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      Dino Danelli, Whose Drums Drove the Rascals, Is Dead at 78

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      His percussion virtuosity was a key to the band’s many hits of the late 1960s, including the chart-topping “Good Lovin’,” “Groovin’” and “People Got to Be Free.”Dino Danelli, whose hard-charging, high-energy drumming powered the Rascals to a string of hits in the late 1960s, including the No. 1 records “Good Lovin’,” “Groovin’” and “People Got to Be Free,” died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 78.Joe Russo, a close friend and the band’s historian, confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation center. He said Mr. Danelli had been in declining health for several years.The Rascals (billed on their first three albums as the Young Rascals) were among the first American bands to emerge in response to the so-called British Invasion of 1964.Formed in New Jersey in 1965, the quartet — featuring Felix Cavaliere on organ and vocals, Eddie Brigati on vocals, Gene Cornish on guitar and Mr. Danelli on drums — drew on a range of influences, including doo-wop, jazz and soul.Mr. Danelli, a protégé of the great jazz drummers Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, merged percussive virtuosity with a rock sensibility. Like Ringo Starr of the Beatles, he set the template for the rock drummer archetype: disciplined and precise, but with a flair that drew the crowd’s eye. He would twirl his sticks — a trick he learned from his sister, a cheerleader — and throw them in the air, before catching them without dropping the beat.Mr. Danelli was responsible for the band’s first big hit. He was a fan of obscure soul records, and one day at a record shop in Harlem, he found a single by the Olympics, “Good Lovin’,” written by Rudy Clark and Arthur Resnick, which reached No. 81 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1965.“We said, ‘Let’s try it, let’s put a new version to it,’” he said in a 2008 interview with the drummer Liberty DeVitto. “It was just a lucky find.”The Rascals played the song during a 1966 appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It soon topped the charts and — with its opening shout of “One, two, three!” — became one of the best-known songs of the decade.Onstage, the band dressed in the sort of foppish outfits favored by several other white acts of the mid-1960s: knee-high socks, short ties, floppy collars. But it was the first white band signed by Atlantic Records, home of Ray Charles, and it was among the few American rock bands to be accepted by Black crowds.The members included a clause in their contracts stating that they would perform only if a Black act was on the bill with them — a fact that meant large swaths of the South remained off limits.As the Rascals evolved, their sound mellowed and they turned out summer-vibe classics like “Groovin’,” which hit No. 1 in 1967, and “A Beautiful Morning,” which reached No. 3 in 1968. That same year, shocked by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, they released “People Got to Be Free,” a paean to racial harmony — written, like the earlier two songs, by Mr. Cavaliere and Mr. Brigati. It also reached No. 1.The Rascals dissolved in the early 1970s; Mr. Brigati left in 1970 and Mr. Cornish a year later. Mr. Cavaliere and Mr. Danelli stayed for two more albums before the band broke up.Mr. Danelli played in a series of bands through the 1970s, and in 1980 he joined Steven Van Zandt, the lead guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, in a side project called the Disciples of Soul.Mr. Van Zandt had grown up as a die-hard Rascals fan. In 1997 he delivered the speech inducting the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, calling Mr. Danelli “the greatest rock drummer of all time.”The Rascals, then known as the Young Rascals, appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in March 1966. From left: Mr. Danelli, Eddie Brigati, Ed Sullivan, Gene Cornish and Felix Cavaliere.CBS, via Getty ImagesDino Danelli was born on July 23, 1944, in Jersey City, N.J., the son of Robert Danelli and Teresa Bottinelli.He is survived by his sister, Diane Severino.He began playing drums at an early age and, after dropping out of high school, moved to Manhattan, intent on pursuing a music career. He picked up gigs in the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village, finagled a room at the Metropole Hotel in Times Square and met Mr. Rich and Mr. Krupa, who both took him under their wing.He traveled to California, Las Vegas and New Orleans for work, including a stint with the jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, before returning to New York. He met his future bandmates at a venue in Garfield, N.J., called the Choo Choo Club, and after playing together in another band, they formed the Young Rascals.The band got back together for a few reunion shows in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, minus Mr. Brigati, performed under the name the New Rascals. At Mr. Van Zandt’s urging, the four original members played a 2010 charity show together, and in 2012 Mr. Van Zandt wrote and produced a “bioconcert” called “The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream” — a multimedia show featuring performances by the band and clips from its 1960s heyday.It ran for 15 shows on Broadway, then toured the country for several months. 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      in Movies

