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      in Movies

      Marcia Nasatir, Who Broke a Glass Ceiling in Hollywood, Dies at 95

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      A former book editor and agent, she got her first movie studio job, at United Artists, when she was 48. She insisted on being hired as a vice president.Marcia Nasatir, who was the first woman to become a vice president of a major Hollywood studio — although, unlike some female executives who followed her, she never got to run one — died on Aug. 3 in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 95.Her sons, Mark and Seth, confirmed the death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Country Home and Hospital.Ms. Nasatir — “the first mogulette,” as she called herself in her email address — was a forerunner of female Hollywood executives like Sherry Lansing, who became the first woman to head production for a studio at 20th Century Fox in 1980, and Dawn Steel, who achieved another first when she was named president of Columbia Studios seven years later.“She was a grande dame, our first female elder,” Lucy Fisher, a former vice chairwoman of Columbia TriStar Pictures, said by phone. “She gave me my first job, as a reader, at United Artists. And she helped me get my next job, with Samuel Goldwyn Jr.“She asked me: ‘Do you really want the job? Then go back and put on a pair of hose.’ I said, ‘Marcia, I don’t own a pair of hose,’ and she said, ‘Good luck.’”Ms. Nasatir began her path to Hollywood as a single mother in New York in the 1950s, when she was hired as a secretary at Grey Advertising. After successful stints as an editor at Dell Publishing and Bantam Books, she left for Hollywood to become a literary agent; her clients included the screenwriters Robert Towne and William Goldman.In 1974, she approached Mike Medavoy, a former top agent who had just been named vice president of production at United Artists. “I hear you’re moving to United Artists,” she said, recalling the conversation years later in “A Classy Broad: Marcia’s Adventures in Hollywood” (2016), a documentary directed by Anne Goursaud. “I think he said, ‘I’m going to need a good story editor,’ and I said, ‘How about me?’”They met soon after for breakfast, and he offered her a story editor position, in which she would look for books, scripts and plays to turn into movies. It was a traditional job for women in Hollywood. But, at 48, she wanted more and demanded that she be hired as a vice president. (Her title was vice president of motion picture development.)“It seemed to me,” she told The Arizona Republic in 1985, “that I would be a more effective employee, and my opinions would be more respected by writers and actors, if I had the title of vice president instead of story editor.”Mr. Medavoy, in a phone interview, said that Ms. Nasatir had brought “taste and reach” to United Artists.“She was strong-willed and tough but really fair,” he said, “and she got everybody to sign on to being that way, to being collegial.”Ms. Nasatir with Mike Medavoy, who hired her at United Artists. “She was strong-willed and tough,” Mr. Medavoy recalled, “but really fair.”A Classy Broad/Marcia Nasatir ProductionsMs. Nasatir worked closely with Mr. Medavoy from 1974 to 1978, a fruitful period for United Artists that begot films like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Carrie,” the 1976 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Bound for Glory” and “Coming Home” — whose female lead, Jane Fonda, thanked Ms. Nasatir when she accepted her Oscar for best actress.It was Ms. Nasatir who gave Sylvester Stallone’s screenplay for “Rocky” to the producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. The film won the Oscar for best picture and had a worldwide gross of more than $117 million (nearly $555 million in today’s money).“‘Rocky’ is, of course, the perfect fairy tale,” Ms. Nasatir said in “A Classy Broad.”Her tenure at United Artists did not have a fairy-tale ending. When Mr. Medavoy and four other executives, including the chairman, Arthur Krim, left United Artists to create Orion Pictures in early 1978, they did not ask her to join them as a partner. And she did not get Mr. Medavoy’s job at United Artists, where he had been in charge of worldwide production; it went to a man, Danton Risser.She resigned and joined Orion as a vice president, hoping that her former colleagues would make her a partner. But that did not happen.“They didn’t want to split things six ways, and didn’t value what my contribution was,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.Mr. Medavoy said in the interview that it was “interesting” that Ms. Nasatir had felt disappointed at not being asked to be a partner at Orion. “Was it because she was a woman? No,” he said. “It was the fact that there were five of us already.”Marcia Birenberg was born on May 8, 1926, in Brooklyn and grew up in San Antonio. Her father, Jack, sold cloth for men’s fine woolen apparel; her mother, Sophie (Weprinsky) Birenberg, had been a garment worker in New York City before her wedding and talked about going on strike “as one of the greatest moments in her life,” Ms. Nasatir once said.Wanting to be a newspaperwoman, Ms. Nasatir studied journalism at Northwestern University and the University of Texas, Austin, but did not graduate.In 1947 she married Mort Nasatir, who was later president of MGM Records and publisher of Billboard magazine; the marriage ended in divorce after six years. She joined Grey Advertising in about 1955 and left after a few years for another secretarial job, at Dell, where she worked for the publisher. While there, she became an editor and recommended that Dell buy the paperback rights to “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller’s dark satirical novel about World War II. Within a year of its publication in 1962, it had sold two million copies.Ms. Nasatir in 2017. In recent years she and the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. had reviewed movies online as “Reel Geezers.” Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressMs. Nasatir moved on to Bantam Books, where her biggest coup was suggesting that the company publish the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy within days of its release in 1964, kicking off the genre of “instant” books. She also worked on acquiring paperback rights to books that were being adapted for movies, a role that brought her into contact with Evarts Ziegler, a Hollywood agent, who hired her for his agency in 1969.She left after five years because Mr. Ziegler would not raise her $25,000 salary (about $146,000 today).“He said, ‘You don’t have anyone to support; a man has a family support,’” she recalled in “A Classy Broad.” “And I said: ‘Zig, I support myself. Why shouldn’t I make as much as a man?’”United Artists offered her $50,000, and after her four years there and one year at Orion, she was briefly an independent producer before being hired to run the film division of Johnny Carson’s company Carson Productions. While there she agreed to take on, when other studios would not, Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Big Chill” (1983), about former college classmates who gather for the funeral of one from their circle. She became its executive producer, and it proved to be a moderate box office success and an enduring favorite among many baby boomers.From then on, her career toggled between holding executive positions, with Fox and Phoenix Pictures (which Mr. Medavoy co-founded), and producing films, including “Hamburger Hill” and “Ironweed” (both in 1987), “Vertical Limit” (2000) and “Death Defying Acts” (2008).Starting in 2008, Ms. Nasatir and the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., who had been a client of hers when she was an agent, reviewed movies online as “Reel Geezers.” Close friends, they were passionate and deeply informed about moviemaking. He could be dyspeptic. She was more laid back. They kibitzed. They squabbled.In addition to her sons, she is survived by two granddaughters and a sister, Rose Spector, the first woman elected to the Texas Supreme Court.Being hired at United Artists had historic significance for Ms. Nasatir, because the studio’s founders had included the actress Mary Pickford. But despite that precedent, she was not destined to run United Artists — or any other studio.“If I had been born 20 years later, I would have been the head of a studio, which I would have liked,” she told Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter in 2013. “But I’m content with how things turned out for me and happy to see other women carry the torch even further.” More

