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      in Movies

      For Joel Kim Booster, Making ‘Fire Island’ Was a Real Trip

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      The writer and star of “Fire Island” reflects on making the rare romantic comedy that puts gay Asian American men at its center.Joel Kim Booster had a thought: Why do we even need movie trailers? Sure, they give people a bite-size look at a film they might find intriguing, but couldn’t we just … not?This was the theory Booster advanced to me one evening in late April, just hours after the trailer was released for “Fire Island,” a gay romantic comedy he wrote and starred in. Booster had anticipated this moment with a not-inconsiderable level of anxiety, so he met the morning with a plan: After posting the trailer online, he would go back to bed, then keep himself distracted with a trip to the gym and several palliative episodes of “Real Housewives.”A few hours into this plan, as his phone blew up with text messages and Twitter began to pick the trailer apart, he texted the “Fire Island” director Andrew Ahn to announce that he was having either a heart attack or a series of mini-strokes.So consider this his mea culpa: “I’ve done it, too — I’ve made massive judgments about a movie based on two minutes,” said Booster, who is 34, bleached-blond and possessed of a voice so NPR-smooth that a microphone almost seems superfluous. “But now, being on the other side of it, I’m just like, ‘Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing in the world!’”A modern, same-sex gloss on “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, “Fire Island” (streaming on Hulu) stars Booster as our narrator Noah, who makes knowing observations about the titular gay enclave and its social mores. (Think of him as Elizabeth Bennet in a pink Speedo.) Noah didn’t come to Fire Island to look for true love, but as he attends to his insecure friend Howie (Bowen Yang) during their vacation gone wrong, he also takes the measure of a stiff and arrogant suitor who just may be his Mr. Darcy.After Booster was done dodging internet comments and replying to his friends’ texts about the trailer, he met me at Akbar, a storied Los Angeles gay bar with amber lighting, strong cocktails and kitschy, beaded bamboo curtains. (Booster, who moved here from New York a few years ago, picked Akbar because it was one of the few gay bars in town “that didn’t feel like WeHo or a Chipotle.”) We were joined by Ahn, who initially drew Booster’s attention after directing the 2016 indie “Spa Night.” They met years ago and bonded over being gay and Korean in an industry that rarely makes room for their stories.From left, Torian Miller, Bowen Yang, Margaret Cho, Tomás Matos and Booster in “Fire Island.”Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures“We were supposed to split up and do our own things so that we’d take the burden off each other,” Booster said as Ahn chuckled into his tequila soda. “But then we decided to do one project together that now has the same problem of having to represent everybody.”Though there have recently been more gay rom-coms from big studios than ever before, that’s not exactly saying much: They still come around as rarely as comets, and none of the other ones — not “Love Simon,” “Happiest Season,” or this year’s forthcoming Billy Eichner vehicle “Bros” — have a leading cast that is comprised mainly of Asian American actors. So there’s an extra layer of scrutiny that Booster expects from people who’ve never seen themselves in a film protagonist before.And he totally gets that, but it’s all superseded by the fact that he’s the protagonist in question, and he can never be all things to all people because his own story is so specific. Booster was adopted as an infant and home-schooled by white parents in Plainfield, Ill., before he came out as a teenager, studied musical theater in college and moved to New York to become a stand-up comedian. Even now, his conservative family is barely aware that their son is making gay rom-coms that the entire internet is determined to weigh in on.So you’ll have to excuse Booster if he can’t take on everybody else’s concerns right now — not when he’s still got plenty of his own to grapple with.“The night before we started shooting, I was like, ‘This is either going to change my life or it’s going to be the biggest flop of my career,’” Booster told me. “And I don’t think there will be anything in between that.”THE FIRST TIME that Booster and Yang went to Fire Island, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. In those days, both men were still clinging to their day jobs (Booster was the project manager for an internet sock company), and to make the trip economically feasible, they fit 11 impoverished friends into a house with three bedrooms. They knew that the island had a reputation as a haven for rich, white gay men with muscles, but it still unnerved Booster when someone would fix him with a hard stare that all but declared, “You don’t belong here.”Still, the more time he spent with his friends on Fire Island, the freer he felt. “You don’t realize the weight you carry every day by just walking around in straight spaces,” he said. And even the peculiar prejudices of the island became grist for the mill once Booster read Austen’s novel and realized that her story of social stratification would map neatly onto his own experiences.Over the next few years, while Booster’s star began to rise as a stand-up comedian, he kept going back to Fire Island and plugging away at a script about the place that would star him and Yang. And in early 2020, Booster’s breakthrough finally arrived when the project was greenlit … by Quibi.Booster with the director of “Fire Island,” Andrew Ahn, at Akbar.