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      Edie Landau, Film Producer Who Was Ahead of Her Time, Dies at 95

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      She and her husband invented a model for faithfully adapting acclaimed literature, illuminating an alternate path for independent cinema.Edie Landau, who in the 1970s and ’80s was one of the few women producing films, working outside the studio system with her husband, Ely Landau, to offer unconventional movies to a mass audience, died on Dec. 24 at her home in the Century City section of Los Angeles. She was 95.The death was confirmed by her son, Jon.In the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to figures like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, indie film was associated in the public imagination with writer-directors too young and eccentric for the studio system. In the years before that period, the Landaus produced artistically ambitious indie movies that followed a different model, adapting great works of literature into movies for the big and small screen.Their focus was plays. In the 1970s, the Landaus started the American Film Theater, which invited viewers to subscribe to regular screenings of movie versions of works by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee and others.There had long been movies based on great plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” that fully translated theater into the idiom of cinema. But the American Film Theater tried something different, faithfully abiding by the plays’ texts in simple, inexpensive productions.The Landaus produced more than a dozen films, often featuring eminent figures in surprising roles. In 1973, the tough-guy movie star Lee Marvin appeared in a film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” The next year, in an unusual turn as a film director, Harold Pinter oversaw the adaptation of Simon Gray’s “Butley.”Zero Mostel and Karen Black in the 1974 movie adaptation of the Eugène Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” one of the first productions of the Landaus’ American Film Theater.Looking back at the project in The New York Times in 2003, the film historian and critic Richard Schickel described it as a “noble experiment,” with some productions that were “close to God-awful” and others that ascended to “masterful movie making.”Ms. Landau frequently acted as a minder of budgets and an organizer on set, but over time she took on an increasingly creative role in her partnership with her husband, particularly after he had a stroke in the 1980s.She took the lead in putting together “Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson” (1983), an original HBO drama starring Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason. She developed a relationship with the writer Chaim Potok and shepherded his 1967 novel “The Chosen” into movie form in 1981 and into a musical adaptation for the stage in 1987.“It was a given that ‘The Chosen’ was to be a musical from the very beginning, ever since Edie Landau approached me with the idea two and a half years ago,” Mr. Potok told The Times in 1987.Richard F. Shepard of The Times praised the movie version for recreating 1940s Brooklyn “with such fidelity that the tree-lined quiet streets of Williamsburg and the particular Jewish life on them seem to have emerged intact from a just-opened time capsule.”A scene from the 1981 film version of the Chaim Potok novel “The Chosen,” produced by the Landaus.Analysis FilmEdythe Rudolph was born on July 15, 1927, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Her father, Harry, was a minor-league baseball umpire who later worked as a projectionist at Manhattan movie theaters owned by Edie and Ely. Her mother, Rose (Zatcoff) Rudolph, was an office clerk.After graduating from Wilkes University with a bachelor’s degree in education in the late 1940s, Edie moved to New York City. She worked as an assistant at radio and television production companies, hoping to move up the corporate ladder. While working at the television distribution company National Telefilm Associates, she met Ely Landau, one of the company’s founders. They married in 1959.That year, WNTA, a New York television station owned by National Telefilm, began airing “Play of the Week,” an anthology series that anticipated the American Film Theater. Ms. Landau worked her way up to become executive vice president of National Telefilm and oversaw some of its original programming, including “Play of the Week.”The Landaus’ children followed them into careers behind the scenes in the performing arts. Alongside the director James Cameron, their son Jon produced “Titanic” (1997), “Avatar” (2009) and the recently released “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Their daughter Tina Landau is a prominent theater director. And their daughter Kathy Landau is executive director of the Manhattan arts organization Symphony Space.Jon recalled how being able to work on the movie adaptation of “The Chosen” launched his own producing career, and how his parents invited the producer Hillard Elkins to a performance of a play written by Tina and performed at her high school, which led to its staging in a professional Los Angeles theater.Mr. Landau credited his mother with those breakthroughs. “She was the one who would make things happen,” he said.Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits. The men in this undated photo include her husband, seated second from left.via Jon LandauMs. Landau’s first marriage, to Harold Rein, ended in divorce. Ely Landau died in 1993. Ms. Landau’s children survive her, along with a stepson, Les Landau; four grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.Photographs from her days as a film producer reveal that Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits.She hit back at what she plainly called “discrimination of women” in 1958, when she filed a formal complaint against United Airlines for not permitting her to board a Chicago-to-New York “executive flight” — a cocktail-and-steak journey designed for men only. Ms. Landau — who later earned a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles just for fun — told the airline that she was an executive, too.The incident turned out to be a harbinger of repeated protests that finally led to scrapping the flights in 1970.After retiring, Ms. Landau wrote poetry. One concise work was titled “That Was Then, This Is Now”: “Please remember that I was once a major executive, not just a house wife,/So please trust me now to be C.E.O. … of my own life.” More

