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      Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 90

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      He was a struggling writer when he won an Academy Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He won another for “Melvin and Howard.”Bo Goldman, one of Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters, who took home Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), died on Tuesday in Helendale, Calif. He was 90.A son-in-law, the director Todd Field, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause.Mr. Goldman was struggling to make a living as a writer until the director Milos Forman saw the script he had written for a project called “Shoot the Moon” — his first screenplay — and, impressed, invited him to take a crack at adapting Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for the screen.The resulting movie, which starred Jack Nicholson as a rebellious new patient who disrupts a psychiatric ward, came out in 1975 and was a career maker. Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, who shared screenwriting credit, won the Oscar for best screenplay adapted from other material; the movie was also named best picture and earned Oscars for Mr. Forman, Mr. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who played the fierce Nurse Ratched.“Even then I hung my head,” Mr. Goldman wrote in a 1981 essay for The New York Times about the insecurities of a writer’s life. “After all, I had adapted somebody else’s work; was it really mine?”It may not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the adaptation.If that doubt had nagged him, it had certainly been dispelled when his original screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980) won him his second Oscar, this time for best screenplay written directly for the screen. That movie was based on the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who claimed that Howard Hughes, in a handwritten will, had left him a share of his vast fortune.Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called it “a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century.” The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best movie of the year and gave Mr. Goldman its best-screenplay award.Mr. Goldman’s screenplay for “Melvin and Howard,” with Jason Robards, left, as Howard Hughes, and Paul Le Mat as Melvin Dummar, earned him his second Oscar.UniversalMr. Goldman worked with the director Martin Brest on two films, “Scent of a Woman” (1992) and “Meet Joe Black” (1998).“People call him the screenwriter’s screenwriter,” Mr. Brest said in a phone interview. “I called him the man with the X-ray ears, because he had a pitch-perfect recall of the nuances of a comment that someone made to someone 50 years prior — he could reproduce the tone, and the reason he remembered it is because the tone told the whole story.”Mr. Goldman would draw on those memories to shape characters, as he did for “Scent of a Woman,” the story of a blind retired Army officer and the prep-school student hired to take care of him, for which he received another Oscar nomination. Al Pacino played the blind man; Mr. Goldman told The Times that he borrowed aspects of his father, one of his brothers and his Army first sergeant in writing the part.Mr. Brest said that Mr. Goldman was an adept collaborator, not only with other screenwriters but also with directors and others involved in the moviemaking process.“He thought of himself as a filmmaker rather than a writer,” he said. “He was part of the creation of a film.”Mr. Brest recalled that for “Scent of a Woman,” which was based on an Italian movie, “Profumo di Donna,” he and Mr. Goldman began by just having long, meandering chats.“Finally I said to him, ‘We’ve been talking for two weeks and having the greatest time, but shouldn’t we get to work?’” Mr. Brest recalled. “And he said that Mike Nichols told him, ‘The digressions are the work, or part of the work.’”Sure enough, much of what they had talked about — childhood memories, people they’d known — ended up being reflected in the script.“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Jack Nicholson was named best actor. Its other Oscars included one for Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, for best screenplay adapted from other material.United ArtistsRobert Spencer Goldman was born on Sept. 10, 1932, in New York City. His mother, Lillian (Levy) Goldman, was a millinery model, and his father, Julian, operated Julian Goldman Stores, a clothing chain that had 42 stores in 11 states at one point but was derailed by the Depression. Four months before Mr. Goldman was born, the company filed for bankruptcy.“I was the son of this kind of displaced merchant prince,” Mr. Goldman told The Times in 1993.Though the family fell on hard times, Mr. Goldman was able to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and then Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953.At Princeton, he participated in shows of the Princeton Triangle Club, a college theater troupe. “I learned how to write there,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Writers Guild Foundation.While writing for the college newspaper as Bob Goldman, a typesetter accidentally left off the second “b” in his name. Mr. Goldman liked it and later legally changed his name to Bo.After three years in the Army — he was stationed in the Marshall Islands, where tests of nuclear bombs were being conducted — he became an assistant to Jule Styne, the composer. He also wrote introductory patter and other tidbits for live television programs.He aspired to a playwriting career and earned a Broadway credit in 1959 as one of the lyricists for “First Impressions,” a musical based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that Mr. Styne’s company produced. The show had a starry cast that included Farley Granger, Polly Bergen and Hermione Gingold, but it lasted only 92 performances.Mr. Goldman continued working in television, including as a script editor and associate producer on the anthology series “Playhouse 90.” But success as a writer proved elusive.He had married Mabel Rathbun Ashforth in 1954, and they eventually had six children. He credited her with keeping the family afloat in the lean years by opening a nursery school in their home and then running a food store called Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack, N.Y., on Long Island.He said that in this period — the late 1960s and early ’70s — he saw families of his contemporaries falling apart and was moved to write his first screenplay, “Shoot the Moon,” about a marriage in crisis because of the husband’s affair. It won many admirers — including Mr. Forman — but no producers wanted to make it because, Mr. Goldman often said, the story struck too close to home for them.After his success with “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Rose” (1979) and “Melvin and Howard,” however, “Shoot the Moon” finally did get made, by the director Alan Parker in 1982. Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, as the struggling couple, were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards.Mr. Goldman’s other screenwriting credits include “The Flamingo Kid” (1984), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “City Hall” (1996).In 2017, when New York magazine asked working screenwriters to discuss the best screenwriters of all time, Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) singled out Mr. Goldman’s “audacious originality, his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humor, and his outright anger at being human, and all with his soft-spoken grace and eloquent simplicity.”Mr. Goldman lived in Rockport, Maine. His wife died in 2017. A son, Jesse, died in 1981. He is survived by another son, Justin Ashforth; four daughters, Mia Goldman, Amy Goldman, Diana Rathbun and Serena Rathbun; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Brest said Mr. Goldman was able to create memorable characters through small details.“His remembrance of nuances, things that people don’t know they’re revealing but that reveal volumes — that was his art form,” he said.He also said he has often repeated something Mr. Goldman once told him: “Your life,” Mr. Goldman said, “is what’s not in the obituary.” More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): ‘Barbie,’ Jason Aldean’s Culture War and Drake’s Tour

