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      Nathan Louis Jackson, Writer for the Theater and TV, Dies at 44

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      He wrote plays that tackled big issues like the death penalty and gun violence. He also wrote for series including the superhero saga “Luke Cage.”Nathan Louis Jackson, an acclaimed playwright who grappled with serious issues like the death penalty, homophobia and gun violence — and was also known for his work on television shows like “Luke Cage,” a Netflix series about a Black superhero — died on Aug. 22 at his home in Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. He was 44.His wife, Megan Mascorro-Jackson, confirmed the death. She said that she did not know the cause, but that Mr. Jackson had had cardiac problems over the past few years, including an aortic dissection and an aortic aneurysm.Mr. Jackson was still attending the Juilliard School when his play “Broke-ology,” premiered in 2008 at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. The story of a Black family in a poor neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan., where Mr. Jackson grew up, it focuses on the confrontation between two brothers over the care of their father, William (played by Wendell Pierce), who has a debilitating case of multiple sclerosis — a disease that Mr. Jackson’s father, who died in 2001, also had.Reviewing the play in The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy wrote that “what makes Jackson’s writing feel true and fresh — aside from its great humor”— was the way he portrayed the brothers. Malcolm, she noted, “isn’t just a selfish striver,” nor is Ennis “just a resigned martyr” — and William “isn’t just a passive victim.”Crystal A. Dickinson and Wendell Pierce in “Broke-ology,” which one critic called “a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA year later, after Mr. Jackson received his artist diploma in playwriting from Juilliard, “Broke-ology” opened at the Off Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.“‘Broke-ology’ is a decidedly imperfect work,” Robert Feldberg wrote in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., “but it’s a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Mr. Jackson’s next play, “When I Come to Die,” explored the emotional turmoil of a death row inmate whose execution goes awry — the drug cocktail that was supposed to kill him managed only to stop his heart temporarily — forcing him to wonder what to do with an unexpected extension of his life, and if he will face another execution.“I started thinking about people in weird time positions, and these cats know exactly how much time they have left on this earth,” he said of death row inmates in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, when the play was running Off Broadway at the Duke Theater, a production of Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging playwrights. “But what happens if you get more of it?”Although Mr. Jackson established an early place for his work in New York City, he remained close to his Midwestern roots. In addition to living in Kansas, he was the playwright in residence at the Kansas City Repertory Theater, in Missouri, from 2013 to 2019.From left, Michael Balderrama, Chris Chalk and Neal Huff as Adrian Crouse in Mr. Jackson’s play ‘When I Come to Die.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat theater staged productions of “When I Come to Die” and “Broke-ology” and the world premieres of his “Sticky Traps,” about a woman’s response to protests by a homophobic preacher at the funeral of her gay son, who had killed himself, and “Brother Toad,” about the reactions in the Kansas City community to the shooting of two Black teenagers.“The beautiful thing about his writing is that he never told the audience what to think,” Angela Gieras, the executive director of the Kansas City Rep, said in a phone interview. “He’d share a story that was compelling and truthful and let the people have their own conversations.”Nathan Louis Jackson was born on Dec. 4, 1978, in Lawrence, Kan. His father, Cary, was a heating and cooling service technician. His mother, Bessie (Brownlee) Jackson, was a preschool teacher.Nathan said that he was not a good student in high school, and that he studied as little as he could.“Ironically, I failed English,” he told Informed Decisions, a Kansas State University blog, in 2017. “I didn’t want to read Shakespeare.”He graduated from Kansas City Kansas Community College with an associate degree in 1999. At Kansas State, where he majored in theater, he made his first attempt at playwriting by creating monologues for forensics competitions.“I’m there in the Midwest, and there ain’t no other Black folks doing this, so I’d just end up doing August Wilson every time,” he told The Times. “I wanted to do a piece that speaks for me, so I said, ‘I’ll just write my own stuff.’”Mr. Jackson wrote two plays in college that were recognized after his graduation by the Kennedy Center. He won the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award twice, for “The Last Black Play” and “The Mancherios,” which he adapted into “Broke-ology,” and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, also for “The Last Black Play.”After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2003, Mr. Jackson acted in a children’s theater, took graduate courses in environmental science and writing, and worked as the manager of a barbecue restaurant.He moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 2007. He and his wife lived in a diverse neighborhood there, and he remembered seeing people from all over the world on the subway.But at the theater, “I did not see that,” he said in an interview with KCUR-FM, a public radio station in Kansas City, Mo., in 2016, “What I saw was predominantly white, older, and with a little money in their pockets.”He strove to write plays featuring “people marginalized by poverty, incarceration or gun violence,” Ms. Mascarro-Jackson said in a phone interview.“Lots of times they were Black characters,” she added, “because that’s what he knew.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by his mother; a daughter, Amaya; a son, Savion; a sister, Ebony Maddox; and a brother, Wardell.Over the last decade, while continuing to work in the theater, Mr. Jackson also wrote episodes of several TV series, including “13 Reasons Why,” “Resurrection,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Southland,” Shameless” and “Luke Cage,” for which he was also an executive story editor. He spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, where he suffered the aortic dissection in 2019.“The series makes a bigger, grander statement about African American men and how we view them,” he told The Kansas City Star in 2016, referring to “Luke Cage,” a Marvel show whose title character is a former convict (played by Mike Colter) with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin who solves crimes in Harlem.He added: “It is undoubtedly a Black show. But at the same time, it’s just a superhero show. We deal with something all the other superheroes deal with. We just do it from a different standpoint.” More

