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      Jon Fosse Wants to Say the Unsayable

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      When the Nobel Prize-winning author Jon Fosse was 7 years old, he had an accident that would shape his writing life.At home one day on his family’s small farm in Strandebarm, a village amid Norway’s western fjords, Fosse was carrying a bottle of fruit juice when he slipped on ice in the yard. As he hit the ground, the bottle smashed and a shard of glass slashed an artery in his wrist.Fosse’s parents rushed him to a doctor and, in the car, Fosse recalled recently, he had an out of body experience. “I saw myself from outside,” Fosse said in an interview. He assumed he was about to die, but he was also aware of a “kind of shimmering light,” he said.“Everything was very peaceful,” Fosse said: He felt “no sadness,” but rather a sense that there was “a beauty, a beauty to everything.”Fosse said that this childhood brush with death had influenced all his literary work: fiction, plays and poetry, for which he will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in a ceremony on Sunday.The perspective he gained in the moment of his accident, Fosse explained, made its way into his writing: “I often say that there are two languages: The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” And it’s in that “silent language,” he added, that the real meaning may lie.In a lecture in Stockholm on Thursday, a ritual that all Nobel laureates observe before getting their awards, Fosse expanded a little on the idea of a silent language. “It is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice,” he said. “Maybe.”To Fosse’s fans the spiritual and existential dimensions are a major part of the appeal. Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel committee that awarded Fosse the prize, said that Fosse’s work induced feelings and questions in readers “that ultimately exist beyond language.” The “deep sense of the inexpressible” in Fosse’s plays and novels leads readers “ever deeper into the experience of the divine,” Olsson said.Last month’s announcement that Fosse had won might have surprised some American readers. Fosse (pronounced FOSS-eh) only recently came to prominence in the English-speaking world with books that include “Septology,” a seven-part opus told in part as a stream of consciousness from the mind of an aging painter. Last year, sections of “Septology” were nominated for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. “A Shining,” a novella about a man lost in a snowy forest who is comforted by a mysterious light, was published in Britain on the day of the Nobel announcement, and in the United States afterward.Yet on continental Europe, Fosse had been a star for decades, less for his novels than for his plays, which have been compared to those of Samuel Beckett and Henrik Ibsen and staged at some of the most prestigious playhouses.Fosse’s books on display in an Oslo bookstore. His work only gained recent recognition in the English-speaking world.Thomas Ekström for The New York TimesSarah Cameron Sunde, an artist based in the United States who has translated Fosse’s plays into English and directed several of them in New York, said that the American audience’s lack of recognition for Fosse could be explained, perhaps, by his frequently morbid subject matter: His writing often features characters wracked by loneliness, desperate for connection and contemplating the end, and many of his plays involve suicide. “Everyone is very afraid of death over here,” she said.In a two-hour interview in Oslo last week, Fosse, 64, said that as a child he didn’t intend to become a writer. His father ran the family’s small farm and managed the village store, and his mother was a homemaker. In his youth, Fosse recalled, he was more interested in rock music than in reading. He grew out his hair, which he still wears in a ponytail, and played guitar — badly, he said — with bands at school dances.But at age 14, for reasons he said he couldn’t explain, he “stopped playing, and even stopped listening to music,” and instead focused on writing poems and stories. His writing was rhythmic, filled with repetition, he said, as if he were trying to maintain a connection to his musical past. “It has been like that for 40 years,” Fosse said.His early books, including his 1983 debut, “Raudt, Svart” (in English, “Red, Black”), were “filled with pain,” Fosse said, often featuring characters trapped in moments of indecision. His second novel, “Stengd Gitar” (“Closed Guitar”), for instance, is about a woman who accidentally locks herself out of her apartment while her baby sleeps inside, then agonizes over what to do next.At the time he was writing these early books, during his 20s, Fosse was an atheist and surrounded by people who were equally irreligious. He taught at a writing academy in the city of Bergen, in Norway, where his circle included “intellectuals, students and young artists” who were committed communists and thought that art and literature should be political. (Karl Ove Knausgaard was one of his students.)But Fosse didn’t agree. “Literature ought to be engaged in itself,” he said, rather than trying to achieve a political, social or even religious goal.As he wrote more, Fosse said, the process itself led him to begin to question his atheism. He never planned a story or a poem in advance — but when the words just tumbled out, he started to wonder where it all came from. He began exploring religion, including attending Quaker meetings, and “a kind of reconciliation, or peace,” came into his writing, he said.Cecilie Seiness, Fosse’s editor for the past decade at Det Norske Samlaget, a Norwegian publisher, said that his interest in religion went beyond his own personal conviction. In the 1990s, Seiness said, Fosse briefly published a literary journal “about bringing God into writing, in opposition to the political writing of the time.” Yet Fosse’s novels and plays were never didactic, she added. “It’s not trying to convert you, absolutely not,” Seiness said. “It’s just about being open to the mysteries of life.”