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and the way in which even anti-corporate dissent has been fully absorbed into corporate brandingA conversation about the way the “Barbie” soundtrack uses contemporary pop stars, and its even more successful deployment of classic hits by Matchbox Twenty and the Indigo GirlsDrake’s current arena tour, his fan-like desire to enjoy Drake hits alongside his audience and his creative versatility, which includes U.K. rap and cringe comedy podcastsThe culture war push behind Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart after a week of controversyThe New York Times’ 50 Rappers, 50 Stories project and its inclusion of Violent J from Insane Clown PosseNew songs by Tanner Adell and Valee featuring Z MoneySnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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      ‘Annihilation,’ ‘Support the Girls’ and More Streaming Gems

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      This month’s rundown of off-the-radar picks on your subscription streaming services includes indies of all stripes, plus three documentary explorations of our changing media landscape.‘Annihilation’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.You’d think that a science-fiction adventure featuring the “Star Wars” alums Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, as well as Portman’s “Thor” co-star Tessa Thompson, would have been a giant hit. But Paramount Pictures seemed baffled by how to market a sci-fi picture about ideas and creeping dread (rather then lasers and intergalactic dogfights), dumping it onto Netflix overseas and into theaters with a shrug in the United States. They fear what they don’t understand; the writer and director Alex Garland, adapting the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, crafts a thrilling yet thoughtful combination of head trip and hero’s journey that owes more to Tarkovsky than Lucas.‘On the Count of Three’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.The feature directorial debut of the stand-up comic and sitcom star Jerrod Carmichael was one of many films all but disappeared by the pandemic; it premiered at the 2021, online-only edition of the Sundance Film Festival before quietly landing on Hulu more than a year later. But there’s much to recommend in “On the Count of Three,” the story of two longtime friends (played by Carmichael and Christopher Abbott) who vow to aid each other in ending their lives after a long day of cleaning up unfinished business. Its chief virtue is its leading actors — Abbott has been doing modest but devastating work on the indie scene for years, and Carmichael matches his co-star’s intensity and anguish — while Carmichael shows a sure hand for navigating the tonal shifts of Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s tricky screenplay.‘White Bird in a Blizzard’ (2014)Stream it on Max.The films of the director Gregg Araki have been so (rightly) celebrated in recent years for their wild stylistic choices and unapologetic queer themes that it’s tempting to overlook his more tempered, mainstream affairs. But this combination of sun-baked noir, coming-of-age drama and Sirkian melodrama remains one of his most fascinating concoctions. Shailene Woodley turns in one of her finest performances to date as young Kat, whose mother, Eve (Eva Green, vamping marvelously), disappears under mysterious circumstances. Kat tries to figure out what happened, but “White Bird” is less a detective story than an exploration of the tricky landscape of young adulthood, dramatized with a weary verisimilitude.‘Violet & Daisy’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.This tale of two teenage girl assassins (Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan) from the writer and director Geoffrey Fletcher (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Precious”) suffers a bit from post-Tarantino preciousness. The M.V.P. here is James Gandolfini, who co-stars as their would-be target, and plays the character with the weary melancholy of a man who knows his days are numbered, and has accepted it. He plays it as dry comedy, with just a touch of doomed inevitability, and that’s the right choice; the genuine tenderness and trust in his scenes with Ronan are a nice plus. “Violet & Daisy” hit theaters just 12 days before Gandolfini’s untimely death, and it serves as a poignant reminder of the wide range of roles he had yet to play.‘Slow West’ (2015)Stream it on Max.Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Oscar-nominated turn in “The Power of the Dog” was not the actor’s first go-round in the Wild West; six years earlier, he co-starred with Michael Fassbender in this eccentric and affecting oater from the writer and director John Maclean. Smit-McPhee plays Jay, a teenage Scottish immigrant traveling the West in search of his sweetheart from back home, with Fassbender as Silas, a frontiersman who takes the innocent and clueless Jay under his wing. MacLean creates a credibly dangerous world of threats both natural and seemingly supernatural (Ben Mendelsohn, stealing the show as a menacing bounty hunter).‘Support the Girls’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.A preview of the film.The writer and director Andrew Bujalski (“Funny Ha Ha,” “Computer Chess”) creates what looks, on its shiny surface, like a sunny workplace comedy along the lines of “Working …” or the Chotchkie’s scenes in “Office Space.” But he’s up to something much slyer, a smart examination of class and gender politics in one of their most pointed playgrounds: a Hooters-style sports bar and grill, where customers leer at scantily clad waitresses while the manager, Lisa (Regina Hall), tries to keep temperatures cool (and maintain her own sanity). It’s a wise, winning comedy, with a particularly sparkling supporting turn by Haley Lu Richardson, a “White Lotus” favorite.‘Voyeur’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.The strange, twisted tale of the motel owner Gerald Foos (who claimed to have spied on his customers for decades) and the superstar journalist Gay Talese (who wrote about Foos in a controversial “New Yorker” article and book) is detailed by the directors Myles Kane and Josh Koury in this riveting documentary. Voyeurism aside, the most compelling passages are less about what Foos did than how Talese’s seemingly sturdy news judgment failed him so spectacularly. Ultimately, “Voyeur” is less a character study than a prescient examination of a faltering media landscape, where a story that’s too good to be true is too often told anyway.‘VHS Massacre’ (2016) / ‘VHS Massacre Too’ (2020)Stream part one and part two on Amazon Prime Video.Kenneth Powell and Thomas Edward Seymour’s first documentary on, per the secondary title, “Cult Films and the Decline of Physical Media” is a bit too ambitious for its slender 72-minute running time, attempting to follow too many strands and chase too many gimmicks. But the most direct material, on the logistics of the video business — from its golden age to this waning period — is invaluable, as Seymour seemed to realize when solo-directing the more successful follow-up, a straight-ahead history of exploitation films, their exhibition and the kind of oddities we’ve lost in this all-streaming, all-the-time era. The sequel is the better film, but both are informative and enlightening, with copious commentary from the people who make these movies, and those who love them. More

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      How ‘Barbie’ Set Designers Brought Those Dreamhouses to Life