      Adrienne Mancia, Influential Film Curator, Dies at 95

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      Her choices for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music gave foreign directors and newcomers valuable exposure in New York.Adrienne Mancia, who scoured the world for significant films and brought them to New York as a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, died on Sunday in Teaneck, N.J. She was 95.Her niece Francine Pozner Ehrenberg confirmed the death, in a care center.Ms. Mancia was instrumental in giving audiences some of their earliest looks at work by Wim Wenders of Germany, Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal and other notable directors, and helped rediscover archival gems and introduce subgenres like European animation and Cinema Novo from Brazil.She joined MoMA in 1964 as the secretary to Richard Griffith, the curator of the museum’s film department. Soon she was given the title of curatorial assistant and began organizing exhibitions; she rose to associate curator and then, in 1977, curator. She held that title until 1998, when she left for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was opening the BAM Rose Cinemas and moving into film programming.Her choices were crucial in expanding the horizons of American cinephiles, particularly in her early decades at MoMA.“As this was before the age of videotape, internet and niche movie channels,” Jon Gartenberg, a curator of MoMA’s film archive for part of her tenure and a longtime friend, said by email, “the recognition for the films that she curated at MoMA garnered an outsized importance in terms of the New York film culture and beyond.”Other museums would take their cues from the programming at MoMA and in the New Directors/New Films series sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Film festivals throughout North America would pick up on Ms. Mancia’s finds, and her vast influence led to awards from foreign governments.“Adrienne Mancia has probably contributed more than any other person to the introduction of Italian cinema in America,” Renato Pachetti, the president of the RAI Corporation, which has financed numerous Italian films, said in 1988 when Ms. Mancia received the Order of the Republic of Italy. Four years earlier, France had given her similar recognition, naming her a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.Ms. Mancia traveled extensively in her search for worthy films, both new and old. The film critic J. Hoberman, who knew her for decades and worked with her as a curator on a 1991 exhibition, “Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds,” said Ms. Mancia had not been content with simply accepting the film packages that other countries would send.“She loved to work in archives,” he said in a phone interview. “She didn’t want them to tell her which films to show. She wanted to pick them out herself.”Her interests were not limited to foreign films, or to the highbrow end of the cinematic spectrum.“She was a cinephile,” Mr. Hoberman said, “but she was not a snob.”In 1979 she organized a seemingly un-MoMA-like retrospective of films from American International Pictures, which in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s specialized in low-budget, quickly made movies for the drive-in crowd like “Girls in Prison” (1956) and “Beach Party” (1963). It wasn’t just an exercise in kitsch.“It’s extraordinary to see how many filmmakers, writers and actors — now often referred to as ‘the new Hollywood’ — took their first creative steps at American International,” she said at the time.“Low budgets can force you to find fresh resources,” she continued, adding that there was an “energy to these feisty films that capture a certain very American quality.”In 1985 she presented an exhibition of films featuring Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. cartoon characters. Again, nostalgia wasn’t the point; the artistry represented by predigital film animation was.“This exhibition makes me very happy and very sad,” she told The New York Times. “It makes me happy because I love it and sad because it might very well be the end of a great era, the end of complete animation, done frame by frame with great care, approaching art.”Adrienne Phyllis Johnson was born on June 5, 1927, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father, Harry Johnson, owned a furniture store, and her mother, Fae (Weintraub) Johnson, was a homemaker.She grew up in Paterson, N.J., and graduated from Eastside High School in 1944 after skipping a few grades. She received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin at 20, and later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.Her niece said that she married Umberto Mancia in Italy, where she spent much of the 1950s. The marriage ended in divorce.At MoMA, she helped establish Cineprobe, a program that from 1968 to 2002 presented works by independent and experimental filmmakers and hosted discussions with them. Though many of Ms. Mancia’s exhibitions were more mainstream, she especially enjoyed spotlighting new and little-known works and directors.“To discover people who have new ways of saying things with film is thrilling,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It keeps the idea alive that there are still surprises out there.”Ms. Mancia, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by a sister, Merle Johnson Pozner.Those who worked with her said that filmmakers weren’t the only ones who benefited from Ms. Mancia; she also influenced many younger curators.“For me, Adrienne was a major bridge between creation and curation,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “Early in my career, working at such an august institution as MoMA, Adrienne pulled me aside and reminded me that without filmmakers, none of us would have any jobs. She instilled in me a sense of humbleness that my mission was to support their creativity in my curatorial work.”Upon her death, Ron Magliozzi, a longtime MoMA staff member who is now a curator in the film department, sent an email to colleagues.“If only a little of Adrienne’s unmatched passion for cinema rubbed off on you,” it said, “it was enough to fuel your career.” More

