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      John Bowman, Comedy Writer With a Knack for Crossing Over, Dies at 64

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      A white writer who left a corporate job, he became known for working on series with Black stars like Keenen Ivory Wayans and Martin Lawrence.John Bowman, a white television comedy writer and producer who left the corporate world to find success on Black-centered shows like “In Living Color” and “Martin,” died on Dec. 28 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 64.His wife, Shannon Gaughan Bowman, said the cause was dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle.Mr. Bowman’s work consisted primarily of writing for and running comedy series. But he also made an important contribution later in his career as a labor leader, helping unionized TV and movie writers get a cut of streaming revenues long before services like Netflix and Hulu changed viewing habits and grabbed tens of millions of subscribers.Mr. Bowman had been a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” as had his wife, when he joined the staff of the Fox sketch show “In Living Color” in 1990.“In Living Color,” created by the Black comedian and actor Keenen Ivory Wayans, brought an African American hip-hop sensibility to network television. Mr. Bowman was one of the show’s first white writers and became head writer in its second season.“He got Keenen, and Keenen got him,” Ms. Gaughan Bowman said in a phone interview.Mr. Bowman had said that Mr. Wayans did not want his show’s writers to bring an overtly political or racial point of view to their work.“Sometimes the white writers would come up with a hard-hitting thing that took a racial attitude,” Mr. Bowman was quoted as saying in the book “Homey Don’t Play That! The Story of ‘In Living Color’ and the Black Comedy Revolution” (2018), by David Peisner, “and Keenen would say, ‘No, no. That may be politically correct but it’s not funny. All you’re doing is trying to incite people, you’re not trying to make them laugh.’”Among the more memorable “In Living Color” sketches Mr. Bowman worked on was “Men on Football,” part a live episode that Fox used to counterprogram against the Super Bowl halftime show in 1992. The sketch, a variation on the regular feature “Men on Film,” featured Mr. Wayans and David Alan Grier as flamboyantly gay reviewers playfully employing double and triple entendres to discuss football.Later that year, Mr. Bowman left “In Living Color” to create “Martin,” also for Fox, with Martin Lawrence and Topper Carew. The show gave Mr. Lawrence, who played a talk-show host in Detroit, a showcase for the arrogant but goofy persona he had perfected as a stand-up comedian.Keenen Ivory Wayans, left, and Damon Wayans in “Do-It-Yourself Milli Vanilli Kit,” a sketch from the first season of “In Living Color.” Mr. Bowman was one of the show’s first white writers and became head writer in its second season.20th Century Fox/Courtesy Everett CollectionMr. Bowman, who was the showrunner for the series, “understood my vision,” Mr. Lawrence said in a statement after Mr. Bowman’s death, adding, “There wasn’t anything too big or too small that could faze him, which made working together a great experience.”Mr. Bowman recalled that Fox’s censors were tough on “Martin” in its first season, which began in the fall of 1992, and that the show suffered for it.“The language on this show is more uncompromisingly Black than it is on any other show,” he told Entertainment Weekly that year. “But you find yourself in the most absurd discussions with censors. I think we’re all frustrated.”Mr. Bowman tapped into his time on “In Living Color” when he teamed with Matt Wickline to create “The Show,” a short-lived 1996 sitcom about a white writer working on a Black series. He was later the showrunner for two other series with Black stars: “The Hughleys,” with D.L.Hughley, and “Cedric the Entertainer Presents,” of which he was also a creator.Ms. Gaughan Bowman said that her husband “liked Black comedy and culture.”“He liked the way Black comedians used language,” she added. “He didn’t want to run ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’”John Frederick Bowman was born on Sept. 28, 1957, in Milwaukee. His father, William, was a lawyer, and his mother, Loretta (Murphy) Bowman, was a homemaker.White attending Harvard as an undergraduate, Mr. Bowman was an editor at The Harvard Lampoon. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1985 and became an executive at PepsiCo, based in Purchase, N.Y., before deciding that what he really wanted to do was work in comedy.At the time, his wife was writing for “Saturday Night Live.”“I told Jim that my husband wasn’t happy at PepsiCo and he wanted to do this,” Ms. Gaughan Bowman said, referring to Jim Downey, the longtime “S.N.L.” head writer.It was a big leap from a corporate job to the “S.N.L.” writers’ room, but Mr. Downey, a former president of The Lampoon, had mined the magazine for writers and was familiar with Mr. Bowman through his writing and through mutual friends. He asked Mr. Bowman to submit sketches; he was hired a year later.“He had the best dry sense of humor of almost anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Downey said by phone. In his only season with the show, Mr. Bowman shared a 1989 Emmy Award with the rest of the writing staff.He went on to be the showrunner in the mid-1990s for “Murphy Brown,” starring Candice Bergen.In addition to his wife, Mr. Bowman is survived by his daughter, Courtney Bowman Brady; his sons, Nicholas, Alec, Jesse and John Jr.; a sister, Susan Bowman; and two brothers, William and James.Mr. Bowman, center, leaving the Writers Guild of America West offices in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2008 after voting to end a strike by Hollywood writers. He was chairman of the union’s negotiating committee.David McNew/Getty ImagesFrom 2007 to 2008 — when he was working on his final series, “Frank TV,” starring the impressionist Frank Caliendo — Mr. Bowman was chairman of the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America West during its 100-day strike against TV and movie producers. During the strike, he talked individually to top studio executives about the union’s position on giving writers a percentage of revenues from what would come to be called streaming — a demand that was ultimately met in a deal struck with production companies.“A lot of it was explaining to people like Les Moonves” — then the chief executive of CBS — “that if they didn’t make money, they didn’t have to pay us anything,” Patric Verrone, who was the writers guild’s president at the time, said in an interview. Referring to Mr. Bowman, he added: “He was a rock. We stood on him and when we needed him, we threw him at things.”Mr. Bowman later taught comedy writing at the University of Southern California. More

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      Maria Ewing, Dramatically Daring Opera Star, Dies at 71

