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      ‘Stranger Things’ Is Back. Here’s Where We Left Off in Season 3.

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      It’s been three years since we last saw the kids from Hawkins take on the Mind Flayer (and the Russians). This refresher should help jog your memory.When the fourth season of “Stranger Things” kicks off on Netflix on Friday, nearly three years will have passed since the previous season was released, but only six months will have passed in the fictional town of Hawkins, Ind. Viewers may wonder why their favorite young characters are aging like the cast of “Grease,” but when you spend your childhood fleeing predatory humanoid creatures unleashed by an alternate dimension, you tend to grow up in a hurry.The break between hauntings may not leave our heroes much time to catch their collective breath, but three years is an usually long gap between seasons, especially for a serialized show as dense with supernatural mythology, ensemble relationships and open-ended questions as “Stranger Things.” If you don’t have a spare 449 minutes to catch up with the third season in full, here’s what you need to remember.Steve and Dustin (Joe Keery, left, and Gaten Matarazzo) helped intercept and decode Russian communiqués to discover clandestine activities under the Starcourt mall.NetflixRed dawnSet in the summer of 1985, the third season took place at the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, before glasnost and Rocky Balboa started to thaw out their relationship. Looking for an edge beyond nuclear proliferation, the Soviets sneaked into Hawkins, where they deployed a giant laser beam to crack open the same gate to the Upside Down that Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and her friends labored so hard to seal up.It was a little like the rationale Paul Reiser, who was introduced as Dr. Owens in the second season, used as a corporate villain in “Aliens”: If this powerful otherworldly force could be harnessed, it could be deployed as an unstoppable weapon of war. Who needs hydrogen bombs when you’ve got the Mind Flayer terrorizing the Heartland?Happily for the citizens of Hawkins, the new Starcourt Mall has opened outside town, a pastel-colored consumer oasis with a Sam Goody, a Jazzercise place and a multiplex showing “Back to the Future.” Unfortunately, all the ma-and-pa businesses downtown are also starting to shutter, including the general store where Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) clerks. And it turns out, those pesky Russians, through secret dealings with the corrupt mayor (Cary Elwes), have gobbled up the Starcourt and surrounding properties for their nefarious purposes.Through intercepted and decoded Russian communiqués, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery), along with Robin (Maya Hawke), Steve’s co-worker at the Scoops Ahoy ice cream parlor, uncovered the operation under the mall.Billy (Dacre Montgomery) took the bad-boy thing to a whole new level. NetflixRe-animatorAs it prepared to exert its psychic force on Hawkins once again, the Mind Flayer started possessing rats and humans, melting down their biomass and combining it to form a spider-like monster used to wreak havoc on earth. Some of the possessed, including the bad-boy lifeguard Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), returned to their lives as hallowed-out clones of their former selves, who became “active” at the malevolent entity’s discretion.As interns at The Hawkins Post newspaper — the one downtown business that’s apparently still thriving — Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) tried to get the scoop, but their deranged rodent story proved unfit for print.Max and Lucas (Sadie Sink and Caleb McLaughlin) had a few ups and downs. NetflixLove will tear us apartWith the core characters moving deeper into adolescence, marathon sessions of Dungeons & Dragons were set aside for romantic intrigue — much to the annoyance of the dungeon master Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who would rather have had life return to normal after his time in the Upside Down. Dustin returned from science camp raving about Suzie, who was reportedly “hotter than Phoebe Cates” but whose existence was questioned. (She exists. And loves the theme to “The Neverending Story.”)Eleven and Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) were playing kissy-face all summer until Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour), El’s adoptive father, put his foot down. That left Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), who had his own on-again/off-again fling with Max (Sadie Sink), to give terrible advice based on what little he understood about girls. Steve used to understand plenty about girls, but he whiffed with Robin, who is into them herself.It took most of the season for the kids to come together, so they have the Mind Flayer to thank for saving their fractured relationships. Nancy and Jonathan stayed on a low simmer as they investigated the rat-and-human possession story, and the will-they-or-won’t-they vibe between Hopper and Joyce continued, despite their obvious feelings for each other.But they had to put their love on hold, too, after they kidnapped a Russian scientist and recruited Murray (Brett Gelman), the former reporter turned private eye, to translate info on how to infiltrate the Soviet operation and shut down the machine that has opened the transdimensional gate.Lucas’s little sister, Erica (Priah Ferguson) used her diminutive size to her advantage in helping save the world.NetflixFright nightThe climatic episode turned the Starcourt Mall into a multilevel battleground over the Fourth of July, with some of the fireworks moved inside. In the mall atrium, the Mind Flayer, by way of the spider monster, squared off against the wildly overmatched kids.A