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      Julian Barry, Who Made Lenny Bruce Into ‘Lenny,’ Dies at 92

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      Mr. Barry’s scripts for a hit Broadway play and later a Hollywood movie about that rule-breaking comic helped give Mr. Bruce a lasting place in pop culture lore.Julian Barry, whose scripts for a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie about Lenny Bruce, both titled “Lenny,” became definitive portraits of the comedian as a truth teller who drove himself mad in a righteous struggle against American hypocrisy, was found dead on Tuesday morning at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 92.His daughter Julia Barry said he had died overnight in his sleep. He had been receiving medical treatment for congestive heart failure and, in recent weeks, for late-stage kidney disease.Like Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon, Mr. Bruce died young (he was 40) and became a figure of continually renewed pop-culture lore. His comedy career and his criminal prosecutions on drug and obscenity charges inspired museum exhibitions, one-man theatrical performances and biographies. From 2017 until this year, a fictionalized version of Mr. Bruce was a recurring character on the Amazon Prime television show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Mr. Barry’s play, which opened on Broadway in 1971, five years after Mr. Bruce’s death, proved that Mr. Bruce could draw an audience posthumously. The 1974 movie version, which starred Dustin Hoffman in the title role, has endured as a classic of the Lenny Bruce mini-genre. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, best actor and best adapted screenplay. (Mr. Barry lost to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo for “The Godfather Part II.”)Cliff Gorman in the title role and Jane House as his wife in the original Broadway production of “Lenny” in 1971.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIn both scripts, Mr. Barry paid homage to Mr. Bruce by including lengthy passages of his stand-up comedic material. His Lenny Bruce is crude but winningly so — more forgiving human frailty than mocking it, and skillful in using earthy common sense to attack the prejudices of his day.Clive Barnes of The New York Times called the play a “dynamite shtick” of theater, and reflected on the irony that Mr. Bruce had been arrested after using language in nightclubs that by 1971 seemed unexceptional when declaimed from a Broadway stage. “The last laugh,” he concluded, “is with Mr. Bruce.”The Broadway star of “Lenny,” Cliff Gorman, won the 1972 Tony Award for lead actor in a play. As Mr. Gorman told The Times in an interview after the play opened, his performance roused Mr. Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, to visit his dressing room and address him as a “genius.”Mr. Barry’s script compared Mr. Bruce to Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift. Some people rolled their eyes.“The story Julian Barry has extracted from Bruce’s life tends to sanctify and, in the end, even to solemnize Bruce rather than to explore his obsessions,” another Times theater critic, Mel Gussow, wrote in a 1972 review, when Sandy Baron replaced Mr. Gorman.But Mr. Barry found a powerful fan in Bob Fosse. After directing the movie version of the Broadway musical “Cabaret” (1972), for which he won the Academy Award for best director, Mr. Fosse decided that he wanted “Lenny” to be his next film project. He hired Mr. Barry to write the script.“In the play, I mythologized Lenny Bruce,” Mr. Barry told Rolling Stone in 1974. In contrast, he said, the movie offered “a cold, objective approach.”Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce and Valerie Perrine as his wife, Honey, in the 1974 film “Lenny,” directed by Bob Fosse and written by Mr. Barry.United ArtistsMr. Barry was perhaps referring to the film’s depiction of Mr. Bruce’s decline — ranting onstage about his arrests, shooting heroin, speechifying pathetically in court and finally dying of a morphine overdose naked on his bathroom floor in Los Angeles.Yet in “Lenny,” filmed in arty black and white, Mr. Bruce’s flaws are redeemed. He cheats on his wife, but he shows himself to be faithful to her when she needs him most. His idealism about racial slurs — that by using them people can sap them of their malign power — goes unquestioned. His enemies in the legal system do not explain their defense of conservative social mores.Mr. Barry saw Mr. Bruce as a tragic hero.“The whole beauty of Lenny,” he told Rolling Stone, “is his message: We’re all the same schmuck.”Julian Barry Mendelsohn Jr. was born on Dec. 24, 1930, in the Bronx and grew up in the Riverdale neighborhood. His father struggled as a salesman during the Depression but eventually rose to become an executive at the Hudson Pulp and Paper Company. His mother, Grace (Fein) Mendelsohn, donated time and money to Jewish causes and the theater.Julian began acting as a teenager while attending Horace Mann, a day school in Riverdale, where, he wrote in his memoir, “My Night With Orson” (2011), he was a “townie” — not as privileged as wealthier fellow students who lived in uptown Manhattan. Believing it would aid a future career in show business — and following the advice of Philip Burton, a British director who taught at a summer acting camp that Julian attended — he modified his name to sound less Jewish while still just a teenager.He was briefly an undergraduate at Syracuse University and Emerson College in Massachusetts. After serving in the Army and fighting in Korea in his early 20s, he established a career as a Broadway stage manager. He then took a risk at the age of 35, turning down steady work to focus on writing.Mr. Barry’s first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play starring Gene Wilder, left, and Zero Mostel.Kino InternationalMr. Barry found success in television writing scripts in the 1960s for popular shows like “Mission: Impossible.” His first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.Mr. Barry’s four marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Julia, from his third marriage, to the film producer Laura Ziskin, he is survived by his longtime partner, Samantha Harper Macy; two daughters, Sally and Jennifer Barry, from his second marriage, to Patricia Foley; a son, Michael, also from that marriage; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.In his autobiography, Mr. Barry described years of meeting stars and starlets. He and Frank Sinatra spent hours telling old stories and imagining a movie they might make together.Summing up his life in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “I was still bumming a ride on my Academy nomination.”Yet project after project of his did not get made, lost in the Hollywood purgatory known as “development.”To some extent, Mr. Barry wrote, it was his own fault for becoming too hip for his own good. He grew his hair long, and he name-dropped in the offhand style of a “Hollywood Phony,” he wrote. Discussing a script of his with Robert Redford and the director Sydney Pollack in Mr. Redford’s hotel room, he suddenly lit up a joint. He was later told that the two men did not like him.“I had to live up to my reputation,” Mr. Barry recalled, “as the man who wrote about Lenny Bruce.” More

