Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Bob Orben, One-Man Gag Factory and Speechwriter, Dies at 95

      by

      He wrote tens of thousands of jokes in his career. Among those who told them were Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton — and, for a while, President Gerald R. Ford.Bob Orben, who after writing jokes for Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton and others in the 1960s found a new avenue for his wit when he became a speechwriter for President Gerald R. Ford in 1974, died on Feb. 2 in Alexandria, Va. He was 95.His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his great-niece, Yvette Chevallier.Mr. Orben was a one-man gag factory. He wrote joke books. He dispatched one-liners to entertainers, politicians and disc jockeys through his subscription newsletter, Current Comedy. And he wrote a column, My Favorite Jokes, for Parade magazine.“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”In 1968, Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican who was then the House minority leader, needed someone to spice up a speech he was going to give to the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists whose annual dinner was an opportunity to lampoon political figures. George Murphy, the former actor and United States senator, knew Red Skelton, for whom Mr. Orben was a writer, and recommended him.Mr. Orben’s goal was to make Ford funny, or at least funnier than Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another speaker at the dinner. After listening to tapes of Ford’s delivery, Mr. Orben came up with a few zingers.“Ford was the surprise hit,” Mr. Orben recalled in 2008 in an oral history interview with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Among the Orben lines Ford delivered was the observation that he had no interest in the presidency, except that “on that long drive back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice within me saying, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’”Mr. Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, he hired Mr. Orben.A 1975 profile of President Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by Mr. Orben that he was going to give to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association. It included references to a prominent Democratic senator and an agriculture secretary known for his off-color remarks.“I have only one thing to say about a program that calls for me to follow Bob Hope,” he read. “Who arranged this? Scoop Jackson? It’s ridiculous. Bob Hope has enormous stage presence, superb comedy writing and the finest writers in the business. I’m standing here in a rented tuxedo — with three jokes from Earl Butz!”Mr. Orben cautioned the president not to pause when delivering a good one-liner.“Watch Hope,” he told him. “You’ll see he really punches through a line.”Mr. Orben fed Ford self-deprecating lines that suited his personality. One of those lines, also delivered in 1975, played off something Lyndon B. Johnson had famously said about him.“It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation,” he said. “And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”Mr. Orben became the director of the White House speechwriting staff in early 1976 and served through the end of the Ford administration.Mr. Orben at the White House with President Ford in 1976. He fed jokes to the president and coached him on how to deliver them.Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.John Mihalec, a speechwriter for President Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign, said it was not surprising that a comedy writer should excel at writing speeches.“Comedy writing is so precise — the setup and the punch line and everything has to be at exactly the right volume and in the right place,” Mr. Mihalec said in a phone interview. “It’s good training for the precision of presidential speechwriting.”Robert Orben was born on March 4, 1927, in the Bronx to Walter and Marie Orben. His father was in the hardware business. Bob was smitten by magic at an early age, and when he was 12 he and his brother, Walter, performed a mentalist act in the Catskill Mountains, “The Boy With the Radio Mind.” It flopped.After graduating from high school in 1943, he attended Drake Business School. He also started his short-lived career in magic.He was hired as a magic demonstrator in a shop in Manhattan, but he found his métier not in performing magic but in writing about magicians; he was impressed by one magician’s onstage comedic patter, which led him to publish a pamphlet, “The Encyclopedia of Patter,” in 1946.Over the next decade he would publish books like “Blue Ribbon Comedy,” “The Working Comedian’s Gag File,” “Tag-Lines,” “Bits, Boffs and Banter” and “The Emcee’s Handbook.” He published dozens of joke collections in his career.He began writing his comedy newsletter in 1958, and in the 1960s he wrote for “The Jack Paar Program” and then for “The Red Skelton Hour.”After coming to the attention of the groundbreaking Black comedian Dick Gregory, Mr. Orben said, he sent him a page of jokes every day. Another one of Mr. Orben’s clients was someone very different from Mr. Gregory: the conservative Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964.“One of the jokes that I wrote for Greg was talking about Goldwater,” Mr. Orben said in the Ford Presidential Foundation interview. “And as you know, the campaign slogan was, ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ And Greg used to say, ‘In your heart, you know he’s white.’”Mr. Orben never returned to the White House. But he kept writing joke books, among them “2500 Jokes to Start ’Em Laughing” (1979), “2100 Laughs for All Occasions” (1983) and “2000 Surefire Jokes for Speakers” (1986).He also continued to write his newsletter through 1989, as well as writing speeches for business executives and working as a consultant to IBM.Mr. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.In 1974, Mr. Orben was helping Vice President Ford rehearse his speech for the Gridiron Club dinner. One line, about Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California, worried Ford: “Governor Reagan does not dye his hair. Let’s just say he’s turning prematurely orange.”He asked Mr. Orben, “Do you think the governor would take offense at that?”“Now, I’m looking at this blockbuster joke of the year go up in smoke, but I think I gave him a fair, honest answer,” Mr. Orben said in the 2008 oral history interview. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. Vice President, Reagan has been in show business a good part of his life. He has gone through a thousand roasts and I’m sure he has heard dyed-hair jokes. So I really don’t think so.’”To Mr. Orben’s relief, Vice President Ford delivered the line. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Reckoning,’ by V (formerly Eve Ensler)