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      in Theater

      Elka Schumann, Matriarch of the Bread and Puppet Theater, Dies at 85

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      She and her husband ran a Vermont-based troupe that has taken on social and political issues in productions featuring enormous puppets.Elka Schumann, who with her husband, Peter, ran the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, known for its countercultural messaging through avant-garde puppeteering, died on Aug. 1 in a hospital in Newport, Vt. She was 85.The cause was a stroke, her son Max Schumann said.As its name suggests, the Bread and Puppet Theater is dedicated to two types of art: baking and puppetry. Fresh sourdough bread, milled and baked by Mr. Schumann, was distributed to troupe members and the audience while monstrous papier-mâché puppets, propelled by actors inside them, told stories that took on social and political causes like housing inequality and antiwar and anti-draft activism.Among the recurring characters was the troupe’s first antagonist, Uncle Fatso, whose roles included a slumlord and allegorical representations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The troupe’s productions included renditions of plays by the leftist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and shows based on the diaries of the anarchist Emma Goldman.The critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a visit to Bread and Puppet Theater in 2007 as surreal, “an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle experience.”The Schumanns ran their operation out of a farm in Glover, Vt., in the northeast part of the state, and toured the country in a sky-blue school bus with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun painted on it. The company made a point of putting on shows in underserved communities and involving children from there in making costumes and sometimes performing.But the troupe was best known for its annual festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a puppet-dense two-day Woodstock-like affair with a pageant, a parade and politically bent skits about climate change, global consumerism and nuclear annihilation. For many years the event, “a countercultural spectacle,” drew crowds of nearly 40,000 and was the troupe’s main source of funding, John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, wrote in a paper.A 1995 performance by members of the Bread and Puppet Theater. For many years they put on a puppet-heavy, Woodstock-like annual festival called Our Domestic Resurrection Circus.Craig Line/Associated PressThe Resurrection Circus started in 1970 but abruptly ended in 1998 after a fight broke out on the grounds resulting in a man’s death.Ms. Schumann was an avowed anticapitalist, and the farm in Glover, complete with livestock and a maple-sugaring operation, became her own quasi-society operating on socialist principles. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.She also managed The Bread and Puppet Press, which distributed pamphlets, broadsheets and posters delivering political and cultural commentary. In a manifesto titled “Why Cheap Art,” which she printed on posters, Ms. Schumann wrote: “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you.”It continued: “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!”Ms. Schumann with her husband, Peter, in 2003. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.Associated PressElka Leigh Scott was born on Aug. 29, 1935, one of two girls, in Magnitogorsk, a city in Russia about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Her mother, Maria Ivanova (Dikareva) Scott, was a teacher. Her father, John Scott, was an American who worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. Her parents had supported the Russian Revolution.When Elka was young, as German forces invaded, the family fled the country, taking a train to Japan and an ocean liner to Hawaii before continuing on to San Francisco. They lived for a time in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City and spent four years in Berlin after the war before returning to the United States in 1949, settling in Ridgefield, Conn.Elka attended Ridgefield High School for three years before transferring to the private Putney School in Vermont, where her grandfather Scott Nearing, a prominent left-wing economist, was a lecturer. She went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in art history in 1958.In a 2016 oral history with the Vermont Historical Society, Ms. Schumann said that her first years at Bryn Mawr were somewhat disappointing: Her classmates spent more time darning socks for their boyfriends than anything else.In her junior year she studied abroad in Munich, where she met Peter Schumann. They married in 1959 and had five children while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they started the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963. The heated political climate of the ’60s made the couple’s work more urgent.Some of the company’s first performances were street parades and protests supporting rent strikes and the labor movement. One protest involved Mr. Schumann parading a puppet of Jesus in Manhattan holding a sign that simply said, “Vietnam.”The family moved to Plainfield, Vt., in 1970, and lived on a farm there for four years until Ms. Schumann’s father purchased the Glover farm that became Bread and Puppet’s home, complete with a museum.In addition to her son Max, Ms. Schumann is survived by her husband; another son, Salih; three daughters, Solvieg, Tamar and Tjasa Maria Schumann; five grandchildren; and her sister, Elena Scott Whiteside.In 2001, Tamar Schumann and the activist DeeDee Halleck made a documentary film titled “AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet.”Ms. Schumann was buried in a pine grove on the farm. More

