Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Movie)

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    Netflix’s Approach Shifts, Pushing Content That Can ‘Pop’

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    The streaming service long thought spending on ads didn’t result in more viewers. That has subtly changed under the marketing chief Marian Lee.Netflix made sure viewers had ample opportunity to hear about “Wednesday,” its macabre hit starring Jenna Ortega.They could come across it in an airport security line when plopping their belongings into a tray that asked “What would Wednesday do?” Or see the title character in the Uber app when they ordered a ride. Or they could encounter it on TikTok, where seemingly everyone from Ukrainian soldiers to hip grannies were performing the title character’s arm-jolting, addictive dance set to the Lady Gaga song “Bloody Mary.”Either way, the marketing resources Netflix dedicated to the show helped to make it a global sensation. The push included Netflix shifting its social media resources from sites like Twitter and Instagram to TikTok after the amateur dance videos went viral. There was also a campaign in which local markets around the world adapted the slogan “What would Wednesday do?” to their country’s taste and culture. (Billboards in Los Angeles cheekily stated: “I read your screenplay. It’s time to rethink your writing career.”)The streaming service said the show’s eight episodes were viewed 1.24 billion hours in the first 28 days they were available, making it the second most-watched English-language series on the service, just behind the fourth season of “Stranger Things.”For the movie “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” there was a widely publicized (including TV commercials) one-week theatrical release on Thanksgiving that generated a reported $15 million in ticket sales. After that, a Los Angeles-based escape room and a handful of murder mystery dinners across the country — and more commercials — helped to keep the word of mouth alive until the expensive star-studded sequel debuted on the service at Christmas time. It racked up 279.7 million hours watched in the first 28 days, which Netflix said made it the fourth most-watched English-language film on the service.“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” received a one-week theatrical release at Thanksgiving and became available on Netflix at Christmas time.John Wilson/NetflixNetflix’s marketing tactics are indicative of an evolving strategy for a company that is facing a much more competitive streaming marketplace — and trying to serve an increasingly fickle audience. The new tactics also come as Netflix has introduced an advertising tier and is cracking down on password sharing as it contends with a maturing U.S. market. It has also essentially replaced its original creative team, opting for executives with broader tastes to serve a global marketplace. To sell this evolution of the world’s largest streaming service, the company is relying on Marian Lee, its third chief marketing officer in three years.“I’m trying to enable creativity, because I want to bring all of this content to more people around the world,” Ms. Lee said in an interview at Netflix’s headquarters in Los Angeles. “I also want the rest of Netflix to understand what the marketing strategy is: We support the content organization.”She spent the previous night staying up late to finish the reality show “Full Swing,” saying she cried in her bathroom when it was over.“I’m watching everything, and I’m going to tell you where I think this is really going to pop,” she said.For all of Netflix’s success over the years, the company has never quite found its footing in marketing. That is primarily because of the company’s core tenet is that the streaming service itself is its greatest marketer, and spending on expensive commercials or advertisements does not always improve viewer engagement. In 2019, the marketing operation moved under Ted Sarandos, who was then the head of content and is now the company’s co-chief executive. He hired Jackie Lee-Joe from BBC Studios to be chief marketing officer. She departed after just 10 months, when Mr. Sarandos surprised many inside Netflix by appointing Bozoma Saint John as the new C.M.O. Ms. Saint John used her formidable social media presence — she has 424,000 followers on Instagram — to host her own lifestyle events under the moniker @badassboz while running the Netflix marketing team, but her impact on Netflix’s shows and movies proved less fruitful.Ms. Lee was the global co-head of music at Spotify when she was hired by Ms. Saint John in July 2021. She was promoted to chief marketing officer in March 2022 after Ms. Saint John left. In contrast with her predecessor, Ms. Lee’s Instagram account is private, and when she was offered Ms. Saint John’s office, she declined, opting to remain in the one she occupied that was closer to her staff.