“I often say that there are two languages,” Fosse said. “The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” Thomas Ekström for The New York TimesDespite his prolific output — often, a book a year — Fosse’s career only really took off in the mid-1990s when he pivoted to the theater. Soon, he was winning major awards for his stark plays, including “I Am the Wind,” whose two characters are simply called “The One” and “The Other,” and “Deathvariations,” about an estranged couple confronting their daughter’s suicide.Milo Rau, one of Europe’s most acclaimed theater directors, said that in the early 2000s, the theater world in some parts of Europe was gripped by “Fosse hype.” “The theater scene was overwhelmed by his spirituality, minimalism, seriousness, melancholy,” Rau said. Fosse’s plays “felt completely new and out of time,” he added.Fosse said he drank to cope with the demands of a globe-trotting theatrical life, and the alcohol eventually took over. At one point in 2012, he said, he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, and barely eating. He collapsed with alcohol poisoning and had to spend several weeks in a hospital.As a son drove him home from that enforced convalescence, Fosse said, he told himself, “It’s enough, Jon,” and never drank again. Soon after, he also converted to Catholicism. Attending mass, Fosse said, “can take you out of yourself somewhere, to another place.” The feeling was similar to the one he got when writing — or drinking, he added.A year after his collapse, Fosse began to be talked up as a Nobel Prize contender, though he did not become a laureate for another decade. By the time of the announcement, he had long completed “Septology,” the multipart novel, at points romantic, at others existential, in which the main character, Asle, a painter, looks back on experiences that are remarkably similar to some in Fosse’s life.At one point in the doorstop of a novel, which the Nobel committee called Fosse’s “magnum opus,” Asle recalls a childhood accident in which he slips in a farmyard and slashes an artery. In the book’s repetitive style, Asle describes the incident, in which he finds himself surrounded by a “glinting shining transparent yellow dust and he’s not scared, he feels something like happiness.”But then he stops picturing the scene. He can’t think about that moment anymore, Asle says. “It’s better to put it in my pictures as best I can.” More

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      Jane Wodening, Experimental Film Star and Intrepid Writer, Dies at 87

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      For 30 years she collaborated with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, her husband, often appearing on camera. After they divorced, she lived off the grid and wrote about her life.Jane Wodening, the longtime collaborator and wife of Stan Brakhage, the avant-garde filmmaker, who flourished as an author after their divorce, writing stories about her years living on the road and then alone in a mountain shack, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Denver. She was 87.The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter, Crystal Brakhage.Mr. Brakhage, who died in 2003, was among the most influential experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, though his work could be considered an acquired taste. He made hundreds of movies, most of them silent, that were deeply personal, sometimes elegiac and very beautiful, though they dispensed with any recognizable narrative, often veering into complete abstraction.For three decades, starting in the 1960s, he and Ms. Wodening (pronounced WOE-den-ing) lived a spartan life in a century-old cabin in a ghost town in the Rocky Mountains called Lump Gulch, sharing it with their five children and many animals, including a donkey and a pigeon named Fanny.It was this world that Mr. Brakhage captured in his idiosyncratic, inscrutable way, in what the film critic J. Hoberman, writing in The Village Voice, described as “home movies raised to the zillionth power — silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves.”Ms. Wodening was the star of many of them. He filmed her delivering their first child in a bathtub in “Window Water Baby Moving” (1959), a startlingly lovely work that is considered one of his masterpieces. “Wedlock House: An Intercourse” (1959) is a kind of short horror film, with flickering images of the couple having sex interspersed with flickering shots of them having an argument.The work didn’t sit well with feminists, who accused Mr. Brakhage of objectifying his wife. But Ms. Wodening didn’t see herself that way.