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      in Music

      Walter Yetnikoff, Powerful but Abrasive Record Executive, Dies at 87

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      Mr. Yetnikoff led CBS Records during the boom years that included Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album. Then he fell from grace.Walter Yetnikoff, who led CBS Records during the boom years of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album and lived the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll life more indulgently than many of his stars did, died on Monday at a hospital in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 87.His wife, Lynda Yetnikoff, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Yetnikoff was one of the most powerful, insatiable and abrasive figures in music in the years just before the digital revolution upended the business.He was among a small group of powerful executives who shaped the record business in the rock era, including Clive Davis (who led Columbia Records and founded Arista Records), David Geffen of Asylum and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic. He strode through those heady days of hit records brashly, licentiously and, by his own admission, often drunk or drug-addled.Though he never claimed to have much of an ear for music, he was adept at pacifying the stars on his roster — who in addition to Mr. Jackson included Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand and Billy Joel — and at outmaneuvering competitors and perceived enemies, at least into the late 1980s.Then came a hard fall.In 1990, Mr. Yetnikoff, having offended too many people with his outrageous behavior, was dismissed by Sony, the company that at his urging had bought CBS Records only three years earlier. He had gone into rehab in 1989 and kicked the booze and drugs that had been his more or less daily diet throughout his reign, but getting clean didn’t make him any more tolerable.“I would go into meetings and ask people to hold hands and say the serenity prayer,” he told The New York Times in 2004, in an interview occasioned by the publication of his eyebrow-raising autobiography, “Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess,” written with David Ritz.Tommy Mottola, once a friend and later, as Mr. Yetnikoff’s successor at CBS Records, viewed as an enemy, put it this way in his own autobiography, “Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” (2013): “The treatment center had removed the alcohol and drugs from Walter’s life — but not the underlying problems that Walter had been using them to anesthetize.”Walter Roy Yetnikoff was born on Aug. 11, 1933, in Brooklyn. His father, Max, worked for the city painting hospitals, and his mother, Bella (Zweibel) Yetnikoff, was a bookkeeper. In his book, Mr. Yetnikoff described a difficult childhood that included regular beatings by his father.At Brooklyn College he grew bored with engineering and switched his studies to pre-law. An uncle paid for his first year at Columbia Law School, where he did well enough that he earned a scholarship for his next two years. Upon graduating, he joined the firm Rosenman & Colin. The other young lawyers there included Clive Davis, who would go on to have his own enormous influence on the music business.Mr. Davis soon moved to the legal department at Columbia Records, a division of CBS, and in 1961 he brought Mr. Yetnikoff on board there, luring him with a salary of $10,000 a year (about $90,000 today).“It wasn’t a money move,” Mr. Yetnikoff told Rolling Stone in 1988. “I thought it would be interesting, exciting. And I got my own office and a telephone with, like, four buttons on it.”His phone at his old job, he said, had no buttons.Mr. Yetnikoff with Michael Jackson and the filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who directed the 18-minute video for Mr. Jackson’s song “Bad” in 1986.Sam Emerson/ABCFor a time the careers of Mr. Davis and Mr. Yetnikoff ascended in tandem. By 1967, Mr. Davis was president of Columbia, and within a few years Mr. Yetnikoff was president of the international division of CBS Records. Mr. Davis lost his job in a financial scandal in 1973, and in 1975 Mr. Yetnikoff essentially replaced him, becoming president of the CBS Records Group, which included Columbia and other labels.In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Yetnikoff somewhat reluctantly let Ron Alexenburg, the head of CBS’s Epic label, sign the Jacksons. Epic had wrested the group from Motown Records (which retained the rights to the group’s original name, the Jackson 5), and though Mr. Yetnikoff wasn’t overly impressed with the Jacksons’ initial albums for Epic, he cultivated a relationship with the group’s key member, Michael, supporting the young singer’s interest in expanding into solo work.In 1982, that encouragement resulted in “Thriller,” still one of the top-selling albums in history. Mr. Jackson brought Mr. Yetnikoff onstage, calling him “the best president of any record company,” when he accepted one of eight Grammy Awards at the 1984 ceremony.“That’s unheard-of,” Mr. Yetnikoff bragged afterward, according to Fredric Dannen’s book “Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business” (1990). “You don’t bring record executives up at the Grammys, ’cause no one’s interested. I went back to CBS and said, ‘Give me another $2 million for that!’”Other megahits released during Mr. Yetnikoff’s tenure included Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” in 1977, the ambitious Pink Floyd double album “The Wall” in 1979, Mr. Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1984, Mr. Jackson’s “Bad” in 1987 and a series of hit albums by Mr. Joel, including “The Stranger” (1977) and “Glass Houses” (1980).Mr. Yetnikoff was not known to be a discoverer of hits or talent. His strengths were in developing relationships with artists, negotiating contracts and easing his stars’ concerns about promotional budgets and a host of other things.“I sometimes feel like their shrink, their rabbi, priest, marriage counselor, banker,” he said in a 1984 interview with The Times. “I know more about their personal lives than I’d like to know.”His wild-man persona seemed to grow in proportion to his power. When he entered the record business, he was an unobtrusive family man. He married June May Horowitz in 1957, and they had a son; a second son arrived in 1962.Mr. Yetnikoff, right, presented gold records to Vera Zorina, the widow of the former Columbia Records president Goddard Lieberson, and the director and choreographer Michael Bennett for the original cast album of “A Chorus Line” in New York in 1978.Carlos Rene Perez/Associated PressBut his ascension was accompanied by numerous affairs, which he detailed, along with his substance abuse, in his autobiography. Other record executives from the period wrote their stories, too, but Mr. Yetnikoff’s was in a class by itself. It was, Forbes said, “a portrait of such out-of-control megalomania that any music executive today, no matter how egotistical or ruthless, has to look better by comparison.”Many people tolerated and even enjoyed him at first, but not everyone.“He treated artists like they were objects, not human beings,” Sharon Osbourne, wife and manager of the rocker Ozzy Osbourne, was quoted as saying in Mr. Mottola’s book. “On top of that, he was the poster boy for misogyny.”In the mid-1980s, Mr. Yetnikoff’s name surfaced in an NBC News report on payola in the record business that focused on independent promoters and their possible ties to organized crime. But CBS came to his defense, and he survived.“Did the ‘Nightly News’ scandal change me?” Mr. Yetnikoff wrote in his book. “If anything, I became more defiant, more arrogant, more contemptuous of my adversaries.”He added: “I charged full steam ahead. I might have been middle-aged, but I adopted the youthful battle cry of more sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I wanted more of everything, and I wanted it with a vengeance.”Eventually, he went too far too often. The stars whose photographs covered the walls of his office began spurning him. Up-and-coming executives, including some he had mentored, eclipsed him. In the summer of 1989, a doctor told him he would be dead soon if he didn’t get clean, which scared him into rehab but didn’t save his career.After being ousted at Sony, Mr. Yetnikoff tried making a movie about Miles Davis (Wesley Snipes was to star), but the project collapsed. Then he tried founding his own record label, Velvel Music Group — Velvel was his Yiddish name — but it failed after three years.“If I had still been drinking, I’d have drunk myself to death,” he wrote of the period after his fall. “But without drink or drugs to annihilate my true feelings, I had to cope with a condition that had existed for much of my adult life: acute depression. While I was running the free world, I could assuage those dark spells by ranting and raging, by antagonizing associates and turning daily tasks into high drama. By yelling, I could move mountains. Suddenly there was no one to yell at.”Mr. Yetnikoff in 2004. “I sometimes feel like their shrink, their rabbi, priest, marriage counselor, banker,” he once said of his stars in an interview with The Times. “I know more about their personal lives than I’d like to know.”G. Paul Burnett/The New York TimesMr. Yetnikoff’s first marriage ended in divorce, as did his second, to Cynthia Slamar. He married Lynda Kady in 2007. In addition to her, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Michael and Daniel; a sister, Carol Goldstein; and four grandchildren. In his later years, Mr. Yetnikoff generally kept a low profile, volunteering for addiction and recovery organizations. Mr. Yetnikoff’s book includes a chapter on a trip he took to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1987, when Mr. Joel performed there. He was surprised, he wrote, when he was not received there with acclaim and deference. The chapter opens with a sentence that perhaps sums up his record-business career as a whole, a dizzying period when he let his power distort his perspective.“Delusions of grandeur,” he wrote, “are especially infectious for the semigrand.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      Kelli Hand, Detroit D.J. and Music Industry Trailblazer, Dies at 56

