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      Poitier and Bogdanovich: The Defiant Ones

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      Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich were geniuses of the Hollywood system who, with great success and frustration, worked to transform it in the same era.Last week, the movies lost two giants — Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich — who each made history in his own way. Our chief film critics discussed the men, their careers and their legacies.MANOHLA DARGIS When Poitier and Bogdanovich died last week, you and I talked about how each had helped shape the periods in which they emerged. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. We know their careers briefly overlapped: Bogdanovich directed Poitier in the 1996 TV movie “To Sir, With Love 2,” a sequel to the 1967 film. For the most part, though, they had separate trajectories partly shaped by race, personal choices and what was happening both in the country and the industry.It’s fascinating to trace the arcs of these separate paths. Poitier’s begins first, with his big big-studio break, the 1950 drama “No Way Out.” He was working in Jim Crow Hollywood that he would later help overturn, but it took so long. In some ways, the pressures and contradictions he faced came to a head at the end of the decade first with the release of “The Defiant Ones” in 1958, in which he has equal billing with Tony Curtis. A year later, though, Poitier is on his knees playing Porgy in “Porgy and Bess,” a role that he’d rejected but was effectively forced into taking.A.O. SCOTT Bogdanovich was fundamentally a historian. Poitier was a history maker. When we started talking about them side by side, it wasn’t to compare their achievements, but to look at how their very different careers illuminated the changes underway in American movies after the studio era.Poitier came up in that system and had no illusions about its interest in racial progress. “Hollywood never really had much of a conscience,” he told an interviewer. “The social conscience that you’re talking about” — the durable myth of liberal Hollywood — “was always only a handful of men,” among them Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who made “No Way Out” and Stanley Kramer, who directed “The Defiant Ones.” “This town never was infected by that kind of goodness,” Poitier said. He could never romanticize Old Hollywood the way Bogdanovich did.Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.” Poitier never romanticized Old Hollywood.United ArtistsDARGIS Absolutely — among other things, I doubt that Poitier would have had access to all those at-times forgotten Old Hollywood veterans like John Ford and Orson Welles. Bogdanovich championed them in his writing and advocacy, and he learned about moviemaking through their conversations and by watching them work. I was looking at Bogdanovich’s anthology “Who the Devil Made It” and he was 20 when he did his first interview, in 1960, with Sidney Lumet. At that point, Bogdanovich had been studying acting with Stella Adler — presumably one reason he was fantastic with actors — and had worked in some 40 professional stage productions, one he directed. What a wunderkind!That year, Poitier turned 33 and started shooting “Paris Blues,” a film that I love despite its flaws, including his marginalization. Still, the film has Poitier and Diahann Carroll playing lovers and they’re beautiful, and shown as desiring and desirable. Poitier was disappointed with how the film turned out and said the studio had “chickened out on us” — he was always being sold out, it seems by the white powers that be, however ostensibly well-intentioned those powers. In 1960, he also joined a campaign to raise defense funds for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It takes nothing away from Bogdanovich to say that Poitier lived in an entirely different reality.SCOTT With Bogdanovich, it could seem that reality was defined above all by movies and his love for them. His cinephilia marks him as a charter member, along with guys like George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, of what used to be called “the film school generation.” Not that Bogdanovich ever went to film school.“Generally I find film schools disappointing,” he told an audience at the American Film Institute. “They spend far too much time on production and not enough time showing the right films to students. Students need to see the classics.” Some of his best films — the modern-day screwball “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972); the black-and-white, Depression-set road movie “Paper Moon” (1973) — are full of that reverence for tradition.Bogdanovich with Barbra Streisand, who starred in his “What’s Up, Doc?”Warner Bros., via Getty ImagesTatum O’Neal in Bogdanovich’s road movie “Paper Moon.”Paramount PicturesSome of the less good ones, too. In “Nickelodeon” (1976), he tried to bring some of the charm of early cinema into the New Hollywood, casting Ryan O’Neal as an accidental picture-maker and Burt Reynolds as a rough-riding screen idol. They spend the early 1910s scraping together two-reelers and battling industry consolidation, and wind up at the 1915 premiere of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of A Nation,” showing under its original title, “The Clansman.” In keeping with the dominant Hollywood origin story of the time, that movie is hailed as an artistic and commercial breakthrough — goodbye nickelodeons, hello movie palaces! — while its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan is brushed aside.The story of the late ’60s, early ’70s renaissance in American movies is conventionally told as a tale of heroic, rebellious white men. But as with the silent era, the truth is more complicated and more interesting. The period was also when Poitier (along with other Black pioneers like Gordon Parks, Ossie Davis and Melvin Van Peebles) turned to directing. He started out with a western, “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), set in the post-Civil War landscape familiar from so many Ford pictures. He also starred in it, with Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee. Do you think the choice of genre — and his treatment of its tropes — says something about his own relationship to the Hollywood past?DARGIS No doubt, though that relationship to genre was very different from that of those white directors, Bogdanovich included, who revisited (or were swallowed by) classic film forms in the 1960s and ’70s. In Poitier’s memoir “The Measure of a Man,” he talks about seeing his first film as a kid. It was a western and he was so wowed that he told his sister, “I would like to go to Hollywood and become a cowboy.” He didn’t know what Hollywood was; he thought people raised cows there — a child’s misapprehension that’s all the more poignant given how historically unwelcoming the town was to Black talent.One reason Poitier appeared in the western “Duel at Diablo” (1966), he said, was that it gave him an opportunity to create a heroic image for Black children who love westerns. He was apparently disappointed by this movie, as well, and his love for westerns and the complex iconography of the American cowboy were not yet in sync. Imagine the representational weight that his