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      in Music

      Herbert Deutsch, Co-Creator of the Moog Synthesizer, Dies at 90

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      An experimental composer, Mr. Deutsch collaborated with Robert Moog to create the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music, launching a revolution in electronic music.Herbert Deutsch, who helped develop the Moog synthesizer, a groundbreaking instrument that opened up new frontiers in electronic music and brought a futuristic sheen to landmark recordings by countless artists, died on Dec. 9 at his home in Massapequa Park, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his wife, Nancy Deutsch, said.Mr. Deutsch, a Hofstra University music professor and experimental composer, joined forces with Robert Moog, an engineer and inventor, to introduce a modular voltage-controlled synthesizer in 1964.With its otherworldly sounds, which could call to mind both a Gothic cathedral’s pipe organ and an extraterrestrial mothership, the Moog (the name rhymes with “vogue”) was the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music. Its debut marked the dawn of the synthesizer age.“There were plugged-in instruments before the Moog synthesizer, but none arrived on the scene with such awe-inspiring potential,” Ted Gioia, the music writer and author of the 2019 book “Music: A Subversive History,” wrote in an email. “The first recordings of Moog music from the 1960s felt like messages from the future, telling us that all the rules were going to change.”Many of those recordings turned out to define their eras. George Harrison purchased an oversized early Moog, which the Beatles used to color multiple tracks on their 1969 album, “Abbey Road,” including “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and Harrison’s composition “Here Comes the Sun.”The Moog reached a broader market in 1971 with the introduction of the compact Minimoog Model D, the first widely used portable synthesizer.“Within months of the first commercial Moog synthesizers showing up in retail stores, commercial recordings started to sound different,” Mr. Gioia said. The futuristic synthesizer beeped and booped its way onto the pop charts in 1972 with “Popcorn” by Hot Butter, and went on to become a driving force behind landmark songs like Kraftwerk’s arty “Autobahn,” Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” (1977), Parliament’s epic funk freak-out “Flashlight” (1977) and Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk crossover hit “Rockit” (1983).The Minimoog Model D, introduced in 1971, was the first widely used portable synthesizer.Moog Music Inc.Even when it was not the featured instrument, the Moog provided moody textures to timeless songs like Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” (1973) and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (1975). It also provided throbbing bass tracks to Michael Jackson’s mega-selling 1982 album, “Thriller.”While Mr. Moog handled the technical side of his namesake invention, during its creation Mr. Deutsch provided a practicing musician’s perspective, which was crucial in transforming it from an electronic gadget into a viable instrument.“Herb Deutsch was the catalyst for the invention of the synthesizer,” Michelle Moog-Koussa, Mr. Moog’s daughter and the executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation, said in a phone interview. “That is no overstatement.”“Herb would say, ‘This is what I need,’” she added, “and Dad would build the circuitry. It was a true partnership between a designer and a musician.”Despite his impact on music of all genres, Mr. Deutsch was the last person to trumpet his accomplishments.“I’m unwilling to go around shouting, ‘Look at me, I’m a part of the history of music,’” he said in a video interview with the Moog Music company in February. “But I do understand that Bob and I are an important part of music history, because that idea has been used in every direction that music can go into.”Herbert Arnold Deutsch was born on Feb. 9, 1932, in Hempstead, N.Y., the youngest of three children of Barnet and Miriam (Myersburg) Deutsch. His father was a clerical worker for the Veterans Health Administration, his mother a bookkeeper. With money tight, his parents also ran a small chicken farm on their property.In a detached garage next to the farm’s largest coop Mr. Deutsch, at age 3, had his first musical epiphany.“For some reason, I had picked up a long straight stick and, holding it in my right hand, was tapping it down on the dirt floor,” he recalled in a 2018 interview with Parma Recordings, a music production company. “At some point in this meaningless action I heard a note whenever I tapped the floor.”“It was a C,” he continued. “Then I tapped the floor an inch or so to the right and heard a D.”Soon he began to “tap out some melodies of music that I recognized as well as music that was new to me,” he said. “Suddenly, I stopped in terror. Of course I could not hear those actual pitches, or was the dirt floor truly magical?”The German rock band Kraftwerk was among the earliest exponents of the Moog synthesizer.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesHe started piano lessons a year later, and at 11, inspired by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, turned his sights to the trumpet. He played in bands throughout high school and during his years at the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.One of his best-known compositions was the haunting, multi-media track “A Christmas Carol, 1963,” an aural collage interspersed with recorded news snippets and medieval chants composed to honor the four Black girls murdered in the infamous Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that year.His performance of another modernist composition at the New York studio of the sculptor Jason Seley in January 1964 earned a positive review in The New Yorker. More significant, however, was the fact that Mr. Moog was in the audience.Mr. Moog, whom Mr. Deutsch had met at a music trade show, was working on his Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell University while running the small R.A. Moog Company, based in Trumansburg N.Y., which manufactured his versions of the theremin, the electronic instrument whose eerie space-age sound was a staple of 1950s science-fiction movie soundtracks.After the performance, the men and their wives went to dinner, where Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Moog discussed new possibilities for electronic music. Mr. Deutsch ended up commissioning a new electronic instrument, to be designed by Mr. Moog in collaboration with Mr. Deutsch.With Mr. Deutsch advising, Mr. Moog designed an instrument consisting of modules linked by patch cords that allowed musicians to create their own vast array of previously unheard sounds from scratch, whether to simulate acoustic instruments or to create their own distinctly electronic sonic palette.That same year, Mr. Deutsch wrote “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” the first composition for the Moog. Soon he was giving pioneering performances at Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.In 1968, Wendy Carlos released “Switched-On Bach,” a watershed moment for the Moog, launching Baroque musical into the Apollo age and the Moog into the bedrooms and dorm rooms of baby boomers. Ms. Carlos also used the Moog to conjure the foreboding sound of a dystopian future on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, “A Clockwork Orange.”After his work with Mr. Moog, Mr. Deutsch turned his attention back to teaching at Hofstra. In 1976, he published his first of three books, “Synthesis: An Introduction to the History, Theory & Practice of Electronic Music.”But in the late 1970s, he joined the Moog Company as marketing director and consulted on new synthesizer designs.By that point, sales of the American-made Moogs had begun to slide as cheaper Japanese synthesizers from companies like Roland and Yamaha came to dominate the market.In addition to his wife, Mr. Deutsch is survived by two children, Lisbeth Mitchell and Edmund Deutsch, from his marriage to Margaret Deutsch, who died in 1996; three stepchildren, Cheryl Sterling, Adam Blau and Daniel Rogge; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.The Moog synthesizer enjoyed a renaissance beginning in the 1990s, thanks to bands like the Beastie Boys, Wilco and Portishead. But by then, Mr. Deutsch had moved on from his days helping design synthesizers. He was, after all, a musician at heart, not an inventor.“A year ago I texted him to discuss something, and he said, ‘I can’t talk tonight because I have band practice,’” Ms. Moog-Koussa said. “He was 89 years old.” More

