Robert Wilson, a leader in avant-garde theater who collaborated with Philip Glass, David Byrne and Lady Gaga over his six-decade career, has died. He was 83.
The “Einstein on the Beach” director died Thursday at his home in Water Mill, N.Y., after a “brief but acute illness,” according to his website.
“While facing his diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he still felt compelled to keep working and creating right up until the very end,” the statement reads. “His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, as well as the Watermill Center, will endure as Robert Wilson’s artistic legacy.”
Wilson was born on Oct. 4, 1941, in Waco, Texas, to a conservative Southern Baptist family. He struggled with a speech impediment and learning disabilities as a child but was aided by his ballet teacher, Byrd Hoffman.
“She heard me stutter, and she told me, ‘You should take more time to speak. You should speak slowly,’ ” he told the Observer in 2015. “She said one word over a long period of time. She said go home and try it. I did. Within six weeks, I had overcome the stuttering.”
In 1968, Wilson opened an experimental theater workshop named after his mentor: the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. He created the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation in 1969, under which he established the Watermill Center in 1992.
In his early 20s, Wilson moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he studied interior design and architecture at the Pratt Institute. Later, he joined the recreation department of Goldwater Memorial Hospital, where he brought dance to catatonic polio patients with iron lungs.
“Because the patients were largely paralyzed, the work he was doing with them was more mental than physical,” wrote his former colleague Robyn Brentano in Frieze. “With his unconventional frankness and tenderness, he drew out people’s hidden qualities.”
Wilson started teaching movement classes in Summit, N.J., while he wrote his early plays. One day in 1968, he witnessed a white police officer about to strike a deaf, mute Black boy, Raymond Andrews, while walking down the street. Wilson came to Andrews’ defense, appeared in court on his behalf and eventually adopted him. Together, Andrews and Wilson created “Deafman Glance,” a seven-hour “silent opera,” which premiered in 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa.
“The world of a deaf child opened up to us like a wordless mouth. For more than four hours, we went to inhabit this universe where, in the absence of words, of sounds, 60 people had no words except to move,” wrote French Surrealist Louis Aragon after the 1971 Paris premiere. “I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never, never has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each night, reality mingles with dream, all that’s inexplicable in the life of deaf man.”
In 1973, Glass attended a showing of Wilson’s “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” which ran for 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The two artists, united by their interest in experimenting with time and space in theater, soon teamed up to create “Einstein on the Beach,” which premiered in 1976 in Avignon, France.
“We worked first with the time — four hours — and how we were going to divide it up,” Glass told the Guardian in 2012. “I discovered that Bob thinks with a pencil and paper; everything emerged as drawings. I composed music to these, and then Bob began staging it.”
Times classical music critic Mark Swed called “Einstein” “easily the most important opera of the last half century,” even though “nothing about what composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put onstage was opera.” Indeed, “Einstein” has become a cult classic despite the fact it has no Einstein, no beach and no narrative.
Wilson and Glass partnered again to create “the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,” which also featured music from Talking Heads frontman Byrne, for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The project, meant to span 12 hours, was ultimately never completed due to funding problems. In 1995, Wilson shared his concerns about arts funding in the U.S. with The Times.
“The government should assume leadership,” Wilson told Times contributor Jan Breslauer. “By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we’re going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell. We need to have a cultural policy [instead]. There has to be a balance between government and the private sector.
“One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing,” Wilson says. “They are the journal and the diary of our time.”
In addition to his stage work, Wilson created drawings, sculptures, furniture and installations, which he showed at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York beginning in 1975. In 2004, Wilson produced a series of video portraits featuring Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Renée Fleming and Alan Cumming. He would return to the medium again in 2013 with Lady Gaga as his subject.
His work on the installation “Memory/Loss” earned him a Golden Lion for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1993.
One of Wilson’s last projects was an installation commissioned by Salone del Mobile in April Centering on Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà at Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, the project explored the Virgin Mary’s pain following Christ’s death with a combination of music, light and sculpture.
“I’m creating my own vision of the artist’s unfinished masterpiece, torn between a feeling of reverential awe and profound admiration,” he told Wallpaper.
Wilson is survived by Andrews; his sister, Suzanne; and his niece, Lori Lambert.
Whether you like Harris or not, a possible run by the XX chromosome former vice president raises a perennial conundrum: Can a woman win the presidency?
She’s a professor of government and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She points out that post-election, Democrats can’t figure out who they are or what they stand for. In that disarray, it may seem easy and safe in 2028 to travel the well-worn route of “a straight, old white guy who fills the status quo.”
That may be especially true in the Trump era, when an increasingly vocal and empowered slice of America seems to believe that women do, in fact, belong in the kitchen making sanwhiches, far away from any decision beyond turkey or ham.
Post-2024, Harris’ defeat — and deciphering what it means — has caused a lot of “morning-after anxiety and agita,” she said. “We’re all doing research, we’re all in the field trying to figure this out.”
While confused Democrats diddle in private with their feelings, Republicans have made race and gender the center of their platform, even if they cloak it under economic talk. The party’s position on race has become painfully clear with its stance that all undocumented immigrants are criminals and deserving of horrific detention in places such as “Alligator Alcatraz” or even foreign prisons known for torture.
The Republican position on women is slightly more cloaked, but no less retrograde. Whether it’s the refusal to tell the public how Trump is included in the Epstein files, the swift and brutal erosion of reproductive rights, or claims, such as the one by far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk, that the only reason for women to attend college should be to get a “Mrs.” degree, Republicans have made little secret of the fact that equality is not part of their package.
Although Trump’s approval ratings have tanked over immigration, he did win just over half of the popular vote last fall. So that’s a lot of Americans who either agree with him, or at least aren’t bothered by these pre-civil rights ideas on race and gender.
Add to that reality the eager pack of nice, safe Democratic white guys who are lining up for their own chance at the Oval Office — our current California governor included — and it does beg the question for the left: Is a woman worth the risk?
“I’ve definitely seen and heard consultants and, you know, even anxious women donors say, ‘Maybe this means we can’t run a woman.’ And I think it’s completely normal for certain elements of the party to be anxious about gender,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, a grassroots advocacy group.
She too thinks the gender question is “logical” since it has been blamed — though not by her — as “the reason we lost to Donald Trump twice in a row, right? Whereas Biden was able to beat him.”
While Timmaraju is clear that those losses can’t — and shouldn’t — be tied to gender alone, gender also can’t be ignored when the margins are thin.
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive political organizing group Our Revolution, which backed Bernie Sanders for president in 2016, said that gender and race are always a factor, but he believes the bigger question for any candidate in 2028 will be their platform.
Harris, he said, “lost not because she was a woman. She lost because she did not embrace an economic populist message. And I think the electorate is angry about their standard of living declining, and they’re angry about the elites controlling D.C. and enriching themselves.”
Greevarghese told me he sees an opposite momentum building within the party and the electorate — a desire to not play it safe.
“Whoever it is — male, female, gay, straight, Black, white, Asian — the candidate’s got to have a critique of this moment, and it can’t be a normie Dem.”
Brown, the professor, adds, rightfully, that looking at the question of a female candidate’s chances through the lens of just Harris is too narrow. There are lots of women likely to jump into the race. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are just two names already in the mix. Brown adds that an outside contender such as a woman from a political dynasty (think Obama) or a celebrity along the lines of Trump could also make headway.
The criticisms of Harris, with her baggage of losing the election and critiques of how she handled the campaign and the media, may not dog another female candidate, especially with voters.
“Whether Kamala runs again or not, I’m optimistic that the American people will vote for a female president,” Vanessa Cardenas told me. She is the executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group for immigrants’ rights.
“After the chaos, cruelty and incompetence of the Trump presidency, Latino voters, like most Americans, will reward candidates who can speak most authentically and seem most ready to fight for an alternative vision of America,” she said. “I believe women, and women of color, can credibility and forcibly speak to the need for change rooted in the lived experiences of their communities.”
Timmaraju said that regardless of what Harris decides, Democrats will probably have one of the most robust primaries in recent times — which can only be good for the party and for voters.
And rather than asking, “Can a woman win?” the better question would be, “Do we really want a system that won’t let them try?”
July 28 (UPI) — The former director of Project 2025 Paul Dans announced Monday he is going to run for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina.
Dans, who designed Project 2025, will now launch a GOP primary challenge against Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was first elected in 2002 and has been since re-elected three times.
Speaking with The Post and Courier, he said he will officially announce his candidacy on July 30 in Charleston, S.C., at the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon museum.
Dans had served as a senior adviser in the U.S. Office of Community Planning and Development at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, then at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, during the first Trump administration before leaving government to join the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, where he helped manage Project 2025.
Trump had been linked to Project 2025 but publicly distanced himself from the plan. However, his administration has carried out some policies outlined in the strategy and contributors have been hired to his adminsitration.
Dans left the Heritage Foundation in July of 2024 “over differences in the strategic direction of Project 2025,” according to a November 2024 press release. There had been some media reports that his departure may have been related to accusations of harassment, but the same release states any concerns Heritage held toward Dans “did not involve any issues with his integrity or inappropriate/offensive behavior towards women.”
The crowd of Republicans seeking to push out Graham also includes former South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who announced a campaign for U.S. Senate earlier this month.
Wallis Annenberg, a deep-pocketed philanthropist who helped transform the city through massive donations to arts, education and animal welfare causes, died Monday morning at her home in Los Angeles from complications related to lung cancer, the family said. She was 85.
The heiress to Walter Annenberg’s publishing empire served, for the last 16 years, as chairwoman of the board, president and chief executive of the influential Annenberg Foundation, which her father started in 1989 after selling TV Guide and other publications to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A representative said the nonprofit organization has assets of about $1.2 billion.
Annenberg, who worked for TV Guide when her father owned Triangle Publications, stepped in as the foundation’s vice president after he died in 2002. When her stepmother, Leonore, died seven years later, Annenberg took the helm, broadening its philanthropic scope beyond media, arts and education to include animal welfare, environmental conservation and healthcare. Since she joined the foundation, it has given about $1.5 billion to thousands of organizations and nonprofits in Los Angeles County.
Wallis Annenberg worked with her father, Walter Annenberg, when his company published TV Guide.
(Annenberg Foundation)
Annenberg was fiercely passionate about funding the arts, with an eye toward making culture accessible to all. She founded the free Annenberg Space for Photography, which opened its Century City doors in 2009. (It closed during the pandemic in 2020, but archival material is still online.) The space showed exhibitions spanning the world of hip-hop, the global refugee crisis and war photography, among other subjects. Annenberg was also a longtime board member of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. She gave $10 million in 2002 to endow LACMA’s director’s position.
LACMA Chief Executive Michael Govan, who came to the museum in 2006 to fill that endowed position, praised Annenberg’s philanthropy.
