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      Richard Roat, Seen on ‘Cheers,’ ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 89

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      A familiar TV face for years, he appeared on many of the most popular prime-time shows of recent decades.Richard Roat, a versatile character actor whose half-century-long career was punctuated by notable guest appearances on three of the most popular sitcoms of recent decades, “Cheers,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” died on Aug. 5 in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 89.Kathy (Arntzen) Roat, his wife and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack. She said Mr. Roat, who lived in Glendale, died in a condo while on vacation.On a 1985 episode of “Cheers,” as the imperious boss of the barstool habitué Norm Peterson (George Wendt), he threatened to fire Norm if he didn’t accept a promotion (and raise) to become the company’s “corporate killer” — the person who terminates people.“Studies have shown that it’s particularly humiliating when you’re fired by someone who is clearly and markedly superior to yourself,” Mr. Roat’s character tells Norm coldly. “That wouldn’t be the case with you, Norman. You’re just an ordinary Joe. We checked out your home life. You have absolutely nothing that anyone could possibly envy or resent.”In 1996, on “Seinfeld,” Mr. Roat was a dermatologist who labeled Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) a “difficult” patient when she sought treatment for a rash. His character turned from friendly to stern when he checked her patient history.“Well, that doesn’t look serious,” he says, barely examining her. “You’ll be fine.” He then adds notes to her history when she complains that the rash is “really itchy.”And on “Friends,” in 2000, he was a professor at the college where Ross (David Schwimmer) taught. At one point he tells Ross that he was violating campus rules by dating a student.“They’re going to fire you,” he says.“Really, it’s not just frowned upon?” Ross asks.Mr. Roat worked primarily in television, starting in 1962 with two very different series about police officers: the sitcom “Car 54, Where Are You?” and the drama “Naked City.” He was a regular on the daytime soap opera “The Doctors” from 1963 to 1964, and over the next 45 years was seen on comedies like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Murphy Brown” and “Ellen” and dramas like “The Fugitive,” “Columbo,” “Matlock” and “Dynasty.”In a 1986 episode of “The Golden Girls,” as the boyfriend of Rose (Betty White), he dies in bed after they sleep together.He also worked regularly in regional theater. He starred with Jo Anne Worley in Ken Ludwig’s theatrical farce “Moon Over Buffalo” at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in William Luce’s one-man show “Barrymore,” about the actor John Barrymore, at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont. He played the title role, based on Lyndon B. Johnson, in Barbara Garson’s political satire “Macbird!” at the Players’ Ring Gallery in Los Angeles, and a married character in Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” about a group of gay men, at what is now the Montalbán Theater, also in Los Angeles.In 1962 he played Mark Antony in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Julius Caesar.” Mr. Roat, seated, with Jay Leno and Ellen Reagan in the 1978 television movie “Almost Heaven.”G Stein/ABC via Getty Images
      Richard Donald Roat Jr. was born on July 3, 1933, in Hartford, Conn. His father was a glazier, and his mother, Lois (Bowan) Roat, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Hartford in 1956, Mr. Roat acted with the Mark Twain Masquers and other local theatrical groups. He also earned a living by driving a bakery truck and holding other odd jobs.In 1961 he made his Broadway debut as a replacement for Michael Ebert in “The Wall,” a play about Jews in occupied Poland during World War II. Mr. Roat played Dr. Jerry Chandler during 172 episodes of “The Doctors” and told The Portland Press Herald that he felt grateful for the opportunity to act regularly.“There’s room for less than one percent of the new actors in nighttime television,” he said. “Unless you’re a ‘regular’ and get a running assignment for a season-long series, your chances in nighttime television are practically nil.”His last television role was in the drama “24” in 2009.Mr. Roat had another long-running role, which he pursued as an actor and continued after he retired that year: as a tax preparer for people in the entertainment business. During a slow period in his acting career in the late 1960s, he took a job in an accountant’s office. On April 15 of that first year, the accountant had a nervous breakdown, Kathy Roat said, and Mr. Roat “took some tax forms and decided to become a tax preparer.” More

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      David Milch Still Has Stories to Tell

