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      in Music

      David Del Tredici, Who Set ‘Alice’ to Music, Dies at 86

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      David Del Tredici, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer who began as an experimentalist but became best known for a midcareer shift toward a style that came to be called the New Romanticism, which yielded a series of rich-hued, tuneful pieces based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.The pianist Marc Peloquin, a longtime friend and collaborator and the executor of Mr. Del Tredici’s estate, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.Flamboyant and gregarious, Mr. Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted. But he also had a gift for explaining his musical goals and how he had settled upon them. And he was frank about his personal life and his demons — alcoholism, for one. If the composer George Antheil had not already laid claim to the phrase “Bad Boy of Music,” Mr. Del Tredici could easily have adopted it himself.Mr. Del Tredici in 1973. He established himself as a young star of the experimental music world with a series of settings of the work of James Joyce.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesStarting as a teenager, when he decided to set aside a promising career as a pianist in favor of composition because of the way a piano teacher had spoken harshly to him, Mr. Del Tredici regularly redefined himself. He often abandoned approaches that had brought him success and went against the grain of the classical music world. Typically, he would face opposition at first, only to see his innovations win over listeners and other composers.He established himself as a young star of the experimental world with a series of settings of the work of James Joyce — most notably “Night-Conjure Verse” (1965) and “Syzygy” (1966), both of which showed how vividly angular, athletic vocal lines and pointillistic instrumental writing could magnify a work’s emotional depths.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      in Music

      George Brown of Kool & the Gang Dies at 74

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      Mr. Brown kept time for a group that combined funk, disco, R&B and jazz to create some of the most memorable pop songs of the 1970s.George Brown, a founding member and drummer of the group Kool & the Gang, who played on funk, disco and pop hits that featured prominently in movies and have been sampled numerous times, died on Thursday in Long Beach, Calif. He was 74.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed in a statement by the band’s publicist, who said the cause was cancer. Mr. Brown had said publicly that he had lung cancer.Mr. Brown, known as Funky, was a key contributor to several of the band’s biggest hits, including “Ladies Night,” “Jungle Boogie” and the party anthem “Celebration.”In a July interview with NPR, he described Kool & the Gang as “the sound of happiness.”In 1964, Mr. Brown linked up with Ricky Westfield and the brothers Ronald Khalis Bell and Robert “Kool” Bell, as well as other friends — Spike Mickens, Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas and Charles Smith — to form a band that would combine jazz, funk, disco and R&B and create some of the most memorable pop songs of their era.Formed in Jersey City, N.J., the band first played jazz while members attended Lincoln High School. The band performed under several names, including the Jazziacs, but eventually settled on Kool & the Gang in the late 1960s.One of the band’s early names was Kool and the Flames but the group changed the Flames to the Gang to avoid confusion with James Brown’s group, the Famous Flames.Kool & the Gang in the 1970s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesGeorge Brown was born on Jan. 15, 1949. His father, George Melvin Brown Sr., worked in the coal industry while his mother, Eleanor White Brown, was a maid in Fort Lee, N.J., and also worked as a key puncher.Both made music a constant part of Mr. Brown’s upbringing, Mr. Brown recalled in his memoir released this year, “Too Hot: Kool & the Gang & Me.”Mr. Brown, who took to drumming at a young age, wrote that he saved up from a newspaper delivery route to buy his first drum set.In a 2015 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Mr. Brown described using butter knives as drum sticks when he first started playing.“Then I went down to a music store on Newark Avenue in Jersey City and took a $3 lesson from a gentleman who used to play with the Shirelles. He said, ‘Hey man, you’re a natural!’” Mr. Brown recalled. “So he gave me ‘Buddy Rich’s 16 Essential Snare Drum Rudiments’ book. I took one more lesson and never went back.”The band was signed by the producer Gene Redd to De-Lite Records 1969.The members were in an early recording session in New York for their instrumental debut album, “Kool and the Gang,” when Mr. Redd encouraged Mr. Brown and Ronald Bell to just “do something.” It led to a freewheeling recording session that produced songs like “Raw Hamburger” and the album opener, “Kool & the Gang.”“It just flowed. And we’re just grooving,” Mr. Brown told The New York Times in an interview last year.George Brown on drums in 1974.Getty ImagesThe sound carried over into the 1970s as the band found fame and added the vocalist J.T. Taylor.Songs like “Jungle Boogie” “Hollywood Swinging” and “Funky Stuff” became Billboard chart staples. “Celebration” — with its cheery chorus “Celebrate good times, come on!” — made it all the way to the top.The group would go on to release dozens of albums, tour worldwide and appeared on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978.The group’s songs have frequently appeared on film and television soundtracks, including for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.In 2015, the band was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Mr. Brown was a producer on an album that the band released this year, called “People Just Want To Have Fun” in anticipation of the group’s 60th anniversary.Kool & the Gang had a broad influence, particularly in hip-hop.According to the website WhoSampled, the band has been sampled in almost 2,000 songs, among the highest of all time. The band’s song “Summer Madness” accounts for 249 samples, by artists including Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Mary J. Blige.Ronald Khalis Bell, a singer, songwriter and saxophonist for the band, died in 2020. Mr. Thomas, who played saxophone, died in 2021.Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Hanh Brown, and five children: Dorian Melvin Brown, Jorge Lewis Brown, Gregory Brown, Jordan Xuan Clarence Brown and Aaron Tien Joseph Brown.Three years ago, Mr. Brown was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to an interview broadcast with the television station KCAL in Los Angeles. After surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Brown recovered and returned to touring in 2022. But this year, the cancer returned.“I didn’t plan on being in a band known around the world, but I welcomed it when it came,” Mr. Brown wrote in his book. “I didn’t know where the music would lead me, but I knew that if I remained focused and persevered, it would happen as God had intended. And it did.” More