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      in Music

      Celebrities Remember Lisa Marie Presley

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      On social media, they recalled her talent, her kindness and her struggles.Celebrities expressed shock and heartbreak on social media over the death of Lisa Marie Presley, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley.“There is heartbreak and then there is sorrow. This would be sorrow and on more levels than I can count,” the Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan said late Thursday on Instagram, where he also shared a photograph of himself with Ms. Presley. “I truly cannot find the words to express how sad this truly is.”“Lisa baby girl, I’m so sorry,” the actor John Travolta said on Instagram. “I’ll miss you but I know I’ll see you again.”The songwriter Linda Thompson, who dated Elvis in the 1970s, also took to Instagram. “My heart is too heavy for words,” she said.The fashion designer Donatella Versace said on Instagram that she would never forget the times they spent together, adding: “Your beauty and your kindness shone so bright.”“So sad that we’ve lost another bright star in Lisa Marie Presley,” the actress Octavia Spencer said on Twitter. “My condolences to her loved ones and multitude of fans.”The Twitter account of the Golden Globes awards said “We are incredibly saddened” by the news of her death. Ms. Presley’s last public appearance was on Tuesday at the awards ceremony to celebrate Austin Butler, who won Best Actor for the title role in the Baz Luhrmann biopic “Elvis.”“Lisa Marie Presley … how heartbreaking,” singer LeAnn Rimes Cibrian said on Twitter. “I hope she is at peace in her dad’s arms.”Some celebrities also remembered the difficulties that she had faced.“Lisa did not have an easy life,” the actress Leah Remini said on Twitter, adding that she was heartbroken by the news. “May she be at peace, resting with her son and father now.”Ms. Presley lost her father when she was 9. Married and divorced four times, she had also struggled with opioid addiction. Her son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020. Less than six months before her own death, she wrote about grieving his loss.Corey Feldman, an actor and singer, said that he had spent hours on the phone with Ms. Presley when she was divorcing the singer Michael Jackson. Benjamin Keough was “like a little brother” to him, Mr. Feldman said.“So much loss, so much tragedy,” he said on Twitter, adding that “She was a beautiful, powerful woman” who wanted to “make her own rules.”“A sweet and gentle soul,” the actor Cary Elwes said on Twitter. “We send our deepest, heartfelt condolences to Priscilla, Riley and her family and friends.” More

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      Jeff Beck, Guitarist With a Chapter in Rock History, Dies at 78

