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      Jane Wodening, Experimental Film Star and Intrepid Writer, Dies at 87

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      For 30 years she collaborated with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, her husband, often appearing on camera. After they divorced, she lived off the grid and wrote about her life.Jane Wodening, the longtime collaborator and wife of Stan Brakhage, the avant-garde filmmaker, who flourished as an author after their divorce, writing stories about her years living on the road and then alone in a mountain shack, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Denver. She was 87.The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter, Crystal Brakhage.Mr. Brakhage, who died in 2003, was among the most influential experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, though his work could be considered an acquired taste. He made hundreds of movies, most of them silent, that were deeply personal, sometimes elegiac and very beautiful, though they dispensed with any recognizable narrative, often veering into complete abstraction.For three decades, starting in the 1960s, he and Ms. Wodening (pronounced WOE-den-ing) lived a spartan life in a century-old cabin in a ghost town in the Rocky Mountains called Lump Gulch, sharing it with their five children and many animals, including a donkey and a pigeon named Fanny.It was this world that Mr. Brakhage captured in his idiosyncratic, inscrutable way, in what the film critic J. Hoberman, writing in The Village Voice, described as “home movies raised to the zillionth power — silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves.”Ms. Wodening was the star of many of them. He filmed her delivering their first child in a bathtub in “Window Water Baby Moving” (1959), a startlingly lovely work that is considered one of his masterpieces. “Wedlock House: An Intercourse” (1959) is a kind of short horror film, with flickering images of the couple having sex interspersed with flickering shots of them having an argument.The work didn’t sit well with feminists, who accused Mr. Brakhage of objectifying his wife. But Ms. Wodening didn’t see herself that way.“Jane was committed to the filmmaking and the artistic enterprise,” said John Powers, who is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis and working on a biography of Mr. Brakhage. “Stan felt he was in service to the muse,” he added, in a phone interview, “and she considered herself a loyal supporter of that muse, and the muse needed help.”A lot of help. Ms. Wodening offered ideas, critiques and camera and sound assistance, along with running the day-to-day business that was “Stan Brakhage.” He signed his work “By Brakhage,” which he always said meant the two of them.Ms. Wodening with Stan Brakhage, her former husband and collaborator. Often the star of his experimental short films, she also offered critiques and camera assistance, and helped run the day-to-day business.Jason Walz/Uncommonbindery, via Granary Books, incBut Mr. Brakhage, never totally faithful, left Ms. Wodening for another woman, and in 1987 the couple divorced. The children had left home, the cabin was sold, as were the animals, and Ms. Wodening took off in a bright yellow Honda Civic kitted out so that she could live in it. (The back seat was removed, among other interventions.)For three years she spent months at a time on the road, touring the country, camping in arroyos, mountain trails and friends’ driveways, even working for a spell as a tour guide at an archaeological site near Barstow, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.“Driveabout,” a 2016 account of that time from Sockwood Press, one of the small presses that has published her work over the years, is charming, funny and often quite profound, like Thoreau but spiced with mild profanity and more drama, as Ms. Wodening faced perils as a single woman sleeping in truck stops, camping near sketchy characters and nursing an old friend through delirium tremens.In this and other works, she came into her own. Her voice was as engaging and charming as her ex-husband’s was abstruse and highfalutin. Steve Clay, a founder of Granary Books in New York City, a small publishing house that is devoted to poetry and art books and that has put out works by Ms. Wodening, recalled his expectation that the wife of Stan Brakhage would be more “formally experimental” in her writing. “Instead, it was sort of folksy and straightforward,” he wrote in an email.To film buffs, however, Ms. Wodening remained a mythic figure — an “Enigmatic Character in Film History” as one radio program described her in a headline.