“Wallis Annenberg blessed the Los Angeles community not only with her philanthropy, but also with her guidance about how to improve our community,” Govan said in a statement to The Times, ”from public access to our beautiful beaches to the livelihood of local animals, and the importance of the arts to our daily lives.”
Under her leadership, the foundation made $38.5 million in low-interest loans for the construction of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The Zoltan Pali-designed center opened in 2013 in a renovated, 1933 Beverly Hills Post Office and has since become a major cultural hub in the heart of Beverly Hills, infusing the tony neighborhood with vibrant music, theater and dance. Broadway star Patti LuPone, comedian Sarah Silverman and the Martha Graham Dance Company have all graced the stage at the Wallis; the center also offers robust educational programming.
When it opened, fellow philanthropist Eli Broad called the center “a great addition” to Los Angeles and “another jewel in the region’s cultural crown.”
Annenberg cared deeply about equity in education. Walter Annenberg had founded the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 1971, and before that the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. But Wallis Annenberg, a USC board of directors life trustee, helped to steer the school’s vision and guide it into the future. She gave $50 million in 2011 to have the Wallis Annenberg Hall built, which nearly doubled the communication and journalism school’s footprint when it opened in 2014. More recently, in March, Annenberg gave $5 million to the university for a high-tech, multimedia production studio to be built on USC’s Capital Campus in Washington, D.C. It’s scheduled to open in August.
Exposition Park got a boost in 2004, when the Wallis Annenberg Building at the California Science Center opened, a project made possible with a $25-million challenge grant from Annenberg. The former armory, redesigned by Pritzker-winning architect Thom Mayne, now has classrooms and laboratories for Science Center educational programming. Annenberg has also funded exhibitions there, including the 2019 interactive exhibit “Dogs! A Science Tail,” which explores the deep bond between humans and canines. It went back on view in May.
In 2004, she also stepped in to help underwrite the Annenberg Community Beach House, located on the grounds of the former Marion Davies estate, after hearing the city of Santa Monica might engage private developers to restore the site, which had been operated as a private club for 30 years. The seaside public space is free and features a playground, gallery and volleyball courts, among other amenities.
Construction crews began the process of placing the first layers of soil over the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing on March 31.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Annenberg was a ferocious animal lover. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing — the world’s largest urban wildlife crossing, which stretches across 10 lanes of the 101 Freeway between the Simi Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains in Agoura Hills — was made possible with a $1-million challenge grant from Annenberg in 2016 followed by $25 million in 2021. When it’s completed, the crossing will help animals such as mountain lions, deer and bobcats pass safely over the freeway. The first layers of soil were laid on the overpass in March. Plans call for its completion in 2026.
“I imagine a future for all the wildlife in our area,” Annenberg said in a statement published by The Times in March, “where it’s possible to survive and thrive and the placement of this first soil on the bridge means another step closer to reality.”
Annenberg also created a Silicon Beach-based animal shelter, the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace, which opened in 2017 and helps to rehabilitate so-called “unadoptable” animals before finding them new homes. PetSpace has a medical facility and offers animal adoptions as well as classes to teach people to how to better care for their pets.
In recent years, Annenberg had been thinking about quality of life for older adults.
In 2022, Annenberg opened the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, a senior center in Koreatown offering visitors a place to pursue new interests and find community through classes that include belly dancing, horticultural therapy and financial literacy. It also hosts concerts, dances and game nights.
Wallis Huberta Annenberg was born in the affluent Main Line area of Philadelphia and grew up, from age 10, in Washington, D.C. Her mother was Bernice Veronica Dunkelman, who went by Ronny. Annenberg had a younger brother, Roger, who died in 1962 when he was 22. She graduated from Pine Manor Junior College in Wellesley, Mass., and attended one year of college at Columbia University before dropping out to get married to neurosurgeon Seth Weingarten. The couple divorced in 1975.
Prior to their divorce, Annenberg had moved to Los Angeles with Weingarten and her children in the early ‘70s. Annenberg was drawn to the city’s energy, creativity and diversity.
Despite her public profile, Annenberg was known to be press shy. The billionaire philanthropist was particularly family-oriented and enjoyed evenings at home with her children and grandchildren. She was also an avid sports fan and loved watching football on TV, martini in hand.
Wallis Annenberg, center seated, with three of her children: Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, Lauren Bon and Charles Annenberg Weingarten. Each is involved in the Annenberg Foundation.
(Hamish Robertson)
The breadth of Annenberg’s philanthropy was global; but it was most keenly focused on Los Angeles.
As outlined in the family trust, control of the foundation passes onto the next generation: Three of Annenberg’s four children who are on the board of directors: Lauren Bon, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten and Charles Annenberg Weingarten. Roger Annenberg Weingarten lives in the L.A. area.
Bon is an artist and founding director of L.A.-based Metabolic Studio, a not-for-profit interdisciplinary art and research hub that explores environmental issues. Gregory Annenberg Weingarten is a former journalist with the Times of London and now is an artist, exhibiting in Europe and the U.S. Charles Annenberg Weingarten is a philanthropist and filmmaker who created Explore, which documents, through films and photographs, selfless acts globally (and has a network of live-cams trained on wildlife).
Besides her four children, Annenberg is survived by five grandchildren.
For filmmaker Scott Mann, three dozen F-bombs had the makings of a million-dollar headache.
When Mann wrapped “Fall,” a 2022 thriller about two women stranded atop a 2,000-foot radio tower, he figured the hard part was over. Shot in the Mojave Desert on a $3-million budget, the film didn’t have money to burn and seemed on course. But Lionsgate wanted a PG-13 rating and, with 35 expletives, “Fall” was headed for an R. Reshoots would cost more than $1 million — far beyond what the production could afford.
In the past, a director might have taken out a second mortgage or thrown themselves at the mercy of the ratings board. Mann instead turned to AI.
A few years earlier, he had been dismayed by how a German dub of his 2015 thriller “Heist” flattened the performances, including a key scene with Robert De Niro, to match stiff, mistranslated dialogue. That frustration led Mann to co-found Flawless, an AI startup aimed at preserving the integrity of an actor’s performance across languages. As a proof of concept, he used the company’s tech to subtly reshape De Niro’s mouth movements and restore the emotional nuance of the original scene.
On “Fall,” Mann applied that same technology to clean up the profanity without reshoots, digitally modifying the actors’ mouths to match PG-13-friendly lines like “freaking” — at a fraction of the cost.
A series on how the AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood — from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.
As AI stirs both hype and anxiety in Hollywood, Mann understands why even such subtle digital tweaks can feel like a violation. That tension came to a head during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, in which AI became the defining flash point in the fight over acting’s future.
“Ours is a rights-based industry,” says Mann, 45, who helped develop a digital rights management platform at Flawless to ensure performers approve any changes to their work. “It’s built on protecting human creativity, the contributions of actors, directors, editors, and if those rights aren’t protected, that value gets lost.”
Mann at his office in Santa Monica.
(Brian Feinzimer / For The Times)
Still, Mann doesn’t see AI as a threat so much as a misunderstood tool — one that, used carefully, can support the artists it’s accused of replacing. Flawless’ DeepEditor, for example, lets directors transfer facial expressions from one take to another, even when the camera angle or lighting changes, helping actors preserve their strongest moments without breaking continuity.
“Plenty of actors I’ve worked with have had that moment where they see what’s possible and realize, ‘Oh my God, this is so much better,’” Mann says. “It frees them up, takes off the pressure and helps them do a better job. Shutting AI out is naive and a way to end up on the wrong side of history. Done right, this will make the industry grow and thrive.”
AI isn’t hovering at the edges of acting anymore — it’s already on soundstages and in editing bays. Studios have used digital tools to de-age Harrison Ford in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” resurrect Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin in “Rogue One” and clone Val Kilmer’s voice in “Top Gun: Maverick” after throat cancer left him unable to speak. The technology has reshaped faces, smoothed dialogue and fast-tracked everything from dubbing to reshoots. And its reach is growing: Studios can now revive long-dead stars, conjure stunt doubles who never get hurt and rewrite performances long after wrap.
But should they?
Actors outside Paramount Studios during a SAG-AFTRA solidarity rally in September 2023.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
As the tools grow more sophisticated, the threat to actors goes beyond creative disruption. In an industry where steady work is already elusive and the middle class of working actors is vanishing, AI raises the prospect of fewer jobs, lower pay and, in a dystopian twist, a future in which your disembodied face and voice might get work without you.
Background actors were among the first to sound the alarm during the 2023 strike, protesting studio proposals to scan them once and reuse their likenesses indefinitely. That scenario is already beginning to unfold: In China, a state-backed initiative will use AI to reimagine 100 kung fu classics, including films starring Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, through animation and other digital enhancements. Lee’s estate said it was unaware of the project, raising questions about how these actors’ likenesses might be used, decades after filming.
If the soul of acting is a human presence, what remains when even that can be simulated?
“You want to feel breath — you want to feel life,” said actor and director Ethan Hawke during a panel at 2023’s Telluride Film Festival, where strike-era unease over AI was palpable. “When we see a great painting, we feel a human being’s blood, sweat and tears. That’s what we’re all looking for, that connection with the present moment. And AI can’t do that.”
Who’s in control?
Justine Bateman may seem like an unlikely crusader in Hollywood’s fight against AI. Launched to fame as Mallory Keaton on the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties,” she later became a filmmaker and earned a computer science degree from UCLA. Now, as founder of the advocacy group CREDO23, Bateman has become one of the industry’s fiercest voices urging filmmakers to reject AI-generated content and defend the integrity of human-made work. Loosely modeled on Dogme 95, CREDO23 offers a certification of films made without AI, using minimal VFX and union crews. It’s a pledge backed by a council including “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, “The Handmaid’s Tale” director Reed Morano and actor Juliette Lewis.
The 2023 SAG-AFTRA contract set new guardrails: Studios must get actors’ consent to create or use digital replicas of their likenesses, and those replicas can’t generate new performances without a separate deal. Actors must also be compensated and credited when their digital likeness is used.
But to Bateman, a former SAG-AFTRA board member and negotiating committee rep, those protections are little more than sandbags against an inevitable AI flood: hard-won but already straining to keep the technology at bay.
“The allowances in the contract are pretty astounding,” Bateman says by phone, her voice tight with exasperation. “If you can picture the Teamsters allowing self-driving trucks in their contract — that’s on par with what SAG did. If you’re not making sure human roles are played by human actors, I’m not sure what the union is for.”
Justine Bateman, photographed by The Times in 2022.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
To Bateman, the idea that AI expands access to filmmaking — a central tenet of its utopian sales pitch — is a dangerous myth, one that obscures deeper questions about authorship and the value of creative labor.