“Jane was committed to the filmmaking and the artistic enterprise,” said John Powers, who is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis and working on a biography of Mr. Brakhage. “Stan felt he was in service to the muse,” he added, in a phone interview, “and she considered herself a loyal supporter of that muse, and the muse needed help.”A lot of help. Ms. Wodening offered ideas, critiques and camera and sound assistance, along with running the day-to-day business that was “Stan Brakhage.” He signed his work “By Brakhage,” which he always said meant the two of them.Ms. Wodening with Stan Brakhage, her former husband and collaborator. Often the star of his experimental short films, she also offered critiques and camera assistance, and helped run the day-to-day business.Jason Walz/Uncommonbindery, via Granary Books, incBut Mr. Brakhage, never totally faithful, left Ms. Wodening for another woman, and in 1987 the couple divorced. The children had left home, the cabin was sold, as were the animals, and Ms. Wodening took off in a bright yellow Honda Civic kitted out so that she could live in it. (The back seat was removed, among other interventions.)For three years she spent months at a time on the road, touring the country, camping in arroyos, mountain trails and friends’ driveways, even working for a spell as a tour guide at an archaeological site near Barstow, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.“Driveabout,” a 2016 account of that time from Sockwood Press, one of the small presses that has published her work over the years, is charming, funny and often quite profound, like Thoreau but spiced with mild profanity and more drama, as Ms. Wodening faced perils as a single woman sleeping in truck stops, camping near sketchy characters and nursing an old friend through delirium tremens.In this and other works, she came into her own. Her voice was as engaging and charming as her ex-husband’s was abstruse and highfalutin. Steve Clay, a founder of Granary Books in New York City, a small publishing house that is devoted to poetry and art books and that has put out works by Ms. Wodening, recalled his expectation that the wife of Stan Brakhage would be more “formally experimental” in her writing. “Instead, it was sort of folksy and straightforward,” he wrote in an email.To film buffs, however, Ms. Wodening remained a mythic figure — an “Enigmatic Character in Film History” as one radio program described her in a headline.“Driveabout” (2016) chronicled the years Ms. Wodening spent living out of her car and on the road after her divorce from Mr. Brakhage in 1987.via Sockwood PressShe was born Mary Jane Collom on Sept. 7, 1936, in Chicago, and grew up in Fraser, Colo., a small town in the Rockies about 70 miles northwest of Denver. Her parents, Harry and Margaret (Jack) Collom, were teachers at the local school, where Harry was also the principal.Jane was a shy child who preferred the company of animals, especially dogs. (She wrote that she spoke canine sooner than proper English.) She worked in an animal hospital and enrolled at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, thinking she would study to be a vet, before dropping out.When she met Mr. Brakhage, “we were adolescent wrecks,” she told an audience a few years ago at Los Angeles Filmforum, a showcase for experimental movies. They married in 1957; she was 21 and he was 24, and “it was quite a relief for both of us.”She recalled her first foray into his films, shortly after their marriage, when he declared: “You should take your clothes off, and we should make a film about having sex.” She balked at first — “I’m not that kind of girl!” — but he said, “I’m an artist, and an artist has to have a nude.” She thought about all the great nudes of history — from Raphael to Duchamp — and told herself, “‘I have an opportunity to join a group of people I quite admire,’ so I stripped and went to it.”For most of her adult life, she was Jane Brakhage. When she returned from her car travels, transformed, she changed her name. She settled on Wodening, meaning child of Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god; since her family lineage stretched back to the early Britons, it felt somehow appropriate, she said. And she bought property near Eldora, Colo., about 20 miles west of Boulder, a mountainous site where she lived in a Hobbit-like shack with no electricity or running water — but thousands of books and a typewriter — living a hermit’s life for the better part of a decade.It agreed with her.When her family worried about communicating with her in an emergency, she became a ham radio operator, learning morse code to do so, and found community among other hammers, as they called themselves, who were mostly men and introverts like herself. Her call sign ended with the letters HPH, to which she gave the phonetics “Hermits Prefer Hills.”“To become a hermit and at the same time to become popular was not only paradoxical,” she wrote in “Living Up There,” her memoir of her years in the mountains, “it was a tremendous delight.”Ms. Wodening was the author of 14 books, including “Wolf Dictionary,” about how wolves communicate with one another. She had a loyal following and small but steady sales.Toward the end of her decade at Fourth of July Canyon, as her mountain home was known, she connected with another hammer, Carlos Seegmiller, a computer programmer. He lured her back to civilization (and helped her trade her typewriter for a computer). They lived together in Denver until his death in 2008.In addition to her daughter, Crystal, Ms. Wodening is survived by her daughters Myrrena Schwegmann and Neowyn Bartek; her sons, Bearthm and Rarc Brakhage; 14 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.At her death, Ms. Wodening was working on a history of the world starting with the Big Bang. More

