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      Tribeca Festival: Music and Movies Make for a Successful Mix

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      The festival has more than 20 music events this year — its highest number yet — including documentaries, music videos and podcasts.Metallica, Billy Idol, Miley Cyrus and Depeche Mode — they are just a few of the music acts participating in the Tribeca Festival this month. The Korean rock band the Rose, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Wizkid and Anderson .Paak are also part of the mix.These artists are either the subject of documentaries or have a hand in creating films premiering at the event, which starts Wednesday and runs through June 15. Following their screenings, some musicians, like Billy Idol and Eddie Vedder, are taking the stage to perform in intimate settings compared with their usual mass crowds. Others, including Depeche Mode and Metallica, are sitting for conversations with audiences.Music has been a part of the event since its inception, according to the festival’s director and senior vice president of programming, Cara Cusumano. In its first edition in 2002, the festival partnered with MTV for a free community concert in Battery Park City with Sheryl Crow, Counting Crows, Wyclef Jean and David Bowie. “We have always considered Tribeca a storytelling festival, so music fits in alongside the other forms of storytelling we celebrate like games, immersive, TV, podcasts and, of course, film at the center,” Cusumano said in an email interview.Much like the festival itself, the amount of music at Tribeca has only grown over the years, she said. The increased presence of musical programming is driven by its popularity with audiences. Cusumano said that the music events saw the highest number of attendees compared with the number of attendees at any other part of the festival. Tribeca is hosting more than 20 music events this year — the highest number yet — including documentaries, music videos and podcasts.“Anecdotally, we often hear audiences speak about how special the experience was since they have usually just seen a doc about the artist, which puts the show and the artist themselves in a unique context,” Cusumano saidIn 2011, Tribeca opened with “The Union,” a documentary about making the eponymous album from Leon Russell and Elton John. In his performance for audiences after the premiere, John dedicated his love ballad “Your Song” to New York. The film and John’s concert set the precedent for Tribeca opening with a music documentary whenever possible, Cusumano said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      James Grashow Documentary Focuses on Life, Death and ‘The Cathedral’

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      The process of making a wood sculpture of Jesus Christ took the artist James Grashow four years to complete.There are some weighty topics — both biblical and personal — that are explored in the documentary “Jimmy & the Demons,” about the sculptor and woodcut artist James Grashow.First there is the art, which is inspired by religion. Grashow, 83, is the titular “Jimmy” in the film, which will debut on Sunday at the Tribeca Festival. The documentary tells the story of his quest to complete “The Cathedral,” his five-foot-tall wood sculpture of Jesus Christ bearing a cathedral on his back while sinister creatures — many of them demons — flock around his feet. It is playful and surreal and obsessively detailed.Then there is the personal: Grashow’s ruminations about life, or more accurately, death. The film captures the artist’s view about the sculpture possibly being the “grand finale” of his career and his belief that he is “in the bottom of the ninth” of his life. The feeling of mortality is strong. Even more resonate, however, are Grashow’s passion for his craft and love for his family.Grashow in his work space that is featured in the documentary “Jimmy & the Demons,” which follows his quest to complete “The Cathedral.”Jennifer WastromDuring a video interview last month, Grashow expressed mixed feelings about “The Cathedral” being finished. “It’s an unbelievable relief,” he said. But elation over completing the project was balanced with another emotion: “At the same time, there’s sort of an emptiness,” he said. “Where do I go now? And what do I do?”“Beginnings are the most difficult,” he said. “Being in the process in the middle of the project is phenomenal.” He likened his creative experience to an enormous spiral. “The fist steps are unbelievably sluggish, but as it quickens and the vortex keeps spinning around, you can’t wait to get up in the morning and approach the work.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When the Whole Country Watched a Nuclear War Movie at Once