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      Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

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      Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.” More

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      Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

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      She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

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      Stream These Great Movies Before They Leave Netflix in September

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      This month’s losses for U.S. subscribers include some of the most beloved titles and characters ever to grace a screen.The titles leaving Netflix in the United States are a real smorgasbord this month, from genre movies to children’s fare to two of the most beloved Oscar winners in cinematic history. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Colette’ (Sept. 12)You may think you know what you’re getting when you click “play” on a period literary biopic starring Keira Knightley — but the director Wash Westmoreland is delightfully uninterested in hewing to expectations. This is no ordinary period literary biopic, because the French writer Colette was no period literary figure; she was an ahead-of-her time scribe and an unapologetically bisexual hedonist whose lust for life made for especially lively prose. Knightley is clearly having a good time subverting her prim-and-proper persona, while Dominic West is deliciously doofy as the man who brings her out of her shell before receding into her long shadow.Stream it here.‘Annihilation’ (Sept. 29)The writer and director Alex Garland is a rare creator of science fiction who truly seems interested in the “science” piece of the puzzle; unlike many of his contemporaries, who use the tools of futuristic fare as window dressing for mediocre action and adventure, he crafts films of ideas, approaching the possibilities of future technologies and alien interactions with contemplation and intellectual heft. Like his “Ex Machina” before it, this adaptation of the novel by Jeff VanderMeer is also as interested in character as it is in genre (if not more so), focusing on a biologist (a fine, and occasionally ferocious, Natalie Portman) who is investigating a possible alien life force while also grappling with the recent death of her husband (Oscar Isaac). Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson round out the cast.Stream it here.‘Clear and Present Danger’ (Sept. 30)Harrison Ford’s second outing as Tom Clancy’s venerable hero Jack Ryan is a tense, well-crafted geopolitical thriller. Newly appointed as the C.I.A.’s acting deputy director, Ryan uncovers a scorcher of a secret: a covert war, conducted by intelligence operatives against a Columbian drug cartel, authorized at the top levels of the U.S. government. Willem Dafoe, Joaquim de Almeida and the “Mission: Impossible” favorite Henry Czerny are among the evil-doers, while James Earl Jones returns as Ryan’s boss and confidante. Ford’s “Patriot Games” director, Phillip Noyce, also returns, a director so deft at putting together a suspense sequence that he manages to generate nail-biting tension with a scene about deleting some files.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (Sept. 30)The director John Hillcoat and the musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave reunited after the triumph of “The Proposition” (2005) for this 1930s crime film with a phenomenal cast, including Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska. Cave’s story, adapted from the historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” by Matt Bondurant, concerns the bootlegging Bondurant brothers (Clarke, Hardy and LaBeouf), who find their business interests threatened by a crooked U.S. Marshal (Pearce) and a rival bootlegger (Oldman), among others. The period costumes and settings are stunning, and the sprawling cast meshes nicely; Hardy is especially strong as a man of few words but furious fists.Stream it here.