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      Richard Anobile, Chronicler of the Marx Brothers, Dies at 76

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      He produced many books about film. But Groucho Marx tried to stop distribution of one collaborative effort because he didn’t like seeing his salty and insulting remarks in print.Richard Anobile, a prolific creator of film books whose friendly collaboration with the anarchic comedian Groucho Marx on a project called “The Marx Bros. Scrapbook” turned sour when Mr. Marx sued to stop its distribution after reading his unedited quoted remarks in print, died on Feb. 10 in Toronto. He was 76.His wife, Elizabeth (Golfman) Anobile, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Anobile (pronounced a-NO-buh-lay) first entered the world of Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo Marx with the publication in 1971 of “Why a Duck?” (the title is based on wordplay between Groucho and Chico over the word “viaduct” in the 1929 movie “The Cocoanuts”). The book combined blowups of frames from scenes in eight of the comedy team’s films with the dialogue that accompanied them. Groucho Marx wrote the introduction.“The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” published two years later, was a more ambitious project, and it brought Mr. Anobile into closer contact with Groucho, then in his 80s, through an introduction by his agent.In addition to excerpts from his many hours of interviews with Mr. Marx, the book included photographs and illustrations, as well as playbills, reviews, advertisements, family scrapbook entries and pages from film scripts. Mr. Anobile also interviewed the other two surviving Marx brothers, Gummo (who left the group long before they started making movies) and Zeppo, as well as friends like the comedian Jack Benny.The film critic Roger Ebert called “The Marx Bros. Scrapbook” “the all-time definitive work on the subject.”Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, the film critic Roger Ebert called the book “the all-time definitive work on the subject.”But Mr. Marx regretted the publication of his raw opinions of people like his brother Chico (“All he could do was shoot the piano keys”); Noël Coward and Truman Capote (whom he tarred with gay slurs); George M. Cohan (“a no-good Irish son of a bitch”); S.J. Perelman, who contributed to the scripts of two Marx Brothers films (“I hated the son of a bitch and he had a head as big as my desk”); and Marilyn Monroe, who had a small role in “Love Happy” (1949), the brothers’ last film.In late 1973, Mr. Marx sought an injunction in New York State Supreme Court to stop the distribution of the book, although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter” and that Mr. Anobile had assured him that he was going to turn his raw language into respectable prose.Whatever it was he had said — to paraphrase a song he had sung in “Horse Feathers” (1932) — he was against it.To prove that Mr. Marx said what he had said, Mr. Anobile brought the tapes of their interviews into court. In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1974, he recalled cautioning Mr. Marx not to say anything during the interviews that he did not want to see published.He added, “He signed a jacket of the book, ‘This is a wonderful book, Richard, thanks to you.’”Mr. Marx — who staged one of his depositions in a Manhattan hotel suite wearing a shirt patterned with the titles of Marx Brothers films and bearing the slogan “Money talks” — never got the injunction or the $15 million in damages that he had demanded.Mr. Anobile told the blog Brain Dead and Loving It in 2018 that the case was settled after Mr. Marx’s death in 1977.Groucho Marx in 1964. He sought an injunction in 1973 to stop the distribution of “The Marx Bros. Scrapbook,” although it had already been delivered to bookstores nationwide. He argued that it contained “defamatory, scandalous, obscene and inflammatory matter.”W. Breeze/Evening Standard, via Getty ImagesRichard Joseph Anobile was born on Feb. 6, 1947, in the Bronx. His father, Joseph, was a government worker; his mother, Isabella (Lanzella) Anobile, was a homemaker who sometimes worked in a bakery. He grew up watching old comedies on television and studied film at the City College of New York; he said he directed one film there but grew disenchanted with the courses and got a job in the paid obituaries department of a newspaper.Another job, with the film collector Raymond Rohauer, led him to work on retrospectives of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy at the supermarket heir Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art in Manhattan. In 1969, he published his first book — “Drat: Being the Encapsulated View of Life by W.C. Fields in His Own Words” — about the comedian with the bulbous nose and misanthropic screen persona who starred in films like “It’s a Gift” (1934) and “The Bank Dick” (1940).It was the start of an unusual publishing career. Mr. Anobile went on to combine movie frames and dialogue in books that ambitiously reconstructed complete films, including “Casablanca,” “Psycho,” Stagecoach,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Frankenstein” and “Play It Again, Sam.” He used the same formula to describe “verbal and visual gems” in the films of W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.He continued to publish into the 1980s, when he realized that people were more likely to watch a film on videocassette than experience it through a book-length, frame-by-frame reconstruction.He soon moved into television production — where he had wanted to be since he was in college — and worked largely as a postproduction supervisor on movies like “Liberace: Behind the Music” (1988) and “Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story” (2004), and series including “Murdoch Mysteries.” He was also the associate producer of some TV projects and, last year, a producer of episodes of “The Kings of Napa,” a series about the wine business on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN channel.In addition to his wife, Mr. Anobile is survived by his stepdaughter, Tamara Kruger. His two previous marriages ended in divorce.When Mr. Anobile began work on “Why a Duck?,” he recalled, he envisioned creating a short, simple book, like “Drat,” filled with quotations and stills from Marx Brothers films. Instead, it became a detailed 288-page book, with scenes matched to their dialogue.“I became so involved with their comedy that I began having guilt feelings about hatcheting my way through their films, plucking one line here and one line there and pawning it off as representative of their humor,” he wrote in “Why a Duck?” “So, faced by the bulk of what I had already accumulated, I decided to do what no one had tried — compile as complete a volume as possible by attempting a literal translation from celluloid to paper.” More

