story

Two of the biggest box-office standouts of 2026 so far were not made by established studio directors or built on franchise IP.

“Obsession” and “Backrooms” — horror films from internet-native directors in their 20s — have outperformed far more expensive studio releases.

The breakout success of these films has ignited debate across Hollywood about what made these movies so popular, especially among Gen Z moviegoers who haven’t been flocking to cinemas in recent years. Here’s what to know:

The numbers

”Obsession” was directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, who got his start on YouTube with sketch comedy and horror shorts. Released May 15 by Focus Features, the film was made for just $750,000 but opened to a staggering $17 million and has improved on its debut every weekend since.

“Obsession” set an all-time horror record for the biggest fourth weekend for a film at the domestic box office, raking in $25.4 million. It now ranks as the year’s fifth most popular film, nearing $200 million domestically and roughly $295 million worldwide — ahead of Pixar’s “Hoppers” ($166 million) and Paramount’s “Scream 7” ($121 million), per Box Office Mojo.

“Backrooms,” from 21-year-old Kane Parsons — known on YouTube as Kane Pixels — drew on an online fascination with liminal spaces, leading audiences through an endless run of nearly indistinguishable rooms.

Released May 29 by A24 (known for such acclaimed films as “Moonlight” and Everything Everywhere All at Once”) on a reported $10-million budget, it opened to $81 million and crossed $100 million in under a week.

Within two and a half weeks, it had outgrossed the entire theatrical runs of horror films “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” “Smile” and “Scream 7.” It sits as 2026’s eighth-highest-grossing film.

Who is watching?

The audiences are young. In recent weeks, nearly 90% of “Backrooms’” viewers were under 35, with more than half under 25. Over “Obsession’s” first few weekends, 75% of the audience was 17 to 34, which is significant at a time when major studios have struggled to consistently get younger viewers to trek to the multiplex.

Why it’s working

Audiences have clearly latched onto the stories, said Jason Blum of Blumhouse–Atomic Monster, who worked on both films.

“There’s been an audience kind of waiting to get back to the movie theaters, and we in Hollywood really have not landed on what would get them back,” he told The Times in an interview this week.

Blum, who upended horror genre with the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, ties the success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession” to a connection to the directors’ origins.

Because the films were made by creators who speak to younger viewers daily on YouTube, he said, that generation “feels like they’re being spoken to.”

David Gross, an analyst at FranchiseRe, framed it as a new pipeline of talent and material. Creators can build large followings very inexpensively, he said, and their stories arrive further developed — which expedites the development and discovery process. He called internet-based storytelling “another additive source for material for movies.” Blum added that the films’ success could make studios more willing to bet on undiscovered directors who “might not have been considered” before.

Rosie Ramirez, chief marketing officer at Galaxy Theatres, said a young first-wave audience tends to generate buzz. More than a month after “Obsession” was released, she said, the Nevada chain’s four California locations are only now seeing a second wave of moviegoers curious about the hype.

Notably, the rise of these two films has unfolded in the shadow of major releases like Disney’s “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” and Mattel’s “Masters of the Universe,” both of which returned underwhelming numbers in their respective opening weekends.

Is it a trend or an anomaly?

Whether this marks a lasting shift or a fluke is unclear. May crossed $1 billion in box office — with “Backrooms” and “Obsession” doing much of the heavy lifting. Despite the improvement, the box office has yet to full return to pre-pandemic levels, with the summer tracking roughly 3.5% behind summer 2019, said Comscore’s Paul Dergarabedian.

And Dergarabedian questioned how the industry could replicate a success that, in his words, was “authentically and organically created” rather than manufactured: “It just happened,” he said.

Ramirez argued the broader summer slate — franchise tentpoles like “Toy Story 5” alongside some original surprises — points to a healthy box office regardless, a reminder that “it doesn’t always have to be the big summer blockbuster.”

The Italian prime minister has accused Trump of making up a story that she ‘begged’ him for a photo at the G7 summit in France.

A diplomatic row between United States President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has escalated, with Italy’s top diplomat cancelling an upcoming visit to the US.

At issue is Trump’s claim that Meloni “begged” him for a photograph during the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in France earlier in the week.

“She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her,” Trump reportedly told the Italian La7 network. The broadcaster only published a dubbed Italian version of the interview, not the original English version.

“She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her.”

On Friday, Meloni posted a video answering Trump’s statement, saying that “certain things deserve an immediate response”.

“Donald Trump’s statements are completely fabricated. I am frankly stunned,” she said. “I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies. After all, this isn’t the first time this has happened.”

The head of a far-right party who campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform, Meloni had long been seen as one of Trump’s most supportive counterparts in Europe.

She had met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate following his 2024 election victory and attended his inauguration in January 2025.

However, the pair have diverged during Trump’s second term over several issues, including support for Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion, the US-Israeli war with Iran, Trump’s threats to seize the Danish territory of Greenland and his criticism of Pope Leo.

In her video, Meloni said it was a “shame” Trump did not show “the same resolve toward the enemies of the West, toward the enemies of the United States” as he did in his statements against her.

She accused the US president of being “much more accommodating” to foes than allies.

“But there’s one thing he must remember: Italy and I do not beg,” she said.

Shortly after Meloni posted the video, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said he was cancelling a weekend trip to the US, where he was scheduled to attend a business forum in Miami, Florida and meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

He called Trump’s reported statements “serious and offensive”. Several other government officials also weighed in.

Justice Minister Carlo Nordio suggested Trump’s remarks besmirched the legacy of the US soldiers who died during World War II.

“The thousands of crosses marking the graves of American soldiers who died to free us from Nazi-Fascist dictatorship did not deserve such a painful blow to our fraternal ties,” Nordio posted on X.

Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said he did not believe Meloni would ever beg for a photo, “not even under threat”.

“Jokes of this kind do no good to anyone: neither to the USA, nor to Italy, nor to the alliance,” he said.

The White House did not immediately respond to Meloni’s comments.

TOY STORY 5

(PG) 102 minutes

★★★★☆

IT’S more than 30 years since the first Toy Story film changed the way we look at the contents of an old toy box.

And it might seem that after four films — and a pretty dire Buzz Lightyear spin-off in 2022 — that the story of toys could have been packed up and put in the loft for ever.

But, no. There’s always room for another play.

And Woody, Buzz and their motley crew realise there’s a new enemy sucking the imagination out of their beloved children’s minds: Technology.

The film focuses on good old rootin’-tootin’ Cowgirl Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack), who is favoured by her owner, Bonnie.

DULCIE PEARCE

Disclosure Day is punctured with plot holes and one-dimensional characters

DULCIE PEARCE

There’s plenty in silly, fun Masters Of The Universe to entertain the family

The kid loves nothing more than playing games where Jessie and Buzz Lightyear get hitched.

Sadly, the neighbourhood kids don’t want to join in with Bonnie. In fact, they laugh at her suggestions.

When Jessie goes on a mission to persuade them otherwise, she watches as they all sit staring at devices, like little zombies.

“That’s not playing!” she exclaims. “They’re not even looking up.”

In a misguided act of kindness, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (Greta Lee) — a kid-friendly tablet that she can use to “connect” with other children. And, as you can imagine, this does the opposite.

Bonnie becomes addicted to the screen, while shunning her toys, losing her imagination and getting cyber-bullied by the girls in her class.

So, it becomes Jessie and the crew’s job to get her away from the screen and the misery it brings. Which, as any parent will know, is a near impossible task.

There is also another story running alongside it involving a shipment of new Buzz Lightyears trying to find their way to a star.

At the same time, Woody has to be brought into the pack as he’s living on the outside with the rebellious Bo Peep.

The brilliant dynamic between competitive pals Woody and Buzz is hugely missed here — as is Randy Newman’s superb theme tune, You’ve Got A Friend In Me.

This time, Taylor Swift’s original song, I Knew It, I Knew You, is played at the credits.

And Jessie’s relentless energy also becomes a little grating.

However, it’s great to see the gang back together on the big screen, and this outing has enough entertainment and imagination to make sure you won’t check your phone throughout.

EFFI O BLAENAU

(15) 90mins

★★★★★

THIS hard-hitting drama is adapted from Gary Owen’s one-woman play Iphigenia In Splott, which transforms his doomed Greek tragedy character into a working-class woman.

Effi (Leisa Gwenllian) has a bleak life, spending her days drinking vodka from a mug with her mates and eating Pot Noodles in a grim house in the Welsh valleys.

Her joy comes from club nights in Llandudno, where she meets handsome soldier Lee (Tom Rhys Harries) and the pair have a passionate one-night stand.

After he ghosts her, Effi discovers she’s pregnant.

But in the poorly maintained hospital in the poverty-stricken area, an NHS maternity care horror story then changes her life forever.

This Welsh-language film is a breathtaking work by director Marc Evans.

It strikes the perfect balance of grit and heart to make the subject matter compelling.

Gwenllian’s performance as the unpredictable and broken Effi is a masterclass in how to make an initially unlikeable character be- come someone you want to throw your arms around and care for.

FAMILIAR TOUCH

(12) 90mins

★★★☆☆

IN her debut feature film, director Sarah Friedland brings to life a moving story about a woman with dementia who is placed in a retirement community.

We meet clever, stylish Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) as she’s making a delicious meal with immaculate precision. Yet at one point, she pops a piece of toast on to the dish-drying rack.

Her son then arrives – whose name she needs a reminder of – and she wonders about his profession and acts as though they may be on a date.

But he is there to take her to an assisted-living home.

Ruth has significant short-term memory loss, though she can still reel off the recipes with precision.

She enters with little protest, apart from telling the carer, in front of her son, that she never wanted children.

Chalfant’s performance is brilliant and has none of the clichés of the elderly.

Ruth is still a sassy, flirty woman who really knows her own mind even though it is betraying her.

This gentle film has a slow pace and the long, silent scenes often ask a lot of the audience – and there’s no rush in unravelling the story.

But its subtle characterisation makes it compelling and somehow uplifting.

Woody, Buzz Lightyear and Jessie will be back at the box office this weekend, delivering what could be the biggest film debut of the year.

Analysts expect the fifth installment of Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story” franchise will pull in at least $150 million in the U.S. and Canada, with some predicting as much as $175 million — either of which would set a franchise record, topping the nearly $121-million opening of 2019’s “Toy Story 4.”

A strong showing for “Toy Story 5” will further fuel a recovery of the box office this year from the post-pandemic doldrums.

Domestic ticket sales are up over last year, and Roth Capital Partners forecasts the second quarter will climb 6.5% to $2.8 billion — a post-pandemic high.

“Toy Story 5” is the first of several family tentpoles this summer, ahead of Universal and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” and Disney’s live-action “Moana.”

“Right now we’re on pace for the best opening of the year,” said Daniel Loria, editorial director at Box Office Co. “This is a performer.”

The timing also is fortuitous for Walt Disney Co. at a moment when its other once-reliable franchises such as “Star Wars” and Marvel have faltered. The recent “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” dropped sharply at the domestic box office after its late-May opening, bested by low-budget horror films “Backrooms” and “Obsession.”

“People love these characters from ‘Toy Story,’ ” said Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Comscore. “It’s just as appealing as ever.”

Indeed, across four films and 30 years, “Toy Story” has grossed more than $3 billion worldwide. It is the most-watched franchise on Disney+, with more than 2 billion hours streamed. Woody, Buzz Lightyear and Jessie have spawned 19 theme park rides, four themed lands, two hotels and roughly $1 billion a year in global retail sales.

The production budget for “Toy Story 5” is about $150 million to $200 million. A crew of about 300 people worked on the film at Pixar’s Emeryville, Calif., headquarters.

For Pixar, the reliance on “Toy Story” reflects a shift away from originals that used to be its lifeblood.

February’s “Hoppers” managed a respectable $372 million worldwide, but the surer money now comes from sequels.

“Inside Out 2” grossed nearly $1.7 billion in 2024, and both “Toy Story 4” and “Toy Story 3” crossed $1 billion globally.

Still, the franchise label is no guarantee: The 2022 spin-off “Lightyear” stalled at $226 million worldwide after straying from the formula, recasting Buzz as an actual sci-fi hero — voiced by Chris Evans rather than Tim Allen — and sidelining Woody and the rest of the gang.

“Toy Story 5” stays closer to home but wades into new territory: the explosion of tech in everyday life. The toys must contend with Lilypad, a tablet that captures the attention of their owner, Bonnie — a premise that grew out of a tech-toy character originally written for “Toy Story 4” and scrapped for time. Disney is betting the underlying tension is universal.