version of “The Wild Bunch” or a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” might have carried in the late 1960s! Belafonte and Poitier had been interested in making a western but nothing came of this until they teamed up for “Buck and the Preacher,” which we both adore as much for its behind-the-scenes story as the one onscreen.Poitier got his start directing when he stepped in on “Buck and the Preacher.” Columbia Pictures, via Getty ImagesSCOTT That story is a sign of how things were changing. Belafonte and Poitier were the producers. They didn’t see eye to eye with the first director, Joseph Sargent, and asked Columbia Pictures to replace him. Shooting had already started in Mexico, and Poitier offered to take over temporarily so the production could keep going while the studio looked for someone else. “Finally they called and said, ‘Why don’t you just continue shooting?’” Poitier remembered years later. “That’s how I started directing. I was just thrown into it.”Poitier went on to become one of the most successful comic directors of the next decade, playing straight man to Bill Cosby in the crime-caper trilogy “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), “Let’s Do It Again” (1975) and “A Piece of the Action” (1977), and steering Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder through the incarceration farce “Stir Crazy” (1980).Those were also Bogdanovich’s best years. We don’t have room to revisit all the dramatic ups and downs of his career, but I think there’s some perspective on that much-mythologized era to be gained by comparing how he and Poitier navigated the changes in Hollywood. It’s instructive, for example, that both were involved in attempts by groups of artists to take advantage of the waning power of the studios and assert their own independence. Poitier was a founder of First Artists, which brought together movie stars (including Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand) seeking creative control. Inspired by that example, Bogdanovich, with Coppola and William Friedkin, organized the Directors Company. Both experiments ultimately failed, which may say as much about Hollywood as the fact that they were tried in the first place.DARGIS Part of the pathos of the 1970s is that for all the great films made that decade — including by Poitier and Bogdanovich — the era laid the ground for the conglomeration, blockbuster-fication and Disney-fication of the industry. The two men traveled different roads, created tremendous work, won the industry’s highest honors and made a lot of money for a lot of people. But by the end of the 1970s, each one’s glory years were over. They kept working, on and off, with success and not, until they were the kind of faded greats the culture is happy to forget until they’re old enough to nostalgically venerate. I’m glad that at least we can do that, and watch their movies, too. The work is all over the place but it’s also immortal. More

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      in Television

      Lionsgate Studios Yonkers Could Become the 'Burbank of New York'

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      A new film and television facility, once fully open, will be ‘hands-down the largest in the Northeast,’ the leader of the project said.“Run the World,” a Starz television series about four 30-something Black women navigating work and love, is set in Harlem. In its first season, the camera lingers over landmarks in the neighborhood, like the Harriet Tubman statue on West 122nd Street, as well as locations across New York City.But when the show begins filming its second season in two months and Ella (Andrea Bordeaux), Sondi (Corbin Reid), Renee (Bresha Webb) and Whitney (Amber Stevens West) reunite to go clubbing, commiserate over cocktails and tumble into bed with their latest flames, they will be doing much of it slightly north of the city, inside a big film production facility that officially opens today in Yonkers.Great Point Studios, which has created the $500 million campus, Lionsgate Studios Yonkers, claims the ever-expanding facility, scheduled to be completed next year, will surpass anything New York City has to offer.Built around the site of an old Otis elevator factory overlooking the Hudson River in newly invigorated downtown Yonkers, the complex currently houses three soundstages, six “talent suites” for actors, dozens of dressing rooms and hair-and-makeup stations, dedicated writers rooms, a carpentry shop for set construction and office spaces. But that’s just the beginning.By the end of next year, the 14.5-acre campus plans to have a backlot (for outdoor scenes), two screening rooms, a postproduction area for editing and a total of 11 soundstages, several of them already claimed by Lionsgate.And now Great Point says it is in contract to buy land for a second production facility in Yonkers. The combined properties, with eight additional soundstages, “will be hands-down the largest in the Northeast,” said Robert Halmi Jr., the company’s chief executive and president, and a longtime producer.The second, soon-to-be acquired site is a 19th-century orphanage, built on grounds landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted.Great Point StudiosAll of which will go toward fulfilling the decade-long dream of Mayor Mike Spano: making Yonkers “the Burbank of New York,” a reference to the California city outside Los Angeles that is home to major film studios. “We are going to be Hollywood on the Hudson,” he said in a phone interview.But the television production business is already booming in New York City. And while it’s certainly common in the industry to shoot in a different place from where a show is set, will moving the production of “Run the World” and other programs set in New York City to Westchester County be a snub to the Big Apple?“Not at all,” said Anne del Castillo, New York City’s media and entertainment commissioner. “I think there is enough production to go around.”Indeed, the goings-on in both cities are part of a wider surge in film production in the metropolitan area, where the industry got its start in the 1890s before decamping to California.But film production has been trickling back for some time, lured by tax incentives and the fact that so many actors, directors and other film professionals live in and around New York.The city has over 250 soundstages — essentially, black boxes in which any sort of scene can be conjured. Some are quite small, however, and may have low ceilings or freestanding columns that interrupt space, having been built in converted warehouses or other industrial buildings. New York still lags behind Los Angeles in terms of square footage for soundstages but is ahead of Atlanta, according to the real estate services firm CBRE.But now the proliferation of streaming platforms and seemingly insatiable appetite for content — driven in part by binge-watching during the pandemic — has set off a frenzy of building soundstages, so-called because they are soundproofed. Netflix, for instance, is planning a major production hub on an old army base in Fort Monmouth, N.J.From left: Andrea Bordeaux and Corbin Reid in “Run the World,” the first television show whose production is relocating to Lionsgate Studios Yonkers.Cara Howe/Starz EntertainmentIn New York, existing facilities are