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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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      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

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      in Theater

      Silver Saundors Friedman, Who Helped Found the Improv, Dies at 89

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      She ran the famous New York comedy club with her husband for years as they launched the careers of many comic stars.Silver Saundors Friedman, a former Broadway chorine whose hankering for an affordable after-work hangout in Manhattan inspired her future husband to open the original Improvisation, the grandfather of comedy clubs, which she later owned outright, died on Dec. 3 in Santa Monica, Calif., She was 89.Her death, in a hospice, was caused by a hemorrhagic stroke, her daughter Zoe Friedman said. Budd Friedman, her former husband, died on Nov. 12 at 90.For years Ms. Friedman auditioned talent for the club, in the theater district, helping to launch the careers of many famous comedians. And she operated it by herself for more than a decade after the couple divorced.When they opened the Improv in 1963, they were so cash poor that they set up shop in a former Hell’s Kitchen coffeehouse, a leased space on West 44th Street near Ninth Avenue, because they couldn’t afford a liquor license. Then they ran out of money remodeling the place — after stripping paneling from the walls — and decided to leave bare brick as the backdrop to its tiny stage.With an open mic available for impromptu appearances, the club became a platform for established comedians to experiment with new material before a sophisticated audience and a springboard for fledgling comics. On a given night Robert Klein, Jay Leno, Richard Pryor or Lily Tomlin might mount the stage. The Improv became a model for comedy clubs across the country.The Friedmans ran the New York club and later a branch in Hollywood until their divorce was finalized in 1979. Ms. Friedman was granted rights to the brand in New York, and Mr. Friedman retained the club in California, which he started in 1975.He opened 22 others in 12 states west of the Mississippi. He and his partner, Mark Lonow, sold their company in 2018 to Levity Entertainment, which later expanded the Improv chain to 25.Ms. Friedman was born Silver Schreck on Aug. 28, 1933, in Los Angeles and raised in Chicago. She was named for Sime Silverman, the founder of the entertainment trade newspaper Variety, where her father, Jay, was an editor. Her mother, Isabelle (Brown) Schreck, worked as an executive assistant for the Marshall Field department store company in Chicago.Silver Schreck graduated with an associate degree from Chicago Teachers College, now Chicago State University.She changed her surname when she decided to pursue a singing career. Her daughter Zoe explained:“With a first name like Silver, it was important that her stage name didn’t make her sound like a stripper. Silver Slippers could have been a great stripper name, but that wasn’t who my mom was. So she and a friend came up with a few options that made Silver sound legit. Saundors was the winner. First audition after claiming that name, the casting person yelled, ‘Silver Sandals. Silver Sandals.’ To which my mom said, ‘It’s Saundors.’ And he said, ‘Just shut up and sing.’”Ms. Friedman is also survived by another daughter, Beth Friedman; and a grandson.Ms. Friedman fared better on Broadway, Mr. Friedman recalled in “The Improv: An Oral History of the Comedy Club That Revolutionized Stand-up” (2017), which he created with Tripp Whetsell. She was appearing in the chorus of “Fiorello” on Broadway when she met Mr. Friedman at Logan Airport in Boston as both were headed for New York from Nantucket, Mass., he with dreams of becoming a Broadway producer.When he tried to date her, she begged off, she said in the oral history, explaining that she was already seeing someone else. Eight months later, when she was cast in the chorus of the hit “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” they met again.“After the show got out each night, Silver and I would go out to eat with some of the cast to places like Sardi’s and Downey’s in the theater district, which none of them could afford on a chorus kid’s salary,” Mr. Friedman told The Washington Times in 2017.“My idea was to open something up in the theater district that was affordable, and where they could get something cheap to eat, sing if they wanted to, and where I could expand my contacts enough to maybe produce my first show,” he said. “It was never going to be anything but a temporary venture.”Ms. Friedman with the comedian Robert Klein at the Improv in Manhattan in an undated photo. Jay Leno, Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin were among the comedians who also appeared there. Jim DemetropoulosThey married six months after the Improv opened.“Even though we continued to present singers for many years to come, about six months after I opened, a very popular comedian named Dave Astor came in and asked if he could do a few minutes,” Mr. Friedman said. “It gradually evolved from there.”“Anything went, which is how I came up with the name ‘the Improvisation,’” he said.Ms. Friedman would audition prospective comedians on the first Sunday of each month. She rejected Eddie Murphy on his first tryout for being “too vulgar,” Mr. Friedman recalled, although Mr. Murphy eventually honed his act and performed at the Improv in Los Angeles.Comics still get laughs at the Improv’s franchises across the country, but Ms. Friedman closed the original New York venue in 1992. She blamed television for the decline in customers.“They demystified it,” she told The New York Times in 1994. “They made it common.” She added, “You can stay home and see all the bad comedy you want.” More

