Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Beyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in Comics

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in ComicsA bumper crop of graphic novels and comic books melds African culture and science fiction, with influences as wide-ranging as space travel, Caribbean folklore and Janelle Monáe.“Hardears,” set on a mythical version of Barbados, is among the titles coming from Megascope this year.Credit…Abrams BooksFeb. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it struck the author and illustrator John Jennings as so unprecedented, such a break from American history, that it was like an event from some far-flung future.“Before then, the only time you would see a president who was Black was in a science-fiction movie,” he said in a phone interview last month. Jennings compared it to the sorts of imaginative leaps one finds in the most forward-thinking works categorized as “Afrofuturist.”This year, fans of Afrofuturism will see a bumper crop of comics and graphic novels, including the first offerings of a new imprint devoted to Black speculative fiction and reissues of Afrofuturist titles from comic-book houses like DC and Dark Horse.Afrofuturism, whether in novels, films or music, imagines worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect. The term was coined by the writer Mark Dery in 1993 and has since been applied to the novels of Octavia Butler (“Kindred”), the musical stylings of the jazz composer Sun Ra and more recently films such as “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” which presented a gorgeously rendered vision of the technologically advanced, vibranium-powered nation of Wakanda.“Afrofuturism isn’t new,” said Ytasha L. Womack, a cultural critic and the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” a primer and history of the movement and aesthetic. “But the plethora of comics and graphic novels that are available is certainly a new experience.”Graphic novels published in January included “After the Rain,” an adaptation of a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, and “Infinitum,” a tale of African kings and space battles by the New York-based artist Tim Fielder.For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, the artist Tim Fielder created Aja Oba, an African king cursed with eternal life. Credit…Harper CollinsThis month marks the long-awaited return of the “Black Panther” comics written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which the National Book Award-winning author began in 2016, as well as the latest installment of “Far Sector,” a series written by N.K. Jemisin and inspired by the actor and musician Janelle Monáe, about the first Black woman to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps.Even older works are getting new looks. Black superheroes from the ’90s-era comic company Milestone — including Icon, a space alien who crash lands on Earth in 1839 and takes the form of an African-American man — are finding new readers on DC Universe Infinite, a subscription service that launched in January. Meanwhile, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse plans to release the comics of the Nigerian-born writer Roye Okupe, who previously self-published them, including his Afrofuturistic series “E.X.O.,” a superhero tale set in 2025 Nigeria.Comics are particularly well suited for Afrofuturism, Womack said. Many Afrofuturistic narratives are nonlinear, something that comics, with their ability to move and stack panels to play with notions of time, can convey. Comic artists can also employ visual elements such as images from the Black Arts Movement, or figures from Yoruba and Igbo mythology, in ways that aren’t available to prose writers.“Afrofuturism is constantly moving into the future and back into the past, even with the visual references they’re making,” Womack said.John Jennings is the founder and curator of Megascope, a publishing imprint “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.”Credit…Jamil Baldwin for The New York Times“After the Rain” marks the launch of Megascope, an imprint of the publisher Abrams “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.” Its advisory board includes the scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr.“Afrofuturism is the catchall,” Jennings, the imprint’s founder and curator, said. “It’s really Black speculative fiction. But that’s sort of a mouthful. I just don’t want people to think that Megascope is only Afrofuturist. We’re dropping horror books, crime fiction, historical fiction.”Okorafor, the author of the imprint’s leadoff title, “After the Rain,” considers her work “Africanfuturism,” a term she coined to describe a subcategory of science fiction similar to Afrofuturism, but more deeply rooted in African culture and history than in the African-American experience. “Nnedi is a very hot author right now,” Jennings said, “so I thought it would be a great kickoff.”In April, the imprint will publish “Hardears,” a fantasy-adventure story set on Jouvert Island, a version of Barbados populated by mythical creatures — giant “moongazers” and shape-shifting “soucouyants” — drawn from Caribbean folklore. “Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.“After the Rain,” adapted from a short story by Nnedi Okorafor, was published in January.Credit…Abrams BooksA professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has devoted much of his career to Afrofuturism, writing scholarly works about it and leading panels devoted to Afrofuturist comics. He has worked with the artist Stacey Robinson, as the duo “Black Kirby,” to reimagine the work of the Marvel artist Jack Kirby through an African-American lens: for example, “The Unkillable Buck,” based on “The Incredible Hulk.”To Jennings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an Afrofuturist. “The mountaintop that Dr. King spoke about does not exist in this universe,” Jennings said. “It’s an imaginary construct of what the future could be.”For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, Fielder created Aja Oba, a powerful African king cursed with eternal life. Oba travels from Africa to the United States and beyond, witnessing Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the rise of American slavery, the civil rights movement and (spoiler alert) the death of our solar system.Despite the fleet of spaceships on the cover, much of Fielder’s narrative is set in history. “Afrofuturists do not have the privilege, like general futurists, of just looking forward constantly,” Fielder said. “There’s so much of our work that was ignored, discarded or destroyed that, as an Afrofuturist, I’m forced to work on projects that are based in the past.”“Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.Credit…Abrams BooksFielder’s immortal hero is also a response to the longstanding cinematic trope of Black men dying before the final credits roll. One of his strongest childhood memories was watching the Black hero’s untimely end in the 1968 horror movie “Night of the Living Dead.” “The white guys are all losing it, and it’s the one brother who keeps his wits about him,” he said. “And then he’s killed. I never forgot that.”“Infinitum” has a distinctly cinematic feel — Fielder’s influences include the “Star Wars” artist Ralph McQuarrie — and the shared references and influences between comic books and movies are likely to continue. After Coates restarts (and ends, after three issues) his run on “Black Panther,” Marvel Studios is expected to release “Black Panther II,” while over at Disney, producers are working with the comic-book company Kugali on “Iwaju,” an animated series set in a futuristic Lagos.Perhaps more than anything, Afrofuturist comics are a means of staking a racially inclusive claim on a multitude of futures. “And just because it’s about a Black subject doesn’t mean it’s just for Black people,” Jennings said. “I love Daredevil, but Marvel would never say: ‘Oh, you know what? This is just for white, poor Irish-American people.’ These stories are for everyone.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Allan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAllan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85He won Emmys for his work on that show and helped create the spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Lou Grant.” Among his other creations was the cereal mascot Cap’n Crunch.Allan Burns in 2016. He was involved in the creation of TV shows ranging from the acclaimed “Mary Tyler Moore Show” to the much-mocked “My Mother the Car.”Credit…Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesFeb. 3, 2021Updated 4:52 p.m. ETAllan Burns, a leading television writer in the 1970s and ’80s who helped create the groundbreaking hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its dramatic spinoff, “Lou Grant,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.His son Matthew said the causes were Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.