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      in Theater

      When Jewish Artists Wrestle With Antisemitism

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      In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More

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      in Movies

      Ted Sarandos Talks About That Stock Drop, Backing Dave Chappelle, and Hollywood Schadenfreude

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      The Netflix executive says he — and the company he helped build — will survive a bout of bad earnings numbers.Maybe it was the tower of seafood sitting before us. Or the Potomac River flowing next to us. Or the fact that Ted Sarandos proposed to his wife, Nicole, on a “touristy booze cruise” under Fourth of July fireworks right in front of where we were sitting on the Georgetown waterfront in Washington.Whatever the reason, the Netflix co-C.E.O. had seafaring adventures on his mind.When I asked Mr. Sarandos how it felt when Netflix lost $54 billion in the blink of an eye on a single bad stock-market day in April, he talked about reading Joseph Conrad’s novella “Typhoon,” once as a younger man and again recently.The first time, he considered the captain who steered straight into the eye of a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean “a terrible leader” who “made a mistake and got people into a very bad situation.” But reading it a couple of decades later, Mr. Sarandos saw the complexity of leadership it takes to get through the storm, as the captain summons all his willpower to dominate a superior force.In this metaphor, the streamer is the steamer, which, Conrad writes, is lurching and pitching and going sideways in the gale “as if taking a header into the void.” And Mr. Sarandos is the skipper who has to swiftly steer the company out of danger, after the stunning news that Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year — without spending too much time rehashing how they got there.“We make decisions based on the best information we have at the time,” the 57-year-old said. “They are not always going to be right, but how you help navigate the outcomes, and the urgency you bring to it, is what gets folks through the storm. And the storms will come.”He recalled the Netflix squall of 2011, when Reed Hastings — the founder who now shares the C.E.O. job with Mr. Sarandos — created a separate company, Qwikster, to handle the DVD business. The move helped accelerate an already falling stock price, culminating in a 75 percent drop.“It was horrifying, disappointing and embarrassing,” recalled Mr. Sarandos, who was then the chief content officer. But he feels that they spent too long “sunshining,” to use the Netflix argot for openly examining failures. “How much time do you spend licking your wounds?” he said, adding: “Let’s have that burned into our memory, but we’ve got to move on and move fast.”He conceded that during the pandemic, when Netflix was Icarus, “there were probably a lot of underlying things in the business” that they could have gone “much deeper” on and been “more curious about if we weren’t doing so well.” (The company added 10 million subscribers in the first three months of the pandemic alone.) He added, “We could have been much more questioning of the success and saying, ‘Are you sure?’”It is certainly a wild plot twist worthy of Hollywood: The swaggering company that revolutionized the way Hollywood does business has stalled, with its stock down over 70 percent over six months.The Netflix Lobby MetricOver a three-hour dinner, Mr. Sarandos was charming and upbeat, dressed down in Levi’s and sneakers. You would never know he had been through a Job-level run of bad fortune in the last few months. First, his father, with whom he was very close, died. Soon after, his mother-in-law, Jacqueline Avant, with whom he was also very close, was shot to death when she encountered a burglar in the middle of the night at her Beverly Hills home. Ms. Avant, renowned in Hollywood for her elegance, art collecting, philanthropy and community organizing in Watts, Calif., was the wife of Clarence Avant, a music mogul known as the “Black Godfather.”Then, on top of Mr. Sarandos’s personal woes, Netflix skidded from rapid growth to grind-it-out. (Its stock peaked above $700 a share in November 2021 and has now fallen below $200.)The rise of Mr. Sarandos, a community college night-school dropout, from a video store clerk in Arizona to the pinnacle of Hollywood, is legendary.“He’s had more singular influence on movies and television shows than anyone ever had,” Barry Diller told me. “He has denuded the power of the old movie companies that had held for almost 100 years. They are now irrelevant to setting the play and rules of the day. If there is still a Hollywood, he is it.”Only a few years ago, the Netflix lobby was the coolest place on earth. Now it’s suddenly gloomy. In her “Saturday Night Live” monologue last weekend, Natasha Lyonne, the star of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” sarcastically cracked that the “two things you definitely want to be associated with right now are Russia and Netflix.”After winning the pandemic, Netflix now finds itself in its own version of its survival drama “Squid Game.” The company hit a ceiling, for now, of some 220 million subscribers, after thinking it could get to a billion with its global empire, and that has thrown a wrench into the future of Netflix and streaming in general. Wall Street suddenly turned a cold shoulder on its former darling, telling Netflix, Guess what, guys, you’ve got to make money, not just grow subscriptions.The company recently announced 150 layoffs, with more sure to come; shows in development, even by big names and a certain Montecito royal, are being dropped. Mr. Sarandos talked about the advertising option, something the company had resisted, so if people want a lower price subscription with ads, they could have it. “For us, it was all about simplicity of one product, one price point.” But, he said, “I think it can now withstand some complexity.”The Netflix hit “Squid Game.”Netflix, via Associated PressAnd how did Hollywood react to this bad news? With a blast of glee. Mr. Sarandos and Mr. Hastings, unassuming men of enormous chutzpah and vision, are being dunked in a vat of schadenfreude, subjected to the sort of vicious backbiting that characterized “House of Cards,” the David Fincher show that helped propel the network to success. As one Hollywood savant said with a shrug, “Nice doesn’t play in this town.”Old-school Hollywood types privately celebrated the news that the new streaming services they had scrambled to create (like HBOMax, Disney+ and NBC’s Peacock) were now disrupting the disrupter. Netflix is a victim of its own success; Ted and Reed pointed the way, but now they have to share their dog bowl. And during inflationary times, people are going to cut back on the number of streaming services they have.Until just recently, Netflix seemed too big to fail, even too big to hate — although some did, anyway. Backed by an ebullient Wall Street, the company was able to outmoney everyone, spending exorbitant sums, poaching talent and executives and muscling into Oscar campaigns with its “Monopoly money,” as one disgusted competitor called it, or “drunken sailor spending,” as another said.