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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Snowpiercer’ and ‘Resident Alien’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat’s on TV This Week: ‘Snowpiercer’ and ‘Resident Alien’“Snowpiercer” returns on TNT. And Alan Tudyk stars in a new comedy series on Syfy.Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs in “Snowpiercer.”Credit…David Bukach/TNTJan. 25, 2021, 1:00 a.m. ETBetween 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. 25-Jan. 31. Details and times are subject to change.MondaySNOWPIERCER 9 p.m. on TNT. Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly star in this science-fiction thriller series, based on both Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi film of the same name and on the series of French graphic-novels that inspired that film. All three share a biting social commentary and a post-apocalyptic setting: A train circling a frozen earth ravaged by a climate calamity, carrying a population of human survivors who are divided by class. The first season of the TV series introduced a former police detective (Diggs) and a member of the train’s bourgeois leadership, Melanie Cavill (Connelly), who holds a rare sympathy for the train’s lower-class inhabitants. The second season, debuting on Monday night, will reveal more about the train’s mysterious billionaire creator, played by Sean Bean. The show has unplanned echoes with real, present life — as Connelly pointed out in an interview with The New York Times in May of last year, when the first season debuted. “Everyone on that train has been separated from their communities, the lives that they lived, the places that they loved,” she said. “We didn’t imagine that, by time this show came out, we would all be living a version of that.” Going into the second season, that grave resonance remains.UNSTOPPABLE (2010) 5:30 p.m. on AMC. For a choo-choo experience with less social bite (but more wizz-banging) than “Snowpiercer,” consider “Unstoppable,” an action movie with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. Directed by Tony Scott, the film casts Washington as a veteran railman who gets paired with a younger conductor (Pine). The plot follows the pair’s efforts to stop a runaway train filled with toxic cargo, which threatens to cause an environmental catastrophe should the train derail. Their mission makes for “nutty, kinetic entertainment,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. Scott, she wrote, “creates an unexpectedly rich world of chugging, rushing trains slicing across equally beautiful industrial and natural landscapes.”TuesdayFrom left, William Childress, Arica Himmel and Mykal-Michelle Harris in “mixed-ish.”Credit…Eric McCandless/ABCMIXED-ISH 9:30 p.m. on ABC. Kenya Barris’s sitcom “black-ish” got a neon jolt of 1980s flavor with “mixed-ish,” a prequel series that debuted in 2019. The prequel looks at the childhood of Rainbow (Arica Himmel), the character played by Tracee Ellis Ross in the main series, and her experience coming of age as a multiracial American teenager at that time. The second season kicks off on Tuesday night with the family discovering that Rainbow’s brother, Johan (Ethan William Childress), has been misrepresenting his race.FORD V FERRARI (2019) 9:05 p.m. on HBO2. This year, Ford is rolling out an electric Mustang crossover to rival Tesla, and Ferrari is preparing to release its first S.U.V. But in 1966, those two car manufacturers went toe-to-toe, pedal to the gas-guzzling metal at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. This historical drama, directed by James Mangold, dramatizes that race and the events leading up to it from Ford’s perspective, centering on Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who work together to develop a car that can outpace their Italian rivals.WednesdayAlan Tudyk in “Resident Alien.”Credit…James Dittinger/SyfyRESIDENT ALIEN 10 p.m. on Syfy. Chris Sheridan, a longtime writer for “Family Guy,” is behind this sci-fi comedy, an adaptation of the Dark Horse comic series of the same name. The story follows Harry, an alien who crash-lands on earth and assumes the identity of a doctor in a small Colorado town. Human viewers of the show may realize that this alien doctor is actually Alan Tudyk, the shape-shifting actor who played the “Star Wars” droid K-2SO and the parrot Iago in 2019’s “Aladdin.”ThursdayTHREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI (2017) 5:50 p.m. on FXM. Frances McDormand’s name is on the tongues of awards-season pundits this year for her role in “Nomadland,” a road drama from Chloé Zhao that’s due out next month on Hulu and in theaters. McDormand won an Academy Award a few years ago for her role in this dark crime dramedy written and directed by Martin McDonagh. She plays a Missouri mother seeking justice for her daughter’s murder — justice that she’s not getting from the town’s ailing police chief (Woody Harrelson) and a tempestuous deputy (Sam Rockwell). In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis took issue with McDonagh’s filmmaking, writing that his “bids at humor grow progressively less successful.” But she praised the performances, particularly McDormand, who she wrote “makes pain so palpably all-encompassing that you see it in her character’s every glance and gesture.”FridayHerbie Hancock performing at the Hollywood Bowl in 2018.Credit…Dustin DowningIN CONCERT AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). With in-person performances still on hiatus, the Hollywood Bowl recently started broadcasting collections of archival performances through the “In Concert at the Hollywood Bowl” program. The 9 p.m. broadcast