‘A League of Their Own’ (Sept. 30)This 1992 smash, directed by Penny Marshall, is based on the true story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed in 1943 to help keep the national pastime going while World War II pulled male ballplayers out of the majors. Geena Davis stars as Dottie Hinson, star catcher of the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the former baseball star and current drunk who coaches the team when he’s sober (which is infrequent). With able support from Jon Lovitz, Madonna, Lori Petty, David Straitairn and many more, this one is smoothly assembled, sensitively acted and riotously funny.Stream it here.‘Nanny McPhee’ (Sept. 30)A decade after winning the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson returned to the typewriter to pen the film version of a slightly less venerated literary property: the “Nurse Matilda” children’s novels, by the British author Christianna Brand. But it doesn’t feel like slumming; Thompson invests her screenplay with all the winking wit you would expect, and she absolutely goes for broke in her performance of the title role, a kind of warts-and-all Mary Poppins. The director Kirk Jones orchestrates the chaos with a sure hand.Stream it here.‘Rocky I-V’ (Sept. 30)The first five films of the Rocky franchise — starring, written and sometimes directed by Sylvester Stallone — vary wildly in style, quality and critical and commercial reception. But taken together, they create a fascinating portrait of mainstream American moviemaking from the late 1970s to the early ’90s, as the modest, character-driven drama of the 1976 original slowly but surely gave way to the montage-heavy, jingoistic bombast of “Rocky IV” from 1987. But for better or worse, each film offers its own pleasures, from the specificity of Stallone’s dialogue to the richly played supporting characters (particularly Talia Shire’s Adrian and Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed) to the crowd-pleasing closing bouts.Stream “Rocky” here, “Rocky II” here, “Rocky III” here, “Rocky IV” here and “Rocky V” here.‘Star Trek’ / ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ (Sept. 30)When J.J. Abrams was announced as the director of a newly rebooted series of “Star Trek” films, he was still best known for his television work. The decision smacked of some desperation; after several “Star Trek” television spinoffs and numerous big-screen resurrections, what could anyone (let alone a not-yet-proven filmmaker) add to the mythos of the original “Enterprise” crew? But Abrams’s inaugural 2009 entry was an absolute treat, a sleek, well-cast popcorn picture that reinvigorated the original characters and story while also playing appropriate tribute. The 2013 follow-up, “Into Darkness,” is less successful but still an entertaining diversion, particularly for Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on Ricardo Montalbán’s villainous “Khan.”Stream “Star Trek” here and “Star Trek: Into Darkness” here.‘Titanic’ (Sept. 30)The 1912 sinking of the Titanic luxury cruise liner remains a source of fascination (and tragedy) in American culture, thanks in no small part to the long shadow cast by James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winner and box office champion. It’s the kind of film that can be described only as “old fashioned”— not as a slam but simply as a statement of fact. Cameron so deftly mixes spectacle and special effects with poignant human interest (thanks primarily to the warmth and chemistry of its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) that one is legitimately reminded of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” It’s a throwback epic, and its appeal has proved timeless.Stream it here.‘Warm Bodies’ (Sept. 30)We’ve seen no shortage of zombie horror in the 21st century, from “28 Days Later” — written by the aforementioned Garland — to the “Dawn of the Dead” remake to the (paradoxically) unkillable “Walking Dead” series and its many spinoffs. But we haven’t seen very many zombie rom-coms, which makes this 2013 charmer from the writer and director Jonathan Levine (“Long Shot”) all the more commendable. Adapting the novel by Isaac Marion, Levine tells the story of R (Nicholas Hoult, later of “The Great”), a zombie who falls hard for the still-living Julie (Teresa Palmer). Well, every relationship has its issues.Stream it here. More

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      5 Stand-Up Comedy Specials to Stream for the Labor Day Weekend