“We were trying to build a library to make up for not having 90 years of storytelling,” Mr. Sarandos said.Once talent gorged on Netflix money, like geese destined for foie gras, some became cranky.“Everything was completely amazing up until it wasn’t,” said Janice Min, the C.E.O. of Ankler Media, whose buzzy newsletter circulates through Hollywood C suites. “It’s hard to destroy the ecosystem and try to become king at the same time.”Netflix was an occupying army. “It was Vichy Netflix in Hollywood for the past decade,” Ms. Min said, “where the whole town was forced to adopt their customs and language. Now the traditionalists believe that the interlopers have had a comeuppance.“The schadenfreude set are licking their chops that this is William Holden facedown in the swimming pool. But this is a company that forced Hollywood to move forward 20 years faster than it would have. The burning question in town is, do the executives at the top stay the same now that they’ve hit a massive speed bump?”I asked Mr. Sarandos a version of that question. Could he survive a Keeper Test? (That’s part of the “radical candor,” as it’s called, in Netflix culture, a constant re-evaluation of whether an employee is a star.)“I hope so,” Mr. Sarandos said. “I mean, I think so. We hold each other and the board holds us both to a pretty high bar,” he said, referring to Mr. Hastings. “And I don’t think there’s a place where he’d say, ‘Hey, where’s your accountability for this?’ We’re pretty on top of both the successes and the failures. And if we were not, I think that we would fail the Keeper Test, yeah.”When I asked Mr. Hastings if Mr. Sarandos would pass, he was brisk: “Ted has passed the Keeper Tests for the last 22 years.” The big picture, he said, is that Netflix “is continuing to have some of the most popular shows in America and around the world. We can always pick it up and, you know, we want to do that.”Despite his low-key manner and folksy expressions like “holy moly,” Mr. Hastings is perfectly capable of icing anyone, if he decides it’s in the best interest of the company. He does not think of employees as family, but as a sports team that has to win trophies. Mr. Hastings fired one of his best friends and original employees, Patty McCord, the human resources chief. They drove to work together and she helped him create the controversial culture.I’m also curious about the future of Mr. Sarandos’s top executives, Scott Stuber, the head of the film division, and Bela Bajaria, who oversees original content. So I press, referring to all of the top brass generally: “So, you don’t think any heads are going to roll?”“Um, the way we are organized, no one gets to make that assumption,” Mr. Hastings said. “Everyone has to continue to raise their game throughout the company.”He continued: “I would say we are always reaching for the highest performance, but our content is not why the current slowdown is happening.”‘Everything’s Not Going to Be for Everybody’Mr. Sarandos loves comedy, something that was his North Star when he found himself smack in the middle of the culture wars. There was a backlash last year to Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, “The Closer,” over his jokes about transgender people, and some Netflix employees walked out of the Los Angeles headquarters in protest.But Mr. Sarandos said that, while he was taken by surprise at the kerfuffle, he did not agonize over supporting Mr. Chappelle. He said that the only way comedians can figure out where the line is, is by “crossing the line every once in a while. I think it’s very important to the American culture generally to have free expression.”He continued: “We’re programming for a lot of diverse people who have different opinions and different tastes and different styles, and yet we’re not making everything for everybody. We want something for everybody but everything’s not going to be for everybody.”Netlix employees and activists protest the company’s handling of the Dave Chappelle controversy outside the company’s headquarters.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesHe said he believes this deeply, so his decision about Mr. Chappelle “wasn’t hard in that way. And rarely do you get the opportunity to put your principles to the test,” he said. “It was an opportunity to take somebody, like in Dave’s case, who is, by all measure, the comedian of our generation, the most popular comedian on Netflix for sure. Nobody would say that what he does isn’t thoughtful or smart. You just don’t agree with him. ”Mr. Chappelle was attacked onstage in May at the Hollywood Bowl during the “Netflix Is a Joke Festival,” by a man who said he was “triggered” by the comedian’s jokes about the L.G.B.T.Q. community and homelessness. Days later, Netflix released a new corporate culture memo, which had been workshopped among company employees for six months, and attracted 10,000 comments. The memo underscored Mr. Sarandos’s response: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”Conservatives celebrated. “Netflix Puts Its Woke Employees On Notice With Blunt Memo,” read a Daily Caller headline. When I asked Mr. Sarandos how he felt about turning into a conservative hero, he said, “It used to be a very liberal issue, so it’s an interesting time that we live in.”He added, “I always said if we censor in the U.S., how are we going to defend our content in the Middle East?”After the Ricky Gervais comedy special went up on Netflix Tuesday, a similar brush fire started about his transgender jokes, with Variety’s Daniel D’Addario writing a story headlined “Ricky Gervais Anti-Trans Special Proves Netflix Is On No One’s Side But Its Own.” I asked Mr. Sarandos about it. He said his remarks about Mr. Chappelle applied to Mr. Gervais.‘Are You the Netflix Guy?’In a town where executives and especially agents are often illiterate about the history of TV and movies, Mr. Sarandos is an unabashed fan. He told me that if he had a free day to do anything, he would watch a movie in the nine-seat screening room in his house, converted from a guest bedroom. The Netflix honcho can wax eloquent on the great shows he’s watching on HBO Max, Showtime, Disney+ and Peacock just as easily as the ones he loves on Netflix.Asked who would be at his dream dinner party, past or present, he said Ernie Kovacs, Carole Lombard, Orson Welles, Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. “I used to see the words ‘Created by Norman Lear’ so often, I didn’t think it was a real person,” he said. “I thought it was like ‘In God We Trust.’” One of the “blessings” of his life, he said, is that he has met many of his idols.“That thing about ‘Don’t meet your heroes,’ I think that’s silly,” he said. “The first time I got to go to the Oscars, we were sitting directly behind Francis Ford Coppola, and I was, like, giddy. So I tapped Nicole and whispered to her, and she goes ‘You’re a terrible whisperer, you know that?’ So the first break comes and he turns around and says, ‘Are you the Netflix guy?’ That was pretty wild.”Mr. SarandosDevin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesHe fell for the 54-year-old Nicole, a film producer who started in the music industry and Democratic politics, the night he met her at an event for Barack Obama in Los Angeles in 2008. She was the Southern California finance co-chair for the Obama campaign and became President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the Bahamas. Mr. Sarandos said he knew she was the one after she showed her chops on old movies such as “Now, Voyager” and “Cabin in the Sky,” with Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong, and documentaries like “Eyes on the Prize,” about the American civil rights movement.His wife said his belly laugh, his “authentic” kindness, his desire to live life to the fullest and the fact that he’s a “really good egg” who jumps out of his car to help a motorist in trouble without thinking twice, are the reasons she fell in love with him. It certainly wasn’t his old Banana Republic jacket. (She upgraded him to a navy Brunello Cucinelli suit one Christmas.) Or his 1996 Acura MDX with the tear in the seat. (As a birthday gift to Nicole, he said he “put it out of its misery” and traded it for a 2016 black Porsche Cayennne S.U.V.)“I was never drawn to this for the trappings,” he said.Of the tragedy they went through with her mother, while Mr. Sarandos was still grieving his father, Ms. Avant said, “It would have torn many families apart. But Teddy doesn’t deflect. He sees a tragedy or crisis, takes it in and says ‘We are going to get through this.’ That’s what I love about him. He’s the calm in the storm.”Mr. Sarandos grew up in a lower-middle-class home in Phoenix in a family of five with young, “hippie Catholic” parents. His father was an electrician. “They started having kids at 17,” he told me. “Neither finished high school. My dad had this philosophy that if there’s leftover food, you could have more kids, I guess. My memories of growing up in that house are that it was chaotic all the time. Nothing was ever on a schedule. We didn’t have a bedtime. We didn’t have a dinner time.”He said TV gave him structure, and he dreamed of going up onto the screen, “The Purple Rose of Cairo” style, to be part of the Cunningham family on “Happy Days.”Ted Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe utilities and phone would often be cut off, he said, but his mother always made sure they had cable TV and she got a V.C.R. and a little dish on the roof to get HBO.“It was this crazy luxury for a family who could barely afford to keep the lights on,” he told me. Somehow, he thinks, his late mother had a vision for his future.The family didn’t go to movies unless it was a drive-in because his father couldn’t go two hours without a smoke. Their cultural high point was going to see Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons every year at the Arizona State Fair.When things got crazy at home, he went to his grandmother’s and it was “paradise.” “It was very structured, very calm,” he said. “She would watch a lot of TV, and she had all the magazines about movies. She always called movie stars by their first names like she knew them, like Mac and Glen for Mac Davis and Glen Campbell. They were friends, and I don’t know who stole whose wife but it was a very big deal for her.”And then, he said, “the universe” offered up the second video store in the state of Arizona around the corner. “When I walked into that store, it was a life changer,” he said. He worked his way up from clerk to managing eight video stores to one of the top jobs for West Coast Video, which at its peak had nearly 500 stores.‘It’s Not Like We Invented the Bidding War, You Know’Netflix resentment has been simmering for a while. Speaking in 2019 at CinemaCon, Helen Mirren told the crowd, “I love Netflix,” but then she flung a vulgarity at the streaming service, adding “There’s nothing like sitting in the cinema.”“She sent an immediate apology text,” Mr. Sarandos told me, smiling. “I think she was caught up in the moment. I mean, you’re talking to a roomful of small theater owners who were feeling they were under assault.”He said he understands “why people would be snickering a bit” now and notes: “Remember, I was in a business that was totally disrupted, too. I was in the video rental business.”Mr. Sarandos became so conversant with the 900 videos in the video stores he ran that he was the pre-algorithm, able to recommend films to people based on what they had previously watched.“I’ve always and I continue to be a very optimistic watcher,” he said. “I hardly ever turn off anything I’m watching because I think the good parts are coming.”As Ms. Min said, “Ted may be the only executive who has come within a million miles of an actual consumer of entertainment during his career.”Netflix’s co-CEOs, Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressMr. Sarandos is philosophical about the town vibrating with joy at his troubles. “Nobody wants to have their foundations challenged or their conventions challenged and we definitely did all that.” He points out that it is, after all, a very competitive business. “It’s not like we invented the bidding war, you know.”Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose movies “Kindergarten Teacher” and “The Lost Daughter” were acquired by Netflix, evokes the Medicis in the way Netflix supports art that might get lost, art that is dark and painful to watch. “Not once was I pushed to make a change I didn’t want to make,” she said.Mr. Sarandos said that when he met Reed Hastings in 1999, he was driven by the desire to help great storytellers reach people around the world.“There were some movies that never came to Phoenix, and it always made me crazy,” he said. “I thought that video rental never really solved the promise because it just became a repeat of the same distribution problem, very hit driven.”Mr. Sarandos often brings up the idea of democratization. “Netflix did diversity and inclusion better than anyone in Hollywood ever had or will,” Ms. Min said. “One of their first shows was ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ a female prison drama, with a transgender character, that no one would touch.”When I talk to other executives and talent around town, they have glowing things to say about Mr. Sarandos behind his back.“It sounds so boring but this guy is incredibly friendly, kind, gregarious and warm,” said Jason Bateman, the star of Netflix’s “Ozark.” “If Marty Byrde were to describe him, he might say, he has all the power of a cartel boss and none of the frown.”Many rivals do question Netflix’s business model, which they think was overvalued by Wall Street and outran financial logic for a long time. Some say royalties have been replaced by front-loaded, bloated contracts, making flops all the more costly and obscuring creators’ ability to see just how successful their works are. Those rivals wonder if the quality of Netflix’s content needs upgrading — given that it made 70 movies in 2021 — so that, as one rival executive put it, they have filet at the buffet as well as vegetables and mashed potatoes.