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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Merry Wives’ and George Carlin

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      A recording of a Public Theater Shakespeare show airs on PBS. And a documentary about George Carlin debuts on HBO.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, May 16 – 22. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE NIGHT HOUSE (2021) 7:08 p.m. on HBO. Rebecca Hall plays a grieving New York schoolteacher reckoning with a profound loss in this horror movie from David Bruckner. After her husband of 14 years, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), takes his own life, Beth (Hall) holes up at her lake house. She begins experiencing sinister, apparently supernatural phenomena that call into question whether she’s haunted by grief or something else. The result is a “hyper-focused, unnervingly sure” thriller, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The New York Times. “Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood,” she said, “while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces.” Hall, Catsoulis added, is “spectacular, flinty and fraying.”TuesdayLIONEL RICHIE: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GERSHWIN PRIZE FOR POPULAR SONG 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Since its inception in 2007, the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize has been given to Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Smokey Robinson and two Pauls — McCartney and Simon — among other important pop musicians. In March, Lionel Richie became the latest recipient, in a ceremony at the D.A.R. Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., where he was honored by other performers including Gloria Estefan (who was a recipient of the prize in 2019), Yolanda Adams, Luke Bryan and Boyz II Men. A recording of the event debuts on PBS on Tuesday night.WednesdayKINGDOM BUSINESS 10:30 p.m. on BET. Two sides of the gospel singer Yolanda Adams are on display this week: See her in a tribute to Lionel Richie (above) and in this new BET drama, in which Adams plays Denita Jordan, a fictional gospel star who runs a record label. Jordan’s popularity is threatened by a younger singer, Rbel (played by Serayah), whose rise is made complicated by a checkered past.ThursdayMONEYBALL (2011) 5 p.m. on AMC. The Oakland Athletics get a boost from bean counting and a man named Beane in this biographical drama. Adapted from a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, “Moneyball” revisits a period around the beginning of the 2000s in which Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), then the general manager of the A’s, leads a transformation of the team — and, eventually, of baseball strategy itself — using statistics. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis called it “the kind of all-too-rare pleasurable Hollywood diversion that gives you a contact high.”FridayGeorge Carlin in “George Carlin’s American Dream.”George Carlin’s Estate/HBOGEORGE CARLIN’S AMERICAN DREAM 8 p.m. on HBO. It makes sense that this new documentary about the comic George Carlin is split into two parts: There was really more than one Carlin. There was the suit-wearing Carlin of the 1960s. The shaggy “seven dirty words” Carlin of the early ’70s. The aged firebrand Carlin of the 2000s. “At the moment when it seemed like he was out of gas, he would suddenly recharge and reinvent himself,” the comedian and filmmaker Judd Apatow, who directed “American Dream” with Michael Bonfiglio, said in a recent interview with The Times. The new documentary, which will be shown over two consecutive nights on Friday and Saturday, explores the many ups and downs of Carlin’s career, and includes interviews with other comic performers including Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Colbert, Bill Burr, Bette Midler, W. Kamau Bell and Jon Stewart. It takes its name from a line Carlin delivered in one of his final specials, “Life Is Worth Losing,” recorded in 2005. “It’s the American dream,” he said, “because you have to be asleep to believe it.”GREAT PERFORMANCES: MERRY WIVES 9 p.m. on PBS. After a pandemic pause, the Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare in the Park series returned last summer with this rethink of the Shakespeare comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Adapted by the playwright Jocelyn Bioh, who is a child of Ghanaian immigrants, and directed by Saheem Ali, who was born in Kenya, this version of the play is set in an African diasporic community in contemporary Harlem. Its cast is led by Jacob Ming-Trent (“Watchmen,” “The Forty-Year-Old Version”) who, as Falstaff, “combines into one bigger-than-life portrait your drunk uncle, a horndog Redd Foxx and some would-be Barry White,” Jesse Green wrote in his review for The Times. This PBS broadcast is a recording of the 2021 show shot at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.A scene from “The New York Times Presents: Elon Musk’s Crash Course.”FXTHE NEW YORK TIMES PRESENTS: ELON MUSK’S CRASH COURSE 10 p.m. on FX. Late last year, The Times published a deep-dive story on Elon Musk’s persistence in pushing autonomous-driving technology with Tesla in ways that former employees said undermined safety. The work of the journalists behind that story — the technology correspondent Cade Metz and the auto-industry reporter Neal E. Boudette — is at the heart of this new, feature-length documentary from the director Emma Schwartz, which goes even further into how Musk’s enthusiasm for self-driving cars may be inconsistent with where both the business and the technology is.SaturdaySATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 11:30 p.m. on NBC. Natasha Lyonne will host the finale of SNL’s 47th season, fresh off the Season 2 debut of Leone’s own show, “Russian Doll,” on Netflix. Japanese Breakfast is set to be the musical guest.SundayA scene from “Bob’s Burgers.”20th TelevisionBOB’S BURGERS 9 p.m. on Fox. Loren Bouchard’s animated sitcom about the Belcher family and its meaty restaurant ends on Sunday night with an episode whose plot hinges on erotic fiction writing. The show was renewed for a 13th season on Fox, but it will be back much sooner on bigger screens: “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is slated to hit theaters on May 27. More

