Today marks the end of an era. Mark Swed — the last full-time classical music critic at a major American newspaper — has retired. On Thursday, members of The Times editorial staff gathered to celebrate Swed, but the mood was somewhat somber. Although we were glad for our beloved colleague, this was not a happy milestone for journalism — or classical music.
Swed is the rarest of writers: a critic with deep empathy and encyclopedic knowledge who can turn the sonic details of an orchestra playing Mahler’s Seventh Symphony into an epic journey for readers. At a time when orchestra leaders struggle to find new audiences for the art form, Swed’s writing did the job for them.
And in an era when everybody is an expert on TikTok, Swed’s informed criticism was a life raft in a sea of slop. He told us why the music mattered — in its historical context, as it related to the modern landscape, and what it meant to him personally. He made us better listeners, and most importantly, he made us curious. After reading his take, we wanted to run out to a concert, an opera or a new music festival.
That this particular kind of writing — and of seeing and explaining the world to readers — is going away with Swed, is truly a tragedy. Thankfully he is leaving of his own accord, and will hopefully continue to write a monthly column, but his loss still stings.
Like many, I watched with sorrow in February as the Washington Post slashed its staff, including its classical music critic, Michael Andor Brodeur. That blow came a little less than a year after the New York Times shook up its culture desk and reassigned its classical music critic, Zachary Woolfe, to serve as the obituaries editor. (The paper is now actively searching for a new classical music critic.)
A number of staffers spoke at Swed’s retirement lunch, and deputy A1 editor John Penner was among them. In his touching speech, Penner noted that Swed was the last of his kind, adding, “with no full-time critic writing anywhere in any newspaper about classical music, American journalism will be poorer, and its readers less informed, inspired and enlightened.”
Penner continued, saying what all of us gathered in that conference room knew to be true, “Mark’s 30 years at The Times coincided with this city’s Golden Age of classical music — the era of Salonen and Dudamel and Disney Hall. L.A. has been the most important and exciting music capital in the country, if not the world. (Why else would New York be stealing Gustavo from us now?) And central to that excitement and importance has been Mark’s writing and criticism. For my money, even when there were many music critics writing for many publications, Mark set the standard for classical music criticism, while opening our ears to new and under-appreciated music.”
Hear, hear.
I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt wishing Swed a happy retirement and humbly asking him to come back to us now and again. This is your arts and culture news for the week.
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The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY
Demand To Be Heard Festival The Sunflower Project presents a celebration centering the voices of survivors of abuse beginning with a screening of the film “Break The Silence: The Gabby Petito Story,” followed by a panel discussion with the Gabby Petito Foundation. Saturday and Sunday is the Resident Artist Showcase, featuring the work of six survivor/artists. Also Saturday are three three arts workshops focusing on music, candle making and body movement, respectively. Film screening, 6 p.m. Friday; 6:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, Resident Artist Showcase. Wisteria Theater, 7061 Vineland Ave., North Hollywood. Arts workshops, 11:30 a.m., 1 and 2:30 p.m. Art Share L.A. 801 East 4th Place, downtown L.A. towardsthesun.org
Jonah Elijah: Ambiguously Free The first U.S. museum solo exhibition by the L.A.-based contemporary painter and mixed-media artist features work that blends personal memories with broader mythologies, religion and history to explore Black culture. On view through December 16. Xela Institute of Art, 2176 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach. xela.art
Joshua Redman Quartet: Words Fall Short The saxophonist performs a new program of music with his ensemble — pianist Paul Cornish, bassist Philip Norris and drummer Nazir Ebo, plus special guest Skylar Tang, an up-and-coming Bay Area-born trumpeter and composer. 7:30 p.m. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills.thewallis.org
Melrose Gallery Walk Gallery spaces, including Hostler Burrows, Lawson-Fenning, Meg Turner, Object, Seventh House, The Window and 22RE, open their doors to celebrate the local design community. Free and open to the public. 5-8 p.m. Hostler Burrows, 6819 Melrose Ave. hostlerburrows.com
SATURDAY
Midterms: This Will Hurt Someone Brightwork newmusic performs a program of contemporary works inspired by civic life and social change, including Ted Hearne’s “Bye Bye Huey,” Natalie Dietterich’s “Philosophy of Furniture,” Ian Dicke’s “Get Rich Quick” (with video), Matt Marks’ “This Will Hurt Someone,” Hesam Abedini’s “What Remains” and “Frederic Rzewsk’s “Coming Together” (with video). 8 p.m. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org