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      in Television

      Stephen Boss, Dancer and Reality TV Star Known as tWitch, Dies at 40

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      Mr. Boss spent nine years with “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” as D.J., guest host and, eventually, an executive producer.Stephen Boss, a charismatic hip-hop dancer and television personality known as tWitch who rose to fame on the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” before becoming a regular on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” died on Tuesday in a motel room in Los Angeles. He was 40.The death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office.Mr. Boss joined “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2008 as a 25-year-old with a talent for popping — a dance form associated with hip-hop that involves isolating parts of the body with a staccato rhythm — and an ability to make the judges burst into laughter with his facial expressions and theatrics.He soon found himself dancing unfamiliar styles like the waltz and the tango on national television, and he finished the show’s fourth season as runner-up. Later on in the series, Mr. Boss performed a hip-hop duet with Ellen DeGeneres — featuring him as a therapist in a sweater vest and her as his client — that would end up shaping the rest of his career.As a bubbly presence on TV who liked to wear a fedora and often broke into dance, Mr. Boss spent nearly a decade with “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” as D.J., guest host and, eventually, an executive producer. “I count on him to look over at and make silly jokes,” Ms. DeGeneres said in an episode this year, the show’s last. “He’s my pal, he’s my sidekick.”In a statement on Wednesday, Ms. DeGeneres said she was “heartbroken” over the death, calling Mr. Boss “pure love and light.”Stephen Laurel Boss was born on Sept. 29, 1982, in Montgomery, Ala., to Connie Boss Alexander and Sandford Rose. He started dancing as a teenager and earned the nickname tWitch because he could not stop moving in school or in church.“Dance constitutes a lot of the conversation that I have,” Mr. Boss told the website Collider in 2014. “While I’m not a ridiculous wordsmith and I can’t clearly verbalize the things that I’m feeling sometimes, I’d say that I can emote how I feel by dancing, 100 percent of the time, and fearlessly at that.”By the time Mr. Boss made it onto “So You Think You Can Dance,” he had already competed on “Star Search” and the MTV show “The Wade Robson Project,” in addition to more traditional dance training at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.If he had not been chosen for “So You Think You Can Dance,” he said in interviews, he planned to join the Navy. But the show embraced him, and for years he would return to dance with new contestants and serve as a judge.Mr. Boss’s marriage also had its origins on the reality show. After dancing with Allison Holker — a contemporary dancer who had performed on Season 2 — at a party at the end of a later season, they became inseparable.“We danced and we were together, like holding hands the very next day, and never looked back,” Ms. Holker Boss told People magazine this year.Dance was often at the center of their relationship: Mr. Boss proposed while the couple were filming choreography for a Microsoft commercial, and the dance — later posted online — turned into a romantic duet. They married in 2013 and built a significant social media following, hosting a reality TV show and posting both dance videos and peeks into their life raising a family.“Stephen lit up every room he stepped into,” Ms. Holker Boss said in a statement. “He valued family, friends and community above all else, and leading with love and light was everything to him.”In addition to his wife and his parents, Mr. Boss is survived by a son, Maddox; a daughter, Zaia; a stepdaughter, Weslie; a brother, Deondre Rose; a grandfather, Eddy Boss; and two grandmothers, Elnora Rose and Marie Boss.After finding fame as a dancer, Mr. Boss explored an acting career. He appeared in films in the “Step Up” franchise and in the second “Magic Mike” movie. (In his role as Ms. DeGeneres’s sidekick, he had his body hair waxed on her show in preparation for “Magic Mike XXL.”)With Ms. DeGeneres’s show ending this year after 19 seasons, Mr. Boss called his return to “So You Think You Can Dance” as a judge a “full-circle moment” in an interview on the “Today” show. He then put his talk-show charm on display as he gave the hosts dance lessons in salsa, popping and locking, and the robot.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