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      In 2017, the Detroit City Council honored Ms. Hand as the “first lady of Detroit” for her contributions to the techno music scene.Kelli Hand, a longtime disc jockey known as K-Hand who was named the “first lady of Detroit” for her musical accomplishments, was found dead on Aug. 3 at her home in Detroit. She was 56.Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Wayne County medical examiner, who said that the cause was related to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.Paramount Artists, which represented Ms. Hand, paid tribute to her on social media.“Kelli was undoubtedly the first lady of Detroit, and a trailblazer for women in the music industry,” the company said on Instagram.Ms. Hand was one of the first female D.J.s in Detroit’s music scene and became known for her catalog of albums and extended plays of house and techno with the start of her own label, Acacia Records, in 1990.In 2017, the Detroit City Council honored Ms. Hand with a resolution that called her the “first lady of Detroit” for being a pioneer in the city’s techno music scene and for being “an international legend” who toured clubs and electronic music festivals.The certificate highlighted some of her accomplishments in the male-dominated industry of electronic music in the 1990s, including being the first woman to release house and techno music.“Such an Honor and exciting,” Ms. Hand wrote on Instagram at the time.YouTube videos captured Ms. Hand wearing a headset and smiling and dancing in place as she entertained crowds with her mixes of bouncy beats at nightclubs and events while touring the world.Ms. Hand, whose legal given name was Kelley, was born on Sept. 15, 1964, and raised in Detroit, where her childhood revolved around music, particularly the drums, according to her website.Her passion for rhythm led her to study music theory in college in New York. She also enhanced her music education in the 1980s by frequenting the Paradise Garage nightclub, where, her site says, she soaked up the sounds of the emergent genre of music that would become known as house.In a 2015 interview with The Detroit Metro Times, she reflected on her interest in spinning records after visiting the club in New York City and others in Chicago.“After frequenting Paradise Garage so many times I wanted to buy the records because I loved the music,” she told The Metro Times. “So the next step was, I got to play these records in order to hear them! That led to purchasing a couple turntables, which also led me to D.J.ing in my own bedroom,” she said, adding that doing so led her to do a residence at Zipper’s Nightclub in Detroit.Ms. Hand also talked about how the D.J. scene was dominated by men when she was starting out and how that played a role in using the gender-neutral name K-Hand for her own music.“I wanted to come out with something that was kind of catchy,” she recalled. “At the same time, I didn’t want people to know that I was a girl, because I was just minding the music business. I’m like, OK, what’s going to happen if my name comes out, and I’m a girl, because mostly it’s a lot of guys? This was back in the day. So the label suggested ‘K-HAND.’”On her website, she said that music was not about how someone looks or about the D.J.’s skills but about “being ‘true’ to yourself, and having the ability to express yourself creatively through your own self-confidence that is within you.”Some of her better-known songs include “Think About It,” “Flash Back” and her 1994 breakout single, “Global Warning,” on the British label Warp Records. Billboard said those songs “put her in league” with Detroit’s other top disc jockeys.In a 2000 review in The New York Times about female disc jockeys and rappers taking part in a music festival, Ms. Hand talked about independent record production. When she took over the dance floor, the writer said, “a sense of freedom was thick in the air.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Neil Vigdor More

