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      Heddy Honigmann, Whose Films Told of Loss and Love, Dies at 70

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      A documentarian, she liked to engage her subjects — Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, survivors of genocide — in conversations.Heddy Honigmann, the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker whose humane and gently paced documentaries of Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, disabled people and their service dogs, Dutch peacekeepers and the widows of men who had been murdered in a tiny village near Sarajevo, were stories of loss, trauma and exile — and the sustaining forces of art and love — died on May 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 70.Jannet Honigmann, her sister, confirmed the death. She said Ms. Honigmann had been ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.In the economic chaos of Peru in the 1990s, when the government nearly bankrupted the country and inflation soared, many middle-class people began moonlighting as taxi drivers, slapping a “Taxi” sticker on their Volkswagen Beetles or battered Nissans to signal that they were on call.Ms. Honigmann collected their histories in the 1995 film “Metal and Melancholy,” riding in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs whose drivers included a teacher, a police officer, an actor and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. (She took more than 120 taxi rides to find her subjects.)The stories that unspooled included a devastating tale from a man whose 5-year-old daughter had leukemia and who was driving to pay for her costly medical care. When he tells Ms. Honigmann that he encourages his daughter, whom he describes as a fighter, by saying “Life is hard, but beautiful,” it’s a maxim not just for this film but for all of Ms. Honigmann’s work.In “The Underground Orchestra” (1999), musicians busking in the Paris metro — including a disc jockey from Zaire who has escaped a forced labor camp and an Argentine pianist whose torture at the hands of his government nearly destroyed his hands — describe the refugee odysseys that have brought them there. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an open-ended celebration of human tenacity and life force that builds up a compelling personal vision in an offhanded, roundabout way.”Ms. Honigmann rode in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs to collect the stories of cabdrivers in Lima, Peru, for her film “Metal and Melancholy” (1995).Icarus FilmsDespite stories of terrible trauma, the movie is also a celebration of the culture these artists have left behind — a “world-music primer,” as Mr. Holden put it, “featuring some astonishingly beautiful sounds.”The cultural critic Wesley Morris, in his Times review of “Buddy,” Ms. Honigmann’s 2019 film about people with disabilities and their service dogs, called Ms. Honigmann a humanist who “listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.”But she was more of a gentle interlocutor than an insistent interrogator. There were no narrators in her films, no propulsive music or quick cuts to tell viewers how to experience what they were seeing. Her pacing was almost languid; she allowed her subjects to tell their stories in their own way and in their own time. And she hated the word “interview.”“‘Interviews were for subjects,’ she would say,” said Ester Gould, who was a co-writer, researcher and assistant producer on many of Ms. Honigmann’s films. “‘I have conversations with people.’”In an interview at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2002, Ms. Honigmann said: “I think the only rule for me is that when I hear the stories, if they keep my attention, they will also keep the attention of the spectators.” She added: “I lost myself in conversations. And conversations, if they are interesting, they are never boring.”Ms. Honigmann was primarily a documentarian, but she also made narrative films — notably “Goodbye” (1995), about the doomed, highly charged affair between a young preschool teacher and a married man.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, all of which had been published after his death in 1987 because he worried that they would be seen as pornographic. Ms. Honigmann’s readers took to their roles with gusto and often confided their own erotic histories. Graphic, sensual, tender and at times very funny, the film is a rumination on desire, memory and age.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.Film ForumMs. Honigmann’s films have won awards at film festivals all over the world and been shown in retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Paris Film Festival, among other venues.In 2013 she was given the Living Legend Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Yet she may be the most famous filmmaker Americans have never heard of, according to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum in New York, which has presented the premieres of many of Ms. Honigmann’s movies.