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDon’t laugh. Yes, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form streaming app has since become one of Hollywood’s most infamous flameouts, but at the time, Booster was all-in. Every other studio had passed on “Fire Island,” and Booster’s other big break — a supporting role on NBC’s 2019 sitcom “Sunnyside” — had capsized, leaving his career in a precarious place: “People were like, ‘It’s going to be huge, it’s the next “Office,” you’re going to be able to buy a house with the residuals once it gets to five seasons.’ And then we were canceled after three episodes.”Quibi didn’t last much longer. The app launched one month into the pandemic, tumbled out of the most-downloaded charts within a week, and was sold for parts to Roku by the fall. “Going into lockdown, everyone was depressed, but I felt like my career was kaput,” said Booster. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is done. By the time this is all over, people will have forgotten about me completely.’”Luckily, Searchlight Pictures began to sniff around the project, provided that Booster could rewrite it as a feature film. And that’s when Ahn got into the ring.“I don’t think I’m patting myself on the back by saying, yeah, I think I’m the only person that could have directed this,” Ahn told me. For the last decade, he has lived in what he calls “a gay Asian flophouse in Echo Park” — a building with cheap rent, no central air, plenty of party-throwing camaraderie and an invader opossum that took an entire month to capture. Ahn felt so well-suited for “Fire Island” that he could have been a character from it; in fact, for the movie’s mood board, he used images of himself and his friends.Ahn was thrilled as the movie became even more Asian during the casting process: When a male actor dropped out, the comedian Margaret Cho came aboard as the characters’ destitute den mother, and Booster’s love interest, originally written for a non-Asian person of color, went to the Filipino American actor Conrad Ricamora. (“In the chemistry read, Conrad flustered Joel, and I loved seeing that,” Ahn said.) Though Booster happily signed off on both castings, he still had some reservations.“It became suddenly not only a gay movie, but an Asian gay movie,” Booster said as we finished our drinks and set out for another bar. “It felt heavier, the responsibility of it.”Still, he knows these sorts of opportunities are few and far between. Booster was crestfallen when he didn’t land the key role of Michelle Yeoh’s gay child in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which ultimately went to the actress Stephanie Hsu: “I went in for it and there was just me and a million girls, and I was like, ‘What is going on?’” he said.Sometimes, Booster even feels like he has to justify being cast in his own movie. As we arrived at the Eagle — a leather bar boasting pinball machines, a pool table covered in red felt and TV sets playing vintage porn — Booster talked about the internet commenters who pronounced him too gym-fit to be plausible as a Fire Island outsider. “I think people are really naïve about how awful gay men can be sometimes,” he said, nursing a beer.“I think there’s a lot of nuance in the fact that, yes, I experience gay racism, but I also look like this,” Booster continued. “I’m aware that I’ve done a lot of work to try and make myself visible in those spaces, and I’ve taken a very conventional way of trying to do that. But also, I had to feel good about myself before I started to do all of this — it wasn’t reverse engineered. The first time I sold a script, I was like, ‘Oh, I have so much more value than just if some rando thinks I’m sexually viable or not.’”And ultimately, you can’t control what those randos think of you, whether they’re anonymous internet commenters or strangers who pass judgment in person. Ahn recounted a story of shooting the movie on the Fire Island boardwalk when two gay men walked by and noticed Booster standing there. “Oh, that’s the lead of the movie,” one said.“Him?” said his friend.Booster, right, with Conrad Ricamora in “Fire Island.”Jeong Park/Searchlight PicturesAhn was indignant, but as he told the story, Booster just nodded. “As a comedian, with everything I’ve done up to this point, I’m just supposed to be funny, you know?” Booster said. “But with this, I’m supposed to be a romantic lead, and it’s a lot for me in my life to be confronted with that and be like, ‘Am I that guy? Is this believable?’”Booster had never been in a relationship before he started writing “Fire Island,” and everything he knew about love, he had learned from watching Nora Ephron movies. But as “Fire Island” headed into production, Booster met the video-game producer John-Michael Kelly, and something in him softened.“I’ve just never met somebody that has made me want to not be alone until I met him,” Booster said.He began to rewrite the scenes he shared with Ricamora, pulling from actual conversations he’d had with Kelly. And the film’s final beat between the characters, which initially culminated in a flippant joke, was tweaked to land on something sweeter and more romantic. “It was like I was doing drag when I first wrote the movie about love,” Booster said, “and then after experiencing it and doing the rewrites, it felt much more real and lived in.”The movie has been earning stellar reviews, which has Booster breathing a sigh of relief: “When I was making it,” he said, “I thought, ‘If this movie is bad, I can never show my face here again. I just ruined my favorite place in the world.’” And yes, he and Yang both plan to go back to the island this summer.“Do you think it’s going to be different?” Ahn asked. “Do you think it’s going to be weird?”“It’s going to be extremely weird,” Booster said. “I’ll either be persona non grata or the mayor.”And what will it feel like when Booster goes from “He’s the lead of ‘Fire Island’?” to “He’s the lead of ‘Fire Island’!”Booster just shrugged: He’ll know when he knows. “I don’t think it’s hit me quite yet,” he said. “I’m not getting Grindr messages about it.” More

