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      in Theater

      Jack Charles, Grandfather of Aboriginal Theater, Dies at 79

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      One of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, he had a resonant voice, a charismatic personality and a troubled personal life that often landed him in jail.MELBOURNE, Australia — Jack Charles, one of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, who has been called the “grandfather of Aboriginal theater” but whose heroin addiction and penchant for burglary landed him in and out of jail throughout his life, died on Sept. 13 in Melbourne. He was 79.He died in a hospital after having a stroke, according to his publicist, Patrice Capogreco.Mr. Charles had a voice that made people stop and listen.Gravelly and majestic, with rounded vowels honed by elocution lessons in a rough-and-tumble boys’ home, it assured him an audience even over the scrum of the Australian prisons where he spent much of his life.“It’s very unusual for a crim or a screw to listen to a prisoner talk for very long,” he wrote in a memoir, using slang for fellow inmates and prison officers. “But for whatever reason, they’d let me run with whatever I was talking about and actually listen.”That voice catapulted Mr. Charles onto the stage, where he captivated Melbourne theatergoers, and helped make him one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal screen actors.He ascribed his talents to his Indigenous heritage. “We’re great orators,” he wrote in his memoir. “That is merely one element of our culture that white people never saw in our development.”Mr. Charles co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theater company, Nindethana Theater, with the actor Bob Maza in 1971. He was known in Australia as Uncle Jack, an Aboriginal honorific denoting his status as an elder.His life was chronicled in an unsparing 2008 documentary, “Bastardy”; his memoir, “Born-again Blakfella”; and the 2010 one-man play “Jack Charles vs. the Crown,” which he co-wrote and performed around the world, despite multiple convictions that would ordinarily have limited his ability to travel.“Mr. Trump gave me a waiver to go to New York and perform ‘Jack Charles vs. the Crown,’” he said of the former president in an interview last year with the Australian news outlet The Saturday Paper. “That’s the ultimate for an old thief like me. I’m still thieving, stealing things. I’m stealing hearts and minds nowadays.”His road to stardom was a rocky one. Mr. Charles wrestled with heroin addiction, homelessness and an almost lifelong flirtation with burglary, for which he was incarcerated numerous times. He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars.It was also a journey of self-discovery: of who he really was, where he had come from, his homosexuality and what it meant to be an Aboriginal Australian and a member of the so-called Stolen Generation, Aboriginal people who for decades as children were removed from their families by the government and forcibly assimilated into white society.Raised in an almost entirely white home for boys, Mr. Charles had no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and did not even know he was Indigenous until other children bullied him for it.He would later use that self-knowledge to educate others about Australia’s history and race relations, whether from the back of a taxi cab or on the set of the 2015 Warner Bros. movie “Pan,” where he draped the Aboriginal flag over the back of his trailer. (He played a tribal chief in the film, alongside his fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.)“It became a talking point to discuss the social and political hopes for Aboriginal Australians,” Mr. Charles wrote, “as well as teaching people about the Dreaming,” an Aboriginal concept for the beginning of time.In his final years, after he had kicked his heroin addiction, he was a familiar and striking figure plying the streets of Melbourne atop a mobility scooter, an Aboriginal flag fluttering on the back.“He was someone that embraced everything, even the bad things,” said Wesley Enoch, an Australian theater director who had worked with Mr. Charles. “He embraced them so that he could understand them and incorporate them in who he was.”He added that to be embraced by Mr. Charles himself, who stood less than five feet tall and whose luxuriant white Afro and beard were perfumed with patchouli oil, was a memorable experience.Mr. Charles starred in the Australian superhero TV series “Cleverman.”Lisa Tomasetti/SundanceTVJack Charles was born in Melbourne on Sept. 5, 1943. He was one of 13 children born to Blanchie Muriel Charles, two of whom died at birth. The 11 survivors were seized from their mother in infancy. Mr. Charles was the only one of his siblings to meet her again.He was placed in his first children’s home at four months old. At his second, the Box Hill Boys’ Home in suburban Melbourne, he endured physical and sexual abuse, he said. The few Indigenous children there were forbidden to speak to one another.“I was whitewashed, if you will, by the system,” Mr. Charles told a state commission.At 14, he moved into a foster home and began a glass-beveling apprenticeship. But after a disagreement with his foster mother over a night out — when he met with other Indigenous Australians and learned his birth mother’s identity — he was removed from the home at 17 and taken into police custody.So began a troubled relationship with the law. Mr. Charles spent 22 years in prison, often on burglary charges. He favored homes in the wealthy Melbourne suburb of Kew, where his forebears had originated.Raised as a Christian, he had been taught that stealing was wrong, he told The Saturday Paper. But committing “burgs,” as he called them, on his ancestral homeland “felt great,” he said. “Very, very satisfying.”Incarceration was, for him, as productive as it was frequent: On behalf of fellow inmates, he wrote love letters to their wives in exchange for chocolate and tobacco. He read extensively, completed his high school education and learned and taught pottery.“You only lose your freedom in the nick,” he said in the documentary “Bastardy,” using a slang term for a jail. “You can’t go anywhere, but your mind can go wandering all over the place when you’re incarcerated. I might be locked up, but I’m free, still. Free inside.”Mr. Charles found his way onto the stage almost by accident. In 1964, representatives of Melbourne’s New Theater came to the Aboriginal youth hostel where he was living to cast an all-Indigenous production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” He was given a role as an understudy.It was a revelation. In the theater, Mr. Charles had found his people. “They threw great parties, and they didn’t seem to care about my sexuality or my Aboriginality,” he wrote in his memoir.For the next seven years he beveled glass in a factory by day and acted with the New Theater by night.But he slid deeper into addiction and ended up on the street. Stints in prison, he wrote, were a relief, as they offered stable housing and regular meals.From 1971 to 1974, he ran the Aboriginal theater group Nindenthana, whose first hit show, “Jack Charles Is Up and Fighting,” explored whether Indigenous Australians should assimilate or stand apart from the country’s white majority.He starred in plays across Australia, including “Cradle of Hercules,” “No Sugar” and, in 2020, “Black Ties,” at Melbourne’s largest theater, the Arts Center. He appeared in several Australian television series, including “Cleverman,” “Women of the Sun” and “Preppers,” and movies, including “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” “Blackfellas” and “Wolf Creek.”He was eventually reunited with four of his siblings: his brother Archie, and his sisters Esme, Eva-Jo and Christine. He did not learn the identity of his father, Hilton Hamilton Walsh, until last year, when he appeared on the reality genealogy television show “Who Do You Think You Are.”He is survived by Christine Zenip Charles, the only one of his 11 siblings he knew to be still alive.In his last years, Mr. Charles was able to look back at his life with magnanimity, moving from a place of deep anger to one of conciliation.“It’s important to keep in mind my story is also about healing,” he wrote in his memoir. “That’s how I’ve been able to keep going.” More