expanding and new ones are being built. In the latter category, Wildflower Studios in Astoria, Queens — a project Robert De Niro is a partner in — will have 11 soundstages when it is completed next year. And Steiner Studios (based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard) will begin work on an eight-soundstage facility in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, this spring.Statewide, there are over 130 qualified production facilities containing over 450 soundstages and over five million square feet, according to Empire State Development; more than half of these properties have opened or been certified in the last five years.Technology has fed the explosive growth in soundstages; with advances in computer graphics and so-called green screens, artificial backdrops have become ever more lifelike.For Lionsgate, which owns Starz, the new Yonkers facility offers “certainty,” said Kevin Beggs, the chair of Lionsgate Television. “We don’t have to spend six weeks canvassing the city of New York and environs” for locations, he said.On a tour last week, however, the new facility was not quite ready for its close-up. “Run the World” is scheduled to begin filming in March on two soundstages, one of them an expansive 20,000 square feet. But in a third soundstage, men in protective gear were still applying a crumbly, black echo-canceling substance. Furniture for support spaces had yet to arrive.One 20,000-square-foot soundstage in Yonkers, which was still undergoing construction last week.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThe pandemic delayed the project for nearly a year, said Mr. Halmi. Lockdowns stopped construction and steel and concrete were in short supply owing to supply chain issues.At the complex, new low-rise buildings have a jazzy blue paint job and big Lionsgate logo. The factory’s brick buildings, built around the turn of the 20th century, are being repurposed as offices, and the factory’s old power plant, where you can see the base of its still-intact smokestack, will one day be a grand entrance.The three completed soundstages are already spoken for, although there is some office space still vacant, said Mr. Halmi, who founded the Hallmark Channel. Mediapro, a Spanish-language content provider, has claimed at least one of the soundstages being built this year.Mr. Halmi is hoping that prop, music production and special effects companies will lease offices at the facility. Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications is starting an internship program this spring in a loftlike space with a small classroom.A classroom for Syracuse University public communications students in Yonkers.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesLionsgate sits in an industrial park next to a Kawasaki plant that assembles subway cars. It is also steps from the Yonkers train station, making it a quick commute from Manhattan’s Grand Central Station or Penn Station.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Peter Bogdanovich, 82, Director Whose Career Was a Hollywood Drama, Dies

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      Within one decade, the ’70s, he was transformed from one of the most celebrated of filmmakers, notably for “The Last Picture Show,” into one of the most ostracized.Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.As a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past — bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself.Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” — only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost — on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.Mr. Bogdanovich with Cybill Shepherd on the set of “The Last Picture Show” (1971). Only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film, it is widely considered his best.Columbia Pictures“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”What was more, Mr. Bogdanovich’s life and work would be affected by violent, almost unimaginable personal loss.Yet in a business that rarely grants second acts, he enjoyed a professional renaissance, both behind the camera and in front of it, in the 21st century. To television viewers of the period, he was probably best known for his recurring role on the HBO drama “The Sopranos.” He portrayed Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist who treats Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco.Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”As a writer and critic, a calling he pursued in the 1960s, he was the author of influential monographs on Hollywood directors before he was out of his 20s.As a director, he blazed to fame in the early ’70s as the auteur of three critically acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show,” based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of small-town Texas life; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a contemporary twist on 1930s screwball comedies, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, about a Depression-era confidence man.Mr. Bogdanovich’s life, it turned out, was bracketed by loss. For as he would discover, he had been born to a family defined by absence.Ryan O’Neal as a con man in 1930s Kansas and Tatum O’Neal as the girl who may or may not be his daughter in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” (1973). Ms. O’Neal won an Academy Award for her performance.Paramount Pictures, via PhotofestA Son of ImmigrantsThe son of Borislav and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in upstate Kingston, N.Y., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents were recent immigrants to the United States — his father a Serbian painter, his mother a member of a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family.The Bogdanovich home, Mr. Bogdanovich recalled long afterward, was pervaded by melancholy. His father was silent and withdrawn. Throughout Peter’s boyhood, their rare moments of camaraderie came when the elder Mr. Bogdanovich took his son to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art.When Peter was about 8, he learned the source of the family sorrow: He had had an older brother, who died as a baby after a pot of boiling soup was accidentally spilled on him.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Mr. Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Mr. Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”By this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures — sound and silent alike. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards.Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system — by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart — beckoned to him above all.“I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”As a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.At 20, he directed an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s drama “The Big Knife.” (The cast included a young Carroll O’Connor.) Around this time, he began writing on film for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He helped program Golden Age pictures for the New Yorker Theater, a Manhattan revival house, and for MoMA.Mr. Bogdanovich with Alfred Hitchcock, one of several noted directors about whom he wrote a series of monographs for the Museum of Modern Art.Universal, via Kobal/ShutterstockFor MoMA, Mr. Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols.Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. (Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Ford. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.)He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002.Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)Hollywood-BoundMr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies — among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) — strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.For Mr. Corman, Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.But it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich cherished. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers — a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen — are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.For its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. Bogdanovich and Ms. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures.Cloris Leachman and Timothy Bottoms in “The Last Picture Show.” The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won two, including one for Ms. Leachman.Columbia PicturesThat film, with screenplay by Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. McMurtry, centers on life and love in a down-at-the-heels town in the early 1950s. Shot in stark black and white in Mr. McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, Texas, the movie, designed by Ms. Platt, portrays a world of boarded-up storefronts and blowing dust.The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line.It also included veterans like Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, who at midcentury had been a member of Ford’s stock company.“The Last Picture Show,” too, is a valentine to old Hollywood. At the town’s fading movie house, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 comedy, “Father of the Bride,” is playing. When the theater is forced to close, the last picture shown there is Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), starring the indomitable John Wayne.Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, “The Last Picture Show” won two, for the performances of Ms. Leachman and Mr. Johnson.The film catapulted Mr. Bogdanovich to the first rank of Hollywood directors. It also upended his personal life. He left Ms. Platt and their two young children for Ms. Shepherd, embarking on an eight-year relationship that furnished ceaseless grist for Hollywood gossip columns.Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in Mr. Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972).Warner Bros.His professional success continued with “What’s Up, Doc?,” a reworking of Hawks’s 1938 comedy, “Bringing Up Baby,” and again with “Paper Moon.”Set in dust-blown 1930s Kansas, “Paper Moon” brought an Oscar to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for her performance as a scrappy girl who may or may not be the con man’s daughter. (Despite her divorce from Mr. Bogdanovich, Ms. Platt designed this film and “What’s Up, Doc?”)After the Hits, DudsBut after the wild success of the early 1970s came a string of creative debacles. Two vehicles Mr. Bogdanovich conceived to star Ms. Shepherd incurred critical vitriol: “Daisy Miller,” his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s 1870s novella, and the musical “At Long Last Love” (1975), also starring Burt Reynolds.“Produced for $15 million, this ‘musical’ was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted,” The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1990. “Critics compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to an orphan trying to play Noël Coward. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich’s ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”His next film, “Nickelodeon” (1976), an overt homage to early cinema starring Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Reynolds, was also critically derided. But there was far worse to come.In the late 1970s, after his romance with Ms. Shepherd had ended, Mr. Bogdanovich met the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. They fell in love, and Ms. Stratten, who was married, left her husband to move in with him.Mr. Bogdanovich gave her a small role in his caper “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. But in August 1980, before it was released, her estranged husband, Paul Snider, shot her to death before taking his own life. (The murder of Ms. Stratten, 20 at her death, would be the subject of a 1983 feature film, “Star 80,” directed by Bob Fosse and starring Mariel Hemingway.)Mr. Bogdanovich with Dorothy Stratten, who was also his partner, on the set of his “They All Laughed” (1980). Before the film was released, Ms. Stratten’s estranged husband shot her to death and then took his own life.DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAfterward, Mr. Bogdanovich was reported to have watched “They All Laughed” — which preserves Ms. Stratten’s last film performance — over and over, as if communing with a ghost.Released in 1981, the film was a critical and box-office failure. Dissatisfied with its promotion, Mr. Bogdanovich bought the rights and tried to distribute it himself. It proved a disastrous decision, costing him some $5 million.In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.”One thing he did that he said he came to regret was to write a biography of Ms. Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn,” which was equal parts adoration and accusation. Published in 1984, it contended that Mr. Hefner, in commodifying her, had been partly responsible for her death.Mr. Hefner retaliated with a bombshell of his own: He publicly accused Mr. Bogdanovich of having seduced Ms. Stratten’s younger half sister, Louise, shortly after the murder, when Louise was 13, below the age of consent.Mr. Bogdanovich denied the accusation. But it was a matter of record that he paid for Louise’s education; arranged for her to have corrective surgery on her jaw — an act, his detractors said, that was intended to make her look more like her dead sister — and, in 1988, when Louise was 20, married her, causing a frenzy of tabloid opprobrium.Louise Stratten, billed as L.B. Stratten, appeared in several films and TV movies directed by Mr. Bogdanovich. They divorced in 2001.“She was like a contact with Dorothy, as far as I was concerned,” Mr. Bogdanovich, speaking of the marriage, told The New York Times the next year. “There was garbage talk that I made Louise have facial surgery — to look like Dorothy. ‘Vertigo’ stuff.”