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      Ned Beatty, Actor Known for ‘Network’ and ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 83

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      Mr. Beatty’s career spanned more than four decades and more than 150 roles in movies such as “Superman,” “All the President’s Men,” “Rudy” and “Back to School.”Ned Beatty, who during a prolific acting career that spanned more than four decades earned an Oscar nomination for his role in “Network” and gave a cringe-inducing performance as a weekend outdoorsman assaulted by backwoods brutes in “Deliverance,” died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by Deborah Miller, Mr. Beatty’s manager, who did not immediately provide details on the cause. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Beatty appeared in more than 150 movies and television projects over the course of his career, frequently cast in supporting roles. While the beefy actor was not known as a leading man of the screen, he became associated with some of Hollywood’s most enduring films.His credits include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “Superman” (1978), “Rudy” (1993) and “Back to School” (1986).On television, Mr. Beatty played Stanley Bolander, the detective known as “Big Man,” on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” appearing on the television series from 1993 to 1995. He also played Ed Conner, the father of John Goodman’s character Dan Conner, on “Roseanne.”In 1976, Mr. Beatty was cast by Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky in “Network,” the critically acclaimed satire about a television network’s struggling ratings and a tube-obsessed nation. His character, Arthur Jensen, gave a memorable monologue in the movie, earning Mr. Beatty an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.In the scene, Mr. Beatty, playing the mustachioed network boss, summons the character Howard Beale, the anchorman played by Peter Finch, into the corporate boardroom and draws the curtains. With the camera trained on Mr. Beatty, who was standing at the opposite end of a conference table lined with banker lamps, he unleashed a ferocious soliloquy. Mr. Beale had a lot to learn about the ways of the corporate world, Mr. Beatty’s character sermonized.“And you have meddled with the primeval forces of nature, Mr. Beale,” Mr. Beatty said, his voice roaring. “And you will atone.”Mr. Beatty then modulated his delivery.“Am I getting through to you?” he said in a normal speaking voice.In “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies,” a 2014 book written by Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Beatty said that he had been intimidated by the length of the speech, but excited by the character and the film.To get the filmmakers to commit to giving him the role, Mr. Beatty said, he told them that he had another movie offer for more money.“I was lying like a snake,” Mr. Beatty said. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be sly. I was doing something that maybe might be in their lexicon.”Mr. Beatty made his film debut in “Deliverance,” the 1972 big screen adaptation of James Dickey’s novel about four friends whose canoeing trip in rural Georgia turns calamitous. Stripped down to white underpants, his character, Bobby, is forced to “squeal like a pig” by a hillbilly before he is raped.The line would go down in movie infamy.“‘Squeal like a pig.’ How many times has that been shouted, said or whispered to me, since then?” Mr. Beatty wrote in a 1989 opinion piece for The New York Times.Mr. Beatty did not distance himself from the scene.“I suppose when someone (invariably a man) shouts this at me I am supposed to duck my head and look embarrassed at being recognized as the actor who suffered this ignominy,” he wrote. “But I feel only pride about being a part of this story, which the director John Boorman turned into a film classic. I think Bill McKinney (who portrayed the attacker) and I played the ‘rape’ scene about as well as it could be played.”Ned Beatty and Jon Voight in “Deliverance” (1972), in which Mr. Beatty made his feature film debut.Warner Bros., via PhotofestBorn on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Beatty spent much of the early part of his acting career in regional theater, including eight years at the Arena Stage in Washington. In a 2003 interview, he told The Times that he averaged 13 to 15 shows per year onstage at the start of his career and spent as many as 300 days performing.In 2003, Mr. Beatty starred as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” appearing with Jason Patric and Ashley Judd. He was reprising his performance in the role of the Southern plantation owner, for which he had been nominated for an Olivier Award as part of the revival’s original London production.Candidly assessing his co-stars, Mr. Beatty said that Broadway had come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they did not have the acting chops to handle.“In theater you want to go from here to there, you want it to be about something,” Mr. Beatty said. “Stage actors learn how to do that. Film actors often don’t even think about it. They do what the director wants them to do, and they never inform their performance with — call it what you wish — through-line, objective.”In “Superman” in 1978, Mr. Beatty played Otis, the bumbling toady of the villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), a role that he reprised in “Superman II” in 1980.In 1986, he was cast in a comedic role as the gushing and unscrupulous Dean Martin of the fictional Grand Lakes University in “Back to School,” offering admission to Thornton Melon, the big and tall clothing tycoon (Rodney Dangerfield), in exchange for donating a building. The head of the business school in the film objected to the quid pro quo.“But I’d just like to say, in all fairness to Mr. Melon here, it was a really big check,” Mr. Beatty’s character retorted.Mr. Beatty delivered another memorable performance in a small role as Daniel Ruettiger, the blue-collar father in “Rudy,” the 1993 movie about a University of Notre Dame walk-on football player who makes the team. As the father enters the stadium for the first time, he is overcome by the moment.“This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen,” Mr. Beatty said. More