on Friday features a performance from Dianne Reeves and a jazz jam session with Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller and Cindy Blackman Santana. It is followed at 10 p.m. by a second program built around show tunes. Performers in that segment include Audra McDonald and Kristin Chenoweth.SaturdayBURDEN (2020) 9 p.m. on Showtime. Garrett Hedlund plays a South Carolina Klan member who renounces his ways thanks to the extreme kindness of a small-town preacher (Forest Whitaker) in this redemption drama. The film, which is based on a true story, “is often preachy and overripe with white-power symbolism,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. “Yet its mood of airless bigotry is quite effective, portraying the Klan’s influence with officials and the police as an ingrained stain on the fabric of the town.”SundayLADY AND THE DALE 9 p.m. on HBO. In the 1970s, an ostensible entrepreneur named Elizabeth Carmichael began touting the Dale, a fuel-efficient, three-wheeled car that promised to be revolutionary. It turned out to be a sham. This new documentary mini-series revisits the case.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWalter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101His movies included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own experience of being blacklisted.The screenwriter Walter Bernstein in 1983. His leftist politics influenced both his life and his art.Credit…Susan Wood/Getty ImagesJan. 23, 2021, 6:06 p.m. ETWalter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died on Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause was pneumonia.Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in various stages of development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he told Variety.Mr. Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.“Fail Safe” (1964), the story of an accidental bombing of Moscow, was a bold rejoinder to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. “Paris Blues” (1961), which he wrote for the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator, starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires” (1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of 19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s.Mr. Bernstein with Woody Allen on the set of the 1976 film “The Front,” based on Mr. Bernstein’s experience during the blacklist of the 1950s. Mr. Bernstein’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.Credit…Columbia PicturesThe subject of “The Front” (1976), also directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an Academy Award nomination (it was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America award), was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a “front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted. (Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance for Mr. Allen that same year in “Annie Hall.”)Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST; “Yanks,” starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy, “Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.A Hollywood EducationMr. Bernstein was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European immigrants who were “not really affected by the Depression,” as Mr. Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his father, a schoolteacher, was protected by civil service employment rules. He attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded the students were split into three shifts, a boon for the film-loving Walter: When he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the Astor Theater, where admission during the day was a dime.Upon graduation, Mr. Bernstein was offered what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of Grenoble. His father knew a French family Walter could stay with and “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding, “If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”Walter Matthau, Julie Andrews and Sara Stimson in “Little Miss Marker” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Bernstein directed.  Credit…Universal PicturesBut the experience broadened him, thrusting him as it did into the midst of young intellectuals, often Communists, living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the currency of conversation.He then attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic of The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled in “Inside Out,” “was that there were no screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the movie.”“I found this no real impediment,” he added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism. Doing it this way made it art.”He also became a contributor to The New Yorker, for which he would write during and after the war, and where he eventually became a staff writer.First, however, there was a war to get through. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he recalled, “but it was a show.”)“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”Making Wartime NewsWhile contributing military-themed articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for Yank, the Army journal, a job that would last throughout World War II. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that would give him his first taste of fame.“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr. Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into war-torn Yugoslavia by anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz, known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav republic until his death in 1980.