‘I’m Not Bitter’Mr. Bogdanovich seemed to return to directorial form in 1985 with “Mask,” a well-received picture starring Cher as the mother of a boy with a facial deformity.But he alienated the Hollywood establishment once more by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, Universal Pictures, and the producer, Martin Starger, for cutting two scenes and substituting music by Bob Seger for the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack that Mr. Bogdanovich favored. (The suit was later withdrawn.)Several critical failures followed, including “Illegally Yours” (1988), a romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe; “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show”; and “The Thing Called Love” (1993), a comedy-drama about country music.In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.From the mid-’90s through the first years of the 21st century, Mr. Bogdanovich resorted to directing for television. His credits include the TV movies “Prowler” (1995) and “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998) and an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney.”But the medium, he said, taught him economy and speed. He returned to the big screen in 2001 with “The Cat’s Meow,” his first feature in nearly a decade. Made for just $6 million, it was shot in only 24 days.Mr. Bogdanovich and Kirsten Dunst on the set of “The Cat’s Meow” (2001), his first feature in nearly a decade.Richard Foreman/Lions Gate FilmsThat film, too, is a paean to old Hollywood. It tells the story — based on a long-suppressed incident that for years ran through the industry in whispers — of a fatal shooting in 1924 aboard the yacht of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.“The Cat’s Meow” — starring Edward Herrmann as Hearst; Kirsten Dunst as his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies; and Eddie Izzard as her lover Charlie Chaplin — earned mostly favorable notices.Mr. Bogdanovich’s luster was also restored with his publication of two acclaimed books: “Who the Devil Made It” (1997), a collection of his interviews with eminent directors, and “Who the Hell’s in It” (2004), about great actors and actresses.Later features he directed include “She’s Funny That Way” (2014) and “The Great Buster,” a documentary about Buster Keaton, in 2018.Mr. Bogdanovich in 2005. “Success is very hard,” he said late in his career. “Nobody prepares you for it.”Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressIn addition to his daughter Antonia, he is survived by another daughter, Alexandra (both from his marriage to Ms. Platt); a sister, Anna Bogdanovich; and three grandchildren.Among Mr. Bogdanovich’s other films as a director are “Saint Jack” (1979), starring Mr. Gazzara as an American who aims to open a bordello in Singapore; “Noises Off …” (1992), an adaptation of a play by Michael Frayn; and the documentary “Directed by John Ford” (1971).In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bogdanovich offered a cleareyed appraisal of his career.“I’m not bitter,” he said. “I asked for it. Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.”But when it came to one of his detractors, at least, Mr. Bogdanovich appeared to have the last laugh. His later-life acting roles included two appearances, in 2005 and 2007, on the NBC series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”In both episodes, Mr. Bogdanovich, always a wicked mimic, played to the hilt a sybaritic, smoking-jacket-clad, thinly veiled incarnation of Hugh Hefner.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Ousts Adele From No. 1

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      The album of music from the latest Disney animated film climbs to the top of the Billboard 200 after first arriving in November.The soundtrack to “Encanto,” the new Disney animated film, has reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart, displacing Adele’s “30” after a six-week run at the top.The “Encanto” album, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda that draw on salsa and hip-hop and are performed on traditional Colombian instruments, came out in November — initially landing at No. 197 — and has had a steady climb to the top. After the film’s streaming release on Disney+ on Christmas Eve, the soundtrack entered Billboard’s Top 10.One of its numbers, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” is currently the most-streamed song on Spotify, beating out a slew of new tracks by the Weeknd. (The Weeknd’s surprise album, “Dawn FM,” released on Friday with just a few days’ notice, is expected to open with huge numbers on next week’s chart.)The “Encanto” soundtrack, which also features pieces from the film’s score by Germaine Franco, had the equivalent of 72,000 sales in the United States last week, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That total includes 88 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package. “Encanto” is the first soundtrack to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s chart since “Frozen 2” in late 2019.Adele’s “30” fell to No. 2, while Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 3 in its 52nd week out. While Wallen has been publicly snubbed by the music industry after being caught on video last year using a racial slur — he received no Grammy nominations — “Dangerous” has been an enormous success, with steady fan loyalty.“Dangerous” was the most popular album of 2021, with the equivalent of 3.2 million sales in the United States, according to MRC — beating out “30” and other hits by Olivia Rodrigo and Drake by a wide margin. Since it came out last January, “Dangerous” has remained in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart every week except one, last month, when it was pushed out by a number of Christmas albums.Wallen is scheduled to begin a tour of arenas in February, including a date at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 9.Also this week, Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 4 and Taylor Swift’s Red “(Taylor’s Version)” is No. 5. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Ailey’ and ‘Somebody Somewhere’

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      PBS’s “American Masters” airs a documentary on the choreographer Alvin Ailey. And a bittersweet comedy series 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, Jan. 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayRICHARD JEWELL (2019) 9 p.m. on TNT. In this biographical drama, Clint Eastwood revisited the case of Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a security guard who alerted authorities to the presence of homemade explosives at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, then was wrongly implicated in the bomb attack by the F.B.I. and media outlets. In Eastwood’s telling, Jewell’s story becomes a case study in prejudice and the potential ill effects of media attention. The result is a “flawed, fascinating movie,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times — “a rebuke to institutional arrogance and a defense of individual dignity, sometimes clumsy in its finger-pointing but mostly shrewd and sensitive in its effort to understand its protagonist and what happened to him.”TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: AILEY 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Like many influential artists, the choreographer Alvin Ailey has had two lives. One began when he was born, in segregated small-town Texas in the 1930s, continued as he worked to become a fundamental part of the evolution of modern dance and ended in 1989, when he died of AIDS-related illness. The other began in 1958, when Ailey established the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and continues today. This new documentary superimposes these two lives by mixing an exploration of Ailey’s rags-to-stages journey — told in part through his own words captured in archival audio recordings — with a behind-the-scenes look at a 2018 project by the choreographer Rennie Harris to stage a dance evocation of Ailey’s life with present-day members of