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      To make their Barbieland sets a reality, the movie’s production team embraced the surreal, going big on bright pinks and shrunken proportions.While working on films like “Atonement,” “Anna Karenina” and “Darkest Hour,” the production designer Sarah Greenwood and the set decorator Katie Spencer, both Oscar nominees many times over, had to turn soundstages into period-accurate sets, using their extraordinary attention to detail to embroider these spaces with texture and soul.And while those jobs were demanding — if even one thing looked wrong, it could dispel the film’s period illusion — they proved to be no match for the bright-pink studio comedy that is Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”“It was one of the most difficult philosophical, intellectual, cerebral pieces of work we’ve ever done,” Greenwood told me last week during a video call with Spencer. “How can that be? It’s ‘Barbie.’ But it really was.”Then again, since the film works on several levels, many things about “Barbie” are headier than you might expect: Though it’s a big-budget film based on a Mattel toy, Gerwig and her co-writer, Noah Baumbach, pose plenty of significant questions about life and womanhood throughout. And in the visually dazzling Barbie Dreamhouses that Greenwood and Spencer designed — where Margot Robbie, as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as Ken, performed — even the smallest details in the background required many months of existential pondering.“Everything is considered,” Spencer said. “Absolutely everything.”Though Gerwig came on board the project as a bona fide Barbie aficionado, Greenwood and Spencer had no personal history with the doll. “Neither of us had Barbie growing up,” Spencer said. “I suppose we were like a lot of the population, quite judgmental about Barbie in a way.”The film’s primary color was a vivid fuchsia. The production cleaned its paint supplier out of every pail they had.Warner Bros.Still, captivated by Gerwig’s enthusiasm, the two women threw themselves into intense research. Their directive was to preserve a sense of play, which is why Barbie’s home has no stairs: Why would a doll deign to descend a flight of steps when she could take a circular pink slide or, even better, float gracefully down from the roof as if guided by the invisible hand of a child?“We all had to believe in it as much as if it was a space movie or period movie,” Spencer said. “We had to research it as though it was set in 1780.”First, the designers studied a vintage Barbie Dreamhouse, finding it to be much more cramped than they anticipated: A classically proportioned Barbie could graze the ceiling of each room with a simple upward swivel of her arm.To simulate that feel, “the Dreamhouses in the film are 23 percent smaller than they would be, as are the cars and roads,” Greenwood said. “When you scale the house down, you make the actors like Margot and Ryan seem bigger, which makes the whole thing seem ‘toy.’”Instead of adapting the Dreamhouses to feel more real, Greenwood and Spencer played up their surreality. When Barbie opens her refrigerator, most of the foods are simply flat cartoon decals. Her oversize cup contains no liquid — why should it, when Barbies don’t drink? — and the size of her toothbrush is even more exaggerated, since it’s the kind of prop a child might find included in a dollhouse.“Once you’ve done that once or twice, those moments of dollness, it makes the whole thing believable,” Spencer said.With few walls to speak of, Barbie Dreamhouses are the definition of “open plan,” which presented its own logistical problems. “You’re designing something that isn’t there, in effect,” said Greenwood, who drew inspiration from museum dioramas to conjure layers of background that would help fill each shot. Since our main Barbies live in a cul-de-sac — in fact, it’s the dot of the “i” in the cursive roads that spell “Barbieland” — each Dreamhouse looks out into several other Dreamhouses, while the blue sky and mauve mountains that surround them were hand-painted onto an 800-foot-long backdrop meant to recall old-fashioned soundstage musicals.If it feels artificial, that’s the point: Why preserve the fourth wall for homes that barely have any walls to begin with? “It’s fake-fake, which is perfect,” Greenwood said. “It was almost Brechtian, the way Greta approached it.”Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie. Her home stands in contrast to the style of the film’s Barbie Dreamhouses.Warner Bros.There is no actual fire in Barbie’s fireplace, nor water in her pool, since Barbieland is devoid of all elements and is as hermetically sealed as a toy box. There aren’t even whites, blacks or browns: Anything in a Dreamhouse that would typically be those colors is just a different shade of pink, with a primary fuchsia so vivid that the production cleaned its paint supplier out of every pail they had.“All the other colors, like the blues, had to up the ante,” Greenwood said, referring to their intensity.The cul-de-sac Dreamhouses were designed in a midcentury-modern style that evokes the time period when Barbie was invented. “We kept coming back to the aesthetic of Palm Springs,” Spencer said. In contrast to those homes, distinguished by clean and simple lines, was the postmodern house on a hill owned by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) — a riot of weird angles and clashing colors, as if Pee-wee’s Playhouse emerged in the middle of a carefully constructed pop-up book.“It was once a Dreamhouse, and it all went a little bit cockeyed, like her,” Greenwood said. “Nothing there was straight, in any sense of the word.”Like its owner, whose face is covered in scribble marks, the walls of Weird Barbie’s house are adorned in doodle patterns and swirls, and there are plenty of other colors on display besides pink. (The primary color on one wall is even, gasp, green.) The other Barbies treat her domicile as if it were a witch’s house, but you can’t deny that Weird Barbie has an eye. Greenwood and Spencer singled out her irregular rainbow rug as a favorite that everyone hoped to take home.“We all wanted her rug, but it’s gone into the Warner Bros. vault of goods,” Spencer said. “But I love the fact that in this vault where you have to go through so much security, you have the Batmobile and then you have Barbie’s car.”Weird Barbie’s house isn’t the movie’s only deviation: Later in the story, after a trip to the real world tips off Ken to the power of the patriarchy, he returns home and exhorts the other Kens to turn the pink and girlie Barbieland into their own personal “Ken-dom.” Soon enough, they’ve staged a hostile takeover of the Dreamhouses — rechristened the “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses” — and given those buildings a man-cave makeover replete with La-Z-Boys, mini fridges and appalling equestrian lampshades.From left, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ryan Gosling and Ncuti Gatwa, three of the film’s Kens.Warner Bros. “We had to keep going back to Greta and saying, really? Really ugly?” Greenwood said. “But there’s a purity to the ugliness as well, because it’s a limited palate.”That’s because these himbos aren’t sure where all of their purloined swag ought to go, or even what most of it does. Barbecues have been placed haphazardly onto ovens, the juicers are filled with Doritos, and flat-screen TVs in every Mojo Dojo Casa House are tuned to the same hypnotically banal clip of a horse in eternal gallop.”He’s no interior designer, Ken,” Spencer said, chuckling. “But can I just say, a lot of the crew wanted to buy things from the Ken-dom. I’m not saying who, but a lot of them did.”The film was shot last year at Warner Bros.’s Leavesden Studios, about 20 miles northwest of London, and as word of the colorful sets spread, the production quickly attracted its fair share of visitors. “We were filming in an English winter, gray and black with snow,” Greenwood said. “So everybody would just come in there for an injection of light and summer.”Added Spencer: “It made people happy. You couldn’t help but smile.”And what of its makers? Did all that time spent on these “Barbie” sets affect their personal palette? Yes, confessed Greenwood.“I’ve painted my bedroom pink, literally,” she said. “I’d never painted anything pink before. I love pink now!” More