“What parent hasn’t had anxiety over tech versus toys with their kids?” said Andrew Cripps, head of theatrical distribution for Walt Disney Studios.

Disney is betting that this universal concern will drive audiences to the film.

The fifth installment also arrives with an unusually high-wattage assist: Taylor Swift wrote and performed an original song, “I Knew It, I Knew You,” and made a surprise appearance at last week’s premiere, performing it after the credits before joining longtime franchise composer Randy Newman for “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

“It means the world to me to be a small part of the universe of these films,” Swift told the crowd.

The expected blockbuster opening for “Toy Story 5” would be a full-circle moment for the long-standing franchise; Pixar animators in 1995 hadn’t even considered the possibility of a sequel while working on the first “Toy Story.”

“There was so much learned on that first film, specifically our iterative process,” Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter said in a phone call last week from Madrid, shortly before the film’s Spain premiere. “A lot of things that we discovered having worked on that film have just continued to inform every movie that we make.”

“Toy Story” revolutionized the movie business as the first computer-animated feature film. But its enduring appeal was in the bonds between the characters, Docter said.

Docter, who supervised animators and helped with character design and writing on the original “Toy Story,” added: “It certainly had some new technology, but it was really up to the story and characters to carry the audience.”

The franchise’s longevity is also due to its ability to capture generations of fans.

“Having parents now that say, ‘I grew up with “Toy Story,” and now I’m showing my kids,’ has been really gratifying,” Docter said.

TOY STORY 5

(PG) 102 minutes

★★★★☆

IT’S been over 30 years since Disney’s Pixar changed the way we all look at the contents of an old toy box forever, with the creation of 1995’s Toy Story.

And it might seem that after four films – and a pretty dire Buzz Lightyear spin-off in 2022 – that the story of toys might have been packed up and put in the loft forever.

But, no. There’s always room for another play.

And Woody, Buzz and their motley crew realise there’s a new enemy sucking the imagination out of their beloved children’s minds: technology.

This film focuses on rootin’-tootin’ Cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), who is favoured by her owner, Bonnie.

DULCIE PEARCE

Disclosure Day is punctured with plot holes and one-dimensional characters

DULCIE PEARCE

There’s plenty in silly, fun Masters Of The Universe to entertain the family

The kid loves nothing more than playing games where Jessie and Buzz Lightyear get hitched.

Sadly, the neighbourhood kids don’t want to join in with Bonnie. In fact, they laugh at her suggestions.

And when Jessie goes on a mission to persuade them otherwise, she watches as they all sit staring at devices, like little zombies.

“That’s not playing!” she exclaims. “They’re not even looking up.” In a misguided act of kindness, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (Greta Lee) – a kid-friendly tablet that she can ‘connect’ with other children on.

And, as you can imagine, this does the opposite – making Bonnie addicted to the screen – while shunning her toys, losing her imagination and becoming gently cyber-bullied by the girls in her class.

So, it becomes Jessie and the crew’s job to get her away from the screen and the misery it brings. Which, as any parent will know, is a near impossible task.

There is also another story running alongside it involving a shipment of new Buzz Lightyears trying to find their way to a star.

Also, Woody has to be brought into the pack as he’s still living on the outside with the rebellious Bo Peep.

These multiple storylines make Toy Story 5 disjointed in places, and while plenty of fresh ideas are shown, it keeps repeating the idea of kids growing out of playing with toys.

The brilliant dynamic between the competitive pals Woody and Buzz is missed – as is Randy Newman’s superb theme tune You’ve Got a Friend in Me (this time Taylor Swift’s original song “I Knew It, I Knew You” is played at the credits).

And Jessie’s relentless energy becomes a little grating.

However, it’s great to see the gang back on the big screen – and it has enough entertainment, imagination and heart to make sure you won’t check your phone throughout.

Toy Story 5 is out on Friday.

NEW YORK — A nationwide network of charitable foundations is encouraging its members to emphasize their positive contributions to American life, a 250th anniversary campaign aimed at quelling what it calls the “greater intensity” of scrutiny felt from the federal government and populist movements.

Popular notions of philanthropy as merely a game for the ultrawealthy to fund partisan projects and commit fraud have left the sector vulnerable to political attacks, as the Council on Foundations sees it, influencing policies that hamper essential community services. The advocacy group, which represents about 1,000 nonprofits, hopes to overcome what CEO Kathleen Enright calls the sector’s “perception gap” with its “Generosity Builds” campaign, launched Monday.

Enright believes most Americans don’t recognize their reliance on the charitable sector. Just about 1 in 20 adults said they or anyone in their immediate family received nonprofit services in the past year, according to a 2023 Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy report.

“This week, I got an MRI at Georgetown University Hospital, I participated in my church at St. Columba’s, my daughter was inducted into National Junior Honor Society. Four or five nonprofits have been instrumental in my life this week,” she said. “Folks just aren’t putting that tag on it.”

And that tag is growing increasingly important, Enright said. Last year, negotiations over President Trump’s tax and spending bill included proposals to levy new taxes on private foundations that Enright said would have taken resources from communities if they made it into the final law.

The battle over defining what nonprofits actually do has recently been amplified from the highest rungs of the Trump administration, which has upended decades of partnerships built with nonprofits. Trump froze, cut or threatened a sweeping range of social service grants characterized by the White House as “government largesse that’s often riddled with corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse.” More recently, the Department of Justice charged the Southern Poverty Law Center — a civil rights nonprofit accused by Republicans of targeting conservatives in its work tracking extremists — with defrauding donors through payments to informants.

Vice President JD Vance described the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the Harvard University endowment as “cancers on American society” back as a 2021 U.S. Senate candidate, telling Tucker Carlson that “we are actively subsidizing the people who are destroying this country and they call it a charity.”

“All across our country, we have nonprofits — big foundations — that are effectively social-justice hedge funds,” he said in a talk that year on “woke capital.”

Narratives about nonprofits being “overly politicized” or wasteful are “extreme minority stories” that don’t reflect how philanthropy operates, according to Enright.

Across many surveys, trust in the nonprofit sector has remained higher than most others. But its impact is sometimes difficult to measure and explain. The sector hasn’t faced an environment this challenging in almost six decades, according to Kathryn Thomas, the vice president of communications for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan.

She cited the congressional effort to increases taxes on foundations’ investment incomes and acknowledged the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts.

“In an era when everything is under partisan attack and there’s so much polarization, we really have to do a better job of emphasizing why we exist,” Thomas said.

Enright said the story of philanthropy is not one where a rich person “saves the day.” She sees growing concerns about billionaires’ influence fueling suspicion about philanthropists’ motivations. Some argue the charitable sector allows moneyed interests to decide how tax dollars are spent rather than elected officials.

The campaign will emphasize that most donors “have just a little bit more than they need and therefore want to give back,” she said, especially at the local level.

“Money does not solve problems. It’s a tool that creative people and institutions inside communities use to solve problems,” she said. “The real heroes of most of these stories are nonprofit leaders, religious leaders, civic leaders who just roll up their sleeves and get something done — but do it with some financial underpinning by charitable foundations.”

That’s the story told by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation in Sarasota, Florida. A 10-apartment affordable housing complex for military veterans opened last year with the foundation’s support.

The area has an “embarrassingly high” number of veterans without housing, according to Jon Thaxton, the foundation’s director of policy and advocacy. Many are priced out in Sarasota, increasingly a luxury destination with high real estate prices.

Local donors had been trying to build a similar project when they approached the foundation in 2020 for help. Thaxton secured land already vested for affordable housing, corralled $2.2 million in donations, got $800,000 from the city and won the backing of their U.S. representatives.

The foundation’s leaders believe their track record made that possible. Phillip Lanham, the president and CEO, noted the project was completed across multiple election cycles and a pandemic, suggesting that community foundations are well situated to “play the long game.”

“Most people think that foundations like us deal with money and donors. We really don’t. We deal with relationships and trust,” Thaxton said. “That’s our commodity. That’s what we earn. That’s what we save. And that’s what we contribute back to the community.”

The Council on Foundations will also elevate examples of early, ordinary philanthropists as part of its case for philanthropy as an integral “part of the American story.” Enright credited a formerly enslaved man with donating land in North Carolina that became an African Methodist Episcopal church that endures as a pillar of the local community.

Lillian Kuri, the president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, welcomed the focus on everyday philanthropists. The Cleveland Foundation is considered the first community foundation, established in 1914 by lawyer Frederick Harris Goff as a way to fund durable change in the city.

The foundation aims to find new ways to expand today’s tent of philanthropists dedicated to improving their surrounding areas. It announced new investments this week in a fund dedicated to turn vacant industrial land into job-ready work sites. They’ve also launched a fund that allows donors to invest in major Northeast Ohio companies, supporting local business growth while that money increases into a sizable amount that can be donated to nonprofits.

“Generosity cuts across everybody,” she said, adding that community foundations offer “a way for everyday people — not just the largest, wealthiest people — to participate in the change they want to see in their communities.”

Pollard writes for the Associated Press.

“The Listeners,” which premieres Friday on Starz, began unusually as a story written by Jordan Tannahill as the basis of Missy Mazzoli‘s 2022 opera, also called “The Listeners” (libretto by Royce Vavrek), which he turned into a 2021 novel, which became a 2024 BBC television series, also written by Tannahill. Starz has cut its original four episodes into five, which means that they end in odd places, but given its controlled, glacial pace, shorter might be better.

Tannahill’s inspiration is an unexplained phenomenon reported in the real world — though exactly how real it is is open to interpretation — generally called “the hum,” where people experience a low but persistent background noise inaudible to others. (It isn’t tinnitus, or any diagnosable medical condition.) One such sufferer is Claire (Rebecca Hall), a high school literature teacher with a husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and a teenage daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia), with whom she gets along well. We begin on an up note, Claire and Ashley singing along to Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” as they drive to school (she also has Nick Drake on her phone). And then the 1970s British folk rock gives way to a less pleasant auditory landscape, as the hum appears, bringing on headaches and nosebleeds and affecting her concentration and mood, her work and family.

Any condition can be isolating from those who don’t share it, and Claire gets some relief when she’s approached by a student, Kyle (Ollie West), who also hears it. They go investigating possible sources of the sound — wind turbines, a radio telescope — and wind up eventually at something like a support group for hum-hearers run by Omar (Amr Waked) and Jo (Gayle Rankin). There is some sketchiness in their past, including a changed identity, and they like to keep the group on a tight rein, but the breathing exercises and visualizations seem pretty standard, and more benign than, say Scientology, and the suggestion that one may tame an affliction by embracing it is pretty reasonable. Claire’s mistake here is not to get a signed parental permission slip, as it were, or enlist a chaperone, and her growing closeness with Kyle (not romantic, not sexual we are assured) will cause them trouble, cost Claire her job and mess up her marriage. She makes some insufficiently careful decisions, but those around her tend to overreact. This is very much a story about listening and not listening.

Directed by Janicza Bravo and photographed with great intention by Jody Lee Lipes, it has the studied look and tempo of a 20th-century art film. (It is always great to look at.) I was reminded of Antonioni’s “Red Desert” and Bergman’s “Persona,” psychological studies of women going to pieces, but also, thematically, of Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” with its characters driven to what looks like madness by private bulletins from the ether, pushing them away from family and toward others who are getting the same message. No aliens here — not a spoiler — though I might have liked that ending more than this, which in its own way seems to drop from space.

You can look for metaphors and social comment here — there are references to conspiracy theories and industrial noise pollution and such — but it seems to me to operate most effectively as a beautifully rendered mood piece and character study, and, certainly in the case of Hall, whose story this is, a platform for some exquisitely subtle acting.

While the smoke has begun to clear at “60 Minutes” after three correspondents were fired, CBS News leadership now faces the challenge of finding journalists who can fill their shoes just three months before a new season starts.

The venerable news magazine was plunged into crisis last week as longtime correspondent Scott Pelley confronted management about the May 28 firings of his colleagues Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega along with the program’s executive producer Tanya Simon and her second-in-command Draggan Mihailovich.

Pelley, who also accused CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the program, was terminated June 2 after a 37-year career at the network. He later gave an interview to The New York Times, accusing Weiss of “putting her thumb on the scale” for the Trump administration when guiding the editorial direction of stories.

(CBS News denied Pelley’s accusations. But Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison, who has given Weiss a free hand in disrupting the CBS News hierarchy, found the turbulent situation concerning enough to personally reach out to veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to The New York Times. He assured Stahl the program would not be subject to political interference, a message she passed along to the staff.)

