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      in Television

      Ashley Nicole Black Is Competing Against Herself for an Emmy

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      The comedian was nominated twice in the same Emmy category for her television writing. She’s just getting started.At first, Ashley Nicole Black didn’t get why people kept sending her the meme of Spider-Man pointing at an identical Spider-Man, an image often used to joke about situations in which two incredibly similar people face off.But when someone Photoshopped Ms. Black’s face onto both Spider-Mans, it clicked. The 2021 Emmy Awards nominations had just been announced, and Ms. Black, 36, had been nominated twice in the same category.She was competing against herself.Ms. Black was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series for “The Amber Ruffin Show” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” Two other people have been nominated twice in this category in the past five years: John Mulaney and Seth Meyers, both in 2019.I CANT WITH YALL 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/YE7gBnqjw0— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) July 14, 2021
      “I feel like that kid still, who’s on the side of the playground, who nobody’s noticed,” Ms. Black said in a recent video interview. But that’s just impostor syndrome talking. Ms. Black has been nominated for an Emmy eight times: twice for writing for a variety special and six times for writing for a variety series. She also won once, in 2017, for her work on “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner” with Samantha Bee.Ms. Black has written for many critically acclaimed series and shows, including “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” “Ted Lasso” and “Bless This Mess.” Although “A Black Lady Sketch Show” is Ms. Black’s first time as a series regular, she was a correspondent on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” and acted in “Drunk History” and the 2014 film “An American Education.”Robin Thede, the creator of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO — which was also nominated this year as an Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, and twice for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (Yvette Nicole Brown and Issa Rae) — sees Ms. Black as “a force of nature and of comedy.”“I have been lucky enough to work with her as a writer and performer and know firsthand how ridiculously good she is at both,” Ms. Thede wrote in an email. “She’s truly a powerhouse who will leave an indelible mark on this industry.”Ms. Black described herself as “someone who’s observing what’s going on in the world, and trying to reflect it back to people.” “To me,” she said, “that’s art.”She is from a family of musicians, so singing in an ensemble, she said — whether it was musical theater or show choir — meant learning to breathe with others and sound like one voice. This set her up for the moment she found improv comedy, because she already knew how to collaborate — and how not to steal a scene. “I was, I think, picking up all the pieces I needed to get where I was going,” she said.After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007, she began a Ph.D. program in performance studies at Northwestern University. She hated it and was anxious all the time, she said, so her parents bought her an improv class at the Second City comedy club in nearby Chicago to blow off steam.When she took a comedy writing class there, a teacher pulled her aside to let her know she was a writer.“People had been telling me, ‘You should try this. You should try this,’ and I had been uncomfortably trying it,” Ms. Black said. “But ‘you’re a writer’? I was like, ‘yes.’ I completely shifted my view of myself to be a writer first. And that was when everything started to fall into place.”Chicago, Ms. Black said, is the best place in the world to learn comedy writing. There’s an “emotionality” she found in Chicago that she values in many of her collaborators, including Ms. Bee and Ms. Ruffin.“What attracted me to Sam and Amber is that they’re admitting to you that they live in the world,” she said. “And they might be upset about it, and they might be angry about it, and they might cry about it on camera, because they’re not removed from it. They’re a part of it.”This is the “good stuff” of comedy, in Ms. Black’s eyes: The stuff that happens when characters have feelings, and when they’re flawed. People who have been to therapy and have their lives together aren’t nearly as fun to embody, she said. A good example of a character who embodies that tension: Ashley’s perfectionistic alter ego on “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”In the show, Ms. Black plays a woman (also named Ashley) who is a bossy know-it-all. She is trying for total control, and in the process, irritating her friends. “I am not like that and take great pains not to be,” Ms. Black said, “but it’s so much fun to play.”“All day, you have anxiety. You’re trying to make sure everyone around you is comfortable,” she said of real life. “You’re thinking about what you say and what you do and how it affects people. And then, when you get to play those characters who aren’t that way, it’s so freeing.”Ms. Black said she tends to be quiet and a little shy, and that she used to worry that not being “on” all the time might disappoint people. “But I’ve sort of released feeling bad about that,” she said, “because I just try to be present and have honest experiences.”During the pandemic, those experiences included spending time with her family in Los Angeles, being a hardworking dog mom to Gordi the Sato and watching every Marvel movie ever made. “I just wanted to watch good guys win some things,” she said.Right now she’s evaluating what she wants to do next and what percentage of her time she wants to spend on each thing. Ms. Ruffin wrote in an email about Ms. Black, “she’s gone from ‘a writer’ to ‘theeeee writer.’” But Ms. Black is still hoping for a 70-30 or 60-40 writing to acting split, she said.For now, “It really made me so happy that people — oh my gosh, I’m getting emotional — care what I’m doing,” she said. “So I’m just really grateful that anybody noticed that I was working so hard.” More