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      His playing with the Yardbirds and as leader of his own bands brought a sense of adventure to their groundbreaking recordings.Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall, a rural estate in southern England. He was 78.The cause was bacterial meningitis, Melissa Dragich, his publicist, said.During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking.In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution.Three years later, when Mr. Beck formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck Group — along with Rod Stewart, a little-known singer at the time, and the equally obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for heavy metal. Specifically, the band’s 1968 debut, “Truth,” provided a blueprint that another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, drew on to found Led Zeppelin several months later.The Jeff Beck Group in 1967, including, from left, Ron Wood, Mr. Beck, Mickey Waller and Rod Stewart.Ivan Keeman/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn 1975, when Mr. Beck began his solo career with the “Blow by Blow” album, he reconfigured the essential formula of that era’s fusion movement, tipping the balance of its influences from jazz to rock and funk, in the process creating a sound that was both startlingly new and highly successful. “Blow by Blow” became a Billboard Top 5 and, selling a million or more copies, a platinum hit.Along the way, Mr. Beck helped either pioneer or amplify important technical innovations on his instrument. He elaborated the use of distortion and feedback effects, earlier explored by Pete Townshend; intensified the effect of bending notes on the guitar; and widened the range of expression that could be coaxed from devices attached to the guitar like the whammy bar.Drawing on such techniques, Mr. Beck could weaponize his strings to hit like a stun gun or caress them to express what felt like a kiss. His work had humor, too, with licks that could cackle and leads that could tease.“Even in the Yardbirds, he had a tone that was melodic, but in your face — bright, urgent and edgy,” wrote Mike Campbell, of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, for an article in Rolling Stone magazine to accompany a poll that named Mr. Beck the fifth greatest guitar player of all time. “It’s like he’s saying: ‘I’m Jeff Beck. I’m right here. You can’t ignore me.’”“Everybody respects Jeff,” Mr. Page said in a 2018 documentary titled “Still on the Run: The Jeff Beck Story.” “He’s an extraordinary musician. He’s having a conversation with you when he’s playing.”Despite the accolades, Mr. Beck never achieved the sales or popularity of the guitarists considered to be his peers, including Mr. Page, Mr. Clapton and one of the players he admired most, Jimi Hendrix. Only two of his albums achieved platinum status in the United States, including “Wired,” his 1976 follow-up to “Blow by Blow.”“Part of the reason is never having attempted to get into mainstream pop, rock or heavy metal or anything like that,” he told the arts website Elsewhere in 2009. “Shutting those doors means you’ve only got a limited space to squeeze through.”It hurt, too, that the mercurial Mr. Beck often worked without a lead singer, and that his groups seldom lasted long. His first band, with Mr. Stewart and Mr. Wood, stood on the cusp of superstardom, with an invitation to play Woodstock. But Mr. Beck turned down the offer, and the group dissolved shortly thereafter.Another band he led that held commercial promise, Beck, Bogert & Appice (featuring the rhythm section of Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, formerly of Vanilla Fudge) earned a gold album in 1973, but Mr. Beck scotched the project after less than two years. Not that he minded his status in the industry.“I’ve never made the big time, mercifully,” Mr. Beck told Rolling Stone in 2018. “When you look around and see who has made it huge, it’s a really rotten place to be.”Mr. Beck performing in London in 1976, where he was opening for Alvin Lee. “I’ve never made the big time, mercifully,” he told a reporter.Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music, via Getty ImagesGrammys and GoldEven so, he earned eight gold albums over more than six decades. He also amassed seven Grammys, six in the category of best rock instrumental performance and one for best pop collaboration with vocals. He was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame twice, as part of the Yardbirds in 1992 and as a solo star in 2009.“Jeff Beck was on another planet,” Mr. Stewart said in a statement on Wednesday. “He took me and Ronnie Wood to the USA in the late 60s in his band the Jeff Beck Group, and we haven’t looked back since. He was one of the few guitarists that when playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond. Jeff, you were the greatest, my man.”Geoffrey Arnold Beck was born on June 24, 1944, in South London to Arnold and Ethel Beck. His mother was a candy maker, his father an accountant. Mr. Beck told Guitar Player Magazine in 1968 that his mother had “forced” him to play piano two hours a day when he was a boy. “That was good,” he said, “because it made me realize that I was musically sound. My other training consisted of stretching rubber bands over tobacco cans and making horrible noises.”He became attracted to electric guitar after hearing Les Paul’s work and was later drawn to the work of Cliff Gallup, lead guitarist for Gene Vincent’s band, and the American player Lonnie Mack. He became entranced not only by the sound of the guitar but also by its mechanics.“At the age of 13, I built two or three of my own guitars,” Mr. Beck wrote in an essay for a book about his career published in 2016 titled “Beck 01: Hot Rods and Rock & Roll.” “It was fun just to look at it and hold it. I knew where I was headed.”He enrolled in Wimbledon College of Art but spent more time playing in bands. Dropping out of school, he began to do studio session work and in 1965 was invited to join the Yardbirds through Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Beck had befriended as a teenager and who had just turned that job down.Though he was with the Yardbirds for only 20 months, Mr. Beck played on most of their successful songs, starting with “Heart Full of Soul,” which broke the Top 10 in Billboard and got to No. 2 in Britain. It was fired by his burning lead guitar line, which took influence from Indian music and which served as the song’s hook.In 1966, the Yardbirds’ single “Shapes of Things,” which got to No. 11 in the United States (No. 3 in Britain), included a frantic double-time solo by Mr. Beck that became one of the band’s most celebrated showcases.Mr. Beck at a rehearsal in 2010. He released a new album that year, “Emotion & Commotion,” which won a Grammy.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesAt the suggestion of his manager, Mr. Beck recorded an instrumental piece for a potential solo project in May 1966 titled “Beck’s Bolero.” It featured on rhythm guitar Mr. Page (who received writing credit on the song), the Who’s Keith Moon on drums, the future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and the in-demand session pianist Nicky Hopkins.A signature instrumental with a complex, unfolding structure, the song wasn’t released at the time, dashing Mr. Beck’s hope that this lineup would comprise his next band. Instead, he soldiered on with the Yardbirds, who then added Mr. Page, first on bass and later in a dueling lead guitar role with Mr. Beck. That fleeting lineup was immortalized in “Blow Up,” the Mod-era film by the director Michelangelo Antonioni, in which they performed a manic version of their song “Train Kept A-Rollin,’” recast as “Stroll On.”Tensions which had been brewing between Mr. Beck and the rest of the Yardbirds came to a boil on an exhausting U.S. tour that fall, compelling him to quit. He later considered this period the low point of his career.“All of a sudden, you’re nobody,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Because the band were able to carry on” with Mr. Page, “it was almost like I was airbrushed out of it.”Even so, a single was released under his own name in March 1967, “Hi-Ho Silver Lining,” which featured a rare vocal by Mr. Beck, which he abhorred. “I sound unbearably bad,” he told Music Radar in 2021.Still, the song got to No. 15 in Britain, and its B-side provided a home for “Beck’s Bolero.”He found more satisfaction by forming the first Jeff Beck Group, with Mr. Stewart, Mr. Wood, and Mr. Hopkins along with the drummer Mickey Waller. Columbia Records signed them and issued their debut, “Truth,” in the summer of 1968. It boasted a new, heavier version of the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things,” along with “Beck’s Bolero.” “Truth” got to No. 15 in Billboard and went gold, fired by its fresh mix of booming rock and emotive soul. Its follow-up, “Beck-Ola,” which subbed the drummer Tony Newman for Mr. Waller, was released a year later and mirrored the debut’s success. But the band imploded almost immediately after.“I don’t know what happened,” Mr. Beck told Music Radar. “It was a lack of material,” he said, plus, he surmised, Mr. Stewart “wanted to see his name up there instead of mine.”Mr. Beck performing at Madison Square Garden in 2010 on a tour with Eric Clapton, the guitarist he had replaced in the Yardbirds.Chad Batka for The New York TimesOne Band, Then AnotherIn the fall of 1969, Mr. Beck tried to rally by planning a new group with Mr. Bogert and Mr. Appice, but that fell apart after Mr. Beck fractured his skull in a car accident. In the meantime, the two other musicians formed the blues-rock band Cactus.Following a long convalescence, a new version of the Jeff Beck Group emerged in 1971, with the soul singer Bobby Tench, the drummer Cozy Powell and the keyboardist Max Middleton, who encouraged Mr. Beck to explore jazz.Their debut, “Rough and Ready,” released in October, featured more original compositions from Mr. Beck than usual, but it barely made Billboard’s Top 50. Its chaser, “Jeff Beck Group,” which tipped toward the soulful side of their sound, did better, breaking Billboard’s Top 20 and going gold.Again, however, the changeable Mr. Beck yearned for something new, so when Cactus broke up, he reconvened with Mr. Bogert and Mr. Appice — the rhythm section he had considered earlier — to form the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice.A notable track on their 1973 debut album, “Beck, Bogert & Appice,” was a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” But Mr. Beck was dissatisfied with both his band’s version of the song and the band itself, and so, during the recording of a second album, produced by Jimmy Miller, he broke up the group, although a live album, “Beck, Bogert & Appice Live in Japan,” came out afterward, in 1975 — a year that changed Mr. Beck’s career.Daringly, Mr. Beck devoted most of the “Blow by Blow” solo album, recorded in 1974 and released in 1975, to instrumentals, inspired by the creativity of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the soaring work of the band’s fusion guitarist, John McLaughlin. To help capture that group’s feel, Mr. Beck hired the producer George Martin, who had overseen Mahavishnu’s album “Apocalypse” the year before (and who had achieved his greatest renown with the Beatles). Mr. Beck told The New Statesman magazine in 2016 that Mr. Martin had provided “a massive pair of wings.”“Just knowing that somebody with such sensitive ears was approving of what was going on, you were flying,” he said.Mr. Beck’s follow-up album, “Wired,” featured two players from Mahavishnu: the drummer Narada Michael Walden and the keyboardist Jan Hammer, expanding the fusion element in the music. Mr. Beck later toured with Mr. Hammer’s band, resulting in the album “Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group Live,” which went gold in 1977.Mr. Hammer was also instrumental in Mr. Beck’s 1980 album, “There & Back,” which got to No. 21 on Billboard’s chart. In 1985, Mr. Beck returned to working with vocalists for his “Flash” album, on which Mr. Stewart sang a version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” (The video became an MTV hit.) Another instrumental recording, “Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop,” issued in 1989, became his final gold album.Starting in the 1990s, Mr. Beck began to do prodigious session work, providing solos on albums by Jon Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, Kate Bush, Tina Turner and others. He showed the continued breadth of his style with his “Emotion & Commotion” album in 2010, which included the standard “Over the Rainbow” and Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.” The latter track won a Grammy, and the album reached No. 11 in Billboard.Over the next few decades, Mr. Beck continued to tour and to record, most recently yielding a collaboration album with the actor and guitarist Johnny Depp, titled “18,” in 2022.Mr. Beck married Sandra Cash in 2005, and she survives him.To his fans, and to himself, Mr. Beck was so deeply identified with his guitar — particularly the Fender Stratocaster — that he seemed inseparable from it.“My Strat is another arm,” he told Music Radar. “I’ve welded myself to that. Or it’s welded itself to me, one or the other.”He added: “It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time. It’s forever sitting there, challenging you to find something else in it. But it is there if you really search.”Alex Traub More