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      Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused

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      Despite not being in the actors’ union, many content creators are passing up deals to promote films or TV shows because they don’t want to be barred from the guild or face online vitriol.Deanna Giulietti is not in the actors’ union, but she turned down $28,000 last week because of its strike.Ms. Giulietti, a 29-year-old content creator with 1.8 million TikTok followers, had received an offer to promote the new season of Hulu’s hit show “Only Murders in the Building.”But SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, recently issued rules stating that any influencer who engages in promotion for one of the Hollywood studios the actors are striking against will be ineligible for membership. (Disney is the majority owner of Hulu.) That gave Ms. Giulietti, who also acts and aspires to one day join the union, reason enough to decline the offer from Influential, a marketing agency working with Hulu.The union’s rule is part of a variety of aggressive tactics that hit at a pivotal moment for Hollywood labor and shows its desire to assert itself in a new era and with a different, mostly younger wave of creative talent. “I want to be in these Netflix shows, I want to be in the Hulu shows, but we’re standing by the writers, we’re standing by SAG,” Ms. Giulietti said. “People write me off whenever I say I’m an influencer, and I’m like, ‘No, I really feel I could be making the difference here.’”That difference comes at a cost. In addition to the Hulu deal, Ms. Giulietti recently declined a $5,000 offer from the app TodayTix to promote the Searchlight Pictures movie “Theater Camp.” (Disney also owns Searchlight.) She said she was living at home with her parents in Cheshire, Conn., and putting off renting an apartment in New York City while she saw how the strike — which, along with a writers’ strike, could go on for months — would affect her income.Representatives for Searchlight and TodayTix did not respond to requests for comment. Hulu and Influential declined to comment.The last time Hollywood’s screen actors and writers went on strike, social media platforms and the $5 billion influencer industry didn’t exist. The actors’ union began admitting content creators in 2021 and still has only a small number of them, but questions have quickly emerged around how the union’s dispute with the major Hollywood studios will affect popular internet personalities.The union’s message that content creators will be blocked from membership if they provide work or services for struck companies has sent many scrambling. A number of creators have pledged support for writers and actors and circulated “scab” lists of influencers who promote new releases or appear at related events. Others have been frustrated or confused by instructions from a union that doesn’t protect them, and that some had never heard of.SAG-AFTRA, which represents some 160,000 movie and television actors, approved a strike on July 13. The division with the studios is driven largely by concerns about compensation in the streaming era and artificial intelligence. They joined screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, the first dual shutdown since 1960. During the strike, actors are not able to engage in publicity efforts for their projects or appear at film festivals or events like Comic-Con.Influencers have become crucial to the entertainment industry in recent years, especially during the pandemic, building buzz and promoting products. They post videos to hype new TV shows and movies, appear on red carpets and at events like the MTV Video Music Awards, and unbox products tied to film and television characters. Typically, as in the case with Ms. Giulietti, outside agencies hire creators on behalf of the studios.“If I were to help the big studios amid this, I’m just hurting myself in the future,” said Mario Mirante, a comedian with 3.6 million followers on TikTok.Marshall Scheuttle for The New York TimesNow those activities, besides limiting their career ambitions, could lead to internet backlash, with one nonunion influencer already posting an apology video for appearing at a recent Disney movie premiere. Others have posted promotional videos anyway, without backtracking or pulling the content. At least one creator posting from a recent premiere opted to turn off their TikTok comments, possibly to avoid potential criticism. On the flip side, videos from creators about jobs and events that they rejected in solidarity with actors have racked up praise and views on TikTok.