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    Kevin Mazur, the Ultimate Celebrity Photographer

    When Taylor Swift opened her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., in March 2023, Kevin Mazur was granted full access to photograph the show.When Beyoncé opened her Renaissance Tour in Stockholm, Sweden, two months later, Mr. Mazur captured the performance from directly in front of the stage.That fall, when Madonna opened her Celebration Tour in London, Mr. Mazur was once again in position for the best shots.At the Met Gala and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, Mr. Mazur, 63, roams freely while photographers from major news outlets are given a short amount of time to shoot the goings-on away from the red carpet.Bob Dylan has let him into the recording studio, Barbra Streisand has had him in her home, and Kurt Cobain invited him on a Nirvana tour. He took some of the last photographs of Michael Jackson, on the night before his death.His motto — “Why wouldn’t you want to make people look good?” — helps explain how he became the John Singer Sargent of live-action digital photography, a go-to chronicler of rock gods and movie stars.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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    Hollywood Has Enough Fake Accents. Bring Back the Weird Voices.

    David Lynch’s voice is unmistakable — and a national treasure. The world of film deserves more like it.“Something is coming along for you to see and hear,” mewled the filmmaker David Lynch in a video posted online this past spring. The clip was a teaser for a music project, and it caught the eye via the director’s old-school cool — his shades and upswept silver locks, framed in close-up. But it was another bit of business that actually held attention: the jangle and blare of Lynch’s reedy voice.Larger-than-life screen personalities are necessarily watchable. Some also prove mysteriously listenable. Lynch is among them, a member of the small pantheon of filmmakers whose mystique is partly indebted to the textures of their speech: the gorgeous intonations of Orson Welles, the reminiscing tones of Agnès Varda, the runaway-train enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino.Over his long career, Lynch has offered his own locomotive thrills. It begins with that unmistakable voice — what the director Mel Brooks once called his “kind of crazy Midwestern accent.” In fact, Lynch’s family moved frequently, and his childhood unfurled across a wide swath of midcentury America. Along the way, his voice settled into a faintly comic register: thin and tremulous, with a hint of helium, containing both the threat of a whine and the chirpy approachability of an archetypal 1950s suburbia.Lynch is a raconteur of some renown; he has spoken of Wookiees, decaying factories and an overfed Chihuahua who resembled “a water balloon with little legs.” He enjoys folksy turns of phrase (“Golden sunshine all along the way,” he often declared in the online weather reports he used to offer) and intriguing maxims (“A washed butt never boils”). Ideas, he argues, are pre-existing “gifts” that artists can “catch.” You can sense a similar pursuit in his interviews: At times he speaks as if he were reciting the words of a dimly heard incoming transmission, wiggling his fingers and shutting his eyes. Even his mundane remarks can take on an air of profundity, ringing persistently in the mind.And sometimes, the ears. Lynch “has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal,” the actress Naomi Watts once said, describing his on-set carnival barking. “When he’s two feet away from you as well.” He’s liable to stretch out words like “beautiful,” imbuing them with the deep emotion of an explorer bringing home tales of briefly glimpsed miracles. His born-in-the-’40s diction makes matters even stranger: Lynch, a self-identified Eagle Scout, can be heard in one documentary repeatedly and earnestly exclaiming, “Oh my golly.”Lynch ‘has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal.’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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    ‘The Interview’: Demi Moore Is Done With the Male Gaze

    Demi Moore’s new movie, “The Substance,” which opens Sept. 20, is a dark comedy about the horrors of getting older as a woman in Hollywood. But it’s also a literal body-horror film — the basic premise is that Moore’s character, an aging actress-turned-celebrity-fitness-instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle, takes a strange elixir (the substance) that allows her to create a younger, more perfect version of herself. And you see that creation in bloody, visceral detail. The movie kind of grossed me out, to be honest, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward. And it was fascinating to see Moore, who has been open about her own struggles with her body image and has lived most of her life in the public eye, play this role.Listen to the Conversation With Demi MooreThe actress discusses how her relationship to her body and fame has changed after decades in the public eye.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppI’ve been mesmerized by Moore for decades, starting in 1985 with “St. Elmo’s Fire,” when her husky voice and bold onscreen persona — in this instance, a kind of wildness that made her seem both alluring and destructive — first broke through. There was a period when it felt as if every movie Moore starred in was an event — “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men,” “G.I. Jane,” “Striptease,” “Indecent Proposal.” She eventually became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, and also an early advocate for pay equity in the industry, long before the issue was part of the national discourse.But even though Moore was such a visible celebrity of my teenage and early adult years, I never felt I knew much about her until reading her revealing 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” which opens at the lowest point in her life, with the end of her marriage to Ashton Kutcher and her relapse into alcoholism. Moore’s struggles started early as the child of a mentally ill, alcoholic mother. But much of the book is about the extreme lengths she went to during her prime Hollywood days to control her body through disordered eating and exercise. Now in her 60s and a grandmother, Moore tells me she has finally grown comfortable in her own skin and, with “The Substance” and this stage of her career, is hoping to upend expectations about what it means to be an aging woman in an industry that both embraced and judged her harshly. (And a note: I asked Moore how her former husband Bruce Willis, who’s living with frontotemporal dementia, is doing, and she said he’s stable and OK, all things considered.)Why did you sign on to star in a movie about a woman who’s aging in Hollywood and at war with her own body? It felt very meta watching you do this. Why it was easy for me to step in and do this is because I don’t feel I am her. This is a woman who has no family — she’s dedicated her entire life to her career, and when that’s taken, what does she have? And so, in a way, I had enough separation from her, and at the same time, a deep, internal connection to the pain that she was experiencing, the rejection that she felt. I knew it would be challenging, but potentially a really important exploration of the issue.Tell me what you understand the issue to be. That it’s not about what’s being done to us — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves. The lack of love and self-acceptance, and that within the story, we have this male perspective of the idealized woman that I feel we as women have bought into. More