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      in Television

      Trevor Moore, Co-Founder of ‘Whitest Kids U’Know’ Comedy Show, Dies at 41

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      The comedian, who released a solo album called “Drunk Texts to Myself” and whose films included “The Civil War on Drugs,” was killed in an unexplained accident.Trevor Moore, a comedian and co-founder of the popular sketch comedy show “The Whitest Kids U’Know,” which appeared on the Independent Film Channel, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 41.His death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County medical examiner-coroner, who said that Mr. Moore had died in a yard on a residential block in the Franklin Hills section of the city, the same block where public records showed that he had lived.He was killed in an accident, according to a statement from his wife, Aimee Carlson, that was released by his manager, Kara Welker. The statement did not provide details of the accident, and Ms. Welker said she did not have additional information. The medical examiner’s office said it would conduct an autopsy.Mr. Moore released a solo comedy album, “Drunk Texts to Myself”; hosted a one-hour special on Comedy Central; and co-directed, co-wrote and starred in the films “Miss March” (2009) and “The Civil War on Drugs” (2011).But he is best known for his work on “Whitest Kids U’Know,” which ran for five seasons starting in 2007. Zany and wry, it sought to wring laughs out of thorny issues like police brutality, the war on drugs and student debt.One writer at the website Salon last year said the show “eerily foresaw the Trump era.” Other times, the show veered into the absurd. After going off the air, it developed a following online, and its YouTube channel has more than 100 million total views.Mr. Moore often rooted his comedy in terrain his audiences could recognize — a park with an old friend, a modern-day White House news conference — and injected each scenario with dizzying amounts of lunacy and humor.In one memorable sketch, a White House press secretary reveals more and more details about an unlikely turn of events on a secret United States space station on the moon that has been taken over by bears.“We believe they may be involved in some sort of intergallatic drug cartel, perhaps affiliated with one of the interstellar wizard alliances,” the press secretary deadpans. Stunned reporters try to absorb the shocking news when one finally asks, “You wouldn’t happen to be invading Iran today, would we?” The press secretary pauses, then smiles wryly and says, “You got me.”In 2019, Mr. Moore brought his idiosyncratic sensibilities to the talk show format, and began hosting “The Trevor Moore Show” on Comedy Central. Its early episodes had titles like “Achieving World Peace with Flat Earth Theory” and “Why is Everyone So Horny All the Time?”“See, the worst part about dying,” Mr. Moore said on the show in June, “is that you don’t get to hear all the nice things said about you after you’re gone.”Born on April 4, 1980, in Montclair, N.J., Mr. Moore was raised in Charlottesville, Va., by his parents, Mickey and Becki Moore, popular Christian rock singers, according to Vanity Fair and the website IMDb.At 16, Mr. Moore began creating weekly cartoons for local newspapers in Virginia, and by 19 he had written and produced a weekly sketch comedy program, “The Trevor Moore Show,” for local television stations, according to IMDb.Mr. Moore graduated with a degree in film from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2010, he married Ms. Carlson. In addition to his wife and parents, Mr. Moore is survived by a 3-year-old son, August. He is also survived by a sister, Lila Haile.News of Mr. Moore’s death drew an outpouring of praise for the comedian from collaborators and admirers.On Instagram, the comedian James Adomian of IFC’s “Comedy Bang! Bang!” said Mr. Moore “was a magnetic friend to all, who thought everything was unstoppably hilarious no matter how scary or hopeless — this sardonic gallows humor was a beacon and a guide to me and many others in dark times.”Referring to two sketch comedy shows with strong cult followings, David Gallaher, who has written for Marvel and DC Comics, said on Twitter that Mr. Moore “blended the BEST of The State and Kids In The Hall to create something beautiful, subversive, and contemporary.”Neil Vigdor More