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      in Television

      Stuart Margolin, Emmy Winner for ‘The Rockford Files,’ Dies at 82

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      A sought-after character actor for decades, he worked frequently with James Garner. He also wrote and directed.Stuart Margolin, a character actor best known for playing the sidekick to James Garner’s private detective on the hit series “The Rockford Files,” a role that won Mr. Margolin back-to-back Emmy Awards as best supporting actor in 1979 and 1980, died on Monday in Staunton, Va. He was 82.His family said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.Mr. Margolin was all over television from the early 1960s into this century, turning up in episodes of dozens of shows as well as in assorted TV movies. He also had a substantial behind-the-scenes career: He wrote several TV movies and directed episodes of “The Rockford Files,” “The Love Boat,” “Touched by an Angel” and numerous other series. In 1987 he and Ted Bessell shared an Emmy nomination for directing for “The Tracey Ullman Show.”Mr. Margolin’s career was tied to that of Mr. Garner, one of Hollywood’s top stars, at several points. Before “The Rockford Files,” which was seen on NBC from 1974 to 1980, he and Mr. Garner were in “Nichols” (1971-72), a short-lived western; Mr. Garner played the title character, a sheriff, and Mr. Margolin played his deputy.After “Rockford,” the two men were in another western, “Bret Maverick” (1981-82), a sequel to “Maverick,” the show that helped make Mr. Garner a star in the 1950s and early ’60s. Mr. Margolin also directed Mr. Garner in several “Rockford Files” TV movies.“Jim has been better to me than anyone else in my life except my father,” Mr. Margolin was quoted as saying in “The Garner Files,” a 2011 memoir by Mr. Garner, who died in 2014.Mr. Margolin in 1978. His ability to create memorable impressions, often with very little screen time, made him a fixture of casting directors’ call lists. Associated PressMr. Garner may have helped his career along, but it was Mr. Margolin’s ability to create memorable impressions, often with very little screen time, that made him a fixture of casting directors’ call lists. That was true even of his Emmy-winning role as Angel Martin, who once served prison time with Rockford and was both his friend and a thorn in his side.“Stuart Margolin, as Angel, is not on the show every week,” the syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner wrote in 1979. “And even when he is on, mostly he is in for little bits and pieces.”“But,” he added, “Margolin has created a vivid character in Angel, no matter how little he is seen. He is notably sleazy — in mind and body — and that’s what makes him fun.”In his memoir, Mr. Garner gave Mr. Margolin full credit for making the most out of the character.“I confess that I’ve never understood why Rockford likes Angel so much, because he’s rotten to the core,” he wrote. “But there’s something lovable about him. I don’t know what it is, but it’s all Stuart’s doing.”NBC had not wanted Mr. Margolin, Mr. Garner wrote. But he was cast in the pilot, and Angel made several more appearances.“NBC still didn’t want him and they told us point-blank not to use him again,” he wrote. “Then he got an Emmy nomination.”Stuart Margolin was born on Jan. 31, 1940, in Davenport, Iowa, to Morris and Gertrude Margolin. He spent much of his childhood in Dallas, where he learned to golf. His first newspaper mentions were in write-ups of the results of golf tournaments.He became good enough at the sport that, he said, he had scholarship offers from several universities. But he was more interested in acting — he caught the bug when he played Puck in a local production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at age 8 — so, after graduating from a boarding school in Tennessee, he went west to study at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.He appeared in numerous stage productions, and he continued to work in the theater throughout his career. But in 1961 he landed his first TV role, on “The Gertrude Berg Show,” and soon television was dominating his résumé.He achieved a new level of visibility when he landed a role as a regular on “Love, American Style,” a buzz-generating series that debuted in 1969 and on which his brother Arnold was an executive producer.That series consisted of several vignettes per episode, with comic skits in between. He was among the cast members performing those skits. Sample bit: Mr. Margolin is behind the wheel in a car, complaining to someone in the back seat that “every time you fix me up with a chick, she turns out to be a dog.” The camera pans to the passenger seat, where, sitting next to Mr. Margolin, is an actual dog.In a 1981 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Garner said Mr. Margolin’s work on that show caught his attention, especially a skit in which Mr. Margolin had a cell door slammed in his face.“I fell out of my chair,” Mr. Garner said. And he knew he had found his “Nichols” sidekick.“I love comedy and I study comedy and comedians,” Mr. Garner recalled. “I said, ‘That’s the guy.’”Mr. Margolin, who lived in Staunton, is survived by his wife, Patricia Dunne Margolin, whom he married in 1982; his brothers, Arnold and Richard; a sister, Anne Kalina; two stepsons, Max and Christopher Martini; a stepdaughter, Michelle Martini; and four step-grandchildren. His marriage to Joyce Eliason ended in divorce.In addition to acting and directing, Mr. Margolin dabbled in music. In 1980 he released a country-rock album, “And the Angel Sings,” for which he was a co-writer on some of the songs. Reviewing it in The Detroit Free Press, Mike Duffy called it “an album of style, wit and lowdown fun.”“It’s almost as if Soupy Sales and Willie Nelson got together,” he wrote. More