weakened El summoned every last drop of energy to beat back the monster. At the same time, her friends blasted away at it with a cache of stolen fireworks. For a moment, El manages to loosen Billy from the Mind Flayer’s psychic grip, and in a last-ditch moment of heroism, he sacrifices himself in order to save her.As that was happening, Dustin and Erica (Priah Ferguson), Lucas’s little sister and an ice cream sample enthusiast, used Dustin’s radio to lead Hopper, Joyce and Murray through the tunnel system below the mall, where they posed as Russian agents to gain access to the giant laser. Although Hopper successfully battled a superagent, who was a dead ringer for Robert Patrick’s T-1000 in “Terminator 2,” he was also vaporized in the course of destroying the machine. Or so it seemed …So long, Hopper (David Harbour). Or maybe not?NetflixEvery time you go awayEarlier in the season, Hopper had vowed to make Joyce feel like Hawkins was a safe place for her to call home. With his presumed death putting an end to that promise, Joyce finally decided to move out of the cursed town that had tormented her family so relentlessly. She and her boys moved to California, joined by El, who had lost both her adoptive father and her powers while fighting the Mind Flayer.In a postscript set in a Russian military complex, the guards sought out a prisoner to feed to a Demogorgon, somehow captured from the Upside Down and kept in an enclosure, like a velociraptor in “Jurassic Park.” The guards were told not to pick “the American” for the Demogorgon’s lunch, which left fans with the obvious question: Who is the American? Is it Hopper?A trailer from early 2020 confirmed that it was, indeed, Hopper. Based on Netflix’s release last week of the first scene (a video since taken down), he and El will have a lot of catching up to do if they manage to reunite. More

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      Jurnee Smollett: ‘The Past Few Years Have Been Heartbreaking’

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      The “Lovecraft Country” star has faced setbacks but emerged with new projects, including the Netflix movie “Spiderhead.”Jurnee Smollett learned she had received a best actress Emmy nomination for her starring role on the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” when she was in the hair and makeup trailer for another project, the coming Netflix film “Lou.”“I started screaming,” she recalled. “I was screaming, and crying.”That joy was tempered somewhat when she heard that her first Emmy nomination — one of 18 for the critically acclaimed series — was also the first time two Black leads from the same drama series had been nominated in the same year. “I thought, it can’t be,” she said. “We’re still making firsts, in 2021? It was sobering, I’m not going to lie.”That first season of “Lovecraft Country,” a horror drama which featured monsters of all sorts, from tentacled demons to racist cops, looked to be the start of something big — until it wasn’t. A much-anticipated second season never came to pass. Meanwhile, Smollett’s life, going back to the death of her father in 2015 after years of estrangement, has been beset by sadness and setbacks.“The past few years have been heartbreaking,” she admitted.But Smollett never stopped working, even in the midst of the pandemic. Among her forthcoming projects are “Lou,” a female-led thriller co-starring Allison Janney, and “The Burial,” a courtroom dramedy in which Smollett and Jamie Foxx square off as rival attorneys. She’s also preparing to reprise her role as Black Canary, the chanteuse superhero with pipes of steel she played in the 2020 film “Birds of Prey.”Courtney B. Vance, left, and Jonathan Majors with Jurnee Smollett in “Lovecraft Country.”Eli Joshua Ade/HBOAnd then there’s “Spiderhead,” a sci-fi thriller based on a 2010 short story by George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” In the film, which premieres June 17, Steve Abnesti, the overseer of an eerily cushy island prison, is conducting drug-fueled psychological experiments on his charges, which include Jeff, a convict serving time for involuntary manslaughter, and Lizzy, a fellow convict who harbors her own dark secret.Chris Hemsworth (the “Thor” franchise) plays the unctuous overseer, while Miles Teller (“Whiplash”) and Smollett play his two primary lab rats. “For a drama like this, a character-driven film where you’re really only talking about three characters, you need to have some heavy hitters,” said the director, Joseph Kosinski, who also directed Teller in the upcoming “Top Gun: Maverick.”“Spiderhead” was shot in Australia in 2020, during the pandemic. Like the controversial Milgram experiment of the early 1960s, in which subjects were ordered by lab coat-wearing “scientists” to administer what they thought were painful electric shocks to other study participants, Jeff and Lizzy are urged to administer drugs with names like Verbaluce (instant verbosity!) and Darkenfloxx (pain beyond imagining!) to each other — you know, for science. (Smooth soundtrack jams from Chuck Mangione and the Doobie Brothers accompany the action.)“Jurnee and Miles make a good on-screen couple for this because they can both play damaged,” Kosinski said.The movie forced Smollett to question what she herself might do under similar circumstances. Would she administer excruciatingly painful drugs to somebody, say, Miles Teller, if someone like Chris Hemsworth asked her to? “I believe, in the comfort of my home, that I would say no,” she said.In a video interview this month, Smollett, 35, looked back on an acting career that has spanned three decades, from sitcoms to feature films, with detours on the stage. “I’ve done this so long,” she said with a laugh. She talked about everything from childhood crushes (“Paul Newman, Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes”) to motherhood (“It’s true what they say, that it’s your heart living outside of your body”), to how she got her name.That name. Her parents, Smollett explained, both had names starting with J, so they decided all six of their children should, too. Smollett’s brother Jojo thinks “Jurnee” might be a play on Sojourner Truth, the 19th-century abolitionist, but Smollett’s mother has a different story.