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      in Television

      Jane Withers, Child Star Who Later Won Fame in Commercials, Dies at 95

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      As a girl, she landed leading roles that were the antidote to Shirley Temple’s. As an adult, she was known as Josephine the Plumber in ads for Comet cleanser.Jane Withers, a top child star in the 1930s who played tough, tomboyish brats in more than two dozen B films and achieved a second burst of fame as an adult as Josephine the Plumber in commercials for Comet cleanser, died on Saturday in Burbank, Calif. She was 95. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Kendall Errair.In her first major movie role, in 20th Century Fox’s “Bright Eyes” (1934), the 8-year-old Jane played a spoiled rich kid who wanted a machine gun for Christmas and took a ghoulish delight in sending her dolls to the hospital. She was the antidote to the movie’s star, Shirley Temple, the always cheerful, always obedient, always smiling orphan.The titles of some of the films in which Ms. Withers starred said it all: “The Holy Terror” (1937), “Wild and Woolly” (1937), “Rascals” (1938), “Always in Trouble” (1938) and “The Arizona Wildcat” (1939).At the end of most of her movies, “just to satisfy everybody, I get a good spanking,” Ms. Withers told Norman Zierold, the author of “The Child Stars” (1965). “The minute they slapped me in ‘Bright Eyes,’ everybody just yelled and waved, they were so happy. Well, I don’t mind. I had my fun.”As an adult, Ms. Withers played Vashti Snythe, the neighbor of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson who delighted in spending her oil money in “Giant” (1956); appeared in several TV series; and voiced the gargoyle Laverne in the animated “Hunchback of Notre Dame II” (2002), a role she first took on after the death of Mary Wickes in 1995.But her most memorable and long-lasting role was as Josephine the Plumber, in a white cap and overalls, in the 1960s and ’70s. Nearly 40 years later, she was still being recognized for that character.“I can be at a market and I’ll be talking to somebody there about a can of peas and all of a sudden they’ll say, ‘I knew that was you! I recognized your voice right away,’” Ms. Withers told The Long Beach Press-Telegram in 2007.Ms. Withers and Richard Clayton in “A Very Young Lady” in 1941.LMPC, via Getty ImagesMost of her films were made at Fox’s small studio in Hollywood. Shirley Temple’s mother, Gertrude, who was said to be choosy about who was allowed to play with her daughter, had Ms. Withers banished from the studio’s grand Westwood lot, according to another former child star, Dickie Moore. In his memoir, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” Mr. Moore wrote that Gertrude Temple was so protective of Shirley that Jane was not even allowed to say hello to her when the children performed together in “Bright Eyes.”Although her Hollywood success did not survive adolescence, Ms. Withers was the rare child actor who entered adulthood prepared for the real world — and with money in the bank. Her parents “taught Jane bookkeeping at age seven,” Mr. Moore wrote, in contrast to almost all the other parents, who refused to allow their meal tickets to grow up and, in most cases, squandered their money. It was a point of pride for her father, a Goodrich executive, that his salary paid the family’s expenses.Jane Withers was born in Atlanta on April 12, 1926, to Walter and Lavinia Withers. Her mother, a movie fan, picked Jane as a name because she thought it would look good on a marquee. By the age of 4, the pudgy child with the Buster Brown haircut was singing, dancing and imitating Greta Garbo; billed as “Dixie’s Dainty Dewdrop,” she had her own local radio program.When Jane was 6, the family moved to Hollywood. After two years of department store modeling and bit parts, she was cast as Joy Smythe in “Bright Eyes.”Like Ms. Temple, Ms. Withers played an orphan in most of her films. In “Paddy O’ Day” (1935), her rescuer was Rita Cansino — soon to be renamed Rita Hayworth — in her first leading role. In “45 Fathers” (1937), she was adopted by a group of old men.By 1937, Ms. Withers was in sixth place on theater owners’ list of the Top 10 box office stars, despite the fact that she performed only in B movies. And sales of Jane Withers paper dolls, hair bows, socks and mystery novels similar to the Nancy Drew series earned her more money than her movies.Stardom also brought Ms. Withers thousands of dolls and teddy bears, most of them sent by fans. Those fans included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had his wife, Eleanor, hand deliver a teddy bear.Jane Withers in 1935. At the end of most of her movies, she once said, “just to satisfy everybody, I get a good spanking.”Film Publicity Archive/United Archives, via Getty ImagesAs she entered her teenage years, Ms. Withers wrote a story for herself, under the pseudonym Jerrie Walters. It was made into the movie “Small Town Deb” (1942). As her contract with Fox ended, she starred as a peasant girl in Samuel Goldwyn’s “The North Star” (1943).Ms. Withers married a Texas oilman, William Moss Jr., in 1947. They had three children and divorced in 1955, leaving Ms. Withers with several oil wells. That same year she married Kenneth Errair, who had been a member of the singing group the Four Freshmen. He was killed in a plane crash in 1968. (Information on her survivors was not immediately available.)In August 2004, Ms. Withers auctioned several hundred dolls, many of them likenesses of film and radio stars and characters of the 1930s, including Sonja Henie, the Lone Ranger and Snow White.Ms. Withers may never have surpassed Ms. Temple’s popularity on the screen. But in the 2004 sale, a Shirley Temple doll dressed in her “Little Colonel” costume sold for $3,100; a Jane Withers doll sold for $5,600. More