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      John Nichols, Author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War,’ Dies at 83

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      After decamping from New York to New Mexico, he wrote what was, for a time, among the most widely read novels about Latinos.John Nichols, a New York City transplant to New Mexico whose exuberant novels, notably “The Milagro Beanfield War,” transformed him from an urban gringo into a local idol, died on Monday at his home in Taos. He was 83.The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Tania Harris.Imbued with a heady pedigree and a peripatetic upbringing, Mr. Nichols evolved instinctively from a cosmopolitan New Yorker and world traveler to a Western writer of the purple sage.He was best known for “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1974), a 445-page political allegory that tells the story of farmers in the fictional town of Milagro Valley who are denied the right to irrigate their farms because water is being diverted to a huge development.“The Milagro Beanfield War” became a crowd pleaser on college campuses, was venerated in his adopted state, and for a while was considered among the most widely read novels about Latinos. In 1988 it was adapted into a film, directed by Robert Redford and starring Rubén Blades, Christopher Walken and Melanie Griffith.“A lot of his work might be characterized as a long slow-motion valentine to the mountains, mesas, high desert, sky and especially people of New Mexico,” said Stephen Hull, director of University of New Mexico Press, which published Mr. Nichols’s memoir “I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer” last year.“He was a comic writer who used tropes of absurdism and excess to depict essential injustices,” Mr. Hull said in an email. “He was deeply affected by a period of time he spent in Guatemala in ‘64-’65, and by the poverty, authenticity, even nobility of his neighbors in northern New Mexico.”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?  More

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      Interview: Rick Riordan, the Man Behind ‘Percy Jackson’

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      What books are on your night stand?I usually have three books going at a time: one in Italian to improve my fluency, a novel in English and a nonfiction work in English. Right now it’s “Il Metodo del Coccodrillo,” a thriller by Maurizio de Giovanni, “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” a near-future dystopian novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and “The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s” by Piers Brendon.How do you organize your books?“Organize” might be too kind a word. I try to group books loosely by subject matter. Celtic studies and books in Irish take up two shelves. Another two shelves are for books in Italian. Not surprisingly, Greek and Roman mythology takes up about four shelves. The rest is a scattered assortment of novels, nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels.What’s the last great book you read?“How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne,” by Sarah Bakewell. I was not well versed in Montaigne’s work, but I admire any biography that can bring its subject to life in such a vivid and relatable way.Are there any classics that you only recently read for the first time?“La Divina Commedia.” I had only read portions of the “Inferno” in English, but my Italian finally got to the level that I could tackle the “Commedia” in the original. It was quite a challenge and took me about a year, but it was well worth the effort to appreciate the poetry in its original form. What struck me was how topical and regional Dante’s references were. For such a timeless poem, it is deeply rooted in the personal dramas and “pop culture” of 13th-century Tuscany.Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?So many. N.K. Jemisin has a brilliant iconoclastic imagination that has reframed fantasy and science fiction for me many times over. Madeline Miller has breathed new life into ancient Greek stories. China Miéville is a genius of speculative fiction whose quirky world-building always delights me. I also love the Irish-language poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).I am lucky enough to have a home office with a large window looking over the Charles River in Boston. During the winter evenings, when the trees are bare and the view is wide open, the sunset on the water is spectacular. With the fireplace going and a bit of soft instrumental music playing … I can’t imagine a better place for enjoying a good book.What kind of reader were you as a child?Reluctant. I