Ailey’s company. The early chapters suggest that Ailey had a performer’s awareness of his own body even in his youth: “I remember being glued to my mother’s hip, sloshing through the terrain, branches slashing against a child’s body,” he says, “going from one place to another — looking for a place to be.”Daniel Puig and Kaci Walfall in “Naomi.”Boris Martin/The CWNAOMI 9 p.m. on the CW. The filmmaker Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle in Time” and “When They See Us”) and the writer-producer Jill Blankenship (“Arrow”) are behind this new superhero series. Based on a DC Comics character, the show follows Naomi (Kaci Walfall), a teenager with a passion for comic books who, after a supernatural occurrence, starts down a path to becoming a hero herself.WednesdayTHE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) 8 p.m. on TCM. A pair of World War II prisoners-of-war classics will be aired on Wednesday night. First, “The Great Escape” with Steve McQueen and company, which focuses on the slow but steady digging of an escape tunnel beneath a German prison camp. Then, at 11 p.m., THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) with Alec Guinness. That movie’s action takes place above ground, as a group of British prisoners are forced to construct a bridge to aid the Japanese.ThursdayTRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2020) 6 p.m. on Showtime 2. Jane Campion’s quasi-Western “The Power of the Dog” is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of this season, and a lot of praise has gone to Ari Wegner’s cinematography. Wegner previously shot “True History of the Kelly Gang,” a visually striking period piece about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, adapted from a Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey. Directed by Justin Kurzel, the film casts George MacKay as Kelly, whose story culminates with a famous shootout. In his review for The Times, Glenn Kenny wrote that the film’s depiction of that event is “undeniably impressive.” But, he added, “the jumpy, springy qualities of the movie’s visual style are unfortunately undercut by its verbal content.”FridayLiev Schreiber in “Ray Donovan: The Movie.”Cara Howe/ShowtimeRAY DONOVAN: THE MOVIE (2022) 9 p.m. on Showtime. The crime drama “Ray Donovan” was canceled in early 2020 before its plot — about a professional fixer played by Liev Schreiber — had reached a clear conclusion. Two years later, its audience will get some level of closure with this feature-length continuation of the show’s story line. The original cast, which also includes Eddie Marsan and Jon Voight, returns.SaturdayHOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) 6 p.m. on Syfy. “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” the fourth installment in the animated “Hotel Transylvania” family-movie franchise, will debut Jan. 14 on Amazon Prime Video. Kids might appreciate this opportunity to revisit the original movie on Syfy, which introduced the series’ exaggerated take on Dracula (Adam Sandler) and his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez). The first sequel, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2, follows at 8 p.m.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Golden Globes 2022: What to Expect Tonight

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      After controversies led to the cancellation of the broadcast, the show will go on — sort of. There won’t be any stars or cameras, but winners will be announced.What do the Golden Globes do after a year of scandals so severe that NBC dropped the broadcast?They tweet through it.Tonight, beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern time, 6 p.m. Pacific, members of the embattled Hollywood Foreign Press Association will announce the winners of this year’s Golden Globes, but they’ll be reading those names to a ballroom at the Beverly Hilton devoid of stars, then tweeting the results in real time.It’s a stunning downgrade for the group that used to throw one of the glitziest awards shows in Hollywood. But after investigations by The Los Angeles Times and New York Times revealed a series of ethical lapses within the H.F.P.A. and a membership devoid of Black voters, Hollywood’s major publicity firms cut off the show’s access to stars.The H.F.P.A. has since announced a new slate of rules and admitted 21 new members, including journalists of color, but it remains to be seen if Hollywood will even acknowledge tonight’s ceremony, or whether the stars up for a win — including big names like Will Smith (“King Richard”) and Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”) — will pretend that nothing happened.Check back here for the list of winners, which will be updated as they are announced. More

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      Quiet Awards Season Has Hollywood Uneasy

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      LOS ANGELES — Steven Spielberg directing a dance-filled musical through the streets of New York. Lady Gaga channeling her Italian roots. Will Smith back on the big screen. This year’s award season was supposed to celebrate Hollywood’s return to glitz and glamour. No more masks, no more socially distanced award shows or Zoom acceptance speeches, no more rewarding films that very few people had seen.Now, between the Omicron spike and NBC’s decision not to televise the Golden Globes on Sunday because of the ethical issues surrounding the group that hands out the awards, Hollywood’s traditionally frenetic — and hype-filled — first week of the calendar year has been reduced to a whisper. The AFI Awards were postponed. The Critics’ Choice Awards — scheduled to be televised Sunday night in hopes of filling the void left by the Globes’ absence — were pushed back. The Palm Springs Film Festival, an annual stop along the awards campaign trail, was canceled. And most of those star-driven award favorites bombed at the box office.The Academy Awards remain scheduled for March 27, with nominations on Feb. 8, but there has been no indication what the event will be like. (The organization already postponed its annual Governors Awards, which for the past 11 years have bestowed honorary Oscars during a nontelevised ceremony.) Will there be a host? How about a crowd? Perhaps most important, will anyone watch? The Academy hired a producer of the film “Girls Trip” in October to oversee the show but has been mum on any additional details, and declined to comment for this article.Suddenly, 2022 is looking eerily similar to 2021. Hollywood is again largely losing its annual season of superficial self-congratulation, but it is also seeing the movie business’s best form of advertisement undercut in a year when films desperately need it. And that could have far-reaching effects on the types of movies that get made.Many were hoping to return to an awards season this year like those of the past, but Covid continues to upend major events.J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times“For the box office — when there was a fully functioning box office — those award shows were everything,” said Nancy Utley, a former co-chairman of Fox Searchlight who helped turn smaller prestige films like “12 Years a Slave” and “The Shape of Water” into best-picture Oscar winners during her 21-year tenure. “The recognition there became the reason to go see a smaller movie. How do you do that in the current climate? It’s hard.”Many prestige films are released each year with the expectation that most of their box office receipts will be earned in the crucial weeks between the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. The diminishing of the Globes — which collapsed after revelations involving possible financial impropriety, questionable journalistic ethics and a significant lack of diversity in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which administers the awards — had already hobbled that equation. If the Hollywood hype machine loses its awards season engine, it could prove devastating to the already injured box office. The huge audience shift fueled by streaming may be here to stay, with only blockbuster spectacles like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” drawing theatergoers in significant numbers..