, her mother “was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with.”Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesI’m not sure if it’s the melody or lyrics, but this song deeply captures the deep feelings of love and profound grief that I feel for the loss of my mother. Throughout the song Stevie Wonder professes all the ways and lengths that the depth of his love reaches. He notes “did you know true love asks for nothing / her acceptance is the way we pay.” I often am reminded of this. The grief that I carry is a tax on the lifetime of unconditional love I’ve experienced from my mother. Like Stevie, she was soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all she came in contact with. We couldn’t have the proper celebration we wanted for her because of Covid, but I imagine if we did, we would have played this song along with so many more of her favorites and danced all night. I can’t hear the song anymore without feeling a deep sense of longing for her. I’m so grateful for her life and legacy, and I miss her terribly. —Nancy Hanks, AtlantaFilm‘School of Rock’It was less than a week after we lost our 4-year-old daughter Laila to cancer, in 2004. A neighboring couple, who had been supportive throughout Laila’s illness, brought over a VHS tape of “School of Rock.” In those very early days of bereavement, as far as I knew, I would never laugh again. But we popped in the videocassette, and before long I found myself laughing out loud, along with the family and friends gathered with us. Although my sadness filled my entire soul, there was somehow still room for humor. The wondrous physics of hope, in a lesson delivered by Jack Black with his electric guitar. As a family, we rewatch “School of Rock” every now and then, and it never fails to uplift. To me, it will always be a symbol of resilience. —Mary Janevic, Ann Arbor, Mich.SportsThe New York RangersWatching the Rangers “offered tremendous comfort to my family,” wrote Pam Poling, whose sister was a fellow fan.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images/Getty ImagesOur sister died in December after an incredibly brief illness. She was our go-to person for all things hockey, especially our beloved Rangers. Watching them skate so beautifully this season offered tremendous comfort to my family. Whether they win or lose, we often text each other, “Joanie would have loved this.” It really helps. —Pam Poling, Fairfield, Conn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Overlooked No More: Renee Carroll, ‘World’s Most Famous Hatcheck Girl’

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      From the cloakroom at Sardi’s, she made her own mark on Broadway, hobnobbing with celebrity clients while safekeeping fedoras, bowlers, derbies and more.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For 24 years, as the hatcheck girl at Sardi’s, the storied theater district restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan, Renee Carroll found fame from within the close confines of a cloakroom.From that post, she hobnobbed with celebrity clientele, fed insider gossip to newspaper columnists and wrote an immensely popular, chatty book that dished about which stage actress ate too much garlic (Katharine Cornell, if you must know) and how fading stars wistfully reacted when rising newcomers like Joan Crawford entered the dining room.Checking hats at a restaurant might seem like a menial job, and in fact the salary for safekeeping homburgs, fedoras, bowlers and derbies was measly, but Caroll saw the position as an opportunity to make her own mark on Broadway.With her wisecracking personality, she won over actors, writers and producers while earning dime or quarter tips. If someone checked a play script with her, she perused it and offered canny critiques, sometimes unsolicited, by the time the patron had finished lunch.Her approbation was considered such a good-luck charm that even hatless playwrights and producers were known to leave her money. Eugene O’Neill once entrusted her with his wristwatch when he had nothing else on hand to check.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More