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      in Movies

      Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 90

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      He was a struggling writer when he won an Academy Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He won another for “Melvin and Howard.”Bo Goldman, one of Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters, who took home Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), died on Tuesday in Helendale, Calif. He was 90.A son-in-law, the director Todd Field, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause.Mr. Goldman was struggling to make a living as a writer until the director Milos Forman saw the script he had written for a project called “Shoot the Moon” — his first screenplay — and, impressed, invited him to take a crack at adapting Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for the screen.The resulting movie, which starred Jack Nicholson as a rebellious new patient who disrupts a psychiatric ward, came out in 1975 and was a career maker. Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, who shared screenwriting credit, won the Oscar for best screenplay adapted from other material; the movie was also named best picture and earned Oscars for Mr. Forman, Mr. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who played the fierce Nurse Ratched.“Even then I hung my head,” Mr. Goldman wrote in a 1981 essay for The New York Times about the insecurities of a writer’s life. “After all, I had adapted somebody else’s work; was it really mine?”It may not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the adaptation.If that doubt had nagged him, it had certainly been dispelled when his original screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980) won him his second Oscar, this time for best screenplay written directly for the screen. That movie was based on the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who claimed that Howard Hughes, in a handwritten will, had left him a share of his vast fortune.Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called it “a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century.” The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best movie of the year and gave Mr. Goldman its best-screenplay award.Mr. Goldman’s screenplay for “Melvin and Howard,” with Jason Robards, left, as Howard Hughes, and Paul Le Mat as Melvin Dummar, earned him his second Oscar.UniversalMr. Goldman worked with the director Martin Brest on two films, “Scent of a Woman” (1992) and “Meet Joe Black” (1998).“People call him the screenwriter’s screenwriter,” Mr. Brest said in a phone interview. “I called him the man with the X-ray ears, because he had a pitch-perfect recall of the nuances of a comment that someone made to someone 50 years prior — he could reproduce the tone, and the reason he remembered it is because the tone told the whole story.”Mr. Goldman would draw on those memories to shape characters, as he did for “Scent of a Woman,” the story of a blind retired Army officer and the prep-school student hired to take care of him, for which he received another Oscar nomination. Al Pacino played the blind man; Mr. Goldman told The Times that he borrowed aspects of his father, one of his brothers and his Army first sergeant in writing the part.Mr. Brest said that Mr. Goldman was an adept collaborator, not only with other screenwriters but also with directors and others involved in the moviemaking process.“He thought of himself as a filmmaker rather than a writer,” he said. “He was part of the creation of a film.”Mr. Brest recalled that for “Scent of a Woman,” which was based on an Italian movie, “Profumo di Donna,” he and Mr. Goldman began by just having long, meandering chats.“Finally I said to him, ‘We’ve been talking for two weeks and having the greatest time, but shouldn’t we get to work?’” Mr. Brest recalled. “And he said that Mike Nichols told him, ‘The digressions are the work, or part of the work.’”Sure enough, much of what they had talked about — childhood memories, people they’d known — ended up being reflected in the script.“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Jack Nicholson was named best actor. Its other Oscars included one for Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, for best screenplay adapted from other material.United ArtistsRobert Spencer Goldman was born on Sept. 10, 1932, in New York City. His mother, Lillian (Levy) Goldman, was a millinery model, and his father, Julian, operated Julian Goldman Stores, a clothing chain that had 42 stores in 11 states at one point but was derailed by the Depression. Four months before Mr. Goldman was born, the company filed for bankruptcy.“I was the son of this kind of displaced merchant prince,” Mr. Goldman told The Times in 1993.Though the family fell on hard times, Mr. Goldman was able to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and then Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953.At Princeton, he participated in shows of the Princeton Triangle Club, a college theater troupe. “I learned how to write there,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Writers Guild Foundation.While writing for the college newspaper as Bob Goldman, a typesetter accidentally left off the second “b” in his name. Mr. Goldman liked it and later legally changed his name to Bo.After three years in the Army — he was stationed in the Marshall Islands, where tests of nuclear bombs were being conducted — he became an assistant to Jule Styne, the composer. He also wrote introductory patter and other tidbits for live television programs.He aspired to a playwriting career and earned a Broadway credit in 1959 as one of the lyricists for “First Impressions,” a musical based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that Mr. Styne’s company produced. The show had a starry cast that included Farley Granger, Polly Bergen and Hermione Gingold, but it lasted only 92 performances.Mr. Goldman continued working in television, including as a script editor and associate producer on the anthology series “Playhouse 90.” But success as a writer proved elusive.He had married Mabel Rathbun Ashforth in 1954, and they eventually had six children. He credited her with keeping the family afloat in the lean years by opening a nursery school in their home and then running a food store called Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack, N.Y., on Long Island.He said that in this period — the late 1960s and early ’70s — he saw families of his contemporaries falling apart and was moved to write his first screenplay, “Shoot the Moon,” about a marriage in crisis because of the husband’s affair. It won many admirers — including Mr. Forman — but no producers wanted to make it because, Mr. Goldman often said, the story struck too close to home for them.After his success with “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Rose” (1979) and “Melvin and Howard,” however, “Shoot the Moon” finally did get made, by the director Alan Parker in 1982. Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, as the struggling couple, were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards.Mr. Goldman’s other screenwriting credits include “The Flamingo Kid” (1984), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “City Hall” (1996).In 2017, when New York magazine asked working screenwriters to discuss the best screenwriters of all time, Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) singled out Mr. Goldman’s “audacious originality, his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humor, and his outright anger at being human, and all with his soft-spoken grace and eloquent simplicity.”Mr. Goldman lived in Rockport, Maine. His wife died in 2017. A son, Jesse, died in 1981. He is survived by another son, Justin Ashforth; four daughters, Mia Goldman, Amy Goldman, Diana Rathbun and Serena Rathbun; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Brest said Mr. Goldman was able to create memorable characters through small details.“His remembrance of nuances, things that people don’t know they’re revealing but that reveal volumes — that was his art form,” he said.He also said he has often repeated something Mr. Goldman once told him: “Your life,” Mr. Goldman said, “is what’s not in the obituary.” More