      by

      Writing now as V, the creator of “The Vagina Monologues” tackles racism, colonialism and sexual violence in a raw and free-associative collection.RECKONING, by V (formerly Eve Ensler)Way before #MeToo — not that it’s a contest — there was Eve Ensler, shouting all the way up into the cheap seats. Her breakthrough 1996 play, “The Vagina Monologues,” eventually performed by a rotating cast of celebrities, amplified stories of rape and abuse and helped de-taboo the female anatomy. Two years after that success she founded V-Day, which has raised piles of money to fight violence against women and girls around the world: Galentine, with gravitas.The writer identifies so strongly with the letter “V” that she has taken it as her new name, she announces in a characteristically raw and free-associative memoir, “Reckoning.” This is a gesture that seems — like most of what she has done in a long career — both performative and potent. “V” stands for “vagina,” “V” stands for “victory,” “V” stands for “peace” (we’ll forget about the canned vegetable drink and the old NBC series about aliens wearing human masks), and for Generation Y on social media, a “V” hand signal has become as popular as the thumbs up was for boomers, the former Ensler’s generation. “I am older now,” she laments. “Irrelevant in the cult/ure of youth, followers and TikTok.”“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,” the English poet Jenny Joseph wrote (to her eventual consternation), and on the back cover of “Reckoning” its rechristened author stands in a fuchsia caftan, raising arms in a V-shape to a rainbowed, sunsetted sky. A little cornball maybe, like a motivational desk calendar in a mall gift shop, but having survived incest, alcoholism, uterine cancer and the occasional mixed review, V, who will turn 70 in May, just Does. Not. Care. She has plenty of fuchsia left to give.For those familiar with Ensler’s work, much of “Reckoning” will feel like a jagged replay of her core stories; amply represented are transcripts of speeches she’s delivered at the conferences and forums where she’s become an honored guest, or pieces previously published in places like The Guardian. She processed her experience fighting cancer in a previous, more humorous memoir, “In the Body of the World” (2013), which was also made into a stage show, and the post-9/11 world in “Insecure at Last” (2006).Now she is examining a term that has become ubiquitous to the point of cliché in American discourse since the murder of George Floyd. For V, as before, the political is intensely personal.Her father’s horrific molestations, which began when she was 5, are further detailed; in what is perhaps the consummate therapy exercise, she expands on the apology she wrote on his behalf in another book. She reveals more of her mother’s complicity by indifference — “I needed her milky breasts. I got cigarette smoke instead” — and her posthumous bequeathal of a musty brown envelope (“Does pain have a smell?” V wonders) with a picture inside of the author as a baby, mysteriously bruised and bloodied. “I spent an entire childhood ducking, fists permanently raised like a boxer, quick but never fast enough, darting, panicked, frenetic, unbearably anxious,” she remembers. “My body was never my body.”In apparent refutation of the patriarchy V wants passionately to upend, “Reckoning” obeys no conventional chronology or form. It’s collaged together with concepts — the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for example, is linked to birds falling from the skies in 2020 — and exhibits a woman drawn inexorably, as if in repetition compulsion, to sites of even worse suffering than her youth. It’s a kind of Choose Your Own Abomination, from Covid to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to Congo, where the author has done humanitarian work and tells of murdered infants and children, repeated rape and even forced cannibalism.“How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?” she wonders in an essay that was originally written for Glamour. Contemplating the ISIS sex market, she imagines “crates of AK-47s, falling from the skies” and “breasted warriors rising in armies for life.”I think V underestimates herself; the jump-cut style she’s refined for decades is actually perfectly suited to people who get their news from TikTok, and her rhythmic singling out of particular words — which she calls “trains traveling through a lush countryside”— presaged hashtag activism.Along the long highway of her argument here, that readers should wake the heck up to injustice and suffering, poems pop up, like little rest stops. “Think of your luxuries, your cell phones/as corpses,” she writes of the mass rapes that occur near coltan mines, which are tapped to manufacture electronic devices. In a section that graphically recalls how AIDS ravaged friends and colleagues, she promises Richard Royal, a collaborator on a magazine called Central Park, that she will not write a poem about the budding trees; he hated pathetic fallacy and echoed Adorno that there is no poetry since Auschwitz. So after his death, in winking homage, she versifies instead his medical woes.“One is always failing at writing,” V acknowledges, in a sentiment any writer understands. And indeed “Reckoning” is, if not a failure, kind of a bloody mess, but defiantly, provocatively, maybe intentionally so. It exhorts readers to confront the worst and ugliest, pleads for progress and peace, and provokes admiration for its resilient, activist author. V shall overcome, someday.RECKONING | By V (formerly Eve Ensler) | Illustrated | 272 pp. | Bloomsbury | $28 More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected’ by Matthew Dennison