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      in Movies

      Ruggero Deodato, Whose ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ Enraged, Dies at 83

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      He directed a variety of movies in a variety of genres. But it was a gruesome found-footage film that brought him both fame and infamy.When you make the most infamous movie ever to come out of a genre sometimes called the cannibal vomitorium, you’ve achieved true cinematic notoriety.That distinction belongs to the Italian director Ruggero Deodato, whose “Cannibal Holocaust” is said to have gotten him briefly accused of murder because of death scenes that seemed a little too real, as well as generating complaints for obscenity and animal cruelty.The film, released in 1980 in Italy and later (sometimes after overcoming bans) in other countries, drew scalding comments from critics and some film scholars. In 1985 the “Phantom of the Movies” column in The Daily News of New York called it “the kind of brain-damaged, stomach-churning cinematic offal that gives junk movies a bad name.”And yet the movie also developed a cult following and is widely credited with influencing later films, especially “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), which, like “Cannibal Holocaust,” used a found-footage conceit intended to leave viewers asking, “Was it real?”Mr. Deodato died on Dec. 29 in Rome. He was 83.Eugenio Ercolani, a filmmaker and film historian who had interviewed Mr. Deodato extensively, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Deodato had pneumonia and had been experiencing kidney and liver failure.Mr. Deodato made a variety of movies in a career that began in the 1960s, as well as directing commercials and episodes of Italian television series. There was, for instance, “Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man” (1976), a crime thriller that Mr. Deodato said was one of his personal favorites. “Last Feelings” (1978), a romantic drama about a competitive swimmer who learns he has a terminal illness, drew comparisons (usually unfavorable) to “Love Story,” the 1970 American blockbuster.But his horror films of the late 1970s and ’80s overshadowed everything else. He directed in a subgenre that, generally speaking, featured encounters between modern Westerners and jungle dwellers, with the Westerners not faring well. Before “Cannibal Holocaust,” he worked the territory with “The Last Survivor” (1977, also released under assorted other titles), in which oil prospectors whose plane is damaged in a rough landing in the Philippines are greeted by cannibals.“Director Ruggero Deodato’s unselective barrage of torture and bloodletting includes termites eating human flesh, a python eating an iguana and a girl giving birth and tossing her infant to a hungry crocodile,” Linda Gross wrote in a 1978 review in The Los Angeles Times.“Promotion material claims ‘The Last Survivor’ was made among authentic tribes and that one crew member who disappeared during filmmaking is presumed to be a victim of cannibalistic rites,” she added. “Pity the cannibals didn’t eat the film instead.”And then came “Cannibal Holocaust.” Filmed in Leticia, in the rain forest of southern Colombia near the country’s borders with Peru and Brazil, it tells the story of an American professor who travels to the Amazon to investigate the disappearance of four journalists who had gone there to make a documentary on cannibal tribes. He finds their film, which recorded atrocities the journalists themselves committed as well as their brutal deaths.Me Me Lai and Massimo Foschi in Mr. Deodato’s “The Last Survivor” (1977), also released under other names, including “Jungle Holocaust,” which one reviewer called an “unselective barrage of torture and bloodletting.”Erre CinematograficaThough Mr. Deodato used local villagers for much of the cast, he brought in some young actors to play the Westerners and, he said, had them sign agreements to not appear in anything else for a year, to keep up the illusion that parts of the movie were real.That came back to haunt him. He said he was accused of actually murdering the actors — of, essentially, making a snuff film — and had to seek them out and produce them in public to get those charges dropped. Other charges, though, stuck, including ones stemming from the real deaths of several animals during the filming.“To confiscate the film the authorities applied a public health law banning the importing of Spanish bullfighting in Italy, and on the basis of this law they seized the film,” he told Starburst magazine years later. “I was fined millions of lira and given a four months suspended sentence.”Mr. Ercolani, who included an interview with Mr. Deodato in his book “Darkening the Italian Screen: Interviews With Genre and Exploitation Directors Who Debuted in the 1950s and 1960s” (2019) and produced the special features included in a recent rerelease of “Cannibal Holocaust,” said that Mr. Deodato “in many ways composed, rather than directed, ‘Cannibal Holocaust,’ as if in a long improvisational jazz session.”“Ruggero Deodato was a director who put himself at the service of the market’s needs,” Mr. Ercolani said by email. “He wasn’t an intellectual, but he was an acutely instinctive man and director. He loved the process of storytelling, may it be in films, TV series or commercials. He had a great sense of rhythm and could recognize a good story.”“This is not to say he wouldn’t put any thought into what he did,” he added, “but he was a man who gave priority to what he felt rather than what he thought. In many ways you could say he followed his gut right into film history with ‘Cannibal Holocaust.’”Mr. Deodato was born on May 7, 1939, in Potenza, in southern Italy. His family moved to the Parioli neighborhood of Rome when he was a child, and he got a taste of acting.“I participated in the early to mid-’50s in a handful of films,” he said in his interview for Mr. Ercolani’s book, “and I was even called by Federico Fellini to audition for a role — I don’t remember for which film — but in the meantime I had gone through puberty and I had lost my boyish charm. I wore glasses, had bad skin, and was discarded immediately.”As a teenager he befriended Renzo Rossellini, son of the director Roberto Rossellini, which provided him with more connections in the film world. In the 1960s he worked with a number of Italian directors on a variety of movies, including Antonio Margheriti’s horror and fantasy titles (“Horror Castle,” “Anthar l’Invincibile”) and Sergio Corbucci’s westerns (“Django”).“I was lucky enough to have been exposed to many different directors,” he said, “and each one of them has been essential to my growth. Margheriti taught me a lot about special effects, while from Sergio Corbucci I inherited a certain taste for violence and brutality.”Mr. Deodato was married to the actress Silvia Dionisio in the 1970s and since the 1990s had been in a relationship with the actress Valentina Lainati. He is also survived by a son, Saverio, and a daughter, Beatrice.Mr. Deodato’s movies after “Cannibal Holocaust” included “Cut and Run” (1985), which involved a cable news crew, drug smuggling and lots of corpses. “You can wait years for a movie as bad as ‘Cut and Run,’” Bill Cosford wrote in a review in The Miami Herald. He also acted occasionally, in his own movies and those of others; his credits included an appearance in “Hostel: Part II” (2007) by the director Eli Roth, a fan of “Cannibal Holocaust.”Mr. Deodato was still racking up minor directing credits until a few years ago. Throughout his career, he was constantly asked about his most famous creation.“He would at times embellish and build upon the numerous legends and myths that surround the complicated making of the film, often contradicting himself in the process,” Mr. Ercolani said. “What is evident is that ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ ended up being a gilded cage for its director.“I feel a large portion of Deodato’s life has been passed battling his own creature, trying to reason with it, or maybe simply trying to fully understand it, and fending off perceptions the film generated about him over the years while embracing the fame it brought him. Deodato was a fun-loving, womanizing, outrageous, egocentric man, larger than life in so many ways, who found himself living for decades with this dark, fascinatingly twisted creature that he tried to educate and direct but that would not listen.” More

