More stories

  • in

    ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Brings Up a Riddle That Looms 25 Years Later

    Twenty-five years ago, the indie horror blockbuster compelled audiences to ask, “Was that real?” The question now permeates our age of misinformation.“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”Audiences packed elbow-to-elbow into theaters in the summer of 1999 saw that shaky white text on a black background during the first moments of “The Blair Witch Project.” What followed was 80 or so minutes of growing dread as three 20-somethings — Josh, Heather and Mike — tried to uncover the truth behind the legend of a supernatural entity called the Blair Witch. It does not end well for the trio.Initially shot for just $35,000, “The Blair Witch Project” grossed almost $250 million, then a record for an indie film. It became a pop culture phenomenon, one that foretold the found-footage horror boom and left one uneasy question hovering over moviegoers: “Is this real?” It’s an existential riddle that looms larger than ever 25 years later, compelling us to apply that exact question to nearly every image, sound or nugget of information we encounter.Back then, creating that air of uncertainty took some strategic work by the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Marketed as a documentary, promotional materials included missing posters for its largely unknown lead actors — Joshua Leonard; Heather Donahue, now known as Rei Hance; and Michael C. Williams — who had to keep ultralow profiles in the lead-up to the film’s release.A separate faux documentary called “The Curse of the Blair Witch,” which aired on cable TV shortly before the film’s premiere, had an eerily convincing true-crime approach: It incorporated candid-seeming photos of the characters including childhood snapshots, as well as fake newspaper articles and interviews with actors posing as Heather’s film professor and Josh’s girlfriend, among others, to round out the alternate reality.Joshua Leonard and his “Blair Witch” co-stars filmed all the footage used in the movie.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

  • in

    A Movie About Brian Eno Is Never the Same Twice Thanks to Software

    Thanks to a software program, the length, structure and contents of the movie are reconfigured each time it’s shown. It’s the only way the musician would agree to the project.Gary Hustwit had a simple wish: to make a documentary about the visionary musician Brian Eno. When that wasn’t possible, he devised a far less simple approach. He made 52 quintillion documentaries about Eno.At a time when it seems like there’s a movie about every band that’s recorded even a 45, Hustwit’s “Eno,” opening Friday, is unlike any other portrait of a musician. It’s not even a portrait, because it isn’t fixed or static. Instead, Hustwit used a proprietary software program that reconfigures the length, structure and contents of the movie.“Every time it plays, it’s a different movie,” Hustwit told an audience in May at the film’s New York premiere. “I’m surprised every time I see it.”His collaborator, the digital artist and programmer Brendan Dawes, explained that because of the variables, including 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive, there are 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie. (A quintillion is a billion billion.) “That’s going to be a really big box set,” Dawes quipped at the premiere.Movie theaters are still guided by “a 130-year-old technical constraint,” Hustwit said over lunch the next day at a Chelsea restaurant. “We can use technology as a structural tool to do interesting things with the narrative. This idea that a film has to be set in stone and always linear is obsolete, I think. There’s another possible path here for filmmaking going forward.”At some showings of “Eno,” Hustwit brings the machine with the Brain One software for the film.Brandon Schulman for The New York TimesWe 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

  • in

    The Meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain

    The beloved chef’s admirers have given him a distinctly modern kind of digital afterlife — at the center of fondly parodic jokes.After Anthony Boudain took his own life in June 2018, the internet was flooded with content memorializing him: obituaries, remembrances, bereft tweets by celebrities and regular citizens alike. But one post in particular foretold the chef’s afterlife on social media. Kyrell Grant, who tweeted as @imbobswaget, suggested that Bourdain had the charismatic aura of someone you might expect to be well endowed — except she said that using a pithy new catchphrase that would quickly enter the popular lexicon, garnering its own entry on Dictionary.com.That message on Twitter (now X) may have marked a transition in how people memorialized Bourdain. He was remembered, chiefly, as someone lovable and accessible: straight-talking, salt-of-the-earth, as thoughtful as he was devil-may-care. A real grief surrounded his loss, and he inspired the same types of posthumous adoration so many figures do, complete with words-of-wisdom quotes pasted over nature photos. But it soon became just as common to see posts playing on his drinking habits or salty comebacks; people began to use images of him in the same ways we use images of pop-culture characters like SpongeBob SquarePants or Homer Simpson. Anthony Bourdain became, in short, a meme.Anthony Bourdain in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2016.William MebaneLast month a new Bourdain meme made the rounds. The chef had offered several oft-quoted bits of advice urging people to explore and enjoy the world: “If you’re 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel,” or, “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” But this new meme paired a pensive portrait of Bourdain with ever more parodic versions of that sentiment. “Go to a [expletive] restaurant. I don’t care what. Go to a [expletive] restaurant and order a [expletive] beer.” A less profane version prodded the reader to take a chance on a Hinge date: “Show her a picture of your cats. Show her two. Give her a tissue while she cries over her ex. Jump over a fence to impress her. Break your ankle. Never hear from her again.” Another tribute hits like whiskey left at a virtual grave: booty shorts emblazoned with the words I MISS ANTHONY BOURDAIN.If you too miss Anthony Bourdain, and you want to engage in serious communion with his oeuvre, there’s a vast trove of media to satiate your craving: 11 books, various essays and graphic novels, hours and hours of television. He participated in countless interviews, appeared on podcasts, played characters based on himself in TV guest appearances. You might dip into the subreddit r/Anthony Bourdain, which, with its 61,000 members, is in the top 2 percent of Reddit communities by size; that forum, far more earnest than X, is often engaged in forlorn discussion.But even in that hallowed space, memes cannot help infiltrating. Yet another variation on fake Bourdain advice recently emerged there, imploring the viewer to eat at Chili’s and get an appetizer combo. Some commenters expected moderators to delete the parody; after all, it didn’t “honor” the group’s subject. Others argued that they shouldn’t. Bourdain was a prodigious Twitter user and a funny one; his afterimage, in most minds, is as someone who could laugh at himself. Surely, people felt, he would have appreciated the lightness of a good Bourdain meme.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