“Driveabout” (2016) chronicled the years Ms. Wodening spent living out of her car and on the road after her divorce from Mr. Brakhage in 1987.via Sockwood PressShe was born Mary Jane Collom on Sept. 7, 1936, in Chicago, and grew up in Fraser, Colo., a small town in the Rockies about 70 miles northwest of Denver. Her parents, Harry and Margaret (Jack) Collom, were teachers at the local school, where Harry was also the principal.Jane was a shy child who preferred the company of animals, especially dogs. (She wrote that she spoke canine sooner than proper English.) She worked in an animal hospital and enrolled at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, thinking she would study to be a vet, before dropping out.When she met Mr. Brakhage, “we were adolescent wrecks,” she told an audience a few years ago at Los Angeles Filmforum, a showcase for experimental movies. They married in 1957; she was 21 and he was 24, and “it was quite a relief for both of us.”She recalled her first foray into his films, shortly after their marriage, when he declared: “You should take your clothes off, and we should make a film about having sex.” She balked at first — “I’m not that kind of girl!” — but he said, “I’m an artist, and an artist has to have a nude.” She thought about all the great nudes of history — from Raphael to Duchamp — and told herself, “‘I have an opportunity to join a group of people I quite admire,’ so I stripped and went to it.”For most of her adult life, she was Jane Brakhage. When she returned from her car travels, transformed, she changed her name. She settled on Wodening, meaning child of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god; since her family lineage stretched back to the early Britons, it felt somehow appropriate, she said. And she bought property near Eldora, Colo., about 20 miles west of Boulder, a mountainous site where she lived in a Hobbit-like shack with no electricity or running water — but thousands of books and a typewriter — living a hermit’s life for the better part of a decade.It agreed with her.When her family worried about communicating with her in an emergency, she became a ham radio operator, learning morse code to do so, and found community among other hammers, as they called themselves, who were mostly men and introverts like herself. Her call sign ended with the letters HPH, to which she gave the phonetics “Hermits Prefer Hills.”“To become a hermit and at the same time to become popular was not only paradoxical,” she wrote in “Living Up There,” her memoir of her years in the mountains, “it was a tremendous delight.”Ms. Wodening was the author of 14 books, including “Wolf Dictionary,” about how wolves communicate with one another. She had a loyal following and small but steady sales.Toward the end of her decade at Fourth of July Canyon, as her mountain home was known, she connected with another hammer, Carlos Seegmiller, a computer programmer. He lured her back to civilization (and helped her trade her typewriter for a computer). They lived together in Denver until his death in 2008.In addition to her daughter, Crystal, Ms. Wodening is survived by her daughters Myrrena Schwegmann and Neowyn Bartek; her sons, Bearthm and Rarc Brakhage; 14 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.At her death, Ms. Wodening was working on a history of the world starting with the Big Bang. More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Be Released in Japan After Earlier Backlash

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      Critics said the film’s cross-promotion with “Barbie” trivialized the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan during World War II, but the biopic will be released in 2024.The box office blockbuster “Oppenheimer” will be released in Japan in 2024, a local distributor announced on Thursday, quashing speculation over the film’s rollout there following criticism of its promotion online.Bitters End, a Japanese film distributor, did not give an exact date for the Universal Pictures film’s opening in Japan, but said it would happen next year.The simultaneous release this summer of “Oppenheimer,” the brooding biopic about the creation of the atomic bomb, and “Barbie,” a fantastic-plastic tale of a doll’s awakening, was a discordant mash-up that delighted film fans. The “Barbenheimer” moment generated fan-made merchandise, memes and plentiful cross-promotion of the two features.But many in Japan took offense, with critics saying that the Barbenheimer meme trivialized the horrors of the U.S. military’s nuclear attacks, which killed hundreds of thousands of mostly civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hashtag #NoBarbenheimer spread widely on social media, and some vowed to boycott watching “Barbie,” which was released in Japan in August.The backlash even spurred conflict among the films’ distributors after the official “Barbie” movie account on social media responded playfully to fan-made Barbenheimer creations — including a photoshopped image of a Barbie with an atomic bomb bouffant.In an unusual rebuke, a Japanese subsidiary of Warner Bros called the headquarters’ endorsement of the meme “highly regrettable.” Warner Bros. later apologized for “insensitive social media” engagement and deleted its responses to the memes.The decision to release “Oppenheimer” in Japan came after “various discussions and considerations,” Bitters End said in a statement on Thursday, according to local media. The distributor said that it was aware that the film’s “subject matter has a very important and special meaning for us Japanese people,” and said it believed that the film should be seen in cinemas. Bitters End did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Foreign films are often released in Japan far later than their initial distribution, sometimes by years, but when its promoters there did not initially set a release date, the marketing backlash caused speculation over “Oppenheimer” not being released at all. It has grossed nearly $1 billion in box office sales worldwide.“Barbie,” the top-grossing Warner. Bros. film of all time at nearly $1.5 billion, debuted in Japan just weeks after its initial release. But its reception in Japanese theaters was modest, and some local commentators speculated that the Barbenheimer controversy had cast a shadow on the film. More

