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      in Music

      Ben Platt Isn’t the Oldest Adult to Play a Teenager Onscreen

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      Here are our picks for the most memorable performances with the biggest age gaps between star and character. Did they pull it off?Can a mop of curly hair, a backpack and an outfit that looks like a mother’s choice for school picture day send a 27-year-old actor back to his senior year of high school?That will be the question facing filmgoers when Ben Platt reprises his performance as the titular awkward teenager in the film adaptation of the heartbreaking Broadway musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” due Sept. 24 in theaters.When the first trailer was released in May, initial reactions to Platt’s attempt to shave off a decade were, well, less than rosy.“Raise your hand if you felt personally victimized by Ben Platt’s wig this morning,” the writer Jorge Molina tweeted, prompting comparisons to the scene-stealing wig Sarah Paulson wore in “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”But that part of his look, at least, was the real thing. Platt set the record straight in a now-deleted Twitter post. “I’m v flattered that ppl think my locks are a wig and I hate to burst bubbles,” he wrote. “But sadly those are my own.”Platt is hardly the first full-grown adult to return to his locker and letterman jacket days for a film, and nowhere near the oldest, though some of them — *cough* Tobey Maguire — look like they should be carrying briefcases instead of backpacks. (Child labor laws make it easier to cast actors over 18 as high school students than to work around regulations for younger actors.)Here are some of the most memorable attempts by 20- and 30- somethings to pass as teenagers. Who makes the grade, and who should have dropped out?John Travolta as Danny Zuko in ‘Grease’John Travolta with, from left, fellow adults Michael Tucci, Barry Pearl and Kelly Ward.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesDanny’s age: 18John Travolta’s age: 23Travolta’s not-so-malevolent gang leader might look a few years older than the “he was sweet, just turned 18” Sandy pegs him for, but it works because he’s a youngster compared with the fellow “high schoolers” around him. Olivia Newton-John was 29; the show-stealing Stockard Channing, at 33, was old enough to play Rizzo’s mother. “Grease” (1978) became the highest-grossing musical film up to that point, so audiences clearly weren’t too concerned — and Travolta’s schoolboy rhapsodizing over Newton-John in that skintight black bodysuit seemed all too real.Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in ‘Sense and Sensibility’Emma Thompson, left, with her (much) younger screen sister, Kate Winslet, and Gemma Jones.Clive Coote/Columbia PicturesElinor’s age: 19Emma Thompson’s age: 36If you remember that Thompson’s character is supposed to be 19 in the Jane Austen novel on which the 1995 film is based, her matriarchal, self-possessed Elinor won’t fool you for a second. Kate Winslet, who was 20 when she played Elinor’s 16-year-old sister, Marianne, emphasizes the gulf. But if it’s been a while since you’ve read the novel and just assume that Elinor is in her late 20s or early 30s, you might give Thompson a passing grade. After all, her intellect and frequent apologies on behalf of the impassioned, though imprudent, Marianne make her closer to a mother than a sister.Alan Ruck as Cameron Frye in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’Alan Ruck, left, and Matthew Broderick are high school seniors. We’ll buy it.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesCameron’s age: 17Alan Ruck’s age: 29Actors pushing 30 don’t have a great track record of pulling off 17-year-olds, and Ruck, despite imbuing Cameron with pitch-perfect humor and sensitivity as Ferris’s wingman, is no exception. Matthew Broderick, who plays Ferris, helped distract from the true discrepancy — he was 24 when the 1986 film was released — but not enough to sell the subterfuge. Luckily, this was one case where the movie was so good that nobody seemed to care.Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle in ‘Harry Potter’Shirley Henderson as a ghost isn’t as spooky as the 23-year difference between her and her character.Warner Bros.Myrtle’s age: 14Shirley Henderson’s age: 37All hail the power of pigtails! (And a 5-foot stature.) Is it creepy, in retrospect, for a fully grown woman to play a giggly 14-year-old ghost flirting with a prepubescent Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002)? Sure. (It would be weird enough to have an actual 14-year-old playing Myrtle, who would have been in her 60s had she not had a fateful encounter with a basilisk.) But honestly, watching the film when I was growing up, I’d never have guessed she was old enough to be Harry’s mother.Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker in ‘Spider-Man’An adult Tobey Maguire climbing the walls as a teenage Peter Parker.Zade Rosenthal/Columbia PicturesPeter’s age: 17Tobey Maguire’s age: 27Maguire, unfortunately, is about as successful at passing for a teenager as Peter Parker is at concealing his identity as the title character in “Spider-Man” (2002). When his character is bitten by a radioactive spider during a class field trip to Columbia University, the actor looks more like he should be a teaching assistant in the lab than a high school student. But he’s far from the only (relatively) over-the-hill Peter Parker, though things turned around in 2015 when a 19-year-old Tom Holland was cast as Marvel’s new Spider-Man.Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’Audrey Hepburn, opposite George Peppard and Patricia Neal, doesn’t look like a recent high schooler, but who cares?Paramount PicturesHolly’s age: 19Audrey Hepburn’s age: 31Sure, Hepburn’s doe eyes and elflike features shaved years off her appearance, but she was clearly a woman in the 1961 film based on the Truman Capote novel. (Though Capote’s first choice for Holly, Marilyn Monroe, then 35, was even older.) Yet Hepburn embodies the novel’s striking, self-sufficient young bohemian, and Holly’s free spirit is as alive in her as in a recent high school grad — even if she never looks like one in her sleek, sophisticated black gown.Jennifer Grey as Baby in ‘Dirty Dancing’Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are both years apart from their characters.LionsgateBaby’s age: 17Jennifer Grey’s age: 27No one puts Baby in a corner, and no one was about to tell Grey she was a decade too old to play the doctor’s daughter who gets tangled up with Patrick Swayze’s bad-boy dance instructor in “Dirty Dancing” (1987). It helped that Swayze, who played 25-year-old Johnny Castle, was 34 at the time, but Grey’s small stature (she’s 5-foot-3), wild curls and big brown eyes made it entirely believable that she was 17.Rachel McAdams as Regina George in ‘Mean Girls’Rachel McAdams, left, Lacey Chabert and Amanda Seyfried as the title trio with more pressing concerns than age.Michael Gibson/Paramount PicturesRegina’s age: 16 or 17Rachel McAdams’s age: 26Do you want to call McAdams’s Regina George an impostor to her face? Mark Waters, the director of “Mean Girls” (2004), initially passed over McAdams for the part because he didn’t think she could pull off a teenager, but then he decided it would make sense if Regina grew up a little too fast. Our take: Even if Regina looks more like she should be gatekeeping for a sorority than a school-lunch table, it works for a conniving character who’s always a few steps ahead of her classmates. More