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      How a 79-year-old Film Director Learned to “Fly” on a Trapeze

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      It’s Never Too Late is a series about people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.There are people who dream of directing a play or a movie. The director Tom Moore has done both. But he has always dreamed of “flying.”“It was a childhood fantasy,” said Mr. Moore, 79, a film, TV and theater director whose credits include the original Broadway production of “Grease” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “’Night, Mother.”“I liked the circus, but loved the ultimate act, which was the trapeze,” he said. “I would wait for that.”But Mr. Moore never thought he had the athletic ability to swing, stretch out, then fly from a long horizontal bar, often 30 feet in the air. He wasn’t good at baseball, and, at 5 feet 7 inches and 150 pounds, he was too small for football at West Lafayette High School, in Indiana. “I just assumed I was not good at sports,” he said.Mr. Moore mapped out his tricks, moves that elicit surprise and applause, during a recent afternoon practice at the Santa Barbara Trapeze Co.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesSo instead of running off to join the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Mr. Moore, who grew up in Meridian, Miss., before moving to Indiana, went to the Yale School of Drama. He did rather well, with “Grease” on Broadway back in 1972, which ran for more than 3,300 performances; the show “Over Here!” with the newcomers John Travolta, Marilu Henner and Treat Williams; and the play “’Night, Mother,” which he also directed for the 1986 film starring Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft.His TV credits include episodes of the 1980s drama “Thirtysomething,” “ER,” “Felicity” and “Ally McBeal.” Along the way he was nominated for two Tonys and three Emmys. (More recently, he coedited the book “Grease, Tell Me More, Tell Me More,” for the Broadway show’s 50th anniversary this year.)Around the age of 50, after the demise of a relationship, he was looking for new adventures. (He is single now and cheekily describes his longtime partners as “a series of valued novellas rather than the one great American novel.”) In 1996, while on vacation at the now-defunct resort Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico, he was drawn to a trapeze rig on the beach, and signed up.Mr. Moore wrapped his hands in tape to reduce blistering during trapeze practice.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesMr. Moore prepared to “fly” during practice. Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesTrapeze was a perfect blend of theatricality and athleticism, and he loved it. He made a “catch” — that is, he managed to grasp the bar in midair — on his first try, and even took part in a show at the end of the week.This spoke to his nascent acting ambitions. “I was never a good actor,” he admitted. “Acting is all about revealing and opening oneself up, and I couldn’t do it.” But he was a performer.He “flew” a few more times at another Club Med in Huatulco, Mexico, over the next year, and decided he wanted to incorporate his holiday pastime into real life. By then he was living in the Hollywood Hills, still directing but feeling somewhat restless, and he asked around for names of trapeze teachers. One kept popping up: Richie Gaona, who came from a famous trapeze family, the Flying Gaonas. Mr. Moore wasn’t sure Mr. Gaona would work with an amateur, but Mr. Gaona agreed. And so, he began learning trapeze in earnest on a rig in Mr. Gaona’s backyard in the San Fernando Valley, about a 40-minute drive from Mr. Moore’s home.“I learned everything from Richie,” he said. “He was amazing. And then I was into it big time and would go three to four times a week.”Mr. Moore climbs to start a trapeze trick. Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesHe got so immersed in the art of trapeze that he ended up making a documentary about the Gaona family called “The Flight Fantastic.”“I think I did things a bit backward because I was so passionately involved in my work and building a career, I didn’t explore the athletic side of me until late,” said Mr. Moore, who considers himself an intermediate amateur. “Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, you’re a trapeze artist.’ I’m nothing of the kind. It’s a sport for me and fun, but I know the skill and talent required to practice the art of trapeze.” (The following interview has been condensed and edited.)What’s your favorite thing about the sport?You can’t think about anything else on the trapeze. If you think about anything else, you’ll fail. That’s a great escape in itself.Mr. Moore resting on the platform at the Santa Barbara Trapeze Co. Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesMr. Moore, left, in midflight with Mr. Weaver.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesWhat’s the hardest thing about the trapeze?Swinging on the bar is the preparation for all tricks that one does on the trapeze. The stronger it is, the higher it is and the more precise it is, the better the trick. It takes a long time to learn to swing. Timing is everything. People think you need strength to do it. Men particularly try to muscle up, but that’s not really it. It’s all about timing and grace. Trapeze at its best is more of a dance in the air.Have you ever gotten hurt?I once had an accident. People think you have a net so you’re fine, but the net can be the most dangerous part. You have to land on your back. If you come in on your legs and feet or knees, you’ll bounce wildly out of the net. You can get severely hurt. The safety lines were holding me back from extra height, so I took them off for a trick, but I was so excited that as I was coming into the net, I was landing on my stomach. I was in the middle of flipping over to my back and I didn’t make it all the way. I bounced extraordinarily high into the air and I came down on the ridge rope, the edges of the net, face first. It sliced through my entire nose all the way to the cartilage underneath.A friend handed me a towel and said, “Put this over your face.” I thought she was trying to stop the bleeding, but everyone was so traumatized by my face. I had done some real damage. An amazing surgeon was able to do the work, a reconstruction of the nose. Mind you, I had done this without telling anyone I was going to do it, or I would never have been allowed. So, I deserved what I got.Mr. Moore in full flight practicing a trick at the Santa Barbara Trapeze Co.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesHow often do you trapeze these days?Maybe once a month. Twenty-five years ago I was willing to sacrifice anything — even time in my career — to get to trapeze, but one matures, even in trapeze. I go when I feel like it rather than on a regular schedule. I’d like to be as good as I was at 60 when I was doing it all the time and when I had a big trapeze birthday party for 250. But I’m not, and that’s OK. But I don’t have any intention of giving it up because I still enjoy doing it.Do the physical demands of trapeze take a toll?Any time I’m away from it and go back, I hurt. As you get older, it’s the joints. They’re in more pain. It’s not as easy as it used to be, but I don’t want to ever stop because I know that once I stop I won’t go back. If you keep doing it, then your body gets used to it.I always practice my hardest trick first, because it requires everything I have to give. I’m telling my body, “This is what you have to do.” It’s like going into the water, whether you edge out inch by inch or plunge right in. It’s better for me to plunge in.Mr. Moore landing after a trick during trapeze practice.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesMr. Moore’s dog, Finnegan, accompanies him to practice.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesWhat has trapeze given you on an emotional level?My athletic pursuits have given me a great sense of self. Many people my age have long ago retired to observation. They’re no longer a participant. I don’t feel that way at all. Attitude, spirit for life, capacity for curiosity and joy are the most important things one can have.I just keep doing what I can do, and fortunately that seems to be quite a bit.I feel my whole life has been reinvention when needed, which I think is a fantastic way to keep staying young. There’s always something new if one stays open to it. More