      by

      “Teller of the Unexpected,” an elegant new biography, sidesteps the ugly side of the children’s book author while capturing his grandiose, tragedy-specked life.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography, by Matthew DennisonMany young readers who love the prodigious oeuvre of Roald Dahl can nonetheless cite at least one thing within it that gives them the ick. For me it was Mr. Twit’s beard in “The Twits” (1980), so ungroomed it might contain “a piece of maggoty green cheese or a mouldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.” When millennial men in Brooklyn started growing big, bushy beards, my inner child dived under the table in horror.The ickiest thing about the life of Dahl, who died in 1990, was his well-documented antisemitism, capped by a 1983 comment about Jews to The New Statesman, in which he declared that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (That it’s custom for observant Jewish men to wear beards makes me even more uneasy about the demonized Mr. Twit.) The Dahl estate has posted an apology for his behavior on its website — linked discreetly under a Quentin Blake illustration of the author in a pink cardigan, looking beneficent and cuddly.Looking back, there were plenty of other oh-no-he-didn’t moments in the literature. The Oompa-Loompas of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” were originally African pygmies — Dahl called the actors who played them wearing orange makeup and green wigs in the 1971 movie “dirty old dwarfs.” And a rapey 1965 story for Playboy, “Bitch,” transformed its adult male protagonist into a “gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come,” as if James and his famous peach had grown up and gone horribly wrong.But none of this is lingered on in Matthew Dennison’s elegant but somewhat glancing new biography of Dahl, subtitled “Teller of the Unexpected.” His subject has sold more books around the world than is possible to count. Netflix bought The Roald Dahl Story Co. in 2021 for a reported $1 billion; “Matilda” alone is movie, musical and multiple memes. Roald Dahl — not mere author but high-yielding content farm — may simply be too big to cancel.His own story has already inspired two major biographies, from which Dennison draws: one authorized, by Donald Sturrock, who also edited Dahl’s letters to his beloved mother, Sofie Magdalene; one not, by Jeremy Treglown. All of these accounts stand as necessary supplements to Dahl’s lyrical but selectively truthful autobiographical writing; Dennison notes his tendency toward “mythomania.” He figured unfavorably in “As I Am,” the memoir by his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, whom he nursed aggressively (some would say sadistically) back to health after a stroke and then left for their friend, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland; and in a roman à clef by their daughter, Tessa. The first Mr. and Mrs. Dahl were rendered in softer focus mourning the death from measles encephalitis of Tessa’s older sister, at only 7, in the recent movie “To Olivia.”As Dennison reminds us, Roald — born in Wales, of Norwegian parentage — also lost a sister when she was 7, to appendicitis, and his father soon after. Backing into writing after a stint at the Asiatic Petroleum Company, his macabre voice and flights into fantasy were clearly engendered by brushes with death and violence.He had been caned at boarding school and, enlisting in the Royal Air Force, was burned and maimed when his Gloster Gladiator plane crashed in the Egyptian desert. After his baby son Theo’s skull was crushed after a taxi hit his pram, Dahl developed a cerebral shunt with a pediatric neurosurgeon and toymaker, like the Wonka figure he was simultaneously creating on the page. Then came Neal’s medical crisis, while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, and her rehabilitation, reenacted in a memorable 1981 TV movie, in which she was played by Glenda Jackson, and Roald by Dirk Bogarde. (Exploring Dahl’s personal and professional entanglements, you’ll tumble down an IMDB hole deeper than the giants’ in “The BFG.”)The author of previous books on Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Dennison recaps most of these extraordinary events without fuss, riffling carefully through letters, diaries and other volumes, from the looks of his endnotes, but conducting no fresh interviews; there are no new revelations that I can discern, but instead refined interpretation. From the Dahl legacy, chocolate and bile and personality sloshing messily in all directions, he molds a digestive biscuit.“Teller of the Unexpected” is maybe best capturing its 6-foot-5-plus subject as a swashbuckler: zooming around school grounds on a motorcycle or parachuting metaphorically into power centers like Washington, D.C., or Hollywood, where Dahl was courted by Walt Disney himself to develop a movie about gremlins — devilish creatures with horns and long tails blamed for R.A.F. mishaps. (Gremlins would go on to appear in plenty of movies, including a 1983 “Twilight Zone” sequence startrng the Dahl look-alike John Lithgow, but this would not turn out to be one of the writer’s many lucrative franchises.) Encouraged early in his career by C.S. Forester and Hemingway, he was notoriously abrasive to his editors and had affairs with older and married women, complaining to a friend of Clare Boothe Luce’s voracious sexual appetite. In Dennison’s telling, Dahl’s contradictions are beautifully illustrated but not particularly interrogated: He is here charitable but cruel; arrogant and desperate for acclaim; a self-declared man of action whose livelihood was language. He was an aesthete who cared deeply about his surroundings, early on collecting birds’ eggs in drawers lined with pink cotton wool and growing up to appreciate the finer things: painting, wine, the great composers. Long before it was fashionable, he made himself a man cave, a “writing hut” steps from his family cottage, whose name, Gipsy House, also offends 2023 ears.And I think he would have liked Dennison’s writing style, lush but clipped, with such phrases as “the ubiquity of caprice” and “buoyant with slang,” full of a reader’s zest. This is not a potted biography, but it is a politely pruned one, idealism washing over the ick.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography | By Matthew Dennison | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Pegasus Books | $27.95 More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      As ‘A Strange Loop’ Ends, Its Creator Looks Back on a ‘Supernova’