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      in Movies

      Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused

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      Despite not being in the actors’ union, many content creators are passing up deals to promote films or TV shows because they don’t want to be barred from the guild or face online vitriol.Deanna Giulietti is not in the actors’ union, but she turned down $28,000 last week because of its strike.Ms. Giulietti, a 29-year-old content creator with 1.8 million TikTok followers, had received an offer to promote the new season of Hulu’s hit show “Only Murders in the Building.”But SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, recently issued rules stating that any influencer who engages in promotion for one of the Hollywood studios the actors are striking against will be ineligible for membership. (Disney is the majority owner of Hulu.) That gave Ms. Giulietti, who also acts and aspires to one day join the union, reason enough to decline the offer from Influential, a marketing agency working with Hulu.The union’s rule is part of a variety of aggressive tactics that hit at a pivotal moment for Hollywood labor and shows its desire to assert itself in a new era and with a different, mostly younger wave of creative talent. “I want to be in these Netflix shows, I want to be in the Hulu shows, but we’re standing by the writers, we’re standing by SAG,” Ms. Giulietti said. “People write me off whenever I say I’m an influencer, and I’m like, ‘No, I really feel I could be making the difference here.’”That difference comes at a cost. In addition to the Hulu deal, Ms. Giulietti recently declined a $5,000 offer from the app TodayTix to promote the Searchlight Pictures movie “Theater Camp.” (Disney also owns Searchlight.) She said she was living at home with her parents in Cheshire, Conn., and putting off renting an apartment in New York City while she saw how the strike — which, along with a writers’ strike, could go on for months — would affect her income.Representatives for Searchlight and TodayTix did not respond to requests for comment. Hulu and Influential declined to comment.The last time Hollywood’s screen actors and writers went on strike, social media platforms and the $5 billion influencer industry didn’t exist. The actors’ union began admitting content creators in 2021 and still has only a small number of them, but questions have quickly emerged around how the union’s dispute with the major Hollywood studios will affect popular internet personalities.The union’s message that content creators will be blocked from membership if they provide work or services for struck companies has sent many scrambling. A number of creators have pledged support for writers and actors and circulated “scab” lists of influencers who promote new releases or appear at related events. Others have been frustrated or confused by instructions from a union that doesn’t protect them, and that some had never heard of.SAG-AFTRA, which represents some 160,000 movie and television actors, approved a strike on July 13. The division with the studios is driven largely by concerns about compensation in the streaming era and artificial intelligence. They joined screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, the first dual shutdown since 1960. During the strike, actors are not able to engage in publicity efforts for their projects or appear at film festivals or events like Comic-Con.Influencers have become crucial to the entertainment industry in recent years, especially during the pandemic, building buzz and promoting products. They post videos to hype new TV shows and movies, appear on red carpets and at events like the MTV Video Music Awards, and unbox products tied to film and television characters. Typically, as in the case with Ms. Giulietti, outside agencies hire creators on behalf of the studios.“If I were to help the big studios amid this, I’m just hurting myself in the future,” said Mario Mirante, a comedian with 3.6 million followers on TikTok.Marshall Scheuttle for The New York TimesNow those activities, besides limiting their career ambitions, could lead to internet backlash, with one nonunion influencer already posting an apology video for appearing at a recent Disney movie premiere. Others have posted promotional videos anyway, without backtracking or pulling the content. At least one creator posting from a recent premiere opted to turn off their TikTok comments, possibly to avoid potential criticism. On the flip side, videos from creators about jobs and events that they rejected in solidarity with actors have racked up praise and views on TikTok.“We don’t have power to make decisions for the talent, but we will in this moment recommend not engaging with struck work or struck companies on paid or organic projects,” said Victoria Bachan, president of Whalar Talent, a unit of a creator commerce company that works with more than 200 content creators. She added that young creators were also more apt to be supportive of unions and organized labor.Still, Whitney Singleton, a 27-year-old with 1.2 million TikTok followers, has been frustrated by what is being asked of her. She had never heard of SAG-AFTRA until the past couple of weeks. Ms. Singleton, using the moniker @KeepUpRadio, has attracted fans by singing and rapping about her favorite video games like Fortnite and streaming herself playing video games. It has been her full-time job for three years. She has collaborated with struck companies like Amazon in the past.“I really do value creators, and I want them to get what they deserve,” Ms. Singleton said. “But it’s really hard for me to just be finding out about an organization and being expected to fall in line with their initiative when I feel like it’s new to me and the influencer space.”She said some influencers were being asked to turn down five-figure deals, and that “the majority of creators I’ve talked to about it feel it’s unfair that as nonunion members, they’re being included in this conversation.”Ms. Singleton was invited to an early screening of the “Barbie” movie and said that while it wasn’t a paid promotion, the union’s guidelines for promoting the movie were “what I would deem murky.” Ultimately, she decided to post about the event, for which she dyed her hair pink.“I actually got no negative feedback, it was all positive,” she said. “For a moment, I felt a bit scared and put in a corner with these requirements because I respect creators in all industries, but I wouldn’t be being true to my heart if I had let those things stop me from living my life and sharing the content.”The union did not respond to questions about the criticism or about how many influencers are included in its membership. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of the biggest studios, has said its offers to the writers and the actors were “historic” improvements on their previous contracts.The reality for many creators is that they dream of someday achieving a level of fame beyond the smartphone screen, making the threat of blacklisting by Hollywood’s most powerful union an ominous one.Mario Mirante, a 28-year-old comedian on TikTok with 3.6 million followers, recently posted a popular video about turning down a deal to promote a show based on his support for actors and writers and his long-term ambitions. Mr. Mirante has hoped to work in Hollywood since childhood, and even has a tattoo of Jim Carrey as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” on his arm.“That’s a lot of influencers’ goal and aspiration and why they do it,” said Mr. Mirante, who lives in Las Vegas. “We love to entertain and express ourselves, and that’s the Super Bowl, that’s the ultimate, being in a movie or a TV show.”Mr. Mirante has previously been paid to promote the movie “Champions” starring Woody Harrelson and a product tied to the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise. “If I were to help the big studios amid this, I’m just hurting myself in the future, if that makes any sense,” he said. “Of course I’m not a part of it right now, but they’re fighting for basic rights, livable wages, not to have their A.I. likeness taken.”Krishna Subramanian, a founder of the influencer marketing firm Captiv8, said studios might need to pivot away from creators during the strike and get agencies to make more traditional display ads to place on Facebook and other sites.Simone Umba is a TikTok creator with more than 300,000 followers who primarily posts about TV shows and movies but has paused making such videos. She said that many influencers felt that they were “stuck in the middle,” but that most were opting to side with the union even as invitations and deals piled up.“We knew we were going to get approached, and it’s like we’re in a really messy family feud,” Ms. Umba, 26, said.She added, “Regardless of if you want to join the union or not, you don’t want to be one of those people that was willing to take a check instead of standing in support of people fighting for actual livable wages.”Ms. Umba said that it had been painful to miss out on posting about the star-studded “Barbie” movie after this summer’s marketing bonanza and that she had declined to attend an early screening of the film in Atlanta. She and a friend were messaging recently after trailers for “The Marvels” dropped, agonizing over their inability to post.“We were texting each other back and forth, like, this is so hard,” she said. She said she was prepared to hold out for months but was already thinking of holiday releases. She crossed her fingers, held them up and said, “Please, please, don’t let it get to Christmas.” More