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      Alain Tanner, Leading Director in Swiss New Wave, Dies at 92

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      With his brainy works of neorealism, he made films that helped establish Switzerland as a film center in the 1970s.Alain Tanner, a pioneering director in the Swiss New Wave movement that took off in the 1970s, known for his cerebral, left-leaning films that challenged bourgeois complacency, died on Thursday in Geneva. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Association Alain Tanner, a Geneva-based group that preserves and promotes his work.Growing up in Switzerland, surrounded by France, Germany, and Italy with their rich cinema traditions, Mr. Tanner went on to be a founder of the so-called Group of 5, norm-shattering Swiss directors who helped drive a new form of national cinema. His best-known films tended toward a stark neorealism, laced with incisive dialogue and an arid wit, and often centered on characters struggling against conformity.Looking back on his career in his later years, Mr. Tanner said he was proud to have been part of a generation that strove to shake the social order.“During the second half of the last century,” he said, “I lived through what was probably the most engaging for cinema, with the questioning of the old styles, the break with old structures and the arrival of modernity.”A sharp-eyed observer of discontent, both emotional and social, he never achieved the name recognition of the French New Wave masters like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday at 91. He acknowledged both as influences.Regardless, critics considered him an important voice. In a 1990 review of Mr. Tanner’s film “A Flame in My Heart,” Vincent Canby described him in The New York Times as a “first-class director” and “one of the most securely cerebral of European filmmakers.”Bulle Ogier in Mr. Tanner’s 1971 film “The Salamander.”Filmo – Verein CH.Film“The Salamander” (1971), which Mr. Tanner shot in 16-millimeter, established his reputation worldwide and had a yearlong run at the Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris. “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976) was an art-house hit in Europe and the United States.Mr. Tanner, a native of French-speaking Geneva, made his early films in French, but his first English-language film, “Light Years Away,” which starred Trevor Howard as a junkyard-dwelling spiritual guide to a rebellious young drifter, won the jury’s special grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981.By that point Mr. Tanner’s reputation in film circles was already cemented based on his groundbreaking films that grappled with the spirit of revolution and personal reinvention of the 1960s.His first feature film, “Charles, Dead or Alive” (1969), conceived in the wake of the 1968 student protests that swept Europe, involved a prosperous middle-aged Swiss watchmaker who abandons a thriving family business, adopts an assumed name and embarks on an ill-fated journey of self-discovery as he settles into a life on the fringes of society with a young couple.Mr. Tanner’s best known films of the 1970s, written with the English novelist, critic and Marxist theorist John Berger, concern the legacies of the tumultuous ’60s.“The Middle of the World” (1974), explores a love affair between an Italian waitress at a railroad cafe and a married engineer who is running for the Swiss Parliament, but also the class tensions between them.Mr. Tanner’s film “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), with the actors Myriam Mézières and Jean-Luc Bideau.Citel Films“Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), focuses on a group of disillusioned friends in Geneva — including an activist-turned-proofreader, an itinerant history professor and a trade unionist — who are prone to extemporizing on topics as diverse as capitalism, revolution, train travel and sex.“Each of the characters is, in his or her own way, as surrounded as Switzerland, hemmed in,” Mr. Canby wrote in The Times in 1976. But, he added, “they have not been anesthetized by mediocrity into dreamless boredom.”Alain Tanner was born on Dec. 6, 1929, in Geneva. His father was a publicist, writer and poet; his mother was a painter.Growing up in Romandy, the French-speaking region in western Switzerland, Mr. Tanner felt alienated from the country’s German-speaking majority. “Switzerland exists much more for the German Swiss than for us,” he was quoted as saying in a 1976 interview with the film critic James Monaco. “They have a real identity, while we don’t.”A lover of movies since childhood, he experienced an epiphany as a teenager when he discovered Italian neorealist directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. At the University of Geneva, Mr. Tanner studied economics, but his real passion was for film. He started a campus film club with Claude Goretta, who would help found the Group of 5. Seeking adventure beyond his native country, he joined the merchant navy after graduation.In the mid-1950s, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta settled in London, where they found work curating archives and subtitling films for the British Film Institute. They befriended the young directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, who were involved with a budding school of documentary filmmaking called Free Cinema. In 1957, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta joined the movement with “Nice Time,” a 17-minute documentary rumination about Piccadilly Circus at night. It won the prize for experimental film at the Venice Film Festival.Returning to Switzerland a few years later, Mr. Tanner directed for television before forming the Group of 5 in 1968; besides Mr. Goretta, the others were Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange. His first feature, “Charles Dead or Alive,” won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Mr. Tanner is survived by his wife, Janine; two daughters, Nathalie and Cécile; and three grandchildren.By the end of his career he had made 21 feature films, including the erotic psychological dramas “A Flame in My Heart” (1987) and “The Diary of Lady M” (1993), along with numerous documentaries for Swiss television.A director once invigorated by the spirit of revolution had long ago mellowed in his political passions.“I believe that neither capitalism nor Communism does anybody any good,” Mr. Tanner said in a 1976 Times interview. “I’m not so much politically minded; I think more about the individual and peoples’ lives.” More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Bachelorette’ and ‘Abbott Elementary’