“We don’t have power to make decisions for the talent, but we will in this moment recommend not engaging with struck work or struck companies on paid or organic projects,” said Victoria Bachan, president of Whalar Talent, a unit of a creator commerce company that works with more than 200 content creators. She added that young creators were also more apt to be supportive of unions and organized labor.Still, Whitney Singleton, a 27-year-old with 1.2 million TikTok followers, has been frustrated by what is being asked of her. She had never heard of SAG-AFTRA until the past couple of weeks. Ms. Singleton, using the moniker @KeepUpRadio, has attracted fans by singing and rapping about her favorite video games like Fortnite and streaming herself playing video games. It has been her full-time job for three years. She has collaborated with struck companies like Amazon in the past.“I really do value creators, and I want them to get what they deserve,” Ms. Singleton said. “But it’s really hard for me to just be finding out about an organization and being expected to fall in line with their initiative when I feel like it’s new to me and the influencer space.”She said some influencers were being asked to turn down five-figure deals, and that “the majority of creators I’ve talked to about it feel it’s unfair that as nonunion members, they’re being included in this conversation.”Ms. Singleton was invited to an early screening of the “Barbie” movie and said that while it wasn’t a paid promotion, the union’s guidelines for promoting the movie were “what I would deem murky.” Ultimately, she decided to post about the event, for which she dyed her hair pink.“I actually got no negative feedback, it was all positive,” she said. “For a moment, I felt a bit scared and put in a corner with these requirements because I respect creators in all industries, but I wouldn’t be being true to my heart if I had let those things stop me from living my life and sharing the content.”The union did not respond to questions about the criticism or about how many influencers are included in its membership. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the biggest studios, has said its offers to the writers and the actors were “historic” improvements on their previous contracts.The reality for many creators is that they dream of someday achieving a level of fame beyond the smartphone screen, making the threat of blacklisting by Hollywood’s most powerful union an ominous one.Mario Mirante, a 28-year-old comedian on TikTok with 3.6 million followers, recently posted a popular video about turning down a deal to promote a show based on his support for actors and writers and his long-term ambitions. Mr. Mirante has hoped to work in Hollywood since childhood, and even has a tattoo of Jim Carrey as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” on his arm.“That’s a lot of influencers’ goal and aspiration and why they do it,” said Mr. Mirante, who lives in Las Vegas. “We love to entertain and express ourselves, and that’s the Super Bowl, that’s the ultimate, being in a movie or a TV show.”Mr. Mirante has previously been paid to promote the movie “Champions” starring Woody Harrelson and a product tied to the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise. “If I were to help the big studios amid this, I’m just hurting myself in the future, if that makes any sense,” he said. “Of course I’m not a part of it right now, but they’re fighting for basic rights, livable wages, not to have their A.I. likeness taken.”Krishna Subramanian, a founder of the influencer marketing firm Captiv8, said studios might need to pivot away from creators during the strike and get agencies to make more traditional display ads to place on Facebook and other sites.Simone Umba is a TikTok creator with more than 300,000 followers who primarily posts about TV shows and movies but has paused making such videos. She said that many influencers felt that they were “stuck in the middle,” but that most were opting to side with the union even as invitations and deals piled up.“We knew we were going to get approached, and it’s like we’re in a really messy family feud,” Ms. Umba, 26, said.She added, “Regardless of if you want to join the union or not, you don’t want to be one of those people that was willing to take a check instead of standing in support of people fighting for actual livable wages.”Ms. Umba said that it had been painful to miss out on posting about the star-studded “Barbie” movie after this summer’s marketing bonanza and that she had declined to attend an early screening of the film in Atlanta. She and a friend were messaging recently after trailers for “The Marvels” dropped, agonizing over their inability to post.“We were texting each other back and forth, like, this is so hard,” she said. She said she was prepared to hold out for months but was already thinking of holiday releases. She crossed her fingers, held them up and said, “Please, please, don’t let it get to Christmas.” More