“My mom was in labor for two hours, and I fell asleep in the middle of coming down the birth canal,” Jurnee Smollett said. “And my mom kept saying, ‘This little girl’s a trip.’ I guess I wasn’t ready to come out, and so she said I took her on a journey.”Smollett’s earliest memories have been on sets and stages. At 3, she played Debbie Allen’s daughter — and Diahann Carroll’s granddaughter — on a pilot for an unsold series, “Sunday in Paris.” At 4, she was cast as Denise Frazer, Michelle Tanner’s pal, on the long-running sitcom “Full House.” The young actress resisted the persistent siren call of the Disney Channel.“I was blessed because I wasn’t a child star,” Smollett said. “I was a kid who acted.”Smollett with Miles Teller in “Spiderhead.”NetflixFilm roles soon followed. In 1996, she appeared in the first of them, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Jack,” alongside Robin Williams. “Robin Williams taught me how to improv when I was 8 years old,” she said. At 11, she was starring alongside Samuel L. Jackson in “Eve’s Bayou,” which also featured Carroll — Smollett’s second role with the pioneering actress before she had even hit her teens. “We were old pals by then,” she said.Over the years, she has shared the stage of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles with Cicely Tyson in a 2014 revival of “The Trip to Bountiful,” and played Angela Bassett’s daughter (the 2001 TV movie “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood”) and Denzel Washington’s pupil (“The Great Debaters”). That 2007 drama “was like taking a master class,” she said.In 2018, Smollett was cast in “Lovecraft Country.” For her role as Leti Lewis, a young Black woman traveling through segregated 1950s America, Smollett drew inspiration from her maternal grandmother, who died before Smollett was born but whom the actress described as “always this mystical figure in our household.”“One of my teachers pointed out to me this idea of blood memory,” she said. “Having that Black and Jewish ancestry, I come from survivors. It’s part of our DNA. My grandmother was a survivor, and her spirit is what I called upon when I approached Leti.”Family has played a major role in Smollett’s life over the past several years. In 2015, her father, whom she had been estranged from for most of her life, died, only two years after reconnecting with Smollett and the rest of her family. “We reunited at my sister’s wedding,” she said. “It was the first time I had seen him in years. It was such a healing moment for my entire family.”Four years later, her brother Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist attack and was later charged with filing a false police report; in the end, her brother was sentenced to 150 days in county jail. Smollett declined to talk about the situation, but “it’s no secret how heartbroken my family is,” she said.“I am so close to Jussie,” she added. “I love that man so much. He’s always been there for me, as all my siblings have. If I didn’t have my family, if I didn’t have my mom and my siblings, I don’t know where I’d be.”And then in 2020, as the pandemic set in, Smollett filed for divorce from her husband, the musician Josiah Bell, after nearly 10 years of marriage. The two had a child together, Hunter, now 5. When asked what it’s like being a mom, Smollett clarified, “A single working mom!”She explained: “It’s the biggest blessing and the biggest challenge, simultaneously. But I’m lucky I’m in a situation in which, as a working mom, I’m able to bring him with me wherever I go. I know not all moms have that benefit.”In the coming years, Smollett hopes to be doing more producing. “‘Lou’ was the first film I produced, and I definitely see myself stepping more into that role,” she said. “I hope to usher more unique voices and filmmakers who are creating inclusive stories, centering folks who aren’t normally centered in these types of stories.”Even so, Smollett isn’t giving up acting any time soon. “I’m very excited about the slate of films we have coming down the pipeline,” she said. “They’re dream roles.”Those include the Black Canary movie, which is being written by the “Lovecraft Country” creator Misha Green. “Jurnee shows up on the day, and she has thought about 900 different ways to approach her character,” said Green, who also worked with the actress on the series “Underground.”Yet even as Smollett looks forward, she’s trying to appreciate the present, if even just a bit. “I’m trying to find a balance between enjoying the now, because that’s something I struggle with, and always looking to the future,” she said. “I’m always like, OK, been there, done that. What’s next?” More

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      David Fincher Tries Animation in ‘Love, Death + Robots’

