MEXICO CITY — It was pouring buckets of rain at the Estadio GNP Seguros on Saturday night, when Oasis played one of two sold-out reunion shows in Mexico City.

Lined at the entrance were tents stuffed with bootleg tour merch and fans seeking respite from the water. You could hear the sloshing of wet socks and Adidas Sambas as they price-checked knockoff memorabilia emblazoned with the Gallagher brothers’ iconically muggy faces.

For 200 pesos, you could get a T-shirt with Noel and Liam Gallagher as fighting cats, or characters from “Peanuts” and “The Simpsons.”

While a downpour isn’t the ideal weather condition for an outdoor concert — my Bohemian FC x Oasis collab football jersey went unseen under a fashionable rain parka — it was certainly fitting for a band that routinely, perhaps obsessively, sings about rain. Yet for Mexican fans of Oasis who’ve anxiously waited years to finally see the brothers reunite, it was all sunsheeeeIIIIIINE.

Outside the entry gates, father and son Santiago and Omar Zepeda, both sporting bucket hats, had a palpable buzz radiating off them as they eagerly waited to enter the stadium. It was a multigenerationally significant day for them.

“I came for the first time with my dad in ’98 at the Palacio de Deportes to see Oasis, and now I get to bring my son,” said Santiago, who came from Guadalajara with his 14-year-old in tow. “There was a moment that I said we’ll just go without tickets and see what we do. We’ll get in because we’ll get in. I feel incredible to be able to have done what I did with my father 27 years later now with my son.”

In August of last year, the Manchester-bred Gallagher brothers — who had been openly feuding for decades — declared that war was over on the 30th anniversary of their 1994 juggernaut debut, “Definitely Maybe.”

“The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over,” they announced. As reunion tour dates opened, and two Mexico City stops were announced, Mexican fans expressed pure elation and flooded Ticketmaster once the sale went live. As you can imagine, it was online bedlam.

Waiting in the Ticketmaster queue filled Esteban Ricardo Sainz Coronado, 24, and Sara Pedraza, 25, with dread. The young couple came in from Monterrey, Nuevo León, but it was uncertain whether they’d make it to what Coronado called “a collective reunion that’s cultural and transcends more than music history.”

Pedraza waited three hours in Ticketmaster’s virtual line, almost missing school and her chance to secure seats as she kept getting bumped off the site. “I stubbornly kept trying and after I don’t know how many attempts, it worked,” Pedraza said. “It was such a huge relief.”

Like Coronado and Sainz, the reunion tour is millions of fans’ first opportunity to see Oasis play live, as they would have been far too young or not even born yet during their heyday. For longtime Oasis heads, it was a chance to once again be in community with their favorite band.

British bands have long had a foothold in Mexico’s alternative scenes, with fans of all ages still packing bars and venues to hear Primal Scream, Blur, Pulp and, of course, Morrissey and the Smiths. These groups have had an enduring, impassioned following that has been explored in books, articles and films, with Mexicans often feeling a spiritual and cultural connection to the U.K.’s music scene stemming back to the Beatles. Oasis could have sold out shows across Mexico 10 times over.

After acrimoniously (and unsurprisingly) breaking up in 2009, the hope to ever see the Gallaghers fill a stadium with the staple of acoustic jam sessions worldwide, “Wonderwall,” dimmed. The brothers’ endless swipes at each other in the media post-breakup didn’t give fans hope they’d get back to “living forever.” Mexican fans even prayed to La Virgen de Guadalupe that the infamously combative brothers wouldn’t break up again even hours before showtime.

“As long as they don’t fight!” said Hector Garduño, who came to the show with his partner, Sofia Carrera, from Querétaro. “That’s what we want, for them not to fight.”

Hector Garduno, left, who came to the show with his partner, Sofia Carrera, from Querétaro, attended the Oasis reunion in Mexico City on Saturday, September 13, 2025.

(Alex Zaragoza/For De Los)

Gracias a la virgencita, the tour has seemingly been all love. The skies eventually cleared up on Saturday, and the stadium indeed filled with Oasis’ soaring, anthemic bangers for 2 ½ hours. For days leading up to the Mexico City date, fans in my orbit and social feeds debated how the show would compare with the crowd at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, where Oasis played the previous weekend.

“[Mexican audiences are] on another level,” said Garduño. “I think these dudes are going to be taken by surprise. I expect jumping, screaming, crying; the emotion of hearing those songs that really move you.”

Mauri Barranco, who came to the show with her best friend, said “I feel like we give a lot of ourselves. That’s why so many artists like coming to Mexico.”

Meanwhile, Alberto Folch, from Mexico City, saw his own audience participation as a challenge. “With all the vibes, with all the emotion, we’re ready to jump, to show them what Mexico is made of,” he said. “Tonight we’re rock ‘n’ roll stars.”

The 65,000 fans in attendance undoubtedly showed up sobbing and screeching with unbridled elation. Liam Gallagher played to the locals, donning a sombrero de charro during “Wonderwall” and the show closer “Champagne Supernova.” The band sounded as if no time had passed since its salad days, with the members’ vocals and musicianship arguably tighter than ever — perhaps a positive side effect of pulling back from the rock star lifestyle now that they’re in their 50s. The sound reverberated clean across the stadium as well (shoutout to L-Acoustics, who provided the sound for the reunion tour), and was praised nonstop by fans I spoke to throughout the weekend. I heard a lot of emphatic cries of “el sonido, güey!”

I pogo’d along with my fellow “madferits” as we turned away from the stage and linked arms to do the Poznań: a signature move at every show, borrowed from Manchester City F.C. fans. During “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” we shouted every lyric and were sprayed by flying beers thrown in raucous excitement.

I’ve never felt more giddy to get splashed with spit-riddled beer — and seemingly neither did anyone around me, who shouted joyful obscenities in Spanish. Three men behind me even sobbed into each other’s chests during “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and the stadium filled with cellphone lights as Noel Gallagher crooned “Talk Tonight.”

The rain didn’t fall again, but even if it had, it would have still felt like the sun.

Sixty years ago the British invasion was in full swing — beyond the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, bands like the Kinks, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and the Animals were all touring across America.

The Who were a late arrival, not reaching these shores until 1967 despite a slew of destined-to-be-classic singles. But the band — despite singing “Hope I die before I get old,” being famously fractious, and enduring the deaths of two key members — are still out there rocking.

More than four decades after their “farewell” tour, the band returns one (last?) time to the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday and Friday. It’s part of their “The Song Is Over” tour, which is an actual farewell tour … Kind of … Probably.

Guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend says that for now he wants to savor the moment. “I want to enjoy doing the best work I can on stage and to celebrate the music.”

While he and lead singer Roger Daltrey have been discussing this final tour, health issues and potential for future projects in one interview after another, they relished the chance to look back at what America and California have meant to them since that first trip.

“It came quite late for us but it was something we’d longed for and a huge adventure,” Townshend said in a recent interview, featuring long, thoughtful and detailed recollections of those early days.

“We were born in the Second World War, 1944 and we had rations — we were living on suet and you were living on steak here,” Daltrey said in his own interview. “For anyone born in those years, their whole dream was to have success in America. It was our dream world. In our early days, all the music we were playing was coming from America — we were mimicking it.”

Townshend agrees (this doesn’t happen often), saying that both as music lovers and musicians “we owed so much to America —the blues, the Motown scene, the New Orleans scene, the jazz scene, the folk music scene and then the Beach Boys with the miraculous ‘Pet Sounds’ album was out and shaking the walls.”

The Who made two American visits in 1967, playing New York in early spring and then returning for a full tour during the Summer of Love that included multiple shows in California.

“Being in New York, staying in a fancy hotel called the Drake that was quite posh with filet steak for fifty bucks felt like the high life,” Townshend says. “It felt like a different world to us.”

The band was playing four shows a day and were on the same bill as Cream so Townshend hung out with Eric Clapton — “he was with the beautiful girls, of course. Roger was too. Keith [Moon] was busy blowing things up.”

Townshend said he made lifelong friends in those two weeks and that “to this day New York feels like a second home.”

Then came the “fantastic indoctrination into the West Coast scene,” Townshend says of hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and the Mamas and the Papas. “It was so different from what was going on in the UK.”

Roger Daltrey speaks during the 39th Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024, at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland.

(Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP)

They played the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in June and then smashed up everything at the Monterey Pop Festival; they played in Anaheim that September shortly before they became a sensation with an explosive — literally — performance on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Keith Moon, conspiring with the Smothers Brothers’ stagehands, loaded his drum kit with a charge of explosives (equivalent to a stick of dynamite) and set them off at the end of the performance. Townshend later blamed that incident for his hearing loss and tinnitus.

Daltrey says “the days of flower power and hippies” was an eye-opening experience, but the biggest impact was the drug culture. “It was a big change in my life because the others [Townshend, Moon and bass player John Entwistle] took quite a liking to the drug culture and someone had to keep them in order, which fell on my shoulders.”

That November they returned for their first show at the Hollywood Bowl as part of the Festival of Music. It was a memorable one. It started on a high because they were supporting the Everly Brothers, Daltrey says. “Their harmonies had been with us from when we were teenagers, so that was exciting.”

Then, as was typical with the Who, things got amped up.

“When I was smashing my guitars, we liked to pretend that everything was catching fire, so Bob Pridden, our road manager and sound man, would set off smoke bombs,” Townshend says.

But, Daltrey notes, they didn’t understand that its location meant the city took safety precautions seriously. “Imagine all this smoke coming up out of the canyon,” he says. “The fire marshal came in and arrested Bob and took him to jail for the rest of the day.”

Additionally, he says, there was a moat in front of the stage (where there are now seats) and in a moment of, call it inspiration, Moon “threw his drums in there and then jumped in after them. It was quite a Hollywood Bowl debut.”

Both Daltrey and Townshend say they’ve retained a romantic view of America since that first trip.

“America has always been so good to us,” Daltrey says. “No matter how many times you hear America being criticized now, it’s still better than most places — every country’s got their problems.”

And while Townshend notes that franchises and chains have made many smaller cities feel alike, he still loves cities like L.A., “where you can walk down Sunset and it’s pretty much as it was years ago — the vibe hasn’t changed. I keep coming back to the word ‘romantic.’ It has a romantic feeling to it.”

Pete Townshend

(Yui Mok / Press Association via AP Images)

Townshend says the Bowl has vastly improved its sound over the years, and that he also likes playing the Greek but also feels indebted to Angel Stadium, where they played before 55,000 people in 1976, which he says marked an important step in rock’s transition from arena to stadium tours.

The band played Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on that first farewell tour in 1982, which Townshend knew in his heart wasn’t a farewell from the start.

Townshend says what he really needed was a hiatus. He’d been in “bad shape, having trouble giving up booze.” (One tactic was using hard drugs. Didn’t help.) He was also finding it easier to write solo material like “Rough Boys” or “The Sea Refuses No River” than Who songs.

“But we had a big record deal — I think if you quantify for inflation, it’s equal to something like $300 million today,” he says. “Probably one of the biggest deals that’s ever been done. I’m sounding like Donald Trump. Sorry. I wasn’t going to mention his name. Anyway, where was I?”

So the band was going to tour to promote “It’s Hard,” which he was dreading as he tried to get clean. He wrote a letter in a British magazine saying he was leaving the band. There was no public reaction, which at first “disappointed” him. But then the marketing folks used it to bill the tour as the Who’s final one. “And then we were selling out f—ing everywhere.”

But it created a false impression. “I should have said I’m going to take a sabbatical, because I had no idea what was going to happen in the future,” Townshend says. “I really just needed 18 months.”

The future is obviously much shorter when you’re an octogenarian, but Townshend, 80, and Daltrey, 81, are still managing to send a few mixed messages about the farewell this time around.

One thing they’ve emphasized is that this is the final tour but not the end of the Who as a live act.

“Touring has become so expensive and it’s incredibly grueling, so it’s hard to justify now,” Daltrey says.

Townshend agrees, saying that in addition to writing songs and prose, he also needs “time and space to just go off with a sketchbook and draw birds or something. Space is really important. And when you tour, you don’t have any space.”

But they will reunite, he adds. “We’ll definitely work together, we’ll do charity shows together.”

Daltrey echoes that idea, which is no surprise. He snuck in some solo shows between Who gigs this summer and still loves performing live. “Music is one of the last true great freedoms we really have but you have to play it live,” he says, even as he acknowledges that he doesn’t know how much longer he can meet his own standards. “That’s the insecurity of the artist–you never know when it’s going to end. My voice is great at the moment, but it could go tomorrow.”

And while the band already postponed two shows early in the tour because of an unspecified illness, they sound astonishingly loud and fresh still, adding new vocal and instrumental flourishes and accents to classics like “Behind Blue Eyes.”

Townshend, who has long been sparing in praise for his partner, calls Daltrey’s voice “amazing.” “He has perfect pitch and he’s singing so great, where he gets the power I don’t know.”

(Meanwhile the guitarist had a knee operation this year and “like every f—ing rock star in the world, I got addicted to oxytocin;” he got depressed but found help and is now “feeling quite chipper.”)

But when Daltrey says “We’re not stopping being a band” it’s clear the two don’t see their future the same way.

Townshend acknowledges this, predicting during our conversation, “Roger will refute everything I say.”

Daltrey responds by saying, “You’ve got to keep him on his toes. Otherwise he’ll just sleep on his yacht.”

And then he starts refuting. Townshend says of the decision to ditch long-time drummer Zak Starkey, “Roger didn’t want him in the band– they’re still good friends, so I don’t know what’s going on;” while Daltrey, in dismissing rumors of a feud with Starkey, avers that “both Pete and I decided we needed to freshen up our sound and Zak didn’t quite fit into that.” (Then, because a Who farewell tour needs some friction, after saying it wasn’t personal and that Starkey is “like a son to me,” he adds “Zak didn’t help matters….He can be a bit of a loose cannon, you know.”)

Daltrey and Townshend were never as close as, say, John Lennon and Paul McCartney; Townshend says they were just too dissimilar and never really socialized much. (On stage now, they banter about their differences but joke about journalists who can’t understand their true connection.)

“He was my protector and he was my first boss,” Townshend says. “ I’ve tried to serve him with great songs and support though I may have been a bit of a bully sometimes.”

Now, he’s curious to see if (mostly) retiring The Who can change the dynamic. “Maybe it’s time to let go of the Who brand,” he says. “It hasn’t belonged to us for many years– it belongs to the industry, the press, the fans. I wonder whether Roger and I will find something new with the Who legacy being lifted from us.”

To that end, he’d gladly write songs for Daltrey to sing as a solo artist. “It’s not difficult for me to write songs for Roger, but I think it’s difficult to write songs for Roger under the Who banner– they’ve got to be as good as “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Baba”–f—ing “O’Riley,” he says. “And that’s not easy.”

While Daltrey is quick to say, “I love the man,” he’s also not having any of that, saying if Townshend wants to write for him, it would be for the band. “Listen, I started The bloody Who. I’m entitled to keep it going as long as I want.”

They could make another Who album if only Townshend would collaborate with him, Daltrey insists. “I can write songs. They’re just not Pete Townshend songs but if Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey wrote songs together, they might be something special.”

He is even changing some of Townshend’s lyrics to “The Song is Over,” which he also cut down for the tour. “It never worked on stage as a complete song, and the lyrics had to move on,” Daltrey says.

In other words, when it comes to The Who, both in terms of fighting and music, the song is not over.

Surprise! The 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival lineup is out and it’s topped by pop stars.

Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G will headline the twin weekends of the festival, which return to the Empire Polo Club in Indio April 10-12 and 17-19, 2026.

Other notable acts include elder statesmen such as Iggy Pop, David Byrne and Devo, rock acts including the Strokes and Turnstile, pop star Addison Rae, jazz pop prodigy Laufey, EDM superstar Kaskade, rapper Young Thug and dozens of others.

The bottom of the festival poster also announces something called “The Bunker Debut of Radiohead Kid A Mnesia.” The British rock band Radiohead recently announced European tour dates.

Also at the bottom of the poster, which has become a place for the festival to announce special engagements, is the world premiere of Anyma’s “Æden.” Anyma, the project of producer and artist Matteo Miller, was the first electronic act to headline Sphere in Las Vegas.

At the top of the poster for Friday, listed between the XX and Disclosure is an act called Nine Inch Noize. German producer Boys Noize joined Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails’ on the band’s recent tour and also labeled a live collaboration as Nine Inch Noize System on Instagram.

Since its inception in 1999, Coachella has included a diverse range of musical styles, but also less-than-expected acts, such as the colorful monsters of the show Yo Gabba Gabba! and the L.A. Phil earlier this year. For 2026, another beloved L.A. institution is on the bill: Bob Baker Marionettes, of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, are listed on the poster for Friday.

Coachella has given a spotlight to some of the world’s biggest K-pop and J-pop acts in recent years and in 2026 acts including Bigbang, Fujii Kaze, and Taemin.

The 2026 edition is also a makeup show of sorts for FKA Twigs, who had to cancel her 2025 North American tour, including stops at Coachella, due to visa issues. Promoter Goldenvoice has traditionally released the festival’s lineup in January, three months or so before the event.

Tickets start at $649 for a three-day pass for Weekend 1 and $549 for Weekend 2. (If you buy a 4-pack of tickets you can save $10 per pass.) VIP passes for Weekend 1 start at $1,299 and are $1,199 for Weekend 2.

New for 2026 is a group camping option, which allows people who want to camp together to arrive at different times. There’s a 10-spot minimum and a 20-spot maximum. Each camping spot is $160.

Passes go on sale to the general public at 11 a.m. Pacific on Friday, Sept. 19 at www.coachella.com.

See the full Coachella 2026 lineup.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s widow Tenisha Warner has confirmed her identity and addressed the public for the first time since “The Cosby Show” actor’s death.

Tenisha Warner, who married Malcolm-Jamal Warner in 2017, posted a wedding photo and a statement on Instagram on Friday, which was the eve of their wedding anniversary.

“Thank you for holding us in so much love during this tender time,” Warner wrote in the caption. “For the first time, I’m sharing a glimpse of the love that began it all. I can still hear my husband’s laugh, still feel the way he made room for every part of me — every tear, every dream.”

Warner also announced that she and her daughter are launching the Warner Family Foundation and River & Ember in the late actor’s honor.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who portrayed Theo Huxtable on the beloved family sitcom for eight seasons, died in July at age 54. Warner drowned at the beach while on vacation with his family in Costa Rica.

The Television Academy tapped Warner’s TV mom Phylicia Rashad for a tribute to the one-time Emmy nominee to kick off the “In Memoriam” segment at the 77th Emmy Awards on Sunday.

“He was a beloved teenager in an iconic television series who the world watched grow into manhood,” Rashad said onstage at the Peacock Theater, “and like all our friends and colleagues who transitioned this past year, Malcolm-Jamal Warner remains in our hearts.”

Although he was happy in his marriage, Warner had kept the identities of his wife and daughter private prior to his death.

“We’ve been together almost 10 years,” he said during a podcast appearance in May. “We’ve never had a fight, an argument, a raised voice or a harsh word. Not that we’ve always agreed. We’re just at a point where we have a way of communicating.”

Tenisha Warner said in her Instagram statement that River & Ember is about carrying that love they shared forward.

“River & Ember was born … from my own journey with grief and love,” she wrote about her new company. “Through story and ritual, I hope to offer families the same gifts he gave us: a sense of being held, and a reminder that even in life’s changing seasons, our inner light is worth tending.”

River & Ember will offer seasonal toolkits of stories, rituals and art for parents and children. The Warner Family Foundation will offer scholarships to young artists.

There were two questions the 77th Emmy Awards, held Sunday night at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, had to answer, other than who would win what. (It’s an honor just to be nominated.)

One was how the show, a glittery evening devoted to the most popular of popular arts, would play against a world gone mad. The other, not distinct from the first, was how first-time host Nate Bargatze would do.

The ceremony is hosted by a round robin of the major networks, and this year the honor fell to CBS, whose corporate overlord, Paramount, has come to represent capitulation to the Trump administration, settling a baseless lawsuit in what is widely viewed as a payoff to grease the wheels of its merger with Skydance and promising to eliminate its DEI protocols. Executive interference in the news department amid an apparent rightward turn has led to the resignations of “60 Minutes” producer Bill Owens and CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon. And there’s the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” the timing of which some have found suspicious.

But if your goal was to avoid insulted celebrities, social media outrage or petulant notes from the White House, you could have done no better than to hire Bargatze, a clean, calm, classical, noncontroversial, nonpolitical, very funny, very successful comedian. Bargatze, who has been in comedy since 2002, saw his career explode over the last few years; his appeal is not so much mainstream, which is to say soft-edged, as it is broad — something for everybody.

The show opened quite brilliantly — perhaps confusingly, if you had missed Bargatze’s “Washington’s Dream” sketches on “Saturday Night Live” on which the routine was closely modeled, including the presence of Mikey Day, Bowen Yang and James Austin Johnson — with the host as Philo T. Farnsworth, “the inventor of television,” foreseeing the medium’s less than sensible future. First presenter Stephen Colbert followed immediately to a standing ovation and chants of his name. “While I have your attention, is anyone hiring? I have 200 very qualified candidates with me tonight who will be available in June.”

Then the host introduced his much publicized, one would say quintessentially Bargatzean, gimmick. To keep acceptance speeches short, he would donate $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America; $1,000 per second would be deducted for anyone going over the allotted 45 seconds. Money would be added to the pot for anyone running short. (J.B. Smoove, a former Boys Club member, was a sort of co-sponsor, in the audience with a young boy and girl.) This efficiency made professional sense, though it had the potential to put a lid on what is usually the most interesting, unruly, moving, unpredictable part of the show. (If anyone had thought for a second, it also spelled trouble: Try talking for what you imagine is 45 seconds. You will be wrong.)

As it happened, the state of the world was addressed, sidelong and directly. Presenter Julianne Nicholson said of living in a post-apocalyptic bunker in “Paradise,” “compared to headlines that’s positively feel-good TV.” Jeff Hiller, winning supporting actor in a comedy series for “Somebody Somewhere,” thanked the Duplass brothers “for writing a show of connection and love in this time when compassion is seen as a weakness.” “Last Week Tonight” senior writer Daniel O’Brien dedicated their second award to “all writers of political comedy while that is still a type of show that is allowed to exist.” And in a generational echo of their “Hacks” characters, fourth-time winner Jean Smart (who has won seven Emmys overall) ended her acceptance speech saying, “Let’s be good to each other, just be good to each other,” while co-star and first-time winner Hannah Einbinder, finished with, “I just want to say: Go Birds, f— ICE, and free Palestine.” Going way over the 45-second limit, she promised to pay the difference on the tote board.

Hannah Einbinder accepts the award for supporting actress in a comedy series for “Hacks” during the show at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

After Einbeinder, the most direct acknowledgment of current bad events came from Academy Chair and CEO Cris Abrego, speaking of the Governors Award given the week before to the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. In a highly quotable speech, he noted how “Congress had voted to defund it and silence yet another cultural institution.” He continued, “In a time when division dominates the headlines, storytelling still has the power to unite us … In times of cultural regression [it reminds] us what’s at stake and what can still be achieved,” and he rattled off a number of much loved shows that challenged the status quo. “In a moment like this, neutrality is not enough. … Culture does not come from the top down, it rises from the bottom up. … Let’s make sure that culture is not a platform for the privileged but a public good for all.” The stars in the audience nodded approvingly.

There were also some pure delights among the bedrock of desultory scripted banter and unimpressive tributes to old shows (“Law & Order: SUV,” “The Golden Girls”). Reunited “Everybody Loves Raymond” co-stars Ray Romano and Brad Garrett, presenting the award for comedy series, recaptured the essence of their television brotherhood. Jennifer Coolidge, presenting the award for lead supporting actress in a comedy, sounded like she’d walked in from a Christopher Guest film. “Between us, I was actually hoping to be nominated for you tonight for my work on this season of ‘The Pitt.’ I played a horny grandmother having a colonoscopy during a power outage and I had to play a lot of levels. I even had to do my own prep.” She went on, after a while, to tell the nominees that winning “is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s really not… I thought I had gotten really close with my fellow nominees especially after I won but I’m pretty sure they removed me from the group chat.”

The inevitable losses incurred by Bargatze’s charity gimmick provided a sort of running joke at the host’s expense, which he managed quite well, while some winners made a game of trying to put money back on the board. But the longer it went on, the more pressure it put on the winners to be short. Eventually, the show found its natural level, as winners said what they needed to, or much of it, and the count dropped tens of thousands of dollars past zero. For everyone but the bean counters, the least important thing about an awards show is it running on time; in any case, it was only a few minutes over.

And, as one might have expected, Bargatze — who made it through the three hours in a way that served the event and his own down-home ethos — paid the originally promised $100,000 and added a $250,000 tip.

An anime film slayed its Hollywood competition at the box office this weekend.

“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle,” already a big hit in Japan, was the highest-grossing movie domestically, beating new films “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale,” “The Long Walk” and “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.”

The film distributed by Sony Pictures and Crunchyroll opened with a better-than-expected $70 million in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada, according to studio estimates, making it the biggest anime opening ever. It’s also the highest-grossing domestic debut of the year so far for an animated film.

Its global weekend for Sony, which owns the Crunchyroll anime brand and streaming service, totaled $132.1 million, which includes 49 international markets.

Globally, “Demon Slayer” had already made more than $272 million in box office revenue, with $213 million in Japan alone, according to data from Box Office Mojo.

The success of “Demon Slayer” is a relief to theater owners at a time when other genres are struggling, including superheroes, comedies and original animation. It’s the latest evidence of anime’s growing global clout.

The new “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” is part of a larger popular anime franchise.

It’s the first installment of a planned trilogy that will span the final showdown between the Demon Slayer Corps and the monstrous creatures the secret organization was created to defeat. A previous theatrical film, “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Mugen Train,” was a box office hit in 2020.

The new “Downton Abbey” film from Focus Features launched with $18.1 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada, which was good enough for third place behind the second weekend of New Line’s “The Conjuring: Last Rites.” Lionsgate’s “The Long Walk,” based on a Stephen King novel, opened in fourth with $11.5 million domestically.

“Spinal Tap II,” a sequel to the 1984 mockumentary comedy classic, opened with a weak $1.7 million.

Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists on Friday elected “The Lord of the Rings” actor Sean Astin to be its national president as one of Hollywood’s most powerful labor unions faces new challenges in a changing film and TV industry.

Astin, known for portraying Frodo’s loyal hobbit friend, Samwise Gamgee, in the Peter Jackson-directed fantasy trilogy, now finds himself headed to a different kind of stage.

The 54-year-old actor will become leader of the 160,000-person performers union as it prepares to enter negotiations next year for a new contract with the major studios at a time when the entertainment industry faces consolidation, productions moving overseas and artificial intelligence.

“I feel proud and I feel determined,” Astin said in an interview. “People keep saying to me, ‘I hope you have time to celebrate’ and celebrating feels like a foreign thought. This doesn’t feel like a moment for celebration. It feels like a moment to say thank you and get to work.”

Astin garnered 79% of the votes cast in the election, according to the actors guild’s data. Voting closed on Friday. Astin beat his opponent Chuck Slavin, a background actor and performer in independent movies.

Slavin on Friday said in a statement that “while the outcome is disappointing, my commitment to advocating for transparency and member rights remains unshaken.”

Astin succeeds outgoing president Fran Drescher, who led the union through a 118-day strike during the last contract negotiations in summer 2023. Under that contract, the union secured AI protections and streaming bonuses based on viewership numbers. Some actors felt the contract didn’t go far enough and hope for more gains during next year’s talks.

Astin told The Times in an interview earlier this month that he is hopeful about securing a fair deal with the studios.

“I have a very good feeling about going into this next negotiation, because it’s clear to me that it’s in both parties’ interest to achieve a good deal,” Astin said.

In general, “the truth is that no union and no management should ever want a strike — that is the tool of last resort,” Astin said.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major studios, said it looked forward to working with Astin “to address the issues most important to SAG-AFTRA performers while promoting stability and opportunity across our industry.”

Astin’s strategy for negotiations was more moderate than that of Slavin. Slavin said that, if elected, he would call a strike authorization vote before meeting with the studios as a way to help boost the union’s leverage during negotiations.

Astin’s running mate, Michelle Hurd, was elected as secretary-treasurer of the union, receiving around 65% of the vote. Hurd has acted in shows such as “Star Trek: Picard” and movies including the romantic comedy “Anyone But You.”

Astin said he would push for more AI protections in the next contract and work with government leaders to keep productions in the U.S.

Astin ran under a group called “The Coalition,” which featured candidates from Membership First and Unite For Strength, two political groups within SAG-AFTRA. Slavin ran as an independent.

Voter turnout for this year’s national election was lower than in 2023, when Drescher was re-elected president. In 2023, roughly 23% of the ballots were returned, compared to this year’s 17%, according to SAG-AFTRA data. In 2021, when Drescher was first elected national president, 26% of the ballots were returned, according to the union.

Astin received a key endorsement from outgoing president Drescher, who he says has been a “constant source of support and guidance” and said he was “eager to help protect her legacy.” Astin’s mother, Academy Award-winning supporting actor Patty Duke, was a past president of the actors’ union.

Astin said that he will begin his term poring over information, meeting with SAG-AFTRA staff and doing outreach to members, including visiting the various locals.

“Now is the time for the optimism,” Astin said on Friday. “When you elect a new president, it’s a new chapter and a new page is turned. There is no reason not to charge forward as a union with our members.”

In “Am I Roxie?,” a world premiere one-woman-show at the Geffen Playhouse, Roxana Ortega, a working actress and alum of the Groundlings Theatre’s Sunday Company, revisits the period in her life when she was the caregiver for her mother, whose memory was unraveling.

When Ortega’s father died of a sudden heart attack outside the post office, she was unprepared for the consequences. He had been protecting the family from her mother’s decline.

An immigrant from Peru who had relinquished her dreams of acting to raise a family, Carmen had a special bond with Ortega. When little Roxana was growing up in Fullerton, her mother would improvise operas while fixing breakfast. Together, they dreamed theatrical dreams.

Carmen has many sisters — “Picture the Housewives of Beverly Hills, but in Canoga Park” — but none were able to take her in. Ortega’s siblings, married with children, were similarly unable.

Not having kids of her own deprived Ortega of the one excuse her family would have recognized. Yet she still wanted to have kids, though not before she found the right husband and made some headway in a career marked by small triumphs, such as booking commercials and webisodes. Was she really going to put her life on hold for a few years?

Finding a painful compromise, she decides to move her mother to an assisted-living facility near her in L.A. Taking this step requires her to go to war with her “inner Latina critic,” who reminds her of the code of her blood: “We take care of our own.” She adds an expletive to the end of this pronouncement, but no emphasis is needed for a daughter who has already indicted herself for selfishness, the one unpardonable sin for a Latina.

“Am I Roxie?,” performed by Ortega with unflagging ebullience in an athletic-wear jumpsuit designed for comfort rather than style, brings to the exhausting, guilt-inducing grind of eldercare her own cultural spin. The subject is relatable, as lifespans have extended while health insurance only seems to contract. Ortega is an agreeable guide through the thicket of problems, such as choosing between senior facilities that resemble “sad Marriotts” or “sad La Quinta Inns.”

The show is more of a personal essay composed for the stage than a deeply imagined performance work. Ortega’s approach is friendly and wryly conversational. She’s bearing witness to a human dilemma our culture would prefer to keep under wraps, but Ortega might just as easily be doing an audio essay or podcast. The one character who comes vividly to life is her own.

There’s a rich tradition of performance artists bringing difficult personal stories to public light. “Am I Roxie?” seems disconnected from the work of Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin and Marga Gomez. Soloists who can populate the stage with uncurtailed ambition.

Thematically, “Am I Roxie?” is structured around the “Circle of Life” song from “The Lion King.” Ortega knows this reference is corny, but it’s also inescapably apt. The person who gave her life now needs her help as she nears the end.

Birth and death weigh heavy on Ortega’s mind, as she ponders her own lifespan, the diminishing window for motherhood and the confused and sometimes angry helplessness of Carmen, who comes to believe that her daughter is her sister. Eventually, Carmen will wonder if she herself is Roxie, an existential dilemma that Ortega refuses to understand as a mere symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.

She’s reluctant at the start to name her mother’s condition. How can she reduce a loved one to a medical diagnosis? Even at Carmen’s most exasperating, she could still surprise Ortega with a simple, poignant question: “How are you doing in your life, Roxie?”

Ortega begins to understand that, though her mother has been transformed, she can still connect with her if she accepts her as she is. By speaking to her mother in the nonsense language she falls into and by playing games of pretend as if they were back in her childhood home, Ortega reaches her mother, if only for fleeting moments.

The production, directed by Bernardo Cubría, seems to have adopted a medical oath of first doing no harm. A set piece is every now and again mechanically (and somewhat quizzically) moved in or out, and there are projections offering illustrations of Fullerton and Ortega’s mental health adventure scaling the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

But “Am I Roxie?” doesn’t depend on scenic frills. Ortega is the show — not just her story but her rapport with the theatergoers, with whom she confides as if to old friends. She shares her fears that she might have occasionally failed her mother, but this confession is just another example of her generous humanity.

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New York — It was a quiet, while not quite silent, morning for the “Table of Silence Project” Thursday, on the plaza of Lincoln Center and in front of David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic. Commemorating the 24th anniversary of 9/11, white-robed members of the Buglisi Dance Theatre circled the plaza, a few with megaphones for chants, an occasional violin joining in, mellowing even the sounds of background traffic roaring down busy Broadway.

On this solemn but beautiful New York day and after more than two years in waiting, Gustavo Dudamel took charge, at least in practice, of the New York Philharmonic. Six decades ago, during the Leonard Bernstein era, America’s oldest and most celebrated orchestra had the city’s (and much of the nation’s) full attention in a way it hasn’t since. Could that happen again?

When Dudamel announced in early February 2023 that he would leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic to become music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 2026, he became instant celebrity news here. A New York Philharmonic player gives Dudamel a cheesecake, and the New York Times writes a story.

This season Dudamel gains his first official title: music and artistic director designate. But the orchestra is basically his baby now. His photo is plastered on the orchestra’s posters and publicity. And on Thursday night, Dudamel, for the first time, opened the New York Philharmonic’s new season. After two weeks this month, he will have a sizable presence later winter and in spring, while also closing out his last L.A. Phil season with major programs.

Dudamel arrived in New York on Tuesday, having spent two weeks conducting the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela, his homeland orchestra, to open Coldplay’s concerts at Glastonbury in England, just as the newly named U.S. Department of War immediately began to live up to its name by sending warships to Dudamel’s native Venezuela and threatening regime change.

But here in New York, Dudamel paid tribute to a new city in his life with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2. In 1945, Bartók, having fled Nazi-invaded Hungary, wrote his final piano concerto in a New York apartment on 57th Street, a block west of Carnegie Hall. Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic premiere of Ives’ Second — the first great American symphony — at Carnegie, then the New York Philharmonic’s home, six years later.

Still, the first orchestral sounds that emanated from the Dudamel designated directorship turned out to be barely heard, while not silent, percussion stirrings. Following a season-opening tradition he began when he became music director of the L.A. Phil, Dudamel began the program with a world premiere.

For this, he directed New Yorkers’ attention westward. In “of light and stone,” Leilehua Lanzilotti sets the sonic stage for an evocation of Hawaii, where she resides, before statehood. She makes references to King Kalakaua, Queen Lili’uokalani and other Hawaiian nobility few in a mainland audience are likely to know. There are fragments of Hawaiian song, a dance of the wind.

Nothing settles in this four-part, 15-minute song of a land, a score that falls somewhere between history lesson and color-field sonic landscape. A whisp of a canorous clarinet or a rumbling rattle is all it takes for a kind of instant transport to a far-off time and place. New York Philharmonic audiences can be cool, but they’ve demonstratively taken to Dudamel at Geffen, and an ethereal performance appeared to open ears.

The young Korean pianist, Yunchan Lim, who became instantly hot after winning the Van Cliburn competition three years ago, was soloist in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto. Lim will be a soloist with Dudamel and the L.A. Phil this season as well as give a solo recital in Walt Disney Concert Hall. He is an exceptional pianist. He too opens ears and can transport a listener to a distant land. And Lim’s case is far more distant or far less knowable than Hawaii.

Lim’s Bartók exists in a world of the pianist’s own. Every phrase is for him an oddity, as if he had found some weird object in an imaginary world and was figuring out what he might do with it. His tools were rhythm, accents and dynamics, each a quirky new toy. The New York Philharmonic produced beauty and excitement, but Lim went his own way that wasn’t quite imaginative enough to improve on Bartók. Here we go again with an exceptional young soloist being pushed into the limelight too soon.

The New York Philharmonic owns Ives’ Second. Written in the first decade of the 20th century, the symphony offered a whole new way of thinking about American and European music and it sat dormant for some four decades before Bernstein premiered it. But that 1951 performance had a huge effect on how to transform folk music, popular music, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and what-not, twisted, transformed and tacked together. Bernstein later recorded it twice with the New York Philharmonic. The first time full of beans that revived it for good. The second time in 1987 as a glorious spiritual exercise. Hearing that performance live left me in a state of rapture.

Dudamel has made a specialty of the symphony himself, conducting it with the Vienna Philharmonic, recording it with the L.A. Phil and now going to the source. His performance Thursday night did not try to follow in Bernstein’s footsteps or necessarily Dudamel’s own. The performance flowed with exquisite lyricism and mustered a thrilling finale.

In Vienna, Dudamel was more robust. At Disney, Dudamel found exceptional expression in every little detail. That was the Dudamel that we last saw at the Hollywood Bowl this summer when he conducted Mahler’s First more vividly than ever.

That is not, quite yet, the Dudamel for New York. Here his Ives seemed to be laying the groundwork, letting his new orchestra show him what it can do before he begins, as he surely will, digging deeper.

It took a once controversial effort for Bernstein to transform an uptight virtuosic New York Philharmonic into a tight but electric one. Now it’s Dudamel’s turn for transmogrification, and he’s made a promising beginning.

It’s the end of “Downton Abbey.” No, really — this time, it’s right there in the title, “The Grand Finale.” After six seasons, five Christmas specials, three movies and a partridge in a pear tree, this is the end, until the next time writer and creator Julian Fellowes is struck with inspiration.

All joking aside, “The Grand Finale” is a fine send-off for the beloved British costume drama, which follows the ups and downs of the aristocratic Crawley family — and their staff — while navigating the tumultuous beginnings of the 20th century.

While the previous “Downton” film, 2022’s “A New Era,” saw the Crawleys venturing to France and hosting a movie crew at their Yorkshire estate, the key to “The Grand Finale” is that Fellowes doesn’t venture into unfamiliar territory. He keeps us grounded in the smaller social and familial dramas, with a few fun guest stars that nod to the year in which the story takes place: 1930.

What Fellowes has done so well with “Downton” is offer an escape to the past, while using the period setting to comment on issues of contemporary relevance. He produces an appealing tension in the simultaneous presentation of archaic cultural norms alongside issues that feel as urgent as ever. In “The Grand Finale,” there’s the tabloid scandal that swarms the divorce of Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) as well as the ongoing struggle that is Lord Grantham’s unwillingness to pass on management of Downton Abbey to the next generation. (Returning again to the role of the patriarch is Hugh Bonneville.)

We can titter at the shock and horror that some of the characters display at even being in the same room as a divorced woman — Lady Mary is rudely escorted from a ball and asked to hide under a staircase lest she come into contact with a royal — and also empathize with the frustration of a new generation that desperately wants to take over from the old guard and maybe even shake things up a bit. It sounds a lot like the complaints that Gen X and millennials have with the boomers. Some things never change, even if divorce is no longer grounds for social expulsion.

Fellowes isn’t exactly subtle with the messaging in his final chapter. American uncle Harold (Paul Giamatti) declares it’s more comfortable to live in the past. Fellowes gets even more self-reflective with the character of Molesley (Kevin Doyle), who progressed from footman to screenwriter in the last film and now demands the recognition that he believes he deserves. You have to laugh when Molesley declares to camera that screenwriters are more important than even movie stars. (Heard, Lord Fellowes, an Oscar winner for his original script to “Gosford Park.”)

“The Grand Finale” brings back old friends from “A New Era,” such as film actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West), now in a quiet relationship with former Downton footman Barrow (Robert James-Collier), and their pal, theater attraction and playwright Noel Coward (Arty Froushan), representing the new wave of media celebrities. In a truly delightful, star-making performance, Froushan delivers mischievous double entendres as Coward, practically licking his chops at all the juicy material he finds at Downton for his new plays, whether it’s Lady Mary’s love woes or the inner workings of the “downstairs” Downton staff.

With the late Dame Maggie Smith no longer delivering her usual barbs, Simon Russell Beale has stepped in to represent the traditionalist ways of thinking. Playing Sir Hector who contends with Lady Isabelle (Penelope Wilton) over the planning of the county show, he mightily resists change and isn’t afraid to let her know about it. He also delivers one of the most spectacular line readings of the phrase “beekeepers and bottling fruit,” so don’t worry — the spirit of the Dowager Countess lives on.

In other subplots, the Crawleys need to manage both a financial pickle related to the American stock market crash and a smooth-talking scam artist who goes by Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), who has inveigled Harold into an Argentine currency grift and Lady Mary into a rebound tryst. He is ultimately merely a device to illustrate Lady Edith’s mannered English claws when she scares him off with threats to his social standing, and a way to urge the Crawleys into new management of their assets, but he’s a fun fly in the ointment nevertheless.

With its mix of old characters and new, worldly upheaval and small-town drama, Fellowes illustrates what “Downton” has always done best, which is a social examination of how much things have changed and how they haven’t changed at all. While some of the character work doesn’t quite develop or deepen our understanding of them, or even take them on new journeys, it’s simply a pleasure to visit one last time — or at least until the next one. (Why pretend otherwise?) World War II is only a few years away. Wouldn’t you like to see how the Crawleys tackle that?

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative millennial influencer who galvanized young Americans to support the GOP and was assassinated this week in Utah, was the most influential modern-day catalyst of shifting voting trends among fledgling voters, according to Republican and Democratic strategists.

Kirk founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 at the age of 18, and it grew into a force that promoted conservative views on high school and college campuses across the nation.

“He found something among young people that none of us identified,” said Shawn Steel, a member of the Republican National Committee from Orange County who knew Kirk for nearly a decade and invited him to speak before the RNC’s conservative steering committee.

“He found an entire movement in America that conservatives were not even aware they could find. Not only that, he nurtured and created an entire new generation of conservative activists,” said Steel, the husband of former Rep. Michelle Steel. “His legacy will endure.”

The admiration for Kirk’s political organizing skills and mental acuity cut across political lines.

“Whether you agreed with him or not — and to be clear, I didn’t — he was one of the most brilliant political organizers of his generation, and probably generations before that,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist who served as an advisor to Presidents Obama and Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris. “He could be controversial, but he struck a nerve with people who were likely disengaged in politics prior to Turning Point and built a powerful movement.”

In addition to appealing to young voters about the economic headwinds they faced as they sought to climb the career ladder and tried to buy a house, Kirk also espoused sharply conservative views.

Beyond espousing traditional conservative views — being anti-abortion, pro-gun rights and dubious of climate change — Kirk was critical of gay and transgender rights, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying last year that if he saw a Black airplane pilot, he hoped he was qualified. He was accused of being an antisemite because of repeated comments about the power of Jewish donors in the United States, and of being Islamophobic because of comments such as describing “large dedicated Islamic areas” as “a threat to America.”

Kirk, 31 and a father of two, died Wednesday after being shot in the neck while speaking at Utah Valley University. Kirk’s assassination was the latest instance of political violence in an increasingly politically polarized country.

In June, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, while state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife survived a shooting at their home, roughly five miles away, the same day. In 2022, a home invader bludgeoned the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). In 2017, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot during a practice session for an annual congressional baseball game. In 2011, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) barely survived an assassination attempt as she met with constituents in a Tucson strip mall.

President Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024 as he successfully sought reelection to the White House.

Kirk’s “mission was to bring young people into the political process, which he did better than anybody ever, to share his love of country and to spread the simple words of common sense on campuses nationwide,” Trump said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Trump told reporters on the White House’s South Lawn that Kirk was partly responsible for his victory in the 2024 presidential election and repeated that he would posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Turning Point USA, created a month before Kirk graduated from high school, became the new face of conservatism on college campuses and had chapters at more than 800 schools. Prominent conservatives heavily funded the group; in the fiscal year that ended in June of 2024, Turning Point reported $85 million in revenue.

Longtime GOP activist Jon Fleischman, the former executive director of the California Republican Party and the former chairman of the state’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1990s, said Kirk was pivotal to Trump’s election.

“Charlie Kirk was probably the single most prominent and successful youth organizer in the Trump movement,” Fleischman said, adding that Kirk superseded any other GOP organizer he knew at increasing conservative prospects among young voters.

“As somebody who cut their teeth as a youth organizer, I have nothing but awe for the level of sophistication he brought to that field of work,” he said.

Support for Trump among young voters exponentially increased in the 2024 presidential election, according to data compiled by Tufts University. While President Biden had a 25-point edge over Trump among voters ages 18 to 29 in the 2020 election, Harris had a four-point advantage among this cohort last year.

“This last election was the best performance Republicans have had with the youth vote, particularly male voters, in 20 years, maybe even going back to the ’80s,” said Steve Deace, a conservative radio host in Iowa who had known Kirk for a decade.

He gave credit for that success partly to work Kirk did on the ground at colleges across the country, notably being willing to amicably debate with people who disagreed with his beliefs.

“Charlie was basically a Renaissance man who was comfortable in a lot of settings. He wasn’t hoity-toity,” he said.

Deace and others added that this moment could be a turning point for the nation’s democracy and the split between the left and the right.

“We’re going to have a real conversation about whether we can share a country or not. The answer may be we can’t,” Deace said. “We have to decide if we are capable of the fundamental differences between us being adjudicated at the ballot box…. We have to decide if we can share a country. If we truly want to, we’ll figure it out. If we don’t, we won’t. That’s the conversation that needs to happen.”

Bombastic conservative commentator Roger Stone went further, arguing that modern-day Democrats are a greater threat to the nation than terrorists, drug cartels and foreign spies.

“The rot is too deep to reverse our course with mere rhetoric,” Stone wrote to supporters. “Sept. 10, 2025 was the day we crossed the Rubicon, lost our innocence and realized only one path remains to ensure humanity’s survival. The time for American renewal is at hand, and the tree of liberty shall germinate in warp speed with Charlie Kirk serving as the martyr of our glorious refounding.”

Political analyst Matthew Dowd lost his contributor role at MSNBC because of comments he made about Charlie Kirk after the young right-wing activist was murdered Wednesday.

Shortly after Kirk was shot to death while speaking on stage at Utah Valley State University, Dowd told MSNBC anchor Katy Tur that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions.”

The angry reaction on social media was immediate after Dowd’s comments suggested that Kirk’s history of incendiary remarks led to the shooting.

MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler issued an apology Wednesday night.

“During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable,” Kutler said in a statement. “There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.”

The network then severed ties with Dowd, according to a person briefed on the decision who was not authorized to comment.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Charlie Kirk,” Dowd later wrote on his Bluesky account. “I was asked a question on the environment we are in. I apologize for my tone and words. Let me be clear, I in no way intended for my comments to blame Kirk for this horrendous attack.”

Dowd is a political consultant who served as the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s successful 2004 presidential reelection campaign. Dowd broke away from the Republican party due to his unhappiness with Bush’s handling of the Iraq war.

Dowd previously served as a political analyst for ABC News.

Nearly two decades after the fact, Anna Wintour is finally giving her review of “The Devil Wears Prada,” the 2006 Anne Hathaway comedy built around the onetime Vogue editor in chief’s notorious style of leadership.

And although Wintour is more than fashionably late, she’s showing up in time for the sequel.

The film “had a lot of humor to it, it had a lot of wit, it had Meryl Streep,” Wintour said recently on the New Yorker Radio Hour. “[The cast] were all amazing. And in the end, I thought it was a fair shot.”

The famed editor, who stepped down from the Vogue gig this summer, said she went into the premiere of the original film wearing Prada but not knowing what the movie was about. Wintour said people in the fashion industry had expressed concerns about the Miranda Priestly character, worrying she would be played as a caricature of Wintour. But those fears were unfounded.

“First of all, it was Meryl Streep, [who is] fantastic.”

“The Devil Wears Prada” is based on the 2003 bestselling novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger, who worked as a personal assistant to Wintour. The film follows a writer played by Hathaway who gets a job at a fashion magazine managed by a highly demanding boss, played by Streep.

The actor who played the no-nonsense editor in chief earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance.

Wintour announced in June that she would step down as editor in chief of the magazine after 37 years at the helm. She will continue to oversee Condé Nast, the global media company that publishes Vogue among other publications including the New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair and Wired.

“The Devil Wears Prada 2” is in production with a release date set for May 2026. Streep, Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci will all reprise their roles; Adrian Grenier, who played Hathaway’s boyfriend in the original film, will not appear. New cast members include Kenneth Branagh, Justin Theroux and Lucy Liu.

Fox News is launching a new Sunday program with its senior White House correspondents Peter Doocy and Jacqui Heinrich, the network announced Wednesday.

The new Washington-based program called “The Sunday Briefing” will replace “MediaBuzz,” the long-running media criticism show hosted by Howie Kurtz that airs at 11 a.m. Eastern.

Heinrich and Doocy will rotate as solo hosts of the “The Sunday Briefing.” Both have covered the White House for Fox News since 2021.

In a statement, Fox News said the new program, which debuts Sept. 21, “will tackle all facets of the White House beat, including the President of the United States’ national and international moves as well as the key issues impacting the administration.”

The son of “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy, Peter Doocy, 38, gained notoriety for his combative questions in the White House briefing room during the Biden administration.

Heinrich, 36, is a highly respected Washington correspondent known for straight reporting on the conservative-leaning network. Her fact-driven approach has occasionally annoyed the Trump administration and opinion hosts at the network who ardently support the president.

Kurtz has anchored “MediaBuzz” since 2013. He will remain at the network as a political media analyst and continue to host a podcast. His final TV program is Sunday.

Kurtz came to Fox from CNN, where he was the original host of “Reliable Sources.” The media criticism program was canceled in 2022 when it was hosted by Brian Stelter.

Fox News is also adding a new weekend program with former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Saturday in America with Kayleigh McEnany” will air for two hours at 10 a.m. Eastern.

McEnany joined Fox News in March 2021 as a commentator and was later named as a co-host on the daily daytime talk show “Outnumbered.” She will continue in that role.

Fox News also named Griff Jenkins as the new co-host of the weekend edition of “Fox & Friends.” The program has used rotating co-hosts since Pete Hegseth departed to join the Trump administration as Secretary of Defense.

Jenkins, a Fox News correspondent since 2003, will sit alongside current “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy and Charlie Hurt.

Fox News also named conservative commentator Tomi Lahren and Iraq war veteran Johnny Jones as permanent co-hosts for its weekend panel program “The Big Weekend Show.”

Actor Raymond Cruz was held in custody for five hours on Monday after a sudsy spat with three women in his Los Angeles neighborhood.

Cruz — who portrayed the drug lord Tuco Salamanca on “Breaking Bad” — was washing his car on the street in front of his Silver Lake-area home when another car with three female occupants parked inches away from him, said Raphael Berko, his agent with Media Artists Group.

Cruz asked the women, who appeared to be in their 30s, to move their car at least a foot away so it wouldn’t get wet, according to Berko.

“The women were very rude to him and said no,” Berko said, adding that ample parking was available elsewhere on the street.

Instead, the women took out their phones and started to record Cruz, Berko said.

The actor, who also played detective Julio Sanchez in “The Closer” and its spin-off series “Major Crimes,” became uncomfortable and turned around, hose in hand, to tell them to “stop recording,” Berko said.

In doing so, Berko says some water may have inadvertently splashed on the women. But the women — one of whom was the daughter of a housekeeper on the block — said Cruz intentionally sprayed them, and they called the police to report an alleged assault.

Cruz was handcuffed by the Los Angeles Police Department and taken into custody for five hours, but Berko said he and his client expect the case will be dropped.

Berko characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, and said Cruz doesn’t have a criminal record.

The actor has a court hearing scheduled for Oct. 1, but online records do not show any charges as of Tuesday afternoon.

Issa Rae, of “Insecure” fame, is an executive producer of (and a major figure in) a new two-part documentary, “Seen & Heard: The History of Black Television,” premiering Tuesday on HBO and streaming on HBO Max. Presented as a film by Giselle Bailey, with a directed by credit shared with Phil Bertelsen, it’s not a comprehensive accounting — any viewer who has watched much TV over the medium’s decades might have an opinion on what’s missing. But what’s here is always interesting, elegantly produced, sometimes exciting, often moving. Young viewers, whose historical and cultural interests might extend no further than their own births, may have their eyes opened, but even we who remember a time before “Julia” may learn a thing or two.

The first episode, “Seen,” begins with Tracee Ellis Ross and Anthony Anderson in the green room waiting to go on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to celebrate the end of “black-ish,” after eight seasons — a Black-created, Black-run series on a major broadcast network — before jumping back to the white-written “Amos & Andy,” and a halting march into a better future. Though the thrust of the combined episodes is more than hopeful — the second episode, “Heard,” is a story of successes — it’s also one of struggle. And in a time when powerful forces want to erase struggle from history, it’s good to remember, or learn, that there was a time within the memory of people you’ll meet here, when Black people barely existed in television, in front of or behind the camera.

“Heard” is essentially a series of profiles in which major industry players tell their stories. “American Fiction” director Cord Jefferson, who left journalism to write for television (“The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” “The Good Place,” an Emmy for “Watchmen”), discusses generational trauma and talks with his father on Zoom about their anger issues (they both seem to be doing well); directors Deondray and Quincy LeNear Gossfield (working on Lena Waithe’s “The Chi”), visit Quincy’s family in suburban Chicago and talk about coming out after keeping their relationship secret for years. Tyler Perry gets emotional with Oprah, remembering the bad old days, and shows the filmmakers around his Atlanta studio complex, with soundstages named after Black stars, including Oprah (stage No. 1, naturally), Denzel Washington, Cicely Tyson, Whoopi Goldberg, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Oprah herself recounts her journey from rural poverty to “not good” TV news reporter to talk show host. (She wasn’t planning on becoming a media mogul, but she’s Oprah, after all.)

Also appearing here are Debbie Allen, Shonda Rhimes, Wilmore, Waithe, Mara Brock Akil (creator of “Girlfriends” and “The Game”), Ava DuVernay, Justin Simien (“Dear White People”), trans actor Dominique Jackson (“Pose”), mogul Byron Allen, and Syreeta Singleton, promoted from a writer’s assistant on the first season of “Insecure” to showrunning the next Rae project, “Rap S—.” Stan Lathan went from directing Black-oriented news shows for public television to “Sanford and Son,” after the show’s star Redd Foxx insisted they hire Black directors and writers. (“Sanford was as honest as I could make him under the circumstances,” Foxx tells Barbara Walters in a clip.) The late Norman Lear, who produced “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times” alongside “Sanford,” sounds a little patronizing, or perhaps just defensive, on the subject of not using Black writers on his Black shows.

All these artists have their own styles and concerns but come together on the basic issues of diversity, visibility and control. (They’re not new issues, and they’re still issues.) “There’s a need to see black people in a variety of roles so as to underscore the importance of a diverse and inclusive society,” says USC professor Todd Boyd.

Diahann Carroll, TV’s first female Black lead in “Julia,” back in the late 1960s: “We’re Americans, we’ve been here all the time. We’re part of every walk of life. We should be part of the industry.”

Simien: “The more specifically Black characters can live in paradoxes, the more human we are.”

Esther Rolle, who left “Good Times” for a season over the emphasis on Jimmy Walker’s character, J.J. “Dynomite” Evans — it also drove John Amos from the show — is seen in a contemporary interview saying, “Until there is more participation behind the scenes we’re not going to be able to control what is before the camera.”

It’s a story about influence, about mentoring and being mentored, and torches passing. Debbie Allen remembers Akil as an intern (“She used to park my car”). Waithe, seen addressing a class of aspiring writers, named her production company for Hillman, the college in the “Cosby” spinoff, “A Different World.” (“They weren’t afraid to be complicated.”) Rae was all about “Living Single”: “I consider [Kim Coles] one of the original awkward Black girls.”

The documentary reflects on mentors and mentees, like Debbie Allen, who recalls when Mara Brock Akil, now a TV writer and producer, was an intern.

(HBO)

Bailey handles the unavoidable question of Bill Cosby with some aplomb, covering his fall from grace after allegations of sexual assault in a couple of voice-over headlines while not discounting the importance of “The Cosby Show” (Rae: “Sometimes I thought my mom watched Claire Huxtable to learn how to parent.”) or the salutary effect it had on NBC’s sagging fortunes. (It’s moving to see the late Malcolm Jamal-Warner, who still calls his old boss “Mr. Cosby,” looking so alive here.)

The series is discursive and selective, as it would have to be, given the size of the subject; it’s less about particular shows, most of which are touched on only lightly, than about cultural waves and the feast and famine cycles of Black TV. Donald Glover appears briefly in a scene from Rae’s web series, “The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which led to “Insecure,” but his own “Atlanta,” one of the greatest TV series of the century, isn’t mentioned. Tamera Mowry-Housley, co-star of “Sister Sister,” remembers Tim Reid, who played her father on the show, telling her how new networks would use Black shows to build an audience and then abandon them in favor of white shows; but you wouldn’t know, unless you already knew, that Reid co-produced and starred in one of television’s great lost series, the New Orleans-set “Frank’s Place” on CBS, or co-created the Showtime series “Linc’s,” set in a Washington, D.C., bar.

Yet it speaks in a way to the richness of the subject that some of the most interesting, which is not to say most successful, Black series of the modern era have been out of the mainstream or resist easy categorization — “The Vince Staples Show,” “Black Jesus,” “The Boondocks,” “I’m a Virgo” — none of which fit in this narrative. I was happy, however, to see Terence Nance, whose great surrealist-operatic HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness” is describable only at length, included. “It’s a colonial dynamic, larger corporations provide the money which creates a system of control,” he says of the TV business. “What’s valuable to me is spiritual values, cultural values, essentially [a] nonnegotiable value system inherited from ethereal realms. That will never be valuable to corporations.”

Wilmore is more optimistic. “We’re truly in the best time right now to create something specific that is for your point of view, that’s different,” he says. “Because there’s so many different types of people that are opening different doors.”

In the end, it’s all down to quality. “My goal is to be a really good television writer,” Waithe tells her class. “That was the mission. To be good at that. Nothing else mattered.”

“Chipocalypse Now.” When the slogan rolled out Saturday, it sounded like a campaign for Chipotle’s latest rebrand of the humble burrito. The reality was less savory. It was a declaration of war, on an American city, by a sitting president, under the guise of a harmless meme.

Referencing the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” President Trump’s Truth Social account posted an AI-generated image of the 79-year-old as the much younger Lt. Col. William Kilgore (Robert Duvall’s character in the film). It was captioned, “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” a parody of a famous quote from Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece. (The original line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”)

The image, meant to look like a movie poster, was emblazoned with the words “Chipocalypse Now” and showed Trump’s image in front of the Chicago skyline, replete with helicopters, flames and a plume of smoke. As for the “Department of War” reference, Trump signed an executive order Friday to rename the Department of Defense, alleging that its old moniker is “woke.” Your tax dollars at work …

Trump’s post generated all manner of concern and outrage, as it should when the White House threatens a military operation on American soil. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker blasted Trump’s meme via X. “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal,” he wrote. “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who spoke to reporters while attending Mexican Independence Day celebrations in Chicago over the weekend, called Trump’s post “disgusting.”

It’s no mistake that “Chipocalypse” sounds as innocuous as a bag of Flamin’ Hot Doritos, but subterfuge is the point. The “I’m kidding but not really” tactic has been referred to as memetic warfare, where everything in a manufactured ecosystem like Trump’s appears to be a harmless joke. MAGA has mastered the art, deploying pop culture-inspired memes that feature an AI-generated Trump as Superman, a Jedi or Sydney Sweeney posing seductively for a denim ad. How can such a playful fellow have dictatorial aspirations?!

If you get upset like Sen. Durbin, MAGA insists it’s because you are “humorless and can’t take a joke.” Funnily enough, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom used the same approach to troll Republicans, they weren’t laughing.

Trump wasn’t jokey or fun Sunday when NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor asked him about the meme on the South Lawn of the White House. He was condescending when he called her “darling” and referred to her question as “fake news.” When Alcindor attempted to respond, Trump snapped back.

“Be quiet, listen! You don’t listen! You never listen,” he said. “That’s why you’re second-rate. We’re not going to war. We’re gonna clean up our cities. We’re gonna clean them up, so they don’t kill five people every weekend. That’s not war, that’s common sense.”

If sense of reason were part of his crime-fighting quotient, his troops would be invading the metro areas with the highest number of murders per capita — New Orleans first, then Memphis, Tenn., and St. Louis. Yet he has left those red-state cities off his list in favor of places run by Democrats.

Trump has talked for weeks about sending ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other enforcement agencies to Chicago. The president claims it’s to combat out-of-control crime rates and to execute mass deportations. He’s already targeted Los Angeles and Washington. D.C., which like Chicago are under Democratic control.

“The president’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution, we must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wrote on social media.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that it was launching a surge of immigration law enforcement in Chicago. They came up with another slogan: “Operation Midway Blitz.”

If only that was a stupid meme too.

TORONTO — The Toronto International Film Festival is hailing its 50th anniversary and I’ve never seen the place more patriotic. On my first morning, I looked up at a coffee shop menu and saw a sticker of a Canadian flag pasted over my habitual order, an Americano.

“A Canadiano, please?” I asked the barista, hoping my guess was correct. He nodded and rang me up. After that first sip, I was awake enough to check the receipt. It said “Canadiano” too.

“In Canada, our identity, our sovereignty, has come under threat,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said on TIFF’s opening night. Carney, inaugurated in March, was onstage at the Princess of Wales theater to introduce the premiere of “John Candy: I Like Me,” a documentary by Colin Hanks about the comedy legend who went to high school just six miles away. Candy was a star on the football squad and the drama club before “SCTV” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” made him famous worldwide.

Carney’s affectionate salute to the local hero had one line that tickled the crowd — “As Uncle Buck said,” the PM intoned with tongue-in-cheek gravitas — and pointed political jabs that got people clapping. He lauded the movie scenes that showcased Candy’s “humor, humanity and humility” and the ones where his lovable characters would snap. Cautioned Carney, “Don’t push a Canadian too far.”

People seem to be snapping all over the festival. Half the films I’ve seen have been about guys gone wild, like Tyler Labine’s vile turn in Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s “Egghead Republic,” a sly satire about a “Vice”-esque CEO in the pre-woke early aughts who drags his abused underlings on a quest to find radioactive centaurs. (Yes, really.) Bizarre, man-eating monsters — aliens? devils? — also roam the slums of ’90s Medellín in “Barrio Triste,” a found footage period piece by the music video director STILLZ that’s like “Cloverfield” if the video camera was controlled by a a gang of teenage bandits who film a whole lot of nothing with occasional spurts of freakish violence. It’s produced by Harmony Korine and it definitely feels like it. My theater seemed to have as many walkouts as it did fans.

“Good Boy,” by Jan Komasa, has an arresting star turn by Anson Boon as a ruffian who gets chained up in a rich family’s cellar until he agrees to behave. It made a great double-feature with Nadia Latif’s “The Man in My Basement,” which flips the power dynamic by having Willem Dafoe’s manipulative millionaire pay a cash-strapped Corey Hawkins to keep him locked somewhere no one will find him. When Dafoe confesses his sins, they’re so grisly your jaw will drop; he’s frightening even when Hawkins is holding the keys. Latif has so many thoughts about retribution and forgiveness that I’m unconvinced that her movie needed ghosts, too. But the veteran theater director has made a wickedly good debut.

Filmmaker Claire Denis has been fascinated by male aggression for decades. Her 1999 masterpiece “Beau Travail” reworked “Billy Budd” in a military training camp in Djibouti, and her latest, “The Fence,” returns to Africa for another macho showdown that takes place on a construction site where a man’s life is worth roughly $200. One dark night, the foreman (Matt Dillon) and his crude protégé (Tom Blyth) are incensed to find a stranger (Isaach de Bankolé) outside the barbed wire who politely but firmly refuses to leave until they hand over his brother’s corpse. The allegory is a tad thick: Humanity rots inside the gates, dignity stands tall outside. Anyone other than Denis completists (and there are a lot of them) should watch only for Mia McKenna-Bruce as Dillon’s young bride, a British city girl whose naive romanticism is evident in the wardrobe of stiletto sandals and red lace lingerie she’s packed for this harsh honeymoon. She’s a cupcake of a thing and you just want to rescue her from all this testosterone.