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      Todd Barry, Tracy Morgan, Sasheer Zamata, Chris Fleming and Jason Fried riff on weird characters, middle age, lost histories and more.Todd Barry, ‘Domestic Shorthair’Stream it on YouTubeTodd Barry speaks fluent sarcasm. After decades of refinement, honing his low-key deadpan into something flexible and distinctive, he can turn a sentence inside-out with the mildest shift in intonation, instantly divorcing what he says from what he means. The pivots in his jokes are subtle but crisp. Ever since David Letterman retired from late night, sarcasm has no better champion. Barry starts waving its flag as soon as the applause settles down on his very funny new special. “That is the type of forced fraudulent crowd response that will propel this whole show,” he says, enough of a hint of a smile to soften the blow.Barry is a taut joke teller more than a yarn-spinner. But his punchlines emerge from anecdotes filled with details about curious characters he’s met, tales that have the quirkiness and surprise of what you find in a sensitively observed short story. There’s the Uber drive who apologizes for not talking during the ride, the waiter who warns against the Italian dressing in a whisper and the cabinet salesman who says he loves his job because it allows him to eat with his customers. He filters the slightest interactions with them through his arch responses, mocking but not mean. His real adversaries are not people but hyperbole, nonsense or any pointless excess of emotion. And some of his most unexpected laughs are in his own mixing up of mountains and molehills. “My printer broke recently,” he said, gently shifting gears to a parody of concern. “Sorry to bum you out.”Tracy Morgan, ‘Takin’ It Too Far’Stream it on MaxIt’s been a rough couple of years for Tracy Morgan, the veteran comic, “30 Rock” scene stealer and all-time great talk-show guest. He almost died after being hit by a Walmart truck, then during the pandemic, his marriage fell apart. In his baggy new special, he says his wife “took that social distancing too far.”If you were looking for a bracing and introspective hour on his troubles, you came to the wrong place. Morgan just brings up his problems to crack wise about them. There is little attempt at timeliness (the expiration date on jokes about the slap at the Oscars has passed) or ambitious set pieces with tight jokes snapping into place. This is a comic coasting on charisma, which he can do as well as anyone. His main subject is middle age. He’s out to prove you don’t need to be mature in your 50s. Instead, he doubles down on sex and fart jokes, yanking his shirt up, rubbing his belly, finishing with a dozen or so minutes on what it’s like to sleep with older women. Ultimately, there’s no escaping the fact that aging changes you. Morgan confesses he pushed a lap dance away at a strip club, shouting: ‘You know my sciatica flared up!”Sasheer Zamata, ‘The First Woman’Stream it on YouTubeWhy does everyone know Amelia Earhart but not Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the world? According to the comic Sasheer Zamata, whose second stand-up special is full of hidden histories, it boils down to marketing. Mock kept to herself, saying, “The kind of person who enjoys being alone in a plane is not the kind who enjoys being continuously around other people.” Zamata says she doesn’t “like going places or doing things,” so perhaps she can relate. Earhart married her publicist, and Zamata calls her the “original Kim Kardashian.”Her digression, filled with punchlines, is just one example of how this special unpacks lost or taboo stories. The political centerpiece of the set is about how we should talk more about female sexuality, especially for girls. She relates a story about masturbating for the first time with a lint roller, then opens the topic to the audience, resulting in some colorful crowd work. Zamata, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, turns jokes into carefully crafted vignettes, often hinging on a twist that leads her to widen her eyes for a long pause. She’s a poised performer, effortlessly moving from crowd work to dating tales to political gibes. Her description of being hit by a car becomes a peg for how people (including doctors) ignore Black women when describing pain but pay attention to them on the question of what is cool. Her solution? Black women should champion illness (“Sickle cell is sick as hell!”), and disease will be “gentrified out of our bodies.”Chris Fleming, ‘Hell’Stream it on PeacockWhenever a new Chris Fleming video appears on my feed, I stop and pay attention. In a scroll of sameness, he’s thrillingly unexpected, a shaggy-haired Los Angeles absurdist who often begins with an offhand and narrow idea (sitting in his car, considering the appeal of Adam Driver, say), then riffs on it with a gusto and flamboyance that accumulates its own comic momentum. His is a pointedly niche sensibility but responsible for some of the biggest laughs I have had on social media. His debut, a scattershot affair that mixes a performance at a theater with sketches, has some very funny oddball ideas, like his celebration of the Nissan Cube as the “one true asexual icon in American culture.”His precise dissection of basic families who think they’re really eccentric is a characteristic hobby horse. But these bursts of lunacy don’t build on one another. In the translation to long form, the pacing gets a little slack. Part of the problem might be editing (you must kill your darlings, especially when they involve sketches that go on too long) and an undercooked overall conceit. Fleming can’t seem to entirely decide if his aesthetic is going to be polished or ragged, his material revealing or purely absurd. He’s smart enough to commit to the personal and the weird, but absurdity requires its own rigor.Jared Fried, ‘37 & Single’Stream it on NetflixIn the crowded field of dating jokes, Jared Fried, an amusingly hyperventilating self-deprecator exploring red flags, online profiles and tensions between millennials and Generation Z, distinguishes himself in a couple of ways. In his very strong act-outs, he does an inspired impression of fake laughing that projects real discomfort. It gooses a familiar bit about married people talking to singles about the perils of matrimony into something spiky and layered. Secondarily, not since Leslie Jones has a comic done more with bulging eyes. While dead eyes can kill an act, expressive ones can illuminate it. More