“Tiffany’s became a Sears overnight,” sniffed one Hollywood player who has dealt with the company.And they wonder about the wisdom of writing gazillion-dollar checks to sign up celebrities with no filmmaking experience, like the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who were given producing deals. (Barack Obama is also signed up to narrate a National Geographic-style nature documentary.)“You have to bet early on storytellers,” Mr. Sarandos said. My experience with Barack and Michelle is they are phenomenal storytellers.”But Netflix is not going forward with Meghan Markle’s cartoon show about a 12-year-old girl, “Pearl.”How does it feel to drop a semi-royal?“We’re all optimistic when we go into these projects,” Mr. Sarandos said, “and sometimes they do or don’t materialize.”What’s So Bad About Being CBS?Mr. Sarandos’s 2020 decision to oust Cindy Holland, his vice president of original content who had developed expensive hits like “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Stranger Things,” “The Crown” and “The Queen’s Gambit” and signed off on big checks — $100 million to Shonda Rhimes (recruited by Mr. Sarandos) and $300 million to Ryan Murphy — continues to rankle in some quarters. Ms. Holland was seen as an exemplar of more curated chic and less mass appeal, and as Kim Masters wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, she clashed with Mr. Sarandos about the demand for ever more volume, the lavish Oscar campaigns and giving Mr. Chappelle more specials.Mr. Sarandos said that he and Ms. Holland got the business to where it was, but he wanted to give Ms. Bajaria, formerly Netflix’s head of unscripted and international content, the top slot because she had international experience, which he thought could help the company to grow. She also had a gift for picking hits like “You.”Some rivals contend that Netflix started out boldly but then became Walmart or CBS, with too much “Emily in Paris” and not enough “Stranger Things.”The Netflix hit “Emily in Paris.”Netflix, via Associated Press“CBS is one of the most successful TV networks in history,” Mr. Sarandos responded imperturbably. “So, yeah.” He also thinks “Emily in Paris” is high-quality television, adding “Peyton Manning goes on ‘S.N.L.’ and is talking about ‘Emily in Paris.’”“We’re trying to satisfy multiple tastes,” he said. “This year, we had two best picture nominees, ‘Power of the Dog’ and ‘Don’t Look Up,’ and they couldn’t be any more different.”And he brags about “Squid Game,” which he calls “the biggest entertainment story in a century.” He said his team in Korea found the story, which had been pitched as a movie for 10 years, and asked the creator to conceptualize it as a series.“This is where the algorithm is your friend,” he said. “The algorithm is an advocate for the audience trying to find that thing you never heard of that you’re going to love. And it kept recognizing very quickly that this thing was happening in Korea and ‘Oh, my God, it’s happening in Japan.’ ‘Oh, it’s happening in France.’”He’s sanguine that Netflix hasn’t hit its ceiling. After all, according to Nielsen, streaming accounted for a little more than 30 percent of TV viewership in the United States in April. Netflix had the most viewers of any streamer, but accounted for just 6.6 percent of all TV viewership in the United States.One way that Netflix will keep growing, Mr. Sarandos said, is that the company will work to tighten password control, or figure out a way people can pay to share their password. “About a third of American households are borrowing the password to someone else’s account,” Mr. Hastings said.Mr. Sarandos doesn’t agree with criticism that Netflix needs to stop greenlighting so many projects and embrace a more selective approach, even though, as Scott Galloway, a tech guru and New York University marketing professor, said dryly, “They’re spending the defense budget of Sweden on content.” (Actually, Netflix spends far more. Sweden spent about $7 billion on defense in 2021, and Netflix said it spent $17 billion on content that year.)“I don’t think that we’ve done anything so willy-nilly that we should rethink it,” Mr. Sarandos said, adding: “While many competitors and pundits talk about volume being a negative, I think it is a tremendous positive for consumers who all have a different view of what ‘quality’ is. I think that, while they kick us around about it, they are starting on the same path — HBO with Discovery programming on the same shelf, Disney broadening their brand with Fox content, and even FX’s radical expansion of output to 22 shows.”Does he think that Netflix not diversifying its revenue strategy has exacerbated recent obstacles?“I think it’s the trade-off of simplicity and complexity,” he said. “And to do what we did in the last 10 years, I think we benefited much more from simplicity.”Many artists at Netflix are happy to defend the company in this moment of churn.“Decisions are not made by an algorithm,” said Guillermo del Toro, who is making “Pinocchio” for Netflix. “What’s really important about Ted is that he’s in the room, not just his body. He’s completely engaged with you.”Jerry Seinfeld waves off the schadenfreude. “People are just yapping away at their lunches, like they always do,” the comedian said. “They come after you if you’ve got the ball. Ted’s got the ball.”Shonda Rhimes, flush with “Inventing Anna” and “Bridgerton” success, is rosy about the future: “I live in this space and I wouldn’t bet against Netflix.”“Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings are A-Rod and Barry Bonds,” Mr. Galloway said, adding that while they may have been beaned in the face, “You don’t want to bet against these guys.”Mr. Sarandos, of course, is optimistic. “We’re 90 years behind all of our current competitors in what we do today, and they’re just entering into our space,” he said. “We have to have content that people like better on Netflix than anywhere else. I know it seems like it should be more complicated than that, but it almost isn’t.”Mr. Sarandos.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You were a better video store clerk than Quentin Tarantino.Ted Sarandos: I don’t know how great a video store clerk he was, but I was probably nicer to the customers who forgot to rewind the tapes.If media executives recreated “Squid Game,” Rupert Murdoch would be the guy who tricks everyone, Reed Hastings would be the frontman, and Bob Chapek would get killed in the first round.(Laughing) Plausible. And you could scramble them in any way.Let’s play MFK (Marry, “Fornicate,” Kill): Hulu, HBO and Disney+.I would say “M” all three and I would “F” all three. The jury is out on “K.”Barack is much more fun to party with than Michelle.Deny.You named your son after Tony Bennett long before you met him.That is true. Anthony Bennett Sarandos. Tony is an unbelievable singer, obviously, but also a civil rights activist, a great painter, a super-well-rounded human being. We got to be good friends and one day, Tony goes “Why would you name your kid Tony Bennett?” I go, “Well, first of all, I never thought I’d have to explain it to you.”After the Netflix subscriber news broke, you turned on Merle Haggard’s hit “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”I’m a huge fan.Executives at media companies make too much money.No comment. More