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      She sought to incorporate acting techniques in her singing rather than settle for predictable staging. Uncertainty about her heritage inspired her daughter, the actress Rebecca Hall, to make the film “Passing.”Maria Ewing, who sang notable soprano and mezzo-soprano roles at leading houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, beginning in the mid-1970s and whose ambiguity about her racial heritage helped drive her daughter, the actress and director Rebecca Hall, to make the recent movie “Passing,” died on Sunday at her home near Detroit. She was 71.A family spokeswoman said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ewing was a striking presence on opera stages, where she strove to bring an actor’s skills and sensibilities to her roles rather than simply stand and sing.“I’ve watched how actors work and work at it,” Ms. Ewing, who was once married to the director Peter Hall, told The Orange County Register of California in 1997, when she was appearing in L.A. Opera’s production of Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora.”“I don’t mean to criticize or underestimate the importance of beautiful vocalism, which alone can move people,” she added. “But why is it that opera so often becomes predictable in terms of staging?”There was certainly nothing staid about her performance, under the direction of Mr. Hall, in the title role of “Salome,” first seen in Los Angeles in 1986 and restaged in other cities, included London. In the initial production she ended the Dance of the Seven Veils wearing only a G-string; in later ones she dispensed with even that. (She is not the only Salome to have ended the dance in the all-together; Karita Mattila did so at the Met this century.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge,” she told The Register. “You go to the precipice and lean over it. You have to. A role like Salome, you are completely on the edge. You’re over it, in fact.”Though critics had sometimes frowned on her leading roles — her attempt at the title role in “Carmen,” also under Mr. Hall, at about the same time drew some harsh notices — her “Salome” was generally acclaimed. John Rockwell, reviewing a return engagement in Los Angeles in 1989 for The New York Times, called it “the most arresting, convincing overall account of this impossible part that I have ever encountered.”Ms. Ewing as Poppea in Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1984. The production was by the noted director Peter Hall, Ms. Ewing’s husband. Dennis Bailey performed the part of Nerone.Guy Cravett/ThornEMIWhenever Ms. Ewing performed, critics almost invariably commented on her exotic looks. Those were in part a product of a mixed racial heritage that Ms. Ewing tended not to dwell on, even with her daughter, who was raised in England.“When I was growing up, my mother would say things to me like, ‘Well, you know we’re Black,’ and then another day she’d say, ‘I don’t really know that,’” Ms. Hall recounted in an episode of “Finding Your Roots,” the PBS genealogy program, filmed last year and broadcast just last week.“She was always extraordinarily beautiful,” Ms. Hall told Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of the program, “but she didn’t look like everyone else’s mother in the English countryside.”Her mother identified as white, she told Professor Gates, but in interviews over the years Ms. Ewing also alluded to possible Black and American Indian ancestry. Ms. Ewing’s father, Norman, for years presented himself as an American Indian, but the researchers on “Finding Your Roots” determined that this was a fabrication; a DNA test of Ms. Hall done for the program showed that she had no Indian background. Her grandfather had in fact been Black.“You, my dear, are indeed a person of African descent,” Professor Gates told Ms. Hall.This was more than a curiosity for Ms. Hall. She had for some time been developing a film based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” about two light-skinned Black women, one of whom passes as white. Part of what interested her about the novel, she said in interviews, was the nagging suspicion that the story was relevant to her own family.“When I asked questions to my mother about her background in Detroit and her family,” Ms. Hall told The New York Times last year, “she left it with an, ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past.’”The film, Ms. Hall’s first feature as a director, premiered in November and has been widely praised as one of the year’s best.Maria Louise Ewing was born on March 27, 1950, in Detroit. Her father was an engineer at a steel company and her mother, Hermina Maria (Veraar) Ewing, was a homemaker.Ms. Ewing studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. About 1975 she made her debut at the Cologne Opera, and in October 1976 she made her Met debut as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”“At the moment some combination of nerves and artistic immaturity holds her Cherubino short of the very best,” Mr. Rockwell wrote in his review. “But she is a singer of enormous potential.”That same month found her on the Carnegie Hall stage, one of two singers in a Mahler program by the New York Philharmonic conducted by James Levine.“The voice is one with a good deal of color, and of course Miss Ewing will grow into the music,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times.Among her early Met roles was Blanche in John Dexter’s 1977 staging of Poulenc’s “Dialogues der Carmelites.” She was slated for a road production of that opera in Boston in 1979 when fog grounded the plane that was supposed to deliver her from New York to Boston for an 8 p.m. curtain. At 4:30 p.m. she climbed into a cab, which delivered her to the Hynes Auditorium at 8:55; the curtain went up at 9:05. The fare: $337.50, not including a $47.50 tip.In addition to her dramatic roles, Ms. Ewing stood out in comedies like Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.”Ms. Ewing’s daughter Rebecca Hall, left, is a noted stage and film actress. They attended the funeral of Ms. Ewing’s former husband, Peter Hall, in 2017. Also pictured is Leslie Caron, who was also married to Mr. Hall.Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Give any ‘Così’ Kiri Te Kanawa’s patrician Fiordiligi, Maria Ewing’s lovably dopey Dorabella and Donald Gramm’s subtly understated Don Alfonso and you will have yourself a night at the opera,” Donal Henahan wrote of the Met’s production in 1982.In 1987 a dispute with Mr. Levine over a revival and telecast of “Carmen” led her to withdraw from Met performances.“I cannot work with a man I cannot trust, and I cannot work in a house that he is running in this fashion,” she said at the time.But she would eventually return; her final Met performance was in 1997 as Marie in Berg’s “Wozzeck.”She and Mr. Hall married in 1982 and divorced in 1990. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by three sisters, Norma Koleta, Carol Pancratz and Francis Ewing; and a granddaughter.In 1996, when she was singing a concert with the Philharmonic, The Times asked Ms. Ewing about that famous dance in “Salome.”“It was my own idea to do the dance naked,” she said. “I felt that it was somehow essential to express the truth of that moment — a moment of frustration, longing and self-discovery for Salome. For me, the scene wouldn’t work any other way.” More

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      Dale Clevenger, Chicago Symphony’s Fearless Horn Master, Dies at 81

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      Mr. Clevenger, who played his notoriously treacherous instrument with daring, was an anchor of the Chicago orchestra’s famed brass section for 47 years.Dale Clevenger, whose expressive, daring playing as the solo French horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 47 years made him one of the most respected orchestral instrumentalists of his generation, died on Jan. 5 at a hospital near his home in Brescia, Italy. He was 81.The cause was complications of Waldenstrom’s disease, a form of lymphoma, his family said.Mr. Clevenger was a pillar of the famed Chicago brass section, which has long been renowned as an unrivaled force for its clean, majestic sound, fearless attacks and sheer might. Working with his equally enduring fellow principals, Adolph Herseth on trumpet, Jay Friedman on trombone and Arnold Jacobs on tuba, Mr. Clevenger helped shape that section into the envy of the orchestra world, and the joy of its conductors.In a statement, Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s music director, called him “one of the best and most famous horn players of our time and one of the glories of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”Mr. Clevenger’s willingness to take risks on his notoriously treacherous instrument, and his ability to surmount those risks seemingly with ease, were symbols of the brash quality of his orchestra. He was a technical virtuoso, but he was also capable of producing an enormous range of colors on his instrument, Mr. Muti’s predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, said. He was also a frequent chamber music partner and soloist.The Chicago