“Allan’s range was like nobody’s,” James L. Brooks, his partner in creating Ms. Moore’s series, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think you ever get an absurdist, a legitimate humorist and a feeling person in one package.”In 1969, Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks were working on “Room 222,” a comedy-drama series set in a Los Angeles high school, when Grant Tinker, Ms. Moore’s husband, asked them to create a series for her. Their first concept was that she play a divorced woman who worked as a reporter for a gossip columnist.“We ran it past Mary and Grant and they absolutely loved it,” Mr. Burns said in an interview for the Television Academy in 2004.But Mr. Burns said that during a meeting he and Mr. Brooks attended at CBS headquarters in Manhattan, a research executive told them there were four things American audiences “won’t tolerate”: New Yorkers, Jews, divorced people and men with mustaches.“What do you do with that?” Mr. Burns said in the interview. “We were dismissed.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks quickly turned the series’ setting into a TV newsroom and Ms. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, into a woman who had never been married and had just ended a long-term relationship.Ed Asner and Mary Tyler Moore in the first episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which Mr. Burns created with James L. Brooks. They later developed the spinoff series “Lou Grant” for Mr. Asner.Credit…CBS, via Getty Images“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — set largely at WJM-TV in Minneapolis and in Mary Richards’s apartment — was praised for Ms. Moore’s portrayal of a single working woman, and for its writing. The series ran from 1970 to 1977 and won 29 Emmy Awards; Mr. Burns shared in five of them.“Allan could channel the character of Mary Richards,” Mr. Brooks said. “He gave us a sense of her by the way he talked about her.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks twice spun off shows from “Mary Tyler Moore” for MTM Enterprises, Ms. Moore and Mr. Tinker’s production company. “Rhoda” followed the ups and downs of Mary’s best friend after she moved back to New York. In “Lou Grant,” which began in 1977, Mary Richards’s tough-yet-comedic newsroom boss, played by Ed Asner, became the determined city editor of a Los Angeles newspaper.In the late 1970s, Mr. Burns started branching out into films. He wrote the screenplay for “A Little Romance” (1979), starring Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and for “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days” (1979), a prequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). He also wrote and directed “Just Between Friends” (1986), with Ms. Moore, Ted Danson and Christine Lahti. It was his only film as a director.Mr. Burns directing Christine Lahti in “Just Between Friends” (1986), which he wrote and directed. It was his only film as a director.Credit…Orion, via Everett CollectionAnd he continued to develop sitcoms. In the 1980s, he created or helped create three short-lived comedy series: “The Duck Factory,” which starred Jim Carrey as an animator; “Eisenhower and Lutz” about a shiftless lawyer played by Scott Bakula, and “FM,” set in a public radio station.In his review of “Eisenhower and Lutz,” John O’Connor of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Burns, “He cannot only whip up generous batches of clever dialogue but is also extremely clever with staging bits of comic business.”Allan Pennington Burns was born on May 18, 1935, in Baltimore. His father, Donald, was a lawyer. His mother, Paulene (Dobbling) Burns, was a homemaker who became a secretary after her husband died when Allan was 9. Three years after that, she and Allan moved to Hawaii, where his older brother, Donald Jr., was stationed at Pearl Harbor.While attending Punahou School in Honolulu, Allan contributed cartoons to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He used his drawing talent while studying architecture at the University of Oregon. He dropped out during his sophomore year in 1956 and moved to Los Angeles, where he was hired as a page at NBC and later became a story analyst. After being laid off, he began writing and illustrating greeting cards while trying to find work at an animation studio.He found a job at Jay Ward Productions, which produced “Rocky and His Friends,” the satirical cartoon series about the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (more formally, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose). Mr. Burns appeared unannounced at Mr. Ward’s office on Sunset Boulevard, toting his portfolio of greeting cards. Mr. Ward leafed through the cards, chuckled and quickly hired him.Mr. Burns wrote for the moose, the squirrel and other characters on “The Bullwinkle Show.” He also developed the character Cap’n Crunch for Quaker Oats, which had hired Mr. Ward’s company to create a mascot for a new cereal. After he and his colleague Chris Hayward left Mr. Ward in 1963, they created “My Mother the Car,” a sitcom that starred Jerry Van Dyke, with Ann Sothern as the voice of his mother, who has been reincarnated as a vintage Porter automobile and speaks only to him. A notable flop considered by some to be one of TV’s worst shows, it was canceled after one season.In 1967 and 1968, Mr. Burns and Mr. Hayward worked on the only season of the sitcom “He & She,” in which the married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss played a comic book artist and his wife, a social worker. Mr. Burns shared his first Emmy with Mr. Hayward for one episode.After “He & She” was canceled, its producer, Leonard Stern, brought them to the espionage parody, “Get Smart,” another series he produced, then in its fourth season. “Room 222” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” soon followed.In addition to his son Matthew, Mr. Burns is survived by his wife, Joan (Bailey) Burns; another son, Eric; and five grandchildren.Mr. Asner, who worked for Mr. Burns on both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant,” recalled him in an interview as a gentlemanly boss.“He was a guide and mentor, and I loved him,” he said. “Jim Brooks was the bouncing-off-the-walls part of the team, and Allan was the stabilizer.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      The Many Lives of Steven Yeun

      by

      Credit…Emily Shur for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexFeatureThe Many Lives of Steven YeunIn his new film, “Minari,” the “Walking Dead” star explores the complex layers of the immigrant experience.Credit…Emily Shur for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETListen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.When I was growing up in the ’90s, the only Asian-American writer I knew was Amy Tan. Her thick paperbacks, “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” were on everyone’s bookshelves. I, of course, hated Amy Tan because I considered myself a hard-edged thinker. Her books, which were mostly about industrious, dignified immigrants, embodied a type of minstrelsy in which the Asian-American writer gives the white audience bits of tossed-off Oriental wisdom — “Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?” — or a few parables about gold and black tigers or what have you. If I had been asked back then what I planned to write about, I might have gestured toward the Beatniks or cutting down trees in the woods or heroin or jazz, but the only concrete pledge I could have given you was, “I will not write ‘The Joy Luck Club.’”In graduate school, while in an M.F.A. program, I would walk to the bookstore and wander among the fiction shelves, wondering where my novel would fit. This was embarrassing and vain, and although I was certainly both those things, I stage-managed my reverie with some measure of self-aware detachment, performing at being a broke, unpublished author fantasizing about his bright future. In a similar spirit, I would look around for Asian authors who were not Amy Tan. There were also Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-Rae Lee, but I saw few others. I knew I was supposed to have some feelings about the dearth of published Asian authors, but nothing really came to me. Maybe there just weren’t many Asian people trying to write novels, or maybe they were bad at it. The tug-of-war between my intellect, which was telling me that I might be in for some rough times in publishing, and my American ambition, which was feeding me some version of a sneaker ad — Just Do It — was never much of a contest. The world would yield to me.I was 23 and typing out a novel about a young Korean man who had a brother with Down syndrome whom he cast in various public-service announcements about tolerance. There were parts that were supposed to be a direct parody of “Life Goes On,” the ABC drama that starred Chris Burke as Corky Thatcher. I thought this was very edgy and funny, but I also mixed in occasional ruminations about Koreanness and the burdens of an immigrant childhood. My workshop professor at the time was known as a leader in the field of experimental fiction. One day, he said something about my work that has stuck with me. “This novel will almost certainly be published because it’s about a life we don’t hear about too often,” I recall him saying. “But what