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      After Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle Attacks, Comedy Venues Increase Security

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      Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars. Dave Chappelle was tackled at the Hollywood Bowl. Now some venues are increasing security to protect comedians.It was a joke about a mother, cocaine and Walmart that set the man off.He had been sitting with a woman at the Laugh Factory in Chicago this winter, shouting enthusiastically in response to a joke about drugs when, after being needled about his relationship with the woman, he said that she was his mother.So when Joe Kilgallon, the next comedian, took the microphone, a joke popped into his head.“That’s healthy — cocaine with your mom on a Monday,” Mr. Kilgallon recalled quipping. “Getting some real Walmart vibes here.”The man leaped from his chair, cursed and made a beeline for the stage, club officials and Mr. Kilgallon recalled. A security guard grabbed the man before he could climb onstage and hustled him out of the club through an emergency exit.It wound up nothing more than a minor confrontation, the kind that comedians have had to deal with for years, given that making fun of people and mixing it up with hecklers is basically part of the job description. But a couple of recent high-profile physical attacks on comedians — Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars in March and a man tackling Dave Chappelle as he performed at the Hollywood Bowl last week — has left some comics wondering if the stage is becoming less safe, and has led some clubs and venues to take steps to beef up their security at comedy shows.Laugh Factory officials say that as a result of the recent unrest, they have added cameras and metal detectors and increased the number of security guards at some of their locations. They have made a few additions — “This is not a U.F.C. match!” “We do not care about your political affiliation!”— to the standard monologue about two-drink minimums people hear as they walk in the door. The Uptown Comedy Corner in Atlanta last weekend hired an off-duty police officer to bolster its security, moved one of its guards closer to the stage and began using metal detecting wands to check patrons and their bags at the door. And the Hollywood Bowl said it had implemented its own “additional security measures” after the attack on Mr. Chappelle.Garrett Baney was searched this week as he entered The Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“When a comedian gets onstage, what is their only goal?” asked Judy Gold, the comedian and author of “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.” “To make you laugh. That’s it.”“When you take the comedian’s intent out of the formula and you decide ‘I am going to take this joke the way I perceive it, instead of the way the comedian intended it,’ ” she said, “and then say ‘I didn’t like that joke, I want that person canceled or silenced or beat up,’ I mean, it’s just devastatingly sad.”In interviews, comedy club owners and comedians themselves expressed varying degrees of concern over the recent events. While some spoke of a worrisome uptick in audience outbursts that predates the Oscars, others cautioned against conflating what happened to Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle and drawing overly broad conclusions.Trevor Noah addressed the situation with comedy last week, when he warily walked out onto the stage of his Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” under the watchful eye of a man in a black windbreaker that said “Security” who appeared to murmur into a Secret Service-style earpiece as Mr. Noah opened the show.Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar in New York, said he viewed the Smith-Rock confrontation as a highly specific “one-off” in which Mr. Smith seemed to be trying to embarrass Mr. Rock more than physically hurt him. Seeing an audience member tackling Mr. Chappelle was concerning, he said, but might be part of a broader trend.“It just seems like violence is creeping up on us,” Mr. Dworman said, citing recent riots and protests that have turned violent. “We have a lot of people equating words with violence. And the logical extension of equating words with violence is to say that it’s reasonable to answer words with violence.”Some comedians brushed off concern about their personal safety, noting that they are not, for the most part, big names like Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle. Several made clear they did not plan to soften their material. But some worried that societal forces, including the bitter debates of the Trump years and the difficulties many faced during the pandemic, may have left people increasingly on edge — and less willing to take a joke.After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and was allowed to stay at the ceremony, some comedians feared it might embolden copy cat attacks. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesJamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, said he had been counseling his comedians to take into account that some audience members have spent much of the last two years inside their apartments during a grueling pandemic. Mr. Kilgallon said he believed that after so much time alone, “people don’t know how to act in public” — whether it be in comedy clubs, bars or sporting events.Comedy clubs have long employed bouncers and security guards to deal with the occasional patron who has been overserved, or who is heckling a tad too much. And long before Mr. Smith strode onto the Academy Awards stage to slap Mr. Rock as retribution for a joke about his wife, there have been scattered instances of people confronting comedians during their sets, or in some cases, physically assaulting them.In the aftermath of the Oscars slap, some comics warned of the potential for copy cats. Mr. Smith was not only not removed from the Dolby Theater after hitting Mr. Rock but was given a standing ovation soon afterward when he was awarded the Oscar for best actor. (He was later banned from the Oscars for 10 years.)“These people gave him a standing ovation and no punishment,” Ms. Gold said of Mr. Smith. “We all said there will be copycat assaults. And there was.”The attack on Mr. Chappelle was murkier. A man carrying a weapon tackled Mr. Chappelle onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was appearing as part of “Netflix Is a Joke: The Festival.” The Los Angeles city attorney charged Isaiah Lee, 23, with four misdemeanors in connection with the attack, including battery and possession of a weapon with intent to assault; Mr. Lee has pleaded not guilty.The Los Angeles police have not released any information about Mr. Lee’s motive for the attack on Mr. Chappelle, whose comedy has provoked controversy in the past. Mr. Chappelle discussed the encounter at another comedy show in Los Angeles later that week, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mr. Chappelle told the audience that he had spoken to Mr. Lee after the incident, and said that Mr. Lee had said he did it to draw attention to the plight of his grandmother, who had been forced out of her neighborhood by gentrification, the trade publication reported.The Laugh Factory recently installed a new security camera.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“More than the incident itself, it’s the reaction people are having and saying — saying this is an ongoing or repeat thing,” said Angelo Sykes, a co-owner of Uptown Comedy Corner, which stiffened its security after the attack on Mr. Chappelle. “When you hear those things it makes you say, ‘OK, we can’t take those chances. We’ve got to be on the safe side.’”In telephone interviews last week, several comedians in Los Angeles said the attacks had been a topic of conversation between comics after shows. Ms. Gold described some of her fellow comedians as “weary and tired” and said others were “freaking out.”Comedy, she noted, is often a work in progress. “We don’t know where the line is until we bring up our material,” she said. “The audience informs us.”Tehran Von Ghasri, a Los Angeles-based comedian, was among those who said an increasing share of “hypersensitive” audience members seemed to be coming to shows and either inviting confrontation, “looking to be offended” — or both.Mr. Kilgallon said social media was also to blame. He has noticed that audience members are now quick to pull out their phones if a controversial topic is being discussed or a tense moment arises. But he said that the fundamentals of comedy remained the same.“Over the last five years, people come up to me after a show and say, ‘It’s got to be tough these days doing comedy — everyone’s so sensitive,’” Mr. Kilgallon said. “And I say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I perform in the bluest parts of the country and some of the reddest parts of the country. If you’re funny — no matter what the joke is, people laugh.” More