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      in Music

      John Morris, Who Brought Rock Legends to the Stage, Dies at 84

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      As a coordinator of the Woodstock festival and the hallowed New York venue Fillmore East, he helped showcase the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.John Morris, who brought an element of spectacle to the rock explosion of the 1960s as a coordinator and M.C. for the era-defining Woodstock festival, and who also helped run the storied rock venues Fillmore East in New York City and the Rainbow theater in London, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 84.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease following treatment for lung cancer, his longtime partner, Luzann Fernandez, said.A New York native, Mr. Morris got his start as a lighting designer — first for theater productions in his home city and on London’s West End, and later for rock concerts — before he began producing concerts himself. He gained prominence in 1967 when he organized a free concert by Jefferson Airplane in Toronto that drew some 50,000 people, and he went on to mount tours by that band, as well as by the Grateful Dead and others.In 1968, Mr. Morris cemented his place in rock lore when he helped Bill Graham, the powerful and feared West Coast rock impresario, open an East Coast answer to his hallowed Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Fillmore East became a magnet for top acts like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers, who recorded a searing live album there, and was often called “the church of rock ‘n’ roll.”Still, no Fillmore East concert could come close to matching the impact of Woodstock, where legions of rock disciples turned a mass migration to a dairy farm in upstate Bethel, N.Y., into a pilgrimage that marked the apotheosis of the hippie era.The crowd on the first day of the festival. It was Mr. Morris who announced, as unanticipated masses converged on the festival, that Woodstock was “a free concert from now on.”Clayton Call/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Morris served as the production coordinator for the three-day event, formally known as the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which featured more than 30 acts. Organizers originally sold tickets for $18 (the equivalent of about $150 today), anticipating a crowd of about 50,000.Before the festival began, Mr. Morris helped the festival’s creators lure cutting-edge talent, using every means at their disposal given budgetary restraints. “We famously got the Who for $11,000 because that was all we had left in the budget,” he said in a 2019 interview with the music site Pollstar, “and we plied Pete Townshend with wine to get him to agree.” (Other sources give the amount as $12,500.)The festival, of course, became a signature event of the 1960s, a rain-soaked counterculture convention at which an estimated 400,000 people or more got high, listened to wailing guitars and lived communally in muddy fields, as memorialized in the Academy Award-winning documentary “Woodstock” (1970), directed by Michael Wadleigh.Mr. Morris, who usually worked behind the scenes, found his own taste of fame after Michael Lang, one of the festival’s organizers, without warning deputized him and Chip Monck, the lighting director, to serve as masters of ceremonies.It was Mr. Morris’s voice that echoed over the hillsides, in his famous announcement, as unanticipated masses converged on the festival, that Woodstock was “a free concert from now on,” to which he added: “That doesn’t mean that anything goes. What that means is that we’re going to put the music up here for free.”But, as he later clarified, it was Mr. Monck, not he, who made the equally famous announcement warning festival goers to avoid the unreliable batch of LSD known as the “brown acid.” “I did not do drugs,” he said, “because I was usually in charge and I didn’t feel I could. So me saying the brown acid is not particularly good would be very out of character, because I would not have the vaguest idea.”However transcendent Woodstock proved to be for the hordes of revelers, Mr. Morris had to deal with continual crises. “You can see me in that film announcing and coming as close to a nervous breakdown as humanly possible,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Malibu Times. “On Sunday, we had what was later on called a tornado that shot through the festival, poured rain, wind — the stage started sort of sliding, feeling dangerous.”However chaotic things got, Mr. Morris later expressed pride in pulling off the seemingly impossible.“We dealt with what became one of the largest cities in New York State at that point,” he said, and “managed to put on one of the best music concerts of all time.”Mr. Morris, center, shared his Woodstock memories at a 2019 panel discussion in Los Angeles with Bill Belmont, left, the festival’s artist coordinator, and Joel Rosenman, one of the festival’s producers.Alison Buck/WireImage, via Getty ImagesJohn Hanna Morris Jr. was born on May 16, 1939, in Manhattan, the elder of two sons. His father was a deputy New York City police commissioner and later an advertising executive. His mother, Louise (Edwards) Morris, had run national youth programs under the New Deal during the Great Depression.The family eventually settled in Pleasantville, a village in Westchester County. After graduating from high school in Somers, N.Y., Mr. Morris spent two years studying theater production at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.Following his tenure at Fillmore East, Mr. Morris spearheaded the reopening of London’s Rainbow theater in Finsbury Park as a rock temple in its own right, starting with a fiery opening show by the Who in November 1971.In addition to Ms. Fernandez, Mr. Morris is survived by his brother, Mark.Mr. Morris continued producing concerts by major acts, including David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Stevie Ray Vaughan through the 1980s. He later produced antiques shows and was a dealer of Native American art and artifacts.For all his later accomplishments, he never stopped expressing pride in helping to make Woodstock, a festival created by the young and for the young (its principal organizers were in their 20s) an unlikely success.“I was the adult in the room, charged with keeping the thing running,” he told Pollstar. “I was older than most everybody else, all of 30 at that point.” More

