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      in Movies

      Pedro Almodóvar, Master of Mystifying Films, Wrote a Book He Can’t Classify

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      Pedro Almodóvar is widely considered Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first — a “fabulist,” in his telling. His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in “Talk to Her.” The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in “The Skin I Live In.”Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodóvar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set.As it turned out, he had been writing many other things, too — short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays — nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola García over the course of the director’s many moves to different apartments in Madrid. In 2022, at the urging of the Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodóvar had a look at what had been saved over the years.“It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn’t know,” said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodóvar had seemingly written decades later. The collection, “The Last Dream,” will be published in English on Sept. 24 by HarperVia.“The Last Dream” is due out Sept. 24 in the United States.HarperVia, via Associated PressJust what this collection is exactly is as much of a mystery as the folders were. Was this a memoir? (One piece was a journal entry written a couple of years back.) Was it fiction — or sketches of ideas that could be fiction — unfinished stories the director never turned into a film? (There is a tale about Count Dracula joining a monastery in Spain.) Much like with his films, Almodóvar feels little need to clarify his output into any defined genre.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Will Jennings, Oscar Winner for ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ Dies at 80

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      As an in-demand lyricist, he won a shelf of awards for hits with Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton and Dionne Warwick, as well as for the theme song for “Titanic.”Will Jennings, an English professor turned lyricist whose 1998 Academy Award for “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song from the movie “Titanic,” capped a long career writing hits for musicians like Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton and Dionne Warwick, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Tyler, Texas. He was 80.The office of his agent, Sam Schwartz, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.Mr. Jennings won the Oscar for best song twice: for “My Heart Will Go On,” which he wrote with James Horner and which was performed by Celine Dion; and in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman”; written with Jack Nitzsche and Buffy Sainte-Marie, it was performed by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes.Mr. Jennings, right, in 1998 with James Horner and Celine Dion, with whom he collaborated on “My Heart Will Go On.”Frank Trapper/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMr. Jennings, right, in 1983 with Jack Nitzsche and Buffy Sainte-Marie when they won an Oscar for “Up Where We Belong.”ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesIn most of his hits, Mr. Jennings wrote the lyrics while his collaborators wrote the melodies — an unsurprising division of labor, given that Mr. Jennings came to songwriting after a career teaching poetry and English literature.He was known for his disciplined work ethic, his subtle references to classical literature tucked into seemingly airy pop tunes and his insistence on getting to know an artist or film to inhabit their perspectives.“With Will, his personality broke down all the barriers and got to what’s real,” said Mr. Crowell, who wrote several songs with Mr. Jennings, including “Many a Long and Lonesome Highway” (1989) and “What Kind Of Love” (1992).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Dan Morgenstern, Chronicler and Friend of Jazz, Dies at 94

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      He wrote prolifically about the music and played an important role in documenting its history, especially in his many years with the Institute of Jazz Studies.Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor in chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Danzy Senna Discusses ‘Colored Television’

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      Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, the novelist Danzy Senna predicted we’d soon be living through what she called the Mulatto Millennium.“Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style. That’s what happened to me just the other morning,” she wrote in a 1998 essay. “I realized that, according to the racial zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the Mulatto. Pure breeds (at least Black ones) are out; hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory.”Droll, insouciant, provocative? Of course — Danzy Senna wrote it. Over nearly three decades, she has spun up hilarious (and occasionally unsettling) stories about the lives of characters who happen to be multiracial — “the country I come from,” as she put it. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” also published in 1998, followed two biracial sisters born in 1970s Boston who are separated by their parents and whose lives take very different paths. It was a best seller.Her latest book, “Colored Television,” her sixth, satirizes Hollywood, academia, the publishing industry, the housing market, ambition and, not least, the pervasive trope of the tragic mulatto.It is also very, very funny.Like much of Senna’s fiction, “Colored Television,” which Riverhead will release on Tuesday, borrows elements from her own life and torques them to the extreme. The novel follows Jane Gibson, a biracial novelist in Los Angeles married to a brilliant, slightly mad painter named Lenny and their two young children. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Charles R. Cross, Biographer of Cobain and Hendrix, Dies at 67

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      He tracked the rise of grunge as the editor of the Seattle music magazine The Rocket. He also wrote acclaimed books about two of the city’s most celebrated rock luminaries.Charles R. Cross, a Seattle music writer who edited The Rocket, a local rock bible, during the city’s grunge-era flowering in the 1990s, and who wrote acclaimed biographies of two of the city’s most venerated musical figures, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, died on Aug. 9 at his home in Shoreline, Wash., He was 67.His death was announced in a statement from his family. No cause was given.Mr. Cross was the editor of The Rocket, a biweekly magazine, from 1986 through 2000, a period when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam redefined rock. It was considered a must-read for musicians looking to join the wave.It would be “impossible to imagine the music or community of Seattle in the 80s and 90s without charles r. cross,” Chris Walla, a former member of Death Cab for Cutie, the critically acclaimed alternative rock band from Bellingham, Wash., wrote on social media.Mr. Cross was also a well-known sage to fans of Bruce Springsteen: He turned his self-produced fanzine into Backstreets Magazine, a trove of Springsteen arcana that was well known to the artist himself.At a concert in Pittsburgh on Sunday, Mr. Springsteen paid tribute to Mr. Cross, telling the audience that his “help in communicating between our band and our fans will be sorely missed” before launching into his song “Backstreets.”Mr. Cross published the first of his nine books, “Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music,” in 1989, followed two years later by “Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell,” an illustrated history that he wrote with Erik Flannigan, with photographs by Neal Preston.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Hypocrite,’ by Jo Hamya