“As Americans, we live in a bubble in terms of film, because Hollywood is so dominant that documentary filmmakers don’t get the same kind of attention that narrative fiction film receives,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “In this country, among documentary filmmakers, Heddy was a star. In Europe, she was a superstar. In the Netherlands, she’s a national treasure.”Heddy Ena Honigmann Pach was born on Oct. 1, 1951, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were European Jewish refugees.Her father, Witold Honigmann Weiss, an artist and illustrator who created a popular comic strip, was born in Vienna and had been interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria before he escaped in 1942, making his way to Peru by way of Russia and Italy. Her mother, Sarah Pach Miller, an actress and homemaker, had left Poland with her family for Peru in 1939. (In Peru, it is the custom to use the surnames of both parents. Heddy dropped the name Pach as a filmmaker.)Heddy studied biology and literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Her father wanted her to be a doctor. She first wanted to be a poet — she loved Emily Dickinson — but decided filmmaking was a better medium for her. She left Peru to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and she did not return to her home country for nearly two decades.An early marriage in Lima to Gustavo Riofrio ended in divorce. In the 1970s she married Frans van de Staak, a Dutch filmmaker she met in Rome, and the couple moved to Amsterdam; she became a Dutch citizen in 1978. Their marriage also ended in divorce.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her son, Stefan van de Staak; her husband, Henk Timmermans; and her stepson, Jaap Timmermans.Ms. Honigmann’s film “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), told of the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces killed the men there. Pieter Van Huystee FilmOne of Ms. Honigmann’s most harrowing films was “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), about the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces had murdered the men and burned the place to the ground in 1992. Ms. Honigmann captured the women’s loss by drawing out their memories of their loved ones, and by showing the photographs and belongings the women had saved as mementos.She said she tried to show that the most terrible thing about war is not the numbers of the dead, which she called an abstraction: “The catastrophe is, for instance, seeing that a whole town has lost all the craftsmen, that people who were in love were separated forever, that children who loved to play football and loved music cannot hear it anymore.”“When you are born from immigrants you are educated in melancholy,” Ms. Honigmann said in her 2002 talk at the Walker Center. “You hear all the time of stories of people leaving. That’s in my films. People are left, or they are leaving, or losing their memory.”When Michael Tortorello, her interviewer, asked her what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Peru, she answered promptly: “I would have a been a taxi driver.” More

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      ‘Look at Me: XXXTentacion’ Review: A Life Cut Short

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      A documentary about a rap sensation who was a troubled and incendiary figure.About a half-hour into this documentary, Cleopatra Bernard, the mother of the rapper XXXTentacion, lists the occasions on which her son got a beating from his father. They are numerous. “But,” Bernard concludes, the father “wasn’t abusive.”Such moments make watching “Look at Me: XXXTentacion” — directed by Sabaah Folayan and executive-produced by Bernard — both fascinating and exasperating.XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was a Florida rapper whose brief life and career were ended in a 2018 shooting. Before that, his emotive music, incendiary persona and criminal notoriety earned him a fan base of America’s most disaffected children — and multiplatinum record sales.He learned he had bipolar disorder in his early adolescence, and he was making rap recordings before he turned 15. One such track in the film sounds like a cry for help that went unanswered.A frenetic and sometimes proudly violent person whose brutal beatings of his girlfriend Geneva Ayala are here chronicled in harrowing detail, XXXTentacion used one of his mug shots as the cover for his breakthrough single “Look at Me.”The film features home video footage of a celebration of his release from jail, at which he accepts platitudes offered by family and management (“do the right thing,” “one day at a time”). After which he flat-out lies about his abusive actions. “She was bruised already,” he says of Ayala.The musician’s life — and those of many around him — became a terrifying and toxic mix of street culture, mental illness and social media. Speaking of the world outside his circle, Bass Santana, a member of XXXTentacion’s crew, observes, “All these people want to see is us destroy each other.” He seems not wholly cognizant of the larger truth of what he’s saying, and that’s heartbreaking.Look at Me: XXXTentacionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Fanny: The Right to Rock’ Review: Still Kicking