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      ‘Minx’ and ‘Stiffed’: Dirty Pictures From a Revolution

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      Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.HBO MaxCultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.Lovibond of “Minx” says a show set in the 1970s like hers shouldn’t still resonate, but it does.HBO Max“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall. More

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      in Music

      How the Indigo Girls Brought Barbie ‘Closer to Fine’

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      A 1989 song about soul searching has maintained cultural relevance for three decades, but the band has also long been the target of homophobic jokes. Fans are savoring a moment of vindication.In Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, where every day is the best day ever, pop stars like Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX provide a bouncy soundtrack as the live-action dolls go about their cheery, blissful lives. That is, until Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical” Barbie cues a record scratch with a rare and shocking existential query: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”To resolve this disruption to her otherwise perfect life, she hops in her pink Corvette and belts along to a track filled with strummed acoustic guitars and close harmonies. “There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line,” she sings with a smile, before thrusting a manicured pointer in the air.Barbie’s song of choice on her way to the Real World is the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.”The Indigo Girls, a folk duo from Georgia who have released 15 studio albums since 1987, featured “Closer to Fine” as the opening track on their self-titled 1989 LP. Emily Saliers wrote the song after she and her fellow singer and guitarist, Amy Ray, graduated from Emory University in Atlanta and were regularly playing a local bar called Little Five Points. It became a staple of the Girls’ live show that spread thanks to college radio play and an opening slot on tour with another Georgia band, R.E.M.It’s a song about seeking, Saliers said by phone this month: “I searched here and I searched there, and if I just try to take it easy and get a little bit of knowledge and wisdom from different sources, then I’m going to be closer to fine.”“Closer to Fine,” with its four-chord verses, octave-jumping chorus and slightly inscrutable lyrics, has been a staple of dorm room singalongs, karaoke excursions and car rides for years, and it is the Indigo Girls’ most identifiable tune. “Indigo Girls,” their first album for a major label, went double platinum and won a Grammy.“It’s got a very easy melody and really easy chorus, and the chorus repeats,” Saliers said. “When you get to a chorus of a song that you’re into and you can just sing it at the top of your lungs, I think just structurally, melodically, it’s really a road trip song and I think that’s why you see it in those kinds of scenes.”Ray said “Closer to Fine” represents 80 percent of the band’s licensing, but the duo are generally told very little about how their music will be used. They don’t allow commercials, but have had successful soundtrack and onscreen placements in films like “Philadelphia” and TV shows including “The Office” and “Transparent.” In 1995, the duo starred as Whoopi Goldberg’s house band in the movie “Boys on the Side.”“I think it was really important at that time for us to reach more people,” Ray said in a phone interview. “Those kinds of things are just invaluable for an artist.”The Indigo Girls have a similar hope for “Barbie,” already a global phenomenon with powerhouse marketing and intergenerational brand recognition. A “Closer to Fine” cover by Brandi and Catherine Carlile appears on the expanded edition of the movie’s soundtrack.“I always felt that song was really defining of who they were in that era,” Brandi Carlile said in an interview. “That, even more than lesbians, what they were was intellectuals. They were offering up a life beyond the life that young people knew. And it’s a very young person’s song,” she added. “It’s about seeking out more than you thought you believed.”Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in the movie. “It’s really a road trip song,” Saliers said of the band’s most recognizable tune.Warner Bros. PicturesStill, given little context in an initial call from their manager, Saliers said she was nervous. “I didn’t know who was directing it or anything, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is about Barbie? We better check to make sure this is kosher,’” she recalled. “But as it turned out, it’s in the hands of Greta and it’s just this amazing thing that happened. It was a complete surprise to me and Amy.”Ray called it a gift: “It’s just absolutely wonderful that they’re using it.”