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      in Music

      Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, Rock Journalist, Dies at 75

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      She took the music seriously at a time when not many writers did. Among her books was a memoir of her life with one of its biggest stars, Jim Morrison.Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, who wrote about rock when music journalists were just beginning to take it seriously, and through her work met Jim Morrison, frontman of the Doors, with whom she said she had a marriage of sorts, died on July 23. She was 75.Her death was announced on the Facebook page of Lizard Queen Press, a publishing enterprise that she founded and that published her recent books. The announcement did not give a cause or say where she died.In the late 1960s, originally as Patricia Kennely (she later changed the spelling of her last name and, in 1979, added “Morrison”), she was a writer for and then editor of Jazz & Pop, a small but well-regarded magazine. She interviewed Morrison in 1969, and when they shook hands there was “a visible shower of bright blue sparks flying in all directions,” she wrote in a 1992 memoir, “Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison.” They soon became romantically involved.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison practiced Celtic paganism; on her Facebook page she described herself as “Author, ex-rock critic, Dame Templar, Celtic witch, ex-go-go dancer, Lizard Queen. Not in that order.” (“Lizard Queen” was a reference to a line from a Jim Morrison poem, in which he wrote, “I am the Lizard King.”) In 1970 she and Morrison exchanged vows in a “handfasting ceremony” that involved drops of their own blood.She said her book “Strange Days” (also the title of the Doors’ second album, from 1967) was a response to the 1991 movie “The Doors.” Oliver Stone, who directed the film, had consulted her on it, and she even played the Wicca priestess who presides over the handfasting. (Val Kilmer played Morrison; Kathleen Quinlan played Ms. Kennealy-Morrison.) But she said she was outraged by the film when she saw it at a screening, feeling that it trivialized the ceremony, did not give enough prominence to her relationship with Morrison, and misrepresented him.Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison and Kathleen Quinlan as Ms. Kennealy-Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991). Ms. Kennealy was not a fan of the film.Alamy“If Oliver had been at that screening, we would never have had to worry about his movie ‘JFK,’” she told The Daily Mail of London in 1992, referring to Mr. Stone’s next film. “I would have killed him.”Critics said the book was just an attempt to gain attention and usurp the place in the Morrison mythos of Pamela Courson, another of his love interests, who called herself his common-law wife. Morrison died in 1971 in Paris at 27; Ms. Courson, who was with him at the time, died a few years later, also at 27. Drugs were suspected in both deaths.In her book, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison blamed Ms. Courson for Morrison’s death, in a bathtub in his apartment. “She fed heroin to the man she claimed to love, leaving him dying while she nodded out,” she wrote.In late October 2010, on the eve of Samhain, a Celtic religious festival that inspired Halloween, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison spoke to The Daily News in New York about her plans for marking the occasion.“I will place a light in the window to guide the souls in the night,” she said. “I will have food, pork and apples in Celtic tradition for the ancestors from the other world. I will talk to my beloved dead, including my father and grandmother. It will be a joyful and deeply holy occasion. Jim usually shows up. And when he does, I will celebrate Samhain, the new Celtic year, with my husband.”Patricia Kennely was born on March 4, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. In 1963 she enrolled at St. Bonaventure University, a Franciscan institution in Allegany, N.Y., to study journalism. That’s where she discovered the Celtic religion.“They had an amazing library on the subject at St. Bonaventure’s, I guess operating on the principle of ‘Know thy enemy,’” she told The Daily News.She transferred to Harpur College in Binghamton, N.Y., after two years and earned an English degree in 1967. While there she discovered the political activism that was brewing on campuses across the nation. She also discovered rock music, and one 1966 album in particular.“It was called ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,’” she wrote in “Rock Chick: A Girl and Her Music,” a 2013 compilation of her Jazz & Pop writings. “And so did I.”While in college she earned extra money as a go-go dancer at nightclubs.“Scorning the white boots and pastel-microdress go-go-girl template that was prevalent across the land, I went Dark Side,” she wrote, “wearing a black leather-look fringed bikini, black fishnets and black knee-high boots.”“I looked like Zorro’s kinky girlfriend,” she added.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison said her book “Strange Days” was a response to Oliver Stone’s movie. Critics said it was an attempt to gain attention and usurp another love interest’s place in the Morrison mythos.After graduating, she landed a job as an editorial assistant at Crowell-Collier & Macmillan Publishing in Manhattan. She saw the first cover of Jazz & Pop magazine on a newsstand in 1967 (it had been founded as Jazz magazine in 1962 by Pauline Rivelli, who in 1967 broadened it into rock coverage and renamed it) and began lobbying for a job there. She was hired as an editorial assistant in early 1968. By the end of that year she had been named editor. The magazine was one of several that came along about the same time that took the music more seriously than the fanzines of the era. (Rolling Stone was founded in 1967.)Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s pieces set the tone for Jazz & Pop. In the April 1970 issue, she wrote about the influence that religions of various kinds were having on music. She thought, for instance, that the band Coven was invoking black magic in dangerous ways. “Black magic is NOT merely an interesting new wrinkle for the PR crowd to play with, or a hot new ad copy slant,” she cautioned.Three months later she blasted rock fans as not being selective enough and not applying their intellects to what they were hearing.“How many excruciating guitar solos, how many organ solos that were so boring your legs started to hurt, how many meaningless vocal improvisations, have we all sat through?” she wrote. “And at the conclusions of all of these various monuments to rock ego, how many standing ovations have we bestowed?”Steve Hochman, a music journalist who was also a friend, wrote of her influence in a Facebook post noting her death.“As a writer and editor of Jazz & Pop magazine,” he wrote, “she helped establish the then-embryonic realm at a time when few thought of pop music as worthy of such critical attention.”Jazz & Pop went out of business in 1971.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s survivors include two brothers, Kevin and Timothy Kennely. A sister, Regina Kennely, died in March.Beginning in the mid-1980s, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison wrote a series of fantasy novels, collectively known as “The Keltiad,” which drew on Celtic legends and mythology. More recently, under the name Patricia Morrison, she wrote mysteries with musical themes, drawing on her time in the rock world. Among the titles are “Scareway to Heaven: Murder at the Fillmore East” and “Daydream Bereaver: Murder on the Good Ship Rock & Roll.” More