“I was the first Western correspondent to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”Although Mr. Bernstein’s interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article made it world news.The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, center, in 1947 after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing to say whether he was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Mr. Trumbo, like Mr. Bernstein and a number of other Hollywood writers, was blacklisted.Credit…Henry Griffin/Associated Press“I had an aunt who was a charter member of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”“I didn’t join the party until after the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they were doing something.”In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep Your Head Down”) on the bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr. Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited work on “All the King’s Men.”Mr. Bernstein ended up staying in Hollywood for six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”That led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated.Suddenly Untouchable“I was still in Hollywood in 1947, during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliation. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack.“I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.Mr. Bernstein at his apartment in Manhattan in 2000. He continued to write, teach and generate screenplay ideas well into his 90s.Credit…Jim Cooper/Associated PressMr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted great moments in history.It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been blacklisted.)“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in “Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”It was the now largely forgotten “That Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s “official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the employable.In the years following the blacklist, Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country” (1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip” (1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’ Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for the live broadcast of “Fail Safe” in 2000.In addition to his wife, a literary agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son, Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Seide.Six decades after the fact, Mr. Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.“I don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Can a Brash Executive in Kansas Save Movie Theaters?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdam Aron, the chief executive of AMC Entertainment, has been regarded in his industry as both a traitor and a trailblazer.Credit…Barrett Emke for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexCan a Brash Executive in Kansas Save Movie Theaters?For Adam Aron, who runs AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest movie theater chain, the past year has been filled with twists and turns. And no one knows the ending.Adam Aron, the chief executive of AMC Entertainment, has been regarded in his industry as both a traitor and a trailblazer.Credit…Barrett Emke for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 22, 2021Most of the time, the 116-year-old movie theater business is rather humdrum.Tickets get sold. Images get projected onto screens, sometimes in 3-D. Every now and then, change-phobic cinema operators get excited about an innovation. The armrest cup holder, for instance, was patented in 1981.But these are not normal times at movie houses. Just ask Adam Aron.A year ago, Mr. Aron, who runs AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest multiplex chain, was feeling unusually invigorated about his antiquated industry. Even with streaming services proliferating — and attendance in North America declining — cinemas worldwide collected $42.5 billion in 2019, a record high. “We see dramatic growth in the size of the domestic box office not so far away,” he said with flourish in late February.By mid-March, the coronavirus had forced Mr. Aron to furlough 35,000 workers, including himself, and close every AMC theater: 10,700 screens in 15 countries. As the coronavirus surged and retreated and resurged, AMC reopened most of its theaters, re-closed many of them and, lately, started to reopen some of them again. To keep the debt-saddled chain alive, Mr. Aron and his chief financial officer, Sean Goodman, who joined AMC just a couple of months before the crisis, have done financial back flips, narrowly averting bankruptcy four times in nine months. AMC has raised more than $1 billion in fits and starts and has secured another $1 billion or so in rent deferrals from landlords.AMC has struggled during the pandemic and said in a recent filing that liquidation or bankruptcy was “likely” without another infusion of cash.Credit…Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressIt has been one of the wildest corporate rides of the pandemic, which has severely tested chief executives everywhere. And it is not over yet.With some film studios now predicting that moviegoing will not begin to recover until midsummer — and postponing releases yet again as a result — Mr. Aron has said AMC needs to raise another $750 million to squeak through. So far, AMC has raised $204 million toward that goal. AMC said in a recent securities filing that, without added cash, liquidation or bankruptcy restructuring was “likely.” One potential new lifeline involves a financing package tied to Odeon, a European theater chain owned by AMC.