Lesley Stahl in the 2022 film “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.”

(A24)

The recent personnel bloodbath followed the already announced departure of Anderson Cooper, and leaves CBS News with four correspondent roles to fill and a far less experienced executive producer — former tech journalist Nick Bilton in place to keep the program on track.

Remaining staffers were encouraged that Maria Gavrilovic, a 19-year veteran of CBS News who worked closely with Pelley, was promoted to senior producer under Bilton. They are also relieved that correspondents Stahl, Jon Wertheim and Bill Whitaker chose to remain with the program rather than leave in solidarity with Pelley.

Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in 2021.

But “60 Minutes” is under pressure to get a new team in place as newcomers will have little time to learn the program’s formula that gives it the comforting consistency its viewers seek. The 13-minute pieces on “60 Minutes” are filmed, written and voice-tracked in a distinctive narrative style that takes time to master, according to people who have gone through the process.

Weiss has told people internally that “60 Minutes” is the most important platform within the news division and if a major story comes from outside its corps of correspondents, it will find a place on the program.

Here are the leading contenders for full-time roles based on interviews with several sources at CBS News who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. A CBS News representative declined comment.

Holly Williams: Williams has been a foreign correspondent working out of Istanbul since 2012. The Australian journalist has reported extensively from war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Gaza and Ukraine. When covering Syria’s civil war from inside the country, she and her team gained access to a prison where alleged ISIS terrorists were being held.

Williams has contributed reports to “60 Minutes” over the years. Before joining CBS, she was a Beijing-based correspondent for Sky News.

CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams,

(Michele Crowe / CBS News)

Tony Dokoupil: The anchor of “CBS Evening News” is expected to be added as a contributor to “60 Minutes,” a role also given to his predecessors at the newscast including Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Scott Pelley and Norah O’Donnell.

Dokoupil has done longer interviews and segments for “CBS Sunday Morning” over his 11 years at the network. The additional exposure to a Sunday night audience of more than 9 million who tune into “60 Minutes” could also help boost his nightly newscast. The program has struggled in the ratings since he took over in January when, during his inaugural week, he awkwardly saluted Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the close of one episode.

“CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil and the network’s chief national correspondent Matt Gutman.

(CBS News)

Matt Gutman: The network’s national correspondent was Weiss’ first significant on-air talent hire when he joined from ABC News in December. Gutman has been a frequent presence on big stories and breaking coverage for “CBS Evening News” since he arrived.

Mariana van Zeller at the Ultimate Disney Fan Event at the Anaheim Convention Center in September 2022.

(Image Group LA / Walt Disney Co.)

Mariana van Zeller: The multilingual journalist is best known for her documentary series “Trafficked,” which airs on the National Geographic Channel. Van Zeller, 50, has won dozens of awards for the program that has taken her around the world to report on black market activities and human trafficking.

Norah O’Donnell: Currently a contributor to “60 Minutes” who already appears on the program’s trademark open, O’Donnell’s role is expected to expand. After CBS settled a $16-million lawsuit filed by President Trump against the program for what he claimed was deceptive editing of an interview, O’Donnell helped the program by stepping up to interview the president twice, subjecting him to tough questions. Her recent joint interview with three U.S. cardinals about Pope Leo XIV and his church’s opposition to the Iran war and Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown became a major story in April.

Major Garrett: The network’s chief Washington correspondent recently appeared on “60 Minutes” to interview Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The assignment caused internal tension as Stahl was pursuing a sit-down with the leader. But Weiss handled the booking and gave Netanyahu the option to select Garrett.

While the decision faced some criticism, the program regularly agreed to former President Obama’s preference for now-retired “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft to interview him even though other journalists on the team wanted a chance.

Tomorrow marks the start of Emmy nominations voting, and we’re marking the occasion with with not one but two issues this week.which means twices as many series, and stories, to catch up with. So let’s get to it!

Cover stories

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

It’s rare for an awards roundtable to spark a real debate, but the thoughtful group of actors to appear on our 2026 Emmy Drama Roundtable — Katherine LaNasa (The Pitt”), Billy Magnussen (“The Audacity”), Zahn McClarnon (“Dark Winds”), Tom Pelphrey (“Task”), Michelle Pfeiffer (“The Madison”) and Karolina Wydra (“Pluribus”) — captured my attention with their layered conversation about runaway production.

Considering the economic boon Hollywood has brought to popular shooting locales like Atlanta and New Mexico, the dire consequences for the L.A. film industry and the increasing threat from production zones overseas, the group didn’t agree on one diagnosis, much less solution, to the problem. But in their conversation, these top names in the industry all showed deep concern about what such changes mean for showbiz’s shrinking middle class. “Our crew doesn’t get to go — the people that we know that we need, that we work with, that we make these things with,” as Pelphrey acknowledged. “We get to go wherever the f— we want, actors, directors, but the crew doesn’t.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

For the guests on our 2026 Emmy Limited Series/TV Movie Roundtable — which included Jamie Bell (“Half Man”), Linda Cardellini (“DTF St. Louis”), Camila Morrone (“Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen”), Michael Peña (“All Her Fault”), Andrew Rannells (“Miss You, Love You”) and Constance Zimmer (“Love Story”) — there’s no predicting which performances will resonate with viewers — or when.

The 2002 live-action adaptation of “Scooby-Doo,” in which Cardellini starred as Velma, has taken on cult status since its premiere, and enjoyed a revival of interest as a new Netflix version announced the cast. Rannells (“Girls”) and Zimmer (“Entourage”) have each seen their roles in epochal HBO comedies revisited by younger generations, who are often viewing the series through a very different lens. Peña, whose comedic flatulence on an “Eastbound & Down” blooper reel is now a viral meme, even wonders if he’ll be remembered for that over more serious fare like “Crash” and “World Trade Center.”

“Is that going to be your In Memoriam thing?” Rannells jokes.

At least Peña, laughing, takes it in stride: “Can you imagine?”

Digital cover: ‘The Boys’

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

There’s plenty to chew on in contributor Max Gao’s digital cover story on Prime Video’s twisted superhero satire after the conclusion of five gloriously gory seasons, but my personal favorite feature may be the sidebar of memorable from key cast members. Chace Crawford’s on-set snacks of choice? Check. Jack Quaid’s surprising craftiness? Also check. Karen Fukuhara’s struggles with nausea? Ditto. If you are already missing “The Boys” and want to re-live it vicariously through some of its central figures, be sure to read the full piece, which already includes creator Eric Kripke and actors Laz Alonso and Erin Moriarty.

The mayor is in

(Ebru Yildiz/For The Times)

Speaking of double duty, Welsh actor Matthew Rhys showcases his range this season in two very different performances, last fall as a real estate scion suspected of killing his wife in Netflix’s “The Beast in Me” and right now as the put-upon mayor of a possibly cursed island town in Apple TV’s “Widow’s Bay.” One man is menacing, the other faintly absurd, but Rhys embraces the challenges of each role with aplomb — in particular, his physical comedy in the latter has gotten several big laughs out of me.

As contributor Emma Fraser reveals in her interview with Rhys, though, there is one stage direction capable of sending a chill up his spine: dance. “That still makes me shudder,” he says of a line-dancing scene in “The Americans” from 8 years ago. Let’s hope Widow’s Bay doesn’t have an underground swing dancing club.

More stories from this week’s issues

Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” with its nonsensical phrase “ba-dee-ya,” has been streamed more than 2.3 billion times on Spotify, more than the band’s next five songs combined (including “Let’s Groove,” “Boogie Wonderland” and “Shining Star”).

In his visually and sonically vibrant film “Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World),” drummer, DJ and director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (“Summer of Soul”) shows how the funky but aspirational band was much more than its biggest hit musically.

But he also explores, in depth, the complexities of the band’s central figure, Maurice White. A self-affirming visionary who wanted to bring hope to people, White mixed journaling with talk of spaceships and metaphysics. However, he was also traumatized by a childhood in which his mother moved to Chicago for more opportunities, leaving White in Memphis, where he was once brutally beaten by white policemen. Those scars created a man who was a distant father and equally remote with his band members at the peak, mistreating them with casual disdain until everything fell apart.

Questlove recently spoke by video call about the film, now streaming on HBO Max, which features interviews with family, surviving band members, childhood friend Booker T. Jones and a couple of fans named Barack and Michelle Obama. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to this story?

In 2020, I was DJing on the internet, live streaming and I was DJing to calm people down from thinking they’re going to die in the apocalypse. One day I did an Earth, Wind & Fire set and when I got to the fourth hour, I thought, “Yo, is this one of the most relentlessly positive groups of all time?”

I started researching the lyrics and realized this band tricked us into positivity, like getting us to eat our vegetables. I started wondering how a band like that got past the velvet rope and realized that none of it was by accident, it was all by design. Their music was so good and you start singing the lyrics and there’s an osmosis effect of positivity that gets you.

When I started this in 2023, I had a spooky feeling that the turmoil of 2020 was going to visit us again, so I thought people would want something to watch that will help them plant seeds of what to do.

Maurice White, the band’s central figure.

(Henry Diltz / HBO)

You save “September” to the end. Was it so people would see the band was more than their biggest hit or to send audiences off humming and happy?

It’s an unlikely legacy song. They have so many meaningful songs like “Shining Star,” while “September” is a leftover that was a filler song from a greatest hits album that became a career-defining song.

Initially, I was coming out the gate with “September,” just, “Let’s get this out the way.”

It took a while. Early on the Obamas weren’t part of the project. I interviewed them the morning after the 2024 elections; they were so professional and so in the moment and also helped us process the day.

We’d never gotten to see them sit next to each other and be playful and dance. And I didn’t say, “OK, let’s see how you move, dance for 12 seconds,” I was just playing something and they started dancing and the camera happened to be running.

But they put the song in context. In 2009, they said, “What’s the statement we want to make to America to show this is a new era at the White House?” And Earth, Wind & Fire was chosen to be one of the bands at the inauguration and it was that song. So my producer said, “Now we can treat ‘September’ like an encore.” We used that story to show how that song grew on its own organically.

White is a complicated guy. Was it challenging to balance everything in your narrative?

Oftentimes Black artists are seen as caricatures or one-dimensional. It’s easy to do the gotcha of “You’re so positive and metaphysical, what about this or that?” My goal is always to find a human element that you see yourself in. In Maurice’s case with his career, he did drink the Kool-Aid. But his personal life stemmed from not ever forgiving his mother for leaving him behind when he was little. When we hold anger and other emotions in, when we refuse to talk to our partners or friends — and you want people to read your minds — that’s when it becomes a problem. But I wanted to show that in a way where I don’t spell it all out. Hopefully people will make the connection of the importance of dreaming and planning and affirmations but also the importance of letting things go, like forgiving people.

Ali Louis Bourzgui scored an upset win for performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for originating the role of David in the musical adaptation of the cult vampire horror film, “The Lost Boys.”

As viewers scrambled to keep their score cards straight — André De Shields was favored to take the trophy for his work in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” — the 26-year-old Bourzgui went on to deliver the night’s most impassioned, and pointedly political speech.

He began by noting that, “Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a non-existent sense of superiority. The billionaires will never find happiness from their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal. The fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not in this lifetime or eternity.”

Through the cheers of an invigorated audience, Bourzgui went on to talk about how “theater is one of the last places people can come to worship the power of true collective human presence.”

At its best, he said, theater helps us see ourselves in a stranger’s story.

“This is dedicated to the beautiful tapestry of immigrant families who make this country really special. May you one day not have to audition for the empathy that should be freely given by this country that benefits from your beauty, for the queer and trans communities who will exist, no matter what people in power try to take away from them.”

Bourzgui, whose father immigrated to America from Morocco, went on to pay tribute to Palestine and his own Arab heritage.

“For the people of Palestine, who deserve a free life, a full life without occupation, for Arabs and their makers and artists, may we continue to tell our stories and show our faces. Our humanity becomes undeniable, and our families can no longer be written off as merely collateral damage, may they know the beauty of our kisses upon his cheek and the romance of a language rooted in passion for love and life itself.”

He wrapped up this speech with a plea for love and empathy.

“If there’s one thing we can learn from vampires, it’s that life is short, but that’s it’s a gift. Find beauty in the ephemeral and gratitude in what is not promised, and always invest in the people that want to see you blossom into your truest self, and hold that space for them in return.”

In this week’s episode of The Envelope podcast, “Love Story” stars Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon open up about inhabiting John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette — and creating a cultural moment of their own.