      by

      Michael R. Jackson discussed his Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical, which closed Sunday after a nine-month Broadway run.The musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize even before it got to Broadway, and then it won the Tony Award for best musical shortly after opening. But on Sunday, it closed after only a nine-month run.It has been a tough theater season all around — “A Strange Loop” was one of six shows that closed Sunday — as the industry continues to face audiences that are smaller than they were before the pandemic.But “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a gay, Black musical theater composer endeavors to write a show about a gay, Black musical theater composer, exited at a high point: During its final week, it pulled in $955,590 at the box office, which was the highest weekly gross of its run, and which set a new house record for the Lyceum Theater.The final night was a celebration: The playwright Michael R. Jackson, who began developing this show when he was 23 and who is now 41, got a standing ovation when he took his seat. There were more standing ovations for the show’s three Tony-nominated performers, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison.Minutes after the show ended, Jackson sat for an interview about the run, the closing and his next project, in a hideaway up a spiral staircase above the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Jackson and the director of “A Strange Loop,” Stephen Brackett, at the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThis show has been part of your life for 20 years. What was this night like for you?It was emotional, and it was a reminder of why I even began to write it. I wanted to fill an empty space that I saw, both in myself and in the world. And so to see that realized and to see everybody filling in that space in all these colorful ways that are even bolder and more beautiful than what I started with was so powerful and so affirming and so necessary.There’s so much anger and pain in the show. Was that anger and pain yours, and do you still feel it?I have access to it. It’s one of many of the colors in the crayon box. But it doesn’t motivate me. There was a time in my life where the anger was the thing that propelled me forward, but I think harnessing it and digging into it and questioning it and living with it and subverting it and making fun of it and then ultimately accepting it really helped me become the artist that was able to write it.The show won the Pulitzer and the Tony but is closing earlier than you would have wanted. Do you think of the show as successful or not?The more that I’ve reflected on it, it really makes sense to me that “A Strange Loop” would be a supernova that cuts across the firmament and then explodes. It’s not necessarily a piece of art that’s meant to fill a commercial need indefinitely, and I now can’t imagine how it would do that without compromising its artistic integrity. So I consider it to be a fantastic success because that’s how I define success. And I’ll always prioritize the artistic integrity over the commercial and the financial.Jackson embraces the actor Jason Veasey at the party after the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMany people imagine that your parents are like Usher’s parents, who can’t accept his homosexuality and are skeptical of his career ambitions. I gather that’s not the case.Everything in the show is a fiction, even if it’s drawn from life. Whatever experiences I had with my parents, I took them in as I saw them, and I remixed them into a story. That’s not my parents, which I think is one reason my parents are able to watch the show and see its success and cheer for me so loudly.Do your parents accept you both as gay and as a musical theater writer?They do.I gather the show has led you to meet some famous people.As a child, I adored Whoopi Goldberg in “The Color Purple” and “Soapdish” and “Sarafina!” I thought, when I heard she was coming, that when I met her I would see that lady from “The View.” But the minute I saw her eyes, she was that wonderful performer from my childhood, and that brilliant artist, who loved my show, and it was such a beautiful moment to meet her and to talk with her about the show. And then there were people who didn’t see the show, but who I got to meet as a result of it. I got to spend time with my idol, Tori Amos, and that was a life-changing experience.One person who didn’t come is Tyler Perry, who is mentioned repeatedly in the show, often critically.The interesting thing there is that he and I have a phone relationship. He called me right after I won the Pulitzer, and we text every once in a while, and we spoke recently. He’s probably one of the most complex relationships in my life with someone who I’ve never met. He has a kind of phobia around “A Strange Loop,” without having ever seen it, whereas I’ve seen most of his work. We’ll see where that relationship goes. Maybe it’ll go nowhere. I told him we need to sit down and have dinner.In the last year and a half there have been a record number of shows by Black writers on Broadway. Many have struggled at the box office, but so have a lot of other shows. What’s happening?We need to look at the larger economic realities that are happening in the world more broadly, and the ways those trickle down. A lot of people get very confused in thinking that theater and Broadway live in their own separate economy, outside of everything else, and it doesn’t.Jackson onstage with cast members at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThroughout its run, the show faced a number of cast absences. What do you think was going on?Coming out of the pandemic, there’s been illness, there’s been all kinds of things going on, and people are taking care of themselves. And I think that’s going to be a new normal: People taking care of themselves, and shows will have to adapt to that.One of the adaptations was that the weekend before the closing, you went on as Usher for three concert-style performances. What was that like?It was really cathartic and terrifying and thrilling. I went from having to live the role to having to play the role, and bringing those two halves together gave me tremendous closure. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had some daily self-loathings that come in and say “Maybe the show’s not that good,” but once I stepped into it, I was again reminded of its power and of its audacity and of its singularity, and I sent daily self-loathing packing.This show has a white director and a white lead producer, which I understand has led to some pushback.There’s this hunger to infantilize me, or any Black artist, for making the choice to collaborate with who they want to collaborate with, and always wanting to use race or gender or some identity marker as an assumed obstacle, when it may not be at all. I wish that people would respect the choices that artists make and not want to undermine them by assuming that there’s some sort of racial discord that is always waiting to tear people apart or animate their artistic decisions. I’m a grown man, and I stand behind my artistic choices.Your next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” starts previews Off Broadway in March. What is it about?It’s a soap opera fever dream about representation in storytelling.I know it’s prompted in part by your own affection for soap operas. If you were a soap opera character, who would it be?Sammy Jo Carrington. She was on “Dynasty,” played with great aplomb by Heather Locklear. She’s a troublemaker, but she always gets what she wants.Jaquel Spivey and John-Michael Lyles take their bows at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDo you see any thematic overlaps with “A Strange Loop”?In some ways I’ve been thinking of it as a companion piece. It’s not a sequel. It’s not direct. But there’s themes that I’ve been working through on “A Strange Loop” that I expound upon in a larger way in “White Girl in Danger,” if that makes any sense. You’ll have to see it.What’s next for “A Strange Loop”?I’m really hoping that people will pick it up and make their own interpretations of it. It’s a story that is like a jewel that has many facets, and you can hold it up to the light and you can see different things in it, depending on how you interpret it. So I really hope that regional theaters and colleges and universities and whoever else decide to take the risk on doing it, and really put their own stamp on it. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Robert Caro Relaxes by Listening to People Drum in Central Park