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      LOS ANGELES — The door to a room at an assisted-living facility swung open, and out darted one of its occupants: a cat named Mignonne, who was eager for some fresh companionship. Then, with more deliberation, came the apartment’s primary resident, David Milch, who was similarly happy to have visitors.“I’m so grateful,” he said, allowing entrance to the quarters where he has lived for nearly three years, but which still feel to him like an intermediate space. “As you may imagine, things are all in a state of flux.”To television viewers who have followed the medium’s resurgence of erudition and artistic credibility, the 77-year-old Milch is a towering figure. A onetime writer-producer on the influential 1980s police drama “Hill Street Blues,” he went on to help create boundary-busting programs like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and his personal masterpiece, the uncompromising HBO western “Deadwood.”Betty Thomas as Lucy Bates in Hill Street Blues, an influential television drama from the 1980s.Shout! Factory/20th Century FoxIn his industry, Milch is well known for his writing style, which blends articulate grandeur with defiant obscenity, and for his appetites. He is a recovered drug addict and a compulsive gambler who, by his own admission, lost millions of dollars on horse racing and other wagers.Now he rises each day in his modest accommodations here, decorated with family photos, some Peabody Awards near a sink and some Emmy statuettes on a shelf, and furnished with a bed, a small TV and a refrigerator containing a single can of LaCroix sparkling water. This is where he has lived since the fall of 2019, a few months after publicly disclosing that he had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.Having welcomed me and his wife, Rita Stern Milch, into the room, Milch explained that he has not lost the powers of observation and articulation that have served him as a writer. Instead, he has found himself training those abilities on his own life as he navigates his experience with the disease.“When you’re in transition, there’s a sense that life lives you,” he said, fiddling with an elastic bracelet that he wore to keep his room key attached around his wrist. “You’re holding on and trying to accommodate all of the impositions and uncertainties.”Describing his present relationship to life and the way he once lived it, he added, “I’m estranged. I can kid myself, but I ain’t a regular.”Preserving what he can remember about himself and sharing it with an audience are already demanding tasks for Milch, and now they have taken on a particular urgency. In the years since he received his diagnosis, he has been working on a memoir called “Life’s Work.”The book, which will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, offers a poetic but unvarnished account of his personal history, abundant with the barbarity and grace that have animated Milch’s fictional characters.The project is a quintessentially Milchian lesson in accurately depicting a life, even one composed of events that he may not always be proud of having lived.As Rita explained, the memoir showed there was beauty in “how he took his life and turned it into art — all the experiences he had, which seemed so wild, he was able to tame in narrative and take back.”David saw an even more fundamental value in the project: “I have felt the blessing of feeling like I know who I am,” he said.A few days before the visit, Rita — who lives about 20 minutes away — had cautioned that he has bad days and good days; even on good days, he can be discursive in his thinking or unaware of his surroundings.“He still thinks like a storyteller,” she said. “And maybe because I love him, but I just find it fascinating. Even when it doesn’t make a lot of sense, there’s something in it that’s just Dave.”On a Tuesday morning in July, David Milch was in a genial mood and voluminous in his affectionate praise for Rita. He said something elliptical about the difficult work that lay ahead, now that it was time for students to enroll in their classes. He saw me admiring a trophy he’d won for a racehorse he once owned and asked, with a gleam in his eye, if I liked going to the track.Milch is happiest “when he’s figuring out a story,” said his wife, Rita Stern Milch. “Sometimes people talk about him as if he’s dead already. Wait a minute, he’s very much alive. And he’s still got something to offer.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesAt the start of 2015, amid other health problems and difficulties with his memory, Milch received a neuropsychological evaluation and was told he had dementia; a few years later he was given a diagnosis of “probable Alzheimer’s.”By the summer of 2019, he was becoming confused on car rides where he was a passenger and fighting with Rita over car keys he had forgotten he was no longer allowed to use. On one exit from his house, he had a particularly nasty, face-first fall on the steps. That October, he moved into the facility where he now resides.Milch was already in the habit of composing his screenplays through dictation and had been recording his speeches at work for the past 20 years. His family members and colleagues expanded that process, recording his personal remembrances and reaching out to others for stories that could stimulate Milch’s memories, all in the service of creating “Life’s Work.”“There were days where the recordings are a lot more wading through confusion,” said his daughter Olivia Milch. “And then there are days where he just rolls and it’s stunning, how he’s able to talk about the disease and what he’s going through.” The book’s prologue was essentially transcribed verbatim, she said, including her father’s ethereal opening words: “I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating, and we aren’t in touch.”“Life’s Work” is by turns a brisk and brutal memoir, beginning with its author’s upbringing in Buffalo, N.Y., at the hands of his father, Elmer, an accomplished surgeon as well as a relentless gambler and philanderer. Elmer operated on mobsters, scammed Demerol prescriptions for himself and enlisted David, while he was still a child, to run his bets for him.The author himself grew up to develop his own crippling vices — he recalls being introduced to heroin as a high-school senior — as well as a prodigious writing talent. As an undergraduate at Yale, Milch studied with the Pulitzer Prize winners Robert Penn Warren and R.W.B. Lewis, and he vacillated between futures at Yale Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop while he made L.S.D. in Mexico and continued to use drugs. “I loved heroin,” Milch writes in the memoir. “I loved checking out. You were here and you were not here at the same time. That has appeal.”Milch was a writer-producer on “Hill Street Blues,” then helped create “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” and “Deadwood.”20th Century FoxIn television, Milch writes that he found a constructive outlet for his energies and learned to open his “imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment.” He was hired at “Hill Street Blues” by its co-creator Steven Bochco, and together they created “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” whose sophisticated storytelling and then-unprecedented use of nudity and explicit language influenced decades of prestige TV that followed.Milch continued to gamble, betting tens of thousands of dollars on individual horse races; he had a heart attack, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and got sober at the age of 53. Then in 2004, he created his magnum opus, “Deadwood,” a drama set in the Dakota territory in the 1870s, a merciless era of American frontier expansion.On that show, Milch writes, “It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say.” He adds, “The actors told me their characters’ deepest truths. They gave themselves up, and they inhabited the parts they had come to.”Paula Malcomson, who played the saloon prostitute Trixie, said that Milch maintained a daily presence on the “Deadwood” set as a kind of wandering, salty-tongued philosopher.“He granted us permission to be ourselves,” she said. “He let us bring forth the things that most people would say, ‘That’s too much. This is uncouth.”Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane on the series, said her portrayal of the disenchanted sharpshooter was influenced by Milch’s own language and physical demeanor.“I will always feel that there is a little piece of David’s soul that I got to dwell inside of,” Weigert said. “It creates a different feeling than when you just work for somebody. I felt like I worked inside of him.”But “Deadwood” was canceled at HBO after only three seasons; other shows Milch made for the network, like “John From Cincinnati” and “Luck,” had even briefer runs and still others weren’t picked up at all.In 2011, Milch writes, his wife went to their business advisers and learned that he had spent about $23 million at racetracks in the previous 10 years. They had $5 million in unpaid taxes and were $17 million in debt, she found.A yearslong period of downsizing followed for the Milches, during which David was able to complete the story of “Deadwood” in an HBO movie that aired in 2019. He has been open about his disease with his colleagues and co-stars, many of whom remain in his life, and say that Milch has retained his fundamental expressiveness.Many in the original cast of the series “Deadwood” gathered again for the movie, which completed the story.Warrick Page/HBOWeigert visited Milch while he was still living at his home. He had forgotten the names of some of his dogs, she said, and where his bedroom was, but “we had this high-level conversation about the transmigration of souls.”W. Earl Brown, who was an actor and writer on “Deadwood,” visited Milch after he moved to the care facility. As Brown recalled, “Dave takes a long look around the room, leans into me and says, ‘I have to tell you something, Earl: The indignities of decrepitude are boundless.’ That quote perfectly encapsulates David Milch.”Malcomson described Milch as “the most human of anyone I’ve ever known.”“I comfort myself a little bit, thinking he burned so bright and there was so much life lived, and maybe that was his exact quota,” she said. “I’m not saying he’s not living life now, but I’m saying that it is a different version of it.”As the publication of “Life’s Work” approaches, Rita Stern Milch said she was anxious about seeing so many intensely personal stories about her husband and their family shared with a wide readership. Having worked as a film producer and editor, she said, “I’m a background person, a behind-the-scenes person. It doesn’t make me comfortable.”But she said those concerns were less important than allowing David to tell readers what he has experienced while he still can. “It’s a horrible diagnosis and it ain’t fun,” she said. “But life goes on. You don’t have to hide people away. They don’t have to disappear.”“This is the game,” Milch said. “This is what’s going on. You can tell yourself it’s something else. But you know that you’re, in many ways, holding on.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesOver a pizza lunch at an outdoor restaurant near the facility, David and Rita explained that they continue to work together on writing projects, whether they end up getting produced or simply provide David with a means of keeping his mind active. (As he writes in the memoir, “I still hear voices. I still tell stories.”)They had revisited an early screenplay of David’s called “The Main Chance,” which takes places at the Saratoga Race Course, but Rita said they backed off once David became agitated, thinking he was back at the track. They have also continued to develop a biographical series about the late-night host Johnny Carson.On the car ride back from lunch, they listened to a radio station that was broadcasting news updates about Major League Baseball.“Did we bet on baseball games?” David asked from a passenger’s seat.“No,” Rita answered as she steered the car.David smiled and seemed glad for the admonishment. “Nor are we going to,” he said happily. More