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      in Theater

      Mark Rylance on ‘Jerusalem’ and the Golf Comedy ‘Phantom of the Open’

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      One Tuesday afternoon last month, Mark Rylance was sitting in his London home, his face and body bearing the accouterments of Johnny (Rooster) Byron, the rowdy onetime daredevil he has been playing in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.”His mustache was long and feral; his bare arms stuck out of a sleeveless T-shirt, flaunting temporary tattoos. Despite the intimidating display, Rylance offered his assurance in a video interview that he was still very much his usual subdued self.“I’m not in character at the moment,” he said in his gentle speaking voice. “I’m still Mark at this time of day. He’s in there somewhere.”In a little while, Rylance would travel to the Apollo Theater, do some vocal warm-ups, play some volleyball in the empty seats with his co-stars, and spend another night in the wild and energetic guise of Rooster. The actor won Olivier and Tony Awards for the original West End and Broadway runs of “Jerusalem” just over a decade ago. Now 62, he has hardly lost a step in the revival: Reviewing the 2022 production for The New York Times, Matt Wolf wrote, “There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in ‘Jerusalem,’ a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman.”This feat feels 180 degrees removed from the soft-spoken, introspective film characters that Rylance has played in recent years: his Oscar-winning turn as the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” or Peter Isherwell, the bumbling tech billionaire from Adam McKay’s farce “Don’t Look Up.”“I’m still Mark at this time of day,” Rylance said. As for Rooster, the character he plays in “Jerusalem,” Rylance said, “He’s in there somewhere.” Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesRylance is once again in understated mode for the biographical comedy “The Phantom of the Open,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release June 3. He plays the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who slipped into a qualifying round of the 1976 British Open and proceeded to shoot an atrocious 121, making him an instant celebrity of sorts.Like the mercurial Flitcroft, Rylance enjoys defying audience expectations and slipping back and forth between roles at either end of the energy spectrum. As he explained, any character — whether easygoing or off-the-wall — could be an opportunity for new personal discoveries.“When I was younger, I was much more egotistically attached to concepts that would come up in my mind about how a character should be,” he said. “But now I know that there’s no bottom to the depth of insanity that will come up through me.”Rylance spoke further about his return to “Jerusalem,” the stark contrast between his stage and film roles and his performance in “The Phantom of the Open.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What has it been like to come back to “Jerusalem” after all these years?It’s a powerful event to be at the center of. The central dynamics of it have got stronger in society, the struggle between whatever you want to call it — order and chaos, machine and nature. Sometimes during rehearsals, I experienced feelings of resistance and doubt in myself.What got you past those feelings?Coming to my senses. I mean that literally: Stop thinking and smell the air. Taste whatever you’re tasting. Listen and look at the other actors. It immediately moves you into something much larger than your own fears or expectations. Doing long runs of plays, you can get into a rut of self-consciousness, and it feels like you’re in some kind of prison yard. But actually, when you come to your senses, the prison yard is open to the sky.The dynamism Rooster embodies — particularly compared to the inwardness of the film characters you’ve been playing lately — was that hard to conjure up again?It’s not a territory that I give myself license to explore very much, that kind of boldness of expression. He’s an exhausting but enjoyable character for me. I have to be quite careful with him. His appetite is strong. There’s a certain wrangling of him to the floor at the end of the show. “OK, calm down — it’s my turn again for a few hours.”Rylance in “Jerusalem” with, from left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear.Simon AnnandShould more actors revive the roles they played earlier in their careers?I’ve been lucky in my life to revive a number of parts. I played Hamlet at 16 in high school and then at 28 to 31 for the R.S.C. [Royal Shakespeare Company] and the A.R.T. [at Harvard], and then again at 40 at the Globe [Shakespeare’s Globe, where Rylance was artistic director]. Reviving parts was the normal practice for hundreds of years before filmed work came in. If we didn’t have film and television, Robert De Niro would probably be doing “Raging Bull” or “Taxi Driver” every five or 10 years, because people would want to see it again. Jimmy Stewart would be doing “It’s a Wonderful Life” every Christmas.Do you think of your film acting as a different undertaking than your stage acting, or are they one continuous thing to you?It all comes from the same place, of enjoying pretending to be someone you think is other than who you are. Eventually it’s all still you. It pulls different things out of me, things that are buried in the back of the drawer. Certainly, in the theater, I have a