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      How Hollywood and the Media Fueled the Political Rise of J.D. Vance

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      “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir that became a star-studded film, raised the profile of the onetime “Never Trump guy” who won an Ohio primary with the help of the former president.Members of New York’s smart set gathered on a warm Thursday evening in the early summer of 2016 at the ornately wallpapered apartment of two Yale Law School professors in the elegant Ansonia building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to toast a Marine Corps veteran, venture capitalist and first-time author named J.D. Vance.They were celebrating Mr. Vance’s new memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled his working-class upbringing in southwestern Ohio and an ascent that brought him to Yale, where his mentors included Amy Chua, one of the party’s hosts. Mr. Vance seemed modest, self-effacing and a bit of a fish out of water among guests drawn from the worlds of publishing and journalism, a half-dozen attendees later recalled. “It was almost stupid how disarmed the people were by that,” said one of them, the novelist Joshua Cohen.“Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out as Donald J. Trump was overcoming long odds to win the presidency, became a phenomenon, and Mr. Vance — a conservative who reassured Charlie Rose that fall that he was “a Never Trump guy” and “never liked him,” and later said he voted for a third-party candidate that year — became widely sought out for his views on what drove white working-class Trump supporters, particularly in the Rust Belt. The book, which had a modest initial print run of 10,000 copies, went on to sell more than three million, according to its publisher, HarperCollins. It was made into a 2020 feature film by Hollywood A-listers including the director Ron Howard and the actresses Amy Adams and Glenn Close. But the J.D. Vance story did not end there.The former “Never Trump guy” went on to embrace Mr. Trump last year, and eagerly accepted his endorsement in the Republican primary for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio that he won earlier this month. Mr. Vance, who once called Mr. Trump “reprehensible,” thanked Mr. Trump “for giving us an example of what could be in this country.”Mr. Trump’s endorsement proved critical in the race, along with the financial support of Peter Thiel, the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire, and favorable coverage by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. But Mr. Vance’s political rise was also made possible by the worlds of publishing, media and Hollywood, fields long seen as liberal bastions, which had embraced him as a credible geographer of a swath of America that coastal elites knew little about, believing that he shared their objections to Mr. Trump.“The reason ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was such a high-octane book was academics, professors, cultural arbitrators — liberals — embraced it as explaining a forgotten part of America,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University who once introduced Mr. Vance at an event. “They wouldn’t have touched Vance with a 10-foot pole if they thought he was part of this Trump, xenophobic, bigot-fueled zeitgeist.”Mr. Howard, who has said that he sought to downplay the political implications of “Hillbilly Elegy” in directing the film, describing it as a family drama, declined to comment for this article. But he told The Hollywood Reporter that he was “surprised by some of the positions” Mr. Vance has taken and the “statements he’s made.” He has not spoken with Mr. Vance since the film’s release, he said.Many of the entities in publishing and Hollywood who helped fuel Mr. Vance’s rise — including HarperCollins, which published his book; Mr. Howard and his co-producer, Brian Grazer; and Netflix, which financed and distributed the film — declined to comment on his reinvention as a Trumpist who rails against elites and who campaigned with polarizing far-right figures, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida.“Hillbilly Elegy” was made into a film starring Amy Adams and Gabriel Basso.Lacey Terrell/NETFLIX“Hillbilly Elegy” was published by a subsidiary of News Corp., which is controlled by the conservative Murdoch family, but through a flagship imprint that puts out broadly appealing books. It did not originally mention Mr. Trump. In an afterword added to the paperback edition, Mr. Vance wrote that despite his reservations about Mr. Trump, “there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me,” citing his “disdain for the ‘elites’” and his insight that Republicans had done too little for working- and middle-class voters.Mr. Vance’s book had a modest initial print run of 10,000 copies but ended up selling more than three million, according to its publisher, HarperCollins.HarperCollins“Hillbilly Elegy” tried to explain some of those voters’ concerns, and in appearances on CNN (where he was named a contributor) and National Public Radio, as well as in opinion essays in The New York Times in 2016 and 2017, Mr. Vance tried to connect those concerns to their support for Mr. Trump.