we need to do is figure out a way to elevate it so that it’s not just a telling of the way things are for a certain type of person.”Declarations like these were quite common in the workshop. Delivered with great gravity, they drew a line between those of us who had serious literary ambitions and those who just wanted to tell our life stories to the world for a six-figure advance and readings at the 92nd Street Y.I took this professor’s class because I wanted to write difficult, literary fiction. I also considered myself a tough student who could handle criticism. But this particular comment collapsed a barrier in my brain, one that had held back conflicting, shameful thoughts about identity. On a pragmatic level, I was happy to hear that my novel would be published. (It wasn’t.) But his dismissal derailed my confidence that I would break free from Chang-Rae Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. If this bizarre book I had written could be regarded only as an “immigrant narrative,” would I ever be anything other than a race writer? Did I have any control over how the world would see me and my work?I felt humiliated, of course, but he raised some issues that I have spent the last 20 years thinking about. What, exactly, is a typical immigrant story? And is the transcription of a person’s traumas and “truth” — which in literary terms usually means explaining all the nuances of the immigrant struggle to a presumed white, upper-middle-class audience — the only thing that qualifies as “literature”? And if not, what then clears the bar? And if you consciously try to write the exact sort of work that might appeal to serious literary types, aren’t you just tap dancing for those who never wanted you around in the first place? I never bothered asking this professor, because I was too embarrassed. He means nothing to me now, but since that class, I have never really been able to put these spiraling questions to rest.Please believe me. I am not trying to identify some incident of bias or racism that took place in my creative-writing program. This professor didn’t mean to be cruel with his comment, and his intentions, I’m sure, were to try to better my writing. Nor do I wish to make a point about white privilege and access to Mount Parnassus. I only want to chart the neuroses that result from realizing that your work will almost certainly be read as an outgrowth of your identity, along with the rage, doubt and ambition this brings on.The problem is that the anxieties never go away. Every capitulation to the “white gaze” comes with shame; every stand you take for authenticity triggers its own questions about what constitutes authenticity. And once you feel comfortable with the integrity of your work, someone says something that flips everything around, and you’re right back staring at your own lying face.Credit…Emily Shur for The New York TimesSteven Yeun has a beautiful Zoom face. His laptop camera points slightly up toward his chin, which accents his sharp cheekbones and delicate nose. My face, by comparison, looks like a russet potato with eye slits scooped out with a spoon. By a visual code most Koreans know, Yeun’s pale skin and delicate features connote cosmopolitanism, while my dark, mushier features evoke the rural peasantry. This isn’t a problem, but I did catch myself staring disapprovingly at my image for an embarrassing amount of time during our calls.This was early December, and we were supposed to talk about Yeun’s latest starring role, in “Minari,” a film written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung about a Korean immigrant family that takes up farming in rural Arkansas. Yeun lives in Los Angeles, and the county had just issued a blanket stay-at-home order. We talked about the usual things: his early moves, from Seoul to Saskatchewan to suburban Michigan; his parents, who were shopkeepers in Detroit; his American childhood, which was mostly spent in the Korean church; his acting career, which now includes a seven-year run on “The Walking Dead” — one of the most popular shows in the history of TV — and starring roles in a pair of films by Korean directors, “Okja” and the critically lauded “Burning.”But our conversations kept circling back to this prismatic neurosis, in which you worry about every version of how other people see you. Yeun had been deep in it, especially for this particular role. One of his concerns was the Korean accent he had put on for the film.Yeun with Yeri Han in “Minari” (2020).Credit…Josh Ethan Johnson/A24“I’ll be honest with you,” Yeun said. “I’m still justifying the accent in my own head. I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of people giving me [expletive] about it, saying, ‘That’s not what a Korean dad accent sounds like.’ But the accent I did is how I remember my dad talking. It’s nuanced; it’s a little different, and it has its own twang and inflections. At the start, I kept trying to mimic the standard Korean ahjussi accent, and it felt fraudulent. And I’m OK with it, because this was the accent I chose for this character as opposed to servicing this collective understanding of what a Korean accent is traditionally supposed to sound like.”There’s something I’ve realized over the past decade of writing about race and Asian immigrants. Not everybody cares about our obsessing over belonging and not-belonging and displacement. That presents a problem for writers, artists and filmmakers: Do you take what is in some ways the easiest path and simply cast Asian actors in traditional roles without talking about that choice — a form of colorblindness that merely puts Asian faces on white archetypes? Or do you try your best to document the neuroses because you feel them within yourself — and while you understand that there are certainly worse forms of oppression in this country, there’s some personal or, perhaps, therapeutic value in expressing yourself in front of an audience? But who is the audience? And is there any real value to the narcissistic self-expression of an upwardly mobile immigrant who has nothing else to worry about?There are no easy answers to these questions, but I don’t see them as the invented problems of the immigrant figure who ascends to international stardom, or even to a regular gig writing about Asian-Americans. Should we ignore them because nobody else really cares about them?“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you,” Yeun said.And so we talked through that. To start, there’s the whole setup behind the article you’re reading right now, which involves me, a Korean-American writer, assigned to profile a Korean-American actor with the idea that I may be able to excavate some deep, epigenetic code we share and present it to the audience of The New York Times Magazine.“Weird question, but do you even want to talk about all this Korean stuff?” I asked Yeun.“What do you mean?” he replied earnestly. There’s a practiced calm in Yeun’s voice when he speaks, but underlying it is a manic, yet ultimately charming, energy. Almost like a lid trying its very best to stay on top of a bubbling pot.“There must be some part of you that saw a Korean writer was going to be writing a profile of you and knew where all this was going. That we’d be talking about Korean stuff. Isn’t there some part of you that wants to not just be seen as some Korean guy? Like maybe you’d rather just talk about the craft of acting or something?”“Well, as long as we can talk about this stuff on a real level, I don’t mind it,” he said, providing a neat answer to an annoying question. “I get what you’re worried about, though. There’s been some times when an Asian person comes to talk to me or photographs me and I can just tell that all they’re trying to do is fit into some conception of what they think white audiences want out of an Asian-on-Asian thing.” He added: “And that’s even more offensive!”“Horrible,” I said. “I don’t even know if I want to ask you about this stuff. Not because it’s too sensitive, but I also feel compelled to ask you to do it because of the implied nature of the assignment: Hey, Korean, tell us about another Korean.”“I think it’ll be OK,” Yeun said. “Or at least it’ll be therapeutic in some way.”Our talks, I admit, were therapeutic, at least for me. Yeun and I are both immigrants, born in Seoul and then raised in mostly white neighborhoods. But Yeun, in many ways, is much more Korean than I. His father, the second of five sons, worked as an architect in Seoul. During a business trip to Minnesota, he fell in love with the natural beauty of the area and the idea of owning land there, after which he began making preparations to move to that part of the world. At the time, the mayor of Regina, Saskatchewan, had started a program to recruit Korean immigrants. Yeun’s father sold his house in Seoul — homeownership was an uncommon luxury back then — gathered up his family and eventually got on a plane.Yeun, lower right.Credit…From Steven Yeun“I got to show you this photo from back then,” Yeun told me at the start of one of our talks. It’s a kindergarten class picture from the Ruth M. Buck School in Regina. Yeun, his hair in a bowl cut, is seated at the end of the front row, wearing fresh white shoes and a decidedly immigrant-kid sweatshirt. All the other kids line up shoulder to shoulder. Yeun sits a few inches away from his classmates.