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      in Theater

      Andrew Garfield Can’t Remember Who He Was Before ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

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      In the movie musical, Garfield plays the creator of “Rent,” who died unexpectedly at 35. Making the film helped Garfield process a death in his own life.Jon (Andrew Garfield) is throwing a party, though there’s hardly a reason to celebrate. He’s riven with anxiety, his cramped apartment is overpacked with people, and he’s just spent money he doesn’t have, a down payment on success that will not come within his lifetime. But still, with a wide grin, Jon toasts his friends, leaps on his couch and sings, “This is the life!”Jon is Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996 just before his new musical, “Rent,” would become a global smash. The new film “Tick, Tick … Boom!” portrays Larson struggling to find success in his late 20s, as he frets about whether he should pack it in and choose a more conventional path than scripting musical theater.Larson originally created “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a solo show, “Boho Days,” starring himself in 1990; after his death, it was reworked by the playwright David Auburn into a three-person production that the “Hamilton” creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saw in 2001, when he was still a senior in college.“Here’s this posthumous musical from the guy who made me want to write musicals in the first place,” said Miranda, who’s now made his feature directorial debut with the film.Miranda saw Garfield in the 2018 Broadway production of “Angels in America” and thought he was “transcendent” in that show. “I just left thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” the director recalled. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything. So I cast him in my head probably a year before I talked to him about it.”Miranda put Garfield through his paces, sending him to a vocal coach and ensuring that the actor would be able to play enough piano so the camera could pan from his fingers to his face throughout the film. But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that is impressively possessed: Garfield plays the passionate, frustrated Larson with enough zealous verve to power all the lights on Broadway.Garfield as Jonathan Larson in a scene from “Tick, Tick … Boom.”Macall Polay/NetflixIt’s all part of a very busy fall for the 38-year-old actor, who recently appeared in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” as the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, it’s rumored, will suit up alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” out in December. (Of that supersecret superhero team-up, Garfield can divulge nothing.) Still, it’s clear that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” meant much more to him than he initially expected.“It’s a strange thing when there’s someone like Jon that you didn’t have any relationship to before, and then suddenly now there’s this mysterious forever connection that I am never, ever going to let go,” Garfield told me on a recent video call from Calgary, Canada, where he’s shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a limited series. “I just feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who I was before I knew who Jon was.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did “Tick, Tick … Boom!” originally come to you?One of my best friends in New York is Gregg Miele, and he’s the great body worker and massage person of New York City — he works on all the dancers and actors and singers on Broadway and beyond. Lin was on his table one morning and asked, “Can Andrew Garfield sing?” And Gregg, being the friend that he is, just started lying, basically, and said, “Yes, he is the greatest singer I’ve ever heard.” Then he called me and said, “Hey, go and get some singing lessons because Lin’s going to ask you to do something.”Lin and I had lunch, and he told me briefly about “Tick, Tick” and Jon. I’m not a musical theater guy in my history — it’s not something that I’ve been introduced to until the last few years, really. So Lin left me with a copy of the music and lyrics, and he wrote at the front of it, “This won’t make sense now, but it will. Siempre, Lin.”Garfield hadn’t done much singing when he was cast in “Tick, Tick … Boom” opposite musical theater veterans. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesYou’ve performed in plays like “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, but in this film, Lin surrounded you with a lot of musical-theater ringers, and even some of the smallest roles and cameos are filled by major players from that world. That had to have been a daunting space to step into.I remember a very specific moment where we were in music rehearsal. Alex Lacamoire was at the piano walking us through the songs — he’s Lin’s musical arranger and producer — and I was with [“Tick, Tick” co-stars] Robin de Jesus and Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Henry and Alex Shipp. You can imagine how I’m feeling! They’re all just pros, they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re making notes. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”Then it comes time for me to get into the song and I’m just trying to get through it. I remember Alex Lacamoire going, “Woo, Andrew!” And then everyone behind him, like Josh and Vanessa and Alex and Robin, were like, “Yeah baby, that’s it baby! You got it, baby!” I go beet red and five minutes pass, and I’m just like, “Hey guys, sorry.” I start crying, and I say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy in my entire life, to be surrounded by the most supportive liars I have ever known.”Garfield working with his director, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who cast him after seeing the actor in “Angeles in America.” Miranda recalled, “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything.”Macall Polay/NetflixJonathan spends the movie anxious about this ticking that only he can hear. How did you interpret that?There was a line in the original one-man show “Boho Days”: “Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode.” It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away, and they had to cut it, but he spends the story trying to figure out what this ticking is: “Is it turning 30? Is it that I haven’t succeeded? Is it some unconscious idea of my girlfriend’s biological clock combined with the pressure of my career? Or is it all of my friends who are losing their lives at a very young age because of the AIDS epidemic?”It could even be a musical metronome. The way you play Jonathan, as this theatrical person who feels so deeply and urgently, it’s almost like he needs to break into song because normal life just doesn’t cut it.Everything is up at an 11. Even when he’s making love, it’s at 11! Somehow he knows that this is all going to end, that this is all so ephemeral, and I think he was acutely, painfully aware that he wasn’t going to get all of his song sung. And I think he was also agonizingly aware that he wasn’t going to get the reflection and recognition that he knew he was supposed to have while he was still breathing.On the last day of shooting, what I understood is that Jon had it figured out. He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one, and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write “Rent.” I don’t think there’s an accident in that. That very visceral knowing of loss and of death, that’s what gives everything so much meaning. And without that awareness, we will succumb to meaninglessness.So what kind of meaning did this story give to you?Every frame, every moment, every breath of this film is an attempted honoring of Jon. And, on a more personal level, it’s an honoring of my mom. She is someone who showed me where I was supposed to go in my life. She set me on a path. We lost her just before Covid, just before we started shooting, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. So, for me, I was able to continue her song on the ocean and the wave of Jonathan’s songs. It was an attempt to honor him in his unfinished song, and her in her unfinished song, and have them meet.I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t want this movie to end, because I got to put my grief into art, into this creative act. The privilege of my life has been being there for my mother, being the person that gave her permission when she was ready. We had a very amazing connection, and now an audience will know her spirit in an unconscious way through Jon, which I just find so magical and beautiful.“I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing,” Garfield said, adding, “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm.”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesStill, that’s a lot to deal with while you were shooting this movie. It can’t have been easy.I was hesitant whether I was going to share that, but I feel like it’s a universal experience. In the best-case scenario, we lose our parents and not the other way around, so I feel very lucky that I got to be with her while she was passing, and I got to read her favorite poems to her and take care of her and my dad and my brother. I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing. It’s the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm. For me, everything has changed: Where there was once a stream, there’s now a mountain; where there was once a volcano, there’s now a field. It’s a strange head trip.You put parts of yourself in other people, almost like they’re the stewards of who you are. And when you lose those people, suddenly you become their steward.As you say, it’s like my mother now lives in me in a way that maybe is even stronger than ever when she was incarnate. I feel her essence. For me, it only comes when one can accept the loss, and it’s so hard for us to do that in our culture because we’re not given the framework or the tools to. We’re told to be in delusion and denial of this universally binding thing that we’re all going to go through at some point, and it’s fascinating to me that this grand adventure of death is not honored.Actually, the only thing that gives any of this meaning is if we walk with death in the far corner of our left eye. That’s the only way that we are aware of being alive in this moment. I think that was the legacy that Jon leaves and the legacy that my mom leaves for me personally, is just to be here. Because you’re not going to be here for long.It reminds me of what was written on your script before all of this happened: “You don’t understand now, but you will.”“You don’t understand now, but you will.” I’m still reeling from the download of understanding what Jon’s life was about, what my mother’s life was about, what all of this is about. Oh God, how lucky to explore that in one’s work! More