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      in Television

      Why Are Hollywood Actors Striking? Here’s What to Know

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      Here’s why Hollywood is facing its first industrywide shutdown in more than 60 years, and what it could mean for your favorite shows.The union representing more than 150,000 television and movie actors announced Thursday that it would go on strike at midnight, joining screenwriters who walked out in May and creating Hollywood’s first industrywide shutdown in 63 years.Here is what you need to know.Why are the actors and writers striking?Pay is often at the center of work stoppages, and that is the case here. But the rise of streaming and the challenges created by the pandemic have stressed the studios, many of which are facing financial challenges, as well as actors and writers, who are seeking better pay and new protections in a rapidly changing workplace.Both actors and screenwriters have demanded increased residual payments (a type of royalty) from streaming services. Streaming series typically have far fewer episodes than television series typically did. And it used to be that if a television series was a hit, actors and writers could count on a long stream of regular residual checks; streaming has changed the system in a way that they say has hurt them. Both groups also want aggressive guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence to preserve jobs.A-list actors last month signed a letter to guild leadership saying they were ready to strike and calling this moment “an unprecedented inflection point in our industry.”What is the position of the Hollywood studios?The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents major studios and streamers, has said it offered “historic pay and residual increases” as well as higher caps on pension and health contributions. They also say their offer includes audition protections, a “groundbreaking” proposal on artificial intelligence and other benefits that address the union’s concerns.The Hollywood studios have also stressed that all the industry upheaval has not been easy for them, either. As moviegoers have been slow to return to cinemas and home viewers have moved from cable and network television to streaming entertainment, many studios have watched their share prices plummet and their profit margins shrink. Some companies have resorted to layoffs or pulled the plug on projects — or both.What will happen to my TV shows and movies?It will take a while for filmgoers to notice a change, since most of the movies scheduled for release this year have already been shot. But TV viewers are already seeing the strike’s effects, and if it drags on, popular shows could see their next seasons delayed.Late-night shows are already airing reruns because of the writers’ strike, and the vast majority of TV and film productions have already shut down or paused production. Big name shows like “Yellowjackets,” “Severance” and “Stranger Things” halted work after the writers’ strike began; it is not yet clear if their upcoming seasons will be delayed.Disney announced several changes to its theatrical release calendar in June, amid the writers’ strike.Now, the actors’ strike will add even greater upheaval.During the first two weeks of July, no scripted TV permits were issued in Los Angeles County, according to FilmLA, which tracks production activity. Film and TV shows that have completed shooting and are already in postproduction can likely stay on schedule, because the work remaining does not typically involve writers or actors.Participating in either film or television production with any of the studios is now off the table, with few exceptions. And that means that within a few months — beginning with the fall lineup — viewers will begin to notice broader changes to their TV diet.The ABC fall schedule, for instance, will debut with nightly lineups that include “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune,” “Dancing With the Stars” and “Judge Steve Harvey” as well as repeats of “Abbott Elementary. The Fox broadcast network’s fall lineup includes unscripted series like “Celebrity Name That Tune,” “The Masked Singer” and “Kitchen Nightmares.”How long could this all drag on?If only we knew.Writers have been walking the picket lines now for more than 70 days, and their union, the Writers Guild of America, has yet to return to bargaining with the studios.The last time the writers and actors went on strike at the same time was in 1960, when Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild.Screenwriters have walked out several times, sometimes for long periods: Their 2007 strike lasted 100 days. The actors last staged a major walkout in 1980; it lasted more than three months.What about the promotion of current shows and films?In the near term, officials have said there will be no promotion of current projects, either online or in person. Do not expect to hear Ryan Gosling touting “Barbie” again anytime soon. A ban on promotion could be very bad news for San Diego’s Comic-Con, upcoming film festivals in places like Venice and Toronto, and scheduled movie premieres like the “Oppenheimer” premiere planned for Monday in New York.The 75th Emmy Awards, which announced its nominations yesterday, may now be in peril. Organizers have already had discussions about postponing the Sept. 18 ceremony, likely by months.Nicole Sperling More