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      Tom Luddy, a Behind-the-Scenes Force in Cinema, Dies at 79

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      Known for his association with Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and many others, he was also a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.Tom Luddy, a quietly influential film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncratic Telluride Film Festival, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-century-old gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964. He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a two-screen art house that had once been managed by the film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art-house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.By the early 1970s he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospectives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the United States premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicated documentary about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Mr. Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinanceable project.” Mr. Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.In an email, Mr. Schrader described Mr. Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousness.”Mr. Luddy at the Pacific Film Archive in the 1970s. He turned it into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveHe had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond mere networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboard.It was Mr. Luddy who suggested that Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free the Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times. When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Mr. Luddy asked her to phone Philip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, for a tutorial.It was a measure of Mr. Luddy’s influence, The Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrant-gangster epic, to Mr. Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”And it was Mr. Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “César,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Ms. Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institution that ignited the farm-to-table movement.Mr. Luddy with the restaurateur Alice Waters in 2011. He encouraged her to name her restaurant Chez Panisse after a character in a French film trilogy.U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive“We saw the films on three consecutive nights and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Ms. Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’”Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Mr. Luddy’s dining room, where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemaking ethos of that decade, or at least of Mr. Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”As the story goes, Mr. Herzog challenged his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to a bet, which was either a publicity stunt organized by Mr. Luddy or a genuine goad from Mr. Herzog: Mr. Herzog told Mr. Morris that if he succeeded in his seemingly quixotic mission to finish his first film, “Gates of Heaven,” a quirky, Gothic documentary about pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog would eat his shoe. The movie was completed by 1978, and Mr. Luddy, Ms. Waters and Mr. Herzog set to work to honor the bet.Mr. Luddy was the master of ceremonies in 1979 when Werner Herzog honored his promise to eat his own shoe if his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris completed his documentary “Gates of Heaven.” Telluride Film FestivalMs. Waters decided, she said, that the best way to get the job done was to treat the shoe (a leather desert boot, actually) like a pig’s foot or a duck and braise it for hours in duck fat and herbs, which they did in her kitchen. Later, at a screening of “Gates of Heaven” in 1979, Mr. Luddy played master of ceremonies as Mr. Herzog, with the aid of a pair of cooking shears, tackled his meal, which was laid out on a table on the theater’s stage. He bravely choked down a few bites, as did Mr. Luddy. Mr. Blank’s film is a touching, and very funny, ode to art-making, and also to the skillful machinations of Mr. Luddy.In 1974, Mr. Luddy and a group of friends, Stella and Bill Pence and the film historian James Card, conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesque former mining town of Telluride, Colo. (Bill Pence died in December.) There would be no prizes, no angling for distribution, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceivable amount of screenings, talks and shenanigans. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.You might find Louis Malle at the bar, Robert Downey Sr. declaiming in the town’s plaza that plots were dead, Mr. Herzog and Barbet Schroeder playing table football. Mr. Lopate recalled that during the festival’s first year he found himself on an elevator with Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist, and Gloria Swanson. The two women were trading health secrets involving sesame seeds.“It mixes new directors and old ones — the venerable King Vidor is here this year — actors, distributors, scholars and the bristly and ardent society of film buffs,” The Times wrote in 1976. “Everyone is available to everyone else — names and no‐names, young and old — up to the point of exhaustion and past it.”In 2016, A.O. Scott of The Times described the festival, then in its fifth decade, as “a gathering of the faithful, consecrated to the old-time cinephile religion,” adding: “The local school gym and a hockey rink on the edge of town are temporarily converted into what screening M.C.s unironically refer to as cathedrals of cinema. Everyone is a believer.”Mr. Luddy might have been cinema’s most fervent believer, as well as its main officiant. The festival reflected his tastes, which were, as David Thomson, the San Francisco-based British film critic and historian, said, “both catholic and universal.” But, he added, “friendship was Tom’s art, really. He was unlimited in his wish and ability to help people in the broad area of film, and he did it without any ulterior motive, which is not common in the movie world.”Mr. Luddy at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival. The festival became a gathering of devotees to the religion of filmmaking, and Mr. Luddy was its most fervent believer and its main officiant. Pamela Gentile, via Telluride Film FestivalThomas William Luddy was born on June 4, 1943, in New York City, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., raised by staunch Democrats in what had been a monolithically Republican community. His father, William Luddy, who had worked in newspaper advertising and founded a national merchandise reporting service, was campaign manager for various candidates and, finally, chairman of Westchester County’s Democratic Party. His mother, Virginia (O’Neill) Luddy, was a homemaker and political volunteer.At the University of California, Berkeley, Tom studied physics and then literature, graduating with a B.A. in English. He also ran a film society and played on the varsity golf team.Mr. Luddy is survived by his wife, Monique Montgomery Luddy; his brothers, Brian, James and David; and his sister, Jeanne Van Duzer.Although Mr. Luddy spent most of his time behind the scenes, he did appear in one movie: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which he played to the creepy hilt one of the first humans to metamorphose into a pod person. “Ah, the ubiquitous Tom Luddy,” The Times quoted a member of a film crew as saying in 1984. “It always seems like there were three or four of him!” More