One centerpiece of this year’s TIFF is its pair of dueling Hamlets: Aneil Karia’s “Hamlet,” which plops its moody scion (Riz Ahmed), pentameter and all, in present-day England, and Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” an imaginary biography of William Shakespeare and his wife (Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley) that takes a stab at the family angst that might have inspired him to pen his guilt-ridden tragedy. I’d pit the two against each other, but I wasn’t a fan of either. The first felt too cold and couldn’t hack how to modernize Morfydd Clark’s Ophelia; the second started strong but got soggy with its repetitive weeping and gnashing. As Hamlet would say, “it touches us not.”

Given “Hamnet’s” pedigree, it’ll stick around through awards season. Zhao won over the Roy Thompson Theater by sheparding the audience through a somatic breathing exercise, as she did last week at Telluride. “Feel the ground underneath your feet, the city of Toronto holding you safe and sound,” she said. At least I liked her kooky sincerity, as well as a supporting performance by 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe as Shakespeare’s fictional son. Besides the early scenes of Mescal and Buckley falling in witchy, filthy, steamy love, the best sequence is when Zhao imagines witnessing the play’s debut at the Globe Theatre with a riveting lead and an enraptured crowd. Kudos to Joe Alwyn who managed to get himself cast in both movies as Laertes in Karia’s “Hamlet” and Shakespeare’s brother-in-law in “Hamnet.”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the movie “Fuze.”

(Anton / TIFF)

Meanwhile, the garrote-taut “Fuze” by David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”), is a high stakes thriller about a British explosives expert (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) tasked to defuse a World War II bomb that’s been disinterred in a crowded London block. When the police chief (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) evacuates the neighborhood, a fiendishly clever gang of thieves headed by Theo James and Sam Worthington seize the opportunity to rob a bank vault. That’s the set-up, but the script shifts so fast from one betrayal to the next that all you can do is hang on.

Likewise, I barely want to say a thing about the twists in “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig’s third (and best) Benoit Blanc puzzle. My one teaser is that Josh O’Connor (“Challengers”) plays a parish priest who gives this clever franchise something I hadn’t realized it needed: soul. Blood will be shed. Possibly even a tear.

Potsy Ponciroli’s “Motor City,” a brutal blood-pumper set in 1970s Detroit, has a great conceit: such an exaggeration of strong-and-silent machismo that the movie only has five lines of dialogue. No one has to explain a thing — you’ve seen this plot a hundred times. The preening villain (Ben Foster), the disgraced sweetheart (Shailene Woodley), and the vengeful hero (Alan Ritchson of TV’s “Reacher”) are archetypes that date back further than D.W. Griffith. Detroit’s own Jack White of the White Stripes has a playful cameo and selected the needledrops from Bill Withers, Fleetwood Mac and Donna Summer that shoulder the emotions. It’s a slender exercise with too much slow motion and a ridiculous ending. Even so, you can scarcely take your eyes off the screen.

On King Street, where many of TIFF’s screenings are held, a promoter in a full-body moose costume advertised National Canadian Film Day, an annual April event where theaters open their doors for free showings of Canadian-made movies. This spring’s lineup included Matthew Rankin’s surreal Manitoba-set comedy “Universal Language,” which won the Best Canadian Discovery award at last year’s TIFF. I’m a champion of the film, and so, too, I reckon is the cineaste I saw inside the Lightbox theater wearing a souvenir T-shirt who’d scratched out the “Toronto” with black marker to scrawl, “Winnipeg.”

I love punkish, low-fi pride. There were heaps of it at the boisterous midnight premiere of local comics Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry”) and Jay McCarrol’s marvelously scruffy “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” which stars the longtime collaborators as aspiring rock stars who have been trying to land a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli theater for nearly 18 years. Johnson and McCarrol have kept up the joke since they launched their “Nirvanna the Band” web series in 2007. Today, they’re a little older and no wiser — thank goodness.

“The movie you’re about to see was paid for almost entirely by the Canadian government,” said Johnson with contagious glee, adding that German audiences have also been shocked to witness the city’s rampant jaywalking.

The mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, was seated two rows ahead of me looking sleek in a one-shoulder gown. I couldn’t tell what was going through her mind when she watched Johnson and McCarrol try to get the Rivoli’s attention by parachuting off the top of the nearby CN Tower, once the tallest building in the world until Dubai bested it with the Burj Khalifa. Frankly, I was too busy gasping. But after the movie, Johnson apologized to her from the stage.

“Are we in trouble?” he asked. The crowd was too rowdy to hear the mayor’s response. Luckily, I could. Chow cupped a hand around her mouth and shouted, “We love you!”

The Kit Kat Club is closing its Broadway doors early on Sept. 21, as current “Emcee” Billy Porter battles a “serious case of sepsis,” according to the production team.

“It is with a heavy heart that we have made the painful decision to end our Broadway run,” said producer Adam Speers in a statement. “On behalf of all the producers, we’re so honored to have been able to bring this version of John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Masteroff’s important masterpiece, ‘Cabaret,’ to New York and to have opened the doors to our own Kit Kat Club for the year and a half we have been here.”

“Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” — as this revival is titled — opened on Broadway in April 2024, with Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin in the lead roles. Following their September 2024 departure, duos Adam Lambert and Auli’i Cravalho, and Orville Peck and Eva Noblezada played the titular roles.

Porter stepped into the role of the Emcee, alongside co-star Marisha Wallace as Sally Bowles, in July. The duo was expected to lead the production’s final 13 weeks — originally scheduled to end on Oct. 19 — before Porter’s illness sidelined him.

“Billy was an extraordinary ‘Emcee,’ bringing his signature passion and remarkable talent,” said Speers. “We wish Billy a speedy recovery, and I look forward to working with him again in the very near future.”

As of Sept. 21, the production will have played 18 preview performances and 592 regular performances. Marty Lauter and David Merino, the production’s longtime alternates for Emcee, will share the role for the final two weeks of performances. Their exact performance schedules — opposite Wallace as Bowles — are forthcoming.

Growing up, Al Roker loved animation. His Saturday mornings were devoted to Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, and he would spend hours studying Preston Blair’s book on how to draw cartoons. He dreamed of becoming an animator for Walt Disney. But when he grew up and became the “Today” weatherman instead, he had the idea to combine his love of weather with his love of animation into a children’s TV series.

“Weather Hunters,” premiering Monday on PBS Kids, follows 8-year-old Lily Hunter (Tandi Fomukong) as she, her younger brother, Benny (Lorenzo Ross) and her older sister, Corky (Kapri Ladd), investigate the weather with the help of their parents, Dot (Holly Robinson Peete) and Al (Roker). The children in the series are based on Roker’s own three children: Courtney, Leila and Nick. And in a case of art fondly imitating life, Roker’s Al Hunter is a local weatherman with a penchant for dad jokes.

“This really is one of those instances where everything that you love in your life comes together,” Roker says. “The show reflects what my childhood was. My parents were very supportive of their children and what their dreams were.”

Roker has been developing the show since his now-adult children were the ages the Hunter kids are in the series. “Good things come to those who wait,” he says with a laugh.

“This is a real passion project for him,” says Sara DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of PBS Kids. 
“We love to have a creator who is so excited about getting kids interested in the world.”

For PBS Kids, a series rooted in weather exploration was a natural extension to its current slate of programming. “Weather plays such a big part of kids’ lives,” DeWitt says. “What should I wear today? What if it rains and I can’t do the thing I was planning to do? Where does that thunder come from? It just immediately opened up so many ideas and possibilities for us about ways we could really connect with families and get them more excited about the scientific topic.”

Over the course of the first 10 episodes, all of which will premiere digitally on PBS Kids at launch, Lily and her family will investigate things like fog, clouds, leaves changing colors, thunderstorms, snow and the moving rocks of the desert. Sara Sweetman, an associate professor at University of Rhode Island, is an educational advisor for the series. “Weather is such fantastic content because it is very relevant to the kids’ lives,” she says. “They understand why it’s important and how it impacts them.”

But weather science, like all science, can get complex pretty quickly. “I was really adamant that there’d be one takeaway message [in each episode],” Sweetman says. “What we really want is [for] kids to watch the show and then run into the kitchen to find their dad or their mom and say, ‘Guess what?’ and be able to state that one idea really clearly.”

Sweetman was involved in each 22-minute episode from the very first pitch. “The ideal situation for educational media is that we hit the learning moment at the same moment as the emotional arc of the story,” she says. “We know from research when we can do that, that kids take that meaning away and hold on to it.”

Peete, the voice of Dot, has been friends with Roker for years. She starred in Hallmark’s “Morning Show Mysteries,” which Roker produced and was based on Roker’s novels. For Peete, whose father, Matthew Robinson Jr., was the original Gordon on “Sesame Street,” starring in the series is a “full-circle moment.” “PBS just meant so much to me,” she says. “It’s one thing for your dad to be on TV. It’s nothing for your dad to be on like the best TV children’s TV show ever. I wish my dad could see that I was actually on PBS doing this type of show with Al. He would be very, very proud that I would continue this legacy of children’s entertainment and education.”

Executive producer and showrunner Dete Meserve says animation allows the series, which is aimed at children ages 5 to 8, to have flights of fancy like the flying mobile weather station known as the Vansformer that the family explores in combined with “reality-based scientific explanations for what’s happening.” The episode on clouds explains how even though Benny can no longer see the sun behind the clouds, the sun is still there.

All kids are scientists, says Meserve, and it’s particularly nice that the character at the center of this series is a young girl interested in science. “There’s research that shows that if she can see it, she can be it,” Meserve says. “And Lily is surrounded by her siblings who have an equal interest, but the way they interact with it is different. Corky wants to film and document it. And then you have Benny, who’s more the artistic part of it. He wants to draw.”

The show also seeks to make some weather phenomena like hurricanes or thunderstorms less scary by helping the young audience understand the science behind what is happening. “We’re explaining what it is and how it works,” Roker says. “Kids can feel some sense of empowerment. In the show we talk about, how do we, as a family, prepare? How do we protect ourselves? How do we keep ourselves safe?”

Throughout the series Lily will form hypotheses and test them to see if the facts fit what she originally thought. “Those are all things that I think the show excels at — helping create those skills for critical thinking that kids can take forward as they get older,” Roker says.

He also hopes children walk away with a sense of the true beauty of weather. “There’s really this magic that happens around us,” he says. “And it’s based in science.”

TORONTO — The smile is beatific, blissed out, even at an ungodly hour on our Zoom call from France. A week later, when I finally meet 43-year old filmmaker Oliver Laxe in person at a private Toronto celebration for his new movie “Sirât,” he radiates serenity. He’s the happiest (and maybe the tallest) person in the room.

“One of the first ideas that I had for this film was a sentence from Nietzsche,” he says. “I won’t believe in a God who doesn’t dance.”

Laxe goes to raves — “free parties,” he clarifies, indicating the ones you need to hear about via word of mouth. He’s thought deeply about what they mean and what they do to him. “We still have a memory in our bodies of these ceremonies that we were doing for thousands of years, when we were making a kind of catharsis with our bodies.”

It’s almost the opposite of what you expect to hear on the fall festival circuit, when directors with big ideas make their cases for the significance of the art form. But the body, the return to something purely sensorial, is Laxe’s big idea.

Steadily, “Sirât” has become, since its debut at Cannes in May, a growing favorite: not merely a critic’s darling but an obsession among those who’ve seen it. A dance party in the desert set at some vaguely hinted-at moment of apocalypse, the movie is something you feel, not solve. Its pounding EDM beats rattle pleasurably in your chest (provided the theater’s speakers are up to snuff). And the explosions on the horizon shake your heartbeat.

“I really trust in the capacity of images to penetrate into the metabolism of the spectator,” Laxe says. “I’m like a masseuse. When you watch my films, sometimes you’ll want to kill me or you’ll feel the pain in your body, like: Wow, what a treat. But after, you can feel the result.”

Laxe can speak about his influences: cosmic epics by the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky or existential road movies like “Zabriskie Point” and “Two-Lane Blacktop.” But he is not a product of a typical grad-school trajectory. Rather, it’s his escape from that path after growing up in northern Spanish Galicia and studying in Barcelona (he tried London for a while) that’s fascinating.

“I was not good,” he recalls. “I didn’t find I had a place in the industry or in Europe. I was not interested. I had bought a camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, and I knew I was accepting that my role was to be a kind of sniper that was working in the trenches but making really small films.”

At age 24, Laxe moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he would live for 12 years at a monastic remove from the glamour of the movies, collaborating with local children on his films. The experience would grow into his first feature, 2010’s “You Are All Captains,” which eventually took him all the way to the prize-winning podium at Cannes, as did his second and third films, all of which came before “Sirât,” his fourth.

“Slowly, the things we were making were opening doors,” he says. “In a way, life was deciding, telling me: This is your path.”

Path is what “Sirât” means in Arabic, often with a religious connotation, and his new movie takes a unique journey, traversing from the loose-limbed dancing of its early scenes to a train’s tracks stretching fixedly to the end of the line. There’s also a quest that gets us into the film: a father and son searching among the ravers for a missing daughter, potentially a nod to “The Searchers” or Paul Schrader’s “Hardcore,” but not a plot point that Laxe feels especially interested in expounding on.

“Obviously I have a spiritual path and this path is about celebrating crisis,” he says. “My path was through crisis. It’s the only time when you connect with your essence. I just want to grow. So that’s why I jump into the abyss.”

“My path was through crisis,” says director Oliver Laxe of his steady rise. “It’s the only time when you connect with your essence. I just want to grow.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Laxe tells me he didn’t spend years perfecting a script or sharpening dialogue. Rather, he took the images that stuck with him — trucks speeding into the dusty desert, fueled by the rumble of their own speaker systems — and brought them to the free parties, where his cast coalesced on the dance floor.

“We were telling them that we were making ‘Mad Max Zero,’ ” he recalls, but also something “more metaphysical, more spiritual. A few of them, I already knew. There are videos of us explaining the film in the middle of the dance floor with all the people dancing around. I mean it was quite crazy. It’s something I would like to show to film schools.”

Shot on grungy Super 16, the production drove deep into craggy, sandblasted wastelands, both in Morocco and mountainous Spain, where the crew would make hairpin turns along winding cliff roads that would give even fans of William Friedkin’s legendary 1977 misadventure “Sorcerer” anxiety.

“It was my least dangerous film,” Laxe counters, reminding me of his “Fire Will Come,” the 2019 arson thriller for which he cast actual firefighters. “We were making the film in the middle of the flames, so I don’t know. I’m a junkie of images and I need this drug.”

There is a Herzogian streak to the bearded Laxe, a prophet-in-the-wilderness boldness that inspires his collaborators, notably longtime writing partner Santiago Fillol and the techno composer Kangding Ray, to make the leap of faith with him. But there also seems to come a point when talking about “Sirât” feels insufficient, as opposed to simply submitting to its pounding soundscapes, found-family camaraderie and (fair warning) churning moments of sudden loss that have shaken even the most hardy of audiences.

“The film evokes this community of wounded people,” he says. “I’m not a sadistic guy that wants to make a spectator suffer. I have a lot of hope. I trust in human beings, even with their contradictions and weaknesses.”

For those who wish to find a political reading in the movie, it’s there for them, a parable about migration and fascism but also the euphoria of a headlong rush into the unknown. “Sirât” is giving odd comfort in a cultural moment of uncertainty, a rare outcome for a low-budget art film.

Its visionary maker knows exactly where he is going next.

“I got the message in Cannes,” Laxe says. “People want to feel the freedom of the filmmaker or the auteur. What they appreciate is that we were jumping from a fifth floor to make this film. So for the next one —”

Our connection cuts out and it’s almost too perfect: a Laxian cliffhanger moment in which ideas are yanked back by a rush of feeling. After several hours of me hoping this was intentional on his part, the director does indeed get back to me, apologetically. But until then, he is well served by the mystery.

If someone told Michael Ubaldini that dusty copies of his old band’s records from four decades ago would sell for hundreds of dollars each, he probably wouldn’t have believed it. Not that anyone was really rushing to tell him. Especially not the internet-savvy young fans of his obscure, ‘80s power pop band the Earwigs that followed him to his present day gigs as a singer-songwriter begging for copies of “She’s So Naive” pressed on 45s for a mere $20 each. To Ubaldini, 61, it (naively) appeared like he was getting the better end of the bargain.

“Some kids came up to me at a gig one time and asked if I had any of Earwigs’ original 45s which had become a collector’s item but at the time I didn’t know it,” said the Orange County-based musician who still gigs regularly in OC and Nashville, Tenn. “I told em ‘yeah I got couple of those.’ They said ‘Can we buy em?’ So I sold them to the kids for $20 each thinking I’d gotten a really good score, but they must’ve felt guilty about what they paid for them because they were offering to give me some other records on top of what they paid me.”

Not long after the dubious parking lot sale, Ubaldini went online to find that the 45s packaged in flimsy, handmade cardboard sleeves with the photo of the band pasted on the front (known as the “alt sleeve” to the original band logo cover) were being sold for over $300 on sites like Discogs.

After his initial shock subsided, Ubaldini tried selling the records himself. “I had a few more and I put one online “bidding starts at $100, buy it now for $350,” he said. “I went to breakfast and came back and somebody bought it.”

The highest amount paid for a rare bootleg copy of the 45 record containing the catchy single “She’s So Naive” and “Here Come the Earwigs” was sold on Discogs for about $500.

This revelation, along with his desire to finally give his old band a proper album release, sparked a recent revival for The Earwig’s largely forgotten legacy. On Saturday, The Earwigs–fronted by Ubaldini alongside the band’s original drummer Dave Reed, guitarist Oscar Munoz and bassist Jerry Adamowicz will play a long-delayed album release party at The Mamba Sports Bar & Grill in Huntington Beach for “The Earwigs—Orange County 1981: The Lost Debut Album” limited edition vinyl pressing. The first two pressings sold out in just five days via pre-order. Each of the pressings of 100 copies is made in a different color which are being stocked in record stores from their native OC to London and Japan.

The once-popular band started in 1978 and played at legendary Costa Mesa venue the Cuckoo’s Nest alongside celebrated bands from the early OC punk scene like The Adolescents, T.S.O.L., Agent Orange and Social Distortion. ”We were part of that scene but we weren’t a punk band—we had a bit of a mod influence mixed with the energy of the Buzzcocks and the Ramones,” Ubaldini said.

Though they never quite fit in with the bands credited for bringing Orange County punk to the world, the pompadour grit that combined Hamburg-era Beatles with sped-up bubblegum pop songs about teenage love and suburban angst carved a brief moment in the music history of the region.

So how did the Earwigs gain this unlikely cult following unbeknownst to its founding member?

Ubaldini thinks it started when radio DJs like KROQ’s Rodney Bingenheimer and KNAC’s Sue Mink started playing the band’s music on their radio shows frequently in the early ‘80s. Fans recorded the tunes off the airwaves onto cassettes that got passed around before they even had an official record to sell. Their songs became sought after among fans of power pop/ garage rock and sped-up rockabilly. The underground success was driven by the catchy, saccharine-yet-explosive single “She’s So Naive.”

Though they were getting airplay, the band’s album, which they recorded in 1981, didn’t see daylight because the ill-fated Rock-A-Mod Records, which the recorded the album for, folded before it could be released.

The band’s original lineup (including guitarist Ashton Rands and bassist Dave Hughes) broke up by 1982 as members grew up and went their separate ways, only to reform with a slightly different line up for a couple more years before permenantly calling it quits in 1984, never releasing any more music. Ubaldini continued to play roots rock and honky-tonk music in OC and formed a new band called Mystery Train that got signed but only lasted for one record. For years, late Times entertainment reporter Mike Boehm championed Ubaldini as a dynamite frontman and songwriter.

“A tall, lean, dark-and-handsome, denim-and-leather type, Ubaldini fits the old-fashioned mold of the classic rock ‘n’ roll rebel as well as anybody on the O.C. scene,” Boehm writes. “Mystery Train is built on sturdy old models, full of cranking, Stones-Creedence guitar riffs and rockabilly licks. It also is largely concerned with that oldest of rock ‘n’ roll subjects: unbridled, gleeful, exuberant sexual lust.” Ubaldini’s local success spent many years gaining steam though never quite taking off.

“Meanwhile all this time I’d be playing in other bands or my own projects there would be someone in the crowd that would yell ‘Earwigs!’ at me,” he remembers. “‘Play some Earwigs!’ It always struck me as funny. And I would never play those songs because I’d written so many others since then.”

Over the years, Ubaldini says he’s gotten offers from a number of small indie labels wanting to put out some of the Earwigs’ old singles. These were mostly bad deals that promised very little profit for the songs Ubaldini wrote as a teen.

“I wasn’t gonna get anything out of it [from any of these small labels], he said. “I thought I might put it out one day but I’m not gonna put it out and just get ripped off. I’ve been through too much in music to get ripped off again.”

The original lineup of the Earwigs: Michael Ubaldini, Dave Reed, Ashton Rands, and Tom Hughes.

(Courtesy of Michael Ubaldini)

Earlier this year, Ubaldini, inspired by the revived interest in his music, finally took the leap and started to remaster the old album of 17 tracks that he never put out, opting to press it independently. A new batch has arrived in time for the band’s last one-off show to commemorate their unlikely cult status. The frontman is excited to sell copies to die-hard local fans who helped keep his music alive.

“I just want to release this Earwigs thing, it deserves its place, it’s part of that time and all these kids wanna hear it,” Ubaldini said. As to why the music itself seems to have caught on even after the revivalists bands like Jet, The Strokes and The Strypes have come and gone, he attributes it to the timeless, straight-ahead nature of the music. “It seems like the songs never got dated really because we stayed away from the synthesizers and we just played rock-n-roll.”

Ubaldini wonders if the mystery of the band that never made it big is what kept people curious about his old music. “People had recorded our stuff and made bootlegs of our music for all these years and it kinda took on a weird life of its own. It’s kinda mind blowing when I think about it,” he said. “There was not one ounce of promotion or anything. It was truly all because of the underground scene.”

Nothing says “awards season” like a fall film festival. The Times’ reporters, critics, videographers and photographers are on the ground at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, bringing you all the news from TIFF’s 50th edition. Our coverage includes our TIFF Daily newsletter, along with photo and video highlights from the Los Angeles Times Studio.

Bookmark this site and revisit all weekend to see new actors, directors, documentarians and international icons who couldn’t wait to say hi to us. And be sure to check out our complete coverage of TIFF 2025 throughout the festival.

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1. Back row left to right, Nadia Latif and Willem Dafoe. Front row left to right, Anna Diop and Corey Hawkins from the film “The Man in My Basement.” 2. Anna Diop.

Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst and Derek Cianfrance from the film “Roofman.”

Back row left to right, Anita Afonu and Ben Proudfoot. Front row left to right, Nana Adwoa Frimpong and Ghanaian Brandon Somerhalder from the film “The Eye of Ghana.”

Pete Ohs from the film “Erupcja.”

Left to right, Lisa Barros D’sa, Glenn Leyburn and Eanna Hardwicke from the film “Saipan.”

Director Oliver Laxe from the film “Sirât.”

Kirsten Dunst from the film “Roofman.”

Stephen Amell, left, and Sean Astin from the film “Little Lorraine.”

Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgard from the film “Sentimental Value.”

than Hawke from the film “The Lowdown.”

Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia from the film “Hamlet.”

Left to right, Thomas DeGrezia, Director Eif Rivera, Brad Feinstein and Christina Weiss Lurie and Diego Boneta from the film “Killing Castro.”

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1. Jay McCarrol. 2. Matt Johnson from the film “Nirvana: The Band – The Show – The Movie.”

Connor O’Malley, Vanessa Bayer, Kate Berlant, Claudia O’Doherty, Eric Rahill and John Early from the film “Maddie’s Secret.”

Channing Tatum from the film “Roofman.”

Left to right, Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, seated, and Adam Carter Rehmeier from the film “Carolina Carolina.”

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1. Samara Weaving from the film “Carolina Carolina.”

Left to right, Idan Weiss and Agnieszka Holland from the film “Franz.”

Left to righy, Chris Candy, Jennifer Candy and Colin Hanks from the film “John Candy: I Like Me.”

Potsy Ponciroli from the film “Motor City.”

Back row, co-Director Tom Dean and Emilia Jones. Front row, co-Director Mac Eldridge and Nick Robinson from the film “Charlie Harper,”

Left to right, Megan Lawless, Cooper Tomlinson, Curry Barker, Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette from the film “Obsession.”

Back row, Chandler Levack and Juliette Gariepy. Middle row, Stanley Simons and Barbie Ferreira. Front row, Devon Bostick from the film “Mile End Kicks.”

After 52 episodes and three movies, the world of “Downton Abbey” is coming to a heartwarming conclusion — for now, at least. The series and the previous two films, 2019’s “Downton Abbey” and 2022’s “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” have followed several characters over an 18-year period, both from the upstairs and downstairs of the grand house. While viewers already said goodbye to the imperious Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith), in the last film when she tragically died onscreen surrounded by her family, there are still many more farewells to come. Here is where we left some of the key characters as “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” arrives in theaters Sept. 12.

Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery)

Lady Mary wasn’t always in line to take over Downton Abbey, but her ill-fated marriage to Matthew Crawley and the birth of their son George ensured that she could be at the helm of the estate, at least until George came of age. Mary eventually remarried toward the end of the series, to race car driver Henry Talbot, but “The Grand Finale” sees the couple divorced and Mary on the outs from society. Still, she has clever ideas about how to keep Downton Abbey afloat and to push it into the modern age as she finally takes the reins from her father. “From the start, she always had a strong personality,” creator Julian Fellowes told The Times in 2022. “And I think what we’ve watched over the years is how she has come to harness her strength, master it and use it to achieve what she wants.”

Edith Pelham (Laura Carmichael)

Laura Carmichael, right, and Elizabeth McGovern in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features)

For many years Lady Edith was the passed-over second daughter, but by the end of the series she was firmly ensconced as the formidable Marchioness of Hexham. She and her husband Herbert “Bertie” Pelham are happily raising two children and she has become a voice of reason for Mary, offering counsel to the sister who once overshadowed her. “The Grand Finale” even gives Edith a satisfying moment of fortitude when she stands up for the family. “By the time we leave her, Edith is a strong woman and capable of big decisions,” Fellowes says.

Robert and Cora Crawley (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern)

Elizabeth McGovern and Hugh Bonneville in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features)

The Crawley clan’s patriarch and matriarch have gone through a lot since “Downton Abbey” premiered, including the loss of their daughter Sybil and multiple financial challenges. Cora dealt with a health scare in “A New Era” while both grieved the death of Violet, whose presence still looms in “The Grand Finale.” Although he technically left Mary in charge of Downton Abbey at the end of “A New Era,” Robert is struggling to settle into the next chapter of his life. It’s up to Cora, his always-steady companion, to help him move forward.

Tom Branson (Allen Leech)

Allen Leech in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features)

After heroically saving the day in the first “Downton Abbey” film, the widowed Tom married Lucy Smith (Tuppence Middleton) in “Downtown Abbey: A New Era,” giving his daughter Sybbie a mother once again. By the end of the second film, Tom and Lucy have a baby of their own and are living away from Downton. The character already got his much-deserved happily ever after and now shows up to dole out sage advice and support for the family. “I felt Tom Branson was the only one we hadn’t really settled in the series,” Leech told me in 2019. Now, he is.

Daisy Mason (Sophie McShera) and Andrew Parker (Michael Fox)

Sophie McShera, second from left, in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features )

Daisy began her journey at Downton Abbey as a belabored kitchen maid, but eventually the estate’s revered cook Mrs. Patmore took her under her wing. She married the dying William Mason during the series and later settled down with Andrew Parker, a footman in the house who has now taken over for Mr. Carson. In the spirit of the younger generation stepping forward, Daisy takes over the kitchen in “The Grand Finale,” an important moment of growth for the character.

Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton)

From left, Penelope Wilton, Allen Leech, Michelle Dockery and Paul Giamatti in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features)

It took some time for Isobel to establish herself at Downton Abbey, but her friendship with the Dowager Countess and her relationship to the family became invaluable throughout the series. She married Richard Grey after her son Matthew’s death and continued her good work with the community’s hospital throughout the episodes. Following Violet’s passing, Isobel has taken up the mantle to organize the county fair — a job that comes with some challenges.

Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt) and John Bates (Brendan Coyle)

Joanne Froggatt in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features)

Anna Bates has always been one of Downton Abbey’s most loyal servants and a thoughtful friend to Lady Mary. She married valet John Bates at the beginning of Season 3 and the couple went through numerous ups and downs in the years that followed, including several miscarriages. They got a much-deserved happy end in the series finale when Anna gave birth to their first child. The films haven’t shaken their contentment and “The Grand Finale” brings another uplifting arrival for the pair.

Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle)

Kevin Doyle, left, and Michael Fox in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.”

(Rory Mulvey / Focus Features)

Mr. Molesley endeared audiences with his hapless but well-meaning misadventures in the series, eventually transitioning from footman to local schoolteacher. He got his due in “A New Era” when he proved himself to be a skilled screenwriter and charmed Phyllis Baxter. In “The Grand Finale,” the couple are married and Mr. Molesley is endeavoring to boost his film career, although he hasn’t left his time at Downtown Abbey in the past.

Lonely Island member Jorma Taccone shattered his pelvis and detached his sacrum after a recent fall from a 20-foot ladder at his farmhouse in Connecticut.

The “Saturday Night Live” alum recounted the incident from his hospital bed during Tuesday’s episode of the “Lonely Island & Seth Meyers” podcast.

“There’s a barn, and the back half of the barn has a big white wall. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is great. We can do a big mural,’” the comedian said to his co-hosts Meyers, Akiva Schaffer and Andy Samberg. “The mural would be very, very large at the top. The apex of this barn is like 25 feet.”

Taccone said that he borrowed ladders, including one that his neighbor described as “bad.” As in, “you shouldn’t use this ladder. Like, it doesn’t have a footing thing. And I was like, ‘No, it’s really good.‘”

Taccone was using the ladder to hang lights around the barn to highlight the mural when he fell 20 feet onto his butt.

“I literally have enough time as I’m falling to be like, ‘I’m going to die,’” he said.

The accident was on Aug. 31, his daughter’s fifth birthday, according to Us Weekly. “It wasn’t the coolest way to start the day,” Taccone said.

Two days post-surgery, Taccone said the doctors expect him to walk again within three to six months.

“It’s been a really scary week, and we’re glad that you didn’t hit your head and that you’re not dead,” Schaffer said.

There was only one question left: How long do the hosts have before they can poke fun at the accident?

“I mean, don’t you think it should be instantaneous?” Taccone quipped.

Taccone’s film “Over Your Dead Body,” which he directed, was recently acquired by IFC in May, according to Deadline. The theatrical release date is yet to be determined.

This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “Wednesday.”

In a world where teenagers grapple with accusations of withering attention spans and a lack of motivation, Wednesday Addams managed to rouse from a coma and made the back-to-school scaries feel even more like a mind trip by … summoning Lady Gaga?

“Wednesday” returned for the second half of its sophomore season on Netflix this week, picking up right after Part 1’s ominous cliffhanger to reveal its moody teenage protagonist evaded potential death and that she was ready to dive back into the twisty world of deadly family secrets, monsterly situationships and friendship woes.

In the middle of the new threats and old mysteries are the show-stopping contributions from the pop superstar (and honorary mother to all outcasts, including her legion of Little Monsters, as her fanbase is called). Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, made a roughly two-minute appearance as Rosaline Rotwood, a deceased professor at Nevermore, the school for outcasts that Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) attends, with second sight capabilities that trigger a Freaky Friday/body-swap interlude between Wednesday and her estranged friend Enid (Emma Myers). The multi-hyphenate artist also provides the song “The Dead Dance” to score what’s poised to be another social media dance trend akin to Ortega’s viral Season 1 moves to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.”

The Times spoke with creators and showrunners Al Gough and Miles Millar to break down the season. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

You know where we have to start: Lady Gaga. Tell me the origin story of this casting.

Gough: It all grew out of the viral dance from the first season. Some fan, who should collect a lot of money, put Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” [over the dance] — because it was “Goo Goo Muck”— and suddenly the dance became its own, whole new thing. We’ve always been huge Lady Gaga fans. And if there was anybody who was the ultimate outcast, it would be her. We just started a conversation with her and her team … is there a way for her to be involved in Season 2? We found this character — because obviously, she’s very busy and touring — that could be a small role, but it’s an impactful one. Out of that grew “The Dead Dance,” a song that she had which we heard a year ago and loved it. They’re like, “She’ll hold it for the show.” And we were like, “Oh my God.”

Millar: When we heard the lyrics, it was almost like she had written the song for the show. And we had this moment in Episode 7, which we’d always planned — we never wanted to repeat ourselves with Jenna doing a dance — but it feels like music and the show and dancing are integral now. To not scratch that itch creatively in Season 2, I think the audience would have been so disappointed. So it felt like, how do we honor the incredible Rave’N dance in Season 1, which became such an iconic moment, but do it in a way that’s different and celebrate new characters? That’s why we came up with the idea of the gala and seeing Agnes [Evie Templeton] and Enid come together. They’ve been antagonistic, and it felt like a beautiful moment of female friendship and blossoming and this incredible Gaga song was just like the icing on the cake.

I was expecting a long courting process when you’re trying to get Lady Gaga — like, writing letters.

Gough: The process wasn’t fast, but it was always very pleasant and complimentary. Everybody wanted it to work. I think that’s where we were starting from, is everybody wanted it to work.

Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams and Lady Gaga as Rosaline Rotwood. (Helen Sloan / Netflix)

There’s a lot of discussion right now about gaps between seasons, and obviously there were some factors that caused the gap here — namely the strikes, but also other projects. How do you feel about that, especially knowing the fan base skews younger? Is it harmful to maintaining that relationship with the material?

Millar: We certainly never wanted a three-year gap. I think the show feels like an event movie, in a weird way, so I think people are prepared to wait, but it’s not ideal. It’s something that we would never want ourselves, as viewers. It’s been gratifying that people have come back in the way they have, and we definitely feel their love for the show, but we had obstacles in terms of getting to that place, coming back. No one’s to blame. It’s just the reality of the strike and everything else. Now the focus is coming back quicker. We rolled right from production into the writers’ room; now we’re rolling right into production [on Season 3 in October]. We’re definitely on a faster cadence, and that’s certainly the plan moving forward.

That said, as hopefully you see on screen, it is a huge show. We have over 3,500 visual effects shots. We’re still finishing [the finale] this week. There are still shots that are going to be dropped in that monster fight on the roof, the fight in the clock tower. The most complex visual effects in the show actually is Professor Olaf, which is the Christopher Lloyd character. But that takes a lot of time and trial and error to get to the point where I think the show looks as good as it does. Certainly our imperative is to get the show back faster; I know Netflix has that goal and wish as well.

Gough: Our goal is we’ve got to create the best show we can create. As Miles said, it takes us a certain amount of time. When you get in your head like that, you can’t actually do your best work. I can guarantee you that’s something that the Netflix marketing department thinks about a lot. They certainly try to keep fans engaged online and through other ways. And the Netflix Houses now that have those [fan] experiences. Can you translate that and keep engagement? You’re right, there’s a lot of shows and movies out there and you want to be able to stay in the zeitgeist in that time when you’re not in the zeitgeist. But for us, at a certain point, we just got to create the show, try to keep all the noise outside.

In the space between Season 1 and 2, Jenna was pretty vocal about not connecting with the character choices from the first season. I’m curious how you felt as it happened? And what has “Wednesday” taught you about how to work with actors and how to consider their opinions or perspective about the material?

Gough: We’re not going to speak to some of that because we’ve spoken to it in previous interviews, but I think our philosophy has always been — from “Smallville” on down “Into the Badlands” — it is a collaboration and a conversation with the actors. We always say movies is a party, but a television show is like a family. They have to feel ownership. We had that with Jenna in Season 1 — she read all the scripts, she gave notes. She’s continued to do that in Season 2. She’s taken a more active role in terms of being in production meetings and understanding the marketing perspective and just having all of that. She’s a generational talent and she’s going to have a very long career, and the career will be more than just acting. Actors are the keeper of the world and they have to be able to [understand] their characters. We’ll take a good idea from anybody. You just want them to be engaged and to have good ideas and be thinking about their characters. It’s something we learned from John Wells, who we met with very early on, before we started running “Smallville,” to get his advice. That’s what he told us. As a creator, you have to have the vision for the show, but you have to be open to these ideas and funnel them through.

Enid (Emma Myers) and Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) in “Wednesday.” Season 2 explores the growing pains of the polar-opposite friends: “The end of Season 1, Wednesday made a friend, but then it’s like, OK, how do you be a friend?”

(Netflix)

Is it fair to say you took some of it into consideration because there was less of an emphasis on a love triangle, at least with Wednesday? We really see things build in the friendship between Enid and Wednesday.

Gough: The thing is, if your first boyfriend turns out to be a monster, there was never going to be like, “Oh, I can’t wait to dive back into a romance” idea. The show’s been in our head for six years; it was always like, Season 2 was once bitten, twice shy, especially if you’re Wednesday Addams — or once bitten, twice stabbed. That felt like the natural evolution. Again, she’s not a character who was, even Season 1 [boy crazy] and it worked great. People were invested and intrigued and wanted to know. I can tell you from having daughters — because most times it’s portrayed as the girls are loving for the boys. That’s not true in every situation. With my two daughters, it’s the boys who’ve been way more interested in the girls, and then they eventually come around or think, maybe I’ll do it. If you look at Season 1, Xavier and Tyler were way more interested in Wednesday. Wednesday had no interest and any time she even delved into what you would see as romance — she went to the dance because she thought he was a suspect. Wednesday never does anything because she goes with the flow. She’s either backed into a corner or it’s going to help her in her larger case. Even in that love triangle, we never betrayed Wednesday. She was never starry-eyed for either boy.

Millar: That love triangle worked, actually, very well. It’s the dramatic backbone of the season and leads Wednesday — because I think Wednesday, as we like to say, is often wrong; she is someone who just is very headstrong, and I think that’s what makes her so intriguing, that she’s complex and flawed. That’s an interesting thing for teenage female protagonist, who often aren’t that. It’s the journey of a teen; with Season 2, we can change it, and Jenna was in an agreement with that. It’s been a very successful partnership in terms of the steering the course of the character, and where she goes and how she behaves and what she says.

What were you interested in exploring between the Enid-Wednesday dynamic in Season 2? And how did you arrive at the body-swapping idea?

Gough: The end of Season 1, Wednesday made a friend, but then it’s like, OK, how do you be a friend? That’s something that she is still very Wednesday [about] and she still has her preconceived notions of Enid, which is, “I can’t tell her the secret, I have to save her. I can’t include her — she’s weak, she’ll lose her mind.” She doesn’t think that Enid can handle it, so she doesn’t really see her friend. With Enid, it’s even the case with Ajax, and moving on to Bruno, which is Ajax saw her one way, and she’s not that girl anymore.

The body-swap episode was a way to explore that so that they could see [what it’s like] literally walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes — in this case, their bodies — and seeing what it is that they appreciate about each other. It’s an idea that’s sitting there — they’re so polar opposites and they’re both such good actors that they’ve created characters with such specific quirks and body movement and cadences and things like that. To then put the one in the other, it just felt like, why wouldn’t we do that?

Millar: We’ve had moments of real darkness this season; we just need to have an episode where the audience is going to have the best time and it be a great ride. I remember we were on set and it was the moment where Enid wakes up in [Wednesday’s] body and starts screaming. Jenna can scream nonstop. She was screaming all day, but it was so incredible to hear. You didn’t know who it was really. It was complete transformation. It was definitely a challenge. It was more than halfway through the season, they were tired and it was a real testament to their resilience and professionalism that they really just went for it.

Gough: They would record each other doing the line so that they could hear. They studied like two A students. They really put everything into it.

The Addams family plays a bigger role this season. From left, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Wednesday (Jenna Ortega), Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez).

(Helen Sloan / Netflix)

You brought the Addams family further into the fold this season, particularly giving attention the mother-daughter dynamic between Morticia and Wednesday — their parallels, their tension.

Gough: The show‘s a comedy, it’s a satire, but it always comes down to [being] a family drama. Season 1 even went back Wednesday’s ancestor, Goody vs. Crackstone; then it was Gomez and Morticia vs. the Gates family. It all comes down to family secrets in this show. We wanted to expand that. The feedback we also got was people love the Addams Family and they’re intrigued by them because there’s no real mythology for the Addams Family. They didn’t have names until the TV show in the ’60s. Then you got a couple movies in the ’90s. People love them, but you don’t know much about them. For us, it’s great because it’s the opposite of “Smallville.” It is a clean slate where you can build the family tree. And we do it with the blessing of Kevin Miserocchi, who runs the Addams Foundation.

You got a taste of it in Season 1, with Morticia and Wednesday, and then you saw it in the Parents’ Weekend episode. But then the idea of Morticia is here, and what does that do? And the idea of this mother-daughter relationship, which especially in the teenage years, can be very fraught. They’re a lot more alike than they want to admit, on both ends. To take that very universal idea and relationship that a lot of people have experienced, but put it through the prism of the Addams Family with Morticia and Wednesday, and they solve their fights with swords and there’s more life-and-death sort of circumstances — that felt like a fun way to do it and a way to open up the show.

Millar: We really wanted to give Jenna some relief as well; she was in every scene of Season 1. It was a creative opportunity for us to explore different characters and to really expand the world of the show.

Thing, performed by Victor Dorobantu, and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams in “Wednesday.” The rogue appendage received a backstory in Season 2.

(Netflix)

I loved getting an origin story for Thing.

Millar: The first thing you see of Slurp is this gloved hand coming out of the ground. We thought, “Oh, everyone’s going to know immediately; it’ll be the worst kept secret in Hollywood.” It’s been really gratifying because that’s such a great twist, if we could pull it off — it’s right in front of your face the whole time.

We talked about [whether Thing] should be attached to someone who is so evil. Obviously, he’s flawed. He’s often doing things for the right reasons; they’re sort of deranged reasons. But Isaac Night [Owen Painter] is a flawed character, but he’s also the noble genius as well. That was a debate. We had some other options we explored and went down the road with, but ultimately we thought it was this idea of transformation of seeing a zombie who then becomes human and the comic foil of Pugsley [Isaac Ordonez] choosing him like a pet dog, and then he starts eating brains — it just sounds so insane, but actually it make sense in the show.

Now I want to know the path you didn’t take with him.

Millar: We had a whole backstory for him, which is he was in a circus and he fell in love with a circus performer. It was a very much more sweet story, rather than this one, which is much more macabre, sort of inspired by Frankenstein, zombie movies.

What can you tease about Season 3? Will there be more Lady Gaga? Things ends with Enid being seemingly trapped in wolf mode and there’s Wednesday’s psychic vision of Ophelia, Morticia’s sister.

Millar: We’re in the middle of [writing] Season 3 now. Our lips are sealed. We can’t say anything, but obviously the end of Season 2 does set up that Ophelia will be coming to feature in Season 3. We’ll say that much.

By this time next year, will we have a Season 3?

Gough: I can’t say anything to that.

Two major digital platforms — YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV — have agreed to carry C-SPAN two months after the nonprofit organization made a public plea for wider distribution.

Changing industry economics have taken a toll on C-SPAN, prompting the U.S. Senate to urge streaming companies to begin offering customers the privately funded television service, which has provided nonpartisan gavel-to-gavel television coverage of congressional hearings and roll call votes for decades.

“All television providers, including streaming services, should make delivery of C-SPAN a priority so Americans can watch Congress in action, in real time,” senators said in their June resolution.

On Wednesday, C-SPAN announced separate distribution agreements with YouTube and Hulu + Live TV.

The agreements expand “access to C-SPAN’s unfiltered coverage of U.S. government for millions of subscribers nationwide, further strengthening the network’s role as an indispensable source of public affairs programming,” C-SPAN said in a statement.

C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. It relies heavily on revenue generated from license fees paid by cable, satellite and other multi-TV channel operators. But as the number of traditional pay-TV homes continues to shrink, C-SPAN found itself running a troubling financial deficit.

Last year, C-SPAN collected $46.3 million in revenue, a 37% decline from $73 million in 2015. That’s largely because C-SPAN and other basic cable channels were available in more than 100 million homes 10 years ago.

Since then, the number of homes has been cut nearly in half.

The three C-SPAN channels — C-SPAN, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3 — will be added to YouTube TV’s base package of channels this fall, the companies said. C-SPAN video clips, archival programming and event coverage also will run on the main YouTube video platform.

In addition, Google-owned YouTube will sponsor the network’s coverage of “America 250” — the celebrations to mark the nation’s founding two and a half centuries ago.

“For nearly half a century, C-SPAN has partnered with cable and satellite providers who recognize the value of our important public service,” C-SPAN Chief Executive Sam Feist said in a statement. “We now look forward to working closely with YouTube to bring C-SPAN’s unfiltered coverage of the democratic process to millions more Americans.”

C-SPAN uses its own cameras in the Capitol, enabling the service to catch the action when government-operated audio and visual equipment is cut off.

Earlier this summer, Feist told The Times that C-SPAN should be able to close its budget gap if YouTube TV and Walt Disney Co.’s Hulu + Live TV would carry its feeds.

Around 20 million households subscribe to such online subscription platforms, known as virtual multichannel video program distributors, which stream broadcast and cable channels.

Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.

Cardi B has prevailed in a civil lawsuit brought against her by a Beverly Hills security guard after two days of testimony from the rapper that was sometimes colorful and drew laughter from jurors.

Emani Ellis sued Cardi B for $24 million, accusing her of assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress in the aftermath of a confrontation in a hallway outside of an obstetrician’s office. Ellis claimed that, during the set-to, the rapper scratched her with a long nail extension, leaving a facial scar.

The hip-hop star was found not liable on all counts by jurors after less
than an hour of deliberations.

“I swear to God, I will say it on my deathbed, I did not touch that woman,” Cardi B said outside the courthouse following the conclusion of the trial. She added that she had missed her kids’ first day of school because of the civil trial.

“I want to thank my lawyers,” she said, “I want to thank the jurors, I want to thank the judge, and I want to thank the respectful press.”

Cardi B, whose real name is Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar, testified that she never touched, scratched or spat at the security guard, who she believed was taking video of her with her cellphone. The rapper was four months pregnant and had an appointment on the day of the incident — Feb. 24, 2018.

Ellis worked as a security guard at the Beverly Hills building where Cardi B had her medical appointment, and she testified that she was doing her rounds when she saw the celebrity exit the elevator. She testified that she was overcome with excitement and declared, “Wow, it’s Cardi B.”

Ellis alleged that the performer then turned to her and said, “Why the f— are you telling people you’ve seen me?” Cardi B then accused her of trying to spread news about her being at the doctor’s office, she testified during the four-day trial.

Cardi B cursed at her, used the N-word and other slurs, called her names, threatened her job, body-shamed her and mocked her career, Ellis said. She alleged Cardi B spat on her, took a swing at her and scratched her left cheek with a 2- to 3-inch fingernail.

But jurors believed Cardi B’s version of events, which was that Ellis was the aggressor.

The rapper blasted the plaintiff in an Alhambra courtroom, saying she was looking for a payout. Cardi B said the pair went chest-to-chest and exchanged angry words but nothing more.

She told jurors that she said to Ellis: “B—, get the f— out of my face. Why are you in my face? Why are you recording me? Ain’t you supposed to be security?’

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Girl is big!’” she testified.” “She’s got big black boots on. I’m like, ‘D—, the hell am i gonna do now?’”

The rapper said that she’s 5 feet 3 and was 130 pounds and pregnant at the time of the incident. She wouldn’t have tried to fight the guard, who was far larger, she said.

Asked if she was “disabled” during the incident, Cardi B’s comments drew laughter in the courtroom: “At that moment, when you’re pregnant, I’m very disabled,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “You want me to tell you the things I can’t do?”

Tierra Malcolm, a receptionist for Dr. David Finke, with whom Cardi B had an appointment that day, told jurors that she saw Ellis corner the celebrity. The receptionist said she then got between them, and the guard reached for the rapper. Malcolm said she ended up with a cut on her own forehead.

Finke testified that he saw the guard cause that injury and also hit the receptionist’s shoulder. He further said that Ellis had no injuries. Both testified they never saw Cardi B hit Ellis.

During closing arguments on Tuesday, Ellis’ attorney, Ron Rosen Janfaza, told jurors, “Cardi B needs to be held accountable.” “There was no video camera … so really it comes down to one thing — do you believe, Ms. Ellis, a guard with a good record? She is a model citizen,” he told jurors.

Rosen Janfaza noted that, under cross-examination, the rapper acknowledged that she and Ellis were chest-to-chest as expletives were exchanged, and that alone is an unwelcome touch and battery on his client, he said. He told jurors that the receptionist and doctor did not see the 40 to 50 seconds where Cardi B labeled his client fat, spat on her and took a swing at her.

He said his client suffered for seven years, and “this was a violent attack.”

Cardis B’s attorney, Peter Anderson, said jurors needed to employ common sense to reject the security guard’s story and that the preponderance of evidence showed his client did nothing more than yell and curse, and “that isn’t something you can sue over.”

“The question is whether Cardi ever struck the plaintiff,” Anderson said. And the evidence is overwhelming that she did not, he said. Anderson said that the guard testified that she never made a police report, did not seek immediate medical attention, did not even use a Band-Aid on the scratch, but went home and took a nap.

Liberty Station, the decades-long transformation of San Diego’s massive Naval Training Center into a mixed-use neighborhood and cultural district, is a welcome reprieve from much of Southern California’s fragmented sprawl. Thanks to its 1920s-era Spanish Revival buildings, arched colonnades and broad public promenades, visiting it feels like stepping back to a time when walkability and simple elegance were the norm. To get a picture in your head, rewatch the original “Top Gun” for NTC’s cameo when Tom Cruise’s Maverick rides toward the house of Kelly McGillis’ Charlie along the complex’s Roosevelt Road with the arcaded buildings perfectly framing the shot.

Despite its legacy and the site’s many amenities, Arts District Liberty Station, the nonprofit that manages more than 100 of Liberty Station’s cultural and hospitality facilities, was still searching for an anchor. Enter San Diego’s Cygnet Theatre, which was seeking a new home. Cygnet had long outgrown its technologically outdated, barnlike theater in Old Town San Diego, its lease was uncertain and its operations were scattered around the area, notes Sean Murray, the Cygnet’s co-founder and artistic director.

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On Sept. 10, Liberty Station’s long-neglected naval base exchange, otherwise known as Building 178, will be reborn as the Cygnet’s new home. Called the Joan, short for the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center in recognition of the project’s lead donors, the 42,000-square-foot complex will serve as the theater’s home for productions — its first will be a staging of James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” — and its offices, while hosting other performance companies from around the region.

Building 178, originally opened in 1942, had included a bowling alley, commissary, tailor shop and even a disco. But after the Navy closed the San Diego training center in 1997, it sat empty and deteriorating, facing threats of demolition or commercial redevelopment.

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1. Chris Bittner, a principal at San Diego’s OBR Architecture. 2. Irwin Jacobs, one of San Diego’s most prominent arts philanthropists. 3. Sean Murray, the Cygnet’s co-founder and artistic director. (Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

“When the Navy left, they just walked out,” says Lisa Johnson, executive director of Arts District Liberty Station. “It looked like they’d gone to lunch — half-drunk coffee cups still on the desks.” Much of Building 178 barely stood. “Ceilings had collapsed. Columns were rotted through. In some cases, stucco was holding up walls that had no structural core,” says architect Chris Bittner, a principal at San Diego-based OBR Architecture.

Bittner, whose grandfather trained at the base during World War II, has worked on various Liberty Station projects for more than two decades. He and his team rebuilt the building’s eastern flank, now containing rehearsal spaces, re-creating the colonial-style roof, beams and walls while opening up breezeways that had been bricked in.

The Joan’s two performance venues — a 280-plus-seat proscenium theater and a 150-seat black box — are built into the surviving part of the building, but many of the spaces around them had to be reconfigured.

For the main theater, to avoid changing the building’s historic roofline, crews excavated below the original slab, lowering the stage and audience levels so catwalks, rigging and lighting grids could fit under the low profile. “We basically took a two-story building and sunk it down a floor,” notes Bittner. Raising the black-box theater ceiling and making the space column-free required massive transfer beams to carry the load of the floor above.

Because the theater sits directly under San Diego International Airport’s flight path (just try having an uninterrupted conversation in the Point Loma neighborhood), the architects wrapped each theater in layered wall assemblies, rubber gaskets and sound-lock vestibules with paired doors to block noise. HVAC units were acoustically isolated with springs and pads, ductwork was lined to slow air velocity, and separate mechanical zones were created so lobby or shop noise couldn’t leak into performances. The main stage also has a thick concrete ceiling, and its subtly faceted acoustic wall panels, embedded with micro-perforations, double as sound absorbers and diffusers, subtly tuning the space.

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1. Leonard and Elaine Hirsch Community Green Room 2. The Dottie Studio Theater 3. Molli and Arthur Wagner Rehearsal Studio 4. Pam Fair and Glen Sullivan Dressing Room 4 (Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

The auditorium design is modern but understated, with its angled panels and pops of color providing lively accents while still focusing attention on performances. The lobby, which opens to its surroundings (and breezes) via large sliding glass doors, tells a different story. With warm wood paneling, exposed concrete, terrazzo and low steel railings, the lively space feels both modern and nostalgic, with references to its past life as a bowling alley. There are lane arrows in some of the floorboards while original lane numbers are painted on the basement girders of the back-of-house spaces. There’s also a small art gallery just below, reached via an open stair.

The project might never have come to life without the support of the Jacobs’, San Diego’s most prominent arts philanthropists. (Irwin Jacobs founded Qualcomm, among other endeavors.) Joan Jacobs died last year, making the theater’s name, which had already been planned, especially poignant. Even more so because Joan, raised in New York City, was a passionate theatergoer. The couple pledged $10 million when the project was still starting up — a move certainly noted by subsequent donors. “Once people saw the scope and ambition it became easier to attract other supporters,” Murray says.

“We hoped our gift would be a catalyst,” says Irwin Jacobs, whose son Gary helped found Liberty Station’s High Tech High in 2000, giving the Jacobs familiarity with the area. “We wanted to help set the stage for the next chapter,” he adds. Jacobs and his late wife supported a dizzying list of cultural facilities in the city (in addition to science and educational giving) including, in recent years, the San Diego Symphony’s Jacobs Music Center, the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building.

“They have shaped the cultural landscape of San Diego,” Johnson says.

Jacobs, who acknowledged that his contributions have “made San Diego a more dynamic place to live and work,” says the Joan may be one of the last (or the last) major cultural project he supports. “We couldn’t think of a better note to end on,” he says. Additional funding included a $10-million grant from the state of California (something that seems unimaginable in today’s political climate), as well as support from San Diego County and dozens of private donors.

The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center (“The Joan”) in Liberty Station in San Diego.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

While Cygnet will operate the facility, the Joan — located at what Bittner calls “the front door” to Liberty Station — is designed as a shared community space. The secondary black box, named the Dottie for significant donor Dorothea Laub, will be available for rental and outside performances. Public galleries and lobby spaces will activate the building throughout the day, not just during shows.

Even as Cygnet prepares to open the Joan, fundraising continues — about 14% of the $43.5-million budget remains to be raised. To its creators, the building’s most lasting legacy may be how it draws people into a campus that also boasts shops, galleries, artist studios, restaurants, museums, a cinema and Liberty Public Market food hall.

“This project is going to activate the whole campus in a way we’ve never seen,” Johnson says. “It’s not just a theater — it’s a magnet. It will bring people here during the day, into the evenings, and make this district a true cultural destination.”

Chloë Grace Moretz tied the knot with her longtime girlfriend over Labor Day weekend.

The “Kick-Ass” actor married model and photographer Kate Harrison during a private ceremony, reports Vogue, which was on site when the brides were doing the final fitting in Paris for their custom Louis Vuitton wedding dresses.

Moretz posted photos of herself on Instagram rocking a baby blue gown along with images of Harrison wearing a white dress with a sweetheart neckline and a birdcage veil. Both gowns were designed by Nicolas Ghesquière, longtime artistic director for Louis Vuitton’s women’s collections.

“It just feels like me,” Moretz told Vogue. “I never really envisioned a wedding dress in my mind growing up, so when we started talking about what that would look like, I knew I would do something non-traditional, and not wear white, and kind of have it feel different, and I think it really does.”

In the Instagram post, the star of “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” also showed off her after-party look, a custom jacket with cut-outs and trousers, which was inspired by a 2019 Louis Vuitton runway look. She accessorized her outfit with a white cowboy hat. Meanwhile, Harrison, who has modeled in campaigns for J. Crew and Topshop, wore a bodice and trousers with a sheer overlay on top.

“A big part of the wedding [is about] sharing things that Kate and I love with everyone that’s going to be there,” Moretz told the magazine. “So there’s fishing, horseback riding, and poker. Kate made a custom poker mat herself, so we’re going to kind of be leaning into it. Our second day is going to be line dancing and everything.”

Moretz came out publicly as a gay woman in November of last year via Instagram, but she and Harrison have been dating since 2018. The couple gave curious fans a peek into their mostly private relationship when Moretz announced their engagement in a New Year’s Day post this year on Instagram.

“We’ve been together for almost seven years and making this promise to each other in a new way, and exchanging these vows,” Moretz told Vogue. “I think it’s important to just stay every day choosing each other.”

Hey, hey, they’re the Runarounds, the latest Pinocchio band to straddle the line between fiction and fact. Meet Charlie (William Lipton), guitar! He’s a romantic! Neil (Axel Ellis), also guitar! Not just a pothead! (He reads Ferlinghetti.) Topher (Jeremy Yun), lead guitar! The quiet one! Wyatt (Jesse Golliher), bass! The even quieter one! And Bez (Zendé Murdock), drums, replacing Pete (Maximo Salas), henceforth the “manager,” who surely has been named for Pete Best, or I will eat my Beatles fan club card.

They have been assembled for your fist-pumping adulation from a reported 5,000-plus hopefuls responding to an open call for musicians and dropped into the center of a teenage musical soap opera, also called “The Runarounds,” premiering Monday on Prime Video.

This rockin’ concoction comes to you courtesy of Jonas Pate, creator of the Netflix teenage treasure-hunt series “Outer Banks,” and like that show, it is a wish-fulfilling fantasy set in Pate’s native North Carolina, specifically the seaside city of Wilmington, which offers a lot of lovely scenery and adorable domestic architecture. And like that show, it is all about being young and wanting to be free, like the bluebirds. Unlike that show, everybody here keeps their shirts on, in the actual sense (though not at all in the metaphorical).

The eight-episode season begins just as high school is ending, which in dramatic terms means parties and a scene in which someone makes a graduation speech. (That will be Sophia, played by Lilah Pate, daughter of Jonas.) Charlie, who has just turned 18, is avoiding telling his parents that he’s not going to go to college, even though he’s been accepted to one. (To just one is the perhaps unintended implication.) His entire future, in his head at least, depends on “getting signed” by the summer’s end — which, in music business terms, is 20th century thinking, but like a lot of music being made today, this is an old-fashioned show. That, and getting Sophia, the beautiful, overachieving sad girl he’s been crushing on for four years, to notice him.

Charlie, Toph, Neil and Pete have been playing unspecified gigs under an unfortunate name I’ll not repeat, and they feel pretty good about the band, although strangely it takes until the pilot for them to realize that Pete is a terrible drummer. After some group soul-searching and flyer-posting, they pick up Bez, who drums so well one wonders why he isn’t in three other bands already — or why there seems to be no other groups around, or any sort of music scene. He brings along his friend Wyatt, who picks up a bass, and a new band is born. Wyatt’s interiority, shy smile and young Jeff Tweedy vibe makes him immediately the most intriguing Runaround.

Along with Sophia, who writes poems that might be lyrics, the female element is filled out by Amanda (Kelley Pereira), Topher’s controlling, capable girlfriend, who will prove a secret weapon for the band, and Bender (Marley Aliah), who goes about with cameras, likes Neil and wholly embodies a somewhat scary, casually cool, not-at-all pixieish dream girl. They don’t get to be in the band, but as actors, they do a lot to support their nonprofessional castmates. (Lipton, the only professional actor in the band — including in 328 episodes of “General Hospital” — comes across as less authentic than the untrained others, though that may be in part because he’s saddled with the heaviest storylines and has to say things like, “I want to write love songs that change the world.”)

As in “Outer Banks,” and two out of every three teen shows ever, most are at odds with their parents, catnip to young viewers who are even occasionally at odds with their own parents, over even minor things because — parents! Charlie’s are played by Brooklyn Decker, whose character teaches film, and Hayes MacArthur, whose character has spent 12 years working on a novel — that is, only working on a novel, which is to say not working; somehow they are not divorced. (And money is becoming an issue, and there is a Big Secret that will shake the family.) “What kind of work is done in a bathrobe, father?” says Charlie’s mouthy little sister, Tatum (Willa Dunn).

Neil’s father, who has health problems, assumes his son will join him in his painting business; Topher’s are conservative stuck-up pills who, like Amanda, have him slated for a career in finance. Bez’s father is also a musician but thinks his son is wasting his time with the Runarounds. Wyatt’s mother is some sort of addict, who hates him. Sophia’s father is self-medicating after the death of her mother some years before, leaving her to pick up the pieces. (“I’m doing everything right on paper but I don’t feel alive,” she says.) Wouldn’t you rather be with your friends, playing in a band?

Wyatt will find a job and a refuge, and the band a rehearsal space in a music store run by nonparental adult Catesby (Mark Wystrach), who spent 18 years in Nashville experiencing success and failure and knew Charlie’s mother once upon a time — so that’ll be a thing. (The store apparently does no business at all.) For inspiration he sends the kids way out in the country to a secret show by his old friend Dexter Romweber (a real person, now deceased, played by Brad Carter), who will shake their nerves and rattle their brains and leave them with words of encouraging and discouraging wisdom before disappearing into the night and a fictionalized fate.

Every so often, we get a performance — at a graduation party, a county fair, a wedding, a roadhouse, a prestigious opening slot, where the crowds react as if they’re extras in a TV show. (The kids can play, and the songs aren’t bad.) As they struggle toward their goal, they’ll meet disaster and resistance. They’ll fuss, they’ll feud. They’ll make mistakes, they’ll make sacrifices, they’ll make trouble, though no trouble that can’t be fixed with an apology or checkbook or someone to bail them out. (I am pretty sure in the long history of underage kids sneaking into clubs, none has ever been arrested and put in jail, but maybe things are different in Wilmington.) They’ll get high and stay out all night, talking heart to heart, which does seem authentically teenage. (The “Wizard of Oz” costumes less so.)

There are niche references for the pop-musically informed: Catesby telling Wyatt to put a couple of P13 pickups into a ’68 Silvertone guitar; moving from the two to the five chord; name-dropping storied rock clubs (the 40 Watt, the 9:30). “This isn’t some f— Squier I got for Christmas,” Neil wails when his Gretsch White Falcon disappears. When Charlie rides his bike off a roof into a swimming pool in the midst of Pete’s party, that is almost certainly in homage to the “I am a golden god” scene from “Almost Famous”; later, they’ll nick an idea from the Beatles.

As with other manufactured bands before them, the line between what’s real and what’s retail is blurred. You can buy Runarounds-branded merch (T-shirts and hoodies, a beach towel, a sweatband, lighters). You can stream their “album,” co-produced by the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison, and released by actual major label Arista, from all the usual musical platforms. They’ve got dates scheduled from mid-September to late October in the South, mid-Atlantic and Northeast in legit rock halls, though whether they will identify themselves by their character names, I don’t know. (That wasn’t a problem for the Monkees, who just used their own.) I doubt they’ll be sleeping on floors or tripled up at a Motel 6, unless things are worse than I know at Amazon. If they split the driving, I hope they’re more responsible with that than the characters they play.

It’s a fluffy show, sometimes catching something real, frequently improbable, never completely ridiculous. But the audience at which it’s aimed may be happy enough with an aspirational fairy tale that reflects their own feelings about their own feelings, for which the music itself is a megaphone and a metaphor.

“All good pop songs are a little corny,” says Charlie.

“Maybe,” replies Sophia, which is the right answer.

TELLURIDE, Colo. — It’s customary at Telluride for a director premiering a movie to step onstage, say a few words and slip away before the lights go down. On Friday night, before unveiling her new film “Hamnet,” Chloé Zhao admitted she couldn’t find the right words. For a film centered on William Shakespeare, the most famous wordsmith in history, that felt oddly fitting.