Kelvin Washington: Welcome to the next episode of The Envelope, Kelvin Washington alongside Yvonne Villarreal; we got Mark Olsen as usual. And so you, my friend, had a chance to speak with stars of “Love Story” — Ryan Murphy, of course, tackling love with this. So it got me thinking, give me some real-life love stories that you’d like to see portrayed, maybe next season. Some love stories you always found interesting.

Villarreal: This one doesn’t have a tragic ending, and that’s why I want it. And that is Ina and Jeffrey Garten. “Barefoot Contessa”!

Olsen: I didn’t know that there was a great romance in her life.

Villarreal: Mark. You’ve never heard of Jeffrey? You don’t know Ina and Jeffrey. OK, this is why we need it. That man adores Ina and anything that she makes. Chicken, anything. This is a love story I need to see get the full display. I’ve read it in her book, but I need —

Olsen: So like “Julie & Julia.” Julia Child and her husband.

Villarreal: But cuter, sweeter, more adoring.

Washington: Loving the food theme here.

Villarreal: She’ll make anything and he thinks it’s delicious, and she laughs at everything he says, and I just want more of it, and I’m very curious what a Ryan Murphy take on Ina and Jeffrey would be.

Olsen: But see, that’s the thing. A Ryan Murphy take on that would ruin it for you.

Washington: That would be dramatic and spicy. Salacious.

Villarreal: Nothing could ruin it for me.

Washington: You got one?

Villarreal: Yeah, what’s yours?

Olsen: Well, I have two. One is because the sort of the ’90s vibes of “Love Story.” So you would obviously do Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. And that one would be very exciting and dramatic and very ’90s-ish. But I think for more of a torn-from-the-headlines [version], Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

Villarreal: It’s too current.

Olsen: That’s why though.

Villarreal: How about you?

Washington: So I’m gonna stay with your ’90s. Instead of the pop grunge. I’m going to go R&B pop. I’m going to go Bobby and Whitney.

Olsen: I mean, that’s gold right there.

Washington: I’m just saying. You got love, you got fame, you got tragedy. You’ve got stuff that we didn’t know about behind the scenes.

Villarreal: Maybe he could hire us as head writers for each of these seasons and we can all have our say.

Washington: We can all have our own season. So as I mentioned, Yvonne, you had a chance to sit down with Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon of “Love Story.” How’d that chat go?

Villarreal: They play John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, respectively, and it sort of looks at this seven-year tumultuous relationship and what they both endured navigating the spotlight and what that did to them, how they each felt about it. So it was interesting to get the take from Paul and Sarah about how they’re also navigating the spotlight, because I feel like social media fame is quite different than what John and Carolyn were navigating back then. And I was curious to see what it was like for them. So yeah, it was an interesting conversation.

Washington: All right, let’s get into that conversation now.

Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly, the breakout stars of FX’s “Love Story.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Villarreal: I imagine doing this series has been a sort of singular experience. What do you want to remember about this moment that you’re in?

Kelly: All of it’s so fun, it’s exciting. It’s definitely, for me, a new muscle that I’m learning to use and explore and stretch and flex. And I get to hang out with her a little bit more. It was wonderful.

Pidgeon: I think it’s just really hard to contextualize what this [is] — [to Kelly] I don’t know if you feel this way too — because there hasn’t been a ton of space from even the show having all the episodes come out. I don’t think I totally understand how this fits into the story of my life. I recognize that we’re experiencing something very exciting. And I think I speak for both of us that we feel really grateful and so honored to have taken on these roles and that it’s resonated and has excited people. But being out and about in New York and someone stops you and says, like, “Are you that girl from that show?” … When you’re making something, it can feel so insular. I remember when I started, I had a freak out sort of midway through like, “Oh, this is actually going to come out. It’s not just about the making of it. People will see it.” I had a huge heat rash. [To Kelly] Remember when we were in Hyannis Port? I just haven’t totally had that perspective. It’s just been very full-on in the most exciting, lovely, happy way.

Kelly: It’s all unfolded in succession. There’s been no period of time to really process. I can’t believe I did it, still. It’s out and it’s exactly the same thing … people are like, “Hey, you’re the guy in that thing, right?” I’m like, “Yeah.”

Villarreal: Has it happened in an awkward way?

Kelly: No, no, it’s all been overwhelmingly positive. I guess that’s best-case scenario, but I still try to walk around with a mustache and glasses and a hat and they’re still like, “Hey …!”

Villarreal: You didn’t try to go to the [JFK Jr.] look-alike contest in New York?

Kelly: Oh, my gosh, no.

Pidgeon: He would have won. That wouldn’t have been fair.

Kelly: It’s too many people. I got the show, so I think I already won.

Villarreal: A big theme of the series is exploring the heavy ramifications of fame on privacy. And aside from the great opportunities that come with doing the press or other things that come along with this, what has it been like adjusting your life to this experience?

Pidgeon: That idea was on both of our minds when we were filming. And we were filming in New York, so apart from the scenes and subject material we were exploring, we actually experienced it in real life as well. You have even more characters in a scene when you’re shooting on the streets of Tribeca and people stop and watch. And there was a lot of interest from the public while we were filming. I’ve been marinating on that idea. Maybe not marinating, but meditating. [Or] a little bit of both. Through our characterization of Carolyn and John, I think we felt those extremes. I haven’t felt anywhere close to that. But I don’t know about you [Kelly], but I feel like I’ve been quite busy going different places, coming on podcasts and things like that where my downtime hasn’t really been spent walking the streets so much. It’s been kind of going home and taking a shower and going to sleep.

Kelly: Same. I haven’t really had much time to go out and just be in the public, which I think has been kind of a gift. I recently had a child, so I have no time between the show and being dad. It’s been really great to live within that little privacy bubble I have at the moment. I’m going to New York for the first time in a little while tomorrow.

Villarreal: Has living in their story made you more conscious of what types of boundaries you do want to set?

Kelly: Absolutely. That was a really great gift of the show. And exploring the exponential setting of what privacy means to people, certainly those two individuals. But now I’ve adopted that within my own life, and it’s like, “OK, yeah, I like to be a private person.”

Villarreal: What about you, Sarah?

Pidgeon: So much, at least for Carolyn, was she was constantly battling this sense of how she was being perceived. And I really admire her ability, whether or not she felt the pressure [to do so] — she never spoke on the record and never had to correct the record despite, in my mind, a lot of those allegations being false in the stories about her. That sense of sort of self-possession is quite admirable and, again, this is so new for the both of us. Being able to embody her, that approach and attitude towards it, is something that’s quite interesting to me. And I mean, it definitely has a lot of self-restraint attached to it, so who knows if I possess that as well.

Villarreal: The love story between John and Carolyn, as well as their fateful flight, generated a lot of media attention. And I know you, Sarah, were a toddler, at the time of their deaths; and you, Paul, were a young boy — and you’re a Canadian. What was your image of them in terms of the lore that surrounded them before making the series?

Kelly: Growing up in Canada, I was familiar with who he was. I became even more familiar with them after living in the States for a while. I was a model before, and I had been told I looked like him, so after being told that, you kind of do a little bit of research. Who is this guy? And I was like, “I don’t look anything like JFK.” But then I realized [they meant] JFK Jr. “OK, maybe; yeah, I do look like him a little bit.” So I became more aware of them after that. But growing up, it definitely wasn’t in my cultural zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it.

Pidgeon: I knew that Carolyn worked at Calvin Klein. I knew they were married. I knew their story. I was such a young child when they passed, but they remained so in the cultural conversation because, especially in 1999, they represented such hope in politics. And they’re such a modern couple, sort of breaking the rules of what those norms are, especially coming from such a storied family that has such legacy in the States.

Villarreal: There’s an overwhelming amount of source material from the Kennedy side, but less so on Carolyn. What proved to be most useful to you? What were the things that you turned to to study or figure out who she was?

Pidgeon: That was such a mystery. [I was] taking these still photographs, mainly paparazzi images — and now that I’ve had a few photos taken of myself, you hold yourself differently when you know someone’s taking a photo of you that you also don’t know. That plus videos of her, very few in which she was speaking. And some of the candid photos, mainly from when she was younger. I sort of laid those on top of each other and then used as many books that I could find and interviews that people would give who knew her. But there’s scarcity in terms of that information. That at times felt arresting, but at other times … there’s a lot of freedom in that. And I think that’s what was so interesting about playing this character that is so well known and yet very enigmatic. Finding her walk and thinking about how that changes over the course of nine episodes and six-and-a-half, seven years. How this woman with so much freedom and anonymity — 26 years old, living in New York City, barreling down these streets in the East Village — then changes when she’s the most photographed woman in America. How that perception changes you physically.

Villarreal: Her walk was very striking for me, because I’m like, I can’t move that way.

Pidgeon: Yes you can. You can get a pair of Manolos.

Villarreal: It won’t look as elegant as you, Sarah, but talk to me about finding that walk because, like you said, it shifts from when the onslaught happens. Did you work with a movement coach? Was that all you?

Pidgeon: Julia Crockett is so incredible. There’s not enough hours in the day to sing her praises. We started with a lot of what I just mentioned, the quotes that people said of how she moved. She spoke with her hands. She could be a fast walker — most people who live in New York are. If there was a video of what I was doing in these hotel rooms, they’d think I was absolutely crazy. Rolling around on the floor, isolating different parts of my body, making it as dramatic as possible, and working it into a circle of attention that felt real. And understanding we were both 5-10, which helps. I think tall women carry themselves in a certain way. But understanding that my body is still my body, and our production I don’t think was particularly interested in doing huge physical transformations in terms of prosthetics or things like that. But getting the shoes, walking around in my spare time in New York in heels, which Carolyn does in the show and Sarah Pidgeon does not. That really changes you and it changes how you feel. And just always having that through line of, “What were the touchstones of Carolyn as a young woman, and where did I want her to end up physically?” You can see it through so many different versions in these different photographs — her hair changes, how she dresses changes, the red lip. I [was] always remembering that there was a journey that I was going on: “How can the world close in on her? What does that feel like?” Also, not only putting it into my body first, but feeling it in my body, imagining that. And what are the images that come up? We thought about [her as a] mossy ball; very tactile, just rolling down these hallways in the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

Villarreal: Paul, you had about three weeks from when you got cast and when production started. And there’s ample stuff to sift through. How did you figure your way out through the noise? What was the thing that really helped you lock in to who he was?

Kelly: He narrates his father’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” and that for me was a great asset. I had to learn how to use my tongue in a different way than I’ve ever spoken before. His speech patterns are different. I worked with a dialect coach. I would listen to that all day, every day — amongst ’90s alt music, some Nine Inch Nails and stuff because that’s what John would do.

Villarreal: Was that what he was into?

Kelly: I think so. One of my favorite photos of him is a candid photo, and he’s wearing a Nine Inch Nails shirt. I’m like, “My guy! Here we go. I can relate.” I watched a lot of his interviews just to see how he kept his cool and composure. He was a very relaxed individual under extreme stress situations. The Larry King interview was a great one; I relied on [it] a lot. I also looked at a lot of images and saw how he moved through the world. I was a model before so I’m pretty good at understanding how my body moves and how to move it; I also worked with Julia pretty briefly, but she gave me some really great tips and I took those throughout the entire duration of filming and just ran with it.

Villarreal: Are you someone that takes bike as your transportation often?

Kelly: Oh yeah. Four wheels moves the body, two wheels moves the soul.

Villarreal: How is it doing it with the suit on?

Kelly: It’s hot.

Pidgeon: Yeah, you did a lot of that in July during a heat wave.

Kelly: Oh, my gosh, when we started filming, the first scene where John is introduced on the bicycle, we shot that on a Sunday and it was like 103 degrees outside and I’m in a ’90s wool suit. It was great … And a hat. And a backpack. There’s a photo where there’s several hands coming at me with fans and spritzer.

Villarreal: How about finding John and Carolyn together? What did that look like for the two of you, figuring out who they were as a couple?

Kelly: I feel like it happened organically. We had like this unspoken bond and trust with each other from the moment we met and it was just like, “OK, we both understand the assignment.” Then we get to step into these shoes and we understand what that was like, I guess, but just going through it together [helped]. It’s also so well written and it is easy to fall into that. It’s very easy to fall in love with this one every day and then fight.

Pidgeon: Oh, you flatter me.

Villarreal: Because you both were so young at the time that they were a couple, were there modern-day couples of your generation that you looked to in terms of how they dealt with the spotlight? Was there someone you were looking to, to help you understand it?