ensemble was already full of idols when Mr. Clevenger joined in 1966, but Mr. Herseth and Mr. Jacobs were inspirations for him, both for their excellence and for their longevity.When the Boston Symphony offered Mr. Clevenger a post in the mid-1970s, he asked his mentors if they intended to perform in Chicago for as long as they physically could. They said yes. He resolved, he later recalled, that “as long as they were in the orchestra, there is nothing that would lure me away from Chicago.” Mr. Herseth went on to be principal for 53 years, Mr. Jacobs for 44.Mr. Clevenger was, however, a more versatile musician than that might imply. For 17 years he had a regular Tuesday-night date playing jazz with a group called Ears, which he said made him a stronger orchestral player. “Within the confines of symphonic structure,” he said in 1978 about the lessons he learned from improvising, “I can make music in a more relaxed, freer way.”Jazz was a side gig, but Mr. Clevenger was serious about leaving his seat on the stage to stand on the podium. “My dream is eventually to become a respected conductor of a major orchestra anywhere in the world,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986. That was not to be, but he did direct the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble in the Chicago suburbs, from 1981 to 1995.The Chicago Symphony’s horn section in the late 1970s. From left, Frank Brouk, Richard Oldberg, Norman Schweikert, Mr. Clevenger and Daniel Gingrich. Robert M. Lightfoot II/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Michael Dale Clevenger was born on July 2, 1940, in Chattanooga, Tenn., the third of four children of Ernest Clevenger, a sawmill manufacturer who was briefly the president of the Chattanooga Opera Association, and Mary Ellen (Fridell) Clevenger, a homemaker. He started learning piano at age 7 and went to concerts with his father.“I kept my eye on this shape of metal, which was the French horn,” Mr. Clevenger recalled of attending those concerts in a video interview for Abilene Christian University in 1984. “I was infatuated with the way they looked. The more I looked, the more I became infatuated with the way they sound. I had a dream, a vision, to play one of those things.”Unable to afford a horn, Ernest Clevenger bought his 11-year-old son a trumpet instead, but Dale persisted. At 14, after making do with a school instrument for a year, he had his own horn, and his life.Mr. Clevenger performed in the Chattanooga Symphony and the Chattanooga High School band, under the bandmaster A.R. Casavant, who played him records of the Chicago Symphony during his lunch hour.He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1958 to study with Forrest Standley, the principal of the Pittsburgh Symphony.After graduating in 1962, he freelanced in New York, joined Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra and spent a year as principal of the Kansas City Philharmonic.He failed his first audition with the Chicago Symphony, in May 1965, but succeeded at a second, in January 1966. On his first week on the job, he was a soloist in Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion and String Orchestra.“For his initial time out,” The Chicago Tribune reported, “he seems a capable addition to our superb first chair lineup.”The Martin concerto was recorded and later released. As well as appearing countless times on record as an ensemble player, Mr. Clevenger was a soloist on several later Chicago Symphony recordings, including a glowing account of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings under Carlo Maria Giulini and a disc of Strauss concertos that won a Grammy in 2002. Mr. Clevenger also set down Haydn and Mozart concertos with the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, and earned a further Grammy for the quintets for piano and winds by Beethoven and Mozart, sharing the bill with the Chicago principal clarinet Larry Combs (a fellow jazz player on Tuesday nights), two members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Mr. Barenboim.The composer John Williams wrote a concerto for Mr. Clevenger. Mr. Williams conducted its premiere with the Chicago Symphony and Mr. Clevenger in 2003. Todd Rosenberg /Chicago Symphony Orchestra In his final years in Chicago, music critics began raising questions about whether Mr. Clevenger was performing up to his usual standards. In 2010 Andrew Patner, writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, called for him to place “a cap on a unique orchestral career that should be noted for its many triumphs and not a late struggle against time.”Mr. Clevenger retired from the orchestra in 2013 and joined the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He had also taught at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities.Mr. Clevenger married Nancy Sutherland in 1966; they divorced in 1987. Alice Render, a hornist and sometime section partner in the Chicago Symphony, became his wife that year; she died in 2011. He married Giovanna Grassi in 2012. She survives him, as do a son, Michael, and a daughter, Ami, from his first marriage; two sons, Mac and Jesse, from his second marriage; a sister, Alice Clevenger Cooper; and two grandchildren.Mr. Clevenger, for whom John Williams wrote a concerto in 2003, always maintained that the purpose of his playing was to delight.“I realize that I have been given a gift, by God, to make music, to perform music, and to give people joy,” he said in the 1984 video interview. “I have the pleasure, the privilege, of making people happy — and in doing so, making my own self happy.” More

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      Bill Staines, Folk Music Mainstay, Dies at 74

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      Among his best-known songs were “River,” “The Roseville Fair” and a cross-generational classic, “A Place in the Choir.”The folk singer Bill Staines used to tell a story about the oddest line in his best-known song, “A Place in the Choir,” whose lyrics celebrate the diversity of the animal kingdom and, by implication, the human one.Thanks to numerous cover versions and a best-selling picture book, countless children and adults could sing you the chorus:All God’s critters got a place in the choir,Some sing low, some sing higher,Some sing out loud on a telephone wire,Some just clap their hands, or paws, or anything they’ve got.But what about the line that ends one of the verses? “The otter hasn’t got much to say, and the porcupine talks to himself.” What’s up with that porcupine?The line, as Mr. Staines often related, came from a camping trip he and his wife, Karen Elrod Staines, took to the Tobacco Root Mountains in southwest Montana. Lying awake in their tent at 4 a.m., he heard an odd chattering outside.“And I figured, Well, they’ve landed,” he told the story to an audience in 2009. But when he peered out the tent flap, it wasn’t extraterrestrials; it was a porcupine talking to itself.Mr. Staines died on Dec. 5 at his home in Rollinsford, N.H. He was 74.His wife said the cause was prostate cancer.Ms. Staines, who works in special education, said the song, which first appeared on Mr. Staines’s 1979 album, “The Whistle of the Jay,” didn’t leap out at either of them as a career highlight.“When Bill wrote ‘P.I.C.’ and played it for me when I got home from school, we both shook our heads and said, ‘I don’t know if this is a keeper or not,’” she said by email. “Obviously and luckily, we were wrong.”The song has been covered by Peter, Paul and Mary; Red Grammer; Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy; and many others. A rousing live performance by the Irish group Celtic Thunder on YouTube has been viewed over seven million times.“Songs are like children you care about,” Mr. Staines, who recorded almost 30 albums, told The Register of Yarmouth, Mass., in 2013. “You write a song and it’s born and you have to nurture it awhile and it grows up healthy and strong and then it develops relationships with people who don’t have anything to do with you. ‘A Place in the Choir’ has a life of its own. It’s like a child that’s grown up and gone away.”William Russell Staines was born on Feb. 6, 1947, in Medford, Mass., to William Henry and Dorothy (Trask) Staines. He grew up in Lexington, Mass., and two boyhood friends, Dick and John Curtis, were the catalysts for his performing career.