Instead, the 43-year-old Zhao led the packed Palm Theater in a meditative “ritual” she and her cast had practiced throughout the shoot, from before the script was even written until the final day on set. She asked the audience to close their eyes, place a hand over their hearts and feel the weight of their bodies in the seats and the surrounding Rocky Mountains holding them safe. Together, the crowd exhaled three long, loud sighs, then tapped their chests in unison, repeating softly: “This is my heart. This is my heart. This is my heart.”

By the time the film ended, those same hearts were left aching. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “Hamnet” tells the story of Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (played by Jessie Buckley) and the devastating death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare — not the untouchable bard of legend but a husband and father reckoning with grief. At once grounded and dreamlike, the film drew perhaps the most rapturous and unanimous response of any debut in this year’s lineup.

Eight years ago, Zhao came to Telluride with “The Rider,” fresh from Cannes and still largely unknown. In 2020 she returned with “Nomadland,” which received a Telluride-sponsored drive-in screening at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl due to the pandemic and went on to win best picture and make Oscar history, with Zhao becoming only the second woman — and the first and only woman of color — to win the directing prize. Then came Marvel’s “Eternals,” a massive undertaking that thrust Zhao into the franchise machine and brought with it a bruising critical reception. With “Hamnet,” she’s back to a smaller canvas, trading cosmic spectacle for intimate human drama.

On Sunday morning in Telluride, still processing the reaction to her latest film, Zhao sat down to talk — speaking so softly that even in a hushed room her words can be hard to catch — about why she took on O’Farrell’s story, how she approached Shakespeare’s world and the delicate task of turning heartbreak into art.

When I interviewed you for “The Rider” in 2018 you said you’re a very pessimistic person and when you get a good review, you’re just waiting for the bad one to drop. What are you feeling right now? Did you expect anything like the reaction “Hamnet” has received?
I was nervous. I’ve walked through fires. I’ve been through the fire — a very painful fire — and I think there is probably a bit of fear around that.

What was the fire? You mean the reaction to “Eternals”?
I’m not going to say out it loud, because when I do, things always get … [trails off]. Let’s just say we were very scared.

I think the fear mainly came from the fact that we felt so sure of what we experienced. It changed all of our lives and mine so profoundly that it’s still reverberating. You think: Were we crazy? And no one else will get it but us?

You go through this long, treacherous journey to deliver these things to safety and now it’s very tender because you look back at all the loss and the sacrifices along the way and you haven’t really had time to process it.

I’m curious what your history was with Shakespeare growing up in China and then moving to England and later Los Angeles as a teenager. What kind of early impression did he make on you?
Shakespeare is very revered in China. In Chinese theater, they do Chinese versions of his plays. When I studied in the U.K., I didn’t speak English at the time and I did have to learn Shakespeare, which was very difficult. I don’t think I’m anywhere near where Paul and Jessie are with their understanding of Shakespeare. The language was always a barrier but the archetypal element of his stories was big for me — particularly “Macbeth.” In high school in Los Angeles, I performed Lady Macbeth’s speech on the stage because everybody had to do some kind of monologue for a project. And I barely spoke English.

You’ve said you initially weren’t sure that you were the right person to direct this movie. What was your hesitation?
There were three elements to that. One is that I’m not a mother. I never felt particularly maternal. People in my life say, “That’s not true, Chloé,” but I don’t see myself stepping into that archetype at all. The second was the idea of a period film — how can I be authentic and fluid in a period film, where you can’t just make things up in the moment, you can’t be spontaneous? The third was Shakespeare. I wondered if I needed to be scholarly.

So how did you come around?
I was driving near Four Corners, New Mexico, when Amblin called. I said, “No, thank you.” Steven [Spielberg] really wanted me to consider it. Then my agent said Paul Mescal wanted to meet me. I didn’t know his work. “Aftersun” was the secret screening here [in Telluride 2022], and we went for a walk by the creek. I watched him talking and thought, “Could he play young Shakespeare?” He already read the book. Then I read it and thought, if Maggie [O’Farrell] can write this with me, she can show me that world. As soon as I read the book, I said, “Can you set a meeting with Jessie Buckley?” I couldn’t see anyone else but her as Agnes.

Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in the movie “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)

You’d just come off “Eternals” after making small films like “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” and “Nomadland.” Now you’re back with something more intimate again. Did it feel like a reset?
Every child has its own beauty and troubles. This budget was maybe six or seven times “Nomadland,” but much less than “Eternals.” But it’s also a period film, which has its own challenges. I come from a tradition of: Tell me how much money you have and I’ll make something with it.

But I changed a lot after “Nomadland” and “Eternals.” In my 30s, I wanted to chase the horizon. I didn’t want it to ever end. I’d just keep running. Then, at the end of “Eternals,” I felt I couldn’t film another sunset that would satisfy me the way in the way it had with “The Rider” and “Nomadland.” I went through a lot of difficult personal times and pushing midlife, I realized I’d been running like a cowboy, like a nomad.

When you stop running and stop chasing horizons and you stay still, the only place you can go is above or below. I descended pretty heavily these last four years. By the time I got to “Hamnet,” I was ready. The difference now is a different kind of humanity: older, more vertical.

We know so little about Shakespeare or his son. Some parts of your film are grounded, others dreamlike. How did you balance that?
First of all, what’s real? Ancient mystics tried to understand what is being. “To be or not to be” goes beyond suicidal thought — it’s about existence itself. Every film has its own truth. For me, the truest thing is what’s present in the moment. I hired department heads and actors with knowledge of the history, but also the capacity to stay present and shift as we go. If someone came in too factual and literal, I said no. I wanted people who could do the research but also stay alive to the present.

Shakespeare’s name isn’t even spoken until late in the movie. This isn’t the icon — he’s a husband and father. Was it appealing to free him from the iconography?
Maggie’s book laid the foundation, really focusing on Agnes. For the film, I wanted it to be about two people who see and are seen by each other. They’re archetypal characters. I’ve studied Jungian psychology and Hindu Tantra — the energies of masculine and feminine, being and doing, birth and death. If we don’t have a healthy connection to our roots, those forces battle within us. By creating two characters who embody that, the story can work at a collective level and an internal one. The alchemy of creativity lets those forces coexist. Hopefully it becomes something more than a story about marriage or the death of a child.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in the movie “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features )

The loss of a child is hard to film and for audiences to watch. We’ve seen it tackled in different ways on screen, from “Ordinary People” to “Manchester by the Sea.” How did you approach portraying that kind of grief honestly without it being too much for the audience to bear?
It might be for some people, which is understandable. I love both those films you mentioned very much and watched them multiple times. I’ve been making films about grief for a while. I don’t think about what’s too much or too little. Agnes’ wailing — I could do that right now in front of you. We should be allowed to. The silence for thousands of years has done great damage.

How do you mean?
Think about ancient warriors coming back from battle — they danced, screamed, healed together. In Tantra, sexuality was part of healing. Now it’s: Talk to a therapist, take medication, go back to your family. The body is restricted. Telling a woman to be quiet when she gave birth and pinning her down. We know why this control happens. But I think people are responding to films where actors are embodied, because we miss that.

How do you see grief as a through-line in all your films?
All my films start with characters who’ve lost what defined them: dreams, home, purpose, faith. They grieve who they thought they were in order to become who they truly are. That’s grief on an individual and collective level. I wasn’t raised to understand grief. So I made films to give characters catharsis and through that, myself.

My friend [“Sinners” director] Ryan Coogler, who knows me so well, sat me down after seeing “Hamnet” and he said, “The other films were beautiful but you hid behind things. This is the first time I saw you in there. You’re finally being seen.” It took four films, working with that kind of grief and fear to get to that point.

The Oscar chatter has already started. You’ve obviously been through this before. How do you tune that out and just focus on what’s in front of you?
The same way that me, Paul and Jessie were doing on set. We made the film by being present. It’s difficult, so I’m trying to take that practice daily — just saying, “OK, today is all we have.” It’s flattering and nice but after what I’ve experienced in my career, you cannot possibly predict how things are going to go. I never expected “Nomadland” to go on that journey. So I surrender to the river.

Do you know what you’re doing next?
I just wrapped the pilot on the new “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series, which is set 25 years later. My company is part of developing it. The fandom is so special to me and I’m excited about how that’s going to go into the world. Then I think I want to do a play. I was working on “Our Town” and I had to let that go in order to do “Hamnet.” But I figured maybe I’ll learn something from this film and come back to the stage.

The industry feels pretty shaky right now: fewer jobs, studio consolidation, anxiety around AI. As a filmmaker, how do you see the state of the business and the art form?
I sense we’re at a threshold — not just the film business, everything. It’s uncomfortable. We’re like Will standing at the edge of the river when, at least in our film, the “to be or not to be” monologue was born. We can’t go back and we don’t know how to go forward. In physics, when two opposing forces pull so strongly, a new equilibrium bursts out. That’s how the universe expands. I think we’re there. We can kick and scream or we can surrender, hug our loved ones and focus on what we can do today.

Hopefully I’m not so pessimistic now. Or at least a little bit less.

TELLURIDE, Colo.  — Jeremy Allen White asked all the questions any normal human being would ask when offered the chance to play Bruce Springsteen in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” In theaters Oct. 24, it’s a movie that examines a slice of the rock legend’s career when he was battling depression and creating 1982’s incomparable exploration of alienation “Nebraska,” a record he didn’t know he was making when he recorded the songs on a primitive four-track tape machine in a rented New Jersey home. It turned out to be his favorite of all his albums.

Most of those questions could be boiled down to: Why me? White didn’t know how to play the guitar. He loves to sing but would never call himself a singer. And while he has a relationship with an audience, particularly those who have white-knuckled their way through his Emmy-winning work as Carmy, the talented and troubled chef on “The Bear,” he says it’s a far cry from the bond Springsteen has forged with his fan base for the past 50-plus years.

“The relationship a musician has with fans is so intimate,” White, 34, tells me the morning after the movie had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. “You listen to him in the car, you go to see him live. He’s there in your ear and it’s just the two of you. You feel like you’re being spoken to. Bruce is so important to so many people. It was daunting. I didn’t want to disappoint.”

By the time we talked, though, White was well past any anxiety about disappointing, if only because he had the approval of the person who mattered the most: Springsteen himself.

“Jeremy tolerated me and I appreciated that,” Springsteen said at a festival Q&A, suggesting that his input on the movie was ongoing and significant — and also welcome. He noted that it was easy to sign off on director Scott Cooper’s vision for the movie, which, with its narrow focus on the deep dive of “Nebraska,” he called an “antibiopic.”

“And I’m old and I don’t give a f— what I do,” Springsteen added, laughing.

White and I are sitting in the sun outside his hotel, basking in the warmth the day after a steady rain. Wearing a battered Yankees cap, jeans, boots and a blue pullover, he’s sporting the casual uniform of the festival, if not the Boss himself. White asks if I mind if he lights an American Spirit. He reaches for his lighter. The premiere is over and his mood is light. We dive right in.

Was there an immediate point of connection with Springsteen?
The more I talked with him, the more I learned. And at the point in his life we show in the movie, he was feeling so fraudulent. Not in his work, but as a human. He felt like he was being caught in a lie all the time. And I don’t want to speak for all actors, but I’ve certainly dealt with that kind of feeling.

It feels like there’s a line between your Springsteen and Carmy on “The Bear,” two men carrying generational trauma and emotional baggage they have no idea how to deal with. Do you see that?
For sure, you can draw that line. They’re cousins. And they’ve both got their art, something they feel confident about. What Bruce was feeling in his relationship with his father and the environment he grew up in, is he felt incredibly unsafe. And that made it difficult for him to trust people and form real connections. For a long time, the only connection he felt was in that three hours he spent on stage.

But then what do you do the rest of the time?
Absolutely. And I’m familiar with those feelings. But my home life as a child was more loving and supportive, so I had to do some creative work to find that tether to Bruce.

You mentioning Springsteen’s dad just popped a thought into my head. Is Carmy’s dad alive?
[Long exhale] We don’t know. That’s a decision that’s up to [showrunner] Chris [Storer].

It’s above your pay grade.
Well above.

You’re really good at playing men who have trouble articulating their feelings, which puts a lot of weight on your shoulders to convey an interior life through close-ups. Do you like that kind of acting?
I do. You have to have an understanding. The camera knows. If you’re just staring at a wall and you don’t have anything going on, the camera will know. The audience will, too.

You do also get to rock out and sing “Born to Run” and “Born in the U.S.A.” How did your vocal chords feel afterward?
I spent an afternoon singing “Born in the U.S.A.” and I got a migraine and I lost my voice. I saw Bruce afterward and he asked, “What’d you do today.” And I said [affecting a hoarse voice], “Uh, I recorded ‘Born in the U.S.A.’” And he smiles and says, “Sounds about right.”

Most of your singing is the “Nebraska” songs, these delicate acoustic songs about despairing characters who have lost hope. Putting across their stories in these songs feels like its own imposing challenge.
I was so focused on just sounding like Bruce and my coach, Eric [Vetro], asks, “What are you singing about? What’s the story? Where’s Bruce coming from? Is he singing from his perspective? Is about his childhood? Is he playing a character?” All these questions that, for an actor, should be right at the front of mind. Because I was so anxious about sounding like him, I found myself blocked by the real thing, which was: How can I just sing the song as honestly as possible?

What song was the breakthrough?
“Mansion on the Hill.” Bruce listened to it and said, “You do sound like me. But it’s you singing the song.” And that gave me permission, not just in recording the music, but making a film where I could tell his story but not be afraid to bring myself to it.

Did you have a favorite song?
Probably “My Father’s House.” It seemed like a warning for me. There’s regret in it. What I heard is a song about a young man not wanting to regret that he didn’t reach out for his father, who he had a love and connection with earlier. There was an immediacy to it, which you then see with Bruce and his father in the film.

Did it make you want to call your dad?
I called him right after recording that song in Nashville. Like many fathers and sons, we have a loving relationship, but we’ve also gone through periods where things have been difficult and it was hard to communicate. Making this film and singing this song has given me another perspective. It also coincides with getting older and having children of my own.

I’m glad you made the call. You can’t have those conversations after a certain point.
That’s what I mean about the warning of that song.

You told me yesterday that you and Springsteen had a debate about “Reason to Believe.” What was the source of the disagreement?
It’s the last song on the album and Bruce says people confuse it as being hopeful. He says that’s not correct. The song is about a woman whose husband has left her and she stands at the end of the driveway every day, waiting for him to come home. And I hear that, and I think, “Oh, that’s real love. That’s romance. Someone’s gonna drive down that road at some point.”

Either that or this poor woman is just going to be walking up and down her driveway the rest of her life.
And no one’s gonna be there. It depends how your ear is on a song.

But you choose to believe.
I choose to walk to the end of the driveway. Absolutely.

Would you call yourself an optimist?
No. [Laughs] Not really.

“Nebraska” came out in 1982 and was informed by the idea that there was a growing divide between the wealthy and the poor and that what we think of as the American Dream was becoming more elusive. Where do you think the album sits more than four decades later?
People are angry. That’s what seems to define our country right now. Anger. And it doesn’t seem to be going away. The songs on “Nebraska” are still going to be speaking to us four decades from now. They’re timeless.

Jeremy Allen White in the movie “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”

(Macall Polay / 20th Century Studios)

Did your early dance background help you with the physicality of the role, the way he carries himself on stage or even just walking around?
For sure. Finding the way he holds his gravity was important. I put little lifts in the boots and that made my posture change, my legs a little longer. Wearing the pants up to here [he points to a spot above his hips], that gets your gravity in your belly button, where I’m crouched over all the time.

There’s a lot of scenes in diners where he’s sitting with one arm over the back of the booth …
… like he’s on his way out almost all the time. One foot in, one foot out.

Musician friends turned you on to “Nebraska” in your early 20s. What music were you listening to then?
My folks are a little older so I grew up listening to a lot of music that Bruce listened to — Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Stones, Aretha Franklin.

Your parents had a strong record collection.
Still do. And I grew up in in Brooklyn in the ’90s, so I got really heavy into hip-hop in my teenage years. I discovered Nas and Jay-Z and Big L and Wu-Tang. Tribe. De La Soul. And then I was around for an exciting time in the New York scene. I was young so I couldn’t really experience it, but the Strokes were coming out and LCD Soundsystem. I felt lucky to be close that stuff as it was happening.

The way you’re talking about all this, it feels like music is a fundamental part of your life.
Absolutely. I love that it’s always with you. I’ve taken a couple of cross-country trips, and I love putting on Motown. I go through periods where I listen to the same 20 songs for a couple of weeks. But then I’ve got thousands of “liked” songs. And the nice part about a long drive is you can shuffle that and it’s like you’re traveling in time. I love getting to visit past versions of myself through music.

Springsteen takes an eventful cross-country trip in the film. What’s your most memorable one?
I did one by myself when I was about 24. I thought I was going to give myself about two weeks to go from New York to L.A. The first week was great. I was enjoying my solitude, listening to a lot of music. Then when I hit Utah, I got incredibly lonely.

Did the landscapes get to you?
Maybe. I had a certain amount of anonymity, which I enjoy on a road trip. You don’t know anybody in these towns and that allows you to be whoever you want to be, passing through. I remember getting to Utah and just being desperate to see somebody who knew who I was. And I got a flat in St. George, Utah. It was a disaster. My phone had died. I didn’t have a spare. I was out on the side of the road trying to borrow somebody’s phone. I took that as a sign. After I got it repaired, I raced to have dinner with a friend, because I felt this this crazy loneliness.

Springsteen says everyone has their “genesis moment,” an experience that charts your path. His was watching Elvis Presley perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956. What’s your genesis moment?
I had been dancing on stage but I didn’t act until I was 14 when I got up in front of a group in middle school. I had this great teacher, John McEneny, and he was having us do this improvisational exercise — two characters, one speaking, one quiet. And my friend, Yael, was playing a mother and I was playing her child who didn’t know how to speak yet. So I wasn’t speaking, like so much of my work [Laughs].

It’s Carmy’s genesis moment too.
Yes. And I remember feeling a presence. I had a hard time focusing as a child, a hard time being present. Still do. But I remember even in silence feeling so at ease and present. And of course I remember the eyes. And even without me doing anything or speaking, I felt attention, people waiting to see what I would do next. And I went, “Whoa.” I felt at peace. I felt present and people were interested. And I thought, “Let me follow this a little bit and see where we can go.”

There’s a scene in the movie, taken from real life, where Springsteen is flipping through the channels one night and stumbles upon Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” a movie that ultimately influences “Nebraska.” With streaming, we don’t really have those serendipitous discoveries any more. Have you ever had a moment like that?
I can’t think of one. But “Badlands” was a favorite of my parents and they showed it to me when I was 13 or 14. Martin Sheen was cool as hell in that role, and I was so impressed with his commitment to that character. And Sissy Spacek conveys so much with so few words.

And like “Nebraska,” “Badlands” was difficult to make. There was a lot of pushback against Malick and what he was trying to do.
There was a lot of confusion going on. They weren’t on the same page. Like with Bruce, it took a lot of diligence on Terrence Malick’s part to realize his vision. It’s so beautiful when you hear about the process of making a film is so difficult, and then something so beautiful and perfect comes out.

Where do you like to see movies in L.A.?
I love the New Beverly. I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the Egyptian not long ago. The Aero, if I’m on the Westside. I miss the Cinerama Dome and the Arclight. New movies, probably the Sunset 5. My favorite thing is go to a movie on a Tuesday at like one in the afternoon. You’re there by yourself. I like seeing movies by myself. Some people get out of a movie and like to start talking about it. I like getting out of a movie and being quiet for awhile.

Did you see “Weapons”? That was my favorite movie theater experience this summer.
I loved “Weapons.” And obviously, it’s a great horror film and funny at times and that ending is just crazy. But also I found myself very emotionally affected. To me the horror of the movie was about, from the child’s perspective, looking at all these adults who were totally incapable, whether it was due to addiction or narcissism.

Bringing this full circle, I’m watching this movie about kids feeling unsafe and I thought of the times in Bruce’s upbringing where he felt a similar way and how that made it so difficult to grow up and be trusting. That he ultimately got to that place is so beautiful. I hope people come away from watching this movie feeling that and, if they’re in a place that’s not so good, maybe thinking that connection can still be possible.

Pop superstardom, it turns out, did absolutely nothing to improve Sabrina Carpenter’s love life.

That’s the thrust of the singer’s shrewd and tangy “Man’s Best Friend,” which dropped Thursday night, just a year after last summer’s chart-topping “Short n’ Sweet.” The earlier album, which spun off a pair of smash singles in “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” went on to be certified triple platinum and to win two Grammy Awards — more than enough to transform Carpenter, now 26, from a former Disney kid into the latest (and horniest) member of pop’s A-list.

Yet all that success seems only to have attracted more of the losers she sang about last time. Here she’s dealing with a smooth talker doling out empty promises, a crybaby who can’t decide what he wants, even a guy so fixated on self-betterment that he’s lost interest in the bedroom.

“He’s busy, he’s working, he doesn’t have time for me,” she trills exasperatedly in “My Man on Willpower,” “My slutty pajamas not tempting him in the least.”

It’s a veritable gallery of rogues, this LP, not least the dude in the dark suit pictured on the cover of “Man’s Best Friend” with a hank of Carpenter’s blond hair in his fist as she kneels before him. The image inspired an instant controversy when she unveiled it in June, with critics accusing her of propping up dangerous ideas about the submission of women in the age of the tradwife.

Responded the singer in a CBS News interview that aired Friday: “Y’all need to get out more.”

Indeed, to take the album artwork at face value is to miss the whole point of Sabrina Carpenter, which is not just lampooning a prudish instinct — of course she’s in on the joke — but demonstrating the limits of a dating scene — of an entire social power structure — in which this is what a girl at the top has to work with.

“I like my boys playing hard to get / And I like my men all incompetent,” she sings in the LP’s opener and lead single, “Manchild.” She swears she’s not choosing them — that they keep choosing her. Then she punctuates the claim by batting her fake eyelashes and rhyming “Amen” with a flirty “Hey, men.”

As with “Short n’ Sweet,” Carpenter made “Man’s Best Friend” with a tight crew of accomplices — Jack Antonoff, John Ryan and Amy Allen, plus a bunch of tasty studio players — and once again they get a sound that combines the hooky splendor of ’70s-era AM-radio pop (think ELO, Wings and especially ABBA) with touches of country and dance music.

“Tears,” in which Carpenter lusts after a guy capable of putting together a chair from IKEA, is a pillowy disco thumper with echoes of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It)”; “Nobody’s Son” puts starchy palm-court strings over a bouncy reggae groove. Carpenter’s singing plays like an actor’s sizzle reel, by turns winsome, sneering, bubbly and resigned; in the twangy “Go Go Juice” alone — it’s about a woman who’s woken up at 10 a.m. and opted to spend the day drunk-dialing exes — she runs through every emotional gradient separating determination from shame.

Song for song — line for line, really — “Man’s Best Friend” isn’t quite as sharp as “Short n’ Sweet,” which offered the rare thrill of a young artist coming into her own on her sixth studio album. Occasionally, you can sense Carpenter reaching for a memeable lyric, as in the many gags about wetness in “Tears”; “When Did You Get Hot?,” meanwhile, feels like something Ariana Grande abandoned after workshopping for a minute.

When she’s on, though, she’s on: “Goodbye” is a dazzling orchestral-pop number in which she gives the boot to a hot-and-cold lover — “Arrivederci, au revoir / Forgive my French, but f— you, ta-ta” — and “House Tour” a winking sex romp whose thwacking drums and rubbery funk bass call to mind Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract.” (After Doja Cat’s Antonoff-produced “Jealous Type,” might this signal a coming Abdul-aissance?)

Near the end of the album, Carpenter dials down the comedy for “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry,” a sad and shimmery ballad about the thin line between love and war. “Silent treatment and humbling your ass / Well, that’s some of my best work,” she sings over strummed acoustic guitar before promising oh so sweetly to “leave you feeling like a shell of a man.”

If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em.

Frankie Muniz — the “Malcolm in the Middle” star turned NASCAR driver — is off the racetrack, for now at least.

The actor is recovering from a broken wrist he suffered after falling from a ladder at his home, he wrote on Instagram on Thursday.

“The phrase ‘FML’ (Frankie Muniz’s Life) takes on new meaning with moments like these,” he wrote.

The accident came right before a NASCAR event at Darlington Raceway in Darlington, S.C., over Labor Day weekend.

Muniz shared that the ladder mishap happened when he was trying to change batteries on a backyard security camera. While he joked about the situation, he said he’s heartbroken to miss the competition.

However, Muniz’s NASCAR career is far from over. He estimates he’ll be back behind the wheel within a few months.

Muniz began his professional driving career in 2006, after the end of “Malcolm in the Middle,” a move that stemmed from his lifelong admiration for the sport.

This isn’t the first time Muniz has found himself on the mend. In a previous interview, the 39-year-old told People that he’s simply “injury-prone,” and broke 38 bones between 2006 and 2017.

Muniz was involved in a crash at a 2024 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship at Phoenix Raceway in Arizona. According to reports from a journalist at the track, Muniz was seen limping into an ambulance after a hard hit from behind, but escaped major injury.

Neither that nor his latest fall are as harrowing as his major crash in 2009.

During a race, the then-21-year-old’s vehicle flipped and violently crashed into a wall. He described the crash as “gnarly” and said it resulted in him breaking his back, ankle, four ribs and a hand.

“My thumb was dangling by the skin,” Muniz told People.

In comparison, his recent fall from the ladder was a bump in the road. As the actor-turned-racer recovers, he plans to come back to racing full-force — and probably follow the instructions on his ladder a little more closely.

“Note to self: heed the ladder warning that says, ‘Do not sit or stand on top step,’” Muniz wrote on social media. “In hindsight, a taller ladder would’ve been smarter. While I’m gutted to miss the races, I’m grateful it wasn’t worse.”

Millions of dollars worth of political TV ads are expected to start airing Tuesday in an effort to sway Californians on a November ballot measure seeking to send more Democrats to Congress and counter President Trump and the GOP agenda, according to television airtime purchases.

The special-election ballot measure — Prop. 50 — will likely shape control of the U.S. House of Representatives and determine the fate of many of Trump’s far-right policies.

The opposition to the rare California mid-decade redistricting has booked more than $10 million of airtime for ads between Tuesday and Sept. 23 in media markets across the state, according to media buyers who are not affiliated with either campaign. Supporters of the effort have bought at least $2 million in ads starting on Tuesday, a number expected to grow exponentially as they are aggressively trying to secure time in coming weeks on broadcast and cable television.

“This early start is a bit stealthy on the part of the no side, but has been used as a ploy in past campaigns to try to show strength early and gain advantage by forcing the opposing side to play catch up,” said Sheri Sadler, a veteran Democratic political media operative who is not working for either campaign. “This promises to be an expensive campaign for a special election, especially starting so early.”

Millions of dollars have already flowed into the nascent campaigns sparring over the Nov. 4 special-election ballot measure that asks voters to set aside the congressional boundaries drawn in 2021 by California’s independent redistricting commission. The panel was created by the state’s voters in 2010 to stop gerrymandering and incumbent protection by both major political parties.

The campaign will be a sprint — glossy multi-page mailers arrived in Californians’ mailboxes before the state Legislature voted in late August to call the special election. Voters will begin receiving mail ballots in early October.

Redistricting, typically an esoteric process that takes place once a decade following the U.S. Census, is receiving an unusual level of attention because of partisan efforts to tilt control of Congress in next year’s midterm election. Republicans have a narrow edge in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the party that wins control of the White House often loses congressional seats in the following election.

Earlier this summer, Trump asked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw his state’s congressional districts to add five GOP members to the House, setting off a redistricting arms race across the nation. California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a campaign to redraw the state’s congressional districts in an effort to boost the number of Democrats in Congress, negating the Texas gains for Republicans, but it must be approved by voters.

The coalition opposing the effort is an intriguing mix: former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, wealthy Republican donor Charles Munger Jr., former GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, Assemblyman Alex Lee (D-San Jose), the chair of the Legislative Progressive Caucus, and Gloria Chun Hoo, president of the League of Women Voters of California.

Many partisans — in both political parties — opposed independent redistricting when it was championed by Schwarzenegger and Munger in 2010.

Jessica Millan Patterson, the former state GOP chairwoman who is leading McCarthy’s effort to oppose new congressional boundaries, demurred when asked about the dissonance. Voters, she said, made their choice clear at the ballot box about their preference to have an independent commission draw congressional districts rather than Sacramento politicians.

“The people of California have spoken,” she said, adding that most voters agree that an independent commission is preferable to partisan politicians drawing districts.

The “Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab” committee that Patterson leads plans to focus on conservative and right-of-center voters, and will be well-funded, she said.

McCarthy was a prodigious fundraiser while in Congress and his long-time friend, major GOP fundraiser Jeff Miller, is raising money to oppose the ballot measure.

Schwarzenegger is not part of the McCarthy effort, instead backing the good-government message of the Munger team. Patterson argues that anything the former governor does only brings more attention to their shared goal, even if he isn’t part of their effort.

“Gov. Schwarzenegger is Gov. Schwarzenegger,” Patterson said, pointing to an X post of the global celebrity wearing a T-shirt that said “Terminate Gerrymandering” while working out on Aug. 15. “He is a celebrity, a box-office guy. He’s going to make sure reasonable people know that we don’t want to put this power back in Sacramento. He will bring the glitz and glamour, like he always does.”

Schwarzenegger has long championed political reform. During his final year as governor, he prioritized the ballot measure that created independent congressional redistricting. Since leaving office, he made good governance a priority at his institute at the University of Southern California and campaigned for independent redistricting across the nation.

“Here are some of the things that are more popular than Congress: hemorrhoids, Nickelback, traffic jams, cockroaches, root canals, colonoscopies, herpes,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2017 Facebook video. “Even herpes, they couldn’t beat herpes in the polls.”

The former governor is reportedly backing the effort by Munger, the son of a billionaire, who bankrolled the ballot measure that created independent congressional redistricting in 2010. Munger has donated more than $10 million to an effort opposing the November ballot measure; the organization he funded has booked more than $10 million in television spots through Sept. 23.

“These ads are the start of our campaign’s effort to communicate directly with voters about the dangers of allowing politicians to choose their voters and abandoning our gold standard citizen-led redistricting process,” said Amy Thoma, a spokesperson for the Munger-backed Voters First Coalition.

Supporters of the effort to redraw the districts argued that Republicans are trying to cement GOP control of the nation’s policies.

“Trump cronies … are spending big to defeat [Prop.] 50 and help Trump rig the 2026 election before a single person [has] voted,” said Hannah Milgrom, a spokesperson for the campaign. “They are spending big — and early — to trick California voters into allowing Trump to keep total control over the federal government for two more years.“

Only John Williams could have put me in the orbit of one of history’s most famous basketball players. Kobe Bryant, like so many others, was a huge fan of Williams’ music; he befriended and sought out the composer for career advice and, when he made his post-athletic pivot to filmmaking, hired Williams to compose a short score.

And because I cover film music for a living, I was able to interview Bryant — along with Williams and Disney animation legend Glen Keane — for The Times in the spring of 2017. I even got to meet Bryant in person, backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, when he rehearsed his narration of “Dear Basketball” at an all-Williams concert. It was an obscenely hot day, and I waited outside Bryant’s dressing room while they finished drying his sweat-soaked shirt with a hair dryer before he came out and cheerfully shook my hand.

I gave Bryant and “Dear Basketball” a fair amount of real estate in my new book, “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” not because of his fame or athletic prowess, but because I feel that his short film inspired one of Williams’ most beautiful works of the last decade, and also because there was something poetic and moving about the whole affair, and about saying goodbye to the thing you love the most — especially as the film became a kind of eulogy for Bryant after his untimely death in 2020.

[The below excerpt is from Tim Greiving’s “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” out Sept. 2. Greiving is a frequent contributor to The Times.]

Kobe Bryant, the 18-time NBA All-Star, was an unexpected admirer of John’s music: as a boy, Bryant would tie a towel around his neck and run around to the theme of Superman; as a player, he used the Imperial March to hype himself up before games; and as a father, he would rock his infant daughters to sleep on his chest listening to Hedwig’s Theme. The six-foot-six athlete from Philly could hardly have been less like John, but he recognized mastery when he heard it. “I asked myself a question,” Bryant said: “What makes a John Williams piece timeless? How is he using each instrument? How is he using the space between them? How is he building momentum, and then how is he taking it away to build it again?” As a basketball player, Bryant said he was “essentially conducting a game,” “so I just wanted to talk to him about how he composed music and try to find something similar that I can then use to help my game as a leader and winning championships.”

Bryant first contacted John for counsel just before the 2008 NBA season. “The first thing I told Kobe was, I’d never seen a basketball game,” John confessed. “High school, college, professional, or television. And of course he laughed.” “But once I had told him my reason for reaching out to him,” Bryant said, “he saw the connection immediately…If we look in our same industry and we just look at things from that funnel, then you wind up essentially recycling information. So sometimes you look outside of that discipline to have a new point of view, a new perspective on it. [John] was digging it.”

They continued to see each other over the years, with Bryant often visiting John backstage after shows at the Hollywood Bowl. When Bryant retired from basketball in 2016, he turned his attention to entertainment. He wrote a sentimental open letter, “Dear Basketball,” as a retirement announcement, and one of his first post-game projects was turning that text into a short film. He wanted it crafted by undisputed masters of their fields, so he commissioned Disney animation veteran Glen Keane— who designed and animated Ariel in The Little Mermaid, among other achievements— and he asked John to write the score. The first thing John said to Bryant was, “I do classical pieces, and it’s all by hand,” almost as a warning. Bryant answered: “The piece will be hand-animated by Glen Keane, who is you in the animation space. I want it to have the human touch. I don’t want it to be poppy, I don’t want it to be hip-hoppy. I want timeless, classical music.”

Somehow, these three disparate artists—with two decades between each of them—hit it off. Keane was an avid fan of Lost in Space growing up in the 1960s, and when he told John how much he loved the music, John was completely embarrassed. “But it’s wonderful, John!” Keane said. “It held the promise of wonder and excitement and fun and quirky and scary and dangerous, and it was all in this one score. And John— the roots of your entire career are in that score.” Keane asked if he could play some of the old music. John said, “No, please don’t!” “No, I really gotta play it for you,” Keane insisted. “So I did.” The unlikely trio sat around a table in Keane’s office “and we just talked,” said Bryant. “John talked about how [the letter] made him feel, Glen how it makes him feel, and we all centered on the same thing, which is why I wrote it in the first place: the beauty of finding what it is that you love to do, and then finding the beauty of knowing that you will not be able to do that forever. Once they saw the nature of the piece, there was really nothing else to discuss.”

(Oxford University Press )

Keane illustrated the five-minute film with graphite on paper, depicting the arc of Bryant’s letter— from young Kobe tossing rolled-up tube socks, to NBA glory, to retiring at 37. John was equally inspired by Bryant’s childlike enthusiasm and Keane’s artisanal process. “The drawings have great fluidity and, in the best sense of the word, great simplicity,” John said. “They really are gorgeous, not only to look at, but rhythmically they’re fabulous.” Keane always animated while listening to music, and for this story it was selections from Empire of the Sun. John used that score as a reference point, but initially he wrote something that was too big, “and he went back and he rewrote it for something that was more understated,” said Keane, “in a similar way that Kobe’s delivery, his narration, is very personal, uninflected, not trying to sell anything. More like revealing. Kobe’s got a very quiet voice, and that also had a big impact in how we animated.”

John took a short break from The Last Jedi and spent two weeks in March 2017 to write and record this short piece—a gift for Bryant. When the towering baller arrived at the Sony scoring stage, John said: “I hope that you like what I’ve written.” Bryant just looked at John and said, “I feel pretty confident that it’s going to be just fine.” When Bryant heard John’s piece for the very first time, emanating from a symphony orchestra, “Oh my God,” he said. “I almost lost my mind. As soon as his hands went up and then the music started, I almost yelled out loud— but I had to remember that the red light was on and we’re recording… It was the most unreal experience I could ever have.” Bryant looked over “and just put his head on my shoulder,” said Keane, “like, ‘I can’t believe it.’ It was so beautiful. Then when it was done, John turned to us and said, ‘I promise it’s going to get better.’”

It was one of the simplest, yet most inspired pieces John wrote during this decade: a brief journey taken by a humble, hummable tune that bottled a young boy’s guileless dreams and aspiration for greatness and glory. His hymnal theme begins as a gentle woodwind duet, which is passed to strings and then accelerates into soaring triumph to accompany Bryant’s heyday. Then it grows small again, a lonely keyboard wandering a broken chord as Bryant’s voiceover admits that his body can only play for so long. John’s knack for noble flying music closes the loop, with heraldic horns and rolling timpani connecting Bryant’s story to his music for American heroism— concluding with a bittersweet reprise of the theme on piano and an uplifting coda as the credits roll. Like the letter itself, the score is part valentine, part elegy—and John put his heart into it. He premiered it at the Hollywood Bowl in September, and Bryant surprised the audience by joining John onstage to narrate. The short film won an Oscar in March 2018—and then very shortly afterward, it became a poignant eulogy for Bryant when he died, age 41, in a helicopter crash on a foggy Sunday morning in Calabasas that also killed his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. John’s wistful, symphonic poem suddenly took on a new shade. “It is elegiac, but it isn’t weepy,” John said of the film when he first scored it, never imagining the sudden tragic fate of his young friend.

It strikes its own manner of saluting the man and the game and the accomplishments with a lot of modesty, I think. It’s very touching, and in the end that may be its highest achievement, that it’s able to praise this man the way it does, without a lot of false vanity or hubris that could easily have spilled into it. That’s my take on it in any case.

It’s time to revisit the age-old question that’s been debated for years: Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?

Lionsgate will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the “Twilight” novels by bringing the entire film saga back to the big screen from Oct. 29 through Nov. 2, The Times confirmed.

The love triangle tale starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner — a human, a vampire and a werewolf, respectively — grossed more than $3.3 billion worldwide during its first run, according to Box Office Mojo.

The films, based on the four-part book series written by Stephenie Meyer, follow the story of Bella Swan (Stewart) and vampire Edward Cullen (Pattinson). Their relationship is tested by Edward’s instinct to harm her and by Bella’s friend Jacob Black (Lautner), who belongs to a rival werewolf clan.

There are five films in the series: “Twilight” (2008); “New Moon” (2009); “Eclipse” (2010); “Breaking Dawn — Part 1” (2011); and “Breaking Dawn — Part 2” (2012). Round-table chats with Meyer, producer Wyck Godfrey, former co-president of Lionsgate Gillian Bohrer and others will accompany each film.

As part of the festivities, Meyers is scheduled to be the honored guest at this year’s Forever Twilight in Forks Festival, an annual celebration in Forks, Wash., the setting of the book series. The fest will take place Sept. 11-14.

The films have remained in pop culture through TikTok trends where fans announce their “gay awakening” using scenes of Bella. Stewart, who came out as queer and married screenwriter Dylan Meyer in April, said the films are “gay” during an interview with Variety in January.

“It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love,” the actor said.

Stewart starred in last year’s romantic thriller “Love Lies Bleeding” (2024) and will next appear in her wife’s directorial debut, “The Wrong Girls,” which is written by the couple.

Pattinson played the titular character in 2022’s “The Batman.” He last appeared in Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi comedy “Mickey 17” (2025) and will appear later this year in Lynne Ramsay’s psychological dramedy “Die, My Love.”

Lautner took a few acting jobs after the end of the saga, in films such as “Grown Ups 2” (2013) and “The Ridiculous 6” (2015), but his most recent credit was in Netflix’s “Home Team” (2022).

Audiences once adored big adult comedies. Jay Roach’s champagne-fizzy “The Roses” is a seductive attempt to lure them back into theaters.

As bright, mean and ambitious as its lead characters, Theo and Ivy Rose (Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman), this resurrection of the ’80s-style R-rated crowd-pleaser is a remake of — or really, an across-the-room nod to — the 1989 hit “The War of the Roses,” which starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as divorcees who fight to the death over their fancy chandelier.

Inspired by the venomous novel by Warren Adler, both films are metaphors for building a home and then tearing it down, although the chandelier this time is merely incidental. This snarky, self-aware couple is the type to build themselves a smart house and name its system HAL.

The Roses meet-cute in a posh London restaurant when Theo asks to borrow Ivy’s knife to slash his wrists. He’s a morose architect who aspires to build risky, revolutionary designs. She’s a kooky chef whose signature seasoning is a mix of powdered anchovy and blueberry. In the cocktail of their marriage, he adds the bitterness and she adds the spice, qualities that can be either overbearing or harmonious. Their version of sweet talk is Ivy chirping, “Never leave me — but when you do, kill me on the way out.”

Brutal humor and obstinacy bind these malcontents together for almost 15 years. Then her career takes off and his flops, upending their equilibrium. Now, they’re battling over who gets custody of their California dream mansion. Twins Hattie and Roy are secondary. (Delaney Quinn and Ollie Robinson play their kids at 10; Hala Finley and Wells Rappaport at 13.)

The script by Tony McNamara (“Poor Things”) unleashes the hilarious spouses to aim insults at each other like explosive corks. (McNamara is so skilled at putting cruel words in Colman’s mouth that he’s already helped win her an Oscar for “The Favourite.”) Theo and Ivy open the film skewering each other at marriage counseling, only to be aghast when the therapist advises them to split up. For a while, they stick together mostly to stick it to her, in defiance of the fact that contempt is the No. 1 indicator of divorce. “In England, we call that repartee,” Theo insists.

You wonder if their jokes keep them from honest communication and then you wonder if Roach, who came to fame as the director of “Austin Powers” and “Meet the Parents,” has ever been afraid of that himself. (For the record, Roach has been married to the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs since 1993 and she here sings two cover songs for the soundtrack, “Happy Together” and “Love Hurts.”)

Mostly, you just enjoy the jokes. Colman, who burst into my awareness in the 2003 TV cringe comedy “Peep Show,” is fantastic throwing jabs around in costume designer PC Williams’ nouveau hipster wardrobe of bold, baggy lines. The actor even does an Ian McKellen impression just because. Yet, the surprise here is Cumberbatch, who seizes his rare opportunity to be flat-out funny, while occasionally rolling over to show Theo’s vulnerable belly. Flirtatiously pouting his lips at Colman, he coos, “How about a three-hour circular argument that goes nowhere?” How about three more Cumberbatch comedies for every awards-baity drama he does?

The story originally satirized materialistic baby boomers stymied by shifting gender roles. Both make interesting time capsules of the traditional man and the liberated woman who revert to smashing fusty china figurines like Neanderthals, although my sticking point with the first movie is that both Roses are too despicable. It’s hard to care about either one once you see how they treat each other’s pets.

But Roach has insightfully made this about people, not societal scapegoats. He and McNamara have changed up nearly everything in this disaster except its vibrations of dread. Since we already know that Theo and Ivy are in for a world of hurt, the film spends much of its running time rewinding to the past to prove how wonderful they could be together — and, more painfully, how sincerely they’ve tried to work out their kinks. We like Cumberbatch and Colman’s Theo and Ivy, even after they’ve become tantrum-throwing twits.

The details of their dissolution — career pressures, childcare clashes, petty jealousies — and its credible tit-for-tat dynamic are discomfitingly relatable. If this version has a larger sociological statement, it’s an indictment of how today’s quest for success is so all-consuming and exhausting that even if you can fit two egos in one house, you probably can’t merge their day planners. In the modern, highly visible, online-viralized game of life, earning money is merely Stage 1. Both Roses are driven to leave their permanent mark on the world.

Meanwhile, their two sets of American friends, Amy and Barry (Kate McKinnon and Andy Samberg) and Sally and Rory (Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou), are equally miserable and toxic. All four are such shallow snobs that they can’t imagine why Ivy would want to own Julia Child’s old stove when it’s, well, old. McKinnon’s Amy toggles through obnoxious progressive stereotypes: She’s a self-professed empath who pretends to be in an open marriage to wheedle Theo into bed. Barry, a depressive, gives Samberg a chance to show a deeper level of comic maturity, and also eventually doubles as Theo’s personal attorney. Otherwise, the script prunes the couple’s legal battle down to one scene with Ivy’s viperous lawyer, played by Allison Janney, who brings a rottweiler to the showdown and claims it’s her service animal.

The gags can be silly. There are two vomit scenes and a pratfall where Colman lands on her face. Yet, Roach and his team have put serious effort into their lovely symbology: a shot of Theo glumly walking down an airplane aisle from first class to coach, images of the cold Pacific crashing against rocks that recall his confession of feeling “waves of hatred” toward his wife.

When the film finally gets to its Grand Guignol climax, it rushes through the barbarity, taking no delight in it. I wanted to laugh but realized I’d fallen too much in love with Theo and Ivy, who are both so pitifully certain they’re in the moral right. The schadenfreude is just sad. It stings how much we root for them to kiss and make up. Still, despite the hasty ending, this splashy comedy deserves to woo grown-ups back to the multiplex. The Roses are estranged, but they’ve reunited us with our love for a genre — and it feels so good.

More than two and a half years after she took office, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has fulfilled a nagging campaign promise to film industry advocates.

She is appointing Board of Public Works president Steve Kang to serve as a liaison between city bureaucracy and the film industry, she said Wednesday. The mayor made the announcement while speaking to a private Zoom meeting of her entertainment industry council Wednesday afternoon, according to three attendees.

Kang will be the chief film liaison, assisted by Dan Halden — who serves as acting director of external relations at the city’s Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) — and producer Amy Goldberg.

The city’s film liaison role was established under former Mayor Eric Garcetti.

In the past, the liaison has served as the point person for film and TV productions looking to shoot in L.A., helping filmmakers navigate the city’s vast bureaucracy.

“I have full confidence that President Steve Kang will deliver in his role as City Film Liaison by finding solutions that protect our signature industry and ensure that local filming of TV shows, movies and commercials can successfully continue and expand,” Bass said in a statement. “With the successful expansion of the California Film & TV Tax Credit and our ongoing efforts to improve local processes, our work continues to keep production jobs here and support small businesses who rely on the industry.”

Bass’ decision not to prioritize the appointment of a film liaison had long frustrated industry advocates. Those concerns were sharpened at a moment when L.A.’s future as a film capital is in peril.

Amid a broader slump in overall film and TV production, the city has long been bleeding production jobs to states and countries that offer generous tax incentives, cheaper labor and more filming-friendly bureaucracies.

Most of those issues are outside the mayor’s control. But some industry advocates felt that naming a film liaison would be an easy move that could make shooting in L.A. a little less of a headache.

Since Bass took office in December 2022, those advocates have pressed the mayor’s office on the issue, with no clear answers about the delay.

“There’s been a clear sense of need, and frustration that it hasn’t happened,” said one industry advocate, who had been present during the mayor’s office’s regular meetings with representatives from film studios, labor groups and other industry interests.

Garcetti had several film liaisons during his administration.

Members of the industry often point to City Hall veteran Kevin James — who held the role for several years beginning in 2015 — as an ideal model, since he had deep City Hall experience, as well as ties to the industry. James served as film liaison while president of the Board of Public Works. The board governs the city’s Department of Public Works, which is responsible for StreetsLA, as well as the street lighting, sanitation and engineering departments.

The mayor’s office has had to navigate a historically difficult 2025, beginning with a catastrophic firestorm, followed by immigration raids and an unprecedented military presence in the city — all of which have necessitated 24/7 crisis responses from her office. But the frustrations over the lack of a named point person far predate the recent crises.

While signing an executive directive to support local film and TV production in May, Bass was asked about the position and said she planned to appoint someone within the next few days.

More than three months later, she finally did.

A comedian who was touring with superstar funnyman Katt Williams was fatally shot last week in Mississippi.

The shooting took place in a building that’s home to a company that bills itself as the official site for Williams merchandise. On Tuesday, the company was given a notice of eviction because of “criminal activity.”

On Aug. 20, police in Southaven, Miss., responded to an “isolated shooting” in the area of Burton Lane. Comedian Reggie Carroll was found suffering from gunshot wounds and taken to a hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Despite lifesaving efforts by officers and medical staff, he died of his injuries, police said. He was 52.

Carroll, who was known for his appearances on the long-running syndicated comedy show “Showtime at the Apollo,” had been traveling with superstar comedian Williams on his spring tour, Heaven on Earth.

Police have arrested 38-year-old Trenell Marquise Williams in the shooting death. The suspect had been working as a security guard on the tour, according to Fox 13 Memphis.

Onyxx Owll LCC on Burton Lane was the home of the clothing line “designed for and by the urban street celebrities and famous creatives,” according to its website. The Southaven Police Department posted a “14-day notice to quit for criminal activity” on the building, the Memphis news outlet said.

The investigation into the shooting death is ongoing. Authorities did not respond immediately Tuesday to The Times’ request for comment.

Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way.

“A New New Me,” her eighth novel, follows Kinga, a 40-year-old Polish woman who, on the Monday we meet her, becomes a Czech passport holder after having recently attained citizenship. She spends her morning crunching instant coffee granules, repeating Snoop Dogg’s daily affirmations, which she’s translated into Czech, and trying on outfits.

After her appointment to pick up her passport — during which she has an odd encounter with a woman named Milica who insists on becoming her friend — Kinga goes to work. She’s a matchmaker employed by a big bank that founded her department in response to Czechia’s Fidelity Awards, given to couples who’ve been together for 50 years or more (in reality, these were floated by the Czech senate but never came to be). At work, Kinga and her work wife Eva compare their personalized news alerts: Eva receives updates about the winner of three gold medals at the European rabbit jumping championships while Kinga’s phone tells her about the Luxury Enamel Posse, a group that invades people’s homes and folds residents into a suitcase along with loose teeth and blank checks.

So much whimsy barely 20 pages into a book could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer, her details always specific and alive, that you know you’re in good hands even if you’re not entirely sure what material those hands are made of, where they’re taking you, or how much they’ll jiggle and jostle you along the way.

After the first chapter, we never meet that particular Kinga who opens the book again. This is because there are seven — or potentially eight, depending on how you count — Kingas inhabiting a single mind and body: Kinga-Alojzia is in charge of Mondays, Kinga-Blažena of Tuesdays, Kinga-Casimira of Wednesdays and so on until Kinga-Genovéva, whose realm is Sunday, before the cycle starts all over again.

In a sense, “A New New Me” is the closest the British author has gotten to writing a thriller, because on Monday evening, Kinga-A finds a man tied up in her pantry and she has no idea how or why or who put him there. He does look somewhat familiar to her — and to some of the other Kingas as well — but she can’t pin him down. Kinga-A’s suspicion is that one of the other Kingas is plotting to get rid of the rest of them, and that this man is playing a part in that. Is he connected to the Luxury Enamel Posse? To Milica? Is he a secret lover? A friend? A stranger conning them all? These possibilities and more are explored over the course of the week, as each Kinga writes or records her day’s diary entry.

But how reliable are they? Kinga-A gives an overview of the others on Monday, but Kinga-B immediately refutes her summaries on Tuesday, and the other Kingas try to make peace, claim indifference, or express their own frustrations in turn, so that by the time we get to Sunday, we’ve read conflicting versions of some key moments in the Kingas’ life, and learned that some of them might be deliberately lying to the others. None of them are able to access the others’ days, but they were all, it seems, more or less present when they were part of their shared OG Kinga — before, that is, she asked Kingas A through G to take over and live her life full time.

Kinga, in other words, seems to have dissociative identity disorder (or DID, previously known as multiple personality disorder), a serious mental illness that begins in childhood and is linked to severe trauma. It’s also a disorder that has gained a lot of attention in recent years due to social media making people who live with it more visible.

Yet Oyeyemi’s novel doesn’t deal with her trauma. Similarly, the Kingas aren’t interested in the process of “integrating” into a single unified self (a common — though not universally desired — therapeutic goal); they’ve found a psychiatrist, Dr. Holý, who is perfectly happy to treat them as they are. Readers do learn that there have been alternate Kingas since childhood, and that their dad is a criminal who went to prison at some point when Kinga was young (only one of the Kingas writes to him). After that, Kinga mostly lived with her grandparents — who seem to have been loving and present — in the Polish countryside, while her brother, Benek, and her mum traveled for Benek’s acting career, an aspiration he had since he was a little kid and which all the Kingas helped support and facilitate in one way or another.

What is “A New New Me” about, then? As in all Oyeyemi’s writing: the chaotic and unpredictable nature of storytelling. What are stories? Where do they come from? How and why do we tell them? Communicating with other people is a constant act of storytelling, after all: We share anecdotes, we narrate our joys and fears and troubles to one another, we agree on the shared story of our reality (or we don’t), we curate our reality differently depending on who we share it with. It follows, then, that communicating with the self, or aspects of ourselves, is just as much about understanding, interpreting and framing our own experiences through narrative.

There’s a lot happening in the background of “A New New Me,” whose main plotline swirls up and around unpredictably like self-serve fro-yo. The most prominent and evocative of these background shadow plays is the relationship between Kinga and her brother, Benek, who we never actually meet, but whose life’s trajectory and career were made possible by Kinga’s childhood sacrifices. It’s fitting and somehow ominous that Benek is an actor — he gets to try on other characters for a living and yet can always return to himself, whereas Kinga actually lives as a series of recurring but separate “characters,” which is to say, her different selves. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this mystery brother haunting the novel, but it’s intriguing.

In addition to getting weirder, Oyeyemi’s novels have been getting funnier over the years, and her new-newest follows that trend. Its humor shows up in the quirks of the Kingas’ personalities (“I’ll just lounge around sending gourmet tourists spiraling by creating Tripadvisor listings and rave reviews for restaurants that don’t exist.”), in their jobs (one of them is a perfumer’s muse; another creates tourist experiences involving manufacturing a crisis and having the client save the day) or simply in the whimsical nature of the world they inhabit (see Luxury Enamel Posse above). “A New New Me” is thoroughly enjoyable and is very likely to reward repeat readings.

I’m off to start it over again myself.

Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”

Mingus Reedus, son of “The Walking Dead” star Norman Reedus and Danish model Helena Christensen, made a concerning statement to a reporter in the wake of his arrest Saturday on suspicion of assault.

On Sunday, a New York Post reporter confronted the 25-year-old outside of his Manhattan apartment. “You want to watch me kill myself?” the model said when he spotted the journalist. He refused to answer questions after that, the Post reported.

The grim remark came just one day after Mingus Reedus was taken into custody by police who responded to a Saturday morning report of an assault in progress, according to USA Today. The Post reported that a 33-year-old female victim was subsequently taken to NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue with “minor injuries.”

Reedus pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges of of third-degree assault, assault recklessly causing injury, criminal obstruction of breathing, second-degree harassment and aggravated harassment, NBC News said. He was released without posting bail.

It wasn’t Reedus’ first arrest on suspicion of assault. He faced accusations in 2021 of punching a woman at the San Gennaro festival in New York City. At the time, he told the New York Daily News that “it was instinct” after the woman was “swarming” his friend group.

“We didn’t think anything of it, but these five girls followed us for two blocks, throwing food at us and yelling,” he said. “We told them to leave us alone, but they kept following, threatening to hurt my girlfriend and her friend.”

He said one woman was “pulling my hair from the back, another throwing water in my face.” Soon after, police got involved, but Reedus claimed they “refused to listen to the context” and arrested him.

In March 2022, he struck a deal and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge — disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to a conditional discharge that required him to attend five private counseling sessions.

Netflix House will soon open its doors.

The streaming video giant on Monday announced when it will open its first shopping, dining and entertainment complexes to the public.

The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company will open its first Netflix House in Philadelphia on Nov. 12. The company’s Philadelphia location is located at King of Prussia shopping center, while its second Netflix House at Galleria Dallas will open on Dec. 11. A third location in Las Vegas will open in 2027.

The more than 100,000 square-foot space will offer fan experiences, merchandise and food inspired by Netflix content, in an effort to capitalize on its popular shows, movies and franchises.

For example, fans will be able to take selfies with Queen Charlotte, see screenings of “KPop Demon Hunters” and enjoy Netflix-themed food and cocktails, the company said in a statement.

The Netflix House complexes will be free for people to enter. Some fan experiences, such as Top 9 Mini Golf and immersive VR games in the Philadelphia location, will cost money.

Netflix House is part of the company’s push to expand further into in-person entertainment. The firm hosted balls similar to those featured on Regency era romance “Bridgerton” and worked with retailers and brands to sell clothing and other merchandise inspired by “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things.”

Such experiences also serve as marketing for the shows and movies.

The streamer could eventually have 50 or 60 Netflix House locations globally, said Netflix Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos last year at the WSJ Tech Live conference.

Jerry Adler, who spent decades backstage on Broadway before reinventing himself in his 60s as a television actor, most memorably as Herman “Hesh” Rabkin on HBO’s “The Sopranos” and Howard Lyman on CBS’ “The Good Wife,” has died. He was 96.

Adler died Saturday in New York, where he lived, according to his family. A cause was not disclosed.

On “The Sopranos,” Adler played Hesh, a Jewish music producer and loan shark with long ties to the Soprano crime family. Not a member of Tony Soprano’s inner crew but close enough to be trusted, he was one of the few who could speak bluntly to James Gandolfini‘s mob boss without fear of reprisal. Adler remained with the series from its 1999 pilot through the final season in 2007, a steady presence on the margins of Tony’s world.

Hesh turned up in some of the show’s most memorable arcs, helping Tony’s protégé Christopher and his girlfriend Adriana in their ill-fated stab at the music business, joining Tony in a horse-racing venture and, in the final season, watching their relationship sour when the boss pressed him for a large loan.

Steven Van Zandt, Adler’s “Sopranos” castmate and guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, paid tribute to Adler on social media: “Such an honor working with you. Travel well my friend.”

While “The Sopranos” launched a number of previously little-known actors to instant fame, Adler’s rise was unusual, the culmination of more than four decades spent behind the scenes on Broadway before he ever stepped in front of a camera.

A Brooklyn native born Feb. 4, 1929, Adler began his career as an assistant stage manager in 1950 on “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and went on to work as stage manager, production manager or supervisor on more than 50 shows, including the original “My Fair Lady,” Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” and “The Apple Tree,” directed by Mike Nichols. He also directed several productions.

By the 1980s, he had moved to Los Angeles to be closer to his children and found steady work in daytime television as a stage manager. It wasn’t until his early 60s that acting entered the picture. After debuting on CBS’ “Brooklyn Bridge” in 1991, Adler found steady film and TV work as a character actor through the 1990s, appearing in Joe Pesci’s “The Public Eye” (1992) and Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993).

After “The Sopranos,” Adler remained a familiar presence on television. He joined “The Good Wife” in 2011 as Howard Lyman, a blustery, out-of-touch partner at the Lockhart/Gardner law firm. What was initially meant to be a one-off guest spot turned into a recurring role across six seasons, with Adler reprising the part in “The Good Fight” in 2017 and 2018.

Adler also recurred on FX’s “Rescue Me” as fire chief Sidney Feinberg and appeared in series ranging from “Northern Exposure” and “Mad About You” to “Transparent” and “Broad City.” His film credits include “In Her Shoes” (2005), “Synecdoche, New York” (2008) and “A Most Violent Year” (2014).

Adler returned to Broadway as a performer late in life, appearing in Elaine May’s 2000 comedy “Taller Than a Dwarf” and Larry David’s “Fish in the Dark” in 2015. Adler’s last screen credit came in the 2019 revival season of “Mad About You.” In 2024, he published a memoir, “Too Funny for Words: Backstage Tales From Broadway, Television, and the Movies,” reflecting on his unusual path through show business.

On Instagram, “Sopranos” co-star Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher, praised Adler as “a fantastic actor and the kindest of human beings. He brought so much humor, intelligence and truth to the role of Herman ‘Hesh’ Rabkin and was one of my favorite characters on ‘The Sopranos.’ I loved working and spending time with Jerry. A true class act.”

Survivors include his wife, Joan Laxman, whom he married in 1994, and his daughters, Alisa, Amy, Laura and Emily.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that no one is truly safe. That gathering dread fueled some great ’70s paranoid thrillers, such as “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation,” but it’s been difficult to replicate that eeriness in today’s extremely online world, when our devices explain and obfuscate with abandon, conspiracies are lifeblood and we feel persecuted one day, invincibly anonymous the next.

The nifty premise of “Relay,” a new white-knuckle ride from “Hell or High Water” director David Mackenzie, is that a certain type of tech-savvy hero can, if not completely ease your anxiety, at least navigate a secret truce with those out to get you. And Riz Ahmed’s solitary off-the-grid fixer, Ash, who hides in plain sight in bustling New York, can do it without ever meeting or talking to you: His preferred mode of traceless communication is the text-telephone service that hard-of-hearing people use in conjunction with message-relaying operators. Like a ready-made covert operation, it keeps identities, numbers and call logs secret.

For the simple fact that “Relay” is not about an assassin (the movies’ most over-romanticized independent contractor), screenwriter Justin Piasecki’s scenario deserves kudos. Rather, Ash’s broker helps potential whistleblowers escape the clutches of dangerously far-reaching entities — unless, of course, they want to settle for cash. It’s a fascinatingly cynical update: Should we make an uneasy peace with our tormentors? (Hello, today’s headlines.)

Before those questions get their due, however, “Relay” sets itself up with clockwork precision as a straightforward big-city nail-biter about staying one step ahead. Seeking protection from harassment and a return to normal life, rattled biotech scientist Sarah (Lily James) goes on the run with incriminating documents about her former employer. When she’s rebuffed by a high-powered law firm, she’s provided a mysterious number to call. Ash, armed with his elaborate vetting methods, puts Sarah through the paces with rules and instructions regarding burner phones, mailed packages and a detailed itinerary of seemingly random air travel. It doesn’t just test her commitment, though — it’s also a ploy to scope out the corporate goons on her trail: a dogged surveillance team led by Sam Worthington (who should maybe only play bad guys) and Willa Fitzgerald.

As the story careens through airports and post offices and New York’s hidey-holes, the cat-and-mouse chase is dizzyingly enjoyable, worthy of a Thomas Perry novel. We wait for the missteps that threaten everything, of course, and they begin with learning that Ash is a failed whistleblower himself, one who is beginning to question his chosen crusade. Another vulnerability, recognizable in the occasional cracks in Ahmed’s commanding stoicism, is the loneliness of the gig. So when a restive Sarah, on one of their protected calls, gently prods for a smidgen of personality from her mysterious unseen helper, one is inclined to shout, “No feelings! Too risky!”

But that, of course, is the slippery pleasure of “Relay,” which pits individuals against venal institutional might. Flaws are the beating hearts of these movies, triggering the peril that makes the blood pump faster. Some of that effectiveness is undercut by some off-putting music choices, but McKenzie’s command of the material is rock solid, Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography achieves a sleek, moody metallic chill and Matt Mayer’s editing is always fleet. In a year that’s already given us one superlative case of adult peekaboo — Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” — “Relay” proves there’s still more room for smart, punchy cloak-and-dagger options.

Ron Howard’s new film “Eden” is a true story about disenchanted Europeans, who, in the 1930s, escaped from their society and decamped on a lonely rock in the Galapagos, only to see their handmade utopia devolve into petty power struggles and murder. It’s also lurid proof that Charles Darwin missed out on the truly juicy survival-of-the-fittest action by about a hundred years.

This is certainly unusual material for a mainstream stalwart like Howard, who knows his way around heroic problem-solving narratives (“Apollo 13,” the Thai cave rescue movie “Thirteen Lives”). But in screenwriter Noah Pink’s melodramatic imagining of incidents both well-documented and mysterious, one can see this Hollywood veteran on a mission to loosen the shackles of his reputation and have some nasty, brutish fun. To wit: A perma-sneering Jude Law greets intruders naked; a wild-eyed Ana de Armas insults and tries to seduce everyone; Vanessa Kirby lets foreplay include the pulling of her diseased tooth; Sydney Sweeney gives birth alone while growling at a pack of wild dogs.

The result may not be terribly illuminating about the (sub)human condition, despite the shout-outs to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. “Eden” is probably closer to an expensive reality show about mismatched survivalists. But as August fare goes, it’s a sticky, sweaty hoot, well cast and paced like a disreputable beach read, even if you might sporadically wish Werner Herzog had gotten first crack at this material. (It was also covered in a 2013 documentary.)