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      The director made his first animated short for the new season of this Netflix anthology. “It was an incredibly freeing, eye-opening, mind-expanding way to interface with a story,” he said.Before David Fincher became an A-list director and multiple Oscar and Emmy nominee — lauded for of-the-moment films like “Fight Club” and “The Social Network” and the TV series “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” — he was one of the co-founders of the production company Propaganda Films. Propaganda was known for its visually dazzling TV commercials and music videos, and Fincher honed his craft in dozens of miniature movies made in myriad styles.Yet until recently, he had never directed animation, even though he loves the medium so much that he signed on a few years ago to be an executive producer of the Netflix anthology animation series “Love, Death + Robots,” which returns for its third season on Friday.“Love, Death + Robots” sprung from the ashes of a project Fincher had been developing with the “Deadpool” director Tim Miller since the late 2000s: a revival of “Heavy Metal,” the animated movie series inspired by the adults-only science-fiction and fantasy comics magazine. The first season of “Love, Death + Robots” debuted in 2019, featuring 18 episodes (ranging in length from 6 to 17 minutes) that adapted short stories by genre favorites like Peter F. Hamilton, John Scalzi and Joe Lansdale. An eight-episode second season followed in 2021.Fincher, left, directed the short under Covid protocols. “I didn’t quite realize how much I communicate through my face,” he said.NetflixDespite his involvement, Fincher never made a short of his own until Season 3, when he and the screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s crime thriller “Seven”) tackled a tale by the British science-fiction author Neal Asher called “Bad Travelling.” Set on the high seas on a distant planet, the story follows a merchant ship as it is tormented by a giant, intelligent crab that manipulates the crew members and then eliminates them one by one. Fincher described the short as “like a David Lean movie crossed with ‘Ten Little Indians.’”“Bad Travelling” was made via motion-capture, a computer-aided style of animation in which actors perform on a set and their facial expressions and gestures are mapped directly onto their animated characters. Fincher worked closely with Miller (who co-founded Blur Studio, the special effects and animation company that produced “Bad Travelling”) and Jennifer Yuh Nelson, an artist and filmmaker (“Kung Fu Panda 2”), who is the supervising director for “Love, Death + Robots.”In a video interview last week, Fincher discussed the challenges and pleasures of making “Bad Travelling” and the series as a whole, and how he carried his detail-oriented directorial approach to this new medium. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Including this volume’s episodes, there have now been three Neal Asher stories adapted for “Love, Death + Robots.” What is it about Asher that suits this show?Well, “Bad Travelling” was part of our original pitch to do this. We’ve had these giant four-foot by six-foot blown-up copies of really beautiful production art sitting around in the conference room for, good God, 12 years or something. Finally, somebody had to make it. That honor fell to me.Neal is a favorite of Tim’s, and Tim does most of our curation. He has a list of, like, 350 short stories he’s always wanted to see animated. Neal was one of the first examples that Tim brought up to me of the kind of stuff that’s available out there, to say, “OK, I think this is sustainable.”“Bad Travelling” was made with motion-capture, a computer-aided style of animation in which actors’ facial expressions and gestures are mapped onto their characters. NetflixThat’s an instructive way to think about this series: not just as an anthology of adult animation but also as an anthology of science-fiction stories of varying lengths and approaches.It’s a very difficult thing to write a short story. It’s an art in and of itself to, in the broadest of brushstrokes, bring a reader into an already populated world, make us understand as much as we need to know about the geopolitics or whatever, and then get on with it. It’s what I’ve done making television commercials. That’s a great sandbox to do something with one idea for 30 seconds or two ideas for 60 seconds. I’ve done music videos, which is like a mélange of ideas that should hopefully hang together in some abstract way over 3 to 4 minutes.The most difficult thing is to acknowledge the integers. When you have 19 minutes, it’s a very different thing than when you have 22 minutes. You have to force yourself with this material to be terse.Does your job as a director change, depending on what you’re making?I think any card-carrying member of the D.G.A. knows the acknowledged formula: You want to come into every scene as late as possible, get out as soon as possible and make your point. That can be applied to a lot of different kinds of directing. You can bore people at 30 seconds. I’ve done that. You can thrill people at 2 hours and 45 minutes, and you can bore people at 2 hours and 45 minutes. I’ve done both of those.I don’t see any of this stuff as slumming. I don’t think of directing television commercials or directing television episodes as a lesser form of directing. And to be honest, that has made my shows like “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter” slightly more expensive than the normal for television programing. Most people think of television as, you know, 7 to 10 days of shooting, to produce an hourlong episode. I’ve yet to be able to do it in that time frame. I’m a slow learner, I admit it.What did you learn from directing animation?When I’m setting up to do a master, I’m thinking in terms of, “If this is going to be an over-the shoulder shot, I either have to get this person away from the door frame, or I have to tell the key grip to go get a chain saw.” But in [computer-generated imagery], that kind of stuff doesn’t enter into it. The space is entirely plastic. It was an incredibly freeing, eye-opening, mind-expanding way to interface with a story because so much of live-action storytelling is enduring or working around practical things.Of course, when you can change anything at a later date, you also have to ask yourself, “How far am I going to kick this can?” You can open up these files and go, “I want the chin to do this, and I want the ears here.” You can modify all this stuff ad infinitum. For somebody who likes