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      in Movies

      ‘Nightbooks’ Review: A Fairy Tale Horror Fit for Kids

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      Genuine scares elevate this modern take on Hansel and Gretel, which follows a bright boy who is held captive in an evil witch’s apartment.In the children’s horror movie “Nightbooks,” a preteen boy is held hostage by a malevolent witch. Alex (Winslow Fegley) is a bright kid whose passion lies in writing scary stories. At the start of the movie (on Netflix), Alex renounces the hobby, fearing it makes him a freak show. On his way to burn his notebooks, however, he is lured into the enchanted apartment of Natacha (Krysten Ritter), who threatens to kill Alex unless he spins her a new tale every evening.For Alex, Natacha’s home is a dark and sinister prison, but it is also a Victorian wonderland. Venture through the right door and you might find a vast library, a magic garden or a unicorn forest. Alex soon befriends Yasmin (Lidya Jewett), another child held captive in the space, and together the Hansel and Gretel pair plot their escape.Several moments in “Nightbooks,” directed by David Yarovesky and based on a book by J.A. White, are genuinely frightening. During some sequences, particularly those that center a creepy-crawly menace called a Shredder, I was tempted to cover my eyes. The director David Yarovesky has a knack for tricks of light — shadows, neon night vision and motion cast in silhouette — and the movie is at its most deliciously chilling when it favors visual flair over jump scares.In its balance of kid-centric themes and unsettling images, “Nightbooks” follows a path paved by horror standouts like “Coraline” and the early works of Tim Burton. Yarovesky’s fairy tale spookfest ultimately doesn’t measure up to the moody ingenuity of those reference points, but its devotion to frights makes it memorable.NightbooksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Television

      Are the Movies Back? Our Critics Weigh In.