“When I was around 11, Dick got a guitar, so of course I had to get one,” Mr. Staines told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 2018. “It was a Sears Silvertone three-quarter-size guitar with a cowboy painted on it. I sanded the cowboy off the front, and Dick and John and I started a little rock ’n’ roll band, with contact pickups on our acoustic guitars.”Before long, he had gone solo and begun writing his own songs, upgrading to a full-size guitar, which he played in an unusual way: upside-down.“When I got my first guitar, I picked it up and held it the correct way, the right-handed way,” he told the Quincy newspaper. “But I’m left-handed and it just didn’t feel right. So I flipped it over and figured this must be the left-handed way of playing. You know, a D chord is still a D chord, so I just had to get to it differently.”That approach gave his picking a somewhat different sound, since he was hitting the high strings with his thumb. At least one fellow guitarist was impressed.“About four years ago I met this fellow in California who was a wonderful guitar player, who said, ‘I really like the way your style sounds,’” Mr. Staines told The Wenatchee World of Washington State in 2009. “And I saw him a year ago, and he’d went out and bought a left-handed guitar and was playing it right-handed. So that’s even one step to the weirder.”Mr. Staines wrote countless songs. Many evoked the natural world, like “River,” one of his best known, with its wistful refrain:You rolling old river, you changing old river,Let’s you and me, river, run down to the sea.Others were character sketches — “pensive, probing narratives made especially memorable by their ability to translate the common details of common lives into songs of uncommon eloquence and beauty,” as L.E. McCullough put it in The Austin American-Statesman in 1986. There was, for instance, “The Roseville Fair,” about a couple’s first meeting and their enduring love. Among those who covered the tune was Nanci Griffith, who called Mr. Staines “the Woody Guthrie of my generation of songwriters.” Ms. Griffith, who died in August, credited Mr. Staines with encouraging her in her own career.Mr. Staines, an old-school troubadour who traveled tens of thousands of miles every year to perform, started out in coffee shops and other small venues. Early in his career, he was M.C. of the Sunday hootenanny at the famed Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.He was still a road warrior half a century later. His most recent album, in 2018, was called “The Third Million Miles.”In addition to Ms. Staines, whom he married in 1976, Mr. Staines is survived by a son, Bowen Keith Staines, and a brother, Stephen.Mr. Staines had another talent: yodeling. He sometimes gave workshops on the skill. In 1975, he won a yodeling contest at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas — “defeating some crestfallen Swiss yodelers,” The Christian Science Monitor reported. More

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      James Mtume, Whose ‘Juicy Fruit’ Became a Hip-Hop Beat, Dies at 76

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      In a wide-ranging career, he went from playing percussion with Miles Davis to writing and producing sleek R&B to a long stint on political talk radio.James Mtume, the musician, songwriter, producer, bandleader and talk-radio host whose 1983 hit “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled in more than 100 songs, died on Sunday at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 76.His cause was cancer, his family said.Mr. Mtume started his career as a jazz percussionist. He was in Miles Davis’s band for the first half of the 1970s, appearing on Davis’s landmark 1972 jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors.But in the late ’70s he pivoted to R&B: He co-wrote hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, produced albums and formed a group, Mtume, which had major hits with his songs “Juicy Fruit” and “You, Me and He.” His sparse, sputtering electronic beat for “Juicy Fruit” gained an extensive second life in hip-hop when it was sampled on the debut single by the Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy,” a No. 1 rap hit in 1994.Mr. Mtume was born James Forman on Jan. 3, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was the jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath, but he was raised by his stepfather, James Forman, a jazz pianist also known as Hen Gates who had played with Charlie Parker, and his mother, Bertha Forman, a homemaker.Jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and John Coltrane were frequent family visitors, and the young James Forman grew up playing piano and percussion; his biological uncle, the jazz drummer Albert (Tootie) Heath, gave him his first conga drum.He was a champion swimmer in high school, winning the Middle Atlantic title for backstroke, and attended Pasadena City College on an athletic scholarship.In California, he joined the US Organization, a Black nationalist cultural group that introduced the holiday Kwanzaa, and he took an African last name: Mtume, Swahili for messenger. He also turned seriously to music.In 1969, Albert Heath recorded four modal, Afrocentric jazz compositions by Mr. Mtume on his album “Kawaida,” featuring Mr. Mtume on congas alongside Herbie Hancock on piano, Don Cherry on trumpet and Jimmy Heath on saxophones. Mr. Mtume also worked with Art Farmer, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard and Gato Barbieri.He joined Miles Davis’s band in 1971 as it was making the transition to the jagged, open-ended, rhythm-dominated funk of “On the Corner.” In an extensive Red Bull Music Academy interview in 2014, Mr. Mtume said that Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” He worked with Davis until 1975, touring and appearing on the albums “Big Fun,” “Dark Magus,” “Agharta,” “Pangaea” and “Get Up With It,” which included a Davis composition titled “Mtume.”Working with Davis, Mr. Mtume expanded his sound with electronic effects. “You don’t fight technology, you embrace it,” he said in 2014. “It’s like fire. It’ll burn you, or you learn how to cook with it.”In 1972, Mr. Mtume made his recording debut as a leader with “Alkebu-Lan: Land of the Blacks” on the Strata-East label, credited to the Mtume Umoja Ensemble. It opened with a spoken manifesto that praised “the role of Black music as a functional organ in the struggle for national liberation.” He released a second jazz album, “Rebirth Cycle,” in 1977.Mr. Mtume with Miles Davis in 1973. In a 2014 interview, he said Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” R. Brigden/Express, via Getty ImagesWhen Davis stopped performing in 1975, Mr. Mtume and the guitarist Reggie Lucas, another member of the Davis group, joined Roberta Flack’s band. Their composition “The Closer I Get to You,” which she recorded as a duet with Donny Hathaway, reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978 and was later remade by Beyoncé and Luther Vandross.They formed Mtume-Lucas Productions to write and produce songs. Among the artists they worked with were Phyllis Hyman, Teddy Pendergrass, the Spinners and Stephanie Mills, for whom they wrote the 1980 hit “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” a Grammy Award winner for best R&B song. On Instagram this week, Ms. Mills praised Mr. Mtume, writing, “He was so brilliant and an amazing music mind.”Between production jobs, Mr. Mtume and Mr. Lucas recorded with their core musicians as the group Mtume, which featured the singer Tawatha Agee. Mr. Mtume described the group’s first albums as “sophistifunk,” using plush harmonies and elaborate orchestrations.But one day, Mr. Mtume recalled, he realized that “I was playing something that sounded just like something else I had done. I got up and I walked away, and