“He owes nearly everything to having become a ‘Trump whisperer’ phenomenon,” Rod Dreher, whose interview with Mr. Vance for The American Conservative in July 2016 was so popular it briefly crashed the magazine’s website, said in an email. “The thing is, he didn’t seek this out. J.D. became celebrated because he really had something important to say, and said it in a way that was comprehensible to a wide audience.”But he also found a particular audience among liberals. “Though ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was read widely across the political spectrum, my impression was that the book helped liberals to understand the causes of what had happened to them in the election of 2016,” said Adrian Zackheim, the publisher of several Penguin Random House imprints, including Sentinel, which focuses on conservative books.Mr. Vance’s work was embraced at a moment when Mr. Trump’s surprising election prompted many media executives to consider what audiences they had been overlooking. ABC, for instance, decided to make a reboot of the sitcom “Roseanne,” a lighthearted prime-time portrayal of people who supported Mr. Trump, including Roseanne Conner herself. (The show was later canceled after its star, Roseanne Barr, posted a racist tweet.)In 2019, Netflix won a bidding war and pledged a reported $45 million to finance the “Hillbilly Elegy” film. It received poor reviews, but was reportedly among Netflix’s most-streamed films the week of its release in November of 2020. Both Mr. Howard and Mr. Grazer have been generous Democratic donors, according to Federal Election Commission filings. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Ms. Close, who played Mr. Vance’s grandmother, put up a series of social media posts urging voters to support Joseph R. Biden Jr. Ms. Close’s representatives did not respond to inquiries.As Mr. Vance ran as an outsider and a conservative, some of his opponents have sought to link him to Hollywood.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesLast year, as Mr. Vance began his Senate run, he renounced his earlier criticism of Mr. Trump. He deleted some old tweets, including one that had called Mr. Trump “reprehensible.” Last month, Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Vance as a prodigal son “who said some bad” stuff about him, using a stronger word than stuff. (Mr. Vance’s campaign declined to comment for this article.)As a Republican candidate in a Republican-leaning Midwestern state, Mr. Vance did not appear eager to tout the central role the publishing, media and film industries played in his rise. But his political opponents have been more than happy to draw the connection.An ad last month for Josh Mandel, a Republican who ran against Mr. Vance in the primary, said Mr. Vance “wrote a book trashing Ohioans as hillbillies, then sold his story to Hollywood.” And Elizabeth Walters, the chairwoman of the Ohio Democratic Party, charged that Mr. Vance had landed “a New York City book deal to cash in on Ohioans’ pain” and made “untold millions from a Netflix Hollywood movie.”Accepting the nomination, Mr. Vance attacked “a Democrat party that bends the knee to major American corporations and their woke values, because the Democrats actually agree with those ridiculous values, you know, 42 genders and all the other insanity.”The fact that a rising star in the Republican Party, which has recently emphasized cultural grievances with the likes of Twitter, CNN and Disney, came to prominence through elite media institutions is not surprising to scholars and cultural critics who have long understood the symbiotic relationship between those ostensible antagonists: the conservative movement and the media-entertainment complex.“To establish populist bona fides — since they represent economic elites — cultural elites are the ones they can rally against,” said Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College.Frank Rich, an essayist, television producer, and former New York Times critic and columnist, said that some of the contemporary Republican Party’s biggest stars — including Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — are “the products of elite institutions” whose “constant railing against the elites is just odd, because it’s so disingenuous.”“Where would Vance be if it hadn’t been for mainstream publishing and book promotion, if it hadn’t been for Ron Howard — an important person in show business who identifies as liberal — and Glenn Close and Netflix?” Mr. Rich asked. “Where would Trump be without NBC Universal, Mark Burnett, the whole showbiz world?”Kathryn Cramer Brownell, an associate professor of history at Purdue University, situated Mr. Vance in a lineage of figures from the entertainment world who became Republican politicians, including George Murphy, an actor turned senator from California; Ronald Reagan, whose success as a film actor helped him become California governor and president; Arnold Schwarzenegger, another movie star and California governor; and Mr. Trump, a longtime tabloid fixture who gained newfound celebrity during the 2000s as host of the NBC reality competition show “The Apprentice,” created by Mr. Burnett.“This is something they are really quick to criticize the left for — relying too much on Hollywood for support and glamour,” Brownell said.“But,” she added, “the Republican Party has been more successful at turning entertainers into successful candidates than Democrats.” More