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      Our chief film critics look at the new season in the new abnormal, while remembering the lessons of cinema history. Are we on the cusp of a new era or will this too pass?Movie theaters are open for business again. and the film world is abuzz with new release dates, in-person festivals, an accelerating Oscar race, an array of Covid-19 protocols and anxious prognostications. Is this the death of cinema (again) or its glorious rebirth? Or has it mutated into something new altogether, a two-headed Disney-Netflix monster with art somewhere in its genome? Our chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, have some thoughts on these matters. They also asked some industry veterans to weigh in.MANOHLA DARGIS Hello, friend — it’s been awhile. I recently returned from a book leave and having failed to win the lottery, I am back (happily!). I ignored most of the movie news while I was gone, though was sad to learn about the closure of my favorite theater here in Los Angeles, the ArcLight Hollywood, which was felled by the lockdowns. It felt like the beginning of the end of something, but here we are in a new season that looks more like 2019 than 2020 — even with requests to see our vax cards. What’d I miss?A.O. SCOTT You didn’t miss much, except for a few episodes in the continuing discourse — part soap opera, part séance, part tech seminar — about the Future of Movies. Judged solely from the slate of upcoming releases (some held back from 2020), that future looks a lot like the recent past. The fall will see new work from both Andersons, Wes and P.T. Jane Campion’s first feature in more than a decade. A new James Bond. The predominance of familiar directors and stars along with newly minted auteurs (like Chloé Zhao, following her best picture win for “Nomadland” with a Marvel spectacle) creates a reassuring sense of continuity. Cinema as we have known it seems to still exist.Richard Madden and Gemma Chan in Chloé Zhao’s new superhero movie, “Eternals.”Marvel/DisneyAt the same time — though not for the first time — it is widely feared to be in mortal peril. Some of that anxiety is Covid-specific. Nobody knows when or how this thing will end, and whether audiences will return to theaters in sufficient numbers to revive the old business models. The pandemic is not the only factor, and the future of movies and moviegoing may depend less on virus mutations or consumer preferences than on corporate strategy.If Covid stretches on, we will lose more art-house theaters, resulting in less box office revenue. At some point there won’t be enough theaters to generate sufficient revenue to justify releasing a movie theatrically. If you lay on how the past 18 months have changed viewing habits, it looks even worse: the art-house audience is more mature, and that demographic has so far not been eager to return to cinemas.— Richard Abramowitz, founder and chief executive of the distributor AbramoramaDARGIS That we’re social animals is what made me think that we’d get back into theaters, that and there’s too much money at stake. Moviegoing has been up and down forever. But for decades the major studios have been eroding exhibition — the moviegoing habit itself — with a business model that banks on a handful of youth-baiting tentpoles and some monster weekends. Their audience flocks to the theaters for a bit, and everyone else waits for home video (or not). I looked at the numbers for the last “Avengers” movie: it opened in American theaters in April 2019 and played through September, but it sucked up more than 90 percent of its domestic haul in 30 days.I imagine that a lot of people waited to see it, just as earlier generations waited for stuff to hit TV, cable, video — all once viewed as a threat to moviegoing. For a time, these different avenues seemed fairly complementary. But the habit of on-demand, whenever, wherever watching has proved overwhelming, which is bad for exhibition but good for the multinational companies that own the studios because they also own the companies which funnel stuff into homes. So, maybe these multinationals will shift exclusively to streaming. Maybe they’ll re-embrace theaters or buy them all up. In the end, I am far more worried about nonindustrial cinema and if its audience will return to theaters.Sure, there’s the occasional blockbuster they may want to see as an Imax experience and want to have that shared community experience, but like everything in the world, with the multitude of choices available and given time, effort and expense to go to the movies, most opt to see movies in the comfort of their homes.— Marcus Hu, co-founder of the distributor Strand ReleasingSCOTT The small screen is definitely getting bigger, whether we like it or not. Subscription revenue is unlikely ever to match blockbuster box-office numbers, but for a lot of independent-minded filmmakers, streaming offers money for projects the big studios don’t make anymore. For a long time, the big studios have been concentrating their resources on franchise, I.P.-driven entertainment at the expense of stand-alone features aimed at adult audiences. Streaming has picked up some of that slack.The upshot is that what you and I and others in our rapidly aging demographic understood by “going to the movies” may have been replaced by a different menu of choices and practices. What I mean is the idea of the movie theater as a destination, independent of a particular film that might be showing. A lot of the time, you’d just go and see whatever was there, and there was always something — art, trash or in between — worth the price of the ticket, which wasn’t all that much. A movie habit was easy enough to acquire, and a lot of us did.Kirsten Dunst in “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s new film.Kirsty Griffin/NetflixKids nowadays haven’t developed it in quite the same way. They have more screens, more options and different reasons for buying a ticket. I’m not lamenting, just observing. What I wonder about is the effect of these changes on the art form that we’re still calling by the anachronistic names cinema and film.The studios stopped making the kinds of movies I make around the time we were finishing “Moneyball” — I remember an exec telling me he would have passed on it if it had come to him then. In the years it took to get that movie made, the world for that kind of movie turned.— Rachel Horovitz, producerDARGIS Let’s check back in 50 years to see how streaming affected cinema, which is always a moving target. To be honest, while it’s interesting to see how the big companies are handling the newest normal, the work I tend to love has long had a separate ecology, with its own way of doing things, its own community and relations. In 1991, Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” needed a slow release, critical love and word of mouth to make a dent, and the same is true of most of the movies we care about now. As a friend asked the other day, would Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” be “Parasite” if it had only been streamed? We both think the answer is no — it would still be great, but not a cultural sensation.Movies, unlike branded entertainment, need to live in the world, not just on personal devices. This isn’t about the putative romance of moviegoing, but how people experience art and culture, because while we’re talking about infrastructure, we are also talking about pleasure — the pleasure of the cinematic object, and the pleasure of your company and conversation. It’s frustrating that people keep writing lazy obituaries for cinema, something they have no feeling for or interest in. I don’t love all that’s transpired in movie history — the shift from film to digital, the loss of technical competency — but I remain buoyed by the persistence of the art and how its ecologies adapt and persevere.Even so, and I think I’ve said this before, I do increasingly view the segment of the movie world that I most worry about as akin to jazz. It’s something usually appreciated by a niche audience but that needs new blood — the kids you mentioned — to truly sustain it.Theatrical films will have exclusive windows in theaters, but those windows will be shorter and more flexible. But movies that matter, that have cultural impact, will again play exclusively in movie theaters for some time, likely 45 days.— Tom Rothman, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture GroupSCOTT I guess I’m always optimistic about the tenacity of artists and the curiosity of audiences, and aware that the good work most often gets done against the grain of whatever the system is at a given moment. But it’s nonetheless important to be critical of that system, and reasonable to wonder how its current iteration might stymie some kinds of originality while encouraging others.Daniel Craig as James Bond in “No Time to Die,” set for the fall.Nicola Dove/MGMThere’s no going back to any previous golden age, and the gold rubs off pretty quickly when you take a close look. The old studios whose products earned the designation “classical” were built on exploitation and predation, and ruled by autocratic moguls. Things were not much better, from an ethical or political standpoint, in the New Hollywood ’70s or the indie ’90s.Still, great and weird movies were being made then, as they are now. But I fear that many of them will languish in the streaming algorithms or in the margins of micro-distribution, estranged from even the smallish publics that might have discovered them. One cause for alarm — which has nothing to do with streaming per se — is the mass extinction of the local newspapers and alt-weeklies that nourished local film scenes across the country. The health of movies is connected to the health of journalism.[I worry] that the economic challenges will force the art-house cinemas away from the smaller titles that add significantly to diversity and inclusion in our cinematic landscape. Additionally, that the downsizing of newspaper and media coverage for smaller films will force the theater owners’ hands in these decisions.— Dennis Doros, co-founder of Milestone FilmsDARGIS The pandemic has brought specific issues to the fore — at the least, maybe improved theater ventilation will put an end to watching multiplex fodder in a miasma of despair and stale popcorn. More to your last point, I think that mostly what the pandemic has done is underscore, again, that all of us are still navigating the world created by the internet, which changed how we labor, play, read, watch, think. The movie industry has a history of different production-distribution-exhibition models that work until they don’t, yet throughout these shifts, movies kept being made and people kept watching them, and I imagine they’ll keep getting made and we’ll keep watching and talking about all of it.SCOTT Let’s hope so! Otherwise we may both find ourselves on permanent book leave. More