“Many have repeatedly underestimated the sheer will of our management to power through this crisis,” Mr. Aron said in an interview, adding a bit of the droll brashness that is his trademark: “We have not yet begun to fight!”The pandemic has also thrust Mr. Aron, 66, to the front lines of the streaming wars, where, over the past six months, his industry has blasted him as a traitor one minute and followed him as a trailblazer the next.Mr. Aron, a relative newcomer to the multiplex business, broke ranks with other chains in July and agreed to drastically shorten the exclusive window that AMC receives to play Universal films. The studio, home to the “Despicable Me” and “Fast and Furious” franchises, now has the right to make movies available in homes through premium video on demand after just 17 days in AMC theaters — down from roughly 90 days, long the industry norm. In return, Universal agreed, for the first time, to share a portion of the premium on-demand revenue with AMC.Mooky Greidinger, who owns Regal Cinemas, the No. 2 chain in North America, dismissed Mr. Aron’s deal as “the wrong move at the wrong time” in an August interview. He cited the usual reason: People will be reluctant to buy tickets if they can see the same film on their living room television set or iPhone screen just a few weeks later.“This is not a business that you are shaking up that easily,” said Mr. Greidinger, whose family has operated cinemas since the 1930s.Consider it shaken: Regal is now in talks with Universal for a similar arrangement, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. Two other chains, Cinemark Holdings and Cineplex, have already followed AMC.Given the initial blowback, Mr. Aron should be taking a victory lap. Instead, he has found himself back on the defensive.The future of moviegoing has been called into question as some studios have embraced streaming.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Aron has been sparring with Warner Bros., which is owned by AT&T, over streaming. Warner recently vowed to release 17 coming films without giving theaters any exclusive play time — or any financial sweeteners. To play a Warner film with no exclusivity, AMC initially demanded up to 80 percent of revenue from ticket sales, according to two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks. Warner rejected that request.Ticket sales are typically split 50-50 between studios and theaters.The two sides struck a deal for at least one film on Thursday, with AMC beginning to sell tickets for “The Little Things,” a Denzel Washington crime thriller that Warner will release on Jan. 29 in theaters and on HBO Max. AMC declined to comment. Warner did not respond to a query.Even if he does manage to steer AMC through the pandemic, Mr. Aron faces bone-chilling challenges on the other side. At best, the company will emerge deep in debt. Moviegoing could surge with pent-up demand. Or the masses, now trained to expect instant access to major films on streaming services or online rental platforms, could be reluctant to return. Nobody really knows.How much fight does Mr. Aron really have left in him?Darryl Hartley-Leonard, who ran the Hyatt Hotel Corporation in the 1980s when Mr. Aron served as chief marketing officer, laughed when asked that question.“Let me explain Adam to you this way,” Mr. Hartley-Leonard said. “Had he been the band leader on the Titanic, not only would he have gone down with the ship, he would have looked over the side as the dark, icy water got closer and asked, ‘Do you think we have time to write another song?’”Blunt and quoting ChurchillMr. Aron, left, was the chief executive of the Philadelphia 76ers, among other jobs, before he entered the movie theater business.Credit…Tim Shaffer for The New York TimesAdam Maximilian Aron is not well known in Hollywood. He lives in a distant land called Kansas, where AMC is based, and arrived at AMC in January 2016 by way of the hotel business.After breezing through Harvard University in three years and earning his M.B.A. (also from Harvard, with distinction), he went to work for Pan American World Airways in the marketing department. In his early 30s, he became Hyatt’s marketing chief and subsequently held the same job at United Airlines. Then he began making a name for himself as a turnaround artist, serving as the chief executive of Norwegian Cruise Line, Vail Resorts and the Philadelphia 76ers. For a time, he was a senior operating partner at Apollo Global Management, the private-equity powerhouse. Before AMC, Mr. Aron ran Starwood Hotels.He can be marvelously blunt. “The quarter was simply a bust,” Mr. Aron told AMC analysts in 2017. More often than not, however, he drifts into monologues and voluminous lists. “Before turning to your questions, I’d like to comment on eight important specific topics,” he said on AMC’s most-recent earnings call. Bad puns delight him, as do folksy interjections. (“Whoa, Nelly!”) He has a tendency to grandstand, quoting, for instance, a wartime Winston Churchill to sum up AMC’s pandemic mind-set. “We shall fight on the beaches,” Mr. Aron told analysts with flourish in November. “We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight on the fields and in the streets.”Mr. Aron is usually one of the more colorful attendees at the annual National Association of Theater Owners convention in Las Vegas. One year, citing a bad knee, he zipped around Caesars Palace on a Rascal mobility scooter. Another time, he made his staid competitors reach for their smelling salts by brainstorming — in front of reporters — ways to reverse a worrisome decline in young ticket buyers.What about allowing smartphone use in the back of certain auditoriums?What about exploring dynamic pricing for tickets (the way airlines do it)? Or selling subscriptions (a certain number of screenings for a flat monthly price) like MoviePass was doing?