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      ‘Our Son’ Review: The Right to Break Up

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      A simple yet engaging melodrama, starring Billy Porter and Luke Evans, explores what it means for two fathers to divorce.Nicky (Luke Evans), a grizzled book publisher, is visiting his family with his 8-year-old son, Owen (Christopher Woodley) — and Gabriel (Billy Porter), Nicky’s husband of 13 years, is conspicuously absent. At the dinner table, Nicky awkwardly breaks the news: He and Gabriel are divorcing. “It must be hard fighting for the right to marry and then ending up in a divorce court like everyone else,” says Nicky’s teenage nephew.“Our Son,” a simple yet engaging melodrama by the director Bill Oliver, explores the nature of this stinging remark. What does it mean to upend a family when generations of gay people before you have struggled to attain this right?Gabriel, a former actor who abandoned his career to become a stay-at-home dad, is the more affectionate parent, while Nicky preaches the gospel of tough love. At first, the two live in a beautiful brownstone in New York, where their lives seem picture perfect: They attend dinner parties with their tight-knit group of gay friends, including Nicky’s former boyfriend (Andrew Rannells) and a lesbian couple (Liza J. Bennett and Gabby Beans) about to have their first baby.When things begin to fall apart, Nicky revolts. He struggles to accept reality, throwing Gabriel out of their home and starting a vengeful custody battle that forces him to confront his own paternal track record. This basic conflict is given some texture through Evans’s prickly vulnerability. He’s a tough guy on the outside with a gooey core of desperation.What divides the two men is a little opaque. While Nicky doesn’t want a divorce yet, Gabriel is adamant about wanting to move on. Gabriel’s reasoning may seem unconvincing, but there’s also something vaguely moving about the film’s refusal to make the men’s relationship seem hyperbolically terrible.Is simply falling out of love not enough to merit a divorce? At the risk of seeming ungrateful, Gabriel reminds us that gay people owe nothing to an institution that was once denied to them. The point is happiness.Our SonRated R for sex scenes and some cursing. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Waitress: The Musical’ Review: A Big-Screen Helping of a Broadway Hit

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      Sara Bareilles is the heart and soul of this live capture of her musical.The musical “Waitress” is about liberation, empowerment and pie — three things that are easy to wholeheartedly endorse, and have turned it into a Broadway hit. Brett Sullivan’s live capture confirms the show’s biggest asset, nearly 10 years after its premiere: Sara Bareilles’s enduring wonder of a score, which skillfully melds a pop melodicism rooted in the 1970s with the narrative demands of musical theater. Bareilles’s first Broadway effort displays a joyful confidence and an unerring sense of emotional release. Unfortunately, the glare of the cameras also highlights flaws that were easier to overlook onstage, mostly having to do with the way power imbalances are depicted.Shot on Broadway in 2021, this version of Diane Paulus’s production stars Bareilles in the title role of Jenna, who is mired in an abusive relationship with good ol’ boy Earl (Joe Tippett) and finds an escape by baking creative, delicious pies for the diner where she works. After discovering she’s pregnant, Jenna has an affair with her obstetrician, Dr. Pomatter (Drew Gehling) — who is very sweet and very married. This played better at the theater, just like a subplot involving the relationship between Jenna’s colleague Dawn (Caitlin Houlahan) by stalkerish goofball Ogie (Christopher Fitzgerald, excellent in a tricky part).Still, this is Bareilles’s show in every way. While she doesn’t quite match the emotional subtlety of Jessie Mueller, who originated Jenna, she has grown in leaps and bounds as an actress and provides a warm anchor for the movie. Thanks to her, this second helping goes down easy.Waitress: The MusicalNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Concrete Utopia’ Review: Housing Insecurity