“Anyone can make a film — my last two, I shot on an iPhone,” Bateman says. “The idea that AI is ‘democratizing film’ doesn’t even make sense. What it really does is remove the barrier of skill. It lets people pretend they’re filmmakers when they’re not, by prompting software that wouldn’t even function without having stolen a hundred years of film and TV production made by real filmmakers.”
Bateman’s opposition to AI is rooted in a deep distrust of Silicon Valley’s expanding influence over the creative process and a belief that filmmaking should be driven by artists, not algorithms. “The tech bro business completely jumped the shark with generative AI,” she says. “Is it solving plastics in the ocean? Homelessness? L.A. traffic? Not that I’m aware of.”
She scoffs at the supposed efficiencies AI brings to the filmmaking process: “It’s like saying, whatever somebody enjoys — sex or an ice cream sundae — ‘Hey, now you can do it in a quarter of the time.’ OK, but then what do you think life is for?“
To Bateman, an actor’s voice, face, movements or even their choice of costume is not raw material to be reshaped but an expression of authorship. AI, in her view, erases those choices and the intent behind them. “I’m deeply against changing what the actor did,” she says. “It’s not right to have the actor doing things or saying things they didn’t do — or to alter their hair, makeup or clothes in postproduction using AI. The actor knows what they did.”
While Bateman has been public and unwavering in her stance, many actors remain unsure whether to raise their voices. In the wake of the strikes, much of the conversation around AI has moved behind closed doors, leaving those who do speak out feeling at times exposed and alone.
Scarlett Johansson, who lent her smoky, hypnotic voice to the fictional AI in Spike Jonze’s Oscar-winning 2013 film “Her,” now finds herself in a uniquely uncomfortable position: She’s both a symbol of our collective fascination with artificial performance and a real-world example of what’s at stake when that line is crossed. Last year, she accused OpenAI of using a chatbot voice that sounded “eerily similar” to hers, months after she declined to license it. OpenAI denied the claim and pulled the voice, but the incident reignited concern over consent and control.
Johansson has long spoken out against the unauthorized use of her image, including her appearance in deepfake pornography, and has pushed for stronger safeguards against digital impersonation. To date, though, she is one of the few major stars to publicly push back against the creeping mimicry enabled by AI — and she’s frustrated that more haven’t joined her. “There has to be some agreed-upon set of boundaries in order for [AI] to not be detrimental,” she told Vanity Fair in May. “I wish more people in the public eye would support and speak out about that. I don’t know why that’s not the case.”
Lights, camera, replication
Ed Ulbrich, 60, a pioneering visual effects producer and co-founder of Digital Domain, has spent his career helping actors do the impossible, one pixel at a time.
In 2008’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” he led the team of more than 150 artists in building a fully digital version of Brad Pitt’s face so the actor could convincingly age in reverse — a two-year effort that earned Ulbrich and three colleagues an Oscar for visual effects and set a new benchmark for digital performance. (Nearly two decades later, the achievement is still impressive, although some scenes, especially those with Pitt’s aged face composited on a child’s body, now show their digital seams.) For 2010’s “Tron: Legacy,” Ulbrich helped digitally transform Jeff Bridges into his 1982 self using motion capture and CGI.
Working on last year’s “Here” — Robert Zemeckis’ technically daring drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as a couple whose lives play out across decades in a single New Jersey living room — showed Ulbrich just how far things have come. For someone who jokes he has “real estate in the uncanny valley,” it wasn’t just the AI-enabled realism that floored him. It was the immediacy. On set, AI wasn’t enhancing footage after the fact; it was visually reshaping the performance in real time.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in the movie “Here.”
(Sony Pictures Ent.)
“You look up and see 67-year-old Tom Hanks. You look down at the monitor — he’s 20, and it looks better than the best CGI,” Ulbrich says. “In my world, the human face is the holy grail. That is the most complicated thing you can do. And now it’s getting done in near real time before your eyes. The actor can come back and look at the monitor and get new ideas, because they’re seeing a different version of themselves: younger, older, as an alien or whatever.”
This kind of seamless AI-driven alteration marks a new frontier in postproduction. Modern AI systems can now “beautify” actors’ faces, like some would with a Instagram or Zoom filter: smooth out wrinkles, alter skin tone, sharpen jawlines, subtly nudge eye position to better match a desired gaze. What once required painstaking VFX can now be handled by fast, flexible AI tools, often with results invisible to audiences.
Once limited to only big-budget sci-fi and fantasy productions, this digital touch-up capability is expanding into rom-coms, prestige dramas, high-end TV and even some indie films. Dialogue can be rewritten and re-lipped in post. Facial expressions can be smoothed or swapped without reshoots. More and more, viewers may have no way of knowing what’s real and what’s been subtly adjusted.
“Here” was largely rejected by both audiences and critics, with some deeming its digitally de-aged performances more unsettling than moving. But Ulbrich says digitally enhanced performance is already well underway.
Talent agency CAA has built a vault of client scans, a kind of biometric asset library for future productions. Some stars now negotiate contracts that reduce their time on set, skipping hours in the makeup chair or performance-capture gear, knowing AI can fill in the gaps.
“Robert Downey, Brad Pitt, Will Smith — they’ve all been scanned many times,” says Ulbrich, who recently joined the AI-driven media company Moonvalley, which pitches itself as a more ethical, artist-centered player in the space. “If you’ve done a studio tentpole, you’ve been scanned.
“There is a lot of fear around AI and it’s founded,” he adds. “Unless you do something about it, you can just get run over. But there are people out there that are harnessing this. At this point, fighting AI is like fighting against electricity.”
While many in Hollywood wrestle with what AI means for the oldest component of moviemaking, others take a more pragmatic view, treating it as a tool to solve problems and keep productions on track. Jerry Bruckheimer, the powerhouse producer behind “Top Gun,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and this summer’s “F1,” is among those embracing its utility.
“AI is not going anywhere and it’s only going to get more useful for people in our business,” he said in a recent interview with The Times.
He recalled one such moment during post-production on his new Brad Pitt–led Formula One drama, a logistical feat filmed during actual Formula One races across Europe and the Middle East, with a budget north of $200 million.
“Brad was in the wilds of New Zealand, and we had test screenings coming up,” Bruckheimer says. “We couldn’t get his voice to do some looping, so we used an app that could mimic Brad Pitt. I’m sure the union will come after me if you write that, but it wasn’t used in the movie because he became available.”
While he’s skeptical of AI’s ability to generate truly original ideas — “We’re always going to need writers,” he says — Bruckheimer, whose films have grossed more than $16 billion worldwide, sees AI as a powerful tool for global reach.
“They can take Brad’s voice from the movie and turn it into other languages so it’s actually his voice, rather than another actor,” he says. “If it’s not available yet, it will be.”
The debate over AI in performance flared earlier this year with “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s award-winning drama about a Hungarian architect. After the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that AI voice-cloning software had been used to subtly modify the Hungarian accents of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, the backlash followed swiftly.
Some critics accused the film of using AI to smooth over performances while presenting itself as handcrafted, a move one viral post derided as trying to “cheap out without soul.” Corbet later clarified that AI was used sparingly, only to adjust vowel sounds, but the decision left some viewers uneasy — even as Brody went on to win the Oscar for lead actor.
If the controversy over “The Brutalist” struck some as a moral crisis, David Cronenberg found the whole thing overblown. Few filmmakers have probed the entanglement of flesh, identity and technology as relentlessly as the director of “Videodrome,” “The Fly” and last year’s “The Shrouds,” so he’s not particularly rattled by the rise of AI-assisted performances.
“All directors have always messed around with actors’ performances — that’s what editing is,” Cronenberg told The Times in April. “Filmmaking isn’t theater. It’s not sacred. We’ve been using versions of this for years. It’s another tool in the toolbox. And it’s not controlling you — you can choose not to use it.”
Long before digital tools, Cronenberg recalls adjusting actor John Lone’s vocal pitch in his 1993 film “M. Butterfly,” in which Lone played a Chinese opera singer and spy who presents as a woman to seduce a French diplomat. The director raised the pitch when the character appeared as a woman and lowered it when he didn’t — a subtle manipulation to reinforce the illusion.
David Cronenberg, photographed at his home in Toronto, Canada, in April.
(Kate Dockeray / For The Times)
Far from alarmed, Cronenberg is intrigued by AI’s creative potential as a way of reshaping authorship itself. With new platforms like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 now capable of generating increasingly photorealistic clips from simple text prompts, an entire performance could conceivably be conjured from a writer’s keyboard.
“Suddenly you can write a scene — a woman is walking down the street, she looks like this, she’s wearing that, it’s raining, whatever — and AI can create a video for you,” Cronenberg says. “To me, this is all exciting. It absolutely can threaten all kinds of jobs and that has to be dealt with, but every technological advance has done that and we just have to adapt and figure it out.”
Ghosts in the frame
In the Hollywood of the late 1970s, there was no AI to tweak an actor’s face. So when “Star Wars” star Mark Hamill fractured his nose and left cheekbone in a serious car crash between shooting the first and second films, the solution was to tweak the story. The 1980 sequel “The Empire Strikes Back” opened with Luke Skywalker being attacked by a nine-foot-tall snow beast called a wampa on the ice planet Hoth, partly to account for the change in his appearance.
Decades later, when Hamill was invited to return as a younger version of himself in the 2020 Season 2 finale of “The Mandalorian,” the chance to show Luke “at the height of his powers was irresistible,” he says.
But the reality left him feeling oddly detached from the character that made him famous. Hamill shared the role with a younger body double, and digital de-aging tools recreated his face from decades earlier. The character’s voice, meanwhile, was synthesized using Respeecher, a neural network trained on old recordings of Hamill to mimic his speech from the original trilogy era.
“I didn’t have that much dialogue: ‘Are you Luke Skywalker?’ ‘I am,’” Hamill recalled in an interview with The Times earlier this year. “I don’t know what they do when they take it away, in terms of tweaking it and making your voice go up in pitch or whatever.”
When fans speculated online that he hadn’t participated at all, Hamill declined to correct the record.
“My agent said, ‘Do you want me to put out a statement or something?’” Hamill recalls. “I said, ‘Eh, people are going to say what they want to say.’ Maybe if you deny it, they say, ‘See? That proves it — he’s denying it.’”
A digitally de-aged Mark Hamill as the young Luke Skywalker in a 2020 episode of “The Mandalorian.”
(Lucasfilm Ltd.)
When Luke returned again in a 2022 episode of “The Book of Boba Fett,” the process was even more synthetic: Hamill was minimally involved on camera and the character was built almost entirely from digital parts: a de-aged face mapped onto a body double with an AI-generated voice delivering his lines. Hamill was credited and compensated, though the exact terms of the arrangement haven’t been made public.
The visual effect was notably improved from earlier efforts, thanks in part to a viral deepfake artist known as Shamook, whose YouTube video improving the VFX in “The Mandalorian” finale had racked up millions of views. He was soon hired by Industrial Light & Magic — a rare case of fan-made tech critique turning into a studio job.