rarely read assigned texts in school, and reading for pleasure wasn’t something that would have occurred to me. That changed when I discovered “The Lord of the Rings,” which was my gateway into fantasy, and from there into mythology and the wider world of literature. I like to say that my karmic punishment for never reading an English text in school was becoming an English teacher.What book should everybody read before the age of 21?I don’t really believe in a canon of must-read texts for everyone. My gateway books were J.R.R. Tolkien’s. Would I recommend them to most 12-year-old kids today to get them interested in reading? Probably not. The most formative books I had read by age 21 were probably Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and “The Habit of Being,” a collection of letters by Flannery O’Connor. Great books, but again, I am not sure I would make them blanket recommendations for every young adult today.What is the best writing advice you have ever gotten?To avoid the cycle of dissatisfaction. Before I was published, I took a class from a mystery novelist who warned me that writing could turn into a succession of moving goal posts. It can be easy to lose sight of why a writer writes — because you have an internal need to turn your thoughts into words.What do you write when you sign books for fans?I usually sign 1,000-5,000 books at a time, in advance of each event, so alas, I don’t get to personalize many books anymore. My signature has become an illegible scrawl. On those rare occasions when I get to have a one-on-one interaction with a fan, I try to add a few vowels and consonants to my scrawl, and perhaps sketch a lightning bolt underneath.Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?Any time I relax and enjoy a book rather than working, or cleaning the house, or running errands, I consider that a guilty pleasure. The type of book doesn’t matter.Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?This is a complex ask, but I would personally love to read more anthologies of Indigenous folklore and mythology from around the world. When my family and I were traveling through the Pacific Northwest last summer, through the lands of the Tlingit, Haida and Chugach, we heard such wonderful stories. I’d love to learn more. Perhaps those books are out there and I’ve simply been unsuccessful finding them, or perhaps the books are not getting the coverage and attention they deserve. It’s also possible some Indigenous writers are wary of popularizing their sacred stories for a mass-market audience, which is totally fair. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?I don’t do dinner parties, so I would probably invite the most introverted writers I could think of — perhaps Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson — because none of them would show up. Then we could enjoy a quiet evening at home by ourselves, reading by the fire. More

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      ‘American Symphony’ Review: Intimate Harmony

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      This portrait of the musician Jon Batiste and the author Suleika Jaouad follows an artistic couple through ambition and adversity.Partway through “American Symphony,” the musician Jon Batiste pokes gentle fun at the coverage he received in advance of the 2022 Grammys. The breadth of his 11 nominations, which bridged pop, jazz and classical categories, made him tough to label. He ultimately fended off Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to win album of the year.This documentary, directed by Matthew Heineman, is likewise deceptively tricky to peg. In the broad strokes, it is a process film, following Batiste, who grew up in the New Orleans area and trained at Juilliard, as he prepares a wildly original symphony that shares a title with the movie. “My ambition for composing this symphony is massive,” he says. “I’m trying to expand the canon of symphonic music, break through long-gatekept spaces.”(Ben Sisario, writing in The New York Times, described the piece, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2022, as a “Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums.”)But this is also a movie about two artists, their love, their creative attitudes and how, as a couple, they approach living a “life of contrasts.” That description comes from the writer Suleika Jaouad, Batiste’s partner (they marry during the film), whose best-selling memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” was published in 2021 and who, before college, studied at Juilliard herself, with a specialization in double bass.As Batiste gets ready for his Grammy and Carnegie Hall coups, Jaouad undergoes a bone marrow transplant after a recurrence of cancer. (She received her first leukemia diagnosis at 22, and from 2012 to 2015 wrote in The Times about her experiences.)While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments. It captures Batiste hiding his head under a pillow as he talks on the phone with his therapist and sits in with the couple as a doctor discusses the open-ended course of chemotherapy he is recommending. When it comes to the music, too, the film is unafraid to dwell on a drawn-out silence or phrase.American SymphonyRated PG-13 Potentially upsetting medical scenes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Peter S. Fischer, Who Helped Create ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 88

