Daniels, Jeff

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    Jeff Daniels Unwinds With Hidden-Camera TV

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    The actor, musician and playwright has made a career out of finding ways to stay creative between “Dumb and Dumber” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”Jeff Daniels has accomplished a lot battling boredom.Before he moved to New York in 1976, he bought a guitar to play when he wasn’t getting work. After he moved back to Michigan in the 1980s, he started getting bored between movie jobs, so he formed the Purple Rose Theater Company. That’s why today, in addition to being an actor known for portraying Atticus Finch on Broadway and Harry Dunne in “Dumb and Dumber,” Daniels, 68, is an accomplished musician and playwright who sometimes performs a one-man musical at a theater he helped bring to life.“Alive and Well Enough,” his 12-episode audio memoir that Audible plans to release Sept. 7, incorporates skits, bits, songs and stories from his career. It leans heavily on his passion for the work, regardless of whether it resonates on the level of his role in the 1983 film “Terms of Endearment.”“The rush is between action and cut, when you’re doing it,” Daniels said in a phone interview this month. “The curtain call has always been kind of a silent movie for me. I walk out and I see them, I hear them, but that’s not the climax. That’s not what happened. For me, by that point, it’s over.”Daniels talked about pursuing his other endeavors — creative and athletic — while avoiding ticks. These are edited excerpts from the conversation and an email.1‘The Beatles: Get Back’I loved every minute of Peter Jackson’s documentary. Seeing the band’s creative process, to watch people of that caliber face the same mountain that everybody else does — whether they’re writing a song or a play or a musical or a poem — was affirming.2Golf in the BackyardDuring Covid, when we all had to kind of bunker, our family put together a golf course on our property. We play with plastic balls, and we each use one club. We’ve got a creek and a pond and some things you have to work around. But you never have a problem getting a tee time, and there’s never a slow foursome in front of you.3My KindleI love the portable library aspect of it, and I read more because of it. I recently read “Grinning at the Edge,” Paul Allen’s biography of the playwright Alan Ayckbourn. And I’ve got Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” queued up now.4Detroit TigersThey’re young and they’re talented and they’re getting better every season. For me, it’s fascinating to watch the management manage the talent and the contracts and who you need. It’s the same uniforms, the same game, the same field, and yet the players change. The cast changes. It’s this living, breathing thing that’s evolving.5Clearing Your Head in the WoodsThings get unlocked when you’re walking or biking through the woods. If you’re stuck on something, then just go for a bike ride and wait. Across the street from my house, there’s a state recreation area. It’s kind of like having 10,000 acres of your own, which you didn’t have to pay for. It’s terrific, especially in the winter when there aren’t any ticks.6Circle RepWhen I went to Circle Rep Off Broadway in the 1970s, they had a whole bunch of playwrights there, including Lanford Wilson and John Bishop. That’s where I fell in love with that kind of theater — live, creating, new play stuff. I wanted to create that creative place at Purple Rose Theater Company, where I’m surrounded by like-minded people who have to do this thing because it’s what we do.7‘Impractical Jokers’When I was doing “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Broadway, I would come back to my apartment and turn on the hidden-camera show “Impractical Jokers” to wind down after a show. Whatever Atticus Finch might’ve watched if he were around, it probably wouldn’t have been “Impractical Jokers.” It was a way to disconnect from the show and just unplug. And the guys just crack me up.8New York CityI go to New York for the theater — to see it and be in it — but also to remind myself of who I am. It’s all about the imagination and the art and the creativity, and imagining all those writers who were in New York and kicking around. It’s a good place for me to write.9My GuitarFor my entire career, an acoustic guitar has kept me creatively alive. Over the past 20 years, I’ve played in clubs all over the country, but my regular gig is on my porch looking out at the lake.10Writing, Even When It’s HardThere’s a battle to it. But when it happens, when you unlock it and that thing launches you toward your ending in a way that you never saw coming, that’s the fireworks. Writing that line that’s going to end the scene, and you close your laptop because you’re going to take the rest of the day off, that’s what keeps you going. You hang onto those euphoric moments. More

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      ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Closes on Broadway as Creators Spar With Rudin