I disbanded the band, and I decided not to do any more productions.”He put together a second lineup of Mtume, without Mr. Lucas, and turned to a style he described as “neo-minimalism,” using just a handful of instruments and fewer effects. The new Mtume lineup recorded “Juicy Fruit.” At first, Mtume’s record label, Epic, dismissed the song as too slow for daytime radio, but it became a No. 1 R&B hit.The title song of Mtume’s 1984 album, “You, Me and He” — a confession of polyamory — reached No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart. On the group’s final album, “Theater of the Mind,” released in 1986, Mtume turned to sociopolitical commentary in songs like “Deep Freeze (Rap-a-Song) (Part 1).” That same year, Mr. Mtume wrote the score for the film “Native Son” and produced a solo album for Ms. Agee.In a radio interview in 1988, during a freewheeling era of hip-hop when samples were widely used without payment or credit, Mr. Mtume denounced hip-hop’s reliance on sampling, calling it “Memorex music” and complaining that the originators were ignored. The hip-hop group Stetsasonic responded with “Talkin’ All That Jazz,” which argued, “Rap brings back old R&B/And if we would not, people could’ve forgot.”Eventually, sampling — by then licensed and credited — would keep Mr. Mtume’s music on the radio. “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled by Alicia Keys, Warren G, Jennifer Lopez, Keyshia Cole, Faith Evans and dozens of others, and many of Mr. Mtume’s other songs and productions have made their way onto new tracks.In 1994, Mr. Mtume scored the TV series “New York Undercover.” At his urging, the show’s story lines featured a nightclub, Natalie’s, where an older generation of musicians, including B.B. King and Gladys Knight, got new TV exposure and younger performers revived old songs. During the 1990s he also produced songs for Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, and K-Ci & Jojo.Yet by the mid-1990s, Mr. Mtume had grown dissatisfied with the music business. He moved into talk radio, and was a co-host from 1995 to 2013 on the weekly show “Open Line,” heard first on WRKS-FM (Kiss-FM) in New York and then on WBLS-FM when the stations merged, discussing politics, activism, news and culture alongside Bob Slade and Bob Pickett. Over the years, he also traveled to Cuba, Libya, Sudan and South Africa. He recorded a TED Talk in 2018, “Our Common Ground in Music,” in which he discussed “the cross-pollination of culture, politics and art.”He is survived by his wife, Kamili Mtume; his brother, Jeffrey Forman; two sons, Faulu Mtume and Richard Johnson; four daughters, Benin Mtume, Eshe King, Ife Mtume and Sanda Lee; and six grandchildren.“Pressing the boundaries. To me that’s always what it was about,” Mr. Mtume said in 2014. “Never give yourself a chance to look back, because that’s always easier. Looking forward is always harder.” More

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      Michael Lang, a Force Behind the Woodstock Festival, Dies at 77

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      He and his partners hoped their weekend of “peace and music” would draw 50,000 attendees. It ended up drawing more than 400,000 — and making history.Michael Lang, one of the creators of the Woodstock festival, which drew more than 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm in 1969 for a weekend of “peace and music” — plus plenty of drugs, skinny-dipping, mud-soaked revelry and highway traffic jams — resulting in one of the great tableaus of 20th-century pop culture, died on Saturday in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 77.Michael Pagnotta, a spokesman for Mr. Lang’s family, said the cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.In August 1969, Mr. Lang was a baby-faced 24-year-old with limited experience as a concert promoter when he and three partners, Artie Kornfeld, John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put on the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on land leased from a dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, in bucolic Bethel, N.Y., about 100 miles northwest of New York City.Since Monterey Pop in California two years before, rock festivals had been sprouting around the country, and the Woodstock partners, all in their 20s, were ambitious enough to hope for 50,000 attendees. Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld, a record executive, booked a solid lineup, with, among others, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and a new group called Crosby, Stills & Nash (they would be joined at the festival by Neil Young). The show was set for Aug. 15-17.They sold 186,000 tickets in advance, at $8 a day. On the opening day, traffic snarled much of the New York State Thruway, and many ticket holders did not make it. Others simply entered the field without paying.In an interview, Mr. Rosenman said that days before the show, workmen had said that they could build a stage or ticket booths but not both; the partners chose a stage.The event became a defining moment for the baby boomer generation, as a celebration of rock as a communal force and a manifestation of hippie ideals. Despite the presence of nearly half a million people, and the breakdown of most health and crowd-control measures, no violence was reported.Mr. Lang — described in The New York Times Magazine in 1969 as a “groovy kid from Brooklyn” — became the public face of the powers behind the festival. He was seen in Michael Wadleigh’s hit documentary “Woodstock” (1970) roaming the grounds in cherubic curls and a vest. Despite the festival’s inception as a moneymaking endeavor, Mr. Lang always insisted that its aims were to bring out the best in humanity.“From the beginning, I believed that if we did our job right and from the heart, prepared the ground and set the right tone, people would reveal their higher selves and create something amazing,” Mr. Lang said in his memoir, “The Road to Woodstock” (2009), written with the music journalist Holly George-Warren.Mr. Lang with an associate, Lee Blumer, at the site of the Woodstock festival in August 1989, its 20th anniversary. Mr. Lang would later be involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 and an unsuccessful attempt to stage a 50th-anniversary concert in 2019.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMichael Scott Lang was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 11, 1944, and grew up in middle-class surroundings in Bensonhurst. His father, Harry, ran a business that installed heating systems, and his mother, Sylvia, kept the books.Michael attended New York University and the University of Tampa, and in 1966 he opened a head shop in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. He soon became involved in the music scene there, and in May 1968 he was one of the promoters of the Miami Pop Festival, with Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.Later that year Mr. Lang moved to Woodstock, N.Y. — then known as a prime bohemian outpost thanks to the residency of Bob Dylan — and he soon met Mr. Kornfeld. Around the same time, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman, two young businessmen who were roommates on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, placed a classified ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal introducing themselves, half in jest, as “young men with unlimited capital” in search of investment ideas.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld always maintained that they never saw that ad. But the four men met through one of Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman’s investments, a recording studio in New York, and Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld suggested a studio in Woodstock, which they said was swarming with talent. The four set up a partnership, Woodstock Ventures, and agreed to work together.In his memoir, Mr. Lang said that Mr. Roberts, who had a large inheritance, had agreed to finance both the studio and the festival. Mr. Rosenman, in an interview, said the plan had been for profits from the festival to pay for the studio.When the Woodstock festival took place, it was initially portrayed in the news media as a catastrophe. The Daily News’s front page declared, “Traffic Uptight at Hippie Fest,” and a Times editorial bore the headline “Nightmare in the Catskills.”But images of endless fields of longhaired fans idling peacefully, and of stars like Hendrix, the Who and Santana commanding thousands of fans, ricocheted around the world and established a new template for the rock festival — even though many local governments around the country quickly took action to keep other such hippie fests out of their backyards.