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      He spent many years as a writer and producer of the hit mystery series starring Angela Lansbury. He later wrote his own mystery novels, set in Hollywood.Peter S. Fischer, a creator, writer and producer of “Murder, She Wrote,” the long-running television series that starred Angela Lansbury as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth, died on Oct. 30 in Pacific Grove, Calif. He was 88.His death, at a care facility, was confirmed by his grandson Jake McElrath, who said he did not know the cause.In 1983, Mr. Fischer and the prolific producers Richard Levinson and William Link pitched CBS on a new series. The three had worked together on “Columbo,” the hit show starring Peter Falk as a rumpled, underestimated police detective, and “Ellery Queen,” with Jim Hutton as a detective who was also an author. This time, their idea was “Blacke’s Magic,” about a magician who solves mysteries.At a meeting with a CBS executive in late 1983, they were told that the network was more interested in a murder mystery series with a female lead. Soon after, Mr. Fischer, he came up with an idea when he watched A Caribbean Mystery,” a CBS-TV movie starring Helen Hayes as Miss Jane Marple, the amateur detective created by Agatha Christie.“Why don’t we meld Miss Marple and Miss Christie into one character, a mystery writer who actually solved murder mysteries using logic, good sense, observations and a twinkly sense of humor that masks the sharp brain lurking beneath a very attractive hairdo?,” Mr. Fischer recalled thinking in his 2013 autobiography, “Me and ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”He came up with the names of both the character, Jessica Fletcher, and the fictional town where she solved murders — Cabot Cove, Maine.But they needed a star. Jean Stapleton, who had portrayed the saintly, ditsy Edith Bunker on “All in the Family,” turned them down. Then they heard that Ms. Lansbury, who was renowned for her work in Broadway shows like “Sweeney Todd” and films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” was willing to star in a TV series. She signed on.Ms. Lansbury with Erin Moran and Tom Bosley in a scene from a 1986 episode of “Murder, She Wrote.”Everett CollectionThe series was an immediate hit and lasted 12 seasons. Mr. Fischer wrote a few dozen episodes and was the executive producer from 1984 to 1991. He shared nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding dramatic series three times and won the Golden Globe Award for best drama series twice. In 1985, Mr. Fischer won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the “Murder, She Wrote” episode “Deadly Lady.”“Peter was a very good showrunner,” Ms. Lansbury, who died last year, told the Television Academy in 1998. “He was really quite brilliant at what he did.”But, she said, “I always wanted to make it appeal to more people and to enlarge our audience even more.”One of the changes she made after succeeding Mr. Fischer as executive producer in 1992, was to move Jessica part time to an apartment in Manhattan, where she taught criminology at a college and tracked down killers in a new location. He disagreed with that decision, but it was no longer his to make.“To throw this over to become a ‘big city woman’ violated everything I believed about her,” he said in interview with his son Christopher in 2012 after he started writing mystery novels.Mr. Fischer in 2018. He retired from television in the 1990s and later wrote murder mysteries set in postwar Hollywood.Nic Coury/Monterey County WeeklyPeter Stephen Fischer was born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Queens. His father, Paul, worked for Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky maker. His mother, Dorothy (Sullivan) Fischer, was a homemaker.Peter fell in love with reading at a young age and started writing short stories as a boy. He wrote plays in high school and at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied in a department devoted to writing, speech and drama, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1956.He married Lucille Warnock in 1957.Mr. Fischer did not become a full-time writer right away; instead he made a living in direct mail, as an insurance investigator and as a trade magazine editor. He also published a monthly magazine, Sports Car News, out of his house in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island.At 35, he got his screenwriting break. He had written a script about a dystopian future in which couples are permitted only one child and people over 65 are denied medical care. With help from his brother, Geoffrey, a casting director at Universal Television, the script found its way to the producer Aaron Spelling and was made into an ABC movie, “The Last Child” (1971), with Michael Cole and Janet Margolin as a couple who are willing to defy the law to have a second child after the death of their firstborn.He then wrote episodes of several Universal series, including “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Columbo,” for which he also worked as a story editor.Three shows Mr. Fischer created or co-created had short runs: “The Eddie Capra Mysteries” (1978), starring Vincent