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      in Music

      Tom Whitlock, Co-Writer of ‘Top Gun’ Anthem ‘Danger Zone,’ Dies at 68

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      Mr. Whitlock wrote the words for that song and the chart-topping “Take My Breath Away,” central elements in the success of the hit 1986 movie.Tom Whitlock, who co-wrote two songs that helped elevate the 1986 movie “Top Gun” into a pop-culture phenomenon, died on Saturday in Gallatin, Tenn. He was 68.His death was confirmed by Gorman-Scharpf Funeral Home, which did not cite a cause.The “Top Gun” songs “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away,” with words by Mr. Whitlock and music by Giorgio Moroder, were just two of the more than 100 songwriting credits he accrued over his career. Songs he helped write were performed and recorded by Bonnie Tyler, Ray Charles, Graham Nash and others. But the work he did with Mr. Moroder for “Top Gun,” the hit Tom Cruise movie about fighter jets and machismo, has especially endured.Mr. Whitlock worked frequently with Mr. Moroder. Together they wrote five songs for the movie, but two in particular achieved widespread acclaim.“Danger Zone,” performed by Kenny Loggins, served as the guitar-heavy, energetic scene setter for the movie’s opening moments, as fighter jets roared off into the sky. The lyrics spoke for an unapologetic thrill seeker, culminating in the oft-repeated line “Highway to the danger zone.” The song reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It was also featured on the soundtrack of the hit 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”Even more successful was “Take My Breath Away,” the soulful ballad performed by the group Berlin that was heard in a love scene. It topped the Billboard charts on Sept. 13, 1986, and won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best original song.Thomas Ross Whitlock was born on Feb. 20, 1954, in Springfield, Mo., to Ross and Peg Whitlock. He started playing the drums when he was 11 years old, he said in a 2014 interview archived on the website rediscoverthe80s.com, and was soon working professionally.After attending Drury University in Springfield and playing in a short-lived band, he moved to Los Angeles. He was helping a friend at a sound studio there when Mr. Moroder, an already accomplished musician who had just bought the studio, said he was having issues with the brakes on his Ferrari, Mr. Whitlock said in the interview. Mr. Whitlock bought some brake fluid, used his own tools and fixed the issue. A few weeks later, he was hired to do odd jobs in the studio.After other people had left the studio for the day, he would stay and work on his own songs. And when other songwriters weren’t around, he recalled, Mr. Moroder turned to Mr. Whitlock for help on the “Top Gun” lyrics.He also wrote lyrics for the theme songs for the 1988 Summer Olympics and the 1990 FIFA World Cup.His marriage to Hollie Whitlock ended in divorce. Survivors include his sister, Mary Whitlock Schweitzer. More

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      in Television

      Barbara Bosson, 83, Dies; Brought Family Drama to ‘Hill Street Blues’