to polish as much as I do, at some point they just have to pull it from your cold, dead hands.Early production art for the short “felt ‘Thief of Baghdad’-adjacent,” Fincher said. “I felt the world itself needed to be a little less phantasmagoric and a little more ‘Deadliest Catch.’”NetflixWith motion capture, is part of your job as a director also to convince the actors that they’re really on a ship, in fear for their lives?Even though you have people in skintight Lycra with Ping-Pong balls hanging off them, you still have to say things like, “OK, in this scene it is the sunset of the third day.” I was working with people from all different kinds of performance-based acting — we had musicians, we had singers. It was an interesting group. And they had no issue being in a leotard, going: “OK, so then I’m fighting the giant crab over here. How big is it? Like two Range Rovers side by side? Where are the eyes? The eyes are on stalks?” You’re attempting to impart this thing that’s totally ridiculous.But honestly, none of that was as difficult for me as being in the middle of Covid and wearing glasses with goggles and a mask and visor. I didn’t quite realize how much I communicate through my face — a lot of director-actor relationships aren’t about giving a line reading but through the way that you interact and the nonverbal cues. The pandemic gear got in the way of all that.How much input did you have on the visual design? Was there any illustrator or director you were looking to for inspiration?Tim and Blur had been working on the story for a long time, and they had a lot of production art that felt “Thief of Baghdad”-adjacent. I felt the world itself needed to be a little less phantasmagoric and a little more “Deadliest Catch.” My whole thing was I wanted the people to be at risk of being washed off the deck at any moment. They’re either going to get chewed apart by these blunt-nosed sharks, or they’re going to be dismembered by these pincers of these giant crustaceans.It must be easier to rip characters apart and spill their guts when you’re working in animation.Yes, and on the water! Like Jim Cameron and Kevin Costner will tell you, there are such things as forces of nature. If you ever do a story that takes place on the high seas, do it in C.G., because you’re not going to be chasing the sun, and you won’t be worried about people being crushed between boats or drowning. And you’ll never be waiting around for the wave machine.Is there anyone you’d like to bring into the fold if you get to make a Season 4?There are a lot, but look, this show takes a while. This episode I did took, like, 18 months. We originally started off wanting to do this with Ridley Scott, Jim Cameron, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski. So many friends of mine I went to and asked, “Would you want to do something like this?,” and they were like, “Yes!” But the reality is that the only way this show is affordable is if the people who are making it don’t mind losing the money they could be making doing something else.Are we hoping that the world embraces this show on a heretofore unseen level, making it a no-brainer to increase the subsidy for it? Yeah, that would be great. Until that happens, it’s hard to get the director of “Avatar” or the director of “Pirates of the Caribbean” to drop everything they’re doing and come and play with us. More

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

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

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      ‘Our Father’ Review: A Doctor’s God Complex Revealed

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      A new documentary tells the story of siblings who unite to bring to justice the fertility specialist who impregnated their mothers with his sperm without consent.At the beginning of the gripping Netflix documentary “Our Father,” the camera creeps through a hallway toward a door with a doctor’s nameplate on it and into an examination room decorated with embroidered Bible verses, gynecological charts and baby photos. A foreboding score plays.There are no jump scares in Lucie Jourdan’s debut feature, about the biological children of Dr. Donald Cline, an Indiana fertility specialist, who for nearly a decade inseminated patients with his own sperm without their knowledge. But make no mistake, “Our Father” is a horror movie. Cline’s deception upends the lives of his unsuspecting patients’ children, and the film is rife with harrowing insights about medical malfeasance and God complexes.At the center of it is an unflinching protagonist. An only child, Jacoba Ballard was stunned when, after taking a DNA test, she received notifications of several half siblings from a genealogy website. Cline had assured hopeful parents that the clinic he operated never used a donor more than three times. We learn from the film that Ballard, who’s now in her 40s, is Sibling No. 0. The last sibling interviewed in “Our Father” is No. 61.Jourdan makes potent — and, at times, speculative — use of re-enactments. In a scene reminiscent of cinema’s version of a detective hunting a suspect, Ballard sits at a desk, evidence papering the wall. Except she is wearing a bright red hoodie, as if to declare, “This is what it looks like to take down the Big Bad Wolf.”There are interviews with Cline’s partner in the clinic and a nurse who assisted him, as well as a sit-down with a former Indiana prosecutor as the documentary tries to address the plaint, “How could this have happened?” “Our Father” also looks into Cline’s possible connection to QuiverFull, a conservative Christian movement that champions procreation. But it is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.Our FatherNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Netflix Tells Employees Ads May Come by the End of 2022