“In essence, yes, I did participate,” Hamill says.
It’s one thing to be digitally altered while you’re still alive. It’s another to keep performing after you’re gone.
Before his death last year, James Earl Jones — whose resonant baritone helped define Darth Vader for generations — gave Lucasfilm permission to recreate his voice using AI. In a recent collaboration with Disney, Epic Games deployed that digital voice in Fortnite, allowing players to team up with Vader and hear new lines delivered in Jones’ unmistakable tones, scripted by Google’s Gemini AI.
In May, SAG-AFTRA later filed a labor charge, saying the use of Jones’ voice hadn’t been cleared with the union.
Last year’s “Alien: Romulus” sparked similar backlash over the digital resurrection of Ian Holm’s android character Ash nearly a decade after Holm’s death. Reconstructed using a blend of AI and archival footage, the scenes were slammed by some fans as a form of “digital necromancy.” For the film’s home video release, director Fede Álvarez quietly issued an alternate cut that relied more heavily on practical effects, including an animatronic head modeled from a preexisting cast of Holm’s face.
For Hollywood, AI allows nostalgia to become a renewable resource, endlessly reprocessed and resold. Familiar faces can be altered, repurposed and inserted into entirely new stories. The audience never has to say goodbye and the industry never has to take the risk of introducing someone new.
Hamill, for his part, seems ready to let go of Luke. After his final arc in 2017’s “The Last Jedi,” he says he feels a sense of closure.
“I don’t know the full impact AI will have but I find it very ominous,“ he says. “I’m fine. I had my time. Now the spotlight should be on the current and future actors and I hope they enjoy it as much as I did.”
Actors, not avatars
Actor and AI startup Wonder Dynamics co-founder Tye Sheridan, photographed by The Times in 2021.
(Michael Nagle / For The Times)
Actor Tye Sheridan knows how dark an AI future could get. After all, he starred in Steven Spielberg’s 2018 “Ready Player One,” a sci-fi thriller set inside a corporate-controlled world of digital avatars. But Sheridan isn’t trying to escape into that world — he’s trying to shape the one ahead.
With VFX supervisor Nikola Todorovic, Sheridan co-founded Wonder Dynamics in 2017 to explore how AI can expand what’s possible on screen. Their platform uses AI to insert digital characters into live-action scenes without green screens or motion-capture suits, making high-end VFX more accessible to low-budget filmmakers. Backed by Spielberg and “Avengers” co-director Joe Russo, Wonder Dynamics was acquired last year by Autodesk, the software firm behind many animation and design tools.
“Since the advent of the camera, technology has been pushing this industry forward,” Sheridan, 28, says on a video call. “AI is just another part of that path. It can make filmmaking more accessible, help discover new voices. Maybe the next James Cameron will find their way into the industry through some AI avenue. I think that’s really exciting.”
With production costs spiraling, Todorovic sees AI as a way to lower the barrier to entry and make riskier, more ambitious projects possible. “We really see AI going in that direction, where you can get those A24-grounded stories with Marvel visuals,” he says. “That’s what younger audiences are hungry for.”
The shift, Todorovic argues, could lead to more films overall and more opportunities for actors. “Maybe instead of 10,000 people making five movies, it’ll be 1,000 people making 50,” he says.
Still, Todorovic sees a threshold approaching, one where synthetic actors could, in theory, carry a film. “I do think technically it is going to get solved,” Todorovic says. “But the question remains — is that what we really want? Do we really want the top five movies of the year to star humans who don’t exist? I sure hope not.”
For him, the boundary isn’t just about realism. It’s about human truth.
“You can’t prompt a performance,” he says. “You can’t explain certain movements of the body and it’s very hard to describe emotions. Acting is all about reacting. That’s why when you make a movie, you do five takes — or 40. Because it’s hard to communicate.”
Sheridan, who has appeared in the “X-Men” franchise as well as smaller dramas like “The Card Counter” and “The Tender Bar,” understands that instinctively and personally. “I started acting in films when I was 11 years old,” he says. “I wouldn’t ever want to build something that put me out of a job. That’s the fun part — performing, exploring, discovering the nuances. That’s why we fall in love with certain artists: their unique sensibility, the way they do what no one else can.”
He knows that may sound contradictory coming from the co-founder of an AI company. That’s exactly why he believes it’s critical that artists, not Silicon Valley CEOs, are the ones shaping how the technology is used.
“We should be skeptical of AI and its bad uses,” he says. “It’s a tool that can be used for good or bad. How are we going to apply it to create more access and opportunity in this industry and have more voices heard? We’re focused on keeping the artist as an essential part of the process, not replacing them.”
For now, Sheridan lives inside that paradox, navigating a technology that could both elevate and imperil the stories he cares most about.
His next acting gig? “The Housewife,” a psychological drama co-starring Naomi Watts and Michael Imperioli, in which he plays a 1960s New York Times reporter investigating a suspected Nazi hiding in Queens. No AI. No doubles. Just people pretending to be other people the old way, while it lasts.
Lloyd Howell has resigned as executive director of the NFL Players Assn., citing distractions his leadership has caused in recent weeks.
“Two years ago, I accepted the role of Executive Director of the NFLPA because I believe deeply in the mission of this union and the power of collective action to drive positive change for the players of America’s most popular sport,” Howell said in a statement released late Thursday night. “Our members deserve a union that will fight relentlessly for their health, safety, financial futures, and long-term well-being. My priority has been to lead that fight by serving this union with focus and dedication.
“It’s clear that my leadership has become a distraction to the important work the NFLPA advances every day. For this reason, I have informed the NFLPA Executive Committee that I am stepping down as Executive Director of the NFLPA and Chairman of the Board of NFL Players effective immediately. I hope this will allow the NFLPA to maintain its focus on its player members ahead of the upcoming season.”
Howell has come under scrutiny since ESPN reported he has maintained a part-time consulting job with the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that holds league approval to seek minority ownership in NFL franchises.
That followed the revelation that the NFLPA and the league had a confidentiality agreement to keep quiet an arbitrator’s ruling about possible collusion by owners over quarterback salaries.
The latest issue was an ESPN report Thursday that revealed two player representatives who voted for Howell were not aware that he was sued in 2011 for sexual discrimination and retaliation while he was a senior executive at Booz Allen.
“I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish at the NFLPA over the past two years,” Howell said. “I will be rooting for the players from the sidelines as loud as ever, and I know the NFLPA will continue to ensure that players remain firmly at the center of football’s future.”
The day before our interview, cinematographer Darius Khondji tells me he went to see a Pablo Picasso exhibit in uptown New York City. And though he would never compare himself to the Spanish painter, Khondji says he found a kinship in the way he described his artistic practice.
“About his style, he said that he was like a chameleon, changing completely from one moment to another, from one situation to another,” Khondji, 69, recalls via Zoom. “This is exactly how I feel. When I’m with a director, I embrace that director completely.”
Backlit, with natural light coming from the large windows behind him on a recent afternoon, Khondji appears shrouded in darkness, at times like an enigmatic silhouette with a halo of sunshine around his fuzzy hair. The Iranian-born cinematographer speaks animatedly, with hand movements accentuating every effusive sentence.
“Sometimes I talk in a very impressionistic way,” Khondji says, apologetically. “I might be confusing but I try to be just honest and say what I feel.”
Khondji’s eclectic resume flaunts an exceptional collection of collaborations, some of the best-looking movies of their moments: David Fincher’s gruesome but gorgeous “Seven,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s darkly whimsical and richly textured “Delicatessen” and “The City of Lost Children,” Michael Haneke’s unflinching love story “Amour,” James Gray’s old-school luxurious “The Immigrant,” the Safdie Brothers’ nerve-racking and kinetic “Uncut Gems,” and now Ari Aster’s paranoid big-canvas pandemic saga “Eddington,” in theaters Friday.
Khondji stands simultaneously as a wise member of the old guard and a hopeful champion for the future of film. Sought in decades past by the likes of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Bernardo Bertolucci, he’s now lending his lensing genius to a new generation of storytellers with ideas just as biting.
“Darius understands the human soul and he masters the tools to express it,” says filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu via email. “All the technical choices — framing decisions, uses of color and lighting techniques — he is able to apply them, but always subordinated to the director’s vision and, most importantly, to the needs of the film itself.”
Khondji, left, with director Alejandro González Iñárritu on the shoot of 2022’s “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”
“Darius is kind of a poet — everything is feeling-based with him,” says Aster via video call from Los Angeles. “He is an intellectual but he is also decidedly not.”
If you were to dissect the pivotal memories that shaped Khondji’s creative mind, the array of touchstones would include a photograph of Christopher Lee as Dracula that his brother would bring him from London. Also in prime of place: an image of his older sister, Christine, whom he considers an artistic mentor.
You would also find the intense orange color of persimmons squashed in his family’s garden in Tehran during winter — the only sensory memory he has from his early childhood before his family moved to Paris when he was around 3 1/2 years old in the late 1950s.
“Sometimes I look at my granddaughter and grandson and say, ‘OK, they are 3, almost 3 1/2, so this is the amount of language I had, but it was probably mostly in Farsi,’” he says. Khondji returned to Iran only once, as a teenager in the early 1970s, with a Super 8 camera in hand.
He has been watching movies since infancy. His nanny, an avid moviegoer, would take him to the cinema with her. And later, his father, who owned movie theaters in Tehran and would source films through Europe, brought him along to Parisian screening rooms as a kid.
“These are all stories told to me and a mix of impressions and feelings of things that I remember,” Khondji explains. That visceral, heart-first way of perceiving the world around him might be the defining quality of his approach to image-making. It’s always about how something feels.
“Cinema is a strong force,” he says. “You cannot limit it only with aesthetic taste or things that you like or don’t like or rules. You just have to go with the flow and give yourself to it. You need a lot of humility.” At that last thought, Khondji laughs.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji, photographed in France in 2021.
(Ariane Damain Vergallo)
When he started making his own Dracula-inspired short films on Super 8 as a teenager, Khondji had little idea about the distinct roles of a film production. Slowly, he started noticing that the directors of photography for the movies he liked were often the same artists.
“I was discovering that some films looked incredible — they had a very strong atmosphere,” Khondji recalls. “Then I found that the same name of one person was on one movie and then another movie, and I thought, ‘OK, this person really is very important.’” He mentions Gregg Toland, the legendary shooter of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”
But it wasn’t until Khondji attended NYU for film school that he dropped his aspirations for directing and decided on becoming a cinematographer. His film exercises leaned more toward the experiential than the narrative. He refers to them as “emotional wavelengths.”
“It’s really the director and the actors that trigger my desire to shoot a movie,” says Khondji. “The script is, of course, a great thing, but once I want to work with the director, I really trust them.”