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      Milton Moses Ginsberg, Unconventional Filmmaker, Dies at 85

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      His movies about a psychiatrist’s disintegration and a werewolf working in the White House bombed. But they both drew favorable attention many years later.Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two ambitious but eccentric films before falling into obscurity, one about the meltdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press aide in a Nixon-like administration who becomes a murderous werewolf, died on May 23 in his apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.The cause was cancer, said his wife, Nina Ginsberg.Mr. Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own movies, wrote and directed “Coming Apart” (1969), a raw black-and-white film that used a single, almost entirely static camera to document the loveless trysts and psychological disintegration of a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who surreptitiously records his encounters with a camera inside a mirrored box.“Coming Apart” received mixed reviews, at best. But the one that devastated Mr. Ginsberg was from The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, who wrote that “if everybody in the cast had refused to strip for action or inaction, ‘Coming Apart’ would have crumbled commercially into a half-baked amateur movie incapable of selling enough tickets to fill a phone booth.”Mr. Ginsberg blamed that review for the film’s box-office failure.“That was it,” he told The New York Times in 1998, adding: “I had done everything I wanted to do. And nothing happened.”Rip Torn in Mr. Ginsberg’s “Coming Apart.” The film received mixed reviews at best and failed at the box office when it was released in 1969. Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. Kino InternationalHe followed “Coming Apart” in 1973 with another low-budget film: “The Werewolf of Washington,” a campy political parody inspired by the classic horror film “The Wolf Man” (1941), which terrified Mr. Ginsberg as a boy, and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.In Mr. Ginsberg’s film, released more than a year into the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays an assistant press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments, like when he’s bowling with the president, and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.“The film isn’t advertised as a documentary,” the syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “but when you think about what’s been going on around this town, you couldn’t tell it from the plot.”In 1975, after Mr. Ginsberg received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he fell into a depression that lifted only after he met and married Nina Posnansky, a painter, in 1983. She and his brother, Arthur, survive him.After the commercial failure of his feature films, Mr. Ginsberg returned to film editing. He worked on various projects, including the Oscar-winning documentaries “Down and Out in America” (1986), about unemployed and homeless people left behind in the economy, which was directed by the actress Lee Grant, and “The Personals” (1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for having made “Coming Apart,” which he wryly called “murder on an audience.”“So if oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie, follow me!” he added.Mr. Ginsberg never made another feature, but in recent years he finished several short video essays, among them “Kron: Along the Avenue of Time” (2011), a phantasmagorical exploration of his life taken through a microscopic journey into intricate watch movements.Mr. Ginsberg in his Manhattan apartment in 1998. “If oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie,” he wrote in the magazine Film Comment in 1999, “follow me!” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMilton Moses Ginsberg was born on Sept. 22, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Elias, was a cutter in the garment district, and his mother, Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg, was a homemaker.After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Ginsberg received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia University. Italian films like Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) inspired him to make movies, but in the 1960s he worked instead as a film editor at NBC News, held a production job with the documentarians Albert and David Maysles, and was an assistant at “Candid Camera,” the popular television series that used concealed cameras to capture people in various situations, which he said influenced the furtive recording of the psychiatrist’s guests in “Coming Apart.”Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment at the response to his features was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. But he was too pained by its reception nearly 30 years before to watch it; he did not enter the theater until it ended, when he spoke to the audience. MoMA has shown it a few times since.“It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Laurence Kardish, the former longtime senior curator of MoMA’s film department, who had seen “Coming Apart” during its original release, said by phone. “It was very explicit and very raw and struck me as an essential New York film, showing a New Yorker’s enthusiasm for self-examination.”When “Coming Apart” was released on video in 2000, an article in The Chicago Tribune called it “stylistically audacious.” And in 2011, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened both of Mr. Ginsberg’s films. After its associate curator, Jacob Perlin, moved to Metrograph, the repertory theater on the Lower East Side, where he is now the artistic and programming director, he held a 50th-anniversary screening of “Coming Apart” in 2019. Restorations of both of Mr. Ginsberg’s movies have been completed by the film company Kino Lorber.The belated acceptance of his films offered some redemption to Mr. Ginsberg.“In 2011, Milton said that he’s had two afterlives,” Mr. Perlin, who became friends with Mr. Ginsberg, said by phone. “When MoMA showed ‘Coming Apart,’ and 2011, when I showed both his films.” More