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      in Theater

      Terry Gilliam's Disputed Sondheim Show Finds a Home

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      The director was set to stage a revival of “Into the Woods” in London. After a clash at the Old Vic theater, the much-anticipated production will now debut 115 miles away, in Bath, England.LONDON — For weeks, a question hung over London theater: What would happen to Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods”?On Nov. 1, the Old Vic theater canceled a revival of the musical, co-directed by Terry Gilliam, after a dispute in which the renowned director was accused of endorsing transphobic views and playing down the MeToo movement. That left the production in limbo and London’s theater world wondering if anyone would dare to take it on.Now, there is an answer. On Aug. 19, 2022, Gilliam’s “Into the Woods” will debut at the Theater Royal in Bath, 115 miles from London. The show will run through Sep. 10, 2022, the theater said in a statement.The fuss around the revival — which had received Sondheim’s blessing before his death — began in May, when the Old Vic announced the production as the centerpiece of its new season. That news caused a stir on British social media, because of comments Gilliam had made, in a newspaper interview, about the MeToo movement and so-called cancel culture.In January 2020, Gilliam told The Independent that MeToo “was a witch hunt” and that he was tired of white men “being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world.” Anyway, he added, he now identified as “a Black lesbian in transition.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}According to a report in The Stage, a British theater newspaper, “some within the Old Vic team” felt Gilliam’s comments were “at odds with the theater’s culture and values.”On May 12, Kate Varah, the Old Vic’s executive director, addressed staff concerns at an internal meeting. She said that she had spoken with Gilliam and that the conversation had reassured her that he shared the theater’s values.But the dispute escalated after Gilliam wrote a post on Facebook about “The Closer,” the Dave Chappelle comedy special on Netflix. In the show, the comedian comments mockingly on transgender issues and aligns himself with some feminists who say a transgender woman’s biological sex determines her gender and can’t be changed. Dozens of Netflix employees in Los Angeles staged a walkout over the special, accusing Netflix of endorsing bigotry.“There is a storm brewing over Netflix’s support for the show,” Gilliam wrote on Oct. 14. “I’d love to hear your opinions.”On Nov. 1, the Old Vic and Scenario Two, the musical’s co-producers, announced that they had “mutually agreed to cancel the production,” leading British newspapers to speculate that the Facebook post was the reason behind the decision. The theater and the director both declined to comment for this article. But on Monday, Gilliam said on Facebook that a group of up-and-coming playwrights, directors, costume designers and others at the theater was responsible for the cancellation.The Theater Royal in Bath, England. “Into the Woods” is set to open at the playhouse on Aug. 19, 2022.Nigel Jarvis/ShutterstockGilliam said that members of a short-term artistic development program at the theater, called the Old Vic 12, had “intimidated” the playhouse into canceling the musical after he recommended Chappelle’s special to his Facebook followers.Members of the program were “closed-minded, humor-averse ideologues,” Gilliam said, adding, “Freedom of Speech is often attacked, but I never imagined that Freedom of Recommendation would be under threat as well.”Three members of the Old Vic 12 declined to comment, but one did note that the program had ended several months before the Old Vic reached its decision on “Into the Woods.”In a phone interview, John Berry, a co-founder of Scenario Two, declined to comment on the Old Vic’s decision. His focus was on making an entertaining show, he added. “For me, nothing else matters.”The controversy around “Into the Woods” is not the only recent scandal involving accusations of bigotry in London’s theaters. In November, several prominent Jewish celebrities and journalists accused the Royal Court Theater of perpetuating antisemitic tropes after it staged a new play by the British playwright Al Smith, called “Rare Earth Mettle.” Early performances in the show’s run featured a character called Hershel Fink, a big-nosed, greedy billionaire who seemed to embody negative stereotypes about Jewish people.After a barrage of criticism on social media and in British newspapers, the character’s name was changed. The theater said in a statement that a Jewish theater director had raised concerns about the character in a September workshop: “We acknowledge our wrongdoing and will include antisemitism in future anti-oppression practices and training,” the statement said.Berry declined to comment on whether the two controversies had implications for theater makers, but added, “I have my own views.”He was certain of one thing, though: “There’s certainly not going to be anything controversial” in his production of “Into the Woods.”“It’s going to be vintage Terry Gilliam,” he said. More