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      in Television

      Lloyd Newman, Teenage Chronicler of ‘Ghetto Life,’ Dies at 43

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      He and LeAlan Jones recorded stories of life and death in a Chicago housing project for NPR, winning a Peabody Award and inspiring the birth of StoryCorps.Lloyd Newman, who teamed up with a fellow teenager in the 1990s to record two award-winning radio documentaries that bared the pernicious underside of growing up in a Chicago public housing project, died on Dec. 7 in Elmhurst, Ill. He was 43.His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of sickle cell anemia, his brother Michael said.Mr. Newman, the understated, harder-luck half of the duo, was 14 and in the eighth grade when he and his best friend, LeAlan Jones, 13, tape-recorded 100 hours of oral history and interviews to produce “Ghetto Life 101.” The producer David Isay transformed into a 28-minute segment on National Public Radio in 1993.In 1996, the youths won a Peabody Award, the youngest broadcasters at the time to do so, for “Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse,” a collage of recordings exploring the killing of a 5-year-old boy, tossed from the window of a vacant 14th-floor apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes by a 10 and an 11 year old because he had refused to steal candy for them, according to the police.The two young journalists “squeezed magic from the streets of their struggling South Side neighborhood,” the reporter Don Terry wrote in The New York Times in 1997.The radio broadcasts were adapted into a book, “Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago” (1997), which they wrote with Mr. Isay.Mr. Isay had produced both documentaries, and they inspired him to establish the StoryCorps oral history project. It began with a recording booth in Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan in 2003 and since then has interviewed a half-million people, an effort to encourage mutual understanding by asking “to hear someone’s truth,” as the project puts it.Even when he was only 14, Lloyd Newman seemed unlikely to outlive his friend. “It’s easy to do wrong around here,” he told The Times in 1996. “It’s easy to get caught up by mistake.”Mr. Jones had been raised by middle-class grandparents in a private home a block away from the housing project. He graduated from high school on schedule, earned a bachelor’s degree in social science from Barat College in Lake Forest, Ill., ran for Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat as the Green Party candidate in 2010 (he polled 3.2 percent) and became a mentor and professional journalist. Yet he seemed more pessimistic of the two.“Unfortunately, Lloyd and I both knew we had accomplished very little with the challenges introduced in the documentaries,” Mr. Jones said in an email this week, citing, among other metrics, the rising toll of Black teenagers killed in Chicago.Mr. Newman’s trajectory was more problematic, but he seemed more spirited.He was “whip smart, street smart, with a huge heart and a shy smile,” Mr. Isay said on NPR last week, but “he lived through more in his first dozen years than most people live in a lifetime.”Lloyd Sentel Newman was born on March 3, 1979, to Michael Murry, an alcoholic who, by the time his son was a teenager, hadn’t lived with the family for a decade, though he kept in touch with them and lived nearby. His mother, Lynn Newman, also drank heavily and died of cirrhosis when she was 35 and Lloyd was 15.Lloyd was raised in a rowhouse, part of the Ida B. Wells Homes, by a sister who was six years older. She and another sister also died of complications of sickle cell anemia.In addition to his brother Michael, he is survived by another brother, Lyndell; and a sister, Ericka Newman.Mr. Newman in 2019. He struggled academically but completed high school and attended college.Michael NewmanLloyd, who sold laundry bags with his father and peddled newspapers, struggled at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago. But he was able to transfer to Future Commons Technical Prep High School (now closed), where he received closer supervision in smaller classes.“It isn’t hopeless,” he told The Times in 1997. “I’ll go to summer school and regular school and night school — I’ll never drop out.”He didn’t. After six years, he finally received his diploma and enrolled at Langston University in Oklahoma, though he never graduated.He returned to Chicago, where in 2006 he was arrested outside his sister’s apartment and charged with the manufacture, delivery and possession of crack cocaine.He pleaded guilty on his lawyer’s advice and was sentenced to two years’ probation. In 2021, his conviction was vacated thanks to another lawyer, Joshua Tepler, after it was determined that the evidence used to convict Mr. Newman had been faked by corrupt police officers who were implicated in more than 100 other phony arrests.In interviews, Mr. Newman said he dreamed of going to college, opening a hardware store or becoming a journalist. After moving to DeKalb, Ill., west of Chicago, to be closer to his brother, he worked as a cabby and as an Uber driver.In 2018, he was hired as a part-time shelver by the DeKalb County Library System and was later promoted to a $16-an-hour position mostly handling book loans to and from other libraries.Before he lapsed into a coma seven months ago, he and a partner were planning to open a tobacco and CBD retail store.“Ghetto 101” originated when Mr. Isay was hired at WBEZ radio, NPR’s Chicago affiliate, to contribute to a series of broadcasts inspired by Alex Kotlowitz’s book “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” (1991).Michael Newman said that Lloyd had responded to a leaflet distributed by Mr. Isay seeking boots-on-the-ground reporters. Lloyd, he said, “thought that it would be fun and something different to do.”Mr. Kotlowitz said in an email that the project had imbued Mr. Newman with a quiet confidence and gave him a job that fit his character, as an “understated yet fiercely powerful storyteller who so relished making individual connections often with people whose lives so differed from his own.”“He was such a generous spirit and such a thoughtful soul,” Mr. Kotlowitz added. “I don’t know if he fully grasped the impact his storytelling had on others, but it inspired so many and challenged them in ways that brought us all closer.”Both youths understood the challenges they faced in the other America, the one outside the ghetto.“If we go in the store, we’re looked at wrong, as if we was going to steal,” Mr. Newman told Charlie Rose on PBS in 1997. “We’re not trusted, and most people feel that way.”By his own reckoning, Lloyd Newman might not have expected to die of natural causes. In 1997, enumerating the most common causes of death in the projects, he told The Times: “People get thrown out of windows, drowned, stabbed, shot. But a lot of that killing would stop if the government would make it livable around here. We don’t have no parks. The swings are broken. There’s nothing for people to do. There’s no fun. Life isn’t worth living without some fun.”In the documentary “Remorse,” Mr. Newman and Mr. Jones stood on the roof of the public housing building from which 5-year-old Eric Morse had been dropped from a 14th-floor window by two other young kids, or “shorties,” in the parlance of the streets. Looking over the edge, Mr. Jones asked Mr. Newman what would have gone through his mind if it was he who had been plunging to the ground.“I’d be thinking about how I’m going to land and if I’m going to survive,” Mr. Newman said. “I’d be thinking about how it is in heaven.”They mulled how long the fall would take and whether there would be time enough to say a prayer. Regardless, they concluded, Eric was so young that he would surely have gone to heaven.“Dude, you think they got a playground in heaven for shorties?” Mr. Jones asked.“Nope,” Mr. Newman said. “They don’t got a playground in heaven for nobody.” More