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      Fred Ward, Actor Who Starred in ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Tremors,’ Dies at 79

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      The versatile actor was known for bringing a grounded charisma to roles across a decades-long career.Fred Ward, the versatile actor who played an astronaut in “The Right Stuff,” a grizzled drifter in “Tremors” and the titular writer in “Henry and June” across a decades-long career, died on Sunday. He was 79.His publicist, Ron Hoffman, confirmed his death. He did not specify the cause of death.“The unique thing about Fred Ward is that you never knew where he was going to pop up, so unpredictable were his career choices,” Mr. Hoffman said in a statement.Mr. Ward was likely best known for his performances in “The Right Stuff,” the acclaimed 1983 adaptation of a book by Tom Wolfe, and “Tremors,” a monster movie that ascended to cult classic status since its release in 1990.But his long career included a broad range of roles in which he applied a sometimes gruff but almost always grounded charisma to parts on film and TV: among other parts, a union activist in “Silkwood,” a detective in “Miami Blues,” Henry Miller in “Henry and June,” and a motorcycle racer in “Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann.”Mr. Ward also played the lead in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” which was intended to be the first in a series but fared poorly in theaters in 1985 and drew mixed reviews.In an interview with The New York Times in 1990, Mr. Ward explained how he chose some roles, saying, “I look for change, a person that changes — he’s on a voyage.”He said he was drawn to the part of Henry Miller because, “I’m part of a generation that, I think, was heavily influenced by Henry Miller, Paris, the ideals there: liberation, a kind of personal and benevolent anarchy that sings through all his pages.”He is survived by his wife, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward. More

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      ‘Firestarter’ Review: A Horror Remake With No Spark

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      Zac Efron stars as the father of a girl, Charlie, who is learning to control her powers.The first “Firestarter” (1984) starred a not-yet-10-year-old Drew Barrymore as a girl who can start fires — with her mind, which makes all the difference. It was based on a Stephen King novel that wedded “Carrie”-redolent telekinesis to the kind of paranoia of “Three Days of the Condor.” The little girl’s power, and the powers of her parents, were the results of shadowy government agency experiments.That’s true here, too, in a remake directed by Keith Thomas from a script by Scott Teems. But the paranoia theme, which has the girl, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and her family living off the grid at the movie’s outset, is quickly shrugged off. This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.Zac Efron pays Andy, Charlie’s father, and he’s got powers, too — with a twitch of the neck, he can cloud people’s minds. Only this action pains him and makes his eyes bleed like Ray Milland at the end of “X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes.” Charlie has inherited his power (without the bleeding).You would think this would add some punch to the proceedings, but no. The final face-off between Charlie and a supercilious military villain (Gloria Reuben) is startlingly anticlimactic, and the subsequent when-children-kill coda is just plain limp. This is also one of those movies where you can’t quite tell if the special effects are janky on purpose.The best thing in this movie is the tense electronic score, concocted by Daniel Davies, Cody Carpenter and his father, John Carpenter. Yes, that John Carpenter — one of the great American directors, and one who makes genre films almost exclusively. As the old magazine puzzles used to ask, what’s wrong with this picture?FirestarterRated R for fire, cursing. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      In ‘The Innocents,’ Kids Behaving Deadly