“Closer to Fine” recurs in the film three times and appears in its official trailer, but it’s been recirculating in pop culture organically, too. In March, a video of the comedian Tig Notaro singing it on a party bus alongside a crew that included Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Sarah Paulson blew up online. The band’s latest album, “Long Look,” arrived in 2020, and they have been on a tour (typically closing with the tune) that touches down in Ireland and Britain next month.“You don’t imagine a folk lesbian duo to be in this hot-pink Barbie movie,” said Notaro, who has been a fan since seeing the “Closer to Fine” video on MTV’s alternative rock show “120 Minutes.” “Kind of just selfishly and personally, I feel like, ‘Yeah, we were onto something all these years,’ you know? It’s validating. Obviously it’s been a huge hit forever, but this is so next level.”“When I hear a song like that,” she added, “it feels like just my chest bursts open with joy and hope.”The Indigo Girls are also the subject of a documentary, “It’s Only Life After All,” directed by Alexandria Bambach, which premiered at Sundance in January. The film serves as a reminder of how Saliers and Ray, both openly queer and from religious Southern backgrounds, endured scrutiny and prejudice as “Closer to Fine” put them in an early spotlight.“For the longest time I always felt we were the brunt of lesbian jokes in kind of a lowest common denominator,” Saliers says in the documentary. Ray echoed those sentiments in the film, saying, “It seemed like the most derogatory thing you could be is a female gay singer-songwriter.”Critics would refer to them as too earnest or overly pretentious, if they covered them at all. The duo were used to comic effect on “Saturday Night Live” and “South Park”; even Ellen DeGeneres employed them as a punchline after her character came out on national television on her sitcom “Ellen.”“That time period that really was just so critical of women — of queer women, of women that didn’t present the way that a patriarchal system wanted them to,” Bambach said. “I think it’s a really critical time for us to be looking back at, you know, just things that we scoffed or laughed off or said were OK.”Brandi Carlile said after watching the duo take so many shots over the years, the “Barbie” moment is extra sweet. “The real injustice of how the Indigo Girls have been treated throughout these last few decades is that they’ve been used as kind of this dog whistling acceptable way to sort of parody lesbians, and I always felt destabilized by it,” she said. “And so seeing something like this happen for them on this scale and watching them and that iconic kind of life-affirming song make its way to new ears is probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in years.”The singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt, 29, found the Indigo Girls in high school but further embraced them in college, when she said their music gave her the confidence to write personal and descriptive lyrics from her experiences as a gay woman.“Representation in culture is the biggest, the single most important thing I think for people to fully embrace themselves,” she said. “You need all these different examples of who you’re allowed to be, and the answer is anybody — you’re allowed to be anybody.”Pruitt called “Closer to Fine” the “northern star” of songwriting. “It’s incredible that it’s having a resurgence in 2023” in “a franchise that I grew up associating with extreme heteronormativity,” she said. “I love how now they’re rebranding it as something incredibly inclusive.”Bambach, who discovered the Indigo Girls during singalongs led by counselors at youth summer camp, saw “Barbie” on opening weekend in Atlanta and said there were screams of joy and recognition when “Closer to Fine” played onscreen.“It’s very gratifying to think that there’s something that this very fine director saw in the song that had cultural relevance in this day and time,” Saliers said. But above all, she appreciates that time has allowed listeners to step back and appreciate the band’s music as simply music.“We’re finally allowed to just be us,” Saliers said. “I guess we’ve stuck around long enough and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just Amy and Emily.’ We no longer are the brunt of a joke and we’re flourishing in certain ways in terms of this relevancy, which is gratifying. It’s strange, you know, to watch culture change and move — and it really has changed for us.” More