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      Started by two Filipino American sisters in California, the influential band is claiming its rightful rank in rock ’n’ roll history.Jean and June Millington, Filipino American sisters and lifelong bandmates best known for their 1970s rock band Fanny, have over 50 years of history in the music industry to reflect on in the documentary “Fanny: The Right To Rock.”When Fanny was signed to a recording contract in 1970, there was no one in rock music quite like them. Though the group’s lineup has had several iterations, all its members have been women, and two — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians. Their musical chops earned them gigs at venues like Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where they won the respect of musicians like David Bowie, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Bag and Cherie Currie of the Runaways.The group disbanded in 1975, but three original members — the sisters June and Jean (Millington) Adamian, and Brie Darling — reunited for an album, “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released in 2018. The thought of the group’s struggles brings a smile to Jean’s face in the movie. “We dealt with the prejudice against girls and feminism, and June says, now we’re bucking ageism!”The director Bobbi Jo Hart decided to show the group’s story through a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews with band members and their famous fans. The film’s most novel sequences come when Hart joins the band for recording sessions for their 2018 album, and finds that even if the voices warble a bit more than they did in the screaming days of youth, Fanny’s sound remains heavy. But the conventional vérité footage doesn’t add new depth to the guitar licks and improvisations, the signals of musicianship that make Fanny feel artistically vital as white-haired rockers. What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.Fanny: The Right to RockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Taste of Whale’ Review: Blood in the Water

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      This documentary offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the practice of whale hunting in the Faroe Islands.The documentary filmmaker Vincent Kelner’s latest project “A Taste of Whale” opens in darkness, broken by the sounds of loud splashes, men yelling and the high-pitched clicks and whistles of an aquatic mammal in distress. A prodding quote attributed to Paul McCartney appears onscreen: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”Provocative as it may be at first glance, “A Taste of Whale,” in theaters and on demand, offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the controversy around whale hunting in the Faroe Islands, a tradition that dates back to the 9th century. Central to it is the hunting season that is referred to as the grind, in which large pods of pilot whales are herded into shallow bays by Faroese whalers and slaughtered en masse for food. (Any meat not eaten immediately by the islanders is preserved through salt-curing.) While pilot whales are not considered to be a threatened species, the hunts have drawn international criticism from animal welfare groups such as the Sea Shepherd, who liken the grind to murder and argue that the practice is unnecessarily cruel.Kelner clearly harbors his own reservations about the hunt, or at least its optics; if there’s any explicit messaging to be found here, it’s that the Faroese killing of whales is no more gruesome than what one may find by peeking inside any slaughterhouse around the world. Indeed, the Faroese villagers interviewed for the film say just as much. Kelner highlights the locals fishing in the bay and dispatching shorebirds with their bare hands, showcasing a desire to play a direct role in where their meat comes from rather than leave it up to an opaque global food system. Yet he’s equally sympathetic to the Sea Shepherd leaders who argue that meat shouldn’t be eaten at all, and not just out of compassion for the animals. By the third act, Kelner throws a whole new wrench into the debate with the appearance of a local environmentalist, who explains how there are more sinister things polluting the Faroese waters than whale’s blood.A Taste of WhaleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Last Night,’ ‘Take This Waltz’ and More Streaming Gems

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      A handful of pointed indie dramas are among the highlights of this month’s off-the-radar streaming picks, as well as a funny werewolf movie and a Robin Williams comedy.‘Last Night’ (2010)Stream it on HBO Max.With the “Avatar” sequels finally, finally, finally heading our way, it’s worth remembering that innocent time when it looked like Sam Worthington was going to be a movie star. There’s a compelling case to be found in Massy Tadjedin’s four-hander, which is something of a mini-“Eyes Wide Shut” — a thoughtful marital drama that candidly explores the frustrations and temptations of long-term adult relationships. Worthington nicely underplays what amounts to the Tom Cruise role, but the eye-opener here is Keira Knightley, whose scorching turn as his frustrated wife reminds us that she’s just as compelling in contemporary roles as period pieces.