“Wednesday,” starring Jenna Ortega, was marketed heavily through TikTok.Vlad Cioplea/NetflixNetflix’s marketing budget has remained fairly consistent, increasing to $2.5 billion in 2022 from $2.2 billion in 2020. But Ms. Lee’s 400-plus global team has enacted a subtle change in strategy, in which many of those dollars have been shifted to focus on individual titles as opposed to the branding of the streaming service itself.Still, the amount of money set aside for marketing remains relatively small, considering Netflix spends $17 billion a year on its programming. And when filmmakers and showrunners grouse about working with Netflix, the complaints are often aimed at the marketing department, which they feel can be limited by its budget. It is an issue traditional studios have tried to capitalize on, arguing that they may pay less upfront for a project but that they will spend more in marketing to let people know when it’s coming out.“The legacy studios spend more on marketing,” said Tripp Vinson, a producer of the Netflix “Murder Mystery” films starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. The first movie came out in 2019 and the second became available to Netflix subscribers on Friday. “But as a producer, what do I care about? You’re implying that the more you spend, the greater chance you have of getting your audience in that legacy, traditional marketing way. Well, I know from ‘Murder Mystery’ 1, whatever Netflix did to market this movie, the amount of viewers that I got, that’s what I care about. And they were astounding numbers.”For “Murder Mystery 2,” the streaming service added a second premiere at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, international billboards and commercials during the National Football League’s divisional playoffs. It also partnered with the social media star Mr. Beast to offer an unwitting couple a surprise trip to the Paris premiere. The first movie landed back on Netflix’s Top 10 list a week ahead of the release, and expectations inside the company for the sequel are high.Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, pushes against the notion that the company had not aggressively marketed specific shows and movies in the past.“I think the tension may be with people feeling like there is only the traditional way to do it, and they don’t realize we market in so many different ways,” she said, noting the service’s social media channels reach 800 million people globally.Netflix held a premiere event for “Murder Mystery 2” at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.Scott Yamano/NetflixFilmmakers, though, have noticed a difference with Ms. Lee.“Right when she arrived, she came down to see what we were doing and visited the set often,” said Debbie Snyder, a producer of the $80 million sci-fi spectacle “Rebel Moon,” which is directed by her husband, Zack Snyder.The plan is for the film, scheduled to debut on Dec. 22, to be the first in a trilogy.Did Ms. Snyder receive the same personalized attention when the film “Army of the Dead” debuted in 2021? “No,” she said. “Not really at all.”Netflix’s film chairman, Scott Stuber, said the marketing department under Ms. Lee was more in tune with the content side of the company. He noted that he was particularly impressed by her nimble approach, like her ability to maintain buzz for “Glass Onion” after its theatrical release.“I like someone who actually knows the old playbook, but also is very interested in how to rewrite the rules for the new playbook,” he said.“I’m trying to enable creativity, because I want to bring all of this content to more people around the world,” Ms. Lee said.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn February, members of Ms. Lee’s brand marketing team crammed themselves into a conference room to discuss, among other topics, “The Marquee,” a handful of high-tech billboards with pithy messages that rotate weekly and appear in strategic locations around the world like Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, Times Square in New York and Les Halles in Paris. She listened intently to the presentation: The board at the Trevi Fountain will be moved to a different location in Rome, one that is less of a tourist spot and more of a place where local Netflix subscribers could connect with it; Times Square is going to get an innovative new billboard that is easier to program yet looks like the physical one on Sunset Boulevard. A marquee is coming soon to Warsaw.“The point of the board is to have fun, be edgy and push all the way to the edge,” she said.“I know it’s a lot of pressure because they have to come up with a new message every week,” she added, “but if they’re just using it for something lame, I’d rather not do it.” More

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      At the Movies, Bagels, Onions and a Side Dish of Nothing