Hearing Khondji speak about directors, it’s clear that he puts them in a privileged light — so much so that he makes a point of creating what he calls a “family” around them to ensure their success. This means he ensures the director feels comfortable with the gaffer, the dolly grip, the key grip, so that there’s no one on set that feels like a stranger.
With Aster, for example, their bond emerged from a shared voraciousness for film. The pair had several hangouts together before a job even entered the equation. Khondji is a defender of the polarizing “Beau Is Afraid,” his favorite of Aster’s movies. “Eddington” finally brought them together as collaborators for the first time.
“Ari and I have a common language,” he says. “We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.”
Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”
(A24)
While scouting locations in Aster’s native New Mexico, he and Khondji came across the small town where the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” was filmed. And though they both revere that arid 2007 thriller, they wanted to get away from anything tied to it, so they pivoted again to the community of Truth or Consequences.
Khondji recalls Aster describing his film, about a self-righteous sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) in a grudge match against the mayor (Pedro Pascal), as “a European psychological thriller on American land.” For the cinematographer, the movie is “a modern western.”
“We wanted the exterior to be very bright, like garishly bright, like the light has almost started to take off the color and the contrast a little bit because it’s so bright, never bright enough,” explains Khondji about shooting in the desert.
For Khondji, working Aster reminded him of his two outings with Austria’s esteemed, ultra-severe Michael Haneke, with which the cinematographer made the American remake of “Funny Games” and “Amour,” the latter on which he discovered a “radically different kind filmmaking” where “everything in the set had to have a grace of realness.”
“‘The color is vivid in a way that it isn’t in any of his other films,” says Aster about the quality that Khondji brought to “Amour,” Haneke’s Oscar-winning film.
Still, after working with some of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers on features, music videos, commercials and a TV show (he shot Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2019 “Too Old to Die Young” and became infatuated with the San Fernando Valley), Khondji prefers to be reinvigorated by younger artists challenging the rules.
“‘Uncut Gems’ was like turning a page for me in filmmaking,” he says, calling out to Josh and Benny Safdie. “These two young filmmakers were making films in a different way. And the fact that I could keep up with them — they are in their 30s — psychologically, it gave me a lot of strength.” Khondji also shot Josh Safdie’s upcoming “Marty Supreme,” out in December.
Is there a visual signature that defines Khondji’s work? Perhaps, even if he doesn’t consciously think of it. A lushness, a preference for olive greens and blacker-than-black shadows. An intense fixation on color in general. There are also aesthetic preferences that Aster noticed from their work on “Eddington.”
“Darius and I hate unmotivated camera movement,” Aster says. “But there are certain things that never would’ve bothered me compositionally that really bothered Darius, and now they’re stuck in my head. For instance, Darius hates it when you cut off somebody’s leg, even if it’s at the ankle. A lot of Darius’s prejudices have gone into my system.”
Khondji concedes to these particularities, yet he doesn’t think in rigid absolutes.
“You have a rule, and then you decide this is the moment to break the rule,” he says, citing the rawness of the films of French director Maurice Pialat or how actor Harriet Andersson looks directly into the camera in Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 “Summer with Monika.”
He recently watched Ryan Coogler’s box-office hit “Sinners” without knowing anything about its premise beforehand. “People who know me know that I don’t like spoilers,” he says. “I’m very cautious with film reviews. They are very important, but at the same time, I don’t want to know the story.”
Khondji had never seen one of Coogler’s films, but was impressed. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “After I watched it I wanted to know who shot the film, but I enjoyed the actors so much and I love just being a real member of the audience.”
It might surprise some to learn that Khondji’s initial interest in seeing a film is unrelated to how it looks or who shot it.
“When I watch a film people say, ‘Oh, did you notice how it was shot?’ And I don’t really go for that,” he says. “I mostly go to watch a film for the director.”
These days, his wish list includes the opportunity to shoot a proper supernatural horror film (Aster might be handy to stay in touch with) and for a company to make a modern film-stock camera. Khondji is not precious about format but believes shooting on film should stay an option as it is the “natural medium” of cinema.
He tells me how much he loves going to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. “It’s really like a shrine for me,” he says, recalling seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” there on true VistaVision.
“It was an incredible emotion,” he adds. “Like the emotion I had when I grew up with my dad, when they would take me to see big films in the cinemas where the ceiling had stars to make you dream even before the film started.”
That dream is what Khondji is still chasing, in the cinema and on set.
“The Seagull: Malibu” and the seldom-revived “Strife,” two ambitious offerings in Theatricum Botanicum’s outdoor season, are reset in the American past.
Ellen Geer, the director, calls her version of Anton Chekhov’s play, “a retelling.” She relocates “The Seagull,” as a program note specifies and her production flamboyantly conveys, “to the self-centered Me Generation of the ’70s that followed the social upheaval of the ’60s.” Malibu, a California world unto its own, hemmed in by the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Santa Monica Mountains on the other, sets up a groovy, glamorous equivalent to the backwater country setting of Chekhov’s original, in which all of the characters seem to be suffering from terminal ennui.
“Strife,” John Galsworthy’s 1909 social drama about the human cost of a deadlock between management and labor, is transferred from the England-Wales border to Pennsylvania of the 1890s. The play, directed by Ellen Geer and Willow Geer, isn’t adapted in the freehanded way of “The Seagull: Malibu,” and the change of locale doesn’t always seem natural.
The production’s opening scene is slightly disorienting. The directors, called to an emergency meeting at the home of the chairman of the board of the American Steel Corp., have the haughty mien of British aristocrats. Later, at the freezing cold abode of one of the leaders of the strike, the impoverished scene takes on unmistakable Dickensian notes. There are a fair number of Irish accents in the mix, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the actors broke out his best cockney.
“The Seagull: Malibu” isn’t always consistent in setting up the time period, but the production’s larkish approach is infectious. Arkadina (Susan Angelo) plays the self-absorbed actress mother who sold out to Hollywood. Defensive about her age, she’s even more prickly about the condescending attitude of her would-be avant-garde playwright son, Constantine (Christopher Glenn Gilstrap), who basically thinks she’s a B-movie hack.
Gilstrap’s Constantine looks more like a future yacht rock frontman than a theatrical renegade. Angelo’s Arkadina seems destined to have her career resurrected in the next decade by a recurring role on either “Dallas” or “Dynasty.” The charged Oedipal dynamics between them are vividly fleshed out.
Rajiv Shah and Susan Angelo in “The Seagull: Malibu” at Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum.
(Ian Flanders)
Willow Geer plays Masha, the Chekhov character who insouciantly declares that she’s in mourning for her life. Her Masha is a pothead and sloppy self-dramatizing drunk, hopelessly in love with Constantine, who only has eyes for Nina (Caroline Quigley). Masha confides her discontent to Dr. Dore (Daniel Reichert), a Gestalt therapist who, like Chekhov’s more traditional Dr. Dorn, has an empirical worldview that stands in stark contrast to the romantic dreaminess of everyone else at the estate.
Thad (Tim Halligan), Arkadina’s rechristened brother, suffers from fragile health and a sketchy backstory. Halligan, however, gives the character definition, especially when advocating for his nephew and risking the wrath of his volatile, penny-pinching sister. Trigger (Rajiv Shah) is the new version of Trigorin, the established writer who, as Arkadina’s younger lover, resists becoming her property even as he enjoys the perks of their celebrity relationship.
The boldly amusing and good-natured production makes the most of the fading California hippie era. The final act, unfortunately, is dreadfully acted. Quigley’s Nina is a delight in the play’s early going, all innocence and starry-eyed enthusiasm. But there appears to be no artistic growth when she returns to encounter a still-lovesick Constantine. Quigley’s acting is as melodramatic and artificial as Nina’s was said to be before her travails and losses transformed her talent.
This isn’t the production’s only failure of subtlety, but it’s surely the most consequential. Still, if you can cope with a deflating finale, there’s much to enjoy in this update of “The Seagull,” not least the glorious Topanga summer night backdrop, which translates Chekhov’s setting into a rustic West Coast paradise.
Emily Bridges and Franc Ross in “Strife” at Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum.
(Ian Flanders)
I can’t remember ever having seen a Galsworthy play, so I was grateful for Theatrium Botanicum’s vision in producing “Strife.” Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1932, Galsworthy is better known for his novels than his plays. (The 1967 BBC television adaptation of his Forsyte family chronicles brought him immense posthumous acclaim.)
“Strife” is an intelligent thesis play, not on the verbal or theatrical level of George Bernard Shaw’s sparkling comedy of ideas but impressive all the same for its complexity of argument and compassionate determination to understand all sides of a problem. The play is especially resonant at this moment when workers are treated like items in a budget that can be erased without regard for human consequences.
There’s a rousing speech about the God of Capital, “a white-faced, stony-hearted monster” that says, “‘I’m very sorry for you, poor fellows — you have a cruel time of it, I know,’ but will not give you one dollar of its dividends to help you have a better time.” These words are spoken by David Roberts (Gerald C. Rivers), a labor hard-liner and rabble-rouser, who is the ideological enemy and (mirror image of) John Anthony (Franc Ross), the chairman of American Steel who refuses to give an inch to the demands of the workers.
In portraying these intractable figures in equivalent moral terms, Galsworthy reveals, if not his privileged background, then his muddled thinking on economic justice. But this large-cast drama (one of the reasons it’s rarely produced today) provides a broad spectrum of human experience, adding depth and nuance to what is undeniably a vigorous debate.
Brian Wallace, left, and Gerald C. Rivers in “Strife” at Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum.
(Ian Flanders)
Enid Underwood (Emily Bridges), Mr. Anthony’s married daughter, is desperate to help her ailing servant, Annie Roberts (Earnestine Phillips), whose health has been destroyed since her husband, David, has been on strike. Enid’s sympathy is strong, but her class allegiance is stronger, setting up an intriguing character study that takes us into the heart of the societal dilemma Galsworthy diligently dissects.
The acting is often at the level of community theater — broad, strident and overly exuberant. Galsworthy, to judge by this revival, seems to be working far outside the tradition of realism. I wish the directors had reined in some of the hoary excesses of the performers, but I felt fortunate to experience a play that might not be an indelible classic but is too incisive to be forgotten.
‘The Seagull: Malibu’ and ‘Strife’
Where: Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga Schedule: Playing in repertory through Oct. 5. For complete schedules, visit theatricum.com
WASHINGTON — Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species.
Last week, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa — which stood 12 feet tall — with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngai Tahu Research Center.
“The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do,” Jackson said. “Every New Zealand schoolchild has a fascination with the moa.”
Outside scientists say the idea of bringing back extinct species onto the modern landscape is likely impossible, although it may be feasible to tweak the genes of living animals to have similar physical traits. Scientists have mixed feelings on whether that will be helpful, and some worry that focusing on lost creatures could distract from protecting species that still exist.