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      in Music

      Hamish Kilgour, Whose New Zealand Cult Band Had Reach, Dies at 65

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      He was a powerful drummer and, most notably, a founding member of the Clean, which inspired indie bands like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk.Hamish Kilgour, a founding member of the New Zealand band the Clean, who was celebrated among fans of underground music for his propulsive drumming and his countercultural approach to life, has died. He was 65.He was found dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday, 10 days after being reported missing, the police there said. His death was referred to the coroner’s office.A central figure in the crop of freewheeling New Zealand musicians on the independent label Flying Nun that came to be called the “Dunedin sound,” Mr. Kilgour spent four decades as a musician, singing and playing percussion and later the guitar.He eventually played with more than 100 bands, including the Great Unwashed, the Sundae Painters and Monsterland, and lived for almost 30 years in New York, where he formed the band the Mad Scene.He also had a secondary passion for painting: He produced hundreds if not thousands of frank, idiosyncratic pictures, many of which were repurposed as album cover art.A deceptively powerful drummer, Mr. Kilgour might start a song in ramshackle fashion, then build to a thunderous conclusion. He had early on been inspired by Moe Tucker’s single snare on live recordings by the Velvet Underground. “I thought, that’s kind of magical and that’s possible — I could do that,” he said in 2012. Ms. Tucker’s minimalist, driving style and her enthusiasm for the power of the tambourine, later colored his own playing.Not every drummer, however talented, is immediately recognizable, said Mac McCaughan, the owner of the label Merge Records, which last year reissued the Clean’s first two releases. “But with Hamish — he had a voice on the drums,” he said in an interview. “He had his own style and his own character.”In 1981, Roger Shepherd, a local record store manager who was in the process of founding Flying Nun Records, saw the Clean perform at the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. “They were pretty obviously the best band in the world,” Mr. Shepherd recalled.Almost before the set had finished, he asked them to record with him. The first recording session produced “Tally Ho!,” a frenetic, surf-rock-adjacent single — made for 50 New Zealand dollars — that scraped into the Top 20 in New Zealand, buoyed by its popularity on student radio stations.Flying Nun’s fortunes had been transformed. The subsequent EP “Boodle Boodle Boodle,” recorded that year on a similar budget, spent 26 weeks on the New Zealand charts. American indie bands, including Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk, would cite it as an inspiration.For listeners outside New Zealand, the musicians on the Flying Nun label had a kind of legendary status, said the American filmmaker Michael Galinsky, who became a friend of Mr. Kilgour’s.“It just opened up all these worlds,” he said of “Tuatara,” a 1988 Flying Nun compilation on which Mr. Kilgour appeared. “It’s so far away — you don’t see pictures of these people, there’s no writing about them, there’s no internet. So they’re mythic, and incredible.”Inspired by the Enemy, a punk group started by friends of theirs, members of the Clean had begun rehearsing together in 1978 — Mr. Kilgour taught himself the drums, while his brother, David, played guitar and Peter Gutteridge played bass. (Mr. Gutteridge was later replaced by Robert Scott.)After its first flash of success, the members of the band made an early decision to split up just four years into their career. But as the Clean’s influence on do-it-yourself underground rock became more apparent, they reunited in 1988. Over the next 30 years, interrupted by long spells apart, the Clean continued to perform in the United States and elsewhere around the world, releasing several albums.As a member of the Mad Scene, Mr. Kilgour recorded multiple albums and EPs, as well as two solo albums, “All of It and Nothing” and “Finkelstein,” and made myriad other guest appearances on other artists’ records.Hamish Robert Kilgour was born in Christchurch on March 17, 1957, the older of two sons of MacGregor and Helen Stewart (Auld) Kilgour. He was reared mostly in Cheviot and Ranfurly, small communities in New Zealand’s rural South Island. In 1972, the family moved to the coastal city of Dunedin, also in the South Island, where Mr. Kilgour’s father took a job as a pub manager while his mother ran the establishment’s kitchen. Hamish received a bachelor’s degree in English and history from the University of Otago in Dunedin in 1977.After his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1982, his mother worked as a nurse to support the family. She later supported her sons’ band, helping to fund both a van and a P.A. system as they performed around the country with the Clean.Mr. Kilgour moved to New York in the late 1980s after the breakup of his first marriage, to Jenny Halliday. There he met Lisa Siegel, who would become his second wife and a bandmate when they formed the Mad Scene. The couple had a son, Taran.But life in New York, where he worked as an art handler, house painter and carpenter in between music gigs, was at times precarious, especially after he and Ms. Siegel broke up in 2013.He moved back to New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic and played music there whenever he could, while eking out an existence that strained his mental and physical health, people close to him said.He is survived by his brother and bandmate, David, and his son.For his contemporaries in New Zealand, Mr. Kilgour was a testament to the notion that being from a far-off country of a few million people with no established rock tradition did not preclude people from making great music.“Just because it comes from here, and not London or New York, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valid,” said Mr. Shepherd of Flying Nun. “That was a startling thing that we kind of knew was true anyway, but that hadn’t been articulated for us.”Richard Langston, a music journalist and longtime friend, said Mr. Kilgour had “changed the way you could record indie rock.”“He was that important,” he added, “and he lived a crazy, brave, solo life.” More