‘Take This Waltz’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.Sarah Polley, the writer and director of “Take This Waltz,” narrates a scene from the film.Magnolia PicturesSarah Polley spent the 1990s turning in lively and exciting performances in indies like “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Guinevere,” and she’d easily be one of our most compelling contemporary actors had she continued down that road. Instead, she went behind the camera, crafting a series of keenly observed and emotionally overwhelming efforts. This was her sophomore effort, a domestic drama that mines similar thematic territory as “Last Night”; Michelle Williams (at her delicate but forceful best) stars as a young wife and mother who feels the irresistible tingle of a new attraction, and must decide how to grapple with it. Polley carefully eschews predictable conflicts or easy outcomes, and tells a story packed with the hard truths of real life and real love.‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.Netflix viewers love Shirley Jackson, as the well-received adaptation of her “The Haunting of Hill House” showed, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the streamer added this 2018 adaptation of Jackson’s 1962 novel to their library. Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario star as the Blackwood sisters, the youngest members of the family everyone in the nearby villages whispers about. All their skeletons tumble out of the closet when smooth-talking cousin Charles (Sebastian Stan) rolls into town with his eyes on the family fortune. Stan is marvelous, secreting oily charm and barely-concealed danger in every scene, while Farmiga and Daddario use their wildly divergent styles to underscore the explicit contrasts and psychological tension between the characters.‘The Angriest Man in Brooklyn’ (2014)Stream it on Hulu.This heartfelt comedy-drama feels like a movie you should have heard more about — the most recent directorial effort by Phil Alden Robinson (“Sneakers,” “Field of Dreams”), featuring one of the Robin Williams’s final performances, and a stellar supporting cast that includes Mila Kunis, Melissa Leo and a “Game of Thrones”-era Peter Dinklage. Williams is the title character, an eternal curmudgeon who discovers he has mere minutes to live, and must set right all the relationships he’s burned down in recent years. Robinson has some trouble settling on a consistent, successful tone, and the occasional vignette doesn’t land. But Williams is wonderful, conveying the character’s furious rage and endless regret with equal aplomb, and the circumstances of his own passing mere months after its release lends extra pathos to his journey.‘Killer Joe’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon.Matthew McConaughey’s unexpected comeback from a no-man’s-land of forgettable rom-coms and dumbed-down star vehicles was just getting underway when he took on the title role of this brutal, twisted, brilliant adaptation of the play by the Pulitzer and Tony winner Tracy Letts. As a ruthless murderer-for-hire plunged into the disarray of a vile, trashy family, McConaughey miraculously twists his movie-star charisma and golden-boy looks into something cold, hard and frightening. The director William Friedkin (“The French Connection,” “The Exorcist”) squeezes the trailer-home setting like a vice, creating creeping dread and pitch-black humor from the bleakest of setups.‘Hello, My Name is Doris’ (2016)Stream it on Netflix.We really, really like Sally Field, but she somehow hasn’t cultivated the late-career visibility of some of her ’70s acting icon peers — she’s working, but seldom in the kind of showcase roles that remind us of what makes her so special. This charming indie comedy-drama attempts to rectify that, casting Field in the juicy role of Doris, an office worker whose unexpected (and unapologetically lustful) crush on a handsome young colleague (“New Girl” himbo Max Greenfield) puts a new spring in her step. Field is empathetic but never panders for sympathy; you’re pulling for her happiness, no matter what circuitous route she may take to it.‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow’ (2020)Stream it on Amazon.In his 2018 breakthrough film “Thunder Road,” the writer-director-actor Jim Cummings created a specific and memorable comic type: an emotionally vulnerable, psychologically wobbly small-town cop whose tenuous grasp on his work and life becomes a sly commentary on toxic masculinity. This follow-up follows the formula — it’s basically “Thunder Road” with werewolves — and that’s fine; the character is so rich and well-defined that it becomes something like W.C. Fields’s huckster or Mae West’s vamp, a carefully-configured persona that eventually generates laughs merely by landing in incongruent situations. And, bonus, “Snow Hollow” features the great Robert Forster in one of his final roles, exhibiting the offhand charm and flinty warmth that made him such a special character actor.‘Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley’ (2013)Stream it on HBO Max.A scene from Goldberg’s film.Getty Images, courtesy HBOGoldberg has always been open about her debt to Mabley, one of the first Black women to make a name, and a living, as what we now think of as a stand-up comic. In tribute, Goldberg helms this documentary account of Mabley’s long, strange journey from the so-called Chitlin Circuit to the televisions of Middle America, with contributing commentary from a who’s who of American comedians. Their analysis and admiration is welcome, but the real draw here is the wealth of archival clips, a sharp reminder of Mabley’s inimitable delivery, screwball timing and quietly subversive style. More

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      The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.