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      in Television

      Cecily Strong Is Starting a New Conversation

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      The “Saturday Night Live” star shares the story of her pandemic experience and a life touched by grief in “This Will All Be Over Soon.”RHINEBECK, N.Y. — It’s hard to think of Cecily Strong and not be reminded of the effusive television characters she plays. If you’re a “Saturday Night Live” fan, you immediately conjure up her exuberant performance as a soused Jeanine Pirro crooning “My Way” while she dunks herself in a tank of wine. Or if you’ve been watching her on the Apple TV+ musical comedy “Schmigadoon!,” you think of her belting out modern-day show tunes praising the pleasures of corn pudding or smooching with a suitor. More

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      in Theater

      Onstage, the Pen Is Usually Duller Than the Sword

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      Plays about writers, including “Mr. Fullerton,” a new potboiler probing Edith Wharton’s love life, too often undermine the real brilliance of their subjects.GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Writing is boring. I should know. I just spent a half-hour revising that first sentence.Playwrights nevertheless like to write about writers, perhaps because of their shared tolerance for tedium. Yet beyond that, what is there really to say? Anything that fleshes out the person beneath the words tends to diminish the artistry; anything that sticks to the unfiltered words is dull.Or so it seems to me from shows made about writers I treasure. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, E.M. Forster, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have all been put through the dramatic wringer recently, many of them emerging as wet rags.The latest to become something of a drip in the process is Edith Wharton. To be fair, it’s clear that in writing “Mr. Fullerton” — a play about Wharton, Henry James and their mutual inamorato, Morton Fullerton — Anne Undeland was as besotted as I am by the steely author of classic novels including “The Age of Innocence,” “Ethan Frome” and “The House of Mirth.”It’s also true that Wharton had an eventful existence away from her pens and notebooks, including the extramarital affair with Undeland’s title character and the quasi-pornography she secretly wrote later. But from the play — and I might argue from any play — you could never guess that a brilliant person was living Wharton’s brilliant life.“Mr. Fullerton,” which was given its premiere last week by Great Barrington Public Theater, introduces the novelist, in her mid-40s, as a buttoned-up spinster; though she has been married for two decades, her marriage is sexless, childless and nearly loveless. After being seduced in 1907 by Fullerton, a somewhat younger and caddish journalist, she opens herself to passion while, the play implies, closing herself to art. The first thing we see in the Great Barrington production, which runs through Sunday, is the Paris apartment Wharton (Dana M. Harrison) rents from the Vanderbilts; the writing desk is under a dust cover but the big brass bed gleams with promise.I will not attempt to prosecute a play deliberately written as a fantasia for its factual improbabilities. (That said: I can’t really see Wharton flipping pages of fresh prose all over the room for her maid, Posy, to pick up and paginate — even if she was known to leave papers to be sorted by her secretary.) My problem with “Mr. Fullerton” has to do with its fictional improbabilities. Fullerton, in real life apparently a magnetic, equal opportunity Lothario — James called him “magically tactile” — is written here (and played by Marcus Kearns accordingly) as more of a puppy than a hound, making campy references to Wharton by her childhood name, Pussy Jones, and proleptically quoting Mae West. When he ghosts her, you’re relieved.Harrison, with Glenn Barrett as Henry James, in “Mr. Fullerton.”Tristan Wilson/Great Barrington Public TheaterWell, no one cares about Fullerton anyway, but the portraits of Wharton and James (Glenn Barrett) as giggling, snarking, gobsmacked adolescents undermine their enormous stature as writers, which the play nevertheless