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      in Television

      Adam Rich, Who Starred in ‘Eight Is Enough,’ Dies at 54

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      Mr. Rich played Nicholas Bradford, the youngest son who was known for his glossy pageboy haircut, in the hit television series “Eight Is Enough.”Adam Rich, a former child actor who starred in the hit television series “Eight Is Enough,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 54.Danny Deraney, Mr. Rich’s publicist, confirmed the death. On its website, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner did not immediately list a cause.Mr. Deraney described Mr. Rich as “kind, generous and a warrior in the fight against mental illness.”“He was unselfish and always looked out for those he cared about. Which is why many people who grew up with him feel a part of their childhood gone, and sad today,” Mr. Deraney added. “He really was America’s Little Brother.”From 1977-81, Mr. Rich starred in the hit television series “Eight Is Enough,” a comforting show about a family of eight children that aired on ABC for five seasons. He played Nicholas Bradford, the youngest son, who was known for having a glossy pageboy haircut.Adam Rich began acting as a child and was best known for playing Nicholas Bradford on “Eight Is Enough,” on which he had a pageboy haircut.BC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesThe show, set in Sacramento and based on a memoir by Tom Braden, dealt with family drama such as the death of a parent, remarriage and tensions among siblings.Adam Rich was born on Oct. 12, 1968, in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to his IMDb page. He studied acting at Chatsworth High School in California’s San Fernando Valley.Mr. Rich was not married and did not have children, Mr. Deraney said.Mr. Rich began acting as a child and appeared in 1976 in the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man,” according to IMDb. He had appearances in other television shows, including “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “CHiPs,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Silver Spoons.”In the 1980s, he appeared in television shows such as “Code Red” and “Dungeons and Dragons.”In the past, he had sought treatment for substance abuse. In 1991, he was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a California pharmacy, and the actor Dick Van Patten, who played Mr. Rich’s father in “Eight Is Enough,” bailed him out of jail, The Orlando Sentinel reported. More