Baggetta as a lawyer; “The Law & Harry McGraw” (1987), a spinoff of “Murder, She Wrote” starring Jerry Orbach as a private investigator; and “Blacke’s Magic” (1986), starring Hal Linden — the collaboration with Mr. Link and Mr. Levinson that CBS did not want. (It ended up on NBC.)In addition to his grandson, Mr. Fischer is survived by his daughter, Megan McElrath; four other grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; his half sisters, Paula Shorts and Stephanie Donnelly; and his half brother, Stephen Fischer. His wife died in 2017. His sons also died before him — Stephen in 2014, Christopher in 2020.Mr. Fischer retired from television in the 1990s. He recast himself a decade ago as a murder mystery writer. He self-published more than 20 books set in postwar Hollywood, with a studio press agent as the sleuth and real movies as backdrops.“He loved old movies,” Ms. McElrath, his daughter, said by phone. “So he came up with this idea of a Jessica Fletcher-like character who’s not in law enforcement but finds himself tripping over all these murders.” More

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      SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood Studios Agree to Deal to End Actors’ Strike

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      The agreement all but ends one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry. Union members still have to approve the deal.One of the longest labor crises in Hollywood history is finally coming to an end.SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, reached a tentative deal for a new contract with entertainment companies on Wednesday, clearing the way for the $134 billion American movie and television business to swing back into motion.Hollywood’s assembly lines have been at a near-standstill since May because of a pair of strikes by writers and actors, resulting in financial pain for studios and for many of the two million Americans — makeup artists, set builders, location scouts, chauffeurs, casting directors — who work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films.Upset about streaming-service pay and fearful of fast-developing artificial intelligence technology, actors joined screenwriters on picket lines in July. The writers had walked out in May over similar concerns. It was the first time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union and Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films, that actors and writers were both on strike.The Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and ended its 148-day strike on Sept. 27. In the coming days, SAG-AFTRA members will vote on whether to accept their union’s deal, which includes hefty gains, like increases in compensation for streaming shows and films, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.SAG-AFTRA, however, failed to receive a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Fran Drescher, the union’s president, had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”Instead, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, proposed a new residual for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take.At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history. SAG-AFTRA said in a terse statement that its negotiating committee had voted unanimously to approve the tentative deal, which will proceed to the union’s national board on Friday for “review and consideration.”It added, “Further details will be released following that meeting.”Shaan Sharma, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, said he had mixed emotions about the tentative deal, though he declined to go into specifics because the SAG-AFTRA board still needed to review it.“They say a negotiation is when both sides are unhappy because you can’t get everything you want on either side,” he said, adding, “You can be happy for the deal overall, but you can feel a sense of loss for something that you didn’t get that you thought was important.”Ms. Drescher, who had been active on social media during the strike, didn’t immediately post anything on Wednesday evening. She and other SAG-AFTRA officials had come under severe pressure from agents, crew member unions and even some of her own members, including George Clooney and Ben Affleck, to wrap up what had started to feel like an interminable negotiation.“I’m relieved,” Kevin Zegers, an actor most recently seen in the ABC show “The Rookie: Feds,” said in an interview after the union’s announcement. “If it didn’t end today, there would have been riots.”The studio alliance said in a statement that the tentative agreement “represents a new paradigm,” giving SAG-AFTRA “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.”There is uncertainty over what a poststrike Hollywood will look like. But one thing is certain: There will be fewer jobs for actors and writers in the coming years, undercutting the wins that unions achieved at the bargaining table.Even before the strikes, entertainment companies were cutting back on the number of television shows they ordered, a result of severe pressure from Wall Street to turn money-losing streaming services into profitable businesses. Analysts expect companies to make up for the pair of pricey new labor contracts by reducing costs elsewhere, including by making fewer shows and canceling first-look deals.The actors, like the writers, said the streaming era had negatively affected their working conditions and compensation.