depends on as the foundation of its interest. I wouldn’t have minded that with James, whose fussbudget pomposity is always worth some deflation.But keep your satirical hands off my Edith! Her achievement is in many ways greater than James’s, given the hostility to women writers of her vintage; certainly, she outsold him. More than that, her actual feelings about the Fullerton affair speak to a far greater seriousness and acuity than the play can dramatize. Though she vacillated on whether her brief experience of physical passion helped her as a human being — she wrote that Fullerton woke her “from a long lethargy” in which “all one side of me was asleep” but also that her life was “better before” she knew him — there’s no confusion from a literary standpoint. Coming out of the affair she produced “Ethan Frome.”That superlatively grim novel provides “Mr. Fullerton” with one of its best moments, which the playwright sets up perfectly. When a newspaper reports that a high school girl back home has been killed in a sledding accident, Posy (Myka Plunkett) immediately bursts into tears and explains that the girl is the daughter who “could have been” hers. Instead, she was the child of a man Posy once loved but rejected because being in service to Wharton offered a better life.Though Posy is an invention, readers of “Ethan Frome” will immediately recognize the story of the sledding accident from the climax of the novel. In this, Undeland and “Mr. Fullerton” get something very right about writing: the ruthlessness of a writer’s thievery, robbing reality (even someone else’s) for material.It’s that ruthlessness that is otherwise missing here, and also in other basically sympathetic portraits of literary artists. In Sarah Ruhl’s play “Dear Elizabeth,” based on Bishop’s correspondence with Lowell, the poets simply read at each other, which is sometimes lovely but almost never dramatic. In Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” E.M. Forster is reduced to a gentle grandpa to new generations of gay men. The opposite problem undoes Poe in several plays about him, including one called “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace”: He is so exhaustingly mad that you cannot imagine his having the spare energy to find even one rhyme for “nevermore,” let alone 18.Reggie D. White as James Baldwin and Crystal Dickinson as Nikki Giovanni in an episode of “Lessons in Survival,” a series of historical re-enactments produced by the Vineyard Theater.via The Vineyard TheaterIn all these works, the actors, designers and directors have conspired to support the portraiture with approximately accurate accents, diction, costumes and hairstyles. “Mr. Fullerton” also has the amusing verisimilitude of being produced, on the campus of Bard College at Simon’s Rock here, just 13 miles south of Wharton’s grand home, the Mount, in Lenox. (A line about the late arrival of spring in the Berkshires received a knowing chuckle the night I attended.) But in the end, all those details are unimportant, and maybe even distracting — or at least Mr. Fullerton’s mustache was.I say that thinking that the best portrait of writers I’ve seen in a theatrical production recently involved no such imitation. The opposite, really. In “Lessons in Survival,” a series of historical re-enactments conceived and performed by the multigenerational members of the Commissary collective and produced by the Vineyard Theater last year, there was no attempt whatever to match the physical characteristics of the actors, or even their gender, with those of the writers they played: Baldwin, Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou and others. Nor was sonic verisimilitude attempted; it didn’t need to be because the actors lip-synced the writers’ recorded words while embodying them in their expressions and postures.It was that disjuncture, that refusal to locate genius within the limitations of the body, that made the episodes so effective and convincing. Leaving affairs and drinking problems out of the picture, they honored what really makes writers dramatic: their muscly ideas, duking it out in words.Mr. FullertonThrough Sunday at the Daniel Arts Center, Great Barrington, Mass. greatbarringtonpublictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      in Movies