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      The group put out five albums in the ’70s and counted David Bowie and Bonnie Raitt as fans. The filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart, dismayed its story hadn’t been told, took action.In spring 2015, the documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart was clicking around the Taylor Guitars website, looking for a new instrument for her 10-year-old daughter, when she came across a short profile of June Millington, the singer and lead guitarist for the pioneering 1970s all-female rock group Fanny.Hart, now 56 and living in Montreal, grew up in a hippie household in California “with piles of LPs all over the place”: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on. But she had never even heard of Fanny, despite the fact that it was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label.Fanny put out a total of five albums between 1970 and 1974, one of which was produced by Todd Rundgren. The band scored two Top 40 hits — the swinging, soulful “Charity Ball” and the doo-wop-flavored “Butter Boy” — and played in the United States and abroad with Slade, Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, the Kinks and Chicago. The group backed Barbra Streisand in the studio and performed on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “American Bandstand.”In 1999, Bowie hailed Fanny as one of the finest rock bands of its time in Rolling Stone. He also lamented that “nobody’s ever mentioned them.”Kathy Valentine, the bassist of the Go-Go’s, a later all-female band, wished more people had spread the word about Fanny. “If their visibility had been higher,” she said in an interview, “we would have seen a lot more women in the rock landscape.” Valentine didn’t hear about Fanny until 1982, she said, by which time the Go-Go’s were making their second album.When Hart, the filmmaker, first learned about Fanny online, she had a visceral reaction. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “It was just another example of amazing women that we don’t know about.” Hart reached out to former band members about the possibility of a documentary, but determined that at the time, the Fanny story didn’t have the “forward-momentum narrative” she was looking for.Then, in January 2017, Hart attended the Women’s March in Washington. She was watching Madonna speak on the Jumbotron when she spotted a woman with “flaming gray hair” onstage, filming the proceedings on her iPhone. It was June Millington. The sighting spurred Hart to call Millington, who had some news: Three members of Fanny — Millington, her younger sister, the bassist and singer Jean (Millington) Adamian, and the drummer and singer Brie Darling, a fellow Filipina-American — were about to make a new album on an indie label. The moment for a film had arrived.The resulting documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock,” opens in New York on Friday before hitting other major markets and, on Aug. 2, video on demand. (It will come to PBS in 2023.) The movie documents the making of that album, recorded under the name Fanny Walked the Earth and released in 2018, and features interviews with five members from the original group’s frequently shifting lineup. (The reclusive keyboardist Nickey Barclay, who has said she hated her time in the band, notably did not participate. She also declined to speak for this article.) Valentine, Bonnie Raitt and the Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott are among the talking heads.From left: Jean Millington, Nickey Barclay, Brie Darling, Alice de Buhr and June Millington practice in the basement of their band’s famed home, Fanny Hill.Linda WolfThe documentary lovingly recounts the history of Fanny, beginning with the sisters June and Jean Millington, who were born in the Philippines to a white American naval officer father and a Filipina socialite mother. In 1961, the Millington family moved overseas to Sacramento, Calif., where the sisters, as early adolescents, had a difficult time fitting in. Racism was a constant part of life. (In the film, Jean recalls the father of a boyfriend of hers telling his son, “I’ll buy you a Mustang if you stop seeing that half-breed girl.” The boyfriend opted for the car.)The sisters found solace in music, forming an all-girl band in high school called the Svelts, which played the radio hits of the day. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey, a Motown cover group that decamped to Los Angeles in 1969 to make it big. Wild Honey signed with Warner Bros. Records’s Reprise label later that year. Not long after, the band, looking for a new name with a female identity, chose Fanny, which in the United States is slang for bottom.“We thought it was a double entendre that would work,” said June Millington, 74. It wasn’t until the band members toured overseas that they discovered that in Britain, fanny is slang for female genitals.Early on, the band lived in Fanny Hill, a house in West Hollywood that Millington, in the film, calls “a sorority with electrical guitars.” Joe Cocker and the lead singer of the Band, Rick Danko, hung out there, and the group Little Feat would come over and jam; Raitt was a houseguest for a time. A libertine, clothing-optional spirit prevailed. “It was a wonderful, creative environment,” said Darling, who is 72 and lives in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t people just getting high” and having sex.The film highlights the fact that two of Fanny’s members — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians, something that the band never dared speak about publicly in those days. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’” recalled de Buhr, now 72 and residing in Tucson, Ariz. “And I’d say, ‘I’m taken.’ I hated not being able to say, ‘Well, I’m in love with a woman.’”Predictably, Fanny was subjected to a great deal of sexism, often being treated as a novelty act. “Most of society didn’t see girls with a guitar between their legs,” said Patti Quatro, 74, who replaced Millington as lead guitarist in 1974. (Quatro, of Austin, Texas, is an older sister of Suzi Quatro.)Millington said that the “condescension and sneering” that would greet Fanny at concert appearances was “so palpable it was almost physical.”Both Millington and her sister recalled, however, that Fanny would ultimately win over the crowd. “I felt like it took at least 10 minutes for everyone to realize there was not a boy band playing behind us,” said Jean (Millington) Adamian, 73, who lives in Davis, Calif. “They were waiting for us to fall down. And once we proved it was really us playing and singing, it was generally a big, uplifting experience.”Rock critics weren’t always swayed though. “We were battered by the reviews,” Millington said. “Every once in a while, they’d say, ‘Oh, they’re good.’” She cited a generally positive 1971 concert review in this newspaper headlined “Fanny, a Four-Girl Rock Group, Poses a Challenge to Male Ego.” “‘What will it do to the male ego?’ Well, who cares?” she said. “Why don’t you guys just deal with it and dig us?”“The fact is that Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” June Millington said.Linda WolfJUNE MILLINGTON EXITED Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of the Institute for the Musical Arts, a nonprofit recording and retreat facility she co-founded with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler, in Goshen, Mass. On the mantel were various Buddhist objects — Millington is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism — and a framed photo of Jimi Hendrix.“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Millington said, was the record company’s insistence that Fanny, whose members favored ’70s California chic, dress up in glammy, more revealing outfits onstage. (“My top was $45 worth of American coins, looped together, that just pinched my nipples,” de Buhr said.) Millington saw it as a sign that Reprise had lost faith in the band. “I took it as an insult,” she said.A new version of Fanny — featuring Adamian, Barclay, Darling and Quatro — signed with Casablanca Records and released a final album, “Rock and Roll Survivors,” in 1974. That record featured the single “Butter Boy,” which Adamian said was inspired by — but not about, as has been widely reported — her then-boyfriend, Bowie, and his gender-bending ways.“‘He was hard as a rock, but I was ready to roll, what a shock to find out I was in control of the situation,’” Adamian said, reciting the song’s opening lines. “I mean, those kinds of lyrics were very tongue-in-cheek and intended to be provocative.” “Butter Boy” became Fanny’s biggest hit, reaching No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1975. But by that time, the band had split up for reasons both artistic and personal.Fanny has technically never reunited. But in 2016, Millington, Adamian and Darling played together at a concert in Northampton, Mass., a collaboration that led to the self-titled album “Fanny Walked the Earth.” That LP includes appearances by de Buhr and Quatro, plus Valentine of the Go-Go’s and members of fellow all-female groups the Runaways and the Bangles.A tentative plan to tour behind the Fanny Walked the Earth album was scuttled when, two months before the record’s March 2018 release, Adamian suffered a stroke that affected the right side of her body. Today, she uses a wheelchair to get around. “I cannot play bass,” she said. “I keep looking at my two fingers, going, ‘If just one of you would move, that would be good.’ It’s absolutely frustrating.”Fanny Walked the Earth’s Jean Adamian, Darling and June Millington.Marita MadeloniMillington has experienced health issues of her own. Her snow-white hair was noticeably shorter than it had been during the Fanny Walked the Earth era, the result of chemotherapy she received last year to treat breast cancer that is now in remission.“I knew I was going to live because my work is not done,” she said. “So anything can happen.” She didn’t discount the idea of some version of Fanny recording or touring again. As for the latter scenario, she said it would take a lot of money to do so properly, given the medical situations she and her sister faced. (Adamian has sung live with Fanny Walked the Earth since her stroke; her son, Lee Madeloni, filled in on bass.)In the meantime, Millington said, she was looking forward to the release of “Fanny: The Right to Rock.” Hart, the director, expressed the wish that the documentary would lead to far wider appreciation for the band. “A not-so-secret dream that I have is if they would get that recognition to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Hart said.Millington isn’t waiting for a call from the Rock Hall. “Is it ever going to happen? I don’t know,” she said. “And at this point, I don’t care.” She said she was comfortable resting on her laurels. “I’m fine with it, because I never imagined anyone would mention Fanny ever again,” she said. “For 30, 40 years, we couldn’t get arrested.”The internet, she said, is exposing new audiences to the band. “Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” Millington continued. “It is igniting people all over the world of different ages and different sexes. It’s like the Olympic torch, and that is really something to be proud of.” More

