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      ‘Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod’ Review: Into the Spotlight

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      A musician who gives away most of his music may be heard everywhere, but few know who he is.Kevin MacLeod is arguably the most prolific composer you’ve never heard of — although it’s very likely you’ve heard his music. The Wisconsin-born musician, who has at times resided in New York, is a pioneer both of digital production and distribution. Essentially, he gives much of his music away. Working though the nonprofit organization Creative Commons, he makes his instrumental pieces available either for a one-time fee, or free. His works wind up on YouTube and TikTok videos, in video games, in big-budget studio films (like Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) and pornographic movies.Directed by Ryan Camarda, “Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod,” conveys the scale of its subject’s achievement while offering an unnerving portrait of the man himself. He is in his late 40s, and he’s not quite what you would call amiable. He has a lot of definite ideas on a variety of topics, including morality in art, and his statements are sometimes startling. At one point he asserts that he wouldn’t care if his music found its way into a movie about “Nazis killing puppies.”The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching. And while it sometimes celebrates MacLeod, there are instances when the filmmaker seems to fret about how many instrumentalists are being put out of work by one-computer bands like MacLeod (something that’s been worrying musicians’ unions and others since even before the all-electronic band Kraftwerk made waves in the early 1970s).MacLeod then drops in a very personal detail, about an hour and 15 minutes in: “Right now, I treat a lot of my depression with alcohol, and it works.” Which throws an already wobbly movie into another orbit entirely.Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘32 Sounds,’ a Film Performed Live, Probes the Power of Listening