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      The hit play, closed since January, was expected to reopen on Broadway this fall.“To Kill a Mockingbird,” a stage adaptation of the classic novel that in January announced a temporary shutdown after Jeff Daniels left the cast and the Omicron variant slammed into New York, will not reopen on Broadway.The play’s writer, Aaron Sorkin, and director, Bartlett Sher, emailed the play’s cast and crew late Thursday to inform them of the decision, and they blamed the original lead producer, Scott Rudin, who had stepped away from an active role in the show after being accused of mistreating collaborators. According to Sorkin and Sher, “At the last moment, Scott reinserted himself as producer and for reasons which are, frankly, incomprehensible to us both, he stopped the play from reopening.”Rudin, who continued to control the rights to the stage adaptation of the Harper Lee novel, sent his own email to Sorkin and Sher on Friday, attributing the decision to the economic situation on Broadway, where overall ticket sales have lagged behind prepandemic levels. Both emails were obtained by The Times.“The reason I opted not to bring back TKAM has to do with my lack of confidence in the climate for plays next winter,” Rudin wrote, using an acronym for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He added, “I do not believe that a remount of Mockingbird would have been competitive in the marketplace.”The show continues to have a healthy life outside New York. A production in London’s West End opened in March, and a national tour in the United States opened in Boston in April. Those productions are unaffected by the Broadway closing.The play opened on Broadway in late 2018, and was a hit before the pandemic, regularly selling around $2 million worth of tickets a week, which is quite high for a play, and recouping its $7.5 million investment costs 19 weeks after opening.Broadway closed in March 2020 because of the pandemic, and “To Kill a Mockingbird” resumed performances last October, with Daniels returning to star as Atticus Finch, as he had done during the play’s first year. The play sold well until early January, with the exception of a week when breakthrough Covid cases forced performance cancellations; Daniels left the cast on Jan. 2, at a time when Broadway grosses were already plunging because of the resurgent pandemic, and the show’s grosses cratered.The play stopped performances at the Shubert Theater on Jan. 16, and Barry Diller, then functioning as lead producer, said it would resume performances on June 1 at the Belasco Theater. That did not happen, and according to the email from Sher and Sorkin the most recent plan had been for the play to restart performances on Nov. 2 at the Music Box Theater.Sher and Sorkin described themselves in the email as “heartbroken” and said they “mourn the loss of all the jobs — onstage, backstage, and front of house — that just disappeared.” Rudin, in his email to them, said, “It’s too risky and the downside is too great. I’m sorry you’re disappointed. It’s the right decision for the long life of the show.”Sher, Sorkin and Rudin all declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the play. The decision to not reopen the play was previously reported by the website Showbiz411. More

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      Harper Lee Estate Told to Pay $2.5 Million in Dispute Over ‘Mockingbird’ Plays

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      The estate is contesting an arbitrator’s ruling that it had been too aggressive in limiting productions of a 1970 adaptation of the novel as Aaron Sorkin’s new staged version came to Broadway.An arbitrator has ordered the estate of the writer Harper Lee to pay more than $2.5 million in damages and fees to Dramatic Publishing, a theatrical publishing company that has licensed a stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” for decades.The ruling found that under pressure from Scott Rudin, then lead producer of a different adaptation of the book, which was intended for Broadway, the estate interfered with Dramatic’s contracts, and tried to prevent some productions of the work.The ruling, made in January, comes nearly three years after Dramatic invoked an arbitration clause in its contract to prevent limits on productions of its adaptation. Dramatic’s adaptation, by the playwright Christopher Sergel, has long been a staple at schools and community theaters around the country. It’s the version of that has been staged every year in Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Ala. And for decades, Dramatic was the only publisher Lee had authorized to license a theatrical adaptation of her beloved 1960 novel about a crusading lawyer named Atticus Finch who represents a Black man who is unjustly accused of rape in a small town in Alabama.Then, in 2018, Rudin brought the new Aaron Sorkin adaptation to Broadway, where it became a box office hit.Christopher Sergel III, president of Dramatic Publishing Company and the grandson of the author of the first adaptation, claimed that the Lee estate acted in concert with Rudin to prevent some local productions of the play from going forward. In cease-and-desist letters to local theaters, Rudin’s lawyers claimed that those productions were no longer permissible because of the Sorkin adaptation. As a result, at least eight theaters canceled productions of Dramatic’s version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”The Broadway production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” opened in 2018 with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch and Celia Keenan-Bolger as Scout.  Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“This has been a long and difficult struggle for Dramatic Publishing, exacerbated by the ravages of Covid on the theater industry and educational system,” Sergel said in a statement posted on the company’s website. “Unfortunately, the Lee Estate left us no choice but to fight.”Sergel said his company has been “fully vindicated” by the ruling, which was earlier reported by Broadway World.The arbitrator ruled that the estate had “tortiously interfered with contracts between Dramatic and several of its licensees” and that “most, but not all, violations resulted from the estate’s interactions with Rudin.” It also stated that Dramatic retains “worldwide exclusive rights to all non-first-class theater or stage rights for its version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”“For Dramatic Publishing to have been dragged through the mud for licensing the play in the very market it had licensed it in for years was really very troubling,” said Kevin Tottis, a lawyer representing Dramatic.The Lee Estate has filed a motion to overturn the arbitration award in federal court in Chicago, according to Matthew H. Lembke, a lawyer representing the estate. Some portion of the arbitrator’s ruling covered damages, but the bulk, more than $2 million, is to reimburse for Dramatic’s legal fees and other costs to pursue the arbitration.Lee, who died in 2016, sometimes expressed ambivalence about the Sergel adaptation, which was published in 1970. In a 1987 letter, Lee said Sergel’s adaptation “admirably fulfills the purpose for which it was written, for amateur, high school and little theater groups, and stock productions.” But she declined Dramatic’s request to stage a Broadway adaptation of Sergel’s play, and held onto those rights until 2015, when she entered a contract for a Broadway production with Rudin.The friction between Harper Lee’s representatives and Dramatic Publishing began to escalate in 2015, after Lee authorized Rudin’s Broadway production. Rudin asked a lawyer for the Lee estate to enforce an agreement with Dramatic publishing that Rudin argued limited them to amateur productions. The estate’s lawyer initially replied that Dramatic held “everything but first-class production rights,” meaning that they could stage their version in regional, noncommercial theaters as well as in schools and amateur theaters. He later reversed his position and maintained that Dramatic had no right to license productions with any professional actors, a shift that the arbitrator traced to the pressure the estate faced from Rudin. A lawyer for the estate also told Dramatic that several productions, which the estate had previously approved, violated the 1969 contract and could not be staged.The Kavinoky Theatre at D’Youville College in Buffalo was one of those that scrapped a production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 2019 after receiving a cease and desist letter from the Broadway production. Libby March for The New York TimesThe fight burst into public view not long after the Broadway opening of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which starred Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch. The estate sent several letters to the publisher disputing its granting of rights to a number of theaters and noted that the 1969 contract with Harper Lee stated that while a “first-class dramatic play” based on the novel is playing in New York or on tour, Dramatic’s version cannot be staged within 25 miles of cities with a population of 150,000 or more in 1960. It also argued that Dramatic did not have the rights to license any productions with professional actors, a claim that the arbitrator dismissed.Lawyers for Rudin sent cease and desist letters to small theaters around the country — including the Kavinoky Theater in Buffalo, the Oklahoma Children’s Theater and the Mugford Street Players in Marblehead, Mass. — threatening them with legal action unless they halted their productions. Many canceled their shows, and Rudin faced criticism for interfering with local theaters.In a surprising about face, Rudin later apologized to the theaters, and said that theater companies that had canceled the play could instead stage Aaron Sorkin’s version of the script.Before the estate and Rudin challenged the local theaters together, they had gone through a dispute of their own over the play. The estate sued him, asserting Sorkin’s adaptation deviated too much from the novel, in violation of their contract; Rudin countersued and offered to stage his play in front of the judge to prove his case.The dispute was settled, and the show went on to become a commercial and critical hit. Rudin stepped back from active producing last May after he was accused of bullying and workplace misconduct; Orin Wolf became executive producer and Barry Diller lead producer to oversee the production.In January, its producers announced that they would shut down the show and reopen in a smaller theater. A North American tour and a London production are both scheduled to begin in March. More