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      in Theater

      Shirley Jo Finney, 74, Dies; Addressed the Black Experience Onstage

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      After an acting career that included playing the Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph in a TV movie, she became known as a director for her work at regional theaters.The actor and director Shirley Jo Finney in 1974 in Sacramento, Calif., where she studied drama. “I have, basically, always been ‘the first African American,’” she once said.Frank Stork/Sacramento Bee, via the Center for Sacramento HistoryShirley Jo Finney, an actor who became a prolific and award-winning director of plays that dug deeply into the Black experience, died on Oct. 10 in Bellingham, Wash. She was 74.The cause of her death, in a hospital, was multiple myeloma, said Diana Finney, her sister and only immediate survivor.Ms. Finney worked for nearly 40 years at regional theaters, where she directed dramas like Pearl Cleage’s “Flyin’ West, which tells the story of late-19th-century Black female homesteaders in Kansas; Ifa Bayeza’s “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about the 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped, tortured and shot by two white men in Mississippi in 1955; and Dael Orlandersmith’s “Yellowman,” which examines interracial prejudice through the story of two young lovers, one with a light complexion and one with a dark one.“She was very much drawn to material by great playwrights of color,” Sheldon Epps, the artistic director emeritus of the Pasadena Playhouse, where Ms. Finney directed twice, said by phone. “But it was also a result of the categorization that artists of color still suffer, where they are assigned to Black plays and not thought of for plays by other writers.”Ms. Feeney was, Mr. Epps said, “passionate and relentless in all the right ways.”When asked about her choice largely to direct plays about Black characters and themes, Ms. Finney recalled her background.“I have, basically, always been ‘the first African American,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1999, during the run of “Flyin’ West” at the Pasadena Playhouse. “My family was the first African American family to move into the neighborhood that I integrated, and then I had to go to the elementary school there — so I’ve always done that. At U.C.L.A., I was the first African American to be in their M.F.A. program.”She added: “How do you break out of the box, and where do you fit into society? How do we maintain the tradition of a tribe and still transcend our own humanity?”Among the many venues at which Ms. Finney worked were the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Play House, the Actors Theater of Louisville and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. But if she had a professional home, it was the Fountain Theater in Los Angeles, where she had directed eight plays since 1997, including “The Ballad of Emmett Till.”In 2015, Ms. Finney was asked by Stephen Sachs, the Fountain’s artistic director, to direct his adaptation of “Citizen: An American Lyric” (2014), Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem and series of essays about race in today’s society.“I read it, and I went, ‘Oh, this is my life,’” she said in a 2017 interview featured on the website of the Center Theater Group, home to the Taper, Kirk Douglas and Ahmanson Theaters in Los Angeles. “Citizen,” she said reminded her of “walking through and navigating those torrential waters of mainstream America when you are a person of color or ‘other,’ and what you have to swallow in order to survive.”When the Fountain observed its 25th anniversary in 2015, Charles McNulty, The Los Angeles Times’s theater critic, wrote that Ms. Finney had infused “Citizen” with “the spirit of public reckoning” and added, “Her cast didn’t so much portray characters as stand in solidarity with the