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      ‘One Piece’ Review: Netflix Tries to Translate the Anime Magic (Again)

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      Remember the live-action, English-language “Cowboy Bebop”?With “One Piece,” Netflix repeats history, and there isn’t much evidence that it paid attention to what happened the first time around.“Cowboy Bebop” was a cult-favorite Japanese animated series that fetishized cool American jazz and film noir and Hollywood westerns, and in 2021 Netflix returned the cultural homage by making an American live-action adaptation. It wasn’t a disaster, but it quickly fell from sight.“One Piece” is a remarkably endurable manga and anime franchise — more than 500 million books sold, 1,073 television episodes and counting — that applies a slapstick, Buster Keaton-like visual energy to an adventure story with roots in Hollywood swashbucklers and musicals like “Captain Blood” and “The Crimson Pirate.” So once again Netflix has been moved to produce an American live-action remake, whose eight episodes premiered on Thursday.The original “Cowboy Bebop” and “One Piece” are very different creatures, but they have something important in common: They are propelled by style. Texture, composition, sound and movement engage us and trigger our emotions; the moody revenge plot of “Bebop” and the rousingly affirmative coming-of-age story of “One Piece” are just serviceable scaffoldings.There’s no reason a live-action version of either anime couldn’t find its own distinctive style. But neither of these shows managed it; if anything, they seem to have avoided the attempt. To an even greater extent than the Netflix “Cowboy Bebop,” the Netflix “One Piece” feels bland and generic. It may satisfy fans of the original who are happy to see events more or less faithfully replicated, but most of the verve and personality of the anime are gone, replaced by busyness, elaborate but uninteresting production design and — a sign of the times — an increased piety regarding the story’s themes of knowing and believing in yourself.Set in a fantastical world made up mostly of ocean and patrolled by colorfully named pirate crews, some of them made up of fish-men, “One Piece” centers on a young wannabe pirate named Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy). Pursuing his childhood dream of becoming king of the pirates and finding a perhaps mythical treasure called the One Piece, he gradually gathers a crew of young misfits like himself, with unhappy pasts and missions that define them: to be the world’s greatest swordsman, or to locate a (perhaps mythical) seafood paradise.From left, Emily Rudd, Iñaki Godoy and Mackenyu form part of a crew of misfits driven by personal missions.NetflixIn addition to unnaturally high spirits and an utter refusal to take no for an answer, Luffy is defined by his ability to stretch his limbs across long distances (handy when throwing punches) and to absorb punishment, the results of eating a forbidden fruit that made his body rubberlike. This bit of comic inspiration by the character’s creator, the Japanese artist Eiichiro Oda, makes Luffy physically and psychologically congruent — he is elastic and indestructible in every way.The series does a more than creditable job of recreating Luffy’s rubbery abilities, and Godoy (a Mexican actor who appeared in the Netflix series “Who Killed Sara?” and “The Imperfects”) is a decent match with the animated character in look and temperament.But there’s not much beyond that for him to play, and the same goes for the rest of the cast, which includes capable performers like Mackenyu as the swordsman, Roronoa Zoro, and Taz Skylar as the piratical chef, Sanji. Depth of writing isn’t make or break amid the carnival atmosphere of the anime, delivered in 20-minute dollops of sensation, but the thinness of the characterizations becomes much harder to ignore in the more deliberate, more ordinary Netflix telling, with the story reshaped into hourlong episodes.That reshaping — the eight episodes correspond to roughly the first 45 episodes of the anime — was surely a major effort, and it would be understandable if there wasn’t a lot of time or energy left over for actually reimagining the material for live actors and constructed sets. The show’s developers and showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, were able to wrestle the story to a draw. But they don’t capture the corny, goofy spirit of the anime, and without that the generalities about living your dream and making way for a new generation just sit there gathering dust.The fates of “One Piece” and “Cowboy Bebop” are, perhaps, a likely consequence of big-box streaming. Taking a show that has found a fanatical following and remaking it with the widest possible audience in mind means making it for no particular viewer at all. More

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      H.B.O. Is Tackling Religion in the Most Remarkable Ways