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      Eskil Vogt, the Oscar-nominated co-writer of “The Worst Person in the World,” explores a childhood paradox in his new horror movie: how kids can be both innocent and cruel.It’s no biggie for horror movie villains to be rabid grannies or killer Santas. But what kind of monster kills a cat?In the new supernatural horror film “The Innocents,” that monster is a preteen named Ben (Sam Ashraf), and his gasp-inducing act early in the film is a hint of the sins to come by his, and other, little hands.“We still like to think that kids are pure angels,” Eskil Vogt, the film’s writer-director, said in a recent interview over video. “I think we need to face that the opposite is true.”Ben, who lives in a towering Oslo apartment complex, isn’t the only kid there with psychic powers. When young Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), her autistic older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), and their mother and father move into the building, Anna miraculously regains her ability to speak. Anna and a neighbor girl named Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who can hear thoughts, team up to call on their powers for (mostly) peaceful ends, flying under the radar of their clueless parents.But Ben, a bullied boy raised by a distant mom, struggles with a far more sinister power he’s not equipped to handle, and the consequences are deadly and heartbreaking.Rakel Lenora Flottum as Ida and Sam Ashraf as Ben in “The Innocents.”IFC MidnightA movie of icy dread, “The Innocents” unnervingly explores how children can be both uncorrupted and cruel, a paradox that can have deep emotional repercussions that linger well past the playground years. The young characters don’t question their otherworldly powers, nor do they fully comprehend the responsibility that comes with them. But they know enough not to tell their parents.Vogt was no different. On vacation as a kid, he remembers using an air gun to shoot a sea gull in flight; he saw the bullet make impact, but the bird didn’t fall. He kept it from his parents.“I remember walking around that day and going to bed that night thinking that this sea gull was dying slowly in agony somewhere because of me,” he said.Vogt said he drew on that and other fraught childhood decisions as he made “The Innocents.” The film (in theaters and on demand) arrives just months after he and his friend and longtime collaborator, the director Joachim Trier, shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for their humanist dramedy “The Worst Person in the World.”In a separate video interview, Trier said if there’s a through line between both films, it’s how Vogt uses “form and visuality to make something that’s worth showing on a big screen.” If the terrors in “The Innocents” are more pernicious than sensational, Trier said it’s the product of Vogt’s deep affection for the films of Alain Resnais (“Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and other formalist cinema of the ’60s. “He’s hard core about that,” Trier said.Slow-burn horror, too. In 2014, Vogt wrote and directed the moody thriller “Blind,” about a paranoid sightless woman. Three years later he and Trier co-wrote Trier’s film “Thelma,” about a college student with telekinetic powers.A horror movie fan, Vogt said he was drawn to the films of David Cronenberg, especially the devilish man-child movie “The Brood” (1979), but also to Wolf Rilla’s “Village of the Damned” (1960), with what he called its “weird and special” youngsters.“I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid,” Vogt said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesVogt said he also looked no further than his living room and his two children, ages 9 and 11, who “can be the best kids in the world and in an instant they can become raging lunatics.” He said it was because of open casting, not an intentional choice, that the kids in “The Innocents” are outsiders beyond their powers: Anna has autism, Aisha has vitiligo and Ben is a boy of color (Ashraf was born in Norway and is of Persian and Pakistani descent).“It wasn’t like they are magical because they’re special,” he added.What Vogt hasn’t made, he stressed, is an evil-kids movie.“It’s a story about basic humanity,” he said.“The Innocents” joins other recent projects about children on the dark side, including the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Firestarter” and the HBO dark comedy series “The Baby.”T.S. Kord, the author of “Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt” (2016), said in an email that ​​diabolic kids have featured in horror with increasing frequency in recent decades as horror “wants to point out all the ways in which the human race is screwing up.”“We’ve devastated children and childhood for practically ever, now they’re striking back,” said Kord, who teaches German, film studies and comparative literature at University College London. Yet we have a societal stake in claiming that children are innocent, she added, “because their innocence defines us as a humane society.”What may unsettle viewers most about “The Innocents” is Vogt’s daring choice to assign villainy to tweens with at least some agency in their actions. In horror, kids are usually bad because of external forces (“The Exorcist”), or they’re teenagers who’ve already been messed up (“Eden Lake”). Of course, there are also fiendish fetuses (“The Unborn”) and blackhearted babies (“Grace”), but their consciousness is still unshaped and therefore particularly susceptible to outside diabolical forces.Flottum’s character goes for a swing in “The Innocents.”IFC Midnight“The Innocents” is closer in spirit to “The Bad Seed” and other horror films in the far more frightening middle, where kids do bad things because they haven’t totally figured out that other people have feelings.“During childhood we have to create our own set of values and morals and not rely on what our parents told us,” Vogt said. Eventually, he continued, “you have to do some of the stuff your mother said you shouldn’t do, and figure out if she was right or not.”It remains to be seen how kids behaving deadly in “The Innocents” will land with audiences. One critic wished that Vogt had focused “more on the harmless side of the children’s powers,” an indication of how strong the desire is to affirm childhood as a time of incorruptible purity.But “kids with powers have consequences,” Vogt said. So does just being a kid.“I remember lying in bed and hearing sounds and imagining the worst thing and how that would become part of my reality because I had no way of distinguishing between what’s real and not,” he said. “I would be completely and totally scared out of my mind. I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid.” More