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      She received five consecutive Emmy nominations for her role as Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of a police precinct captain.Barbara Bosson, who starred in a half-dozen TV crime dramas from the 1970s to the ’90s but who is best known for her five seasons on “Hill Street Blues,” for which she was nominated for five consecutive Emmy Awards, died on Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 83.Her son, Jesse Bochco, confirmed her death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Ms. Bosson was a relatively unknown actress when she burst through the doors of a police station in the pilot episode of “Hill Street Blues,” the much-lauded police drama that ran from 1981 to 1987. She played Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of Capt. Frank Furillo (played by Daniel J. Travanti), and she had come to demand alimony, which he was chronically late in paying.Fay’s was supposed to be a one-off appearance, but producers, critics and audiences liked her so much that the writers — including her husband, Steven Bochco, the show’s producer and co-creator — quickly made her a part of the main cast.With its busy camera work and overlapping story lines, “Hill Street Blues” is widely considered a landmark in TV history. Set in a gritty (but unnamed) American city, the show offered a textured take on working-class life that struck a chord with a country in the midst of stagflation and deindustrialization. It was nominated for 97 Emmys, a record at the time for a one-hour drama (it has since been surpassed by “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “ER” and “Game of Thrones”), and won 25.Ms. Bosson’s performance as Fay was central to that success. Her character was difficult and self-pitying, but she was also a hardworking single mother struggling to make ends meet.“Fay is one of those transition women,” she told The Washington Post in 1987. “She grew up in one kind of set of values — she’s not unbright, but she never thought she’d have to support herself. And then she found herself divorced, poor, with a child and real angry.”Ms. Bosson faced accusations that she had won the role because she was married to Mr. Bochco. She brushed them off, but she also said they drove her add depth to the character as a way of showing her creative independence. It was her idea, for example, to make Fay a victims’-rights advocate.Mr. Bochco left the show over creative differences at the end of the fifth season. Ms. Bosson left soon after, claiming that the producers were trying to strip Fay of the endearing qualities she had worked so hard to add.Ms. Bosson went on to star in several more crime shows, including the Bochco creations “Hooperman,” “Cop Rock” and “Murder One,” Her performance as a deputy district attorney on “Murder One” earned her a sixth Emmy nomination.Ms. Bosson at a Screen Actors Guild event in 2005.Mark Sullivan/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarbara Ann Bosson was born on Nov. 1, 1939, in Charleroi, Pa., about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Her father, John, was an aspiring tennis coach who made ends meet as a milkman, and her mother, Doris, was a homemaker. When Barbara was a teenager, her family moved to Gulfport, Fla., where she graduated from high school in 1957.She gained admission to the drama department at Carnegie Tech (today part of Carnegie Mellon University), but it was too expensive for her parents. Instead she moved to New York, where she worked as a secretary and took acting classes at night. She also worked for a time as a hostess at the Playboy Club in Midtown Manhattan.“I put up with a lot of leering men to be able to study acting,” she told The St. Petersburg Times in 1990.She eventually saved enough money to enroll at Carnegie Tech in 1965, but left before graduating to pursue acting. Her classmates included several future “Hill Street Blues” colleagues, among them Mr. Bochco and the actors Bruce Weitz and Charles Haid.Mr. Bochco was married, but he had divorced by the time they met again, in Los Angeles, in 1969. They married at the end of the year.They divorced in 1997. Mr. Bochco died in 2018. Along with her son, Ms. Bosson is survived by a daughter, Melissa Bochco; two grandchildren; and her brother, Richard.Ms. Bosson’s first screen credit was in the 1968 crime thriller “Bullitt,” with Steve McQueen, and through the 1970s she was seen in a series of small TV and film roles. She was also a member of the Committee, an improv troupe.Though she continued to find work in the 12 years between leaving “Hill Street Blues” and her retirement in 1997, she found it increasingly frustrating, with good roles for women her age few and far between.“There’s this wonderful tradition in Hollywood where men as old as 60 or 70 play opposite women of 20,” she told The Washington Post. “The only time you’ll see an older woman with a younger man is if she’s so knock-them-down-dead gorgeous that anybody would go for her.” More