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      In ‘American Rust,’ Buildings Crumble, Passions Burn

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      The setting is both beautiful and ugly, resplendent and run-down. Green foliage wraps around rusting mills, no longer in use; steep hills drop off to the river, like the plummeting dreams of local residents.This is the Monongahela Valley, home to the new nine-episode Showtime series “American Rust,” debuting Sept. 12. Encompassing parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the Mon Valley, as locals call it, is steel country, which means it has been hit hard in recent decades. Unemployment runs rampant. So does opioid abuse.Based on Philipp Meyer’s debut novel from 2009, “American Rust” tells a story of those who call the Mon home, those who want to leave and those who can’t seem to, no matter how hard they try.“It’s like a gravitational pull,” Jeff Daniels said in a recent video call from his Michigan home. Daniels plays Del Harris, the police chief of the fictional town of Buell, which the book situates about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh in Fayette County, Pa., near the real-life towns of Belle Vernon, Fayette City and Monessen.Maura Tierney plays Grace Poe, whose romance with the local sheriff, played by Jeff Daniels, becomes very complicated when her son becomes involved in a murder.Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesChief Harris lives a complicated life. He is in love with Grace Poe (Maura Tierney), who sews at a local dress factory and lives in a trailer on the verge of foreclosure. Grace’s son, Billy (Alex Neustaedter), who chose to stay in Buell instead of accepting a Division I football scholarship, keeps getting caught up in violent crime, including a murder.You could say the chief is compromised by his circumstances and passions.He isn’t the only one. Billy’s best (and perhaps only) friend, Isaac English (David Alvarez), is also the brother of the woman who broke his heart, Lee (Julia Mayorga) — and that may be the least of their friendship’s complications. Meanwhile, Isaac and Lee have troubles of their own: Their father (Bill Camp) was nearly killed in a mill accident, and their mother committed suicide by walking into the river with pockets full or rocks, like Virginia Woolf.Lee, though married and living in New York — she is the rare character in “American Rust” who has managed to escape — finds herself drawn back to Billy nonetheless. Isaac remains trapped at home, forced to care for an angry, wheelchair-bound father who constantly belittles him.Interior scenes of “American Rust” were filmed at 31st Street Studios, in Pittsburgh, the town once known as Steel City. Today it is a regional hub for the arts and tech. Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesJared Wickerham for The New York Times“Any one of these characters could pack up their car and just leave, but they don’t,” Daniels said. “Maybe they can’t. Maybe they’ve got nowhere else to go. They’re at the bottom.”Daniels’s road to Buell began over 10 years ago when he went to see Meyer read from his novel in New York. Daniels was struck by how Meyer located the humanity of characters who don’t get a lot of cultural shine, characters he knows from having spent most of his life in Michigan.“Nobody’s famous,” Daniels said. “Nobody’s trending. These are just everyday normal people that are in every corner of every county in this country.”Meyer grew up in a blue-collar area of Baltimore in the ’80s, when he watched various industries — textile, shipyards, steel, auto — slowly decline. “Violent crime was super high,” Meyer said from his home in Austin. “But it was also clear that you had this giant population of unemployed young men, guys in their 20s and 30s who had been laid off last year or four years ago or five years ago. The American dream had failed them.”Monessen, like the fictional town of Buell, has struggled since the local steel industry collapsed.  Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesBut for his first novel, he decided Baltimore, with its many industries, was too complicated for what he had in mind. When he visited Pittsburgh, where his brother was in college, Meyer realized, “This is where I put the story.”Soon after Daniels met Meyer, the actor was knee-deep in “The Newsroom” (2012-14) and other projects. But “Rust” never left his mind. His father, Robert Lee Daniels, had been the mayor of Daniels’s hometown, Chelsea, Mich., and owned a lumber yard. Daniels recognized the characters in “American Rust.”