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      The ABC reality dating show wraps up a season, and the Emmy Award-winning sitcom begins its second.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Sept. 19-25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE NEIGHBORHOOD 8 p.m. on CBS. This sitcom, starring Cedric the Entertainer and Max Greenfield, is back for its fifth season. The show’s premise is: What happens when Dave (Greenfield), an earnest professional conflict negotiator, moves in next to Calvin (Cedric), an auto-repair shop owner in a mostly Black neighborhood in California? The result is a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes contentious relationship.John Legend and Gwen Stefani on “The Voice.”Tyler Golden/NBCTHE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. Camila Cabello, John Legend, Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani will be back in their plush red swivel chairs this week as the 22nd season of this competition singing show begins. As always, the first episode is a blind audition in which singers perform with the judges faced away — if a judge likes what they hear, they turn around.TuesdayTHE RESIDENT 8 p.m. on Fox. Last season of this medical drama ended on a bittersweet note with Dr. Conrad Hawkins (Matt Czuchry) looking back on memories of his wife (Emily VanCamp), a nurse who died in a car crash. The beginning of the new season involves Conrad making a decision about his current love life.THE BACHELORETTE 8 p.m. on ABC. With this season’s finale, we can hope for not one but two engagements. That’s because the show has featured two leads this year — Rachel Recchia and Gabby Windey (who both had their heart broken by Clayton Echard last season) — and each has one suitor left. Time will tell if two weddings are in the cards, or if more people fall into the crowded group of failed “Bachelor” relationships.WednesdayTHE MASKED SINGER 8 p.m. on Fox. This show, which originated in South Korea and involves celebrities performing in elaborate costumes until someone guesses their identity, begins its eight season. Past contestants have included Natasha Bedingfield, Wiz Khalifa and Logan Paul, just to name a few. We already have a sneak peek of two of the “characters”: a fortune teller and a pi-rat (that’s half pirate, half rat).Sheryl Lee Ralph in “Abbott Elementary.”ABC/Gilles MingassonABBOTT ELEMENTARY 9 p.m. on ABC. Just over a week after winning two Emmy Awards (Sheryl Lee Ralph for best supporting actress in a comedy, and Quinta Brunson for best writing for comedy), this show is back for Season 2, with teachers returning to school for development week. Leslie Odom Jr., Lauren Weedman and Keyla Monterroso Mejia will be guest starring this season.ThursdayNORMAN LEAR: 100 YEARS OF MUSIC AND LAUGHTER 9 p.m. on ABC. George Clooney, Laverne Cox, Tom Hanks, Rita Moreno, Jennifer Aniston, Jimmy Kimmel, Amy Poehler, Kristen Bell and Octavia Spencer are a few of the names who will be giving speeches or performing comedy sets in this special celebrating the screenwriter and producer Norman Lear, known for “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times.” He turned 100 years old in late July.FridaySHARK TANK 8 p.m. on ABC. The sharks (a.k.a. the judges) Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Kevin O’Leary are back for the 14th season of this business reality show, and the Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow and the DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu are joining them. This week’s premiere will be live, so audience members can weigh in on whether the sharks should make a deal with the entrepreneurs.SaturdayTHE SUNSHINE BOYS (1975) 6 p.m. on TCM. This film, based on Neil Simon’s 1972 play by the same name, stars Walter Matthau, Richard Benjamin and George Burns (who won an Academy Award for his role). The movie is about two comedians who reunite years after their vaudeville comedy act was popular. “‘The Sunshine Boys,’ which I like, is the sort of movie that makes you grin almost continuously, laugh out loud on a number of occasions, and then, at the end, leaves you wondering if that’s all there is,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review of the film for The New York Times.SundayGLOBAL CITIZEN FESTIVAL: TAKE ACTION NOW 7 p.m. on ABC. This live concert, hosted by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and taking place in Central Park in New York City and in Accra, Ghana, seeks to raise funds for extreme poverty. Metallica, Charlie Puth, the Jonas Brothers, Mariah Carey and Rosalía will perform in New York while Usher, SZA and H.E.R. are set to perform in Accra.Marc Warren in “Van der Valk.”Courtesy of Company Pictures, NL Films & A3MIVAN DER VALK 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This show, starring Marc Warren as Piet Van der Valk, the titular homicide cop in Amsterdam, is back for a second season. It starts off with a gruesome murder of a solicitor with a confusing note in the pocket of her coat when her body is found. More