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      Netflix could introduce its lower-priced ad-supported tier by the end of the year, a more accelerated timeline than originally indicated, the company told employees in a recent note.In the note, Netflix executives said they were aiming to introduce the ad tier in the final three months of the year, said two people who shared details of the communication on the condition of anonymity to describe internal company discussions. The note also said Netflix planned to begin cracking down on password sharing among its subscriber base around the same time, the people said.Last month, Netflix stunned the media industry and Madison Avenue when it revealed that it would begin offering a lower-priced subscription featuring ads, after years of publicly stating that commercials would never be seen on the streaming platform.But Netflix is facing significant business challenges. In announcing first-quarter earnings last month, Netflix said it lost 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of the year — the first time that has happened in a decade — and expected to lose two million more in the months to come. Since the subscriber announcement, Netflix’s share price has dropped sharply, wiping away roughly $70 billion in the company’s market capitalization.Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-chief executive, told investors that the company would examine the possibility of introducing an advertising-supported platform and that it would try to “figure it out over the next year or two.”The Race to Rule Streaming TVA New Era: Companies like Netflix, HBO, Hulu and Amazon ushered out the age of “prestige TV” and ushered in an age of anything goes.Netflix’s Woes: The streaming star lost subscribers for the first time in a decade as competitors continue to expand. What explains its poor performance?A Warning Sign?: Netflix’s sudden problems may be an indication that other streaming services are heading toward an unstable future.Commercials: Streaming executives are having a change of heart about ads and offering lower-priced versions in exchange for commercials.The recent note to staff signaled that the timeline has sped up.“Yes, it’s fast and ambitious and it will require some trade-offs,” the note said.A Netflix spokeswoman declined to comment.Netflix offers a variety of payment tiers for streaming access; its most popular plan costs $15.49 a month. The new ad-supported tier will cost less. Other streaming services have similar plans. HBO Max, for instance, offers a commercial-free service for $15 a month, and charges $10 a month for the service with advertising.Indeed, in the note to employees, Netflix executives invoked their competitors, saying HBO and Hulu have been able to “maintain strong brands while offering an ad-supported service.”“Every major streaming company excluding Apple has or has announced an ad-supported service,” the note said. “For good reason, people want lower-priced options.”Netflix has discussed its interest in building out an advertising infrastructure externally as well, including with a company called The Trade Desk, which helps advertisers place ads on various internet-enabled platforms, said a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to describe them. The Trade Desk counts David Wells, the former chief financial officer of Netflix, as a board member, and has been in touch with Netflix for years, this person said, but discussions ramped up recently, after Netflix said publicly that it would create an advertising tier.Last month, Netflix also announced that it intended to begin charging higher prices to subscribers who shared their account with several people.“So if you’ve got a sister, let’s say, that’s living in a different city — you want to share Netflix with her, that’s great,” Greg Peters, Netflix’s chief operating officer, said on the company’s earnings call. “We’re not trying to shut down that sharing, but we’re going to ask you to pay a bit more to be able to share with her.”Mr. Peters said the company would go “through a year or so of iterating” on password sharing before it rolled out a plan.In the note to employees, Netflix executives said the advertising-supported tier would be introduced “in tandem with our broader plans to charge for sharing.”Tiffany Hsu More

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      In Comedy, Timing Is Everything, Especially at Netflix’s Festival

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      Planned long before the streamer hit a rough patch, the expansive event had the feel of the end of an era. Still, there were plenty of stellar shows.LOS ANGELES — Over the past two weeks, in a shock-and-awe display of cultural power that suddenly seems from a bygone era, Netflix put on a behemoth festival that summoned all corners of the comedy world. Take Saturday evening, for instance. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey cracked jokes at the YouTube Theater while Billy Eichner hosted an evening of LGBTQ+ stand-ups at the Greek Theater that included, among others, Wanda Sykes and Tig Notaro. Tim Heidecker chatted with comics at the Elysian Theater, a savvy new alternative space, while Mitra Jouhari from Adult Swim’s “Three Busy Debras” prepared to go onstage. Two miles away, Gabriel Iglesias was getting ready to be the first stand-up to ever perform at Dodger Stadium.The inaugural Netflix Is a Joke Fest which was cooked up before the pandemic and then postponed, rivaled if not eclipsed Just for Laughs, the mammoth industry event in Montreal. Producing 298 shows in dozens of spaces throughout Los Angeles, this ambitious effort took place in an awkwardly humbling moment for the streaming giant, after a quarter when it reported losing subscribers for the first time in a decade and its valuation dropped more than a third. There were layoffs, talk of price increases and the once unthinkable, adding digital ads.The physical kind blanketed the city, including a seven-story sign overlooking Hollywood Boulevard that commanded: “Please Laugh Responsibly.” This is the sort of corporate humor that uses jokey irony to disguise a commercial purpose, but there was something especially incongruous about the swagger of these promotions. To trumpet, in another sign, “the biggest comedy event in history” (with an asterisk and the joke “probably”) while employees anxiously whispered about the company’s future gave the festival a certain “last days of the Roman Empire” vibe.Ads for the festival blanketed Los Angeles. Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMy week at the festival, seeing two shows a night, was a reminder that comics thrive in such environments. “Anyone hear an earthquake or a tremor?” David Letterman quipped at his live talk show, held at the festival with only stand-ups as guests. (They performed short sets and also sat down to chat.) With his old pinpoint timing, he waited a beat before quipping: “Must have been the Netflix stock crashing.”Anthony Jeselnik told the crowd at his show he loved that Netflix started the festivities by “laying off half their marketing team, losing a billion dollars and then trying to kill Dave Chappelle” — a reference to an audience member’s attack on Chappelle earlier in the festival. Known for taut jokes, Jeselnik leaned more into storytelling while sticking to his commitment to navigating hot button subjects in sharp-edged punch lines, starting with material on the trans community that aims to be both transgressive and progressive. The rap against Jeselnik is that his use of misdirection can be formulaic, like a math problem, but this show was advanced calculus, an implicit rebuke to comedians relying on lazy jokes about marginalized groups. He said he had writer’s block over the pandemic so he set himself goals to escape it. “I wanted to not aim too high,” he said at a leisurely pace: “Set something easy: try to handle this better than John Mulaney.”Those expecting Mulaney, who performed at the Forum, to dig deep into the relationship drama that has made him a tabloid staple would be disappointed. He is touring with an hour of material that is the most anticipated of the year, and it lives up to the hype. (No news on when it will become a special.) When I first saw him do the same material at City Winery one year ago, his discussion of addiction and rehab was raw and messy and bleak. It has tightened into a polished showbiz machine, with his broadest act-outs, impressions and even an extended song and dance. (The suggestion of a suicidal tendency is gone.) His show is less a baring of the soul than a joke-dense and pointed scuffing up of his image. Its key line: “Likability is a jail.”If so, Meg Stalter might be its current warden, since her videos during the pandemic turned her into an unlikely star with a devoted community of fans who delighted in her collection of flamboyantly overwrought characters. How this success will translate to her live comedy is an open question. In a hectic, digressive performance to a sold-out audience, she left her characters behind and stuck to one self-dramatizing, often flailing star whose biggest laughs were less the product of bits than interactions with the crowd.While there were several star-driven shows, the festival was anchored by many showcases of short sets, often hosted by big names like Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. They introduced a stellar lineup of mostly women comics, including Cristela Alonzo and Michelle Buteau (who both told quarantine jokes). In between acts, Fonda and Tomlin bantered, comparing notes on who had been arrested more. When Margaret Cho came onstage, a few days after the leak of the Supreme Court abortion opinion, she told the hosts, “I look forward to getting arrested with you after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.”Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda were hosts of one show featuring mainly women comics.Elizabeth Morris/Netflix The biggest show by far was Iglesias’s at Dodger Stadium, a stand-up set that seemed to double as a celebration of its own feat, even though seeing comedy in a ballpark is not ideal. When Martin Moreno asked the crowd to not look at screens before introducing him, most of the audience, myself included, was watching him on a giant screen.But many of the funniest, most satisfying performances took place in small rooms, none more so than the one by Liza Treyger, whose act has become a Richard-Lewis-level opera of neurotic self-deprecation. What she called her “monologue of bad habits” is a rapid-fire series of beyond-jaded jokes at her own expense that often take the form of exasperated questions: “Do you ever watch a video on Instagram and tell your friends you watched a documentary?” she said. “Do you run late on purpose just to feel something?”For comedy nerds, it was also a pleasure to see Marsha Warfield, a former star of the sitcom “Night Court” and a figure from the 1970s Comedy Store scene whose legendary reputation rarely translates into high-profile shows. In a confidently moseying delivery, she talked about falling out of the public eye and coming out of the closet on Facebook, then defensively insisted that’s just where old people are. “Facebook is the 21st-century version of sitting in an open window and yelling at people,” she said.Of course such intimate live shows are not what created the most news. That would be Pete Davidson returning to stand-up (“In the last couple years, I’ve been onstage less than the babies inside of Ali Wong,” he said, a solid inside baseball quip) and cracking jokes about Kanye West. There was also the attack on Chappelle which added an element of tension to the entire festival. Beefy security guys were quick to clamp down on hecklers. I saw two people wrestled