      by

      The biographer and subject of the documentary “Turn Every Page” talks about his loyalty to the Giants and the Knicks, Zooming with classmates and falling under the spell of Captain Hornblower.When the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb approached Robert Caro about a documentary on the relationship between him and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, Caro didn’t want to do it. He nonetheless found it insulting when Robert, Lizzie’s father, didn’t want to do it either.That’s just the nature of their relationship.But she persisted. And eventually Caro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and her father opened their inner sanctum for “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” about the dynamic, contentious half-century collaboration behind “The Power Broker,” the Zoom-bookshelf must-have about the urban planner Robert Moses, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” whose fifth volume Caro has been working on for about a decade.“Why was I reluctant?” Caro, 87, asked in a video call from his orderly West 69th Street office.“We’ve worked out a way of working together,” he said. “It’s two people who are, I suppose, both determined that they stand behind their ideals so firmly that they didn’t want the public to see what that was like.”What indeed. There was the “terrible situation” when Gottlieb, now 91, insisted that 350,000 words be excised from “The Power Broker,” including the chapter that Caro still thinks is about the best he’s written. The quarrels about semicolons that Gottlieb wanted removed and Caro felt should stay, that made Caro wonder, “Why am I doing this?” The editorial comments, so offensive to Caro, that in another age would have warranted a duel.“At the same time, I know that he’s going to support things that maybe nobody else would support,” Caro said, like allowing a three-book series to expand to five and finding him financing through the lean years. “To say that’s invaluable is to slight how wonderful it is to have someone like that behind you.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.From their initial meeting through their arguments, there was always this: “At the end, we’re both talking about the writing on the same level,” Caro said of the editor he now considers a friend. “That’s the reason I picked him in the first place.”Caro, in writing, expanded on his 10 cultural necessities, which include Trollope, typewriter ribbons and the Knicks. And the Giants. These are edited excerpts.1. The Photograph of the Very Moment My Wife and I Met For reasons too complicated to explain here, a photographer was following me around taking pictures of me at a dance at Princeton in 1956. Ina, whom I had never met, came dancing by with her date. “Let’s take a picture of me with her,” I told the photographer, and cut in on her. The photograph was taken, and it sits on a bookshelf in our apartment to this day. It is a bit cracked and fragile, but it is so precious to me that I am afraid to take it out of its frame so it can be restored.2. My Typewriters I write my books not on a computer but on a Smith Corona Electra 210. They stopped manufacturing them about 30 years ago, but I have accumulated some. You need spares because when a part breaks on the one you’re using, you have to cannibalize the part from another one. When I have a book coming out, and newspaper profiles mention that I use them, people send me their old ones that were stored away years ago. Thanks to this generosity, I had 14 of them three years ago. I’m down to 11 already.3. My Typewriter Ribbons Harder and harder to get. And I like cotton ribbons, not the customary nylon, very heavily inked. That way, the words you’re typing are bolder and blacker. When you’ve typed the same page over many times, the words stop having an impact, and having them bold and black helps.4. My Shack In the woods behind my house on Long Island — maybe 70 yards in — is a 15 by 20 foot garden shed with a high pointed roof. It sits on a foundation of cinder blocks. That is where I write in the summer. The walls and ceiling are bare unpainted wood, and there is nothing in the shed but my desk, a filing cabinet, two little bookshelves, an air-conditioner, and, of course, nailed to one wall, a corkboard. I bought it 23 years ago. When we arrive at the house at the beginning of each summer, I run over to the shack to see if there has been a leak in the roof during the winter, and there never has. Unless there is a special reason, I don’t bring my cellphone there. I pin the pages of my outline to the corkboard, and I’m ready to go. It is my favorite place on earth.5. The New York Giants Despite everything.6. The New York Knicks Despite everything.7. Zoom Sessions With Horace Mann Classmates For some years we did it in person, in a restaurant, but now one of us has moved to another city, so we Zoom. We do it every four or five weeks. We’ve known each other since we were 11 or 12. We’re older now.8. My First Edition of Trollope My publisher, Sonny Mehta, gave this to me as a gift to celebrate the occasion of my having been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a set of Trollope’s novels called the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.” I love Trollope and particularly those novels, as Sonny knew, and this set is the first collected edition of those works, published in 1887.9. My Bound Volumes of the Captain Hornblower Series When I was a boy, I was in the spell of those seven books. I would take them out of the public library branch at Broadway and 99th Street and sit down on the steps outside and start reading; I couldn’t wait until I got home. One year, Ina got me the perfect present. She had them bound in a naval blue binding with anchors and naval devices in gold on the spines. Every time I glance at my bookshelf and see them, I start remembering favorite scenes, sometimes finding to my surprise that I am reciting the scene, without having opened the book.10. Sundays in Central Park In the afternoons, after work, Ina and I walk in at the 69th Street entrance. Pedaling or jogging along the drive are human beings of every race and color. To the right is the Sheep Meadow, a vast space, really: 15 acres. And on summer Sundays, it seems like every square foot of those acres contains people — families, touch footballers, picnickers, etc., etc. To the left are people in immaculate white outfits. English lawn bowlers. Keep going: roller skaters gyrating gracefully or wildly to disco music. Keep going: seated on a bench, a line of drummers, generally 10 or 11 of them. Their drumming almost hypnotizes me; I can sit there for an hour listening to them. Somehow it drums the tension from writing right out of me. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