“I know these guys,” he said. “I know what they sound like. I know how they talk. I know how they think. I know how they walk. I live around them. This is their world.”So when he found the bandwidth, he sought out two writer-producers with whom he had worked on a TV adaptation of another acclaimed book, “The Looming Tower”: Dan Futterman and Adam Rapp. (They, along with Daniels, are among the executive producers.)Futterman, the showrunner of “Rust,” recalled the question Daniels asked: “‘If you love it, would you remind me what I love about it?’”Charleroi, Pa., is held up in the novel “American Rust” as an example of a Rust Belt town that is beginning to revitalize.Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“I told him that I loved what felt to me like a central theme of the book and something that I have written about before,” Futterman said from his New York home. “Can you both love somebody and use them at the same time?”Put another way, what terrible things are we willing to do in the name of love? And what kinds of things might a police chief overlook?The apple of Chief Harris’s eye, his moral blind spot, is Tierney’s Grace, who loves the chief but also knows he can come in handy.“I don’t know if anyone’s ever loved her, and I think she’s made a lot of choices based on that,” Tierney said in a video call from New York. “That’s an interesting person to try to get inside of.”“She’s had to really make her own way, every which way,” she continued. “Then she’s got this fierce devotion to her child, who I think she’s trying to compensate for somehow, but I don’t know if that’s the smartest thing to do. She’s a flawed person who’s trying to just keep her head above water.”Before the shoot, Daniels sent Tierney an email. “I’m not a big chatter,” he wrote, “but if you want to chat, I’m happy to do that. Or if you want to just jump off the cliff, let’s do that.”She wanted to jump off the cliff. And so did he.The ArcelorMittal coke works near downtown Monessen.Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“I don’t enjoy over-talking things,” she said. “We’ve both been doing this for a really long time. So it’s really enjoyable to just show up and know that your partner in the work is going to be prepared, and we just would let it fly.”As with any adaptation, “American Rust” took some intriguing detours on the way from page to screen. Grace is now a union organizer, quite a challenge in a company town where many workers are immigrants who don’t speak English. Isaac’s personal journey has been rerouted. His and Lee’s Mexican heritage has been more fully fleshed out. The story’s central crime is now a mystery, not only to most of the town but also to the viewers.While Meyer wasn’t involved with the series, he is thrilled with the results.“I don’t know if anyone’s ever loved her, and I think she’s made a lot of choices based on that,” Tierney said of her character. “That’s an interesting person to try to get inside of.”Jared Wickerham for The New York TimesDetails add authenticity to the wall of a set in Pittsburgh designed to look like a Mon Valley bar. Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“I’m pretty overjoyed that it has made it onto the air,” he said. “When people think of the middle of the country, maybe they think of ‘Yellowstone,’ which is a fun show but more fantasy than reality. This is the story of what’s happening to about half of America that we don’t really hear that much about.”There’s a sense in “American Rust” that everyone is doing his or her best, which isn’t always good enough in a land beset by fatalism and inertia. In researching the place and the people, Daniels came to see them for what they are — and aren’t.“They’re not just a bunch of hopeless addicts,” Daniels said. “Much like the people in the series that Danny pulled out of the book, these are good people who have to make bad choices just to either survive or to hold onto their dignity.”Pittsburgh, once known as Steel City, has a population of less than half what it was at its peak in the 1950s. Still, the city has been revitalized in recent decades, having successfully diversified its economy after the steel industry collapsed. Cast and crew shot interiors at 31st Street Studios, a home for dozens of film and TV productions to date. Futterman described a city in the midst of a tech and art resurgence, with a vibrant theater scene.It’s when you travel outside of Pittsburgh that you notice what’s gone. The economic downturn has left towns like Donora, Monessen and Rankin as shells of their former selves. This is where the bulk of “American Rust” unfolds and where much of the show was shot. (As in “Mare of Easttown,” another Pennsylvania gothic drama, the Rolling Rock and ruins abound.)