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      Amy Stechler, Documentarian Who Helped Define a Style, Dies at 67

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      She worked on early projects at Florentine Films, where Ken Burns, her husband for a time, would find fame with “The Civil War.”Amy Stechler, who was instrumental in the early years of Florentine Films, the company behind the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” and numerous other acclaimed documentaries, and who went on to make an Emmy-nominated documentary of her own on the artist Frida Kahlo, died on Aug. 26 at her home in Walpole, N.H. She was 67.Her daughters, Sarah and Lilly Burns, said the death was probably related to her declining health from primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which had been diagnosed in 2005.Ms. Stechler, who was married to Mr. Burns from 1982 to 1993, was credited as the writer and a producer on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1981 documentary that was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit and the first major project of Florentine Films. The company had been formed in 1976 by Mr. Burns and two college friends, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires, with Ms. Stechler joining soon after.The four were recent graduates of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where, Mr. Burns said in a phone interview, two professors in particular, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, had influenced their thinking about storytelling and the power of still images. They plunged right into the “Brooklyn Bridge” project, learning by doing.“Everybody told us we couldn’t do it,” Mr. Burns said. “‘Why aren’t you apprenticing?’”Mr. Squires said that Ms. Stechler was a key part of that learning process.“It’s really important to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,” he said. “We were all just sort of making it up as we went along.”“Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.Mr. Burns had been inspired to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge by the 1972 book “The Great Bridge,” by the historian David McCullough, who provided narration for the documentary. Mr. Burns recalled a moment during a recording sessions when Mr. McCullough, who died on Aug. 7, told him and Ms. Stechler that the writing needed work, hauled them aside and gave them an impromptu three-hour tutorial.“We came back in with a much improved script,” Mr. Burns said. “It was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives.”The project took several years. Mr. Burns said that in 1979 he and Ms. Stechler were living together in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when a rent increase — to $325 a month from $275 — drove them out of the city and to Walpole, N.H., and a house where Mr. Burns still lives.“Forty-three years ago last week,” he said on Wednesday, “we packed up a green van and moved up here.”They and the rest of the team finished editing the documentary there. The results were a breath of fresh air for the somewhat staid documentary genre. “Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.“‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is more than just a short course in one colorful phase of American history,” Kenneth R. Clark wrote in a review for United Press International in 1982. “It is a thing of grace and beauty — one of television’s few truly golden hours.”The film put Florentine and especially Mr. Burns on the map. In 1984 he and Ms. Stechler jointly directed “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” another well-received documentary, on which Ms. Stechler was also a writer and producer. She was also one of the writers of “The Statue of Liberty” (1985), directed by Mr. Burns, which was nominated for an Oscar.She and Mr. Burns had married in 1982 and by 1986 had two daughters. Ms. Stechler stepped away from filmmaking for some two decades and took up painting, although she had consulting credits on “The Civil War,” Mr. Burns’s Emmy Award-winning 1990 mini-series, which transformed the documentary landscape.Ms. Stechler returned to filmmaking in 2005 long enough to write and direct “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, about the Mexican painter known for her colorful artwork and eventful life. Robert Koehler, reviewing it in Variety, called it “uncommonly smooth, fluid and richly textured.”Mr. Squires was her cinematographer on that project. He said the choice of subject did not surprise him.“I really feel that she saw Frida as a kindred spirit,” he said, “an uncompromising woman who was trying to tell her truth as she saw it.”Ms. Stechler in an undated photo. “It’s really important,” a colleague at Florentine Films said, “to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,”Florentine FilmsAmy Georgeanne Stechler was born on June 23, 1955, in New Haven, Conn. Her father, Gerald, was a psychologist, and her mother, Ellen (Bodner) Stechler, was a social worker.She grew up in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Squires said that as an undergraduate at Hampshire College she was outraged by the white response to efforts to desegregate Boston schools in the mid-1970s and made a student film about it, a project for which he was part of her crew. She was a year or two behind Mr. Burns in school, graduating in 1977, and was part of the crew for his senior film project.Mr. Squires said that although the young filmmakers’ education at Hampshire had grounded them in ideas and theories, it was not a traditional film curriculum and was short on practical matters. Once the group was in the real world trying to get Florentine going, it was often Ms. Stechler who figured out the nuts and bolts.“She was always innovating, always saying, ‘OK, we have a problem, how do we fix this?’” he said, adding, “It’s far harder to figure out how to do something than how to make minor improvements along the way.”He saw a through line connecting the varied subjects of the films she worked on — Kahlo, the Shakers, the visionaries behind the Brooklyn Bridge — and including her as well.“They were all people who had the courage of their convictions,” Mr. Squires said.Ms. Stechler’s second marriage, to Rod Thibeault, also ended in divorce. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her partner, Bill Patterson; a sister, Nancy Stechler Gawle; and five grandchildren.Ms. Stechler split her time between Brooklyn and Walpole, where she lived not far from Mr. Burns. He said she was “as fiercely her own person as anybody I’ve ever met, but also kind of graceful — there was a kind of grace in who she was.”He summed up her influence on his career simply.“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” he said. More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Loses Three More Cast Members

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      Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari are the latest performers to depart “Saturday Night Live.”Lorne Michaels continues to make good on his vow that “a year of change” is coming to “Saturday Night Live”: Three more cast members are departing the long-running NBC sketch series before the start of its 48th season.Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari are leaving “S.N.L.,” according to a person familiar with the departures who was granted anonymity to discuss plans NBC had not announced publicly.Villaseñor and Moffat both joined “S.N.L.” as featured players in fall 2016 and were promoted to the main cast in fall 2018. On the show, Villaseñor has portrayed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as original characters like Cesar Perez; she hosted the Film Independent Spirit Awards in April 2021. Moffat’s repertoire included a recurring impersonation of Eric Trump as well as characters like Guy Who Just Bought a Boat.Athari, who performed previously in the comedy troupe Goatface and appeared on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” joined “S.N.L.” last fall as a featured player.NBC declined to comment on Thursday. The network did not respond to questions about why these performers were leaving or whether further changes were expected at “S.N.L.” in the coming weeks.Their off-season exits follow the departures of the veteran cast members Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney, who all made their final “S.N.L.” appearances on the show’s 47th season finale, in May. The new season is expected to begin in October. More