to the ground and dragged out of a theater before a Snoop Dogg-hosted show; another person was forcibly ejected after heckling Letterman. Many comics seemed jittery and ready to battle. When Mike Epps, dressed in a black leather suit, walked onstage shadow boxing, everyone got the joke. This was funny, but that this celebration of jokes sat alongside the new alertness to security added yet another irony to this festival.Pete Davidson made headlines for his return to stand-up (and for jokes about Kanye West).Ser Baffo/Netflix Comics were sympathetic to Chappelle, but the backlash toward his jokes about the trans community started make its way into sets. After saying that people have been asking her about the assault, Robin Tran, a trans comic who was headlining a show, quipped: “I just want to say, for the record, I only told him to scare Chappelle.” At a different show, another trans comic, Nori Reed, did a very funny, experimental set that postponed telling a conventional punchline for a few minutes, then calling it inspired by Chappelle: “No jokes, all vibes.”One of the strengths and perhaps vulnerabilities of Netflix, the festival and service, is its range. The streamer’s comedy taste has always been difficult to pin down. Its brand is big. I interviewed the heads of Netflix comedy in 2018, around the height of their power, though competition from rival services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ loomed. Asked if they could continue to draw the most famous names with big money, Lisa Nishimura, the vice president of independent and documentary film content, said: “If we continue to grow the audience, we’re OK.”Now that the audience has shrunk, what does that mean? Will the number of Netflix comedy specials dwindle? Will competitors fill the space? HBO has been putting out quality shows and found a discourse-dominating hit with Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” (That special was directed by Bo Burnham, whose “Inside” is one of the most impressive success stories for Netflix of the past few years.)In a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, just a few blocks from the hotel where club owners and comics stayed and you could see unnerving sights like late-night Comedy Cellar staple Dave Attell bathed in Hollywood daylight, I met with Robbie Praw, the director of original standup at Netflix. He looked weary managing this behemoth. Asked if financial troubles will change Netflix’s commitment to comedy, he said no but conceded that when it came to the number of specials, there would be “a little more curation.”It was a cautious, careful answer, one that reflected the moment more than any joke, billboard or festival did that week. More

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      Frank Langella Blames ‘Cancel Culture’ After Firing From Netflix Show

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      The actor said his dismissal from “The Fall of the House of Usher” followed a love scene in which the actress playing his wife accused him of touching her leg.Frank Langella, who was fired in April from his leading role in a Netflix mini-series after a misconduct investigation, said on Thursday that his dismissal followed a love scene in which the actress playing his wife accused him of touching her leg — an action not in the script.“She then turned and walked off the set, followed by the director and the intimacy coordinator,” Langella wrote in a column for Deadline, about a March 25 incident on the set of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The series is based on works by Edgar Allan Poe and created by Mike Flanagan.“I attempted to follow, but was asked to ‘give her some space.’ I waited for approximately one hour, and was then told she was not returning to set and we were wrapped,” Langella wrote.Langella said he and the actress were both clothed during the scene. During the ensuing investigation, he said, someone in human resources told him that the intimacy coordinator had suggested where the actors should place their hands during the scene. Langella called the instructions “absurd,” he said.“It was a love scene on camera,” Langella said. “Legislating the placement of hands, to my mind, is ludicrous. It undermines instinct and spontaneity.” Referring to the human resources employee, Langella wrote, “Toward the end of our conversation, she suggested that I not contact the young lady, the intimacy coordinator, or anyone else in the company. ‘We don’t want to risk retaliation,’ she said.”Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday evening.Langella said that he had been “canceled,” and that the harm to him has been “incalculable,” including losing a thrilling part, facing a stretch of unemployment and suffering a tarnished reputation. These indignities, he said, are “the real definition of unacceptable behavior.”“Cancel culture is the antithesis of democracy,” he said. “It inhibits conversation and debate. It limits our ability to listen, mediate, and exchange opposing views. Most tragically, it annihilates moral judgment. This is not fair. This is not just. This is not American.”The production plans to recast Langella’s role as Roderick, the reclusive patriarch of the Usher family, and reshoot the scenes in which he had already appeared. The series also stars Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell and Mark Hamill, among others.Langella, 84, known for his performances both onscreen and onstage, shot to fame in the title role of the 1979 film “Dracula” after starring in a Broadway production as the count. He also played President Richard M. Nixon in both the stage and screen versions of “Frost/Nixon,” earning an Oscar nomination as well as a Tony Award for best actor in a play in 2007. Recently, Langella appeared as the judge in the Netflix film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” More