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      The 1983 ABC movie “The Day After” was a landmark moment that proved contentious even before it aired, as a new documentary shows.In 1980, the year the new documentary “Television Event” (in theaters) opens, researchers found that about three-quarters of Americans believed there would be nuclear war in the next 10 years. Schoolchildren participated in evacuation drills. There were enough nuclear weapons in America and the Soviet Union to wipe out the world’s population many times over. And yet, as participants in the film repeatedly point out, for the most part people couldn’t bear to think about it. We find it hard to live with our own imminent destruction and also remember to take out the trash regularly.That knowledge, though, gave rise to “The Day After,” the controversial TV movie that aired on ABC in 1983 and was watched by more than 100 million people, about 67 percent of the American viewing public that evening. The film, shot in Lawrence, Kan., depicts the very real-feeling aftermath of a nuclear attack.The production and release were fraught. Some executives felt that TV wasn’t the place to scare people; there was a lot of strife behind the scenes. To tell the story of “The Day After,” the director, Jeff Daniels, weaves together copious behind-the-scenes production footage with contemporary interviews. The “Day After” director, Nicholas Meyer, still seems a little scarred by the experience. Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Pictures, talks about conceiving the idea for a movie that “has meaning, that has import.” The more skeptical, practical Stu Samuels, then vice president of ABC Motion Pictures, speaks at length about the many challenges of getting this kind of movie shot and on the air, including run-ins with the network’s standards department. Edward Hume, who wrote “The Day After,” and Stephanie Austin, an associate producer, talk about the film, as does Ellen Anthony, who lived in Lawrence and played the youthful Joleen, a girl who must live in an underground bunker with her family.“Television Event” makes a very compelling case that “The Day After” was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement, even if it was made for the small screen. There were plenty of difficulties, both on the ground and in the edit room; there was network skepticism and even, eventually, some disapproval by the federal government. One flaw in documentaries of this sort can be a chorus of interviewees who all echo one another and seem basically in agreement, but that is not the case here: The subjects of “Television Event” often express skepticism or outright animosity toward one another, giving different versions of events and opinions about the process. That not only makes it a fascinating glimpse into this production, but reminds the audience how tricky it is to get anything made, let alone a movie like “The Day After.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Dramatizations That Deliver

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      Across television, film and podcast, here are four picks that successfully give well-known true-crime stories the scripted treatment.Not long ago, comically bad re-enactments were the cornerstone of true-crime movies and TV shows. Despite their cheesiness, these staged scenes served a purpose: to bring scenarios to life, of course, but also to offer some relief from talking-head interviews and still shots of photographs and documents.But in the last decade or so, the number of true-crime stories that have received scripted treatment, often casting A-list actors, has exploded. It’s a phenomenon due in part to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series “American Crime Story” — which debuted in 2016 and has taken on the O.J. Simpson saga and the assassination of Gianni Versace — and more recently “Monster.”Coming this summer is a Paramount+ mini-series about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen who was found strangled to death in her family’s Colorado home in 1996. It will star Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen as JonBenet’s parents. And over at Hulu, a scripted series about the Murdaugh family murders is being developed. Like their predecessors, these series will most likely aim to hew closely to their stranger-than-fiction origins while giving the creators artistic license in how the cases are brought to life onscreen.Ahead of those, check out these four offerings that give such stories the dramatized treatment to great effect.Mini-Series“The Staircase”Few true-crime stories have held my attention over the years as this one about Michael Peterson, a North Carolina novelist and aspiring politician who was charged with the death of his wife, the telecom executive Kathleen Peterson. She was found crumpled and bleeding at the base of the staircase in their upscale Durham home in 2001.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marcel Ophuls, ‘The Sorry and the Pity’ Director, Dies at 97

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      He was best-known for “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a landmark film that debunked ideas of vast French resistance to the Nazi occupation.Marcel Ophuls, the German-born filmmaker whose powerful documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” exploded the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, died over the weekend in France. He was 97.His death was announced by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who did not provide further details. Mr. Ophuls had directed several minor feature films before vaulting to fame in 1969 with “The Sorrow and the Pity,” his four-and-a-half-hour documentary on wartime Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city located almost at the center of France. In a dispassionate, incisive style, he interviewed shopkeepers and farmers, bankers and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers who either collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy regime or actively resisted the occupation — but who in most instances had turned a blind eye to the roundups of Jews and anti-Nazis.When the film was first shown in Paris cinemas, it was met with shock, outrage and tears. It stripped away the myth — fostered by Charles de Gaulle when he returned to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 — that a vast majority of his compatriots were either open or secret supporters of his resistance movement.Originally produced for television, “The Sorrow and the Pity” was banned from French airwaves until 1981. Conservative politicians denounced Mr. Ophuls, calling his work a “prosecutorial film” that unfairly portrayed the French as cowardly or worse. “It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French,” Mr. Ophuls insisted in a 2004 interview with The Guardian newspaper. “Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ used French and German wartime newsreels, including one of Adolf Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower during a visit to France.Milestone Film)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Michael Roemer, Maker of Acclaimed but Little-Seen Films, Dies at 97