      by

      She had success with a play about abortion in 2001, and in 2015 wrote the libretto for the opera “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Bridgette A. Wimberly, a playwright whose first staged work, a drama about abortion, was an Off Broadway hit in 2001 with Ruby Dee in the lead role, and who later made a mark in opera, writing the libretto for the widely produced “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” died on Dec. 1 at a care center in the Bronx. She was 68.Her family said the cause was complications of strokes.Ms. Wimberly took up playwriting relatively late. In an interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2003, when one of her plays was being staged by the Cleveland Play House, she confessed that had someone told her a decade earlier that she would be a playwright, “I would have said that someday I’d be going to Mars, too.”Yet her first produced play, “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” staged at the Women’s Project Theater in Manhattan in April 2001, was so well received — The New York Times called her “one of the country’s most powerful chroniclers of the Black underclass” — that after its initial run ended it was brought back for an eight-week summer run at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village.The play was developed through the Cherry Lane Alternative mentorship project, in which Ms. Wimberly worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.Ms. Dee, then 76, played a character known only as Grandma who, as the story opens in a scene set in Memphis in 1968, is preparing to perform an illegal abortion on a teenager. The action later shifts to 1980, with Ms. Wimberly’s script exploring the consequences of that abortion and another one that Grandma is preparing to perform.“The play is smart enough to realize that there are many truths,” Anita Gates wrote in a review in The New York Times, “some of them contradictory.” In Newsday, Gordon Cox wrote, “‘Saint Lucy’s Eyes’ doesn’t boast much narrative momentum, but Wimberly shows an admirable talent for the unhurried development of her characters and for dialogue that consistently rings true.”Several more of Ms. Wimberly’s plays were produced over the next dozen years, and then, in 2014, she was offered the chance to take her writing in a different direction.Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss-born saxophonist and composer, had been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera to write an opera, and had landed on the pioneering jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker as a subject. He knew Ms. Wimberly through her brother, Michael, a percussionist with whom he had performed, and asked her to write the libretto of what would become “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”First, though, Ms. Wimberly had to overcome some personal reservations. An uncle had been a jazz saxophonist and had been somewhat obsessed with Parker. He had also begun using heroin, the drug that contributed to Parker’s death in 1955 at 34. Her uncle, 14 years younger than Parker, died at 35.“My grandmother hated Charlie Parker because she thought he got my uncle hooked on heroin,” Ms. Wimberly told The Times in 2015. “All my life, he was just a bad name.”Lawrence Brownlee, right, as Charlie Parker and Will Liverman as Dizzy Gillespie in Opera Philadelphia’s 2015 production of “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Dominic M. MercierBut she took the assignment and developed a certain respect for Parker. “Yardbird” was commissioned as a showcase for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who portrayed Parker when the opera had its premiere in Philadelphia in 2015. The work imagined the period immediately after Parker’s death in 1955, with the jazz great pondering, among other things, his wives and other people from his past as well as the large orchestral work that he was never able to write.“In the end, he didn’t write an orchestra piece, and we weren’t going to have him write a false one,” Ms. Wimberly told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015. “But I feel that what he passed on was that he inspired so many people to create, he opened up the doors, he set the birds free, the people free, the music free, like with what he did with the blues. What he did for jazz itself was allow others to do what he was not able to do in his lifetime.”Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the Philadelphia premiere for The Times, called the work “a 90-minute, swift-paced chamber opera with a pulsing, jazz-infused score.” The next year the opera had its New York premiere at the Apollo Theater, where Parker himself had played. It has since been staged by Seattle Opera, Arizona Opera and other companies, and will be performed in January by the New Orleans Opera.Mr. Schnyder, in a phone interview, said that, because it had a white, male, European composer, the piece needed a librettist who could bring an African American and a female sensibility.“It was a perfect match because she looked at the story of Charlie Parker from a really different perspective, focusing on his relationships with different women in his life,” he said. “That proved to be much more interesting than just focusing on the music.”Bridgette Angela Wimberly was born on Jan. 7, 1954, in Cleveland to John and Conchita (Smith) Wimberly. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in 1978 and later did graduate studies at Columbia.Ms. Wimberly, third from right, and other former members of the Cherry Lane Theater’s mentorship project at a 2014 event celebrating the project’s 16th anniversary.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesShe was trained as a medical researcher and worked for a time at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; later several of her plays, including “Saint Lucy’s Eyes” and “Forest City,” about Cleveland’s first integrated hospital, would touch on medical issues.She was interested in poetry and began sharing some of hers in a reading group that met in a Harlem theater where the conditions were not always ideal.“When it was cold, we froze,” she told The Times in 2001. “When it rained, we had to use our umbrellas inside. When it was hot, we burned up.”The poetry led her to dabble in theater. In 1997 she participated in a directing workshop at Lincoln Center. She wrote a scene for one exercise; others in the class, she recalled, told her, “You should finish this”; and the eventual result was “Saint Lucy’s Eyes.”Ms. Wimberly is survived by her mother; her brother; and a sister, Bernadette Scruggs.Seth Gordon, who teaches at the Helmerich School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma, directed the premiere of “Forest City” for the Cleveland Play House in 2003.“Bridgette gave voice to the stories of people who struggled quietly and with dignity, and to chapters of African American history that deserve attention,” he said by email. “She wrote with a striking poetic flair, and with a sense of grace that also defined her very generous spirit.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Super 8 Years’ Review: Annie Ernaux’s Celluloid Memories