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      in Music

      Don Lewis, Unsung Pioneer of Electronic Music, Dies at 81

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      He invented the first system for integrating multiple instruments using a single control panel, predating the MIDI controller by years.It was 1974, and Don Lewis was getting tired of hauling around so many keyboards. One day he would be in a studio in Los Angeles, working alongside Quincy Jones. A week later, he might be on tour as a member of the Beach Boys’ backup band. Or he might be performing his own gigs, shuffling up and down the West Coast with an ever-growing assortment of keyboards and other equipment.He could have just taken his trusty Hammond Concorde organ, itself not a small item. But Mr. Lewis was an aural explorer, constantly on the hunt for new sounds. If he found a keyboard with a particular tone to it, he had to add it to his collection. He was a one-man band; he aspired to be a one-man orchestra.His problem was about more than sheer weight. Each instrument had to be controlled separately, and there was no industry standard for integrating them. An electrical engineer by training, he decided to strip them down for parts and build something new.It took him three years of designing and fund-raising, but in 1977 he finalized the Live Electronic Orchestra, commonly known as the LEO.This musical Frankenstein’s monster brought together pieces from three keyboards, a slew of synthesizers, control panels and a drum machine into a set of plexiglass modules. Mr. Lewis sat in the middle, like a musical air traffic controller. His design allowed him not only to choose the sounds he wanted, but also to mix them in real time.Mr. Lewis, 81, died on Nov. 6 at his home in Pleasanton, Calif. His wife, Julie Lewis, said the cause was cancer.These days, people are used to the idea that they can produce virtually any sound they want on a laptop. That was far from the case in the 1970s, but Mr. Lewis found a way to create a symphony of sound at his fingertips.The LEO cost more than $100,000, and he never made another. Still, it was a hit. He played six nights a week in a packed bar along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Among his many fans was an engineer named Ikutaro Kakehashi, who was so inspired by Mr. Lewis’s invention that he went on to develop, with Dave Smith, the musical instrument digital interface, known as MIDI, the protocol that makes modern music production possible. (Mr. Smith died at 72 in June.)A big part of Mr. Lewis’s success as a live musician was getting audiences to listen to him and not gawk at his keyboard rig. His technology was so clever, so seamless, that most people soon forgot about it entirely and allowed the music he created to sweep them away. He was an unsung pioneer of electronic music who paved the way for a billion beeps, boops and oonz-oonzes to come.He wasn’t without his critics, who said that he was not a musician at all but a mere button-pusher. In the mid-1980s, members of the musicians’ union protested his performances, claiming that he would drive them out of business. He challenged their right to picket him before the National Labor Relations Board. He lost.The prospect of having to cross a picket line just to do his job was too much. He stored the LEO in his garage and tried to put the whole experience behind him. Several years later, the government re-examined his case, and this time decided in his favor — and even gave him a settlement.He didn’t bring back the LEO, though. He donated it to the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, Calif., where it sits on display today.He was a one-man band who with his invention, the LEO system, aspired to be a one-man orchestra. Mr. Lewis in 1971.Denver Post, via Getty ImagesDonald Richard Lewis Jr. was born on March 26, 1941, in Dayton, Ohio. His father worked odd jobs, and his mother, Wanda (Peacock) Lewis, was a cosmetologist. They divorced when Don was very young, and he rarely saw his father again until decades later.He grew up in a religious home, attending church at least once a week. Early on he became obsessed with the organ, and with the sounds that the church organist was able to draw out of it.One night he had a dream that he had replaced the organist on the bench.“I woke up and told my grandmother and grandfather, ‘I’ve got to learn the keyboard, because the feeling I had in that dream was something I hadn’t felt in my whole life,’” he recalled in the documentary “Don Lewis and the Live Electronic Orchestra,” scheduled to air on PBS in February.He enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute in 1959 to study electrical engineering. He sang in the school chorus and even performed at a rally for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.He stayed only two years. As tensions with the Soviet Union began to heat up, the Army was expanding the draft, and Black college students, unlike most white students, were often not exempt.Mr. Lewis enlisted in the Air Force. He received training as a nuclear weapons specialist and served for nearly four years in Colorado and New Mexico.After receiving an honorable discharge in 1965, he moved to Denver, where he was hired as an engineer for Honeywell, ran a church music program and worked part-time in a music store. Soon he was getting booked as a nightclub act, and eventually made enough to quit his day job.Mr. Lewis spent the next several years on the road, often as a demonstration musician for Hammond, the organ company. He was already tweaking his instruments and equipment, looking for ways to eke out new sounds. He was also making his name as a studio engineer and musician, working with musicians like Mr. Jones and Marvin Hamlisch, especially after he settled in Los Angeles in the early 1970s.Along with his wife, he is survived by his sister, Rita Bain Merrick; his sons, Marc, Paul and Donald; his daughters, Andrea Fear and Alicia Jackson; and five grandchildren.After putting the LEO in storage, Mr. Lewis worked as a consulting engineer for companies like Yamaha and Roland. He was on the team that developed the sounds for Yamaha’s revolutionary DX7 — the instrument that defined 1980s synth pop — and the team behind Roland’s TR-808, perhaps the most popular drum machine ever made.He taught at Stanford, Berkeley and San Jose State, and with his wife ran a program to bring music into elementary schools.“I think music is more than entertainment,” Mr. Lewis said in the documentary. “I think it has a stronger and more meaningful purpose in our lives. And I think what we’re here to do as individuals is help people unlock and find those things that are dormant.” More