lot more access to a collective consciousness when I’m playing with an audience and it’s going well. You’re lifted into something larger than yourself. You don’t get it in film because the audience isn’t there.Have you been seeking out a specific type of character to play in the movies?I’m in the fortunate position to turn down roles, so I’m not completely a victim of fate. After a very explosive character like Rooster, I will be more interested in an implosive character like Cromwell in “Wolf Hall” or Abel in “Bridge of Spies.”Where would you place a character like Peter Isherwell from “Don’t Look Up”?I suppose the role in “Don’t Look Up” could have been either of those things. He might have been a much more expressive character like Elon Musk. But in the conversations with Adam, we were interested in his inability to communicate. There’s some kind of barrier between that kind of person and a true, intimate, satisfying connection with other human beings — or plants, animals, anything on the planet. He just didn’t know how to do that.“I was very much like Maurice,” Rylance said of the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, whom he plays in his new film. “I learned by watching television.”Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesDoes making a movie like that feel like playing a professional sport?It’s a bit like what you see in English football matches, the coach and the player who’s about to be substituted, having a quick word. “Watch out for him” or “Keep on the lefthand side.” That’s what it’s like on film. You’re suddenly joining a team who have already been playing for a while — Leonardo [DiCaprio] and Meryl [Streep], they were all quite tired. They’d been playing for months when I arrived for my 10 days.Was there a time in your career when you’d turned your back on film and TV acting entirely?There definitely was. When I came to New York for “Boeing-Boeing” on Broadway, I became friends with Fran McDormand and Joel Coen, and they auditioned me for “A Serious Man.” I was very enamored of the script and their films and really wanted to do it. When I didn’t get the part, I was surprised by how sad I was. It was an unusual feeling for me. I can picture myself now sitting in the cafe, thinking, oh, I really want this. So I pursued getting a New York agent and manager and started to go for auditions. And they were breathtakingly dull and bad things. Eventually, out of guilt, I took a film where I ended up lying on the floor, being beaten with a hammer, fish and chips being sicked up on my face, covered in blood. The director was on his Game Boy, 100 yards away, not even watching. And I quit.You were ready to walk away from screen acting entirely?All my career, I’ve been told by agents that unless I make time for film and TV, I’m not a serious actor. I thought, my favorite Kabuki actors and Kathakali actors, they don’t worry about film and television. I’ve got this fabulous theater career, I make a fine living at it, I have great parts. And I got rid of all these agents and decided I would never work in film again, unless someone really asked me and I had the time. I guess nature abhors a vacuum, because a few years after that, Spielberg asked me to be in “Bridge of Spies.”But no hard feelings about how “A Serious Man” turned out?Michael Stuhlbarg was wonderful in that role and the better actor for it, no doubt about it.What appealed to you about “The Phantom of the Open”?I’ve done a lot of comedies in the theater and enjoyed it. That was always a surprise to me, because I was very shy as a teenager and completely surprised when I got up and made people laugh. Even “Jerusalem,” tonight, there’ll be moments that I’ll think, why are they laughing? And it’ll take me a while to figure out what it is. This is one of the few comedies I’ve been asked to be a part of in film, with a lot of aspects of Don Quixote, jousting at windmills, believing his own identity, not being persuaded by other people’s perception of who he is. Not sociopathic or psychopathic, where he doesn’t even hear what other people are saying — there’s a dignity to Maurice, that he honors his own truth, and I loved that about it.Rylance in “The Phantom of the Open” as the quite bad amateur golfer Maurice Flitcroft.Nick Wall/Sony Pictures ClassicsDid playing a real-life figure interest you?I’m wary of playing very famous people. Even William Kunstler [whom he played in “The Trial of the Chicago 7”] is a bit on the edge of people really knowing him. The comments from some of the real-life Chicago Seven people, when they saw the film, and the nasty things they said about us trying to portray these characters, stung. I’ve been asked to play Truman and different people like that. The shoe is a bit too tight.Did you know anything about Maurice Flitcroft before making the movie?No. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wonderful YouTube stuff. His interviews are amazing, because you think, “You can’t be serious. You can’t really mean that. You must be brilliant at winding up reporters for a laugh.” But I’ve watched them hundreds of times and I can’t see a crack in the sincerity. I just have to play this guy sincere.Are you a golfer yourself?As kids, we would borrow our granddad’s golf clubs and make a golf course in his lawns in Kent. As we got to 15, 16, we would sometimes go to the local golf course on a Monday morning, when no one else was there, and play — very, very poorly and with no training. I was very much like Maurice. I learned by watching television.As we see in the film, Flitcroft gained a new level of recognition when he came to America. Did that feel familiar to you?Sometimes, the Americans have more appreciations for the English soul than the English. But there’s also a reverse thing — maybe we English have a deeper appreciation for American culture. I certainly learned more about American culture when I came to study at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in ’78 than I’d learned in America [where his family lived in the 1960s]. The young acting students were the ones who turned me on to Spencer Tracy, Bob Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Dean, Brando. Even Bob Dylan and Elvis, Frank Sinatra. All those people that my parents had loved to some degree — I hadn’t realized how deeply cultural and soulful they were until I was amongst young English actors saying, “Watch this, listen to this.”This makes me want to take a trip to England and learn what I’m missing about American culture.You could just take a day trip to New Jersey and get the same thing. More