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      ‘The Woman King’ Surprises With $19 Million at the Box Office

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      The Gina Prince-Bythewood historical drama, starring Viola Davis, did at least 25 percent better than analysts had expected.It doesn’t have to be all sequels and superheroes.“The Woman King,” an original war drama starring Viola Davis, collected a strong $19 million in ticket sales for Sony Pictures Entertainment over the weekend, at least 25 percent more than analysts had expected. It was the best September opening for a similar film — pedigreed, awards-oriented, based on historical events — since Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” in 2016.Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a screenplay by Dana Stevens, “The Woman King” focuses on the Agojie, an all-female warrior troop in Africa in the 1800s. The trailer and other preview materials for the film prompted calls for a boycott on social media over concerns that it glossed over or ignored aspects of the slave trade. But “The Woman King” received rapturous reviews. More important, ticket buyers gave the PG-13 movie an A-plus grade in CinemaScore exit polls, which bodes well for “you’ve got to go see it” word of mouth.With little competition for older ticket buyers in the weeks ahead, “The Woman King” could ultimately generate in the vicinity of $100 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts said. “These movies play to healthy multiples during their holdover weeks,” said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a film consultancy.“The Woman King” cost roughly $50 million to make, not including marketing, with Sony and eOne joining to pay for it.About 58 percent of the audience for “The Woman King” was over the age of 35, according to Sony, with 39 percent over 45. Black moviegoers made up 59 percent of the audience, with white ticket buyers the second-largest group.The R-rated “Barbarian” (from 20th Century Studios, a Disney division) was second at the domestic box office over the weekend, with about $6.3 million in ticket sales, for a two-week total of $20.9 million. The low-budget slasher prequel “Pearl” (A24) arrived in third place, collecting $3.1 million. More

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      Will Smith’s ‘Emancipation’: What Will Apple Do?