      Pulitzer-Winning Critic Wesley Morris Captured the Moment

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      For his piercing insights on race and culture, Wesley Morris recently received his second Pulitzer Prize. But he won over colleagues long before that.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Wesley Morris was ready for his medal.In 2012, he had just won his first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, as a writer for The Boston Globe, and was at the ceremony at Columbia University with his mother. But when he wondered out loud where he could pick up the award, he got a surprise.“Oh, sweetie,” Tracy K. Smith, that year’s poetry winner, told him. “We don’t get a medal, only the public service winner gets that. We get a paperweight.” (OK, she was exaggerating a little.)“My mom was like, ‘Oh my God, Wesley,’” he said, laughing.It was the rare oversight for Mr. Morris, a deep thinker and New York Times critic at large who recently won his second Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the only person to receive that award twice.He was recognized for an ambitious body of work over the past year on race and culture that included not only incisive essays about the racial justice movement and the impact of cellphone videos on Black Americans, but poignant personal pieces like a Times Magazine story about how growing a mustache was connected to his sense of Blackness.“I love important, weighty ideas,” he said, though he added that he also likes considering topics that are lighthearted and frivolous.Gilbert Cruz, The Times’s culture editor, said Mr. Morris’s pieces stood out for their scope and accessibility.“He has a unique ability to step back, look across the cultural and social landscape and speak to us in a way that makes it seem as if we’re engaged in a conversation,” Mr. Cruz said. “A funny, smart, sometimes emotional and always riveting conversation.”Sia Michel, The Times’s deputy culture editor who has edited Mr. Morris’s work for three years, similarly praised both Mr. Morris’s intellect and his common touch. “He has an imposing sense of critical authority and moral authority but always invites the reader in,” she said.Mr. Morris said his dreams of becoming a critic dated back to when he received an assignment in eighth grade: Write a report after either reading Howard Fast’s 1961 novel “April Morning” or watching the TV movie version of it. He decided to do both, then wrote a scathing critical review.“You didn’t really do what I asked you to do,” he recalls his teacher, John Kozempel, telling him. “But you did do a thing that exists in the world. It’s called criticism, and this is a good example of it.”Of course, not everyone can write elegant essays that educate even when they excoriate, and which provide an entry point to a conversation rather than closing a door to opposing views. But when Mr. Morris begins to put words on a page, the ideas flow.“I don’t know how I feel about a lot of things until I sit down to write about them,” he said. “That’s my journey as a writer — to figure out where my brain, heart and moral compass are with respect to whatever I’m writing about.”When Mr. Morris files a story, Ms. Michel said, she always knows she’ll get four things: surprising pop cultural and historical connections; a brilliant thesis; at least one “breathtaking” passage that reads like poetry; and a memorable, revised-to-perfection ending.“He always reworks his last graph until it slays,” she said.Mr. Morris said his biggest challenge is that he has so many ideas, he never has time to pursue all of them.“I can be paralyzed by my glut of ideas,” he said, “which often means I wait to write things until the last minute.” He added that he’s been known to write 3,000-word pieces on a same-day deadline.Yet somehow, amid writing for the daily paper, the Sunday Arts & Leisure section and The Times Magazine, as well as co-hosting the weekly culture podcast “Still Processing,” Mr. Morris manages to make time for everyone, his podcast co-host, Jenna Wortham, said.When Mr. Morris won his first Pulitzer in 2012, Mx. Wortham, who uses she/they pronouns, was a newly hired Business reporter for The Times who had been assigned to write a story about him. They left a voice mail message and sent an email to Mr. Morris.Thinking he would be too busy to respond right away, Mx. Wortham went out for coffee but after returning found a long, thoughtful voice mail from Mr. Morris with “more information than I needed.”“It left the deepest impression on me,” Mx. Wortham said. “And I remember thinking I would strive to be someone who always made time for other reporters.”Their friendship, which began six years ago, has only blossomed and deepened since then, Mx. Wortham said.“I’ve seen Wesley give a barefoot unhoused man money for a pair of shoes and absolutely demolish a dance floor with equal amounts of grace,” she said. “There’s no one like him, and we are all so lucky to exist in this iteration of life alongside him.”Although Mr. Morris’s profile is much higher now, he said he intended to respond to every one of the hundreds of congratulatory emails, texts, calls and Twitter messages he received after this year’s win — a goal that’s still in progress.“I’m still not done,” he said recently. “Even with strangers, if someone took a second out of their life to congratulate me for this, it’s important to me to say thank you.” More

