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      Jean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and More

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and MoreHe was a favorite of Luis Buñuel and other top filmmakers. He also had a fruitful collaboration with the stage director Peter Brook.Jean-Claude Carrière in 1999. He had more than 150 film and television writing credits and also wrote books and plays.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Jean-Claude Carrière, an author, playwright and screenwriter who collaborated with the director Luis Buñuel on a string of important films and went on to work on scores of other movies, among them Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89.The death was confirmed by his daughter Kiara Carrière. No cause was given.Mr. Carrière had barely started in the movie business when he met Buñuel, the Spanish-born director, in 1963 (although he had already won a short-subject Oscar for a 1962 comedy he made with Pierre Étaix, “Happy Anniversary”).“At the time, he was looking for a young French screenwriter who knew the French countryside well,” Mr. Carrière recalled in a 1983 interview with the writer Jason Weiss.“I was a beginner,” he said. “I had gone to Cannes, and he was seeing various screenwriters there. I had lunch with him, we got along well, and three weeks later he chose me and I left for Madrid. Since then I haven’t stopped.”His first project with Buñuel was “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), for which the two adapted the Octave Mirbeau novel of the same name. Mr. Carrière continued to work with Buñuel for the rest of the director’s career, including on his last feature, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in 1977. (Buñuel died in 1983.)Fernando Rey and Carole Bouquet in a scene from the 1977 film “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the last of Mr. Carrière’s many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.“Quite often the screenwriter has to guess what exactly the film is that the director wants to make,” Mr. Carrière told Interview magazine in 2015. “Sometimes the director doesn’t even know himself. You have to help him find the right thing. That was the case with Buñuel. At the beginning, he was looking around in many different directions, and finally when we went the right way, we felt it.”Mr. Carrière also collaborated with other top filmmakers, including Jacques Deray (on the 1969 movie “The Swimming Pool” and more) and Louis Malle (on the 1967 film “The Thief of Paris” and others). In the 1970s one of his greatest successes was as a writer of Volker Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), which was adapted from the Günter Grass novel about a boy who, in the midst of the gathering chaos that led to World War II, decides not to grow up; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.In the 1980s he wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Daniel Vigne’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s “Danton” (1983), Milos Forman’s “Valmont” (1989) and numerous other movies. Among the most recent of his more than 150 film and television credits were “The Artist and the Model,” a 2012 drama directed by Fernando Trueba, and “At Eternity’s Gate,” a 2018 film about Vincent van Gogh directed by Julian Schnabel.In 2014 Mr. Carrière received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. The citation said that his “elegantly crafted screenplays elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”The prolific Mr. Carrière also wrote books and plays, often collaborating with the stage director Peter Brook. His interests knew no bounds.With Mr. Brook he created “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour stage version of the Sanskrit epic, which was staged at the Avignon Theater Festival in France in 1985 and then made into a film. He once wrote a book with the Dalai Lama (“The Power of Buddhism,” 1996). He wrote a novel called “Please, Mr. Einstein” that, as Dennis Overbye wrote in a 2006 review in The New York Times, “touches down lightly and charmingly on some of the thorniest philosophical consequences of Einstein’s genius and, by extension, the scientific preoccupations of the 20th century — the nature of reality, the fate of causality, the comprehensibility of nature, the limits of the mind.”His was deliberately ever curious.“People say I am very dispersed,” he told The Guardian in 1994. “But I say that to pass from one subject to another, from one country to another, is what keeps me alive, keeps me alert.”A scene from Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), one of three films for which Mr. Carrière was nominated for a writing Oscar.Credit…Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalJean-Claude Carrière was born on Sept. 17, 1931, in Colombières-sur-Orb in southern France, into a family of vintners. As World War II was ending in 1945, his father, who had a heart condition that was making it difficult for him to work the land, took a job at a cousin’s cafe near Paris. There Jean-Claude had access to better schools and could indulge more fully in the passion for writing that had, as he put it, “imposed itself on me” since he was a young boy.In his mid-20s he published a novel, “Le Lézard.” It caught the attention of the comic actor and director Jacques Tati, who provided Mr. Carrière with a sort of backward entry into his career: Mr. Tati hired him to write novels based on some of his movies. He also introduced him to the process of making and editing a film.He and Mr. Étaix jointly wrote and directed “Happy Anniversary,” a comic short about a couple trying to celebrate their anniversary. Mr. Carrière was surprised by the Oscar.“I came to the office and the producer was jumping out of joy: ‘We have the Oscar! We have the Oscar!,’” he told Interview. “I asked, ‘But what is the Oscar?’ I didn’t know.”His family background benefited him in his fateful meeting with Buñuel the next year.“The first question he asked me when we sat down together at the table — and it’s not a light or frivolous question; the way he looked at me I sensed that it was a deep and important question — was, ‘Do you drink wine?’” he told Mr. Weiss.“A negative response would have definitely disqualified me,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Not only do I drink wine, but I produce it. I’m from a family of vintners.’”Their bond thus sealed, Buñuel and Mr. Carrière went on to collaborate not only on “Diary of a Chambermaid” but also on “Belle de Jour” (1967), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and other films.In 1971 Mr. Carrière was among the writers on Mr. Forman’s “Taking Off,” a comedy about parents searching for a runaway daughter that received good notices. The same was not true of the next Carrière-Forman partnership, a Broadway production of Mr. Carrière’s two-character play “The Little Black Book,” with Mr. Forman directing. When it opened in April 1972, Clive Barnes, reviewing in The Times, called it “a foolish little play without either wit or humanity.” It closed after seven performances.Mr. Carrière in 2001. He received an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his “elegantly crafted screenplays,” which the citation said “elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”Credit…Jean-Pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis only other Broadway effort was better received. It was “La Tragedie de Carmen,” which he, Marius Constant and Mr. Brook adapted from the Bizet opera, with Mr. Brook directing. It opened in November 1983 and ran for 187 performances.Mr. Carrière was nominated for writing Oscars for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Brook once explained what made Mr. Carrière such an in-demand writer, whether the job was creating original material, adapting a novel or opera, or reining in an epic poem.“Like a great actor, or a great cameraman, he adapts himself to different people he works with,” Mr. Brook told The Times in 1988. “He’s open to all shifts caused by the material changing, and yet he brings to it a very powerful and consistent point of view.”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Theater

      Working in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWorking in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.“We Play Ourselves” finds a struggling playwright exiled to Los Angeles and obsessing over New York. Then she meets the manipulative filmmaker next door.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” Jen Silverman said of her debut novel. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021“Theater only feels like an accomplishment if you’re part of the cult,” a character in Jen Silverman’s new novel, “We Play Ourselves,” says. “The rest of the world thinks we’re all wasting our best years.”The book’s flailing heroine, Cass, an emerging playwright, flees New York after a disastrous opening night. At loose ends in Los Angeles, she drifts toward an unscrupulous filmmaker and the teenage girls in her orbit. Like much of Silverman’s writing, the book balances what Silverman’s colleague, the showrunner Lauren Morelli, praised as a “razor-sharp absurdism alongside a deep reverence for humanity.”Silverman (“The Moors,” “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties”) started the novel in 2018, having temporarily moved to Los Angeles for a stint in Morelli’s “Tales of the City” writers’ room. Most days, she would arrive at her office an hour or two early and sit at her desk, trying to translate theater’s ephemerality into prose. She thinks she could only write the novel, her first, because theater felt so distant, which acted as a kind of deprogramming.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” she said during a recent video call. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side. It’s not an idealized love.”Dana Delany, left, and Chaunté Wayans in Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” which had an Off Broadway run in 2018.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn addition to plays, teleplays and now novels, Silverman also writes poems, essays and short stories. (She denies being prolific, which is funny.) Across genres, her style is mutable, her word choice precise, her interest piqued by tales of transformation and how people do and don’t resist it. The director Mike Donahue, a frequent collaborator, said that he admires her work because he never knows the form it will take. “It’s always an entirely new world to try to crack and a new language to understand,” he said.Speaking from the Upper Manhattan apartment that she shares with her partner, the set designer Dane Laffrey, Silverman discussed art, autobiography and what it means for the book to arrive in a world without theater. “It’s hard because I want so desperately to be back in a theater,” she said. “But when I think about hearing somebody three rows behind me cough, like, I feel this cold panic.