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      The Civil War drama “Emancipation” finished filming early this year. Now, Apple faces a quandary on what to do with the movie.Apple has a Will Smith problem.Mr. Smith is the star of “Emancipation,” a film set during the Civil War era that Apple envisioned as a surefire Oscar contender when it wrapped filming earlier this year. But that was before Mr. Smith strode onto the stage at the Academy Awards in March and slapped the comedian Chris Rock, who had made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.Mr. Smith, who also won best actor that night, has since surrendered his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and has been banned from attending any Academy-related events, including the Oscar telecast, for the next decade.Now Apple finds itself left with a $120 million unreleased awards-style movie featuring a star no longer welcome at the biggest award show of them all, and a big question: Can the film, even if it succeeds artistically, overcome the baggage that now accompanies Mr. Smith?The sensitivity of the situation is apparent. According to three people involved with the film who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the company’s planning, there have been discussions inside Apple to release “Emancipation” by the end of the year, which would make it eligible for awards consideration. Variety reported in May, however, that the film’s release would be pushed into 2023.When asked for this article how and when it planned to release “Emancipation,” Apple declined to comment on that or anything else about the film.The Race to Rule Streaming TVCable Cowboy: The media mogul John Malone opened up about the streaming wars, the fast-changing news business and the future of his own career.Warner Bros. Discovery: The recently formed media colossus announced plans for a free streaming service and a paid subscription streaming service combining HBO Max and Discovery+.Turmoil at Netflix: Despite a loss of subscribers, job cuts and a steep stock drop, the streaming giant has said it is staying the course.Live Sports: Apple and Amazon are eager to expand their streaming audiences. They increasingly see live sports as a way to do it.e.There is no easy answer. Should the company postpone a film based on an important historical subject because its leading man is too toxic? Or does Apple release the movie and watch the outcome unfold? Audiences could be turned off by Mr. Smith’s presence, perhaps taking some gloss off the well-polished Apple brand. Or they could respond positively to the film, prompting an Oscar campaign, which could then upset members of the academy. And the question of how to publicize “Emancipation” will bring scrutiny to a film marketing unit that has already drawn grumbles of dissatisfaction in Hollywood for skimpy ad spends and disjointed communication — and parted ways with its head of video marketing this month.“If they shelve the movie, does that tarnish Apple’s reputation? If they release it, does it tarnish their reputation?” asked Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and the former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “Hollywood likes a win-win situation. This one is lose-lose.”“Emancipation,” directed by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) and with a script by William Collage, is based on the true story of a slave who escaped to the North and joined the Union army to fight against his former captors. Shot outside New Orleans and troubled by delays caused by hurricanes and Covid-19, the movie is about a man known as “Whipped Peter,” whose scarred back was photographed and became a rallying cry for abolition during the Civil War. It finished filming about a month before the 2022 Oscar telecast in March.“Emancipation” was already generating 2023 awards buzz, but plans for the film’s release were thrown into question when Mr. Smith rushed the stage and slapped Mr. Rock. Later in the show, Mr. Smith won the best actor award for his work in “King Richard.”Though Mr. Smith can still be nominated for his work, the reaction to the slap means the Oscar chances for “Emancipation” have dimmed exponentially..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Indeed, there are some in the film industry who believe that releasing “Emancipation” along with other Oscar contenders this year will only anger academy voters who were embarrassed by Mr. Smith’s actions.Bill Kramer, the newly installed chief executive of the film academy, said on a recent call with reporters that next year’s show will not dwell on the slap, even in joke form. “We want to move forward and to have an Oscars that celebrates cinema,” he said. “That’s our focus right now.”The presence of “Emancipation” would make that difficult. Stephen Gilula, the former co-chief executive of Fox Searchlight, the studio behind such Oscar winners as “12 Years a Slave” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” said releasing the film in the awards corridor between now and the end of the year, would put undue pressure on the movie and make the slap the center of the conversation.“Regardless of the quality of the movie, all of the press, all the reviewers, all of the feature writers, all the awards prognosticators are going to be looking at it and talking about the slap,” Mr. Gilula said in an interview. “There’s a very high risk that the film will not get judged on its pure merit. It puts it into a very untenable context.”To some, the film may be too good to keep quiet. Apple set up a general audience test screening of “Emancipation” in Chicago earlier this year, according to three people with knowledge of the event who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to discuss it publicly. They said it generated an overwhelmingly positive reaction, specifically for Mr. Smith’s performance, which one of the people called “volcanic.” Audience members, during the after-screening feedback, said they were not turned off by Mr. Smith’s recent public behavior.Mr. Smith largely disappeared from public view following the Oscars. But in July, he released a video on his YouTube channel in which he said he was “deeply remorseful” for his behavior and apologized directly to Mr. Rock and his family.The public mea culpa, which lasted a little more than five minutes and consisted of Mr. Smith sitting in a chair and speaking to the camera, had been viewed more than 3.8 million times since it was posted on July 29. Yet it is unclear whether it has improved the public’s perception of him. Mr. Smith’s Q score, a metric that measures celebrities’ appeal in the United States, plummeted after the Oscars. Before the slap, Mr. Smith consistently ranked among the top five celebrities in the country, alongside Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, according to data provided to Variety. When his appeal was measured again in July, (before he released his video apology) it dropped to a 24 from a 39, what Henry Schafer, executive vice president of the Q Scores Company, called a “precipitous decline.”Apple has delayed films before. In 2019, the company pushed back the release of one of its first feature films, “The Banker,” starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson, after a daughter of one of the men whose life served as a basis of the film raised allegations of sexual abuse involving her family. The film was ultimately released in March 2020 after Apple said it reviewed “the information available to us, including the filmmakers’ research.”Many in Hollywood are drawn to Apple for its willingness to spend handsomely to acquire prominent projects connected with established talent. But the company has also been criticized for its unwillingness to spend much to market those same projects. Two people who have worked with the company, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss dealings with Apple, said it usually created just one trailer for a film — a frustrating approach for those who are accustomed to the traditional Hollywood way of producing multiple trailers aimed at different audiences. Apple prefers to rely on its Apple TV+ app and in-store marketing to attract audiences.Yet those familiar with Apple’s thinking believe that even if it chooses to release “Emancipation” this year, it will not feature the film in its retail outlets like it did for “CODA,” which in March became the first movie from a streaming service to win best picture. That achievement, of course, was overshadowed by the controversy involving Mr. Smith. More

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      Henry Silva, Actor Who Specialized in Menace, Dies at 95