“You look miserable,” I said.“Totally!” he said. We had been discussing his family’s moves. After a year in Regina, Yeun’s family relocated to Taylor, Mich., where an uncle had opened a clothing store. This uncle started out in America as a runner for cargo ships — when they docked in New York City, he ran on board and offered to fetch things offshore for the crew. At some point, he began selling jeans out of his car on the side. One day, he said to his wife, while holding a map of the United States in front of them, “Wherever my spit goes is where we’ll move.”The spit landed on Michigan, and that’s where the uncle started his small business. The Yeun family followed him there. Young Steven was placed in a new school. He spoke no English and had to be dragged into the classroom. “My parents say that I came home one day and asked them what does ‘don’t cry’ mean,” Yeun said. “So they think those were the first English words I learned because I was hearing it at school all the time.”Yeun remembers being a happy kid in Korea who wandered around shopping centers and stole away from home to play video games in a nearby arcade. “The family put me on this pedestal,” Yeun said. “I was a cute kid with pale skin and light brown hair, and everyone was proud of that. Then we moved to Regina, and I went from feeling that attention to all of a sudden coming to the middle of nowhere and being pulled kicking and screaming into kindergarten.“I’ve looked at this photo so many times,” Yeun said. “If you look at photos of me in Korea, I’m like joyful, man. So happy, like flipping my yellow bucket hat upside down.” Or hanging out with a friend, he added. “And then you see this photo, and I look so terrified.”The family eventually moved up the river to Troy, a Detroit suburb, when Yeun was in fifth grade. His parents opened a beauty-supply store for Black customers in the city and joined one of the several Korean churches in the area. That’s where Yeun spent most of his time — playing sports with kids from church and attending Sunday school.“When I was in school, I was playing within a persona,” Yeun said. “I’m going to be quieter, nicer, friendlier. But when I’m at church, I’m going to be me. When I’m at home, I’m going to be me. And sometimes I think I was putting up such a mask and a wall when I was at school that I had no patience for anything when I was at home.” He let his emotions “build up into this constant anger.”In Detroit at the time, there were just enough Koreans to fill a few church congregations and run a handful of Asian grocery stores. But it wasn’t like Los Angeles or Queens, where the enclave can contain your entire life — where you grow up around your kind, you go to school with your kind, you play youth sports with your kind, you end up dating and marrying your kind. “I remember when I first went to L.A. and saw these totally free Korean dudes,” Yeun said. “They weren’t weighted down with all that same self-consciousness. They even walked differently.”Those were the divisions in his life: quiet and unassuming Steven at school; confident Steven at church, playing in the band and holding his own on the sports fields. And for most of his childhood and his young adulthood, Yeun didn’t overthink these divisions. He existed in both spaces at once.[embedded content]“My perception of race was pretty stunted,” Yeun said. “I was shielded from really understanding what was happening.” He knew, for example, that his parents ran a store that sold beauty products to Black customers in what at the time was a high-crime area in downtown Detroit, but his parents said little about their experience. Today Yeun knows all about the history of the Korean middleman class in Black neighborhoods, but the aphasia of his youth speaks to a difficult, oftentimes obscured reality of immigrant life in America. The first-generation parents start selling beauty products because they met someone at church who runs the supply chains. They then get a loan from an intra-Korean lending group and open up shop. Three decades pass, and nobody’s given much reflection to anything beyond raising the kids and paying the bills. The kids will eventually be able to process their American career through whatever idiom they pick up, whether patriotic pride in entrepreneurship or learned shame for the exploitation they determine took place. Most likely, they will feel both at the same time.After graduating from Kalamazoo College, where he performed in an improv group, Yeun hedged his bets. When he expressed interest in acting, his extended family and friends would suggest he consider moving to Korea, following the path of dozens of gyopos — the Korean word for Koreans who grow up abroad — in film and music who saw no opportunity for themselves in America. But he also applied for a job at Teach for America and prepared to take the LSAT and MCAT. When the teaching job didn’t come through, Yeun moved to Chicago to make the rounds on the comedy/improv circuits for a few years. He moved to Los Angeles when he was 25. Two church friends from Michigan had rented out a condo in Koreatown. Yeun moved in with them and set out on the audition circuit.Five months after arriving in Hollywood, he tried out for the role of Glenn Rhee on “The Walking Dead.” He had just been turned down for a sitcom role — for what he calls a “plucky assistant” — and wasn’t expecting much. To his shock, he got the job.Yeun as Glenn Rhee in Season 6 of “The Walking Dead” (2016).Credit…Gene Page/AMC The success of “The Walking Dead” catapulted Yeun into an odd place. Now he was one of the most recognizable Asian-American actors in the country, perhaps even the world, but the speed of his success and his relatively short time in Hollywood meant that he skipped over the crises of identity, authenticity and frustration that are the birthright of the Asian-American actor.He also took on a strange new role as an inspirational sex symbol for young Asian men, not for his own exploits but for Glenn’s ongoing relationship with a white woman named Maggie, played by Lauren Cohan. An Asian man dating a white woman on the most popular show on TV was seen as not only a marker of progress but also a permission slip for white women to maybe start dating more of us. Yeun understood the excitement but wasn’t sure what to make of the fuss. Should he be proud? Or did he even want that sort of attention at all? “I went through the same journey that I’m sure most Asian-American men go through,” Yeun said, referring to the typical rejections and emasculations that befall so many of us. “It’s just so paper-thin — you’re asking Asian men to be validated by whiteness, and you’re basically saying that I can only feel like a man if I’m with a white woman, which is just a terrible thing to think.”Fair or not, Glenn Rhee, and by extension Yeun, was touted as the Great Asian Hope, the Jeremy Lin of dating white women on TV. “I still get emails from Asian dudes to this day,” Yeun said. “And they’ll say something like, ‘Thank you so much, you’re the first one of us to ever do this.’”Watching his career from afar, especially after “The Walking Dead,” when he branched out into auteur films like Bong Joon Ho’s “Okja” (2017), Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” (2018) and, most notably, Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” (2018), it seemed as if Yeun was on a different track than other established actors like John Cho, Daniel Dae Kim, Margaret Cho or Sandra Oh. They were all identifiably Asian-American — their roles required the acknowledgment that people who looked like them might also be heading to White Castle or working in a Seattle hospital. Yeun, by contrast, felt as if he came out of some new mold of race and representation, an immigrant actor who could simply just be a success, both in Hollywood and abroad. There was an effortlessness to his career that seemed unencumbered by lengthy conversations about the importance of seeing Asian faces on the screen or the never-ending squabbles about casting white actors in Asian roles.