      by

      In this wistful movie, the French writer and Nobel laureate revisits her life with help from her son, who’s also the director.The film’s images have faded, but the memories they’ve stirred up are vivid and full of feeling. In one shot, a tiny boy pushes a big wheelbarrow. In another, an old man and woman pose with the awkwardness of an earlier generation that never learned how to look at ease before any camera. And then there is the vision of the young woman at a desk, a pen resting in one hand, who gazes at the camera with a tight, unwelcoming smile. I like to think that she’s impatient to get back to the papers on the desk, to get back to her writing and to herself.The woman — the French writer Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October — doesn’t smile much in “The Super 8 Years,” a wistful memory movie that she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot. On Dec. 7, in her Nobel Prize lecture, Ernaux spoke about her roots in provincial France, her love of books and desire to write, a yearning that was thwarted by her position as a woman. “Married with two children,” she said, “a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, each day I moved further and further away from writing and my promise to avenge my people.”You see that woman now and again in “The Super 8 Years,” which was made before she became a Nobel laureate — what timing! Directed by Ernaux-Briot, and written and narrated by Ernaux, it consists of somewhat degraded-looking home movies from the early 1970s to the early ’80s. In the winter of 1972, as Ernaux explains in voice-over, she and her husband, Philippe Ernaux, bought a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera and projector. Years later, she and Ernaux-Briot revisited these fragile mementos and, with some deft editing, sound effects and music (the original material is silent), created this short, potent, quietly elegiac feature.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.For Ernaux and her husband, the Super 8 camera was “the ultimate desired object,” more coveted than a dishwasher or even a color television. “Film truly captured life and people,” Ernaux explains, though how it captured life and people was complicated. That’s evident the first time you see the younger Ernaux in “The Super 8 Years” entering a house while carrying two cardboard boxes. She’s wearing a dark, hooded coat and an awkward, inscrutable smile, as if she were ill at ease about being (caught) on camera. Or maybe she’s embarrassed by (or for) Philippe, who, as Ernaux explains, shot most of the home movies.Ernaux writes about this image and its complicated smile in her exquisite 2008 memoir “The Years,” which works as a companion piece to “The Super 8 Years.” In her book, Ernaux asserts that there is “something ascetic and sad, or disenchanted” about her younger self’s expression in this scene, adding that her smile lacks spontaneity. I instead see shyness or just self-consciousness, especially in how she looks at the camera only to cast her eyes downward. But this isn’t my memory, and as Ernaux writes in “The Years,” one of the greatest ways to foster self-knowledge is “a person’s ability to discern how they view the past.”For a time, Super 8 was a way for many to view a present that would soon be the past. Introduced by Kodak in 1965, the film format was a significant player in the moving-image revolution that swept the 20th century, turning amateurs (who could afford it) into moviemakers and everyday life into a global celluloid archive. This archival impulse dovetails with Ernaux’s approach in “The Years,” which is partly organized around photos of her from different eras that prompt cascades of words about her life, her family, its town, the region, the country and beyond. A similar impulse shapes “The Super 8 Years,” in which Ernaux insistently tethers images of her former domestic life, with its gentle and agonized ebb and flow, to larger world affairs, to questions of feminism and other liberation struggles.Instructively for a memoir, Ernaux almost entirely avoids using “I” in “The Years,” preferring “we” and often referring to herself as “she.” In “The Super 8 Years,” the “we” usually seems to mean her family, and she switches pronouns freely as if to suggest the mutability of identity. In one section about a vacation in Morocco, Ernaux says, “I thought of the finished manuscript in my desk drawer.” Soon, though, over images from Germany, she refers to her younger self like a friend. “She is 33 and doesn’t yet know,” Ernaux says, that the manuscript she’s submitted “will be published as ‘Cleaned Out,’” referring to her 1974 debut novel.At one point in “The Super 8 Years,” Ernaux ponders what story is being told in this “parade of images” as the movie cuts from a child to her and then to exploding fireworks. Words were needed, she continues, to give meaning to these “snippets of family life invisibly recorded inside the history of the era.” This reminds me of her observation in “The Years” that memory never stops. “It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.” Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.The Super 8 YearsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Michael Feingold, Forceful Drama Critic, Dies at 77