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      Joanna Barnes, Actress in ‘The Parent Trap’ and Its Remake, Dies at 87

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      In 1961, she played a vixenish fortune hunter. In 1998, she played the character’s mother. In between, she kept busy on TV and also wrote novels.Joanna Barnes, whose many screen roles included the conniving fiancée of a divorced father in the 1961 film “The Parent Trap” and, 37 years later, the character’s mother in the remake — and who, while still enjoying success as an actress, embarked on a successful second career as a writer — died on April 29 at her home in The Sea Ranch, Calif. She was 87.The cause was cancer, her friend Sally Jackson said.Ms. Barnes’s role in the hit Disney movie “The Parent Trap” was part of her busy first five years in Hollywood, which began in television on series including “Playhouse 90” and “Cheyenne” and then advanced to supporting roles in “Auntie Mame” (1958), opposite Rosalind Russell, and “Tarzan, the Ape Man” (1959), which starred Denny Miller in the title role.Ms. Barnes, as Jane, in the 1959 film “Tarzan, the Ape Man,” with Denny Miller, left, in the title role and Cesare Danova.FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty ImagesLife magazine featured Ms. Barnes in a photo spread that promoted “Tarzan.”“The silk-clad debutante, above, and the barelegged tree climber at right are the same — Miss Joanna Barnes of Boston and Hollywood,” the article said in part. “She is the latest and, MGM insists, the brainiest of the 20 girls who have played Jane, the genteel Englishwoman in the Tarzan films.”In “The Parent Trap” (1961), starring Hayley Mills in the dual role of long-separated twin sisters who meet and conspire to reunite their divorced parents, Ms. Barnes played the vixenish fortune hunter dating the girls’ father, played by Brian Keith. When the film was remade 37 years later with Lindsay Lohan as its star, Ms. Barnes played the mother of her former character, who was portrayed by Elaine Hendrix.“She had no judgment about being in a remake,” Nancy Meyers, the director of the film, said in a phone interview. “And she was one of those people who, after you say, ‘Cut!’ you want to keep talking to her.”Ms. Barnes never became a major star, and in the 1960s she began to find diversions from acting.In 1967 she hosted the ABC television series “Dateline: Hollywood,” on which she took viewers behind the scenes on studio tours and interviewed stars. She wrote a syndicated column, Touching Home, and a book, “Starting From Scratch” (1968), about interior decorating.Her first novel, “The Deceivers” (1970), was a sexy Hollywood exposé that swirled around a former child actress and the powerful people in her orbit.Ms. Barnes’s first novel, published in 1970, was a sexy Hollywood exposé. She went on to write three others.“Joanna Barnes is Jacqueline Susann with a brain,” the critic John Leonard wrote in The New York Times, referring to the author of the saucy 1966 saga “Valley of the Dolls.” He added, “A few of the characters in ‘The Deceivers’ seem to have been stamped out of stale Saltines; the sex grows like grass between each block of plot; and, as in too many first novels, everything gets resolved at a big party. But Miss Barnes is an excellent guide for tourists in the land of the plastic cactus.”She also wrote the novels “Who Is Carla Hart?” (1973); “Pastora” (1980), about a 19th-century woman’s rise in San Francisco society, which was a New York Times paperback best seller; and “Silverwood” (1985).“Acting and writing feed each other,” she told The Associated Press, adding, “When I’m beginning to feel confined at writing, I take time out for acting.”And socializing. In 1971, she briefly dated Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser at the time. When Maxine Cheshire of The Washington Post reported that she and Mr. Kissinger had attended a party in Hollywood together, she noted that Ms. Barnes had written “The Deceivers,” “which Kissinger hasn’t read.”Ms. Barnes was born in Boston on Nov. 15, 1934, and raised in Hingham, Mass. Her father, John, was an insurance executive, and her mother, Alice (Mutch) Barnes, was a homemaker. She studied English at Smith College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1956 — the year she earned her first screen credit in the TV series “Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers.”In 1961, she was booted from the Boston Social Register, which, she told The St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times, did not approve of actors. She had just been in the hit movie “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas.“Played a degenerate Roman lady,” she said. “Delicious part.”Over the next three decades she was seen on many TV series, including “Bachelor Father,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Love American Style,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Trapper John, M.D.” In the 1965-66 season she was a regular on “The Trials of O’Brien,” a short-lived series about a defense lawyer, played by Peter Falk. She played his ex-wife.She is survived by her stepdaughters, Laura and Louise Warner; her stepson, John Warner; and her sisters, Lally Barnes Freeman and Judith Barnes Wood. Her marriages to Richard Herndon and Lawrence Dobkin ended in divorce; her marriage to Jack Lionel Warner ended with his death in 2012.For all her success on the screen, her interest in acting had faded — until the remake of “The Parent Trap” came along.“Her part was small but memorable, and I definitely didn’t need to tell her how to play it,” Ms. Meyers wrote in an email. “She knew exactly what to do and played it to the hilt.” More