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      in Theater

      Michael Schultz on Breaking the Mold for Black Directors

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      When Michael Schultz began work on his first film, in 1971, there was no road map for a lengthy career as a Black director in Hollywood. The first two studio movies to employ Black directors — Gordon Parks’s “The Learning Tree” (1969) and Ossie Davis’s “Cotton Comes to Harlem” (1970) — had only relatively recently left theaters. And the movement that would soon be known as Blaxploitation — mimicking the work of Davis, Parks and the trailblazing independent filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles — did little to suggest a promising future.Schultz was 32 at the time and a rising star of the New York theater scene. He had been tapped to direct a public television documentary, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Though he didn’t know it, Schultz had already begun an improbable course that would take him to the heart of the mainstream film and television industry, where he has essentially remained for the past five decades.Although he has cast a more modest shadow than some of his peers, Schultz holds a singular résumé. He has directed more than a dozen films, including the classics “Cooley High” (1975), “Car Wash” (1976) and “Krush Groove” (1985); is responsible for the first feature-film appearances of Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Blair Underwood; and has worked consistently in television since the 1990s.At 83 — and due behind the camera this fall, for Season 5 of the CW drama “All American” — he is probably the longest-working Black director in history.Last month, I met Schultz in New York at the offices of the Criterion Collection, which in December will release a remastered special edition of “Cooley High” — a coming-of-age drama set in the 1960s at a school in Chicago. Schultz is slim and energetic, with an easygoing manner and a guitar-pick-shaped face framed by wavy silver hair. In a darkened editing suite, he directed a sound engineer to raise the soundtrack of a pivotal scene by four decibels.“I wanted to make sure that people can hear it,” he said. “They’re going to be watching at home, and all kinds of stuff is happening at home.”At lunch later that afternoon, and over several earlier phone and video interviews, we discussed the winding trajectory of his career. These are edited excerpts from our conversations.From left, Corin Rogers, Joseph Carter Wilson, Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs in “Cooley High.”Olive FilmsWhen you look at “Cooley High” today, what do you see?I see really good performances by Glynn Turman, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Garrett Morris. I see some things I wish I could have done better.Like what?Like showing Larry as a basketball superstar. That little swish he does is pretty hokey. It would be nice to set his character up a little better. Little nitpicky things like that.Do you always have that feeling when you’ve completed a film?You’re never satisfied. Because there’s always something you missed or something that you didn’t think of in the shooting of it. But there’s also always wonderful things that happen that you didn’t think of because of the communal creativity of the actors and the cameraman and all of the elements that make up the film. It’s a dual universe: good and evil, black and white, up and down.How did “Cooley High” come to you?The editor of a film I’d done, “Together for Days” (1972) [a kind of gender-swapped, post-civil rights-era update of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”], connected me with the producer Steve Krantz. He had met the writer, Eric Monte, and they had a script based on all of these incredible stories Eric had from growing up in the Cabrini Green [housing project] of Chicago. But the script wasn’t really a script — it was still mostly just stories. So I met with Eric for seven or eight hours a day for four weeks. Every night, me and my wife [Gloria Schultz] would cut everything down until we had the completed script.What did you see in Eric’s stories? What was the vision?It had this perfect dramatic twist in the death of a friend that sends the main character off to pursue his dreams. That really happened to Eric. And I thought it could be a window into the lives of Black kids that had never been seen before. My theory was that if it was as culturally specific as possible, and as Black as possible, it would translate across the racial divide and people would fall in love with these kids and their humanity.It’s become famous for its soundtrack, as well, which is wall-to-wall Motown — The Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson. How did you get all of those songs?I was using Motown music on the set and in the editing room, just because I loved it. But nobody valued that music at the time.Really?Yeah. We were able to get it for a very reasonable fee, which was good because the budget for the whole film was like $900,000. The problem came when they wanted to put it out on cassette, because by then the music had had this resurgence and the studio couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t until much later, after Motown got bought by Universal, that they were finally able to do a deal.You started out in the theater in New York, with the Negro Ensemble Company. How did you end up there?I had moved to New York after studying theater at Marquette in Milwaukee, where I grew up. My wife and I were working with the McCarter Theater in New Jersey when Douglas Turner Ward and Robert Hooks were just starting the Negro Ensemble Company. My wife suggested I drop my résumé off with them before we went on the road to do a play that she was acting in and I was directing. Douglas Turner Ward ended up coming out to Yellow Springs, Ohio, to see it and offered me any of the plays in the Negro Ensemble Company’s opening season. I chose “Song of the Lusitanian Bogey” [Peter Weiss’s drama about Portuguese colonialism in Angola], which ended up being their very first production.Schultz, left, with Douglas Turner Ward, working together at the Negro Ensemble Company.Edward Hausner/The New York TimesYou made the transition to features in the same year “Super Fly” (1972) came out; right after “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and “Shaft” (both in 1971). What did you make of Blaxploitation?I thought what Melvin [Van Peebles, the director of “Sweet Sweetback”] was doing was very inspirational. He self-distributed that film. And I learned a lot from watching Gordon [Parks, the director of “Shaft”]. But when it devolved into all this stereotypical stuff, “Hell Up in Harlem,” “Sheba, Baby,” all the pimps and fur coats, I said, “Wait till I get my break, because I’m gonna do it a lot better than this.”There was a huge backlash at the time within the Black community — in editorials in Ebony; from the Coalition Against Blaxploitation, which included the N.A.A.C.P.; from Jesse Jackson. The argument was that the movies were degrading and setting us back. Did you participate in those debates?I agreed with [the criticism] in a way. But to me, providing work for actors who couldn’t get work was a very important thing to do. And so it wasn’t so black and white. Yeah, they’re putting white people on top of the pyramid [most Blaxploitation films, after the initial wave, were directed by white men], but they’re keeping Black people working. I was against the tired imagery, especially given the power of the medium and the influence that it has on people’s minds. Unless you have a counter, unless you can see other versions of who we are, it’s damaging.When you started working in Hollywood, did people ever think that you were white, because of your name?All the time. And there was an assumption that I was Jewish, even though it’s a German name. It happened in New York, actually. My agents got me a meeting with the producers of a big Broadway show. They had seen my name on other hit shows in town, but they had never seen my face. I’ve never done a lot of PR. So I walk into this meeting and all of the faces in the room just fall. They couldn’t even keep it together.Oh, wow. What happened?I didn’t get the gig. It was “Oh. Oh — we thought … well, it’s good to meet you.” And then I didn’t hear from them again.Do you have German in your family?Not that I know of. I did the DNA thing and there’s significant European [ancestry], but it’s so far back that who knows?After “Cooley High,” you did “Car Wash,” which was a big