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      Douglas Cramer, Producer of TV Hits and Art Aficionado, Dies at 89

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      He had a hand in some of the biggest shows of the 20th century, including “Dynasty” and “The Love Boat.”Douglas S. Cramer, who produced some of the most successful television shows of the 20th century, many — including “The Love Boat” and “Dynasty” — in partnership with Aaron Spelling, and who used his substantial wealth to become a leading art collector, died on Friday at his home on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. He was 89.His husband, Hubert Bush, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Cramer had a long career in television, producing or helping to develop shows including “Peyton Place” in the 1960s, “The Odd Couple” in the 1970s and “Hotel” in the 1980s. In the 1990s he produced a string of television movies based on novels by Danielle Steel.Today, television producing credits are handed out for a variety of reasons, and those given them often have little direct involvement in the show. But in Mr. Cramer’s day the producer was often more like a film director, shaping the cast and look of a series.“I was very hands-on,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2009 for the Television Academy Foundation. “There was nothing I wasn’t involved with. I worried about every performer, every extra, every piece of clothing.”Mr. Cramer joined forces with Mr. Spelling, the most prolific American television producer of the era, in the mid-1970s. “The Love Boat,” which they produced jointly, ran for 250 episodes beginning in 1977 and had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Mr. Cramer’s connections and interests — Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.Mr. Cramer, left, in 1984 with his longtime producing partner Aaron Spelling, center, and their fellow producer E. Duke Vincent.Gene Trindl/MPTV ImagesIf that series was a cultural reference point, “Dynasty” was the type of show that helps define a decade. A prime-time soap opera about a rich oil family, the Carrington clan — Blake (John Forsythe), Krystle (Linda Evans), Alexis (Joan Collins) and others — the show ran from 1981 to 1989. It gave a campy gloss to the decade while also occasionally managing to be groundbreaking: It had a prominent gay character and a prominent Black character, both still rare at the time.“We walk a fine line, just this side of camp,” Mr. Cramer told New York magazine in 1985. “Careful calculations are made. We sense that while it might be wonderful for Krystle and Alexis to have a catfight in a koi pond, it would be inappropriate for Joan to smack Linda with a koi.”That series and others, Mr. Spelling, who died in 2006, told The New York Times in 1993, benefited from the distinctive Cramer touch.“Douglas is a very creative man,” he said. “He has immaculate taste in art direction and wardrobe.”He also had immaculate taste in art. He amassed a collection that included both known names and up-and-coming talents, and he made significant gifts to museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, whose director, Glenn D. Lowry cited Mr. Cramer’s donation of “a superb group of paintings and sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, among others.”Steve Martin, a fellow art aficionado, recalled gatherings at a ranch Mr. Cramer owned in Santa Ynez, Calif.“He would host a yearly ‘hoedown,’ with hay rides, buffets, inviting Hollywood’s and the art world’s glitterati,” Mr. Martin said by email. “One year, the hoedown centered around the opening of his gigantic, multilevel private museum, stuffed with Lichtenstein, Baselitz (as I recall), Ruscha (as I recall), and dozens of other important artists. All the high-level art mingled with guys and gals dressed in gingham and cowboy hats.”“The Love Boat” had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Mr. Cramer’s connections and interests. Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesDouglas Schoolfield Cramer Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1931, in Louisville, Ky. His father was a businessman, and his mother, Pauline (Compton) Cramer, was an interior designer who, after the family moved to Cincinnati when Doug was a boy, started writing a newspaper column, “Polly’s Pointers,” full of home decorating and other tips. She and his grandmother, who owned an antiques shop and would take him on buying trips, “opened my eyes to looking at what was around me,” Mr. Cramer said in the oral history, “which I think had a lot of impact on me as a producer.”Those buying trips with Grandma also spawned his interest in collecting, something he began doing as a child.