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      in Movies

      Johnny Depp’s Win in Court Could Embolden Others, Lawyers Say

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      The actor’s victory against his ex-wife Amber Heard in one of the highest profile defamation cases to go to trial could inspire others to try their luck with juries.As the #MeToo movement fueled a public airing of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, defamation lawsuits quickly became a tool for both the accused and accusers to seek retribution and redemption.Men accused of misconduct have increasingly turned to defamation suits to try to clear their names, as have victims accused of making false allegations. But between the high costs of lawyers’ fees and the fears of revealing embarrassing details in open court, many such cases are settled before they ever reach trial.The bitter legal battle between the actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was closely watched in part because it was one of the highest-profile defamation cases to make it to trial recently, and several lawyers said that Mr. Depp’s victory in a Virginia court on Wednesday — when he was awarded more than $10 million in damages — could embolden others accused of abuse or misconduct to try their luck with juries, despite the real risks of airing dirty laundry in public.Ugly charges of physical abuse and lurid testimony came to define the Depp-Heard trial, which included one line of questioning about actual dirty laundry: the couple’s fierce argument over how the sheets in a Los Angeles penthouse where they were staying had become befouled. But the jury found in the end that Ms. Heard had defamed Mr. Depp in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”“Some people will definitely look at this as a playbook for suing your accuser,” said Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer who practices in Fairfax, Va., where the trial played out over six weeks, and who briefly represented the former employer of a witness called in the Depp case. The proceedings were broadcast and livestreamed far beyond the walls of the courtroom.The $10.35 million award to Mr. Depp was offset by a $2 million partial victory for Ms. Heard, who countersued Mr. Depp for defamation after a lawyer representing him made several statements to a British tabloid calling her abuse accusations a “hoax.” The jury did not find two of those statements defamatory, but found that a third — in which the lawyer had accused Ms. Heard of damaging the couple’s penthouse and calling 911 “to set Mr. Depp up” — did defame her.Mr. Depp praised the verdict, saying that “the jury gave me my life back,” while Ms. Heard described it as “heartbreaking.”The outcome differed from that of a case in Britain, where a judge had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. While Britain is sometimes considered hospitable to libel cases, the judge who heard that case, Andrew Nicol, found that there was sufficient proof to conclude that most of the assaults Ms. Heard described had occurred, and he determined that what the newspaper had published was “substantially true.”Several high-profile defamation cases in recent years have been settled before they reached trial. In 2019, seven women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation after they were accused of lying, settled their claims; a spokesman for Mr. Cosby said that his insurance company had decided to settle the cases without his consent. And the casino mogul Steve Wynn recently agreed to a settlement of a defamation suit he had filed against the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who said she would retract a statement accusing him of inappropriate behavior involving a client.In the wake of the Depp verdict, several lawyers and legal experts said, people accused of assault and misconduct may now be more inclined to try to bring defamation cases to trial. And some advocacy organizations and lawyers worry that the case could have a chilling effect on the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, adding to their fears that they could be punished for speaking out.“I do think that well-resourced individuals who feel slighted by speech that embarrassed or criticized them in some way may feel emboldened by this verdict,” said Nicole Ligon, a First Amendment law professor who provides pro bono legal advice for people considering going public with sexual misconduct accusations. “I imagine part of the reason they’ll feel emboldened is beyond the verdict itself but the public reaction to it.”The trial was captured by two cameras in the courtroom that allowed the testimony to be packaged into memes and online commentary — much of which mocked Ms. Heard’s accusations of abuse. In an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, said that the cameras had turned the trial into a “zoo.”Before the trial, Ms. Bredehoft had sought to persuade the judge to block cameras from the courtroom, arguing that Ms. Heard would be describing incidents of alleged sexual violence and predicting that “anti-Amber” networks would take statements out of context and play them repeatedly.“The potential for saturation of an unsequestered jury is a tremendous risk in this case,” Ms. Bredehoft argued, according to a court transcript from February.Judge Penney S. Azcarate ordered that cameras be allowed, maintaining that Ms. Bredehoft’s argument about victims of sexual offenses would only pertain to criminal trials. The judge suggested that allowing cameras could make the make the courthouse “safer” by giving a broader audience of viewers access to the case remotely.Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Watch Tom Cruise Go Hypersonic in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