The first transplants to the uninhabited island of Floreana were German botanist Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Law) and his devoted, ailing partner, Dore (Kirby). Scolds who glorified suffering against the world’s wrong turns, the pair sought a radical reboot of society in rugged isolation, save the inconvenient fact that Ritter’s grandstanding philosophical missives back home were published in newspapers, turning them into eccentric folk heroes. Soon, their precious suffering took the form of new neighbors: idealistic war veteran Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his wide-eyed young wife Margret (Sweeney), who are looking for a new, self-sufficient way of life for their budding family.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse addition to this oil-and-water mix of high-minded nonconformist cranks and hard-toiling middle-class settlers than a capitalist sybarite. Enter the grandiose Baroness Eloise (De Armas), carried like Cleopatra onto the beach by her male lovers (Toby Wallace and Felix Klammerer), and ready to claim Floreana as the future site of an exclusive luxury resort called Hacienda Paradiso. Her first order of business, however, is pitting the scowling Ritter and bland, industrious Wittmers, who had managed a bearable distance so far, against each other.

The island, given an appropriately sickly, uninviting sheen by cinematographer Mathias Herndl, clearly wasn’t big enough for all of these new-world experimenters. But the movie’s two hours offer plenty of room for their portrayers. Howard’s generosity with his actors keeps this ensemble a charged group of clashing molecules. You wouldn’t mistake anybody’s turn for a full-throated or, conversely, subtle characterization — there’s a messiness to the cutting that prioritizes motion over stillness — but the broad strokes of personality are fun.

At its most raw (or is it overcooked?), when de Armas’ loaded-gun vibe veers toward camp or Law peacocks his pomposity with a hint of desperation, the situation may remind you of some insane pre-Code potboiler like 1932 “The Most Dangerous Game,” when a tale of people at their worst seemed all the more fascinating for unfurling in an exotic locale. Just because this corrupting pity party doesn’t crescendo so much as peter out isn’t any more of a reason to dismiss “Eden.” A little time spent with the farcical maneuverings of isolated megalomaniacs means you can skip reading the news that day.

A wave of purple and hot pink hair and cartoon K-pop bops is taking over multiplexes.

With summer blockbusters in the rearview mirror and only a few new films out, movie theaters expected a bit of a lull at the box office this weekend.

Then Netflix dropped a bombshell. The streamer would release its hit animated film “KPop Demon Hunters” — already a viral phenomenon on streaming — in theaters Saturday and Sunday for sing-along screenings.

The movie will be shown on more than 1,750 screens in the U.S. and Canada, with 1,150 shows sold out as of Thursday, according to industry sources. It’s an unusually high-profile move by Netflix into cinemas, which is using the big screen experience to capitalize on and promote one of its biggest wins.

Packed houses include the theaters of Dallas-based Look Dine-In Cinemas, which has locations in Glendale, Redlands, Downey and Monrovia.

“This will be the dominant force for the weekend,” said Look Chief Executive Brian Schultz. “We could put it on every screen in our auditorium.”

But is this theatrical release really gonna be golden, to paraphrase one of the musical’s most infectious earworms? We won’t know for sure. Or at least how golden.

Los Gatos-based Netflix will not release box office figures, sticking with the company’s long-standing policy that has long frustrated industry pros. All the same, based on presale numbers, the movie could haul in $16 million to $22 million, according to estimates from analysis site Box Office Theory. That total, if Netflix reported it, would unseat the expected official No. 1 domestic movie, “Weapons.”

The release is a welcome surprise for theater owners — particularly in the doldrums of summer, when even late breakout hits like Warner Bros.’ horror film “Weapons” have been out for weeks. But it also underscores the tricky relationship between exhibitors and Netflix, which has famously eschewed traditional theatrical film releases.

The streamer has briefly put films in theaters for Oscar consideration, as it did with “Roma” and “The Irishman,” and did give director Rian Johnson’s 2022 comedy “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” a short window in cinemas. (It will also have a three-week exclusive theatrical run for Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” in October.)

But the streamer has long been adamant that its focus is on growing its subscriber base — not on developing a theatrical business. Earlier this year, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the theatrical movie experience was “outdated” for most people. When the company does theatrical releases, it views them as marketing efforts.

That has led to long-standing complaints from theater owners, who argue that streaming has lessened their business and trained audiences to wait until films are available at home.

“Netflix and a sizable share of theatrical exhibition have spent so many years toeing the line as frenemies, if not outright adversaries,” Shawn Robbins, director of movie analytics at ticket seller Fandango and founder of Box Office Theory, said in an email. “This is a weekend that again highlights how they could, and perhaps should, start working together more often to the benefit of both sides.”

The film, produced by Culver City-based Sony Pictures Animation, is the most-watched original animated movie in Netflix’s history, according to the streamer.

It’s also now the second-most-watched film ever on Netflix behind the 2021 action-comedy “Red Notice” starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. The movie’s soundtrack has also been a hit, with the song “Golden” peaking at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and continuing to hold onto a high ranking.

“KPop Demon Hunters” focuses on a popular girl group called Huntr/x that uses its music and dance moves to battle evil, including a demon boy band. The movie has spawned a number of memes, including close-ups of the characters’ expressive faces.

The music, as well as the film’s strong female characters, were a draw for Heather Hollingsworth and her 10-year-old daughter, Kayleigh, who have now watched “KPop Demon Hunters” multiple times and are planning to see a screening this weekend with Kayleigh’s best friend and her mom. “Golden” is Hollingsworth’s favorite song from the film, and the one that gets stuck in her head most.

“The songs are really catchy,” said Hollingsworth, 41, a speech language pathologist who lives in Littleton, Colo. “Also the characters’ vulnerability being their strength — that strong friendship — it’s a very powerful message.”

Though they could continue watching “KPop Demon Hunters” at home on Netflix, Hollingsworth said the appeal of the theatrical screening was the social experience.

“There’s something about having it in a movie theater that is way more fun for the kids, especially,” she said.

The sing-along screenings follow similar showings for “Wicked,” as well as concert films such as Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” and Beyonce’s “Renaissance World Tour.” Unlike “KPop Demon Hunters,” those films were exclusively in theaters first, resulting, in the case of “Wicked” and Swift, in hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales.

For Look Cinemas, sing-alongs have long been big business and often result in a demand for party bookings, Schultz said. Indeed, tickets for “KPop Demon Hunters” have been selling in large groups.

“It’s going to make for a very fun weekend,” he said.

Times staff writer Kaitlyn Huamani contributed to this report.

Masked goons are terrorizing American cities. U.S. inflation is persisting. Gaza is starving to death. The Cracker Barrel unveils a new logo.

If you guessed which crisis is not like the others, then you’ve spotted the latest source of outrage fueling the right-wing media universe, where trivial distractions from Trump’s failures and the Epstein files are the name of the game.

In a kerfuffle as layered as the eatery’s hash-brown casserole ($4.79 for a side dish, $15 and upward for an entree-sized portion), the folksy-themed establishment, which first opened its doors in 1969, is once again fodder in a one-sided culture war.

The crime? The chain’s classic gold and brown logo now features the chain’s name in a more minimalistic font. Gone is the eatery’s unofficial mascot, that folksy fellow in coveralls who enjoys leaning on a wooden barrel.

“WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” said Cracker Barrel regular-in-spirit-only Donald Trump Jr. when responding to a post on X where the user shockingly blamed DEI for the restaurant’s monstrous decision.

“Cracker Barrel is done,” wrote the Federalist’s Sean Davis. “Woke executives killed it, wrapped the corpse in a rainbow flag, and then made it do a little puppet show in New York City for the entertainment of all their woke little friends.”

Not exactly a puppet show, but the Cracker Barrel did host its “A Taste of Country, Anytime” event Thursday in New York City with country music star Jordan Davis. The chain purported to bring a “country hospitality experience to the big city,” complete with “entertainment on the front porch, rocking chairs, classic Cracker Barrel games and crave-worthy food.”

Clearly a ruse for yet another Pride parade or Latin American gang invasion.

The deception started on Aug. 19, when the Tennessee-based chain in a press release announced changes to its logo and menu as part of a campaign titled “All the More.” The rebrand features new menu items, restaurant remodels and an “enhanced brand look and feel.”

“We believe in the goodness of country hospitality, a spirit that has always defined us. Our story hasn’t changed,”  said Cracker Barrel Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Moore in a statement. “Our values haven’t changed.”

But their signage has changed, and that in itself signaled a threat to a way of life that we need to rediscover, you know, in order to make America great again.

Nostalgia for a time that most of us weren’t even alive to see is part of Cracker Barrel’s appeal. Renowned for its Southern comfort food and down-home appeal, generations of Americans have wandered through the establishment’s general store decor and dined on its Southern comfort food. But like any business, it needs to keep up with the tastes and demands of new generations, and apparently Gen Z, millennials and even Gen Xers aren’t buying black licorice and candy corn like their predecessors once did.

It’s hardly the first time the dubiously-named dining establishment has faced accusations that it’s going gay. As the Bulwark pointed out, there was 2023 e-outrage over Cracker Barrel’s acknowledgment of Pride month, which included a rainbow-themed rocking chair and some corporate-speak about “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at Cracker Barrel.”

“We take no pleasure in reporting that Cracker Barrel has fallen,” the organization Texas Family Project wrote at the time. “A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob.”

When the country is in chaos and entangled in man-made catastrophes abroad, it’s easier to rail, risk-free, against a manufactured crisis. Fox Business News led its Friday news lineup with a Cracker Barrel report, but not about the logo redesign: “Cracker Barrel over the past decade has worked closely with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), changing its company culture to be more inclusive and LGBT-friendly ahead of its controversial store rebrand,” reads the lede.

It’s yet to be seen if a sizable swath of America will forgo the Signature Saucy Chicken Sandwich in protest, constituting another national crisis to chew on.

In the early 20th century it was widely thought that there was intelligent life on Mars, and that we actually knew something about the inhabitants. Fringe theorists and yellow journalists spread this view, but so did respected scientists and the New York Times. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world had Martians on the brain. The mania could be summed up by the philosophy of Fox Mulder, the paranormal investigator played by David Duchovny on “The X-Files”: “I want to believe.”

How this came to pass is the subject of “The Martians.” David Baron’s deeply researched and witty book explores what happened when “we, the people of Earth, fell hard for another planet and projected our fantasies, desires, and ambitions onto an alien world.” As Baron writes, “This romance blazed before it turned to embers, and it produced children, for we — the first humans who might actually sail to Mars — are its descendants.”

Well before there was Elon Musk, there was Percival Lowell. A disillusioned, admittedly misanthropic Boston Brahmin, Lowell came to see himself as a scientist with the soul of a poet, or a poet with scientific instincts. He was also filthy rich, and he poured much of his money into equipment and research that might help him prove there was life on Mars.

He was hardly alone. Other movers and shakers in the Martian movement included French astronomer and philosopher Camille Flammarion, who brought missionary zeal to the task of convincing the world of extraterrestrial life; and Giovanni Schiaparelli, the colorblind Italian astronomer who observed “an abundance of narrow streaks” on Mars “that appeared to connect the seas one to another.” He called these “canali,” which in Italian means “channels.” But in English the word was translated as “canals,” and it was quickly and widely assumed that these canals were strategically created by agriculturally-inclined Martians. Lowell, Flammarion and Schiaparelli collaborated and communicated with one another throughout their lives, in the interest of spreading the word of life on Mars.

Baron, a Colorado-based science writer, approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive, focusing on the social currents and major figures of his story rather than scientific concepts that might go over the head of a lay reader (including this one). The Mars craze unfolded during a period defined by the theory of evolution, which expanded our conception of gradualism and inexorable progress, and tabloid journalism, which was quick to present enthusiastic postulation and speculation as fact, whether the subject was the Spanish-American War or life on other planets. Science fiction was also taking off, thanks largely to a prolific Englishman named H.G. Wells, whose widely serialized attack-of-the-Martians story “War of the Worlds” piqued the Western imagination. All of the above contributed to Mars fever.

One by one Baron introduces his protagonists, including Musk’s hero Nikola Tesla. An innovator in wireless communication and what would now be called remote control, Tesla won over the press and public with his enigmatic charm, which led his pronouncements to be taken seriously and literally by those who should have known better. “I have an instrument by which I can receive with precision any signal that might be made to this world from Mars,” he told a reporter. Tesla briefly had a powerful benefactor in Wall Street king J.P. Morgan, who funded Tesla’s wireless research before deciding the Mars obsession was a bit much and cutting him off.

Baron comes not to bury the Mars mania, but to examine the reasons why we choose to believe what we believe. Lowell, spurned in his romantic life and treated as a black sheep by his dynastic family, found in Mars a calling, a raison d’être. As Baron writes, “Mars gave his life purpose; it offered him the means to prove himself a success worthy of the Lowell pedigree.” The Mars believers were dreamers and misfits, all with something to prove (or, in the case of some publishers, papers to sell).

As Baron points out, the scientific method often fell by the wayside amid the hullabaloo. An acquaintance of Lowell’s bemoaned the habit Lowell had of “jumping at some general idea or theorem,” after which he “selects and bends facts to underprop that generalization.” Lowell himself once advised an assistant, “It is better never to admit that you have made a mistake.” Or later, as he sought photographic evidence of the Mars canals: “We must secure some canals to confound the skeptics” — which, today, carries eerie echoes of “Find me the votes.”

None of which should denigrate the dreams of space exploration. Nobody, after all, imagined we would actually walk on the moon. Carl Sagan, the great science popularizer and member of the Mariner 9 team that captured groundbreaking images of Mars in 1971, concluded that those canals were, as Baron puts it, “mere chimeras, an amalgam of misperceptions due to atmospheric distortion, the fallible human eye, and one man’s unconstrained imagination.” But that imagination, Sagan added, had value of its own: “Even if Lowell’s conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabled canals, turned out to be bankrupt, his depiction of the planet had at least this virtue: it aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility, to wonder if we ourselves might go to Mars.”

L.A. Times contributor Vognar recently joined the staff of the Boston Globe.

Long before Zack Fox was making scene-stealing appearances in “Abbott Elementary,” releasing music and amassing millions of views on his sweat-inducing DJ sets, he was best known for his Twitter jokes.

Fox, a graphic artist and emcee for Atlanta-based indie label Awful Records at the time, was posting absurdly funny tweets under the alias “Bootymath,” raking in tens of thousands of followers. His undeniable social media presence and comedic chops are what ultimately brought him to Los Angeles in 2017 when filmmaker, artist and producer Flying Lotus tapped him to co-write and star in his body-horror comedy “Kuso.”

“Then I just got stuck and then I got married,” says Fox, who tied the knot with Mayumi “Kat” Fox, a DJ and entrepreneur who launched the popular Mayumi Market AAPI marketplace. Thankfully, he’s enjoying living in L.A., which he says has a similar Southern hospitality charm as his Atlanta hometown.

Fox’s latest adventure? Starring in writer-director Alex Russell’s “Lurker,” a gripping psychological thriller that explores the insidious parasocial bond between a rising pop star and a seemingly meek retail employee, which is out in theaters Friday.

He’s also gearing up to unleash his “creative sandbox concept” called UWAY, which is hosting its first rave in collaboration with the L.A.-based record label and jazz community Minaret on Sept. 6 in New York.

Fox takes us along for his highly caffeinated Sunday in L.A., which involves losing track of time at a Yemeni cafe, taking his dogs Kiwi and Pepper for a walk at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area and having dinner at a plant-based Thai spot with all of his friends.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

10 a.m.: Doomscroll on TikTok
I’ll be generous to myself and say I might get up at 10 a.m. Even if I say I’m going to get up at 9 a.m., you know I’m going to do the TikTok ingestion at the top of the day so let’s pad it with 30 to 60 minutes of just doomscroll.

10:30 a.m.: A calisthenics workout at home
We have a third room in the crib where we keep workout equipment, so I’ve become a calisthenics freak. I never was like that before, but something about having it in the house makes me want to do that more. So I’m really getting into pull-ups and dips. I’m getting kind of scary good at the dips, and if you’re a fan of me you know Shemar Moore is my muse, so I’m trying to do whatever I can in life to look like that. So Sunday, it’s my free day, I’m going to get in there [and] get that work in.

11:30 a.m.: Have a guilty, delicious breakfast
Usually by that time, Kat is already up and she’s Filipino, so she’s going to start making food that you are existentially required to eat or the relationship is gonna turn bad. All I know is I just have to eat it whether I’m hungry or not, so I guess we’ll call that a guilt-trip breakfast [laughs]. A guilty breakfast that has a 100% hit rate of being delicious. That’s the cool trade off. One time she made this savory waffle with rice, eggs, green onions and other stuff. She put the sweet and savory ingredients and eggs in the waffle maker. It honestly sounds super illegal, like a way that you summon a troll or something.

12 p.m.: Walk Kiwi and Pepper
We’d probably take our dogs around the neighborhood. We like to give Kiwi and Pepper their red carpet at least twice a day. We have a very social dog network out here.

2 p.m.: Lose track of time at Jalsah
After that, I’m probably doing the thing where I pretend like I don’t have a caffeine addiction, but really, really want to go to a cafe and have multiple caffeinated beverages. I have been going to this Yemeni cafe downtown called Jalsah. Usually I’m going down there because I have a couple other caffeine crackheads in my social group and we go there. I love it because it feels like a little slice of Yemen like there’s Yemeni jazz and they have the right smells going on, the right vibe [and] the right people. You know you go to a bar and order a pitcher of beer that you’re just going to have the whole day? You can get this sort of pitcher of hot coffee for the table and pour it for yourself. It’s got cardamom and the coffee has like stone fruit notes and it’s sweet. I didn’t realize that Yemenis make coffee the way that Black moms make coffee where it’s strong but very sweet. Caffeine has a time dilation on it so it could be hours that I’m in there or 30 minutes. Who knows?

4 p.m.: Get fresh at Nepenthes
Because I’m downtown and if I’m with friends, then we might have to go get fresh. We might have to take it on down to Nepenthes and get a really expensive pair of socks that we’re gonna lose immediately. Maybe a pair of shorts or something that looks exactly like the other clothes that I already have.

5 p.m.: Take the dogs on another walk
Now that I have the bag of clothes, we gotta take that back home. We’re going to have to think about where we’re going to [take] these dogs again because they are the star of the show. In this family, Kat is the lead singer, Kiwi is on the keyboard, Pepper is the drummer and I’m way off to the side playing bass. Usually, if it’s a regular day, I would say Kenneth Hahn park would be the spot. Or we’d go to Huntington garden. It’s a ways out because once you’re there, you’re like, “Why am I not doing this every single day?”

7 p.m.: Plant–based dinner with the homies
We love going to this spot called Salaya in Thai Town. It is plant-based Thai food. Most of it is on par with what you’re going to get at a typical non-vegan Thai spot. A lot of it is actually beating the Thai spots that I love because I’m plant-based when I’m with Kat, but when I’m out in the world, I just eat whatever. I’ll eat a bald eagle if you fry it right [laughs].

9 p.m.: Go to the movies
After that, we’d probably go see a movie at Alamo Drafthouse or New Beverly [Cinema]. During Black History Month, the New Beverly did a double feature of “CB4” and “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.” We had that b— crackin’. I brought everybody I know.

11 p.m.: Work on music
At this point, I’ll probably wrap up the day by working on music with friends. Maybe we’ll go to Pirate Studios or we’ll go to a friend’s home studio and make music. Honestly, I think making beats is a good way to wrap up the day. It’s very low pressure and I think it’s good to work out the brain muscles a little bit before bed.

1 a.m.: More caffeine to power through the night
If we start making beats late, sometimes I like to hit a late-night cafe if things get too social. Sometimes we’ll hit M3 or About Time in Koreatown. At About Time, we’ll sit out back by the fire.

8 a.m.: A caffeinated, low BPM rave
Drinking coffee that late ruins my week [laughs]. Everything’s messed up now. I’m missing calls. I’m missing the email. I’m panicking at the meeting Monday. I’m walking in looking like Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.” On this caffeine Sunday, I’m going to sleep Monday. I’m a raver and I think a group of three or more Black people talking with a substance involved does qualify as a rave. It’s a low BPM rave. It’s about 40 BPM and there’s no CDJs involved, but it is a rave.

Could Domhnall Gleeson be the savior of local journalism?

OK, maybe that’s a sensational oversell — but his latest character knows that news stories need a hook to draw readers in fast. We’re trying.

The 42-year-old Irish actor has built an impressive and diverse career, often playing people entangled in precarious situations: a young man with the ability to time travel who tries to change his past in hopes of improving his future in the heartfelt and whimsical “About Time”; the leader of a group of fur trappers working in unsettled territory in the Midwest who gets caught up in a gruesome fight for survival in “The Revenant”; or a software programmer selected to be part of an experiment with a female robot with humanlike qualities in “Ex Machina.”

Now, he’s stepping into the turbulent, you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying experience of being in the newspaper biz.

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In Peacock’s “The Paper,” Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, a nerdy, well-meaning and enviably hopeful guy who has just been installed as editor in chief of the Toledo Truth Teller. His qualifications? Well, he used to sell cardboard and toilet paper, and he’s a nepo baby with a journalism degree. And he’s coming in with earnest intentions: to motivate a small staff that has grown restless and dissatisfied with its their profession — succumbing to the unsavory demands of the job in 2025, like selecting a wire story about Elizabeth Olsen’s nighttime skin routine only to discover it exceeds the allotted print space — and revive, or in some cases kick off, their desire to do responsible local journalism that delivers useful and effectual information to the community.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t want to be Superman; I wanted to be Clark Kent,” Ned says in the first episode. “Because to me, Clark is the real superhero. He’s saving the world, too, by working at a newspaper. And that, to me, is much more noble and much more achievable, and I love that.”

Scenes from “The Paper”: Domhnall Gleeson as Ned, left, the new editor in chief of the Toledo Truth Teller, and Tim Key as Ken, an out-of-touch corporate boss at Enervate, the paper‘s owner. (Aaron Epstein / Peacock)

Sabrina Impacciatore as Esmeralda, a nemesis of sorts for Gleeson’s Ned. (John P. Fleenor / Peacock)

It’s a romantic — some might say naive — ideal that hasn’t been squeezed dry by cynicism. And as someone in an industry as handcuffed to budgets and the bottom line as any, Gleeson can relate to that wide-eyed objective to do meaningful work even when it’s been overpowered by economic forces.

“The first time you do something, the wonder of it is huge,” Gleeson says on a recent day. “You only see the good stuff — or I did, at least. Then as you get older, you do get a little more tired. It’s a little harder to get up in the morning. The industry that I’m in, I’m constantly amazed at the people, older than me, who’ve retained their youthful enthusiasm for it. I find that very aspirational. I think, despite some of the cliches that there are around acting — and around journalism — that you’ll find a lot of people who really, really believe in it into their 50s, 60s, 70s.”

But “The Paper” is a spinoff of “The Office” — in the loosest sense — so this isn’t a soapbox. Still, it tugs on a topical issue within its comedy. (We’ll get to that.) First, though, it’s important to understand the connective tissue to its predecessor: the same mockumentary crew that filmed the mundane, silly and often completely relatable 9-to-5 lives of the staff at Scranton’s Dunder Mifflin has now set its sights on a newsroom of uninspired misfits trying to keep the ship above water as it navigates the wrecking waves of modern journalism. And to help bridge “The Office” to this workplace, former Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez (played by Oscar Núñez) now works as an accountant at the paper.

Domhnall Gleeson enters the journalism world in Peacock’s “The Paper”: “The press has always been under threat to some degree. There are always people in power who don’t want the thing printed that doesn’t make them look good or they don’t like.”

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

As a fan of “The Office,” Gleeson says playing in the mockumentary format brought a unique layer to how he thought about his character: “How does he [Ned] feel about them being in this place where he’s trying to do well as a new boss? You start to think … he’ll want the good stuff on the record. If he does something that he feels is good, he’ll probably want to make sure they got it. And if something’s not going as planned, he will try to hide away. When we were shooting, it was interesting because I’d find myself between our two camera operators and almost looking to them from time to time in a similar way — like, ‘What did they think?’”

Gleeson is beaming in from Scotland, where he’s been for the last month filming an as-yet-unannounced independent film. He quickly apologizes for his hair — in all of its shaggy, slightly curled glory — as he combs his fingers through it: “I’ve got a perm. Life is good.”

He says he wasn’t necessarily looking to do a TV series right now, but when “The Paper” came along, he was eager to dive into its comedic trenches.

But he first made sure to check in with at least two of the original cast members from “The Office” : Steve Carell and John Krasinski. Carell, who played the show’s bumbling boss Michael Scott for seven seasons, starred opposite Gleeson in FX’s 2022 psychological thriller “The Patient,” about a troubled man with homicidal urges (Gleeson) who holds his therapist (Carell) captive. And Krasinski, whose role as the show’s dry-witted paper salesman Jim Halpert propelled him to stardom, starred alongside Gleeson in this year’s heist action-adventure film, “Fountain of Youth,” directed by Guy Ritchie.

“What’s great about both those guys,” he says, “is it wasn’t like, ‘You should do this, you should do that.’ They each said, ‘I think it would be great. I think you would have loads of fun. I think you could do something really good.’ And that was it. I jumped.”

He adds: “And don’t forget, when they did the show, they were under a lot of scrutiny because the U.K. ‘Office’ was such a masterpiece and had been so heralded, and they still found their space. It took a little time, but they found it. I’m just hoping for the same for us — that we find our space.”

Still, he’s aware fans of the U.S. “Office,” which ran for nine seasons and is one of the most streamed series today, might be reluctant to give “The Paper” a try. And that those who do, might be quick to make comparisons or feel the impulse to see whether these new characters fit the archetypes of the original — for example, is Ned more like a Michael or more like a Jim?

“I feel like what we have is different enough to be its own thing,” he says. “My belief is Ned’s different to both of those characters. He is a new boss in a job he is unqualified for to a certain degree, and he carries a different eternal ambition and optimism about it that sets him apart. There will always be overlaps, but it’s different enough that people will, hopefully, take him on his own merits.”

Created by Greg Daniels, who adapted the American version of “The Office,” and Michael Koman (“How to With John Wilson,” “Nathan for You”), the series arrives at a particularly fraught and existential moment in journalism. Each passing week brings a sobering headline about how news organizations are either adapting or shuttering because of rapid economical, technological and cultural shifts, as well as responding to political pressure.

“First and foremost, the show needs to work in terms of comedy,” Gleeson says. “I also think that the press has always been under threat to some degree. There are always people in power who don’t want the thing printed that doesn’t make them look good or they don’t like. But right now feels full-on extreme.”

However, he believes Daniels and Koman care deeply about journalism and journalists. So how do you make something funny without being too satirical or negative?

“They show both sides of it — the idealism and the difficulty to live up to those ideals,” Gleeson says. “If it was a show where everybody did good journalism, I don’t know how funny people are going to find it. I think what’s funny about this is people trying to do good journalism and not really living up to it all the time.”

Scenes from “The Office”: John Krasinski as Jim Halpert and Jenna Fischer as Pam Halpert in “The Office”; the duo had a will-they, won’t-they dynamic in the series. (Byron Cohen / NBC)

Steve Carell, who played bumbling boss Michael Scott, and the cast. (Justin Lubin / NBC Universal)

Daniels and Koman, who spoke together on a separate video call, say that if “The Office” was a story of people who were very uninspired in their work, “The Paper” is a story of how people can be inspired in their work. And the key was finding someone to be the leader of a bleak endeavor who was a decent person and could boost morale.

“To me, he’s in that category of people like Jimmy Stewart — he can be so funny, but he’s brimming with humanity and emotion,” Koman says, pointing to Gleeson’s performance in “Black Mirror” as a man brought back to life as an android using his social media posts. “I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh’ — that he could play the same person basically, but still there are subtle differences between these two people. I have no idea how he does it. But I thought, if he could do that, he can do anything.”

Plus, Gleeson had comedic chops, and you want somebody who is simultaneously funny and emotionally available, Koman says. Daniels adds that he’d be happy to have someone like the actor as a boss.

“I was in a job, at one point, that everybody thought was cool, but it was very dysfunctionally run. I remember telling people that I thought it would have been more fun to work at, say, Enterprise car rental if the boss was fun and the spirit was good,” Daniels says. “We needed someone who seems like a fun guy and a very sincere person and has a sense of mission. And the thing is, it’s a very hard mission — it’s almost impossibly hard to imagine he’s [Ned] going to turn the clock backwards and restore this grand institution. But he’s trying, and it’s a valuable thing to do. When he says, ‘I want to be Clark Kent’ — that was one of his [Gleeson‘s] things; he added that notion when he was thinking about the character.”

Because Gleeson is nothing if not intentional about comedy.

The son of actor Brendan Gleeson, Domhnall describes himself as a shy kid growing up; but seeing people not be shy who could really make him laugh “loudly in a way that was embarrassing,” he says, was a feeling he craved. He names funnymen like Peter Sellers and Jim Carrey and British sketch shows like “Smack the Pony” and all-things “Monty Python” as favorites. His first job as an actor was in Martin McDonagh’s unruly black comedy “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” with a plot that hinges on a mangled cat. In his 20s, he wrote and starred in the Irish sketch comedy show “Your Bad Self” — one memorable skit involved a group of friends en route to a concert and one guy (Gleeson) in the backseat has drunk too much lemonade. Short on time and believing he only has to pee, a friend hands him a soda bottle mid-drive, only to watch him drop his trousers and squat over the bottle.

Domhnall Gleeson spoke with young reporters ahead of his work on “The Paper”: “What I took away from my experience was the fact that young people are still getting into it … and that vibrancy, despite the odds, I found really cool.” (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

“Now, Jim Carrey is a unicorn — I’m aware of my limitations,” he says, quick to let it be known that he is not an improv genius. “That’s not what I’m going for. I remember seeing ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and that making me laugh and sort of cry. You’ve got a bunch of amazing actors who do comedy and drama all the time, but then you’ve got Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston doing something totally different and just full of pathos. That’s a different sort of class of acting that’s also comedic. All those things made me fall in love with it.”

He’s brought that blend of pathos, uniqueness and nerve to the comedy turns he’s taken on over the years — including in the 2013 film “About Time,” HBO’s romance-thriller-comedy “Run” and Prime Video’s “Frank of Ireland,” which he created and starred in with his brother Brian. He approaches “The Paper” with the same level of intrigue for truth. He didn’t do any intensive shadowing of journalists ahead of filming the show, but he did do some shoe-leather reporting — he spoke to and observed young reporters in Cincinnati and Toledo, and he visited a college newspaper in Ohio.

“What I took away from my experience was the fact that young people are still getting into it,” he says. “I found that immensely heartening, even though they know that, not that the odds are stacked against journalism, but that it is a harder business to get into. It’s a harder business to last in. It’s a harder business to make a living in than it used to be and there are fewer positions available. Despite all that, people are still going into it because they care about it — and that vibrancy, despite the odds, I found really cool.”

We’re sure Clark Kent would agree.

The 2020 presidential election is history, but a legal dispute over Fox News’ reporting on President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud is heating up.

A motion for summary judgment by voting equipment company Smartmatic filed Tuesday in New York Supreme Court laid out in detail how phony allegations that it manipulated votes to swing the election to Joe Biden were amplified on Fox News.

The motion also described how the Fox News Media hosts who are defendants in the suit — the late Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business — were allegedly committed to helping Trump prove his fraud theories so he could remain in office.

“I work so hard for the President and the party,” Pirro wrote in a text to Ronna McDaniel, then chair of the Republican National Committee.

Pirro left Fox News in May to become U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Smartmatic is suing Fox News for $2.7 billion in damages, claiming that the network’s airing of the false statements hurt the London-based company’s ability to expand its business in the U.S.

Fox News settled a similar suit from Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million in 2023.

The motion alleged that on-air hosts repeated the fraud claims even though executives and producers were told they were false.

The Fox News research department, known as the “Brainroom,” allegedly informed network producers that Smartmatic’s role in the 2020 election was limited to Los Angeles County and that the company’s software was not used in Dominion voting machines, another false claim made on the air.

Fox News maintains the network’s reporting on President Trump’s false claims were newsworthy and protected by the 1st Amendment. But part of the company’s legal strategy has been focused on minimizing the damage claims.

Fox News has asserted that any problems Smartmatic has experienced in attracting new business are rooted not in its reporting but in the federal investigation into the company’s activities with overseas governments.

Last year, Smartmatic’s founder, Roger Alejandro Piñate Martinez, and two other company officials were indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office and charged with bribing Philippine officials in order to get voting machine contracts in the country in 2016.

While the Trump camp’s assertions that the election was fixed were not believed throughout Fox News and parent company Fox Corp., the conservative-leaning network gave continued to give them oxygen to keep its audience tuned in, the motion alleged.

The motion described a “pivot” that occurred on Nov. 8, 2020, when then-Fox News Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan asked Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott to address the decline in the network’s ratings after Biden was declared the winner of the election. The network also looked at research to evaluate why viewers were leaving.

“The conclusion reached based on performance analytics: give the audience more election fraud,” the court document stated.

Such thinking, the filing said, permeated the company, already in a panic over losing viewers to right-leaning network Newsmax. The upstart outlet saw a ratings surge after Biden’s win due to its unwavering support of Trump’s claims.

“Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said in a text to his colleague Greg Gutfeld.

Throughout November and December 2020, the three hosts named in the suit, Dobbs, Pirro and Bartiromo, repeatedly featured Trump’s attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell as guests. They spread the falsehoods that Smartmatic software was used in Dominion voting machines and altered millions of votes.

Smartmatic’s work in Los Angeles during the 2020 election was meant to be an entry point for the company to expand its domestic business. The company’s defamation suit claims that Fox News obliterated those efforts by presenting the false fraud claims.

But Fox News believes that issues with Smartmatic’s $282-million contract with Los Angeles County could help advance its case.

On Aug. 1, federal prosecutors filing a legal brief alleging that taxpayer funds from the county went into a slush fund held by a shell company to help pay for its illegal activities.

Federal prosecutors handling the case involving Smartmatic’s business in the Philippines said they plan to detail similar alleged schemes out of L.A. County and Venezuela to show that the bribery fits a larger pattern.

Fox News attorneys have filed a brief asking for county records that they believe will help bolster their case. The network is also expected to try to get the Smartmatic indictments in front of the court to raise doubts about the company’s reputation.

A Smartmatic representative said Fox News’ records request is a diversion tactic.

“Fox lies and when caught they lie again to distract,” a Smartmatic representative said in a statement. “Fox’s latest filing is just another attempt to divert attention from its long-standing campaign of falsehoods and defamation against Smartmatic.”

The company added that it abided with the law in Los Angeles County and “every jurisdiction where we operate.”

Smartmatic’s Tuesday court filing also included information that contradicted public statements Fox News made at the time.

The document alleged that Fox News fired political analyst Chris Stirewalt and longtime Washington bureau executives Bill Sammon for their involvement in calling the state of Arizona for Biden on election night. The early call of the close result in the state upset the Trump camp and alienated his supporters.

At the time, Fox News said Stirewalt departed as part of a reorganization and Sammon retired.

But the motion said Rupert Murdoch himself signed off on the decision to sever Stirewalt and Sammon from the company in an effort to assuage angry viewers who defected.

The motion cited a communication from Dana Perino, co-host of Fox News show “The Five,” describing a phone call with Stirewalt after his dismissal.

“I explained to him — you were right, you didn’t cave, and you got fired for doing the right thing,” Perino said.

Both Sammon and Stirewalt now work in the Washington bureau of NewsNation, the cable news network owned by Nexstar Media Group.

Oscar-winner Ariana DeBose is mourning the loss of her mother, Gina Michelle DeBose, who has died at age 57 after battling Stage 3 ovarian cancer.

The “West Side Story” actor and Broadway star announced her mother’s death Tuesday on Instagram, sharing photos of the two of them over the years — from the younger DeBose’s childhood to her historic win at the Academy Awards in 2022.

“I couldn’t be more proud of her and how she fought this insidious disease over the past 3 years,” DeBose wrote.

Ariana DeBose, 34, said in her tribute that her mother was her “favorite person, my biggest fan and toughest critic. My best friend.” The “Love Hurts” actor said her mother “fought like hell” to support her daughter’s ambitions, adding that her accolades — which include BAFTA, Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe awards — belong equally to her mother.

The actor said her mother was a longtime public school teacher who devoted her life to educating young people. She was “the greatest advocate” for arts education, she said, adding that the death of the elder DeBose would deeply impact her mother’s community: “She was a force of epic proportion.”

Actors including “Abbott Elementary” star Quinta Brunson, “Insecure” alumna Yvonne Orji, former “Dancing With the Stars” pro Julianne Hough and celebrity fitness trainer Amanda Kloots rallied around DeBose in the comments section as she broke the news. In addition to paying tribute to her mother, DeBose highlighted several charities where supporters could donate in her mother’s honor.

“My greatest and most proud achievement will always be to have made her proud,” DeBose wrote. “I love you mommy. Now travel amongst the seas, the winds and the angels as I know you always loved to do.”

Nexstar Media Group, the largest TV station ownership group in the U.S., has agreed to acquire Tegna Inc.’s 64 broadcast outlets, the companies announced Tuesday.

The deal will be the first major test of the TV station ownership rules under President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has called the current rules arcane and has indicated he’s open to change.

The Irving, TX-based Nexstar, which owns Los Angeles outlet KTLA, will pay $22 a share for Tegna in a deal valued at $6.2 billion. The offer is 30% over the 30-day average of Tegna’s closing stock price on Aug. 8.

Nexstar has more than 200 stations in 116 markets, although some of are owned through partnerships. The company also owns NewsNation, the cable news channel launched in 2020, and a majority stake in the CW Network.

Tegna currently owns TV stations in 51 markets, including KFMB in San Diego and KXTV in Sacramento.

The combined companies would have total 265 stations reaching 80% in the U.S.

Broadcasters have asked that the FCC lift the current ownership cap that limits owners to coverage of 39% of the country so they can consolidate and achieve the scale needed to compete with tech firms that don’t face the same type of regulatory restrictions.

The ownership cap was last revised upward in the pre-streaming era of 2004. The FCC rules also limit the number of stations an owner can have in a single market.

“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with Big Tech and legacy Big Media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Nexstar Chairman Perry Sook said in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Sinclair Broadcasting, a Baltimore-based station ownership group, has also made an unsolicited bid to merge its stations with Tegna.

Sook played down the Sinclair proposal during a Tuesday appearance on CNBC. He said he was informed of the bid Monday and said the Tegna board is proceeding with Nexstar.

Sinclair is a far smaller company — valued a $1 billion — than the $6 billion Nexstar and carries far more debt.

“I think the (Tegna) board considered all of that in their deliberations last night and voted unanimously to support our transaction,” Sook said.

TV station owners are looking for relief as they have been losing audience over the last decade due to consumers migrating to streaming platforms.

While TV ratings have slumped, network TV affiliates draw massive audiences for NFL games that enable them to command high prices for commercials. Local stations also prosper during presidential and mid-term election years when they see an influx of political advertising revenue.

Everyone can use an editor, and Shakespeare is no exception. Fortunately, he married one.

Tired of being cooped up with the kids in Stratford-upon-Avon, Anne (Teal Wicks), wife of the great playwright, pops down to London to see the first performance of “Romeo and Juliet.” The new tragic ending that Shakespeare (Corey Mach) proudly previews to the company strikes her as completely wrongheaded.

“What if … Juliet doesn’t kill herself?” she proposes. As strong-willed as her husband, she doesn’t wish to argue the point. She merely wants to put her idea to the test.

Behold the premise of “& Juliet,” the euphoric dance party of a musical that updates Shakespeare with a dose of 21st century female empowerment. The production, which opened Friday at the Ahmanson Theatre under the fizzy direction of Luke Sheppard, reimagines a new post-Romeo life for Juliet while riding a magic carpet of chart-toppers from juggernaut Swedish producer Max Martin, who has spun gold with Katy Perry, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, among other pop titans.

This good-time jukebox musical relies as much on its wit as on its catalog of pop hits. The show’s music and lyrics are credited to Max Martin and friends — which sounds like a low-key cool table at the Grammy Awards. The clever book by Emmy winner David West Read (“Schitt’s Creek”) creates a world that can contain the show’s musical riches without having to shoehorn in songs in the shameless fashion of “Mamma Mia!”

Take, for instance, one of the early numbers, “I Want It That Way,” a pop ballad made famous by the Backstreet Boys. Anne starts singing the song when Shakespeare initially resists her idea of giving Juliet back her life. She wants him to go along with her suggested changes not because she’s sure she’s right but because she wants him to trust her as an equal partner. The song is redeployed in a way that has little bearing on the lyrics but somehow feels coherent with the original emotion.

Obviously, this is a commercial musical and not a literary masterpiece on par with Shakespeare’s tragedy of ill-starred lovers. “& Juliet” would have trouble withstanding detailed scrutiny of its plot or probing interrogation of Juliet’s character arc. But Read smartly establishes just the right party atmosphere.

Juliet (a vibrant Rachel Webb), having survived the tragedy once scripted for her, travels from Verona to Paris with an entourage to escape her parents, who want to send her to a nunnery for having married Romeo behind their backs. Her clique includes Angélique (Kathryn Allison), her nurse and confidant; May (Nick Drake), her nonbinary bestie; and April, her newbie sidekick out for fun who Anne plays in disguise. Shakespeare casts himself as the carriage driver, allowing him to tag along and keep tabs on the cockeyed direction his play is going.

In Paris, the crew heads directly to the Renaissance Ball, which has the look and feel of a modern-day mega-club. Entry is barred to Juliet, but not because she’s ridiculously underage. Her name isn’t on the exclusive guest list. So through the back door, Juliet and her traveling companions sashay as the production erupts in “Blow,” the Kesha song that encourages everyone to get their drink on and let loose.

Rachel Webb and the North American Tour Company of “& Juliet.”

(Matthew Murphy)

The dance setting — kinetically envisioned by scenic designer Soutra Gilmour, lighting designer Howard Hudson, sound designer Gareth Owen and video and projection designer Andrzej Goulding into a Dionysian video paradise — provides the all-purpose license for Martin’s music. It’s the atmosphere and the energy that matter most. Paloma Young’s extravagant costumes raise the level of decadent hedonism.

In this welcoming new context — imagine “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” suffused with girl power — there’s never anything odd about the characters grinding and wailing like karaoke superstars. The ecstatic motion of Jennifer Weber’s choreography renders dramatic logic irrelevant.

But love is the name of the game, and both Juliet and May fall for François (Mateus Leite Cardoso), a young musician with a geeky sense of humor who’s still figuring out his identity. May doesn’t expect romance to be part of their fate. In the Spears song “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” they give powerful expression to an inner confusion this musical romance is determined to sort out with an appropriate partner.

Unlike for the original characters, a happy ending is no longer off-limits. Shakespeare and Anne wrestle to get the upper hand of a plot that seems to have a mind of its own. Shakespeare pulls a coup at the end of the first act that I won’t spoil except to say that what’s good for the goose proves dramaturgically viable for the gander.

Teal Wicks, left, Rachel Webb, Nick Drake and Kathryn Allison in the North American Tour of “& Juliet.”

(Matthew Murphy)

This spirited competition stays in the background, but their marital happiness matters to us. Mach’s Shakespeare has the cocky strut of a rapper-producer with a long list of colossal hits. Wicks gives Anne the heartfelt complexity of one of her husband’s bright comic heroines. There’s a quality of intelligent feeling redolent of Rosalind in “As You Like It” in Wicks’ affecting characterization and luscious singing.

But the musical belongs to Juliet, and Webb has the vocal prowess to hijack the stage whenever she’s soaring in song. If Juliet’s character is still a work in progress, Webb endows her with a maturity beyond her years. She makes us grateful that the Capulet daughter is getting another crack at life. When the big musical guns are brought out late in the second act (“Stronger,” “Roar”), she delivers them as emancipatory anthems, fueled by hard-won epiphanies.

Allison’s Angélique is just as much a standout, renewing the bawdy earthiness of Shakespeare’s nurse with contemporary sass and rousing singing. If the supporting cast of men doesn’t make as deep an impression, the festive comic universe is nonetheless boldly brought to life.

“& Juliet” bestows the alternative ending everyone wishes they could script for themselves — a second chance to get it right. This feel-good musical is just what the doctor ordered in these far less carefree times.

Last year, Isabela Merced was living a double life. By day, she was running around the set of “The Last of Us” in Vancouver — dodging Infected, WLF soldiers and Seraphites alongside co-star Bella Ramsey.

Then, after wrapping what was sometimes a 15-hour workday, she’d be on a flight 4,500 miles away to Atlanta — doing costume fittings and fight training to become Hawkgirl in James Gunn’s “Superman.”

“I didn’t know I could do that,” she tells De Los. “I proved to myself that I’m capable of more than I think.”

The Peruvian American actress has the kind of career that any young actor would aspire to: She made her Broadway debut at 10 years old in “Evita,” earned critical acclaim acting opposite Benicio del Toro in “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” at 17 and starred in the live-action film adaptation of the massively successful “Dora the Explorer” franchise when she was just 18.

In the last year alone, she’s grown into a certified action star, making waves in huge franchise entries like “Alien: Romulus,” “The Last of Us” Season 2 and “Superman.” At 24 years old, her filmography of formidable heroines, scrappy spitfires and multifaceted young women in major blockbusters has put her on a path that’s been largely inaccessible to so many of the Latino actors who came before her. It’s why she also has her sights set on producing, hoping to provide more opportunities for her community in front of and behind the camera.

Yet this month, she’s turning her focus away from the screen and toward her other creative calling: music.

In 2020 she released her debut EP, “The Better Half of Me,” which showcased her bilingual prowess through soulful Latin pop tracks, written and produced alongside her brother, Gyovanni Moner, during quarantine. Now, she’s revisiting the project in a collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning Peruvian artist Tony Succar. Their new single “Apocalipsis,” released Friday, transforms Merced’s 2020 song of the same name from a slow jam to a modernized salsa groove fit for a Miami nightclub.

With “Superman” now out on digital platforms, Merced spoke with De Los about donning Hawkgirl’s helmet, working with Succar on “Apocalipsis,” and what’s coming up next.

It seems like everything is kept pretty under wraps for these massive superhero movies. How much did you know going into your “Superman” audition?
Initially, I had no idea who I was auditioning for because everything had secret names. I think mine said “Cyclone” in the script. I didn’t actually find out who I was until the day of the camera test with the [Justice Gang].

Oh, wow. How did they tell you?
They didn’t want to make it obvious that they were about to tell me, so it was all really mysterious. I’d been doing all the fittings, and the fight training, and then I got pulled into James [Gunn’s] trailer with the producers and everyone, and they were like “Do you want to be Hawkgirl?” As soon as I found out, I was really, really excited because I was like “Oh thank God, it’s someone I know.”

What was your connection to Hawkgirl before this?
I grew up watching [the “Justice League” animated series] and the character is canonically Latina, so I loved that. Her history is really complicated, and it gets even crazier when you get into the comics, but I was a huge fan of her in the show, and I drew a lot on my memories of Maria [Canals-Barrera’s] version of her. I mean, they’re two different characters, but they’re still of the same spirit because they share memories of their past lives.

What made you most excited about this version of the character? Did you connect with her at all?
She’s the only young woman in this group of guys, in an industry that’s mostly headed up by men, and in a movie that’s mostly led by men. It was a really cool opportunity to exercise a different way of being in that kind of environment. She’s kind of the unfiltered and disconnected, doesn’t-care-how-she’s-perceived version of me, and that was really cathartic to play.

Isabela listened to punk music to get in the mindset to play Hawkgirl.

(Jason Roman)

Because you also have a music background, I’m curious about whether you use music as a tool to get into character?
Oh, yeah, definitely. Every character I play, I make a playlist of songs that remind me of them, and I’ll play them before I go to film. With Hawkgirl it was a lot of punk music that I was discovering, with all these really strong singers. Then there were songs that Bella [Ramsey] and I really loved by Adrianne Lenker that informed our experience a lot as Dina and Ellie [in “The Last of Us”]. There was some ‘80s music in there too, maybe some early 2000s, but in general, just really soft, sweet, romantic songs.

You’re releasing a salsa remix of your 2020 single, “Apocalipsis,” with Tony Succar. How did that come about?
I mean, “remix” almost feels like an understatement because it feels like a completely different song. That’s thanks to Tony, who’s the first Peruvian to win a Grammy. He came to me with this opportunity four years ago, and we recorded the song, but I was signed to a label and we weren’t able to release it. Now that I’m free and independent, and he won his Grammy, he wanted to put it on his EP, and I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s do it.” He gave me the freedom to do the video for it, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I got to dance for it, and I learned all the choreography in an hour and a half. It was crazy, but I’m really excited for people to see it.

How would you describe your music taste? And how does it connect to the type of music you want to make?
It’s hard to pin down. If I’m looking at my most recents, it’s Hermanos Gutiérrez. But it’s also Dick Gaughan, Big Thief, Los Mirlos, which is a Peruvian band, and the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. There’s no through line there other than good music. I already have a lot going on with acting, so if music could stay something fun and light for me, and not so disciplined, I think that would be nice.

Is there a musical or an idea for a musical that would get you excited about returning to Broadway?
Have they done a Selena musical? No, I think I would have remembered that. But that would be cool, getting to dance on stage. It would be like a concert-slash-musical theater experience, kind of like what they did with Gloria Estefan’s “On Your Feet!” If it was made by the right people with respect to her life and her legacy, I think that could be dope.

But honestly, if I were to do something on Broadway, I would love for it to be an original composition. I’m currently working on one right now. I’m producing it, and also going to be in it. Things are moving along really well, and it’s another project with friends. I think we have to take more bold chances when it comes to Broadway, because everyone’s trying to reach a younger audience — but I think the most efficient way of doing that is by allowing the younger audience to bring their stories forward and tell them.

You’ve mentioned that you’re getting into producing. What kind of projects do you have in the works right now?
I’m producing one movie that’s shooting in September called “Psyche.” I’m really excited about it. We have Latina director, and also the project I’m supposed to do next after that is going to be directed by a Peruvian woman. So there’s some really, really cool s— that I’ve been trying to do, where I’ll have more creative control and freedom — but also a lower budget, so, you know, roughing [it] compared to what I’ve been doing the last few years. But I’m excited to get to the root of why I love to do this and feel it fully.

Your career is so interesting because it’s just getting started, and yet, it’s not the kind of career that many Latino actors have historically been able to achieve so early on. How do you process that?
I’m in an interesting position because I think Hollywood is really comfortable picking Latino actors who are sort of white-forward or mixed before they’re willing to cast Indigenous people. And look, I’ll take anything I can get, because, girl, I’m just trying to work in this economy. [Laughs]

But I think being aware of that is really important because when I go off and do my own projects, and have the power, I can hire people that look more like the people that I grew up with, or that look like my family. But it doesn’t always happen that way. Financing is hard to get, and when you’re trying to bring people on, they want someone who’s already known, and Hollywood just hasn’t given many of those opportunities to people of certain skin colors.

Because you’ve grown up in this industry, I’m curious what your experience has been like learning to speak up for and advocate for yourself?
Something I’ve learned is that there’s always a power struggle going on, whether that’s on a personal level, or on a bigger level, or even socially. I think we’re constantly fighting for power. And because of that, we can become very defensive. So I think the biggest challenge for me wasn’t necessarily what I went through, but how I reacted to it: by choosing to keep an open heart and still love freely and trust in people because of how I was raised. I think we all have a choice to make when we’re harmed, and that’s to either close up and harm others, or to keep going. It sucks, but I won’t let that dictate the way I move through life.

Terence Stamp, the prolific English actor who played General Zod in the “Superman” films and earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the title character in “Billy Budd,” has died. He was 87.

Stamp died of undisclosed causes Sunday morning, his family confirmed to Reuters.

“He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come,” the family said in a statement.

Stamp began his acting career onstage in 1960 on London’s West End, but quickly received international attention and critical acclaim with his 1962 portrayal of the title role in Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s historical adventure novel, “Billy Budd.”

The humanity Stamp imbued in the tragic, stammering naval vessel crewman established Stamp as a talent to watch — with a Golden Globe Award for best male newcomer to prove it. Still, Stamp didn’t fully break through in Hollywood until 1978 when he embodied the chilling persona of Superman’s arch-nemesis, General Zod, in the first film of what would become a wildly successful franchise. Stamp took on the role again in 1982’s “Superman II.”

Stamp, with his calm demeanor and pale eyes, proved such a successful villain that he feared he was becoming typecast as one. In 1994 he decided to try something radically different when he took on the role of a transgender woman named Bernadette in Stephan Elliott’s now cult-classic film, “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.”

The film marked one of the first times a transgender character was portrayed as a lead in an international film. When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of that year, The Times’ then film critic, Kenneth Turan, interviewed Stamp for a feature. Stamp told Turan that he had been extremely nervous to play the role, but that a good friend encouraged him to take it, saying, “If you don’t start doing parts like this all you can look forward to is playing villains in Hollywood movies for the rest of your life,” and that, Stamp said, “stuck fear and loathing into my heart.”

“Priscilla,” about a group of drag performers on a bus trip to play a show at a resort hotel in the Australian desert, was a critical success, with Turan writing that it, “added some needed life to the Cannes Film Festival scene,” debuting in a “raucous midnight screening.”

In 1999 Stamp teamed up with Peter Fonda in Steven Soderbergh’s crime thriller, “The Limey.”

“When ‘60s icons collide, that should be the pitch for ‘The Limey,’,” noted a feature in The Times about the project. Stamp called his role as a British ex-con named Wilson investigating the death of his daughter in L.A., “the best offer I’ve had in 40 years.”

Stamp and Fonda, old friends who had long wanted to work together, were both experiencing comebacks at the time, with Stamp having just played Chancellor Finis Valorum in the blockbuster, “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.”

Terence Henry Stamp was born in London in 1938. His father was part of the Merchant Navy, and was often away for long periods of time. Stamp was raised mostly by his mother, grandmother and a variety of aunts. He loved the movies and idolized Gary Cooper and James Dean.

As a young man he earned a scholarship to Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art — one of Britain’s leading drama schools — and soon began performing at repertory theaters. His roommate at that time was the young actor Michael Caine, and the pair made friends with Peter O’Toole, quickly becoming enmeshed in the good-looking, fast-moving London party scene of the 1960s. Stamp famously dated actor Julie Christie, whom he starred alongside in director Ken Loach’s first feature film, 1967’s “Poor Cow.”

Stamp was known for his intense dedication to craft, particularly his ability to hone in on the psychological underpinnings of a given character. He was known for bringing the same depth of devotion to all his roles, including 1962’s “Term of Trial” alongside Laurence Olivier; William Wyler’s “The Collector” (1965); Joseph Losey’s “Modesty Blaise” (1966); John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding Crowd” (1967); and a 50-minute short film by Federico Fellini, “Toby Dammit” (1968), among many others.

In 1999, while filming “The Limey,” he told The Times, “When you’ve had a long career you kind of merge all your great roles together. So I don’t think about being good in an individual thing. I think of the collective total, of working with [William] Wyler and Pasolini … I recently thought to myself, ‘You know, if it had to end now, it would really be OK.’ From ‘Billy Budd’ to ‘The Limey,” no actor could ask for more, so it’s a very great moment for me.”

In the annals of things I could not have seen coming, none has been more unexpected than “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads,” a queer Spanish-language stop-motion comedy melodrama, set in the aesthetic world of a 1980s Pedro Almodóvar film. (It arrives Sunday at midnight on Adult Swim, the home of things one doesn’t see coming, and premieres the next day on HBO Max.)

Though it takes place in Ecuador, its central character, Marioneta Negocios (Pepa Pallarés), is Spanish, and it’s easy enough to imagine Almodóvar muse Carmen Maura in the role — though it is also impossible to imagine the story told as well, or at all, in any other way. When I call this series perfect, notwithstanding the happy imperfections of its puppets and sets, it’s not because everything works as its meant to, but because there’s nothing you can measure it against — it occupies its own self-created space. Every element is necessary. Even presenting it in English would be to lose romantic, dramatic, telenovelistic force.

At the center of the story is the cuy, a guinea pig eaten in Andean South America, though in this telling they’re also used in a version of bullfighting. (Some cuys are large enough to ride on.) The primary action is a power struggle between Marioneta, a socialite running a campaign promoting cuy as pets, not food, and Doña Quispe (Laura Torres), who has risen from life as a humble butcher to the anything-but-humble CEO of the country’s most famous restaurant, El Cuchillo (the knife).

Mixed up in their lives are Coquita Buenasuerte (Gabriela Cartol), Marioneta’s seemingly happy-go-lucky assistant; Espada Muleta (Kerygma Flores), a matadora in love with Marioneta; Nina (Nicole Vazquez), Doña Quispe’s vegetarian daughter, serving a pro-cuy group as its Minister of Refreshments and Head of Recruitment for Rebellious Teens — “I have looked upon the caged cuy through the prison of capitalist enterprise, through the hubristic iron bars of a homocentric world view” — who will become a pawn in the older women’s game.

Not everything will be as it seems.

Created by Gonzalo Cordova (a veteran of “Tuca & Bertie” and “Adam Ruins Everything”) and produced by the Mexican animation studio Cinema Fantasma, the series comes packaged as eight 11-minute episodes — that is cartoon length — which neatly constitute a short feature film. On the bill are mystery, suspense, terror, revenge, hot romance (including some puppet sex), masked stalkers, performance art, love notes posted with knives, parodies of television shows and commercials, old secrets coming to light and nuns singing karaoke.

From “Gumby” to “Rudolph” to “Wallace and Gromit” to “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” stop motion is of all forms of animation most magical and in its real-space, three-dimensional, handcrafted way the most like life, if not necessarily the most lifelike. (It can look ungainly, which is also part of its charm.) It’s a magnification of childhood playtime, a puppet show in which the puppets have broken loose from the puppeteers. The cleverness of the execution is as or more important than how seamless it is. “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads” does all sorts of neat tricks, some you notice and more you simply accept — and when deemed necessary, or just amusing, it will insert a live-action hand or mouth. It’s an exaggerated world — appropriately to the heavy-breathing material — but emotionally expressive, even moving, and lots of fun.

Two and a half years before he died, Elvis Presley sat on the floor of a walk-in closet at the Las Vegas Hilton and discussed a project that might have changed the course of his life.

The meeting, as recounted by Presley’s longtime friend Jerry Schilling, put the King of Rock and Roll face to face with Barbra Streisand, who’d come to see Presley perform at the Hilton in March 1975 then sought an audience after the show to float an idea: Would Presley be interested in appearing opposite Streisand in her remake of “A Star Is Born”?

At the time of the duo’s conversation — Schilling says that he, Presley’s pal Joe Esposito and Streisand’s boyfriend Jon Peters squeezed into the closet with the stars in a search for some quiet amid the commotion backstage — it had been six years since Presley had last played a dramatic role onscreen; Streisand’s pitch so tantalized him, according to Schilling, that they ended up talking for more than two hours about the movie.

“We even ordered in some food,” Schilling recalls.

Presley, of course, didn’t get the part famously played by Kris Kristofferson — a casualty, depending on who you ask, of Streisand’s insistence on top billing or of the unreasonable financial demands of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. (In her 2023 memoir, Streisand wonders whether the character of a self-destructive musician was in the end “a little too close to his own life” for Elvis’ comfort.)

Whatever the case, Schilling believes that the disappointment over “A Star Is Born” set Presley on a path of poor decision-making that effectively tanked his career before his tragic death at age 42 on Aug. 16, 1977 — 48 years ago this weekend.

“That was the last time I saw the twinkle in my friend’s eye,” Schilling, 83, says of the sit-down with Streisand.

An intriguing new box set commemorates the King’s final burst of creativity. Released this month in five-CD and two-LP editions, “Sunset Boulevard” collects the music Presley recorded in Los Angeles between 1972 and 1975, including the fruit of one session held just days before the meeting about “A Star Is Born.” These were the studio dates that yielded songs like “Separate Ways,” which Elvis cut amid the crumbling of his marriage to Priscilla Presley, and “Burning Love,” his last Top 10 pop hit, as well as 1975’s “Today” LP, an exemplary showcase of Presley’s latter-day blend of rock, country and blue-eyed soul.

Is yet another repackaging of Presley’s music really something to get excited about? The Elvis industry has never not been alive and well over the half-century since he died; in just the last few years, we’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s splashy big-screen biopic, the latest book from the singer’s biographer Peter Guralnick (this one about Parker) and not one but two documentaries about the so-called ’68 comeback special that heralded Presley’s return to live performance after nearly a decade of film work.

More gloomily, “Sunset Boulevard” arrives as Priscilla Presley — who got her own biopic from director Sofia Coppola in 2023 — is making headlines thanks to an ugly legal battle with two former business partners she brought on to aid in managing the Presley brand. (The feud itself follows the sudden death two years ago of Priscilla and Elvis’ only child, Lisa Marie Presley.)

Yet the new box offers an opportunity to ponder the curious position Elvis found himself in once the glow of the comeback special had faded: a rock and roll pioneer now strangely removed from the culture he did as much as anyone to invent.

“Sunset Boulevard’s” title, which the set shares with Billy Wilder’s iconic 1950 movie, can’t help but evoke the spoiled grandeur of an aging showbiz legend. It also refers to the physical location of RCA Records’ West Coast headquarters at 6363 Sunset Blvd., across the street from Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome. Now the site of the L.A. Film School, the building is where the Rolling Stones recorded “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and Jefferson Airplane made “Surrealistic Pillow” — and where Presley set up in the early ’70s after cutting most of his ’60s movie soundtracks at Radio Recorders near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

Jerry Schilling at his home in West Hollywood.

(JSquared Photography / For The Times)

By 1972, rock had long since evolved beyond the crucial influence Elvis exerted at the beginning of his career. Nor was the King particularly dialed into what was happening in music while he was busy in Hollywood.

“We weren’t as exposed as much as I wish we would’ve been to everything going on,” Schilling says on a recent afternoon at his home high in the hills above Sunset Plaza. A core member of Elvis’ fabled Memphis Mafia, Schilling has lived here since 1974, when Elvis bought the place from the TV producer Rick Husky and gifted it to Schilling for his years of loyal friend-ployment.

“When you’re doing movies, you’re up at 7 in the morning and you’re in makeup by 8,” Schilling continues. “You work all day and you come home — you’re not necessarily putting on the latest records.”

More than the growling rock lothario of Presley’s early days — to say nothing of the shaggy psychedelic searchers who emerged in his wake — what the RCA material emphasizes is how expressive a ballad singer Elvis had become in middle age. Schilling says the singer’s romantic troubles drew him to slower, moodier songs like “Separate Ways,” “Always on My Mind” and Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” the last of which he delivers in a voice that seems to tremble with regret. (Presley had to be cajoled into singing the uptempo “Burning Love,” according to Schilling, who notes with a laugh that “when it became a hit, he loved it.”)

But in the deep soulfulness of this music you’re also hearing the rapport between Presley and the members of his live band, with whom he recorded at RCA instead of using the session players who’d backed him in the ’60s. Led by guitarist James Burton, the TCB Band — that’s Taking Care of Business — was assembled ahead of Elvis’ first engagement at Las Vegas’ International Hotel, which later became the Las Vegas Hilton; indeed, one of “Sunset Boulevard’s” more fascinating features is the hours of rehearsal tape documenting Presley’s preparation in L.A. for the Vegas shows that began in 1969.

The sound quality is murky and the performances fairly wobbly, as in a take on “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” where Elvis can’t quite seem to decide on a key. Yet it’s a thrill to listen in as the musicians find their groove — a kind of earthy, slow-rolling country-gospel R&B — in an array of far-flung tunes including “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” even the Pointer Sisters’ “Fairytale.”

The RCA Records building on Sunset Boulevard in an undated photo.

(RCA Records)

In one rehearsal recorded Aug. 16, 1974, Elvis cues his band to play the Ewan MacColl ballad made famous by Roberta Flack: “‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Friggin’ Face,’” he calls out as we hear the players warming up. Then they all lock in for a closely harmonized rendition of the song so pretty there’s something almost spooky about it.

Sitting next to the balcony he was standing on when he got the phone call alerting him to the news of Presley’s death, Schilling takes clear pleasure in spinning well-practiced yarns about his years with Elvis: the time John Lennon told him to tell Presley that he grew out his sideburns in an attempt to look like the King, for instance, or the audition where Elvis took a flier on a relatively unknown drummer named Ronnie Tutt who ended up powering the TCB Band.

He’s more halting when he talks about the end of his friend’s life and about what he sees as the lack of a serious artistic challenge that might have sharpened Elvis’ focus. Staying on in Vegas a bit too long, making so-so records in a home studio set up at Graceland — these weren’t enough to buoy the man he calls a genius. Does Schilling know if Presley saw “A Star Is Born” when it came out at the end of 1976?

He considers the question for a good 10 seconds. “I don’t know,” he finally says. He started tour managing the Beach Boys that year and was spending less time with Presley. “He never mentioned it to me. I wish I knew. There’s probably nobody alive now who could say.”

Tristan Rogers, the Australian actor behind the magnetic Robert Scorpio on “General Hospital,” died Friday after a battle with lung cancer, according to his manager. He was 79.