“Do you think some of your success came from the fact that you kind of stumbled into this life-changing role after five months in L.A. and didn’t have to really dwell on all the limitations?” I asked Yeun.He said he had also felt this self-doubt during his career — the feeling of helplessness that comes with realizing that nobody who looks like you has done the things you want to do. “It’s painful to feel that aware,” he said. But he also said he thought there were ways in which that hypersensitivity could become its own prison. “You can lock yourself into those patterns, and then all of a sudden you can’t even see outside of it,” he said. “You don’t see how you might be able to break through the system.” Then he added: “If I see a door is cracked open, I just want to see what’s behind that thing. And I just go through it. And I get burned a lot, too, but whatever.”In late September of 2017, Yeun flew to Korea to film “Burning,” a psychological thriller about a young, struggling writer named Lee Jongsu who falls in love with Shin Haemi, a woman from the same rural village. At the start of the film, Haemi asks Jongsu to look after her cat before she travels to Africa. When she returns, she’s accompanied by Yeun’s character, a shifty playboy named Ben. Lee Chang-dong, the film’s director, doesn’t reveal much about Ben, but we know that he’s rich, doesn’t really have a job that he can explain and seems to exist in a cosmopolitan, aggressively Western layer of the Korean elite. But Ben, despite his Americanized name, is not a gyopo. He is a full-blooded Korean sociopath. “I think Lee Chang-dong thought my body will do one type of acting while my words did another type of acting,” Yeun said. “And that disconnect would create this strange, unimaginable character.”Unlike many Asian immigrants his age, who respond to their parents in English when they talk in their native language, Yeun had always spoken Korean in the home. He was already fluent enough, but Lee wanted that dissonance — the Korean character flowing through a famous American body — to be fully actualized. The five months Yeun spent shooting the film in Seoul allowed him to imagine what life would be like if his parents had never immigrated to North America, or perhaps if he had decided to pull up stakes and pursue a career in Korean film. He certainly wouldn’t have been the first do this — Korean dramas, movies and K-pop have their fair share of gyopos.But his time in Seoul convinced him that America was his home. Early during his stay there, he saw a director friend’s childhood photo on Instagram. He was dressed in a karate costume and wore a shirt emblazoned with the Japanese Rising Sun flag, which in Korea is comparable to the Confederate flag in the United States. Impulsively, Yeun liked the photo, which set off a maelstrom of outrage. In the end, he was forced to issue an apology. This was unpleasant, but Yeun also realized that a life and career in Korea wouldn’t actually break him out of the prismatic neurosis.“When I’m here in America, I can feel this constant protest, like, I’m not just a Korean person, I’m an American person. And then you go over to Korea and they only look at you as an American, or, if you’re lucky, like a Korean person that might have lost their way or is disconnected from their whole thing. That’s true, but I’m also a version of a Korean person. You know what I mean? Like, I can’t change my DNA. I have the same epigenetic information passed down through the blood we share. Do I know all the same things as Koreans who grew up in Korea? No, because I don’t live there and because I’m not indoctrinated by that society.”[embedded content]Yeun paused. I told him this was more or less what my father said when I told him I wanted to move to Korea during the early days of the pandemic. The people he and my mother left in 1979 would never accept me, my daughter or my wife. Yeun and I talked about it for a bit, and he conceded that perhaps being a famous movie star might intensify these dynamics. We were both sure that most Korean people would not have the time or the bandwidth to care deeply about the gyopos in their midst, but we also agreed that we, the gyopos, would always be questioning what people were thinking.I told Yeun that I had been struck by what he said about how being Asian-American meant that you were constantly thinking about everyone else, but nobody was ever thinking about you. But maybe his kids might be able to grow up without this debilitating awareness?“I don’t want to eliminate all of that questioning for them,” Yeun said. “But I hope they’ll be more unlocked than me and less traumatized. But for me, the [expletive] nature of that statement is that it implies a lack of agency about it, like our brains are just hard-wired to consider others. I think that’s probably still true of me and our generation, but I don’t think it’s, like, fate.”I’m familiar with what he’s talking about. It feels like a light but constant tinnitus; you’re aware that it’s there, but you also figure out ways to tune it out and just kind of get on with your life. I know, for example, that being a “race writer” comes with assumptions about the true literary value of your work, which then makes you want to write about anything else, which then raises those recurring questions about who is steering the ship. All that is exhausting and counterproductive. Better to just be Amy Tan and accept the country and your role in it for what they are. Today I write almost entirely about race and identity, although not exactly by choice. My job — even what you’re reading now — is part of my career of explaining Asian-Americans to white people. It’s fine. But even if it weren’t, what am I going to do about it?When the trailer for “Minari” appeared online this past fall, I texted the link to a Korean friend. She said she wasn’t sure she could watch the film because those two minutes seemed almost too accurate, too close to some memories she had left interred. When I went online to read others’ reactions, I saw similar responses, not only from Asian-Americans but also from Latino and Black immigrants as well. I understood where they were coming from. The trailer suggested an intimacy that made me deeply uncomfortable. Yeun plays a struggling young father who reminded me of a version of my own father that I had shelved away. What was life like for him as a young immigrant with two children? I witnessed his frustrations, of course, but I can only see them today through an inoculating hindsight that tells me that while our situation might have presented us with difficulties, our struggles matter less than other struggles. This might be a sensible tack for me to take — I speak perfect English and live comfortably — but it has wiped away the memories of my father when we arrived stateside. What was he thinking?At its core, “Minari” is a straightforward and exceedingly honest movie about a Korean-American immigrant family that moves from Los Angeles to Arkansas. Jacob Yi, the patriarch played by Yeun, grows tired of his work as a chicken sexer, a job that mostly entails taking baskets of newborn chicks and sorting them by gender. He wants to start a big farm that will supply produce to the thousands of Koreans who are immigrating to the United States. Jacob’s wife, Monica, played by Yeri Han, has reservations about her husband’s ambitions, but she goes along as he sows, irrigates and plows a cursed plot of land.Yeun’s character is a departure from any of his previous roles. But Yeun also sees it as the culminating point in his career to date. If he never had to hone his Korean for “Burning,” for example, he might not have been able to passably play a native Korean speaker struggling with his English. It also presented Yeun with an opportunity to reflect on his own father.“My dad had a tough time, I think.” Yeun said. “As the patriarch, I’m sure he had to go out and touch the world a little bit more, which made him very distrusting of people. As a Korean man, it had to be hard to come from a collectivist country that, you know, predicates your worth on who you are and what position you hold, to a place that also has those types of hierarchies but you just don’t know what they are.”Yeun continued: “He got really frustrated. He couldn’t trust the system to acknowledge him. I remember we were at a Murray’s auto shop, and he tried to return a hose that didn’t work for his car. And they wouldn’t let him return it.” The people at the store told him they didn’t sell that product, and Yeun’s father was sure they were lying. “And he couldn’t speak the language so well. So, he made a huge scene, instead, and threw the hose on the ground. And then I just remember as a kid being like, Well, my dad freaked out in this Murray’s auto shop.”Jacob Yi spends much of “Minari” in a state of quiet rage. He doesn’t understand why his crops aren’t growing; he doesn’t understand why Monica wants to move back to Los Angeles or why she might want to be around more Korean people. He doesn’t understand why his family doesn’t fully and enthusiastically support his farm dreams.“Minari” premiered at Sundance and took home the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and an audience award. Yeun’s father sat next to him during the screening, which unnerved Yeun. “There’s such a rift between generations because of the communication barrier, and because of a cultural barrier,” he said. But with this film, what he and the director were trying to tell their parents was: “I’m a father. And now I understand what you had to go through.”Yeun began to tear up as he told this to me. “Every time I talk about it, I’m just, like, crying about it, you know? Because I think my dad felt seen.” And, Yeun added, his father “was able to communicate that back to me through a look.” They started to close the gap. “That took 36 years to bridge.”