“I started to collect saltshakers for some bizarre reason,” he told The Courier-Journal of Louisville in 2003. “From saltshakers it went to postcards. I had an enormous collection of postcards of art and posters.”He also developed an early fascination with the theater and New York City. After six months at Northwestern University in Illinois, he left college at 18 and went to live in New York, securing a job as a production assistant at Radio City Music Hall.The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 led him to conclude that “I’d rather be at the University of Cincinnati than fighting in Korea,” as he put it in the oral history; he eventually earned an English degree there.He returned to New York as a graduate student at Columbia University, obtaining a master’s degree and also making a start on a career as a playwright; his drama “Call of Duty” was staged at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village in 1956. The play had a decent run, but his main takeaway from the experience, he said, was the realization that “I really hadn’t lived enough to have anything to write about.”Though the Korean War was over, he was eventually drafted into the Army, spending six months working in communications. He managed a summer playhouse in Cincinnati for several seasons, at the same time teaching at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.From left, Joan Collins, John Forsythe and Linda Evans in an episode of “Dynasty,” one of the most successful shows with which Mr. Cramer was involved. “We walk a fine line,” he said of “Dynasty,” “just this side of camp.”ABC Photo ArchivesIn the late 1950s and early ’60s, sponsors were particularly influential in television, and Procter & Gamble, headquartered in Cincinnati, was one of the biggest players. Hoping to work his way into the television business, Mr. Cramer went to work there as a supervisor on two of its daytime shows, “As the World Turns” and “The Guiding Light.”After several years there he moved to New York, where in the early 1960s he took a job at ABC. As director of programing planning there, he helped develop “Peyton Place” into a hit series and also was involved in bringing “Batman” to the small screen in 1966.At ABC and throughout his career, Mr. Cramer crossed paths with future Hollywood titans. One was Barry Diller, who would later lead Paramount and 20th Century Fox.“I met Doug Cramer in the parking lot of the Bel Air Hotel as I was leaving my job interview with his boss at ABC,” Mr. Diller said by email. “He gave me the ticket to retrieve his car, thinking I was the parking attendant, and I’ve greatly admired him ever since.”From ABC Mr. Cramer moved to 20th Century Fox, and then to Paramount. There, as executive vice president in charge of production, he had overall authority over its many series, including “Love American Style,” “The Brady Bunch” and “The Odd Couple.” He soon formed his own production company, and in 1974 he produced “QB VII,” based on the Leon Uris novel, a star-studded production often identified as network television’s first mini-series. It won six Emmy Awards.After his run with Mr. Spelling, Mr. Cramer formed a different kind of partnership with Ms. Steel, beginning in 1990 with a TV movie version of her “Kaleidoscope.”“The time that I spent working with Doug Cramer on 21 TV movies and mini-series based on my books,” Ms. Steel said by email, “are among the happiest memories of my career, with fantastic results.”Mr. Cramer’s marriage to the gossip columnist Joyce Haber ended in divorce in the 1970s. A daughter, Courtney, died in 2004, and a son, Douglas III, died in 2015. Mr. Cramer began his relationship with Mr. Bush in 1991, and they married in 2006. A brother, Peyton, also survives him.Mr. Bush said that one of Mr. Cramer’s proudest accomplishments was that quirky casting on “The Love Boat.” In addition to working Warhol into an episode, he would sometimes engineer theme episodes, including one that featured designers like Bob Mackie and Halston. It was a chance, Mr. Bush said, to give Middle America, which loved the show, a look at people they might not otherwise see.“Doug made that accessible to America,” Mr. Bush said. “I think that was important.” More