nameless voices reflecting, mourning and expressing outrage over the micro and micro aggressions (from a careless bigoted remark to police abuse) confronting Black people on a daily basis.”Shirley Jo Finney was born on July 14, 1949, in Merced, Calif., about 55 miles northwest of Fresno. Her mother, Ricetta (Amey) Finney, was a teacher and counselor. Her father, Nathaniel, sold auto parts. In 1959 she moved to Sacramento with her mother, her sister, her stepfather, Charles James, a municipal court judge, and her stepbrother, also Charles James.In high school, she was in the drama club. She then attended Sacramento City College for one semester before transferring to Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento). At a party, she met Wilma Rudolph, the sprinter who had won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and was teaching at the school. They became friends, and Ms. Finney became a babysitter for Ms. Rudolph’s children.“I told her, ‘One day, I’m going to make a film about you,’” Ms. Finney recalled in an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2000.She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1971 and earned a master’s degree in theater arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, two years later.After appearing in several television series and films, she was cast by the director Bud Greenspan in the TV movie “Wilma” (1977), which also starred Cicely Tyson as Ms. Rudolph’s mother. It received mixed reviews, but John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote that it was “given a touch of substance through a good performance by Shirley Jo Finney.”Ms. Finney as the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics, alongside Jason Bernard playing Ed Temple, her coach, in the 1977 television movie “Wilma.”Archive PL/AlamyShe continued to act occasionally into the 1990s, on series like “Lou Grant,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Night Court,” but by that time she had also begun to direct plays.“I love actors, and I love that process of bringing people who are strangers together, to work for a common purpose,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. “I love creating an atmosphere where you feel comfortable enough to share who you are, to create. And then you can go within to give the best you can give.”She called that process “orgasmic.”Mr. Sachs of the Fountain Theater said that Ms. Finney developed her own shorthand to communicate with actors.“Actors had to learn to speak ‘Shirley Jo,’” Mr. Sachs said by phone. “She spoke a language unto herself, with body movement and her cackling laugh. She had a way. When she spoke, she’d stand up, pace around the room, or rock on a chair and say, ‘I’m feeling it, I’m feeling it.’ She was almost like a shaman.”Among the honors Ms. Finney received were three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for her direction of individual plays and the organization’s Milton Katselas Award for her career work.Although she worked around the country, Ms. Finney never directed on Broadway. Her only chance at it ended in 2008, when financial backing fell apart for a revival of Ntozake Shange’s play “For Colored Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Ms. Finney received a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Eric Charbonneau/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn 2010, shortly before rehearsals were to begin for “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” the play’s director, Bennett Bradley, was stabbed to death. Mr. Sachs asked Ms. Finney to take over.“She came into the rehearsal room that day, unprepared, and took over like she had been destined to do it,” Mr. Sachs recalled. “She delivered a benediction to the company; she brought the cast together to tell this story and said that what happened to Ben echoed what happened to Emmett Till. In five or 10 minutes, she turned us around.” More