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      in Movies

      Carol Easton, Biographer of Arts Figures, Dies at 87

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      Curious about creativity, she chronicled the lives of Agnes de Mille, Jacqueline du Pré, Samuel Goldwyn and Stan Kenton.Carol Easton, whose curiosity about creativity inspired her to write biographies of four prominent figures in the arts — Stan Kenton, Samuel Goldwyn, Jacqueline du Pré and Agnes de Mille — died on June 17 at her home in Venice, Calif. She was 87. More

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      in Movies

      Clare Peploe, Film Director Who Jumbled Genres, Dies at 79

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      She contributed to the movies of her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, but occasionally made her own, including “Triumph of Love.”Clare Peploe, a director and screenwriter who liked to merge genres in her own films, and who also made significant contributions to some of the movies of her husband, the celebrated filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, died on June 24 in Rome. She was 79.The cause was cancer, said Alessandra Bracaglia, her assistant.As a director, Ms. Peploe made a quick impact with her first effort, a comic short called “Couples and Robbers,” about newlyweds who commit a robbery, which she wrote with Ernie Eban; it was nominated for the short-subject Oscar in 1981.“In this comedy-thriller she has demonstrated that in her very first film she is a talent to be reckoned with,” Richard Roud wrote in The Guardian Weekly when the film played at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982. “The casting and direction of actors is superb. If someone doesn’t finance a feature film by her, it will be a great shame.”Ms. Peploe, though, found financing to be a struggle, especially since her films defied easy categorization, and when she did set a project in motion, she worked at a deliberate pace. As a result, her oeuvre was limited. Her first feature, “High Season,” wasn’t released until 1987, and there would be only two others, “Rough Magic” in 1995 and “Triumph of Love” in 2001.She had a knack for attracting well-known actors to her projects. “High Season,” a comic indictment of gauche tourists, starred Jacqueline Bisset, Irene Papas and Kenneth Branagh, among others. “Rough Magic” featured Bridget Fonda as a magician’s assistant on the run in Mexico and Russell Crowe as a man hired to track her down.“Triumph of Love,” her most well-received feature, was her take on an 18th-century stage comedy by Pierre de Marivaux and had a cast that included Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley, Fiona Shaw and Rachael Stirling.Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in a scene from “Triumph of Love,” Ms. Peploe’s most well-received feature.Sundance ChannelAll these films were hard to pigeonhole. “High Season” was both a commentary on what tourism does to an ancient Greek village and a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-style romantic fantasy. “Rough Magic,” The Independent of Britain said, “veers from Saturday morning serial-style thrills to Buñuelian surrealism to light noir, with dashes of Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks here and there.”“Clare Peploe’s films as director are distinguished by an uncommon combination of madcap narrative intricacy, sophisticated battles of the sexes, picturesque locations and artistic self-consciousness,” Susan Felleman, a professor of art history and film and media studies at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design, said by email. “They’re screwball comedies for the art-house set.”When she wasn’t directing films, Ms. Peploe was sometimes writing them. Her first film credit was as one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about rebellious American youths, “Zabriskie Point” (1970), although she played down her contribution, describing her role as “the umpteenth assistant” on the film.“I wasn’t really a writer on it, I was a researcher on it,” she said. (She was useful because she was fluent in English.) She shared screenwriting credit on Mr. Bertolucci’s films “Luna” in 1979 and “Besieged” in 1998.When she was directing, though, she generally banned her famous husband from the set.“He makes people nervous,” she told The Independent in 1996.Clare Frances Katherine Peploe was born on Oct. 20, 1941, in Tanga, in northeastern Tanzania. Her father, William, was a British civil servant who became an art dealer and director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, and her mother, Clotilde (Brewster) Peploe, was an artist.She had an exotic early life: growing up and attending schools in Kenya, London, Italy and Paris, picking up several languages and acquiring a worldly outlook. Living in a variety of cultures, she told The Record of New Jersey in 1997, “you learn to see everything — an historical event, a war, a wedding ceremony, whatever — in so many different ways.”Ms. Peploe in 2001 with her husband, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. She made significant contributions to a number of his movies.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe met Mr. Antonioni in the late 1960s and worked with him on “Zabriskie Point.” She first met Mr. Bertolucci in 1970 at a screening of his film “The Spider’s Stratagem,” and they met several times afterward, bonding over their shared love of Jean-Luc Godard. She served as a second assistant director on “1900,” Mr. Bertolucci’s 1976 drama of class struggle, and before the end of the decade they had married.Ms. Peploe said that, counterintuitively, being associated with her husband didn’t help her with the nuts-and-bolts aspects of her own filmmaking like obtaining financing.“In fact,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1988, “I recently realized that many of the problems I encountered had to do with being married to him. I naïvely assumed that people didn’t care about that sort of thing and just saw me as being me, but I now see there’s a certain envy you encounter, an attitude of ‘she doesn’t need our help — look who she’s married to.’”Creatively, however, they complemented each other, she said.“Over the years Bernardo often asked me to help him with ideas for his films, and I always surprised myself with the cinematic, Bertolucci-like ideas I’d come up with,” she said. “He had a sort of Svengali effect on me and has been instrumental in helping me come into my own as a filmmaker.”Mr. Bertolucci died in 2018. Ms. Peploe, who lived in Rome, is survived by a brother, Mark Peploe, who shared a screenwriting Oscar with Mr. Bertolucci for the 1987 film “The Last Emperor.” More