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      Clarence Williams III, a Star of ‘Mod Squad’ Is Dead at 81

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      He portrayed Linc Hayes, a hip undercover police officer who was teamed with Peggy Lipton and Michael Cole. Clarence Williams III, the reflectively intense actor who starred as Linc Hayes, a young, hip undercover police officer on ABC’s “The Mod Squad,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 81.The cause was colon cancer, his manager, Allan Mindel, said.“The Mod Squad,” which ran from 1968 to 1973, was one of the first of its kind — a prime-time network series that focused on members of the hippie generation at the same time that it exploited them.The show had two ad taglines. “First they got busted; then they got badges” summarized the show’s back story: three hippies in trouble with the law who then joined the police force as plainclothes cops with built-in disguises — their youth and their counterculture personas.The second — “One Black, one white, one blonde” — referred to the cast: Mr. Williams, Michael Cole and Peggy Lipton. Mr. Williams was one of the first Black actors to have a lead role on a television series.Aaron Spelling, the show’s producer, never liked Linc’s Afro, Mr. Williams recalled in an NPR interview in 1999, so the style was toned down. A bit. For a while. Then, each week, he said, “we’d tease it out a little bit more.”Clarence Williams III was born in Manhattan on Aug. 21, 1939. His father, Clarence Jr., known as Clay, was a musician. His mother is omitted from his biographies. Asked about her on Sunday, a family member declined to give her name and described her as “largely absent.” He was raised by his paternal grandparents.Although “The Mod Squad” made Mr. Williams a symbol of the Vietnam War generation, he actually served in the military just before that era. He was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in the late 1950s.His interest in acting began when he visited a Harlem Y.M.C.A., where his sister was working, and dropped in to watch a play’s run-through. By the end of the evening he had been cast in the production.He began his acting career on Broadway, where his grandfather had appeared as early as 1908. The young Mr. Williams appeared in three plays, including “Slow Dance on the Killing Ground” (1964), for which he received a Tony Award nomination and a Theater World Award. The New York Times review offered high praise.“Mr. Williams glides like a dancer,” Howard Taubman wrote, “giving his long, fraudulently airy speeches the inner rhythms of fear and showing the nakedness of terror when he ceases to pretend.”Mr. Williams played an F.B.I. agent on “Twin Peaks” in 1990 and appeared in many films and television series after “The Mod Squad” ended.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesHe owed his screen career to Bill Cosby, then a rising star. Mr. Cosby saw him on the New York stage and recommended him to Mr. Spelling, who was casting “The Mod Squad” at the time.Mr. Cosby was the first Black actor to win a leading role in a prime-time American series, “I Spy,” beginning in 1965. Diahann Carroll starred in the sitcom “Julia” three years later — the same season that “The Mod Squad” began.After the show ended, Mr. Williams dropped out of sight for a while, expressing disappointment in the kinds of roles available to Black men. He returned to Broadway, appearing as an African head of state, with Maggie Smith, in a Tom Stoppard drama, “Night and Day” (1979).Beginning in the 1980s, he had a busy film career. He played Prince’s abusive father in “Purple Rain” (1984) and Wesley Snipes’s heroin-addicted father in “Sugar Hill” (1993). He was a crazed blackmailer in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and a wild-eyed storytelling mortician in “Tales From the Hood” (1995). He had small roles in the blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1988) and in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987).Television brought Mr. Williams new opportunities too. He was a leader of the Attica prison riots in HBO’s “Against the Wall” (1994); a segregationist governor’s manservant in the mini-series “George Wallace” (1997); Muhammad Ali’s father in “Ali: An American Hero” (2000); and a retired C.I.A. operative in 10 “Mystery Woman” movies (2003-07). He did guest appearances on close to 40 series, from “Hill Street Blues” to “Empire.”His other film roles included a much-too-loyal aide-de-camp in “The General’s Daughter” (1999), a glowering criminal who is set on fire in “Reindeer Games” (2000), an old-school crime lord in “American Gangster” (2007) and a White House servant’s older mentor in Lee Daniels’s “The Butler” (2013). His last film was “American Nightmares” (2018), a horror comedy.In 1967, Mr. Williams married Gloria Foster, a stage actress who appeared twice on “The Mod Squad” and later played the Oracle in “The Matrix.” They divorced in 1984.He is survived by his daughter, Jamey Phillips, and his sister, Sondra Pugh.Mr. Williams often contended that he didn’t take being a role model that seriously. “All of this is escapism, fantasy,” he told TV Guide in 1970, early in the run of “The Mod Squad.” “This is what the box is about.”In the same interview, though, he recalled being happily mobbed by young Black fans at a basketball game and acknowledged, “It’s kind of nice for kids to see a reflection of themselves.” More

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      Graeme Ferguson, Filmmaker Who Helped Create Imax, Dies at 91

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      He partnered with friends to produce stunning original technology that would give movie viewers an immersive, stadium-like experience.Graeme Ferguson, a Canadian documentarian who cocreated Imax, the panoramic cinema experience that immerses audiences into movies, and was the chief creative force of the company for years, died on May 8 at his home in Lake of Bays, Ontario. He was 91. More