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      in Movies

      Cary Elwes Is Soothed By Grunge and a Maltese Poodle

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      The actor, who appears in the latest “Mission: Impossible,” picked up a deep interest in Napoleon’s life from Stanley Kubrick.When Cary Elwes got a call about appearing in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” he said yes to the movie before he knew much about the part. He came to learn that his role was that of Denlinger, the director of national intelligence. But the character’s biography and place in the “Mission” universe was long a mystery, even to the man who played him.“It was a pleasant surprise,” Elwes said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “It was so secretive that we were really getting as much as we needed to know when we needed to know it.”But he knew exactly what he was getting into with Tom Cruise, having worked with the franchise’s star more than 30 years earlier in the 1990s racecar drama “Days of Thunder.”“He was the same guy then as he is today,” Elwes said, adding: “He sort of inspires everyone around him to give it 110 percent.”Elwes, 60, talked about the music, cities, pets and pastimes that similarly inspire him. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1GrungeMy music’s very important to me. It helps me define my day in terms of soothing me. My interests range from classical to jazz, blues, the Beatles, Zeppelin and grunge. Let’s face it: Nirvana and Pearl Jam changed music. They invented a whole new genre. Because of that, there’s always going to be a place for them.2MaryleboneLondon has changed so much in the 30 years since I lived there that when I go back now I’m finding new places that I really get fond of. One of them is Marylebone, a great strolling street area, which has a lot of little restaurants, shops, boutiques and pubs. It’s very charming and there’s very little traffic, so it’s perfect for a sunny day.3Video ChatI regularly make trips abroad to shooting locations. I made an agreement with my wife and daughter that we should never be apart more than two weeks, and if we are, then I should figure out a way to come home or bring them out to where I am. As they grow older, your kids, they start testing their wings to leave the nest. So, when I’m not there, I still try to catch as much time as I can with my daughter, either through FaceTime or Zoom.4Our Maltese PoodleWhen I was a kid, I had a cat, but I didn’t understand how to treat it well and to get the cat to hang out with me. I never wanted a dog, but then my daughter sent me a picture of a Maltese poodle and I just about melted. This is the first time I’ve had a pet as an adult and there’s a love there that I didn’t understand until I had one for myself and he became part of the family.5BiographiesI’m an amateur historian, so I love reading about people’s stories and history, especially historical biographies. Right now, I’m reading a biography called “Hannibal,” by Patrick N. Hunt. I’m also reading a memoir by Carolyn Pfeiffer, an old friend of the family, who has written a book about her life in the entertainment industry called “Chasing the Panther: Adventures and Misadventures of a Cinematic Life.”6… Especially Napoleon’sI was fortunate enough to be over at Stanley Kubrick’s house when he was studying Napoleon to make a movie right after “2001.” I witnessed some of his research, and that set me on a lifelong path of studying Napoleon. The only person who’s been written more about than Napoleon is Jesus, but the best biography is Felix Markham’s “Napoleon.”7The Language of FilmWhen I was studying film at Sarah Lawrence College, I had a wonderful professor who showed us mostly European movies and really opened my eyes to the beauty and the language of François Truffaut, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini and all kinds of fabulous European directors I’d never seen before. It changed my whole appreciation of film.8Tide PoolsMuch of the coastline of Spain is either sand or rock. The rocky areas are usually cliffs that have been carved out by erosion from wave action over the centuries. What they’ve done in many areas is carved out these little tide pools, which I first discovered when I was a kid. When you’re 5, 6 years old, coming across a miniature, natural swimming pool with crabs and little fish in it is about as exciting as it gets. Anything that excites you as a child, you will always be linked to in life.9Movie TheatersYou can’t put a price on being in a darkened room with strangers, watching a movie and all of you experiencing the same emotions together.10WritingI like to write when I have some downtime, just keep my brain alert. I’ve published a memoir, “As You Wish” (with Joe Layden). But I can’t tell you about the things I’m working on now. They’re top secret. More