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      The director Joseph Kosinski narrates a sequence from the film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.“Want Mach 10? Let’s give ’em Mach 10.”That line, delivered by Maverick (Tom Cruise) in the long-anticipated, and already quite popular, sequel to “Top Gun,” may help to prepare audiences for the fact that things have become a little bit more updated in the sky since the 1986 original.This early sequence has Maverick arriving to discover that the hypersonic flight test he was meant to perform has been canceled by an admiral (Ed Harris), who would prefer to spend on drones.But “canceled” is not in Maverick’s vocabulary, and he proceeds with the test as planned, aiming to reach Mach 10 speeds.Discussing the scene, the director Joseph Kosinski said that he and his crew designed the sleek aircraft in conjunction with Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed Martin.It is based on an aircraft “that may or may not exist,” he said. The shots of it in the hangar are “a full-scale mock-up that we built with their cooperation.”Kosinski said the scene was meant to “take a turn and take ‘Top Gun’ into the future. Here we see Maverick on the very cutting edge of aviation.”Pay close attention to the final shot of the scene, where Maverick takes off. It had to be done by one of the few Navy pilots cleared to fly what is called a low-altitude transition maneuver. The pressure wave the maneuver created destroyed a piece of the set, which meant the crew was only able to do the shot once.Read the “Top Gun: Maverick” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Crimes of the Future’ Review: The Horror, the Horror

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      In his latest shocker, David Cronenberg prophetically reads the signs while Léa Seydoux performs surgeries on a beatific Viggo Mortensen.Few filmmakers slither under the skin and directly into the head as mercilessly as David Cronenberg. For decades, he has been unsettling audiences, derailing genre expectations and expanding the limits of big-screen entertainment with exploding heads, gasping wounds and desiring, suffering, metamorphosing bodies. A modern-day augur, he opens up characters — psychically and physically — with a detached cool and scalpel-like cinematic technique, exploring what lies (and festers) inside as he divines prophetic meaning.His latest, “Crimes of the Future,” is very tough and creepy, yet improbably relaxed; it’s a low-key dispatch from the end of the world. Set in an indeterminate future, it centers on a pair of artists — Viggo Mortensen as Saul, Léa Seydoux as Caprice — who mount surgeries as performances. With Saul lying supine in a biomorphic apparatus as viewers gaze from the sidelines, Caprice — using a multicolored controller — delicately probes Saul’s viscera, removing mysterious new organs that have grown inside his body. The audience members are quiet, attentive, respectful (moviegoers might yelp); for his part, Saul looks ecstatic.The movie takes place in a depopulated waterfront city where the carcasses of rusted, barnacle-covered ships languish on the shore. There, in shadowy streets and derelict buildings, men and women roam, often without apparent purpose, as if heavily medicated or perhaps blasted by that collective devastation called reality. There’s a disconcerting, characteristically Cronenbergian lack of affect to most of them — few experience pain anymore — even when they’re carving one another up in dark corners or in performances. Times have changed, but the human appetite for violence and spectacle remain intact.The story emerges incrementally in scenes that seem to drift even as they lock into place. In between performances and shoptalk, Saul and Caprice are drawn into overlapping intrigues involving a dead child and an inner-beauty pageant. An amusing Kristen Stewart shows up with Don McKellar in a decrepit office that once could have been used by Philip Marlowe, but now has the disquieting words “National Organ Registry” inscribed on the front door. There’s also a cop (Welket Bungué) who skulks around with Saul in the shadows, where the dead child’s father (Scott Speedman) lurks enigmatically.For the most part, the world in “Crimes of the Future” resembles what you imagine everyday life might look like in a not-too-distant future, one defined by need, decay, violence, extreme entertainment and environmental catastrophes of our own wretched making. It is terrible, and eerily familiar. But Cronenberg doesn’t pass judgment on it or shake his fist at the sky. Instead, with visual precision, arid humor, restrained melancholia and a wildly inventive vision of tomorrow that puts those of most movie futurists to shame, he reveals a world that can be agony to look at, exposing its pulpy innards much like Caprice opens up Saul.Mortensen and Seydoux are the conjoined heart and soul of “Crimes of the Future,” and they imbue the movie with waves of feeling, appreciably warming the overall chill. His eyebrows seemingly shaved and face often obscured by a scarf, Saul presents a curious figure, one who’s at once an artist, ninja and religious ascetic. Although his hands and feet look undamaged, the placement of the cables on his appendages — as well as the many cuts that Caprice makes on his body during their performances — evoke stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ. And Saul does suffer, clearly, but for whom? For him, Caprice, us?