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      Jim Stewart, Unlikely Entrepreneur of Soul Music, Dies at 92

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      His background was in country music. But Stax, the label he founded with his sister, achieved a level of success with Black artists that rivaled Motown’s.Jim Stewart, who with his sister founded Stax Records, home to R&B luminaries like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave — and, after Motown, the best-selling soul music label of the 1960s and ’70s — died on Monday in Memphis. He was 92.His death, at a hospital after a brief illness, was confirmed by Tim Sampson, communications director for the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis.A former banker, Mr. Stewart first ventured into the music business in 1957, when he and his sister Estelle Axton established Satellite Records in a relative’s garage. Intending to release recordings of country and rockabilly music, Mr. Stewart and his sister, who died in 2004, never suspected that three years later their label would be producing some of the most enduring Black popular music of the era.“I had scarcely seen a Black person till I was grown,” Mr. Stewart, who grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a farm in rural West Tennessee, was quoted as saying in Peter Guralnick’s “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom” (1986).“When I started, I didn’t know there was such a thing as Atlantic Records; I didn’t know there was a Chess Records or Imperial,” he continued, referring to record companies that promoted Black vernacular music. “I had no dream of anything like that.”His remote upbringing notwithstanding, Stax placed more than 100 singles on the pop chart during Mr. Stewart’s tenure at the label, among them Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood” and Isaac Hayes’s theme from the movie “Shaft.” The influence of its catalog on generations of performers has proved wide and deep, extending to Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones as well as to the many hip-hop and R&B artists who have sampled Stax recordings.In a 2013 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Stewart attributed his decision to start recording Black music to a single epiphany: hearing Ray Charles sing “What’d I Say.”“I was converted immediately,” he said. “I had never heard anything like that before. It allowed me to expand from country to R&B, into jazz, into gospel, wrapped all in one. That’s what Stax is.”Mr. Stewart was the audio engineer, and often the credited producer, on many records made at Stax, including Mr. Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.”The label began to make its mark in 1960, shortly after Mr. Stewart and his sister moved their operations to the former Capitol Theater at 926 McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. One day the popular singer and local disc jockey Rufus Thomas walked into the record shop that Mr. Stewart and Ms. Axton operated at the front of the building and announced that he wanted to record a duet with his daughter Carla.The record in question, “’Cause I Love You,” was only a regional hit, but “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” a dreamy ballad released the same year, reached both the R&B and pop Top 10 for Ms. Thomas in 1961. The same was true of 1961’s “Last Night,” a slinky saxophone-driven instrumental by the Mar-Keys, the R&B combo that evolved into Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Stax’s storied house band.Mr. Stewart and Ms. Axton in an undated photo. Mr. Stewart’s decision to start a record company would not have been possible had Ms. Axton not taken out a second mortgage on her home to buy him recording equipment.Charlie Gillett Collection/RedfernsThe success of “Gee Whiz” and “Last Night” changed the artistic and commercial direction of Satellite Records. It also acquired a new name, combining the first two letters of the owners’ last names to form the portmanteau Stax, after Mr. Stewart and Ms. Axton learned that another label owned the rights to Satellite.In 1962, “Green Onions,” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s, further cemented the label’s credibility on the emergent soul music scene, climbing to the pop Top 10 (and No. 1 on the R&B chart). A gutbucket instrumental, “Green Onions” served as a prototype for the groove-steeped, blues- and gospel-bred music that became synonymous with Stax — a sound as lean and funky as Motown’s was lush and refined.Just as inspiring as the music made at Stax was the social climate Mr. Stewart cultivated there. Known for its laid-back and inclusive vibe, the label was guided by a spirit of good will — almost all the recording artists were Black, the house musicians both Black and white — that bore witness to possibilities for racial harmony at a time when segregation prohibited Black and white people from sharing public spaces.