“Adam has never been interested in just running a company,” Mr. Hartley-Leonard said. “He has always wanted to change an industry — to challenge that lazy, this-is-how-we-have-always-done-it mentality that can settle in.”Excoriated for the smartphone idea, Mr. Aron quickly dropped it. But he pressed forward with the contentious notion of subscriptions: For $23.95 a month, AMC Stubs A-List members can see up to three movies a week at any location.Tapping his experience with hotel and airline loyalty programs (he created Pan Am’s frequent-flier program in 1982), Mr. Aron improved AMC’s version, Stubs, which has 25 million members, up from two million in 2016. He also moved AMC into the video-on-demand business by starting an iTunes-style online store.“In terms of innovation, Adam has done a great job,” said Eric Wold, a senior analyst at B. Riley Securities.Even so, Mr. Wold noted, AMC shares have struggled. The company’s market capitalization in March, just as the pandemic started, was $780 million. It was $2.2 billion when Mr. Aron arrived.AMC shares hit a 52-week low of $1.91 on Jan. 5, down 45 percent from a month earlier, when Warner announced its streaming plans. Shares were trading at about $2.90 on Friday.“You are painted by the stock price as chief executive, and by that measure his tenure has not been strong,” Mr. Wold said. “If he can steer them out of this current nightmare, of course, that changes everything.”‘Stare change in the face.’AMC has seen growth in Saudi Arabia in recent years, though moviegoing in North America is weakening.Credit…Tasneem Alsultan for The New York TimesIn some ways, Mr. Aron is trying to push a boulder up a hill. Moviegoing is growing overseas — AMC has been making inroads in Saudi Arabia — but attendance in North America, the world’s No. 1 movie market, has been weakening for nearly two decades. Admissions in North America peaked at 1.6 billion in 2002.The thrill of big screens and super-salty popcorn has been undercut by fancy home theater systems. Shopping malls, which house many theaters, have fallen out of favor. Some people complain about sticky theater floors and disruptive patrons. Others say moviegoing has become too expensive — concessions, tickets, babysitters — especially given the growing array of low-cost, at-home entertainment options that are already part of a household’s budget. Disney+ subscriptions are $7 a month. A single trip to a theater to see a Disney film for a family of four would run $50-plus (not including snacks) in bigger cities.AMC entered the pandemic with pre-existing conditions, including considerable debt, the result of a modernization campaign that started in 2012 when Dalian Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate, bought AMC from a group of private equity companies. It began to replace worn seats with La-Z-Boy-style recliners; install enhanced projection and sound systems; and experiment with alcohol sales.Mr. Aron supercharged the initiative. The strategy: Find ways to raise prices for existing customers and, hopefully, win some new ones.He also went on a shopping spree, paying $3.3 billion to buy several competing chains and transforming AMC into the world’s largest cinema company.But the spending added up.AMC had $4.8 billion in debt when the pandemic started, up from $1.9 billion when Mr. Aron arrived in 2016. Debt now totals $5.5 billion — not including rent payments that have been deferred during the pandemic — a colossal sum for a company that generated $5.5 billion a year in revenue when running as normal.“Go back to the Jack Welch school of management,” Mr. Aron said when asked if his acquisitions made sense in retrospect, referring to the fabled General Electric leader. “You pick up economies of scale, and being No. 1 gives you other enormous advantages, including, in our case, negotiating with studios from a place of greater strength.”Mr. Aron will need all the negotiating leverage that he can get. Most of the conglomerates that own movie studios are downsizing their theatrical slates and routing more movies toward their own streaming services, which need exclusive content to grow. This paradigm shift is one reason that Mr. Aron engaged with Universal about shorter exclusivity periods.“Some of my competitors, the ones caught up in the past, are saying that I’m the worst human being alive on the planet,” Mr. Aron said shortly after announcing the Universal deal. “But sometimes you have to stare change in the face, recognize that it has or soon will arrive, and reshape it to one’s own benefit.”Has the conservativeness of the multiplex business surprised him?“It’s shocking actually,” he said. “Shocking.”Hoping for another magic trickMr. Aron turned around Vail Resorts by expanding it beyond skiing. Time will tell whether he can pull off a similar turnaround in the movie industry.Credit…Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesChallenging the status quo — and upsetting competitors in the process — is the thread that extends through Mr. Aron’s career. “What separates successful leaders from unsuccessful leaders is boldness, and I have always tried to be the opposite of timid, to fundamentally change a company or an industry for the better,” he said.When he was running Norwegian in the early 1990s, Mr. Aron made waves in the conservative cruise industry with a marketing campaign about sex. (One tagline: “There’s no law that says you can’t make love at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday.”) When he arrived at Vail Resorts in 1996, he outraged traditionalists in what was then a stubbornly static business by dramatically expanding the company beyond skiing. He bought other winter resorts and a chain of luxury hotels; opened dozens of restaurants and retail stores; and plunged into condo development. By the time he left Vail in 2006, competitors were copying his strategy.