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      He was forever cast as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. But he took pride in his ability to play each bad guy differently.Henry Silva, who for decades was high on the call list of any Hollywood casting director in search of a particularly menacing villain, died on Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 95. His son Scott Silva confirmed the death, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital.Mr. Silva appeared in more than 130 movies and television shows, scowling through many of them as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. He was an assassin sent by a mob boss to wreak vengeance in “Johnny Cool” in 1963. He was a drug addict with a tendency to shoot people in the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie “Sharky’s Machine.” He was a corrupt C.I.A. operative in “Above the Law,” a 1998 Steven Segal film. He was even reprehensible as a cartoon: He voiced the supervillain Bane in animated TV shows involving both Batman and Superman.Yet Mr. Silva was a serious actor, with training at the Actors Studio in New York and appearances on Broadway and in well-regarded movies like “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). He prided himself on not letting the typecasting make him lazy.“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2000. “I have a seven-minute reel of clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don’t always go to the same place, because that would be boring.”Henry Silva was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Brooklyn (not, as most sources have it, in 1928). He grew up in Spanish Harlem, raised by his mother, Angelina Martinez, after his father, Jesus Silva, left when Henry was young.“It was the kind of place,” he told Knight Ridder in 1985, “where if you lived on one block and you wanted to go a few blocks away, you had to take a couple of guys with you, or else you would get your ass kicked. I mean, that’s the only way to put it; I can’t say that you would get ‘beat up.’”“So you were always tense, and you were always on guard,” he continued. “You were never relaxed.” He said he often tapped into those memories when playing characters who were full of jittery, bottled-up anger.By the time he was 8 he had determined that he wanted to be an actor; he said that the Andy Hardy movies of Mickey Rooney, with their idyllic small-town life so different from his own, were an inspiration of sorts. He left school at 13 and worked odd jobs. Years later, he would sometimes be complimented by real gangsters.“They say, ‘My God, where did you learn how to play us?’” Mr. Silva told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. “I say, ‘I lived with “us.” I grew up with “us” in New York.’ I used to know the guys who used to run the whole areas, the prostitution rings. I used to shine their shoes.”His mother hoped he would become a postal carrier, but instead he tried the acting life. He occasionally landed a bit part, including one on Broadway in the Tennessee Williams flop “Camino Real,” which ran for two months in 1953.In 1955 Mr. Silva was one of hundreds who auditioned for the Actors Studio, then being run by Lee Strasberg. He was one of five selected for membership. He was soon part of the cast when the group staged “A Hatful of Rain,” Michael V. Gazzo’s play about a morphine addict named Johnny Pope (played by Ben Gazzara). The play was picked up for a Broadway run and opened in November of that year with a cast that also included Shelley Winters and Anthony Franciosa.Mr. Silva earned good notices for his portrayal in the production of, yes, a bad guy: a drug pusher known as Mother. He reprised the role in the 1957 film version.“A Hatful of Rain” would be Mr. Silva’s last Broadway appearance, but television and film offers were beginning to pile up. In the late 1950s he appeared in TV series like “Suspicion” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and in movies, including “The Tall T” (1957), with Randolph Scott, and “The Law and Jake Wade” (1958), with Robert Taylor.The roles were big enough to catch the attention of one particularly influential person.“One day, many years ago,” he recalled in 2000, “I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in the first car I ever owned, a Chevy convertible. I pulled up at a stoplight and heard someone say, ‘Henry, I like you in movies.’”It was Frank Sinatra, who invited Mr. Silva to visit him on the set of “Some Came Running.” When Mr. Silva showed up, Sinatra recruited him to be in a film with him — the original “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960). Mr. Silva played one of the gang that Danny Ocean (Sinatra) brought together for a spectacular multi-casino robbery scheme. Forty-one years later, Mr. Silva would record his last movie credit by appearing in a small part in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” remake.Mr. Silva was cast in the 1960 movie “Ocean’s Eleven” after a chance meeting with Frank Sinatra while at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. Clockwise from left: Akim Tamiroff, Richard Conte, Buddy Lester, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Mr. Silva, Richard Benedict, Norman Fell and Clem Harvey.United Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Silva became a secondary member of the Rat Pack, a circle of Sinatra pals that also included Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop, and he would appear in two more movies with Sinatra in 1962, “Sergeants 3” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” Both demonstrated a quality that served Mr. Silva well for years: At least by the standards of the day, he could pass as a variety of races and nationalities.He described himself as being of Italian and Hispanic descent, but in “The Manchurian Candidate” he played a Korean heavy who engages in a memorable karate fight with Sinatra’s character. In “Sergeants 3” he was an American Indian, and not for the last time; he played a number of Indians, including one in a 1965 episode of the TV series “Daniel Boone.” In the 1982 comedy “Wrong Is Right” he was a Middle Eastern fanatic.Some roles, though, reflected his actual heritage. He played a number of Hispanic characters of various nationalities. In “Johnny Cool,” one of his few leading roles (he played the title character), he was Sicilian.He also went to Italy for a time in the 1970s to make crime films when that genre was the rage among Italian directors, a stretch of his career he apparently enjoyed.“If they didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t care, because it was so joyous,” he said in Mike Malloy’s 2012 documentary “Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s.”Mr. Silva’s marriage to Ruth Earl in 1966 ended in divorce in 1987. His previous marriages, to Cindy Conroy and Mary Ramus, also ended in divorce. Besides his son Scott, he is survived by another son, Michael. Mr. Silva had an explanation for his ability to play sinister characters decade after decade.“I think the reason that I haven’t disappeared,” he said in 1985, “is that the heavies I play are all leaders. I never play a wishy-washy anything. They’re interesting roles, because when you leave the theater, you remember these kinds of guys.”Vimal Patel More

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      In Toronto, Films by Women About Women, but That’s Where the Similarities End