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      Sam Green’s documentary about the physics and emotions attached to sound comes to BAM with a live score performed by JD Samson and Michael O’Neill.Early in Sam Green’s relentlessly curious documentary “32 Sounds,” the filmmaker asks an employee of the British Library Sound Archive — one of the world’s largest collections of audio recordings — if she has a favorite sound. Choosing among the archive’s nearly 7 million options, she cues up a 1987 recording of the mating call of the Moho braccatus, a Hawaiian bird with dark plumage and bright shocks of yellow sprouting from its legs.The Moho braccatus was declared endangered in 1973, and by the early 1980s its population had dwindled to two, one male and one female. In 1982, the female was killed in a storm. And so this heartbreaking recording depicts the male’s determined mating call — a lilting, hauntingly hopeful whistle — ringing out five years after the death of the only bird who could possibly answer it.The Moho braccatus’s mating call is one of the most memorable of the 32 sounds Green alludes to in his freewheeling documentary’s title; there are also, among others, muffled gurgles from inside the womb (sound number one, naturally), the sound of a tree falling in the woods (playfully and expertly reconstructed by the Foley artist Joanna Fang), and even the sound of silence, as demonstrated by a particularly delightful montage of a wide variety of musicians performing “4’33”,” by John Cage.At the beginning of a showing of “32 Sounds” Friday evening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher theater, following celebrated runs at Sundance and SXSW, Green himself announced to the audience, “We’re going to make a documentary film about sound,” highlighting the transitory and participatory nature of what was about to take place. “32 Sounds” is the latest of what the Oscar-nominated Green calls his “live documentaries,” a hybrid form that combines conventions of a film screening, a theatrical performance and a live concert to create a unique and ephemeral experience. (His previous works include “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” which featured the rock band Yo La Tengo performing an original score at screenings, and “A Thousand Thoughts,” which he made in collaboration with the writer Joe Bini and the Kronos Quartet.)At live showings of “32 Sounds,” Green himself provides in-person narration, while the musicians JD Samson and Michael O’Neill perform, in real time, Samson’s eclectic, largely electronic score. With the narrator and musicians seated in front of the movie screen, proudly displaying their processes, the effect is as though one has unscrewed the top of a traditional documentary to expose its busily whirring component parts.Samson demonstrating the wonders of a whoopee cushion.Maria Baranova-SuzukiEach audience member is also given a pair of headphones — Green and his crew travel with 500 of them — to better immerse themselves in the film’s soundscapes, and particularly for its experiments with binaural audio. Among the lively cast of characters Green meets in his wide-ranging meditation on sound and human memory is the Princeton physicist Edgar Choueiri, who experiments with recordings that mimic three-dimensional sound. He demonstrates this viscerally, shaking a matchbox at various points around a binaural microphone; wearing headphones, the listener can detect the clattering matches moving around in space. It’s heady and spine-tingling, like high-tech ASMR.While there’s certainly a specific charm to seeing “32 Sounds” live (particularly during a five-minute interactive dance break, when Green invites audience members to walk up to the stage and feel the quaking power of a pair of subwoofers as Samson acts as D.J.), the filmed narrative is engaging and richly visual enough that “32 Sounds” would still achieve many of its most spectacular effects at home, preferably through a pair of good headphones. (It played virtually at Sundance and is the first of Green’s live documentaries that, in addition to being performed live, will eventually be able to stream.)If there’s a star of “32 Sounds” (aside from the human ear), it’s the spirited Annea Lockwood, an 82-year-old experimental composer who has been making field recordings of rivers for more than 50 years. There’s a contagious wonder on her face as she invites Green, and the viewer, to listen to the loquacious chatter of organisms picked up by her underwater microphone. She prefers the term “listening with” rather than listening to — a non-hierarchical way of framing humans’ coexistence with the sonic environments all around them.Much like Cage’s “4’33”” or the composer Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy of “deep listening,” Green’s film aims to sharpen the viewer’s (er, listener’s) sense of hearing by redirecting awareness to the everyday environmental sounds one too often takes for granted. His 95-minute exploration prefers to leapfrog across several dozen scintillating surfaces, though, rather than approaching the type of depth or stillness Lockwood seeks with her river recordings. The formal structure of “32 Sounds” is a nod to François Girard’s 1993 experimental biopic “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” and its chattily inquisitive tone is occasionally reminiscent of an audiovisual episode of “This American Life.”What gives the film a lingering gravitas, though, is how often Green’s sonic journeys lead him back to contemplating grief and loss. One man’s trash is another man’s aural treasure, as Green finds with the answering machine tapes he’s saved to preserve the voices of deceased loved ones. Lockwood admits that part of the reason she “listens with” the chirping creatures in her backyard each evening is that she finds the experience of listening to music too emotionally intense since her longtime partner, the composer Ruth Anderson, passed away several years ago.In the earliest days of recorded sound, Green points out that the phonograph — the first technological development to allow deceased people’s voices to have an afterlife — was sometimes advertised as a means of “stopping death.” His film serves as a poignant reminder that, for all the incredible technical advancements of the past century or even the past decade, that particular goal still remains elusive. But whether through the personal preservation of sonic mementos like wax cylinders, voice mail messages or any number of yet-to-be-invented formats, that impossible impulse to press pause on mortality is likely to echo, like the Moho braccatus’s persistent call, well into the distant future. More

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      in Theater

      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

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      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