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld quit the partnership. To settle more than $1 million in debts from Woodstock, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman sold film and soundtrack rights to Warner Bros.; according to Mr. Rosenman, it took about a decade for Woodstock Ventures to break even. Mr. Roberts died in 2001, and in 2006 a performing arts center and museum, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, was opened on the site of the 1969 festival.Mr. Lang in 2018, when the ill-fated 2019 Woodstock concert was in the planning stages.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesIn 1971, Mr. Lang formed a record label, Just Sunshine, which signed artists including the folk singer Karen Dalton and the funk singer Betty Davis. He also managed Joe Cocker, whose memorable performance at Woodstock helped build his fame. Mr. Lang was also involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 — the latter marred by fires, rioting and allegations of sexual assault — and he eventually rejoined Woodstock Ventures as a minority partner.That company holds the trademark and other intellectual property rights for the Woodstock festival, including the image of a dove on a guitar that was part of its first poster. Among its many licensing deals was one for Woodstock Cannabis.Mr. Lang is survived by his wife, Tamara Pajic Lang; two sons, Harry and Laszlo; his daughters Molly Lang, LariAnn Lang and Shala Lang Moll; a grandson; and his sister, Iris Brest.In 2019, Mr. Lang attempted to revive Woodstock for a 50th-anniversary concert in Watkins Glen, N.Y., that would feature Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Chance the Rapper, Santana and Imagine Dragons. But the event collapsed amid a legal battle with its financial backer, an arm of the Japanese advertising conglomerate Dentsu.To make the 50th-anniversary show stand out in a market that had become crowded with large-scale festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, Mr. Lang envisioned the new event as one that would make social and environmental activism central to its experience, and hark back to its roots.“It just seems like it’s a perfect time,” he said in an interview with The Times, “for a Woodstock kind of reminder.” More

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      Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies

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      Within one decade, the ’70s, he was transformed from one of the most celebrated of filmmakers, notably for “The Last Picture Show,” into one of the most ostracized.Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.As a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past — bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself.Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” — only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost — on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.Mr. Bogdanovich with Cybill Shepherd on the set of “The Last Picture Show” (1971). Only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film, it is widely considered his best.Columbia Pictures“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”What was more, Mr. Bogdanovich’s life and work would be affected by violent, almost unimaginable personal loss.Yet in a business that rarely grants second acts, he enjoyed a professional renaissance, both behind the camera and in front of it, in the 21st century. To television viewers of the period, he was probably best known for his recurring role on the HBO drama “The Sopranos.” He portrayed Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist who treats Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco.Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”As a writer and critic, a calling he pursued in the 1960s, he was the author of influential monographs on Hollywood directors before he was out of his 20s.As a director, he blazed to fame in the early ’70s as the auteur of three critically acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show,” based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of small-town Texas life; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a contemporary twist on 1930s screwball comedies, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, about a Depression-era confidence man.Mr. Bogdanovich’s life, it turned out, was bracketed by loss. For as he would discover, he had been born to a family defined by absence.Ryan O’Neal as a con man in 1930s Kansas and Tatum O’Neal as the girl who may or may not be his daughter in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” (1973). Ms. O’Neal won an Academy Award for her performance.Paramount Pictures, via PhotofestA Son of ImmigrantsThe son of Borislav and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in upstate Kingston, N.Y., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents were recent immigrants to the United States — his father a Serbian painter, his mother a member of a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family.The Bogdanovich home, Mr. Bogdanovich recalled long afterward, was pervaded by melancholy. His father was silent and withdrawn. Throughout Peter’s boyhood, their rare moments of camaraderie came when the elder Mr. Bogdanovich took his son to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art.When Peter was about 8, he learned the source of the family sorrow: He had had an older brother, who died as a baby after a pot of boiling soup was accidentally spilled on him.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Mr. Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Mr. Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”By this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures — sound and silent alike. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards.Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system — by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart — beckoned to him above all.“I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”As a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.At 20, he directed an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s drama “The Big Knife.” (The cast included a young Carroll O’Connor.) Around this time, he began writing on film for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He helped program Golden Age pictures for the New Yorker Theater, a Manhattan revival house, and for MoMA.Mr. Bogdanovich with Alfred Hitchcock, one of several noted directors about whom he wrote a series of monographs for the Museum of Modern Art.Universal, via Kobal/ShutterstockFor MoMA, Mr. Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols.Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. (Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Ford. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.)He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002.Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)Hollywood-BoundMr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies — among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) — strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.For Mr. Corman, Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.But it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich cherished. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers — a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen — are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.For its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. Bogdanovich and Ms. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures.Cloris Leachman and Timothy Bottoms in “The Last Picture Show.” The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won two, including one for Ms. Leachman.Columbia PicturesThat film, with screenplay by Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. McMurtry, centers on life and love in a down-at-the-heels town in the early 1950s. Shot in stark black and white in Mr. McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, Texas, the movie, designed by Ms. Platt, portrays a world of boarded-up storefronts and blowing dust.The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line.It also included veterans like Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, who at midcentury had been a member of Ford’s stock company.“The Last Picture Show,” too, is a valentine to old Hollywood. At the town’s fading movie house, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 comedy, “Father of the Bride,” is playing. When the theater is forced to close, the last picture shown there is Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), starring the indomitable John Wayne.Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, “The Last Picture Show” won two, for the performances of Ms. Leachman and Mr. Johnson.The film catapulted Mr. Bogdanovich to the first rank of Hollywood directors. It also upended his personal life. He left Ms. Platt and their two young children for Ms. Shepherd, embarking on an eight-year relationship that furnished ceaseless grist for Hollywood gossip columns.Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972).Warner Bros.His professional success continued with “What’s Up, Doc?,” a reworking of Hawks’s 1938 comedy, “Bringing Up Baby,” and again with “Paper Moon.”Set in dust-blown 1930s Kansas, “Paper Moon” brought an Oscar to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for her performance as a scrappy girl who may or may not be the con man’s daughter. (Despite her divorce from Mr. Bogdanovich, Ms. Platt designed this film and “What’s Up, Doc?”)After the Hits, DudsBut after the wild success of the early 1970s came a string of creative debacles. Two vehicles Mr. Bogdanovich conceived to star Ms. Shepherd incurred critical vitriol: “Daisy Miller,” his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s 1870s novella, and the musical “At Long Last Love” (1975), also starring Burt Reynolds.“Produced for $15 million, this ‘musical’ was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted,” The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1990. “Critics compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to an orphan trying to play Noël Coward. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich’s ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”His next film, “Nickelodeon” (1976), an overt homage to early cinema starring Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Reynolds, was also critically derided. But there was far worse to come.In the late 1970s, after his romance with Ms. Shepherd had ended, Mr. Bogdanovich met the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. They fell in love, and Ms. Stratten, who was married, left her husband to move in with him.Mr. Bogdanovich gave her a small role in his caper “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. But in August 1980, before it was released, her estranged husband, Paul Snider, shot her to death before taking his own life. (The murder of Ms. Stratten, 20 at her death, would be the subject of a 1983 feature film, “Star 80,” directed by Bob Fosse and starring Mariel Hemingway.)Mr. Bogdanovich with Dorothy Stratten, who was also his partner, on the set of his “They All Laughed” (1980). Before the film was released, Ms. Stratten’s estranged husband shot her to death and then took his own life.DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAfterward, Mr. Bogdanovich was reported to have watched “They All Laughed” — which preserves Ms. Stratten’s last film performance — over and over, as if communing with a ghost.Released in 1981, the film was a critical and box-office failure. Dissatisfied with its promotion, Mr. Bogdanovich bought the rights and tried to distribute it himself. It proved a disastrous decision, costing him some $5 million.In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.”One thing he did that he said he came to regret was to write a biography of Ms. Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn,” which was equal parts adoration and accusation. Published in 1984, it contended that Mr. Hefner, in commodifying her, had been partly responsible for her death.Mr. Hefner retaliated with a bombshell of his own: He publicly accused Mr. Bogdanovich of having seduced Ms. Stratten’s younger half sister, Louise, shortly after the murder, when Louise was 13, below the age of consent.Mr. Bogdanovich denied the accusation. But it was a matter of record that he paid for Louise’s education; arranged for her to have corrective surgery on her jaw — an act, his detractors said, that was intended to make her look more like her dead sister — and, in 1988, when Louise was 20, married her, causing a frenzy of tabloid opprobrium.Louise Stratten, billed as L.B. Stratten, appeared in several films and TV movies directed by Mr. Bogdanovich. They divorced in 2001.“She was like a contact with Dorothy, as far as I was concerned,” Mr. Bogdanovich, speaking of the marriage, told The New York Times the next year. “There was garbage talk that I made Louise have facial surgery — to look like Dorothy. ‘Vertigo’ stuff.”‘I’m Not Bitter’Mr. Bogdanovich seemed to return to directorial form in 1985 with “Mask,” a well-received picture starring Cher as the mother of a boy with a facial deformity.But he alienated the Hollywood establishment once more by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, Universal Pictures, and the producer, Martin Starger, for cutting two scenes and substituting music by Bob Seger for the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack that Mr. Bogdanovich favored. (The suit was later withdrawn.)Several critical failures followed, including “Illegally Yours” (1988), a romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe; “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show”; and “The Thing Called Love” (1993), a comedy-drama about country music.In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.From the mid-’90s through the first years of the 21st century, Mr. Bogdanovich resorted to directing for television. His credits include the TV movies “Prowler” (1995) and “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998) and an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney.”But the medium, he said, taught him economy and speed. He returned to the big screen in 2001 with “The Cat’s Meow,” his first feature in nearly a decade. Made for just $6 million, it was shot in only 24 days.Mr. Bogdanovich and Kirsten Dunst on the set of “The Cat’s Meow” (2001), his first feature in nearly a decade.Richard Foreman/Lions Gate FilmsThat film, too, is a paean to old Hollywood. It tells the story — based on a long-suppressed incident that for years ran through the industry in whispers — of a fatal shooting in 1924 aboard the yacht of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.“The Cat’s Meow” — starring Edward Herrmann as Hearst; Kirsten Dunst as his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies; and Eddie Izzard as her lover Charlie Chaplin — earned mostly favorable notices.Mr. Bogdanovich’s luster was also restored with his publication of two acclaimed books: “Who the Devil Made It” (1997), a collection of his interviews with eminent directors, and “Who the Hell’s in It” (2004), about great actors and actresses.Later features he directed include “She’s Funny That Way” (2014) and “The Great Buster,” a documentary about Buster Keaton, in 2018.Mr. Bogdanovich in 2005. “Success is very hard,” he said late in his career. “Nobody prepares you for it.”Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressIn addition to his daughter Antonia, he is survived by another daughter, Alexandra (both from his marriage to Ms. Platt); a sister, Anna Bogdanovich; and three grandchildren.Among Mr. Bogdanovich’s other films as a director are “Saint Jack” (1979), starring Mr. Gazzara as an American who aims to open a bordello in Singapore; “Noises Off …” (1992), an adaptation of a play by Michael Frayn; and the documentary “Directed by John Ford” (1971).In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bogdanovich offered a cleareyed appraisal of his career.“I’m not bitter,” he said. “I asked for it. Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.”But when it came to one of his detractors, at least, Mr. Bogdanovich appeared to have the last laugh. His later-life acting roles included two appearances, in 2005 and 2007, on the NBC series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”In both episodes, Mr. Bogdanovich, always a wicked mimic, played to the hilt a sybaritic, smoking-jacket-clad, thinly veiled incarnation of Hugh Hefner.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Dwayne Hickman, TV’s Lovelorn Dobie Gillis, Is Dead at 87