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      “Righteous Gemstones” remains a surprisingly complex (and hilarious) take on American faith.It’s hard to find a doctrine that better explains this country’s political and cultural trajectory over the past 50 years than the so-called prosperity gospel, which reversed the old dogma in one key, seductive way: It came to interpret the attainment of worldly wealth and privilege as proof of spiritual exceptionalism, the rewards of a life lived righteously. Jesus says in Matthew 19:24: “And I say again unto you — it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” But across the end of the 20th century, any number of figures built immense and lucrative flocks by coming at that problem from a very different direction: a promise, perhaps, that you might look great crossing into heaven in a camel-hair suit. That this sentiment aligned so well with politically ascendant strains of conservatism may or may not be coincidence, but the net effect was the same. There is the elevation of wealth as a sign of virtue. There is the sense that if only those in need had been more righteous, they, too, might have been blessed. There is, in short, the long, strange trajectory of American temperament that has, on some level, brought us to HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones.”“Gemstones,” the brainchild of the writer-performer Danny McBride, is the story of a megachurch’s descent into corruption and chaos, rendered in the cheerfully unruly tradition of Mark Twain. Audiences may respond to McBride most immediately as a comedian of great physical gifts, but he is also a satirist of increasingly subtle intelligence, and there is a startling, possibly underappreciated depth to this critique of wealth, power and spirituality.That’s not to suggest that the show, which recently ended its third season, is averse to over-the-top parody. In one memorable moment from this summer, we’re presented with a flood of lights, hip-hop dancers and brute-force gospel music as a silver-haired preacher — a onetime child evangelist still known as Baby Billy — steps forward to host the first episode of “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers,” a liturgical quiz show that, as people keep pointing out, is a carbon copy of “Family Feud.” Moments later, the production is interrupted by a horde of locusts descending on the building. This — the profane, the sacred and the apocalyptic — is the world of “Gemstones,” condensed.This is a portrait of damaged people born into the redemption business, trying to find anything redeemable about themselves.The show bears obvious similarities to its critically fetishized network peer “Succession.” In each, we focus on three entitled siblings, potential heirs to an empire built by their charismatically imperious father, and their desire, real or imagined, to transcend the implications of their birthright. But while the Roys of “Succession” are armored with stylish nihilism, the three Gemstone offspring, lieutenants in the family’s sprawling spiritual operation, are less mannered and far more relatable. Even as they behave badly, even appallingly, you can sense their maladroit grasping for the morality they’ve always understood to be interchangeable with their privilege. Television’s depictions of religion have often leaned either toward po-faced dogma or scouring atheism, but here is one that dares to split the difference. McBride has made a career of playing swaggering Southern blowhards, inhabiting them with such familiarity that they transcend simple mockery and become almost poignantly human; “Gemstones,” too, has a fondness for its characters that runs parallel to the humor it wrings from their failings.And the Gemstone children definitely have failings. The eldest, Jesse, is a pompous hothead whose default response to any insult is light violence and who, despite his persona as a family man, has enjoyed the sort of hard-partying lifestyle that would make early-1970s Led Zeppelin blush. His sister, Judy, is a flamethrowing libertine with a staggeringly foul mouth and a tendency to transgress against her lovingly milquetoast husband. The youngest, Kelvin, is comparatively sweet but locked in a closet of his own making, profoundly in love with his best friend and prayer partner. Like a staging of “King Lear” at a monster-truck rally, the show has a loneliness that undergirds its berserk energy. Much of it is delivered by John Goodman, who brings a touching pathos to the role of the church’s patriarch, Eli Gemstone — a man of humble beginnings whose best intentions toward his kin only seem to multiply their avarice and shamelessness. There is also the conscience of the family, his deceased wife, Aimee-Leigh, seen only in flashback. (And, once, as an ill-advised hologram.) We see her counsel that “money ain’t everything,” but these words float by, unheeded, against the ever-escalating scale and spectacle of the Gemstone Salvation Center or the family’s own theme park. Their Ferris wheels and roller coasters have replaced precisely the kind of down-home, small-town, tiny congregations that represent the family’s own roots, but the Gemstones are masters of a great American skill: They can see themselves as the salt of the earth even while surrounded by Croesus-like wealth.This year, “Succession” concluded its final season on a bracingly cynical note, suggesting that its four seasons of familial infighting were little more than a meaningless sideshow in one cul-de-sac of the corporate world. “Gemstones,” by contrast, has come to hint at a better future. Some of the first season’s action involved Jesse’s oldest son, Gideon, having scandalized the family by lighting out to Hollywood to become a stuntman. By Season 3, he is firmly back in the fold, demonstrably more mature than his own father and serving as Eli’s chauffeur. The affection that develops between the two characters culminates in the season’s finale, in which Gideon asks his grandfather if he might teach him to be a preacher — as if suggesting that the dysfunction of today’s Gemstones might be a generational blip brought on by the distorting effects of wealth and power. At its most serrated, the show has satirized the unrepentant predation that marked the heights of televangelism, as churches were remade into spiritual money-laundering operations. At its most generous, though, it has been remarkably forgiving, letting each sibling fumble toward something like self-awareness. This is a portrait of damaged people born into the redemption business, trying to find anything redeemable about themselves, continually held back by the profit motive. This is not the only fascinating vision of the church on HBO these days. There is also “Somebody Somewhere,” which recently finished its second season. Bridget Everett plays Sam, a truculent self-styled outcast who has returned to her small Kansas hometown following the death of her sister. In a cheerful twist on the usual Hollywood portrayals of “flyover” Christian America, Sam finds companionship in a church-adjacent “choir practice,” where she joins her best friend, Joel, who is both deeply devout and openly gay. In the Season 2 finale, Sam — blessed with an extraordinary singing voice she has become reluctant to use publicly — belts out “Ave Maria” at the wedding of a trans man and a cis woman. This is a rare representation of the way religious fellowship connects and enriches communities of many sorts. Tonally, it approaches the polar opposite of “Gemstones,” but what the two series share is a knack for finding the strangeness and nuance in American religion, a topic Hollywood has more often regarded as a zero-sum contest between the wholesome and the heretical. True salvation, both programs understand, may be someplace in between.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Jake Giles Netter/HBO More