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      in Movies

      In ‘The Lesson,’ With Richard E. Grant, It’s a Bad Writer Who Steals

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      Richard E. Grant and Daryl McCormack star as writers with similar source material in a feature tracing the limits of literary authorship.In “The Lesson,” an amusingly taut British thriller playing now in American movie theaters, two novels result from the same events at an opulent country estate.This chamber piece — a debut feature from both the director Alice Troughton, a regular of episodic television, and the comedian turned screenwriter Alex MacKeith — asks, both tacitly and explicitly: Can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?One of the film’s writers, J.M. Sinclair (a ferocious Richard E. Grant) is a consummate literary star, who hasn’t published a novel since his firstborn son’s suicide. The unscrupulous Sinclair, however, is about to write the final chapter in a new novel, “Rose Tree,” while staying true to his favorite aphorism, “Great writers steal.”J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) is a celebrated, and ruthless writer, willing to betray anyone in his life for his own success.Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetThe other scribe, Liam Somers (the Irish actor Daryl McCormack), is a young upstart with writing ambitions of his own. Hired as a live-in tutor to Sinclair’s youngest child, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), to help him gain admission to Oxford University, Somers soon begins taking copious notes on the family, and becomes entangled with their secrets.The larger narrative we witness — of a monstrous father willing to betray anyone in his life for a self-aggrandizing pursuit, and a stranger entering this isolated family unit to solve the central mystery around the elder son’s death — will eventually become Liam’s first book.“I’d never been offered a part quite like that before,” Grant said recently by phone. “Playing anybody who has that amount of entitlement and monstrous ego, you long for them to fall apart.”Given Sinclair’s twisted sense of ownership over his children, Troughton, the director, described the character as a toxic parent certain that “there’s nothing that your children can do that doesn’t belong to you, or come from you.” Francisco Goya’s graphic painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” served as the director’s key reference for understanding Sinclair’s behavior, she said in a video interview.Yet the most influential scribe may be one who never puts pen to paper, nor fingers to keyboard, but orchestrates the events that help both the movie’s literary works come to fruition: Hélène Sinclair, a curator and wife to the overbearing patriarch, played by the French actress Julie Delpy. Hélène’s objective in allowing Liam inside the home is to unveil her husband’s secrets.“She essentially functions as the detective with Liam operating as a vector for her,” MacKeith said. “When you underlay that with her motive of discovery, but also vengeance, her agency in the film and her orchestration does make her the author.”For Delpy, who described her character as a “mother fatale,” answering the question of who deserves credit when a writer creates a story from actual events is less clear-cut.Hélène Sinclair (Julie Delpy) uses Liam unveil her husband’s secrets.Gordon Timpen/Bleecker Street“When you tell stories about people around you, are you using them, or are they partly authors, since you’re telling their story?” she asked in a recent phone interview. “Is the story solely the writer’s writing, even if based on someone else? What’s the limit between inspiration and coauthorship?”Delpy, a writer-director herself, said she believed that the need for attribution depends on what’s being borrowed. She admitted to having stolen single lines, or small situations from strangers’ conversations she overhead in restaurants, which she then has transformed into stories.The kind of intellectual theft Sinclair is happy to engage in, on the other hand, is far more insidious. Even his repeated aphorism is purloined from T.S. Eliot.Inspiration for Sinclair’s ruthless appropriation of others’ writing, MacKeith said, came from the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which a writer plagiarizes Miguel de Cervantes’ masterwork word for word, and then claims it as his own.The taut thriller asks, both tacitly and explicitly, can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetOver the course of the film, it becomes hard to decipher precisely who is responsible for each story within the story. Liam’s novel is only possible as a side effect of Hélène’s machinations, and, early on, Sinclair decides to enlist Liam in his writing process for “Rose Tree.”As for whose work “The Lesson” itself is, MacKeith said that after their close five-year collaboration to bring the film to screen, he and Troughton were joint authors. The seasoned director brought touches of horror, as well as the idea of redemption, to the piece, MacKeith said, which were in turn elevated by the ensemble cast and crew in every tense scene.“As an actor, you have to create something beyond the script itself,” McCormack said. “I always hope that when I’m working alongside other people, that I can have a sense of being a co-author to the story in what I can do.”For MacKeith, this idea of collective ownership of the movie extended to the viewers, who must draw their own conclusions from “The Lesson,” especially after an unsettling plot twist.“The product itself is picture-locked,” he said, “but our discussion about it means that we as the audience can also have authorship of it in our interpretation.” More

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      Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Prizewinning Biography 25 Years in the Making