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      in Movies

      Kaycee Moore, Actress in Black Directors’ Seminal Films, Dies at 77

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      She explored her characters’ inner lives in movies like “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” independent works that grew out of the L.A. Rebellion movement.Kaycee Moore, whose nuanced acting documented Black American life in movies by a group of young, Black independent directors in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Aug. 13 at her home in Kansas City, Kan. She was 77.The death was confirmed by the Watkins Heritage Funeral home. No cause was given.Ms. Moore made only a handful of movies, but they had an outsize impact on American cinema. Her portrayals defied the traditional roles for Black women of her era, in action-packed or trauma-filled blockbusters, and instead laid bare the interior lives of her characters.Her debut came in “Killer of Sheep” (1978), the director Charles Burnett’s first feature. (It was his thesis for the film program at the University of California, Los Angeles.) Mr. Burnett was a member of the community of independent filmmakers that would later become known as the L.A. Rebellion.Their movies, unlike many mainstream Hollywood pictures, humanized Black characters and celebrated Black family life, though they did not shy away from hardship. Ms. Moore’s characters in “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” (1983) were both struggling wives who wanted the best for their children and husbands in a system portrayed as designed to keep Black Americans down and out.“Killer of Sheep” follows a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker whose leading of lambs to their death takes on biblical resonance. Ms. Moore played the worker’s unnamed wife as she raises their family in the blighted Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Critics lauded the film’s stark visual style, and The Sacramento Bee called Ms. Moore’s performance “incandescent.”Upon the film’s rerelease in 2007, the critic Stuart Klawans, writing in The Nation, praised the “profoundly moving” work of Ms. Moore and Henry G. Sanders, who played her husband. “Their lives are denuded in many ways, materially impoverished and spiritually numbed,” he wrote, “but for all that, they have the grandeur of unchallengeable fact.”“Bless Their Little Hearts” came next for Ms. Moore. She played Andais, the wife of the protagonist, Charlie (Nate Hardman). The film, directed by Billy Woodbury and written by Mr. Burnett, charts Charlie’s struggle to find permanent work and the temptations he faces to turn to crime, all set against the backdrop of a newly begun extramarital affair.Looking back at the L.A. Rebellion films in an essay in The New York Times in 2020, the critic Ben Kenigsberg found Ms. Moore’s performance naturalistic. “She is shown in contrasting scenes riding the bus: in one, she nods off from fatigue; later, having discovered that Charlie is having an affair, she is wide-awake,” he wrote. “When the two finally fight about the fling, the scene, staged in a single take, feels utterly extemporaneous.”Acting in “Bless Their Little Hearts” was not always easy for Ms. Moore. She recalled in the production notes for the film that the climactic argument scene, filmed in one take, included actual physical violence. But “for the most part,” she said, “it was a film set that was full of love.”Her acting style, Mr. Woodberry, the director, said in an interview, was not naturalistic but realistic, informed by small expressions and actions and drawn from personal experience. “She’s a person who knew a lot about life,” he said of Ms. Moore, “and she could bring that to the character.”Ms. Moore later joined an ensemble cast of Black actors in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), which is generally considered the first film by a Black woman to achieve a wide release in the United States. In the film, Ms. Moore played Haagar Peazant, a discontented member of the insular Gullah community in the islands off South Carolina during the Jim Crow era. Ms. Moore imbued the character, who wants to leave the community, with an iron will.“The film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians,” The Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in 1992.L.A. Rebellion movies have entered the pantheon of American film. “Daughters of the Dust” and “Bless Their Little Hearts” were made part of the prestigious Criterion Collection, and “Killer of Sheep” was one of the first 50 films introduced into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990.Kaycee Collier was born in Kansas City, Kan., on Feb. 24, 1944. Her mother, Angie Mae (Sandifer) Aker, was an activist and advocate for Black Americans with sickle cell disease. Kaycee had seven siblings, two of whom died of sickle cell anemia, inspiring her mother’s devotion to the cause, according to “Kansas City Women of Independent Minds,” a 1992 book by the Kansas City historian Jane Fifield Flynn. Kaycee’s father, Andrew Collier, died shortly after her birth, Ms. Flynn wrote.She married John Moore Jr. in 1959 and later married Stephen Jones. She is survived by the two children of her first marriage, John Moore III and Michelle Moore Swinton; her siblings Margaret Hall, Angie Ruth Wesley, Frances Collier and Jimmie Collier; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.It was in the 1970s that Ms. Moore headed west to audition for Hollywood roles and met Mr. Burnett, the filmmaker who would cast her in “Killer of Sheep.” Her last major film role was in “Ninth Street” (1999), by the writer-director Kevin Willmott.After her mother died in the 1990s, Ms. Moore took over her role as executive director of the Kansas City chapter of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. More

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      Head of Paramount Pictures is ousted as ViacomCBS focuses on streaming.