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      in Theater

      Adrian Hall, Who Invigorated Regional Theater, Dies at 95

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      As founding artistic director, he made Trinity Rep in Rhode Island a leader in theatrical innovation. He then made his mark in Dallas as well.Adrian Hall, who as founding artistic director built Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., into one of the premiere regional theaters in the country, and who did similarly important work in Dallas and elsewhere, died on Feb. 4 in Tyler, Texas. He was 95.Trinity announced his death in a statement. A neighbor, Ruth Barrett, said Mr. Hall, who lived in his native city, Van, Texas, east of Dallas, died in a hospital.Curt Columbus, Trinity’s current artistic director, called Mr. Hall “a visionary artist, not only in the way he challenged the aesthetic limits of the stage, but also in the challenging subject matter he produced.”Mr. Hall led Trinity from its founding in 1964 until 1989, presenting one inventive production after another. For the last six years of that tenure, he was also artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, another important regional house.In the 1960s and ’70s, with the establishment not only of Trinity but also of houses like American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts, the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Steppenwolf in Chicago, the regional theater movement that had begun a generation earlier under Margo Jones in Dallas and others solidified. Mr. Hall and his counterparts championed bold works innovatively staged.“His work was rooted in the work of the founders of the movement who came before him, especially Margo Jones, but then burst it wide open,” Kevin Moriarty, executive director of the Dallas Theater Center, said by email. “Like them, Adrian was deeply committed to creating a body of work with a company of actors who were resident in a community, rather than pick up actors for hire.“But,” he continued, “his unique approach to theatrical narrative and design was a significant aesthetic departure. Fusing the European influences of Brecht and Grotowski with a deep American sensibility (even more specifically, that of a gay Texan maverick), Adrian created theater in which actors confronted the audience directly.”In the early days of Trinity, that audience often consisted of high school students. In 1966, Mr. Hall received federal funding for a three-year program he called Project Discovery, which bused students from throughout Rhode Island to Providence to experience theater. In the first season, he mounted shows like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” thinking that the students would be interested in seeing plays they might be reading in class.They weren’t. They slashed seats, vandalized the bathrooms, threw things at the actors.“It was my moment of truth,” Mr. Hall told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Even though I was frightened of them, I knew it was a battle unto the death with me. I had to make them listen.”“That,” he added, “is when I fired the cannons and sprayed them with water.”The reference was to the company’s adaptation of “Billy Budd,” the Herman Melville novella. Mr. Hall staged it in 1969, with the theater transformed into the H.M.S. Indomitable. The set was the work of Mr. Hall’s longtime collaborator Eugene Lee, who died on Feb. 6. (“Lee’s Indomitable is a masterpiece of stagecraft,” Kevin Kelly wrote in a review in The Boston Globe, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if she sailed.”)For that and other productions, Mr. Hall altered the theater seating in ways that made the students feel part of the action, an effort to shake them out of their indifference.“It seemed to me I had worked all my life to make theater possible, and the audience was saying, ‘We don’t want no part of it,’” he told The New York Times in 1975. “And so I began right then to move outside of the proscenium and to surprise those little devils, to throw things at them, to challenge them, to intimidate them.”That approach became a signature of Mr. Hall’s work. By 1972 The Times was calling him “probably the most interesting director now working in the American regional theater.” Fifteen years later, the newspaper described the Texas-born Mr. Hall as “regional theater’s most charismatic evangelist, preaching the gospel of the nonprofit theater and warning against that devil, Broadway, with a driven fervor that is as Southern as tent meetings and as brashly Texan as a fur coat at the Cotton Bowl.”For some directors, the text of a play guides the presentation. But for Mr. Hall, and others in the regional theaters of the day, the director’s vision was paramount.“He brought his own unique aesthetic to a play,” Mr. Moriarty said, “focusing on the violence of a visceral experience in a shared, rough space, rather than creating illustrations that attempted to represent reality.”In 1981 Trinity won the Tony Award for regional theaters.Mr. Hall on the set of “The Tempest” at the Dallas Theater Center in 1987. For the last six years of his tenure at Trinity, he was also artistic director there.Mark Perlstein for The New York TimesMr. Hall was born in Van on Dec. 3, 1927, to Lennie and Mattie Hall. His father thought he should follow in his footsteps and become a rancher; his mother envisioned him as a preacher. Instead he read a lot, acted in school plays and, after graduating from high school at 16, enrolled at East State Texas Teachers College in Commerce.In 1947, he took a fateful trip to Dallas, where he met Ms. Jones, who was attracting attention with the repertory theater she had started there.She suggested that he apply to the Pasadena Playhouse’s theater arts school in California. He was accepted, and studied for six months there before returning to the teachers college. He graduated in 1949 and, from 1951 to 1953, served in the Army, where he started the Seventh Army Repertory Company, “doing grim little plays like ‘Darkness at Noon’” all over Europe, he told The Boston Globe in 1986.In the 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Hall directed in New York City, the Catskills and elsewhere before getting the call from a group of Providence business people who were trying to turn an amateur theatrical group, Trinity Square, into a professional one.He leaves no immediate survivors.Mr. Hall had a big personality and sometimes clashed with theater boards; his reluctance to set his full season in advance was one source of friction, since that made it hard to market subscriptions. A split with the Trinity board led him to leave Providence in 1989 and devote his full attention to the Dallas job, only to have that end when he clashed with the board there the same year, after which he became a freelance director.“Every once in a while,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989, “an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”If his personality set him apart, so, to some, did being openly gay. It also influenced his work.“Being gay, well, it’s an outsider status, no matter what anyone else says, and part of me really likes that,” he told The Globe in 1986. “It keeps me on edge, keeps me aware of what it’s like not being fully accepted, what it’s like being scored and thought less of because you’re different.“I identify with society’s rejects. Always have. That’s what my work’s about.” More