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      in Movies

      Angelo Badalamenti, Composer for ‘Twin Peaks,’ Is Dead at 85

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      The filmmaker David Lynch turned to his haunting work again and again, for “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive” and other neo-noir films.Angelo Badalamenti, an internationally sought-after composer who wrote the hypnotic theme to “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch’s 1990s television drama series, and the music for five Lynch films, including “Blue Velvet” (1986), died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. He was 85.His niece Frances Badalamenti confirmed the death. She said she did not know the cause.Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano behind Isabella Rossellini when she sang “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club in Lumberton, N.C., a flower-filled, picket-fence kind of town with a very dark side. Aside from the title song, a Bobby Vinton hit from 1963, he had composed much of the film’s music.He also wrote the music for Mr. Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” and had a small role in the film as one of two mobster brothers who spits out his espresso in a conference-room scene.His best-known work was the “Twin Peaks” theme, recognizable from its first three ominous, otherworldly notes. He won the 1990 Grammy for best instrumental pop performance for the number, which was, according to the Allmusic website, “dark, cloying and obsessive — and one of the best scores ever written for television.”In 2015, a Billboard writer described the theme as “gorgeous and gentle one second, eerie and unsettling the next.” It was, according to Rolling Stone, the “most influential soundtrack in TV history.”Mr. Badalamenti didn’t really disagree.“Music and composing — I almost feel a little guilty about it — come so easily for me,” he told the north New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2004. “It’s like the well doesn’t seem to run dry.”Angelo Daniel Badalamenti was born on March 22, 1937, in Brooklyn. A second-generation Italian-American, he was the second of four children of John Badalamenti, a fish market owner, and Leonora (Ferrari) Badalamenti, a seamstress.Growing up in the Bensonhurst section, he started piano lessons at 8 but quit because he preferred playing stickball outdoors with his friends. He took it up again at his older brother’s insistence and came to appreciate the piano when girls admired his playing. He was soon accompanying vocalists and other acts at Catskills resorts during summers off from high school and college.Mr. Badalamenti attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music in 1960.His first job was teaching the seventh grade in a public school, but when he wrote a musical Christmas program for his students, members of the Board of Education saw the production and told the local public TV station Channel 13 about it. The station videotaped and broadcast the show, and the Monday after Christmas, Mr. Badalamenti got a call from a Manhattan music publisher with a job offer.Nina Simone recorded some of his first songs, including “I Hold No Grudge,” in 1965. Nancy Wilson sang “Face It, Girl, It’s Over” (1968).Mr. Badalamenti got started in films by writing music for “Gordon’s War,” a 1973 blaxploitation film. Ossie Davis, the director, wanted an all-black crew, all “brothers,” he said. Mr. Badalamenti pointed to Sicily on a world map. “You do seven strokes from Sicily, and you’re in Africa,” he said he told Mr. Davis. “I may not be your brother, but I’m certainly your cousin!”Mr. Badalamenti was at the piano when Isabella Rossellini sang “Blue Velvet” in the 1986 David Lynch movie of the same title. De Laurentis Group/Courtesy Everett CollectionHe and Mr. Lynch met when Mr. Badalamenti was called in as a vocal coach for Ms. Rossellini on the set of “Blue Velvet.”Jamie Stewart, whose band Xiu Xiu did an album of “Twin Peaks” music, saw Mr. Badalamenti’s Lynchian work in a historical midcentury context: a postwar world where everything appeared to be sunshine and pastels but where the evil unleashed by World War II still lurked.“It’s very romantic but can be terrifying,” Mr. Stewart said of the music, speaking to The Guardian in 2017. “It has a violence and a sincere sentimentality — sadness but not despair.”Mr. Lynch, who described Mr. Badalamenti’s work as having “a deep and powerful beauty,” said that he and the composer would be entirely in sync in expressing Mr. Lynch’s vision for a film. “I sit next to him and I talk to him, and he plays what I say,” he said in an interview with the American Film Institute.As Mr. Badalamenti explained on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” that’s how he wrote “Laura Palmer’s Theme” for “Twin Peaks.” Sitting beside him at his Fender Rhodes keyboard, Mr. Lynch began talking.“It’s the dead of night,” Mr. Badalamenti said. “We’re in a dark wood. There’s a full moon out. There are sycamore trees that are gently swaying in the wind. There’s an owl.”The words became notes that evoked the story of a murdered homecoming queen in the Pacific Northwest.They collaborated again and again, on the films “Wild at Heart” (1990), “Lost Highway” (1997) and “The Straight Story” (1999), in addition to “Mulholland Drive.” There were five iterations of “Twin Peaks,” including the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) and an 18-episode sequel series (2017).In between, Mr. Badalamenti wrote for a wide variety of movies, among them “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987), “The Comfort of Strangers” (1990), “Naked in New York” (1993), “The City of Lost Children” (1995), “A Very Long Engagement” (2004) and “The Wicker Man” (2006).He used what he called his “classical chops” to score “Stalingrad” (2013), a wartime love story set against that pivotal 1942 battle. It was an enormous box office success in Russia, where it was produced.One of his longest-running projects was the music for the PBS program “Inside the Actors Studio,” which was on the air from 1994 through 2019, hosted by James Lipton.Writer’s block was rarely a problem for Mr. Badalamenti, but composing a torch-lighting theme for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona had him stumped. The notes finally came to him in the shower, he recalled, and he hurried downstairs to his piano. “I wrote it in half an hour,” he said.He received the Henry Mancini Award from Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a Lifetime Achievement honor from the World Soundtrack Awards.Mr. Badalamenti is survived by his wife, Lonny; his daughter, Danielle; and four grandchildren. His son, André, died in 2012.His niece Frances interviewed him for a magazine, The Believer, in 2019. He remembered being drawn to film noir in his youth, telling her, “The haunting sounds have been there, the off-center instrumentals, ever since I was a child.”Alex Traub More