Wayans, Marlon

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    Greg Cannom, Who Made Brad Pitt Old and Marlon Wayans White, Dies at 73

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    He won five Oscars as a makeup artist on movies in which characters transformed, like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “White Chicks” and many more.Greg Cannom, an Oscar-winning movie makeup artist responsible for some of the most striking acts of movie magic in recent decades — including the transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney in “Vice,” the creation of a giant expressive green head for Jim Carrey in “The Mask,” and the reverse aging of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — died on May 3. He was 73.His death was announced by Rick Baker, a frequent collaborator and another of Hollywood’s most admired movie makeup artists, as well as by the IATSE Local 706 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild. Neither source provided further details.An online fund-raising drive for Mr. Cannom posted two years ago listed a series of health challenges, including severe shingles, a staph infection, sepsis and heart failure.Mr. Cannom won Oscars for best makeup for his work on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) and “Vice” (2018).In 2005, he won a “technical achievement” Oscar for the development of a modified silicone that could be used to apply fantastical changes to an actor’s face while retaining the appearance of skin and flesh.Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Mr. Cannom won an Oscar for his work on the film.Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘White Chicks’ at 20: Comedy Beyond the Pale

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      The Wayans brothers’ subversive comedy is smarter than you remember.When the oversexed basketball player Latrell Spencer (Terry Crews) turns to his date to sing Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” he does so to prove his total love of all things white. Spencer is the stereotypical embodiment of the lascivious muscular Black man intent on procuring a white woman to prove his own masculinity. “Once you go Black, you’re gonna need a wheelchair,” he says. And yet, despite the broadness of his carnal desires, his performativity is the comedic soul to the director Keenen Ivory Wayans’s astute racial passing satire “White Chicks.”A gender-bending film (streaming on Hulu) that wields whiteface to interrogate the appropriation of Black culture into affluent, gendered white spaces, the film, upon initial release, was critically reviled. Roger Ebert named it the seventh worst movie of 2004. “Who was it made for? Who will it play to,” he asked. In the two decades since, however, its spiky critique of white privilege has revealed itself to be far more incisive than its lowbrow humor would indicate.Best summarized as “Some Like It Hot” meets “The Simple Life,” “White Chicks” follows Kevin Copeland (Shawn Wayans) and Marcus Copeland (Marlon Wayans), two bumbling F.B.I. agents nearing termination. Tasked with protecting two wealthy white women — the shallow Brittany Wilson (Maitland Ward) and her sister, the idiotic Tiffany (Anne Dudek) — from kidnappers, the detectives find trouble when a car crash injures the two women, leaving them unwilling to attend a fashion event in the Hamptons. To save their jobs, Kevin and Marcus pose as the sisters by dressing in skirts and heels, wigs, makeup, prosthetics. And the “white” voices they adopt become their tools.While blackface has minstrel roots, whiteface arises from a different impulse. Often employed in comedies, the practice enables Black people to pass as white, putting them in proximity to the believed benefits and privileges the skin tone provides. In works like the Whoopi Goldberg corporate satire film “The Associate” or the Eddie Murphy “White Like Me” sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” the practice not only gives the infiltrator a financial and social advantage, it allows the racial passer to upset the perceived stability of racial identity.In “White Chicks,” the identity switch works in similar fashion with the added twist of a gender swap. When Kevin and Marcus become Brittany and Tiffany, they’re given the privileges of white femininity. In an early scene, set in the Hamptons, a concierge asks for a credit card to hold the room. Kevin and Marcus, stuck with their own debit cards, threaten to throw a “bitch fit” if the hotel doesn’t allow them to check-in. After a tantrum, they’re allowed in their rooms.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marlon Wayans on ‘Good Grief’ and the Death of His Parents

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      It’s not easy to build a long and lucrative career by making comedy that some people might be tempted to call silly or sophomoric. If it were, more comedians would be as successful as Marlon Wayans. Wayans, the youngest sibling in a family dynasty that also includes his brothers Damon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans and his sister Kim Wayans, has over the course of his 30-plus-year career scored in nearly every format. He has starred in broad sitcoms (the WB’s “The Wayans Bros.”), irreverent sketch comedy (“In Living Color”) and slapstick movies (“White Chicks”; the first two installments in the “Scary Movie” franchise), and released three, let’s say, Rabelaisian standup specials. His newest effort in that realm, “Good Grief,” will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on June 4.Listen to the Conversation With Marlon WayansThe comedian talks to David Marchese on becoming a different person after the death of his parents.In that special, Wayans, who has also carved out an impressive sideline as a supporting dramatic actor in films, is branching out by using comedy to work through some seriously heavy emotions. “Good Grief” is all about the death of his parents as well as the nearly 60 other loved ones he has lost in recent years.When I talked with Wayans, he was in Albuquerque, where he was filming a psychological horror movie for Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company — and, ahead of the first of our two conversations, getting ready to host a party for the cast and crew.Since you’re having a party tonight, it seems perfectly natural to talk about the subject of your new special: the death of your parents. Isn’t that crazy? Other people are like, What’s your next special? “Oh, it’s a funny journey about the death of my parents.” But it wasn’t just the death of my parents. I lost 58 people that I loved in a matter of three years. It felt, like, biblical.How do you find the funny thing in the sad thing? It’s been a gift since I was a kid. I mean, all of us Wayanses, we’re crazy people. The worst thing happens, and the first thing we’d think is What’s funny about it? I remember when my cousin Ceddy died and my auntie buried him in jeans and a T-shirt and some Air Force 1s and a baseball cap. Damon looks and goes, “If there’s a dress code in heaven, I don’t think Ceddy’s getting in.” More