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      in Television

      Delia Fiallo, Master of the Telenovela, Is Dead at 96

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      She wrote more than 40 telenovelas, the American soap opera’s addictive cousin, and was one of the most celebrated names in Spanish-language television.Delia Fiallo, the Cuban-born television writer known throughout Latin America as the “mother of the telenovela,” the addictively melodramatic Spanish-language cousin to the American soap opera, died on Tuesday at her home in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 96.Her daughter Delia Betancourt confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Every fan of the genre knew what to expect: Gypsy maidens. Wicked stepmothers. Wealthy, handsome male heirs. Amnesia, fictional illnesses, mistaken identities, misplaced babies. And at the center of it all, a young and beautiful woman who was often an orphan, but always from a humble background, and with whom the well-born young man would fall madly in love — though the couple would be thwarted through all sorts of swirling Shakespearean complications (murder, faked pregnancies, love triangles, those conniving stepmothers) before coming together in a happy ending, 200 or so episodes later. (American soap operas go on forever, with an unending cast of characters. The telenovela works itself out in under a year, with a finite cast of characters. Mostly, they end happily.)“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo told Variety in 1996. “A couple meet, fall in love, suffer obstacles in being able to fulfill that love and at the end reach happiness.” She added, “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Ms. Fiallo was a master of that operatic, weepy form. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, she wrote more than 40 telenovelas, most of which were produced in Venezuela and then adapted (often by Ms. Fiallo herself) and televised all over the world (and continued to be shown long after her last original drama, a blockbuster called “Cristal,” first aired in 1985). In Bosnia, pirated versions of “Kassandra” — which she adapted from a show originally called “Peregrina,” about a Gypsy maiden who falls in love with, well, you know — were so popular that when the series went off the air in 1998 it caused an international incident. The State Department intervened, pleading with the distributor of the series to donate all 150 episodes to maintain the peace in a small Bosnian town riven by political factions but united over its love of the show.“I want my ‘Kassandra,’” The New York Times reported at the time, “became a complaint of many ordinary Bosnians.”While Ms. Fiallo’s Cinderella stories were global successes, it was in the Americas that they resonated the most.In the United States, three generations of Latin American families often wept together in a nightly ritual that’s hard to imagine today. “You watched what your family watched, every day for weeks and months,” said Ana Sofía Peláez, the Cuban American writer and activist, whose fluency in Spanish came in large part from sobbing with her Cuban-born grandfather through years of Fiallo dramas like “Cristal,” “Esmerelda” and “Topacio.” She recalled both of them losing it when Luis (the wealthy stepson of the head of a modeling agency that is the plot pivot of “Cristal”) sang “Mi Vida Eres Tu” — “You Are My Life” — to his beloved Cristal (the orphaned model whose ruthless boss turns out to be her biological mother).“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo once said. “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Leila Macor/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“My grandfather and I were raised in different countries,” Ms. Pelaez said. “We had different frames of reference. But we found the same things romantic, and we were transported by those stories together.