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      Martin Sherwin struck the deal and dove into the research. But it was only when Kai Bird joined as a collaborator that “American Prometheus” came to be.Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted.So on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a $70,000 contract with Knopf for the project. Paid half to get started, he expected to finish it in five years.In the end, the book took 25 years to write — and Sherwin didn’t do it alone.When Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is released on July 21, it will be the first time many younger Americans encounter the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But that film stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” co-written by Sherwin and Kai Bird.Knopf published this masterwork in 2005. But it was only thanks to a rare collaboration between two indefatigable writers — and a deep friendship, built around a shared dedication to the art of biography as a life’s work — that “American Prometheus” got done at all.Cillian Murphy, center, as the title character in “Oppenheimer,” which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressOPPENHEIMER would have been a daunting subject for any biographer.A public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, he directed the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking the atomic bomb from theoretical possibility to terrifying reality in an impossibly short timeline. Later he emerged as a kind of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear era, publicly opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and becoming a symbol both of America’s technological genius and of its conscience.That stance made Oppenheimer a target in the McCarthy era, spurring his enemies to paint him as a Communist sympathizer. He was stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing convened by the Atomic Energy Commission. He lived the rest of his life diminished, and died at 62 in 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.When Sherwin began interviewing people there who had known him, he was taken aback by the intensity of their feelings. Physicists, and the widows of physicists, were still angry for the casual neglect Oppenheimer had shown to his family.Yet after Sherwin moved his own family to Boston for a job at Tufts University, he and his wife Susan met Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, who admitted with embarrassment that their years working under Oppenheimer on the bomb were some of the happiest of their lives.Among the scores of people Sherwin also interviewed were Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer’s onetime best friend whose Communist ties in part formed the basis of the inquisition against him, and Edward Teller, whose testimony at the 1954 hearing helped end his career.Published in 2005, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography.Naum Kazhdan/The New York TimesOppenheimer’s son Peter refused a formal interview, so Sherwin brought his family to the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe, saddled up a horse and rode to the Oppenheimers’ rustic cabin, wrangling a chance to talk to the scientist’s son as the two men built a fence. “Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” said Susan Sherwin, who accompanied him on many research trips, and survives him. But he had a knack for connecting with people.Sherwin’s deadline came and went. His editor retired, and he did his best to avoid his new one. There was always another person to interview, or another document to read.The unfinished book became a running joke in the Sherwin household.“We had this New Yorker cartoon on our refrigerator my entire childhood,” his son Alex remembered. “It’s a guy at a typewriter, and he’s surrounded by stacks of papers. His wife is in the distance, in the threshold of the door to his office. And he says, ‘Finish it? Why would I want to finish it?’”KAI BIRD, A FORMER associate editor at The Nation, needed a job. It was 1999, and while Bird had written a couple of modestly successful biographies, as a 48-year-old historian without a Ph.D. he was underqualified for a tenure-track university position and overqualified for nearly everything else. His wife, Susan Goldmark, who held a lucrative job at the World Bank, was getting tired of being the main breadwinner.Bird was unsuccessfully applying for jobs at newspapers when he heard from an old friend. Sherwin took Bird out to dinner, and suggested they join forces on Oppenheimer.They had known each other for years, and their friendship had solidified in the mid-1990s, when Bird included Sherwin’s essays in a volume about the controversy surrounding a planned Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.A 1957 photo of Oppenheimer at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.John Rooney/Associated PressBut there was one complication. “My first book started out as a collaboration with my best friend,” the writer Max Holland, Bird said, “and eight years later ended in divorce.” Things broke down, in part, over disagreements about how much research was enough.The episode had been painful. Never again, his wife reminded him.