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      in Television

      The Pitfalls of Oven-Ready TV

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      Prestige shows like “Winning Time” love to dramatize the real people at the heart of recent-ish events. It doesn’t always go well.It’s May 1980 at the Forum in Los Angeles, and the crowd is in a frenzy as the rookie Magic Johnson and the legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead the Lakers to their first N.B.A. championship in eight years. This is the setting for the recently completed first season of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” which dives into its subject matter with brio. Helmed by the ubiquitous Adam McKay — director of “The Big Short,” “Don’t Look Up” and a parade of successful film comedies — “Winning Time” is an antic chronicle of the Lakers’ highly eventful 1979-80 season, with main characters that include not just Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar but other Lakers titans like the coach Pat Riley and the owner Jerry Buss. Its 10-episode arc is fast and fun, full of on-court magnetism and off-court machismo, and it all actually happened. Sort of.Many of the people depicted in the show will be familiar to basketball-loving viewers, and that’s part of the appeal: There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness. And for those who lived through this total blast of a Lakers season, it has to be unbelievably fun reliving it on HBO. But while the acknowledged source material for “Winning Time” is the longtime reporter Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” the process of adapting it seems to have been as freewheeling as the team’s run-and-gun offense. This is most apparent in the show’s treatment of the Hall of Fame guard turned coach turned legendary league executive Jerry West.West’s character on “Winning Time” is a doozy. As played by the Australian actor Jason Clarke, he is a basketball savant with serious rage issues, prone to throwing trophies, breaking golf clubs and drinking to excess. It’s a humorous and not completely unsympathetic portrait. At one point in the show, just after Buss, the new team owner, has given his staff a motivational speech, West makes a grandiose public display of quitting his job as head coach, completely souring the vibe. Eventually West returns to the office without much explanation. Reinstalled as a sort of omniscient consultant on a highly informal basis, he remains a profane, hair-trigger wild card through the rest of the season.There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness.But the West in “Winning Time” doesn’t square with the real Jerry West’s recollections, or with the recollections of many others who were part of the Lakers organization at the time. When West recently asked HBO for a retraction and an apology, several figures from the show, including Abdul-Jabbar (who also objected to his own portrayal) and the former Forum executive Claire Rothman, were quick to take his side. They maintain that West was not a yeller and not erratic in his work and that they never saw him drinking in his office. And while it’s always possible that time and friendship have softened everyone’s memories, it’s notable that West’s more outrageous moments on the show aren’t in Pearlman’s book. In response to West’s criticism, HBO released a statement saying that “Winning Time” is “based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing,” but that it is “not a documentary.”You could say the same for a lot of shows these days. From the latest iteration of “The Staircase,” dramatizing a mysterious death in North Carolina that was chronicled in a 2004 documentary, to “WeCrashed,” about the failed start-up WeWork, to “Pam & Tommy,” which reimagines Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s marriage and sex tape, contemporary television is awash in semi-fictionalized accounts of recent-ish events. These shows elide the logistical and cost concerns associated with telling a new story from scratch by falling back on a prefabricated narrative. The reason for this boomlet — call it Oven-Ready TV — is the same reason Hollywood churns out superhero movies: It’s seen as a safe form of intellectual property to invest in. “Everything’s expensive to make, and everyone wants to keep their job,” the journalist turned true-crime TV writer Bruce Bennett told me. “If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity for the development and production people who have to pay for the thing.”The most prominent recent example of this phenomenon is “The