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      Both “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and the “Knives Out” sequel delve into the abyss, where life has no meaning. What they do next is surprising.“I got bored one day and I put everything on a bagel. Everything — all my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on Craigslist, sesame, poppy seed, salt,” Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) says in the faultless, head-spinning science fiction film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”She’s explaining this to Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner who has strained relationships with both her goofy though pure-hearted husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), and her daughter, Joy, who, in an alternate universe, is also Jobu Tupaki, a goddess of destruction. Jobu Tupaki tells her the everything bagel eventually collapsed in on itself and became the ultimate truth: “Nothing matters.”Two of the most memorable objects in film last year were conceptual foodstuffs: In “Everything Everywhere,” the bagel is an entryway to the abyss, and in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” the titular vegetable offers layers and layers of intrigue that ultimately amount to nothing. In both films, the nihilistic foods threaten to leave the plot at a dead end. And yet both films then use that impasse to subvert the expectations of the genres in which they’re working.Though the multiverse has, in recent years, become the default direction for moneymaking franchises to go in, the concept is difficult to successfully execute. Opening up a fictional world to alternate universes means keeping a tight leash on the narrative and the world-building, making sure that neither gets bloated to the point where there are endless loopholes as well as inconsistencies and unresolved questions.But there’s also the issue of emotional stakes. If every plot point and character can be reset in another universe, then every moment of resonance, particularly tragedies — think of Rick and Morty rendered lifeless, mangled and bloodied in a garage explosion, or the Scarlet Witch’s vicious murders of Charles Xavier and the superhero illuminati — can be undone with the help of a portal gun, Time Variance Authority TemPad or other time-manipulating device.Peeling Back the Layers of ‘Glass Onion’Daniel Craig returns as the world’s greatest detective, facing down a blue-chip cast of possible murderers in the “Knives Out” sequel.Review: The film “revives the antic, puzzle-crazy spirit of the first ‘Knives Out,’” our critic writes. “This time the satirical stakes have been raised.”A No-Spoilers Guide: Here’s what you need to know about the director Rian Johnson’s new whodunit, without spoiling anything. We promise.A Cinematic Experiment: The movie was distributed in 600 theaters for just one week to stoke interest in the streaming debut on Netflix on Dec. 23.Dusting Off Agatha Christie: The first “Knives Out” was “essentially an energetic, showy take” on the famous mystery writer’s works, we said in our 2019 review.Once you can see every universe, suddenly none of them seem to matter. The multiverse inevitably leads to madness: Though an alternate Waymond cautions Evelyn against making too many universe jumps, for fear that she’ll become like Jobu Tupaki, she does so anyway, and is almost seduced by her alternate-daughter’s nihilism. But the film, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, cleverly uses the everything bagel, a symbol of the nothingness at the heart of Jobu Tupaki’s philosophy as well as the nothingness at the heart of so many multiverse stories, to ground the story and show what a well-executed multiverse movie can achieve.When Evelyn learns about her other selves, and their relationships and very different lives, instead of everything seeming inconsequential, she is able to make new connections with those around her and understand the limitless potential she didn’t know she had. After witnessing visions of life without Waymond and discovering that another version of herself pushed Joy so hard that she became Jobu Tupaki, Evelyn earns a new gratitude for her family.Meaning and purpose are the antitheses to the nothingness of the everything bagel. And established characters and stakes are the antitheses to the lazy multiverse narrative.Just as multiverse superhero shows and movies get a bad rap, so do murder mystery films. Like a game of “Clue,” they can be formulaic, with even their twists becoming accepted tropes — often as transparent as, say, a glass onion.Edward Norton, left, and Daniel Craig inside the glass onion of the title.NetflixIn Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” sequel, Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is back with his foppish threads and Southern drawl to join the billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) for