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      in Music

      Henry Grossman, Photographer of Celebrities and Beatles, Dies at 86

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      He was best known for his formal portraits of prominent politicians and entertainers. Less famously, he took thousands of candid shots of John, Paul, George and Ringo.Henry Grossman, a photographer who was best known for his formal portraits of celebrities and other public figures — but who also, less famously, immortalized the Beatles on film in thousands of unscripted antics while juggling a side career as a Metropolitan Opera tenor and a Broadway bit player — died on Nov. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 86.His son, David, said he died in a hospital several months after sustaining injuries in a fall.Mr. Grossman produced paradigmatic portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, Leonard Bernstein and Nelson Mandela. He photographed new Metropolitan Opera productions for Time magazine and was the official photographer for many Broadway shows.His portraits of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were published on the front page of The New York Times on Nov. 23, 1963, accompanying the news that the young president had been assassinated in Dallas and succeeded by his vice president the day before.The Nov. 23, 1963, front page of The New York Times featured two formal portraits by Mr. Grossman: one of President John F. Kennedy, who had just been assassinated, and one of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had just been sworn in to replace him.Mr. Grossman’s sensitivity to classical portraiture’s interplay of shadow and light was inspired by his father, the artist Elias M. Grossman, an immigrant from Russia whose etchings were acquired by numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.By the time Henry graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1958, he had compiled an impressive portfolio of portraits of guest speakers on campus and photographs of stage productions there. His fledgling second career as a singer would imbue him with an empathy for performers that helped him establish an unusual bond with celebrity subjects.He was only 27 — barely older than the Beatles themselves — when he was commissioned by Life magazine in 1964 to cover the band’s American television debut, on the popular CBS variety series “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Mr. Grossman photographed the hirsute quartet juxtaposed against a jungle of television cameras, amplifiers and other backstage impedimenta, and he shot from the balcony to capture their electrifying effect on the audience. His creative eye would be reflected in an archive of some 7,000 photos he would take of the Beatles over the next four years.That only a few dozen were published or even printed at the time — most famously a 1967 portrait for Life of the newly mustachioed band members — left other photographers (among them Robert Freeman, Dezo Hoffmann, Astrid Kirchherr, Jürgen Vollmer and Robert Whitaker) more closely associated with the Beatles than Mr. Grossman was.Only a few dozen of Mr. Grossman’s Beatles photos were published at the time he took them. The best known was this one, seen on the cover of Life magazine in 1967. Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.But Mr. Grossman’s archive of intimate moments at home, at private parties and during overnight recording sessions amounted to more images of the band taken over a longer period than any other photographer’s, according to his publisher, Curvebender Publishing.In 2008, Curvebender released “Kaleidoscope Eyes,” a limited-edition book of Mr. Grossman’s photographs documenting an evening at Abbey Road Studios in London as the Beatles were recording the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” In 2012, the company published “Places I Remember,” a hefty volume that included 1,000 of his Beatles photographs.The Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan Show” debut did not transform Mr. Grossman into a fan overnight. But during the band’s American tour that summer, he befriended George Harrison.“After that,” Mr. Grossman told The Times in 2012, “anytime I went to London, I’d check into my hotel, call their office to find out George’s phone number du jour — they had to change them, because the fans would find them out — and I’d arrange to spend a day with them.”“They were accustomed to seeing me with a camera, documenting everything that went on around me,” he explained in “Places I Remember.” “It was simply part of me, part of who I was. More than that, I had become a friend.”“I was first a friend and second a photographer,” he added. “So when I pulled out my camera, no one thought twice about it. No one cared. It wasn’t seen as invasive.”Among the many public figures Mr. Grossman photographed was Eleanor Roosevelt in 1960. Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.Henry Maxwell Grossman was born on Oct. 11, 1936, in Manhattan. His father died when he was 10, and his mother, Josephine (Erschler) Grossman, helped support the family by selling her husband’s etchings.After graduating from Metropolitan Vocational and Technical High School in Manhattan at 16, Henry earned a scholarship to Brandeis, where he received a degree in theater arts and did graduate work in anthropology — and where he first made a mark as a photographer.After returning to New York City, he began his career as a freelance photographer for Life, Time, Newsweek and Paris Match, among other magazines, and for The Times.His marriage to Carol Ann Hauptfuhrer in 1973 ended in divorce. He is survived by their children, David and Christine Grossman, who are both professional musicians, and his sister, Suzanne Grossman.While in his 20s, Mr. Grossman studied at the Actors Studio. After touring in the 1960s with the national company of the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Grossman, a tenor, made his New York singing debut at Carnegie Hall in 1973 and went on to appear with the Washington Opera Society and the Philadelphia Lyric Opera. In the 1980s, he performed in concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti, and in the next decade he sang in three productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He also did some acting. He made a brief appearance in the 1978 movie “Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” while on location in Italy as film photographer, and he played a scullery worker in the original cast of the Broadway musical “Grand Hotel” for its full run, from 1989 to 1992.Jacqueline Kennedy in 1967. Mr. Grossman waited to be invited rather than insinuating himself into his subjects’ private lives.Henry Grossman/Grossman Enterprises. All rights reserved.Mr. Grossman was gregarious but largely unassuming, waiting to be invited rather than insinuating himself into his subjects’ private lives. That was how he managed to take photos for Jacqueline Kennedy of her children at home, and to accompany George Harrison on his “Dark Horse” tour of North America in 1974.“I learned a lot from the Beatles,” he was quoted as saying in the 2012 Times article. “I was interested in how they took to fame, how they used it. It wasn’t easy for them.“One night in Atlantic City, I asked Ringo how he liked seeing America. He took me to the window of his hotel room, pointed to a brick wall across the parking lot, and said, ‘That’s what we’ve seen.’ They were trapped.”“I guess one reason we got along so well was that they knew I wasn’t trying to get anything from them,” Mr. Grossman said. “And I think I got the pictures I got because I wasn’t posing them. I wasn’t injecting myself into the scene as a participant. I was just watching.“I was like a fly on the wall. I got what was there.” More