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      in Television

      Richard Belzer, Detective Munch on ‘Law & Order: S.V.U.,’ Dies at 78

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      A stand-up comic, he called his hard-boiled character on the long-running TV drama “Lenny Bruce with a badge.”Richard Belzer, who became one of American television’s most enduring police detectives as John Munch on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and several other shows, died on Sunday at his home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. He was 78.The death was confirmed by Bill Scheft, a friend of Mr. Belzer. Mr. Scheft, who has been working on a documentary about Mr. Belzer’s life and career, said that the actor had suffered from circulatory and respiratory issues for years.As Detective Munch, Mr. Belzer was brainy but hard-boiled, cynical but sensitive. He wore sunglasses at night and listened to the horror stories of rape victims in stony silence. He was the kind of cop who made casual references to Friedrich Nietzsche and the novelist Elmore Leonard. He spoke in quips; when accused of being a dirty old man, he responded: “Who are you calling old?”In a 2010 interview with AARP The Magazine, Mr. Belzer — who was a stand-up comic when he was not playing Munch — described his television alter ego as “Lenny Bruce with a badge.”With Munch, Mr. Belzer found phenomenal success. In 2013, when the character was written out of “SVU” — as the “Law & Order” spinoff is often called — Mr. Belzer wrote in The Huffington Post that he had appeared as Munch in more than 500 hours of programming on 10 different shows.The character’s run began in 1993, on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and included guest appearances on “Sesame Street” and “30 Rock.”At his retirement, Mr. Belzer was often described as the actor with the longest run playing the same character on television, as well as the actor who had played the same character on the largest number of different shows.Mr. Belzer performing in Central Park in 2011. Karsten Moran for The New York TimesA life of mistreatment, misbehavior and missed opportunities prepared Mr. Belzer for his star turn as a streetwise detective.Richard Jay Belzer was born on Aug. 4, 1944, in Bridgeport, Conn. He grew up in a housing project in the city. His father, Charles, co-owned a wholesale tobacco and candy distributor, and his mother, Frances (Gurfein) Belzer, was a homemaker.“Our mother didn’t know how to love her sons appropriately,” Leonard, Mr. Belzer’s brother and a fellow comedian, told People magazine in 1993. “She always had some rationale for hitting us.”Richard added, “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked. I had to make my mom laugh or I’d get my ass kicked.”She died of cancer, and Charles died by suicide before Mr. Belzer turned 25. Leonard jumped from the roof of his Upper West Side apartment building and died in 2014.Mr. Belzer routinely fought authority. “I was thrown out of every school I ever went to,” he told AARP. He served in the army for a little under a year, then received a discharge on psychiatric grounds after repeatedly injuring himself.He went on to work as a truck driver, jewelry salesman, dress salesman, dock worker, census taker and reporter for The Bridgeport Post. In that job, he dreamed of becoming a serious writer — but instead spent his free time dealing drugs.In 1971, Mr. Belzer answered an ad in The Village Voice for auditions for a sketch show, and soon enough he found himself performing stand-up. In 1975, he began working as a warm-up comic for the “Saturday Night Live” audience, but his friend Lorne Michaels did not invite him to join the cast. Mr. Belzer accused Mr. Michaels of breaking a promise to him — a charge Mr. Michaels did not comment on to People.Absent fame or fortune, Mr. Belzer became the bohemian prince of New York City comedy. His fans included Robert De Niro, John Belushi and Richard Pryor. Mr. Belzer gained renown for working the crowd, which often meant insults — labeling, for instance, the bejeweled get-up of a drunk audience member as “Aztec pimp” — but could also include his attempting to start a brawl.He held court at an Upper East Side club called Catch a Rising Star, where he was given an hourlong slot on a nightly basis. In 1981, a Rolling Stone profile described him as spending his final three dollars on a taxi to his set, performing while on quaaludes and mocking a famous talent manager in the audience.“On the outside, he was still ‘The Belz,’ in shades and black leather punk jacket, coke-dealer thin, lupine, always cool and relentlessly self-assured,” David Hirshey and Jay Lovinger wrote. But on the inside, he was “scared” — 37 years old and still struggling to afford meals.Mr. Belzer performing his stand-up act in 1988 at Caroline’s comedy club in New York.Catherine McGann/Getty ImagesHis life began turning around in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Belzer survived testicular cancer, quit drugs and married Harlee McBride, a former Playboy model and actress.In 1990, he found financial stability in a characteristically absurd and brutal fashion. Five years earlier, Hulk Hogan, demonstrating a wrestling move on Mr. Belzer on TV, knocked out the comic and dropped him headfirst to the ground. An out-of-court settlement enabled Mr. Belzer and Ms. McBride to buy a home in France, which they called variously the Hulk Hogan Estate and Chez Hogan.His career took off after he began appearing as Detective Munch on “Homicide,” when he was nearly 50 years old.Mr. Belzer’s first two marriages — to Gail Susan Ross and Dalia Danoch — ended in divorce. He is survived by Ms. McBride; two stepdaughters, Bree and Jessica Benton; and six step-grandchildren.Mr. Belzer came to own two homes in the south of France, and he built a basketball court at one of them. He enjoyed shooting baskets and waiting for one of his dogs to collect the rebounds. He read up on Roman history and visited ancient ruins.At the start of his career in television, he spoke happily about leaving behind his romantic, rough-and-tumble years in stand-up comedy.“I tell you,” he said to People, “I won’t miss making drunks laugh at 2 in the morning.” More

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      Sal Piro, ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ Superfan, Dies at 72