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“The movie business is this gigantic rock, and we’re close to seeing that rock crumble,” said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “People have gotten out of the habit of seeing movies on a big screen. Award season is the best single tub-thumping phenomenon for anything in the world. How many years can you go without that?”William C. Demille, the president Of The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences, handing the Oscar for Best Actress to Mary Pickford for her role in “My Best Girl” and Best Actor to Warner Baxter, right, for “Old Arizona,” in 1929. Hans Kraly, left, received the award for Best Screenplay for “The Patriot.”Keystone-France/Gamma-KeystoneThe Academy Awards were created in 1929 to promote Hollywood’s achievements to the outside world. At its pinnacle, the telecast drew 55 million viewers. That number has been dropping for years, and last year it hit an all-time low — 10.4 million viewers for a show without a host, no musical numbers and a little-seen best picture winner in “Nomadland.” (The film, which was released simultaneously in theaters and on Hulu, grossed just $3.7 million.)Hollywood was planning to answer with an all-out blitz over the past year, even before the awards season. It deployed its biggest stars and most famous directors to remind consumers that despite myriad streaming options, theatergoing held an important place in the broader culture.It hasn’t worked. The public, in large part, remains reluctant to return to theaters with any regularity. “No Time to Die,” Daniel Craig’s final turn as James Bond, was delayed for over a year because of the pandemic, and when it was finally released, it made only $160.7 million in the United States and Canada. That was $40 million less than the 2015 Bond film, “Spectre,” and $144 million below 2012’s “Skyfall,” the highest-grossing film in the franchise.Well-reviewed, auteur-driven films that traditionally have a large presence on the awards circuit, like “Last Night in Soho” ($10.1 million), “Nightmare Alley” ($8 million) and “Belfast” ($6.9 million), barely made a ripple at the box office.And even though Mr. Spielberg’s adaptation of “West Side Story” has a 93 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it has earned only $30 million at the domestic box office. (The original grossed $44 million back in 1961, the equivalent of $409 million in today.)According to a recent study, 49 percent of prepandemic moviegoers are no longer buying tickets. Eight percent say they will never return. Those numbers are a death knell for the midbudget movies that rely on positive word of mouth and well-publicized accolades to get patrons into seats.Some believe the middle part of the movie business — the beleaguered category of films that cost $20 million to $60 million (like “Licorice Pizza” and “Nightmare Alley”) and aren’t based on a comic book or other well-known intellectual property — may be changed forever. If viewing habits have been permanently altered, and award nominations and wins no longer prove to be a significant draw, those films will find it much more difficult to break even. If audiences are willing to go to the movies only to see the latest “Spider-Man” film, it becomes hard to convince them that they also need see a movie like “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s black-and-white meditation on his childhood, in a crowded theater rather than in their living rooms.“All of this doesn’t just affect individual films and filmmakers’ careers,” Mr. Galloway said. “Its effect is not even just on a business. It affects an entire art form. And art is fragile.”“Dune” was the only likely best-picture contender with a major theatrical release to gross over $100 million at the box office last year.Chiabella James/Warner Bros.Of the other likely best-picture contenders given a significant theatrical release, only “Dune,” a sci-fi spectacle based on a known property, crossed the $100 million mark at the box office. “King Richard” earned $14.7 million, and “Licorice Pizza” grossed $7 million.“The number of non-genre adult dramas that have cracked $50M is ZERO,” the film journalist and historian Mark Harris wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “The world of 2019, in which ‘1917’ made $160M, ‘Ford v. Ferrari’ made $120M, and ‘Parasite’ made $52M, is gone.”Still, studios are adjusting. MGM is slowing down its theatrical rollout of “Licorice Pizza” after watching other prestige pictures stumble when they entered more than 1,000 theaters. It is also pushing its release in Britain of “Cyrano,” starring Peter Dinklage, to February to follow the American release with the hope that older female moviegoers will return to the cinema by then. Sony Pictures Classics is redeploying the playbook it used in 2021: more virtual screenings and virtual Q.&A.s to entice academy voters while also shifting distribution to the home faster. Its documentary “Julia,” about Julia Child, hit premium video-on-demand over the holidays.Many studios got out in front of the latest pandemic wave with flashy premieres and holiday parties in early December that required proof of vaccination and on-site testing. But so far in January, many of the usual awards campaigning events like screenings and cocktail parties are being canceled or moved to the virtual world. “For your consideration” billboards are still a familiar sight around Los Angeles, but in-person meet-and-greets are largely on hold.Netflix, which only releases films theatrically on a limited basis and doesn’t report box office results, is likely to have a huge presence on the award circuit this year with films like “Tick, Tick … Boom,” “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” vying for prizes. Like most other studios, it, too, has moved all in-person events for the month of January to virtual.“Last year was a tough adaptation, and it’s turning out that this year is also going to be about adapting to what’s going on in the moment,” Michael Barker, a co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, said in a telephone interview last week. He spoke while walking the frigid streets of Manhattan instead of basking in the sunshine of Palm Springs, where he was supposed to be honoring Penélope Cruz, his leading lady in the Oscar contender “Parallel Mothers.”“You just compensate by doing what you can,” he said, “and once this passes, then you have to look at what the new world order will be.” More