In an email to The Times, Rogers’ manager Meryl Soodak said his client was “a family man” who is survived by his wife, two children and a grandson.

“[He was] loyal, kind and loved his role of Scorpio,” Soodak said.

Rogers’ signature commanding voice and poised bravado made Scorpio a fan favorite on the long-running soap opera, and became his most recognizable role. As the enemy-turned-close-friend of star character Luke Spencer (played by Anthony Geary), Rogers appeared in some of the most memorable moments of the show’s run.

In November 1981, Scorpio stood by as Luke and fellow star character Laura wed in front of 30 million viewers, still the highest-rated hour in American soap opera history.

In true soap opera fashion, Scorpio would allegedly die a dramatic and fiery death in an explosion in South America in 1992, only to return alive for a short stint in 2006.

Through every iteration of his “General Hospital” career, Rogers embraced Scorpio’s status as an ‘80s TV icon.

“I think this character will follow me to my grave,” Rogers told the New York Times in 2006.

Rogers was born June 3, 1946, in Melbourne, Australia. Out of high school, he played in a rock band with friends and began taking up modeling roles, he recalled in an interview. For “extra money,” he acted in small TV and soap opera roles in Australia in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, including stints in the shows “Bellbird,” “Number 96” and “The Box.”

Early in his career, his Australian accent deterred casting directors from booking him for American shows, Rogers recalled in a 2022 interview. However, in 1980, he found himself auditioning for what was supposed to be a small, single-episode role on “General Hospital.”

This caught the eye of Gloria Monty, the show’s visionary producer, who asked Rogers to stay on as a recurring character.

Rogers was key to shaping the character of Scorpio, from his name to his risk-taking bravery, on what would eventually become the longest-running daytime soap opera in American television history, according to Guinness World Records.

“I started in earnest, I had a feeling that I had done something right. I had evolved into the character. [Scorpio] took everyone by surprise, he looked different, he sounded different, he conducted himself in a different way and the public latched onto this right away. And so all of a sudden, away we went,” Rogers said in a radio interview earlier this year.

While the show was set in a New York hospital, the late 80s saw it shift focus into an action adventure storyline that heavily featured Scorpio as an agent of the fictional World Security Bureau, or WSB.

Broadcaster ABC notes that the change kept the attention of viewers and contributed to the continuation of the show’s success, as spies and agents created complex and popular mystery storylines within the “General Hospital” universe.

According to the New York Times, the second week after Rogers’ character was revived in 2006, “General Hospital” was the No. 1 daytime drama among young women, drawing larger-than-average audiences back to the show.

Rogers also acted in the series “The Young and the Restless,” “The Bay,” and “Studio City,” as well as voice-acting in the Disney animated film “The Rescuers Down Under.”

Genie Francis, who played Laura Spencer in “General Hospital,” said of Rogers on X, “My heart is heavy. Goodbye my spectacular friend. My deepest condolences to his wife Teresa and their children. Tristan Rogers was a very bright light, as an actor and a person. I was so lucky to have known him.”

Kin Shriner, also an actor on the show, added in a video posted on X, “I met Tristan 44 years ago at the Luke and Laura wedding. We were stashed in a trailer and I was taken by his Australian charm. Over the years we’ve worked together … we always had fun. I will miss Tristan very much.”

In one of his last interviews, Rogers reflected on the joy of his acting career.

“I’ve had a good time of it,” he said.

Teyana Taylor was ordered to cover ex-husband Iman Shumpert’s $70,000 in attorney fees after she was found in contempt of court for violating terms of her 2024 divorce agreement.

Taylor, 34, and Shumpert, 35, both had been accusing each other of violating the agreement by leaking their settlement terms to blogs, according to court documents filed Aug. 5 in Georgia’s Fulton County Superior Court.

The court found the “Gonna Love Me” singer had violated the “prohibition against disclosure of ‘summaries, abstracts, portions and descriptions’” of the final judgment in their divorce.

Taylor confirmed her marriage to the former NBA pro during a 2016 appearance on “The Wendy Williams Show” and the couple appeared that same year in the official music video of the track “Fade” by Kanye West (now known as Ye).

The exes have two children together, Iman “Junie” Tayla and Rue Rose, now 9 and 4, respectively. Shumpert helped Taylor deliver both babies at home in the couple’s bathroom.

The couple separated in 2023 and she filed for divorce that November. The split was finalized in July 2024, then in March of this year details of the agreement suddenly appeared online, leading to the filings in civil court.

Taylor had asked the court to order Shumpert to pay her legal fees, but after she refused to show proof of income, the answer was no. The “Coming 2 America” actor did not answer questions about her assets and her income, stating the information was “completely irrelevant to any issue.”

The court ordered Taylor to pay for Shumpert’s fees, saying she had the means to pay because she has been in three movies since the divorced was finalized and has TV series booked for this fall.

During the hearing, Taylor failed to prove that Shumpert had provided details from their divorce case to entertainment blogs.

Mamá … you got some f—ing cojones, baby.

These were some of the last words that legendary singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley left for his mother on an answering machine — not long before he tragically drowned in a river in Memphis, Tenn., in the spring of 1997.

Just three years earlier, Buckley, a staple of New York’s downtown coffeehouse scene, had released his debut album, “Grace” — a collection of eclectic guitar confessionals and cover songs, propelled by the androgyne elasticity of his four-octave vocal range. The orchestral rock elegance of “Grace” drew a stark contrast from the grunge fare that conquered the airwaves in the early ‘90s.

It would also be the only full-length album he released while alive.

Helmed by Academy Award-nominated director Amy Berg, the new documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” recalls the story of Buckley’s life and death, primarily and most intimately by the women who loved him most: his former partners, artists Rebecca Moore and Joan Wassen; and of course, his mother, Mary Guibert.

Buckley was born on Nov. 17, 1966, to Guibert and her high school sweetheart, who became the beloved antiwar folk singer Tim Buckley. Yet before the release of “It’s Never Over,” Buckley’s Latino heritage had long been eclipsed in the media by that of his famous, yet estranged father.

“There’s so much emphasis on the Buckley side of things,” says Guibert, who calls me from her home in Northern California. “But [Tim was] just somebody flying through the night.”

Guibert and her family immigrated to Anaheim from the Panama Canal Zone, a territory long contested between the United States and Panama until 1999. A student at Loara High School, Guibert became a skilled cellist, pianist and dancer. She started going steady with Tim, then just a quarterback and member of the French Club, in 1964; they married the following year, after Guibert became pregnant at 17.

“When I met him in high school, I was very busy,” Guibert says. “I was sitting first chair cello in the Youth Symphony Orchestra. I was performing in a play. I [took] ballet, tap and modern jazz dance classes. I wanted to be an actress on Broadway. … But I was the one with the uterus.”

It was during Guibert’s fifth month of pregnancy that Tim abandoned her to pursue his musical career — and tune in and drop out with the likes of 1960s icons such as Andy Warhol and Janis Joplin.

The couple divorced in 1966, just a month before Jeff was born. In an show of narrative justice, the documentary juxtaposes Tim’s righteous monologues against the Vietnam War and social inequality with scenes of Guibert and their son celebrating milestones in his absence.

Tim remarried in 1970 and died five years later of a drug overdose. Jeff was notably omitted from the obituary and not invited to the funeral. He would later resent comparisons by music journalists to his father, whom he’d spent only a handful of days with as a child.

“I have a great admiration for Tim and what he did, and some things that he did completely embarrass me to hell,” said Jeff in a 1994 interview. “But that’s a respect to a fellow artist. Because he wasn’t really my father.”

Guibert wells with pride when I ask her about bringing up a rock legend in a Latino household; she and her mother sang nursery rhymes to young Jeff in Spanish. Family members often referred to him as “El Viejito,” for his long face and an emotional literacy well beyond his years.

But Guibert admits that their home life was no lighthearted family sitcom. She and her siblings were often subjected to violence at the hands of her father. “I adored my dad, but I feared him like nothing else,” she says. “The escape route was to get married and get the f— out of there. But after I divorced Tim, I couldn’t get a checking account for my paycheck … because in those days, I had to have my father’s signature.

“In spite of the machismo,” she says, she left home with Jeff at 19, got a job and started a new life in North Hollywood. “Jeff was my rescuer. He’s the reason I [said], ‘You know what? I have to take my son out of here because I don’t want him to grow up to be a man like [my dad].’”

Guibert and Jeff often moved homes. She eventually married Jeff’s stepfather, Ron Moorhead, changed Jeff’s name to “Scott” (it didn’t stick) and gave birth to his half brother, Corey. Yet she continued to smoke pot and party with her peers, longing for the kind of life enjoyed by other young California girls.

Jeff adopted a stern, fatherly tone with his mom, which the documentary illustrates with the missives he left on her answering machine. But however fraught, or codependent their relationship was, Guibert says, it remained strong to the end.

“He said, ‘Mama, you could have given me up, you could have aborted me, you could have done all of those things and you chose to keep me,’” she recalls. “And I think that was a bond that never could be broken.”

Throughout the documentary, friends and lovers remember Jeff’s bottomless well of empathy, which was no more pronounced than in his music. Perhaps due to what he described as his “rootless” nature, he felt at ease interpreting songs by artists across cultures and genres, from Nina Simone to Edith Piaf and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and imbuing their lyrics with his own yearning, elegiac croons. Likening himself to a “human jukebox,” Jeff entranced millions of fans with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but he got listeners hooked with original ballads such as “Grace” and “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.”

Berg first reached out to Guibert about making a film in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2019 that she agreed to share her treasure trove of archival materials. Guibert says it was her own protective, motherly instinct that gave her pause; she also preferred the idea of a scripted film. (Actor Brad Pitt had originally vetted the idea of a biopic in the ‘90s, but the project fell through; he eventually became executive producer of “It’s Never Over.”)

“With all respect to documentarians and filmmakers, it takes a long time to really understand how things work,” Guibert says.

She has previously supervised the production of all of Jeff’s posthumous records, including the 1998 compilation “Sketches for My Sweetheart, the Drunk,” and a live album released in 2000 called “Mystery White Boy.” She adds that she made a “handshake deal” with Don Ienner, then president of Columbia Records, to be present in the studios for the mixing process.

Yet Guibert remains hesitant to share all his musical material, which is locked in a climate-controlled unit in Seattle. “It would be like showing his dirty laundry,” she says of releasing certain recordings. “That’s what agonized him so much — that when you record things, they are forever.”

Eventually, Guibert says, she would like to revisit the idea of a biopic about her son, who’s continued to amass a cult following in the decades since his death. “Grace” reentered the Billboard 200 in July and debuted on the Top Alternative Albums and Top Rock & Alternative Albums charts.

“If somebody had said you’re going to be the curator for an amazing phenomenal artist, I would have said groovy — who?” Guibert says. “If they said, ‘It’s your son, but he has to die first. … I’d say, ‘Oh no, I’ll keep being a secretary.’ I’ll keep selling whatever I can sell until I’m too tired and they have to put me in the home.”

“But that’s not my fate,” she says, “and that was not his.”

Released by Magnolia Pictures, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is now showing in select theaters across the U.S.

Colombian singer Ryan Castro gets in his feels with his new joint single, “Apodo,” alongside Tejano band Grupo Frontera.

Released on Thursday, the collaboration yearns for unrequited love. The song boasts Grupo Frontera’s traditional norteño sound, with the addition of their signature bongo of course. But it also includes hints of Caribbean reggae — like double chop beats — an element from Castro’s musical background that he is all too familiar with, having spent his formative years in Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island, where part of his family still resides.

The new song release comes on the heels of another important announcement: Castro has announced dates for his upcoming Sendé World Tour, with stops in five major U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami and New York. The “Mujeriego” singer will perform in L.A.’s Woodley Park on Oct. 11.

Such large venues are a drastic change of scenery for the 31-year-old singer, who began his musical career busking in Medellín buses and streets, and was once dubbed “El Cantante Del Ghetto.”

In recent years, Castro has distinguished himself as a versatile and collaborative artist, joining in on popular songs like Karol G’s remix version of “Una Noche de Medellín” with Cris MJ, and the controversial track “+57,” which featured Colombian artists Feid, J Balvin and Maluma.

His recent cross-genre collab with Grupo Frontera shouldn’t come as a surprise. Two years ago, Castro paired up his deep voice with corrido tumbado star Peso Pluma in the reggaeton hit “Quema” featuring SOG, which landed him his first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 92.

Earlier this summer, Castro released his most intimate project to date, “Sendé,” a riveting collection of 18 songs that blends his familiar reggaeton sound with old-school Caribbean reggae and dancehall beats.

From its first track, also titled “Sendé,” Castro sets the mood with a sticky intro by Jamaican toaster U-Roy from Dawn Penn’s “No, No, No.” Almost seamlessly, the song blends into its second track, “Rebecca,” which features the enticing Hindi vocals of Deevani from Tito El Bamino’s Flow Natural ft. Beenie Man.

Already a standout in this album is the hip-hop-inspired bop “Sanka,” featuring Curaçaoan rap artist Dongo, which infuses the familiar rhythms of Dr. Dre’s popular “What’s the Difference” (feat. Eminem & Xzibit).

Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Caribbean album without a reference to dancehall music, mainly Shaggy’s famed “Boombastic,” refashioned with Castro’s own unique title, “Bombastik<3,” featuring Blaiz Fayah and Tribal Kush. The album also features a range of artists including former collaborator Peso Pluma, fellow parcero Manuel Turizo and the Jamaican legend himself, Shaggy.

For full Sendé World Tour dates and ticket information, visit SendeWorldTour.com.

From the opening moments of “Highest 2 Lowest,” Spike Lee’s remix-as-remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime thriller “High and Low,” you should know that the filmmaker is here primarily for a good time and he’s asking us to play along.

Over aerial shots of the sun hitting the New York City skyline, including the stunning Olympia building looming over Brooklyn, Lee layers “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” the opening song from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma!,” a jarring, cheeky choice that jolts us out of what we might think a Spike Lee Kurosawa remake is supposed to be.

The Japanese auteur has long been a major influence on Lee, and when the script for “Highest 2 Lowest” (by Alan Fox), which had been in development with other filmmakers, came his way, Lee made it his own. He also cast longtime collaborator Denzel Washington, an apt pairing. Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune; Lee has Washington. (It’s their fifth film together.)

This all sounds great on paper, but what ends up on screen is a confusingly mixed bag. Kurosawa’s “High and Low” was based on the 1959 Ed McBain cop novel “King’s Ransom,” about a moral dilemma that becomes an identity crisis for a wealthy man. Transporting the action to Japan’s post-World War II economic boom, Kurosawa examined class differences in the country. Though Lee uses the text to comment on the haves and have-nots too, his focus is trained on the 21st century attention economy dictated by the social media hordes.

When we pick up with David King (Washington) on the balcony of his Olympia penthouse, he knows that a change is going to come this beautiful morning. A superstar music mogul, King is aware that his company, Stackin’ Hits, is about to be sold out from under him. Secretly, he’s set a plan in motion to orchestrate a leveraged buyout and take control of the sale. But when he receives a call that his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been snatched off the street and the kidnappers are demanding $17.5 million, his scheme to save his company goes up in smoke.

But then, Trey shows up. As it happens, the kidnappers have mistakenly taken his son’s best friend, Kyle (Elijah Wright), the child of David’s longtime confidant and driver, Paul (Jeffrey Wright), a devout Muslim rich in street smarts but not money. David’s personal relief is cut short when he has to decide if he’s going to pay the ransom and save his best friend’s kid — and his face, considering the media scrutiny — or follow his dream and save his company.

“Highest 2 Lowest” mimics the high and low bisection of Kurosawa’s film, with the first hour set in the moneyed confines of the Kings’ luxe apartment, laden with priceless African American contemporary art. As cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera lingers over the Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley paintings, one might wonder why he doesn’t just sell a few to remedy his money problems.

The first hour of “Highest 2 Lowest” is more baffling than anything else. The fluid long-take cinematography by Libatique is impeccable, but with a melodramatic tone courtesy of a distracting, over-the-top score by Howard Drossin and weak performances from the supporting cast, it feels more like a Tyler Perry movie than a Spike Lee joint.

But then, liberation: The film hits the streets and Lee unfolds an absolutely sublime piece of kinetic New York City filmmaking, a chase scene with a subway car full of Yankees fans chanting their anti-Boston sentiments intercut with a Puerto Rican Day Parade performance by the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra. Finally, we’re cooking with gas. It’s one of the best sequences of the year.

David and Paul take matters into their own hands while searching for Kyle’s kidnapper, who turns out to be an aspiring rapper named Yung Felon (an excellent ASAP Rocky). Washington and Rocky face off in two electric scenes in the back half of the movie, both times separated by glass: a recording booth and a jail visitation. Rocky capably steps up to Washington’s loose but intense actorly flow and contributes a great song to the soundtrack too.

Washington is unsurprisingly mesmerizing, improvising small gestures and throwaway lines. But there’s still an element of camp and goofy humor that lingers, taking away from the script’s leaner, meaner elements. Generously, one might interpret this as a Brechtian nod toward the film’s artifice as an arch and knowing remake laden with references. But that keeps us at a distance from the emotional reality of these characters. When Lee brings everything home with a message about creating real art from the heart and the responsibility of stewarding Black culture, it’s a bit too late to take it seriously.

“Highest 2 Lowest” has its highs and lows, and when the highs are high, it soars. Those pesky lows are certainly hard to shake though.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Tech scion David Ellison and his leadership team at Paramount sent a message to Hollywood: A new era is underway.

Nearly a week after taking the keys to the battered media company, Ellison and his top executives met with reporters at the Paramount Pictures lot Wednesday to show that they mean business.

Ellison and his team will be based in Hollywood — not New York — and they plan to view the entertainment industry through a California lens by making big investments, leaning into technology and building on popular franchises, including “Top Gun,” “Star Trek” and “Yellowstone.”

Last week, Ellison’s Skydance Media and its backer RedBird Capital Partners closed their $8-billion takeover of the firm that includes CBS, Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Showtime and the Melrose Avenue movie studio.

“One of our biggest priorities is actually restoring Paramount as the No. 1 destination for the most talented artists and filmmakers in the world,” Ellison said. “Very simply, great filmmakers make great movies.”

Such a Paramount comeback would be long overdue.

The film studio has suffered from decades of under-investment, and was often bypassed by many of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers. The studio plans to release eight films next year, but that’s too small an output to sustain a theatrical film business, Paramount executives said.

The plan is to nearly double the number of feature films to 15 and, and eventually, 20 movies a year.

Ellison, the 42-year-old chairman and chief executive, was eager to bury his days of being a political target, following the lengthy regulatory review of the deal and President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS for its edits of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall. Paramount settled the lawsuit last month, agreeing to pay $16 million.

Days later, CBS notified Stephen Colbert that it was ending his late-night talk show in May — prompting howls among some fans and raising speculation the show was sacrificed to appease Trump. CBS has said the decision was “purely” based on economics; the show has been losing money.

Programming will be created with broad audiences in mind, Ellison and his lieutenants said. Ellison said his goal is to move the company away from political divisions in an effort to reach a wider audience.

“One of the things I think is important is I don’t want to politicize this company,” Ellison said. “We’re an entertainment company first, and I genuinely believe if you’re breathing, you’re our audience. We want to be in the business of speaking to everybody.”

For Ellison, movies have been a lifelong interest. He recounted his days growing up when he, his mother and sister would go to the cinema or pick from their extensive home library of video cassette tapes.

He intends to “significantly scale” the amount of content the studio produces and has entrusted his longtime deputy Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, a former Sony executive, as co-chairs of Paramount Pictures. The studio plans to concentrate on key intellectual property such as “Star Trek,” “World War Z” and “Transformers,” with Goldberg saying that “Star Trek” is a priority across the company.

Paramount executives are also interested in filmmaker-driven original films. Late last week, Paramount said it landed an original project called “High Side,” helmed by “A Complete Unknown” director James Mangold, which reunites him with actor Timothée Chalamet.

In addition, Paramount Pictures plans to greenlight family films, with classic movies like “The Goonies,” “Gremlins” and “Night at the Museum” as touchstones, Goldberg said. There’s also interest in R-rated comedies, horror and stories that appeal to Middle America.

Paramount has no plans to crank out low-cost films for its Paramount+ streaming platform, said Cindy Holland, the new head of streaming for Paramount.

“The movies that we make will be made for theatrical,” Ellison said, adding that there is cultural significance to making films for the big screen.

Ellison also praised actor Tom Cruise, whom he met when he founded his Skydance Media company in 2010. Skydance co-produced “Top Gun: Maverick” and recent “Mission: Impossible” installments. Goldberg recounted how she and Greenstein called Cruise after Paramount unveiled its new leadership structure.

“It was to thank him for, frankly, the huge piece he’s been in Paramount’s history, Paramount’s present and how important he is for Paramount’s future,” Goldberg said. “‘Top Gun 3’ is a massive priority for us.”

The new corporate ownership structure gives the family of Larry Ellison (David’s billionaire father) and RedBird the ability to build the company for the future, rather than manage for quarter-by-quarter earnings.

The Ellison family now owns 50% of the company, and RedBird holds 20% — a dominant position. Regular shareholders have 30% of the stock in the new company. Shares soared more than 36% on Wednesday to $15.

The event included Ellison’s co-investor, RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale, who stressed his confidence in Paramount’s prospects.

Cardinale noted that he dispatched two of his top executives to join the company — Andy Gordon, a former Goldman Sachs banker is now Paramount’s chief operating officer and chief strategy officer, and Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal executive who’s now Paramount‘s president — to signify the importance of rebuilding.

“I’m betting my firm and my career on this deal,” Cardinale said.

On Wednesday, longtime Paramount shareholder Mario Gabelli sued Redstone and Paramount, alleging the deal structure disadvantaged shareholders other than Redstone, who received a premium for her stock.

As part of the deal, the Redstone family was paid $2.4 billion for their National Amusements Inc. firm, which held the controlling shares. After their considerable debts are paid, the family should come away with $1.75 billion. Paramount’s B-class shareholders received $15 a share.

Skydance and RedBird have promised investors that it will find $2 billion in cost savings, which means further belt-tightening and layoffs. Shell said he didn’t want Paramount to become a company that had perpetual layoffs, saying the plan was to have one restructuring and “then be done with it.”

The executives also showed no interest in cleaving off the cable channels, unlike Comcast or Warner Bros. Discovery, which are preparing for spinoffs. Shell said the diminished status of the channels gives the company opportunities to rebuild those brands.

In their first week, Ellison and RedBird have made big bets. On Monday, the company said it would spend $7.7 billion over seven years to lock up U.S. streaming and television rights to UFC mixed-martial arts fights for the Paramount+ streaming service and CBS.

In addition, Paramount in July agreed to pay $1.25 billion over five years to the creators of Comedy Central’s “South Park.” A separate deal with Trey Parker and Matt Stone allows the cartoon to run exclusively on Paramount+.

When asked what Paramount assets were underappreciated, Ellison talked about the broad reach of CBS, which just ended the regular television season in first place in prime-time among broadcast networks for the 17th consecutive year. He also mentioned CBS’ relationship with the NFL, Masters golf tournament and NCAA March Madness.

Gordon added, “I actually think every asset is underappreciated here.”

This is Sudan Archives’ allow-me-to-reintroduce myself era, a reappraisal after drastic personal overhaul, one that refuses to exploit upheaval for material. Sudan, whose birth name is Brittney Denise Parks, is one of the rare souls who remains real in the spotlight and behind the curtain, disarmingly authentic. Her resultant style, of both dress and music, is edging and transcendent, aloft and full of momentum. She is currently basking in a post-breakup glow mingled with the anchor that is her commitment to honest self-expression.

It’s surprising in the way it’s sometimes unexpected for an artist to return to herself at the exact moment she could have strayed into the wrong kind of reinvention, the wrong climb, for the wrong reasons — careerism, opportunism, fear of her own idiosyncrasies. Instead, Sudan has refined her innate originality in her forthcoming album “The BPM,” which was recorded mostly in Detroit and sounds as carefree and earnest as the new way of life she’s cultivating.

Sudan Archives’ jacket and assorted accessories from thrift stores, Santee Alley and ENIS ARCHIVES.

Sudan’s reinvention, in both her life and art, has found its depth in minimalism. She’s just moved into an open-concept loft with violins mounted on the main wall like tribal masks. A spiral staircase separating the living room from the kitchen leads up to the bedroom, arranged how a set designer might install a backstage for a performer in a show or documentary, just extravagant enough to indicate you’re in the territory of fantasy-building and an artist’s practical magic. Clothing and jewelry are the artwork upstairs; the way the instruments and recording equipment adorn the bottom floor with purpose and function, chic without trying too hard, is elevated without any air of elitism. The entire space is autobiographical and intimate in a way that would make the wrong visitor feel like an intruder and the wrong inhabitant an impostor. It is a real home.

Part of rebirth is the bittersweet mastery of warding off misaligned energy. After ending a years-long relationship with a man she might have married, and selling the home she’d shared with him, Sudan moved into a space that gets so much Los Angeles sunlight it makes it impossible for a tenant to hide from herself. Neither grief nor the sublime can be avoided when everything around you is yours. And you can sense her higher level of accountability and drive. The space demands this focus, it has its own diva-ism — fierce, vibrant, vulnerable in an almost confrontational way, and just as subdued when the curtains are drawn. These rooms sing with Californian lyricism, that casual L.A. bliss that the rest of the word criticizes, envies, misunderstands. An organic kale salad, the faint scent of sativa from days before, the blond best-friend puppies gallivanting as the light turns them golden before they all finally sit together on the anti-inflammatory PEMF mat that is supposed to calm the nervous system and recalibrate the blood. A modest slice of paradise, earned.

The first single on Sudan’s upcoming album, dropping this October, is called “Dead.” The looping refrain “hello, it’s me” haunts and hums scantily and seductively behind a manic pulsing beat and harrowing strings, until the final movement in the song punches rapid-fire as if knocking out an opponent with self-revelation. All of this is accomplished with a staggering of tones, an ecstatic beat backed by subtle melancholy that becomes a resolve in the song, though the single resists that facile air of having something to prove that makes many I’m back anthems mediocre. A hit, homegrown and singular yet universal.

Sudan, wearing her own tour merch top, in her new home.

When I arrive at Sudan’s new place for this interview and photo shoot, having heard the vision months earlier while sitting in her old house after a party, my heart applauds. Her team is there with wardrobe options for the video shoot for her next single. The summer solstice week heat is oppressive but the mood convivial in a West Coast casual way, with everyone acting like close friends and aloof strangers at the same time, as is habit in Los Angeles social life. Having tried on several statement pieces ahead of our arrival, Sudan is back in her streetwear, some baggy Adidas-esque track pants and a white tank with the word “dead” written on it in sardonic all-caps and kitten-heeled sandals, large-framed glasses, her dog dotingly in and out of her lap. We discuss the merits of living alone, and how it changes and expands the aura, but demands resilience and that you become your own best friend.

The new album shifts from the devotional undertones on her previous release, “Natural Brown Prom Queen” (2022), to openhearted lust and yearning for a good time, a reinstating of latent passions that were tempered by sentimentality and fidelity before. In a very literary sense, the opening track on the 2022 album is called “Home Maker,” and the singer declares herself one, and we feel invited into a tradition we’re all supposed to recognize: domestic life, wanting to be both kept and free. Whereas each track on “The BPM” is more emancipatory than the one that precedes it; home means something new, a deliberate renovation of received ideas of how to make a house a home. With “Dead” as portal, we enter a carefree, semi-disembodied afterlife on the dancefloor where not much matters but the beat and the matter-of-fact vocal jolting it into place. There’s a Kafka-esque moment about an anthropomorphized insect in the center of the album’s plot, and the final track promises ascension, Heaven even, the many mansions of a spiritual home.

A Jordan Piantedosi outfit in Sudan’s closet. The artist recently narrowed down her clothes to statement pieces only she can pull off.

Sudan holding her Studio Cult bag.

An assortment of accessories from thrift stores, Santee Alley and ENIS.

Sudan wears her Rick Owens boots.

The photographer Sam Lee and Sudan Archives in the artist’s home.

As is common with a life reset, Sudan explains that she has also reset her closet, getting rid of things, narrowing down her clothes to statement pieces only she can pull off: retro faux fur, dreamy blunted-magenta puff coats, billowing maxi skirts as editorial as they are casual. Though her current evolution is not so much about the clothing as a new frequency, one that channels sovereignty and breakthrough while remaining modest and inviting. You feel this in her new music. At the beginning of a clear rebirth she exudes a relaxed urgency, the kind that arrives when you want to make up for time spent in the limbo of a romantic love that alters and enriches you but cannot last forever; you want to make it last a little longer, just to be sure. Then it’s over.

Each stunning string instrument leaning against the stark white wall is a tally and talking book, marking the value of a period of relative solitude and reflection. The creative mind loosens, there’s no judging or lurking audience, no one to argue or negotiate with, no one to become but the next iteration of herself, exposed and haloed by light in these enjambed rooms of her own. Every woman needs to live entirely alone for at least a little while, especially if she is an artist, in order to meet herself before giving parts of that identity away to accommodate another. It’s a luxury, a quantum leap, one that can save your imagination from a propensity to meek fatalism or received social patterns. You cannot make original work while trying too hard to fit in anywhere for any reason.

Vitaly chain and custom motherboard pendant by Justus Steele, made for Sudan Archives’ music video.

Sudan wears Jean Paul Gaultier top and Anna Bolina skirt for her forthcoming single on the album “The BPM.”

In Sudan’s case, she has outsmarted the risk of succumbing to tradition, and the freedom has raised and mellowed all stakes. One day she might be in costume for a shoot, wearing brutalist platforms and corsets and a face full of exaggerated glam, the next her braids might make the otherwise-understated outfit pop and swoon, another still, a tight dress and loose blazer help her blend in at an overhyped industry function. Sudan is confident and fluid in her styling, but never vain or flamboyant. There’s a mercenary quality to the more ostentatious looks; they please crowds or pacify them for long enough to compel closer listening to the intricacies of her music.

When Sudan styles herself for an afternoon at home without fittings or videos to prepare for, a new glamour emerges, a simple headwrap as cocoon and coronation as her accessories become the story — a pair of black Rick Owens boots, a golden pair of Schiaparelli earrings — glints of the regal and playful energy that you hear in the music. There’s a looming sense that it all could have been so different, so constricted by a one-and-only-love-type romance, that we must gulp the emancipation down before someone notices this new optimism and tries to steal it or woo it back into latency.

Custom body suit constructed by Justus Steele and co-designed with Sudan.

I really hear Soul II Soul’s hook “back to life/back to reality,” like a tapestry making piano-esque shadows against the light in the room. We discuss the panopticon, the lack of walls and how it forces better boundaries. Sudan muses about getting a curtain for privacy when she has guests. And we rejoice a little too candidly about the merits of solitude in creative life. Giddy, renegotiating the meaning of intimacy among friends can be so soothing.

Many people are theorizing the importance of being “a main character” on social media and in life; what’s refreshing and enduring about Sudan is that she does not need theory — she practices, acts, demonstrates her singularity, wears it out and maintains it inside when no one is watching. “I just want it to be real,” she assures me, when I ask if anything feels too personal, too revelatory. The music that comes of her dedication is as radiant, born of her own intentions. There’s something boundless about what’s next, an upward spiral without the density of too much ego to threaten its flow, an album so spot-on, satisfying a craving we didn’t know we had, one for serious joy, and so personal without being tedious, that it feels effortless, a meant-to-be reunion with the best versions of ourselves.

Sudan wears Phlemuns top, H&M swimsuit top, Untitlab boots and Average Citizen necklace.

Chance the Rapper is opening up about co-parenting with his ex-wife as he prepares to release a new album and go on a national tour.

The rapper from Chicago stopped by the “CBS Morning” studio on Monday to discuss the release of his second studio album, “Star Line.” Chance, whose real name is Chancelor Bennett, described the new EP as his “most expansive work.”

“It covers a lot of different areas in my life,” he said.

Chance etched his way into the music world after recording a mixtape during a high school suspension. He self-released “10 Days” in 2012 and began his career as an independent artist, a path that he continues to follow.

He followed up his debut LP with “Acid Rap” a year later, and “Coloring Book” in 2016. In 2023, Chance celebrated the 10th anniversary of his second mixtape by performing the entire tape at the Kia Forum.

“I wrote [Acid Rap] when I was opening up for artists playing 300-cap rooms. I’m rapping about doing open mics but closing my eyes and seeing arenas. Going back and playing arenas for that project just makes me proud,” Chance said in a 2023 interview.

Now, the rapper behind tracks like “Cocoa Butter Kisses” and “No Problem” said his new album reflects the change his personal life has gone through in the last six years, including his divorce from Kirsten Corley, with whom he shares two children.

“It’s always just a good thing to, as an artist … release and to like, you know, just share with the world,” he added.

The couple married back in 2019 and announced their separation last year on their Instagram. Corley filed for divorce in December 2024. They continue to raise their two young daughters together.

“You know, family is like one of the biggest things for me, for [Corley], for my kids, for my mom and dad, so I think the most important thing for anybody that’s ever navigating [parenting after a divorce] is making sure that you keep an environment for the kids where they understand that [family is] the priority,” Bennett said.

His last album, “The Big Day,” was released in 2019. Chance the Rapper is releasing his follow-up on Friday and will go on tour starting in September, with a stop in L.A. on Oct. 20.

For the first episode of “Saturday Night Live’s” 50th season, Bowen Yang dressed up as Moo Deng, a baby hippo the internet was then obsessed with. Yang’s all-in appearance during the series’ “Weekend Update” segment conflated Moo Deng’s journey with that of reluctant pop star Chappell Roan — a surprising combination that captivated the audience.

“I was surprised by the way it took off,” Yang says, speaking over Zoom from New York. “We were juxtaposing these two cultural things, the ways that people were pushing through any sense of boundaries that these two living beings had. It was observational, and I think the response was this force-multiplying thing where people did not think these two lenses could be stuck on top of each other.”

As with many of his popular sketches, Yang found it fascinating to follow the trajectory of the appearance after the episode aired. On one hand, he was thrilled by its levity. But he also describes having “a self-flagellating instinct” to worry it would lose its relevance. “It has all these different directional tensions to it, and I’m proud of it,” he says. “But a sketch is such a disposable medium that is both great and that feels like there is no bottom, so you constantly have to keep filling it.”

Since joining “SNL” as a writer in 2018 and then as a cast member in 2019, Yang has delighted viewers with his willingness to play everyone from a famous hippo to George Santos to Charli XCX. He’s sung with Lady Gaga, kissed Ariana Grande and portrayed the iceberg that sank the Titanic. His eclectic approach has not only earned him four Emmy nods for supporting actor in a comedy series but also solidified him as a fan favorite.

“My only intention at the show has been to try as many things as possible,” he says. “With impressions, I’m like, ‘Let me just try it. Let me try my hand at these little dishes and go from there.’ That was my approach even when I could have really specialized. And I have the show to thank for giving me an opportunity to try out different things.”

There was one impression that Yang was less sure about. In Season 50, “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels asked Yang to play Vice President JD Vance. The comedian says he “very intentionally” tried to talk Michaels out of it, but he wouldn’t budge. “So I put my best foot forward,” Yang says. “I hired a dialect coach. I requested a screen test to get the beard right. I tried color contacts. I feel like I’ve developed this reputation where I will do my best even if I don’t think I’m the best person for it.”

Yang says he will step back into Vance’s beard again for Season 51 if he’s called on to reprise the role, even if he would prefer to put his energy elsewhere. “It might sound like a complaint to say I really didn’t want to do it, but it truly just is me reflecting on it,” Yang says. “I’m really honored and proud to have done it. And I thought a lot about the legacy of other cast members who have done vice presidential impressions in the past, like Beck Bennett, Jason Sudeikis and Tina Fey. Those are all heroic comedians to me.”

Being part of “SNL” has helped to hone Yang’s comedic instincts, as well as his ability to pitch and write sketches on an impossibly fast-paced timeline. He’s not sure if being on the late-night show has made him funnier, but it has made him quicker. “You are absorbing every kind of comedic sensibility and every kind of production instinct,” he says. “I don’t think I’m a better comedian, but I do think I have a sense of how to bring something to the finish line.”

“Everyone starts thinking about life after ‘SNL’ as soon as they start ‘SNL,’” Yang says.

(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)

This year, Yang made Emmy history by becoming the most-nominated Asian male performer, with a total of four acting nominations. The accolade wasn’t something that occurred to Yang until it was published in a headline, but he is nonetheless pleased, calling it a “genuinely singular thing.” He remembers Michaels telling him that “people won’t know what to make of you” during his first season in the cast, and it’s gratifying to know that his Asian and gay identities resonate with the audience.

“The best thing about ‘SNL’ in the last few years is that it’s this really representative cross-section of all different schools of comedy,” Yang says. “We have club comedians, alt comedians, people who came up on TikTok, sketch people, improv people, Black people, queer people — every kind of comedy has a place in the show.”

In November, Yang will return as Pfannee in “Wicked: For Good.” He also hosts a podcast, “Las Culturistas,” with Matt Rogers. But after the whirlwind of “Wicked” going to the Oscars and “SNL” celebrating its 50th anniversary, Yang is not planning to add anything else to his plate as he prepares for the next season of “SNL.” Still, he admits that he has considered what he might do next.

“Everyone starts thinking about life after ‘SNL’ as soon as they start ‘SNL,’” he says. “You constantly think about the outcome once you call it or once it’s called for you. I could end up on the chopping block, who knows. That was brought to the fore during ‘SNL 50.’ No matter what happens here at this place, no matter what the political climate is or the cultural climate is, there’s something beautiful about being able to gather and reflect and appreciate each other. I can’t wait to be on a porch with James Austin Johnson or Sarah Sherman one day, decades from now, and be like, ‘Wow. What a trip.’”

New York City native Kevin Mares was killed Sunday in the La Perla neigborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The 25-year-old was visiting the island to see a Bad Bunny concert.

Mares was fatally shot in the early morning hours, outside of a nightclub called Shelter for Mistreated Men. The shooting took place when several people near Mares began arguing and one pulled out a gun and shot at least three people, the Associated Press reported.

Homicide detective Sgt. Arnaldo Ruiz told the AP that Mares was an innocent bystander in the situation and that a pair of siblings from La Perla remain hospitalized after being shot. No arrests have yet been made.

Mares was joined by his girlfriend and two friends in Puerto Rico. It was his partner who ended up delivering the news of his death to Mares’ parents.

“I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘I’m sorry. We lost him,’ ” Hector Mares, Kevin’s father, told CBS News New York.

“Whoever did this, took from us a piece of us, you know?” Kevin’s mother, Sandra Mares, added.

A longtime Bad Bunny fan, Mares and his friends were consistently in attendance of the “La Mudanza” singer’s concerts and had been prepping for their San Juan trip for months.

“Every time Bad Bunny comes here, they go to most all of his concerts,” Sandra Mares said.

Mares — whose parents are originally from Mexico — was born and raised in the East Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens and was studying to be a veterinarian at LaGuardia Community College.

“He got a lot of dreams. He was working as a vet technician. And at the same time he was studying,” his father told ABC 7 New York.

“He was about to propose to [his girlfriend] this fall. Yeah. He wanted to do something special. He shared that with us,” his mother added. “He was a lovely son. He cared about all of us, his family, friends. He has a lot of friends who’s really going to miss him, too.”

Now, the Mares family is asking for anyone with information about the shooter and more specifics about the incident to please step forward.

“What we’re asking the people is, if anybody knows what happened, who did this, [to say something],” his mother told CBS. “We don’t know [anything]. We want justice.”

The family is currently making efforts toward having Mares’ body returned home, but it remains in Puerto Rico as the investigation into his death is still ongoing.

Kevin’s father started a GoFundMe to raise enough money — the campaign’s target is currently $50,000 — to plan Kevin’s funeral arrangements.

“Kevin Mares was a deeply loved son, devoted friend, and a source of inspiration to everyone who knew him. His wholehearted kindness, adventurous spirit, and unwavering commitment to family made him a pillar of strength for his loved ones,” the GofundMe page states. “Family was at the center of everything he did, and his sudden passing has left an unfillable void in our lives. … Your support will help us honor Kevin’s memory and give him the farewell he deserves.”

Before Byron Allen became a media mogul, he was one of those comedians whose life was changed by Johnny Carson.

Growing up, Allen would accompany his mother to the NBC lot in Burbank, where she worked as a publicist, and was provided with a show business education. An aspiring comic who played comedy clubs as a teenager, he regularly waited in the parking lot for the late-night host to exchange a few words before tapings of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

When Allen was 18 years old, he became the youngest comic to appear on Carson’s “Tonight” stage. It led to a regular role on the NBC prime-time series “Real People” and a successful stand-up career that had him touring for two decades.

Now Allen, 64, is poised to reenter the late-night TV arena — and just when the genre is at a crossroads. CBS’ decision to end “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” next May raises questions about the future of the nocturnal kingdom Carson once ruled.

Allen will become a part of the CBS late-night lineup starting Sept. 22, when his series “Comics Unleashed” takes over the 12:30 a.m. time slot and will follow Colbert during his final season.

Allen’s series hasn’t produced a new episode since 2016, but the 233 that were made during its original run have remained in syndication and aired as a stopgap for CBS in 2023 after the network canceled the money-losing “Late Late Show With James Corden.” The network is picking up “Comics Unleashed” for the 2025-26 season as the successor to Corden replacement “After Midnight With Taylor Tomlinson,” which concluded its second and final season in June.

Allen has no illusions about why CBS has turned to “Comics Unleashed” again.

“It’s not cheaper,” Allen said. “It’s zero.”

Allen Media Group buys the airtime on CBS for “Comics Unleashed” and keeps most of the advertising time on the program to sell.

It’s the same formula Allen used for “Entertainers With Byron Allen,” the program that launched his company in the 1990s. Allen would score interviews with major stars at press junkets and cut them into a weekly program.

He would go to the National Assn. of Television Program Executives conference, an annual TV marketplace for syndicated programming, and tell station owners that when the high-priced new shows they were buying failed, they should come to him and get “Entertainers” for free. The stations received half the commercial time while Allen sold the rest to national advertisers from his kitchen table.

“I’m addicted to selling,” Allen said.

CBS said Colbert’s show is being canceled for financial reasons, with insiders saying it was accruing losses of $40 million a year.

“The Late Show” may have the most viewers in late night, but Colbert has the biggest piece of a shrinking pie. Nielsen data show the number of homes using television between 11:35 p.m. and 1:35 a.m. has declined around 13% in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. Ad revenues for all of the shows have declined dramatically as well over the last few years.

Late-night shows are expensive to produce, with high-priced hosts, large writing staffs and the costs of servicing live audiences. While they generate revenue from clips on social media, they don’t do well on streaming. The topical nature of the shows diminishes their value as library product, which helps keep subscribers hooked on streaming platforms.

What makes “Comics Unleashed” different than traditional late-night franchises is that it’s designed to have a longer shelf life.

In the recent reruns that have aired on CBS and in syndication, viewers heard an occasional joke about the Bush administration or a plug for a comic’s MySpace address. But for the most part, the shows contain few references that date them.

“I tell the comedians we’re shooting ‘I Love Lucy,’” Allen said. “Something that’s evergreen. So I don’t want to hear any political humor. Just be funny, family-friendly and advertiser-friendly.”

In addition to veteran comics Allen has known for years, the series booked many stand-up stars before they became household names, including Kevin Hart, Whitney Cummings, Sebastian Maniscalco, Nate Bargatze and Chelsea Handler.

Stand-ups who toil on the comedy club circuit are thankful for the exposure the show provided.

“To me, Byron is the patron saint of comedians,” said Greg Romero Wilson, who wrote for the program and appeared as a panelist. “He’s given so many opportunities to comics of every level. From up-and-comers to names you’ve known your whole life, Byron makes room for everyone.”

Stand-up comic Shang Forbes said he hears from audience members at clubs who recall bits from episodes of the series he taped years ago.

“It was a very good experience,” Forbes said. “I was surprised how many people saw it.”

Allen wanted “Comics Unleashed” to re-create the camaraderie he experienced during his own stand-up career, which started when Jimmie “J.J.” Walker hired him as a 14-year-old joke writer alongside David Letterman and Jay Leno. (“Let me ask my mom,” Allen said when he got the offer.)

“What I remember most is that comedians were at their funniest afterwards when we went to Canter’s Deli,” Allen said.

Since buying the Weather Channel for $300 million in 2018, Allen has made a habit of throwing his hat in the ring whenever a legacy media company is said to be up for sale. But he recently reached a deal to sell 10 of Allen Media Groups’s 28 TV stations to Atlanta-based Gray Media as part of an effort to reduce the privately held company’s debt and invest in streaming.

As the owner of network affiliate stations, he is well aware of the economic challenges facing traditional TV as viewers migrate to streaming, driving down ratings and ad revenue.

“All of it is under pressure,” he said. “The networks are spending more on sports and less on nonsports content.”

Allen spends a lot of time talking to bankers and lawyers — over the last decade he’s filed lawsuits against Comcast, McDonald’s and Nielsen, all of which were settled — but despite running a business, he will host new episodes of “Comics Unleashed” himself. He plans to produce 132 half-hours, which will run back-to-back with repeat episodes. He will also be writing some jokes.

“You never stop being a comedian,” he said. “It’s a muscle that never goes away.”

Bobby Whitlock, the keyboardist, singer-songwriter and co-founder of the blues-rock group Derek and the Dominos, has died. He was 77.

In a statement, his manager, Carole Kaye, said, “With profound sadness, the family of Bobby Whitlock announces his passing at 1:20 a.m. on Aug. 10 after a brief illness. He passed in his home in Texas, surrounded by family.”

Although Derek and the Dominos is perhaps best known for launching singer and guitarist Eric Clapton into solo superstardom, Whitlock was a key contributor to the group’s 1970 debut “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” and an influential session musician and singer-songwriter in his own right.

Whitlock was born March 18, 1948, into a poverty-stricken early life in Millington, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis. His keyboard and piano skills, formed around Southern church traditions, led him to eavesdropping on sessions at Stax Records’ studios, which took notice of his uncommonly soulful musicianship. Stax Records signed him to its new pop-focused imprint HIP — he was the first white artist to join singers like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave at the label group.

His major breakthrough came when he was asked to join Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, an acclaimed rock-soul combo whose collaborators included generationally important artists like Duane and Gregg Allman, Leon Russell, George Harrison and Clapton.

Delaney & Bonnie and Friends took Whitlock on tour with Clapton’s supergroup, Blind Faith, and Clapton used much of that band’s lineup to record his 1970 solo debut. He later asked Whitlock to join him in a new combo (with bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon), assembled to back Harrison on “All Things Must Pass,” which became Derek and the Dominos.

“The empathy amongst all the musicians outcropped most noticeably in Bobby Whitlock, in whom Eric found an accomplished and sympathetic songwriting partner and back-up vocalist,” Clapton biographer Harry Shapiro wrote in “Eric Clapton: Lost in the Blues.”

On “Layla,” the group’s sole studio LP, Whitlock wrote or co-wrote half of the album’s songs, including “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Tell the Truth.” A U.S. tour featured opener Elton John, who wrote in his autobiography that, among the Dominos, “it was their keyboard player Bobby Whitlock that I watched like a hawk. He was from Memphis, learned his craft hanging around Stax Studios and played with that soulful, deep Southern gospel feel.”

While the band’s drug use and personal tensions eventually led to a split, Whitlock released his self-titled solo debut in 1972 and “Raw Velvet,” a follow-up that same year. As a session musician, he played on the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” and Dr. John’s “The Sun, Moon & Herbs.”

He continued releasing solo material through the ’70s, returning in the ’90s and often collaborating with his wife and musical partner CoCo Carmel.

“How do you express in but a few words the grandness of one man who came from abject poverty in the south to heights unimagined in such a short time,” Carmel said in a statement to The Times. “My love Bobby looked at life as an adventure taking me by the hand leading me through a world of wonderment from music to poetry and painting. As he would always say: ‘Life is what you make it, so take it and make it beautiful.’ And he did.”

Whitlock is survived by his wife and children Ashley Faye Brown, Beau Elijah Whitlock and Tim Whitlock Kelly.

The Los Angeles we know has long been an irresistible subject for novelists and moviemakers — so much so that they’ve often tortured reality to make it conform to their imagination.

Robert Towne mined the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in his screenplay for “Chinatown” but moved the story ahead up by some two decades, from 1913 to the 1930s, to give his scenario its noir sensibility.

Ridley Scott and his filmmaking team depicted a future Los Angeles beset with darkness and a never-ending downpour of rain for “Blade Runner” — never mind that its source material, Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” was set in San Francisco, that provincial burg some 400 miles to the north.

Years ago, Mike Davis wrote “fear eats the soul of Los Angeles.” Today, protection dogs, security cameras and guards are big business.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

But the task of depicting a future Los Angeles hasn’t been monopolized by fiction writers. Nonfiction writers have joined them in their obsession. They include the late environmentalist Marc Reisner, author of the indispensable “Cadillac Desert,” the public policy expert Steven P. Erie of UC San Diego, historians such as Kevin Starr and Carey McWilliams, and polemicists such as Mike Davis. Even most of those whose subject is or has been the L.A. of their own time have taken pains to look ahead.

How well have they outlined the future of Los Angeles and Southern California? Let’s see.

The tone of nonfiction conjectures about the future of Los Angeles generally fall into two categories, elegiac or apocalyptic — and sometimes both: “utopia or dystopia,” in the words of Davis.

Davis was the avatar of the latter approach. The first of his books about Los Angeles, “City of Quartz” (1990), mostly looked back at the history of the city’s development. It was his follow-up, “Ecology of Fear” (1998), that really attempted to sketch out a future for the city, based on his vision of “the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and ranch-style homes — as it erodes socially and physically into the twenty-first century.”

Davis drew a line from what he saw as “the current obsession with personal safety and social insulation … in the face of intractable urban poverty and homelessness, and despite one of the greatest expansions in American business history” in the mid-1990s to explain “why fear eats the soul of Los Angeles.”

Mike Davis in his San Diego home in 2022.

(Adam Perez / For The Times)

He wasn’t far wrong. A few years later, I visited the maker of underground nuclear shelters fashioned from corrugated steel at his shop and showroom on the 5 Freeway in Montebello, where he was doing great business for models that started at $78,000 each; “Yes, paranoia does sell” was how I headlined my column. It still does: Guard dogs, surveillance cameras and sentry-protected neighborhood tracts have proliferated all around the Southland.

Davis foresaw the continued development of “tourist bubbles” — theme park-like “historical district, entertainment precincts, malls … partitioned off from the rest of the city” — think developer Rick Caruso’s shopping center the Grove, opened in the Fairfax District in 2002, which presents blank or billboarded walls to the outside world, enclosing a Disneyesque landscape of shops and restaurants inconspicuously monitored by security services.

:::

As opinion pollsters know, when you ask people what the future will look like, they invariably paint a picture that looks just like the present, only more so: If there’s a crime wave when they’re being polled, they foretell a world beleaguered by armed gangs; if there’s a recession, they expect a world of unrelieved poverty; if it’s a period of technological advancement, they foresee a world of flying cars.

Writers projecting a future of L.A. tended to fall into the same pattern. The Slovenian transplant Louis Adamic, who had emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in the port community of San Pedro, scrutinized Southern California with pitiless objectivity in a 1930 essay titled “Los Angeles! There she blows!”

Adamic mentioned the conviction among Angelenos that their city “will ultimately — perhaps within the next three or four decades — be the biggest city in the world.” And he acknowledged that “the place has many great advantages, among the foremost, of course, being Climate, and but a single drawback, which, however, is an extremely serious one — that of water shortage.”

Nevertheless, noting that the city’s population had doubled over the previous 10 years to nearly 2 million, he confidently predicted that it would number 3 million by 1935. It didn’t reach that mark until the 1980s, and it’s not the first time, nor the last, that a prediction of the city’s future overshot the target. His concern about water, of course, was spot-on.

Another writer who extrapolated from what he saw of the Los Angeles of his time was Morrow Mayo, whose 1933 book “Los Angeles” is quoted elsewhere in The Times’ Future of L.A. package. Mayo expressed the opinion that even if “the territory known as the ‘City of Los Angeles’” grew from its then-population of 1.2 million to 4 million or more, he doubted that “it will ever be permanently the great vibrant, vital, nerve-center of the Pacific coast.”

The reason, Mayo wrote, was its climate — “meant for slow-pulsing life; a climate where man, when he gets adjusted to the environment, takes his siesta in the middle of the day. Go-getterism in this climate does violence to every law of nature.”

Boeing C-17 military transport planes in various stages of completion at a company facility in Long Beach. Carey McWilliams wrote that the aircraft industry was “likely to remain in the region and even to expand production,” but Boeing’s military aircraft assembly line was shut down in 2015, ending an era.

(Los Angeles Times)

What kept Los Angeles even marginally vibrant was the steady influx of vigorous immigrants from the East and Midwest. After a few generations under the sun, Mayo concluded, “it will settle back to normalcy, and become in tune with nature, for man has never yet failed to adjust himself to the climate in which he lives.”

Thus did Mayo pioneer the stereotype of the laid-back Angeleno with barely a care in the world.

On the other hand, Mayo quoted a fellow prognosticator as finding in the city’s industrial districts “that same peculiarly contented type of workman, the same love of little homes ‘across the street from the factory,’ the diligence and care for the flowers in the front yard, or the fruit trees and vegetables in the rear, a total lack of the Bohemian spirit, the love of a comfortable, humble existence,” that could be seen in Philadelphia.

As a picture of Los Angeles, Mayo wrote, “I suspect that it is prophetic. ‘Los Angeles — the Philadelphia of the West.’”

Such miscalculations point to another pitfall facing those who would dare to predict the future of Los Angeles: Change has come so rapidly that any prediction can be confounded within the lifetime of its author. Thus Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of the California pageant, wrote in his book “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land” that the aircraft industry was “likely to remain in the region and even to expand production.”

McWillliams wrote those words in 1946; by 1980, when he died, the industry had crashed in Southern California, entering a long period of retrenchment that ended with Boeing’s closing of the region’s last commercial aircraft manufacturing plant in 2005. The Long Beach plant’s 300 workers were transferred to Boeing’s military aircraft assembly line, but that was shut down in 2015, ending an era, as The Times observed, in which the region was. “once synonymous with the manufacture of aircraft.”

The trajectory of the Los Angeles ecology, and by extension that of Southern California and the entire state of California, was the subject of Reisner’s 1986 book, “Cadillac Desert.” He viewed the water politics of the region, quite properly, through the prism of winner-take-all economics. Water was wasted by farmers and urban residents because it was almost free. That was already beginning to change in his time, he observed, but the process would need years, even decades, to play out — if it ever could.

In his 1986 book, “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner viewed the water politics of the region, quite properly, through the prism of winner-take-all economics.

(L.A. Department of Water and Power)

“The West’s real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth,” he wrote in the closing pages of “Cadillac Desert.” Reisner looked ahead, hopefully, to a West that “might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states’ rain …. A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more — in revenues, in jobs — than water taken out of the rivers.”

“At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future than forward to the past.”

Regrettably, Reisner, who died in 2000, didn’t live to see that happen. Whether his hope will ever be fulfilled remains an open question.

Perhaps the most penetrating look at the future of Los Angeles and its state came from Peter Schrag, a former editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee. In his 1998 book “Paradise Lost,” Schrag sought not simply to foretell the region’s future, but to explicate how its future foretold what was in store for the country as a whole. (Its subtitle was “California’s Experience, America’s Future.”)

When he wrote the book, California was in one of its boom phases. It was again “the driving engine of national economic growth and likely to remain in that position until well into the next century …. Because of foundations laid forty years go … it is at the forefront of the world’s leading-edge technologies and of its creative energy.” (He was right about that, at least up to this moment.)

Surfers enjoy a day at Venice Beach. Los Angeles and California are the subject of unending curiosity for readers of history and current affairs no less than for consumers of novels and movies.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

But Schrag also pointed to the state’s “increasingly dysfunctional governmental and fiscal public institutions, the depleted state of its public infrastructure, services, and amenities, the growing gaps between its affluent and its poorer residents, and its pinched social ethos,” which “hang like dark clouds in the sunny skies.”

California had exported to other states the facile low-tax policies of Howard Jarvis and Ronald Reagan’s view of government as “the problem, not the solution.”

In addition, Schrag saw that the emergence of social media “may insure against the power of Big Brother to dominate communications, but they also amplify the power of shared ignorance …. What used to be limited to gossip over the back fence is now spread in milliseconds.”

And he foresaw how the changing demographics of California would be replicated nationwide:

“The new kids now crowding into the schools and universities of California — black, brown, Asian — will constitute the majority of the state’s workforce, and a good part of the nation’s, in the next decade, and forever after,” he wrote.

Schrag had his finger on an essential truth about Los Angeles and California that remains true to this day: They’re the subject of unending curiosity for readers of history and current affairs no less than for consumers of novels and movies. That has been true since the vision of a land of gold — El Dorado — drew the Spanish conquistadors to these shores. The world wishes to know what L.A. and California are, and where they are headed.

Kevin Starr wrote: “In recent times, the American people have turned to California and asked it to create a technology revolution, and California responded.”

(Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Kevin Starr, writing in 1995, understood how that impulse would play out in the decades to come. “The United States is testing its future through California,” he said in an essay for the website of the California State Library, which he served as state librarian from 1994 to 2004. Establishing California as a “bellwether state,” he wrote: “The American people are asking a series of questions which now become the California challenge …. Can the American people turn to positive effect the cultural diversity of a nation in the process of being transformed? … Can the American people maintain their standards of living and education?”

Starr’s answer to the questions he posed was a resounding yes! “In recent times,” he wrote, the American people have turned to California and asked it to create a technology revolution, and California responded …. The American people have turned to California for new models of lifestyle, new ways of enjoying and celebrating the gift of life, and California responded with an outpouring of architecture, landscaping, entertainment, sport and recreation.”

The confidence that Starr projected 20 years ago may have faded, and may fade further in the future in Los Angeles and up and down the state. But one thing that probably will remain true is that the region’s path into the future will inspire writers to keep peering into their crystal balls, cloudy as they are.

Short, pained lives marked by achievement and promise and then abruptly gone leave a restless afterglow. Youth is supposed to fade away, not become one’s permanent state. And regarding the late musician Jeff Buckley — a roiling romantic with piercing good looks whose singing could rattle bones and raise hairs — that loss in 1997, at the age of 30 from drowning, burns anew with every revisiting of his sparse legacy of recorded material.

Lives are more complicated than what your busted heart may want to read from a voice that conjured heaven and the abyss. So one of the appealing takeaways from the biodoc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is a repudiating of the typical narrative of inescapable fate, instead pursuing the richness of a gifted artist’s ups and downs. Director Amy Berg would rather us see Buckley as he was in the world instead of some conveniently doom-laden figure.

The result is loving, spirited and honest: an opportunity for us to get to know the talented, turbulent Buckley through the people who genuinely knew him and cared about him. But also, in clips, copious writings and snatches of voice recordings, we meet someone empathetic yet evasive, ambitious yet self-critical, a son and his own man, especially when sudden stardom proved to be the wrong prism through which to find answers.

With archival material often superimposed over a faint, scratchy-film background, we feel the sensitivity and chaos of Buckley’s single-mom upbringing in Anaheim, the devastating distance of his absentee dad, folk-poet icon Tim Buckley (you’ll never forget the matchbook Jeff saved), and the creative blossoming that happened in New York’s East Village. There, his long-standing influences, from Nina Simone and Edith Piaf to Led Zeppelin and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, coalesced into a post-grunge emotionalism anchored by those unbelievable pipes.

Even after Buckley’s record-label discovery leads to the usual music-doc trappings — tour montages, media coverage, performance morsels — Berg wisely keeps the contours of his interior life in the foreground, intimately related by key figures, most prominently Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, romantic confidantes such as artist Rebecca Moore and musician Joan Wasser, and bandmates like Michael Tighe. Berg keeps these interviewees close to her camera, too, so we can appreciate their memories as personal gifts, still raw after so many years.

Fans might yearn for more granular unpacking of the music, but it somehow doesn’t feel like an oversight when so much ink on it already exists and so little else has been colored in. The same goes for the blessed absence of boilerplate A-list praise. The global acclaim for his sole album, 1994’s “Grace,” which includes his all-timer rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” certainly put admiring superstars (Dylan, Bowie, McCartney) in Buckley’s path, including one of his idols, Robert Plant. But Berg stays true to a viewpoint rooted in Buckley’s conflicting feelings about the pressures and absurdities of fame, and why it ultimately drove him to Memphis to seek the solace to start a second album that was never completed.

The last chapter is thoughtfully handled. Berg makes sure that we understand that his loved ones view his death as an accident, not a suicide, and the movie’s details are convincing. That doesn’t make the circumstances any less heartbreaking, of course. As warmer spotlights go, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” may never fully expunge what maddens and mystifies about the untimely end of troubled souls. But it candidly dimensionalizes a one-album wonder, virtually ensuring the kind of relistening likely to deepen those echoes.

Actress Gina Carano, Lucasfilm and its parent company Walt Disney Co. have settled the federal lawsuit filed in which Carano claimed that, in 2021, she was wrongfully terminated from her role in “The Mandalorian” after she expressed her conservative political views on social media.

The settlement details have not been made public, but Lucasfilm released a statement praising Carano’s on-set professionalism and expressing the hope of “identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.”

I am here to beg everyone to remain calm and avoid using the four Cs: cancel culture (is this the end of it?) and corporate capitulation (is this another example of it?)

No and no.

Cancel culture has long been an amorphous and often recklessly applied term, used to describe a litany of events, including but certainly not limited to male predators losing their jobs, students protesting their school’s choice of graduation speakers and outrage over J.K. Rowling’s stance on transgender women.

Recently, however, it has taken a far more concrete shape that looks astonishingly like the White House where President Trump continues to literally cancel all manner of things, including U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency and huge portions of Medicaid. Recently, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the bureau documented weaker than expected numbers for July and downward revisions for the previous two months.

Corporate capitulation, too, is alive and well, with law firms, universities and media companies falling like dominoes before Trump’s lawsuits and threats of defunding. Last year, Trump sued ABC and its parent company Disney for defamation after anchor George Stephanopoulos wrongly stated on air that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping E. Jean Carroll — Trump had been found civilly liable of sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. Disney settled for $15 million, paid to Trump’s presidential foundation and museum.

Even more troubling was Paramount Global’s decision to pay a $16-million settlement in what many consider a frivolous lawsuit brought by Trump against “60 Minutes.” After late-night host Stephen Colbert called the move a “big fat bribe” designed to ensure Paramount’s recent acquisition by Skydance, CBS, which is owned by Paramount, announced that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was being canceled due to financial considerations.

So while it is tempting to see Disney settling with Carano as a piece of a larger and very worrisome whole, particularly when Elon Musk financed her lawsuit, it was in fact simply the right thing to do.

Carano is a former mixed martial artist turned actor who has been vocal about her support for conservative causes and President Trump. In 2020, she had caught some flack for posting “beep/bop/boop” as her pronouns in her Twitter bio, which some took as her way of mocking trans people. She denied this, changed her bio and expressed support for the trans community.

There were also posts that criticized masking policies and shutdowns during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as one calling for an investigation into voter fraud after the 2020 election.

But it was a repost on Instagram that cost her her job — in February 2021, she reposted a famously horrific image of a half-naked Jewish woman fleeing from a mob with a moronically simplistic message about divisive politics: “Most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

Landing just a month after then-President Trump sent an armed mob to attack the Capitol in the hopes of overturning an election he refused to believe he had lost, the post, which appeared to compare MAGA supporters in 2021 America with Jews in Nazi Germany, sparked #FireGinaCarano.

And that’s exactly what Disney did. Calling her posts “abhorrent and unacceptable,” Lucasfilm excised her character from “The Mandalorian” and canceled an upcoming spinoff in which she was to star. Her talent agency, UTA, dropped her and Hasbro canceled a line of toys based on her “Mandalorian” character.

It was an overreaction that smacked of fear and pandering. I do not agree with the sentiments Carano expressed in her posts, but compared with the blithely toxic abuse regularly used on social media, they are relatively benign, based far more on genuine ignorance — most people are in fact aware of the vicious antisemitism leveraged by the Nazis as well as their institutionalized tactics of fear — than anything else.

Of course, those who attempt to be politically provocative on social media (and reposting a photo of a victimized Jewish woman in such context is the definition of political provocation) cannot then feign shock and dismay when people are provoked, especially at a time when far-right tweets, including the president’s, had led to a violent attack against lawmakers. (Hence the irony of Musk’s support — the platform he renamed X was in large part built on its ability to harness all manner of just and unjust hashtag campaigns.)