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      In 2017, Viacom turned to one of Hollywood’s most seasoned and respected executives, James N. Gianopulos, to revive its flatlining Paramount Pictures operation. Mr. Gianopulos quickly stabilized the 1910s-era studio — repairing relationships with filmmakers and producers, building a thriving television division from near-scratch, and restoring Paramount to profitability.He was ousted on Monday, with his status as the consummate Hollywood insider having curdled into a liability, at least to ViacomCBS, the conglomerate that owns Paramount, where streaming, streaming, streaming is the new currency of the realm.Brian Robbins, 58, who runs Viacom’s children’s television business, will succeed Mr. Gianopulos, 69, as chief executive of Paramount Pictures, ViacomCBS said. Emma Watts, 51, the president of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, was notably passed over for the job.The reversal of fortune for Mr. Gianopulos, who had two years left on his contract, did not shock the movie capital, where speculation about his standing inside ViacomCBS had been gossiped about for months. Shari Redstone, who controls the company, had signaled in private that Mr. Gianopulos had become a frustration. In particular, he had, at times, resisted a ViacomCBS effort to prioritize the Paramount+ streaming service at the expense of ticket sales and theaters. Big-screen releases remain of crucial importance to studio partners like Tom Cruise, who stars in Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible” series and coming “Top Gun” sequel.Shari Redstone, the chair of ViacomCBS, in July. She has been pushing the company to prioritize streaming.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesBut the ouster rattled the film business nonetheless. It was seen by some as barbarous — tradition holds that senior statesmen get to write their own endings. And it added to a changing of the guard: Ron Meyer, a longtime film power at Universal, left last year amid a sex scandal, and Alan F. Horn, the chief creative officer at Walt Disney Studios, is widely expected to retire in the coming months.Bob Bakish, the chief executive of ViacomCBS, said in a statement that the leadership change would “build on Paramount’s strong momentum, ensuring it continues to engage audiences at scale while embracing viewers’ evolving tastes and habits.” He said Mr. Robbins was an “expert” at developing franchises by “leaning into the unique strengths of new and established platforms.”Mr. Bakish called Mr. Gianopulos “a towering figure in Hollywood” and thanked him for revitalizing Paramount. In the same statement, Mr. Gianopulos recounted a list of major changes he had successfully navigated over his nearly 40-year career — such as the introduction of VCRs and online film rentals — and wished Mr. Robbins “all the very best success.”For many film industry stalwarts, Mr. Robbins is an affront to their identities; he comes from television, said while holding one’s nose. Mr. Robbins has experience as a movie producer and director. But much of the Hollywood establishment also looks down on that part of his résumé, which includes “Norbit,” a commercially successful but critically reviled Eddie Murphy vehicle from 2007. Not exactly Oscar bait.Mr. Robbins gained fame as a young actor in the 1980s by playing a mulleted rebel on the ABC sitcom “Head of the Class.” In the 1990s and 2000s he worked as a television producer (“Kenan & Kel” on Nickelodeon, “Smallville” on the WB) and a film director (“Norbit,” “Varsity Blues”).By 2009, however, Mr. Robbins started to become disillusioned with Hollywood. Younger audiences — his specialty — were living online. He began experimenting with low-budget films starring YouTube personalities like Lucas Cruikshank (a.k.a. Fred Figgelhorn) and started a YouTube channel, AwesomenessTV, aimed at teenage girls. In 2013, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then running DreamWorks Animation, bought AwesomenessTV for about $33 million. (Mr. Katzenberg remains a mentor.)“There is no movie business anymore!” Mr. Robbins was quoted by Fast Company as saying in 2013. “The model’s broken, and I see that as an opportunity.”Mr. Robbins was named president of Nickelodeon, which is also owned by ViacomCBS, in 2018. He has become known inside Viacom as a plain-spoken, never-say-die futurist who believes that Paramount+, the company’s relatively small streaming service, must be supercharged. Mr. Robbins has eagerly rerouted new children’s programming toward Paramount+ and away from Nickelodeon’s traditional cable channels. One such show, a reboot of “iCarly,” has been a hit for the streaming service.Mr. Gianopulos, or “Jim G” as everyone in Hollywood refers to him, will remain a consultant until the end of the year, ViacomCBS said. “Jim is nothing less than legendary in this business, and I am humbled and grateful to him for his years of mentorship and friendship,” Mr. Robbins said in a statement.Mr. Robbins will continue to lead Nickelodeon, ViacomCBS said. But he will not get all of Mr. Gianopulos’s portfolio; Paramount Television Studios will now report to David Nevins, the chairman and chief executive of Showtime Networks. More

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      When Matt and Ben Met Nicole: How They Came to Write ‘The Last Duel’