“There was so much talent here, under circumstances that were almost considered impossible in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1960, with the racial situation here,” Mr. Stewart told The Associated Press in 2013, reflecting on the spirit of camaraderie that he helped foster at Stax. “It was a sanctuary for all of us.”James Frank Stewart was born in Middleton, Tenn., on July 29, 1930, one of three children of Dexter and Olivia (Cole) Stewart. His parents were farmers, and his father supplemented the family income with work as a bricklayer.Young Jim grew up playing gospel music at home on the fiddle with his father, uncle and two sisters. After graduating from high school, he moved to Memphis, where he worked at a local bank for several years before being drafted into the Army.In 1953, after completing two years of service, he returned to Memphis and resumed working as a bank clerk while playing fiddle in local country dance bands. He earned a degree in business from the University of Memphis.Mr. Stewart’s decision to launch Satellite Records in 1957 would not have been possible had his sister not taken out a second mortgage on her home to buy him recording equipment.A distribution deal with Atlantic Records further opened doors for Mr. Stewart’s fledgling label, especially after the success of “Gee Whiz” and “Last Night.” A few years later, Mr. Stewart hired the songwriting and production team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, enabling Stax to expand its capacity to develop artists and repertoire and, ultimately, its roster.The arrival of Al Bell as national sales director in 1965 further strengthened the label’s capacity, lending it the promotional muscle needed to market its artists beyond Memphis and the South. But tragedy eclipsed this flush of prosperity when Mr. Redding and four members of his band, the Bar-Kays, died in a plane crash in 1967.Mr. Stewart in 1969 with Al Bell, left, who joined Stax as national sales director in 1965, and Isaac Hayes, who was a songwriter and producer at Stax in partnership with David Porter and also had hit records as a performer. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAround the same time, Stax dissolved its distribution deal with Atlantic, a settlement that, because of a contractual loophole, cost the label the rights to virtually its entire catalog.The assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April 1968 cast even more of a pall over conditions at Stax, threatening the racial amity that had prevailed up to that point. Later that year Mr. Stewart, Ms. Axton and Mr. Bell, by then also an owner, sold Stax to Gulf & Western in exchange for stock in the company.Ms. Axton sold her stock in the label to Mr. Bell in 1970, and Mr. Stewart eventually followed suit.In 1975, following a revival of good fortune under Mr. Bell’s leadership, including the signing of the Staple Singers and others, creditors forced Stax into bankruptcy, leaving behind a legacy of some 800 singles and 300 albums.Stax’s foreclosure was a hardship for Mr. Stewart, who had invested much of his personal wealth trying to satisfy the creditors. He resurfaced in the early 1980s, occasionally supervising projects for former Stax artists, but soon retired from the business except for occasional appearances at the Stax Museum and Stax Music Academy. The label has since changed hands a few times.In 2002, after decades out of the public eye, Mr. Stewart was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the nonperformer category for his contributions to the creation and evolution of Southern soul music.Album covers on display at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis.Adrian Sainz/Associated PressHe is survived by his son, Jeff; two daughters, Lori Stewart and Shannon Stewart; and two grandchildren. Evelyn (White) Stewart, his wife of more than 50 years, died in 2020. Another sister, Mary Louise McAlpin, died in 2017.“Mr. Stewart was the unpretentious soft-spoken diminutive white guy with a Brylcreem-lathered hair part and fat-rim glasses that I met in 1962,” Deanie Parker, Stax’s longtime publicist, told The Memphis Commercial Appeal after Mr. Stewart’s death.“He gave us opportunities denied to most Blacks in America and we gifted him with an indelible Memphis Sound that, together, we created at Stax Records.” More

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      in Television

      George Newall, a Creator of ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ Dies at 88