But as my colleague Robin Abcarian noted when Carano filed her lawsuit in 2023, the social media mob’s decision that a woman, who was far from a household name, deserved to lose her livelihood, and more important, Lucasfilm’s agreement with that decision, was extreme.

Bad publicity is never good for an entertainment property and whether it was explicit in her contract or not, Carano did represent, to a certain extent, “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm and Disney. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry’s increasing reliance on social media has created a world in which actors and other creative types are expected to amass millions of followers on platforms that tend to reward the outspoken and outrageous over the thoughtful. Encouraged to reveal themselves “authentically,” stars can find themselves prodded by fans to comment on current events and excoriated when they refuse or respond in a way that certain followers consider insincere or politically incorrect.

Telling people to stay off social media is not the answer; neither is regulation by hashtag campaign.

While Carano’s case is certainly reflective of many perils that face us at the moment, the fact that she reached a settlement, including an apparent promise of more work, is not a sign of further deterioration.

The fear that our cultural landscape is being attacked by political forces that would strangle the notion of free speech and competing ideologies is real and justified. But in this case, the capitulation came not when Disney and Lucasfilm decided to settle with Carano, but when they fired her in the first place.

Busta Rhymes is rejecting claims leveled against him in a lawsuit filed this week by a former assistant, calling it an “attempted shake-down.”

Dashiel Gables, who filed the lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is accusing Rhymes — real name Trevor Smith Jr. — of wage and hour violations as well as assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“I have been made aware of the claims made by Dashiel Gables, and I completely and categorically deny these allegations,” Rhymes said in a statement to The Times. “For a very brief period, Dashiel assisted me, but it did not work out. Apparently, Dashiel has decided to respond to being let go by manufacturing claims against me in an attempt to attack and damage my reputation.”

Rhymes, 53, said he is preparing a countersuit and is “confident [it] will expose this for what it is — an attempted shake-down by a disgruntled former assistant.”

In the lawsuit, which was reviewed by The Times, Gables alleges that Rhymes repeatedly called him a slur related to sexuality and mocked his poor hearing by telling him to “get a hearing aid.” He also says he was improperly categorized as a salaried employee and wasn’t paid overtime despite allegedly being required to work 15-, 16- and 18-hour shifts regularly for a flat $200 a day.

The lawsuit says he was required to perform “menial tasks,” including fetching cigars for the rapper.

The suit says Gables, 44, accompanied Rhymes on tour from early July to early September of last year, seven days a week, without being paid travel time or overtime, then worked for him from 2 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. daily without pay over his day rate from Sept. 3, 2024, until Jan. 10.

On that last day, the lawsuit alleges, Rhymes “constructively terminated” Gables’ employment “by repeatedly punching him in the face” after first raging at his assistant for not promptly bringing a “catering-size” pan of chicken in from the rapper’s car, then chewing Gables out for sending a text to his minor daughter during work hours.

Gables “tolerated a great deal of abuse while working for Busta Rhymes, he could not tolerate the repeated physical assault and was unable to return to work,” the complaint says, adding that Gables went to the hospital for treatment of bruising and swelling and filed a police report regarding the alleged assault. He did not return to work.

After Gables filed the police report he was “frozen out of the hip-hop music industry,” the complaint alleges. He is seeking back pay as well as compensatory and punitive damages and is asking for a jury trial.

Hundreds to thousands of animal species go extinct every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and things are projected to get even worse if climate change continues unabated. A new novel by U.S.-based Australian writer Emma Sloley, “The Island of Last Things,” imagines a time in the nearish future when not only animals but whole ecosystems of living things have been wiped out, leaving a handful of surviving zoos around the globe attempting to preserve the species in their care. Except that those zoos close, one by one, due to a multitude of reasons: insufficient funding, a movement protesting the care and feeding of (nonhuman) animals in a time of mass human suffering and a deadly strain of Candida spreading through the wildlife population. The last remaining zoo sits on Alcatraz Island, inhabiting the grounds and structures of the former prison.

“The Island of Last Things” is largely narrated by Camille, a woman in her mid-20s who prefers the company of animals to people and has worked on Alcatraz for pretty much the entirety of her adulthood. Unlike most of the other workers, who travel to the mainland every Sunday, Camille stays put. “I only ever felt fully real when I was working,” she explains early in the book, “and after the workday was done I retreated into a state of minimal existence, like a robot powered down between tasks.” She’s a natural with the animals, though, her presence as calming to them as theirs is life-giving to her.

Everything begins to change for Camille when a new zookeeper, Sailor, arrives on the island. Sailor is in her 40s and had a long career at the Paris Zoo before it, too, closed down. Camille is assigned to give her the new employee tour, and the two quickly form a bond based in their deep love of, and respect for, the animals in their care.

It’d be easy to assume that all 200 or so zookeepers on the island are there for that exact reason too, but the reality is more complicated. Zookeeping is a practical choice for some “because it offers a better life than anything else going,” Sailor points out. Zookeepers “may as well live and die surrounded by animals than in a sweatshop or war zone, right?” Then, too, there’s the sheer bleakness of the role: “Everyone starts off enthusiastic,” Camille tells Sailor, “but then, I don’t know. They just sort of give up.” And why wouldn’t they? After all, they are aware, every single day, that the animals locked in their various enclosures are some of the, if not the, last of their kind, and they’re living out the end of their species in an environment far removed from their native habitat. It’s no wonder that many keepers choose to emotionally distance themselves and sink into apathy.

As Sailor settles into her new job on Alcatraz, she begins to shake things up, which both thrills and terrifies Camille, who has always kept her head down and followed the rules. Even more meaningful to Camille than Sailor’s boundary pushing, though, is Sailor’s friendship and how she includes Camille in whatever she’s dreaming up: “it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived a life of loneliness how powerfully that casual ‘we’ worked on me.”

Camille is an interesting narrator in part because she’s what some might derogatorily call a “passive” character, but whom I read instead as intensely observant and watchful. It’s true that she’s not the instigator of most of the drama that occurs on the island once Sailor arrives, but she’s often along for the ride, surprising herself over and over again by how far she’ll go to maintain her friend’s attention and respect. Camille has a front row seat to how Sailor is constantly working those around her — flirting, befriending, gently threatening, subtly manipulating — in order to get what she wants, and perhaps it’s because what Sailor wants is always in service to the animals that Camille doesn’t mind. Still, there’s a bittersweet dramatic irony at play because the reader can recognize that Camille is, at least sometimes, yet another of Sailor’s tools.

In brief chapters that alternate with the main narrative, Sailor’s history comes alive in bits and pieces, and it becomes clear that she’s intent on trying to smuggle animals out of the zoo to get them to a rumored sanctuary on a vast tract of land somewhere in China. But Alcatraz Zoo is owned by a billionaire (of course) and is guarded within an inch of its life, so the whole endeavor seems far-fetched and potentially impossible — yet Sailor’s plan, once hatched, moves forward despite all of Camille’s concerns.

Is the sanctuary even real? Readers never get a completely satisfactory answer to this, and the way Sailor talks about it certainly makes it sound like a fairy tale, one that she and Camille both willingly believe in because the prospect of a world without any hope is just too painful. Indeed, “The Island of Last Things” doesn’t sugarcoat how bad things have gotten in that future world, but Sloley refuses to let her characters succumb to despair; she is intent on highlighting the small moments of beauty, joy, and care that emerge even during disastrous, horrible times. “Do me a favor, huh?” Sailor asks Camille one night. “Promise me you’ll start imagining a better world than this one.” Imagining such a world, Sloley seems to be reminding her readers, is the only way to begin the work of creating it.

Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”

“Chimp Crazy” star Tonia Haddix on Thursday was sentenced to 46 months in prison.

The 55-year-old exotic animal broker was convicted for lying to a federal judge about the death of her chimpanzee Tonka, whom she was hiding in her basement. Haddix, who calls herself the “Dolly Parton of chimps,” pleaded guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice in March and was arrested in July for harboring yet another ape in her Missouri home.

“Now that Tonia Haddix is locked up, she’s getting a taste of the suffering she inflicted on animals by imprisoning them in cages and denying them any semblance of a natural life,” Brittany Peet, PETA Foundation‘s general counsel for Captive Animal Law Enforcement, said in a statement. “PETA is relieved to see justice done and urges everyone to support the Captive Primate Safety Act, which will keep vulnerable monkeys and apes out of the pet trade and the hands of ruthless dealers like Haddix.”

PETA first considered legal action against Haddix in 2018 after she took ownership of seven chimpanzees from the now-closed Missouri Primate Foundation, according to the animal rights group. After a court ordered Haddix to relinquish them all, she claimed Tonka — a celebrity chimp who’s appeared in “George of the Jungle,” “Buddy” and “Babe: Pig in the City” — had died.

In Episode 2 of the four-part docuseries “Chimp Crazy,” which aired on HBO in 2024, Haddix broke down in tears during a Zoom court hearing as she detailed Tonka’s alleged death. But just after Missouri Senior District Judge Catherine D. Perry ruled in her favor, the chimp was discovered locked in a small cage in Haddix’s basement, where he could only walk a few steps in each direction and had no access to the outdoors.

“Chimp Crazy” director Eric Goode, who was obscuring his identity via a proxy director during filming due to his reputation as the producer of “Tiger King,” ultimately made the decision to inform PETA where Tonka was. The chimp was removed from Haddix’s custody on June 5, 2022, and relocated to the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Fla.

“I didn’t feel guilty,” proxy director Dwayne Cunningham told The Times last year. “I always said to Tonia, ‘Don’t ever say anything to me that you don’t want the whole world to know.’ And Tonia being Tonia, she just kept talking. So I didn’t feel guilty; I felt like I was doing my job. But I felt bad for a friend, because I could see that the love story was spiraling out of control.”

The Avengers will soon be assembling for a much younger demographic.

Disney Jr. plans to expand its collaboration with Marvel, announcing a new series launching in 2027 titled “Marvel’s Avengers: Mightiest Friends.” It’s a partnership that began in 2021 when Disney Jr. premiered “Spidey and His Amazing Friends,” the first full-length Marvel preschool series, and has expanded to include the upcoming “Iron Man and His Awesome Friends.”

“Disney Jr. are the pros at this age group,” says Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Studios television and animation. “‘Spidey and His Amazing Friends’ was our first shot at giving little kids a front-row seat to the Marvel Universe.”

Currently in its fourth season with two additional seasons already greenlit, “Spidey” has been wildly successful. It’s the first Disney Jr. series to run for more than five seasons and is the second most popular streaming series (after “Bluey”) for children ages 2 to 5, according to Nielsen.

“The success of ‘Spidey’ really confirmed we were onto something and proved the demand for superhero stories designed specifically for this age group,” says Alyssa Sapire, head of original programming and strategy at Disney Jr. “It fueled this broader strategy with Disney Jr. and Marvel.”

There’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and now there will be the Marvel Preschool Universe. “Marvel’s Avengers: Mightiest Friends” will feature kid versions of all the MCU characters including Spidey, Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Black Panther, Thor and, for the first time, Black Widow. “Avengers are the ultimate learning to play nice story,” Winderbaum says. “It’s endless fun to watch Thor, Widow, Hulk and Cap learn about teamwork. That’s always a fundamental lesson for that group whether it’s in the features or the animated shows.”

Young viewers will get a sneak peek of what’s to come with two “Marvel’s Spidey and Iron Man: Avengers Team Up!” specials. The first 22-minute special premieres Oct. 16 and finds Spidey, Iron Man and all the Avengers stopping Ultron and Green Goblin from their nefarious plans. Another special, this one Halloween-themed, will debut in fall 2026.

“These characters are so timeless and have appealed to audiences across generations,” says Harrison Wilcox, who executive produces all the Marvel preschool series. “What is most important to us is to tell fun, relatable, positive stories that families can enjoy together.”

To that end, next up for Disney Jr. and Marvel is “Iron Man and His Awesome Friends” which will premiere Aug. 11 on Disney Jr. and stream on Disney+ on Aug. 12. Tony Stark and his alter ego, Iron Man, were the natural choice for the next MCU character to get the preschool treatment. “‘Iron Man’ was the film that launched our studio,” Winderbaum says. “We love the idea that a young audience who wasn’t around in 2008 can be introduced to Marvel through a character at the core of Marvel history.”

This series finds Tony Stark (Iron Man) and his best friends Riri Williams (Ironheart) and Amadeus Cho (Iron Hulk) working together to solve problems, like a villain intent on stealing everyone’s toys.

“Tony Stark is very relatable and aspirational,” says Wilcox. “He didn’t stop until he found a way to protect the entire universe. We wanted three kids that were distinct from each other but also shared some certain qualities. They’re all very intelligent. They’re all tech savvy. They all want to use their brains to make the world better.”

The trio works out of Iron Quarters (IQ) with Vision as their de facto supervisor. “We thought it would be nice to have someone who could sort of act as the caretaker of our kids,” Wilcox says of including the beloved android in the series. “We wanted our audience to know that these characters were loved and supported. Even though they have superpowers, someone’s looking out for them.”

Each superhero also brings something new for the young audience to connect to. One thing that will separate the upcoming “Iron Man” series from “Spidey” is that Iron Man doesn’t have a secret identity. Everyone knows Tony Stark is Iron Man. “We saw there was this differentiation we could really lean into,” Sapire says. “They’re real kids who use their ingenuity and smarts for the good of the community.”

When bringing these characters to the under 5 set, every detail matters. “Even in this Marvel superhero space, we’re always tapping into that preschool experience,” Sapire says. “We take the responsibility to entertain naturally curious preschoolers very seriously. When we have their attention, we want to honor that time with them with stories that inspire their imaginations and bring that sense of joy and optimism.”

They approach the legendary Marvel villains with care as well. “Iron Man” features Ultron (voiced by Tony Hale), Swarm (Vanessa Bayer) and Absorbing Man (Talon Warburton). “You have to make sure the villain is not sympathetic,” Wilcox says. “But also not frightening. We rely heavily on our partners at Disney Jr. for that and their educational resource group, which provides us a lot of feedback to make sure our preschool audience is engaged in the story and they feel the stakes of the story, but they are still watching in a comfortable space.”

While all the series remain true to the overall MCU, they don’t get too tied up in what is and isn’t canon. “These shows are about what makes each character tick, more than the lore that surrounds them,” Winderbaum explains.

And, like in the movies, the superheroes will make mistakes. “Marvel does not put their characters up on a pedestal,” Wilcox says. “We want our characters to reflect real people in the real world. So that’s always been important to us is that there’s a certain level of relatability. Everyone can see a part of themselves in a Marvel hero and learn and grow just like our characters do.”

Jane Pitt, a schoolteacher, philanthropist and the mother of film star Brad Pitt, died on Tuesday at the age of 84.

The Pitt family shared her obituary with KY3, an NBC-affiliated station in Springfield, Mo., where Jane and her husband, Bill, raised their three children — Brad, Doug Pitt and Julie Neal.

The cause of Pitt’s death was not revealed by the family.

Doug Pitt’s daughter Sydney shared a tribute to her grandmother on her Instagram account with a series of pictures.

“We were not ready for you to go yet but knowing you are finally free to sing, dance, and paint again makes it a tad easier,” she wrote.

“I don’t know how we move forward without her. But I know she’s still here in every brushstroke, every kind gesture, every hummingbird. She was love in its purest form,” Sydney added.

In addition to being an accomplished artist, her family said Jane Pitt was an elementary school teacher with the Springfield public school system. In 2009, the Pitts donated $1 million to establish the Jane Pitt Pediatric Cancer Center at Mercy Hospital in Springfield.

She would occasionally make red carpet appearances with her son Brad. The actor’s six children are among the Pitts’ 14 grandchildren, and the family said Jane Pitt treasured her role as grandmother. “The years of ‘Your Special Day’ of one-on-ones with each grandkid are some of their fondest memories,” the family said in her obituary.

Continued growth in streaming subscriptions and strong domestic tourism to its theme parks propelled Walt Disney Co.’s fiscal third quarter earnings, even as its theatrical results dipped, the company said Wednesday.

The Burbank media and entertainment giant reported $23.7 billion in revenue for the three-month period that ended June 28, up 2% compared with the same quarter a year earlier. Earnings before taxes totaled $3.2 billion, 4% higher than a year ago . Earnings per share were $2.92, up from $1.43 last year.

“We are pleased with our creative success and financial performance,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in a statement. “With ambitious plans ahead for all our businesses, we’re not done building, and we are excited for Disney’s future.”

The company’s entertainment division, which includes its studios, Disney+, Hulu and linear television business, reported $10.7 billion in revenue, 1% higher than a year earlier. Its operating income, however, totaled $1 billion, down 15% compared with the previous year. That was the result of lower results in content sales and licensing, which includes theatrical distribution, and linear television.

Disney’s content sales and licensing unit reported revenue of $2.3 billion, up 7% compared with a year ago , but recorded a loss of $21 million in operating income. The company attributed that to lower theatrical distribution results during the third quarter of this year, when it released Disney and Pixar’s original animated film “Elio,” which struggled at the box office, as well as Marvel Studios’ “Thunderbolts*,” which received strong critical reviews but had a middling commercial performance.

The earnings only captured part of the theatrical results for the live-action adaptation of “Lilo & Stitch,” which would go on to gross $1 billion in global box office revenue. The quarterly earnings were also negatively impacted by the comparison to last year’s “Inside Out 2” box office performance.

Disney’s linear networks including ABC and the Disney Channel continued to struggle, reporting revenue of $2.3 billion, down 15% compared with last year. Operating income fell 28% to $697 million. Part of that decline was due to the lower international results stemming from the company’s Star India merger.

Still, Disney’s streaming business saw gains during the third quarter, posting a 6% increase in revenue to $6.2 billion and operating income of $346 million, compared with a loss of $19 million a year earlier.

The company now has 183 million Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions.

Disney’s theme parks also boosted revenues, despite concerns about a drop-off in international tourism to the U.S. fueled by trade tensions. The experiences division, which includes the Disney theme parks, cruise line and Aulani resort and spa in Hawaii, reported revenue of $9.1 billion, up 8% compared with the previous year. Operating income rose 13% to $2.5 billion.

Disney said visitors spent more at the parks during the third quarter, and that its domestic parks and experiences operating income increased 22% to $1.7 billion.

Disney’s sports unit, which includes ESPN, reported revenue of $4.3 billion, down 5%, due to higher programming and production costs for the NBA and college sports rights and the lack of NHL Stanley Cup Finals rights, which Disney has every other year. Operating income was $1 billion, up 29% from last year.

The NFL has reached a deal to take a 10% ownership stake in the Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, the league and Disney announced Tuesday evening, a move that is expected to solidify the sports media outlet’s relationship with the league for years to come.

In return for the equity stake valued at more than $2 billion based on recent valuations of the company, ESPN will take over the NFL’s cable properties including the NFL Network and Red Zone, the popular channel that continuously updates fans on the slate of Sunday contests. The NFL Network also has the rights to seven regular season games.

In addition to the sale of NFL Network, the NFL and ESPN are also entering into a second non-binding agreement, under which the NFL will license to ESPN certain NFL content and other intellectual property to be used by NFL Network and other assets.

The deal is a big win for ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro, who took over the Disney unit in 2018 with a mandate to improve the company’s relationship with the NFL.

The equity stake comes ahead of ESPN’s move into the direct-to-consumer streaming business this fall, which gives consumers the opportunity to purchase the company’s sports channels without a cable or satellite TV subscription. NFL Network will also be available on the streaming service.

“This is an exciting day for sports fans,” Pitaro said Tuesday in a statement. “By combining these NFL media assets with ESPN’s reach and innovation, we’re creating a premier destination for football fans. Together, ESPN and the NFL are redefining how fans engage with the game — anytime, anywhere. This deal helps fuel ESPN’s digital future, laying the foundation for an even more robust offering as we prepare to launch our new direct-to-consumer service.”

The new product is aimed at recapturing sports fans who are forgoing cable and satellite services. ESPN has seen its reach in cable decline from 98 million homes in 2013 to around 72 million as a result of cord-cutting.

“Today’s announcement paves the way for the world’s leading sports media brand and America’s most popular sport to deliver an even more compelling experience for NFL fans, in a way that only ESPN and Disney can,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in a statement.

ESPN has the broadcast rights to “Monday Night Football” and two Super Bowl games in the current NFL contract that runs through 2033 but is expected to be reopened in 2029.

The deal with Disney means the NFL’s other partners — Fox, NBC, CBS, YouTube and Amazon — will be bidding against an entity that the league has a financial interest in next time the media rights come up.

Lachlan Murdoch, executive chairman of Fox Corp., told Wall Street analysts Tuesday he is not concerned the NFL’s partnership with ESPN will impact his network’s standing with the league.

“We have a tremendous relationship with the NFL,” Murdoch said. “We appreciate that they are fans of the broadcast and cable networks, and we look forward to working with them and deepening our relationship with them as we move forward.”

As the author of multiple books about Elvis Presley — including his magisterial 1994 biography “Last Train to Memphis” and its 1999 sequel, “Careless Love” — Peter Guralnick has interviewed hundreds of subjects and combed through a tall mountain of archival material in his quest for the truth about the most consequential American musical artist of the post World-War II era.

But as it turned out there was more material, far more than Guralnick could squeeze into his Elvis biographies, and that material is the basis for his latest deep dive, “The Colonel and the King.” A visit to the Graceland archive shortly after the publication of “Last Train to Memphis” revealed a trove of correspondence written by Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker, the rotund, blustery operator that shepherded the musician’s career from the mid-1950s until shortly before his death in 1977. A cursory sift through the material revealed tens of thousands of letters tracing in minute detail the inner workings of Elvis business, from publicity campaigns to the finer points of his recording and movie contracts.

These missives exploded the myths around a man who has for decades been derided as a cynical and unscrupulous opportunist that cheapened Presley’s legacy while enriching himself at his client’s expense. “I read the letters and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is nothing like the person that has been portrayed,’” says Guralnick from his Massachusetts home.

What Guralnick found was a scrupulously honest businessman in love with what he called “the wonderful world of show business” and the art of the handshake deal, in thrall to his star client’s talent and willing to do whatever was necessary to keep him front and center. Guralnick’s new book is the story of an immigrant scrapper who became a kingmaker with his unerring instinct for the main chance. The first half of the book is Guralnick’s narrative; the second half contains a generous selection of Parker letters.

Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Holland, Elvis’ manager-to be-dropped out of school at 12. “His uncle owned a small circus,” Guralnick notes. “He did every sort of job, like how to site the tent so it would have the maximum visual impact. He knew how to water the elephants, he studied the acrobats.”

After a few false starts, he stowed away in 1929 on a ship bound for New Jersey, adopting the name Tom Parker shortly after reaching American soil. There was an Army stint in Hawaii, some odd jobs, and then he found what he loved: the itinerant world of the traveling carnival. At home in this milieu, Parker mastered the art of grassroots promotion, of pulling in large crowds by plastering the town with loud, hyperbolic placards. “In the world of the carnival and the circus, nobody questioned your pedigree,” says Guralnick. “Your handshake was your word, and everyone trusted and supported each other.”

Parker scouted talent and took them on as clients. By the time he witnessed Elvis performing at the Louisiana Hayride in the summer of 1955, he had already enjoyed big success with singers Hank Snow and Eddy Arnold and had adopted the Colonel moniker. Elvis, he sensed, was different.

“He sees in Elvis someone without limits, a great creative artist with great drive,” says Guralnick, “and Parker was prepared to throw over all of what he had achieved with Arnold and Snow in order to cultivate this untested talent. And he put everything he had into it.”

Even a cursory reading of Parker’s voluminous correspondence reveals a man not prone to passing over even the smallest detail in order to please his client. Working with a small staff of loyalists including his trusted associate Tom Diskin, Parker oversaw every aspect of Elvis’ business, from meals to publicity to hotel accommodations. Work was play, it consumed his life, and this is exactly how he liked it. “It is of course these funny letters and my feeling that One must enjoy his work or grow stale keeps me on the go,” he wrote to his friend Paul Wilder in a 1957 letter.

He was a tireless proselytizer for his star client. Shortly after signing Elvis to a management deal, he immediately set about convincing the William Morris Agency of the greatness of his charge, writing to agent Harry Kalcheim that Elvis “has the same type of personality, and talents along the line of James Dean,” and that “if you ever follow one of my hunches, follow up on this one and you won’t go wrong.”

Elvis, for his part, deeply appreciated Parker’s enthusiasm and loyalty. “Believe me when I say I will stick with you thru thick and thin and do everything I can to uphold your faith in me,” Presley wrote to Parker in November 1955, shortly after he had secured a recording contract with RCA. “I love you like a father.”

Author Peter Guralnick previously wrote Elvis biographies “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love.”

(Mike Leahy)

“Parker defended Elvis against every single entity with which he was dealing,” says Guralnick. “RCA wanted to turn him into a mainstream artist, like a crooner, and Colonel wouldn’t allow that to happen. When Kalsheim asked Parker to rein in Elvis, because he was too wild on stage, Parker refused.”

“The Colonel and the King” debunks some of the most stubborn myths about Parker, refuting the notion that Parker destroyed Elvis’ career by force-feeding awful material down his throat. While Parker was a hawk when it came to contract negotiations, he had no say in any artistic decisions and fended off record and film executives with designs on grabbing Elvis’ ear.

“He completely removed himself from Elvis’ creative life,” says Guralnick. “It was a partnership of equals, but Parker didn’t get involved in that aspect of Elvis’ career.” For many Elvis fans of long standing, Parker’s hands-off approach as revealed in his letters will be hard to square with the singer’s enlistment in the Army in 1958 and his subsequent posting to Germany, which, so the conventional wisdom tells us, killed the first vital phase of his career and kick-started the descent into awful Hollywood movies that effectively turned this erstwhile force of nature into a B-movie hack.

Parker endorsed Elvis’ Army move — his client wasn’t about to be a draft dodger — but the decision to push Elvis into movies was a bilateral strategy that both men agreed was the best way to generate income at a time when Presley was reeling from his mother’s death and fretting about money — as was Parker. “It was actually financial and psychological,” says Guralnick about the left turn that changed Presley’s career. “And so the Colonel needed to reassure him, to say, ‘things are even better now than when you went into the Army, and when you get out you’ll be making even more money.’”

But even “Clambake” and “Harum Scarum” couldn’t douse Presley’s musical artistry and fire. His triumphant 1968 comeback TV special kick-started an artistic renaissance. The hits returned: “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Burning Love.” In 1969, Parker booked Elvis for a triumphant series of dates at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. The downside of this was that Parker picked up a nasty gambling habit, while his client soon became dependent on prescription drugs. Presley and Parker grew distant, as Presley insulated himself with sycophants and his behavior both on and offstage grew increasingly erratic.

Parker was cast adrift by Elvis’ death in 1977, retreating to his Palm Springs home. Ten years later, he was brought back into “Elvisland” by Priscilla Presley and Elvis Presley Enterprises President Jack Soden, coordinating an Elvis festival at the Las Vegas Hilton and selling all of his memorabilia to the estate. But he never regained his standing at the top of the Elvis hierarchy, much to his dismay.

In assessing Parker’s legacy, Guralnick thinks that it all comes down to “the great music he helped Elvis bring to the world — not through any musical contributions of his own, obviously, but by creating the conditions necessary to ensure Elvis’ creative independence from the start. Not to mention all the joy he himself delivered and derived from what he always liked to call the Wonderful World of Show Business.”

Sean “Diddy” Combs will remain in federal custody until he faces sentencing later this year, a judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian on Monday denied the disgraced rapper and music producer’s motion requesting release prior to his sentencing on Oct. 3, The Times has confirmed. Combs has been in federal custody in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest in September. The facility is reportedly notorious for incidents of violence as well as staffing shortages, inmate overcrowding and even power outages.

“Combs fails to satisfy his burden to demonstrate an entitlement to release,” Subramanian said in the order, reviewed by The Times. “The motion for bail is denied.”

A legal representative for Combs, 55, did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

In his order, Subramanian was unswayed by lawyers’ arguments for Combs’ release including that he shouldn’t be punished for his “swinger” lifestyle; that he’s the target of “ongoing threats of violence” at the MDC; and explanations for his violence against ex-girlfriends Casandra “Cassie” Ventura and Jane, who went by a pseudonym. The two women testified about the musician’s orgies known as “freak-offs” and made allegations about his violent behavior.

Combs’ attorneys urged the release, insisting their client is not a flight risk. The judge, however, didn’t see “clear and convincing evidence” of this or the danger that his lawyers said Combs faced at the prison. Regarding the “squalor and danger” at the facility, Subramanian acknowledged that “public outcry concerning these conditions has come from all corners,” according to the order.

Yet, he wrote, Combs has said that MDC staff have “been able to keep him safe and attend to his needs, even during an incident of threatened violence from an inmate.”

Though Combs was cleared in July of racketeering and sex trafficking, the jury convicted him on two counts of prostitution-related charges. The jury’s split verdict leaves Combs facing up to 10 years in prison for each of the two counts of prostitution.

The denial of bail comes after Combs’ legal team on Sunday submitted a letter from a woman who identified herself as “Victim 3” from the trial. Virginia Huynh wrote in support of the rapper’s release, claiming he had “made visible efforts to become a better person,” according to the letter reviewed by The Times.

She added: “I want to assure the Court that if released, I believe Mr. Combs will adhere to all conditions imposed and will not jeopardize his freedom or the well-being of his family. Allowing him to be at home will also support the healing process for all involved.”

Sterling K. Brown is telling me about the underground bunker in his Ladera Heights home, a feature common to houses built during the Cold War, when fears of a nuclear holocaust ran rampant and kids were watching “duck and cover” films at school.

Brown and his wife, Ryan Michelle Bathé, sealed the bunker when they moved in, not wanting their two boys to wander in there.

But now that Brown has spent the last couple of years immersed in making the Emmy-nominated drama “Paradise,” set inside a massive domed underground city that some 25,000 people call home after a tsunami floods the planet, I wonder if the show’s doomsday vibes have seeped into his consciousness.

“It’s definitely seeped into my wife’s brain,” Brown says, laughing, adding that now that the boys are older — Andrew is 14 and Amare will be 10 next month — he and his wife are “actively” looking at opening it up and, per Bathé, stocking it with provisions. He goes on to tell me about friends who have bought land in rural areas to develop and build their own communities, so if push comes to shove they’ll survive while everyone else is picking through the rubble.

Has he considered joining them?

“It’s a different take than Sterling’s take,” Brown answers after a beat, noting that he’s not passing judgment. “But there is a level of preparation that I blissfully throw caution to the wind because I’m someone who believes in a Gump-ian existence, that everything will work out the way that it’s supposed to.”

Gump as in Forrest, Brown clarifies, as if there’s any doubt. So even though he’s in the middle of shooting the second season of “Paradise,” much of which finds his Secret Service agent looking for his wife in a world outside the bunker where things have most decidedly not worked out, Brown says he is focusing on “things that are shiny and beautiful and delightful.”

Case in point: a ring he grabs off a table in his office. When Brown and I first met, it was the first Saturday in May and Brown was at The Times taking part in an actors roundtable, which meant he wasn’t at Andrew’s soccer game or helping coach Amare’s flag football team. The soccer game was being recorded, so missing it stung less. But Brown is the defensive coordinator of the football team and, heading into the playoffs, their record was 2-3-1. Nonetheless, he was confident they’d be OK because, again, Brown is a self-professed “sunny-side-up” kind of guy.

“Not only did we make the playoffs” — here Brown retrieves the enormous ring — “we won the Super Bowl. We eked in and played our best football at the right time.

“Not to diminish anything else that’s going on in my world, because it’s a good time to be SKB,” Brown says a couple of days after earning a lead actor Emmy nomination for “Paradise.” “But it was a big moment for me. I can’t lie.”

Was it his finest moment? The word “moment” has me remembering what Dan Fogelman, Brown’s showrunner on “Paradise” and “This Is Us,” told a colleague not long ago, talking about a “Paradise” shower scene that showcased Brown’s backside. “It was his proudest moment on the show,” Fogelman said.

“He’s so dumb,” Brown says, not even letting me finish the question. “I do know what he said, and I won’t even lie. I’m not not proud of it because here’s the thing: I look at this front part of my body all the time. And I don’t always know what it looks like behind. And when I got to see it, I was like, ‘You know what?’ Not bad. Not bad at all.’”

There are many things to parse in this response. Luckily, Fogelman is more than happy to help. For one thing, he explains, it taps into Brown’s drive to be the best. Yes, he leads from a light place — you’re never going to leave a conversation with Brown feeling heavier than when you began — but the man likes to win. And Fogelman enjoys baiting him, telling Brown that if they played a game of one-on-one basketball, Fogelman would get at least one point.

It doesn’t matter that he’s winking when he says this. Just the notion that an out-of-shape writer would score a point off him drives Brown nuts.

Plus, that “not bad at all” highlights Brown’s willingness to speak his inner monologue out loud. He doesn’t have many moments where he thinks, “I wonder if I should tell this story. Maybe it will make me look bad.”

“People are desperate for authenticity and truth,” Fogelman says. “Actors in Sterling’s position usually have a persona that’s carefully crafted. Sterling is who he is.”

If you want to hear that essence pouring through, there might not be a better place than the podcast Brown does with his wife, Bathé. (Yes, a second season is coming.) It lives up to its title, “We Don’t Always Agree,” featuring the couple’s candid exchanges about money, child-rearing, racial identity and religion. No punches are pulled.

Says Brown: “My wife and I are two different people. My wife is a warrior. She’s going to fight and she’s going to fight hard. I respect her. Me … I am a peace worker. I’m going to try to find the connective tissue that allows you to recognize that we’re not as different as you think.”

“You want to know my favorite episode of ‘The West Wing’?” Brown asks. “It’s ‘Isaac and Ishmael,’ talking about how the two different branches came from Abraham — two different groups but from the same person. But yet our instinct toward nationalism and tribalism keeps us in this constant state of ‘us’ against ‘them.’ And as long as we believe in this fallacy of separation, that’s going to continue.”

Brown, center, with co-stars James Marsden and Krys Marshall in “Paradise.”

(Brian Roedel / Disney)

Having, like Brown, grown up in the church and then gone in a different direction, believing that there’s no monopoly on God, we spend a lot of time talking about the side-eyes family and friends give us when we talk about our spiritual journeys.

“A lot of my faith practice in my youth was performative, so that people saw that I was following the rules and playing the game,” Brown says. “Now, the connection with the source is the only thing that matters. I’ve never felt closer to God, the universe, nature, whatever you want to call it.”

Brown is reading the Bible to his boys right now, focusing on the Old Testament with his oldest, Andrew, who is having a hard time reconciling the God of love in the New Testament with the vengeful God that turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt when she looked back on the ruined Sodom and Gomorrah. Does God change? Or is it the ways people explain God?

“Fear is a powerful motivator, and today we’re seeing how fear can galvanize people into making decisions for their own self-protection,” Brown says. “What the New Testament is trying to say is that love is as powerful and a pure motivator for the right action. What I want to do is embody love, which is ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Brown is adamant in his belief that God wants us to question how the universe works and why there is so much suffering in the world.

“What questions are you asking God these days?” I ask when we reconnect. The first thing that comes to his mind is his mother, Arlene, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2018 and soon lost her ability to speak: Why her? How does this good woman merit a disease that imprisons you in your own body?

“That’s what my brothers and sisters struggle with in a very Job-like way,” Brown says. “And what I’ve learned is that faith doesn’t remove obstacles from your life. Faith allows you to believe there is a purpose for those obstacles. There is a level of grace when I see her. Never am I seeing someone defeated or angry. Arlene Brown is still smiling.”

“Listen, my head is not stuck in the sand,” Brown continues. “Life can be difficult. But life is also too short not to find something to be grateful for.”

And there you have what Fogelman calls the essence of his friend and collaborator — “a deep thinker but not a heavy man. He radiates warmth and positive energy.”

Brown tells me a funny story about how his manager used to get mad at him when he’d miss an audition because he was too busy cleaning his house. For Brown, it was perfectly logical: Cluttered space, cluttered mind. Too much chaos? Brown’s brain can’t function.

That need for control and order runs up against the way Brown likes to picture himself as an easygoing, go-with-the-flow kind of guy. His wife, he says, is happy to disabuse him of that notion. But what really made Brown see himself clearly was the time he and Bathé partook in the psychedelic ayahuasca at a Costa Rica dispensary. (I’m not giving him side-eye. Are you? Brown feels you and heads you off. “We’re crunchy granola Black people,” he explains.)

When the shaman gave Brown the “medicine,” he didn’t feel anything at first. Sure, the stars were beautiful. But that couldn’t be the extent of the experience. The shaman approached him. Do you need another cup? Maybe. Brown drank the equivalent of half a shot glass and, instantaneously, he felt his body seep into the ground. It was like he disappeared into the earth. Was he dead? No. He could see the sweat bouncing off his body and hovering over him. Maybe the shaman saw something and was concerned because she approached Brown and asked if she could sing to him.

“And she starts singing this song, which sounded very serpentine, like if a snake was able to sing,” Brown says.

Like the python in “The Jungle Book”?

“Yes!” Brown says. “Now the more I look at things people have created, I’m like, ‘They did ayahuasca.’”

Nothing about the experience was what he anticipated, which is the lesson he took away: You can’t control anything. Just be present to what’s happening now — and observe.

“And as I move through life, I experience more peace and comfort just doing precisely that,” Brown says.

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

I will say this: I should be watching more cartoons. It has been harder to indulge this passion for some of the best, most pleasurable work television has to offer with so many ordinary series fighting for my professional time and attention, but here and now I make a more or less midyear resolution to get back to them. Please hold me to it.

Two great animated series are posting new seasons after long hiatuses (neither on the original platform, both on Hulu). “King of the Hill,” which ran on Fox from 1997 to 2009, lives anew with 10 fresh episodes streaming Monday; “The Amazing World of Gumball” (2011-2019), one of the greatest products of a great age of Cartoon Network, is back as “The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball,” in a 20-episode season now available. (Earlier seasons of both shows are available on the platform.) Each is under the protection of their original creators; both are their easily recognizable, extremely different old selves.

Visually, there is little to no difference between one multi-camera sitcom and the next, one single-camera mockumentary sitcom and the next, one single-camera non-mockumentary and the next, one CBS police procedural and the next. But every cartoon creates its individual grammar, its dynamic, its world, its synergy between the image and the actors, its level of awkwardness or slickness. (The voice actors, I mean — animators are also actors.) There are trends, of course, in shapes and line and ways to render a mouth or an eyeball, and much drawing is drawn from the history of the medium, because art influences artists. But the spectrum is wide, and novelty counts for a lot.

Created by Ben Bocquelet, “Gumball” doesn’t settle for a single style — that is to say, not settling is its style. The characters comprise a hodgepodge, nay, an encyclopedia of visual references, dimensions, materials and degrees of resolution, and include traditional 2-D animation, puppet animation, photo collage and live-action, usually set against a photographic background and knit into a world whose infinite variety seems nothing short of inevitable. (Netflix’s late “The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants” is the only other cartoon with such a range of modes.

Like many modern cartoons (excepting anime, which I would argue is a different, if widely influential, art), its main characters are children. Gumball, currently voiced by Alkaio Thiele, is a blue cat, the son of a cat mother and a rabbit father; he has a pink rabbit little sister, Anais (Kinza Syed Khan), and an adoptive brother, Darwin (Hero Hunter in the new season), a pet goldfish who grew legs and gets around quite easily in the air. Their middle-school classmates include a ghost, a cloud, a banana, an ice cream cone, a daisy, a balloon, a cactus, a T. Rex and a flying eyeball. Gumball’s girlfriend, Penny (Teresa Gallagher) is a shape-shifting yellow fairy. Each is rendered in a different style, and that is just the tip of the animated iceberg.

Like the best cartoons ostensibly made for kids, it doesn’t underestimate its audience, what it might understand or can handle. Many “Gumball” episodes devolve into a sort of authentically disturbing horror movie, including the last episode of the original series, which saw the characters frighteningly transformed into realistic animated children and a void opening just before the closing credits. It also demonstrates an adult skepticism about the world that might profitably infect young minds. There are critiques of capitalism, consumerism and online culture: In the first episode of the new season, an evil talking hamburger controls the corporate universe; in another, mother Nicole (Gallagher again) is seduced into virtual reality by a lonely, jealous chatbot.

The decade and a half since “King of the Hill” went off the air — surreptitiously, if obviously, referenced in a remark about “that cooking show that Fox stupidly canceled 15 years ago” — is not exactly represented in the new season, but time has passed. (The characters did not age 13 years over the original series — but they grew a little.) Hank, voiced by co-creator Mike Judge, and Peggy Hill (Kathy Najimy), returning to Arlen, Texas, from Saudi Arabia, where Hank had been exercising his expertise in all things propane, are drawn older by the addition of a few wrinkles but are substantially unchanged. As a character, Hank, of course, distrusts change, though possibly not as much as the friends who gather, as before, in the alley behind his house; indeed, he worries that the love of soccer he acquired while away will reduce his standing in their eyes. Peggy, on the other hand, was enlarged by her time away; she likes to demonstrate a few words of Arabic. Both Hills are dealing uncomfortably with retirement; he looks for odd jobs, takes a stab at making beer (not that fruit-flavored stuff); she exercises.

In the revived “King of the Hill,” Bobby and Hank compete against each other in a home brew competition, to Peggy’s dismay (but eventual delight).

(Mike Judge/Disney)

The show is set in an awkwardly drawn but highly evocative, extremely ordinary environment that perfectly serves its stories; it feels like an accurate outsider-art rendition of its middle-class Texas suburb. There is little in it that couldn’t be handled as live-action situation comedy; indeed, for long stretches you can close your eyes and let it play in your head like an old-time radio show — “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Vic and Sade” for the deep cut — which testifies to the quality of the writing and the performances. (Judge’s voice has an unschooled quality that perfectly matches the drawing. I was once almost certain that Hank’s voice was that of my friend Will Ray, a country-music guitar slinger — which would have made sense, given Judge’s interest in the music and his occasional moonlighting as a bass player. That is neither here or there, but I am happy to have found a place to mention it.)

Their son, Bobby (Pamela Adlon), is now an adult; little dots on his chin indicate either that he can grow a beard but neglects to shave or that he can’t quite grow a beard; it doesn’t seem exactly like a choice. A formerly established talent for cooking — the final episode of the original run concerned his ability to judge the quality of a cut of meat — has blossomed into his becoming a restaurateur, offering a fusion of Japanese and Texas cuisine; he is evidently good at this, though for whatever reason — more work to draw them? — his restaurant is devoid of customers. The torch he carries for sometime girlfriend Connie Souphanousinphone (Lauren Tom) occupies the other half of his storyline here.

There are light topical references — a sidelong joke about the names billionaires give their children, for example — but the show happily lives in its world of day-to-day annoyances and victories. Hank is excited by a trip to the George W. Bush presidential library, but one can’t imagine him with any affection for the current Oval Office occupant; he’s too common-sense for that. Extreme views and conspiracy theories are loaded into Hank’s pest exterminator friend Dale Gribble. The late Johnny Hardwick, who voiced him for the first six episodes of the new season, was replaced by Toby Huss. (Jonathan Joss, who played the character John Redcorn, died in a shooting this June.) Cartoons have a way of dealing with death — they don’t have to — and time means no more there than the animators want it to. It’s a comfortable state of being.

This is a story about a movie that saved a sport. OK, that’s a stretch, but only a little one.

Scottie Scheffler is the No. 1 golfer in the world. Has been for a couple of years. He has won two Masters titles, one PGA Championship and the recent British Open, as well as an Olympic gold medal. He is so good that somebody ought to check his golf balls for tiny magnets that hook up to the cups on the greens. So far this year, by slapping a little white dimpled ball around in the grass, he has won $19.2 million. He has yet to turn 30, but his overall income, just from golf tournaments, is around $90 million.

This guy is so good that his caddie, Ted Scott, is estimated, at the normal 10% of winnings, to have pocketed about $5 million. For carrying a bag.

So, what’s the problem?

Scheffler is so good that he might also be sparking a trend called remote remorse. You really want to watch, but once he gets ahead by a couple of shots, there is nothing left. No drama, no possible twist and turn, no chance of any excitement. Other players in those tense, title-on-the-line final holes, dunk a shot into the water or bury one so deep in the sand that their only choice of club is a shovel.

Not Scheffler. He is a 6-foot-3 human robot whose veins circulate ice water. When the going gets tough, Scheffler yawns.

So, you see this and you know what is coming next — final putt, arms raised in satisfaction, a hug for his multi-millionaire caddie, the mandatory TV interview with the apparently mandatory British-accent female sportscaster, who will always start with, “How does this feel?”

You, and millions more, click the button on your remote for something more interesting, like HGTV or the Gardening Channel. When Scheffler gets ahead in the final round like that — which is almost always — it is game over. He can squeeze the drama out of a golf tournament like Bill Belichick could out of an NFL postgame interview.

Certainly, you say, Tiger Woods used to win lots of tournaments by lots of big margins and that never seemed boring.

That’s because it wasn’t. Tiger was animated, angry, annoyed, analytical, fed up with some part of his game, charged up over another part, mad at a reporter, upset with his agent. Tiger could win by eight, occasionally did, and it was still must-see TV. When Tiger was at his best, nobody could beat him and the public loved him and just wanted more. Scheffler is currently at his best and the public certainly is terribly impressed and, sadly, kind of meh. Tiger was a pound-on-the-table-and-shout-at-the-TV kind of player. Scheffler is a nod and a shrug.

But there is hope. Hollywood has intervened, as only Hollywood can.

Twenty-nine years ago, an up-and-coming comic named Adam Sandler made a movie inspired by one of his New England friends, who was a great hockey player and could also hit a golf ball a long distance with a hockey stick. Sandler called the movie “Happy Gilmore” and found a wide audience that loved it for its irreverence about a game that flaunts hushed reverence.

Among the highlights was an on-course fistfight between Happy Gilmore (Sandler) and aging TV game show host Bob Barker. Barker won by KO.

The movie was hilariously overdone slapstick. It was a gut-laugh-a-minute. It was so stupid and wacky that it was wonderful.

Now, Sandler has made “Happy Gilmore 2,” and it is again a must-see for all the reasons that the original was. Plus the cameo appearances. Especially one by Scheffler.

In the movie, Scheffler is good, funny, fun. He doesn’t have a lot of lines, but he has perfect timing. He punches a guy out on the green and the cops come and haul him away. “Oh, no. Not again,” he says.

Remember, earlier this year, when Louisville cops hauled him away and put him in an orange jail suit, when he was accused of making a wrong turn while driving into the golf course at the PGA Championship, a tournament that he would eventually win? Well, Sandler and his writers made hay out of that, but more significantly, Scheffler played to it perfectly.

After the movie punch-out, Scheffler is pictured in a jail cell, in an orange jail suit, as a guard asks, since he has been in that cell for three days, if he wants to get out. Scheffler replies, “Ah, what’s for dinner?” When he is told chicken fingers, he says, “I think I’ll stay another night.”

Now, of course, none of that is knee-slapping stuff, but it is Scheffler, and the self-effacing comedy is a perfect image-enhancer, even if it is only in a stupid movie. It is so much better for golf fans to see Scheffler as a roll-with-the-punches fun guy, than an emotionless, ball-striking robot. Neither is totally accurate, but in this media world of image-is-everything, “Happy Gilmore 2” has done wonderful things for this wonderful golfer. Even moreso, for his sport

He will be all over your TV screens for the three-week FedEx playoffs. It starts Aug. 7 with a tournament in Memphis, followed by the next week in Baltimore and the grand finale Aug. 21 in East Lake, Ga., near Atlanta. For the playoffs, the PGA will distribute $100 million in prize money and the winner will receive $10 million.

Scheffler, a likely winner, would then certainly be invited to appear on TV, especially the late-night shows such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon. This would present another great image-building opportunity. He could show up in an orange jump suit.

It felt like 2022 all over again when Josh Gad took to Instagram to express his heartbreak about contracting a “virus known as COVID” and announce his decision to pull out of playing King Herod in the highly anticipated production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl, which staged its first night of a three-night run Friday.

Gad hinted that maybe — if he tested negative — the situation might change. The following day, however, John Stamos announced on social media that his weekend “just got biblical” and that he was stepping in for Gad in the show.

On Friday, things got extra dramatic when Gad said that he had tested negative. Fans on his social media clamored to know what that might mean, but he stayed mum until Saturday when he posted a photo of himself in an elaborate gold lamé costume with the words, “See you all Sunday night.”

A rep for the Los Angeles Philharmonic said that final confirmation that Gad will return won’t come until noon Sunday.

Stamos appeared as Herod on Friday night, bringing some comic relief to an electric, deeply emotional show.

After one of star Cynthia Erivo’s solos, the audience clapped so loud, long and reverently, that tears came to the singer’s eyes — which only caused the crowd to cheer harder. The moment of symbiotic love lasted for at least 3 minutes, maybe more.

The Bowl was packed with marquee names, including former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Jim Carrey and Ted Neely (who played Jesus in the 1973 film adaptation of the musical). Erivo brought composer Andrew Lloyd Webber onto the stage as a special guest during curtain call.

Still, Gad fans were many — you could tell because they held Olaf dolls and wore Olaf jewelry — and they could be heard expressing their sorrow at the absence of Gad in the crush of the crowd after the show.

Gad’s addition to the cast, which included Erivo as Jesus, Adam Lambert as Judas and Phillipa Soo as Mary Magdalene, was hailed by fans; and in an interview with The Times during rehearsal, Gad spoke about being beyond excited to perform at the Bowl for the very first time with a stellar cast that he called the Avengers of musical theater.

“I’ve wanted to play the Hollywood Bowl forever,” said Gad. “But I never thought I was good enough to play the Hollywood Bowl,” he added with a self-deprecating smile

Even though the role of King Herod entails a single song — a kind of comic interlude that Gad likened to the part of King George in “Hamilton” — Gad showed up at as many rehearsals as possible before he came down with COVID. He just liked sitting on the sidelines, soaking up the scene and the incredible talent on display, he said.

At a Saturday rehearsal before the show, he filmed numbers on phones for various cast members and cheered his heart out. His sense of excitement was palpable. Now he’ll get one night to give “King Herod’s Song” his all.

SEOUL  — When South Koreans start to obsess over a movie or TV series, they abbreviate its name, a distinction given to Netflix’s latest hit “K-pop Demon Hunters.” In media headlines and in every corner of the internet, the American-made film is now universally referred to as “Keh-deh-hun” — the first three syllables of the title when read aloud in Korean.

And audiences are already clamoring for a sequel.

The animated film follows a fictional South Korean girl group named “HUNTR/X” as its three members — Rumi, Mira and Zoey — try to deliver the world from evil through the power of song and K-pop fandom.

Since its release in June, it has become the most watched original animated film in Netflix history, with millions of views worldwide, including the U.S. and South Korea, where its soundtrack has topped the charts on local music streaming platform Melon. Fans have also cleaned out the gift shop at the National Museum of Korea, which has run out of a traditional tiger pin that resembles one of the movie’s characters.

Much of the film’s popularity in South Korea is rooted in its keenly observed details and references to Korean folklore, pop culture and even national habits — the result of having a production team filled with K-pop fans, as well as a group research trip to South Korea that co-director Maggie Kang led in order to document details as minute as the appearance of local pavement.

There are nods to traditional Korean folk painting, a Korean guide to the afterlife, the progenitors of K-pop and everyday mannerisms. In one scene, at a table in a restaurant where the three girls are eating, viewers might notice how the utensils are laid atop a napkin, an essential ritual for dining out in South Korea — alongside pouring cups of water for everyone at the table.

“The more that I watch ‘Keh-deh-hun,’ the more that I notice the details,” South Korean music critic Kim Yoon-ha told local media last month. “It managed to achieve a verisimilitude that would leave any Korean in awe.”

::

Despite its subject matter and association with the “K-wave,” that catch-all term for any and all Korean cultural export, “K-pop Demon Hunters,” at least in the narrowest sense, doesn’t quite fit the bill.

Produced by Sony Pictures and directed by Korean Canadian Kang and Chris Appelhans — who has held creative roles on other animated films such as “Coraline” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — the movie is primarily in English and geared toward non-Korean audiences. But its popularity in South Korea is another sign that the boundaries of the K-wave are increasingly fluid — and that, with more and more diaspora Korean artists entering the mix, it flows in the opposite direction, too.

Those barriers have already long since broken down in music: many K-pop artists and songwriters are non-Korean or part of the Korean diaspora, reflecting the genre’s history of foreign influences such as Japanese pop or American hip-hop.

“Once a cultural creation acquires a universality, you can’t just confine it to the borders of the country of origin, which is where K-pop is today,” said Kim Il-joong, director of the content business division at the Korea Creative Content Agency, a government body whose mission is to promote South Korean content worldwide. “Despite what the name ‘K-pop’ suggests, it is really a global product.”

In “K-pop Demon Hunters,” Zoey is a rapper from Burbank. In addition, the soundtrack was written and performed by a team that includes producers, artists and choreographers associated with some of the biggest real-life K-pop groups of the past decade.

Streaming productions are increasingly flying multiple flags, too: Apple TV’s “Pachinko” or Netflix’s “XO, Kitty” are both American productions that were filmed in South Korea. But few productions have been able to inspire quite the same level of enthusiasm as “K-pop Demon Hunters,” whose charm for many South Koreans is how accurately it captures local idiosyncrasies and contemporary life.

While flying in their private jet, the three girls are shown sitting on the floor even though there is a sofa right beside them. This tendency to use sofas as little more than backrests is an endless source of humor and self-fascination among South Koreans, most of whom would agree that the centuries-old custom of sitting on the floor dies hard.

South Korean fans and media have noted that the characters correctly pronounce “ramyeon,” or Korean instant noodles. The fact that ramyeon is often conflated with Japanese ramen — which inspired the invention of the former decades ago — has long been a point of exasperation for many South Koreans and local ramyeon companies, which point to the fact that the Korean adaption has since evolved into something distinct.

It’s a small difference — the Korean version is pronounced “rah myun” — but one that it pays to get right in South Korea.

Apple TV’s “Pachinko,” with Sungkyu Kim, Eunchae Jung and Minha Kim, is an American production filmed in South Korea.

(Apple)

The girls’ cravings for ramyeon during their flight also caught the eye of Ireh, a member of the real-life South Korean girl group Purple Kiss who praised the film’s portrayals of life as a K-pop artist.

“I don’t normally eat ramyeon but whenever I go on tour, I end up eating it,” she said in a recent interview with local media. “The scene reminded me of myself.”

South Korean fans have also been delighted by a pair of animals, Derpy and Sussy, which borrow from jakhodo, a genre of traditional Korean folk painting in which tigers and magpies are depicted side by side, popularized during the Joseon Dynasty in the 19th century.

In the film, Derpy is the fluorescent tiger with goggle eyes that always appears with its sidekick, a three-eyed bird named Sussy.

“K-pop Demon Hunters” is peppered with homages to Korean artists throughout history who are seen today as the progenitors of contemporary K-pop.

(Netflix)

Though they have long since been extinct, tigers were once a feared presence on the Korean peninsula, at times coming down from the mountains to terrorize the populace. They were also revered as talismans that warded off evil spirits. But much like Derpy itself, jakhodo reimagined tigers as friendlier, oftentimes comical beings. Historians have interpreted this as the era’s political satire: the magpie, audacious in the presence of a great predator, represented the common man standing up to the nobility.

The movie is peppered with homages to Korean artists throughout history who are seen today as the progenitors of contemporary K-pop. There are apparent nods to the “Jeogori Sisters,” a three-piece outfit that was active from 1939 to 1945 and is often described as Korea’s first girl group, followed by the Kim Sisters, another three-piece that found success in the U.S., performing in Las Vegas and appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Longtime K-pop fans might recognize the demon hunters from the 1990s as S.E.S., a pioneering girl group formed by S.M. Entertainment, the label behind present-day superstars Aespa and Red Velvet. (Bada, S.E.S.’s main vocalist, recently covered “Golden,” the film’s headline track, on YouTube.)

For a long time, South Korean audiences have often complained about outside depictions of the country as inauthentic and out of touch. Not anymore.

“Korea wasn’t just shown as an extra add-on as it has been for so long,” Kim said. “‘K-pop Demon Hunters’ did such a great job depicting Korea in a way that made it instantly recognizable to audiences here.”

Ella Berman’s third novel, “L.A. Women,” is set in Laurel Canyon between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s. It’s a perfect place and time for a novelist looking to establish a tense atmosphere: The dreamy, free-love atmosphere slowly curdled into hard drugs and the Manson murders. Sunshine turned to smog. Joni Mitchell’s sprightly “Ladies of the Canyon” album gave way to the melancholy “Blue.”

A scene early in the novel captures the dynamic, as locals assemble for a party in the home of Lane, an acclaimed novelist and journalist, while the bloom begins to fall off the rose: “They are here because their world was so vivid, so beautiful, that they are all somehow willing to settle for a ghost version of it.”

That line comes from Lane’s perspective, and she has reasons to be cynical: In 1975, her marriage is crumbling, her second novel has taken a beating with the critics, and her estranged friend and fellow writer, Gala, has gone missing. That last plot point is the novel’s drivetrain, because her disappearance exposes so many things about the culture of the time: flightiness, despair, drugs, loss and fear.

Before their split, Lane and Gala were at the same time friends and rivals. In the late ’60s, Lane was a nationally famous explainer of California culture, hard-edged but with a literary bent. (Think Joan Didion.) Gala was the free-spirit hanger-on in the city’s club scene, falling for a rock singer and happily dishing about her Southern California misadventures. (Think Eve Babitz, with a dash of Carrie Bradshaw.) Gala gave Lane some valuable tough-love advice about the draft of her first novel, which moved Lane to open some doors for Gala at big-ticket magazines. They covered different worlds. What would be the harm?

Over the course of Berman’s novel, it becomes clear the answer is plenty. As the narrative shuttles back and forth between 1965 and 1976, Berman shows how messily entangled the two women’s lives are, and that their influence on each other as writers is more porous than either wants to believe. “L.A. Women” is in part a mystery novel, as Lane investigates Gala’s disappearance. But she’s questioning the sincerity of her motivations along the way. After all, her next book is a roman à clef about Gala, and writing about a woman who might be in dire straits would be exploitative. Or, rather, more exploitative.

Gala’s disappearance also prompts Lane to wonder what kind of fiction about her old friend would be most accurate. Is she a fallen starlet or a woman reinventing herself? She observes that one version of Gala “would end up like so many L.A. women before her — violet and vomit-streaked in a stranger’s bed at the Chateau, or maybe she would buy a baby grand piano and move to the coast to start over, bright-eyed and sober with a new sense of wonder for the world.” Resolving that question is as key to the book as Gala’s location.

In the meantime, Berman sets plenty of scenes in some of L.A.’s most famous landmarks: the Magic Castle, Musso & Frank’s, the Chateau Marmont, and, hey, look, it’s painter Ed Ruscha driving down Wilshire Boulevard! Such cameos feel a little tacked-on and obligatory, candy-colored as a Hockney painting. But the novel’s truest setting is an emotional one, anyway; Berman’s gift is for revealing the ways that attachment warps into envy, and how we rationalize or ignore those emotions even while they consume us.

Berman suggests that, in some ways, the culture pushed both Gala and Lane into becoming adversaries. Though their writing styles are distinct, they’re framed by others as rivals, particularly by men: “Isn’t that what most men wanted — to flatten women not into individuals with needs and wants and requirements, but into a vague, out-of-focus mass?” Men who fail to follow the rules wind up in the city’s cultural thresher as well: The women’s mutual friend, Charlie, a high-powered music-industry power broker (think David Geffen) has his status threatened once his homosexuality becomes an open secret.

“L.A. Women” is in many ways a breezy book, gentle about its crises and suggesting early on that a happy ending is in the offing. But thematically it has teeth. Media culture, Laurel Canyon culture, gender culture all conspire to keep Lane and Gala from being what a writer needs most to be: honest. For all of her storied flintiness, Lane strains to keep her feelings about Gala at a distance, and Gala refuses to acknowledge that she needs Lane to anchor her recklessness. But admitting to that sort of need requires a decade of emotional work, and the novel’s strongest moments show how deep the struggle can run.

“Writers are always selling someone out,” the Lane-like journalist Janet Malcolm once famously wrote. The reasons for that are myriad: money, attention, a good story, status. “L.A. Women” captures that range with admirable sensitivity. But at its core it grasps that the challenge is more fundamental: How we can treat the people close to us more as human beings and less like commodities. Or, as Gala puts it: “It was infinitely more satisfying to be somebody rather than somebody’s plus-one.”

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

As Justin Timberlake bid farewell to his Forget Tomorrow world tour, he got candid with fans about his health.

The “Mirrors” and “SexyBack” pop star, 44, on Thursday revealed in a heartfelt Instagram post that he powered through his circuit of live performances as he battled a “relentlessly debilitating” bout of Lyme disease. The singer, who faced backlash for his low-energy performances in recent weeks, said in his lengthy caption that sharing his health issues was to help him “shed some light on what I’ve been up against behind the scenes.”

The Grammy-winning singer and actor went in depth about the disease’s mental and physical toll. Although he said he was “shocked” by the diagnosis, he said it provided some clarity.

“At least I could understand why I would be onstage and in a massive amount of nerve pain or, just feeling crazy fatigue or sickness,” he continued. “I was faced with a personal decision. Stop touring? Or, keep going and figure it out.”

The Mayo Clinic defines Lyme disease as an illness “caused by borrelia bacteria” that humans can get if they are bitten by an infected tick. Symptoms of Lyme disease can include joint stiffness, muscle aches and pains, fever and headache. Antibiotics are used to treat the disease.

Timberlake, amid the “fleeting stress my body was feeling,” said he opted to continue with his tour. “I’m so glad I kept going,” he said.

Pushing through with the tour, which began in April 2024 in Vancouver and ended Wednesday in Turkey, allowed Timberlake to prove his “mental tenacity,” he said. The singer said he would also work to be “more transparent about my struggles” with fans.

Throughout his tour, Timberlake faced a handful of personal and public obstacles. In October 2024, he announced the postponement of several shows to recover from bronchitis and laryngitis. That same month, he also abruptly called off a concert in Newark, N.J., because of an injury.

Notably, the former ‘NSYNC frontman carried on with his slate of shows last year after his DWI arrest in the Hamptons in June 2024. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of impaired driving, his driving privileges were suspended and he was sentenced in September to 25 hours of community service at a nonprofit of his choosing. He was also required to make a public safety announcement about the dangers of impaired driving.

After sharing his health update, Timberlake reminisced on his touring experience, continuing his post in his own comments section. He thanked supporters for their “energy and love” and the crew and artists who joined him on the road. Though performing live is “sacred” to the “Suit & Tie” music star, he said the status of his stage career remains unclear.

“I honestly don’t know what my future is onstage but I’ll always cherish this run! And all of them before,” he wrote. “It’s been the stuff of LEGEND for me.”

He ended his post sending love to his actor wife Jessica Biel and their two children. His caption accompanied a carousel of behind-the-scenes photos.

Former Times staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report.

Skeletal babies. Starving families shot down while waiting in line for food. Images and video of the famine in Gaza are now everywhere, and they’ve done in a few weeks what 21 months of war could not: squeeze empathy for Palestinians out of MAGA.

This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia became the first House Republican to publicly use the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis now gripping the Palestinian enclave. “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza,” Greene said in a social media post on her X account Monday evening.

More than 125 people have died because of malnutrition, including 85 children, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said over the weekend. According to the United Nations, more than 875 people have been killed in recent weeks, most by Israeli troops, while trying to access food and aid at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution centers. On Monday alone, Israeli strikes or gunfire killed at least 78 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip.

Greene’s comments coincide with growing global outrage over reports of mass starvation in Gaza since Israel first cut off supplies to the enclave in March, then reopened aid lines in May but with new restrictions. In recent days, photographs and videos of emaciated children and dying infants have proliferated across news and social media, as have videos of desperate Palestinians killed while waiting in line for food.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday that “there is no starvation in Gaza.” And commanding officer Effie Defrin, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Force, told reporters that most of the images were fake and distributed by Hamas. “It’s a campaign,” he said. “Unfortunately, some of the Israeli media, including some of the international media, is distributing this information and those false pictures, and creating an image of starvation which doesn’t exist.”

But even President Trump, a staunch supporter of Israel and Netanyahu, had to concede when asked about the crisis. “That’s real starvation stuff — I see it, and you can’t fake that,” he said Monday while in Scotland, where he met with European leaders and fielded questions about a crisis of another sort (his relationship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein). “We have to get the kids fed.”