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      in Movies

      John Bailey, Oscars President at a Time of Strife, Dies at 81

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      A respected cinematographer, he guided the motion picture academy at the height of the #MeToo movement and dealt with infighting around the Oscar ceremony.John Bailey, an accomplished cinematographer who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2017 to 2019, a tumultuous period when Harvey Weinstein was excommunicated from the group and complaints mounted about the Academy Awards ceremony, died on Friday. He was 81.His death was announced by the academy, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.As a cinematographer, Mr. Bailey collaborated frequently with celebrated directors like Paul Schrader and worked on many well-known movies, including “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “The Big Chill” (1983).Before he was chosen to head the academy, he had never held a prominent public role, and he was never nominated for an Oscar himself, though he helped others win the award. In an interview in 2020 with the publication American Cinematographer, Mr. Bailey said he generally tried to make his own work “invisible.”After the academy announced in August 2017 that he would be its next president, The New York Times reported: “Hollywood scratched its head. Who?”It took only two months for Mr. Bailey to find himself in the news. Shortly after The Times and The New Yorker published investigations revealing previously undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment against the producer Harvey Weinstein, the academy voted overwhelmingly to “immediately expel” him. It was only the second known instance of an expulsion from the academy.(The first happened in 2004, when the character actor Carmine Caridi had his membership revoked after he broke rules about lending DVD screeners of contending films. Since then, the comedian and actor Bill Cosby, the director Roman Polanski and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel have also been expelled.)In a letter Mr. Bailey sent to members of the academy days after the vote, he wrote that the organization could not become “an inquisitorial court.” But he also expressed passionate support for the decision.“We are witnessing this venerable motion picture academy reinvent itself before our very eyes,” Mr. Bailey said to a luncheon of Oscar nominees several months later, according to Vanity Fair. “I may be a 75-year-old white male, but I’m every bit as gratified as the youngest of you here that the fossilized bedrock of many of Hollywood’s worst abuses are being jackhammered into oblivion.”In the kind of head-spinning turn of events that became familiar during the height of the #MeToo moment, Mr. Bailey himself became the subject of a sexual harassment accusation only weeks later.Variety reported that the academy had received three harassment complaints about Mr. Bailey. But the academy later announced that it had only one such accusation to look into, and within weeks it determined that there was no merit to the claim.More turmoil for Mr. Bailey’s academy lay ahead. The 2018 Oscars telecast saw a drop-off in ratings that has never been fully reversed. The comedian Kevin Hart was hired to host the 2019 ceremony, then stepped down amid criticism of jokes he had made years earlier about not wanting his son to be gay, leaving that year’s event hostless.Mr. Bailey made the case for two changes to the ceremony designed to maintain viewer interest in a new era: adding a “popular film” category, to include the kind of blockbuster movies that the Oscars otherwise overlook, and holding some award announcements during commercial breaks to shorten the broadcast. The academy encountered such severe blowback to those proposals that it scrapped both of them.In 2019, when term limits compelled Mr. Bailey to step down from his position, The Times described his tenure as “chaotic,” but in hindsight, perhaps none of the scandals of Mr. Bailey’s era rose to the level of Will Smith giving Chris Rock an unscripted slap to the face midbroadcast. (Mr. Smith received a ban of 10 years from the Oscars.)Getting embroiled in culture wars and power struggles was an unexpected career development for Mr. Bailey. He made it his modus operandi, he told American Cinematographer, to avoid “tawdry” films. Describing his youthful aspirations in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bailey said, referring to a long-dead French film critic, “I wanted to write — to be the American André Bazin.”Mr. Bailey in 1983 with the director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of “The Big Chill.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionJohn Ira Bailey was born on Aug. 10, 1942, in Moberly, Mo. He grew up in Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County, California. He told American Cinematographer that his father was a machinist who never went to high school.He earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1964, and several years later he earned a graduate degree in cinema from the University of Southern California. He entered that program to pursue film studies, a young cinephile hoping to become a critic, but found himself drawn instead to cinematography.Early in his career, he had small jobs on several enduring films, like being the camera operator on Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” The beauty of Néstor Almendros’s cinematography in that movie remained an inspiration for Mr. Bailey.When Mr. Schrader was preparing to shoot “American Gigolo” (1980), he planned to find a European cinematographer. But then, American Cinematographer reported, he was introduced to Mr. Bailey, found himself impressed by Mr. Bailey’s knowledge of foreign film and decided to hire him instead. The two men would go on to work together on five movies.That same year, Mr. Bailey worked with Robert Redford on “Ordinary People,” Mr. Redford’s directorial debut, which won several Oscars, including for best director.In later years Mr. Bailey repeatedly collaborated with the directors Michael Apted (on the 1996 movie “Extreme Measures” and other films) and Ken Kwapis (on films including “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” in 2005 and “He’s Just Not That Into You” in 2009). He also wrote a blog about film for American Cinematographer.His accomplishments at the academy included expanding international membership, which he told The Times helped the South Korean film “Parasite” win the best-picture award in 2020.He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol Littleton, an Oscar-nominated film editor.At the 2018 luncheon for Oscar nominees, Mr. Bailey had some useful advice for winners, The Times reported.“Thank your mom,” he said, “not your personal trainer.” More

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      in Television

      Peter S. Fischer, Who Helped Create ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 88