“Instead of sitting around whining, Adam says: ‘These are our cards. How the hell are we going to play ’em?’” said Harry Frampton, a major Colorado real estate developer. “Anytime that happens, you make a couple of people mad along the way.”“Vail was tired around the edges, and Adam’s approach — it’s not just about skiing — was transformative,” Mr. Frampton added. “He called it the Vail Renaissance, which I thought was silly branding at the time. But I was wrong.”Time will tell whether the movie theater industry comes to view Mr. Aron the same way. If nothing else, his tenacity in avoiding bankruptcy has certainly been noticed.“During this crisis, Adam has been like Houdini,” said Richard L. Gelfond, the chief executive of Imax. “Every time I start to doubt that he can do something, he somehow pulls off another magic trick.”For his part, Mr. Aron is optimistic that AMC, founded in 1920 and standing for America Multi-Cinema, will find the needed rescue funding and enjoy a “renaissance” as people emerge from the pandemic.“If you want to know my mood, I’m very encouraged that multiple vaccines are rolling out globally,” he said. “To use a bad pun, it’s a real shot in the arm.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Salt-N-Pepa, Hip-Hop Duo That Spoke Up for Women, Tells Its Own Story

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySalt-N-Pepa, Hip-Hop Duo That Spoke Up for Women, Tells Its Own StoryIn a new biopic for Lifetime that they helped executive produce, the rap group that got its start in 1980s New York traces its roots and its conflicts.Pepa, left, and Salt. “Pep called and was like, ‘Girl, we have to do our movie before someone else does,’” Salt said.Credit…Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesJan. 22, 2021, 1:58 p.m. ETWhile selling warranties on washing machines from a Sears call center in Queens, the friends Cheryl James and Sandra Denton came together as a hip-hop duo called Super Nature with the staccato 1985 track “The Show Stoppa (Is Stupid Fresh).” When they first heard it on the radio, they danced together on top of a car. It was just the beginning: James became Salt and Denton became Pepa; the group changed its name and scored 10 hits on the Hot 100, including the ’80s dance classic “Push It” and the ’90s sex anthem “Shoop,” becoming one of the few superstar female acts of hip-hop’s male-dominated golden era.Fixtures on the I Love the ’90s tour circuit in recent years, the twosome tell their story in a new Lifetime biopic, “Salt-N-Pepa,” out Saturday, that captures both the rush of touring the world and the conflicts that broke them up in 2002. The group’s longtime D.J., Spinderella, is a character in the film, too, but the biopic doesn’t cover her unsuccessful lawsuit against the duo, which was filed in 2019. The film — which they executive produced along with Queen Latifah and others — begins and ends on a note of unity, showing their 2005 reunion for a VH1 event.“It was something me and Pep had been shopping around,” Salt said. “Pep called and was like, ‘Girl, we have to do our movie before someone else does.’” Latifah, an old friend, attended meetings where they picked the director (Melvin Van Peebles) and screenwriter (Abdul Williams of “The Bobby Brown Story”).The duo’s “Laverne & Shirley”-style partnership — Salt calm and precise, Pepa loose and boisterous — has endured despite a dispute with the man who helped them get their start, abuse, divorce and plain old Salt vs. Pepa personality conflicts. “We get to tell a 36-years lifetime in like two and a half hours,” Pepa said on a group Zoom interview. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From left, Monique Paul, Laila Odom and GG Townson in “Salt-N-Pepa.”Credit…LifetimeFor a movie about the journey of two women, your producer and manager Hurby Azor, known as “Luv Bug,” plays a big role as a crucial creative force, especially at the beginning. How much did you grapple with the decision to emphasize his character?SALT Well, the truth is the truth. And Hurby was our guy. He started out being my boyfriend. Being an artist was something that he embodied and transferred over to us. My mom took me to all the Broadway plays, and I took singing lessons and dance lessons, and I did productions at home with my cousins for my aunties. But I didn’t know how to sing. I didn’t play an instrument. When hip-hop came along, it was an opportunity to realize something that I was passionate about — and that was through Hurby.In an early scene, we see Hurby (played by Cleveland Berto) drilling Pepa (played by Laila Odom) to rap without her Jamaican accent, and Salt (played by GG Townson) caught in the middle. How frustrating were those early days?PEPA For me, with hip-hop, it was a way of life — we had these park jams where the turntables are getting electricity from the light poles. When Hurby felt that I was the one that will be Pepa, I was thrown in the studio. Hurby had his vision. He wanted it said, done — this kind of way and no other way. I had a difficult time in the beginning, jumping on the beat. Finally, I got it.SALT Pep always says, “Hurby is our third,” and the chemistry between the three of us was explosive on so many levels. Pep and Hurby used to fight like cats and dogs. It was just an explosion of creativity, of passion, of drama that resonated into a sound, a music, a movement.The opposites-attract part of your personae, as depicted in the movie, is based on reality?PEPA One-hundred percent.SALT I’m an introvert and a little bit of a recluse. What I love about being an artist is the creative process. I love taking something from nothing and bringing it to fruition, I love the response from the audience, but I don’t necessarily love everything that comes along with it — the attention and the chatter. But Pep loves it all.PEPA I’m an extra-extra-extrovert.SALT Someone asked us, when we first met, what intrigued us about one another. What made her interested in me is, she was thinking, “Who is this girl that’s not paying me any attention?”PEPA When we were in college, I was coming in the lunchroom and talking crazy, and I used to see Cheryl in the corner and notice her. It was a chemistry. I was pulled to her.