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      in Television

      John Korty, Director of ‘Miss Jane Pittman,’ Is Dead at 85

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      He was best known for a series of ambitious television movies that examined racism, disability and other social issues.John Korty, a director best known for ambitious made-for-television projects, including the 1974 film “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which won nine Emmy Awards, died on March 9 at his home in Port Reyes Station, Calif. He was 85.His brother, Doug Korty, said the cause was vascular dementia.“Miss Jane Pittman,” a CBS presentation based on the Ernest J. Gaines novel in which a Black woman recounts more than a century’s worth of memories, featured an acclaimed performance by Cicely Tyson as the title character. John J. O’Connor, reviewing the film in The New York Times, called it “a splendid night for television.”“John Korty’s direction is cool and restrained,” he added, “never underlining and always avoiding what could easily be mawkish.”The Emmys the film won included one for Mr. Korty for best directing of a single program, comedy or drama.Mr. Korty on the set of the 1974 television movie  “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” which went on to win nine Emmy Awards, including one for Mr. Korty.via Korty Family Cicely Tyson as the title character, a woman who recounts more than a century’s worth of memories, in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”Bettmann via GettyMr. Korty also won both an Oscar and an Emmy for “Who Are the Debolts? And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?,” a documentary about a couple whose many children included hard-to-place adopted ones with disabilities or other challenges. American television networks weren’t interested in the documentary when Mr. Korty first offered it; it was initially released as a film in Japan, then shown at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1977, where it received a standing ovation.That brought it an Oscar for best documentary feature, but Mr. Korty still wanted to get it in front of TV audiences. With some persuasion from Henry Winkler, whose role as Fonzie on “Happy Days” had made him one of the network’s biggest stars, ABC finally broadcast a cut-down version in late 1978; that version won the Emmy for outstanding individual achievement for an informational program.Although Mr. Korty also directed lighter fare and the occasional Hollywood feature, including “Oliver’s Story,” the 1978 follow-up to the hit 1970 movie “Love Story,” he gravitated toward television movies that touched on social issues.In addition to “Miss Jane Pittman,” which covered a century’s worth of the Black experience, he directed “Go Ask Alice” (1973), about teenage drug addiction; “Farewell to Manzanar” (1976), about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; “Second Sight: A Love Story” (1984), about a blind woman; “Resting Place” (1986), about a family’s attempt to have a Black officer who was killed in Vietnam buried in his hometown’s all-white cemetery; and “Eye on the Sparrow” (1987), about a blind couple trying to adopt.“I wouldn’t give up television movies,” Mr. Korty told The Times in 1986. “There is nothing like the response you get. Fifty million people saw ‘Jane Pittman’ in one night. That’s very different from even the biggest hit movie.”Mr. Korty on the set of “Farewell to Manzanar,” his 1976 TV movie about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.via Korty FamilyIn the best of his television work, Mr. Korty sought to illuminate subjects and perspectives not often addressed in the mainstream. In an essay he wrote for The San Francisco Examiner in 1978, he said that was his hope for the “Debolts” film, in which he showed the children’s disabilities in unflinching detail, rare for TV at the time.“It seems that most physically handicapped people have their greatest struggles not with their crutches, but with their identities — being accepted as individuals rather than as a distasteful class of outcasts,” he wrote. “We hope that by the end of our film the audience will forget who is on crutches and who isn’t.”John Van Cleave Korty was born on June 22, 1936, in Lafayette, Ind. His father, Richard, was an engineer, and his mother, Mary (Van Cleave) Korty, was a nurse.“I started drawing when I was 5 years old,” Mr. Korty said at a 2013 panel discussion of his work, “and for many, many years I thought I was going to be what you’d call a commercial artist.”But in 11th grade a teacher showed the class some of the innovative animated films of Norman McLaren, and Mr. Korty found a new interest. He soon made his first animated film, but, as he told The Abilene Reporter-News of Texas in 1986, he couldn’t afford new film stock. Instead he somehow obtained a reel of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and dumped bleach on it in his parents’ bathtub to erase the images, then hand-painted images on its 2,600 frames. The trick worked, he said, but it took him a week to scrub the bathtub clean.He earned a bachelor’s degree at Antioch College, where he continued to experiment with animation. In about 1963 he settled in the Bay Area, where he set up his own studio. One of his earliest professional efforts, “Breaking the Habit,” a documentary about smoking produced in cooperation with the American Cancer Society, was nominated for the short-subject documentary Oscar in 1965.Mr. Korty directed the independent features “The Crazy-Quilt” (1966), “Funnyman” (1967) and “riverrun” (1968) before he made his first television movies, drawing some critical acclaim and the attention of other young filmmakers who were interested in working outside the Hollywood system. Among them were Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who came to visit his setup in 1968.“They showed up in two station wagons, and when Francis walked in, his mouth dropped open,” Mr. Korty told The Marin Independent Journal in 2011. “He said, ‘My God, you’ve done exactly what we want to do: get out of Hollywood and set up a studio. If you can do it, we can do it.’”A year later Mr. Coppola and Mr. Lucas would found their American Zoetrope studio in San Francisco. Mr. Korty had an office there for several years and went on to work with Mr. Lucas. He and Charles Swenson directed “Twice Upon a Time,” an animated feature made with Mr. Lucas’s Lucasfilm company in 1983, and the next year Mr. Korty directed “Caravan of Courage,” a Lucasfilm TV movie based on the Ewok creatures from the “Star Wars” movie “Return of the Jedi.”“I wouldn’t give up television movies,” Mr. Korty said in 1986. “There is nothing like the response you get. Fifty million people saw ‘Jane Pittman’ in one night. That’s very different from even the biggest hit movie.”via Korty FamilyThough the success of “Miss Jane Pittman” brought Mr. Korty offers to direct Hollywood films, he rarely accepted. “Oliver’s Story,” which he directed in 1978, was an exception. It was a bigger-budget movie than he normally attempted, with big stars — Ryan O’Neal, Candice Bergen — and Mr. Korty wasn’t entirely comfortable.“It’s the first movie I’ve ever made that I’ve felt not a part of,” he told The Sacramento Bee in December 1978 as the early reviews, many of them unflattering, were coming in. “I know I put things in this movie that I liked and the audience wouldn’t — and vice versa.”Mr. Korty’s marriages to Carol Tweedie in 1959 and Beulah Chang in 1965 ended in divorce. In 1989 he married Jane Silvia, who survives him, along with his brother; a sister, Nancy Korty; two sons from his second marriage, Jonathan and David; a son from his third marriage, Gabriel; and three grandchildren. More