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      For their first writing reunion since “Good Will Hunting,” Ben Affleck and Matt Damon collaborated with the writer-director Nicole Holofcener on a period drama.It’s been nearly 25 years since Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in “Good Will Hunting,” and cemented the kind of Hollywood partnership where one name is rarely spoken without the other.But for their first writing reunion since then, “The Last Duel,” the men didn’t want just another version of The Matt and Ben Show. What they did want for this historical drama about a woman who was raped, and the men who refuse to believe her, was a female collaborator. And so they sought out the writer-director Nicole Holofcener, celebrated for her nuanced observations of thorny contemporary women in movies like “Enough Said” and “Friends With Money.”“The Last Duel,” directed by Ridley Scott, based on Eric Jager’s 2004 book and in theaters Oct. 15, depicts France’s final officially sanctioned trial by combat: In 1386, Jean de Carrouges, a knight, and his friend-turned-rival, Jacques Le Gris, a squire, are ordered to fight to the death after Carrouges’s wife, Marguerite, accuses Le Gris of raping her, and he denies it. Whoever survives will be proclaimed the winner as a sign of divine providence. Should Carrouges lose, Marguerite will be burned at the stake for perjury.The film, set amid the brutality of the Hundred Years’ War, is divided into three chapters — the “truth” according to Carrouges (played by Damon), Le Gris (Adam Driver) and finally, Marguerite (Jodie Comer). Damon and Affleck wrote the male perspectives, while Holofcener wrote Marguerite’s.“The heaviest lift in the architecture of this screenplay was the third act, because that world of women had to be almost invented and imagined out of whole cloth,” Damon said. “The men were very fastidious about taking notes about what they were up to at the time. But nobody was really talking about what was happening with the women, because they didn’t even have personhood.”“This is an adaptation of a book that we read,” he added, “but Nicole’s part is kind of an original screenplay.”Ben Affleck, left, Nicole Holofcener and Damon. Affleck sent her some pages he and Damon had written. “They weren’t good,” Holofcener said, “but they were good enough for me to say, ‘I want to work with these guys.’”From left: Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times; Dan MacMedan/Getty Images; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesOn a spirited video call in late August — Damon in Brooklyn, Affleck and Holofcener in Los Angeles — the three discussed the intricacies of their collaboration and of portraying sexual assault during a violent period when women were little more than chattel. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Let’s start at the beginning. Matt, it’s December 2018 and you’ve just read Jager’s book. What happened next?MATT DAMON Ridley and I had been looking for something to do together since “The Martian,” and we’d had a few near misses. So I sent it to Ridley, and he loved it. In March 2019, Ben came over for dinner, and he took the book that night and called me at 7 the next morning and said, “Let’s do this.” And that was how we set off to writing. But very quickly, through a bunch of different conversations we were having with a bunch of people, we decided that it would serve the story best if we found the best female writer we could to write the female perspective.NICOLE HOLOFCENER [Dryly] Plus, Ridley and I have been looking for something to do together for years.DAMON [Laughs] Oh, now I’m an [expletive]. Oh, God.HOLOFCENER No — no. Am I making fun of you? I didn’t mean that. I was just thinking about how different my sensibility is from Ridley’s. That’s all.DAMON Yeah, yeah. Well, Nicole was our dream writer and our first choice. And thank God she said yes. And she said yes in large part because Ben, behind my back, sent her about 10 or 15 pages that we hadn’t shown anybody. And I was so embarrassed, like professionally embarrassed, that he sent them to Nicole Holofcener.HOLOFCENER They weren’t good, but they were good enough for me to say, “I want to work with these guys.”DAMON I think they were bad enough that she was like, “Oh, these guys need help.”HOLOFCENER Bad enough so that I wasn’t intimidated to be able to write for medieval language, at least in English. But they’re so talented, and I was immediately very flattered. The only hesitation I had was, “Can I come out of my own little world and write about something like this?” And as soon as I started and I got their support, I found that I could do it.Jodie Comer as a 14th-century woman who accuses a squire of raping her.Patrick Redmond/20th Century StudiosSo why three chapters?BEN AFFLECK Very quickly, we recognized that the film has a clear point of view on who’s telling the truth. And that this incredibly heroic character, Marguerite de Carrouges, had this story that deserved to be told. It was evident that it was going to be an exploration of the dynamics of power, roots of misogyny and survival in medieval France. It had all the elements of what makes a story really great to tell — the idea of an unreliable narrator, a second unreliable narrator and then a kind of reveal of what happened through the eyes of a character who was both the hero and whose humanity was denied and ignored.HOLOFCENER But also, you get the fact that it wasn’t black and white to the men, and it was so black and white to the woman about what happened. So, the male point of views offer this perspective of male delusion.Nicole, Marguerite wasn’t nearly as fleshed out in the book. How did you go about creating her world?HOLOFCENER I did research about what women were like then and what they had to put up with. I gave her a friend to be able to talk to. I knew that she would have to take over the estate when he was away fighting. So I read up, “Well, what did they do?” Took care of the animals and the horses and the harvesting. And I really tried to imagine just how awful it was for her and how she dealt with the awfulness. Her life was pretty bad being married to Jean de Carrouges and so when she was violated, she had nothing to lose, really. I mean, she was going to suffer. She had the potential of suffering dearly and dying, but at that point she was just tired of having no voice.How do three writers keep things straight?AFFLECK Once the script got close to a completed stage, then it got passed around, emailed. In fact, one of the biggest challenges was the maddening technological aspects of keeping up with various versions — that they had included everyone else’s changes.HOLOFCENER We kept working off the wrong drafts. It was like: “Wait a minute. I took that line out two months ago. Why is it still there?” We’re not the most technically savvy.DAMON We had one of those moments where I think we’d done half a day on one of these things and we’re realizing, “Oh no, this is the wrong draft,” and then you have to try to go through and figure out what you’ve done.HOLOFCENER Matt doesn’t even have a laptop. So don’t get me started.How did you make sure you were portraying Marguerite’s rape accurately without exploiting it?AFFLECK We were especially sensitive and careful to really listen and do research, whether it was consulting with RAINN [an organization that helps victims of rape, abuse and incest], survivors of assault, historical experts, women’s groups, and trying to allow all of those other experiences to inform the story and make it as authentic as possible.HOLOFCENER I think that those organizations really, really wanted to make sure we were making it clear what the truth was — that this is not “he said, she said.” This is not ambivalent.AFFLECK We had questions like: “Are we whitewashing if we don’t show the emotional toll and the severity of this? To what extent does it become too much? And where do you feel the bounds of tastes are?”HOLOFCENER A lot of it was about how often do we see the rape and how long is it? How long do we have to suffer through this? That was a topic of conversation. And so we took their notes seriously and did a lot of trimming. We had to show some scenes twice, but it was necessary. We had to see the rape twice, as disturbing as it was to watch.Damon and Comer in “The Last Duel.” The writers had to decide how much of the attack to show given that it would be repeated to show different perspectives.20th Century StudiosWhat choices did you make to either stick with or depart from the book?DAMON The biggest departure is the rape scene. Marguerite de Carrouges, what she said in court and over and over again to an ever-widening group of people and eventually all of France, was that Jacques Le Gris entered her home with another man, Adam Louvel. We have in the movie Louvel coming in, but then Le Gris tells him to leave. In Marguerite’s actual testimony, the rape was much more brutal. She was tied down and gagged. She almost choked to death. And Louvel was in the room.HOLOFCENER [Le Gris] told himself he loved her.AFFLECK What was fascinating was the degree to which this behavior and attitude toward women was so thorough and pervasive, and the vestigial aspects that are still with us today. That’s really powerful. What we have hoped is people will look at it and go: “Have I always understood how my actions were being perceived by others? Have I always recognized other people’s reality, truth, perspective, in the course of my behavior?” And maybe reflect on that.Ben, I understood that you were originally going to portray Le Gris. And then you decided to play the libertine Count Pierre d’Alençon instead of facing off against Matt onscreen. Why?HOLOFCENER He came to his senses.AFFLECK What happened truly is that —DAMON We heard Adam Driver was interested. [Everyone laughs.] More