Pidgeon: I think they were pretty singular, especially considering so much of how we view them as a couple was the time in which they existed. I don’t think I can really point to a couple … obviously there’s a comparison with [Princess] Diana, but I can’t really I put my finger on a couple that had the same essence of John and Carolyn, or the same challenges and obstacles of being a couple in public life. [To Kelly] Can you think of anyone?

Kelly: Not really, no.

Pidgeon: It was also that we were coming in on this advent of paparazzi. Obviously coming from such an important family, there was — and I want to speak for you [Kelly] in terms of how you felt about your characterization of JFK Jr. — but there was so much investment in them as a couple because America, and really the world, had watched him grow up. So of course there is this heightened interest in who America’s son marries. And again, that hope that they were this modern couple, one that we’ve never seen before, and what will they become in this new millennium? In terms of finding them together, what was so wonderful about the writing of the show was they were — granted, it happened in about three or four episodes [for the show’s purposes] — but as we were getting to know each other, so were Carolyn and John. They were falling in love with each other and figuring out what that dynamic was and having those misfirings and miscommunications and moments of intensity and questioning. The amount of times I’ve used the word “meta” while talking about the experience of making this show, that sort of mirrored life in a way. I was able to just absolutely give over to Paul and trust him and be excited working with him every single day and be so curious about who John and Carolyn were that day on set. No one better than Paul Anthony Kelly.

Kelly: Oh, you flatter me.

Villarreal: There are a lot of scenes that are stuff that we’ll never know whether they actually happened. But then there are the moments that were played out in tabloids — one of them is the Bryant Park episode. What can you tell me about what that was like shooting on the streets of New York? What do you remember about that experience?

Kelly: What was it, the Nextdoor app called?

Pidgeon: Citizen.

Kelly: The Citizen app. They called it [a] “domestic dispute” … so we were obviously doing our job correctly. It was interesting. Shooting in New York is a very interesting experience because you have all these outliers just watching and gawking. Everyone’s got phones and cameras and what have you. And we’re so in it and doing it and then to have like this blowup argument over and over and again, take after take, angle after angle.

Pidgeon: I wonder if someone reported us just to be like, “Make it stop!”

Kelly: Yeah, exactly. Nobody tried to save you in the moment. Maybe that was them trying to save you [by posting it in the app].

Pidgeon: That was always something to contend with or accept, really, at a certain point. This is an expectation of working in the city. And what I really liked about that scene was that — considering there was such little videography of her, especially because that was a private moment that was unfortunately caught on tape — they both had less inhibitions. I found it [to be] a really amazing exercise as an actor to finally be able to really take something and mimic it exactly and find how the words that Connor [Hines] had written [aligned with it]; it felt like such a great sign when it felt the writing really matched what I physically knew to be true. Because our interest in the story is what happens behind closed doors, as you said. But in those few moments that we did re-create, the real-life [moments], it felt very reassuring as an actor to feel like the words that we were speaking matched the physical footage. I just found it such an exciting way to go about it, to have it really be this outside-in approach. You take this physicality and vocal pattern that I had developed as Carolyn, but then really have some proof for that to be the jumping-off point. I love that we had that scene; we had when they take their first photo after their wedding; we had, in Episode 9, the [Newman’s Own/George Awards] event. Remember that clip that we watched? We’re in the exact same outfits, and I think it’s the Newman’s Own event. I always appreciated those moments. It felt like a different way in to a character that I had really started to get to know at that point.

Villarreal: Whenever I watch something based on a true story or people that were like historical figures, I can’t help but Google to see if something really happened. Is there something you Googled in the process of making the show where you were like, “Did this really happen?”

Pidgeon: There’s a bit of speculation as to how they met. There’s a couple of different stories. Considering this couple was so well known, the fact that there’s still a mystery into how they even met for the first time I think is quite interesting.

Villarreal: I Googled — and I will say I clearly am not the only one that thought this because there was a whole story of it — “Did they really eat KFC chicken?”

Pidgeon: They did.

Kelly: Fine dining.

Pidgeon: You didn’t eat any chicken.

Kelly: Noooo. I got secondhand chicken. That chicken, oh my gosh.

Pidgeon: They did warm it up a bit, but it was pretty cold, you know.

Villarreal: We can’t talk about this show without talking about the wardrobe, the costumes. It’s such a key piece to the storytelling here. Tell me about that collaboration and what the clothes said to you about who Carolyn is and then who John is.

Pidgeon: Yes, clothes are incredibly important to the story and to how most of the public knows and remembers Carolyn. Working with Rudy Mance was so incredible. What he was able to source, while we’re not necessarily sure if they were pieces that Carolyn herself wore, they were the exact pieces of the exact same collection. The very few pieces we weren’t able to source, they were impeccably re-created. Just the attention to detail, I had never really experienced something like that. It was just really watching a master at work, and the rest of our crew as well; not a detail was ever overlooked. The mystery that we really tried to solve in the beginning was: Wow, there’s so many photos of her [from] ’95, ’96 and beyond; there are far fewer photos of what she looked like when she was working at Calvin Klein. And we’re in that space and that time for quite a while. From the photos that we do have of her living in this time in her life, and then how we know she will dress, what are the through lines? What are the pieces she repeats? I don’t think I wore much Prada in the first two, three episodes, which makes sense, because she was just starting out at Calvin Klein. We [had her wear] a lot of Calvin pieces. What was so insightful to playing her was her sartorial choices and her understanding of how, especially since she never spoke on the record, [and] what she can communicate through fashion and how in those initial fittings, even before I really spoke the words of those episodes, how it immediately changed how I held myself as Carolyn was growing and getting older. I keep referencing this quote about Yohji Yamamoto, a designer whom she wore frequently. He liked making the association with his clothing to armor. I just thought that was such a great way into her sort of mental state and how she approached clothing. It was very her, she wore the clothes. That was something that I had to remember, that if I was going to try and embody her, I had [to] feel like I was wearing the clothes because that’s what really stuck out. You always saw her first, despite her wearing some incredibly beautiful clothing. Carolyn was No. 1.

Kelly: John had such great style. Sometimes it was pretty kooky. I also loved that too because it just is such a sense of him. Working with Rudy was a dream. He and his team were incredible. They were able to source so many things. And if they couldn’t find it, it was a direct re-creation, like exact copy of what it was. I remember even just like those shorts with the Knicks logo that he wears playing football. I remember seeing a comment, “John would never wear those.” [Sighs.] “OK, sure.” There’s something about getting into those outfits that it just was this whole other transporting layer of becoming. You hold yourself differently in these things and it just made it feel more real and you’re like, “OK, cool,” and you just live in it and it feels good and you get slouchy and whatever. It was really nice.

Villarreal: How does your style compare? Did they influence your style now?

Kelly: Honestly, it’s a little different, but it’s not that far off. I feel pretty good in a suit. I like to wear suits a lot. I’m the suited heavy metal guy.

Pidgeon: You also have that cool factor about you too. I think there’s something in that with John. He looked great in a suit, he looked great in a tux, but then there was a bit of an edge to him. There was bit of a realness, I think, that you guys share.

Villarreal: Everyone’s trying to emulate it. So many TikToks of people trying to re-create it. Sarah, do you feel like you can never go back to brunette now? Like this is your thing now? You have to stick with it?

Pidgeon: The blond seems to be working. I like being a different hair color. I don’t think I’ll be blond forever. Simply too much time [involved]. It’s so much work. My colorist is amazing — Kari Hill. Cannot sing her praises enough. And Alex Pardoe, who does extensions. It’s been really interesting to find how I [am as a blond] — so much of my time being blond was embodying Carolyn. [Paul and I] would both sleep on the weekends. We wouldn’t do anything while we were shooting. So I didn’t really get a chance to take a walk in this new hair. And when I started dressing again, to go out, I would put on my favorite clothes from when I was brunette. It’s like, “Oh, it just doesn’t hit.” It’s been cool to see how I present and how color theory is crazy. But we’ll see, I guess it depends on how much time I have on my hands.

Villarreal: The series really grapples with the media invasion that swirled around them. What do you say to the critics that feel that a show like this either reignites that craze or contributes to it? What do you want the takeaway of a show like this to be?

Pidgeon: Thinking about one of the first questions you asked — how are we now dealing with with being potentially recognized — I think the intensity of interest in famous people, famous couples, celebrity, actors, musicians, you name it, artists, it’s changed shape, but it has never gone away. Our intention in making this show was, again, what we know about their lived reality, but what can we infer might have happened behind those closed doors. To the general public, [they were] sort of two-dimensional … I knew very little about Carolyn, but I ingested so many photos of her far before this project was ever on my radar. While I recognize this may have contributed to reigniting interest in them, I hope that that interest feels like there’s a more intimate understanding of these people; that they weren’t just figures, that they were people with very full lives, feelings, a profound sense of privacy, intense relation to each other, very, very human. I guess that would be my answer to that. I hope that this is also a bit of a lens or a mirror that, again, if that intensity hasn’t changed, how might we [change it] in the future?

The World Cup arrives in L.A. on Thursday. This marks the first time the festivities have taken place in the Southland since 1994, when Pasadena’s Rose Bowl hosted the final between Brazil and Italy, which famously ended in a scoreless tie and was decided by a penalty shootout that led to Brazil winning its fourth World Cup title. (The U.S. hosted the Women’s World Cup in 1999 and 2003, with the finals at the Rose Bowl and Home Depot Center [now known as Dignity Health Sports Park], respectively.)

Soccer is art and art is soccer and soccer is life — and also one of the most beloved sports on the planet — and thankfully for you, dear arts lover, you can mix your passion for art and fútbol by heading to a free public viewing party at a number of local museums and cultural institutions.

This year sees Spain and France as favorites, with England, Brazil, Portugal and defending champions Argentina all in the running. No matter who your team is, there is a museum watch party for you. Here are your top choices, in no particular order:

The Getty Center: A variety of watch parties will take place on newly installed big screens at the museum’s Trellis Bar & Lounge and Garden Terrace Cafe, which will also feature themed menu items and drinks. The Getty will stay open until 9 p.m. on June 12, 19, 26 and July 3 to accommodate evening games. Normal Friday hours will resume July 10. Admission is free, but a reservation is required. Parking is free after 5 p.m.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: The museum is hosting two free outdoor watch parties on large screens located on its Smidt Welcome Plaza on Wilshire Boulevard. Mexico vs. Korea can be seen from 6 to 8 p.m. on June 18; and Uruguay vs. Cape Verde will take place at 3p.m. on June 21.

LACMA is also hosting a few soccer-themed events, including “Andell Family Sundays: ‘Fútbol Is Life’,” set to take place on June 7, 14 and 28 from 12:30 to 3:30 pm. The event features art-making workshops inspired by the museum’s ‘Fútbol Is Life’ exhibit featuring soccer miniatures by Lyndon J. Barrois Sr., and led by artists Karl Petion and Patricia Yossen. There is also an event called “Let’s Play: Soccer Juggling,” from noon to 3 p.m. on June 21. This is also tied to the exhibit and offers lessons in soccer basics through a drop-in juggling and accuracy workshop led by representatives from American Youth Soccer Organization. All ages and experience levels are welcome. RSVP required.

The Autry Museum of the American West: The Autry’s free Griffith Park watch party will take place at 4 p.m. June 12 when Paraguay takes on USA. The event will feature food trucks, themed cocktails, soccer-inspired games and activities, and local vendors selling specialty wares. Free, but an RSVP is required.

The Music Center: It’s not a museum, but it’s one of the city’s most beloved cultural centers. It’s also hosting a free public screening of Spain vs. Uruguay from 5 to 7 p.m. on June 26 on its lovely Jerry Moss Plaza, including family-friendly activities and themed refreshments. Bring a picnic or pick your dinner from an on-site restaurant. Stick around after the game for a free global dance party celebrating the start of the 22nd season of the Music Center’s Dance DTLA.

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt putting my game face on. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Gustavo Dudamel: Celebrating 17 Years
In his final concert as L.A. Phil music director at Disney Hall, the maestro joins his Venezuelan and American identities, conducting two poetry-inspired choral symphonic works. John Adams’ “Harmonium” borrows texts from Emily Dickinson and John Donne to explore time, harmony and rhythm. “Cantata Criolla” by composer Antonio Estévez follows a Venezuelan troubadour who squares off against the devil.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com

Haunted
In this one-act dance opera, composer Paul Salerni unites poetry and music to share a tale of doomed love entwined with a ghost story with an unexpected conclusion. Based on a libretto by former California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org

SATURDAY

Family Fest: Pride
A free, outdoor event celebrating love, identity and inclusivity, featuring Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Iwalani Music, Everybody Dance LA, Drag Story Time, Color Me Face Painting and more.
11 a.m.-2 p.m. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. thewallis.org

“Catapult” by Alex Gardner, 2025. Acrylic on canvas.
48 1/16 x 96 1/16 inches.