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      in Movies

      ‘King Otto’ Review: For Greece, a Whole Different Ballgame.

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      Christopher André Marks analyzes the Greek national soccer team’s championship season under the leadership of a German coach.“King Otto,” which opens with a quote from “The Odyssey,” treats its retelling of a soccer underdog story as the stuff of myth. In 2004, the German coach Otto Rehhagel led the Greek national team to victory in the European Championship. The team had never even won a match at a major competition before. According to the closing titles, Rehhagel became the first foreign-born coach to win a major international soccer tournament for another country’s national team.In this documentary directed by Christopher André Marks, the coach, the players and others recount Rehhagel’s arrival in Greece as someone who didn’t understand the culture or speak the language. (In its opening minutes, “King Otto” makes clear that the offscreen filmmaker and Rehhagel also had a linguistic barrier to overcome.) Ioannis Topalidis, who became Rehhagel’s assistant coach and the interpreter connecting him with the players, emerges as one of the liveliest subjects.Somewhat gratingly, “King Otto” treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head. Vassilis Gagatsis, the president of the Hellenic Football Federation at the time, says he hired Rehhagel because he thought that “being a German, he would be able to instill the discipline that we Greeks lack.” One player says that the team “became calmer and cold-blooded” under Rehhagel. According to Gagatsis, the German coach turned out to have “the heart of a Greek.”“King Otto” is less grandiose and more granular when it goes match by match through the 2004 tournament. The briskly edited recap probably holds more suspense for those who didn’t follow the events than those who did.King OttoNot rated. In Greek and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Bisping: The Michael Bisping Story’ Review: An M.M.A. Fighter Speaks Out

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      A documentary takes a look at Bisping’s tough and tender sides.This slick documentary about the mixed martial arts fighter Michael Bisping spends a lot of its first half putting up a kind of cinematic “Tough Guys Only” sign. Bisping’s a crudely voluble bruiser from the North of England! His father was a sniper in the British Army! “Fighting is something that I liked, to be honest,” Bisping says, when not swearing at his critics.OK, then. The movie is executive produced by Bisping himself, which signals a certain subjectivity. The director, Michael Hamilton, assembles a “Raging Bull”-style montage in the middle of the movie, alternating cage footage with home movies to underscore Bisping’s more tender side. This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.In 2013, after getting a detached retina in a fight, Bisping became blind in one eye. Despite the vision loss — which he did not reveal, as it would have kept him out of the sport — he went on to become U.F.C. champion in 2016. For reasons that become obvious, Bisping and the movie do not detail how he got cleared to fight, but fight he did. And even the milquetoasts who have hung in there until this point will feel compelled to hand it to him.The movie star Vin Diesel, with whom Bisping appeared in an action-packed movie, here waxes poetic about being an alpha male. And Joe Rogan shows up without the benefit of a trigger warning, but hey, Rogan was a U.F.C. commenter back in the day. He contributes the movie’s most amusing anecdote, in which Bisping, at a weigh-in, baits Vitor Belfort, a fighter who is known for being a devoted Christian, with the taunt “Jesus isn’t real.” As it happens, Belfort’s the guy who went on to deliver the blows that detached Bisping’s retina.Bisping: The Michael Bisping StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Television