“I told Marty, ‘No, I can’t. I like you too much,’ ” Bird said.So began a yearlong charm campaign to convince Bird, but especially Goldmark, that this time would be different. “I was watching very carefully, looking at them interacting and finishing each other’s sentences the way couples sometimes do,” she recalled. “They were both so cute.”Finally, with everyone on board, Gail Ross, Bird’s agent, negotiated a new contract with Knopf, which agreed to pay the pair an additional $290,000 to finish the book.Sherwin cautioned Bird that there were gaps in his research. But soon “untold numbers of boxes” started showing up at Bird’s home, according to his wife. As Bird began to sift through everything, he recognized how painstakingly detailed and dizzyingly broad Sherwin’s research was. “There were no gaps,” Bird remembered.It was time to write. Bird started at the beginning.“I wrote a draft of the early childhood years,” he said, “and Marty took it and rewrote it.” Sherwin sent the revision back to Bird, who was impressed. “He knew exactly what was missing in the anecdotes,” Bird said.Kai Bird, left, and Martin J. Sherwin in 2006, showing off a copy of their long-in-the-making book “American Prometheus.”Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressTheir process took shape: Bird would pore over the research, synthesize it, and produce a draft which he’d send to Sherwin, who would recognize what was missing, edit and rewrite, and return the copy to Bird. Soon Sherwin was drafting as well. “We wrote furiously for four years,” Bird said.Sherwin always knew that the hearing that stripped Oppenheimer of his clearance would be the “epicenter” of the biography, Bird said. They argued about what the evidence might suggest, but never about style, process, or the shape of the book itself. “It became,” Susan Sherwin said, “almost a magical thing.”By fall 2004, nearly 25 years after Knopf committed to the project, the manuscript was almost ready. Bird and Sherwin’s editor Ann Close vetoed “Oppie,” the pair’s working title. A scramble ensued, until something came to Goldmark late at night: “Prometheus … fire … the bomb is this fire. And you could put ‘American’ there.’ ”Bird dismissed “American Prometheus” as too obscure, until Sherwin called the next morning to tell him that a friend, the biographer Ronald Steel, had suggested the same title over dinner the night before. “I’m in big trouble,” said Bird. His wife felt vindicated.Bird said that his collaborator would have been pleased by “Oppenheimer.” Michael Avedon/AugustOn April 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” was published to enormous acclaim. The Boston Globe raved that it “stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer, and is an achievement not likely to be surpassed or equaled.”Among its numerous accolades was the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Bird always thought the book had an outside shot at the prize, but Sherwin had been skeptical. “He always thought I was an incorrigible optimist. So he was genuinely astonished,” Bird would later say. “He was, in fact, sweetly elated.”BY THE TIME the collaborators learned in September 2021 that Christopher Nolan planned to turn “American Prometheus” into a film, Marty Sherwin was dying of cancer.The pair had read several unmade scripts based on their book over the years, so Sherwin was doubtful of its chances in Hollywood. He was too sick to join, but Bird and Goldmark met Nolan at a boutique hotel in Greenwich Village. Bird reported to Sherwin in person afterward that, with Nolan as writer and director, their work was in good hands.“Oppenheimer’s story is one of the most dramatic and complex that I’ve ever encountered,” Nolan said recently. “I don’t think I ever would have taken this on without Kai and Martin’s book.” (Anticipation for the movie has put the biography on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction paperbacks.)A still from the movie shows Murphy at Los Alamos, where one of the authors got to visit the set.Universal PicturesOn Oct. 6, 2021, Bird received word that his friend had died at the age of 84.Sherwin “would have been deeply pleased,” by the film’s accuracy, Bird said after seeing the film for the first time. “I think he would have appreciated what an artistic achievement it is.”He recalled the day he and his wife spent a few hours on the film’s set in Los Alamos. The crew was filming in Oppenheimer’s original cabin, now painstakingly restored. Bird watched Cillian Murphy do take after take as Oppenheimer, astonished at the actor’s resemblance to the subject he’d spent years studying.Finally, there was a break in filming, and Murphy walked over to introduce himself. As the actor approached — dressed in Oppenheimer’s brown, baggy 1940s-era suit and wide tie — Bird couldn’t help himself.“Dr. Oppenheimer!” he shouted. “I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!”Bird said Murphy just laughed. “We’ve all been reading your book,” the actor told him. “It’s mandatory reading around here.” More