The undeniable horror in Gaza has hit an inflection point, and while the spike in compassion among the MAGA set may be momentary, other world leaders are seeking solutions to the suffering with or without U.S. support. Late Tuesday, France and 14 other Western nations called on other countries to move toward recognizing a Palestinian state. The statement was signed by the foreign ministers of Andorra, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Slovenia and Spain.

Greene’s use of the word “genocide” is her strongest condemnation yet of Israel’s war conduct, and it deviates from the Republican party line of unconditional support for the Jewish state. But she has also targeted pro-Palestinian lawmakers such as representatives Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), accusing them of “antisemitic activity” and “sympathizing with terrorists” when they called for Israel to lift its blockade of humanitarian aid for Gazans.

Greene’s comments about Gaza were in part a rebuke to a Republican representative, Randy Fine of Florida. Last week, he said the images of skin-and-bones children in Gaza were “Muslim terror propaganda” and posted, “Release the hostages. Until then, starve away.” The New York Times reported that Fine’s remarks were made the same day he was promoted to a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee where he would focus on international policy.

Greene posted Sunday that she “can unequivocally say that what happened to innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th was horrific. Just as I can unequivocally say that what has been happening to innocent people and children in Gaza is horrific.”

Recently, the IDF announced it would pause action in certain parts of Gaza for hours each day and increase aid drops. The death toll from the war in Gaza has topped 60,000, with more likely buried under rubble from nearly two years of fighting. Hamas killed an estimated 1,200 people in an attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Though there has been an outcry over the staggering number of civilian deaths since the start of the war, increasingly graphic coverage of the Gaza famine has engendered new levels of outrage on both sides of the political spectrum. Too bad it’s taken the unspeakable suffering of babies, families and innocents to get us here.

A New Mexico judge has dismissed Alec Baldwin’s lawsuit alleging that he was maliciously prosecuted — one year after the actor-producer was cleared of a criminal charge in the “Rust” shooting death of the film’s cinematographer.

Baldwin alleged in a January lawsuit that he was the victim of overzealous New Mexico prosecutors and law enforcement. Baldwin claimed he had become the state’s celebrity scapegoat for the accidental on-set shooting of director of photography Halyna Hutchins.

The lawsuit came six months after a judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charge that Baldwin had been facing.

Former New Mexico 1st Judicial District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ended Baldwin’s trial last July after learning prosecutors withheld potential evidence from Baldwin’s legal team.

Baldwin’s subsequent suit targeted special prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey, 1st Judicial Dist. Atty. Mary Carmack-Altwies, Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputies and Santa Fe County Commissioners.

The defendants were “blinded by their desire to convict Alec Baldwin for all the wrong reasons, and at any cost,” his lawsuit claimed.

On Tuesday, a different judge dismissed Baldwin’s claims against the state, citing a lack of activity in the case.

Third Judicial Dist. Judge Casey B. Fitch wrote that it had been six months since any “significant action” had been filed in Baldwin’s case. Fitch gave the lawyers 30 days to file a motion to keep the lawsuit moving.

The ruling comes as legal proceedings in the “Rust” shooting saga are winding down.

In May, weapons handler Hannah Gutierrez was freed from prison after serving 14 months for her felony conviction of involuntary manslaughter in Hutchins’ October 2021 death on the New Mexico film set.

Baldwin’s case was dismissed a year ago by a Marlowe Sommer, who has since retired, on what was supposed to be the third day of the actor’s high-profile trial.

Instead, his defense attorneys raised serious questions over how New Mexico law enforcement officers and prosecutors handled evidence as they mounted their prosecution.

Baldwin’s attorneys accused the state of misconduct, pointing to a batch of unexamined bullets that a potential witness turned over to sheriff’s investigators in March 2024. Marlowe Sommer appeared furious over the handling of the evidence, which was not given to the defense, and dismissed the single charge against Baldwin.

Earlier this year, when Baldwin’s suit was filed, Morrissey said prosecutors had long been aware of Baldwin’s plans to sue New Mexico. She added: “We look forward to our day in court.”

On a recent Saturday in Inglewood, about a dozen acclaimed music producers including Dahi — who’s worked with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole and Drake — and DJ Khalil — who has collaborated with artists like Dr. Dre, Kanye West and Eminem — gathered with 80 students to geek out on the art of beat making.

The free three-day workshop, called the Audio Affect Series, was co-hosted by TEC Leimert, a South L.A.-based nonprofit that aims to bridge the gap between technology and entertainment, Serato (DJ and music production software company) and beloved street wear retailer Undefeated. The purpose of the event, which took place July 25-27, was to bring Black and brown producers of all skill levels together for hands-on instruction designed to help them level up their skills.

The idea for the workshop manifested a few years ago when TEC Leimert hosted a music production activation during its annual conference in the Leimert Park Plaza. Hours after the conference was over, attendees were still huddled in a small tent where a few producers were doing live beat making sessions and offering tips.

“It was like 8 p.m. and they were still going,” recalls TEC Leimert Executive Director Paris McCoy. “It was just so clear that this was the type of space that artists wanted to be in, so I was just like, “We got to make it happen.” By the time her nonprofit reached out to the Serato team about collaborating on a beat making program, they were eager to get involved because they were already in talks about doing something similar, McCoy says.

“We started to realize that there was a gap between some folks who were trying to get into the music production space but didn’t have the [tools] and/or, depending on where they are, access to mentors who can help them kind of walk through things,” adds OP Miller, who is a DJ and head of artist relations for Serato.

Roughly 80 rising Black and brown producers participated in the three-day workshop hosted by TEC Leimert, Serato and Undefeated.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The first official Audio Affect Series took place in 2023 at Serato’s studio in L.A.’s Arts District. It featured four separate workshops that took place over the course of several months. About 35 people participated in each of the intimate sessions, which were beginner-friendly and were led by L.A.-based artists like Lyric Jones, Georgia Ann Muldrow and Dahi.

This year’s event, which was held at Volume Studios in Inglewood, was even larger. Roughly 80 out of 200 applicants were selected for the program. Undefeated provided merchandise for the workshop, including a hoodie that many attendees wore throughout the weekend.

The participants, who ranged from teens to Gen-Xers, were dispersed in various studios inside the massive multi-production studio. With their headphones on, they bobbed their heads to the beats they were cooking up and watched intently as sound waves danced across their laptop screens.

The workshop, which was designed for intermediate to advanced skill levels, covered topics such as how to discover your personal sound as a producer, how to sample and clear tracks and how to create a strong online presence. Throughout the weekend, participants watched live demos from speakers and they were given time to cook up beats of their own. On the final day, each student was given the aux to play their beat for the entire group.

“This is a necessary program to have for people who are interested in making music,” says Linafornia.

(Halline Overby)

Among the speakers were pioneering funk artist and TEC Leimert board member Dām-Funk; Watts-born rapper and producer Dibiase; Inglewood-born musician and event curator Thurz; and multi-instrumentalist and singer Amber Navran.

Erika Jasper, a longtime DJ and self-proclaimed “novice producer,” attended the first Audio Affect Series in 2023 and decided to come back because she wanted to build her confidence as a female producer.

“I figured it would be nice to learn from some of the best producers in the game,” says Jasper, who goes by the artist name q.sol. “Plus, Serato always does a phenomenal job at providing the best instruction, step by step.”

After making beats for roughly 25 years, Thomas Phillips says he wanted to participate in the program because he’s trying to take his music more seriously now. “I’m a software engineer, but I want to switch over to audio [engineering],” says Phillips, who brought along his 7-year-old son, who was making beats of his own. “So I’m just putting a lot more attention to my craft and being more intentional instead of just doing it in my spare time as a hobby.”

Linafornia, a producer and DJ from Leimert Park, says being able to participate in an event like the Audio Affect Series would’ve been helpful for her when she started making beats after high school.

“This is a necessary program to have for people who are interested in making music and they get to hear perspectives from people who look like them, who are around their age,” says Linafornia, who led a talk on the history of L.A.’s sound, ranging from jazz to G funk and hip-hop. “I didn’t have that growing up. I wish they had programs like this when I was a teenager.”

Dahi, an Inglewood-born producer who won a Grammy for his production on J. Cole and 21 Savage’s song “A Lot,” spoke at the first Audio Affect Series and was eager to return.

“Showing people the tools to make better music is something that I’m always championing and I think that is something that we need to do more of,” says Dahi, who walked students through his creative process when it comes to making beats. “I think a lot of times, people complain about what they don’t like now and that it’s not good, and I’m just like “Help the youth. Help people who want to get better.”

Many attendees said they could relate to Navran’s presentation about finding her own sound after years of singing and playing woodwind instruments, then finally taking the deep dive into music production years later.

The class of students for this year’s Audio Affect series pose for a group photo.

(Halline Overby)

“I didn’t produce for a long time because I thought I couldn’t,” says Navran, who is also a member of the L.A.-based band Moonchild. But after “receiving encouragement from friends, seeing other people do it and getting a starter kit of how different people approach stuff was such a nice way to jump into it.”

Like Linafornia, Navran wishes that a program like the Audio Affect Series existed at the start of her journey. “To be surrounded by producers, people you can meet, collaborate with and be inspired by is so powerful,” she adds.

To wrap up the workshop, each of the participants will be given about two months to complete and submit a beat to be considered for the Audio Affect Series’ compilation project. Legendary producer and DJ Battlecat will be curating the project, which will be released on vinyl next year.

After receiving positive feedback for the program, McCoy says she and her team want to make it an annual event so more people can experience it.

She says, “There is a real hunger and need for this kind of space.”

Awdah Hathaleen a Palestinian community leader who was a consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” died Monday after an Israeli settler allegedly shot him to death in the occupied West Bank.

“No Other Land” filmmaker and subject Yuval Abraham announced his colleague’s death Monday, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “[Hathaleen] just died. Murdered.” Two hours prior, Abraham shared video of the confrontation that led to Hathaleen’s death. In the video, the settler in a dark shirt can be seen shoving people in a group, pulling out and pointing his pistol in their direction. The video shows him firing at people off-screen.

In the caption of his video, Abraham writes that the settler “just shot” Hathaleen in the lungs and identified the shooter as Yinon Levi. Levi was among the 13 hard-line Israeli settlers targeted last year by international sanctions for their alleged attacks and harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank. President Trump lifted U.S. sanctions against the Israelis in January.

“This is him in the video firing like crazy,” Abraham tweeted.

The incident occurred in in the village of Umm al-Khair, in the Masafer Yatta region that was the focus of “No Other Land.” Hathaleen was rushed to a hospital in Israel, where he was pronounced dead, his family confirmed to the New York Times. He was 31.

According to multiple reports, Israeli police said they responded to the scene, detaining and arresting an Israeli citizen. Police did not identify the detainee they took in for questioning, and claimed “terrorists hurled rocks toward” the nearby Israeli settlement of Carmel, according to CNN. Additionally, the Israeli military detained five Palestinians and two foreign tourists for their alleged involvement in Monday’s incident, the BBC reported.

The IDF did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for confirmation on Tuesday.

“No Other Land” filmmaker and Palestinian journalist Basel Adra on Tuesday tweeted video showing the attack from another angle. In this video, Levi is seen with the pistol in his right hand, smacking a person in front of him. The clip also sees Levi raising his right arm and firing off-screen. Adra says Levi “fires the bullet that took” Hathaleen’s life, adding in his caption that “the apartheid court decided to release him to house arrest.”

On Monday, Adra tweeted he was in disbelief about his friend’s death: “My dear friend Adwah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village where a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time.”

On Instagram, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence described Hathaleen as a well-known community figure: “an activist, artist, and teacher in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta.” The activist group reminded Instagram followers that last month Hathaleen and another Palestinian man were denied entry, detained overnight and deported back to the West Bank when they arrived at the San Francisco International Airport.

“So many in our community knew Awdah, and gained so much by learning from him, and being his friend,” the organization said, concluding its statement with a call to action. “May Awdah’s memory be a revolution. May we see justice for Awdah, and justice for all Palestinians, within our lifetime.”

Earlier this year, Israeli settlers brutalized another member of the Oscar-winning “No Other Land” team. In March, Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal was beat in his head and stomach by settlers in the village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta area. Palestinian residents said the settlers, some wearing masks, some carrying guns and some wearing military uniforms, attacked as residents were breaking their fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, according to the Associated Press. Israeli military and police forces detained the filmmaker on suspicion of hurling rocks at IDF and police.

He was released a day later, with bruises on his face and blood on his clothes. As he recalled hearing “the voice of soldiers laughing at me,” his wife said she felt the international attention surrounding “No Other Land’s” Oscar win prompted settlers to “attack us more.” The harrowing documentary , which became the subject of controversy in Miami Beach earlier this year, documents Israel’s demolition of Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta and the displacement of their communities in favor of Israeli military training grounds.

Since Israel launched its war against Hamas nearly two years ago, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday. At least 77 were killed over the past 24 hours, most while seeking food.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Adam Lambert sits on a rickety wooden chair just outside the main chapel at the Hollywood United Methodist Church on a break from rehearsing the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Dressed in beige shorts and a vest with matching mid-calf boots, Lambert wears his trademark glitter eye makeup with thick black liner. He’s calm and collected, content to spend his lunch break chatting, even though the rehearsal schedule is a breakneck nine days total. He chalks up his easygoing demeanor to the high-wattage professionalism of the cast, and his familiarity with the music.

Lambert first heard the soundtrack on one of his dad’s vinyl records when he was about 10 years old.

“I’ve always wanted to do that musical. I’ve always wanted to play Judas,” he says with a smile. “And when they told me Cynthia [Erivo] was interested, I was like, ‘Wow, this is gonna be crazy.’”

Lambert, a fan-favorite “American Idol” runner-up who began performing with Queen in 2011, plays Judas to Erivo’s Jesus in the Hollywood Bowl production directed by Tony-winning choreographer Sergio Trujillo.

Josh Gad, who portrays King Herod, calls the cast “the musical theater version of the Avengers.” He’s referring to Erivo and Lambert, in addition to Phillipa Soo as Mary Magdalene, Milo Manheim as Peter, Raúl Esparza as Pontius Pilate, Tyrone Huntley as Simon and Brian Justin Crum as Annas. The sold-out show runs from Friday to Sunday.

Judging from the ongoing commentary and controversy over the casting on social media, a queer, Black, female actor playing Jesus and a gay actor portraying Judas feel like a revelation to fans grappling with mounting concerns about civil rights in America. Over the last six months, the Trump administration has curtailed diversity, equity and inclusion programs and attempted to roll back key legal protections for certain members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“The challenge for the audience of seeing a female Black Jesus is so exciting. And we all feel the excitement,” says Lambert, adding that the show doesn’t change lyrics or pronouns. “Maybe it doesn’t have to do with male or female. I don’t really know if it matters what gender Jesus was, because it was about the teachings and the love and the connection to faith. So shouldn’t it transcend gender?”

Power — who has it and who doesn’t — has emerged as a defining narrative in 2025. That was also the case 2,000 years ago when Pontius Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus, who posed a serious threat to the religious and political primacy of the Pharisees, the Herodians and the Romans. The 1971 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice imagines the final days of Jesus’ life, including his agony, before he ultimately accepts his fate.

Gad is keenly aware of the notion of power as historic through-line as he approaches his titular number, “Herod’s Song,” in which the King of Judea coyly mocks Jesus before taking a frightening turn into true menace.

“This is a man who’s so insecure he can’t afford to let Jesus out of his chains in order to actually face him without the help of soldiers around him,” Gad says. “My hope is that I’m getting to bring one of the greatest hypocrites to life in a way that will both make people laugh and also make them recognize that archetype.”

Brian Grohl, left, Josh Gad, Adam Lambert and Sergio Trujillo are bringing “Jesus Christ Superstar” to the Hollywood Bowl.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

The musical was first released as a concept album in 1970 and played at the Hollywood Bowl in 1971, before debuting on Broadway later that year. During its run, protests outside the stage door were commonplace, and although the musical has reached the pinnacle of success over the years, it has remained controversial.

Big summer musicals have been a staple of the Hollywood Bowl since 2000, but the shows went dark due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. With the exception of “Kinky Boots” in 2022, “Jesus Christ Superstar” is the first of what Bowl leaders hope will be an annual resumption of the beloved programming.

“We wanted to make sure that when we came back, it was the most spectacular thing we could do,” says Meghan Umber, president of the Hollywood Bowl and chief programming officer at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Jesus Christ Superstar,” was always at the top of the Bowl’s musical wishlist but wasn’t available until now, adds Brian Grohl, associate director of programming for the L.A. Phil.

“The number of titles that can sustain three nights at the Hollywood Bowl is a narrowed-down list already,” Grohl said, so securing the title resulted in a lot of jumping and shouting around the office. And when it came to who would play Jesus, Umber and Grohl both say Erivo topped the list. Her “yes” made all the others follow.

Adam Lambert performs Saturday during a rehearsal of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Gad calls Erivo — who was not present at a recent rehearsal because of a previous engagement — a “generational talent.” And he’s far from alone. Talk to anyone on the cast or crew and they will immediately hold forth on her extraordinary gifts.

“I see the hand of God in her,” Trujillo says reverently. “Even now, me being in the room with her, I hear it and I see it, and it is transcendent.”

Trujillo decided to go back to the musical’s roots as a concept album and is staging the show as a bare-bones rock concert. Instead of elaborate scenic design, there are black road boxes, microphones and cords. Even the costumes are contemporary with nods to their lineage. A rhythm band will play onstage and a 37-piece orchestra will perform behind a giant LED screen that will create the illusion that the musicians are hovering in the sky above the action.

Keeping the show in the present and infusing it with the raw energy of youth culture was crucial to Trujillo’s vision, he says, adding that in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, the musical “reflects the turbulent political times that we’re living in.”

“As I set up each one of the characters, they’re at a microphone singing and then they take the microphone and they step into the scene. I always want to remind the audience that we are in a concert, but we’re also telling the story,” says Trujillo. “Every single person understands the opportunity that we all have to take this monumental story, this monumental score, and to do it justice. So everyone is coming at it with such goodwill and so much joy.”

At a Saturday rehearsal in the church gym, Trujillo’s words ring true. The ensemble cast of more than 20 talented dancers and singers, in sweats and hoodies, run through “What’s the Buzz.” Gad watches and cheers from a table on the sidelines next to conductor and musical director Stephen Oremus, who smiles and nods his head with the beat.

“If you need me to stand in for Jesus, I’ll do it,” Gad jokes.

Phillipa Soo, who plays Mary Magdalene, sings a heartfelt rendition of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Lambert mesmerizes the assembled crew and onlookers with a potent rendition of “Heaven on Their Minds” and Soo brings tears with a heartfelt performance of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

“The more time I spend with this musical, the more brilliant I understand it to be,” says Manheim during a brief break. The 24-year-old, who‘s gained a tween following after playing Zed in Disney Channel’s “Zombies” franchise, is part of the youth cohort Trujillo wanted to cast. He wasn’t as familiar with the score as the older cast members — which is part of the point.

“It’s cross-generational,” says Trujillo of the show. “This is the gift that you give to your children and then it just gets passed on.”

Keshia Knight Pulliam, who shared the screen with Malcolm-Jamal Warner on “The Cosby Show,” highlighted the Emmy-nominated actor’s musical talents as she broke her silence on his death.

Pulliam on Sunday shared an Instagram video of Warner playing the bass at Atlanta’s City Winery. She shared the video of Warner, best known for his portrayal of clean-cut Theodore Huxtable, a week after he drowned while swimming in the Caribbean off Costa Rica. He was 54.

“A week ago I lost my big brother but I gained an angel,” Pulliam captioned her video. She played Rudy Huxtable, the youngest of the TV family’s children.

“I love you… I miss you,” she added, before referencing the other Huxtable children. “We got our girls.”

“House of Payne” star Pulliam, 46, is the latest “Cosby Show” star to mourn Warner. As news of the actor-musician’s death spread last week, co-stars including Bill Cosby, Geoffrey Owens and Raven-Symoné paid tribute. Cosby told CBS News last week he and co-star Phylicia Rashad were “embracing each other over the phone” when they learned of Warner’s death.

“He was never afraid to go to his room and study. He knew his lines and that he was quite comfortable even with the growing pains of a being a teenager,” Cosby said of Warner.

Owens, who appeared as Warner’s on-screen brother-in-law, Elvin Tibideaux, said in a statement shared with Deadline that his co-star’s death had left him speechless. “Malcolm was a lovely man; a sweet and sensitive soul. I respected him for many reasons, including the fact that he genuinely loved the act of creation,” he said.

Warner, also a TV director and a Grammy-winning musician, was on vacation with his family at the time of his death. He was swimming when a current pulled him deeper into the ocean.

The Red Cross in Costa Rica confirmed to The Times last week that its first responders also tended to another man in the same drowning incident that claimed Warner’s life. The patient, whose identity was not disclosed, survived. First responders found Warner without vital signs, and he was taken to the morgue.

As news of his death spread last week, his Hollywood peers, including Morris Chestnut, Tracee Ellis Ross, Viola Davis and Niecy Nash also paid tribute on social media. Beyoncé honored the actor, briefly updating her website to include a tribute to the TV star.

Pulliam also thanked fans on Sunday for their support as she mourned. “Thank you for every text, call and all the love that you have sent my way,” she said in an Instagram story. “I’ve just needed a moment.”

City Winery in Atlanta, the venue from Pulliam’s video, will host an event in Warner’s honor on Wednesday. “This tribute is our communal offering to say: Thank you. For the way he gave, for the work he created, for the bridges he built between TV, poetry, music, and love,” says the event website. According to the site, all profits will go to Warner’s family. He is survived by his wife and daughter.

Ken Jennings wants you to know he didn’t name his trivia game “Kennections.”

“It’s really an unpleasant name,” the “Jeopardy!” champion turned host says of the quizzes now published weekly by Mental Floss. “We have to lead with that. It was suggested by an editor at Parade Magazine, but it doesn’t look good or sound good.”

But Jennings loves the quizzes themselves, which are now collected (kellected?) in “The Complete Kennections.” The Simon & Schuster release, on shelves July 29, follows earlier Jennings books that included more writing. Those include: “Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs,” “Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks,” “Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids” and “100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife.”

Jennings recently spoke about his books, AI and why trivia matters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was writing books always a goal?

I was an English major in college. I wanted to write and to teach, but writing didn’t seem like a practical choice. I was also doing a double major in computer science, and in 2000 it was absurdly easy to get a job at a friend’s startup, even if you were a terrible programmer, which I was.

Writing about geography and myths and fabled places of the afterlife all seem to make sense coming from the brain of a “Jeopardy!” champion.

It’s easy to imagine the same kid in an elementary school library, reading about these things in the World Book encyclopedia during a rainy recess. That’s my origin story. I was just a sponge for weird information. That’s my origin story right there.

I thought of “Jeopardy!” as a fun, crazy summer and did not think it would be my life, so I tried making each book less about “Jeopardy!” and trivia than the one before it.

Is the information in your books trivial, or do you think it’s important to get readers to understand geography and the way our culture passes down myths and tales?

I’m a believer that trivia is not just a bar pastime, or even a way for little Lisa Simpsons to get told they’re smart into adulthood. I always felt trivia was kind of a universal social good, a way to enjoy cultural literacy.

I feel I’m part of the last generation that had to justify having nerdy interests. It was kind of shameful and made you the punchline of jokes in movie comedies and stand-up. Today, it seems self-evident to everyone younger than us that, well, of course you would just be obsessive about lunchboxes or about “Battlestar Galactica” or fossils. That’s totally normalized, and it’s actually good.

But I’ve also been mourning the loss of generalists, people who knew a little bit about everything, which is what “Jeopardy!” celebrates, but it’s not fashionable. We live in a siloed society of specialists. And I really think we’d be better off if everybody knew a little bit about everything.

I do think it’s good to know trivia is not something that makes you better than other people. It doesn’t exist to show off or even to make you feel smarter about yourself. Ideally, it should bring people together and make the world more interesting and make you a more sparkling conversationalist.

“Jeopardy!” and your books strive to make learning facts fun. Is there a lesson there for educators?

I think that’s the beauty of trivia. I wrote a series of books for kids with amazing facts because I liked that kind of book when I was a kid. And you can see it in a classroom, when you see kids’ eyes light up about information and about serious subjects and about knowledge when it’s presented in a fun way, especially with narrative.

Narrative is the secret sauce. It just makes kids think the world is an amazing adventure and you just have to be curious and dig into it. But that gets beaten out of us, and then a lot of us at some point just specialize in one thing. You need to remind people that learning is not a chore. If it’s not fun, you’re doing it wrong. And trivia is very good at that.

Every good “Jeopardy!” clue tells a story in some way, saying, here’s why you should want to know this or here’s what this might have to do with life and the reason why this is not random minutia, which I think is a lot of people’s stereotype of trivia nerds. A trivia question can help you connect it to other things. Trivia is just an art of connections.

That’s certainly true in your “Kennections” book.

I grew up doing crosswords, riddles and rebuses. I’ve always liked trivia that rewards not just the recall of the right fact but has a little more mental clockwork involved so you have to solve some puzzles. You have to analyze the clue and figure out why it exists and what it’s asking or what it’s not asking, what was included, what was omitted. There’s a lot of analysis that can kind of lead you to the right answer by deduction, even if you don’t know the right fact off the top of your head. One half of your brain is just trying to recall these five facts, but you’ve got this other half that’s trying to figure it out and step back and take the big picture. And it might be something outside the box.

The art of it is finding five things that fit in the category but that can have double meanings: Commodore is both a computer and a member of a Lionel Richie combo.

You write that “Kennections” consumes your life — you go into a bagel store and wonder if you can build five questions out of the flavors. Is the problem that in your day-to-day life, you’re constantly seeing things and thinking things this way? Or is the problem that you can’t say this out loud because you’ll make your family crazy?

That’s something I learned early — that being this trivia-loving kid has the potential to be annoying. But my kids know what they’re getting from me at this point. And they both have the gene themselves. One is obsessed with Major League Baseball, and one is obsessed with the history of Disney theme parks, and they have encyclopedic knowledge every bit as awe-inspiring and freakish as I had as a kid. And I’m proud of that.

Do you worry about living in a culture that’s so polarized that facts aren’t even universally received and where AI takes over people’s need to be curious, allowing students to take shortcuts in learning?

I think an oligarch class is going to deliver us a combination of both, where the AI will not only create reliance on it but give us bad, counterfactual information about important issues. And it’s really something I take seriously. It’s really something we need to be pushing back on now.

You don’t want to trust an AI summary of a subject or AI’s take on an issue without understanding who controls that algorithm and why they want you to hear that information.

Twelve years after a breakup that didn’t stick — and one year shy of the 20th anniversary of its biggest album — My Chemical Romance is on the road this summer playing 2006’s “The Black Parade” from beginning to end.

The tour, which stopped Saturday night at Dodger Stadium for the first of two concerts, doesn’t finally manifest the long-anticipated reunion of one of emo’s most influential bands; My Chem reconvened in 2019 and has been performing, pandemic-related delays aside, fairly consistently since then (including five nights at Inglewood’s Kia Forum in 2022 and two headlining appearances at Las Vegas’ When We Were Young festival).

Yet only now is the group visiting sold-out baseball parks — and without even the loss leader of new music to help drum up interest in its show.

“Thank you for being here tonight,” Gerard Way, My Chem’s 48-year-old frontman, told the crowd of tens of thousands at Saturday’s gig. “This is our first stadium tour, which is a wild thing to say.” To mark the occasion, he pointed out, his younger brother Mikey was playing a bass guitar inscribed with the Dodgers’ logo.

So how did this darkly witty, highly theatrical punk band reach a new peak so deep into its comeback? Certainly it’s benefiting from an overall resurgence of rock after years dominated by pop and hip-hop; My Chem’s Dodger Stadium run coincides this weekend with the return of the once-annual Warped Tour in Long Beach after a six-year dormancy.

Then again, Linkin Park — to name another rock group huge in the early 2000s — recently moved a planned Dodger Stadium date to Inglewood’s much smaller Intuit Dome, presumably as a result of lower-than-expected ticket sales.

The endurance of My Chemical Romance, which formed in New Jersey before eventually relocating to Los Angeles, feels rooted more specifically in its obsession with comic books and in Gerard Way’s frank lyrics about depression and his flexible portrayal of gender and sexuality. (“GERARD WAY TRANSED MY GENDER,” read a homemade-looking T-shirt worn Saturday by one fan.) Looking back now, it’s clear the band’s blend of drama and emotion — of world-building and bloodletting — set a crucial template for a generation or two of subsequent acts, from bands like Twenty One Pilots to rappers like the late Juice Wrld to a gloomy pop singer like Sombr, whose viral hit “Back to Friends” luxuriates in a kind of glamorous misery.

For much of its audience, My Chem’s proudly sentimental music contains the stuff of identity — one reason thousands showed up to Dodger Stadium wearing elaborate outfits inspired by the band’s detailed iconography.

In 2006, the quadruple-platinum “Black Parade” LP arrived as a concept album about a dying cancer patient; Way and his bandmates dressed in military garb that made them look like members of Satan’s marching band. Nearly two decades later, the wardrobe remained the same as the band muscled through the album’s 14 tracks, though the narrative had transformed into a semi-coherent Trump-era satire of political authoritarianism: My Chemical Romance, in this telling a band from the fictional nation of Draag, was performing for the delectation of the country’s vain and ruthless dictator, who sat stony-faced on a throne near the pitcher’s mound flanked by a pair of soldiers.

The theater of it all was fun — important (if a bit crude), you could even say, given how young much of the band’s audience is and how carefully so many modern pop stars avoid taking political stands that could threaten to alienate some number of their fans. After “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a bearded guy playing a government apparatchik handed out Dodger Dogs to the band and to the dictator; Way waited to find out whether the dictator approved of the hot dog before he decided he liked it too.

Fans react as My Chemical Romance performs.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Yet what really mattered was how the great songs still are: the deranged rockabilly stomp of “Teenagers,” the Eastern European oom-pah of “Mama,” the eruption of “Welcome to the Black Parade” from fist-pumping glam-rock processional to breakneck thrash-punk tantrum.

Indeed, the better part of Saturday’s show came after the complete “Black Parade” performance when My Chem — the Way brothers along with guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, drummer Jarrod Alexander and keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac — reappeared sans costumes on a smaller secondary stage to “play some jams,” as Gerard Way put it, from elsewhere in the band’s catalog. (Its most recent studio album came out in 2010, though it’s since issued a smattering of archived material.)

Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance performs.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

“I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” was blistering atomic pop, while “Summertime” thrummed with nervy energy; “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” was as delightfully snotty as its title suggests. The band reached back for what Way called his favorite My Chem song — “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” from the group’s 2002 debut — and performed, evidently for the first time, a chugging power ballad called “War Beneath the Rain,” which Way recalled cutting in a North Hollywood studio “before the band broke up” as My Chem tried to make a record that never came out.

The group closed, as it often does, with its old hit “Helena,” a bleak yet turbo-charged meditation on what the living owe the dead, and as he belted the chorus, Way dropped to his knees in an apparent mix of exhaustion, despair, gratitude — maybe a bit of befuddlement too. He was leaving no feeling unfelt.

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina reshaped the City of New Orleans.

Spike Lee examined the disaster with two big HBO documentaries, the 2006 “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” just a year after the event, and a 2010 sequel, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise,” and is involved with a new work for Netflix, “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” arriving in late August. Other nonfiction films have been made on the subject over the years, including “Trouble the Water,” winner of the grand jury prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nova’s “Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City,” “Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of the Children,” and “Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues,” while the storm also framed the excellent 2022 hospital-set docudrama “Five Days at Memorial.” As a personified disaster with a human name and a week-long arc, it remains famous, or infamous, and indelible.

In the gripping five-part “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” premiering over two subsequent nights beginning Sunday at 8 p.m. on National Geographic (all episodes stream on Hulu and Disney+ Monday), director Traci A. Curry (“Attica”) necessarily repeats many of Lee’s incidents and themes. But she finds her own way through mountains of material in the series that is at once highly compelling and difficult to watch — though I suggest you do.

Though there are many paths to take through the story, they lead to the same conclusions. Curry speaks with survivors, activists, scientists, officials and journalists, some of whom also appear in archival footage, but her eye is mainly on the victims, the people who lost their homes, people who lost their people, those unable to evacuate, for lack of money or transportation or the need to care for family members. If the storm itself was an assault on the city, most everything else — the broken levees, the flooded streets, the slow government response, the misinformation, the exaggerations and the mischaracterizations taken as fact — constituted an attack on the poor, which in New Orleans meant mostly Black people. (“The way they depicted Black folks,” says one survivor regarding sensational media coverage of the aftermath, when troops with automatic weapons patrolled the streets as if in a war zone, “it’s like they didn’t see us as regular people, law abiding, churchgoing, hard working people.”)

Effective both as an informational piece and a real-life drama, “Race Against Time” puts you deep into the story, unfolding as the week did. First, the calm before the storm (“One of the most peaceful scariest things,that a person can experience,” says one 8th Ward resident), as Katrina gained power over the Gulf of Mexico. Then the storm, which ripped off part of the Superdome roof, where citizens had been instructed to shelter, and plunged the city into darkness; but when that passed, it looked briefly like the apocalypse missed them.

Then the levees, never well designed, were breached in multiple locations and 80% of the city, which sits in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, found itself under water. Homes drown: “You’re looking at your life, the life that your parents provided for you, your belongings being ruined, your mother’s furniture that she prided is being thrown against a wall.” Residents are driven onto roofs, hoping for rescue, while dead bodies float in the water. This is also in many ways the most heartening part of the series, as neighbors help neighbors and firefighters and police set about rescuing as many as possible, going house to house in boats running on gasoline siphoned from cars and trucks. A coast guardsman tears up at the memory of carrying a baby in her bare arms as they were winched into a helicopter.

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Malik Rahim, a community organizer, was a resident of Algiers Point in New Orleans. (National Geographic)

Lt. General Russel Honore served as commander of Joint Task Force Katrina and is widely credited for reestablishing order and evacuating the Superdome. (National Geographic)

And then we descend into a catalog of institutional failures — of governance, of communication, of commitment, of nerve, of common sense, of service, of the media, which, camped in the unflooded French Quarter or watching from afar, repeated rumors as fact, helping create a climate of fear. (Bill O’Reilly, then still sitting pretty at Fox News, suggests looters should be shot dead.) More people escaping the flood arrive at the Superdome, where the bathrooms and the air conditioning don’t work, there’s no food or water and people suffer in the August heat, waiting for days to be evacuated. Instead, the National Guard comes to town along with federal troops, which residents of this city know is not necessarily a good thing.

Many speakers here make a deep impression — community organizer Malik Rahim, sitting on his porch, speaking straight to the camera, with his long white hair and beard, is almost a guiding spirit — but the star of this show is the eminently sensible Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré(now retired), a Louisiana Creole, who was finally brought in to coordinate operations between FEMA and the military. (We see him walking through the streets, ordering soldiers to “put your guns on your back, don’t be pointing guns at nobody.”) Honoré, who is free with his opinions here, had respect for the victims — “When you’re poor in America, you’re not free, and when you’re poor you learn to have patience” — but none for foolish officialdom, the main fool being FEMA director Michael Brown, mismanaging from Baton Rouge, who would resign soon after the hurricane.

When buses finally did arrive, passengers were driven away, and some later flown off, with no announcement of where they were headed; family members might be scattered around the country. Many would never return to New Orleans, and some who did, no longer recognized the place they left, not only because of the damage, but because of the new development.

The arrival of this and the upcoming Lee documentary is dictated by the calendar, but the timing is also fortuitous, given where we are now. Floods and fires, storms and cyclones are growing more frequent and intense, even as Washington strips money from the very agencies designed to predict and mitigate them or aid in recovery. Last week, Ken Pagurek, the head of FEMA’s urban search and rescue unit resigned, reportedly over the agency’s Trump-hobbled response to the Texas flood, following the departure of Jeremy Greenberg, who led FEMA’s disaster command center. Trump, for his part, wants to do away with the agency completely.

And yet Curry manages to end her series on an optimistic note. Residents of the Lower 9th Ward have returned dying wetlands to life, creating a community park that will help control the next storm surge. Black Masking Indians — a.k.a. Mardi Gras Indians — are still sewing their fanciful, feathered costumes and parading in the street.

Diana Ross returned to the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night for the first of two weekend concerts — her fifth engagement at the hillside amphitheater since 2013 and her second gig in her adopted hometown of Los Angeles in less than a year (following her performance at last August’s old-school Fool in Love festival). In other words, it’s not exactly hard to catch the 81-year-old pop legend onstage these days — which isn’t to say that it’s not worth doing. Here are nine moments that made me glad I showed up Friday:

1. After coming out to — what else? — “I’m Coming Out,” Ross zipped through a frisky Motown medley linking some of the 12 No. 1 hits she and the Supremes scored in the 1960s. Would I have liked to have heard full versions of “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name of Love”? Sure. But hearing these all-timers stacked up in rapid succession was a thrill of its own — a reminder of the blend of efficiency and ingenuity attained on a daily basis at Hitsville, U.S.A.

2. Ross was backed by more than a dozen musicians at the Bowl, including four horn players and four backing vocalists, and they were cooking from the get-go: crisply propulsive in the Motown stuff; tight and gliding in “Upside Down”; lush yet down-home in Ross’ take on Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” from her 1972 Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues.”

3. Two wardrobe changes meant that we beheld three glittering gowns in all, beginning with the fluffy canary-yellow number she emerged in. About halfway through the show, Ross slipped into a pipe-and-drape dressing room at the rear of the stage then slipped back out wearing bedazzled ruby red; later, she changed into a shimmering gold look. Each dress came accompanied by a matching shawl that Ross would eventually toss to the stage to be retrieved by a waiting assistant who seemed to know precisely when it would happen.

4. Each dress also came with a bulky mic pack that — in an endearingly peculiar costuming choice — Ross opted to wear on her waist instead of hiding it around back.

5. “I have an album out, a current album — the title of the album is called ‘Thank You,’” Ross told the crowd as she began to introduce a tune from her not-bad 2021 LP. Then she turned her head stage-left toward a sound engineer in the wings: “Who’s talking in the mic? I can hear a mic.” She returned to the audience. “Anyway, the title of the album is called ‘Thank You.’ Each song was specially written so that I could say ‘thank you’ to you for all the wonderful years, all the…” Another glance left. “Somebody’s talking in the microphone.” Another turn back. “We’re gonna start with this one — ‘Tomorrow,’ OK? We’ll start that if I can out-talk whoever’s talking over here.”

6. Ross’ daughter Rhonda joined her mom to sing another new-ish tune, “Count on Me” — “She’s been practicing,” Diana said proudly (if somewhat shadily) — then stuck around to do a mini-set of her own self-help-ish soul-folk songs, one of which beseeched us all to “stop gaslighting ourselves.”

7. Half a century after “The Wiz” debuted on Broadway in 1975, Ross sang her two big numbers from the Black retelling of the “The Wizard of Oz,” which she helped cement as a cultural landmark with her role as Dorothy in a fondly remembered movie adaptation. Here, “Home” was wistful yet determined, while “Ease on Down the Road” got even the high-rollers in the Bowl’s box seats moving.

8. During “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand),” Ross led the crowd in a call-and-response recitation of what she called “my mantra”: ”I’m so grateful / For all the blessings in my life / For there are many / All is well / I’m resilient / Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

9. More of Ross’ children appeared onstage at the end of the show to join her for a rowdy “I Will Survive” — and to plug their latest commercial endeavors. “Can I say one thing?” Tracee Ellis Ross asked. “‘Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross’ on Roku streams today, so check out the show.” Diana Ross reclaimed the microphone and gestured toward her son Ross Naess. “This is my son — he’s doing a line of caviar called Arne Reserve.” She looked around. “Chudney, what’s happening with you?”

British actor Micheal Ward, known for the Netflix series “Top Boy” and and most recently Ari Aster’s movie “Eddington,” is facing charges of allegedly raping and sexually assaulting a woman in the United Kingdom in 2023.

London’s Metropolitan Police announced in a Friday statement that prosecutors had charged BAFTA winner Ward, 28, with two counts of rape and three counts of sexual assault following an investigation into an alleged January 2023 incident. The statement did not provide details about the incident, including the location and the identity of Ward’s accuser.

“Our specialist officers continue to support the woman who has come forward — we know investigations of this nature can have significant impact on those who make reports,” Det. Supt. Scott Ware said in the statement.

Representatives for Ward did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment Friday. The actor is due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court in London on Aug. 28.

Ward, who was born in Jamaica, broke into acting less than a decade ago, appearing in the British drama series “Top Boy” and rapper Rapman’s 2019 film “Blue Story.” He won BAFTA’s rising star award in 2020. That same year he appeared in “The Old Guard” opposite Charlize Theron and in Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” miniseries.

His movie credits also include Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” “The Book of Clarence,” “Bob Marley: One Love” and “The Beautiful Game.” He currently stars as a young police officer in “Eddington,” the latest film from “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” filmmaker Aster.

After finally getting approval from the Federal Communications Commission, Skydance Media is just weeks away from completing its $8-billion merger with Paramount Global, leading to sweeping changes for some of the most iconic media brands.

CBS, MTV Networks and Paramount Pictures are all bracing for upheaval when Larry Ellison and his son, David, take the keys from Paramount Global controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. The long-running ownership saga has played out while the rules of the media industry have been upended by streaming and, more recently, a White House unafraid to use its muscle to silence critics.

Skydance and its backer, RedBird Capital Partners, have promised investors that it will find $2 billion in cost savings, which means further belt-tightening and layoffs.

“This will be the most dramatic change to the organization since its inception,” said one longtime CBS insider who was not authorized to comment publicly.

Here is what Wall Street and the media industry will be watching for once the deal closes on Aug. 7:

Will Skydance spend enough to supercharge streaming?

Last year, Paramount+ added 10 million new subscribers to reach 77.5 million. Its subscriber count is now 79 million, thanks also to NFL programming, CBS shows such as “NCIS” and original hits including “1923,” “Landman,” “Lioness” and “Tulsa King.” Paramount has projected full-year U.S. profitability for Paramount+ this year, making it one of the fastest subscription services to get there.

But its relatively scant resources and thinner slate has made it difficult to truly compete with Netflix and the other biggest players. One potential solution: partnering with a rival streamer to increase its reach.

“Questions around the long-term scalability of Parmamount+ continue to loom large,” analyst firm MoffettNathanson noted in a report Friday. “Will the new management team pursue external partnerships as a viable path forward?”

Ellison and his team have suggested that they will bring a tech-focused sensibility to Paramount. Technological prowess would help Paramount+ improve its user interface and recommendation process, which insiders acknowledge is currently underwhelming. As expected, the architect of Paramount+ original series strategy, Paramount Global co-CEO Chris McCarthy, will leave when the deal closes.

Can traditional TV be saved?

Analysts also want to see Skydance will increase investment in film and TV franchises to revive assets that have been constrained by Paramount’s debt.

While Skydance will get a robust library of films and TV shows, it will also be faced with the slow-melting iceberg that is broadcast and cable TV, which continues to lose viewers. Streaming has surpassed broadcast and cable as the leading source of video consumption just as Skydance takes over CBS and Paramount Global’s array of channels that include MTV, BET and Comedy Central.

Doug Creutz, an analyst for TD Cowen, believes the merged company should consider spinning off traditional TV businesses, similar to what Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast are doing with their cable channels. Whether that will happen remains to be seen.

“There is a clear opportunity to improve Paramount’s growth profile by letting those assets go,” Creutz wrote Friday. “On the other hand, we suspect the Ellisons did not purchase Paramount in order to break it up for parts.”

A test of Skydance’s commitment to broadcast may come if the FCC relaxes TV station ownership rules, which would likely lead to consolidation.

How will ’60 Minutes’ reset?

CBS News’ “60 Minutes” received a vote of confidence with the naming of Tanya Simon, a respected veteran insider to take over as executive producer. She was the choice of the program’s strong-willed correspondents.

Simon’s appointment is expected to provide stability following the departure of longtime showrunner Bill Owens, who was forced out amid the push for a $16-million settlement over President Trump’s lawsuit claiming the program deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look better to voters.

“60 Minutes” remained tough in its White House coverage as negotiations went on. The question is whether that approach will continue with new owners. Larry Ellison has a friendly relationship with the president, and the new owners agreed to appoint an ombudsman to oversee news coverage.

Getting it right matters from a business perspective too, as “60 Minutes” remains the most profitable program on CBS.

With Simon in place, new management is expected to address other areas of the news division that can use improvement. The network’s revamp of the “CBS Evening News” has been a disappointment in the ratings and will likely see some changes.

In the longer term, there has been chatter that Skydance may set its sights on acquiring CNN from Warner Bros. Discovery and combining it with the broadcast news operation, an idea that has been considered numerous times over the last few decades.

“South Park” characters Eric Cartman, left, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski.

(Comedy Central)

Will creative freedom be tested?

CBS canceled “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” upsetting his fans, progressive Democratic legislators and other late-night hosts who make their living lampooning President Trump.

The network said it was strictly a business decision, as the younger viewers who made late-night TV monstrously lucrative for decades are no longer showing up. The timing of the move made the company look as if it were capitulating to Trump, who long had the host on his enemies list.

But Colbert will remain on the air through May. The show has already been sold to advertisers for next season. The host has remained unrelenting in his mockery of Trump.

The season premiere of “South Park” only upped the ante. The animated series made references to the “60 Minutes” deal, showed Trump in bed with the devil and aired its own version of a Trump-mandated PSA, showing a naked president with talking genitalia.

There is no question both shows will test the patience of the new owners.

Pulling Colbert off or censoring the “South Park” creators, who just received a $1.5-billion deal to continue their show and move its library to Paramount+, would lead to a far greater backlash than what has been seen so far. Any attempt to curtail their voices will send a negative message to creative types who consider working with the company’s movie and TV operations going forward.

Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One” from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

(Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

Can the movie business be revived?

Over the last few years, Paramount Pictures — home of franchises such as “Transformers” and “Mission: Impossible” — has ranked either fifth or fourth at the domestic box office. So far this year, the lone major movie studio still located in Hollywood proper has accounted for about 7% of ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada, according to box office website the Numbers.

Since the pandemic, the company has enjoyed a number of major hits, including “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.” It has also had some solid singles and doubles, including “Bob Marley: One Love.” But overall, the more-than-century-old studio has struggled from underinvestment in its intellectual property and movie brands.

The latest “Mission: Impossible” starring Tom Cruise — the eighth and purportedly last in the series — grossed $589 million globally but cost $300 million to $400 million to make, not including marketing costs. Paramount’s latest effort, an animated “Smurfs” reboot, sputtered at the box office. Next up: a reboot of “The Naked Gun.”

The unit’s leader, Brian Robbins (also head of Nickelodeon at Paramount Global), is expected to leave the studio, though he has not officially announced his plans. David Ellison is a movie fan and is expected to take a particular interest in the operation, with plans to put Skydance’s chief creative officer, Dana Goldberg, in charge of film at Paramount. Skydance has worked with Paramount on movies before, producing “Maverick” and the “Missions: Impossible” films

HOUSTON, TEXAS – JANUARY 11: Denico Autry #96 of the Houston Texans sacks Justin Herbert #10 of the Los Angeles Chargers during the second half of the AFC Wild Card Playoff game at NRG Stadium on January 11, 2025 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Sloter/Getty Images)

(Brandon Sloter / Getty Images)

Will the NFL take its ball elsewhere?

A transfer of ownership means the NFL can reopen its long-term deal with CBS, which has a Sunday package of games, the AFC Championship Game and two Super Bowls. The NFL is the lifeblood of broadcast television, providing a vast majority of the year’s most-watched programs.

Without the NFL, CBS would face tremendous challenges in getting fees from pay TV operators who carry its stations. Revenue from affiliates who pay the network for its programming would also dramatically decline.

Although the NFL is known for taking a pound of flesh at every opportunity, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has signaled he will give careful consideration before making any changes.

“We’ve had a long relationship with CBS for decades and we also have a relationship outside of that with Skydance,” Goodell told CNBC earlier this month. “We have a two-year period to make that decision. I don’t see that happening, but we have the option and it’s something we’re going to look at.”

The NFL could wait until 2029 when it has the option to open up the contract with all of its media partners. The new media deal for the NBA — $76 billion over 11 years — has the NFL believing its pact is underpriced.

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

The theatrical box office market is down. It’s harder than ever to get people out of their homes and into the cinema. The business model for movies in streaming is still a work in progress.

Given all these challenges, who would want to buy a movie studio now?

Many people, it turns out. Earlier this month, the entertainment industry was abuzz after reports that film and TV production company Legendary Entertainment, the company behind “Dune” and “A Minecraft Movie,” was considering a potential acquisition of “Hunger Games” and “John Wick” producer and distributor Lionsgate Studios. Both companies have declined to comment on the reports.

It’s hardly the only deal news in the film business.

In June, independent film finance and production firm Alcon Media Group — known for “The Blind Side” and “Blade Runner 2049” — bought the film library of “Joker” and “Ocean’s Eleven” producer and financier Village Roadshow Entertainment for $417.5 million after an auction process that was part of the West Hollywood company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Village Roadshow did not respond to a request for comment. Alcon could not be reached for comment.

And of course, the biggest takeover in the business is the long-pending sale of Paramount Global to Skydance Media, an $8-billion deal that received government approval Thursday.

Though the first half of the year has been rocked by uncertainty in the financial markets, including fears about the effects of President Trump’s tariffs and trade policies, there is likely pent-up demand for dealmaking that could emerge in the coming months and years, said lawyer Tom Ara, a partner in the private equity group at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who also leads the firm’s entertainment, sports and media practice.

“There’s a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines, and I think there’s a lot of desire by different strategic and financial players to make deals,” he said. “Film, TV — it’s still the least expensive form of entertainment for the vast majority of the general public, and so it’s not going anywhere.”

Movie attendance was badly damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and has not recovered. Domestic revenue remains down 24% from 2019, according to Comscore. But even as the industry has undergone change and upheaval, strategic buyers, both foreign and domestic, see value in what film studios are producing.

Intellectual property has become key, as audiences now gravitate mostly toward what they already know. With studios’ vast libraries of films, not only could those collections be ripe for reboots, sequels, prequels or spinoffs, but they also give owners options for other, non-film revenue streams, such as merchandise, theme park opportunities, TV shows, streaming deals and licensing.

“It’s less about short-term earnings and more about using that film studio as a key to unlock strategic value down the road,” said Brandon Katz, director of insights and content strategy at research firm Greenlight Analytics. “They’re not necessarily standalone cash cows. The interest in one is more about the broader ecosystem.”

While intellectual property can come from anywhere, movies are a particularly valuable way to generate value because of their worldwide distribution. A major hit can drive more revenue at every stage of a film’s post-release distribution journey, said J. Christopher Hamilton, a practicing entertainment attorney and a professor at Syracuse University who focuses on the business of media.

“It’s like being given the raw materials to build the empire,” he said. “No matter how successful the streaming network is … it’s never going to have the same level of impact globally on every level as a blockbuster hit.”

Private equity firms — which tend to be attracted to film and TV libraries because of the cash flow they generate — have retrenched a bit from their previous interest in Hollywood. But some groups have participated in recent deals, including RedBird Capital Partners, which is backing the Skydance bid for Paramount, and Apollo Global Management, which also made a play for Paramount in a joint bid with Sony Pictures Entertainment. Apollo has a minority stake in Legendary.

Lionsgate has long been considered a potential acquisition target, particularly as it’s one of few so-called mini-major studios left in the industry.

The company acquired cable network Starz in 2016 for $4.4 billion to bulk up and better compete in the media ecosystem. But the business model for traditional television cratered amid the rise of streaming, and earlier this year, the two formally split into separate publicly-traded companies. Lionsgate merged its studio business with a special purpose acquisition company in a deal that valued its assets at $4.6 billion and gave it a way to raise new capital.

The decoupling from Starz was seen as a way for Lionsgate to separate itself from the declining fortunes of the TV business and potentially be more attractive to buyers as a standalone studio, analysts said. Lionsgate also has a distribution arm, which could be enticing for a company like Legendary, which partners with other studios such as Warner Bros. to release its films.

Village Roadshow, which has a library of 108 films including stakes in “The Matrix” films and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” went up for sale amid a bruising legal battle with Warner Bros. and after the pandemic and the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 throttled an ambitious slate.

Alcon, led by co-CEOs Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, could be limited in what it can do with the properties, many of which were released by and co-financed with Warner Bros. Pictures. But Alcon still saw value in the assets to supplement its own content library. The Village Roadshow titles collectively generate an estimated $50 million annually, Alcon said.

For David Ellison and his billionaire father, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, buying a legacy studio like Paramount is an opportunity to turn around an asset that has long suffered from poor corporate decision making and chronic underinvestment.

Who else could be in the market for a studio or film library during this period of consolidation?

Foreign buyers are a possibility, particularly those from the Middle East, analysts and experts said.

Qatari broadcaster BeIN Media Group already owns a 51% stake in film and TV studio Miramax (Paramount Global owns the other half). Last year, Saudi Arabia launched a $100 million film fund to attract productions to the country. And Hollywood studios are recognizing the potential for new audiences and customer bases in the Middle East — earlier this year, Walt Disney Co. said it would open a new theme park in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Though tech companies like Apple or Google are frequently discussed as potential buyers of legacy studios, the fact that none have yet embarked on a deal — with the exception of Amazon for MGM Studios — could indicate that they don’t see it as a business priority, Hamilton said.

In the end, the discussion about mergers and acquisitions indicates the volatility of the industry — and individual studios’ realistic assessments about their own futures, said Corey Martin, managing partner and chair of Granderson Des Rochers’ entertainment finance practice.

“I think that we’re going to see further consolidation,” he said. “You’re already seeing the signs of some of these various parties coming to grips, being honest with themselves as companies and platforms about whether they’re buyers or sellers — and to the extent you are a seller, how do you best position yourself to maximize shareholder value?”

This story contains spoilers for “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”

Marvel’s First Family has finally made its formal MCU debut, which means it’s time to engage in everyone’s favorite tradition: breaking down the movie’s post-credits teases to suss out what’s next.

Directed by “WandaVision” helmer Matt Shakman, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” introduces audiences to Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn). The movie, which officially opens Friday, pits the quartet of superpowered astronauts against Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a cosmic entity with an insatiable hunger for planets.

As the title teases, “First Steps” marks the beginning of Phase 6 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which will culminate with a pair of massive “Avengers” crossover films.

Like most MCU installments, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” features multiple post-credits stingers. The first, which is shown midway through the end credits, sets up the superhero team’s next big adventure.

The mid-credits scene takes place four years after the Fantastic Four’s showdown with Galactus. It shows Sue sitting on a couch, reading a story to her and Reed’s son, Franklin Richards. After finishing the book, she steps away to grab another, turning down robo-assistant H.E.R.B.I.E.’s suggested title. Sensing something is wrong, Sue starts charging her powers. She rounds the corner to check on Franklin and finds a mysterious cloaked figure interacting with her child.

While his face is not shown, his green cloak and the mask he is holding make it clear to fans familiar with their Marvel lore that this is Doctor Doom.

This marks the first appearance of the iconic villain in the MCU. The character, also known as Victor von Doom, made his comic book debut in “Fantastic Four” No. 5 (1962) and has been a foe of Marvel’s First Family ever since. In the comics, the character is both a scientific genius and a sorcerer hailing from the fictional country of Latveria. (The name of the country is briefly shown in “Fantastic Four: First Steps.”)

Doom’s introduction into the MCU has been highly anticipated since Marvel Studios’ presentation last year at San Diego Comic-Con. Among the major announcements was that the fifth “Avengers” film had been retitled “Avengers: Doomsday” and that “Iron Man” actor Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to the franchise as Doctor Doom.

While Doom’s exact interest in Franklin is not revealed, it’s easy to assume that the child’s powers would be appealing to a supervillain. This encounter also hints at the reason why the Fantastic Four eventually make their way to the universe where the rest of the MCU heroes reside.

“First Steps” is set on Earth-828 — a tribute to “Fantastic Four” co-creator Jack Kirby, who was born Aug. 28, 1917 — a retrofuturistic world in a separate corner of the Marvel multiverse. But the “Thunderbolts*” post-credits scene shows the Fantastic Four’s spacecraft Excelsior appearing in their world on Earth-616. Could Doom have kidnapped young Franklin and taken him to an alternate universe? Whatever the reason, Samuel Sterns’ warning from the “Captain America: Brave New World” post-credits scene was apt: The multiverse is coming.

Fans might wonder how the “Fantastic Four” post-credits scene might have played out had the studio not altered its original plans to feature Kang the Conqueror as the franchise’s next big bad. In the comics Kang and Franklin are part of the same family tree so it’s easy to imagine him as the surprise interloper Sue sees. Either way, a magical nanny might have been helpful. (Marvel Studios pivoted from its original plan after Kang actor Jonathan Majors was convicted on assault and harassment charges in 2023.)

The second “Fantastic Four: First Steps” credits scene is shown after the full credits roll and serves more as a fun bonus and tribute to the eponymous superhero team’s animated past.

“Avengers: Doomsday,” hitting theaters Dec. 18, 2026, will be a massive MCU crossover featuring members of the Fantastic Four, the Thunderbolts/New Avengers and more. Confirmed “Doomsday” cast members include veteran “Avengers” stars Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Captain America), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man) and Tom Hiddleston (Loki), as well as Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian), Lewis Pullman (Bob Reynolds), Wyatt Russell (John Walker) and Hannah John-Kamen (Ava Starr/Ghost).

Up next for the MCU is “Wonder Man,” a series starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II that will debut on Disney+ in December. The next Phase 6 film is Marvel and Sony’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” slated for a July 2026 release.

It’s a summery, late-afternoon Saturday on the backyard lawn of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, with the kind of warmth and variety of sounds, sights and smells that have defined weekends in many Los Angeles neighborhoods for generations. This one happens to be for a KCRW Summer Nights event headlined by East L.A. soul revivalists the Altons, but the blend of demographics, cultures and backgrounds on display gives it an authentically local feel that could be mistaken for an informal block party in any decade — except perhaps for the screen printer creating band merch and a design of Snoopy humping an ice cube with an expletive about Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That same blend of history and cultures that has brought Los Angeles together across generations is also what’s given the Altons their signature sound and made them one of the city’s latest breakout stars. When they go on tour and bring their unique blend of soulful “oldies,” modern rock and bilingual R&B around the world, they aren’t just sharing their music but also their culture.

“On any given weekend, you can have some party down the street playing cumbia or music that your parents grew up on, their next door neighbor might have a punk rock show, and another guy down the street that’s just listening to oldies and Art Laboe,” vocalist and guitarist Bryan Ponce explains about the roots of the Altons’ diverse sound stemming from their collective Los Angeles childhoods. “We all grew up on all of this music that we’d hear in our neighborhoods, so all of our influences just came together and came out in our music.”

For a band that started with modest expectations nearly a decade ago, the Altons now find themselves heading out on international tours and playing to thousands of people at a time — as they will Saturday when they rock the Oldies 2 Souldies show with Los Lonely Boys at the Greek Theatre. And while their rise has been more of a gradual incline than anything particularly stratospheric, they’ve carved their own path without compromise. They’re willing to fuse genres, languages, tempos and sounds as they see fit and based on what they feel will work best for the songs and messages they’re wanting to deliver instead of catering to what may be popular in the moment, a choice that’s made them the face of the “oldies revival” now that millennials and Gen Z are falling back in love with tunes from their grandparents’ day.

“It’s incredible to play a show where a grandmother’s there with her daughter and grandkids, and just have multiple generations of people come together,” vocalist Adriana Flores says. “There’s not a lot of shows that I would even take my dad to, so I think it makes the music even more special and I’d like to be one of the bands shedding the light on what’s been happening in L.A. We’ve been doing it for years and just sharing the types of music we like — which is the retro sound of soul mixed with other elements. We like to show people what’s been happening in L.A. that’s not just Hollywood.”

The Altons’ Adriana Flores and Bryan Ponce perform at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in late June.

(Brian Feinzimer / For The Times)

That desire to show the “real” L.A. that they know and love is a driving force for the Altons, particularly as they go further and further from home. All of them — Flores and Ponce along with Joseph Quinones on guitar/backup vocals, Chris Manjarrez on bass, Christian “Elyzr” Meraz on keyboards and drummer Caitlin Moss — are proud to represent their East L.A. roots for those who only see the California that gets presented on television. The group eagerly reminisces about a fan they met at a show in France who had never set foot in California but loved the culture so much that he dressed the part of a classic cholo. “He looked like he could have been related to me or went to school with me,” Ponce says with a laugh. “He was bald, he had the Locs on, the Pendleton on and he was screaming our neighborhoods.” They recall the times they’ve felt like cultural ambassadors bringing their hometown heritage to cities like Boston.

But the self-placed weight of representing and sharing their lifelong culture isn’t always all fun and games. Just a matter of weeks before they were walking through the halls of LA Plaza’s museum to see their brand-new exhibition on the importance of East L.A. musicians, they were on tour in the U.K. feeling helpless as they watched the ICE raids and protests flood the city.

Bryan Ponce and Adriana Flores onstage at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

(Brian Feinzimer / For The Times)

“You couldn’t really grasp what was going on,” Ponce says. “I would watch videos and see stuff online, but I didn’t really see it until we came home for a couple of days before we left again. [Manjarrez] and I live close to each other, and we started seeing videos of all these places and stores and people in our community. It was just devastating to have to leave again and see that they’re getting even closer to your house and seeing it happening on your street. You’re trying to go and play music to entertain people, but you’re also trying to find a balance. It’s like ‘Are we going to speak on what’s going on?’ Because some people thought that L.A. was burning down, and that’s not really the case.”

“Watching the community go through something so heartbreaking while being away was really difficult,” Flores adds. “It was really tough seeing our community being targeted, but I’d like to believe that music and being creative and spreading joy is a form of resistance. I hope that people can come to our shows and escape. Even though this is way bigger than us, we have to use our platform to be vocal about what’s going on. It’s scary times, but another scary time was the ‘60s when the whole civil rights movement was happening, and some of the best music came out of that because people were finding that outlet and creating.”

Southern Californians, we have not been betrayed. In-N-Out Burger is not moving its headquarters to another state, despite all the panic and performative outrage over recent comments by the fast food chain’s owner and chief executive, Lynsi Snyder.

Last week, on the “Relatable” podcast, Snyder told conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey that she’s leaving the Golden State for Tennessee. “There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here,” said Snyder, who became president of the family-run chain in 2010 at age 27, making her one of the country’s youngest billionaires.

It must be rough.

Her comments set off a disinformation blitz, launching the Double-Double into the middle of a red-state/blue-state culture war where, clearly, nothing is sacred. Anti-Cali factions incorrectly posted, podcast and crowed about yet another business fleeing the West Coast. More proof that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “failing” state sucks! It appeared that In-N-Out was following Tesla and Charles Schwab, companies that cited regulatory challenges and operational costs among their reasons for relocating. Chevron also fled. Perhaps it was the high gas prices.

Many Californians, particularly those in SoCal, felt abandoned and disrespected. They, after all, propped up the chain for 76 years, only to be told by its owner that the place that made her family’s business — their home — is no longer to her liking. On X, Oracle Park Seagull posted “‘Not easy for In N Out to do business in California…’ Said the person who became a billionaire doing business almost exclusively in California. So much so, it was a point of pride for the chain. Gotcha.”

Snyder’s grandparents opened their first In-N-Out in Baldwin Park in 1948, and for decades, the chain was renowned for serving a magical burger that could only be found in Southern California. Locals felt, and still feel, a sense of pride and ownership in the successful, homegrown business. It’s a symbol of West Coast entrepreneurship, its cups and packaging decorated with images of palm trees. And if we’re honest, the mere suggestion of In-N-Out leaving the state triggered a primal fear among Angelenos. Where else were we going to sit in a milelong drive-thru line at midnight waiting for a delicious burger and debatable fries?

Newsom even chimed in, starting his X post with, “For those interested in the facts, rather than fiction, In-N-Out is expanding East — creating a second HQ in Tennessee.” In SoCal, the company is shutting down its office in Irvine, consolidating its corporate operations to Baldwin Park. Today, In-N-Out operates in more than 400 locations across eight states.

Snyder responded Monday to the kerfuffle in an Instagram post: “Where I raise my family has nothing to do with my love and appreciation for our customers in California.”

It’s not the first time In-N-Out has made its stance clear on polarizing issues and politics. The company made news in 2021 when it pushed back against Newsom and California’s COVID-era proof-of-vaccination mandates.