The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird.
An artist’s depiction of the largest species of moa, the South Island giant moa, which could stand 12 feet tall.
(Colossal Biosciences via AP)
Unlike Colossal’s work with dire wolves, the moa project is in very early stages. It started with a phone call about two years ago after Jackson heard about the company’s efforts to “de-extinct” — or create genetically similar animals to — species such as the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf.
Then Jackson put Colossal in touch with experts he’d met through his own moa bone collecting. At that point, he’d amassed 300 to 400 bones, he said.
In New Zealand, it’s legal to buy and sell moa bones found on private lands, but not on public conservation areas — nor to export them.
The first stage of the moa project will be to identify well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, Colossal’s chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, said.
Those DNA sequences will be compared with genomes of living bird species, including the ground-dwelling tinamou and emu, “to figure out what it is that made the moa unique compared to other birds,” she said.
Colossal used a similar process of comparing ancient DNA of extinct dire wolves to determine the genetic differences with gray wolves. Then scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to modify them at 20 sites. Pups with long white hair and muscular jaws were born late last year.
Working with birds presents different challenges, Shapiro said.
Unlike mammals, bird embryos develop inside eggs, so the process of transferring an embryo to a surrogate will not look like mammalian IVF.
“There’s lots of different scientific hurdles that need to be overcome with any species that we pick as a candidate for de-extinction,” Shapiro said. “We are in the very early stages.”
If the Colossal team succeeds in creating a tall bird with huge feet and thick pointed claws resembling the moa, there’s also the pressing question of where to put it, said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who is not involved in the project.
“Can you put a species back into the wild once you’ve exterminated it there?” he said. “I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that they could do this in any meaningful way.”
“This will be an extremely dangerous animal,” Pimm added.
The direction of the project will be shaped by Maori scholars at the University of Canterbury’s Ngai Tahu Research Center. Ngai Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, an expert in moa bones, said the work has “really reinvigorated the interest in examining our own traditions and mythology.”
At one of the archaeological sites that Jackson and Davis visited to study moa remains, called Pyramid Valley, there are also antique rock art done by Maori people — some depicting moa before their extinction.
The South Island giant moa at 12 feet tall would dwarf even the tallest humans.
(Colossal Biosciences via AP)
Paul Scofield, a project advisor and senior curator of natural history at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, said he first met the “Lord of the Rings” director when he went to his house to help him identity which of the nine known species of moa the various bones represented.
“He doesn’t just collect some moa bones; he has a comprehensive collection,” Scofield said.
Larson writes for the Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
July 9 (UPI) —Jason Moran, an acclaimed pianist, composer, educator, bandleader and recording artist, said he has left his position as jazz artistic director at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
The center, which receives federal funds, has undergone dramatic changes since Donald Trump became president again and he installed himself as chairman. He ousted arts center President Deborah Rutter and Board Chairman David Rubenstein, and replaced board members appointed by former President Biden.
A number of artists have been replaced or have voluntarily quit, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, who canceled a run of his Broadway hit, Hamilton, next year.
Moran, who accepted the position in 2011, one year after his predecessor, Billy Taylor, died, didn’t mention any disagreements with Trump or others in a post on Tuesday on Instagram.
Moran, 50, described “14 years of inviting thousands of artists to share their work with audiences.” And he was grateful “to an incredible staff that ushered artists from the negotiation to the after party.”
In his role, he developed programming and curated artists for one of the largest jazz programs in the United States.
He hosted performances and education programs that included the National Endowment for the Arts’ “NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert” and Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead, a residency for emerging artists of which Moran is an alum.
Moran, who scored the films Selma and 13th, tours the world as a performer. In 2010, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.
“Thank you to the composers, comedians, choreographers, performance artists, skateboarders, filmmakers, authors, illustrators, dancers, photographers, sculptors, scientists, crews and on and on,” he wrote. “These young ones are beautifying the stage. And with that, I bowed on Juneteenth.”
Moran, who was born in Houston, began studying the piano at age 6, according to information posted on the Kennedy Center website. He attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and then Manhattan School of Music in New York City.
At the college, he attended a class by saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
“My first day on the job at The Kennedy Center was when Sonny Rollins was receiving his Kennedy Center Honor,” Moran wrote,
The center, which includes a 2,465-seat Concert Hall, the 2,347-seat Opera House, the 1,161-seat Eisenhower Theater and the 320-seat Family Theater, made its public debut on Sept. 8, 1971.
Trump attended the opening night of Les Miserables on June 11.
During his first term, Trump didn’t attend a performance there, including the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony after several performers honored at the annual gala spoke out against him.
Shorter enrollment periods. More paperwork. Higher premiums.
The sweeping tax and spending bill pushed by President Trump includes provisions that will not only reshape people’s experience with the Affordable Care Act, but also sharply undermine the gains in health insurance coverage associated with it, according to some policy analysts.
The moves affect consumers and have particular resonance for the 19 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that run their own ACA exchanges.
Many of those states fear that the additional red tape — especially requirements that would end automatic reenrollment — would have an outsize impact on their policyholders. That’s because a greater percentage of people in those states use those rollovers versus shopping around each year, something more commonly done by people in states that use the federal healthcare.gov marketplace.
“The federal marketplace always had a message of, ‘Come back in and shop,’ while the state-based markets, on average, have a message of, ‘Hey, here’s what you’re going to have next year, here’s what it will cost; if you like it, you don’t have to do anything,’” said Ellen Montz, who oversaw the federal ACA marketplace under the Biden administration as deputy administrator and director at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. She is now a managing director with the Manatt Health consulting group.
Millions — perhaps up to half of enrollees in some states — may lose or drop coverage as a result of that and other changes in the legislation combined with a new rule from the Trump administration and the likely expiration at year’s end of enhanced premium subsidies put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Without an extension of those subsidies, which have been an important driver of Obamacare enrollment in recent years, premiums are expected to rise 75% on average next year. That’s starting to happen already, based on some early state rate requests for next year, which are hitting double digits.
“We estimate a minimum 30% enrollment loss, and, in the worst-case scenario, a 50% loss,” said Devon Trolley, executive director of Pennie, the ACA marketplace in Pennsylvania, which had 496,661 enrollees this year, a record.
Drops of that magnitude nationally, coupled with the loss of Medicaid coverage for millions more people under the legislation Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” could undo inroads made in the nation’s uninsured rate, which dropped by about half from the time most of the ACA’s provisions went into effect in 2014, when it hovered around 14% to 15% of the population, to just over 8%, according to the most recent data.
Premiums would rise along with the uninsured rate because older or sicker policyholders are more likely to try to jump enrollment hurdles, while those who rarely use coverage — and are thus less expensive — would not.
After a dramatic all-night session, House Republicans passed the bill Thursday, meeting the president’s Friday deadline. Trump is expected to sign the measure on Independence Day. It will increase the federal deficit by trillions of dollars and cut spending on a variety of programs, including Medicaid and nutrition assistance, to partly offset the cost of extending tax cuts put in place during the first Trump administration.
The administration and its supporters say the GOP-backed changes to the ACA are needed to combat fraud. Democrats and ACA supporters see this effort as the latest in a long history of Republican efforts to weaken or repeal Obamacare. Among other things, the legislation would end several changes put in place by the Biden administration that were credited with making it easier to sign up, such as lengthening the annual open enrollment period and launching a special program for very low-income people that essentially allows them to sign up year-round.
In addition, automatic reenrollment, used by more than 10 million people for 2025 ACA coverage, would end in the 2028 sign-up season. Instead, consumers would have to update their information, starting in August each year, before the close of open enrollment, which would end Dec. 15, a month earlier than currently.
That’s a key change to combat rising enrollment fraud, said Brian Blase, president of the conservative Paragon Health Institute, because it gets at what he calls the Biden era’s “lax verification requirements.”
He blames automatic reenrollment, coupled with the availability of zero-premium plans for people with lower incomes that qualify them for large subsidies, for a sharp uptick in complaints from insurers, consumers and brokers about fraudulent enrollments in 2023 and 2024. Those complaints centered on consumers being enrolled in an ACA plan, or switched from one to another, without authorization, often by commission-seeking brokers.
In testimony to Congress on June 25, Blase wrote that “this simple step will close a massive loophole and significantly reduce improper enrollment and spending.”
States that run their own marketplaces, however, saw few, if any, such problems, which were confined mainly to the 31 states using the federal healthcare.gov.
The state-run marketplaces credit their additional security measures and tighter control over broker access than healthcare.gov for the relative lack of problems.
“If you look at California and the other states that have expanded their Medicaid programs, you don’t see that kind of fraud problem,” said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the state’s Obamacare marketplace. “I don’t have a single case of a consumer calling Covered California saying, ‘I was enrolled without consent.’”
Such rollovers are common with other forms of health insurance, such as job-based coverage.
“By requiring everyone to come back in and provide additional information, and the fact that they can’t get a tax credit until they take this step, it is essentially making marketplace coverage the most difficult coverage to enroll in,” said Trolley at Pennie, 65% of whose policyholders were automatically reenrolled this year, according to KFF data.
Federal data show about 22% of federal sign-ups in 2024 were automatic reenrollments, versus 58% in state-based plans. Besides Pennsylvania, the states that saw such sign-ups for more than 60% of enrollees include California, New York, Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia, according to KFF.
States do check income and other eligibility information for all enrollees — including those being automatically renewed, those signing up for the first time, and those enrolling outside the normal open enrollment period because they’ve experienced a loss of coverage or other life event or meet the rules for the low-income enrollment period.
“We have access to many data sources on the back end that we ping, to make sure nothing has changed,” Altman said. “Most people sail through and are able to stay covered without taking any proactive step.”
If flagged for mismatched data, applicants are asked for additional information. Under current law, “we have 90 days for them to have a tax credit while they submit paperwork,” Altman said.
That would change under the tax and spending plan before Congress, ending presumptive eligibility while a person submits the information.
A white paper written for Capital Policy Analytics, a Washington-based consultancy that specializes in economic analysis, concluded there appears to be little upside to the changes.
While “tighter verification can curb improper enrollments,” the additional paperwork, along with the expiration of higher premiums from the enhanced tax subsidies, “would push four to six million eligible people out of Marketplace plans, trading limited fraud savings for a surge in uninsurance,” wrote free market economists Ike Brannon and Anthony LoSasso.
“Insurers would be left with a smaller, sicker risk pool and heightened pricing uncertainty, making further premium increases and selective market exits [by insurers] likely,” they wrote.
Appleby writes for KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
An Israeli strike on a residential building in Gaza killed the director of the Indonesian Hospital, Marwan al-Sultan, along with members of his family. Al-Sultan had repeatedly called for the international community to help keep medical workers safe.