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor the moment, however, the agreements with actors and writers represent a capitulation by Hollywood’s biggest companies, which started the bargaining process with an expectation that the unions, especially SAG-AFTRA, would be relatively compliant. Early in the talks, for instance, the studio alliance — Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros. — refused to negotiate on multiple union proposals. “Rejected our proposal, refused to make a counter” became a rallying cry among the striking workers.As the studio alliance tried to limit any gains, the companies cited business challenges, including the rapid decline of cable television and continued streaming losses. Disney, struggling with $4 billion in streaming losses in 2022, eliminated 7,000 jobs in the spring.But the alliance underestimated the pent-up anger pulsating among the studios’ own workers. Writers and actors called the moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era had deteriorated the working conditions and compensation for rank-and-file members of their professions so much that they could no longer make a living. The companies brushed such comments aside as union bluster and Hollywood dramatics. They found out the workers were serious.With the strikes dragging into the fall and the financial pain on both sides mounting, the studio alliance reluctantly switched from trying to limit gains to figuring out how to get Hollywood’s creative assembly lines running again — even if that meant bending to the will of the unions.“It was all macho, tough-guy stuff from the companies for a while,” said Jason E. Squire, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “But that certainly did change.”There had previously been 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood.“The executives of these companies didn’t need to worry about labor very much — they worried about other things,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the Writers Guild negotiating committee, said in an interview after the writers’ strike concluded. “They worried about Wall Street and their free cash flow, and all of that.”Mr. Keyser continued: “They could say to their labor executives, ‘Do the same thing you’ve been doing year after year. Just take care of that, because labor costs are not going to be a problem.’ Suddenly, that wasn’t true anymore.” As a result of the strikes, studios are widely expected to overhaul their approach to union negotiations, which in many ways dates to the 1980s.Writers Guild leaders called their deal “exceptional” and “transformative,” noting the creation of viewership-based streaming bonuses and a sharp increase in royalty payments for overseas viewing on streaming services. Film writers received guaranteed payment for a second draft of screenplays, something the union had tried but failed to secure for at least two decades.The Writers Guild said the contract included enhancements worth roughly $233 million annually. When bargaining started in the spring, the guild proposed $429 million in enhancements, while studios countered with $86 million, according to the guild.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord takes a meaningful step toward stabilization. About $10 billion in TV and film production has been on hold, according to ProdPro, a production tracking service. That amounts to 176 shows and films.The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Because the actors’ union prohibited its members from participating in promotional campaigns for already-finished work, studios pulled movies like “Dune: Part Two” from the fall release schedule, forgoing as much as $1.6 billion in worldwide ticket sales, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant.With labor harmony restored, the coming weeks should be chaotic. Studio executives and producers will begin a mad scramble to secure soundstages, stars, insurance, writers and crew members so productions can start running again as quickly as possible. Because of the end-of-year holidays, some projects may not restart until January.Both sides will have to go through the arduous process of working together again after a searing six-month standoff. The strikes tore at the fabric of the clubby entertainment world, with actors’ union leaders describing executives as “land barons of a medieval time,” and writers and actors still fuming that it took studio executives months, not weeks, to reach a deal.Workers and businesses caught in the crossfire were idled, potentially leaving bitter feelings toward both sides.And it appears that Hollywood executives will now have to contend with a resurgent labor force, mirroring many other American businesses. In recent weeks, production workers at Walt Disney Animation voted to unionize, as did visual-effects workers at Marvel.Contracts with powerful unions that represent Hollywood crews will expire in June and July, and negotiations are expected to be fractious.“It seemed apparent early on that we were part of a trend in American society where labor was beginning to flex its muscles — where unions were beginning to reassert their power,” said Mr. Keyser, the Writers Guild official.Brooks Barnes More