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      In Jo Hamya’s second novel, “The Hypocrite,” a 20-something playwright puts her absent, aging writer dad on blast.THE HYPOCRITE, by Jo HamyaEven bad, absent daddies can set aside ego to appreciate the trappings of a classic. In “The Hypocrite,” Jo Hamya’s sharp and agile new novel, an unnamed, aging writer admits the brilliance of a nearly 10-minute sex scene to open his daughter’s latest play. It’s a shame the actor thrusting onstage is a venereal, self-regarding avatar of the writer himself, otherwise he’d tell his daughter how clever she was.We are in London, in the summer of 2020. The city is cautiously stirring to life after months of lockdown. The play has been warmly received by critics, and its 20-something playwright, Sophia, is unquestionably talented. Also: wounded, blinkered, petulant.Her father is a middle-aged novelist of moderate renown who is said to “offend people for a living,” and whose views aren’t quite prehistoric but are premodern enough that I’d prefer not to hear his feelings about women breastfeeding in public. At a glance, he resembles Martin Amis during a low moment. He saw Sophia only intermittently during her childhood, hasn’t published a book in years, hasn’t navigated the shifting cultural tides terribly well. Settling into his seat at the theater, he had no idea what he was in for.Their longest stretch of time together, a Sicilian vacation a decade earlier in which Sophia took dictation for his novel-in-progress, is the play’s subject. Her memory is ferociously loyal, but unsparing: She nails precise details of the dill-scented kitchen where they worked, his cherished purple shirt, the sexual encounters he thought he’d kept secret. Within moments, the humiliation sets in — he is reduced to a version of himself that had sex “like a pig and wrote like a dictator,” as the audience howls with laughter.Still, there are crumbs of mercy. Thank God Sophia hasn’t cast someone who can replicate the sputtering of his orgasms.And thankfully, nobody in this appropriately claustrophobic story emerges the clear hero. No one is that doomed L-word, likable. Hamya bats our sympathies between characters: Sophia, the neglected child who craves both her father’s approval and his artistic toppling; her father, who seems baffled by how quickly he’s encountered irrelevance; and Sophia’s mother, who is justifiably fed up after loving two self-engrossed yet profoundly un-self-aware writers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Bob Tischler, Who Helped Revive ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Dies at 78

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      A producer of “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and albums by the Blues Brothers, he became S.N.L.’s head writer after a dismal season early in its history.Bob Tischler, who was part of the production and writing team that helped revive “Saturday Night Live” after the groundbreaking comedy show fell into a deep creative trough in the 1980-81 season, died on July 13 at his home in Bodega Bay, Calif. He was 78.His son, Zeke, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Tischler did not define himself as a writer when he joined “S.N.L.” He was best known for his work in audio, having produced “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and albums by the Blues Brothers.“I produced a lot of comedy and I did writing, but I wasn’t a member of the union or anything,” Mr. Tischler told James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for their book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live’” (2002).“S.N.L.” needed a lot of help. After five trailblazing seasons under Lorne Michaels, its first producer, it floundered under his successor, Jean Doumanian, whose only season was widely considered the show’s worst to date.The show’s “flinty irreverence gave way a year ago to cheap shocks and worn-out formulas,” the reporter Tony Schwartz wrote in a 1981 New York Times article.Dick Ebersol, who replaced Ms. Doumanian as producer, hired Mr. Tischler as a supervisory producer in the spring of 1981 at the suggestion of the dark and temperamental Michael O’Donoghue, a veteran of the original “S.N.L.” whom Mr. Ebersol had brought back as head writer, and who had known Mr. Tischler from the Lampoon radio show. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Overlooked No More: Renee Carroll, ‘World’s Most Famous Hatcheck Girl’

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      From the cloakroom at Sardi’s, she made her own mark on Broadway, hobnobbing with celebrity clients while safekeeping fedoras, bowlers, derbies and more.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For 24 years, as the hatcheck girl at Sardi’s, the storied theater district restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan, Renee Carroll found fame from within the close confines of a cloakroom.From that post, she hobnobbed with celebrity clientele, fed insider gossip to newspaper columnists and wrote an immensely popular, chatty book that dished about which stage actress ate too much garlic (Katharine Cornell, if you must know) and how fading stars wistfully reacted when rising newcomers like Joan Crawford entered the dining room.Checking hats at a restaurant might seem like a menial job, and in fact the salary for safekeeping homburgs, fedoras, bowlers and derbies was measly, but Caroll saw the position as an opportunity to make her own mark on Broadway.With her wisecracking personality, she won over actors, writers and producers while earning dime or quarter tips. If someone checked a play script with her, she perused it and offered canny critiques, sometimes unsolicited, by the time the patron had finished lunch.Her approbation was considered such a good-luck charm that even hatless playwrights and producers were known to leave her money. Eugene O’Neill once entrusted her with his wristwatch when he had nothing else on hand to check.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More