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      Jacob Desvarieux, Guitarist Who Forged Zouk Style, Dies at 65

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      His band, Kassav’, found millions of listeners as it held on to Caribbean roots while reaching out to the world. He died of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Jacob Desvarieux, the guitarist and singer who led Kassav’, an internationally popular band from the French Antilles, died on July 30 in a hospital in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the island where he lived. He was 65.The cause was Covid 19, Agence France-Presse reported.Mr. Desvarieux and the founder of Kassav’, the bassist Pierre-Edouard Décimus, created a style called zouk by fusing Afro-Caribbean traditions of the French Antilles with sleek electronic dance music.Kassav’ made nearly two dozen official studio albums, and the band recorded an additional two dozen studio albums credited to individual members, along with extensive live recordings.Kassav’ toured worldwide and sold in the millions, particularly in France and in French-speaking Caribbean and African countries. Mr. Desvarieux shaped a vast majority of the band’s songs as guitarist, songwriter, arranger or producer, and his amiably gruff voice often shared the band’s lead vocals, with lyrics in French Antillean Creole. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, paid tribute on Twitter: “Sacred zouk monster. Outstanding guitarist. Emblematic voice of the Antilles. Jacob Desvarieux was all of these at the same time.” Kassav’ made suave, irresistibly upbeat music with a carnival spirit, and purposefully stayed connected to its Afro-Caribbean roots. Its albums mingled love songs and party songs with sociopolitical commentary, sometimes couched in double entendres. The core of the zouk beat drew on gwo ka, from Guadeloupe, and chouval bwa, from Martinique: two traditions rooted in the drumming of enslaved Africans.“Through our music, we question our origins,” Mr. Desvarieux said in a 2016 interview with the French newspaper Libération. “What were we doing there, we who were Black and spoke French? Like African Americans in the United States, we were looking for answers to pick up the thread of a story that had been confiscated from us.”He added, “Without being politicians or activists, Kassav’ carried it all. From our faces to the themes in our songs, everything was very clear: We were West Indian, there should be no mistake, we wanted to mark our difference.”Jacob F. Desvarieux was born in Paris on Nov. 21, 1955, but he soon moved to Guadeloupe, where his mother, Cécile Desvarieux, was born; she raised him as a single parent and did domestic work. They lived in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in Paris and, for two years, in Senegal.When Jacob was 10, he asked his mother for a bicycle; she gave him a guitar instead, considering it less dangerous.After returning to France, he joined rock bands in the 1970s, playing songs from Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, and worked as a studio guitarist. His own music increasingly looked to Caribbean and African styles, including compas from Haiti, Congolese soukous from what was then Zaire, rumba from Cuba, highlife from Ghana and makossa from Cameroon.One of his bands in the 1970s, Zulu Gang, included musicians from Cameroon; Mr. Desvarieux also worked with the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, who had the international hit “Soul Makossa.”In 1979 in Paris, Mr. Desvarieux met Pierre-Édouard Décimus, a musician from Guadeloupe with an ambitious concept for a new band: strongly rooted in the West Indies but reaching outward. “We were looking to find a soundtrack that synthesized all the traditions and previous sounds, but that could be exported everywhere,” Mr. Desvarieux told Libération.Kassav’ was named after a Gaudeloupean dish, a cassava-flour pancake, and also after ka, a drum. A zouk was a dance party, and a 1984 hit by Mr. Desvarieux, “Zouk-La-Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni” (“Zouk Is the Only Medicine We Have”), made the word zouk synonymous with the band’s style.Mr. Desvarieux, left, performing in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast in 2009. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said of him on Twitter: “Sacred zouk monster. Outstanding guitarist. Emblematic voice of the Antilles.” Sia Kambou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKassav’ released its debut album, “Love and Ka Dance,” in 1979. “It was successful because it was Antillean music — it was local,” Mr. Desvarieux told Reggae & African Beat magazine in 1986. “But it was also better made than other Antillean discs. The instruments and vocals were in tune, and there were more sounds, like synthesizers and things like that — all the things that were not heard in Antillean records.”As the band pumped out new music, its early influences from disco and rock receded; Kassav’ simultaneously brought out its Caribbean essence and mastered programming and electronic sounds.It had a commercial breakthrough in 1983, with “Banzawa,” a single from what was nominally a solo album by Mr. Desvarieux and was later repackaged as a Kassav’ album. The 1984 album “Yélélé,” which was billed as a project by Mr. Desvarieux and Georges Décimus (Pierre-Edouard’s brother) and later credited to Kassav’, included the single “Zouk-La-Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni.” With 100,000 copies sold, it was the first gold record for an Antillean band, and it led to Kassav’ being signed to Sony Music and distributed internationally. By the end of the 1980s, the sound of zouk was influencing dance music worldwide.In 1988, Kassav’ was named Group of the Year by Victoires de la Musique, an award presented by French Ministry of Culture.Zouk’s popularity peaked as the 1980s ended, but Kassav’ continued to draw huge audiences. From the 1980s onward, Kassav’ regularly played long residences at the 8,000-seat arena Le Zenith, where it recorded live albums in 1986, 1993, 1996, 2005 and 2016; Mr. Desvarieux estimated that the band performed there 60 times.For the band’s 30th anniversary, in 2009, Kassav’ played at France’s national stadium, Stade de France, and in 2019, it sold out its 40th anniversary concert at the 40,000-seat Paris La Défense Arena.Kassav’ also toured across continents and built a huge, loyal audience, particularly in Africa, where it has drawn stadium-sized crowds since the 1980s. The Senegalese songwriter Youssou N’Dour wrote on Twitter, “The West Indies, Africa and music have just lost one of their greatest Ambassadors.” In Luanda, the capital of Angola, there is a museum of zouk, La Maison du Zouk, that has a collection of 10,000 albums. Mr. Desvarieux and Pierre-Édouard Décimus attended its opening in 2012.Mr. Desvarieux was also occasionally cast for film and television. In 2016, he appeared as an African cardinal in the HBO series “The Young Pope.”Mr. Desvarieux welcomed collaborations with musicians from Africa and the Caribbean. He appeared on Wyclef Jean’s 1997 album “The Carnival” and recorded songs with the Ivory Coast reggae singer Alpha Blondy and with Toofan, a group from Togo.“Laisse Parler les Gens” (“Let the People Talk),” a 2003 single he made with the Guadeloupean singer Jocelyne Labylle, the Congolese singer Cheela and the Congolese rapper Passi, sold more than a million copies.Mr. Desvarieux, whose immunity was weakened because he had had a kidney transplant, was hospitalized with Covid-19 on July 12 and placed in a medically induced coma before his death.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Throughout the band’s career, even after Kassav’ was signed to multinational labels and encouraged to sing in English, the band’s lyrics were always in French Antilles Creole, insisting on its island heritage. “The music is a stronger language than the language itself,” Mr. Desvarieux said in 1986. “If the music pleases, the language isn’t important.” More