      Av Westin, Newsman Behind ABC’s ‘20/20,’ Dies at 92

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      After nearly 20 years at CBS News, he went to a rival network and helped turn its answer to “60 Minutes” into a frequent Emmy Award winner.Av Westin, an influential television producer who rose from copy boy at CBS News for Edward R. Murrow in the 1940s to help make ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine a perennial winner of Emmy Awards, died on March 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.His wife, Ellen Rossen, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Westin had spent a year as the executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” when he took over at “20/20” in 1979. Over the next seven years, the program won more than 30 news and documentary Emmy Awards, including 11 in 1981.Looking to differentiate “20/20” from the entertainment shows it competed with in prime-time, as well as from CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Westin mixed ambitious investigative reports with celebrity profiles, lifestyle features and “process pieces” about artistic endeavors like the making of a new album of standards by Linda Ronstadt.A documentarian at heart, Mr. Westin also ordered a series of features called “Moment of Crisis,” which looked back at news events like the disastrous explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the efforts to save President Ronald Reagan’s life after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.“20/20,” which was hosted by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs in the 1980s, had an A-list group of correspondents that included Sylvia Chase, Lynn Sherr, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Jarriel, Bob Brown and Sander Vanocur.Mr. Brown recalled that Mr. Westin gave correspondents and producers considerable leeway to cover a story as they chose.“But when the piece was screened, Av took over and was at his best,” Mr. Brown said in a phone interview. “He could break apart a story and make you see everything you’d done wrong and let you know what you had to do to fix it. He had a genius for going straight to a problem.”Mr. Westin’s time at “20/20” came to an end in February 1987, when he circulated an 18-page memo within ABC News and to its top executives at its parent company, Capital Cities/ABC, criticizing news-gathering procedures and calling the division inefficient and in need of a new focus.He said that he had been quietly asked by a Capital Cities executive to critique ABC News, whose president was Roone Arledge.“Cap Cities had essentially decided that Roone was not their guy anymore,” Mr. Westin said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2011. The executive told him that “Roone’s tenure was going to end, and I was likely to be the preferred candidate of management.”“What I wrote was accurate,” Mr. Westin added, “but obviously it was inflammatory.”The memo led Mr. Arledge to suspend him and take him off “20/20.” But the suspension did not last long, and Mr. Westin went on to work on projects like “The Blessings of Liberty,” about the U.S. Constitution at its centennial, until he left the network in 1989.It was not the first time the two men clashed. In 1985, Mr. Arledge killed a “20/20” segment about the death of Marilyn Monroe and her ties to the Kennedys, calling it “gossip-column stuff.” Mr. Westin objected, and Mr. Rivera angrily told the gossip columnist Liz Smith that he and others at “20/20” were appalled that Mr. Arledge “would overturn a respected, honorable, great newsman like Av.”Mr. Westin with the “20/20” host Hugh Downs in 1981. He recruited an A-list group of correspondents for the program.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesAvram Robert Westin was born on July 29, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, Elliot, was a vice president of a commercial baking company. His mother, Harriet (Radin) Westin, was a homemaker. Av Westin graduated from New York University in 1949. He had begun his studies as a pre-med student, but an experience during a summer job as a copy boy at CBS in 1947 altered his direction, to English and history.“A bulletin moved that a ship was sinking off Newfoundland,” he told the Television Academy, and he promptly carried the teletype copy to an editor. “I was the only person at CBS News headquarters who knew that information,” he said. “I was the ultimate insider. That’s the epiphany.”Mr. Westin was a writer, director, reporter and producer for 18 years at CBS, during which he earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies at Columbia University in 1958. He won an Emmy in 1960 as a writer for the documentary “The Population Explosion,” and in 1963 created and produced “CBS Morning News” with Mike Wallace.He left CBS in 1967, spent two years as executive director of the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Laboratory and joined ABC News in 1969 as the executive producer of its evening newscast, then anchored by Frank Reynolds. It was an era when “ABC Evening News” trailed CBS and NBC’s nightly news operations in prestige, ratings and financial resources.“My target is ‘H and B,’” Mr. Westin told The Indianapolis News in 1969, referring to NBC’s co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “I think people are getting tired of them, and if they’re shopping around, I want them to look at us before they automatically turn to Walter” Cronkite.The broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, who was a correspondent on the evening news program, said of Mr. Westin in a phone interview, “He probably elevated the ‘ABC Evening News’ as much as anyone until Roone Arledge,” adding, “Av was a very ambitious man, who thought he should have been ABC News president.”While at ABC News, Mr. Westin ran its “Close-Up” documentary unit, for which he won a Peabody Award in 1973. He won another Peabody the next year, for producing and directing the documentary “Sadat: Action Biography,” about the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat.He left ABC News in 1976 in a dispute with Bill Sheehan, the president of the division, but returned two years later at Mr. Arledge’s request “to get rid of” the incompatible, feuding “Evening News” anchor team of Ms. Walters and Harry Reasoner.“The day I arrived back at ABC, one of the producers who was in the Reasoner camp came up to me and said, ‘You know, she owes us 5 minutes and 25 seconds,’” Mr. Westin told the Television Academy, referring to how much more Ms. Walters had been on the air than Mr. Reasoner over the past year.After returning as the executive producer of “Evening News,” Mr. Westin collaborated with Mr. Arledge on an overhaul in 1978 that transformed the show into the faster-paced, graphics-oriented “World News Tonight,” with three anchors: Mr. Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Peter Jennings in London.A year later, Mr. Arledge moved Mr. Westin to “20/20.”After leaving ABC News, Mr. Westin was an executive at King World Productions, Time Warner and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’s foundation.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Mark. His previous marriages to Sandra Glick and Kathleen Lingo ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.To Mr. Westin, evening news programs, which cannot provide much depth in 22 minutes of airtime, have a clear mandate.“I believe the audience at dinner time wants to know the answers to three very important questions,” he said, explaining a rule he had at ABC News. “Is the world safe? Is my hometown and my home safe? If my wife and children are safe, what has happened in the past 24 hours to make them better off or to amuse them?” More