Dropout,” Hulu’s arch dramatization of the rise and fall of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, which followed the 2018 book “Bad Blood,” a raft of overlapping podcasts and an HBO documentary by Alex Gibney called “The Inventor.” Watching the dramatization back-to-back with Gibney’s film, it’s striking how much stranger Holmes seems in real life when compared with Amanda Seyfried’s excellent, humanizing portrayal. Where “Winning Time” uses West’s character to amp up the drama, “The Dropout” seems to tone Holmes down for its own purposes — making her more likable, more sympathetic. It’s an understandable narrative decision, but also a curious one, given how easy it is to observe the real Holmes in so many venues and notice the glaring difference. (Another recent example, “Inventing Anna,” made many journalists’ eyes roll for its inauthentic portrayal of the reporting process and life at New York magazine.)‘If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity.’But what do any of these shows owe to the people they are depicting, and to the viewer who spends many, many hours with characters they might reasonably expect to be something like the real thing? West, a victim of child poverty and domestic violence, has been painfully candid about the adverse circumstances that shaped him and his desperate bouts with anxiety and depression. He wrote about this in his 2011 autobiography, “West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,” and a beautiful Sports Illustrated feature that same year went even further in chronicling West’s struggles with self-loathing and suicidal thoughts.The producers of “Winning Time” are clearly familiar with this part of West’s story — at one point in the show, he lies catatonic in a dark room for days — which makes the decision to render him a fool even stranger. Perhaps McKay’s taste for clownish characterization explains it. The director made his bones with gloriously absurd fare like “Talladega Nights” and “Anchorman,” but even his more topical films are full of outsize satirical portrayals. As one critic wrote about McKay’s version of Dick Cheney in “Vice,” “McKay seems to think we can’t be trusted to grasp what he sees as Cheney’s Machiavellian villainy unless he spells it out in cartoon language.”The West in “Winning Time” is certainly a cartoon. Now that the series has been greenlit for a second season, it will be interesting to see whether the showrunners take West’s pushback and deep love for the Lakers into account as they develop his character and lay out his coming achievements. These include five championships in the 1980s and the signing of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, setting off another Lakers dynasty in the ’90s. Perhaps in future episodes a more nuanced West will emerge. Or maybe, just as in the Showtime era that “Winning Time” reanimates, the mandate to entertain will always prevail.Source photographs: Warrick Page/HBOElizabeth Nelson is a journalist and singer-songwriter based in Washington. Her band, the Paranoid Style, will release its new LP, “For Executive Meeting,” in August on the Bar/None Records label. More

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      ‘Since I Been Down’ Review: Crime and Punishment

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      The inmates in this documentary offer reasons for rethinking the harsh sentencing of young people in Washington State.On a May night in 1997, in Tacoma, Wash., Kimonti Carter strafed a car he believed was carrying rival gang members. It wasn’t — not that that should matter. One of the car’s five passengers, a college student, Corey Pittman, 19, was killed. Carter, who had recently turned 18, was sentenced to life in prison.In the director Gilda Sheppard’s sympathetic documentary “Since I Been Down,” the punishment is also a crime.Rife with archival visuals of Tacoma in the late 1980s and ’90s, when crack cocaine and gang violence were claiming lives, the documentary’s greatest strength is as a listening tour, with Carter as its chief guide.Because Carter shot from a car, he was charged with aggravated first-degree murder, which carried an automatic mandatory life sentence. (His resentencing hearing is scheduled for July 8.) He is not the only subject of harsh prison time. Washington State’s three-strikes sentencing (it abolished parole in 1984) can land especially hard on young offenders.Over the decades, Carter has expressed remorse, but it is his role as a beneficiary of and leader in the inmate-led initiatives the Black Prisoners’ Collective and T.E.A.C.H., or Taking Education and Changing History, that suggests transformation.Other inmates here share insights, as do two former detectives, some ex-gang members, and the mothers of victims and perpetrators. One former inmate, Tonya Wilson, who served 17 years, is especially astute about the personal as well as societal forces that led to her incarceration.Another inmate says, “We say a lot of the answers that people in society are seeking will be found in prison.”“We’ve caused pain,” that inmate says, “primarily ’cause we were in pain.”Far from seeming like an excuse, in “Since I Been Down,” this observation sounds like a way toward reckoning and change.Since I Been DownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More