“Crimes of the Future” is about a lot of things, including desire and death, pain and pleasure, transformation and transcendence. Saul is its centerpiece. You first see him at home in bed, a structure that hangs from the ceiling like a suspended cradle. It’s striking, but what really catches the eye are the bed’s cables, medical tubing that look like elephant trunks and are attached to Saul’s pale, bare hands and feet. The bottom of each cable resembles a small webbed hand, a distinctly anthropomorphic vision that makes it seem as if he were being cared for by an extraterrestrial nanny.The attentiveness of Saul’s care, including from Caprice, makes a painful contrast with the horrific indifference shown to the movie’s one child (Sotiris Siozos). “Crimes of the Future” begins with the murder of this child; it’s a visceral, distressing jolt that will drive at least some moviegoers out of the theaters. Opening a story with a shock of violence is an obvious way to kick-start events, create intrigue, hook the audience. We are used to it. The murder of a child, though, is more unsettling than most screen violence. That’s partly because of its horror, but also because — while movies show us many ghastly things — they like to package violence, sex it up, make it cinematic. They resist showing us at our real and abject worst.In strictly functional terms, the murder serves as a red flag — a kind of trigger warning for the movie audience — an announcement of intent or at least narrative limits. Cronenberg is, I think, telegraphing what kind of movie you’re about to watch: He will not be taking any prisoners or blunting the story’s edges. The murder is genuinely awful and it rocks you to the core, creating a low, unwavering thrum of deep unease that remains intact through the disparate narrative turns and tone shifts. Most movies that deploy violence tidy it up with empty outrage and vacuous moralizing; here, the violence haunts you.In its themes, body work and convulsions of violence, “Crimes of the Future” evokes some of Cronenberg’s other films, notably “Videodrome,” a shocker about (among other things) a man who loses his mind. This new movie feels more melancholic than many of the earlier ones, though perhaps I’m the one who’s changed. Once again, people are evolving and devolving, mutating into something familiar yet also something different and terrifying. Yet despite the morbid laughs and the beatific smile that can light up Saul’s face like that of St. Teresa of Ávila, “Crimes of the Future” feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.Crimes of the FutureRated R for filicide, surgeries and power-drill violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      George Shapiro, Talent Manager Who Pushed for ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 91

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      He left his job as an agent in the 1970s to guide the careers of Jerry Seinfeld, Carl Reiner and other comics.George Shapiro, an ebullient Hollywood talent manager who nurtured and oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in the Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 91.His family announced the death in a statement.Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Mr. Seinfeld, whom he signed as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980. He lobbied NBC to build a series around him and was an executive producer of the hugely popular “Seinfeld” sitcom.“He was the only person to read every draft of every episode of the series and was very critical as they went from first draft to shooting draft,” Mr. Seinfeld said in a phone interview. “He was the only one who really knew what we were doing.”He added: “The bond between George and I was, we thought show business was the greatest thing invented by man, and we couldn’t get enough.”Mr. Shapiro was also an executive producer of Mr. Seinfeld’s Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” which is on hiatus.A schmoozer who loved to be on sets, Mr. Shapiro was a partner for more than 40 years with his childhood friend Howard West in their talent management firm Shapiro/West & Associates.As managers, they oversaw and protected their clients interests by being executive producers of various projects, including “The Last Remake of Beau Geste” (1977), starring and co-written by Marty Feldman; “Summer Rental” (1985) and “Sibling Rivalry” (1990), which Mr. Reiner directed; and two TV specials starring Mr. Kaufman.Mr. Shapiro first watched Mr. Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in 1978, despite the comedian’s reluctance.