(Wild Don Lewis Photography; courtesy of Alex Garden and Perrotin)

Alex Gardner, Gabriel Rico and Makiko Kudo
A trio of new exhibitions connected through the natural world and the creatures, great and small, who inhabit it: In “Animals,” painter Alex Gardner explores his experience of fatherhood; Gabriel Rico’s “Gabrielinos (I Am You And What I See Is Me),” the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles, uses textile, assemblage and sculpture to encourage viewers to think about the world around them; the life and death of Japanese painter Makiko Kudo’s pet cat inspired “Reincarnation,” a series of oil paintings.
Opening reception, 6-8 p.m.; exhibitions run through July 11. Perrotin Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Blvd. perrotin.com

Magnificent Mozart & Mahler
Eckart Preu conducts the Long Beach Symphony in two classical masterpieces, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and Mahler’s Fifth.
7:30 p.m. Long Beach Terrace Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd. longbeachsymphony.org

Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum
The summer repertory season launches with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the great outdoors of Topanga Canyon.
“Romeo and Juliet,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday-Sept. 26; “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” Sunday-Oct. 10. Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. theatricum.com

SUNDAY

Juneteenth Block Party
Debbie Allen Dance Academy (DADA) hosts its annual free community celebration featuring free dance master classes, live performances, carnival rides, games, food trucks, music and a marketplace for local and minority-owned businesses. Noon-7 p.m. Debbie Allen Dance Academy, 1850 S. Manhattan Place, L.A. debbieallendanceacademy.com

L’Chaim America!
The Braid theater company performs real stories of American Jewish life centered on gratitude and possibility.
2:30 p.m. Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. skirball.org

MONDAY
National Museum of the Aftermath
The project, conceived and titled by Cauleen Smith and curated by Jon Rubin and Harrison Kinnane Smith, travels from city to city adopting a different name and form in each location. For two months, it will operate within Oxy Arts, challenging the status quo of history and speculating on the future.
11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; through Aug. 8. Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd., L.A. oxyarts.oxy.edu

WEDNESDAY

Denise Burse, from left, Charlayne Woodard and Deborah Joy Winans in rehearsal for “Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous” at Geffen Playhouse.

(Isaak Berliner.)

Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous
An expat actor of a certain age returns to the U.S. primed for a comeback, only to face a new generation with very different ideas from her own. Written by Pearl Cleage and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. Denise Burse, Olivia Washington, Deborah Joy Winans and Charlayne Woodard star.
Through July 12. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. geffenplayhouse.org

The Revolutionists
Playwright Lauren Gunderson turns France’s Reign of Terror on its ear in this raucous comedy about women fighting for égalité. Directed by Jamie Torcellini.
Previews, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, through June 28. International City Theatre, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach. https://ictlongbeach.org/therevolutionists/

THURSDAY

Double Take: Photographs in Pairs
An intriguing exhibition matching photographs based on their formal qualities: the angle of a body, the geometry of a space, the relationship between figures and the interpretation of color. Photographers featured include Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lauren Greenfield, Mary Ellen Mark, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Bruce Weber and Bastiaan Woudt.
Opening reception 7-9 p.m. Thursday; exhibition runs through July 18. Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave. faheykleingallery.com

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2025.

(David Swanson/For The Times)

Ojai Music Festival
This year’s music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, is in the spotlight as a composer with the U.S. premiere of his new work for violin and cello and the first complete performance of his “Six Preludes” for piano, and other works; Salonen also conducts the Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening concerts. In its 80th year, the festival pays tribute to its defining musical figures and welcomes L.A. Phil New Music Group, Colburn Orchestra, L.A. Dance Project and many other noteworthy artists.
Through June 14, 2026. Libbey Bowl, 210 S Signal St., Ojai. ojaifestival.org

Rheology
This experimental play by Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie winner Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a collaboration with his mother, physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, filled with dramatic urgency.
8 p.m. Thursday, and June 12-13. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

Thursday Night Jazz
Weekly series featuring guest musicians backed by the Jack Lieberman Trio. Upcoming guests include the Tyler Hammond Jazz Experience (June 11); Ido Eylon and Willem Jochems (June 18); and Joey Du Bois with Kahlil Childs (June 25).
8 p.m. Thursdays. The Spotlight, 1601 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. thespotlight.la

Arts anywhere

New and recent releases of arts-related media.

Ann Patchett and her novel “Whistler.”

(Los Angeles Times illustration; images from Emily Dorio, Harper)

Ann Patchett, ‘Whistler’
What does a literary novelist have to do with the performing and visual arts? In Patchett’s stories, the past is often inextricably entwined with the present and within those threaded timeframes lie traces of genetic code leading to the arts and art-adjacent worlds. In “Taft” (1994), the protagonist is a former jazz musician turned Memphis bar owner; “The Magician’s Assistant” (1997) finds the title character unraveling the illusions of her own life; “Bel Canto” (2021) features a famous American soprano at the center of a hostage crisis; and “Tom Lake” (2023) revolves around a Michigan woman’s long ago love affair with a soon to be famous actor during a summer stock production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Of the writer’s latest book, “Whistler,” Times contributor Leigh Haber wrote, “This exquisite writer has once again delivered an incandescent work of fiction — sweet, but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love. It’s also an ode to New York City itself.” And that ode notably begins with the protagonist and her husband at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A place that Haber notes, “one gets the sense, they know by heart.” This connection to art may prove to be tangential — I’ve only read a quarter of the book — but Patchett’s appreciation of these worlds is anything but.
Harper: 304 pages, $30

— Kevin Crust

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Jeff LeBeau, left, and Tim Cummings in the West Coast premiere of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville” at the Ruskin Group Theatre Arts Center, dairected by John Perrin Flynn.

(John Perrin Flynn)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty reviewed the West Coast premiere of playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville,” directed by John Perrin Flynn, at the Ruskin Group Theatre. The play, which explores the lives of two estranged half brothers from a small Idaho town, is “beautifully acted,” McNulty writes, adding, that Hunter, “the bard of Idaho,” is “one of the theater’s outstanding American realists.”

McNulty also loved the Alicia Keys jukebox musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” which staged its L.A. debut last week at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre. The musical tells the story of Key’s upbringing in the Manhattan neighborhood of the show’s title, but the story isn’t where the show shines, writes McNulty, noting that the joy comes from the way Keys’ music is seamlessly integrated into the narrative.

Yo-Yo Ma plays the solo for the premiere of Angelica Negron’s “Mudillo” on Thursday, May 28, 2026.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“Our streets are garlanded with ‘Gracias, Gustavo’ banners and billboards. The Walt Disney Concert Hall shop has become a Dudamel-torium, aisles bursting with Gustavo T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, refrigerator magnets and this and that,” writes Times classical music critic Mark Swed in a review of Dudamel’s penultimate weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall, including one featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Dancers from choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project rehearse at LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries on Friday, May 22, 2026, in Los Angeles.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project is staging a free, two-week-long series of public shows called “City of Dance” which take place at nine Southern California landmarks, including LACMA, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Tongva Park and Stearns Wharf. Read all about how the project came to be, including its use of Philip Glass’ score from the critically acclaimed 1982 documentary film, “Koyaanisqatsi.”

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts announced its 2026-27 season.

(Jason Kempin / Getty Images for Wallis Annenber)

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts has unveiled its 2026-27 season, its first under the leadership of its new executive director and CEO, Jean Davidson. Highlights include music by Joshua Redman Quartet; Ronald K. Brown and his dance company Evidence, comedy and cabaret by performers including Sandra Bernhard and designer Isaac Mizrahi; recitals by L.A. Opera, concerts featuring Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and much more. “At the heart of this season is a belief in the power of live performance to connect people to ideas, to one another, and to the shared human experience. We are proud to support artists who spark curiosity, foster empathy, and invite dialogue, while continuing to strengthen The Wallis as a vibrant gathering place for all audiences,” said Davidson in a news release. See the full schedule here.

Pacific Jazz Orchestra also announced its 2026-27 season led by composer, arranger and conductor Chris Walden. The 40-piece string orchestra and big band hybrid is entering its fourth season with five programs dedicated to jazz, swing, soul R&B, Broadway and pop, staged in six venues across the region, including in Beverly Hills, Irvine, Northridge, Palm Desert, Santa Barbara and Ventura. Featured guest artists include Broadway star Sutton Foster, pianist David Benoit and vocalist Nayanna Holley. See the full schedule here.

UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance has announced “Far Away, Here,” a new multiyear international opera initiative that will launch in the 2026-27 season with the U.S. premiere of a new adaptation of “Kafka’s Letter to His Father, “ scheduled to run Nov. 12-14 at the UCLA Nimoy Theater. The initiative will continue to present U.S. premieres of under-the-radar operas by artists from around the world, and is curated and produced by tenor Timur Bekbosunov, in collaboration with CAP UCLA’s executive and artistic director, Edgar Miramontes.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

I told you where to watch the World Cup at area museums, but here’s a list for folks who would like to watch the old-fashioned way, at restaurants and bars.

This story includes spoilers for “Masters of the Universe.”

He-Man has made his way back to the big screen thanks to the power of Grayskull — and Hollywood’s love of nostalgia.

Now in theaters, “Masters of the Universe” stars Nicholas Galitzine as Eternia’s long-lost Prince Adam. Working a menial HR job after getting stranded on Earth as a child, Adam “(he/him)” dreams of reuniting with his Sword of Power in order to make his way back home.

Spoiler: He does (with a little help from his friends).

Helmed by “Bumblebee” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” director Travis Knight, the movie is “a dopey, friendly comedy about modern masculinity in crisis with a He-Man who openly wonders what kind of a man to be,” according to a review by Times film critic Amy Nicholson.

Much like the first live-action film around the popular 1980s toyline, the new “Masters of the Universe” features a couple of post-credits scenes that tease what could come in the franchise’s future. But for now, fans will have to wait to learn whether a sequel is forthcoming.

Yes, Orko is in the He-Man movie

Fans of the He-Man franchise can rejoice because everyone’s favorite floating wizard (and court jester) does make an appearance after the main “Masters of the Universe” story ends. In a nod to the animated Filmation series in which the character originated, Orko appears in a brief stinger after the conclusion of the film in order to share what lessons audiences could learn from the story they just watched.

Has He-Man seen the last of Skeletor (Jared Leto)?

(Amazon MGM Studios / Prime)

The mid-credits scene introduces a familiar hero

The most significant of the bonus scenes comes in the middle of the credits. The scene opens with Prince Adam’s mother, Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley), sharing a moment with Duncan (Idris Elba).

After the queen mentions she had given up hope for reuniting with “both of them,” Man-At-Arms replies “perhaps one day she’ll come back to us too.”

The scene then cuts to the “she” in question, wearing a red cape and holding a familiar sword.

“Force Captain… Adora?” calls out a voice.

“No, not anymore,” she replies.

Those familiar with the lore of the “Masters of the Universe” franchise will recognize that the mysterious woman is Adam’s long-lost twin sister, Adora. The most common backstory is that Adora was kidnapped by Hordak as an infant and raised on the planet Etheria as a member of his Evil Horde. She eventually learns the truth about her heritage and defects to fight for good.

The Sword of Protection gives her the power to transform into the hero She-Ra.

Is that the last post-credits scene?

Nope. The final stinger shown after the credits are done rolling involves Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) and Skeletor (Jared Leto). It appears He-Man has not seen the last of his nemesis — as long as a sequel is greenlit.

The last time Angelenos sacked an incumbent city attorney in the primaries, almost 30% of them were unemployed.

That was May 2, 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression, when sprawling encampments blanketed downtown, King Kong ruled movie theaters and violent crime reached a fever pitch not seen again for almost half a century.

Incumbent City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s near-certain defeat on Tuesday may have little in common with Erwin P. Werner’s primary loss 93 years ago, but themes of Depression-era Los Angeles echo through the contest.

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice who leads the race with ballots still being counted, wooed voters with shoe-leather and social media savvy, promising to use the office to fight for wage workers and tenants. But it was the city’s powerful unions and its increasingly democratic socialist bloc that propelled her to the top spot, mirroring the coalition that drove California’s sharp left turn in the early 1930s.