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      in Movies

      Dave Chappelle Responds to Netflix Controversy in Instagram Post

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      Dave Chappelle responded to the controversy over his Netflix standup special “The Closer” — which has been criticized as promoting bigotry toward transgender people — by posting a five-minute video clip to Instagram on Monday in which he denied that he had been invited to speak to transgender employees of the streaming service and refused.“That is not true,” he said in the video, which was taken during a weekend performance in Nashville. “If they had invited me, I would have accepted. Although I am confused about what we would be speaking about. I said what I said, and boy, I heard what you said. My God, how could I not? You said you want a safe working environment at Netflix. It seems like I’m the only one who can’t go to the office anymore.”The controversy over Mr. Chappelle’s special has put Netflix at the center of a conversation involving transphobia, free speech and employee activism. Last week, a group of Netflix employees in Los Angeles staged a walkout. Some employees working virtually also shut their laptops in solidarity.Hours before the protest, Netflix released a statement saying that it understood “the deep hurt that’s been caused,” and that it recognized “we have much more work to do both within Netflix and in our content.”In his video, Mr. Chappelle addressed the transgender community, saying, “I’m more than willing to give you an audience but you will not summon me. I am not bending to anybody’s demands.”Mr. Chappelle said he had three conditions for any meeting: those involved must watch “The Closer” in its entirety, he would choose the time and place, and “you must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.”Ms. Gadsby, a comedian whose specials have been successful on Netflix, criticized Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos this month for defending Mr. Chappelle. Mr. Sarandos had invoked Ms. Gadsby in a statement in which he defended Mr. Chappelle’s right to artistic expression.Mr. Chappelle also said that a documentary he made chronicling a series of stand-up shows he hosted during the summer of 2020 from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio, could not find distribution because of the controversy over “The Closer.” Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, the film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, for the reopening of Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Chappelle said he would release the documentary himself in 10 American cities over the next month. (Ten dates in different cities were listed on the Instagram post.)“You have to answer the question, am I canceled or not?” he said before dropping the microphone and walking off the stage. More

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      in Television

      Netflix Employees Walk Out to Protest Dave Chappelle's Special

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      Amid cheers and chants of “Team trans!,” dozens of Netflix employees walked out of a company office building in Los Angeles on Wednesday to protest a recent Dave Chappelle stand-up special, in one of the most visible signs of worker unrest in the history of the streaming service.Critics inside and outside the company have said that Mr. Chappelle’s show, “The Closer,” promotes bigotry against transgender people. The protest put the tech company directly at the center of broader cultural debates about transphobia, free speech and employee activism. Throughout the day, #NetflixWalkOut was a top trending topic on Twitter.Carrying signs that read “Hey Netflix: Do Better” and “Transphobia Is Not a Joke,” the employees joined more than a hundred supporters and activists who had begun rallying a couple of hours before. In addition to the scene in Los Angeles, some Netflix staffers working remotely shut their laptops and called off work for the day at noon. It’s unclear how many at Netflix, which had more than 9,000 full-time employees globally at the end of last year, participated in the virtual walkout.Netflix has found itself directly at the center of broader cultural debates about transphobia, free speech and employee activism.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesAt the protest in Los Angeles, Joey Soloway, the creator of the Amazon Prime comedy series “Transparent,” urged Netflix executives to add a transgender person to its corporate board “this week,” and pushed the entertainment industry as a whole to begin hiring significantly more transgender people, adding: “I want to pitch to a trans person. I would love to have a trans person give me notes on my story. I want a trans agent. I want a trans manager. I want so many trans critics at newspapers.”Under bright skies, activists and supporters vastly outnumbered a small group of counterprotesters who carried signs that read “Jokes Are Funny” and “Netflix, Don’t Cancel Free Speech.” There were a few minor skirmishes, but the atmosphere was mostly peaceful, with supporters chanting, “We want accountability. When do we want it? Now!” and, “Trans lives matter.”One of the organizers of the protest was Ashlee Marie Preston, who was featured in the Netflix documentary “Disclosure,” about Hollywood’s impact on the transgender community. In an interview, Ms. Preston said she was there because Netflix employees have to be “very careful” about speaking to the news media. Ashlee Marie Preston, who was featured in the Netflix documentary “Disclosure,” about Hollywood’s impact on the transgender community, helped organize the rally.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesB. Pagels-Minor, who is transgender and was fired last week from their job as a program manager at Netflix, read a list of demands that employees had for the company. Among them were hiring more transgender people and including disclaimers for content that is criticized for being transphobic. Netflix has said Mx. Pagels-Minor was fired for sharing sensitive documents outside the company; a lawyer for the former employee denied that her client shared information with the news media.One employee, Gabrielle Korn, wrote on Twitter: “We aren’t fighting WITH Netflix. We’re fighting FOR Netflix. We all know how great it can be and that it’s not there yet.”Though Mr. Chappelle’s special has come under fire, there are some who have defended him, including the comic Damon Wayans, who told TMZ last week, “We were slaves to P.C. culture and he just, you know — as an artist, he’s van Gogh. He cut his ear off. He’s trying to tell us it’s OK.”The rally attracted counterprotesters, including one who was pushed and asked to leave the premises.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesAmid the rolling public relations crisis, Netflix executives have begun to adopt a conciliatory tone while still remaining supportive of Mr. Chappelle.Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, gave several interviews on Tuesday in which he said that he had “screwed up” communication with employees after the outcry and that he should have discussed the controversy with more “humanity.” Mr. Sarandos also conceded that shows, series and movies on Netflix did have an impact on the real world, something he denied in an initial statement.Similarly, hours before Wednesday’s protest, the company said in a statement that it supported the walkout.“We value our trans colleagues and allies and understand the deep hurt that’s been caused,” Netflix said in a statement. “We respect the decision of any employee who chooses to walk out and recognize we have much more work to do both within Netflix and in our content.” More