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      He went on to appear in movies and other TV shows and to work as a television executive, but the role of Dobie would dog him for decades.Dwayne Hickman, the affable, apple-cheeked actor whose starring role in the revered sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” would dog him for more than half a century, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 87. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, a spokesman for his family said. Broadcast on CBS from 1959 to 1963, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” was an essential ingredient of adolescence for the postwar generation and remained popular in syndication for years. Mr. Hickman became one of TV’s first teenage idols for his portrayal of its lovelorn hero, and he remained indelibly identified with the character ever after, a fate he bore with genial resignation.“Dobie Gillis” followed the fortunes of its hero, his friends and family in Central City, a community whose precise location was never specified but that in all its wholesomeness seemed eminently Midwestern.Dobie, 17 when the show begins, is Everyteen. (Early in the series, Mr. Hickman’s brown hair was bleached blond to make him look as cornfed as possible, until the peroxide treatments began to make his hair fall out.) He pines ardently, in the words of the show’s jazzy theme song, for “a girl to call his own,” and just as ardently for the financial wherewithal to squire that girl around.For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager’s point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker,” gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul.Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie’s best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps “Work!” at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment. Mr. Denver would go on to star in “Gilligan’s Island.”Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie’s affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate. Dobie’s cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.)Mr. Hickman had begun his screen career — reluctantly — some two decades earlier, trailing in the footsteps of his brother, Darryl, three years older and initially far better known. Darryl Hickman, whose fame was eventually eclipsed by Dwayne’s, would play Dobie’s big brother, Davey, in a few episodes of the show’s first season.Mr. Hickman, center, with Mr. Denver and Sheila James in a “Dobie Gillis” reunion special in the 1980s.CBSBy the time “Dobie Gillis” ran its course, Dwayne Hickman had become so closely identified with the title character that he had difficulty landing other roles. He was too old by then to play a teenager in any case: He had been 25 when “Dobie” began and was 29 when it ended.As a result, his career over the following decades wove in and out of Hollywood, embracing stints as the entertainment director for Howard Hughes’s Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas, an advertising man, a network programming executive and, in later years, a successful painter of realist landscapes.But for decades after his series ended, Mr. Hickman could scarcely walk down an American street without a stranger stopping, staring and joyfully calling out, “Hi, Dobie!” as if greeting a long-lost friend.Dwayne Bernard Hickman was born in Los Angeles on May 18, 1934. His father, Milton, was an insurance man; his mother, the former Louise Ostertag, had had designs on stardom herself, but, as Louise Lang, made it only as far as extra work in a few Hollywood pictures.As an adult, Mr. Hickman said that he had never planned on an acting career and had never particularly wanted one. He landed his first screen role by accident, when his mother brought him along to Darryl’s audition for “The Grapes of Wrath,” the 1940 Henry Fonda vehicle. Darryl won a part as one of the Joad children; Dwayne was cast as an extra, earning $21. Dwayne’s other childhood screen appearances included roles on the TV series “Public Defender,” “The Loretta Young Show” and “The Lone Ranger” and in the films “The Boy With Green Hair” (1948) and “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!” (1958), based on a novel by Max Shulman, the creator of “Dobie Gillis.” He received his broadest exposure yet when he was cast in “The Bob Cummings Show” (also called “Love That Bob”) as Chuck, the nephew of Mr. Cummings’s character; the series was broadcast variously on NBC and CBS from 1955 to 1959. While working on that show, he was also a full-time student at what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Though the demands of his screen career caused him to leave before graduating, he later returned and completed a bachelor’s degree in economics there.Once Mr. Hickman became a nationwide heartthrob as Dobie — other actors considered for the role had included Tab Hunter and Michael Landon — his handlers attempted to cash in by turning him into a singing star. By his own ready admission Mr. Hickman could not sing. The two resulting albums, “School Dance” and “Dobie,” he later wrote, “didn’t exactly top the Billboard charts. ”Mr. Hickman in 1965.  Starting in 1977, he spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, and he later directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.” Graphic House/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesHis post-“Dobie” credits include the film “Cat Ballou,” with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, but consist mostly of trifles like “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965); two TV reunions, “Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?” (1977) and “Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis” (1988); and, in the 1990s, a recurring role on the series “Clueless.”Starting in 1977, Mr. Hickman spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, where he supervised the content and development of series including “Maude,” “Good Times,” “M*A*S*H” and “Alice.” He directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.”Mr. Hickman’s first marriage, to Carol Christensen, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Joanne Papile. His survivors include his third wife, Joan Roberts Hickman; their son, Albert; and a son, John, from his first marriage.In his 1994 memoir, “Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman,” written with Ms. Roberts Hickman, Mr. Hickman recounts what happened when he took her to the hospital to await the birth of their son. “When I walked into the labor room, a nurse was asking her questions as she filled out her chart,” he wrote. “When she finished, she looked up and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Gillis, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’’Mr. Hickman continued: “Joan grabbed my hand and said, ‘Promise that if anything happens to me you won’t name this boy Dobie!’ ” More