hit for Universal. It was also the first of three movies you did with Richard Pryor [followed by “Greased Lightning” and “Which Way Is Up?,” both released in 1977]. What was your bond with him?Richard and I were supposed to do another movie before “Car Wash” called “Simmons From Chicago,” a comedy about a pimp who becomes president. It never got made, but I went to his house to talk about it and we got along very well. I thought he was a brilliant comic — my friends and I all loved listening to his stuff — but he hadn’t really broken onto the scene in films yet. And he respected the work I had done in the theater. We were simpatico. Even though we had completely different backgrounds, we had similar energies. We were both dedicated to the work and wanted to make an impact.Schultz on the “Carbon Copy” set with George Segal and Denzel Washington.Avco Embassy Pictures/Getty ImagesYou also cast Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Blair Underwood in their first feature films (“Carbon Copy” in 1981, “Together for Days” and “Krush Groove”). What was your secret?Sam was a student at Morehouse. We were shooting “Together for Days” in Atlanta and he came in to audition for a background role. When I watched him, I said this guy needs a speaking part. He was very natural. He was the kind of kid who you didn’t see the acting with — there was a certain ease.When Denzel came in for “Carbon Copy,” [a race comedy, also starring George Segal, about a white businessman who finds out he has a long-lost Black son], I knew immediately that he was the guy. He was centered and focused, with a real self-assuredness that made him seem mature for his age. He wasn’t in awe of any of the things around him. And he was very handsome. I did tell him, though, “Hey, if you want to be a leading man, you better get that gap in your front teeth taken care of.” [Laughs] And he did.Wait …He did. I said, “It’s not a requirement. You got the part. But I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve never seen a leading man with a gap in his teeth.” [A representative for Washington declined to comment.]And Blair?Another audition [for “Krush Groove,” an early hip-hop film about the founding of Def Jam, in which Underwood plays a character based on Russell Simmons]. Matter of fact, I almost hired another kid. We were getting ready to make the call, but I saw Blair out in the hallway. I said, “Cancel the call. This is the guy.” He read and he was great. He just had this energy, this aura about him.You directed the Beatles musical “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was a big pivot and had a big budget and a high profile. How do you get an assignment like that?Robert Stigwood [the producer of the film and the manager of the Bee Gees] was a big fan of “Car Wash.” He had wanted me to do “Grease” [which Stigwood was also a producer on]. I tried to work it out, but I was editing “Which Way Is Up?” and Travolta had a hard out because he had to go back to his TV show [“Welcome Back, Kotter”]. So then Stigwood offered me “Sgt. Pepper’s” as a consolation prize.Did you ever wish you had done Grease?It wasn’t really the kind of musical I wanted to do. I never liked musicals growing up; they always seemed phony to me. So even if I had accepted it, I would have done it differently. “Sgt Pepper’s” wasn’t like a traditional Hollywood musical. It was more like an opera or an extended music video — a different approach to music as a filmic experience. Would it have been nice to have done “Grease”? Yeah. It made a lot more money than “Which Way Is Up?”Critics savaged “Sgt. Pepper’s,” especially the Bee Gees, who were kind of in an impossible position, standing in for the Beatles, who don’t appear in the film. How did it feel when you were shooting?The Bee Gees were cool when they were playing music, but trying to get them to act was quite tedious. Peter Frampton, as well. When the guys were singing, they were fine. But otherwise it was elementary school theater. Barry Gibb couldn’t get out of bed unless he had a stogie; he was high constantly. [A representative for Gibb didn’t respond to a request for comment.] Peter was a really sweet guy, but the Bee Gees hated him. I think they resented the fact that he had this huge hit album out [“Frampton Comes Alive!”]. They were always ignoring him and trying to make his life as difficult as they could. But I ended up really liking the movie and thought it was going to be a big hit. At the very first screening, the audience loved it. The studio was ecstatic. But it got really damning reviews. It was like “The worst musical in the history of modern Hollywood moviemaking.”How did you deal with that?It was a big hit internationally. I made more money on that film than on most of my earlier films put together. But the response in America was devastating, depressing, deflating. It took me about a year to recover. I had been doing one film after the other before that and was pretty wiped out. Going through that emotional disappointment and taking that break kind of slowed down the trajectory of my career.Schultz says, “It’s extraordinarily gratifying to see the talent” of Black directors today, “to see so many avenues for young people to develop and get in the mix. And they’re coming with the goods.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesSince the ’90s, you’ve worked most frequently as a television director. What do you like about the medium?When I was starting out, everybody in film looked down their nose on television. I always thought that was stupid. My feeling was, “Hey, television reaches millions of people.” It’s crazy not to want to get your story out to an audience of that size.But would you rather have been making features?No. [Pauses]. Because around that same time, our family was going through some personal difficulties. Our oldest son was stricken with schizophrenia and I had to have a steady stream of income coming in.I’m so sorry.Thank you. I had to keep working to get him the level of care that he needed. I couldn’t wait around for six months to get the green light for a feature.That sounds really scary.It was. But we had really good psychiatrists, therapists and these new medicines — psychotropics. The scary thing was when he would have a relapse. You’re always afraid that they’ll end up on the street and the cops will get involved, or shoot them down. But we just weren’t willing to let him go. Fortunately, our son is OK today.How do you think you’ve been able to survive through so many seasons of change in the industry?I’m good at what I do and focus on what’s best for the project. Maybe it’s my theater background, but I like to work very collaboratively and make everyone a part of the process. I don’t need to be Michael Bay or James Cameron, or whoever. I remember, after we finished “The Last Dragon” [a 1985 Black kung fu comedy, produced by the Motown founder Berry Gordy], Berry Gordy decided that he should be credited as the director. But the Directors Guild wouldn’t let him. So Berry went and changed the title to “Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon,” just to get his name in there. I’ve never understood that kind of ego. [A representative for Gordy didn’t respond to a request for comment.]Were you angry?Well, I was not happy about it. But I wasn’t going to spend a whole lot of energy being upset. [Gordy] is very slick. It’s no wonder he made all that money.In the last decade, there’s been a real resurgence in Black filmmaking, with many more Black directors working regularly than in the past. What has it been like for you to see that evolution?It’s extraordinarily gratifying to see the talent, and to see so many avenues for young people to develop and get in the mix. And they’re coming with the goods. I don’t think it would have happened, though, if there weren’t Black executives, as well. Ryan Coogler had a Black executive supporting “Black Panther” [Nate Moore, Marvel Studios’ vice president of production and development]. When you have the creative and the executive in sync, that’s when extraordinary things can really happen. We saw that way back when with the Negro Ensemble Company.When you’re on set today, is it still as fun as it used to be?Oh yeah. I still get the butterflies when I’m starting something new — “Am I going to mess this up?” But once I’m in there, it just flows. People keep asking me when I’m going to retire and I always say, “Retire from what? Having fun?” I’ll retire when either my body gives out or it starts to feel like work. But, right now, I’m having fun — and they’re still paying me. More