“This is the story of what’s happening to about half of America that we don’t really hear that much about,” said Philipp Meyer, who wrote the novel on which the series is based.Jared Wickerham for The New York Times“There are some places where the steel mills are still going, and some where they’re just gone,” Futterman said. “In the town of Buell, it’s gone. The steel mill is shut down, and you can feel the reverberations of that throughout the town, and through all the people that are affected by it in some way.”And yet, the region retains a haunting beauty.“There are these steep drop-offs down to the river and all these steel bridges,” Futterman said. “There are a lot steel mills, some semi-functional, some rusting back into the ground right on the shores of the river. It’s not like other places I’ve been.”Meyer describes the landscape with stark lyricism in the novel: “The mill itself had been like a small city, but they had closed it in 1987, partially dismantled it 10 years later; it now stood like an ancient ruin, its buildings grown over with bittersweet vine, devil’s tear thumb and tree of heaven. The footprints of deer and coyotes crisscrossed the grounds; there was only the occasional human squatter.”It can seem desolate. But for Daniels, it all boils down to the most basic human emotions.“They’re all seeking love, and they’re capable of hate,” he said. “They’re capable of everything. When they’re backed up against the wall, these people are just trying to survive, doing whatever at that point, and trying to hang onto a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s what makes it interesting to me.” More

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      Jeff Daniels to Return to Broadway in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

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      The production also has a new management team to replace Scott Rudin, who stepped aside after allegations of abusive behavior.Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which before the pandemic was the rare play to have a long and lucrative Broadway run, will resume performances on Oct. 5.It will reopen with a pair of familiar faces onstage: Jeff Daniels, who starred as the righteous lawyer Atticus Finch during the show’s first year, will return to lead the cast, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Finch’s daughter, Scout, in the original cast, will return to that role. They are planning to remain in the cast until Jan. 2.Offstage, there is more change.This is the first of Scott Rudin’s shows to announce a plan to move on without its lead producer. In April, Rudin said he would step back from producing after facing scrutiny of his bullying behavior.The production will now be overseen by Orin Wolf, who was the lead producer of the Tony-winning musical “The Band’s Visit,” and who is the president of a touring company, NETworks, that before the pandemic had been engaged by Rudin to supervise a “Mockingbird” tour. Wolf’s title will be executive producer, and he will be responsible for the show’s operations, reporting to Barry Diller, a lead producer who will be the producers’ managing member with ultimate responsibility for its financing.“The show was positioned in a strong and beautiful way, and I don’t think my job is to come in and fix anything, but to honor what’s there,” Wolf said in an interview. “I’m not coming in to make artistic decisions.”Wolf said Rudin would not have any role with the production, adding that he has had no recent communication with Rudin. Wolf’s agreement was negotiated with Diller, he said, and a condition of his employment was that Rudin would have no voice in the production.“The Broadway company will no longer pay any compensation to Scott as a producer, and he’ll no longer have any managerial or decision-making role of any kind,” Wolf said. “He does have a small investment position, which is passive.”“To Kill a Mockingbird,” adapted from the 1960 Harper Lee novel, opened on Broadway in December 2018. It has consistently played to full houses; over the course of the play’s prepandemic run, it had an audience of 810,000 people and grossed $120 million, according to the Broadway League. The show recouped its $7.5 million capitalization — the amount of money it took to bring it to Broadway — 19 weeks after opening.Wolf, who has collaborated several times with the director of “Mockingbird,” Bartlett Sher, said he agreed to manage the production in order to try to protect both the show and its 182 employees. “We’re going into uncharted territory,” he said, “but my job is to make sure we’re creating an environment for the artists to do their jobs, to make sure we’re putting the production back up that people loved, and once we’ve done that job, my job is to keep trying to discover what this post-pandemic audience is.”Wolf will also continue to oversee the national tour of “Mockingbird,” which is scheduled to start performances in Buffalo, N.Y., next March and to open in Boston next April, starring Richard Thomas. The British producer Sonia Friedman will oversee a London production, starring Rafe Spall, that is scheduled to begin performances in March. More