Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Edward Bond, Playwright Who Clashed With Royal Censors, Dies at 89

      by

      His brazen first play, “Saved,” though it drew outrage, led to the end of more than 200 years of state control over the theater.No modern British dramatist polarized his countrymen as much as Edward Bond, who died on Sunday at age 89.To some, he was an unholy terror, relentless in his doctrinaire socialism and disconcertingly fond of violent theatrical effects. To others, he was almost a secular saint, a writer of unflinching integrity in a world of compromise and so sensitive to human frustration that he invariably peopled his plays with characters suffering, often graphically, from extreme forms of oppression and exploitation.But both parties would agree that his first important play, “Saved,” precipitated the end of theatrical censorship in Britain.In 1965, the Royal Court Theater submitted “Saved,” a graphic portrait of mostly young and sometimes violent no-hopers adrift in London’s lower depths, to the Lord Chamberlain, who had held absolute power over British drama since 1737. The response by a functionary was widely thought of as absurdly anachronistic: A scene in which hooligans stone to death a baby in a pram could not be publicly staged.Mr. Bond refused to alter a line, and the Royal Court supported him by temporarily becoming a private club, and thus, as the law then stood, no longer needing the Lord Chamberlain’s sanction.This was a tactic that had been used in London before, notably for Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1956 and Arthur Miller’s “View from a Bridge” in 1958, both of which hinted at the then-taboo subject of homosexuality.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Wanted: Writers for Awards Show Jokes. Must Be Skilled at Diplomacy

      by

      Hosts who have to entertain insiders at the ceremony and outsiders watching at home. Presenters who change their minds. No wonder the bits are awkward.In the middle of struggling through the opening monologue of the Golden Globes in January, the comic Jo Koy did something unusual, if not unprecedented, for the host of a major awards show: He blamed the writers.“I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at,” he said of his jokes, prompting writers across the country to grind their teeth.Koy, who later apologized, endured some light mockery a week after the show, when his ex-girlfriend Chelsea Handler followed up a successful joke in her monologue at the Critics Choice Awards by saying, “Thank you for laughing at that. My writers wrote it.”If something positive came from this episode, it’s that a spotlight was put on a corner of the showbiz work force that tends to remain in the shadows: the joke writers for awards shows like the Oscars on Sunday.“It’s a small fraternity, and they always remained anonymous,” said Bruce Vilanch, the best known of this breed, who said his acclaim for the job, which included starring in the 1999 documentary “Get Bruce!,” had spurred resentment among his predecessors. “They were not personalities in their own way. They never talked about this stuff. I think there was almost a code.”Chelsea Handler made sure to acknowledge her writers when she hosted the Critics Choice Awards.Kevin Winter/Getty Images For Critics ChoiceWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Joan Holden, 85, Playwright Who Skewered Rich and Powerful, Dies

      by

      As the principal writer for the Obie-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, she created iconoclastic left-wing satire that courted both chuckles and outrage.To Joan Holden, a fiercely left-wing playwright for the award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, life in a capitalist society offered almost too many targets: conniving politicians, labor-squashing industrialists and masters of war looking to profit by spreading conflict around the globe, to name just a few.As the theater collective’s principal playwright from 1967 to 2000, she largely trafficked in satire, collaborating on loose-limbed lampoons and melodramas like “Ripped Van Winkle,” about a 1960s hippie who conks out for decades after a monster L.S.D. trip and awakens to find himself trapped in a nightmare of yuppie greed and materialism in the 1980s.Even in the troupe’s broadest farces, the point was to make audiences chuckle their way to political enlightenment.Ms Holden during an event staged by her San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1969. Audiences needed little background to figure out the group’s leftist political leanings. via Holden family“I write plays about things I’m pissed off about, usually attacking people in power,” she said as part of a panel on humor in 1999, as reported in her obituary in The San Francisco Chronicle. She described humor as “the revenge of the powerless.”“Physically, I can’t get at these people,” she said, but she “can expose them to ridicule. Maybe I can’t slay the dragon, but I can make him look silly.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Amy Herzog on Adapting Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy of the People’ for Broadway

      by

      At a rehearsal for “An Enemy of the People,” a Broadway revival of the 1882 play, the actor Jeremy Strong paced around an auditorium, wearing pants that were damp from kneeling in ice.As Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who tries in vain to warn his Norwegian coastal community about contamination in the town’s springs, Strong looked shaken, but hopeful. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” said Strong, known for playing the fragile yet ruthless media executive Kendall Roy on four seasons of “Succession.” “We just have to imagine.”To anyone intimately familiar with “An Enemy of the People,” written by Henrik Ibsen, those lines might sound slightly off key. Ibsen ended the play on a more defiant note, with the doctor boasting that he is the strongest man in the world, because the strongest are those who stand alone.“That didn’t resonate with me at all,” said Amy Herzog, who wrote the new adaptation, which is scheduled to begin performances on Tuesday.Herzog watches a rehearsal of “An Enemy of the People,” which stars Jeremy Strong, right, opposite Michael Imperioli, left.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesInstead of ending with Ibsen’s image of a lonely, heroic truth-teller, she changed it. And it isn’t the first time she’s boldly revamped his work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      “Poor Things,” the Weird Movie, Was “Poor Things” the Weird Novel, First