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      His “Nothing but a Man” and “The Plot Against Harry” drew critical praise but never found an audience. He said he took “a certain pride in not having been a success.”Michael Roemer, an independent filmmaker who earned critical praise for his keen understanding of character and his sensitive exploration of relationships in a slender portfolio that included “Nothing but a Man” and “The Plot Against Harry,” died on Tuesday at his home in Townshend, Vt. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ruth Sanzari.Mr. Roemer’s interest in moviemaking began at Harvard in the late 1940s. In 1939, when he was 11 and living in Berlin, he and his sister had been among thousands of Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany and sent to England. There he would stay — writing plays to improve his English, he said — until he came to the United States in 1945, at the end of World War II.His career as a director began when NBC gave him the opportunity to make “Cortile Cascino,” a 46-minute documentary about slum life in Palermo, Sicily, that he made with Robert M. Young. It was also the start of a pattern in which his films would all but disappear for decades at a time.“Cortile Cascino” depicted a Sicilian life so grim that NBC executives balked at putting it on the air. It did not reappear until it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993.Long delay also befell “Nothing but a Man,” directed by Mr. Roemer and written by him and Mr. Young, a frequent collaborator. With Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln in central roles, it tells the story of a Black railroad worker married to a preacher’s daughter who struggles to maintain his dignity in the segregated Alabama of the early 1960s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With ‘Dead Outlaw,’ the ‘Coroner to the Stars’ Is Getting One Last Act

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      For much of his early career, Thomas Noguchi spent his days as a civil servant toiling away in the basement of a building in downtown Los Angeles.But even in a city filled with larger-than-life celebrities, Noguchi, a Japanese immigrant, managed to become a household name. Because over a span of 15 years as the chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County, he inspected the bodies of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate and many others to determine how they died. He was, as many around town called him, the “coroner to the stars.” And as such, he became something of a notorious star himself, delivering news that, he contends, people sometimes did not want to hear.“The public might not be ready, but I felt I had the responsibility to inform the public,” Noguchi, now 98, said in an interview at his home this month. “They might not accept it. But they actually heard it from the right source.”Now, more than four decades after he was demoted from his administrative post amid accusations of mismanagement, he is getting one last brush with fame. A fictionalized version of Noguchi pops up in several scenes in the Tony-nominated musical “Dead Outlaw,” and a new documentary about him, “Coroner to the Stars,” is making the rounds of the festival circuit. There’s even a new book.Thom Sesma singing the number “Up to the Stars” as Dr. Thomas Noguchi in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“With what I would find out from death investigations, the public and news people would be very interested in knowing what I feel,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Art Spiegelman Documentary Had Trump Criticism Removed Before Airing on Public TV

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      A segment in a documentary about the cartoonist Art Spiegelman was edited two weeks before it was set to air on public television stations across the country.The executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning “American Masters” series insisted on removing a scene critical of President Trump from a documentary about the comic artist Art Spiegelman two weeks before it was set to air nationwide on public television stations.The filmmakers say it is another example of public media organizations bowing to pressure as the Trump administration tries to defund the sector, while the programmers say their decision was a matter of taste.Alicia Sams, a producer of “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse,” said in an interview that approximately two weeks before the movie’s April 15 airdate, she received a call from Michael Kantor, the executive producer of “American Masters,” informing her that roughly 90 seconds featuring a cartoon critical of Trump would need to be excised from the film. The series is produced by the WNET Group, the parent company of several New York public television channels.Stephen Segaller, the vice president of programming for WNET, confirmed in an interview that the station had informed the filmmakers that it needed to make the change. Segaller said WNET felt the scatological imagery in the comic, which Spiegelman drew shortly after the 2016 election — it portrays what appears to be fly-infested feces on Trump’s head — was a “breach of taste” that might prove unpalatable to some of the hundreds of stations that air the series. But the filmmakers have questioned whether political considerations played a role. They have noted that earlier this year, according to Documentary Magazine, which first reported the “American Masters” decision, PBS postponed indefinitely a documentary set to air about a transgender video-gamer for fear of political backlash.Sams pointed out that their film had already been approved for broadcast — the filmmakers agreed it would be shown at 10 p.m. rather than 8 p.m., so that certain obscenities would not need to be blurred or bleeped — and that the call came a week after a Capitol Hill hearing in which Congressional Republicans accused public television and radio executives of biased coverage (the executives denied that accusation in sworn testimony).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More