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      He spent many years as a writer and producer of the hit mystery series starring Angela Lansbury. He later wrote his own mystery novels, set in Hollywood.Peter S. Fischer, a creator, writer and producer of “Murder, She Wrote,” the long-running television series that starred Angela Lansbury as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth, died on Oct. 30 in Pacific Grove, Calif. He was 88.His death, at a care facility, was confirmed by his grandson Jake McElrath, who said he did not know the cause.In 1983, Mr. Fischer and the prolific producers Richard Levinson and William Link pitched CBS on a new series. The three had worked together on “Columbo,” the hit show starring Peter Falk as a rumpled, underestimated police detective, and “Ellery Queen,” with Jim Hutton as a detective who was also an author. This time, their idea was “Blacke’s Magic,” about a magician who solves mysteries.At a meeting with a CBS executive in late 1983, they were told that the network was more interested in a murder mystery series with a female lead. Soon after, Mr. Fischer, he came up with an idea when he watched A Caribbean Mystery,” a CBS-TV movie starring Helen Hayes as Miss Jane Marple, the amateur detective created by Agatha Christie.“Why don’t we meld Miss Marple and Miss Christie into one character, a mystery writer who actually solved murder mysteries using logic, good sense, observations and a twinkly sense of humor that masks the sharp brain lurking beneath a very attractive hairdo?,” Mr. Fischer recalled thinking in his 2013 autobiography, “Me and ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”He came up with the names of both the character, Jessica Fletcher, and the fictional town where she solved murders — Cabot Cove, Maine.But they needed a star. Jean Stapleton, who had portrayed the saintly, ditsy Edith Bunker on “All in the Family,” turned them down. Then they heard that Ms. Lansbury, who was renowned for her work in Broadway shows like “Sweeney Todd” and films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” was willing to star in a TV series. She signed on.Ms. Lansbury with Erin Moran and Tom Bosley in a scene from a 1986 episode of “Murder, She Wrote.”Everett CollectionThe series was an immediate hit and lasted 12 seasons. Mr. Fischer wrote a few dozen episodes and was the executive producer from 1984 to 1991. He shared nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding dramatic series three times and won the Golden Globe Award for best drama series twice. In 1985, Mr. Fischer won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the “Murder, She Wrote” episode “Deadly Lady.”“Peter was a very good showrunner,” Ms. Lansbury, who died last year, told the Television Academy in 1998. “He was really quite brilliant at what he did.”But, she said, “I always wanted to make it appeal to more people and to enlarge our audience even more.”One of the changes she made after succeeding Mr. Fischer as executive producer in 1992, was to move Jessica part time to an apartment in Manhattan, where she taught criminology at a college and tracked down killers in a new location. He disagreed with that decision, but it was no longer his to make.“To throw this over to become a ‘big city woman’ violated everything I believed about her,” he said in interview with his son Christopher in 2012 after he started writing mystery novels.Mr. Fischer in 2018. He retired from television in the 1990s and later wrote murder mysteries set in postwar Hollywood.Nic Coury/Monterey County WeeklyPeter Stephen Fischer was born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Queens. His father, Paul, worked for Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky maker. His mother, Dorothy (Sullivan) Fischer, was a homemaker.Peter fell in love with reading at a young age and started writing short stories as a boy. He wrote plays in high school and at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied in a department devoted to writing, speech and drama, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1956.He married Lucille Warnock in 1957.Mr. Fischer did not become a full-time writer right away; instead he made a living in direct mail, as an insurance investigator and as a trade magazine editor. He also published a monthly magazine, Sports Car News, out of his house in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island.At 35, he got his screenwriting break. He had written a script about a dystopian future in which couples are permitted only one child and people over 65 are denied medical care. With help from his brother, Geoffrey, a casting director at Universal Television, the script found its way to the producer Aaron Spelling and was made into an ABC movie, “The Last Child” (1971), with Michael Cole and Janet Margolin as a couple who are willing to defy the law to have a second child after the death of their firstborn.He then wrote episodes of several Universal series, including “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Columbo,” for which he also worked as a story editor.Three shows Mr. Fischer created or co-created had short runs: “The Eddie Capra Mysteries” (1978), starring Vincent Baggetta as a lawyer; “The Law & Harry McGraw” (1987), a spinoff of “Murder, She Wrote” starring Jerry Orbach as a private investigator; and “Blacke’s Magic” (1986), starring Hal Linden — the collaboration with Mr. Link and Mr. Levinson that CBS did not want. (It ended up on NBC.)In addition to his grandson, Mr. Fischer is survived by his daughter, Megan McElrath; four other grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; his half sisters, Paula Shorts and Stephanie Donnelly; and his half brother, Stephen Fischer. His wife died in 2017. His sons also died before him — Stephen in 2014, Christopher in 2020.Mr. Fischer retired from television in the 1990s. He recast himself a decade ago as a murder mystery writer. He self-published more than 20 books set in postwar Hollywood, with a studio press agent as the sleuth and real movies as backdrops.“He loved old movies,” Ms. McElrath, his daughter, said by phone. “So he came up with this idea of a Jessica Fletcher-like character who’s not in law enforcement but finds himself tripping over all these murders.” More