      by

      For decades he wrote about theater in The Village Voice, but he also was a dramaturge and a Tony-nominated translator.Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.Daniel Pardo, one of his executors, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said Mr. Feingold had had a longstanding heart condition.Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even if his target was a venerable veteran.He once dismissed Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music is often said to be derivative, with this line: “Webber’s music isn’t so painful to hear, if you don’t mind its being so soiled from previous use.”In 2003 he assessed Neil Simon’s last produced play, “Rose’s Dilemma,” saying that it “doesn’t mean anything to anybody and doesn’t reveal any understanding, on its author’s part, of how plays are written.” Mr. Simon at that point had won multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Theatrical trends did not impress Mr. Feingold either, especially Broadway’s late-20th-century fixation on big-budget musicals that, as he once put it, were about “large, mechanized objects” rather than characters. His 1991 takedown of Cameron Mackintosh’s production of “Miss Saigon,” which ran on Broadway for 10 years and was famed for its onstage helicopter, was part of theatrical lore.“Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get ‘Miss Saigon,’ which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over,” Mr. Feingold wrote. “After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished, without regard for their size, history or landmark status.”He went on to list other things that needed to be done away with, including the staff of The New York Times (where the critic Frank Rich had praised the show). Also, he said, “Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments; this year’s Pulitzer Prize judges in drama could be used for the job.” Those judges had, weeks earlier, given the drama Pulitzer to Mr. Simon for “Lost in Yonkers.”But Mr. Feingold was not a critic who would just sit and snipe. He was active in creating for the theater himself, even while writing criticism for The Voice.He translated numerous European works for the American stage, especially those of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His adaptation of the Brecht-Weill collaboration “Happy End” even made Broadway in 1977, with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the cast. He shared Tony nominations for the book and for the score. He earned another Broadway credit in 1989 for his translation of another Brecht-Weill work, “Threepenny Opera.” His translation earned some favorable comments, but critics trashed the show, which featured the rock star Sting.Mr. Feingold spent time as literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theater, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., roles in which he would read scripts and often help shape ones that were accepted for production. The theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, in his book “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), recounted the role played by Mr. Feingold in propelling the career of August Wilson.In 1982, when Mr. Wilson was still largely unknown, he brought his play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where Mr. Feingold was doing dramaturgy. The first reading of the piece, directed by William Partlan, lasted more than four hours. Mr. Partlan and Mr. Feingold talked Mr. Wilson through the necessary trimming.“Cutting was a torment to him,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview for the book. “Cutting was always a terrible struggle for August because every word was blood.”Another reading was held, and this time the play was 90 minutes shorter. Mr. Rich, the Times critic, was in the audience and was impressed. His enthusiastic write-up in The Times jump-started Mr. Wilson’s career.“While there’s nothing novel about rich language in the theater,” Mr. Rich wrote, “it is quite unusual in 1982 to find a playwright who is willing to stake his claim to the stage not with stories or moral platitudes, but with the beauty and meaning of torrents of words.”Mr. Feingold wrote for The Voice from 1971 to 2013, when he became a victim of downsizing (though he would return later in a limited capacity). Robert Simonson, reporting on that dismissal in Playbill, said that Mr. Feingold’s writing was known for “erudition and understanding of theater history, both ancient and modern, and how current plays fit in with that continuum.”Mr. Feingold, right, in 2015 at the Obie Awards with, from left, the costume designer William Ivey Long, the performer Lea DeLaria and Heather Hitchens, the president of the American Theater Wing. Mr. Feingold was often a judge for the Obies, and he received one of his own in 2020.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for American Theater WingMr. Feingold was born on May 5, 1945, in Chicago. His mother, Elsie (Silver) Feingold, taught piano, and his father, Bernard, managed a tannery.Michael grew up in Chicago and Highland Park, Ill., where the family moved when he was in high school. The Highland Park high school he attended had a drama club where, as he put it in an interview with the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project in 2018, “I did some inept acting and some slightly less inept directing.”He became further interested in theater at Columbia University, where he earned a degree in English and comparative literature in 1966. He had taken a senior seminar from Robert Brustein, who was then known primarily for his theater criticism, and in the fall of 1965 asked if Mr. Brustein would write him a recommendation to support his application to the Yale School of Drama. After Christmas break, he asked if Mr. Brustein had remembered to do so.“He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’” Mr. Feingold said in the oral history. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Read The Times tomorrow.’”The next day the newspaper reported that Mr. Brustein had just been named dean of Yale Drama.“So he wrote the recommendation and then he accepted it,” Mr. Feingold said, “feeling that he should take his own advice.”Mr. Feingold had wanted to study playwriting at Yale, and he did, but Mr. Brustein steered him toward criticism as well. He began writing for The Voice, and in 1983 he was named its chief drama critic.Mr. Feingold, who lived in Manhattan and who leaves no immediate survivors, was often a judge for the Obie Awards, which recognize Off Broadway work. In 2020 he received one of his own, a special citation recognizing “his extraordinary service to the theater.”He was, above all, a champion of theater that is bold and challenging. In 1993 he was the editor of “Grove New American Theater,” a play collection that included work by Karen Finley, Mac Wellman and other cutting-edge writers.In the introduction to that book, he lamented the cyclical nature of American theater: a period of innovation, then stagnation, repeated endlessly, stunting growth.“If the theater doesn’t grow up, the American public doesn’t grow up either,” he wrote. “Instead, it gets hotted up, every 20 years or so, over the same issues — sex, politics and religion — the three matters that art, according to some strangely permanent lunatic fringe of American opinion, must never be allowed to deal with, at least not in any open manner.” More