  • in

    ‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

    MTVThis is Danny. He fell in love with a woman he’d met online. When he saw her photo, he called it love at first sight.He and Rosa talked on the phone daily for months and exchanged reams of texts in Spanglish. They bonded over being Puerto Rican.“You’re so funny, Daddy,” she once texted him. “You’re so sexy, my love,” Danny replied. Though they’d never met, he was making big plans: marriage and family.When the red flags started to pile up, Danny contacted “Catfish,” on MTV, for help. The truth was far from what he’d hoped. Rosa was secretly Jose.The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital FutureSince its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryThe saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.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

  • in

    Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

    I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, I called.It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”The man had no idea who I was. More

  • in

    ‘Dune: Part Two’ Gives Sci-Fi-Obsessed Silicon Valley a Reason to Party

    In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco on Thursday evening, tech workers from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled next to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook founder, chatted as others sipped from cannily named cocktails like the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut Campari, sweet vermouth) and the Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear purée, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry veteran, dropped by. Alex Stamos, the former head of security at Facebook, was also spotted.“Do you think they’ll let me take home one of the freaky sandworm popcorn buckets?” someone in the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets had become a sensation across social media.The techies were all there to celebrate Silicon Valley’s newest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the latest movie adapted from the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped inspire many of them to become interested in technology. The film, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada over the weekend, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie.”The invitation-only private screening at the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly show focused on sci-fi and fantasy films. And it was not the only game in town.Across Silicon Valley — from venture capital firms to tech executive circles — people had booked their own private screenings of the movie, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the venture firm 50 Years invited founders, friends and investors to “come fuel your imagination with stellar science fiction” in a theater takeover.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

  • in

    Cody Fry, Noah Kahan and Other Musicians Grapple With Universal’s TikTok Fight

    Cody Fry and Noah Kahan are among the artists who are wondering how the battle between Universal Music Group and the social media platform might affect them.Things were going well for Cody Fry, a singer-songwriter and producer known for his lush pop songs. He was looking forward to a pair of concerts with Ben Rector and the Colorado Symphony at the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. And on Monday his management team called him with exciting news: One of his songs, “Things You Said,” a romantic duet with Abby Cates, was gaining TikTok traction in China.More than 750,000 videos were created with that song in a single day, Mr. Fry said in a TikTok video. It was the kind of organic viral moment that artists and marketers dream of, the kind that can’t be forced.But by Thursday, many of the fan-made videos featuring “Things You Said” went mute. The sudden TikTok silence came about after Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, pulled its catalog from TikTok after its contract with the platform expired.In addition to Mr. Fry, who is signed to Decca Records, one of the company’s many labels, Universal artists whose videos went silent include SZA, Taylor Swift and Ice Spice.Picture a TikTok video of somebody dancing to a snippet of Ms. Swift’s “Bejeweled.” Now picture that person dancing in complete silence.“Help, this is so awkward with no music,” a comment read on a recent TikTok posted by Ice Spice, a rapper whose music regularly sparks a big reaction on the platform.