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      What’s on TV This Week: The Emmys and Monday Night Football

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      The best of prime-time television will be honored during the 73rd annual Emmy Awards and the tradition of Monday Night Football continues.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Sept. 13-19. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL 8:15 p.m. on ESPN. Monday Night Football returns with a game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Las Vegas Raiders. Though the N.F.L.’s 18-week season officially began last Thursday, the Monday night games begin this week. The tradition of broadcasting Monday Night Football began in 1970, making it one of the longest running prime-time programs in television history. After a hiatus, Trevor Noah will be back on the set of “The Daily Show.”THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. Trevor Noah will be back on Monday with “The Daily Show,” following a hiatus that began in June. Since the start of the pandemic, Noah has been calling his show “The Daily Social Distancing Show,” with production and filming taking place at his home. Though Comedy Central released a trailer dubbing this “the new era of ‘The Daily Show,’” it is unclear whether the rest of this season, the show’s 26th, will be filmed at the well-known “Daily Show” set with a live audience or back at Noah’s apartment.TuesdayEXTINCTION: THE FACTS 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the last of this four-part series, David Attenborough explores the millions of species at risk of extinction. Studies have found that humans are speeding up extinction, and we are currently in a phase of mass extinction. In the series, Attenborough explains how those extinctions and changes in biodiversity could effect humans through threats to food and water security, increased risk of climate change and a greater risk of more pandemics.THE PAPER CHASE (1973) 8 p.m. on TCM. This film, directed by James Bridges and starring Timothy Bottoms, follows a first-year student at Harvard Law as he navigates his schoolwork and a new relationship. Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic, wrote that “there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés.”WednesdayFUTURE OF WORK 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). PBS wraps up its “Future of Work” series this Wednesday. It has explored the changing norms in workplaces and the long-term impact we see in educators, workers and communities. Amid the pandemic, a lot of businesses have shut down, implemented “work from home” policies or laid off employees entirely.ThursdayFrom left, Nilsa Prowant, Aimee Hall and Codi Butts on “Floribama Shore.”Courtesy of MTVFLORIBAMA SHORE 8 p.m. on MTV. The fifth season of “Floribama Shore” is premiering on Thursday night. The show, which debuted in 2017, is an MTV production inspired by the notorious and wildly successful “Jersey Shore.” This show follows the lives of seven young adults from the Florida Panhandle and beyond. With roughly the same format as “Jersey Shore,” the cast members share a “shore house” and don’t have access to cellphones or social media. Season 5 will take place on a farm in Georgia.BROOKLYN NINE-NINE 8 p.m. on NBC. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is wrapping up its eight-year run with a one-hour series finale on Thursday. The episode’s title — “The Last Day” — could be a hint to fans that Andy Samberg’s character, Jake Peralta, is leaving the N.Y.P.D. What it means to be a police officer in 2021 has been a main focus of this final season. The writers worked in plotlines around real-life events that followed the murder of George Floyd.FridayTHA GOD’S HONEST TRUTH WITH LENARD ‘CHARLAMAGNE’ MCKELVEY 10 p.m. on Comedy Central. Lenard McKelvey, better known as Charlamagne Tha God, is hosting his first Comedy Central show. The program, which is executive produced by Stephen Colbert, will examine social issues through sketches, discussions and interpersonal experiments. McKelvey grew to notoriety on his New York-based radio show “The Breakfast Club,” which has since been inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. He has also released two books: “Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It” and “Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me.” The show will give viewers a new way to dive deep into McKelvey’s point of view.SaturdayTHE HARDER THEY FALL (1956) 6 p.m. on TCM. Humphrey Bogart stars in this movie as a former sportswriter who is hired by a shady fight promoter to boost a rising boxing star from Argentina. The film, which was based off a book of the same name, offers plenty of behind-the-scenes boxing-match drama. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “With a fury and speed that keeps one dizzy for a matter of 10 rounds (or reels) — which, in screen time, is over 100 minutes — it bangs out a punishing tale.”SundayAn Emmy statuette on display in 2019. This year, the red carpet will be a little different.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockE! LIVE FROM THE RED CARPET — THE 2021 PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS 6 p.m. on E!. Before an awards show, celebrities in designer clothing are usually featured together, but this year is a little different. Stars will be allowed to walk the red carpet (unlike last year’s show, which was virtual) in limited numbers. And only about a dozen members of the press will be allowed on the carpet. Hopefully, even with the limited press, audiences will get a glimpse of this year’s TV stars all decked out.73RD EMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. Though this year’s Emmy Awards ceremony will be small, just nominees and their guests are allowed inside, and the mask mandate in Los Angeles will likely still be in effect, it is still a step toward normalcy after last year’s virtual ceremony. The show will take place at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles and will be hosted by Cedric the Entertainer. This year, “Ted Lasso” is poised to be one of the night’s biggest stars, with 20 nominations — breaking the freshman comedy series record of 19 nominations that was held by “Glee.” In an already momentous moment, the “Pose” actress Mj Rodriguez became the first transgender person to be nominated in a lead acting category. More