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      Robert LuPone, Actor Who Became a Behind-the-Scenes Force, Dies at 76

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      After playing a critical Broadway role in “A Chorus Line,” he helped start the vibrant Off Broadway MCC Theater. TV watchers knew him from “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.”Robert LuPone, an actor and dancer who originated the role of the driven director-choreographer in the musical “A Chorus Line” on Broadway and later helped run a vibrant Off Broadway theater company known for thought-provoking new works, died on Saturday in Albany, N.Y. He was 76.His wife, Virginia (Robinson) LuPone, confirmed the death, at a hospice near his home in Athens, N.Y. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. LuPone was familiar to television audiences from his roles on “The Sopranos” and the “Law & Order” franchise. But his first love, like that of his sister, Patti LuPone, was the theater.By 1975, when Mr. LuPone auditioned for “A Chorus Line,” he had been dancing since childhood and had been in a few Broadway shows. Initially cast as Al, one of the dancers vying for a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway musical, Mr. LuPone persuaded Michael Bennett, who conceived and directed the show, that he could play the director, Zach, after Barry Bostwick, who had been cast in the part, left the show during the workshop phase.“Michael has trouble directing actors,” Mr. LuPone said in an interview on the website of the Muny, the musical theater in St. Louis, when it staged “A Chorus Line” in 2017. “No, let me put it this way: Michael has trouble directing egos. He has a tremendous ego. And I have a tremendous ego. Barry Bostwick obviously has a bigger ego than I do.”At the Public Theater, and then on Broadway, “A Chorus Line” was an enormous hit. When it opened at the Shubert Theater — where it would run for 15 years — Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times that as Zach, Mr. LuPone “retires to a godlike perch at the rear of the auditorium and wheedles out of the brassy and the giggly, the pleading and the nonchalant, snippets of their pasts.”The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards — Mr. LuPone received a nomination for best featured actor in a musical — and won nine, including best musical. That year, his sister was nominated for best featured actress in a musical, for “The Robber Bridegroom.”“A Chorus Line” proved pivotal for Mr. LuPone: His future was no longer in dancing.Ms. LuPone said that her brother had been an “extraordinary dancer,” and that his decision to give up dancing “haunts me.” In an email, she wrote, “I think he couldn’t take the dictatorial environment that choreographers at that time created.”Mr. LuPone said that dancing in musicals had become a “hollow experience.” In an oral history interview in 2018 with Primary Stages, an Off Broadway theater company, he said, “I wasn’t really able to speak, and the ideas were, for me, superficial.”That realization led him to study at the Actors Studio and perform with the Circle Repertory Company. He began teaching acting at New York University in 1981 and showed a very direct demeanor that his students at first found surprising.“Who was this guy from musical theater talking to us actors?” Bernie Telsey, one of those students, said in a phone interview. “He’d never taught before. But it became the best class ever.” Some students continued to study with him after they graduated.In 1986 Mr. LuPone and Mr. Telsey formed the Manhattan Class Company, which later became MCC Theater. Will Cantler soon joined them as associate artistic director and was named an artistic director in 2011.Over nearly 40 years, the company has sought to produce challenging, original plays and musicals, with a view to what Mr. LuPone called a “third act” — affecting audience members enough to keep them talking about the shows after they returned home.Three MCC productions transferred to Broadway and received Tony nominations for best play: “Frozen,” the story of the aftermath of a 10-year-old girl’s murder, which opened in 2004; “Reasons to Be Pretty” (2008), about people’s obsession with beauty; and “Hand to God” (2014), a dark comedy about a teenager and his profane, possibly demonic sock puppet. An Off Broadway MCC production of “Wit,” Margaret Edson’s play about a woman’s reflections on dying after she learns that she has ovarian cancer — which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Drama Desk Award for outstanding play in 1999 — also moved to Broadway.Mr. LuPone in the 1998 Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” He was also a familiar face on “The Sopranos” and “Law and Order.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRobert Francis LuPone was born on July 29, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up in Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Orlando Joseph LuPone, was an elementary school principal in Northport. His mother, Angela (Patti) LuPone, a homemaker, encouraged Robert and Patti’s show business ambitions, driving them to classes. Robert and Patti danced together as children, winning third prize at a Jones Beach talent contest.“I still have the trophy,” Ms. LuPone said. “It was a tango.”Robert took tap lessons after school before enrolling in the Martha Graham School, where as a teenager he studied modern dance with Graham, José Limón and Antony Tudor. He attended Adelphi University, on Long Island, but, spurred by meeting a dancer better than he was who had gone to the Juilliard School, he transferred there. He majored in ballet and minored in modern dance and graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.By then he had been in the ensemble of a 1966 production of “The Pajama Game” at the Westbury Music Fair (now the NYCB Theater at Westbury) on Long Island. He made his Broadway debut as a dancer in 1968, in “Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato,” and danced in three more Broadway shows before his agent sent him to audition for “A Chorus Line.”Mr. LuPone worked steadily as an actor in theater, in movies and on television. He played the Apostle Paul in the film version of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973); was in six daytime soap operas (earning a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for his role on “All My Children”);was seen on series like “Gossip Girl,” “Ally McBeal” and “Billions”; and, between 1997 and 2001, was in Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Sam Shepard’s “True West” and Herb Gardener’s “A Thousand Clowns.”In six episodes of “The Sopranos,” he played Bruce Cusamano, Tony Soprano’s neighbor and physician, who recommends that Tony see a psychiatrist.In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. LuPone is survived by his son, Orlando, and his twin brother, William.Mr. LuPone’s acting career was secondary to his work at MCC, where he not only developed, oversaw and produced four or five shows a year but also raised money for the theater’s permanent home, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, which opened in 2019.“Bob was fearless,” Mr. Telsey said, adding that playwrights often found it hard to accept the candid notes that Mr. LuPone would write them during previews. “They’d be so stressed, but three days later realized that Bobby was right. He pulled no punches.” More