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      ‘One Piece’ Creator Hopes Live-Action Series Will Defy ‘a History of Failure’

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      On Thursday, an eight-part adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate comedy-adventure “One Piece” will make its Netflix debut. The stakes are high: Millions of fans want to see if the showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda (whom Oda describes as “‘One Piece’ superfans”), succeeded in converting the beloved manga and anime series to live-action. Although some viewers over 30 may not recognize the title, “One Piece” is one of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world.Since July 1997, when it began appearing in the Japanese manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, “One Piece” collections have sold more than 516 million copies worldwide. An animated TV series notched its 1,000th episode earlier this year, and there have been numerous TV specials, light novels and video games; fans discuss “One Piece” trivia on countless websites. The 15th theatrical feature, “One Piece Film: Red,” was the No. 1 box-office hit in Japan in 2022, outdrawing “Top Gun: Maverick.”Netflix held the fan screening in Santa Monica, Calif. The “One Piece” franchise is enormously popular, with more than 516 million books sold and numerous anime series and movies released.Yuri Hasegawa for The New York TimesOda is extremely private — he does not allow his face to be photographed, if he can help it — but he talked about “One Piece” in a rare interview from Los Angeles. Speaking through the interpreter Taro Goto, he discussed the origins of “One Piece,” casting its hero for TV, and the film that changed his mind about live-action adaptation. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When it comes to adapting a phenomenally popular manga and anime series like “One Piece” to live action, what do you have to keep in mind?A live-action adaptation of a manga doesn’t simply re-enact the source material on a one-to-one basis: It involves really thinking about what fans love about the characters, the dynamics among them — and being faithful to those elements. A good live-action show doesn’t have to change the story too much. The most important thing is whether the actors can reproduce the characters in a way that will satisfy the people who read the manga. I think we did it well, so I hope audiences will accept it.Colton Osorio, left, and Peter Gadiot in “One Piece,” premiering Thursday on Netflix.NetflixYou’ve said you wanted to be a manga artist since you were in elementary school. How did “One Piece” begin?I set out to draw the manga I wanted to read when I was young. When I started, I had to draw things that didn’t exist to get attention. There were plenty of heroes who fight the demons and save the world; the market was saturated with that kind of story. I wanted to do something different but relatable. I understood that I had been supported and helped by a lot of people to get to where I was, so friendship became a central theme.The hero of the story is Monkey D. Luffy (it rhymes, appropriately, with “goofy”), who is determined to become King of the Pirates by finding a fabulous treasure known as the One Piece. Luffy is warmhearted, upbeat and ferociously devoted to his friends, but he’s no matinee idol. How did you design him?I knew I wanted to write a pirate manga, and just drew from instinct the kind of young boy I imagined in the role. As the adventure continued, I realized that various kinds of pirates would appear, so I decided to give Luffy a face that would be very easy to draw. Later, when I had to give autographs and needed to sketch Luffy, it was easy to do.