An enormous shadow hovers over the characters in “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and it’s the same one that has been dogging composer Alexandre Desplat ever since he was a teenager in Paris.
That shadow? The music of John Williams.
“He’s such a legend for all of us,” says Desplat, 63, on a Zoom call from London, where he’s been burning the midnight oil on the score for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming “Frankenstein.” “He’s just the only one to follow.”
Like Williams, Desplat is now a grizzled (though painterly handsome) veteran himself, with hundreds of films to his name. He’s already completed three scores this year alone — for the French-Swedish Palme d’Or nominee “Eagles of the Republic,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and this week’s “Jurassic” heavyweight.
He’s also making his North American conducting debut on July 15 in a grand survey of his film career at the Hollywood Bowl, a fitting, if overdue, coronation of his two-decade reign as an A-list composer in America.
When Desplat began scoring Hollywood films in the early 2000s, his music swept in like a breath of fresh French air — elegant, restrained, melodic, idiosyncratic — and the list of filmmakers who sought him out reads like a sizable section of the Criterion Closet: Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.
“He’s the last tycoon of American movie music,” Desplat said in 2010 of his idol John Williams. “He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
His ride-or-die partner is Anderson, who first employed him on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and who teed up Desplat’s first Oscar win with “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (He’s been nominated eleven times.) May’s “The Phoenician Scheme” marked their seventh collaboration.
“As I started being a film composer, I had my idols in sight — of course Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue,” Desplat told me in 2014. “All these duets were strong and they showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer would be for both of them. It’s not only good for the film, it’s good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style by doing several movies with the same director.”
In a town too often filled with generic, factory-farmed scores, his were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up on the same diet of American movies and their iconic scores. The young Desplat was obsessed with U.S. culture — listening to jazz, watching baseball and the Oscars — and he decided he wanted to score movies after he heard “Star Wars” in 1977. Emblazoned on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “Composed and Conducted by John Williams.”
“That,” Desplat told his friend at the time, “is what I want to do.”
It’s fitting and kind of funny that two decades after charming audiences with a delicate, waltzing score for the 2003 Scarlett Johansson prestige picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the composer is now promoting a stomping monster score for a blockbuster behemoth starring Johanssson and a bunch of CGI dinosaurs — and tampering with John Williams’ sacred musical DNA.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” isn’t the first time he’s had to brave the T-rex-sized footprints of his hero: Desplat scored the final two films in the “Harry Potter” series, and he was also the first composer on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project from original director Gareth Edwards, and before composing any notes.
“I went as far as the change of directors and change of plans,” Desplat explains, “and the weeks passing by, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (on 2017’s “Star Wars”-esque “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Much like his work on “Harry Potter,” Desplat’s odes to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whispers than shouts — though there are a handful of overt declarations of both the iconic anthem and hymn for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-masterpiece. More subtle homages arrive in his use of solo piano and ghostly choir, and in the opening three notes of his motif for the team led by Johansson’s character — a tune that almost begins like Williams’ “Jurassic” hymn.
“So there’s a connection,” Desplat says. “I take the baton and I move away from it.”
He composed new leitmotifs for wonder, for adventure, for danger. His score, much like the original, is an amusement park ride full of sudden drops, humor and family-friendly terror, with a few moments of cathartic, introspective relief.
Mostly, Edwards kept pushing him for more hummable motifs.
“When I was tempted to go back to something more abstract — you know, French movie,” Desplat says, winking — “he would just ask me to go back towards John Williams’ inspiration of writing great motifs that you can remember and are catchy.”
Desplat worries this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don’t hear much of that in many movies that I watch,” he says. “It’s kind of an ambient texture — which is the easiest thing to create.”
In college, he would listen to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score on a loop, and as his own scoring career developed, he was paying keen attention to John Williams’ more intimate chamber scores like “The Accidental Tourist” and “Presumed Innocent” — as well as juggernauts like “Jurassic Park.” Besides the music itself seeping in, he learned that it was important to score every kind of film, no matter how big or small. Williams’ work also taught him “that I could have something elegant, classical, but with some seeds of jazz in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”
Whenever he hears someone talking dismissively about Williams, Desplat gets defensive. “I want to punch them,” he says, only half kidding.
“He’s the master, what can I say?” Desplat told me in 2010. “He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
(Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures )
When Desplat received his first Academy Award nomination, for “The Queen” in 2007, the one person who called from Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”
Desplat had met the French legend a few times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “After Dark, My Sweet.” Desplat was aghast when he saw director James Foley taking away Jarre’s melody and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, save for a simple electronic thump.
The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre calmly said: “It’s his film. I have to accept that.”
“That’s a lesson that I learned very early on,” Desplat says. “I’ve never forgotten that, because it’s still the same,” he laughs.
He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serenader of the French New Wave in films like “Jules and Jim” and “Contempt.” “They were so kind,” Desplat says, “such sweet men, both of them.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Desplat says: “He said awful things about me in books.”)
What they all have in common — besides a penchant for composing beautiful music — is the defiant, transatlantic leap from the French film industry where they started to the highest perch in Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging meaningful partnerships with directors like Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Delerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood Hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored a few hits including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches.”
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy,” says Desplat, who has already completed three scores this year. “That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Desplat started professionally in France in 1985 and wrote roughly 50 scores before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the English-language film that put him on Hollywood’s radar. He continues to do French films amid the summer blockbusters and American art house pictures.
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
He enjoys the freedom of a big-budget project. “To be able to have a studio say, ‘Go, write what you need to write.’ The director, he wants an orchestra, he wants 95 musicians. Great! They don’t even say anything. You just go and you record. They book the studio. They book the musicians.”
Still, the limitations he trained under gave Desplat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, resourcefulness, speed. He had to orchestrate everything himself, which means his music bears a distinctive fingerprint. And composing for small, sometimes unorthodox ensembles gave his music a clean, transparent signature as opposed to the all-too-typical wall of mud.
He can’t say much about his 100-minute score for “Frankenstein,” which he just finished recording with a giant orchestra and choir at both Abbey Road and AIR Studios, and which comes out on Netflix in November. The reason he does so many films, Desplat proposes, is because he’s lazy.
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy. That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
June 30 (UPI) — Member nations of the International Atomic Energy Agency called out Iran Monday for threats made against Rafael Grossi, the organization’s top official.
“Any undermining, sanctioning or even threat against the director general personally or his staff are completely unacceptable,” posted Austria’s Chancellor Christian Stocker to X Monday.
The French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs released a statement Monday that it “strongly condemns the threats against the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
The French statement was further echoed by a joint press release from France, Germany and the United Kingdom that condemned “threats against the Director General of the IAEA Rafael Grossi.”
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani spoke Sunday on the CBS News program “Face The Nation” and said that there was no threat made to Grossi, despite an article that ran last week in Iran’s ultra-conservative Kayhan newspaper that alleged Grossi to be a spy for Israel, and that “as soon as he enters Iran, he will be tried and executed for spying for Mossad and participating in the murder of the oppressed people of our country.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubiohad responded Saturday on X that “calls in Iran for the arrest and execution of IAEA Director General Grossi are unacceptable and should be condemned.”
Iravani however, when asked by CBS if he condemned calls for Grossi to be executed, replied “Yeah.”
He also explained that IAEA inspectors already in Iran are safe but are not being permitted to inspect nuclear sites there. “It is our assessment is that they have not done their jobs,” Iravani said, and implied the IAEA “failed” in regard to the attacks made by Israel and United States on Iranian nuclear facilities.
In the joint statement made by Britain, France and Germany, the countries called on “Iranian authorities to refrain from any steps to cease cooperation with the IAEA.”
“We urge Iran to immediately resume full cooperation in line with its legally binding obligations, and to take all necessary steps to ensure the safety and security of IAEA personnel,” the statement continued.
“The organization’s work is now more important than ever and must urgently be continued,” said Stocker in the same X post he made Monday.
The IAEA had announced in a press release Friday that radiation levels in the Gulf region had remained normal following the attacks on Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant and the Tehran Research Reactor.
Grossi explained in the release that the attacks “could have caused a radiological accident with potential consequences in Iran as well as beyond its borders.”
“It did not happen, and the worst nuclear safety scenario was thereby avoided,” Grossi said.,
June 25 (UPI) — White House budget director Russell Vought on Wednesday urged U.S. senators to approve the Trump administration’s proposed cuts of $8.3 billion in foreign assistance and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting.
Vought testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The cuts, which are from the Department of Government Efficiency, are a tiny fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spends each year
The House last week voted 214-212 to advance the request that reduces funds for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has largely been dismantled, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps to fund NPR and PBS.
Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate. A simple majority is needed for passage.
A group of protesters disrupted the meeting, saying “Vought’s Cuts Kill,” and “Vought Lies, People Die!”
Capitol Police officers forcibly removed some protesters from the room, with at least one hitting his head on the floor.
During his opening remarks, Vought touted the cuts as part of Trump’s “steadfast commitment to cutting wasteful federal spending antithetical to American interests.”
“Most Americans would be shocked and appalled to learn that their tax dollars, money they thought was going to medical care, was actually going to far-left activism, population control and sex workers,” Vought said. “To be clear, no lifesaving treatment will be impacted by this rescissions package.”
If Congress approves the cuts, the AIDS program would lose $400 million, and another $500 million would be stripped from global health programs that support child and maternal health, AIDS care and prevention of infectious diseases.
Lawmakers from both parties have criticized the proposed cuts.
“There’s no way that President Trump’s administration would allow such wasteful and questionable spending,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Vought.
“So, I am puzzled why you would be cutting funds that the president signed in March as part of the continuing resolution.”
Trump signed legislation in March to keep the government open through September.
Vought responded the costs are “largely multiyear funding,” and that “there is some expiring funds with regard to fiscal year ’25, but the way that this was structured was to find the waste.
“We are $37 trillion in national debt,” Vought said. “Our view is to see, when we look at these programs, can we do it cheaper, as evidenced by what we find, and then to reflect that, with some savings to the taxpayer.”
Collins also questioned the administration’s proposed cuts targeting the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
“These are not only the right thing to do for humanitarian reasons, but they’re incredible instruments of soft power,” she said. That includes “lifesaving multivitamins for pregnant mothers and the food supplement that’s used for malnourished children.”
Collins held up a packet of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food used to treat malnutrition in babies and young children.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican serving South Carolina, said he was surprised that millions of dollars were being spent to support abortions and gender care under PEPFAR. The AIDS-fighting program has been credited for saving millions of lives since President George W. Bush launched it more than 20 years ago.
Graham said he would approve the measure though he backs the program.
“And to my Democratic colleagues: There is a consequence to this crap,” Graham said. “The first thing I thought about: How is PEPFAR fraud, waste and abuse? Well, I had no idea there was one dollar spent like this.”
GOP members in the House and Senate have voiced concerns about the potential impact cuts would have on local stations and rural radio.