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      in Movies

      Lara Parker, a Memorable Witch on ‘Dark Shadows,’ Dies at 84

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      Her three-dimensional portrayal of a character who was also a vampire helped the Gothic soap opera develop a cult following.Lara Parker, who found small-screen fame in the 1960s and ’70s as a beguiling and vengeful witch on the popular Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died on Oct. 12 at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 84.The cause was cancer, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, a friend and fellow “Dark Shadows” actress.“Dark Shadows,” seen daily on ABC from 1966 to 1971, was a departure from standard soap opera fare, blending romantic intrigue with horror and science fiction. The show chronicled a wealthy and eccentric Maine family dealing with the usual soap melodramas — but also time travel, ghosts, werewolves and vampires.With her icy beauty and elegant demeanor, Ms. Parker proved coolly seductive in her primary role among several on the show, Angelique, an 18th-century servant girl and witch who puts a curse on a wealthy shipping scion, Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) after he spurns her for Ms. Scott’s character, Josette, turning him into a vampire and dooming the two to carry on a tempestuous cycle of passion and revenge as they time-hop through history.Despite the pulpy premise, Ms. Parker brought a complexity to her role. “I played her as somebody who was much more of a tragic figure, who was desperately, desperately in love,” she said in a 2016 interview with Den of Geek, a pop culture website.In doing so, Ms. Parker, whose character also dabbled in vampirism, and Mr. Frid helped expand the two-dimensional portrayals of vampires and witches seen in old Hollywood B-movies.“When you’re invited into someone’s living room in a show that is essentially bodice-ripping horror, you have to make yourself palatable to the household, which in those days mostly meant housewives and children,” Ms. Scott said in a phone interview. “Lara and Jonathan did that by bringing a dimension of vulnerability, so you cared about the characters as people, not just evil forces. In that way, ‘Dark Shadows’ was really the granddaddy for all contemporary vampire films.”As the show grew in popularity, Ms. Parker found herself continually recognized by loyal viewers on the streets — although not always in ways she expected. “I used to get on the subway platform when school let out at 3:15 in the afternoon,” Ms. Parker said during a television appearance in the early 1990s, “and instead of the fans coming up and asking for an autograph, they would run.”Ms. Parker brought a complexity to her portrayal of Angelique. She played the character, she said, as someone “who was desperately, desperately in love.”Everett CollectionLara Parker was born Mary Lamar Rickey on Oct. 27, 1938, in Knoxville, Tenn., to Albert and Anne (Heiskell) Rickey. Her lineage included the Confederate general James Longstreet and L.Q.C. Lamar, a Mississippi statesman who achieved a national profile as a congressman, senator and Supreme Court justice after the Civil War.Ms. Parker, who went by the name Lamar, grew up in Memphis, where she attended Central High School, and eventually earned a scholarship to Vassar College, where she studied philosophy, before transferring to Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in Memphis.She later studied speech and drama in a master’s program at the University of Iowa and had several lead roles at a repertory theater in Pennsylvania before moving to New York City. Within two weeks, she was in the cast of “Dark Shadows.”After the show went off the air, Ms. Parker moved to Los Angeles, where she turned her attention to prime-time television, appearing on “Hawaii 5-0,” “Kung Fu,” “Baretta,” “The Incredible Hulk” and other shows, as well as several television movies. She also had a powerful, if brief, role as a prostitute who tries to revive a client after he has a heart attack in the 1973 feature film “Save the Tiger,” for which Jack Lemmon won the Academy Award for best actor.Still, Ms. Parker’s relationship with the show that made her famous was far from over: “Dark Shadows” become an enduring cult favorite to new generations of horror fans, and Ms. Parker fed their obsession after turning her attention to writing. In 1998, she published “Dark Shadows: Angelique’s Descent,” the first of her four novels inspired by the show, which chronicled the early life of her character.She also helped revive the show on the big screen, appearing, along with her former co-stars Ms. Scott, Mr. Frid and David Selby, in a cameo role in the 2012 feature-film version of “Dark Shadows,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, with Eva Green as Angelique.Ms. Parker’s survivors include her husband, Jim Hawkins; two sons, Rick and Andy Parker; a daughter, Caitlin Hawkins; and a grandson.In the years following her breakout role, Ms. Parker discussed the significance of the show, which in her view helped modernize — and sexualize — the vampire figure in the years before “Twilight.” To her, this seemed only natural.“The bite itself is like the act of sex,” she once said. “There is penetration, and there is pleasure and there is abandonment.”“The story of the vampire goes back to before the Egyptians, before the Greeks, and exists in every single culture,” she added. “Why is it so widespread? Not because it’s true, but because it contains the truth of our fears and our desires.” More

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      Marina Cicogna, Italy’s First Major Female Film Producer, Dies at 89