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      The Toronto International Film Festival returns to business mostly as usual with throngs of excited attendees and some of the year’s most anticipated new movies.Each year, filmgoers of all persuasions, casual viewers and true believers both, descend on the Toronto International Film Festival to sample and to gorge. Cannes has the red carpet, Telluride has Oscar contenders and Sundance has the next big thing, maybe. Toronto has bulk. It’s stuffed with movies of every type, size, style and ambition. Some are destined for immortality and others will enter the Oscar marathon that has already begun. Still other titles will languish on streaming platforms; some of these will deserve better fates.The festival, which ends Sunday, returned to full capacity this month after two years of severely limited in-person screenings. With mask mandates and other restrictions lifted, the crowds in theaters felt close to prepandemic levels, though not at their crushing worst. The throngs outside its main locations were marginally thinner, too, though they surged like tidal waves for the flashiest guests, notably Taylor Swift (accompanying her suitably titled 10-minute “All Too Well: The Short Film”) and Harry Styles (one of the stars of the gay period romance “My Policeman”).“Harry, Harry, Harry!” I heard one afternoon, as I rushed to a screening, past men and women racing toward a scrum of security personnel and parked black S.U.V.s. If Swift and Styles start making more movies and in-person appearances, theatrical distribution might have a chance to recover. Toronto may not do glamour all that well, but over the years it has transformed into an essential industry destination partly by “eventizing” itself, creating an 11-day spectacle for attendees and gawkers alike while serving as a launchpad for new movies like “The Woman King,” which opens Friday.Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesToronto skims a lot of cream from other festivals, giving audiences early peeks at the major titles that will be much discussed in coming months. And while journalists can often preview these offerings back home, it’s a singular experience seeing new movies with packed audiences, witnessing how jokes land and surprises shock. One movie that’s guaranteed to play extremely well is Laura Poitras’s elegantly structured documentary about the photographer Nan Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which just won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. A personal-meets-the-political portrait that goes deep on Goldin’s opium-epidemic activism, it left the audience audibly moved; the distributor should hand out tissues with every ticket.Spotify should ready itself for an uptick in streaming of Louis Armstrong’s music. One highlight of my festival week was the documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” which was directed by Sacha Jenkins, son of the filmmaker Horace B. Jenkins. (Apple has the documentary, but Sacha Jenkins said before one screening that it would also open in theaters.) Drawing on Armstrong’s vast personal archive — including reels of his taped musings — the movie builds beautifully into a portrait of a genius as well as the country that he graced and that didn’t give him the love he deserved. The music is of course brilliant, though some critics wanted more musicology to go with it.The audience I saw “Louis Armstrong” with seemed thrilled. The hothouse environment of festivals can be wildly misleading simply because people are so pumped to be in attendance, which can make widely reported metrics like the duration of standing ovations meaningless (boos are far more instructive). But watching a movie with other festivalgoers invariably heats up and enlivens a room, creates an electric vibe, though it helps when directors introduce their work. Steven Spielberg did just that for the premiere of “The Fabelmans,” a wistful coming-of-age story about a young film lover who grows up to become, well, you know.Paul Dano, left, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord and Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans,” about Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentWritten by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner, the story tracks the awakening, cinematic and otherwise, of the young Sammy (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle). The kid is the least interesting part of the movie, which perhaps sounds funny and even insulting but makes sense given that it’s about someone who grows up to make larger-than-life (Spielbergian!) fantasies. The father is played by Paul Dano, who seems to have borrowed Michael Stuhlbarg’s voice for the role, but the movie is anchored by Michelle Williams’s sensitive performance as the mother, Mitzi. Williams’s affecting intensity gives the movie regular shocking jolts of passion, attenuating its otherwise overly easy, overly familiar flow.“The Fabelmans” didn’t set the festival on fire; its restraint and lightly elegiac mood are unlikely to get most pulses racing, even if these qualities serve it extremely well. As he did in his version of “West Side Story,” which was also written by Kushner, Spielberg embraces a kind of poetic realism in “The Fabelmans” that I’m still getting a handle on. He’s looking at his own life through the mist, as you would expect. And while he shows the tears, if not necessarily the snot, Spielberg is also, in his singular way, engaging with some of the corrosive truths about his childhood, particularly with respect to Mitzi. It’s an interesting movie that I look forward to revisiting.Mitzi Fabelman is just one of the many women characters who made this year’s Toronto memorable. Another is Lib Wright, the brisk British nurse played by a strong Florence Pugh in the period drama “The Wonder.” Directed by Sebastián Lelio from Emma Donoghue’s novel, it follows Lib as she journeys to an isolated village in 19th-century rural Ireland, where she’s been employed by some stern local men to observe a girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who’s said not to have eaten in months. Is her fast a miracle, a scam, or something else? Not all of Lelio’s choices work, specifically his decision to call attention to the movie’s artifice (it opens and closes on a soundstage), but its horror and righteous fury are undeniable.Florence Pugh in “The Wonder,” set in 19th-century Ireland.NetflixPart of what made the bounty of all these women characters so pleasurable is that a fair number appear in movies directed by women. In the not-distant past, women often felt boxed in by their subjects, though especially by their modest resources. That’s less the case now, and day after day at Toronto, you could watch all manner of female-driven pictures, from spectacles to chamber pieces. Some women were as recognizable as your own life (if generally more interesting) and others were entirely, engagingly different. For someone who makes a living primarily writing about movies made by men with men and for men, it was especially gratifying.That was the case even when the movies didn’t entirely work or felt off the mark. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of “Emily,” a moving, sexually charged drama about Emily Brontë directed by the actress Frances O’Connor. Certainly I never heard about some of the wilder things that this Emily (an excellent Emma Mackey) does throughout her tumultuous, tragically abbreviated, dramatically inflected life. Even so, with its performances, its unabashed romanticism and visual choices — landscapes, textures, gleaming light and bodies — the movie persuasively opens up an artistic consciousness, showing how Brontë became the writer that she did. However fanciful its portrait of the artist as a young woman, it’s very effective.Alice Diop’s electric contemporary drama “Saint Omer” turns on a very different question of truth. Set partly in a French courtroom, it centers on a young writer, Rama (Kayije Kagame), sitting in on the trial of another woman, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who’s admitted to drowning her baby. Intellectually galvanizing and emotionally harrowing, the story explores motherhood, race and postcolonial France with control, lucidity and compassion. It’s an extraordinary work that’s all the more impressive because it’s the first fiction feature from Diop, who’s an established documentarian.“Saint Omer” will be on the slate in the forthcoming New York Film Festival and so will “The Eternal Daughter,” from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. It too concerns motherhood, though in a different register and to dissimilar ends. It focuses on a relationship between a mother-and-daughter duo, similar characters who are both played with distinct nuance by Tilda Swinton. The story largely takes place at a grand hotel where the two have come for an intimate, progressively more fraught getaway. Over the course of the story, the time frame subtly, at times comically, shifts, as does the relationship, which — like Swinton’s twinned performances — proves devastating. More