“We have Native American radio stations in South Dakota. They get their funding through NPR,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said during the hearing. “Ninety-some percent of what they use.”
The director called PBS and NPR “radical far-left networks,” and “there is no longer any excuse for tax dollars to subsidize” them.
Dispatches from northern China, Jia Zhangke’s movies constitute their own cinematic universe. Repeatedly returning to themes of globalization and alienation, the 55-year-old director has meticulously chronicled his country’s uneasy plunge into the 21st century as rampant industrialization risks deadening those left behind.
But his latest drama, “Caught by the Tides,” which opens at the Frida Cinema today, presents a bold, reflexive remix of his preoccupations. Drawing from nearly 25 years of footage, including images from his most acclaimed films, Jia has crafted a poignant new story with an assist from fragments of old tales. He has always been interested in how the weight of time bears down on his characters — now his actors age in front of our eyes.
When “Caught by the Tides” premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics leaned on a handy, if somewhat inaccurate, comparison to describe Jia’s achievement: “Boyhood,” which followed a young actor over the course of 12 years, a new segment of the picture shot annually. But Richard Linklater preplanned his magnum opus. Jia, on the other hand, approached his film more accidentally, using the pandemic shutdown as an excuse to revisit his own archives.
“It struck me that the footage had no linear, cause-and-effect pattern,” Jia explained in a director’s statement. “Instead, there was a more complex relationship, not unlike something from quantum physics, in which the direction of life is influenced and ultimately determined by variable factors that are hard to pinpoint.”
The result is a story in three chapters, each one subtly building emotionally from the last. In the first, it is 2001, as Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) lives in Datong, where she dates Bin (Li Zhubin). Early on, Qiaoqiao gleefully sings with friends, but it will be the last time we hear her voice. It’s a testament to Zhao’s arresting performance that many viewers may not notice her silence. She’s so present even without speaking, her alert eyes taking in everything, her understated reactions expressing plenty.
Young and with her whole life ahead of her, Qiaoqiao longs to be a singer, but her future is short-circuited by Bin’s text announcing that he’s leaving to seek better financial opportunities elsewhere. He promises to send word once he’s established himself, but we suspect she may never see this restless, callous schemer again. Not long after, Bin ghosts Qiaoqiao, prompting her to journey after him.
“Caught by the Tides” richly rewards viewers familiar with Jia’s filmography with scenes and outtakes from his earlier movies. Zhao, who in real life married Jia more than a decade ago, has been a highlight of his movies starting with his 2000 breakthrough “Platform,” and so when we see Qiaoqiao at the start of “Caught by the Tides,” we’re actually watching footage shot around that time. (Jia’s 2002 drama “Unknown Pleasures” starred Zhao as a budding singer named Qiaoqiao. Li also appeared in “Unknown Pleasures,” as well as subsequent Jia pictures.)
But the uninitiated shouldn’t feel intimidated to begin their Jia immersion here. Those new to his work will easily discern the film’s older footage, some of it captured on grainy DV cameras, while newer material boasts the elegant, widescreen compositions that have become his specialty. “Caught by the Tides” serves as a handy primer on Jia’s fascination with China’s political, cultural and economic evolution, amplifying those dependable themes with the benefit of working across a larger canvas of a quarter-century.
Still, by the time Qiaoqiao traverses the Yangtze River near the Three Gorges Dam — a controversial construction project that imperiled local small towns and provided the backdrop for Jia’s 2006 film “Still Life” — the director’s fans may feel a bittersweet sense of déjà vu. We have been here before, reminded of his earlier characters who similarly struggled to find love and purpose.
The film’s second chapter, which takes place during 2006, highlights Qiaoqiao’s romantic despair and, separately, Bin’s growing desperation to make a name for himself. (This isn’t the first Jia drama in which characters dabble in criminal activity.) By the time we arrive at the finale, set during the age of COVID anxiety, their inevitable reunion results in a moving resolution, one that suggests the ebb and flow of desire but, also, the passage of time’s inexorable erosion of individuals and nations.
Indeed, it’s not just Zhao and Li who look different by the end of “Caught by the Tides” but Shanxi Province itself — now a place of modern supermarkets, sculpted walkways and robots. Unchecked technological advancement is no longer a distant threat to China but a clear and present danger, dispassionately gobbling up communities, jobs and Qiaoqiao’s and Bin’s dreams. When these two former lovers see each other again, a lifetime having passed on screen, they don’t need words. In this beautiful summation work, Jia has said it all.
‘Caught by the Tides’
In Mandarin, with subtitles
Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes
Playing: In limited release at Lumiere Cinema at the Music Hall, Beverly Hills; the Frida Cinema, Santa Ana
President Trump got his way Friday, just not on his terms.
Two weeks after Trump said he fired the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery director, Kim Sajet, she stepped down of her own accord.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. This was not an easy decision, but I believe it is the right one,” Sajet wrote in a note to staff shared in an email by the Smithsonian Institution’s leader, Lonnie Bunch. “From the very beginning, my guiding principle has been to put the museum first. Today, I believe that stepping aside is the best way to serve the institution I hold so deeply in my heart. The role of a museum director has never been about one individual — it is a shared mission, driven by the passion, creativity, and dedication of an extraordinary team.”
The news follows Trump’s May 30 post on Truth Social that he was firing Sajet, the first woman to hold her post at the National Portrait Gallery, for being “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.”
Trump’s authority to fire Sajet immediately came under question. The Smithsonian is not part of the executive branch, and the president does not choose its Board of Regents. Reports soon surfaced that Sajet continued to show up at work each day.
On Monday the Board of Regents held a lengthy meeting and then issued a statement that said Secretary Bunch had the board’s support “in his authority and management of the Smithsonian.” The statement declared the institution’s full independence, including in personnel decisions. The statement said Bunch had been directed to “articulate specific expectations to museum directors and staff regarding content in Smithsonian museums, give directors reasonable time to make any needed changes to ensure unbiased content, and to report back to the Board on progress and any needed personnel changes based on success or lack thereof in making the needed changes.”
It is unclear if Sajet, who served as the museum’s director for 12 years, made her decision prior to the Board of Regents meeting. The Smithsonian did not respond to a question about that.
“Once again, we thank Kim for her service. Her decision to put the museum first is to be applauded and appreciated,” Bunch wrote in his email to staff. “I know this was not an easy decision. She put the needs of the Institution above her own, and for that we thank her.”
Kevin Gover, the undersecretary for museums and culture, will serve as acting director, Bunch said.
The Smithsonian has a delicate task ahead as it moves forward following Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directs Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s 21 museums and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and threatens to end federal funding for exhibitions and programs based on racial themes that “divide Americans.”
Bunch’s email to staff stressed that the organization has an imperative to remain nonpartisan.
For more than a quarter century, director Kevin Smith has tried to resurrect “Dogma,” his religious satire about two fallen angels looking to get back into heaven. Recently, his prayers for the 1999 comedy were finally answered.
On Thursday, the movie got a theatrical re-release across 1,500 AMC Theatres screens in honor of its 25th anniversary. Technically, the milestone was last year. But the second coming of a movie that brought us one of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s best on-screen collaborations and an A-list comedic ensemble — including George Carlin, Chris Rock, Janeane Garofalo and Alan Rickman — not to mention the meme-worthy, winking “Buddy Christ,” warrants a long-awaited hallelujah.
“It’s got a good legacy to it,” Smith said of the film. “It’s become the ‘umbrella film’ for me. The umbrella film is the movie that no matter what you do, even if you make s— that people don’t like, they won’t crucify you — pun intended — because you made a movie that they like.”
“To me, it plays like a kid really trying to celebrate his faith after having grown up in a church where every Sunday, everyone seemed to be mourning it. … It’s a love letter to spirituality,” Kevin Smith said about “Dogma.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Though the sparkling period of Smith’s career is largely defined by 1994’s “Clerks” and 1997’s “Chasing Amy,” his fourth film, “Dogma,” steeped in irreverence and hilarity centered around his former Catholic faith, is still considered one of his classics. The movie debuted at Cannes in 1999. He returned to the renowned film festival last month, when the comedy played in the Cannes Classics section, just days before sitting down with The Times on camera to discuss “Dogma’s” whirlwind re-release. In the interview, the director, writer and actor recounts how the movie was saved by filmmaker and actor Alessandra Williams, who raised money to buy the film from Miramax earlier this year, decades after it was acquired and shelved by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein sold Smith’s film, along with a trove of others, to Williams to help pay for his legal defense, Smith said.
In collaboration with Iconic Events, the film has since been remastered in 4K for its screening tour and is being shown in select AMC theaters. Smith is well-seasoned when it comes to touring his old films, pairing the screenings with Q&As and stand-up performances throughout the live presentations. It took little time for him to book a sold-out, 20-city tour aimed at getting fans fired up to come see “Dogma” once again under much different (and safer) circumstances.
“Even with getting people aware of the movie this time around, it’s not as fraught with peril as it was back in the day,” Smith said, referring to the death threats, protests and 400,000 pieces of hate mail he said the movie garnered from Christian extremists who denounced what they believed to be the film’s mockery of their faith.
“You Jews better take that money you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets,” Smith said while closing his eyes and reciting one of the letters from memory. “We’re coming because we’re coming in there with shotguns. Signed, Your Brothers in Christ.”
Though the controversy of the film has definitely waned, the inspiration behind the film remains steadfast, Smith said. “To me, it plays like a kid really trying to celebrate his faith after having grown up in a church where every Sunday, everyone seemed to be mourning it. So I think [people hopefully see it] for what it is. It’s a love letter to spirituality.”
A majority of Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted against the 2024 compensation package given to Chief Executive David Zaslav and other executives at the company’s annual meeting Monday, according to a regulatory filing.
Almost 60% of the votes cast came in against the 2024 executive pay package at the company, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday. The vote is nonbinding.
In a statement, the board said it “takes the results of the annual advisory vote on executive compensation seriously,” adding it “looks forward to continuing its regular practice of engaging in constructive dialog with our shareholders.”
Zaslav, 65, earned $51.9 million last year in salary, stock awards and other compensation. Shares of Warner Bros. declined 7.1% in 2024, while the S&P 500 index gained 23%.
Warner Bros. reported first-quarter financial results that missed Wall Street’s estimates last month. The company recently reorganized into two business units, fueling speculation it may split off cable TV networks like CNN and TNT into a separate company. The entertainment giant took a $9.1 billion writedown to reflect the declining value of its traditional TV networks last year.
Zaslav, who merged Discovery with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create Warner Bros. Discovery, has drawn criticism during his tenure as CEO. He recently changed the name of the company’s Max streaming service back to HBO Max after an unsuccessful brand overhaul. The company also announced it is launching a new online video service built around CNN, three years after canceling the short-lived CNN+ streaming service.