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      in Music

      Yoshi Wada, Inventive Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77

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      A member of the Fluxus performance art movement (and a contractor by trade), he incorporated bagpipes, electronics and, yes, plumber’s materials in his music.Yoshi Wada, a Japanese-born composer and artist who drew a following creating cacophonous, minimalist performances on homemade instruments and was a member of the Fluxus performance art movement that took root in New York in the 1960s, died on May 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 77.His son and musical collaborator, Tashi Wada, confirmed the death but said the cause was not known.Yoshi Wada’s music was characterized by dense, sustained sounds that could create mind-bending acoustic effects. He borrowed widely from different musical traditions — Indian ragas, Macedonian folk singing and Scottish bagpipes — all while supporting his musical life by working in construction.In one early technique, in the 1970s, he attached mouthpieces to plumbing pipes that could extend more than 20 feet. In ritualistic, multihour concerts, he immersed listeners in the richly resonant drones that emanated from this Alphorn-like instrument, which he called an Earth Horn.Combined with electronics created by the sound artist Liz Philips, the pulsating sonorities of the pipes offered a new take on the minimalist style then in vogue.“The result was certainly one of the more coloristically attractive of the many recent instances of minimalist, steady-state sound that one hears these days,” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote of one Wada concert in 1974, at the Kitchen in Lower Manhattan, “rather like an evening’s worth of the very beginning of Wagner’s ‘Rheingold.’”Mr. Wada’s idiosyncratic singing and use of bagpipes became the basis for two important albums in the 1980s, released on free-jazz labels. One, “Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile,” was recorded in an empty swimming pool; to delve more deeply into the project, Mr. Wada slept in the pool. The other release, “Off the Wall,” made in West Berlin through a grant he had received, combined bagpipes with a handcrafted organ and percussion.“What I’d like to get is a feeling of the endless space,” he said in a 1987 interview. “I want to create this feeling of infinity by sound.”Mr. Wada also created elaborate sculptural sound installations. For “The Appointed Cloud,” in 1987, he hung organ pipes and gongs in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Guided by a computer program developed by David Rayna, visitors would press buttons to change the sound of the composition in real-time.“A lot of young children came,” Mr. Wada recalled in 2016, “and they went crazy pushing the buttons and enjoyed it quite a lot.”Mr. Wada performed with his son, Tashi, in 2018. They became a duo in recent years. Dicky Bahto via RVNG Intl.Yoshimasa Wada was born on Nov. 11, 1943, in Kyoto, Japan, to Shukitchi Wada, an architect, and Kino Imakita. His father died in World War II, and his childhood was marked by the hardships of the postwar years.Yoshi had powerful early experiences hearing monks chant in a local Zen temple. Enthralled by Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, he took up jazz saxophone as a teenager. He studied sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts and sought out avant-garde collectives in Japan, like the Gutai group and Hi-Red Center.“It was looking at the moon in a Zen garden for a whole night,” Mr. Wada later recalled of a “happening” presented by the artist and musician Yoko Ono. “It was quite a nice feeling. I remember that afterwards I took a bath and went home.”After receiving his bachelor’s in fine arts degree, he moved to New York in 1967. George Maciunas, widely credited as the founder of the Fluxus movement, lived in Mr. Wada’s building. Soon, Mr. Wada was enmeshed with Fluxus’s high-minded absurdism, making music from cardboard tubes and syncopated sneezes.Mr. Maciunas had started purchasing abandoned buildings in the area of Manhattan that would become known as SoHo and converting them into artists’ co-ops, and he conscripted Mr. Wada to help with the carpentry and plumbing.Never having trained in music formally, Mr. Wada took lessons in electronic music from the composer La Monte Young and became, in the early 1970s, a disciple of the guru Pandit Pran Nath, who taught North Indian classical singing in Mr. Young’s studio.“He tried to absorb everything, at a very high spiritual level,” Mr. Young said of Mr. Wada in an interview. “He was a very pure and noble person.”His fascination with the microtonal inflections and hypnotic drones of Indian ragas, along with his dissatisfaction with standard instruments, led Mr. Wada to create the Earth Horns. But his musical interests continued to expand. He heard Macedonian folk singing at a festival and decided to study it, then started a small choir to sing eerie, modal improvisations. He attended Scottish Highland games in the late 1970s and was struck by the possibilities of the bagpipe.After learning the solo bagpipe style known as “piobaireachd,” Mr. Wada built his own “adapted” version of the instrument — with plumbing fittings, pipes and air compressors — for evening-length performances that fused composition and improvisation.“In studying all of these different traditions, one thing he always talked about was that he wanted to find ways to make them his own,” his son, Tashi, said in an interview.Mr. Wada performing at the Signal Gallery in New York in 2016. “He tried to absorb everything at a very high spiritual level,” the composer La Monte Young said. “He was a very pure and noble person.”Peter GannushkinMr. Wada supported his family by continuing his construction work, even starting his own contracting company. He stored his menagerie of makeshift instruments in the subbasement of their building, one of those that Mr. Maciunas had developed. Tashi Wada recalled that a childhood drum kit once found its way into one of his father’s sound installations.Beginning in 2007, Tashi Wada, who is also an experimental composer, helped reissue his father’s older recordings, which are now available on the label Saltern. In 2009, the Emily Harvey Foundation, which promotes the arts and which had preserved some of Mr. Wada’s Earth Horns, invited him to reprise his 1970s performances. The original electronic drone system was lost to history; instead, Tashi re-created the parts live. Father and son became regular musical collaborators.Mr. Wada’s first wife was Barbara Stewart. He married Marilyn Bogerd in 1985; they divorced in 2014. In addition to their son, he is survived by their daughter, Manon Bogerd Wada, and a granddaughter.In 2016, Tashi Wada interviewed his father for the arts magazine BOMB and asked him about the hallucinatory effects that he said he had experienced in the 1980s while practicing his music in a small studio space in West Berlin.“I wasn’t taking drugs at that time,” Mr. Wada said. “It wasn’t needed. Sound draws me into a dreamlike world, when the sound is in tune. It’s a very good effect and keeps me awake.” More