“We were all in,” she continued. “It was a shared experience that I didn’t appreciate at the time but I value so much today. It was a pan-Latin experience. Her shows were Venezuelan. But my parents would say proudly, ‘Of course, pero es Cubana’: She is a Cuban writer.”Delia Fiallo was born on July 4, 1924, in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, the only child of Felix Fiallo de la Cruz, a doctor, and Maria Ruiz. The family moved often, from small country town to small country town, and Delia, shy and bookish, began writing stories to combat her loneliness.She majored in philosophy at the University of Havana, and in 1948, the year she graduated, won a prestigious literary prize for one of her short stories. She edited a magazine for the Cuban Ministry of Education, worked in public relations and wrote radionovelas — the precursor to the telenovelas that arrived with television in Cuba in the 1950s — all at the same time, before turning to the form that would make her famous.In Cuba before the revolution, that form flourished thanks to the sponsorship of companies like Colgate-Palmolive, said June Carolyn Erlick, the editor of ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, and the author of “Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context,” (2018). Writers like Ms. Fiallo honed its central themes: “Love, sex, death, the usual.”Ms. Fiallo met her future husband, Bernardo Pascual, the director of a radio station and a television actor, when they were both working in radio. They married in 1952. (Their daughter Delia said it was love at first sight, just like in one of her stories: “She told herself, ‘That man is going to be mine, ese hombre va a ser mío.’”) After the couple moved to Miami in 1966, Mr. Pascual worked in construction and then started a company that built parking garages. “The family joke is that in exile Bernardo passed from the arts to the concrete,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1987.Ms. Fiallo first tried to sell her scripts in Puerto Rico, for $15 an episode, but Venezuelan broadcasters offered her four times as much; to prepare, she immersed herself in the culture of Venezuela, a country she barely knew, by reading novels and interviewing Venezuelan exchange students in Miami to learn the local idioms.She took her themes from the news, but also from romance classics like “Wuthering Heights.” She often tackled social issues — rape, divorce, addiction — which meant often butting heads with the censors. A late-1960s drama, “Rosario,” a sympathetic exploration of the trauma of divorce, was suspended for a time by the Venezuelan government. In 1984, the government threatened to cancel “Leonela” if Ms. Fiallo didn’t kill off one of its characters, a woman who was a drug addict.“Some friends say I could have chosen a more literary genre,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald. “But this is what I feel most comfortable with. You can touch more people this way than with any book. Novelas are full of emotions, and emotions are the common denominator of humanity.”In the late 1980s, as many as 100 million viewers in the Americas and Europe tuned in to watch episodes of Ms. Fiallo’s shows. Her fans were devoted to her characters and their odysseys, and they often called her at home — her phone number was listed — to discuss plot lines. One fan, claiming she did not have long to live, begged Ms. Fiallo to reveal one story’s ending.“The fans are passionate about the characters,” she said in 1987. “I would be embarrassed to have my number not listed. I don’t think it would be quite fair.”In addition to her daughter Ms. Betancourt, Ms. Fiallo is survived by three other daughters, Jacqueline Gonzalez, Maria Monzon and Diana Cuevas; a son, Bernardo Pascual; 13 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Pascual died in 2019.“I consider myself successful if I can deliver to viewers a world of fantasy, even if only for an hour,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1993. “Everyone is young at heart. Illusions don’t fade with time, and it is beautiful to rekindle a love affair, even if it’s not your own.” More