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      Keanu Reeves Will Be Your Mirror

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      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicHe’s an unknowable icon, the internet’s adorably tragic boyfriend, a prolific actor who never seems to be acting. Wesley Morris wants to get to the bottom of Keanu Reeves — and to understand “why we get so much out of a movie star who appears to give us so little.”He turns to Alex Pappademas — the writer, podcast host and author of “Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon” — to try to solve this mystery.Keanu has had a three-decade acting career, through which he is arguably just playing different versions of himself. And he is conscious of his audience knowing this: “He knows that we’re there, and he wonders if we’ve figured out that it’s just Keanu Reeves once again playing a character,” says Alex.Wesley and Alex discuss the most memorable examples of Keanu being Keanu (including the time he literally played himself) — and why we are seeing ourselves whenever we look at the actor.Keanu Reeves.Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionHosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More

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      ‘Kamikaze Hearts’ Review: Truth or Fiction

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      Juliet Bashore’s porn-world quasi documentary is a delirious and distressing portrait of two women’s tempestuous relationship.Juliet Bashore’s “Kamikaze Hearts” is a porn-world quasi-documentary about the underground scene in 1980s San Francisco that shivers spit and cold sweat. Originally released in 1986, it is now receiving a national rollout courtesy of a new 2K restoration.A prism of ideas about performance, sex, identity, addiction, labor and much more, the film also plays like a bout of frenzied, opioid-induced delirium. It’s not exactly pleasurable — and it’s filled with disorienting longueurs — but it really sticks.The apparent drama centers on the tempestuous relationship between the unhinged porn star Sharon Mitchell and her hapless lover Tigr. We follow these women over the course of a few days working on the set of a new adult film based on the opera “Carmen.”That project will never be completed, because there is no adult “Carmen” film. The entire work — the tensions on set between the women performers and their sleazy male bosses, Mitchell and Tigr’s increasingly intense spats — was scripted and storyboarded, with the performers, many of them actual adult film professionals, improvising and playing versions of themselves.Much like porn, in which real sex acts are performed in fake contexts, this self-referential haze of a film blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. Perhaps the technology-inundated audiences of today, numb to the unstable realities and meta-universes that characterize the online experience (and franchise films, for that matter), won’t feel as impressed. Yet Tigr and Mitchell feel as alive as a fresh fever. And when we see the two women, who are actual heroin addicts, shoot up on camera, what could be more real?Kamikaze HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More