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How’s your pandemic going?It’s the best pandemic I’ve ever had. I’ve been working on the book. I got galleys for it in April. It felt a little crazy, because the world was on fire and I’m trying to decide between a semicolon and a comma. And I’ve been reading a lot. That’s saving my sanity. Maybe.How did this book come about?I had been writing a different book. But something about being in L.A. and being plunged into a different medium, I longed for theater, like in a visceral, full-body way. And I found that when I would sit down to write, I would just start writing about theater. I ended up calling my editor and saying, “I’m writing a completely different novel. I hope that’s OK.”Do you think that people outside the theater understand theater?What everybody understands is the desire to be transported outside yourself, the desire to experience something larger than you, the desire to be deeply moved. Everybody wants to feel magic in their lives.How autobiographical is the novel?The part that feels really aligned with my personal experience is the way that theater became something so much larger than a career, that it took the place of a spiritual life. Cass longs for it and needs it in a way that was a really personal, active thing for me. But there are a lot of divergences and one of them is Cass’s hunger for visibility and acknowledgment and her desire to be famous. Attention makes me really nervous, to be honest. So I found it really interesting to follow a character who desperately wants to be a public figure and whose sense of self is constructed around what is being said about her.Silverman started the book while working in the writers’ room for the Netflix reboot of “Tales of the City.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesYou’ve written an intense opening night scene. What are opening nights like for you?Like a particular ritual or ceremony that we’ve all agreed to participate in. From the gathering of the crowds to the party. Then there’s a judgment that’s going to come down and what will that judgment be? Depending on whether you’re a writer who reads reviews, that judgment can feel different, but it’s like running a gauntlet.Are the parties fun at least?I’m shy. Crowds scare me. I was not cut out for like a life of extroverts. I try to bring a friend who is an extrovert, and then just watch them thrive in this company of humans.Do you read reviews?I’ve gone back and forth. There was a time when I was like, “I’m not going to read reviews.” Then I was like, “No, there’s a lot to learn, I don’t have to agree with it. But I should learn.” At this point, there are a set of critics that I find really smart, thoughtful, nuanced, complex. I don’t always agree with them. They don’t always say good things about me. But I always want to know what they’re saying.In the novel, the theater world is rife with professional jealousy. Is that your experience?The arts economy in the U.S. is defined by scarcity, because we don’t have government funding. Institutions don’t have a lot of support beyond ticket sales. If you are a woman, queer, an artist of color, it’s very clear that there is a slot and the people who are your community, your collaborators, your family, are also being positioned as your competitors. I don’t think that is good for the arts. I don’t think that is good for the culture.Still, the book makes theater seem very sexy. Is it?It can be. What interests me is that it’s a really intimate place. No matter your role, you are performing essentially a mind meld in a really rarefied, intensified environment. Some of my closest friends, people who are family, are people I met doing shows.Cass has a nemesis in Tara-Jean, a younger playwright. And she falls for a TV star and an elegant director. Are these based on real people? Did you worry that readers would think so?I did have a moment of real anxiety about it. It is very much fiction. I had theater friends read it. A few of them actually called me after and they were like, “I didn’t know you knew this person.” But each of them had a different person. I’ve heard five different theories for who Tara-Jean is.What does it mean to have this novel arrive in a world largely without theater?I have no idea. I thought it was a different world that the novel was going to be entering. For myself, I have dreams almost every other night about theater. Sometimes it’s my play; most of the time it’s somebody else’s play. Sometimes the dream is really good. And sometimes, I have this feeling of like, “Wait a minute, aren’t we in a pandemic? Where’s my mask?” But because my longing for theater is such a big part of my life, I’ve been really enjoying reading about theater. I hope that this book can be that for other people.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Movies

      Beyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in Comics

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in ComicsA bumper crop of graphic novels and comic books melds African culture and science fiction, with influences as wide-ranging as space travel, Caribbean folklore and Janelle Monáe.“Hardears,” set on a mythical version of Barbados, is among the titles coming from Megascope this year.Credit…Abrams BooksFeb. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it struck the author and illustrator John Jennings as so unprecedented, such a break from American history, that it was like an event from some far-flung future.“Before then, the only time you would see a president who was Black was in a science-fiction movie,” he said in a phone interview last month. Jennings compared it to the sorts of imaginative leaps one finds in the most forward-thinking works categorized as “Afrofuturist.”This year, fans of Afrofuturism will see a bumper crop of comics and graphic novels, including the first offerings of a new imprint devoted to Black speculative fiction and reissues of Afrofuturist titles from comic-book houses like DC and Dark Horse.Afrofuturism, whether in novels, films or music, imagines worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect. The term was coined by the writer Mark Dery in 1993 and has since been applied to the novels of Octavia Butler (“Kindred”), the musical stylings of the jazz composer Sun Ra and more recently films such as “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” which presented a gorgeously rendered vision of the technologically advanced, vibranium-powered nation of Wakanda.