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      Love thy neighbor is far from mind when disaster strikes a Seoul apartment complex in this blackhearted social satire.Murder, mayhem and moral collapse follow all too quickly when an apocalyptic earthquake flattens Seoul in “Concrete Utopia,” South Korea’s entry in this year’s Oscar contest for best international feature. Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.A brief introduction sets the scene as a newscaster notes the city’s declining prosperity, its towering apartment blocks no longer steppingstones to a home, but a final destination. And when the ground buckles and heaves in terrifying waves, the stunned residents of the Hwang Gung Apartments emerge to discover that their building is the only one left standing. Surrounded by corpse-strewn rubble, lacking water or power, they wait for rescue teams that never arrive. So when newly homeless survivors beg for entry, the residents must decide: Who deserves to live?Centering our concerns on a compassionate young couple (Park Seo-jun and Park Bo-young), and shot through with shards of dark humor, “Concrete Utopia” observes how quickly we dehumanize the needy when they threaten our survival — and asks if we can be blamed for doing so. After the residents elect a leader (Lee Byung-hun) who swiftly shapes order from chaos, flashbacks reveal his violent past in scenes as morally ambivalent as his present behavior. He is not who the residents think he is, but he may very well be who they need.As housing shortages fill our news feeds, “Concrete Utopia” pokes relentlessly at the meaning and moral obligations of owning a home. When things get desperate, the film wonders, how far would you go to protect yours?Concrete UtopiaNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Film Explores the Roots of Our Racism

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      Ava DuVernay’s new feature film, adapted from the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste,” turns the journalist into a character who examines oppression.Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” is as audacious as it is ambitious. At its core, it concerns an intellectual argument about history and hierarchies of power, but it’s also about the fraught process of making this argument. It’s a daunting conceit that DuVernay has shaped into an eventful narrative that is, by turns, specific and far-ranging, diagnostic and aspirational. It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.The inspiration for “Origin,” which DuVernay both wrote and directed, is Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed, best-selling 2020 book “Caste.” In it, Wilkerson argues that to fully understand the United States and its divisive history, you need to look past race and grasp the role played by caste, which she sees as an artificial and static structural “ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” Caste, she writes, separates people — including into racially ranked groups — and keeps them divided. These separations, as the subtitle puts it, are “The Origins of Our Discontents.”For the film, DuVernay has turned Wilkerson into a dramatic, at times melodramatic character of the same name — a moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor — who develops her thesis while traversing history and continents on a journey from inspiration to publication. The movie also includes segments of varying effectiveness that dramatize Wilkerson’s understanding of specific caste systems: One is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, another in Depression-era Mississippi and a third in India over different time periods. This last interlude focuses on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), who helped draft India’s Constitution and championed the rights of Dalits, people once deemed “untouchables.”Isabel’s intellectual quest is bold, sweeping and determinedly personal — a handful of close relatives have decisive roles — and DuVernay’s version of that venture is equally expansive. She gives it tension, tears, visual poetry, shocks of tragedy, moments of grace and many interlocking parts. “Origin” opens in 2012 with a re-enactment of the last night in the life of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), the unarmed 17-year-old who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. The killing becomes the catalyst for her thesis about caste because, the more she considers it, the more she believes that racism alone can’t explain it. Racism, she says at one point, has become “the default” explanation.Isabel’s process unfolds rapidly and is framed by her resistance to the default. Her resistance surfaces in a discussion that she has with her husband, Brett (a sympathetic Jon Bernthal), and mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), as they watch President Obama address Martin’s death on TV. It also informs Isabel’s talks with an acquaintance (Blair Underwood), who early on urges her to write about the case, pushing her to listen to the 911 calls that were made the night Martin was killed. (Wilkerson is a former bureau chief for The New York Times; her first book is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”)Isabel does listen to the 911 calls one quiet evening at home. Steeling herself, she begins the recordings, at which point the scene shifts to the night of the killing; it’s as if she had hit play on a grotesque movie. As DuVernay cuts back and forth between Isabel and that night, you hear George Zimmerman, a largely offscreen presence, talking to a dispatcher as he follows the worried teenager in his car. (“He’s running.”) You also watch as a terrified Martin struggles for his life. DuVernay’s staging here is blunt, visceral and harrowingly intimate. Isabel is shaken and so are you, in part because the 911 calls in the re-enactment are real.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘The Archies’ Review: A Masala Milkshake at Pop’s, Anyone?