“We, the second generation, are pretty indoctrinated,” Yeun told me. “The American gaze is also part of us, where we remember our parents, and collectively talk about our parents in the ways that we saw them from our vantage point.” He went on: “Most families are stymied from ever even touching those deep emotional things together.”Credit…Emily Shur for The New York Times“Minari” is loosely autobiographical, as most quiet immigrant films are. The director, Lee Isaac Chung, grew up in Arkansas, where his parents worked as chicken sexers. But Chung wanted to avoid projecting the child’s gaze onto his parents. While the film stars a young boy named David, played by Alan Kim and presumably modeled on Chung, his film mostly seems unconcerned with his childhood perspective and how he feels about his place in the rural South. This was intentional. “I felt like I needed to get it away from the memoir and autobiography space,” Chung told me. “I didn’t want to bring attention to myself in the directing. I didn’t want to work out my daddy issues in the script.” Jacob and Monica, Chung said, are just familiar movie characters, not embodiments of how he feels about Asian-American identity. We don’t get an impassioned speech from Jacob about race and dignity and shared humanity.I don’t think it’s possible to get to this unvarnished, honest place without first untangling everything that might make you lie about your parents. “Minari,” in other words, is not what I call dignity porn, the type of story that takes the life of a seemingly oppressed person, excavates all the differences compared with the dominant culture and then seeks to hold these up in a soft, humanizing light. Look, the dignity porno will say: Kimchi isn’t weird. Ergo, we are as human as you. “I didn’t want it to feel like a story that makes us feel bad for Jacob or impressed with his life,” Chung said. “I was aware of what the expectations for a film like this might be, and my only hope was to subvert them a bit.”Chung continued: “Explaining myself to white people isn’t something I want to do.” He wanted to make something that would show his daughter their family’s American roots. “Something that got at spiritual matters and what it means to be a human being. What it means to be a man. What it feels like to be a failure.”Most dignity porn centers on some racist episode that shatters the lives of the protagonists. Chung’s movie does include white people and some scenes of racial discomfort, but he does not vilify anyone, nor does he try to make some statement about how racism or xenophobia or any other form of oppression weigh down the lives of these striving people. The white boy who stares at David in church ultimately becomes his friend. There’s no scene of redemption or mutual understanding — in the worst of the quiet immigrant films, these reckonings come when the white person realizes that he does, in fact, see the other as human — only the inevitability of two boys in proximity eventually growing to like each other. And Chung’s light touch in these scenes, without the tears or hysterics, resembles the way so many new immigrants experience racism. Often, you might not even know it’s happening. And even if you do, you lack the time and the context to turn it into a crying matter.While watching the film, I was reminded of watching “The Simpsons” with my father as he gamely tried to follow the show’s thicket of references. “I don’t understand the humor,” he told me once with great disappointment. “I haven’t seen these movies they’re talking about.”This was how my parents experienced so many aspects of American life. They mostly couldn’t pick up on what their children might call “microaggressions” or any of the veiled comments and exclusions. They generally kept the faith — rightfully, I believe — that a majority of the people who asked questions about where they were from, or what they ate, or told them about a great Korean-barbecue restaurant they had visited, were acting out of curiosity, even kindness. This, of course, did not mean our lives were free from prejudice, but rather that part of the immigrant optimism about the new country comes out of a deep unfamiliarity with the subtle ways people let it be known that the immigrants’ dreams aren’t particularly welcome. We children are aware of all this, of course, because we are American.[embedded content]Why is it so hard for us to see them without first laundering them through our own need for identity, belonging and progress? My parents arrived in Oregon in 1979, bought a used Dodge Dart Swinger and immediately began hiking around the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. I see this period in the soft, sun-glazed light of the old Japanese camera they lugged around. Every summit vista, every shot of the lodge at Yellowstone, every poorly composed photo of the apartment where I would spend the first two years of my life looks as if it were bathed in honey. These images float, pleasantly, and suggest a happier time before I show up as a fat-cheeked, almost formless baby. “Minari,” which is set in the 1980s, is shot in a similar light, with the same American cars and the same lack of comprehension: We don’t know exactly why we are here, but here we are. But while my fantasies about my parents at my age are rooted in a need to see them as happy and ambitious, Chung’s film, as animated through Yeun’s acting, shows them for who they were. Perhaps that’s the only way out — to paint the picture of our parents before our memories of ourselves arrive; to show them as strangers to us, before the context settled in. And if we can strip them down and see them without the weight of identity and its spiraling neuroses, perhaps we can also see a better version of ourselves.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Resident Artists Are Named

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Resident Artists Are NamedMembers of the global group share the painter’s passion for using art to explore social change.Kehinde Wiley at the Black Rock artist residence he founded in Dakar, Senegal, in 2019. It is welcoming its second group of artists, filmmakers and writers from around the world. Hilary Balu’s “Voyage vers Mars 5,” explores the flight of populations to other continents.Credit…Jane Hahn for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021Updated 2:59 p.m. ETA Congolese painter whose art reflects how globalization and consumerism have transformed African society. A Nigerian-American filmmaker whose work focuses on cultures and experiences of Africans and the diaspora. A visual activist from Texas who forces her viewers to confront issues that are deemed difficult to tackle.These are among the 16 artists selected for the 2021 residency at Black Rock Senegal, the seaside studio in the West African capital city of Dakar belonging to Kehinde Wiley, the painter best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama.The artists, who will spend several weeks at the lavish studio along a volcanic-rock-lined shore, express themselves in a variety of formats and come from across the globe. But many in this year’s group share Wiley’s passion for using art to explore social change.His most recent works include the stained glass fresco of breakdancers in the Moynihan Train Hall and his “Rumors of War” statue in Richmond, Va. — a Black man with ponytailed dreadlocks on horseback in the style of monuments to Confederate war generals. Wiley is not part of the Black Rock selection committee, which aims to consider the class of artists as a whole and tries to pick a diverse group of residents, including personal identities and nationalities and the medium they work in.Among the residents is Hilary Balu, from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, whose recent brightly colored yet sorrowful series “Voyage vers Mars” explores the tragedy of contemporary migration — in this case the flight of a population to another continent, like astronauts leaving a destroyed earth for another planet.Hilary Balu’s “Voyage vers Mars 5,” explores the flight of populations to other continents.Credit…MAGNIN-AAbbesi Akhamie, who lives in Washington, is a Nigerian-American writer, director and producer whose latest short film, ​“The Couple Next Door” from last year, premiered at the Aspen Shortsfest and won the Audience Choice Award at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival.Irene Antonia Diane Reece from Houston uses her family archives as a form of activism and liberation, with some of her work exploring family history and racial identity.Other residents include Delali Ayivor, a Ghanaian-American writer; Mbali Dhlamini, a multidisciplinary artist, and Arinze Ifeakandu, a Nigerian writer who recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and writes about queer male intimacy. The residents will each spend several weeks at a time in the studio, with coronavirus restrictions in place, in staggered stages, beginning this month.Some might overlap with Wiley, who has spent much of the past year in Dakar, using the global pandemic as an opportunity to pause and paint, sometimes working with Black Rock residents who have helped him in his work.