“Afrofuturism isn’t new,” said Ytasha L. Womack, a cultural critic and the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” a primer and history of the movement and aesthetic. “But the plethora of comics and graphic novels that are available is certainly a new experience.”Graphic novels published in January included “After the Rain,” an adaptation of a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, and “Infinitum,” a tale of African kings and space battles by the New York-based artist Tim Fielder.For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, the artist Tim Fielder created Aja Oba, an African king cursed with eternal life. Credit…Harper CollinsThis month marks the long-awaited return of the “Black Panther” comics written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which the National Book Award-winning author began in 2016, as well as the latest installment of “Far Sector,” a series written by N.K. Jemisin and inspired by the actor and musician Janelle Monáe, about the first Black woman to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps.Even older works are getting new looks. Black superheroes from the ’90s-era comic company Milestone — including Icon, a space alien who crash lands on Earth in 1839 and takes the form of an African-American man — are finding new readers on DC Universe Infinite, a subscription service that launched in January. Meanwhile, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse plans to release the comics of the Nigerian-born writer Roye Okupe, who previously self-published them, including his Afrofuturistic series “E.X.O.,” a superhero tale set in 2025 Nigeria.Comics are particularly well suited for Afrofuturism, Womack said. Many Afrofuturistic narratives are nonlinear, something that comics, with their ability to move and stack panels to play with notions of time, can convey. Comic artists can also employ visual elements such as images from the Black Arts Movement, or figures from Yoruba and Igbo mythology, in ways that aren’t available to prose writers.“Afrofuturism is constantly moving into the future and back into the past, even with the visual references they’re making,” Womack said.John Jennings is the founder and curator of Megascope, a publishing imprint “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.”Credit…Jamil Baldwin for The New York Times“After the Rain” marks the launch of Megascope, an imprint of the publisher Abrams “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.” Its advisory board includes the scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr.“Afrofuturism is the catchall,” Jennings, the imprint’s founder and curator, said. “It’s really Black speculative fiction. But that’s sort of a mouthful. I just don’t want people to think that Megascope is only Afrofuturist. We’re dropping horror books, crime fiction, historical fiction.”Okorafor, the author of the imprint’s leadoff title, “After the Rain,” considers her work “Africanfuturism,” a term she coined to describe a subcategory of science fiction similar to Afrofuturism, but more deeply rooted in African culture and history than in the African-American experience. “Nnedi is a very hot author right now,” Jennings said, “so I thought it would be a great kickoff.”In April, the imprint will publish “Hardears,” a fantasy-adventure story set on Jouvert Island, a version of Barbados populated by mythical creatures — giant “moongazers” and shape-shifting “soucouyants” — drawn from Caribbean folklore. “Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.“After the Rain,” adapted from a short story by Nnedi Okorafor, was published in January.Credit…Abrams BooksA professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has devoted much of his career to Afrofuturism, writing scholarly works about it and leading panels devoted to Afrofuturist comics. He has worked with the artist Stacey Robinson, as the duo “Black Kirby,” to reimagine the work of the Marvel artist Jack Kirby through an African-American lens: for example, “The Unkillable Buck,” based on “The Incredible Hulk.”To Jennings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an Afrofuturist. “The mountaintop that Dr. King spoke about does not exist in this universe,” Jennings said. “It’s an imaginary construct of what the future could be.”For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, Fielder created Aja Oba, a powerful African king cursed with eternal life. Oba travels from Africa to the United States and beyond, witnessing Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the rise of American slavery, the civil rights movement and (spoiler alert) the death of our solar system.Despite the fleet of spaceships on the cover, much of Fielder’s narrative is set in history. “Afrofuturists do not have the privilege, like general futurists, of just looking forward constantly,” Fielder said. “There’s so much of our work that was ignored, discarded or destroyed that, as an Afrofuturist, I’m forced to work on projects that are based in the past.”“Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.Credit…Abrams BooksFielder’s immortal hero is also a response to the longstanding cinematic trope of Black men dying before the final credits roll. One of his strongest childhood memories was watching the Black hero’s untimely end in the 1968 horror movie “Night of the Living Dead.” “The white guys are all losing it, and it’s the one brother who keeps his wits about him,” he said. “And then he’s killed. I never forgot that.”“Infinitum” has a distinctly cinematic feel — Fielder’s influences include the “Star Wars” artist Ralph McQuarrie — and the shared references and influences between comic books and movies are likely to continue. After Coates restarts (and ends, after three issues) his run on “Black Panther,” Marvel Studios is expected to release “Black Panther II,” while over at Disney, producers are working with the comic-book company Kugali on “Iwaju,” an animated series set in a futuristic Lagos.Perhaps more than anything, Afrofuturist comics are a means of staking a racially inclusive claim on a multitude of futures. “And just because it’s about a Black subject doesn’t mean it’s just for Black people,” Jennings said. “I love Daredevil, but Marvel would never say: ‘Oh, you know what? This is just for white, poor Irish-American people.’ These stories are for everyone.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Can an Abuser Make Amends? ‘The Color Purple’ Points the Way