Meanwhile, county prosecutor John McKinney tapped into voter frustration with homeless encampments, a blighted downtown and general distrust of City Hall to pull off a last-minute heist of the second runoff spot. McKinney only started campaigning in earnest five weeks ago, but managed to win votes with a tough-on-crime campaign — even as some categories of city crime have dipped to historic lows.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, left, shares a laugh with L.A. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, right, at Avance Democratic Club’s politics and tacos event on May 16.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

As of Thursday morning, Roy had nearly double the number of votes of Feldstein Soto. McKinney led the incumbent by 13 percentage points for the second runoff slot. The race has not yet been called, but Feldstein Soto issued a statement effectively conceding the race Wednesday morning. She acknowledged that “the voters had spoken” and referenced “her successor’s administration.”

Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The ouster of Feldstein Soto would be nearly unprecedented. Werner’s 1933 loss is the only similar instance since the city adopted its current primary ballot process in 1917, according to the City Clerk’s office. No other incumbent city council member or mayor has ever failed to advance out of the primary when facing two or more opponents.

“This is not something that has happened in the lifetimes of most people who follow city government,” said Mike Bonin, former City Council member and executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

McKinney’s sudden emergence in the race in May saw him hijack the incumbent’s support from law enforcement. His campaign received $3 million worth of independent expenditures. An official with a group supporting McKinney — who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media — said an internal poll showed Feldstein Soto falling nearly 10 points outside the runoff a week before election day.

Since Roy had already captured the support of the county Democratic Party and energized left-leaning voters, that put Feldstein Soto in the center, analysts said, which left her vulnerable in a race that most people casting ballots hadn’t closely followed.

“To the extent that people had any information, they knew that one of them basically wanted to be tougher and somebody on the other side wanted to be kinder, that left her with very little room to maneuver,” said Roy Behr, a longtime consultant to veteran politicians in the city.

Roy “micro-targeted” likely progressive voters in social media spots, experts said, presenting as an affable presence in her ever-present purple blazer while sharing her vision of serving as the “people’s lawyer.”

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, appears poised to finish first in the June 2 primary race for L.A. city attorney.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Boosted by a massive influx of cash from rental giant Airbnb, some of McKinney’s ads played up his hard-luck upbringing in one of New Jersey’s most violent cities. His campaign also sent out texts that painted his opponents as “George Gascón”-style Democrats, invoking the former progressive district attorney as a bogeyman for voters anxious about crime.

AI-generated videos depicted McKinney as a stoic, suit-clad crime fighter walking through a dystopian version of L.A.’s Metro system.

“The debate isn’t necessarily two candidates on one stage appealing to one person, it’s for attention and information in the same sphere,” said Spencer Slovic of Mycorrhiza Digital, who ran Roy’s digital advertising. “That battle of information will play out almost in different realms.”

Without a compelling story for her powerful but poorly understood role, Feldstein Soto often struggled to explain her achievements in office.

In a recent interview with The Times, she said she delivered on “public safety, public integrity and public services.” She went on to discuss granular improvements she made to the office, such as limiting access to law enforcement databases by former employees, modernizing internal systems and improving the rapport between the city attorney’s office and LAPD. By her own admission, she doesn’t often publicly celebrate her accomplishments.

“I didn’t hold some big press conference and hop up on a white horse and declare myself Joan of Arc and the savior of all things Los Angeles,” she said. “Which I could have done.”

Tumult during Feldstein Soto’s lone term in office was easier for voters to identify. The cost of litigation exploded. A high-ranking city lawyer accused her of abusing her power, prosecuting political enemies, mistreating employees and engaging in “inappropriate alcohol consumption.” Feldstein Soto claimed she improved her office’s rapport with the LAPD, but the police union’s decision to rescind its endorsement of her and instead back McKinney cost her a key voting bloc.

Feldstein Soto’s messaging was at times muddled and lacked the flair of her challengers, political observers said. Campaign finance records show she paid for 80 email blasts, mailers and other messages that sought to influence voters.

John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, appears set to advance to a run-off against Marissa Roy in the race for L.A. city attorney.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

In one video, she stood in front of a static background and talked for three minutes straight about her record while describing her opponents as representing the “extreme left” and “extreme right.” She attacked both for receiving large sums of money from “special interests,” especially McKinney for accepting Airbnb’s largesse. Feldstein Soto sued the rental giant for price gouging in the wake of the 2025 wildfires.

Roy’s campaign sent out 180 communications, records show, the bulk of them ads for Instagram and Facebook, where her team said they saw instantly which stories resonated with likely voters and which were duds.

Slovic said a “clip of Hydee talking about how she wasn’t going to prosecute the Trump administration” seemed to touch a nerve with voters.

“That was by far our best performing ad,” he said, adding, “What Democrats really want in primaries is someone who will fight and have some sort of backbone.”

McKinney had just 23 communications, campaign records show, plus 19 more made by independent groups. He often leaned into the same gritty visuals that defined mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s viral AI spots.

In a race for a position most voters don’t understand, McKinney’s and Roy’s ability to play a consistent character may have proved critical, political analysts said.

“The vast majority of voters started off with no strong feelings about the race,” Behr said. “Nobody had any votes locked down other than their friends and neighbors.”

In the race for Los Angeles mayor, incumbent Karen Bass secured a place on the November ballot. But who will challenge her is yet to be determined, as votes are still being tallied.

With 62% of the expected vote counted, reality television personality Spencer Pratt sits in second place and City Councilmember Nithya Raman trails in third. Although Pratt has declared victory, the Associated Press, which estimates the expected votes in, has not called the race.

This story is based on a snapshot of precinct-level results provided by the L.A. County registrar on Wednesday. The Times analyzed the 525,326 votes processed so far. This story will be updated when winners are finalized in early July by the secretary of state.

This map shows the margin and density of votes by precinct. Areas where a candidate leads by a wide margin, such as Brentwood for Pratt, appear darker on the map. More densely populated neighborhoods — such as Bass strongholds in Baldwin Hills and Hyde Park — appear in brighter colors. As of Wednesday, an estimated 710,000 ballots were yet to be counted, according to L.A. County officials.

The preliminary results show narrow margins among precincts on the Eastside, with some precincts showing an almost 30% split across the top 3 candidates.

Bass retained a strong lead in precincts across South L.A. compared with her 2022 race against Rick Caruso. Pratt has garnered heavy support from his neighbors in Pacific Palisades, as well as precincts in Bel-Air and Shadow Hills.

Raman, who represents Los Feliz, Hollywood Hills, Sherman Oaks and Encino on the city council, has so far underperformed in her home 4th District. She led in 12 of the 66 precincts, particularly in parts of Los Feliz. A few precincts in East Hollywood swung heavily for Pratt; but Bass led much of CD-4.

To win the race outright, Bass needs to secure at least 50% of the vote. She currently holds 35% of the vote and a five-point lead over Pratt. A Berkeley IGS poll released last week found that Bass and Raman would likely defeat Pratt by double digits in the event of a runoff.

Mail-in ballots with a June 2 postmark will be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

Cape Fear,” premiering Friday on Apple TV, is a 10-episode limited series remake of a 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of a 1962 film adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners,” and as in a game of telephone each subsequent version adds new material and moves a little farther from the original. (The credits to the series, created by Nick Antosca, note all previous sources and screenwriters.) Thirty-four years having passed since the last go-round, we are treated to such modern advances as catfishing, drones, deep fakes, social media and pushy true-crime podcasters.

In each iteration, a family is menaced by a recently released ex-con who blames one or more of them for his incarceration. Antosca fills his extra-long take on the material with complications and inventions; though the series is also chock full of borrowings from and allusions to its predecessors — you can hardly call them Easter eggs, lying there as they do in plain sight. (And sound: Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein‘s earlier scores share space with Jeff Russo’s new one.)

In every version, the antagonist is a now-charming, now-menacing psychopath named Max Cady (Javier Bardem), memorably played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991. In the novel and movies, Cady was serving time for rape; here it’s for the murder of his wife and unborn child, when new evidence suddenly springs him from prison after 17 years. We are invited to suspect this evidence from the very beginning, though this suspicion will itself become suspect. “Or is it?” is a question you’ll be prompted to ask through the series.

The objects of Cady’s slow-boiling vengeance — seemingly — are married lawyers Tom (Patrick Wilson) and Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), sharing the position previously represented solely by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte in turn. Anna, who had unsuccessfully represented Cady, ironically works for an Innocence Project-type nonprofit, whose chief, Noa Toussaint (CCH Pounder), is only too delighted to fundraise on the back of Cady’s celebrity. Cady, claiming no hard feelings, insinuates himself into their world, apparently friendly, apparently helpful, so that it’s not always clear what’s sincere and what’s strategy. Is he a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or just a creepy, sometimes violent sheep? (“Killed his wife, didn’t kill his wife,” a minor character will volunteer, “he’s an arrogant bastard either way.”)

There are now two Bowden children in the picture, doubling earlier versions. Natalie (Lily Collias), Anna’s daughter from a previous relationship, is a good girl looking to go just a little bad, who feels unseen by her busy parents. Sad, sullen younger half-brother Zach (Joe Anders), unrecovered from a social media misstep, is acting more strangely than teenage boys usually do.

This is a cat and mouse — or cats and mice — melodrama, with customized stock characters given dark secrets and backstory traumas less as explanation than complication. (Good, bad, whatever, everyone’s got issues.) Cady, who has a prison-acquired brain injury — cue flashback, in black and white, naturally — suffers from headaches and hallucinations, reacting painfully to flashbulbs (a Chekov gun, I wondered?), seeing visions of his dead wife and son, whom he pictures grown. (He is sad about it, whether or not it’s his fault.) And is that masked woman in green he keeps seeing real or imagined?

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s all screwed together tight, even the pieces that stick out at weird angles. (Is there a reason to make Cady an apparently talented chef, other than to demonstrate his knife skills?) The actors fill their parts with feeling. Bardem gets the most, and most extreme attitudes, to play, whether cozying up individually to the Bowdens, threatening a groupie, undergoing a religious conversion, acting normal or being weird. Adams is low-key forceful as his primary opponent. (Tom’s comparatively weak character is underscored by his secret habit of microdosing LSD and a nothingburger flirtation with a colleague.) Collias is impressively real. The dialogue is well-crafted, the Southern atmosphere (Atlanta doubling Savannah, with Savannah here and there standing for itself) suitably oppressive.

Nevertheless, it’s fair to ask whether this story, even with its yards of extra material, could be told in under nine hours? The answer, most assuredly, is yes. And might it be better shorter? It might.

Not that I’ve ever been a fly on the walls of the executive conference or dining or washrooms where such deals are made, but I suspect the length has less to do with artistic necessity than A) the obscure economics of streaming and B) the not unrelated habits of viewers, who, to judge by questions I get asked, abhor a vacuum. A 10-episode series will put off the moment when they have “nothing to watch,” while the streamer gets to keep them in the ecosystem longer. “Cape Fear” is hardly the only series to which this applies. As I imagine the series will do well — mystery with a smattering of horror seems very much what the people want — more may be just the ticket for some people. Still, there’s a sense that the story has expanded to fill the space, with plotlines for all and crazy side trips (snakes! drugs!) in escalating levels of nuttiness.

That might be more feature than bug, but I can’t say I felt much of anything for the characters, or was concerned whether the Bowdens would emerge from their ordeals a stronger family. (Whatever the outcome, I’d say they have work to do.) Having been given only eight of 10 episodes to review, I’m interested, in a disinterested way, how this all will shake out, when the story finally moves to the Cape Fear River, and whatever final twists — that there will be twists, I am certain — an inevitably Action Packed Finale has in store.

Twenty pages into “There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood” by bestselling Pasadena author Rasheed Newson, I had to stop reading. Not because the story and characters were anything less than gripping —I was utterly transfixed. Not because I was unmoved by the setting, the 1950s version of the iconic landmarks where today’s Angelenos, myself included, work, play, eat and drink: Griffith Park, the L.A. Central Library, the Paramount Pictures lot, the Roosevelt Hotel, the Tam O’Shanter in Atwater Village and the Black Cat in Silver Lake, site of America’s first queer riot, also depicted in the book.

No, it was writerly admiration — OK, envy — that stopped me. As I turned the pages, I kept scribbling the same question in the margins. “How did Newson do this?”

How did Newson, author of the 2022 bestseller “My Government Means to Kill Me” and a producer/writer on such popular TV series as “The Chi” and “Bel-Air,” craft a novel populated with a seamless mix of real and invented characters, each with their own true or fictional backstory, personality, career vicissitudes, sartorial style and sexual proclivities, adhering simultaneously to both his novelistic timeline and historically accurate events?