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      Patrick Sky, ’60s Folk Star and Later a Piper, Dies at 80

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      He was a part of the folk revival emanating from Greenwich Village, mixing melodic songs and satire. Then he became infatuated with the uilleann pipes.Patrick Sky, who established himself as part of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid-1960s with smooth guitar-picking and a Southern twang that could be melodic or sassy, then became adept at playing, and making, the notoriously difficult instrument known as the uilleann pipes, died on May 26 in Asheville, N.C. He was 80.His wife, Cathy Larson Sky, said the cause was cancer. He died at a hospice center and lived in Spruce Pine, N.C.Mr. Sky’s best-known song was probably “Many a Mile,” a weary-traveler lament that opened his debut album, titled simply “Patrick Sky,” in 1965. It was covered by others, including Buffy Sainte-Marie, his girlfriend early in his career. He was also skilled at “sardonic, satiric rags and blues,” as The New York Times put it in 1965, and as his career advanced, those elements of his repertoire became more caustic.That aspect of his music culminated in what fRoots magazine called “the most politically incorrect folk album ever,” a 1973 release titled “Songs That Made America Famous.” The track titles — “Vatican Caskets” and “Child Molesting Blues” among them — convey the tenor of the record.“America’s full of prudes, you know,” Mr. Sky told fRoots in 2017. “So I just did a record that’d sort of gouge them in the eye with a stick.”By then, though, Mr. Sky, who was of both Irish and Creek Indian heritage, had turned his attention to the uilleann pipes, perhaps the most difficult instrument to play in the arsenal of Irish music, after meeting the master piper Liam O’Flynn at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in the early 1970s. Mr. Sky learned not only to play the instrument but also to make it, something he did for the rest of his life, helping to revive a faded art. In 2009 he and his wife, a fiddler, made an album, “Down to Us.”One magazine called this 1973 release by Mr. Sky “the most politically incorrect folk album ever.” Patrick Leon Linch Jr. (who legally changed his name in the 1960s) was born on Oct. 2, 1940, in College Park, Ga., outside Atlanta. His father was a munitions worker, and his mother, Theron Rutilla Heard Linch, was a registered nurse.Patrick grew up in Georgia, Louisiana and other parts of the South and was interested in music from an early age. In 1957 he enlisted in the Army, serving in an artillery unit until his discharge the next year.“I began playing at little coffeehouses,” he said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song” (1976), “eventually finding my way to Florida.”There he met Ms. Sainte-Marie, and a few years later, when she went north to New York, he did, too. His Southern sensibilities sometimes made for an amusing fit with the Greenwich Village folkies he began socializing and playing with. His wife said he used to tell about the time the musician Dave Van Ronk and other friends offered to take him out for soul food, a term he didn’t know. At the restaurant, when the collards and fatback, cornbread, fried pork chops and such arrived, his friends asked what he thought.“Back home,” he told them, “this is what we just call ‘food.’”As folk music enjoyed a boom, a music newsletter called Broadside began sponsoring “singing newspapers,” as they were described — concerts at which a string of performers would sing topical songs, often written for the occasion. Mr. Sky played at the first one, at the Village Gate in 1964, to a crowd of 500; Pete Seeger was the master of ceremonies, and the other performers included Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Jack Elliott and Ms. Sainte-Marie.In February 1965, Mr. Sky played a bigger venue, Town Hall, in Midtown. In his review, Robert Shelton of The Times called him “an important new folk-song talent.” Mr. Sky went on to play to 2,400 at Carnegie Hall in December 1966.Mr. Sky performing at the Eagle Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1986. His Southern sensibilities had made for an amusing fit with the Village folkies he played and socialized with in the 1960s.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesHis second album, “A Harvest of Gentle Clang,” had been released that year. Mr. Sky became a regular at folk festivals, clubs and colleges, and two more albums followed before the decade’s end: “Reality Is Bad Enough” in 1968 and “Photographs” the next year.But he began performing less and less, and after “Songs That Made America Famous,” he retired for a time, though he began doing shows again in the 1980s, adding the pipes to his performances.Few people played that instrument at the time. In a segment filmed several years ago for “Around Carolina,” a local cable show, Mr. Sky, who lived in Rhode Island for a while, joked about his unusual obsession.“I used to tell people I was the best piper in all of New England,” he said, “which is true because I was the only piper.”He continued to perform with his wife at pipers’ festivals and other events until 2018, when he was found to have Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Sky earned a bachelor’s degree in poetry at Goddard College in Vermont in 1978 and a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993.Two early marriages ended in divorce. He married Cathy Anne Larson in 1981. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Liam Michael Sky; a son from an earlier marriage, Marcus Linch; and three grandchildren. More