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storycritic’s notebookCan an Abuser Make Amends? ‘The Color Purple’ Points the WayAfter #MeToo, as movies and TV grapple with issues of rape, revenge and restorative justice, a survivor reconsiders a male character at a crossroads.In the movie adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Celie, center, played by Whoopi Goldberg, escapes an abusive relationship and finds a better life with Shug (Margaret Avery) and Squeak (Rae Dawn Chong.)Credit…Warner Bros.Feb. 5, 2021Updated 6:28 p.m. ETRevenge is at the heart of “Promising Young Woman.” Not only does the film open with its main character Cassie (Carey Mulligan) targeting men who take advantage of inebriated women, but we soon realize that she does so in service of a larger goal: avenging the rape, and eventual suicide, of her best friend, Nina. Even though she ultimately appears to get justice, this result is far from gratifying. Rather, it is a sobering reminder that because most rape victims will never see their assailants held accountable in their lifetime, revenge, or at least the fantasy of it, is all that is left.To me, the movie is an example of how the #MeToo movement has influenced representations of sexual assault onscreen. Works like Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special “Nanette” and Michaela Coel’s breakout HBO show “I May Destroy You” center the voices of rape survivors, while movies like “The Assistant” and “Promising Young Woman” show the perspective of friends or female bystanders who also suffer as secondary victims of sexual assault. Unfortunately, even as the embrace of these points-of-view represents progress, these narratives also reflect a real-world legal system that repeatedly denies or delays justice to rape victims.Arabella (Michaela Coel) and Zain (Karan Gill) in a scene from HBO’s “I May Destroy You.”Credit…HBOAs both a critic and as a feminist activist, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this dilemma. And over the past two years I have been working on the book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” about Alice Walker’s groundbreaking novel that prioritized the vantage point of a rape and domestic abuse survivor named Celie. Through the redemptive arc of its antagonist, Albert, “The Color Purple,” from 1982, paved the way for today’s debates about atonement, rehabilitation and forgiveness. It anticipates the extralegal practice of restorative justice, a remedy that is intended to heal victims as well as prevent the accused from reoffending by having them accept full responsibility for their actions, while also engaging in a consensual, reparative process with their victims.When I began my research on “The Color Purple,” a story that I first read at 15, I knew that I would focus on Celie’s relationships with her sister, Nettie, her bawdy blues woman lover Shug and the defiant Sofia. Those are the Black female characters that I have turned to as I struggled with my own sexual assault as a teenager in the 1990s, the ones I highlighted to my students as a young college professor in the early 2000s, the ones I find renewed inspiration in today.But what I did not expect to find was how much my middle-aged self would be drawn to Albert, the figure Celie fearfully refers to as M______ (Mister) for most of her life. Celie is forced by Pa — who has raped and impregnated her and given away her two children — to marry Albert, a much older widower. When Celie joins Albert’s family, he continually beats her as she raises his children and tends to his house. It is only over time that we realize how broken he is, defeated both by Jim Crow and his domineering father, who prevented him from marrying his life’s love, Shug. In other words, while his rage is never justified, the novel seeks to understand its origins, giving it a powerful story line that was often initially overlooked by the novel’s biggest detractors.Though “The Color Purple” earned Walker a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the novel also generated much criticism, mostly from well-known Black male writers and community activists who were offended by the depiction of abuse by Pa and Albert and by Celie healing from that violence in a romantic relationship with Shug. By the time the movie debuted in 1985, Walker and the filmmakers were ill-prepared to defend themselves against accusations that the movie reproduced vicious stereotypes about African-American men. Such condemnations overlooked the healing made possible by Albert’s own desire to make amends.After Celie discovers that Albert has been hiding Nettie’s letters from her for decades, she leaves with Shug, and curses Albert.Soon Albert’s life — his farm, his home, his family — fall apart, forcing him to make a critical decision: either crumble or find a way to reconcile with Celie. And so he rises to the occasion, and begins the long journey of repairing his relationships with his son and grandchildren, and in time, Celie and her children.Celie (Goldberg) rebels against the abusive Albert (Danny Glover) on a day she prepares to leave him. Credit…Warner Bros.Albert’s arc, however, was far more abbreviated in the Oscar-nominated movie, in which he was indelibly played by Danny Glover. But even with his limited transformation onscreen, I see Albert anew when I watch the movie now.Glover imbued his character with such charisma, dignity and depth that Albert is neither pure villain nor a blameless victim. Instead, he is a Black man at a crossroads and thus has the opportunity to reimagine what paths of masculinity lie ahead.But Walker’s vision of Albert was realized in the musical adaptation that premiered on Broadway in 2005 and even more fully in a revival in 2015 with Isaiah Johnson in the role. In that version, Albert’s breakdown is even more totalizing, making his turnaround all the more meaningful, and memorable.