In-N-Out’s packaging also includes Bible verses, a practice started in the late ’80s by Snyder’s uncle, co-founder Rich Snyder. John 3:16 can be found on the bottom of the In-N-Out soda cup. The milkshake cup features Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” On your next visit, you can check for a verse in your fries container. That is, if there is a next time. Instead of the memory of a tasty burger, many lifetime In-N-Out loyalists have been left with a bitter taste in their mouths.

When the wildfires ripped through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January, Michael Flood, chief executive of the L.A. Regional Food Bank, knew the demand for aid would explode.

“It was especially high in January through March as so many people were displaced and lost power and water,” Flood said. He saw demand for food relief rise 30%. “It is still high,” he said. “People had to move in with family and friends around the county. We did a food bank in Inglewood in February and we saw just how many had been displaced by both fires.”

His organization, which provides food assistance to hundreds of thousands of Angelenos every month, got significant help from the FireAid benefit concert in January. That show, produced by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and music mogul Irving Azoff, featured dozens of A-list musicians like Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish and the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing at the Kia Forum and Intuit Dome. The event — along with matching donations from Ballmer and his wife Connie — raised $100 million for wildfire relief.

Six months after the fires, The Times individually contacted over a hundred organizations that received FireAid funds, nonprofits in food aid, housing, mental health, childcare and ecological resilience. A review of the beneficiaries’ grants and work showed how FireAid was an urgent lifeline in the worst of the disaster and beyond.

“We want people to understand that there’s been a thoughtful process behind this, and our top priority was trying to do what people needed, and do what’s best for fire survivors,” said Lisa Cleri Reale, a member of FireAid’s grant advisory committee.

Yet the grant recipients are still grappling with the deep, intertwined needs of a scarred Los Angeles. That work will require investment for years to come.

“The high cost of rent, and food prices being 25% higher, it all puts pressure on people already struggling to meet basic needs,” Flood said. “Even though we’re six months from the fires, there’s still such a significant need.”

In between sets, FireAid highlighted individual stories of incalculable tragedy. One family, the Williams of Altadena, recalled onstage that “At 3:30 in the morning, the warning hit our phones. We grabbed what we could — our grandmother’s special clock, our father’s ashes, our 47-year-old parrot Hank. Among the five of us standing here, we lost four homes and we’re struggling to find places to live.”

For music fans calling in donations during Stevie Nicks’ and Sting’s sets though, it was fair to ask how those specific groups were chosen, and how they were making a difference to families like the Williams. In late May, the Palisades Community Council sent a letter to the Annenberg Foundation and FireAid organizers. The critical letter asked for a full accounting of the grants, and clarity on the decision-making process behind them.

The FireAid organization responded with the full timeline and the grant amounts they’d dispersed, along with plans for future rounds and applications for small groups to apply.

“This is very different from other philanthropy. We have a different magnifying glass looking at us,” Reale said. “There are people who bought tickets to these concerts, who donated on the website, the musicians who gave their time, these people want to know that their contributions are doing what’s best. We have fire survivors as our top priority, but we’re also asking — can we look at the FireAid donors and explain our decisions in a tangible way?”

In breaking down the group’s grant-making process, FireAid representatives showed how its earliest priorities were organizations providing direct cash, food and shelter to survivors.

In February, $1 million went to the L.A. Regional Food Bank, followed by a second grant of $250,000. The money went to pay extra drivers, forklift operators and warehouse workers to help process and distribute donations after the fires. “We’re a year-round program, so when disaster strikes, that gets laid on top of it,” Flood said.

With its February grant, the group Inclusive Action distributed $500 cash grants to landscapers, street vendors and other outdoor workers who lost jobs or homes in the fires. The Change Reaction, a direct-aid group, got $2 million from the first round of FireAid grants.

Change Reaction’s president, Wade Trimmer, said that the funds provided 2,500 recipients with grants up to $15,000 for immediate rent and transportation needs.

The Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center burns during the Eaton fire in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 7.

(
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images)

“The strategy was to stabilize as many households as we could because when you have stability, you make better decisions,” Trimmer said. “Even for wealthy people in the Palisades, it was still a full-time job and an absolute nightmare dealing with it all. But in Altadena, there was an older population with multigenerational households, so for every house that burned, that affected two or three households.”

That money helped sustain Elizabeth Jackson, the owner of White Lotus, a workout studio in the Palisades that employed 14 fitness instructors. Jackson lost both her home and business in the fires. “We lost every single client at the studio because our clients lost their homes,” Jackson said. “They’re all starting their lives over.”

Through a White Lotus regular, Jackson got in touch with Change Reaction, which used some of its FireAid funds to give $1,000 to each White Lotus staffer and replace fire-damaged equipment so Jackson could reopen in a smaller space nearby. She hopes to return to her old property once it is rebuilt.

“That support was a bright light in all the ugliness that happened,” she said. “It’s awful to lose the studio, but being on the receiving side of that beauty, it’s even more powerful than the negative. It keeps me going.”

The physical devastation in the burn zones was incomprehensible. For the immediate work of debris removal, flood prevention and vegetation clearing, Team Rubicon got a $250,000 grant. “FireAid demonstrated a clear understanding of the unpredictable nature of wildfire response, and they recognized the importance of flexibility and agility during both the immediate relief and long-term recovery phases,” the group’s spokesperson Thomas Brown said. “They invested in our work at a critical moment.”

Wounded and displaced pets received free veterinary care through groups like the Pasadena Humane Society and Community Animal Medicine Project. Yet many people tasked with helping others were also suffering. Many local nonprofit workers lost homes and workplaces, and needed aid to stay afloat while serving others.

“A lot of our staff were in crisis too, where they lost homes or were the only house left on their street in Altadena,” said Stacey Roth of Hillsides, a Pasadena foster care and youth mental health facility near the Eaton fire zone. One of Hillsides’ main residential buildings suffered significant smoke damage, and the FireAid grant allowed the facility to move its vulnerable population to hotels nearby.

The fire in Pacific Palisades quickly consumed more than 1,200 acres on Jan. 7, pushed by gusting Santa Ana winds.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Michael Sidman of Jewish Family Service lost his own home in the Eaton fire in Altadena. “I’m very lucky to have a strong support system, but it’s been a nightmare navigating this,” he said. “When you think about people navigating this alone with no family, and unsure how to connect with services, I don’t know what they’d do.”

His organization used its $250,000 grant from FireAid largely for comprehensive disaster case management work, particularly for survivors to manage the FEMA bureaucracy. Other early grants went to groups like Legal Aid, Bet Tzedek Legal and Public Counsel to help with insurance claims, as documents lost in the fires made proving residence and home ownership challenging.

“At first, people didn’t know where they’d spend the night, didn’t know where to get food and were all grieving for their mental health,” Sidman said. “Now we see the need shifting to long-term effects and recovery plans, providing step-by-step facilitation of how to get their lives back on track.”

As the weeks of recovery continued, FireAid’s priorities for its second $25-million grant round expanded to longer-term efforts like insurance and government case management, mental health services, navigating home rebuilding permits and environmental recovery.

“It’s one thing to get people cash aid, but it’s another to help them navigate the future,” Reale said. “Even though rebuilding seemed far away back in January, we knew that people needed to figure out their finances. Some of the fire victims our grantees were working with were on precarious ground financially even before the fires. Our job was to get them into a strong position so when they were ready to rebuild their lives, they wouldn’t be floundering.”

The fires significantly disrupted school and childcare for young families, many of whom are now homeless or miles away from family and resources.

Victor Dominguez, president and chief executive of YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, said its FireAid grant provided emergency childcare for a thousand displaced children, along with mental health resources and camp activities for children to reconnect with their fire-scarred neighborhoods.

“Young kids experienced so many traumatic things in their local communities,” Dominguez said. “After the fires, kids and families had an opportunity to go somewhere safe where they trust. Now we are seeing the shock, the reality of this being a long-term experience. We were able to hire more licensed social workers, and the money we received from FireAid helped support that.”

Mental health services remained a complex and ongoing need, especially for youth and children. “I went to the Sears building a couple of months ago, where Pali High is temporally housed, to look at this big wall where kids had posted notes about how they felt post-fires,” Reale said. “You could see that the trauma is still alive and well. Nobody’s healing overnight.”

Much of the aid dispersed was less visible to the public, if lifesaving for its recipients. Yet two marquee FireAid projects involved rebuilding and revamping damaged public green space, including Loma Alta Park, near Altadena. A second site, Palisades Park, will open this summer.

Alana Lewis, who was impacted by the recent Eaton Canyon wildfires, at a community gathering at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Altadena on Jan. 17.

(James Carbone/For De Los)

As residents in the burned areas explore rebuilding homes, issues like soil testing, remediation and permitting have emerged as new bureaucratic challenges for future FireAid grants to help navigate.

Questions around how to support rebuilding — or where it should happen at all — are complex. FireAid’s third round of grants are likely to focus on longer-term mitigation efforts and environmental resilience to prevent and manage future fires, which are all but inevitable in climate change.

“The reality is we don’t have enough money to rebuild every lot that was lost,” Reale said. “What we can do is wrap ourselves around tools or ways that a lot of people can benefit from when they’re ready to rebuild, and that could be the sustainable models. We can’t rebuild the same way. So we’ll put our money toward things that are helping people with home hardening models, and things to prevent and mitigate future fires.”

For the more intangible cultural communities lost — like the music studios, rehearsal rooms and artists’ homes burned in both fires — recovery will be diffuse. The January concert made FireAid a natural fit as a partner for MusiCares, the Recording Academy’s affiliated charity. That organization declined to say how much FireAid gave specifically, but said that the grant contributed to $6.25 million in fire recovery aid given to 3,200 affected music professionals to help rebuild studios, pay medical bills and evacuate burn sites.

Post-fire gentrification and financial speculating are new major fears. The Palisades has always been a coveted neighborhood, where working-class residents will face challenges returning to any affordable apartments lost. Altadena — home to a long-standing Black community and many blue-collar, intergenerational households — could see longtime residents forced out of their beloved neighborhood yet again, this time by economic forces.

A spokesperson for the Black LA Relief and Recovery Fund said it will use its FireAid grant to “build power among residents so they can return, reclaim and rebuild amidst political and financial threats like land grabs and gentrification.”

The Pacific Coast Highway near Big Rock Beach in Malibu, Calif., on July 8.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

FireAid moved heaven and earth to produce a benefit concert on par with the Concert For Bangladesh and Live Aid. Yet that $100 million is just a sliver of the billions in damage inflicted on Altadena and the Palisades. (Applications for the final round of small nonprofit grants are still open).

Reale and other FireAid organizers admit that the scale of aid needed is staggering, universally painful yet fraught with class and racial stratification. The FireAid concert made a profound impact for the groups serving survivors on the ground. It’s also nowhere near enough to meet the need, and never could be.

“At the beginning, we were just worried about basic necessities. Then the reality set in of ‘I have no home, I can’t go back,’” Hillsides’ Roth said. “The need we’re seeing now is helping people process that, and get a path to move forward.”

A balladeer in the body of a headbanger, Ozzy Osbourne brought soul and emotion to the heavy-metal genre he helped invent as the frontman of Black Sabbath and which he turned into a global force as an outrage-courting solo act. Osbourne, who died Tuesday at 76 — just weeks after he gave what he billed as his final performance in his hometown of Birmingham, England — sold tens of millions of albums, was twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and late in life found an unlikely second career as a pioneering reality-television star. Here, in the order they were released, are 10 of his essential songs.

Black Sabbath, ‘Paranoid’ (1970)

As heavy as Black Sabbath was, the band could also be remarkably light on its feet, as in the group’s zippy breakout single, which hit No. 4 on the U.K. pop chart. “Paranoid” is narrated by a depressed young man who “can’t see the things that make true happiness,” as Osbourne sings against Tony Iommi’s chugging guitar riff. Yet the song keeps hurtling forward with a kind of dogged determination. Black Sabbath closed with “Paranoid” — current stream count on Spotify: 1.3 billion — at this month’s farewell concert.

Black Sabbath, ‘War Pigs’ (1970)
An antiwar protest song as pointed as John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son,” “War Pigs” couches its musings on the mendacity of Vietnam’s architects in images of witches and sorcerers poisoning brainwashed minds. The disgust in Osbourne’s sneering vocal is still palpable.

Black Sabbath, ‘Iron Man’ (1970)
Leave it to Osbourne to find the empathy in this bludgeoning yet weirdly tender account of a guy who travels through time to save humanity only to be “turned to steel in the great magnetic field” on his return trip. “Nobody wants him / They just turn their heads,” he sings, “Nobody helps him / Now he has his revenge.”

Black Sabbath, ‘Sweet Leaf’ (1971)
A love song addressed to weed? Osbourne stretches the bit about as far as it can go as Iommi cranks out the sludgy lick that would later be sampled prominently by the Beastie Boys in their “Rhymin & Stealin.”

Black Sabbath, ‘Changes’ (1972)
Osbourne’s most touching vocal performance came in this woebegone piano ballad from Black Sabbath’s fourth album; he sings with so much agony about a romantic breakup that the song doesn’t even bother with guitar or drums. In 2003, Osbourne recut “Changes” as a duet with his then-19-year-old daughter Kelly; a decade later, the soul singer Charles Bradley recorded a wrenching cover not long before he died.

‘Crazy Train’ (1980)
Osbourne got the boot from Black Sabbath in 1979 after his bandmates tired of his drug and alcohol abuse. Yet Osbourne quickly rebounded as a solo act, scoring a Top 10 rock radio hit on his first try with “Crazy Train,” which he wrote and recorded with guitarist Randy Rhoads, who’d left Quiet Riot to join Osbourne’s band. Lyrically, “Crazy Train” contemplates the “millions of people living as foes” amid the Cold War — a dark theme that somehow led to Osbourne’s most euphoric song.

‘Mr. Crowley’ (1980)
To follow up “Crazy Train,” Osbourne and Rhoads — who would tragically die in a plane crash in 1982 while on tour with Osbourne — revived Black Sabbath’s preoccupation with the occult for this midtempo jam about the self-styled prophet Aleister Crowley.

‘No More Tears’ (1991)

Unlike many heavy-metal elders, Osbourne stayed relevant into the grunge era with hits like the bleakly hypnotic title track from his quadruple-platinum “No More Tears” LP, which showcased his close collaboration with guitarist Zakk Wylde.

‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ (1991)
“No More Tears” yielded another staple of early-’90s MTV in this soaring power ballad that Osbourne and Wylde wrote with Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead.

Post Malone featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Travis Scott, ‘Take What You Want’ (2019)
At 70, Osbourne surprised many with his robust vocal cameo in this trap-metal pile-up from Post Malone’s smash “Hollywood’s Bleeding” LP. The singer’s collaboration with producer Andrew Watt on “Take What You Want” led to Osbourne’s recruiting Watt to oversee his final two solo albums: 2020’s “Ordinary Man” and 2022’s Grammy-winning “Patient Number 9.”

Hunter Biden finally made news outside the MAGA mediasphere for something that’s usually the work of Fox News and other deep state disseminators: He verbally bashed the Democratic Party, CNN’s Jake Tapper, former Obama aides and even Hollywood’s devastatingly handsome ambassador George Clooney.

President Biden’s son, whose very name inspires a Pavlovian response among right-wing conspiracy theorists, appears to have pulled a page from the opposition’s playbook when during two recent interviews he leaned into grievance politics, repeatedly hurled expletives and condemned those who “did not remain loyal” to his father.

Hunter Biden’s first round of interviews since the 2024 election started out tame enough when last week on a new podcast hosted by Jaime Harrison, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he said that Democrats lost to Donald Trump because they abandoned his father. There was no “grand conspiracy” to hide his father’s health issues, he said. “We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party. That’s my position. We had the advantage of incumbency, we had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down.”

Fair enough. Then it was on to Clooney, one of the first high-profile figures on the left to call for Biden to step aside from his reelection campaign after a disastrous debate performance. Hunter Biden disparagingly referred to the actor as “a brand” and told Harrison, “Do you think in Middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wis., gives a s— what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?”

Then came the knockout punch. In a separate, three-hour-plus interview released Monday with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, he said of the star: “George Clooney is not a f— actor. He is a f—, I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand. … F— him and everybody around him.”

Hunter Biden also had some words for senior Biden aide Anita Dunn. “The Anita Dunns of the world, who’s made $40 [million], $50 million off the Democratic Party, they’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anyone in history and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever run.” Former Obama aide and political analyst David Axelrod was also on the list. He said Axelrod “had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama.”

And if the above sentiments were attributed to the current president’s sons, who’ve characterized the Democratic Party as Nazis and referred to those who were protesting immigration sweeps by the patently offensive term “mongoloids”? Meh, it’s just another Monday. But Hunter Biden, like most public-facing Democrats, is held to a different standard. When they go low, we go high. Remember that sage advice that worked for Democrats back in the late aughts and early 2010s but now sounds like advice pulled from a 1950s guide to etiquette? The younger Biden not only deviated from that lefty code but also mirrored his tormentors, then unleashed his ire onto his own party.

Hunter Biden‘s own reckless actions over the years made him grist for all manner of right-wing helmed investigations. Then there are the stupid conspiracies, whether it’s the missing laptop or that mysterious bag of cocaine found in the White House. Hard to keep track, but the younger Biden went there during his recent interview. “I have been clean and sober since June of 2019. I have not touched a drop of alcohol or a drug, and I’m incredibly proud of that,” he told Callaghan. “And why would I bring cocaine into the White House and stick it into a cubby outside of the Situation Room in the West Wing?”

But he also attributed at least one recent alleged conspiracy to those outside the right-wing cabal or, more specifically, to Jake Tapper. The CNN anchor co-wrote “Original Sin,” a provocative book that claimed President Biden’s confidants worked to conceal his declining health from the public.

Hunter Biden argued that it was nonsense and that the “ability to keep a secret in Washington is zero.”
“What sells, Jaime?” he asked Harrison. “What sells is the idea of a conspiracy.” And the public spectacle of flaming your enemy’s enemy.

Reality TV star Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman and his family are mourning the recent loss of one of their own.

Anthony, the reality TV star’s teenage step-grandson died on Saturday evening after he was allegedly accidentally shot by his father, Gregory Zecca — Chapman’s stepson — in Naples, Fla., The Times has confirmed. He was 13.

A spokesperson for the Collier County Sheriff’s Office told The Times on Monday that it is investigating the alleged shooting. Officers received a call about a shooting incident at an apartment on Sumter Grove Way in southern Florida at around 8:08 p.m., the spokesperson said, adding “this was an isolated incident.” No arrest has been made in connection to the incident, People reported.

According to the incident report reviewed by The Times on Monday, parts of it redacted, the responding officer heard screaming on the dispatch call. First responders arrived at the apartment and the victim — whose name was not revealed — was pronounced dead before 8:30 p.m.

In a statement shared to TMZ, which first reported on the alleged shooting, Chapman and his wife, Francie Chapman, confirmed Anthony’s death.

“We are grieving as a family over this incomprehensible tragic accident and we grieve the loss of our beloved grandson, Anthony,” the statement said. The couple also requested privacy as they grieved their loved one.

The Times did not hear back immediately from the 72-year-old reality star or his wife on Monday.

Chapman, best known for his long-running A&E reality TV show “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” married Francie Chapman (née Frane) two years after wife Beth Chapman died in 2021 following a battle with cancer.

He has been married six times and has a total of 13 children from those marriages. Zecca, 38, is Francie Chapman’s son from a previous relationship.

In “The Hunting Wives,” a brightly configured murder mystery cum cartoon sex opera premiering Monday on Netflix, Brittany Snow plays Sophie O’Neil, newly arrived from Boston with husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) and prop young son to fictional Maple Brook, Texas, a rich people’s town somewhere in the vicinity of Dallas. Graham is an architect, seemingly — at one point he will say, “Soph, you gotta check out this joinery,” which, in the three episodes out for review, is as specific as that will get — who has come to work for rich person Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) to build “the new Banks HQ.” What will happen in there is not said.

The O’Neils step into this world by way of a fundraiser at which Banks, who wants to be governor, is making a speech in support of the National Rifle Assn., highlighting the need for guns for “good people” to fend off “all sorts of evil sumbitches” and the “personas malos keep pouring in every day” across the border. This is as much of a platform as he will bother to have; plotwise, the point is that running for office may expose his swinging private life to public scrutiny.

Over the course of the party, we meet the major players: Jill (Katie Lowes) is married to Rev. Clint (Jason Davis), who runs the local megachurch; her son Brad (George Ferrier) — who would be named Brad — is an unpleasant slab of basketball-playing meat who is seeing, which is to say, trying to sleep with Abby (Madison Wolfe), a nice girl from the wrong side of the tracks. (Jill is against the relationship; Abby’s mother, Starr, played by Chrissy Metz, has her own reservations.) Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), second among the eponymous wives, is married to Sheriff Jonny (Branton Box); I’m not sure whether Jonny is his first or last name, but this does seem the kind of place where the sheriff would be known by his first. Supplementary wives Monae (Joyce Glenn) and Taylor (Alexandria DeBerry) are just there to make up the numbers.

Most important is Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), whom Sophie encounters in a bathroom where she has gone to take a Xanax for her social anxiety, and who, within seconds and not for the last time, is casually topless. Margo has no social anxiety.

She seizes on Sophie as fresh blood, or from some genuine connection, or because she recognizes in the newcomer the sort of person who needs a person like her, someone Margo can productively dominate to their mutual advantage. Margo immediately declares they’ll be besties — creating a rift with Callie, the current occupant of that role, who, radiating jealousy at every pore, is determined to get between them.

Sophie, Graham seems proud to announce, was once “a bit of a wild child … a party girl” who became a career woman — a political PR operative — and, for the last seven years, a full-time mother. He has a lightly controlling, “for your own good” manner, keeping her from drinking or driving — there’ll be a reason for that, you’ll have guessed — but before long, she will drink, and she will drive. “Two rules,” says Margo, getting her behind the wheel. “Trust me and do everything I say.”

Drafted into Margo’s world, Sophie is soon shooting skeet, and then, having bought her own guns, wild boar. I cite again the Chekhov dictum to the effect that a gun in the first act ought to go off in the second, but there are so many about here, and our attention so significantly drawn to them, it would be a shock if some didn’t fire — the only questions being which and when and whose, pointed at what or whom.

Developed by Rebecca Perry Cutter (“Hightown”) from May Cobb’s 2021 novel of the same name, the series offers a light dusting of political references — “deplorables,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, no abortion clinics “left to bomb,” negative mentions of feminism and liberals — that might as easily been left off in light of the insular fantasyland within which “The Hunting Wives” operates. (Did J.R. Ewing ever express a political opinion?) Given the context — liberal Northerners camped among conservative Southerners — one might have expected a “Stepford Wives” scenario, but this is something different. Within, or exploiting, their sociocultural limits (“We don’t work, we wife,” says Monae proudly), the women party heartily while the men, even when nominally powerful, come across as comparatively bland, uninteresting and distracted. Graham, who is very nice, can seem positively dim; “Take my wife, please,” he’ll happily joke when Margo rides up on a jet ski to spirit Sophie away from a family day at the lake.

The characters are types, but the actors fill them out well, and the dynamic between Margo and Sophie really is … dynamic. Margo is intriguing because she’s hard to figure. Like Sophie, she has a hidden past — when a mysterious figure at the local roadhouse (Jullian Dulce Vida) calls her Mandy, it makes her atypically nervous because, obviously, she was once called Mandy. She lies to her husband; she’s having sex with Brad, which just seems like bad taste. But there’s something authentic and genuine about Margo magnified by Akerman’s entrancing performance. Margo is a temptress, the devil on Sophie’s shoulder — but maybe the angel too.

Lest we forget, there’s a murder, which opens the show in a flash forward; the series catches up with it by the end of Episode 3. (It brings in Karen Rodriguez as Det. Salazar, which promises good things.) There’s also a briefly mentioned missing girl, which will certainly tie in somehow. But with only three episodes out of eight seen, it’s impossible to say where it’s all going — unless you’ve read the book, I suppose, but even then, you never know. What’s clear is that there’ll be more secrets to reveal, with skeletons tumbling out of every closet. And these are big houses, with plenty of storage.

Theater and television actor Tom Troupe has died at 97.

Troupe died Sunday morning of natural causes in his home in Beverly Hills, according to his publicist, Harlan Boll.

Known for his extensive career in theater and TV, Troupe made his Broadway debut in 1957 playing Peter van Daan in “The Diary of Anne Frank.” A year later, he moved to Los Angeles and appeared in more than 75 TV series over the course of his career, including “Mission: Impossible,” “Star Trek,” “Planet of the Apes,” “CHiPs,” “Quincy M.E.” and “Who’s the Boss.”

However, he continued to act in stage productions, appearing in “The Lion in Winter,” “Fathers Day” and “The Gin Game,” all three of which also co-starred his wife, actor Carole Cook. He also starred in a single-character play he co-wrote called “The Diary of a Madman.”

Troupe also had roles in several films, including 1991’s “My Own Private Idaho,” starring Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix; 1970’s “Kelly’s Heroes,” which starred Clint Eastwood and Don Rickles; and 1959’s “The Big Fisherman.”

He and Cook were awarded the L.A. Ovation Award for Career Achievement in 2002 because of their extensive stage work over the years in Los Angeles.

Born in Kansas City, Mo., on July 15, 1928, Troupe got his start acting in local theater productions before he moved to New York City in 1948.

He won a scholarship to train with stage actor and theater instructor Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio in Manhattan before he went to fight in the Korean War, where he was awarded a Bronze Star. After the war, he returned to New York to act on the stage.

Troupe married Cook in 1964. The actor, who was known for her roles in “Sixteen Candles” and Lucille Ball’s “The Lucy Show,” died in 2023 at the age of 98.

Troupe is survived by his son, Christopher, daughter-in-law Becky Coulter, granddaughter Ashley Troupe and several nieces and nephews.

Elvis Presley’s worn Omega wristwatch, gifted to him by Johnny Cash, sold for $103,700 this week.

Goldin, a leading sports and pop culture memorabilia auction house, sold the engraved timepiece as part of its inaugural music memorabilia auction, which closed Wednesday night. Other high-selling items included a D.A. Millings & Son custom suit worn by John Lennon in 1963 ($102,480), a signed copy of Led Zeppelin’s album “Presence” ($19,520) and George Harrison’s sunglasses ($47,590). Goldin also set a new sale record for a type 1 photo — or photo developed from an original negative within two years of when the picture was taken— of rapper Tupac Shakur, which sold for $10,370, according to the auction house.

Though sports and trading card auctions are Goldin’s “bread and butter,” the company is venturing more into pop culture, said head of revenue Dave Amerman. This transition is documented in Goldin’s Netflix show, “King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch,” which premiered in 2023 and was just renewed for a third season.

“We realized that we get so many music items and we build them into our pop culture sales, we just want to separate it and make its own event out of it,” Amerman told The Times.

Many of the Beatles items belonged to music promoter Chris Agajanian, who’s been building his collection for more than 40 years. Agajanian owns more than 2,000 pieces of Beatles memorabilia and signed letters of provenance for many of the items in the Goldin sale.

The music auction also included more than 500 concert posters graded by the Certified Guaranty Company, the leader in comic book grading. Poster subjects ranged from the Grateful Dead and the Beatles to Sonic Youth and Blink-182.

In 2020, Goldin sold one of the most expensive albums of all time: a copy of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Double Fantasy” that Lennon unwittingly signed for his assassin, Mark David Chapman, just before the Beatle was shot in 1980. It went for $900,000.

Additionally, the auction house holds the record for most expensive toy sold at an auction: a 1979 prototype action figure of “Star Wars” bounty hunter Boba Fett that went for more than $1 million in 2024.

Goldin’s Hollywood Props & Memorabilia auction, featuring Harrison Ford’s “Indiana Jones” whip, a “Star Wars” Stormtrooper prototype helmet and George Reeves’ “Superman” suit, is currently live. The auction closes Aug. 6.

Actor Kate Beckinsale is mourning the loss of her “dearest friend,” her mother British actor Judy Loe.

The “Underworld” star announced Thursday that her mother died Tuesday evening, writing in an emotional Instagram post that Loe died “in my arms after immeasurable suffering.”

Though Beckinsale in her post did not disclose a cause of death, she announced last year that her mother had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Loe was 78.

The “Pearl Harbor” actor, 51, said she felt compelled to announce her mother’s death because she had to register the “Space Island One” actor’s death certificate. She shared a carousel of photos and videos of her mother from over the years, including snaps of Loe in her youth and with granddaughter Lily Mo Sheen, whom Beckinsale shares with ex Michael Sheen.

“I am paralysed,” Beckinsale wrote in her caption. “Jude was the compass of my life, the love of my life, my dearest friend.”

Loe, born March 6, 1947, in Manchester, enjoyed a versatile career that began in the 1970s and earned her dozens of credits, mostly on British TV series. She broke out on the ITV fantasy series “Ace of Wands” in 1970s and went on to appear in numerous other programs for the network including “The Chief,” “Crown Court,” “Let There Be Love” and “Goodnight and God Bless.”

Throughout her career — her most recent credit was a minor role in the TV miniseries “Fool Me Once” in 2024 — Loe took on a variety of roles ranging from a magician’s assistant in “Ace of Wands” to a much sought-after divorcée in “Singles” to a spacecraft commander in “Space Island One.”

Prior to taking on screen roles, Loe pursued a career on the stage, including repertory theater in northern England’s Crewe, where in 1968 she met fellow actor Richard Beckinsale, whom she would marry in 1977. Though they split after two years of marriage, they welcomed daughter Kate in 1973. Richard Beckinsale died at age 31 from a heart attack.

Loe remarried in 1997 to television director Roy Battersby, who died in January 2024 after a brief illness. He was 87.

In her announcement, Kate Beckinsale praised her mother for her legacy, “huge heart” and courage in the final year of her life.

Beckinsale continued: “She has been brave in so many ways, forgiving sometimes too much, believing in the ultimate good in people and the world is so dim without her that it is nearly impossible to bear.”

Loe is survived by six stepchildren in addition to her daughter, according to the Guardian.

It’s another dry, sweltering morning in Las Vegas, and the guitarist Zoltan Bathory has just left his Gothic castle. Bearded and dressed in black, with a bundle of dreadlocks piled high on his head, he’s now piloting a small boat across a man-made lake filled with tap water, on his way to breakfast at a nearby café.

The newly renovated replica castle is a recent project and perk of Bathory’s 20-year career as guitarist and founder of the multiplatinum heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch. But last year, as the metal act began planning to celebrate those two decades of action, Bathory discovered that their longtime former label, Prospect Park, had quietly sold the masters to the first seven 5FDP albums.

The group, which retained 50% ownership in the masters but not “administrative rights,” was not informed before the sale.

“We were not privy to the deal. It was completely behind curtains. That’s the annoying part of this,” says Bathory. “I wish they had a conversation because we could have done a deal together, or maybe we would have bought it. We didn’t even get an option. We found out from somebody else. Well, wait a minute, what’s going on?”

With that anniversary coming up in 2025, 5FDP adjusted after finding inspiration in the example of pop superstar Taylor Swift, who responded to the sale of her catalog with a hugely successful series of “Taylor’s Version” rerecordings of entire albums. Swift re-created four of her records, each one topping the Billboard Top 200, before she finally bought back the rights to her catalog this year.

Five Finger Death Punch decided to follow that lead, and in January began rerecording the band’s most popular songs. The first batch of new recordings arrived under the title “20 Years of Five Finger Death Punch — Best of Volume 1,” released Friday, to be followed by “Best of Volume 2” later this year.

“When this happened, it came up immediately: ‘Well, this happened to Taylor and what did she do?’” Bathory says of the plan. “She battle-tested it. And she’s a big artist. ‘OK, that’s your move? Now this is our move.’”

It is just the latest chapter in a sometimes turbulent career for the musicians, as the band rose to become one of the most successful hard rock/metal bands of their generation, boasting 12 billion streams, surpassed only by Metallica and AC/DC. During its first decade, 5FDP released four platinum-selling albums in the U.S., beginning with its second release, 2009’s explosive “War Is the Answer.”

The unexpected sale of their masters — to the independent music publisher Spirit Music Group — was perhaps the final round in a frequently contentious relationship with Prospect Park founder Jeff Kwatinetz. In 2016, the label sued Five Finger Death Punch in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging breach of contract over a coming greatest hits package and the recording of a new album.

That lawsuit got ugly, including an accusation in its initial filing that the band was “attempting to cash in before the anticipated downfall of their addicted bandmate,” a blunt reference to singer Ivan L. Moody’s period of self-destruction at the time. The band countersued. The cases were settled out of court the following year.

A request for comment sent to Kwatinetz through his attorney was not returned by press time, but he told Billboard last month that the band’s current management stopped cooperating, so “I sold my half.”

As he settles into the small lakeside café over a glass of organic matcha tea and avocado toast, Bathory expresses little real anger over the suits and the sale, and looks back cheerfully at the band’s long relationship with the label. The guitarist says he actually enjoyed their heated discussions, reflecting not only their conflicts of the moment, but a shared history as the band rose from clubs on the Sunset Strip to stadiums around the world.

“With our former label president, this is probably the funniest relationship. In the past, we were suing each other for various [issues],” Bathory says with a smile. “We get on the phone, and we’re talking about a lawsuit, and he’s like, ‘You guys lost this injunction.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, f— you.’ ‘Oh, f— you!’ We had this back and forth, and then it’s ‘How’s the kids?’ And then we just talk about albums and music and whatnot for like an hour.

“And then, ‘OK, see you in court.’ ‘F— you,’” he adds with a laugh. “It’s a game of life. And I believe in the way of the samurai. The saddest day in the samurai’s life is when your worst opponent dies, because that’s the guy who kept you on your toes.”

Sessions for the new recordings unfolded quickly from 5FDP’s current lineup that also includes baseball bat-wielding singer Moody, longtime bassist Chris Kael, and two newer members, drummer Charlie Engen and lead guitarist Andy James.

The musicians recorded their parts separately, re-creating songs some of them had by now performed live nearly 1,000 times around the world. The resulting tracks are not exact replicas of the originals, but are faithful to their spirit while leaving room for the natural evolution that happens through years of touring.

The result on “Best of Volume 1” is a potent representation of the band’s history, opening with the snarling riffs of “Under and Over It.” The first volume includes 13 rerecordings and three live tracks. When played side-by-side with the originals, the new self-produced songs never sound like tired retreads but are powered by some contemporary fire in the band’s performances.

The first public glimpse in the project was a rerecording of “I Refuse,” a power ballad from 2018, this time as a duet with Maria Brink (of In This Moment), released as a single in May.

Once news of the project, and its inspiration, began to spread, Five Finger Death Punch began to hear from a new constituency: Swifties.

“What’s kind of crazy is that I see Taylor Swift’s fans on our social media and bulletin board going, ‘Yeah!’ That’s the most bizarre thing,” Bathory says of the new voices cheering the band forward. “We are so far away from each other in style. But it seems like it hit a chord. I guess people who don’t necessarily understand or are privy to the music business and how it works still feel like this is not right.”

While the band is also six songs into recording its next album of new material, Bathory says the new best-of recordings are expected to be fully embraced by the band’s famously intense following.

“Our fans are pretty hardcore,” Bathory says. “They’re very engaged, and they know exactly why we did this. So I think, just to support the band, they will switch [their allegiance to the newer versions] anyway. But these recordings are going to live next to each other.”

Founded in 2005, Five Finger Death Punch was the culmination of the rock star dreams of Bathory that began as teen in Hungary, first as a fan of British punk rock, before turning to metal after discovering Iron Maiden (with early singer Paul Di’Anno). He built his own electric guitar to look like one used by the L.A. heavy metal band W.A.S.P., with a skull-and-crossbones painted onto the surface.

Rock music wasn’t played on TV or the radio in the then-communist country, so Bathory and his friends traded cassette tapes of any punk and metal they got their hands on. “Somebody always somehow smuggled in a record, and we would all copy it,” he remembers. “It created this subculture where we didn’t just look at it as music. It was the sound of the rebellion.”

Bathory also dressed the part, drawing attention for his Def Leppard T-shirt with the Union Jack flag, studded leather jackets and belts, and long hair. Kids who adopted that look and spoke in the language of Western hard rock actually risked arrest, he says.

“I’ve been chased around by the cops so many times,” he recalls with a laugh.

By his early 20s, Bathory moved to New York City with his guitar, about $1,000 in his pocket, and no English-speaking skills. While living in low-budget squalor, he slowly taught himself English, first by translating a random copy of the Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” He played with bands that got nowhere, and after six years relocated to Los Angeles, and things started to change.

For a year, he played bass in the L.A. hard rock band U.P.O., which enjoyed some chart success, then formed Five Finger Death Punch, with a name inspired by the 1972 kung fu film “Five Fingers of Death” and Quentin Tarantino’s two “Kill Bill” epics.

Zoltan Bathory, founder and guitarist of the heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch, pilots a small boat on the man-made lake outside his Las Vegas house.

(Steve Appleford)

“I knew exactly what I wanted. There was a vision,” says Bathory.

That vision got clearer when he first saw singer Moody performing with the nu metal band Motograter. It was Bathory’s good fortune that Motograter would soon break up. He reached out to Moody in Denver.

“He was special — his performance, his voice. That star quality thing is a real thing,” notes Bathory of the growling, emotional singer. “You could tell he was a rock star, right? I’m like, OK, that’s the guy.”

In their first years as a band, the quintet played more than 200 shows annually. “We played every little stage that exists,” Bathory says.

Sitting beside the guitarist now in the café is Jackie Kajzer, also known as radio DJ Full Metal Jackie, who first spotted the band on MySpace. She soon caught an early set at the Whisky a Go Go and was immediately sold on their sound and potential. She was also a junior manager at the Firm, a leading management company at the time representing Korn, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park.

Kajzer urged the company to sign the ominously-named Five Finger Death Punch, and after two showcase performances on the Strip, it did. The metal band was soon added to the side stage of the high-profile 2007 Family Values Tour, followed the next year by the traveling Mayhem Festival, leaving a powerful impression among new fans and fellow artists.

“When you find something that makes you feel something, it makes it worth fighting for,” says Kajzer, who has remained part of the band’s management team ever since, now at 10th Street Entertainment. “I had never felt it before. PS: I’ve never really felt that again, that same early feeling. You believe in it and you want to shake everyone else and make them get it as well.”

Five Finger Death Punch’s recording career began by uploading a few songs at a time — early versions of “Bleeding,” “Salvation,” and “The Way of The Fist” — to MySpace, then an essential platform for new acts, or what Bathory now remembers with a laugh as “the center of the universe.”

“It was extremely hard, but in the beginning we knew we had something because there was this instant interaction,” Bathory says of fan response. “We were all in bands before — many, many bands. We all recognized that, OK, there’s something different here. We didn’t have to convince people. It just started happening and it was growing really fast.”

Zoltan Bathory, stands beneath a Turkish lamp in his Las Vegas house.

(Steve Appleford)

“The ones that make it, they’re here for decade after decade,” he says of the larger metal scene, which enjoys a seemingly eternal audience. “The family [of fans] is extremely loyal and they’re there forever. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

The band’s first album, 2007’s “The Way of the Fist,” was largely recorded in Bathory’s apartment near the Sunset Strip. It reached halfway up the Billboard Top 200 album chart and eventually went gold, with 500,000 copies sold. While even greater success follower, there has also been the usual ups and downs in the life of a metal band, with group members coming and going, troubles with substance abuse, and arguments over creative choices.

After two decades together, the singer and the guitarist have survived.

“It’s still a tornado. It’s a band, a bunch of guys, so I don’t think it’s ever going to change. We built this freaking thing like it was a battleship,” says Bathory with a grin, sitting in the castle beneath an ornate Turkish lamp.

“It’s always going to be that we fight and argue, but at the end of the day, we always figure things out. We always climb the next mountain.”

The shocking cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” is a sign that time is running out for one of TV’s most beloved formats.

The late-night talk show was invented in the 1950s as a way for networks to own their own programming rather than have it provided by sponsors. Now, amid shrinking audiences and a politically turbulent climate for free speech, the familiar desk-and-sofa tableau is in serious trouble.

CBS announced Thursday that the upcoming 2025-26 TV season for “The Late Show” will be its last. Executives blamed the cancellation on financial concerns felt across all network late-night shows. Last year, NBC cut “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to four nights a week while “Late Night With Seth Meyers” cut its live band.

Still, industry veterans were bewildered by the timing.

It’s hard to imagine Paramount Global executives did not anticipate blowback from announcing the move days after Colbert blasted the company’s $16-million settlement with President Trump over CBS News’ “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Colbert described the deal as a bribe during his Monday monologue.

Every move the company makes is now under a microscope as it tries to get the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump acolyte Brendan Carr, to approve an $8-billion merger with Skydance Media. Canceling the most watched late-night program hosted by one of Trump’s harshest critics will draw even more scrutiny.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), weighed in on X shortly after taping an interview on Colbert’s program.

“If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better,” Schiff posted.

The Writers Guild of America also raised questions, saying the cancellation appeared to be a case of “sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump Administration.”

One factor contradicting the theory is that Colbert, who has another year on his contract, will remain on the air through May. His commentaries have never been restrained by network executives over his 10-year run and that situation is not expected to change in his final season.

The poor optics may be a matter of contractual timing.

Paramount Global had to complete the deals with writer-producer teams in July for the upcoming “Late Show” season, according to a person familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to comment.

Those deals typically run for a full year, but with the company’s intention to cancel the program — decided several months ago — the contracts being offered only ran through May, which tipped off the network’s plans.

When Colbert learned of the cancellation decision on Wednesday, he made the call to inform his staff and his audience the next day.

“Late Show” is said to be losing somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars a year as younger viewers have fled. Since 2022, the program has lost 20% of its audience in the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49 age group, according to Nielsen data.

Ad revenue for “Late Show” in 2024 was $57.7 million, according to iSpot.tv, down from $75.7 million in 2022. “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on NBC and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC have also seen significant declines over that period.

CBS has already given up on one hour of late night due to financial pressure. Two years ago, it canceled its 12:35 a.m. “Late Late Show” program hosted by James Corden because it was losing money.

CBS came up with a lower-cost replacement with “After Midnight,” but that ended after two seasons as its host Taylor Tomlinson decided not to renew her deal. CBS is replacing it with a syndicated program, “Comics Unleashed,” from Byron Allen’s Entertainment Partners in an arrangement that will cost the network nothing.

Still, Paramount Global will find itself facing questions about why CBS did not seek ways to reduce the production costs of the program instead of just pulling the plug.

If CBS decides to continue programming the 11:30 p.m. slot, it will be hard-pressed to approach the same audience levels that Colbert attracted.

CBS is giving up a popular culture touchstone, although in the current fragmented media landscape, the days of such hosts having massive sway over a large audience have passed.

Media analyst Rich Greenfield wrote that legacy media companies investing in expensive original programming outside of sports and news may be ill-advised as viewers continue to flock to streaming.

“Ending ‘The Late Show’ is the tip of the iceberg with massive programming and personnel cuts to come,” he said.

For decades, late-night TV served as the brand identity of the broadcast networks.

Jack Paar was the witty conversationalist that made Middle America feel like it was invited to a sophisticated Manhattan cocktail party. His successor, Johnny Carson, became a trendsetter in the 1960s, defining male coolness. He had his own clothing line. His dry monologue was often a gauge of the country’s political mood. An invitation to take a seat next to Carson after a stand-up set turbocharged the careers of many top comedians.

CBS was unable to compete with Carson for decades, trying and failing with the likes of Merv Griffin and Pat Sajak. When David Letterman became available after he was bypassed for the “Tonight” job at NBC, he came to CBS in 1993 and made the network a serious contender.

Letterman’s offbeat, sardonic brand of humor also gave a layer of hipness to CBS, which had long had a reputation for stodginess.

“Late Show With David Letterman” helped make late-night network TV a financial bonanza. While the proliferation of cable networks was cutting into audience share in the 1990s and early 2000s, the late-night habit still thrived, especially with its ability to reach young men, the most elusive demographic for TV advertisers.

As a result, late-night hosts became the highest-paid stars in the business. Letterman and Jay Leno were both earning in the neighborhood of $30 million a year until networks started trimming salaries 10 years ago.

But technology chipped away at the late-night talk show habit. When DVRs reached critical mass, consumers started to catch up with their favorite prime-time shows during the late-night hours.

The most painful blow came from social media. While online clips of the late-night shows draw hundreds of millions of viewing minutes, that doesn’t generate the same kind of ad revenue as TV. They also make showing up at 11:35 p.m. every night pointless.

“The networks cut up all of the best parts of the show, and by the end of the night you can see all of them on social media,” said one former network executive who oversaw late-night programs. “There’s no reason to even DVR it.”

Prime-time programs add millions of viewers through on-demand streaming after they air on the broadcast networks. Topical late-night shows don’t have the same shelf life.

While politics have long been an important element of late-night comedy, the emergence of Trump‘s political career in 2015 — and his ability to drive ratings and the national conversation — made him the dominant topic.

Where Carson, Letterman and Leno skewered both sides of the political spectrum, Trump’s ability to provide endless comedy fodder on a daily basis made him an easy, entertaining and ultimately one-sided target.

For years it worked. Ratings for Colbert — who made his bones on Comedy Central satirizing a reactionary talk show host — languished for the first two years after he replaced Letterman. Audience levels and ad rates surged in 2017 once Trump came into office and became Colbert’s muse.

But the country has become more politically polarized in recent years and the relentless lampooning of Trump has created a lane for “Gutfeld!,” a nightly Fox News talk show with a conservative bent.

While not technically a late-night show (it airs at 10 p.m. Eastern), “Gutfeld!” drew an average of 3 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025 according to Nielsen and has grown 20% since 2022.

The young men that used to make late night an advertiser magnet are now turning to podcasters such as Joe Rogan and others who can speak without the restraint of broadcast TV standards.

What is it about brothers? So competitive, so determined to outshine the other, so very male. In popular music, there are numerous examples of passionate sibling partnerships that have burned bright only to flame out, leaving recriminatory anger and the occasional lawsuit in their wake.

The Everly brothers were no exception. Foundational pillars of 20th century popular music, they formed the first great harmony vocal duo to bridge country music and pop. Over a five year period from 1957 to 1962, the brothers recorded a series of singles — “Wake Up Little Susie,” “Bye Bye Love” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” among them — that imprinted themselves into the pop-music canon, their soaring, wistful, close-interval harmonies gliding straight into our souls.

You don’t have to look too hard to find Phil and Don Everly’s traces. The Beatles regarded them as the harmony group they longed to emulate; you can hear them sing a snatch of “Bye Bye Love” in Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” documentary, and Paul McCartney name-checked them in his 1976 song “Let ‘Em In.” Simon & Garfunkel wanted to be the Everlys and included “Bye Bye Love” on the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album. In 2013, Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones recorded “Foreverly,” an album of Everly Brothers songs.

And yet, biographies of them are scant. Barry Mazor’s “Blood Harmony” is long overdue, a rigorously researched narrative of the duo’s fascinatingly zig-zaggy 50-plus-year career, as well as a loving valentine to the pair’s enduring musical power.

In his book, Mazor is quick to refute many of the myths that have accreted around the pair, starting with the backstory that the brothers were reared in Kentucky, a cradle of bluegrass, and that their dad, an accomplished guitarist and singer, nurtured them up from rural poverty into spotlight stardom. In fact, Mazor’s book points out that the brothers, who were born two years apart, moved around a lot as kids — Iowa and Chicago, mostly — soaking in the musical folkways of those regions and absorbing it all into their musical bloodstream. Though they were apprenticed by their father to perform as adolescents, they were their own men, with a sophisticated grasp of various musical genres as teenagers.

“They were as much products of the Midwest as they were of Kentucky,” says Mazor from his Nashville home. “The music they learned and the culture they absorbed was in Chicago, where they lived with their parents for a time, and they picked up on the R&B there. All of this eventually adds up to what we now call Americana, which is music that has a sense of place.” The Everlys brought that country-meets-the-city vibe to pop music.

Another misconception that Mazor clears up in “Blood Harmony” is the notion that the Beatles were the first musical group to write and play its own songs. In fact, Phil and Don wrote a clutch of the Everlys’ greatest records, including Phil’s 1960 composition “When Will I Be Loved,” which became a mammoth hit when Linda Ronstadt covered it in 1975. It’s also true that Don is rock’s first great rhythm guitarist, his strident acoustic strum powering ”Wake Up Little Susie” and others. George Harrison was listening, as was Pete Townsend.

The Everlys produced hits, many of them written by one or both of the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant: “Bird Dog,” “Love Hurts,” “Poor Jenny” and others. But the Beatles’ global success became a barricade that many of the first-generation rock stars couldn’t breach, including the Everlys. “Even though they were only a couple of years older than the Beatles, they were treated as old hat,” says Mazor.

Complicating matters further: A lawsuit brought by their publishing company Acuff-Rose in 1961 meant that the brothers could no longer tap the Bryants to write songs for them. The same year, they enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and found, just as Elvis had discovered a few years prior, that military service did little to help sell records. By the time the lawsuit was settled in 1964, both brothers had descended into amphetamine abuse.

The Everlys had to go back to move forward. Warner Bros. Records, their label since 1960, had become the greatest label for a new era of singer-songwriters taking country-rock to a more introspective place. Future label president Lenny Waronker, an Everlys fan, wanted to make an album that would place the brothers in their proper context, as pioneers who bridged musical worlds to create something entirely new.

Author Barry Mazor is quick to refute many of the myths surrounding the Everlys.

(Courtesy of the author)

The resulting project, called “Roots,” drew from the Everlys’ musical heritage but also featured covers of songs by contemporary writers Randy Newman and Ron Elliott. Released in 1968, the same year as the Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” and the Band’s “Music from Big Pink,” “Roots” sold meekly, but it remains a touchstone of the Everlys’ career, a key progenitor of the Americana genre. “‘The ‘Roots’ album was one last chance to show they mattered,” says Mazor. “And there was suddenly room for them again. It wasn’t a massive seller, but it opened the door.”

If anything, it was their own fraught relationship that tended to snag the Everlys’ progress. Their identities were as intertwined as their harmonies, and it grated on them. Mazor points out that they were in fact vastly different in temperament, Phil’s pragmatic careerism running counter to Don’s more free-spirited approach. This push and pull created tensions that weighed heavily on their friendship and their musical output.

“Phil was more conservative in some ways. He was content to play the supper club circuit well into ‘70s, while Don wanted to explore and was less willing to sell out, as it were,” says Mazor. “And this created a wedge between them.” Perhaps inevitably, from 1973 to roughly 1983, they branched out as solo artists, making records that left little imprint on the public consciousness. They had families and eventually both moved from their L.A. home base to different cities.

But there was time for one final triumph. Having briefly set their differences aside, the brothers played a reunion show at London’s Royal Albert Hall in September 1983, which led to a collaboration on an album with British guitarist Dave Edmunds producing. Edmunds, in turn, asked Paul McCartney whether he would be willing to write something for the “EB 84” album, and the result was “On the Wings of a Nightingale,” their last U.S. hit, albeit a modest one.

“The harmony singing that the Everlys pioneered is still with us,” says Mazor. “If you look back, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, all of these brother acts all loved the Everlys. But there’s also a contemporary act called Larkin Poe, who called one of their albums ‘Blood Harmony.’ They set an example for how two singers can maximize their voices to create something larger than themselves. This kind of harmony still lingers.”

When a country like Armenia sends a film out into the world, it’s not just art. It’s a way to preserve memory, to reach a scattered diaspora. Each film offers the world stories that might otherwise be forgotten. So when President Trump proposes a 100% tariff on all films “produced in foreign lands,” the damage isn’t limited to foreign competitors or outsourcing studios. It threatens to shut out small nations like Armenia, for whom cinema is a lifeline.

The proposal hasn’t taken effect — yet. But July 9 marked a turning point in Trump’s broader tariff agenda, with a deadline for reimposing sweeping trade penalties on countries deemed “unfair.” While the situation for films remains unclear, the proposal alone has done damage and continues to haunt the industry. The tariff idea arises from the worldview that treats international exchange as a threat — and cultural expression as just another import to tax.

Take “Amerikatsi” (2022), the extraordinary recent movie by Emmy-winning actor and director Michael A. Goorjian. Inspired by his grandfather’s escape from the Armenian genocide — smuggled across the ocean in a crate — the project is not just a movie; it’s a universal story rooted in the Armenian experience, made possible by international collaboration and driven by a deep personal mission. Goorjian filmed it in Armenia with local crews, including people who, months later, would find themselves on the front lines of war. One was killed. Others were injured. Still, they sent him videos from the trenches saying all they wanted was to return to the set. That is the spirit a tariff like this would crush.

Armenia is a democracy in a dangerous neighborhood. Its history is riddled with trauma — genocide, war, occupation — and its present is haunted by threats from neighboring authoritarian regimes. But even as bombs fall and borders close, its people create. Films like “Aurora’s Sunrise” (2022) and “Should the Wind Drop” (2020) carry voices across oceans, turning pain into poetry, history into cinema. These films don’t rely on wide releases. They depend on arthouses, festivals, streamers and distributors with the courage and curiosity to take a chance. A 100% tariff would devastate that.

Indeed, the ripple effects of such a tariff would upend the entire global film ecosystem. Modern cinema is inherently international: A Georgian director might work with a French editor, an American actor and a German financier.

So sure, many American films use crew and facilities in Canada. But international co-productions are a growing cornerstone of the global film industry, particularly in Europe. Belgium produces up to 72% of its films in partnership with foreign nations, often France. Other notable co-production leaders include Luxembourg (45% with France), Slovakia (38% with Czechia) and Switzerland (31% with France). These partnerships are often driven by shared language, which is why the U.S. is also frequently involved in co-productions with Britain as well as Canada. Israel too has leaned into this model, using agreements with countries such as France, Germany and Canada to gain access to international audiences and funding mechanisms.

The U.S. government cannot unmake this system and should not try to do so. To penalize “foreign-made” films is to punish Americans too — artists, producers and distributors who thrive on collaboration. You can’t build a wall around storytelling.

Supporters of the tariff argue it protects American workers. But Hollywood is already one of the most globalized industries on Earth, and the idea that it suffers from too many foreign films is absurd. If anything, it suffers from too few. The result of this policy won’t be a thriving domestic market — but a quieter, flatter, more parochial one. A landscape where the next “Amerikatsi” never gets seen, where a generation of Armenian American youth never discovers their history through a movie screen.

If America still wants to lead in the 21st century — not just militarily and economically but morally — it should lead through culture and avoid isolation.

Stories like “Amerikatsi” remind us why that matters. A film that begins with a boy smuggled in a crate across the ocean ends with a message of joy and resilience. That’s not just Armenian history — it’s American history too. It cannot be separated. Unless we want that kind of storytelling priced out of our cinemas (and off our streaming platforms), we must keep the doors open.

For America to turn its back on stories like these would be a betrayal of everything film can be. And it would impoverish American society too. That way lies not greatness but provinciality.

Alexis Alexanian is a New York City-based film producer, consultant and educator whose credits include “A League of Their Own” and “Pieces of April.” She is a past president of New York Women in Film & Television and sits on the board of BAFTA North America.

Picture this: A gaggle of 21-year-olds squeeze into a booth, pull the curtain and smile for the camera. After a series of mysterious analog rumblings, the booth expels a tiny strip of prints. The posers crowd in to savor the tiny film prints — and raise their cameras to snap digital images of them.

While boomers blink in puzzlement, legions of digital natives have embraced the old-school ritual and machinery of the photo booth — and the people at San Francisco-based Photomatica are among those building empires on that enthusiasm. Their latest venture: a Photo Booth Museum in Silver Lake, which opens Thursday.

For anyone who grew up with digital photography, a photo booth is a sort of visual adventure — a selfie with “analog magic.” And at $6.50 to $8.50 for a strip of four photos, it’s more affordable than plenty of other entertainment options. Photomatica, one of several companies riding the photo booth wave, has been restoring and operating these contraptions since 2010. This is the company’s second “museum.”

At the new L.A. site at 3827 W. Sunset Blvd. (near Hyperion Avenue), the company has gathered four restored analog photo booths — two of which date to the 1950s — and one digital booth. The 1,350-square-foot space is designed to look “as if you walked into a Wes Anderson movie set,” said spokeswoman Kelsey Schmidt.

The machines are retrofitted to accept credit cards and Apple Pay, but otherwise the technology is original on the old machines — which means no retakes and a 3-to-5-minute wait for image processing. The film-based booths print black-and-white images only; the digital booth offers a choice of color or black and white.

Is this at all like a traditional museum experience? No. It’s a for-profit venture. Though visitors might learn a little about photography history, the core activity is making and celebrating selfies. So far, Schmidt said, the booths have been especially popular with people under 25, especially female visitors.

Photomatica rents out and operates about 250 booths (including bars, restaurants, hotels, music venues and special events) nationwide. The company hatched the museum idea after drawing immediate crowds with a booth in the Photoworks film lab on Market Street in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.

On its Thursday opening night, the L.A. Photo Booth Museum will operate from 6 to 10 p.m., offering up a limited number of free photo sessions and key chains. Otherwise, daily hours will be 1 to 9 p.m.

July signals summer fun, Independence Day and … Emmy nominations.

Nominations for TV’s biggest awards show will be announced Tuesday. This year’s field of small-screen offerings includes returning favorites like HBO’s “The White Lotus” and breakout hits such as Apple TV+’s “The Studio.”

Here is everything you need to know about this year’s Emmy nominations.

When will Emmy nominations be announced?

The 77th Emmy Awards nominations will be revealed Tuesday beginning at 8:30 a.m. PT/11:30 a.m. ET. The nominees will be announced by Television Academy Chair Cris Abrego alongside “What We Do in the Shadows” star Harvey Guillén and “Running Point’s” Brenda Song.

How can I watch?

You can livestream the announcement on the TV Academy’s website or YouTube channel.

Who are the predicted nominees?

“Hacks” and “The Studio” are expected to lead the comedy pack. Other contenders include “The Bear,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Abbott Elementary,” “Shrinking,” “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Nobody Wants This.”

Drama series nominees could include “Severance,” “The Pitt,” “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us.” “Slow Horses,” “Andor,” “The Diplomat” and “Squid Game” are also in the running.

The limited series front-runners, meanwhile, include “Adolescence,” “The Penguin,” “Dying for Sex,” “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” and “Disclaimer.”

After nominations are announced, final-round voting will commence Aug. 18 and conclude Aug. 27.

When are the 2025 Emmy Awards?

The 77th Emmy Awards will take place Sept. 14 at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET at downtown’s Peacock Theater in L.A. Live. The ceremony, hosted for the first time by Nate Bargatze, will air live on CBS and stream on Paramount+ the next day.

Jesse Collins Entertainment is producing the Emmy Awards for the third consecutive year.

The Creative Arts Emmys will be held Sept. 6 and 7.

Blackpink is back in the area.

The K-pop girl group, made up of Rosé, Lisa, Jennie and Jisoo, triumphantly kicked off the North American leg of the Deadline world tour Saturday night at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. After taking a two-year break to focus on solo projects, the group reunited for its first U.S. concert since the Born Pink tour concluded in 2023.

Despite dropping only one group number since then — hardstyle, Diplo-produced “Jump,” released Friday — Blackpink sold out two nights at one of the Los Angeles area’s biggest venues.

“This is incredible. It is such an honor to perform at the SoFi Stadium for you guys,” Rosé said. “We are really really excited to be here.”

Sarah Hoang has been a Blackpink fan since 2019, following their Coachella debut that same year. To celebrate her first time seeing the girl group, the San Diego resident passed out commemorative tickets to other fans.

“I’ve been waiting for them for a long time,” Hoang said. “I was really excited to be finally seeing them in L.A., especially at the first tour of the U.S. leg.”

The stadium was awash in pink as fans went all-out for their idols. While many dressed according to the band’s namesake, others took inspiration from the girls’ solo projects. Concertgoer Evelyn Rios, who lives in Los Angeles, nailed Jennie’s look from the “Ruby” album cover in her all-black outfit and cherry-red wig. A fan since 2020, she attended the 2023 show at Dodger Stadium and noted she was most excited to hear “like Jennie.”

The show consisted of five acts and an encore, alternating between group and solo sections. Blackpink started off strong, firing through “Kill This Love,” “Pink Venom” and “How You Like That.”

The Saturday night set list was identical to the one in Goyang, South Korea, last weekend, save for Lisa’s solo section. While the maknae — or youngest member of the group — performed “New Woman” and “Rockstar” for the tour’s opening dates, she opted for the edgier “Thunder” and “Fxck Up the World” Saturday night.

Lisa’s two-piece Louis Vuitton set evoked Wonder Woman as she conquered the stage, lightning crackling behind her. Channeling the same spellbinding energy from her Coachella set earlier this year, where she also performed tracks from “Alter Ego,” Lisa proved why she’s among K-pop’s most magnetic performers.

All four solo projects are sonically distinct, and seeing them back-to-back highlighted just how artistically diverse the Blackpink members are. Jennie, who also performed solo at Coachella this year, leaned into her hip-hop influences as she delivered a mashup of “Mantra,” “with the IE (way up)” and “like Jennie.” Meanwhile, Jisoo pleased with the effervescent, electronic pop of “earthquake” and “Your Love.”

Rosé prompted laughs from the audience as footage of her filming a TikTok and eating French fries backstage played leading up to her solo section. When she finally appeared in front of the audience, she took a more intimate approach, sitting at the edge of the stage with guitarist Johnny “Natural” Najera.

Starting with heartbreak anthems “3am” and “toxic till the end,” Rosé concluded with the upbeat, global chart-topping single “Apt.,” during which she brought a fan on stage. Released with Bruno Mars in October, the song still sits comfortably on the Billboard Hot 100.

Blackpink debuted “Jump” before its official release last weekend in South Korea, so Los Angeles fans were prepared for the long-awaited comeback single. They jumped and danced all the way through the addictive track when Blackpink performed it not once, but twice.

“I must say the song is really addictive the more and more I hear it,” Rosé said after the first run. “I personally think it’s the most exciting one to perform during our set.

With a mix of old and new hits, Saturday night brought together both longtime fans and K-pop newcomers.

Sydney Grube and Thet Aung drove up together from San Diego just for the concert. While Aung has been a fan since the group began, Grube started listening after seeing Lisa in HBO’s “White Lotus” in February.

“I started listening to all the solo acts, and then started listening actually to the Blackpink music,” Grube said, adding that she was most excited to see the individual sections.

The concert also united fans of all ages, with plenty of families arriving in coordinating outfits. At one point, Blackpink even shouted out all the “baby blinks” in the audience — many of whom were not even born when the group debuted in 2016.

“I did want them to dance more, but they did really good,” said 9-year-old Tara Castro, who was wearing a Blackpink hat and glasses. “They’re my favorite K-pop.”

With tour dates charted through January, fans are expecting new music — perhaps even a full album — sometime soon. Hopefully this isn’t the last we see of Blackpink in our area.

OK, I’ll say it. I’m sick of superheroes. I blame the Marvel Cinematic Universe (36 movies and counting over 17 years) and the DC Extended Universe (43 movies and counting, mostly since the late 1970s). Maybe Earth’s not big enough for two universes. They’re running pretty thin these days, down to rebooting reboots, making sequels for prequels and squeezing every ounce from the intellectual property tube to fill out streaming platform minutes.

But there’s always Superman. The Krypton-born alien, orphaned, sent off into space for survival and then raised by adoptive parents in Kansas. He’s now been with American pop culture for 10 decades (eight in film). Despite an outfit modeled after a circus strongman, he’s become a durable, transcendent symbol of the ultimate immigrant and somehow a simultaneous embodiment of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

Superman’s the classic American good guy, and so this weekend’s opening of the new “Superman” with David Corenswet is a great time to think about the real good guys and gals in American life — that is, if you can find any. Where are all the good guys and gals in America? What qualifies someone for the title these days?

The idea has definitely shifted. It’s as if by sheer screen volume the fake superheroes overwhelmed the public consciousness. Superheroes are dialed up so high we can’t hear what real heroes sound like anymore. A 2008 poll in Britain found almost a quarter thought Winston Churchill was fake, while a majority of Britons believed Sherlock Holmes was real.

We’ve become confused: We prefer to watch fake heroes on screen rather than expect real ones to emerge in life. And so the fake ones become the only kind of hero we recognize.

The historian Daniel Boorstin described this transition from heroism to fame in his 1961 book “The Image.” He noted that heroes in American history were typically known for great public contribution through immense difficulty and danger. It didn’t matter much what they looked like because their deeds had saved lives and mattered to so many.

But pictures and movies changed everything in the 20th century. Heroes became celebrities. We traded away enduring contributions to the public good in exchange for flimsy, flashy fame that works for a paycheck. Value over values; money over all.