a murder mystery weekend on a private island, where an actual murder soon takes place.Bron, an obnoxious hybrid of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes, welcomes his guests into a flashy world of wealth, where he casually shows off Paul McCartney’s guitar and the Mona Lisa, has a robot carry off their luggage and even seemingly has his own Covid-19 vaccine (the film takes place early in the pandemic).The film, like the original, uses many clichés of the genre: a clandestine invitation, a group of people stuck in a remote location, an eccentric “genius,” priceless treasures, a suspicious character from the past, a secret twin, a faked death. But the fun of “Glass Onion” is that it takes these tropes to build what appears to be an elaborate murder scheme, only to reveal that the crime was much more straightforward than it seemed.“I keep returning in my mind to the glass onion,” Blanc says in the final act, “something that seems densely layered, mysterious and inscrutable. But in fact, the center is in plain sight.” Bron, he reveals, is the murderer, but he’s no criminal mastermind; he’s stupid, and, to Blanc’s disgust, even unoriginal when it comes to plotting his friends’ deaths.According to the murder mystery formula, when the detective solves the case, it’s over; our contract with this fictional world ends when we get the bad guy. “Glass Onion” also subverts that expectation through its structure: At exactly halfway through the movie, Blanc has figured it out, but before he explains everything, “Glass Onion” cuts to the past. Once Blanc’s real reason for joining Bron’s get-together is clear, the film moves through the plot again to show us the same characters and events from a new perspective.But the movie’s greatest subversion is its ending. The villain isn’t defeated by traditional means; though Blanc solves the case, Bron disposes of the single bit of evidence that could put him away, rendering Blanc powerless to do anything. So Bron wins — until his glass onion and the priceless artwork inside go up in flames. At the last minute, “Glass Onion” pivots from an enjoyable but hollow murder mystery into a contemporary morality tale about the dangers of capitalist ambitions.The boundless emptiness of the everything bagel and the crystal-clear nothing at the center of the glass onion illustrate the ultimate fakeouts: They threaten to swallow their worlds (or universes) in a kind of cinematic existentialism, where a deli favorite and a vegetable prove there’s nothing worth accounting for in a multiverse or a mystery island. But both “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Glass Onion” know how to navigate their genres and show that behind the emptiness of your favorite conceptual foodstuff can be surprises, universes — everything. More

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      Producers Guild Awards Nominate Several Blockbusters and Omit Films by Women

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      ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Top Gun: Maverick” made the cut. “The Woman King” and “Women Talking” were snubbed.After a hectic few days of guild nominations and awards shows, the Producers Guild of America announced the 10 nominees for its best feature film award on Thursday, and this list may be the most consequential yet when it comes to predicting the strongest Oscar contenders: Over the last four years, only three movies made it into the Oscars’ best-picture lineup without first being nominated for the PGAs.Here is the producers’ list of feature-film nominees:“Avatar: The Way of Water”“The Banshees of Inisherin”“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”“Elvis”“Everything Everywhere All at Once”“The Fabelmans”“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”“Tár”“Top Gun: Maverick”“The Whale”The producers guild has historically been inclined toward blockbuster product, and this list includes several big-screen success stories, including three of the highest-grossing films of 2022 — “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — and two other box-office hits, “Elvis” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”But the exclusion of epic-scaled projects like the glitzy “Babylon” and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s action drama “The Woman King” may doom those films’ chances at making the Oscars’ best-picture lineup: When academy voters replace a PGA pick with one of their own choices, they typically substitute an indie or international film instead.Another notable snub was the Sarah Polley-directed drama “Women Talking,” which debuted at the fall film festivals with plenty of buzz but has struggled since its theatrical bow during the crowded Christmas holiday. None of the films on the PGA list were directed by women, and if “Women Talking,” “The Woman King” and Charlotte Wells’s acclaimed “Aftersun” fail to make