“Albert gets his redemption and he does something,” said John Doyle, the director of the Tony-winning revival. “He does things for the children of the community and maybe that’s all a little through a pink gauze. But there’s something wonderful about that.”These days as we, on college campuses, in the halls of Congress, or in our homes, argue about how best to forgive or punish those who have harmed others, we often miss a crucial aspect of the debate that might help us move forward.A scene from the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Color Purple” in 2015; from left: Jennifer Hudson as Shug, Cynthia Erivo as Celie, Isaiah Johnson as Mister/Albert and Kyle Scatliffe as Harpo.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow does one actually atone for violence they inflict on others?Given pervasive racial bias in the criminal justice system, it makes sense that Black women, like Walker, have imagined accountability outside of the courtroom. Among recent #MeToo narratives, “I May Destroy You,” created by the Black British artist Coel, gestures to restorative justice through the relationship between Arabella (Coel) and fellow writer Zain (Karan Gill). After he removes his condom without her consent during sex, Zain is later able to earn her begrudging trust by helping her complete her book, which in turn leads to her journey of self-acceptance and rebirth.But then Zain revives his own writing career under a pseudonym. Albert embarks on the much more arduous path of acknowledging his violence and all the harm that he caused.And in the final moments of “The Color Purple” onstage, his hard work leads to him standing together with his family. He is not a hero — that status belongs to Celie, Shug and Sofia — but he still gives us a reason to hope.Because most survivors of violence will never hear an apology or benefit from such restitution, Albert remains one of the more elusive and exceptional characters in American culture, a figure that can teach us all to take accountability for our actions, and to find redemption along the way.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Movies

      ‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and Hollywood

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The Times‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and HollywoodJan. 25, 2021Updated 2:45 p.m. ETAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.When the writer and director Mike Nichols was young, he had an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccine. The result was a complete and lifelong inability to grow hair. One way to read Mark Harris’s crisp new biography, “Mike Nichols: A Life,” is as a tender comedy about a man and his wigs.He got his first set (hair, eyebrows) before he went to college. It was dismal. Nichols attended the University of Chicago, where Susan Sontag was also a student. One reason they didn’t date, Harris writes, is that “she was thrown off by his wig.”Nichols moved to Manhattan to make it as a comedian. A friend said that she would enter his tiny apartment and “the smell of acetone” — wig-glue remover — “would just hit you in the face.”Nichols found fame in his mid-20s. His improvisational comedy routines with Elaine May, whom he’d met in Chicago, were fresh and irresistible. They took their act to Broadway in 1960, where Nichols met Richard Burton. Through Burton, he would get to know Elizabeth Taylor.On the set of “Cleopatra,” Taylor asked the production’s hairstyle designer, “Do you do personal wigs? Because I have a dear friend who’s a comic in New York, and he wears one of the worst wigs I’ve ever seen.” Before long, Nichols’s toupees were unrivaled.“It takes me three hours every morning to become Mike Nichols,” he told the actor George Segal. He had a sense of humor about it all. He would tell how his son, Max, crawled into bed beside him and, seeing only the back of his head, screamed, “Where’s Daddy’s face?”I’ve gone on too long about hair and the lack of it. But growing up bald was, Nichols’s brother said, “the defining aspect of his childhood.”Nichols’s gift as a director was his ability to locate and lightly tug on the details that make a character. If he’d made a movie of his own life, the wig scenes would have been superb — satirical and melancholy. He might have set a bathroom-mirror montage to the Beatles’ early cover of “Lend Me Your Comb.”His awkwardness made him watchful. He became a student of human behavior. When he finally got the chance to direct, it was as if he’d been preparing to do so his entire life.Nichols’s first two films were “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate” — the first furious, daring and adult, the second zeitgeist-defining. He directed four consecutive hit plays at nearly the same moment. Oscars, Tony Awards and a landslide of wealth followed.He made up for his time as an outsider with a vengeance. He collected Arabian horses and Picassos and began friendships with Jacqueline Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein and Richard Avedon. He was a cocky princeling who became a master of what Kenneth Clark liked to call the “swimgloat,” a way of moving through elite society as if on a barge made of silver and silk.Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky (or Igor Michael, it’s unclear) in Berlin in 1931. His father, a doctor, was a Russian Jew who changed the family name to Nichols after the family emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. The family had some money, and Nichols’s father’s patients in New York included the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Nichols attended good schools in Manhattan, including Dalton.Mark Harris, whose new book is “Mike Nichols: A Life.”Credit…David A. HarrisAt the University of Chicago he became an omnivorous reader and watcher of films. His wit was withering; people were terrified of him. May’s wit was even more devastating. They were made for each other. They were never really a romantic couple, Harris writes, though early on they may have slept together once or twice.Harris is the author of two previous books, “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” and “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.” He’s also a longtime entertainment reporter with a gift for scene-setting.He’s at his best in “Mike Nichols: A Life” when he takes you inside a production. His chapters on the making of three films in particular — “The Graduate,” “Silkwood” and “Angels in America” — are miraculous: shrewd, tight, intimate and funny. You sense he could turn each one into a book.Nichols was an actor’s director. He was avuncular, a charmer, wide in his human sympathies. He tried to find what an actor needed and to provide it. He could place a well-buffed fingernail on a tick that wanted to be a tock. But he had a steely side.He fired Gene Hackman during week one on “The Graduate.” Hackman was playing Mr. Robinson and it wasn’t working, in part because, at 37, he looked too young for the role.Sacrificing someone early could be a motivator for the remaining cast, he learned. He fired Mandy Patinkin early in the filming of “Heartburn,” and brought in Jack Nicholson to play Meryl Streep’s faithless husband.One reason the chapter on Nichols’s film of Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” is so rich is that Harris, who is married to Kushner, had access to the playwright’s diary.Nichols turned to projects like “Angels in America” to shore up his serious side. But in everything he did, he found the funny. He knew instinctively that tragedy appeals mainly to the emotions while comedy taps the mind.Nichols presided over a lot of muck, expensive flops like “The Day of the Dolphin,” with George C. Scott; “The Fortune,” with Nicholson and Warren Beatty; and “What Planet Are You From?” with Garry Shandling. Reading Harris’s accounts of making these films is like watching a cook strain his stock down the disposal.Nichols’s Broadway flops included a production of “Waiting for Godot” with Steve Martin and Robin Williams. His failures rattled him. He battled depression (one of his vanity license plates read “ANOMIE”) and had suicidal urges after being placed on Halcion, a benzodiazepine. He had, Harris writes, “an almost punitive need to prove his detractors wrong.”He had a manic side. He snorted his share of cocaine and, for a while in the 1980s, used crack. You imagine him on the latter, racing back and forth from film set to Broadway as if through a set of constantly swinging cat doors.Harris details his subject’s many collaborations with Streep, and with Nora Ephron. Nichols was married four times. His final marriage, to Diane Sawyer, was the one that lasted.Nichols was a hard man to get to know, and I’m not sure we understand him much better at the end of “Mike Nichols: A Life.” He was a man in perpetual motion, and Harris chases him with patience, clarity and care.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Stand’: Tracing the Stephen King Epic Through Its Many Mutations

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Stand’: Tracing the Stephen King Epic Through Its Many MutationsKing’s post-apocalyptic novel about the aftermath of a deadly pandemic has been adapted into a new mini-series for CBS All Access. But the story has a complex history of its own.Jovan Adepo and Heather Graham star in the new CBS All Access adaptation of “The Stand,” the second time the Stephen King novel has been made into a TV mini-series.Credit…CBSDec. 17, 2020Take a pandemic. Add the paranormal. Make it a uniquely American story of survival horror. The result: “The Stand,” Stephen King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel from 1978, a new mini-series adaptation of which debuted Thursday on CBS All Access.Conceived in the pre-Covid era, the show has taken on new resonance since, telling the story of a weaponized virus that wipes out 99 percent of the population. But that’s only the beginning. The real battle happens afterward as supernatural forces of darkness and light — embodied by the demonic dictator Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) and the holy woman Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) — duel for the souls of the plague’s survivors.Since the original novel’s original release, King’s saga has entered the pop-culture consciousness in many different incarnations, including an expanded edition of the book and an earlier mini-series adaptation. In anticipation of the show’s arrival, we’re tracing the story from its point of origin to its latest mutation.The AllegoryThe opening act of King’s novel is an eerily plausible account of the complete collapse of human society after the “Captain Trips” superflu is unleashed upon the world. That aspect has found relevance across the decades since the novel’s publication, in the Cold War nuclear arms race, through the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, to the events of 2020.But that’s only the first part. Flagg is presented as an even worse plague upon the living — a grinning dictator who builds a new society based on human drivers like greed, pride, lust and wrath and who exploits the virus for the sake of his own power. Are there lessons to be applied in the real world? Successive generations have thought so.Alexander Skarsgard as the villain Randall Flagg, who was originally inspired in part by the Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze.  