      by

      Hot air balloons soar above the Mediterranean. Aerial streetcars fly along ropes suspended above the alleys of a candy-colored Lisbon. Pastel green smoke billows into the night sky from the funnels of a cruise ship.This is the eye-poppingly surreal world that Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, thrills to in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated film “Poor Things.”Bella, a 25-year-old woman who, after committing suicide, is reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant, is the daring and unusual creation of Alasdair Gray, whose 1992 novel was adapted for the movie.And it may not even be his most eccentric book. A prolific writer and visual artist who died at 85 in 2019, Gray wrote five other novels, two novellas, 89 short stories and a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse”).In Scotland, Gray is something of a national treasure, his papers housed at the National Library of Scotland. (The cover flap for his illustrated autobiography, “A Life in Pictures,” described the lifelong Glaswegian as “Scotland’s best-known polymath.”)Outside Britain, however, he is not exactly a household name.“I would say he’s one of the very few writers from my lifetime that I’m in awe of,” said the English novelist Jonathan Coe, adding that Gray is “enormously respected” by writers and critics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Brian McConnachie, Humor Writer ‘From Another Planet,’ Dies at 81

      by

      A contributor to National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV,” he had a patrician presence that belied a whimsical and sometimes anarchic wit.Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and ’80s — National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV Network” — died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.Mr. McConnachie — who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes — had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.“Look, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I’d get that,” Alan Zweibel, an original “S.N.L.” writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. “The rest of us were hooligans.”Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and “S.N.L.” orbits, Mr. McConnachie’s laid-back, whimsical style — with some anarchic, disturbed twists — fit in well with the other writers’ contributions.“If the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,” Rick Meyerowitz, a leading illustrator there, wrote in “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), his history of the magazine, “the main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.”In addition to writing for National Lampoon, Mr. McConnachie appeared in its “1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” among other places.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: “Cocktails With George and Martha” by Philip Gefter

      by

      COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip GefterWhat a document dump!The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)That Lehman is no longer a household name, if he ever was, is one of showbiz history’s many injustices. Before the thankless task of condensing Albee’s three-hour play for the big screen (on top of producing), he wrote the scripts for “North by Northwest” (1959), arguably Hitchcock’s greatest, and with some help, “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). The latter was based on his experience copywriting for a press agent, which inspired a novelette in Cosmopolitan called “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” (Will someone please bring back the novelette?)From beyond the grave, in a production journal titled “Fun and Games With George and Martha” housed at the Harry Ransom Center, Lehman dishes on working with Mike Nichols, the then-darling of New York intellectuals hired to direct his first Hollywood film, starring his famous, furiously canoodling friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.But first “Cocktails With George and Martha” fans out like a deck of cards the back story of the play, which initially featured Uta Hagen as Martha, the delulu grown daughter of a New England college president, and Arthur Hill as George, her husband, an associate history professor whose career has stalled. (Yes, they are named for the first first couple of America.) A younger married pair named Nick and Honey come over for the world’s longest and most hellacious nightcap.Steeped in alcohol and analysis themselves, sophisticated audiences thrilled to the play’s voyeurism and vulgar language, even as the Pulitzer Prize committee got prudish, suspending the drama prize the year “Woolf” was eligible.Gefter describes how another playwright, probably jealous of the box-office returns, accused Albee rather homophobically of “neuroticism” and “nihilism” in The New York Times. “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to,” Albee responded in one of cultural journalism’s best mic drops, “let us stop going to the theater entirely. Let us play patty-cake with one another or sit in our rooms and contemplate our paunchy middles.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      David J. Skal, Scholar Who Took Horror Seriously, Dies at 71

      by

      In books like “The Monster Show” and “Screams of Reason,” he examined the cultural significance of movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people.David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not always taken seriously — movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people — whose erudition, combined with a chatty writing style, made his books lively and entertaining.As an evangelist for horror, he was a regular guest on NPR, explicating frightful topics in a sonorous and friendly voice, and a consultant to Universal Studios for a theme park ride in Florida, “Halloween Horror Nights.” He also added commentary tracks to Universal’s DVD series of classic monster movies, from “Dracula” (1931) to “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954).“One of the major functions that monsters provide for us is they let us process our fears about the real world without having to look at them too directly,” he told The New York Times in 2014.He could riff in his writings on the cultural theories of Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling and R.D. Laing. But his own critiques were never stuffy, grounded as they were in his personal fandom for a genre he first encountered as a boy living outside Cleveland. His first movie memory was watching “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” on television.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