“I’m learning to view, discuss, and critique art that often depicts the Black body from a range of perspectives that span the globe,” Wiley said in an email exchange. “There’s an unending variety of rubrics through which artists are pushing the possibilities of representation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWalter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101His movies included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own experience of being blacklisted.The screenwriter Walter Bernstein in 1983. His leftist politics influenced both his life and his art.Credit…Susan Wood/Getty ImagesJan. 23, 2021, 6:06 p.m. ETWalter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died on Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause was pneumonia.Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in various stages of development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he told Variety.Mr. Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.“Fail Safe” (1964), the story of an accidental bombing of Moscow, was a bold rejoinder to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. “Paris Blues” (1961), which he wrote for the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator, starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires” (1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of 19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s.Mr. Bernstein with Woody Allen on the set of the 1976 film “The Front,” based on Mr. Bernstein’s experience during the blacklist of the 1950s. Mr. Bernstein’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.Credit…Columbia PicturesThe subject of “The Front” (1976), also directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an Academy Award nomination (it was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America award), was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a “front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted. (Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance for Mr. Allen that same year in “Annie Hall.”)Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST; “Yanks,” starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy, “Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.A Hollywood EducationMr. Bernstein was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European immigrants who were “not really affected by the Depression,” as Mr. Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his father, a schoolteacher, was protected by civil service employment rules. He attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded the students were split into three shifts, a boon for the film-loving Walter: When he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the Astor Theater, where admission during the day was a dime.Upon graduation, Mr. Bernstein was offered what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of Grenoble. His father knew a French family Walter could stay with and “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding, “If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”Walter Matthau, Julie Andrews and Sara Stimson in “Little Miss Marker” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Bernstein directed.  Credit…Universal PicturesBut the experience broadened him, thrusting him as it did into the midst of young intellectuals, often Communists, living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the currency of conversation.He then attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic of The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled in “Inside Out,” “was that there were no screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the movie.”“I found this no real impediment,” he added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism. Doing it this way made it art.”He also became a contributor to The New Yorker, for which he would write during and after the war, and where he eventually became a staff writer.First, however, there was a war to get through. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he recalled, “but it was a show.”)“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”Making Wartime NewsWhile contributing military-themed articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for Yank, the Army journal, a job that would last throughout World War II. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that would give him his first taste of fame.“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr. Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into war-torn Yugoslavia by anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz, known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav republic until his death in 1980.“I was the first Western correspondent to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”Although Mr. Bernstein’s interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article made it world news.The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, center, in 1947 after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing to say whether he was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Mr. Trumbo, like Mr. Bernstein and a number of other Hollywood writers, was blacklisted.Credit…Henry Griffin/Associated Press“I had an aunt who was a charter member of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”“I didn’t join the party until after the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they were doing something.”In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep Your Head Down”) on the bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr. Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited work on “All the King’s Men.”Mr. Bernstein ended up staying in Hollywood for six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”That led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated.Suddenly Untouchable“I was still in Hollywood in 1947, during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliation. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack.“I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.Mr. Bernstein at his apartment in Manhattan in 2000. He continued to write, teach and generate screenplay ideas well into his 90s.Credit…Jim Cooper/Associated PressMr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted great moments in history.It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been blacklisted.)“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in “Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”It was the now largely forgotten “That Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s “official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the employable.In the years following the blacklist, Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country” (1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip” (1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’ Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for the live broadcast of “Fail Safe” in 2000.In addition to his wife, a literary agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son, Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Seide.Six decades after the fact, Mr. Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.“I don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Trip Into the Otherworldly With Adrienne Kennedy as Guide

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA Trip Into the Otherworldly With Adrienne Kennedy as GuideA digital four-play retrospective, capped by a world premiere, illuminates this writer’s fascination with doubling, violence and Black identity.Maya Jackson, left, and Michael Sweeney Hammond in Adrienne Kennedy’s “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” a Round House Theater production in association with the McCarter Theater Center.Credit…via Round House TheaterPublished More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      A Playwright’s New Subject: Her Husband, the Pandemic Expert

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Playwright’s New Subject: Her Husband, the Pandemic ExpertProlific and widely-produced, Lauren Gunderson didn’t have to look far to create “The Catastrophist,” a play about risk that’s both timely and personal.The playwright Lauren Gunderson, right, with her husband, Nathan Wolfe, an expert on pandemics and the subject of her new play “The Catastrophist.”Credit…Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesJan. 14, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSAN FRANCISCO — Confined by the pandemic to her three-story Victorian home, Lauren Gunderson did not have to go far to find inspiration for her latest play. He was one room away, in the home office next to hers on the top floor.Over Rombauer chardonnay (for her) and a vodka tonic (for him) she set her phone down, opened the voice recording app and interviewed Nathan Wolfe, her husband of eight years. The transcripts of those conversations are the basis of “The Catastrophist,” her new solo play that was filmed on a stage near San Francisco in December and will premiere as “cinematic theater” later this month.With the exception of Shakespeare, Gunderson has been the most produced playwright in the United States in recent years, according to a tally by American Theater magazine.Wolfe has his own claims to stardom, albeit of the more academic variety. He is an expert on plagues who warned presciently about the risks of a big pandemic years before the word became such an everyday, and despised, piece of vocabulary. (“This is Nathan Wolfe,” read the cover headline on the summer issue of Wired magazine. “We should have listened to him.”)The founder of a company that models the risk of epidemics, Wolfe speaks with a measured cadence, as if an algorithm had carefully selected the words. Asked how he plans his own activities, his answer would not be out of place in a World Health Organization news release: “We are not going to take any risks that are unnecessary because it’s not socially responsible and it’s not individually responsible.”Gunderson is colloquial and effervescent, speaking in metaphors that could be slotted into her next play. She tends to interrupt her husband to add some color to his gray sentences. “We all feel afloat, adrift. Where is the land? What do we stand on?” she said, summarizing our collective psychological response to the pandemic.Gunderson’s long list of works includes many that spotlight the lives of scientists, some well known, some obscure. This piece — which was commissioned by the Round House Theater in Bethesda, Md., and the Marin Theater Company in Mill Valley, Calif., where Gunderson is playwright in residence — is of course more intimate.That’s not to say she didn’t go in well aware of the pitfalls in basing a play around the life of her spouse, including hagiography. “Truly never been more terrified of writing anything than writing this,” Gunderson announced on Twitter.She, and they, will quite literally live with the consequences. “The Catastrophist” will be available for streaming from Jan. 26 through Feb. 28.“My job is to look at people’s complexities and faults, and failures and betrayals,” Gunderson said on a recent afternoon, seated in her backyard next to her children’s trampoline. Her voice was muffled by a paisley face mask. “To turn that kind of eye to my husband, who I love, is bracing. It was way harder than I thought.”William DeMeritt in tech rehearsal during filming of Lauren Gunderson’s play “The Catastrophist.”Credit…via Marin Theatre CompanyGunderson’s “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” is streaming through Jan. 17 from TheaterSquared in Arkansas. Her previous subjects include Émilie du Châtelet, an 18th-century French mathematician and philosopher, and Olympe de Gouges, a French playwright and early women’s rights activist.None were able to peer over her shoulder as she worked. “They are all dead, so they can’t fact check me,” she said. Gunderson said she hadn’t considered writing about her husband until Jasson Minadakis, the artistic director of the Marin Theater, sent her a text proposing the idea. Her initial thought: “No, no — no!”But she came to believe that her husband would be a good vehicle to talk about the pandemic. Minadakis would direct.“The Catastrophist” tells the story of Wolfe’s upbringing by a father who, along with other relatives, shares a particular medical vulnerability. It follows his quest as a virus hunter whose early career was spent in Africa and Asia looking for clues to the next major pandemic.In past science-related works, Gunderson has not hesitated to be educational as well as entertaining. And the Wolfe character’s disquisitions in “The Catastrophist” can have the feel of a National Geographic documentary. “We have only a minor sliver of knowledge of the viral world,” he says. “Viruses are the most abundant life-forms on the planet.”But at its heart “The Catastrophist” is a personal story about risk and mortality. And at a time when so much in our lives is disrupted or simply just canceled, part of Gunderson’s mission was to open a discussion about how we anticipate and deal with future risks.In one particularly explanatory scene Wolfe delves into the concept of the micromort — a measurement of the likelihood of death from a particular activity.Skydiving, at 8 micromorts per jump, is safer than a ride on a motorcycle at 10 micromorts, he tells us. Attempting to climb Mount Everest: 39,000 micromorts. His character admits that he is drawn to adventure sports, more so than his wife.“I promised her I’d never do anything over 200 micromorts,” he says.And at the risk of giving away too much, Gunderson, in “The Catastrophist,” explores how a man who spends his life calculating risk can do such a lousy job of assessing it for himself. “The playwright in me had to push all the buttons and unlock all the secret drawers,” Gunderson said of writing about her husband.   Credit…Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesPerhaps inevitably for a play written in the throes of a plague there is a meta aspect to the work. Gunderson’s life in the pandemic was tightly intertwined with writing about it.San Francisco, like so many other cities, has been shaken and transformed since March. Tents sheltering homeless people have proliferated on the streets. Property crimes and drug overdoses have soared. Restaurants have closed, many forever.But from a purely medical standpoint, San Francisco appears to have beaten the odds. Its rate of deaths from the coronavirus, 27 per 100,000 people, is less than one quarter the national average. In the balancing act that we all face, the city has chosen safety and caution over economic continuity and normality.Gunderson was cloistered for much of the spring, starting in March when San Francisco and neighboring counties became the first in the nation to order residents to stay at home. She has bought her groceries online since; social interaction outside her family has been limited to a few walks with friends and sparsely attended birthday parties in the backyard for her two children, who are 6 and 4.But as a writer, Gunderson said, she was not handcuffed.“I’ve had the freest mind I’ve had in several years,” she said. “The deadlines evaporated.”“The play,” she added, “came out of that space.”That’s not to say putting it on has been easy.It was filmed the first week of December in the empty Marin Theater, across the Golden Gate Bridge. The crew included a woman whose job was to make sure the director stayed socially distanced from the camera operators; to provide hand sanitizer, gloves and other protective equipment; and to administer coronavirus tests. The tests were so expensive that the crew was forced to cut the filming from two weeks to one.“We were all building the boat as we were sailing it,” Gunderson said.William DeMeritt, a Shakespeare specialist whom she recruited to play her husband, flew in from New York and then worked from an auxiliary apartment near the theater, a mother-in-law unit owned by one of its patrons.“I rehearsed remotely from that little apartment with everyone else on a little Zoom screen,” DeMeritt said.The filming was done with only half a dozen crew members, each of whom was allowed access to a discrete space in the theater. It was shot in snippets, a novelty for a crew accustomed to works’ being performed from beginning to end.Gunderson watched from home via livestream.DeMeritt, who in pre-pandemic days had roles in “Shakespeare in Love,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and a handful of television shows, said he hopes the production inspires an industry that has been walloped by the virus. Anything, he said, to help theater survive the pandemic.He met Gunderson several years ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and they have kept up a friendship. After agreeing to take the part in “The Catastrophist,” he met with Wolfe and Gunderson on a hike in the Marin headlands, the steep ridges and canyons not far from the Golden Gate that afford wondrous views of the Pacific Ocean.But DeMeritt said the character he portrays has somewhat rougher edges than Wolfe the man, a tendency toward knowing-it-all that the director, Minadakis, encouraged, in part as a contrast to the personal vulnerabilities revealed in the script.“Lauren was able to put in some of Nathan’s less fabulous character traits because she knows him so intimately,” Minadakis said.“I had to encourage Bill to not get up there and play a hero,” he added, “but to play a very human individual who has pride and who has ambition.”Wolfe as a child with his father, Chuck Wolfe, a doctor who inspired his career path.Credit…via Lauren GundersonWolfe has become well known as a scientist whose warnings about the impact of a potential pandemic went unheeded.Credit…Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesWolfe has watched Zoom rehearsals and doesn’t seem bothered by the portrayal.“The play does a great job of showing the mildly irritating features of my personality,” he said in his backyard, before rushing off to take a call. “It’s an honest critique. We all have failings.”Gunderson said the play was a gift to their marriage. She, a master of words, learned more about her husband’s world of numbers and risk.And she’s confident she struck the right balance in writing about him.“The partner in me wanted to make my partner safe and happy and comforted,” she said. “The playwright in me had to push all the buttons and unlock all the secret drawers and make a mess.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More