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      Archie and pals get radicalized when their hometown, now conveniently relocated in India, is threatened by corporate overlords.Namaste from Riverdale! In “The Archies,” the director Zoya Akhtar transplants the all-American comic book hamlet to India, where the Anglo-Indian teenager Archie Andrews (Agastya Nanda) is up to his usual tricks, dating both Betty (Khushi Kapoor) and Veronica (Suhana Khan).Set in 1964, this inessential Bollywood-tinged fantasia is two and a half hours of soda shops, chaste dates, candy-colored petticoats, and athletic musical numbers choreographed to a mix of modern-ish new tunes and classics like “Wooly Bully.” Akhtar, who wrote the script with Ayesha Devitre Dhillon and Reema Kagti, is fearless in her fanciful reorientation. Why not?It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity. Reggie (Vedang Raina) invents beat-boxing; the kids applaud a quote from Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema is truth 24 times a second.” Mostly, however, it’s rote shtick. Jughead (Mihir Ahuja) chows down on some kind of burgers while Archie and his girlfriends flirt, fight and flirt some more.Suddenly, the focus shifts from how much Riverdale hasn’t changed to how much it might under threat of a corporate takeover. This wheezy old save-the-town plot only holds our interest because of our long acquaintance with the characters who are now being radicalized. It’s strangely compelling to watch Archie transform into an anticapitalist activist. “I can’t just live my life for kicks,” he sings, “Everything is politics — hey, hey!”The cast is tasked solely with looking chipper and gyrating enthusiastically. The ladies do a saucy number on roller skates; later, Khan’s vampy Veronica lands a back flip. The film does its darnedest to dazzle from its lavish production design to its showboating cinematography. For good measure, Akhtar slaps cartoon-style exclamations on the screen: “Smack!” “Pow!” and, for Hindi speakers, “Dhishoom!”The ArchiesNot rated. In Hindi and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Obamas’ Vision for Hollywood Company: ‘This Isn’t Like Masterpiece Theater’

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      With three new films on Netflix, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, is pursuing projects in different genres that aren’t always uplifting.The film “Leave the World Behind” centers on the idea of mistrust and how easy it is for humans to lose empathy for one another when faced with a crisis. It is at once unnerving, misanthropic and bleak and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it’s produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground.Set to become available on Netflix on Friday, it is one of three films from Higher Ground that will be released within a month of one another on the streaming service. The others are “Rustin,” a biopic about a gay Civil Rights era activist, Bayard Rustin, and “American Symphony,” a documentary tracking the relationship between the musician Jon Batiste and his partner, Suleika Jaouad. Together, the films provide the best evidence of the five-year-old company’s attempts to evolve from an earnest, feel-good brand to one that is more complex and focused primarily on good storytelling centered around, Mr. Obama said, people who are dealing with “the tensions that are in our society.”“It’s taken a while for us to remind our team at Higher Ground, as well as the creative community in Hollywood, that this isn’t like Masterpiece Theater — not everything we do has to fit on PBS,” Mr. Obama said in a phone interview. “We are known to watch other things.”Those familiar with Mr. Obama’s lists of his favorite books, movies and TV shows know that his interests are varied. (When he named Amazon’s raunchy superhero show “The Boys” as one of his favorites in 2020, it shocked the show’s creator and its fans.)“I’m a bit of a sucker for science fiction, dystopias or thrillers,” he said. “Michelle jokes that my favorite movies involve horrible things happening to people and then they die, whereas she actually likes fun, uplifting stories that make her laugh.”In the past 18 months, the company has made its ambitions known to Hollywood by signing with the talent agency Creative Artists Agency to improve its access to new material; agreeing to an audio deal with Amazon’s Audible Originals after parting ways with Spotify; and, in April, hiring a senior executive with film and television experience, Vinnie Malhotra from Showtime.Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali in a scene from “Leave the World Behind.”NetflixSam Esmail, the director of “Leave the World Behind,” is known for a paranoid and dark outlook on society, as represented by “Mr. Robot,” the acclaimed thriller series he created. He was surprised his path ever crossed Mr. Obama’s. But when they discussed “Leave the World Behind,” which is based on Rumaan Alan’s novel that was a pick of Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Esmail said he was heartened that the former president was not interested in shying away from the themes of the film, whose starry cast includes Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali.“He really didn’t want to pull punches,” Mr. Esmail said. “He wanted to have these characters face the truth about the fragility of our society and how do we reckon with that. I found that refreshing.”Some in the Hollywood trade press criticized Netflix’s deal with Higher Ground, struck in 2018, as being more about name recognition than actual content. “Rustin” and “Leave the World Behind” are the first narrative feature films from the company.