    @codyfrymusic Am i muted yet? #music #musicindustry #universalmusic #umg #thingsyousaid #tiktokmusic #greenscreen ♬ original sound – Cody Fry 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

  • in

    Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the Big Shift in True Crime

    Not long ago, true crime storytellers had little in the way of first-person footage captured in real time to rely on. Now, as much of our daily lives are documented, the genre is transforming.There’s a moment near the end of the 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” where Gypsy Rose Blanchard is filming her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, as he lies nude in a hotel room bed. A day earlier, Godejohn had stabbed to death Gypsy’s mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. The killing was part of a plot the couple hatched to free Gypsy, who was then 23, from her mother’s grip so they could be together. In the short video, we hear Gypsy make a playful sexual comment amid her copious, distinctive giggling.Dee Dee Blanchard had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades. It was believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of child abuse in which a caregiver might induce illness to draw public sympathy, care, concern and material gifts — and the saga captured the collective interest.The snippet is the first time we see it unfolding through Gypsy’s eyes, and the point of view serves as a glimmer of what would become one of the biggest shifts in true crime storytelling.Stories like these were once conveyed through re-enactments, dramatizations and interviews with police officers, journalists, medical professionals, family and friends. If there were primary sources, those were typically scans of photos of happy families or of grisly crime scenes underpinned by voice-over narration, exemplified on shows like “20/20,” “Dateline,” “Snapped,” “Forensic Files” and “48 hours.” Home video cameras, which became popular in the 1980s, certainly changed the true crime landscape, but those recordings were generally sparse and supplemental. In rare instances, viewers might hear directly from the perpetrators or victims in interviews often conducted years after the fact.Dee Dee Blanchard, right, with her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who endured decades of physical and mental abuse by her mother. via The Blanchard Family/LifetimeNow we have reams of first-person digital footage, which means that viewers, more than ever, are privy to the perspectives of those directly involved, often during the period in which the crimes took place, closing the distance and making the intermediaries less essential. The case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard encapsulates the trajectory of this phenomenon. Her saga, for example, received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a 2019 limited series on Hulu, for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. But those looking for a definitive, unvarnished, visceral take on the events now have options and direct channels, rendering that series as almost an afterthought.The rise of social media has, of course, accelerated this dynamic. Blanchard and Godejohn’s relationship was almost exclusively online before the murder, and Facebook posts and text messages between them were used in court by prosecutors to incriminate them. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison; Gypsy received 10 years, of which she served about seven.She was released on Dec. 28, 2023, and the following day she posted a selfie to Instagram with the caption “First selfie of freedom,” which has gotten more than 6.5 million likes. Online, she’s been promoting her new Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” “This docuseries chronicles my quest to expose the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now,” we hear her say from prison.Blanchard and her husband married in 2022 while she was still in prison. via Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ryan AndersonShe has quickly become a social media celebrity, with more than eight million Instagram followers and nearly 10 million on TikTok. Since her release, she has shared lighthearted videos like one with her husband, Ryan Anderson (they married in 2022 while she was in prison), at “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway and more serious ones, like a video in which she explains Munchausen syndrome by proxy.Technology’s influence on modern criminal investigations has become foundational in many documentaries from recent years.In the two-part HBO documentary “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter” (2019), the story is largely told through the thousands of text messages exchanged between two teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014. The text messages led up to the exact moment of Roy’s suicide. Selfie videos that Roy had posted online are also shown. Carter spent about a year in prison for her role in his death. The documentary (by Erin Lee Carr, who also directed “Mommy Dead and Dearest”) left me “spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology,” as I wrote last year.One of the highest profile murder trials in the United States in recent years — that of the disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who shot and killed his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021 — ultimately rested on a staggering recording captured moments before the murders. That video, on Paul’s phone, placed the patriarch at the scene of the crime, sealing his fate: two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.Alex Murdaugh, center, as seen in the Netflix docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” His murder trial was among the most talked about in recent years.NetflixThe use of that footage, along with abundant smartphone video that brought viewers into the world of the Murdaughs, in documentaries like Netflix’s two-season “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” would have been unimaginable not long ago.But perhaps no recent offering illustrates this shift like HBO’s docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” Members of the group Love Has Won live-streamed their days and nights; they filmed and posted untold hours of preachments and online manifestoes to YouTube and Instagram Live. Much of the three-episode series comprises this footage, and in turn viewers watch Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God,” slowly deteriorate over the course of months from the perspective of the people who were worshiping her.It’s a vantage point so unnerving and haunting, it dissolves the line between storytelling and voyeurism. When the group films her corpse, which they cart across numerous state lines, camping with it along the way, we see all that, too, through the eyes of the devotees. Several of the followers continue to promote her teachings online.Amy Carlson, center, who led a group called Love Has Won, as seen in the HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”HBOIt was clear this month in the comments on Blanchard’s Instagram that many were uncomfortable with her re-emerging as a social media presence. Some found it odd that she would participate so heavily and publicly immediately after her release. Others thought it was in bad taste for her to celebrate her freedom while Godejohn serves a life sentence.The greatest criticism of the true crime genre is that horrors are being repackaged as guilty-pleasure entertainment, allowing viewers to get close — but not too close — to terrible things. And perhaps the best defense of true crime is that it allows viewers to process the scary underbelly of our world safely. It is a strange dance between knowledge, observation and entertainment.Either way, the fourth wall is cracking, and perhaps the discomfort this might cause has been a long time coming. More