“One Piece” includes strong female characters like Nami, played in the series by Emily Rudd. (With Mackenyu Arata, center, and Iñaki Godoy.)NetflixSomething that sets “One Piece” apart from many adventure manga is the powerful, capable women in the story, including the archaeologist Robin and Nami, the navigator.There are many strong women in the world of “One Piece” — women with intelligence like Robin, or with abilities like Nami. There are even attractive and strong women among the enemy pirates. In the manga I read as a kid, there was always a point where the heroine existed just to be rescued. That didn’t sit well with me; I didn’t want to create a story about women being kidnapped and saved. I depict women who know how to fight for themselves and don’t need to be saved. If a moment comes where they’re overpowered, their shipmates will help them out, and vice versa.As a boy, Luffy ate the accursed gum-gum fruit and it turned his body into rubber, allowing him to deliver fantastic stretchy kicks and punches in fights. Isn’t he better suited to animation than to live action?When I first started, I didn’t think there was any point in drawing a manga that could be remade in live-action. But when I saw the movie “Shaolin Soccer,” it felt like a manga-esque world brought to life. I changed my mind. I realized times had changed, and there was technology available that could make a live-action “One Piece” happen. So I shifted to finding the right partner to bring the manga to life.Actors have portrayed Luffy and his crew in stage shows and even in a Kabuki play. But attempts to adapt popular anime into American live-action movies and series have generally been unsuccessful, as in the widely panned “Ghost in the Shell” (2017) and the short-lived “Cowboy Bebop” (2021). Did that worry you?Various manga had been made into live action, but there was a history of failure; no one in Japan could name a successful example. Would fans of “One Piece” — and viewers who don’t know the manga — accept it? Perhaps it was time to search for the answer. Thankfully, Netflix agreed that they wouldn’t go out with the show until I agreed it was satisfactory. I read the scripts, gave notes and acted as a guard dog to ensure the material was being adapted in the correct way.Oda said casting Luffy was the biggest challenge. “I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy,” he said.NetflixLuffy is not the brightest doubloon in the dead man’s chest, but he’s an endearing character: He’s impulsive and happy-go-lucky until some villain threatens his friends or menaces someone weaker — then it’s a fight to the finish. Was he difficult to cast?I thought the biggest challenge was going to be finding somebody to play Luffy — I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy. When I first created Luffy, I drew the most energetic child I could imagine: a normal child on the outside, but not at all normal on the inside. Iñaki was just like the person I drew; he felt absolutely natural. Before I saw the first cut of the show, a lot of my notes were based on how the manga Luffy would act. But after seeing Iñaki’s performance, I was able to shift gears and give notes on how the live-action Luffy should act.The live-action “One Piece” uses more extensive dialogue than the manga or the animated series, which focus more on the visuals.In a manga, the more dialogue you put in, the less space you have to draw, so I cut the words as much as possible. But when people actually talk, the conversations are different. In live-action dramas, there’s always a lot of dialogue. If the characters spoke in real life, their speeches would have the natural feel that’s in the scripts. I’m very happy about how that turned out.Over the last 26 years, you’ve drawn thousands of pages of the manga as well as magazine covers, book covers and posters. You still draw in ink on paper; have you ever considered switching to digital?Everyone is drawing digitally now and it’s not that I’m not interested in it, but for some reason readers tend to take that work a little lightly. I enjoy the experience of drawing by hand, and I expect I’ll continue using hand drawing for the duration of “One Piece.”You’ve spoken with enthusiasm about the possibility of a second season of the live-action series, and “One Piece” collections continue to appear on best-seller lists around the world. When you started Luffy’s saga back in 1997, did you ever imagine it would run for more than 25 years?I never thought “One Piece” would last this long: When I began, I imagined it might run for five years. But it was my first time doing something serialized, and I found that as I kept writing, the characters took on lives of their own. Before I knew it, they were writing the story for me, and it just kept going. More