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      in Theater

      Frank Galati, Mainstay of Chicago Theater, Dies at 79

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      He brought his adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” to Broadway and won Tony Awards. He also directed the long-running hit “Ragtime.”Frank Galati, a writer, director and actor whose work in Chicago, especially his celebrated adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath,” furthered that city’s international reputation in theater, and whose long résumé included directing the Broadway hit “Ragtime,” died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 79.His husband, Peter Amster, said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Galati was a towering figure in Chicago-area theater for decades, working with the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters and other houses there and teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He specialized in adaptations, and in 1988 his version of John Steinbeck’s dust-bowl epic, “The Grapes of Wrath,” was a hit for Steppenwolf.He both wrote and directed “The Grapes of Wrath,” though it took work to persuade Steinbeck’s widow, Elaine Steinbeck, to release the rights. She told The Chicago Tribune in 1988 that once she saw what Mr. Galati had done with the novel, she was glad she did.“I took the script to bed with me,” she said. “As soon as I started reading it, I sat bolt upright. I didn’t think it would be that good.”It was good enough to make the trip to Broadway, with Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Lois Smith leading the cast. When it opened at the Cort Theater in March 1990, Frank Rich reviewed it for The New York Times.“The production at the Cort,” he wrote, “an epic achievement for the director, Frank Galati, and the Chicago theater ensemble at his disposal, makes Steinbeck live for a new generation not by updating his book but by digging into its timeless heart.”The production earned Mr. Galati two Tony Awards, for best direction of a play and best play.Gary Sinise, left, and Terry Kinney in Mr. Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The production’s run on Broadway in 1990 earned Mr. Galati Tony Awards for both writing and directing.Later in the 1990s Mr. Galati directed another high-profile show, the musical “Ragtime.” Based on the E.L. Doctorow novel and adapted by Terrence McNally, with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, it opened in Toronto in December 1996 to acclaim, and in January 1998 it settled in for a two-year run on Broadway. Mr. Galati received a Tony nomination for best direction of a musical.Those were just two highlights from a career that stretched back to his college days at Northwestern, where, at the School of Communication, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a master’s in 1967 and a doctorate in 1971. For the Forum Theater in 1973, he adapted “Boss,” the Chicago columnist Mike Royko’s book about Richard J. Daley, the city’s longtime mayor, into a musical, for which he also wrote the lyrics; it won a Joseph Jefferson Award (Chicago’s version of the Tonys) for best new play. Other Jeffersons followed, with Mr. Galati winning for directing, writing and acting.Adaptations were a specialty — in addition to “The Grapes of Wrath,” the works he adapted included two books by Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore” and “after the quake” (Mr. Murakami’s only demand, Mr. Galati said, was that the title be rendered in lowercase letters), as well as William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and numerous others. He and Lawrence Kasdan even shared an Oscar nomination for adapting Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist” into the 1988 film of the same name.“Almost every novel conceals a drama,” Mr. Galati told Stay Thirsty magazine in 2014. “Some of those dramas are very hard to coax out, some jump out of the book and run up onto the stage. Of course, if the novelist creates scenes that play through brilliant dialogue, that’s half the battle. That’s very true of Steinbeck. The scenes in his books are completely stage worthy. Other writers, like Henry James, are much harder to adapt.”If he had success as an adapter, he told The New Haven Register in 2006, when “after the quake” was being staged at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., it was because he was “not afraid to keep much of the narrator’s voice.”“Long narrative passages don’t scare me in performance,” he said.Countless actors knew of Mr. Galati’s touch as a director, and many issued tributes on learning of his death.“Every actor will know what I mean when I say Frank waited for me,” Molly Regan, a member of Steppenwolf, said in a statement. “He waited for me. He cast you, and then he trusted you. Sometimes he knew me as an actor better than I knew myself.”Last year, when Mr. Galati was inducted in the Theater Hall of Fame, he returned those kinds of compliments.“I’m honored, I’m humbled, I’m grateful,” he said in his acceptance speech, “but I cannot accept this honor for myself. Rather, I dedicate this honor to my students, and to every single actor I have been inspired by and learned from. The rehearsal hall is where I have spent the happiest hours of my life.”A scene from the Broadway production of “Ragtime.” Mr. Galati’s direction of the show earned him a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrank Joseph Galati was born on Nov. 29, 1943, in Highland Park, Ill., north of Chicago. His father, also named Frank, was a dog trainer and boarder, and his mother, Virginia (Cassel) Galati, was a saleswoman with Marshall Field, the department store.He grew up in Northbrook, Ill., and enrolled at Northwestern, where one of his earliest notices resulted from his appearance in a faculty and student talent show in 1964.“A born comic, Frank Galati of Northbrook, a junior in the school of speech, made eight appearances,” The Chicago Tribune wrote. “In one, he portrayed a professor who spent so much time telling his class how far behind it was that he never caught up with the class schedule.”Mr. Galati had a lifelong fascination with Gertrude Stein, which he incorporated into his theatrical life beginning in the mid-1970s, when he directed a reading of some of her works called “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.” — a title borrowed from a Stein work. In 1976, for the Chicago Opera Theater, he directed “The Mother of Us All,” the Virgil Thomson opera for which Ms. Stein wrote the libretto.In 1987, at the Goodman, he staged perhaps his most ambitious Stein-inspired piece, “She Always Said, Pablo,” featuring Ms. Stein’s words and Pablo Picasso’s works — the one a writer who expanded our view of language, the other an artist who changed our way of seeing. Richard Christiansen, reviewing it for The Tribune, called it “a high point of Galati’s work as an interpretive artist.” The production was later seen at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Galati said he found Ms. Stein’s texts mesmerizing.“They’re just beautiful to listen to,” he told The Tribune in 1987. “They gallop, leap, jump and tinkle in our ears.”Mr. Galati and Mr. Amster, who had been together for 52 years and married in 2017, relocated to Florida in the mid-2000s, about the time Mr. Galati took emeritus status at Northwestern. At his death they were dividing their time between homes in Sarasota and on Beaver Island in Michigan.Both have been active in the Asolo Repertory Theater of Sarasota. Mr. Amster is directing its production of “Ken Ludwig’s The Three Musketeers,” which opens Jan. 11. Last year Mr. Galati, reuniting with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty, directed the premiere of a new musical there called “Knoxville,” based on James Agee’s autobiographical novel, “A Death in the Family.” Mr. Galati, of course, did the adaptation.In addition to Mr. Amster, he is survived by a sister, Franny Clarkson.At the Theater Hall of Fame induction, Mr. Galati was introduced by B.J. Jones, artistic director of Northlight, a Chicago-area theater for which Mr. Galati directed the inaugural production in 1975 when it was known as the Evanston Theater Company. Mr. Jones singled out a moment in Mr. Galati’s long career that, he said, showed “the depth of his humanity”: his insistence that Susan Nussbaum, a young actress who was in a wheelchair since being hit by a car a few years earlier, be cast in the role of Gertrude Stein in the premiere of “She Always Said, Pablo.”Ms. Nussbaum, who became a disabilities-rights advocate and died last year, often cited Mr. Galati’s support as pivotal to her post-accident life. In an interview in 1994, when she was playing the Stein role at the Kennedy Center, she credited him with “always going beyond the vision that other people have seen.” More