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      Like many others, he was riveted by the film and attended numerous midnight showings. Unlike many others, he made it the focus of his life.On a cold, snowy night in January 1977, Sal Piro waited in line outside the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village to see “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the first time. A campy science-fiction/horror musical whose characters include the cross-dressing mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, it had been developing a following for its Friday and Saturday midnight showings for several months.Mr. Piro didn’t know much about the film, which follows a couple (played by Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick) as they seek help at Frank-N-Furter’s castle after their car gets a flat tire. But he was impressed that one of his friends had already seen it 19 times.“So we got in line, made friends with some of other people on line and, once inside, we were both amazed and gobsmacked and under its spell,” the songwriter Marc Shaiman, a friend who was with Mr. Piro that night, recalled in an email.Mr. Piro remembered his excitement at seeing the giant disembodied red lips that open the film with the song “Science Fiction Double Feature”; the infectious “Time Warp” dance; and Tim Curry’s dramatic entrance as Frank, singing “Sweet Transvestite.”“Image followed image and the impact on me was tremendous,” Mr. Piro wrote in “Creatures of the Night: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Experience” (1990), one of three books he wrote or co-wrote about the film. “I began living the movie as it unreeled.”Fans like Mr. Piro soon became fanatics. Showings turned into extreme exercises in audience participation. They dressed as the characters. They shouted comments at the screen. They danced in the aisles during the musical numbers. They threw rice at the wedding scene.Mr. Piro’s love of the movie lasted the rest of his life. In the spring of 1977, he founded the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” Fan Club with several friends, who chose him as their president. He would ultimately see the film some 1,300 times.He was still the club’s president — and the face of the “Rocky Horror” fan universe — when he died on Jan. 22 at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.His sister, Lillias Piro, said the cause was an aneurysm in his esophagus.Mr. Piro is credited with helping to turn the “Rocky Horror” mania that started at the Waverly into a broad phenomenon that spread to other theaters, in New York City and around the world.He organized events with members of the film’s cast and sent out newsletters keeping fans up to date. He coordinated fans’ performances at theater showings, where he would head to the stage to introduce the film with a chant that began “Give me an ‘R’” and eventually spelled out “Rocky.”“He was a very honest guy, you believed in him,” Lou Adler, a producer of the film, said in a phone interview. “He didn’t have ulterior motives. The fan club wasn’t a business or a means to something else, but to make it the very best for the fans, because he was one of them.”In 2010, to celebrate the release of “Rocky Horror” on Blu-ray, Mr. Piro led a “Time Warp” dance with 8,239 participants in West Hollywood, Calif., which Guinness World Records certified as the largest such dance ever.Showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” turned into extreme exercises in audience participation, with audience members dressing as the movie’s characters.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesWhen a young couple walked through the rain to a mad scientist’s castle with newspapers over their heads, audience members similarly sought shelter.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesSalvatore Francis Martin Piro was born on June 29, 1950, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Paul, was a construction worker, and his mother, Eileen, was a waitress.Mr. Piro attended Seton Hall University from 1968 to 1972, the last two years at the university’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, but he did not earn a degree.He taught theology and directed plays at Roman Catholic high schools in New Jersey for three years before being laid off in June 1976. He spent that summer as the drama director of an all-girls camp before moving to Manhattan to pursue a career as an actor.He waited tables and got some roles — and then came “Rocky Horror.”A scene from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” featuring, from left, Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon. Mr. Piro saw the movie more than 1,300 times.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBefore it was a movie, “The Rocky Horror Show,” written by Richard O’Brien, had opened in 1973 as a stage musical in London. It became a smash hit there and had a brief run on Broadway two years later.The film flopped in limited release in September 1975, but it was revived in early April 1976 as the midnight show at the Waverly.And then came Mr. Piro, Mr. Shaiman and an expanding group of like-minded fans who became part of the early vanguard of audience participation. For Mr. Piro, talking back to the screen brought back memories of 1961, when he was 10 years old and watching “Snow White and the Three Stooges” at a theater.“I remember that just as Snow White was about to bite into the poisonous apple, a voice from the theater warned audibly, ‘You’ll be sooorry!’” he wrote in “Creatures of the Night.”Mr. Shaiman, the future Tony Award-winning composer and co-lyricist of “Hairspray,” said that he and Mr. Piro, friends from community theater in New Jersey, felt compelled to shout their comments at the screen once others began.“Sal & I, both HUGE hams, knew we had to join in,” said Mr. Shaiman, who added that he had seen the film more than 70 times.Mr. Piro, Mr. Shaiman and others in the small group who saw “Rocky Horror” early on will be the subject of a scripted movie, based on “Creatures of the Night,” to be filmed this summer.“It’s hard to think of making the movie without him,” Adam Schroeder, one of the producers, said by phone.Mr. Piro’s involvement in “Rocky Horror” was consuming, but it wasn’t a paying job. Over the years, he wrote greeting cards, a column for The Fire Island News, the three “Rocky Horror” books and the questions for a “Rocky Horror” trivia game.He had a handful of film and TV roles — he played a “Rocky Horror” M.C. in a 1980 episode of the series “Fame” and a photographer in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” (2016), a made-for-TV remake of the original film.From 1991 to 2014 he worked at the Grove Hotel, in the Cherry Grove community on Fire Island, first as the entertainment director of its Ice Palace nightclub and then as the manager of both the hotel and the nightclub. He also wrote and directed theatrical shows for the Arts Project of Cherry Grove.In addition to his sister, he is survived by two brothers, James and Joseph.Mr. Adler said that he saw Mr. Piro at a film event last month at IFC Center, as the Waverly, where “Rocky Horror” became a hit, is now known.“He said to me we’re both reaching ages where something might happen to either one of us,” said Mr. Adler, who is 89. If that happened, he said Mr. Piro asked him, “Who’s going to watch over Rocky?” More

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      Stella Stevens, Hollywood Bombshell Who Yearned for More, Dies at 84