“They already had the character of Latka. And, of course, Andy did this Foreign Man character, so it was a perfect match,” Mr. Shapiro told Newsday in 1999. “Taxi,” too, was a hit.Mr. Shapiro and Mr. West were executive producers of “Man on the Moon” (1999), which starred Jim Carrey as Mr. Kaufman. (Mr. Kaufman died in 1984 at 35.) Danny DeVito, a producer of the film, played Mr. Shapiro, and Mr. Shapiro had a role as a club owner who had once fired Mr. Kaufman.Early in the film, Mr. DeVito tells Mr. Carrey, “You’re insane, but you also may be brilliant.”Mr. Shapiro’s other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”George Larry Shapiro was born on May 18, 1932, in the Bronx. His father, Ira, was a furrier. his mother, Sylvia (Lebost) Shapiro, was a social activist. George’s time at P.S. 80 in the Bronx, where he met Mr. West, was the subject of two documentaries, “The Bronx Boys,” in 2003, and “The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80,” 10 years later.As a youngster, he loved comedies, including those made by Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. “I sat in the theater and felt like someone was tickling me,” Mr. Shapiro said in a Television Academy interview in 2007.He got a stronger whiff of show business as a teenager while working as a summer lifeguard at the Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where writers like Neil Simon; actors like Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett and Pat Carroll; and the director and choreographer Herb Ross created revues and other shows. Agents traveled from Manhattan to scout talent on weekends — the sort of future that appealed to Mr. Shapiro.“I said, ‘This is your job?” he said in the Television Academy interview. “To watch the show, to have a nice dinner, to come to a resort with a lake? I have to look into that.”After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree from what is now New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration, Mr. Shapiro served in the Army for two years. He considered a career in social work and sales — his older brother, Don, was a salesman in Texas and offered him a job — but got a mailroom position at the William Morris Agency in Manhattan with help from Mr. Reiner, his uncle.He was soon promoted to agent, with a salary of $38 a week, before eventually moving to the company’s Los Angeles office, where he specialized in packaging mid-1960s TV series like “Gomer Pyle — USMC” and “That Girl” with the actors, writer and directors represented by William Morris.But Mr. Shapiro disliked being responsible for so many clients, and so in 1973 he started his own management firm to focus on a few preferred ones. Mr. West, with whom he had worked at William Morris, soon joined him, and they ran Shapiro/West & Associates until Mr. West’s death in 2015.To push for a sitcom for Mr. Seinfeld, Mr. Shapiro sent numerous letters to Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment. The nudging eventually led to a meeting with Mr. Tartikoff and other network executives at which Mr. Seinfeld laid down a firm rule.“Jerry made one thing clear,” Mr. Shapiro told the Television Academy. “He said, ‘I’m not going to play a shoe salesman or an accountant or a father with a job.’ And he came up with the premise of the series, that he would play himself.”In recent years, Mr. Shapiro produced “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” (2017), a documentary in which Mr. Reiner talked to nonagenarians like Betty White and Dick Van Dyke, and “The Super Bob Einstein Movie” (2021), about the comic actor and writer known for his ongoing television portrayal of Super Dave Osborne, a hapless parody of a daredevil.Mr. Shapiro is survived by his former wife, Melody (Sherr) Shapiro, from whom he was divorced; his daughters, Carrie Shapiro Fuentes and Stefanie Shapiro; a son, Danny; five grandchildren; and his brother. His marriage to Diane Barnett ended with her death in 2005.Mr. Reiner’s son Rob Reiner, the actor and director, said Mr. Shapiro had been a nurturer, professionally and personally.“He loved my dad, he looked up to him — he was like a father to him,” said Mr. Reiner, whose company, Castle Rock Entertainment, produced “Seinfeld.” “George loved being around my dad, and when he started getting older, he’d come over to the house and walk him around the block. That’s the thing you need to know about George: He took care of everybody.” More

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      ‘The Phantom of the Open’ Review: ‘The World’s Worst Golfer’ Wins Laughs

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      Inspired by Maurice Flitcroft’s stunningly bad results at the 1976 British Open, this comedy plays with a genre in which underdogs so often triumph.The British comedy “The Phantom of the Open” — about a working man’s dreams of golf glory — features a few dreamlike sequences that suggest the director, Craig Roberts, is a fan of the 1946 fantasy romance, “Stairway to Heaven,” especially when a tiny golfer circles a golf ball the size of the moon.Inspired by Maurice Flitcroft’s attempts to qualify for the British Open in 1976, this comedy is also the sort of good-hearted movie the director Frank Capra would have liked to have taken a swing at.The actor Mark Rylance brings a mix of sorrow and optimism to his portrayal of Flitcroft, the shipyard crane operator who, encouraged by his wife, Jean (Sally Hawkins), to finally follow his dreams, enters the British Open. The rub: Neither of them knows anything about golf.A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.“Phantom” opens with Maurice nervously awaiting a television interview years after his first try at the Open. The scene plays with a genre in which underdogs so often triumph. Maurice, it turns out, is stunningly bad. Simon Farnaby based the screenplay on his and the sports journalist Scott Murray’s biography, “The Phantom of the Open: Maurice Flitcroft, The World’s Worst Golfer.”Maurice’s personal mantra is “practice is the road to perfection.” Even so, it may not get him there. His persistence will, however, aggravate golfing elites and mortify his stepson Michael (Jake Davies), who has been promoted by the shipyard higher-ups. The twins Christian and Jonah Lees bring a silly buoyancy to this already offbeat tale as Maurice and Jean’s championship, disco-dancing sons. (That, too, is based on fact.)The Phantom of the OpenRated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More