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    Venice Film Festival Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt And More

    No amount of star power can truly outshine the beauty of La Serenissima, the ancient republic better known as the city of Venice. But the Venice Film Festival, with its parade of A-listers arriving for movie premieres in water taxis, comes close.Typically held not long after the fall couture shows in Paris, the Venice Film Festival benefits, in pure fashion terms, from being a showcase of the newest garments from some designers. How these elaborate, often form-fitting, confections are transferred so rapidly from Parisian runways to Venetian red carpets hardly matters to looky-loos with their eyes perennially pressed to the glass of fashion.This year’s festival, running from Aug. 28 until Saturday, has not just been an exhibition for new designs, but also of vintage pieces. Some looked as fresh as ever. Garments old and new are among these 15 looks, which will be hard to forget for reasons good and bad (but mostly good).Taylor Russell: Most Modern Retro!Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersThe actress radiated an icy elegance in a Loewe gown reminiscent of the creations of Jean Louis, a designer who had the lock on high glamour during the golden age of Hollywood studios.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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    Peter Marshall, Longtime Host of ‘The Hollywood Squares,’ Dies at 98

    He played straight man to all manner of celebrities, asking questions on what was for many years the most popular game show on television.Peter Marshall, who coaxed cheeky rejoinders from celebrities like Burt Reynolds, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers and Paul Lynde as the longtime host of “The Hollywood Squares,” for years one of the most popular game shows on television, died on Thursday at his home in Encino, Calif. He was 98.His wife of 35 years, Laurie Marshall, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Marshall, an actor, singer and comedian with an authoritative baritone, hosted “The Hollywood Squares” from 1966 until 1981. The show brought him four Daytime Emmy Awards.“The Hollywood Squares,” which stuffed celebrity guests and risqué humor into a daytime game show, was a variation on tic-tac-toe, played by two contestants on a set that featured a grid of nine squares rising above the stage, a celebrity guest seated in each.A contestant would choose a square, Mr. Marshall would ask the star inside it a question, and the star would usually respond with a quip — a zinger, in the show’s parlance — before giving a serious answer. The contestant would then tell Mr. Marshall whether he or she thought the star had answered correctly, and the square would be won if the contestant was right. The first contestant to complete a line won the game; the first to win two games won cash and prizes.The center square was reserved for the funniest celebrity; the comedian Paul Lynde occupied it for much of the show’s run.Mr. Marshall, center, with an early group of “Hollywood Squares” panelists. From left: Wally Cox, Abby Dalton, Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam.NBC, via Everett CollectionWe 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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    How Hollywood Glamour Is Reviving the Endangered Broadway Play

    George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Denzel Washington and Mia Farrow are coming to Broadway, where some producers see plays with stars as safer bets than musicals.Robert Downey Jr. is deep in rehearsals for his Broadway debut next month as an A.I.-obsessed novelist in “McNeal.” Next spring, George Clooney arrives for his own Broadway debut in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and Denzel Washington returns, after a seven-year absence, to star in “Othello” with Jake Gyllenhaal.Then comes an even more surprising debut: Keanu Reeves plans to begin his Broadway career in the fall of 2025, opposite his longtime “Bill & Ted” slacker-buddy Alex Winter in “Waiting for Godot,” the ur-two-guys-being-unimpressive tragicomedy.Broadway, still adapting to sharply higher production costs and audiences that have not fully rebounded since the coronavirus pandemic, is betting big on star power, hoping that a helping of Hollywood glamour will hasten its rejuvenation.Even for an industry long accustomed to stopovers by screen and pop stars, the current abundance is striking.It reflects a new economic calculus by many producers, who have concluded that short-run plays with celebrity-led casts are more likely to earn a profit than the expensive razzle-dazzle musicals that have long been Broadway’s bread and butter.For the actors, there is another factor: As TV networks and streaming companies cut back on scripted series, and as Hollywood focuses on franchise films, the stage offers a chance to tell more challenging stories.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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    Overlooked No More: Renee Carroll, ‘World’s Most Famous Hatcheck Girl’

    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

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    John Mayer on Being the Watch World’s Celebrity ‘Go-To Guy’

    When the guitarist John Mayer takes the stage this week in Las Vegas, to cap Dead & Company’s 10-week residence at the Sphere arena, his wristwatch is bound to loom large on the venue’s massive LED screen.“I happen to have a job where my wrist is naturally looked at,” Mr. Mayer, 46, said last month on a video call from his home in Los Angeles.That suits the longtime watch collector (and downright watch nerd) just fine.“The number of people who come up to me and ask me what I’m wearing is far greater than the number of people who come up to me and say, ‘Love your music, or how’d you write that song?’” he said. “People want to know about watches more than anything. They’ll say, ‘Gotta ask: What do you have on?’ It’s such a great entree to conversation.”One of Mr. Mayer’s favorite talking points is his new collaboration with the Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet (A.P.). After three years of development, in March the brand introduced a Royal Oak perpetual calendar wristwatch designed by Mr. Mayer.Limited to 200 pieces, the $180,700 timepiece, encased in 18-karat white gold, featured a blue metallic dial inspired by the night sky as well as some subtle aesthetic details that Mr. Mayer conceived.“When you look at this perpetual calendar, the first thing you should see is the time,” he said. “You shouldn’t see the vastness of the universe when it comes to timekeeping if you’ve got 15 minutes to get to a meeting.”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