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      Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

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      His movie producing career consisted of just seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, three for “Midnight Cowboy” and three for “Coming Home.”Jerome Hellman, who produced “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Academy Award, and who went on to solidify his reputation with other tough-minded dramas, like the Oscar-winning “Coming Home,” died on May 26 at his home in South Egremont, Mass., in the Berkshires. He was 92.The death was confirmed by his wife, Elizabeth Empleton Hellman.Almost no one at the 1970 Academy Awards ceremony expected “Midnight Cowboy” to win. The movie was the gritty urban story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young, handsome, naïve and not particularly bright Texan who decides to start a new life in New York City as a male hustler catering to wealthy older women, and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a grubby Bronx con man with a debilitating limp who becomes Joe’s unlikely ally.Shot with an initial budget of only $1 million, the movie included straightforward but far from pornographic depictions of straight and gay sex, prostitution and gang rape. The film’s rating was later upgraded to R.Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times seemed hesitant to overpraise the film, which was based on James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel of the same name. It was “tough and good in important ways,” Mr. Canby wrote, “slick, brutal (but not brutalizing)” and “ultimately a moving experience.”Mr. Hellman didn’t even bother to write an acceptance speech.“I probably only said 10 words” after Elizabeth Taylor handed him the trophy, Mr. Hellman told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. “It must have been the shortest speech in the history of the Oscars.”Mr. Hellman’s entire movie producing career consisted of seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, not to mention an additional 11 nominations. Three Oscars were for “Midnight Cowboy”; John Schlesinger also won as best director and Waldo Salt for best adapted screenplay.The other three — for best actor, best actress and best original screenplay — were for “Coming Home” (1978), an ambitious drama directed by Hal Ashby. Mr. Voight and Jane Fonda starred in the film, he as a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran with a social conscience, and she as a military wife who becomes his lover while her conservative straight-by-the-book husband is deployed in the same war.Jon Voight, left, and Dustin Hoffman in a scene from the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Oscar.United ArtistsBetween those two successes, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), also directed by Mr. Schlesinger, was another story altogether. Based on Nathanael West’s novel, set on the fringes of 1930s Hollywood, it was a depressing tale of a seductive but tainted promised land where some people came to fail and some to die. William Atherton, Donald Sutherland and Karen Black starred, respectively, as an Ivy League designer, a sexually repressed accountant and an untalented starlet.Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.Mr. Hellman’s last film was “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), directed by Peter Weir from Paul Theroux’s novel about an inventor who moves to a tropical island with his family, tries to create a utopia and fails. Harrison Ford starred.Mr. Hellman in 2009. At one point he described his earlier films as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesMr. Hellman was married to Joanne Fox from 1957 to 1966 and to Nancy Ellison, a photographer, from 1973 to 1991. In addition to his third wife, a film promoter whom he married in 2001, his survivors include a son, J.R.; a daughter, Jenny Hellman; and a grandson.Authors and commentators considered Mr. Hellman a driving force in the creation of what some called the New Hollywood of the 1970s, where power shifted from big-studio committees to independent filmmakers with purpose. But the era didn’t last long. In 1982, in an interview with The New York Times, he described the films he had made up to that point as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”“People just can’t believe that after the success of ‘Coming Home,’ I couldn’t just do what I wanted,” Mr. Hellman observed. But the studios, he said, were now run by business types who needed every film to be a blockbuster.“All that my success has won me is the luxury of immediate access to top executives,” he said. More