How did Newson seat his fictional protagonist — Aaron Touissant, a Black, closeted gay Hollywood “fixer” employed by Skyline Studios to keep queer actors’ secrets secret — at the same Beverly Hilton ballroom table with Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, James Edwards, Eartha Kitt and Xavier Barlow, Newson’s invented Black gay movie star who is Skyline’s greatest hope and Touissant’s principal client?

I couldn’t read another page without knowing, and those unread pages were calling to me. So I called Rasheed Newson, whom I’d seen around the L.A. lit scene but had never met, and asked how he’d made the magic of his novel happen.

“I wanted to do a deep dive into Black queer history during the Golden Age of cinema,” Newson said. “The first thing that came to me was Xavier’s character. I decided to make him the 10-years-younger, queer rival of Sidney Poitier, to highlight the acceptable versus unacceptable — meaning, straight versus gay — 1950s Black movie star.

“I read a lot of books on Hollywood’s golden era,” Newson said. “But I was trying to get closer to what people were thinking at the moment, rather than what they reflected back on later. Only newspapers give you that. So I spent hours and hours in the downtown L.A. public library, poring over microfiche, reading the newspapers of the time.”

Author Rasheed Newsom.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

I asked Newson about the titular “one sin in Hollywood.”

“That sin is disobedience,” he said. “Particularly when your disobedience threatens to upend how the business makes money. In Hollywood you can be an addict, be a philanderer, be outspoken. But don’t disrupt the cash flow.”

Newson’s plot and characters serve the novel’s thesis well. We meet Aaron Touissaint as a brutally bullied “sissy” in a small, small-minded Ohio town. Aaron escapes his torturers, first by rooting himself in the town’s only movie theater open to Black people, and then by lying about his age and enlisting in the Navy at 16. On the Korean battle front, Aaron becomes the aide and the lover of superstar fighter pilot and “model Negro” Horace Dixon. When the war ends and Skyline Studios buys the screen rights to Horace’s life story, Aaron follows Horace to Hollywood.

The movie is canceled. Horace leaves Hollywood and a heartbroken but determined Aaron behind. Hired as a Skyline security guard, Aaron is promoted to fixer, keeping himself and Skyline’s A-listers closeted by any means necessary. To that end, Aaron marries Kimberly, who becomes his poised, self-contained “beard.”

At the top of Aaron’s client roster is Xavier Barlow, Skyline’s new, hot rising star and Aaron’s new, hot crush. “The bond between us was never conventional,” narrator Aaron tells us. “Off and on for nearly a decade, it was my duty to keep [Xavier’s] nose clean. … He challenged me to admit who and what I am. And I fell in love with him.”

As secret same-sex love stories all too often do, Aaron’s love for Xavier, and Xavier’s one-man campaign to mitigate Hollywood’s homophobia, come to a tragic and suspicious end. Soon after Xavier publicly protests the studio’s homophobic rewrite of a movie script he intended to serve as his coming-out announcement, a truck crashes into his car on Wilshire.

“This was no accident,” Aaron realizes. “Xavier was hunted down.” With his best friend, Diahann Carroll, and a sizable contribution from Sidney Poitier, Aaron organizes the funeral, attempting to redeem the reputation he was hired to protect. “The news reports following Xavier’s death impeached his character,” Aaron says. “The implication was that gay men naturally had messy lives and untimely deaths. … Confidential magazine went as far as to print that “the driver of the truck [that killed Xavier] could well have been one of Xavier’s spurned male lovers.”

“Furious at the coverage,” Aaron narrates the story, “Diahann asked me, ‘Why don’t they print the lovely things I have to say about Xavier?’ ”

“I said, “They never will. Xavier fought the studio, and everything you’re reading is part of his punishment.”

The erasure of gay Black Hollywood is really the point of this imaginatively crafted, stunningly tense, historically significant sophomore novel. Newson’s impressive gifts for story, for writing the erotic and the noir, and for rooting himself in his adopted city are on magnificent display here. By smoothly merging the true and the invented stories and characters of 1950s Hollywood, Newson alerts us to the increase in racism and homophobia evident in the entertainment business, and in the U.S., today.

Rasheed Newson will talk with novelist Laura Warrell at Octavia’s Bookshelf at 6 p.m. Monday, and with writer Manuel Betancourt at Skylight Books. at 7 p.m. June 24.

Maran, a Silver Lake-based author, has written “The New Old Me” and other books.

After a complete shakeup at CBS’ “60 Minutes,” ousted correspondent Cecilia Vega said she had been facing pressure to insert political bias into her stories and dealing with censorship.

“I very much fear what comes next for … the future of the legendary broadcast,” Vega said in a social media post on Thursday referring to “60 Minutes.”

Vega, who had worked at the newsmagazine for three years, was fired alongside the program’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, and fellow correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who notoriously clashed with CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss over a segment on President Trump’s immigration policies.

The latest shakeup follows multiple controversial moves by Weiss, who’s set on remaking the institution long defined by tradition. She arrived at CBS News in October with no television experience, installed by Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison after he acquired her digital news outlet, the Free Press, with a mandate to change the network.

Ellison’s political intent has been brought into question as he owns CBS’ parent company. The billionaire and his father, Larry Ellison, built a friendly relationship with the Trump White House as Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery still needs regulatory approval.

Ellison’s pronouncements that CBS News needs to move more to the political center has led to the perception that the network is trying to placate Trump with more positive news coverage, even as “60 Minutes” has remained tough with its White House reporting.

“Our responsibility is to preserve that legacy and vital mission by building a show that thrives in the 21st century,” wrote Weiss in her note to staff. “That requires a new approach: expanding ’60 Minutes’ beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News.”

Vega claims, in her statement, that “in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.” She also said that reporting teams are holding back on submitting specific story pitches, due to the “fear of the internal repercussions.”

“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven,” Vega wrote. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”

She said that in working at “60 Minutes” she’s had to keep stories rooted in fact and away from “questionable editorial suggestions.”

“I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity,” Vega said. “I am far from the only ’60 Minutes’ correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?’”

In a statement, a CBS News representative said, “We respect Ms. Vega and her contributions, but her claims are not based in reality.”

Vega joined the newsmagazine in 2023, becoming the program’s first Latina correspondent. Before that, she worked for over a decade at ABC as the network’s chief White House correspondent and co-anchoring “Good Morning America.”

Several journalists like ABC’s John Quiñones and former Univision anchor Jorge Ramos offered words of support for Vega’s remarks. Quiñones commented, “Journalism is stronger because of your voice, your courage and your story-telling, Cecilia,” and Ramos wrote in Spanish that he respects and admires her.

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker William D. Caballero won the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression for his intensely personal, multimedia feature debut, “TheyDream.” During his acceptance speech, he made a powerful statement.

“In case ICE were ever to harm me or kill me, this film will serve as the truth of who I am, and who my family is, before Fox News or this administration ever makes us out to be the villain[s],” he recalls paraphrasing during a recent interview.

Blending live action footage with different animation techniques — as well as the 3-D-printed miniatures that have been a fixture of Caballero’s work for more than a decade — “TheyDream” honors the filmmaker’s Puerto Rican loved ones, particularly his mother, Milly.

She collaborated with him in the making of this one-of-a-kind portrait of loss, resilience and shared healing. Their heartfelt exchanges throughout this process are also shared on-screen.

“Seeing her light up and become transformed throughout was just invigorating, because it allowed us to talk about heavy things and bond throughout the process of creating a story that’s personal [for us] both,” Caballero says. “It’s like, ‘Let’s guide each other and instead of me taking your stories and making magic with them, let’s make this magic together.’”

The brilliantly unconventional piece of autobiographical storytelling will screen as the closing night film of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF) on Sunday. Recently, John Leguizamo and Ben DeJesus joined the film as executive producers.

Starting with his 2013 short film “How You Doin,’ Boy? Voicemails From Gran’pa,” Caballero has used miniatures to immortalize his loved ones. That bite-sized introduction to his Boricua grandfather’s humorous wisdom evolved into the HBO Latino show, “Gran’pa Knows Best.”

“When I started working on ‘Gran’pa Knows Best,’ I knew that 3-D printing was this new technique,” he says. “But I’d never seen anyone that looked or sounded like my grandfather in it. I realized that it could be a really creative method to preserve his voice and his story. “

Then came the 2017 short “Victor & Isolina” about his grandparents’ relationship, and more recently in 2022, he debuted “Chilly and Milly,” which focused on his parents. Some of the sets from these shorts, tiny replicas of places familiar to Caballero, and a few of the miniature characters were reused in “TheyDream.”

“Being able to create these things in miniature is almost like getting back in touch with the idea of play,” Caballero explains. “As a child, you invent lots of stories all the time. But now as an artist, I’m able to tell stories that touch upon reality and painful memories, but also hopes and dreams in a way that hearkens back to the innocence of childhood.”

Filmmaker William D. Caballero will screen “TheyDream” on Sunday at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF).

(William D. Caballero)

“TheyDream” is a culmination of the eclectic and nimble artistic practice that Caballero has developed since he studied digital art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

“I’d always just been attracted to new ways of expressing myself and expressing stories. And I say this both in a way that brings me pride, but also brings me a bit of a headache, because I don’t think I’ll ever be a conventional filmmaker,” he says, laughing.

Still, working outside the margins of traditional moviemaking requires great adaptability.

When Caballero received funding for “TheyDream” in 2021, the money wasn’t enough to conceive it as he had originally envisioned it: entirely told with 3-D-printed figures in physical sets. The lack of resources forced him to rethink his approach, and he opted for hiring two Puerto Rican animators, Julisse Tinoco and Frank Martinez, each of whom animate in distinct styles, to help him create some of the sequences needed.

“This all goes back to the resourcefulness that I learned when I was young,” Caballero says. “When you’re born Latino and low-income in this society, you can’t let yourself be written off or you’re already defeated before you even begin.”

Caballero grew up in housing projects in New York City, and later in a trailer in his grandmother’s backyard in Fayetteville, N.C. Both of his parents were disabled.

Filmmaker William D. Caballero poses as his father for a reference shot in the making of his 2026 film “TheyDream.”

For Caballero, he says the arts have provided an escape that he “needed in order to survive and not feel weighed down by American consumerism, by poverty and by feeling trapped.” Whenever grief has perturbed him, Caballero has processed it through creativity.

With “TheyDream,” he wished to extend that vehicle for self-reflection to his mother. The film addresses complicated familial bonds and his mother’s experience caring for others.

“Throughout the years, we’ve lost several of my family members that we were both close to, but my mother especially,” he says. “She feels their absence much stronger than I do. I live in Los Angeles, my mother still lives in North Carolina. Knowing that she was alone in the mobile home, it just made me feel like, ‘That can’t be good for her.’”

His mother, he says, deals with self-esteem issues because her identity has for so long been reduced to being a caretaker for elderly relatives, who, inevitably, pass away — leaving her feeling like a failure. In reality, it was thanks to her devotion that they added years of life.

Caballero’s mother was at the Sundance premiere of “TheyDream,” where she witnessed how others saw her through the film she helped her son craft.

“I wanted her to feel like, ‘Mom, look at all these people that are clapping for you. They’re clapping for you because you are a hero. You deserve to hold yourself high and be strong and know that there’s something incredible in your story that’s indicative of the stories of many low-income Americans, regardless of race,’” Caballero says, visibly moved.

A prolific and highly regarded artist (he is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow), Caballero has several other projects in the works that he’s trying to shop around. One of them is an episodic series titled “Second Fiddle,” about a 15-year-old Latino boy who gets accepted to a prestigious summer youth orchestra camp — and whose overbearing mother decides she’s going to stay in the camp with him.

Caballero’s mother, Milly, got the animated treatment in “TheyDream.”

“I never saw a Latino playing violin on TV or the big screen. I didn’t see any quirky, nerdy, artsy Latino kids like I was,” he says. “And I felt in my core that [it] was just wrong and something that I could change.”

Another project, “Raúl Playing Game,” is “an adult version of Pixar’s ‘Inside Out,’ ” that takes place in the mind of a closeted bisexual man. Caballero himself is bisexual. In 2022, “Raúl Playing Game” was selected for the LALIFF Inclusion Fellowship, which provided support for a short film version that serves as proof of concept for a potential TV show.

“I always wanted to make sure that I was telling authentic stories even if not necessarily always positive stories,” he says. “I’m very happy that I never lost track of that. Because I do believe that we need to tell our own stories, in our own unique voices, before someone else does it for us.”