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      She starred alongside the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. But she wanted to direct and write, and she felt held back by industry sexism.Stella Stevens, whose turn as an A-list actress in 1960s Hollywood placed her alongside sex symbols like Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch, but who came to resent the male-dominated industry that she felt thwarted her ambitions to be more than a pretty face, died on Friday at a hospice facility in Los Angeles. She was 84.Her son, the actor and director Andrew Stevens, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Stevens was among the last stars to emerge from Hollywood’s studio system, an arrangement that guaranteed her work but, she often said, also limited her creative aspirations. She won a Golden Globe in the “most promising newcomer” category for her role in “Say One for Me” (1959), a musical comedy starring Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds, but felt coerced into joining the cast of “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962), an empty Elvis Presley vehicle.Like Ms. Welch, who died on Wednesday, Ms. Stevens was ambivalent, if not outright indignant, about being cast as a Hollywood sex symbol. She described herself as introverted and bookish, and she sought to work with auteurs like John Cassavetes, who cast her as the female lead in “Too Late Blues,” his 1961 drama about a jazz musician (played by Bobby Darin).”I wanted to be a writer-director,” she told the film scholar Michael G. Ankerich in 1994. “All of a sudden I got sidetracked into being a sexpot. Once I was a ‘pot,’ there was nothing I could do. There was nothing legitimate I could do.”She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s. She starred as the love interest of the title character, a timid college professor who undergoes a personality transformation, in “The Nutty Professor” (1963), which Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in; “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963), a romantic comedy directed by Vincent Minnelli; and “The Silencers” (1966), a spy spoof starring Dean Martin.In between, though, she had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies, and critics came to view her as a star who was perpetually kept away from realizing her full potential.From left, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall and Ms. Stevens in “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972).20th Century FoxTwo exceptions came in the early 1970s: She acted opposite Jason Robards in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970), a comic western directed by Sam Peckinpah, and as part of an all-star cast assembled for “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), joining Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman in an overturned ocean liner.By then her sex-symbol days were fading, and Ms. Stevens hoped to have the time and reputation to become a director. But female directors were almost unheard-of at the time, and her attempts to get support for what she called “a marvelous black comedy” that she wanted to make met repeated dead ends.“Every man I’ve gone to for four years has smiled at me and then double‐crossed me,” she told The New York Times in 1973. “Every man I’ve talked to in every office in this industry has tried his best to discourage me from directing. They don’t want me to find out it’s so easy because it’s supposed to be terribly hard.”Stella Stevens was born Estelle Caro Eggleston on Oct. 1, 1938, in Yazoo City, Miss., though she often told interviewers she was from a town called Hot Coffee, a nearby community. Her agent said anything sounded better than “Yazoo.”Her father, Thomas, worked for a bottling company in Yazoo, and her mother, Estelle (Caro) Eggleston, was a nurse. When Stella was still young, they moved to Memphis, where her father worked in sales for International Harvester.Stella dropped out of high school at 15 to marry Herman Stephens. They had one child, Andrew, and divorced in 1956. (She later changed her surname to Stevens because, she said, it was easier for people to pronounce.)Ms. Stevens in 1968. She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s, but she also had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies.Jack Kanthal/Associated PressShe returned to school after the divorce and earned a high school diploma. She enrolled at Memphis State College, now the University of Memphis, with plans to become an obstetrician.She also took up theater. A role in a college production of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” brought an invitation to audition in New York, and by 1959 she was in Los Angeles, on a three-year contract with 20th Century Fox.She finished three movies in six months, including “Say One for Me,” but the studio dropped her soon after. With a young son to feed, she took an offer from Playboy to pose nude for $5,000. After the shoot, she said, Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s publisher, would pay her only half and told her that she had to work as a hostess at the Playboy Mansion to earn the rest.Before the photos ran she signed a new contract, with Paramount. She asked Mr. Hefner to cancel the magazine feature, but he refused, and she appeared as Playmate of the Month in the January 1960 issue, a few months before winning her Golden Globe.“People don’t realize how horrible men can be toward a beautiful woman with no clothes on,” she told Delta magazine in 2010.Her relationship with Playboy remained complicated. Despite her anger at Mr. Hefner, she posed nude for the magazine two more times. She then sued Mr. Hefner and Playboy in 1974, citing several instances of invasion of her privacy, but the case was thrown out because the statute of limitations had expired.In 1998, Playboy named Ms. Stevens 27th on its list of the 20th century’s sexiest female stars, just behind Sharon Stone.Ms. Stevens in 2002. She became a regular guest star on television shows. Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesIn addition to her son, Ms. Stevens is survived by three grandchildren. Her longtime partner, Bob Kulick, died in 2020.Despite her career’s post-1960s fade, Ms. Stevens remained eager to work. She turned to television and had roles in some 80 episodes over the next four decades. Most of them were guest appearances on shows like “Murder, She Wrote,” “The Love Boat” and “Magnum P.I.,” though she was also a member of the regular cast of several shows, including the soap opera “Santa Barbara.”When she did return to film, it was often for soft-core erotic thrillers and campy horror movies, like “Chained Heat” (1983), in which she played a prison warden, and “The Granny” (1994), in which she played a wronged grandmother who comes back to life to get revenge on her scheming family.She eventually did get into the director’s chair, for “American Heroine,” a 1979 documentary, and “The Ranch,” a 1989 comedy starring her son. She also wrote a novel, “Razzle Dazzle” (1989), which featured a thinly fictionalized version of herself.“I don’t feel I’ve been successful yet,” she told The Vancouver Sun in 1998. “I’m still waiting to be discovered. I see myself as a work in progress. I keep trying to work and improve and do things I’m proud of.”Danielle Cruz contributed reporting. More