“It’s difficult to be friends and business partners, and anybody in that position can relate,” Salt said.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHow much writing did you both do for the script, and did you work separately or together?PEPA Separately.SALT It was a lot of rewrites. What I found frustrating — I’m just keeping it real — it was quite a few restrictions when you’re making a movie that I was not ready for.PEPA Keep it real, Salt!SALT Legal restrictions, infringing on other people’s rights that people had to sign off on, budget restrictions. What ended up being important was a story of two women in a male-dominated industry who were friends first, who became business partners, who faced a lot of struggles to be heard, to be taken seriously — from the record company to our producer Hurby. We had struggles in our relationships and picked the wrong men over and over.PEPA We get to take ’em back to college, when it all started and we making $200 per show.SALT And splitting it.There was a long period after Salt-N-Pepa’s biggest hits and before Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, when the route for women in hip-hop was limited. How much did you pay attention to that?SALT I remember that question being asked a lot when there was a big, empty space of no women. I have no idea why, other than this is a male-dominated genre of music and business, and we had to come through a Hurby. There was a time when you had to be vouched for by a camp — a man camp. That’s starting to change through social media and all the avenues that people have to put themselves out there, without belonging to a Jay-Z or whoever.How many of the original “Push It” video eight-ball jackets, originally designed by your friend Christopher Martin (Play of Kid ’n Play), do you each own?PEPA The original was stolen backstage at a performance.SALT I remember it being Brixton, London, and someone breaking in the back door of our dressing room. We came in and the door was open and the jackets were gone.PEPA Everything else stayed — the pocketbooks, everything.In the movie, at the time of the split, Salt says, “I have to carve out a space that has nothing to do with you.” Now that you’re back together, is that still important?SALT Absolutely. When I left, I got to deal with a lot of my own issues, my own demons. It’s healthy when you’re in a group to also be able to maintain your individuality. We were doing this since we were 18, 19 years old, and I did not get the opportunity to figure out who I was apart from Salt-N-Pepa. I felt a lot of disconnect after a while, a lot of resentment, a lot of anger coming from Pep that I did not understand. I felt like I was in a spiral of trying to prove myself to her: “Girl, I got your back. Girl, I’m here for you.” Nothing I did or said could remedy what she was feeling. I feel like there was a great miscommunication.PEPA [vigorously playing with her hair] The point is, you and I have never talked — you keep telling me how I feel and say and think. When have you and I talked?SALT I feel resented by you. And your answer —PEPA It’s a feeling I never got to talk through with her. It’s all her feeling with everything. I’m dealing with her boyfriend being the manager! I’m going through a whole situation, too. We were in it together. When you’re feeling all of this, I’m feeling it, too.How unified is Salt-N-Pepa these days?SALT Relationships go through different phases. I know one thing: I love Sandy, and I know that Sandy loves me. It’s difficult to be friends and business partners, and anybody in that position can relate. Sometimes we will be married and sometimes we will be co-parenting the brand and sometimes I will be sleeping on the couch.PEPA But communication is the key to all successful relationships.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Looking for a Great Courtroom Drama? Start Here

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGateway MoviesLooking for a Great Courtroom Drama? Start Here“Anatomy of a Murder,” starring Jimmy Stewart, is a legal drama that trusts audiences to dwell in gray areas.At the defense table, Lee Remick, left, Jimmy Stewart and Ben Gazzara, with Arthur O’Connell and Eve Arden behind them.Credit…Columbia PicturesJan. 21, 2021Updated 6:27 p.m. ETGateway Movies offers ways to begin exploring directors, genres and topics in film by examining a few streaming movies.Ready-made pressure-cookers that force audiences to question their own values, American courtroom movies are practically a genre of their own. Yet even the greatest ones give in to some pretty hokey dramatic impulses. Think of Jack Nicholson’s huffing, “You can’t handle the truth!” at the end of “A Few Good Men.” Paul Newman’s closing argument to the jury in “The Verdict” mentions faith, power and the symbols of justice — and not a single fact from the case.Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), one of the greatest trial movies, isn’t immune to that sort of grandstanding, but here the witness whose last-minute testimony wraps up the proceedings doesn’t neatly settle matters of guilt or innocence. By convention, courtroom films tend to tilt viewers’ sympathy toward an underdog or the wrongfully accused. But in “Anatomy of a Murder,” the defendant has indisputably committed the killing he’s accused of, and his defense lawyer is played by Jimmy Stewart — no one’s idea of an underdog, at least by the late ’50s. (He may have played one in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” in 1939, but was now well into the darker, postwar phase of his career.)Even the jazz score by Duke Ellington (who has a cameo) expresses a kind of brassy ambivalence; this is not a film inclined to easily hummable melodies or triumphal orchestral swells. It’s a legal drama that trusts audiences to dwell in gray areas — what one character calls the “natural impurities of the law.”“Anatomy of a Murder”: Rent it on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play or Vudu.“As a lawyer I’ve had to learn that people aren’t just good or just bad, but people are many things,” Paul Biegler (Stewart) says late in “Anatomy of a Murder,” in a line that is as close as the movie comes to stating its animating principle. It speaks to Preminger’s audacity that the film takes an hour before the camera enters a courtroom. The first section is devoted to establishing the characters, teasing out the facts of the case and devising a legal theory that might lead a jury to believe a killing was somehow excusable.Biegler is a small-time lawyer on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, earning a comfortable living while the many fish he has time to catch pile up in his fridge. “I run a few abstracts and divorce Jane Doe from John Doe every once in a while,” he explains. He’s being modest: Although he doesn’t have much experience as a defense lawyer, he did used to be the district attorney. His knowledge of that office serves him well when he goes on a different kind of fishing expedition, tricking the current D.A. (Brooks West) into revealing crucial information about a polygraph test.The case involves a Korean War veteran, Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who has shot and killed a bar owner named Barney Quill. The lieutenant’s wife, Laura (Lee Remick), had told him that Barney had raped her. “I have the unwritten law on my side,” Manion tells Biegler, but Biegler explains that the “unwritten law is a myth.”The case for letting Manion off will instead rest on a string of written legal premises. Maybe he committed murder in a dissociative state. Maybe that state meets the legal definition of insanity or maybe not. Maybe an obscure precedent from the state Supreme Court will allow Biegler to thread the needle.George C. Scott, left, Joseph N. Welch and Kathryn Grant in a scene from the classic drama.Credit…Columbia PicturesIs anyone implicated in this trial not culpable in some way or other? Certainly not Frederick, who is established as an abusive, jealous husband with a violent temper. And maybe not Laura. While victim blaming is anathema today, this is a movie made in 1959, and an assistant attorney general (George C. Scott) whom the district attorney has brought in for help goes to some lengths to insinuate to the jury that the way Laura dressed and acted on the night of the crime meant that she invited what happened to her. (In his telling, she may even have been “making a play” for Quill.) Preminger has already established Laura as a firecracker who could ignite: When she first meets Biegler at his office, she really makes herself at home on the couch. And Remick, whose performance toggles between vulnerability and flirtatiousness on a dime, creates a multidimensional character who remains a marvel of ambiguity.“Anatomy of a Murder” hardly represented Preminger’s first challenge to the Production Code Administration or to local censorship boards, both of which tried to police the subject matter presented in movies. His 1953 film “The Moon Is Blue,” a comedy deemed to have taken a scandalously flippant attitude toward sex, opened without the administration’s signoff. Preminger’s “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955), starring Frank Sinatra, focused on a heroin addict.Nevertheless, “Anatomy of a Murder” still packs a punch with characters frankly discussing rape, contraception and panties. The judge, Weaver, has to ask the courtroom audience not to laugh whenever the undergarments are mentioned.While some other Preminger films of the era (“Bonjour Tristesse” from 1958 or “Porgy and Bess,” released the same year as “Murder”) used wide-screen formats like CinemaScope or Todd-AO, “Anatomy of a Murder” instead favors claustrophobic compositions that ask viewers to judge several characters’ reactions at once. Pay close attention to the questioning scenes: Preminger frequently takes care to keep the lawyer, the witness and — just a bit further in the background — the judge in focus simultaneously.About that judge: To the extent that there is a clear crime in “Anatomy of a Murder,” it is the scene stealing of Joseph N. Welch in the role. Amazingly, he wasn’t an actor at all: Welch is better known as the special counsel for the Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, in which he gave Joseph McCarthy a dressing-down that contemporaneous audiences might have freshly remembered from television: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”After meeting with the lawyers from both sides in his chambers, Judge Weaver delivers a line of the ages of his own: “Skirmish over. Shall we join now on the field of battle?”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More