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      The Many Violations of the Violent Birth Scene

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      Does the gory surprise C-section in “House of the Dragon” represent a grim historical reality, an urgent political statement or a worn cultural cliché?“Are you sure you want to watch this?” my husband asked as we cued up the “House of the Dragon” premiere last week.We had both seen the online warnings that the “Game of Thrones” prequel kicked off with a “grisly,” “brutal” and “gory medieval C-section.” I had undergone a cesarean section a couple of years ago, during the birth of my son, and now I was again pregnant and preparing for the possibility of a second surgery. But yes, I was sure I wanted to watch it.I was, I guess, curious about what the most horrific interpretation of the procedure might look like. I’m still thinking about the scene — not because it is so violent, but because its violence is framed as so profound. Like so many depictions of pregnancy, its visceral and emotional possibilities are largely obscured by a tangle of clichés posturing as insight.King’s Landing, after all, is not a subtle place. At the top of the episode, an uncomfortably pregnant Queen Aemma foreshadows her fate: “The childbed is our battlefield,” she tells her daughter, Princess Rhaenyra. “We must learn to face it with a stiff lip.” Meanwhile, her husband, King Viserys, is ominously confident that this pregnancy, after a run of miscarriages and stillbirths, will finally produce a male heir.Instead, the queen’s labor reaches a dangerous impasse. The grand maester informs the king that the baby is in a breech position, and that “it sometimes becomes necessary for the father to make an impossible choice” — to “sacrifice one or to lose them both.” Viserys approves the surgical removal of the baby without Aemma’s knowledge or consent. As birth attendants restrain their desperate, confused queen, the grand maester slices into her belly. The queen dies, and her baby dies soon after.Throughout the violent birth scene, the queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen.Ollie Upton/HBOWhat is the meaning of this gruesome spectacle? George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” the book on which “House of the Dragon” is based, has the queen die in childbirth in an unspecified manner; only in the show does it become a murder by way of a rogue belly slicing. In a series of interviews, Miguel Sapochnik, one of the showrunners and the episode’s director, exhaustively explained the resonance of the choice. The scene — intercut with a bloody jousting tournament mounted by the king in premature celebration — was designed to be “a distillation of the experience of men and the experience of women” in Westeros, Sapochnik said. But it was also meant to reveal “parallels to our own past and present,” he added. It represents the grimness of childbirth in the medieval era, from which Martin’s fantasy world draws, when “giving birth was violence”; but it also represents the grimness of childbirth in post-Roe America, when the scene reads as “more timely and impactful than ever.”“Anxious not to get it wrong,” eager “not to shy away” but also “not to sensationalize,” the creative team — the episode was written, directed and edited by men — enlisted two midwives to advise on set and innumerable women to screen the sequence before it aired. The scene, Sapochnik promised, was just the beginning of a whole season of portentous births, each seeded with additional gender commentary. The theme of this birth, he explained, was “torture.”The sheer violence of the scene didn’t shock me. (Earlier in the episode, a character slices off a man’s penis and tosses it atop a pushcart piled with various severed appendages — violent spectacle is a major element of the show.) But the implied profundity of the violence struck me as faintly ridiculous. The loading of meaning onto the queen’s death felt like an attempt to sidestep the criticism that dogged “Game of Thrones” — that it indulged in senseless violence against women. But the imposition of sense on such violence can also feel unsatisfying, as the female character’s interiority is subsumed into the creators’ effort to make a statement.The showrunners intercut the childbirth scene with the cartoonish violence of the jousting to make points about both the past and the present.Ollie Upton/HBOThe scene creaks under the weight of so many signifiers. The queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen. We see her moaning in the background, tangled in bedclothes. We zoom close on her delirious face in gauzy light, evoking the softness of a maternity shoot. Often we see her from above, as if we are peering down on her in a surgical theater. Or we spy her from beyond her rounded stomach, as if we are attendants assisting in the delivery. We look down upon her as she is cut open, drained of blood and stuffed with reaching hands.As the scene wears on, the camera itself seems moved by cowardice. It retreats further and further from the queen’s perspective, assuming a remote and clinical gaze. Often it looks away entirely, focusing instead on the cartoonish gore of the jousting,which comes to stand in for the violence of the birth. The queen’s screams are silenced, overlaid with the sounds of a roaring tournament crowd and the outlandish squishing of skulls and brains. In its desperation for meaning, the scene does become senseless.Being pregnant can feel like passing from the physical world into the world of signs. Pregnancy is weighted with so much metaphorical significance that it is even a metaphor for significance — pregnant with meaning. But I’m not pregnant with meaning; I’m just pregnant. And so I watch depictions of pregnancy and birth from my own removed position, curious what my experience signifies to other people, and what it is supposed to say about our culture and politics.The “House of the Dragon” C-section is neither historically accurate (the mother’s life was valued over that of the fetus in much medieval teaching, as Rebecca Onion detailed in Slate) nor particularly of the moment (post-Roe, many women are begging doctors for surgical interventions in their pregnancies). But it does access a persistent cliché: The C-section is a birth choice loaded with stigma, as Leslie Jamison noted in an essay on the procedure last year. It is coded as “both miraculous and suspect, simultaneously a deus ex machina and a tyrannical intervention” — the antithesis of a “natural birth.”This construction voids the mother’s role in childbirth, ceding it to a patriarchal medical establishment. The riddle from “Macbeth” — which posits that because Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, he is not “of woman born” — persists. On-screen pregnancies still rarely end in C-sections. When they do, they are the stuff of horror. As the film critic Violet LeVoit has argued, the vaginal birth is framed as the climactic final struggle of the hero’s pregnancy journey. A C-section, then, renders our hero a victim — and a failure.None of this coincides with my own experience. I didn’t feel bad for having a C-section, or feel that I didn’t truly “give birth” to my son; I felt that my doctors and I did what was medically necessary to deliver him safely. And yet I feel nagged by this imposed narrative, and I am reminded of it whenever I see a birth scene shot from above, as the “House of the Dragon” one often is.Birth was, for me, an overwhelmingly sensory experience, not a visual one. During labor, I couldn’t see past my own abdomen. My strongest memory of the surgery, which the hospital shielded from my view with a raised blue tarp, is of the uncanny release of pressure in my anesthetized body when the baby was removed. As it was happening, a doctor asked if I wanted her to photograph the moment, and I impulsively agreed, thinking that I could always delete the image if I couldn’t stomach it. When I look at the photo now, I recognize my son’s features emerging from the bloodied edges of my body, but I don’t recognize the point of view. It is as if I am reliving another person’s memory, not my own.So no, the depiction of violence in birth does not bother me. But the bird’s-eye view of it does. The camera’s insistence on its lofty perspective, on looking down on the birthing woman’s full body from a spectator’s remove — that strikes me as the real violation. In those jarring shots, the depiction of male violence becomes indistinguishable from the male gaze.Maybe future “House of the Dragon” births will resonate with my own feelings about childbirth. And I’m sure other parents, bringing their own experiences to the episode, left it with different interpretations. But that is the trouble with trying to distill the entire “experience of women” into a scene — the idea is absurd, even in a fantasy world. More