the Oscars best-picture list, it will be the first time the category has excluded female filmmakers in four years.Only three films earned nominations from the producers, directors and actors guild this week: Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” the sci-fi hit “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and the dark feuding-friends comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin.” That trio should be considered the strongest Oscar contenders as voting for the Academy Awards begins Thursday.The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Feb. 25. Here is the rest of the Producers Guild list:FilmAnimated Feature“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”“Minions: The Rise of Gru”“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”“Turning Red”Documentary“All That Breathes”“Descendant”“Fire of Love”“Navalny”“Nothing Compares”“Retrograde”“The Territory”TelevisionEpisodic Drama“Andor”“Better Call Saul”“Ozark”“Severance”“The White Lotus”Episodic Comedy“Abbott Elementary”“Barry”“The Bear”“Hacks”“Only Murders in the Building”Limited Anthology Series“Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”“The Dropout”“Inventing Anna”“Obi-Wan Kenobi”“Pam & Tommy”Television Movie“Fire Island”“Hocus Pocus 2”“Pinocchio”“Prey”“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”Nonfiction Television“30 for 30”“60 Minutes”“George Carlin’s American Dream”“Lucy and Desi”“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy”Live, Variety, Sketch, Standup and Talk Show“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah”“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”“Saturday Night Live”Game and Competition Television“The Amazing Race”“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars”“Top Chef”“The Voice”Sports Program“Formula 1: Drive to Survive”“Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Detroit Lions”“Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers”“McEnroe”“Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Come Off”Children’s Program“Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock”“Green Eggs and Ham”“Sesame Street”“Snoopy Presents: It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown”“Waffles + Mochi’s Restaurant”Short-Form Program“Better Call Saul: Filmmaker Training”“Love, Death + Robots”“Only Murders in the Building: One Killer Question”“Sesame Street’s #ComingTogether Word of the Day Series”“Tales of the Jedi” More

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      How Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim Came to Appear in ‘Glass Onion’

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      A fan of musical theater, Rian Johnson had long hoped to land the two stars. But he was already in the editing phase when they agreed to take part.When “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” isn’t setting up its actors to look like the possible perpetrators of a devious crime, the comic caper is reveling in its star-studded ensemble.There are of course the A-listers who populate the principal cast, including Daniel Craig, Janelle Monaé, Edward Norton and others. And there are the fleeting, unheralded appearances from famous faces like Ethan Hawke, Serena Williams and Yo-Yo Ma that function as rapid-fire visual gags.But a couple of these cameos now carry an unexpected poignancy. In the prologue of the film, which was released on Netflix on Friday, the sleuth Benoit Blanc (Craig) is in a melancholic funk, looking for ways to keep his brain engaged at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.We see Blanc relaxing in his bathtub, playing the multiplayer video game Among Us with a squad of online celebrities that includes Natasha Lyonne and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.The other two members of Blanc’s eclectic gaming group are Stephen Sondheim, the renowned composer of musicals like “Company,” “Into the Woods” and “A Little Night Music,” and Angela Lansbury, the decorated stage and screen actor from “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Both stars have died since work was completed on “Glass Onion” — Sondheim in November 2021 at age 91 and Lansbury this past October at age 96 — and the film may well be the final screen appearance for each of them.It’s a bittersweet occasion for their fans, a group that includes Rian Johnson, the writer and director of “Glass Onion” and creator of the “Knives Out” series. As Johnson explained in a recent video interview, he wanted the Sondheim and Lansbury cameos to stand as tributes to two of his favorite artists — and to give him an excuse to interact with these cultural greats whose paths he might not otherwise have crossed.