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      Marilyn Bergman, Half of an Oscar-Winning Songwriting Duo, Dies at 93

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      With her husband, Alan, she wrote the lyrics to “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind,” as well as a number of memorable TV themes.Marilyn Bergman, who with her husband, Alan Bergman, gave the world memorable lyrics about “misty watercolor memories” and “the windmills of your mind” and won three Academy Awards, died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93. A spokesman, Ken Sunshine, said the cause was respiratory failure.The Bergmans’ lyrics, set to melodies by composers like Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand, were not everywhere, but it sometimes seemed that way. For many years their words were also heard every week over the opening credits to hit television shows like “Maude,” “Good Times” and “Alice.”The Bergmans and Mr. Hamlisch won the 1974 best-song Academy Award for “The Way We Were,” from the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand romance of the same name. (The album of that movie’s score also won the Bergmans their only Grammy Award.) Their other best-song winner, “The Windmills of Your Mind” (“Round, like a circle in a spiral/Like a wheel within a wheel”), was written with Mr. Legrand for the 1968 film “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Their third Oscar was for the score of Ms. Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl,” also written with Mr. Legrand.The Bergmans with Barbra Streisand at the premiere of “Yentl” in New York in 1983. They shared an Oscar with Michel Legrand for that film’s score.Ron Galella/Barbra Streisand, via ReutersAside from the Oscar winners, their other popular songs included the title track of Frank Sinatra’s album “Nice ’n’ Easy,” written with the songwriter Lew Spence; the poignant ballad “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” from the 1969 movie “The Happy Ending,” with music by Mr. Legrand; and “Where Do You Start?,” written with Johnny Mandel and covered by artists like Tony Bennett, Michael Feinstein and Ms. Streisand.Ms. Streisand released an album of the Bergmans’ songs, “What Matters Most,” in 2011. The compilation “Sinatra Sings Alan & Marilyn Bergman” was released in 2019.Television was a significant part of the Bergmans’ careers as well. They won three Emmy Awards: for the score of the 1976 TV movie “Sybil,” written with Leonard Rosenman; the song “Ordinary Miracles,” written with Mr. Hamlisch and performed by Ms. Streisand in a 1995 concert special; and “A Ticket to Dream,” another Hamlisch collaboration, written for the American Film Institute’s 1998 special “100 Years … 100 Movies.”But their lyrics were probably heard far more often by viewers of popular late-20th-century television series. They wrote the words to the bouncy theme songs for the hit sitcoms “Maude,” “Alice” and “Good Times,” as well as the themes for the nostalgic comedy series “Brooklyn Bridge” and the drama series “In the Heat of the Night.” Their hit “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” best known as a duet by Neil Diamond (who wrote the music) and Ms. Streisand, was originally written for Norman Lear’s short-lived series “All That Glitters.” Early in her career, Ms. Bergman was one of relatively few women in the songwriting business. In a 2007 interview with NPR, she recalled attending meetings of the performance rights organization ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) at which the only women “would be me and a lot of the widows of songwriters who were representing their husbands’ estates.” She was the first woman to serve as president of ASCAP, a position she held from 1994 to 2009.The Bergmans in 1980. “Our experiences in the theater and film have shown us that the two require entirely different kinds of writing,” Ms. Bergman once said, and movies were always the couple’s first love.Associated PressMarilyn Katz was born on Nov. 10, 1928, in the same Brooklyn hospital where Alan Bergman had been born four years earlier. The daughter of Edith (Arkin) and Albert Katz, she attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, now LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.A school friend introduced her to an uncle, Bob Russell, who wrote the lyrics to the Duke Ellington hit “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and would later write the lyrics to “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Marilyn regularly went to his home after school to play piano for him as he wrote.By the time she had earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and English from New York University, she had set aside ideas of a music career and planned to become a psychologist. But a fateful accident sent her back to the arts.In 1956 she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her shoulder. Seeking help during her recuperation, she flew to Los Angeles to stay with her parents, who had moved there. So had Mr. Russell, and when she looked him up he suggested that she do some songwriting herself. Unable to play the piano because of her injury, she recalled many years later, she could not compose and so decided to write lyrics instead.Working under the name Marilyn Keith, she took a job with Mr. Spence, who also worked with Alan Bergman. Mr. Spence introduced the two, and their musical partnership began immediately. They were married two years later.Asked in 2010 on the television program “CBS News Sunday Morning” how she and Mr. Bergman managed to work together while staying married, she said: “The way porcupines make love. Carefully.”Ms. Bergman’s husband survives her, as do their daughter, Julie Bergman, and a granddaughter.In a 2002 interview with American Songwriter magazine, Ms. Bergman defined the difference between an amateur and professional songwriter as “the ability to rewrite” and “not to have fallen so in love with what you have written that you can’t find a better way.”The Bergmans were inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980 and jointly received a Trustees Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2013.Although best known for their movie and television work, the Bergmans did try writing for the Broadway stage, although they did not have much success. “Something More!,” starring Barbara Cook and Arthur Hill, for which they wrote the lyrics and Sammy Fain wrote the music, lasted less than two weeks in 1964. They fared better, but not by much, in 1978 with “Ballroom,” an adaptation of the 1975 TV movie “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” with music by Billy Goldenberg. Despite being produced and directed by Michael Bennett, whose previous Broadway show had been the monster hit “A Chorus Line,” “Ballroom” closed after three months.“Our experiences in the theater and film,” Ms. Bergman told The New York Times in 1982, “have shown us that the two require entirely different kinds of writing.” And movies were always the couple’s first love.“We found we must be more abstract when writing for film,” she said, “because film really speaks more to the preconscious part of the brain, the part of us that dreams.” More