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      in Music

      Gangsta Boo, Memphis Rapper Formerly With Three 6 Mafia, Dies at 43

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      Born Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, she was one of the first female rappers to build off the gangster rap image and sound that took off in the 1990s.Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, the Memphis rapper and former member of Three 6 Mafia who, as Gangsta Boo, helped define the genre in the South with her confident flows and forged a path for other female artists, died on Sunday in Memphis. She was 43.She was found dead on Sunday afternoon in a neighborhood west of Memphis International Airport, the Memphis Police Department said in a statement on Monday. “There were no immediate signs of foul play,” the police said, adding that the investigation into her death was ongoing.With clever lyrics that could be flirtatious and playful or forceful and proud, Gangsta Boo quickly established herself in the 1990s as a rising rap star who hailed from and flourished in the South. As a teenager, she joined Three 6 Mafia, an underground rap group that would go on to become one of the most influential of its era.In 1995, Gangsta Boo and the other members of the group, Juicy J and DJ Paul, released their debut album, “Mystic Stylez,” a nightmarish addition to the booming rap scene at the time. The album, part of the subgenre of rap known as horrorcore, captivated listeners with its dark references to death and murders, its eerie beats and its ominous vocals. Gangsta Boo referred to herself on the album as “the devil’s daughter,” capturing the supernatural tone of the project.Three years later, Gangsta Boo released her first solo album, “Enquiring Minds.” It featured one of her best-known hits, in which a teasing line provided both its title and a sticky and memorable hook: “Where Dem Dollas At!?”While the single hinted at a superficial sentiment, Gangsta Boo said in an interview with the website HipHop DX in 2014 that it also touched on the pressures of motherhood and raising a child.“How can you have a baby by a dude that has nothing? I feel the same,” she said. “I feel like that even more now. That’s why I don’t have kids. It’s got to be the right one and the right moment.”Lola Chantrelle Mitchell was born on Aug. 7, 1979, in Memphis. Her father, Cedric, was a postal worker, and her mother, Veronica (Lee) Mitchell, was a homemaker. She once described the world of her youth as “rough.”“I got a hood in me because I had a lot of hood friends,” she said in an interview with All Urban Central in June 2022. Her neighborhood in Memphis was called Whitehaven, but she and her friends nicknamed it Blackhaven because the area’s residents were predominantly Black.She graduated from Hillcrest High School in Memphis. While young, she met Paul Duane Beauregard, better known as DJ Paul. The two soon bonded over their love of music.Impressed by her lyricism, DJ Paul asked if she wanted to join his crew, Three 6 Mafia. She did. At 16, Gangsta Boo made her first significant leap in the music industry.“It just happened like that overnight,” she told All Urban Central, adding, “We took off kind of fast.”Gangsta Boo collaborated with Three 6 Mafia on several albums but left the group in the early 2000s to pursue a solo career.When asked why she left, she said in an interview with MTV in 2001: “There’s no problem. Sometimes people grow apart, and basically that’s what it is. There’s no drama, no beef. It’s still the same. I just kind of grew apart, and I’m not doing things that they’re doing. I’m not cursing in my music no more. We just grew apart like a marriage.”That same year, Gangsta Boo renamed herself Lady Boo — because, she said, she was not “living the gangster lifestyle” and wanted to align herself more closely with God. However, her website still referred to her as Gangsta Boo at her death.The makeup of Three 6 Mafia evolved over the years. In 2006, after Gangsta Boo’s departure, the group won an Oscar for best original song with “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from the film “Hustle & Flow.”Later in her career, Gangsta Boo collaborated with numerous rappers, especially those with roots in the South.She told Billboard last year that “as far as female hip-hop and rap, I think it’s in a good space.”“They say, ‘Gangsta Boo walked so a lot of people can run,’” she added.Gangsta Boo is survived by her mother and two brothers, Eric and Tarik.As she aged, Gangsta Boo reflected on having been one of the first female rappers to build off the gangster rap image and sound that took off in the 1990s, singing about smoking, payback and villainous intentions — themes typically reserved for men.“A lot of guys in Memphis was like ‘Gangsta Pat,’ ‘Gangsta Black’ — gangsta this, gangsta that,” she told All Urban Central.But toward the end of her life, the moniker had taken on an enhanced meaning.“It’s more, you know, just enjoying my life as a legendary gangster,” she said.Livia Albeck-Ripka More