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      Review: ‘In the Company of Rose’ Is a Pleasant Portrait

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      When the theater and film director James Lapine first met Rose Styron, he knew her as William Styron’s widow. He learned there was a lot more to her.In 2014, the film and theater director James Lapine was invited to a Martha’s Vineyard lunch with the writer Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”). At the lunch, Lapine proceeded to record an impromptu interview with Rose. Unlike lesser mortals, Lapine (a protean force in American arts who wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” among other things) has the means to spin a feature film out of such an encounter.Composed of archival footage and interviews done with more polished equipment over the years, “In the Company of Rose” is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to. As Lapine, who narrates the film, admits, “I’ve often jumped into projects without really knowing what I was doing.” In her account of her life, Rose, too, seems to have moved forward without too much calculation. She recalls being unimpressed by Styron at a reading for his first novel, “Lie Down In Darkness,” they only clicked later, in Rome, where Rose was studying and William was living on a fellowship.Rose is kind, cheerful, frank, and she has a knack for telling stories laden with famous figures without sounding as if she’s name-dropping. She typed Styron’s work for nearly a decade. On becoming interested in human rights, she traveled for Amnesty International. She says that she and her husband resembled a stereotypically 1950s American couple, and that they managed their marriage “mainly by not talking about things, instead of talking about them.” But when Styron had depression in the 1980s she was a stalwart helpmate in his recovery, and encouraged him to write “Darkness Visible,” the memoir that has become one of his best known works. As existences in rarefied worlds go, this one plays as well-lived.In the Company of RoseNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More