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      in Movies

      Netflix Earnings Results: Q3 2021

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      It’s been a tale of two Netflixes over the last few weeks, as a long-anticipated Dave Chappelle special drew sharp condemnations from staffers and critics alike and as the South Korean sleeper hit “Squid Game” became a global sensation, making it the streamer’s most-watched series to date. (Both detail a grim view of the world.)Neither contributed much to the company’s results in the third quarter, which ran through Sept. 30 (“Squid Game” debuted in the last week of September and Mr. Chappelle’s special became available in October), but Netflix gained 4.4 million new subscribers in the period, beating its own estimate of 3.5 million. Netflix now has 222 million customers, about 67 million of them in the United States. The company booked $7.5 billion in revenue and $1.4 billion in profit, slightly better than expectations.Both shows do matter to the company’s current quarter, for which Netflix anticipates adding 8.5 million new customers, one of the biggest quarterly forecasts in the company’s history. Netflix also said it expected to generate $365 million in profit on $7.7 billion in sales. In other words, as far as Wall Street is concerned, what controversy?Mr. Chappelle’s show became a rare public relations nightmare for Netflix as critics saw it as a hostile invective toward the transgender community rather than the boundary-pushing stand-up routine that Ted Sarandos, the company’s co-chief executive, defended it as. Employees have threatened to walk out in protest on Wednesday, and some in the creative community have called out Mr. Sarandos.Jaclyn Moore, the head producer for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” said she would no longer work for the company if “they continue to put out and profit from blatantly and dangerously transphobic content.”Then there’s “Squid Game.” The dystopian series pits indebted citizens against each other in a set of children’s games where losers die and the winner walks away with millions in cash. The show has stormed the globe and has become one of Netflix’s most valuable new franchises, inspiring memes and costumes just in time for Halloween.“A mind-boggling” 142 million accounts watched at least the first two minutes of the show in its first month, making it the No. 1 program in 94 countries, including the United States, the company said. “The breadth of ‘Squid Game’s’ popularity is truly amazing.”A set of leaked internal documents revealed that “Squid Game,” which cost $21 million to make, is worth at least $891 million by one Netflix metric, according to a recent report in Bloomberg News. The story revealed for the first time how Netflix determines the value of its programming, a mystery that has long frustrated Hollywood’s producers.Unlike traditional television, where economics are governed by ratings and cable licensing fees, Netflix has a completely different set of financial goals. It has no live programming, no commercials, no prime time. Unlike network TV, Netflix doesn’t make more money when viewers watch more hours of programming. It makes more money when people sign up.The company can estimate whether subscribers joined to watch a specific show or even if a program kept customers from leaving. Based in part on that data, Netflix ascribes an “efficiency” metric to a show based on the value of each viewer, according to the documents leaked to Bloomberg. “Squid Game” has a very high “efficiency” rating, akin to a profit measure.Netflix’s share of the streaming pie has continued to shrink as competitors like Disney+, AppleTV+ and HBO Max have entered the market. The company’s “demand interest” — a measure of the popularity of shows and streaming services created by Parrot Analytics and a key barometer of how many new subscribers services are likely to attract — has started to fall. Netflix’s share of interest dropped 2.5 percentage points to 45.8 percent in the third quarter, while Disney+ and AppleTV+ gained in market share, the measurement firm said.Netflix said it would start disclosing different data points on viewership such as hours viewed and would no longer report the number of accounts watching a particular program.Netflix is looking for new ways to keep customers glued to its service and has started experimenting with games. The company recently acquired Night School Studio, the producer of the story-based game Oxenfree.“It remains very early days for this initiative and, like other content categories we’ve expanded into, we plan to try different types of games, learn from our members and improve our game library,” Netflix said on Tuesday. More

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      in Television

      Gadsby and Netflix Employees Pressure Executive Over Dave Chappelle Special

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      Tensions at Netflix continued to flare on Friday, 10 days after the release of a special by the comedian Dave Chappelle that critics inside and outside the company have described as promoting bigotry against transgender people.Early on Friday, a Netflix star criticized the company and Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive, in a stinging social media post. Later in the day, Netflix said it had fired an employee for sharing documents related to Mr. Chappelle with a reporter, and Mr. Sarandos fielded pointed questions from employees during a companywide virtual meeting.In a rare public rebuke, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby upbraided Mr. Sarandos by name for his defense of Mr. Chappelle. Ms. Gadsby, whose 2017 Netflix special, “Nanette,” earned an Emmy and a Peabody Award, is the most prominent entertainer to criticize Mr. Sarandos and Netflix, which she referred to in an Instagram post as an “amoral algorithm cult.”Mr. Sarandos and Netflix’s other co-chief, Reed Hastings, have been unwavering in their support of Mr. Chappelle, who signed a lucrative multiyear deal with the company in 2016 and has won Emmys and Grammys for his Netflix work. In a note this week, Mr. Sarandos countered the arguments of Netflix staff members who had suggested that Mr. Chappelle’s special, “The Closer,” could lead to violence against transgender people, writing that he had the “strong belief that content on-screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”Mr. Sarandos, who joined Netflix two decades ago and became its co-chief executive last year, also said that the company would go to great lengths to “ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story.” He cited inclusive Netflix programs like “Sex Education” and “Orange Is the New Black” as well as Ms. Gadsby’s specials, which also include “Douglas,” released in 2020.In her social media post on Friday, Ms. Gadsby, who is a lesbian, objected to the executive’s references to her in his defense of the company and Mr. Chappelle’s special.Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix specials were critical and popular successes, called the company “amoral” in a social media post on Friday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Hey Ted Sarandos!” Ms. Gadsby wrote. “Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chappelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view.”She continued: “You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of the hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted.”Netflix declined to comment on Ms. Gadsby’s remarks.At a virtual company meeting that started at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, Mr. Sarandos replied to a series of tough questions from employees, who asked about Mr. Chappelle’s special and how the company had responded to criticisms of it, according to three people with knowledge of the gathering. The event became emotional when several employees were persistent in their questioning of Mr. Sarandos and his support for someone who they feel engages in hate speech, the people said.After the meeting, Netflix said in a statement that an employee had been fired for sharing internal documents pertaining to Mr. Chappelle with the press.“We have let go of an employee for sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company,” the statement said. “We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company.”The documents included private financial information regarding Mr. Chappelle’s Netflix specials that were published this week by Bloomberg, according to a person with knowledge of the termination. The documents included the costs for the specials — $24.1 million for “The Closer” and $23.6 million for Mr. Chappelle’s previous special, “Sticks & Stones” — as well as an internal metric that determines the value of the specials relative to their budgets.Such data is available to Netflix staff but rarely made public. The appearance of the statistics in a published article is a further sign of how deep the schism is between some Netflix employees and company leadership.Several organizations, including GLAAD, which monitors the news media and entertainment companies for bias against the L.G.B.T.Q. community, have criticized Mr. Chappelle’s special as transphobic. A group of Netflix workers has planned a walkout for next week in protest.Nicole Sperling More