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      A countess from an influential Italian family, she charted her own course and produced films by the likes of Pasolini and Zeffirelli.Marina Cicogna, an Italian countess who became her country’s first major female film producer, guiding to the screen celebrated films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, died on Nov. 4 at her home in Rome. She was 89.Her death was announced by La Biennale di Venezia, the organizer of the Venice Film Festival. No cause was given.Rising to prominence in an era when the only female names on film posters were often those of actresses, Ms. Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) became one of the most powerful women in European cinema, as both a producer and a distributor.She started from a lofty perch. Her maternal grandfather, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, was an industrialist and statesman who served various government roles, including as Italy’s minister of finance under Mussolini. He also founded the Venice Film Festival. In the mid-1960s, when Ms. Cicogna was in her early 30s, she and her brother Bino took control of her family’s production and distribution company, Euro International Films.Even so, she faced challenges: working with imperious male auteurs; earning the respect of the country’s left-leaning cultural leaders despite her titled upbringing; and openly dating women as well as men at a time when such topics were rarely discussed in public by figures of authority.Ms. Cicogna in 2009. She brought prominent films to the screen, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Medea” and “Teorema,” as well as Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” which won the 1971 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.Nick Harvey/WireImage, via Getty ImagesNor was her path as a woman always easy. “At the time I didn’t think about it,” she said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Roma this year. “But at the end of the day, yes, the intention to put you down was there, definitely.”Among the prominent films she produced or distributed were “Medea” (1969), Pasolini’s hypnotic reimagining of the Euripides tragedy, starring the opera singer Maria Callas; “Teorema” (1968), also directed by Pasolini, in which Terence Stamp plays an enigmatic stranger who seduces, one by one, members of a wealthy family in Milan; “Brother Sun Sister Moon” (1972), Zeffirelli’s lush retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi; and “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Petri’s Kafkaesque thriller, which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1971.Ms. Cicogna also had three films at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, including Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour,” starring Catherine Deneuve as a Paris housewife who secretly works at a bordello, which won the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion. In addition, she put her stamp on the proceedings by throwing a lavish party that became festival lore.“I didn’t give a big ball, but rather said that everyone could dress as they wanted, as long as they were in white and yellow or white and gold,” Ms. Cicogna said in a 2013 interview with T, The New York Times’s style magazine. “I sent two small Learjets, one to Corsica to pick up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the other to Rome to pick up Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim.”Such obvious displays of wealth would go out of fashion following the leftist student uprisings in Europe in 1968. “You couldn’t have a big party without hurting people’s feelings,” she continued. “You couldn’t go around with a Rolls-Royce without being thrown eggs at.”Ms. Cicogna, center, with the actresses Gina Lollobrigida, left, and Jane Fonda at the lavish party the countess threw for the 1967 Venice Film Festival. The party became festival lore.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesCountess Marina Cicogna Mozzoni Volpi di Misurata was born on May 29, 1934, in Rome, the daughter of Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, a banker, and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, who purchased Euro International Films, ultimately handing control over to her children.Growing up, Ms. Cicogna was a cinema lover who mingled among the children of David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind,” and other film heavyweights at the Venice festival.After an education in Italy, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she roomed with Barbara Warner, whose father was the Hollywood film mogul Jack Warner. During a school break, Ms. Warner invited her to California.“I never went back,” Ms. Cicogna told T. “I stayed for three months in California at the Warners’.”She later studied photography in the United States, brokering her platinum connections to shoot luminaries like Ezra Pound and Marilyn Monroe in candid moments.Her early forays into the film business included distributing a 1967 West German film, “Helga.” “It was the first time you saw a birth, a woman producing a child, on film,” she told T. “I decided we should publicize it. We put ambulances at the exit of the film, saying that people would faint when they saw that.”Ms. Cicogna in 1967 with the director Luis Buñuel, whose “Belle de Jour” won the Venice festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori Portfolio, via Everett CollectionShe was at times linked romantically with the likes of Warren Beatty and Alain Delon, but she also spent decades in a relationship with Florinda Bolkan, a Brazilian model and actress.After they split, she began a long relationship with Benedetta Gardona, a woman more than two decades her junior, whom Ms. Cicogna legally adopted for financial reasons. Ms. Gardona remained her companion until Ms. Cicogna’s death. (Complete information on survivors was not immediately available).Ms. Cicogna looked back on her career highlights of the 1960s and ’70s in the 2021 documentary “Marina Cicogna: La Vita e Tutto il Resto” (“Life and Everything Else”), directed by Andrea Bettinetti, as well as her autobiography, “Ancora Spero: Una Storia di Vita e di Cinema” (“I Still Hope: A Story of Life and Cinema”), published this year.Still, in a 2017 video interview, she expressed regret that she had not remained in the film business. “If I had to look back, I should have never stopped producing, although Italian cinematography has not been the same since. It’s not so great,” she said, adding: “I am also a person who is very torn between the European rather lazy aesthetic way of life and the American more creative, more active way of life.”“I’ve been more European than active,” she said. “I haven’t done as much as I should have done. But I can’t say I’m sorry. That’s the way it was, and that’s it.” More