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      ‘Jane by Charlotte’ Review: A Mother-Daughter Duet

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      Charlotte Gainsbourg makes her directorial debut with an elusive portrait of her mother, the French-English star Jane Birkin, at age 74.“Jane by Charlotte,” the directorial debut of the actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Antichrist”), is a meandering and elusive documentary portrait of Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin. An “It” girl of the 1960s and ’70s, Birkin is known for starring in risqué art-house films (like “Blow-Up”), and for her romance with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she collaborated on a hit album before starting her solo singing career.Gainsbourg pays homage to Agnès Varda’s 1988 docudrama, “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” which captures Birkin, age 40, considering her status as a muse and icon. “Jane by Charlotte” sees Birkin at 74 and picks up on fixations of hers apparent in that earlier film — her love of bulldogs, photographs and motherhood — as well as her ideas about femininity.In contrast to Varda’s metanarrative approach, Gainsbourg’s is straightforward, switching between elegantly staged mother-daughter conversations and home video-esque footage of Birkin’s everyday activities — like performing her music in Japan, gardening with her granddaughter and visiting a bulldog breeder.Gainsbourg purports to look at her mother as she’s “never dared before,” hoping to close a rift between them. Birkin speaks, rather obliquely, about intimate subjects like her lifelong dependency on sleeping pills and her maternal insecurities — the premature death of her first daughter, Kate Barry, looms over the film.Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.When Gainsbourg and Birkin visit Serge’s famed black-walled Paris home, for instance, the dwelling’s peculiarities are taken for granted. (The house has remained mostly unchanged since Gainsbourg’s death in 1991 and is now going to be a museum.) Those devoted to the Gainsbourg-Birkin universe may delight in the miscellanea presented here, but Gainsbourg has no interest in rendering her mother’s life, or their relationship, accessible or particularly fascinating to the uninitiated. This makes for an occasionally trivial experience, but one senses Gainsbourg doesn’t care — she might have made the film for no one but herself.Jane by CharlotteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More