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      in Television

      Markie Post, ‘Night Court’ Actress, Dies at 70

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      Ms. Post played a bail bondswoman on the show “The Fall Guy” in the 1980s and starred opposite John Ritter in the sitcom “Hearts Afire” in the 1990s.Markie Post, the effervescent actress known for her roles on the television series “Night Court” and “The Fall Guy” and the movie “There’s Something About Mary” during a career that spanned four decades, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.Her death was confirmed by her manager, Ellen Lubin Sanitsky, who provided a statement from Ms. Post’s family specifying that the cause of death was cancer.Ms. Post had continued to act for nearly four years after her initial cancer diagnosis and while undergoing chemotherapy treatments that she referred to as her “side job,” her family said.Since her diagnosis, she had worked on a Lifetime Christmas movie and had a recurring guest role on the ABC series “The Kids Are Alright.”Frequently cast in daffy roles that emphasized her comedic timing, Ms. Post became a television fixture in the 1980s.She appeared on “The Love Boat,” “The A-Team” and “Cheers” before landing a prominent role as a bail bondswoman on “The Fall Guy,” an action show about a stuntman, played by Lee Majors, who moonlights as a bounty hunter.Her greatest success came on the sitcom “Night Court,” when she was cast as Christine Sullivan, the alluring and naïve public defender who was the romantic interest of Judge Harry T. Stone, played by Harry Anderson. The judge was not her only suitor, though. So was Dan Fielding, the lecherous prosecutor played by John Larroquette.One of her co-stars on the show, Charlie Robinson, who played the pragmatic court clerk, died last month at 75.Ms. Post with John Larrouquette in “Night Court.”NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesIn the 1990s, Ms. Post starred opposite John Ritter on “Hearts Afire,” a political sitcom in which she played a former journalist who went to work as a press aide for a Southern senator. Her father was played by Ed Asner, who paid tribute on Sunday to Ms. Post on Twitter.Born on Nov. 4, 1950, in Palo Alto, Calif., Ms. Post began her career working on game shows, writing questions for “Family Feud,” finding prizes for “The Price Is Right” and doing research for “Split Second.”“I learned more researching that game show than I did in four years of college,” Ms. Post said in an interview with Bill Tush on his show in the 1980s.In 1998, Ms. Post was cast by the Farrelly brothers as the ditsy mother of Mary, the main character in “There’s Something About Mary,” who was played by Cameron Diaz. Later in her career, Ms. Post’s acting credits included “Scrubs” and “Chicago P.D.”Ms. Post is survived by her husband, Michael A. Ross; and two daughters, Kate Armstrong Ross, an actress, and Daisy Schoenborn, who said in their statement that Ms. Post exemplified kindness.They described Ms. Post as “a person who made elaborate cakes for friends, sewed curtains for first apartments and showed us how to be kind, loving and forgiving in an often harsh world.” More