“There’s plenty of reason to believe that it could be a vanity brand,” said Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, who last year extended the initial four-year deal for another two years. “But they got street cred right out of the gate.”He referenced Higher Ground starting out with “slightly lower stakes things,” like Ms. Obama’s kid-oriented food show “Waffles + Mochi” and documentaries like “Crip Camp,” which centered on disability rights, “American Factory,” which highlighted the plight of blue-collar workers in a globalized society and won an Oscar for best documentary.Michelle Obama in a scene from “Waffles + Mochi.”Adam Rose/Netflix“I think this year, with ‘Rustin’ and ‘Leave the World Behind,’ you can see the scope and scale and potential for the ambitions that they have, and we have for them,” Mr. Sarandos said.Among the projects Higher Ground has in development is a film adaptation of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David W. Blight. Regina King is set to direct, with a script by Kemp Powers, reuniting the duo behind “One Night in Miami.”But now the company is also expanding into other genres: It has grabbed the rights to S.A. Cosby’s best-selling crime thriller “All the Sinners Bleed,” which it will produce with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, and to “Hello, Beautiful” by Ann Napolitano, a family drama that was a pick in Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Both will be made into series for Netflix.Ms. Obama is also working closely with Lupita Nyong’o, who will produce and star in a romantic comedy called “Fling,” based on a novel by J.F. Murray. An unscripted series called “Boomin Love,” about older people finding companionship, is currently in production with a Harvard-trained behavioral scientist, Logan Ury, who is serving as one of the on-air experts.“These might not be something people expect,” Mr. Obama said of the upcoming projects. “I think we’re now in a place where we’re branching out into different genres, and people are starting to probably get the signal that ‘Oh, if we’ve got a good story that doesn’t neatly fit into what we expect Higher Ground might be interested in, they still might be a good partner for us.’”In a scene from the documentary “American Factory,” two women working at Fuyao glass company in Ohio, in 2019.Netflix, via Everett CollectionProducing projects based on high-profile novels, which have a built-in fan base, could augur well for Higher Ground, whose output so far has had respectable reviews though none have topped Netflix’s weekly top 10 most-watched lists.Still, there are plenty in Hollywood who find themselves star-struck by the Obamas. When Mr. Obama visited C.A.A.’s offices in September, agents flooded into the company’s conference room and later described the day with words like “magical” and “the greatest.” Matthew Heineman, who in his 20 years as a documentary filmmaker has embedded with vigilantes fighting drug cartels and American special forces stationed in Afghanistan, said he was “nervous” walking into the restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard for what he described as a “surreal” meeting with the former president about “American Symphony.”The couple is known to give notes on scripts and will look at various edits as a project moves through post production, though Mr. Obama says he does so “with great humility.”“One of the great pleasures of being president is everybody having an opinion about how you can do your job and frequently from people who have no idea what it’s like to do your job,” he said.“Michelle and I do not aspire to be full-time Hollywood moguls,” Mr. Obama said.Stephen Voss/NetflixDespite the projects ahead, Mr. Obama said the couple intended to continue spending just 10 to 15 percent of their time nurturing Higher Ground, especially as the 2024 election approaches and they are called to the campaign trail.“Michelle and I do not aspire to be full-time Hollywood moguls,” he said.For the projects they do choose, however, their support can make the difference. Bruce Cohen, a producer of “Rustin,” credits the Obamas with getting his film made after HBO passed on it years earlier.“Once you have them in your corner, it gives you a really good chance,” he said.And Mr. Heineman, whose film documents Ms. Jaouad’s battle with leukemia, was able to form a partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Be the Match organization, which helps connect patients to bone marrow donors, because of Higher Ground, he said. “The idea of trying to make an impact with the film was something that was important to him and important to me,” Mr. Heineman said, referring to Mr. Obama.While Mr. Obama was no stranger to Hollywood — since his early days of campaigning for the presidency he found a welcoming audience among the show business elite — he has found that working in this business has taken some getting used to.“It’s ironic that the private sector is made out to be this hyper-efficient thing, and the government is plodding, slow,” he said. “I think part of it is ideological and part of it is people’s experience with the D.M.V.“Everything takes so long — decisions, contracts, scripts,” Mr. Obama said. “We organized a major address or a G20 meeting in three weeks. Getting somebody to read a script in three weeks is lucky, much less write a script in three weeks.” More