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      Ayo Edebiri and Her Dog Gromit Go to the Bookstore

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      A morning out in Los Angeles with the surprise star of “The Bear” and her Chihuahua mix.LOS ANGELES — Ayo Edebiri has an arresting screen presence because she doesn’t look like she’s acting. In “The Bear,” the frenetic restaurant drama that has been one of the most talked-about shows of the summer, she is usually the calm at the center of the storm.In real life, she’s the same — unassuming, unshowy — and she speaks in an even tone. In other words, she’s not the kind of person who will break into a series of practiced anecdotes when a reporter shows up.On a hot day in Los Angeles, she was standing outside her apartment complex in the Los Feliz neighborhood, waiting for her puppy, Gromit, to do his business. She then picked up what he had left in the grass with a biodegradable green baggy. She looked around for a trash can but couldn’t find one, so she ended up tucking the baggy into her canvas tote.Gromit is a small dog with black and white hair. He is part Chihuahua, part minikin and part terrier, Ms. Edebiri said, adding that she knows the mix because she had his DNA tested.“He’s a melting pot,” she said. “I think he’s the American dream.”Ms. Edebiri, whose first name means joy in Yoruba, grew up in Boston, where she sang in a church choir and appeared in plays put on by the congregation. At 26, after a few years of writing for television and working as a stand-up comic and podcaster, she finds herself becoming known as an actress.“I love doing the show,” she said of “The Bear.” “Even when we were making it, we all felt like it was really special and an honor to do. But also because of that, I think there was this fear that people wouldn’t get it.”Ms. Edebiri plays the sous-chef Sydney Adamu on the critically acclaimed show “The Bear.” FXPeople got it. And they responded to her character, the even-keeled sous-chef Sydney Adamu, a kind of stand-in for every unflappable Gen Z-er who suspects that they might have a better idea of how to run a workplace than their chaotic boss.Gromit started moving toward some broken glass in the street. “That’s glass,” Ms. Edebiri said in her calm voice. “We are not doing that, dude.” She gave the leash the gentlest of tugs, and Gromit heeded her command.Before “The Bear,” Ms. Edebiri liked to make roast chicken for friends. While preparing for her role, she took courses at the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena and shadowed several chefs in Chicago and New York. And, yes, she learned how to prepare the cola braised ribs that become an obsession for her character.“I made it a lot,” she said. “There was a lot of practicing. It needs to look real. And if we’re practicing it, you might as well make it taste real.”Ms. Edebiri with Gromit near her home.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesIn addition to her work on “The Bear,” she played Hattie on the AppleTV+ show “Dickinson.” She also provides the voice for Missy Foreman-Greenwald, a biracial girl feeling her way through puberty, on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth.” So far in her acting career, the characters she plays seem to deal with anxiety by putting on a brave front, and they share a quiet confidence.“I don’t have to dig too deep to access that anxiety,” she said.For a time, she said, she was ready to accept that she didn’t have what it takes to be a performer.“I remember singing in the choir and doing plays, and my god-mom, she was like, ‘You know what? This may not be your gift,’” Ms. Edebiri recalled with a laugh. “She was like, ‘You’re good, but this might not be for you.’ I was like, ‘For sure.’”She changed her mind during middle school and high school, she said, when she started doing improv. After that, she went to New York University with the aim of becoming a teacher, only to realize it wasn’t for her. At the behest of some college friends, she started doing stand-up.“I was definitely nervous about the idea of performing alone,” she said. “I didn’t like being onstage and was very nervous at first.”Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter a few years spent working in writers’ rooms Ms. Edebiri became known for her work in front of the camera.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and wrote for the NBC sitcom “Sunnyside,” the FX series “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Dickinson.” Leaving the comfort of the writers’ room to go in front of the camera was a big adjustment, she said.“It’s weird,” she said. “I look like this, so I might as well look like this. I don’t want to be self-mythologizing, but I do feel like, growing up, on TV, there weren’t a lot of young Black women who I felt actually looked like me or people I knew, or were allowed to have imperfections.”“There’s a lot of Black women on TV in the media,” she continued, “and I feel like we look different, but we also still look like ourselves. I feel like that’s important and beautiful.”She went into Bru, an airy coffee shop, and ordered a lavender lemonade with sparkling water. When asked what she has learned from her various roles, she demurred. “This is like an actress question,” she said. “I’m not used to answering questions like an actor.”Gromit gets V.I.P. treatment at Skylight Books.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesSoon, Ms. Edebiri and Gromit walked into the Skylight Bookstore, an indie shop with a huge ficus tree surrounded by walnut colored shelves. She came across “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories” by the late Finnish writer, illustrator and comic book author Tove Jansson. She tapped the cover with her index finger, ornamented with a rustic gold signet ring that reads “Libra.”“She rules,” Ms. Edebiri said, picking up the book. “She’s like this incredible lesbian that made the Moomin comics.”As she moved toward the checkout area, Ms. Edebiri was asked if she would like to go back in time and give her younger self some words of advice.“I don’t think I would say anything, because that messes with the rules of time travel,” she said. “Everything you learn is in the time and in the season that you’re supposed to.”Near the cash register, she spotted a cookbook, “Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora,” edited by Bryant Terry. She set Gromit on top of the checkout table — along with the Tove Jansson book — before she squatted down to open the cookbook.Ms. Edebiri and Gromit on a recent morning in Los Angeles.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesWhile she flipped through its pages, her dog was becoming a star of the store. He wagged his tail on the makeshift stage, ears pointed upward, as three store employees fussed over him, petting him and giving his ears a scratch. After Ms. Edebiri set the cookbook near the cash register, one of the workers started reading to Gromit from the Jansson book.“He is loving it,” Ms. Edebiri said with a laugh. More