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      He was the last surviving member of the team that produced the educational cartoon for ABC-TV that informed Generation X.George R. Newall, an advertising executive who was the last surviving creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated musical snippets that taught young Generation X television viewers grammar, math, civics and science for a few moments during otherwise vacuous Saturday-morning commercial programming, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his wife, Lisa Maxwell, said.“Schoolhouse Rock,” series, which ran from 1973 to 1984 and was revived in the 1990s, used quirky cartoons and upbeat music to furtively transform rote learning into euphonious fun during regular programming and before the government, in the 1990s, mandated that stations broadcast a modicum of educational and informative fare.The show won four Emmy Awards.The series spawned books, recordings, live singalong shows and a nostalgia cult that will mark the show’s 50th anniversary next year when the Walt Disney Company presents a prime-time television special; rereleases “The Official Schoolhouse Rock Guide,” written by Mr. Newall and Tom Yohe; and publishes an adult coloring book featuring all of the program’s characters.Among the show’s perennial favorite songs were “Three Is a Magic Number,” celebrating tripods, triangles and even a couple producing a baby; “Interjection!” which depicts a cartoon character getting stuck in the posterior with a big needle; and Mr. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives.”“Schoolhouse Rock” originated in the early 1970s when David McCall, president of the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, complained to Mr. Newall, a creative director there, that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”Could Mr. Newall put the multiplication tables to music? he asked. Mr. Newall’s search for a quirky musician who might help led him to Ben Tucker, who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, which Mr. Newall frequented regularly.“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’” Mr. Newall told The New York Times Magazine in 2018.‘He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’” Mr. Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”The song inspired Mr. Yohe, the agency’s art director and a cartoonist, to start doodling. What was originally conceived as an educational phonograph record morphed into a series of three-minute films that the creative team presented to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, a client of the agency.Mr. Eisner happened to be meeting with Chuck Jones, the immortal Warner Bros. animator.“After we played the song and Tom showed them the storyboards, Eisner looked at Jones and said, ‘What do you think?’” Mr. Newall told The Times in 1994. “And Jones said, ‘I think you should buy it right away.’ It was probably the quickest deal in television history.”The first season was followed with themed series on grammar, government (to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration), science and computer technology.In 1976, Carol Rinzler wrote in The Times, “The ‘ABC Schoolhouse Rock’ animated bits, which teach math and reading concepts and, this year, American history, are a joy. It’s worth sitting in front of your TV all morning to catch the one in which the Constitution is set to music.”Three-minute “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons like “Conjunction Junction” tried to teach children grammar, math, civics and science.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Eisner later became chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired “Schoolhouse Rock” in 1996 (including new segments produced in the 1990s with J.J. Sedelmaier Productions) when it bought Capital Cities/ABC.Mr. Newall and Mr. Yohe were the executive producers and creative directors of the original episodes and worked with other collaborators. Mr. Newall composed 10 of the songs.In 1996, Atlantic Records released an album featuring alternative musicians like Moby (who croons a brassy version of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening”), and in 2002 the Disney Company issued a DVD of all the “Schoolhouse Rock” episodes and a timely lyrical explication by Mr. Newall of why some states in a presidential election are more equal than others.In 2013, Mr. Newall spoke about the show and Mr. Dorough performed “Schoolhouse Rock” songs at a free concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Yohe died in 2000, Mr. Dorough in 2018.George Robert Newall Jr. was born on June 17, 1934, in Lakewood, N.J. His father was a builder. His mother, Louise (DeNyse) Newall, worked for the school board in Brick Township.After attending Point Pleasant Beach High School and serving in the Army’s 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mr. Newall graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1960. He moved to New York City, where, starting in a mailroom at $50 a week, he worked for a number of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.At McCaffrey & McCall, he conjured up the Hai Karate brand of men’s toiletries for Pfizer with an advertising campaign that parodied the industry’s customary romanticized appeal to raw sexual passion by including self-defense instructions to fend off libidinous women.In 1978, he and Mr. Yohe started a company to produce animated educational programming. They won another Emmy for “Drawing Power,” an animated series for NBC, and awards for cartoons that promoted nutrition, cartoons that urged young viewers to read (“When You Turn Off Your Set, Turn On a Book”) and cartoons that were praised for being neither sexist nor racist.In the 1980s, Mr. Newall joined Wells Rich Greene, where he produced TV commercials in which Alan Alda pitched Atari computers.Mr. Newall is survived by his wife, the artist and singer Lisa (Chapman) Maxwell; a stepson, Lake Wolosker; and his sisters, Jessie Newall Bissey, Kathy Newall Hogan and Anne Newall Kimmel. More