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.New Books: The year since Sondheim’s death has seen an array of books offering further glimpses into his life. We look at some of them.Now, Johnson said, his experience in securing the involvement of his personal heroes has taught him never to take such opportunities for granted. “One thing I’ve learned is that every moment you get with somebody that you respect, savor that time,” he said, “and put yourself in that situation as often as possible.”While Johnson’s affection for Sondheim may not be immediately evident from his résumé — the filmmaker’s credits include “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and the time-travel thriller “Looper” — Johnson grew up a fan of musical theater, and included a shout-out to Sondheim in the original “Knives Out”: a scene of Craig lost in thought as he sings along with “Losing My Mind,” from the Sondheim musical “Follies.”Sondheim was also a lover of wordplay, games and crossword puzzles, and he enjoyed orchestrating murder-mystery parties with his friend Anthony Perkins. He and Perkins wrote the screenplay for the 1973 whodunit “The Last of Sheila,” which starred James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch and Ian McShane, and which Johnson proudly cited as a source of inspiration for his “Knives Out” films.Sondheim’s ties to the mystery genre go deeper still: his only nonmusical Broadway production was the play “Getting Away With Murder,” which he wrote with George Furth and which ran for just over a month in 1996. In an interview with The New York Times that year, he recounted how Laurence Olivier had told him he’d used Sondheim as his model for the game-loving mystery author he played in the 1972 movie “Sleuth.” (In the same interview, Anthony Shaffer, the author of “Sleuth,” denied a longstanding rumor that he had originally titled it “Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?”)Through his love of Sondheim’s musicals, Johnson was introduced to Angela Lansbury, who played Mrs. Lovett in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” as well as a filmed version that played frequently on Johnson’s television. That is, when Johnson wasn’t glued to “Murder, She Wrote,” the cozy CBS series that cast Lansbury as the crime-solving author Jessica Fletcher. For children of the 1980s, that show “was actually pretty pivotal in installing a love of whodunits and murder mysteries into all of our brains,” said Johnson, who also slipped a few seconds of a Spanish-dubbed “Murder, She Wrote” episode into the original “Knives Out.”Ram Bergman, Johnson’s producing partner, said that Sondheim’s and Lansbury’s cameos were recorded during the editing of “Glass Onion,” as he and Johnson tried to reach them, working every connection they had.In Sondheim’s case, Bergman said, “I wasn’t really sure how to get to him. But then I was on a call with Bryan Lourd, our agent, and it somehow came up. I said, we really would love Stephen to do this. And I swear, five minutes later, he emailed me: he’s going to do it.”Bergman added, “Rian was in heaven, and I was in heaven because I knew how much he meant for Rian.”Sondheim performed his contribution on a recorded Zoom call. In that conversation, Johnson said, “I mentioned to him that we were trying to get Angela Lansbury. And he said, ‘Oh, Angie — I’m friends with her. Tell her I’m doing it. She’ll do it.’”Later on, Johnson went to Lansbury’s home in Los Angeles and recorded her portion on his laptop computer.“She couldn’t have been lovelier and more generous,” Johnson said, adding that Lansbury was perfect for the scene in every way except one: “Not a gamer,” he explained. “And so she was very patient in letting me describe the rules of Among Us, up to a point. At which point she just said, ‘You know what? Just tell me what the lines are. I’ll trust you.’”Those were Johnson’s only interactions with Sondheim and Lansbury before they died. In each of his conversations, Johnson said, he wasn’t ashamed of sharing his admiration for them.“I allowed myself to have that little awkward moment of saying to them what I’m sure every person who meets them says,” he said. “But still, it felt really nice to tell them that I wouldn’t be here doing this if it weren’t for them.”Getting to pay this kind of posthumous homage to his idols is a bittersweet distinction, Johnson said: “It’s sad, because as a fan, I wish they were still around and making stuff,” he said. “I hope they would have enjoyed the little scene and gotten a laugh out of it.”Natasha Lyonne did not get to interact directly with Lansbury or Sondheim but is no less proud to be part of it.Asked what it was like to have played even a minor role in their curtain calls, Lyonne replied in the arch spirit of a “Knives Out” movie: “Honey, I know what you’re getting at and it wasn’t me,” she said. “I have alibis for both.”Then, with more sincerity, she continued, “It goes without saying that they were giant losses of two incredible lives well lived. I guess we’ll only know if I make it to 90, if I was actually worthy of being up there with them.” More