Credit…Robert Falconer/CBSThe InspirationKing has written extensively about the inspiration behind “The Stand” and its evolution over time, namely in his 1981 nonfiction book on horror writing, “Danse Macabre”; in the preface to the expanded 1990 edition of “The Stand”; and in a post about the novel on his website.“The Stand,” as he has explained it, arose from two disappointments. The first was an unfinished novel about the kidnapping and brainwashing of the heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army and its leader Donald DeFreeze. The second was a longstanding desire to write an American answer to “The Lord of the Rings” — a desire he had never found a way to fulfill. “The Stand” is, in part, a synthesis of these divergent ideas.Two news stories jump-started the book for King, one a “60 Minutes” segment on chemical and biological warfare and the other a report he recalled about a chemical spill in Utah that had killed a flock of sheep. Had the wind blown the other way, King has written, “the good people of Salt Lake City might have gotten a very nasty surprise.”Thinking about what the earth might be like after humanity, King, who was living in Boulder, Colo. (where much of the novel is set), pulled inspiration from George R. Stewart’s post-apocalyptic novel “Earth Abides” and from the fire-and-brimstone intonations of a preacher on a local radio station, who spoke ominously of plagues. King became fascinated, meanwhile, with a ghostly F.B.I. photo of DeFreeze taken in the middle of a bank robbery, in which the ringleader’s face was blurred. He wrote down the lines that would serve as the foundation of the novel: “A season of rest,” “A dark man with no face” and, quoting the preacher, “Once in every generation a plague will fall among them.”“And that was that,” King recalls in “Danse Macabre.” “I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called ‘The Stand.’”The EvolutionThe roots of “The Stand” run even deeper than the novel’s two-year writing time would suggest. His 1969 story “Night Surf” (a revised version of which was published in early 1978 as part of the short story collection “Night Shift”) had introduced the concept of the flulike virus nicknamed Captain Trips, in dubious homage to the Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia. King’s 1969 poem “The Dark Man” has been seen as an anticipatory exploration of the character traits that would be poured into Flagg, himself nicknamed “The Dark Man,” in the novel.King spent two years writing “The Stand,” published in 1978, but its earliest seeds can be traced back to a story from 1969. Credit…DoubledayWhen “The Stand” finally arrived in October 1978, it was 400 pages shy of the version King originally turned in to his publisher. The edits were a consequence of publishing logistics rather than of quality control, King writes in the preface to the 1990 version of the novel: Based on his sales history, his publisher arrived at a price for the book that necessitated heavy edits to reduce the page count and make the book financially feasible. King made the cuts himself.By the ’90s, however, King was, well, the king of horror. In response to popular demand, a new expanded edition hit the stands, restoring much of what King had previously taken out and updating the material for the new decade. This is the most widely read version, and it’s the version upon which the new television adaptation is based.The AdaptationsMatt Frewer played the Trashcan Man in the 1994 TV mini-series on ABC, adapted by King himself and regarded by many fans as one of the better King adaptations. Credit…CBS, via Getty ImagesThis isn’t the first time “The Stand” has been adapted for another medium. In 1994, ABC aired a four-part mini-series based on the 1990 edition of the book, written by King and directed by his frequent collaborator Mick Garris. With a strong cast led by Gary Sinise as the Texas everyman Stu Redman and Jamey Sheridan as the denim-clad demon Flagg, it stands out as one of the better King adaptations — not at the level of “The Shining” (which King famously hated), “Carrie” and “The Dead Zone,” but well worth a weekend binge. (Unlike the 1994 version, which showed the apocalypse unfolding, the new version will begin after the superflu has already struck, with flashbacks to the pre-plague lives of its characters.)And from 2008 to 2012, Marvel Comics serialized a 31-issue comic-book adaptation, written by the future “Riverdale” showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrated by Mike Perkins. The comics have been collected in a series of hardcovers and a huge, now out-of-print omnibus edition.King has also adapted some of the characters and concepts from “The Stand” into other novels. Most notably, the arch-villain Flagg appears, in various guises and interdimensional iterations, as the heavy in other King works, from the fantasy novel “The Eyes of the Dragon” to the epic “Dark Tower” series, which ties much of King’s oeuvre into a single expanded universe. It’s this latter incarnation that Matthew McConaughey portrayed (though the character is named Walter Padick) in the 2017 feature film “The Dark Tower.”Matthew McConaughey (left, with Idris Elba) in “The Dark Tower” as the character Walter Padick, a later incarnation of the arch-villain Randall Flagg. Credit…Columbia PicturesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More