Aperghis Trilogy Long Beach Opera performs three works by experimental composer Georges Aperghis: “Le corps à corps”,” Les Sept Crimes de l’amour,” “Récitations.” Directed by James Darrah Black. Christopher Rountree conducts. 7:30 p.m. The Queen Mary, 1126 Queen’s Way, Long Beach. longbeachopera.org
The Horror Show An immersive deep dive into the movie genre presented in six themed galleries: Gothic, Psychological, Science, Slasher, Religion and Ghosts, with behind-the-scenes looks at a range of titles that includes everything from Oscar winners to drive-in classics. But first, you must pass through “The Hallway,” bwahahaha. 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Wednesday–Monday, on view through July 25, 2027. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org
Senon Williams: here now, now gone, gone here A solo exhibition of the artist’s work, in which he collects materials such as nails, slips of paper, fragments of language and industrial remnants, then uses assemblage to rearrange them and discover deeper meaning. Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, on view through Nov. 15. The Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Blvd. prs.org
Promised Lands: California’s Unratified Treaties and Native Resilience Archival materials, contemporary objects, images and voices from local tribal communities relate the complex history of the state with its indigenous people. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park. theautry.org
Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music Sing-A-Long Actor and comedian Melissa Peterman hosts the annual screening of the 1965 Oscar winner for best picture complete with a costume contest and more than a few of your favorite songs. 7:30 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com
Daymé Arocena’s Alkemi The Grammy nominee and Juno Award–winner blends Afro-Cuban beats with neo-soul, jazz and contemporary Latin pop. 7:30 p.m. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. thewallis.org
San Pedro Festival of the Arts The 20th annual event, presented by Los Angeles Choreographers & Dancers, features 20 dance companies demonstrating a variety of styles and cultural traditions. 1-4:30 p.m. Peck Park, Upper Green near the Community Center, 560 N. Western Ave. triartsp.com
Tokio Ueyama: The Hollows Between Mountains The first museum exhibition in California of the Little Tokyo-based Japanese artist (1889–1954) features his drawings, prints, photographs and paintings as well as artists he was associated with, including Diego Rivera, Tōyō Miyatake, Edward Weston and Henrietta Shore. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday–Sunday, on view through Feb. 28, 2027. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, 3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa. langson.uci.edu
SUNDAY
Grant Gershon conducts the Los Angeles Master Chorale at Walt Disney Hall, Nov. 16, 2025.
(David Butow/For the Times)
Brahms’ Requiem The Los Angeles Master Chorale, led by Grant Gershon, opens its silver anniversary season with a program that also includes Bruckner’s “Te Deum.” 7:30 p.m. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. lamasterchorale.org
WEDNESDAY
Rubén Blades & Roberto Delgado Big Band: Fotografías Tour The Panamanian salsa greats perform classic Afro-Cuban music flavored with rock, jazz and Latin American influences. Silvana Estrada opens. 8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com
Menopause The Musical: 25th Anniversary Tour Four women at a lingerie sale share their experiences with “the change” through parody songs of pop hits. 7:30 p.m. Bank of America Performing Arts Center, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks. bapacthousandoaks.com
The Broadway production of “The Outsiders.”
(Matthew Murphy)
The Outsiders The Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s coming-of age-novel set in 1960s Tulsa arrives with Ponyboy Curtis and his fellow greasers facing off against the upper-class Socs. Through Oct. 18. Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Oct. 20-Nov. 1. Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. tour.outsidersmusical.com
THURSDAY
Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares The Broadway star sings original songs and shares stories with her trademark wit in this one-woman show. Directed by Annie Tippe. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills.thewallis.org
The Dance and the Railroad Asian American theater collective Artists at Play and Latino Theater Company team up for a rare revival of an early David Henry Hwang play set during the 1867 Chinese railroad workers’ strike. Directed by Katherine Chou. Previews, 8 p.m. Thursday and Oct. 2. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Nov. 1. Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring Street, downtown L.A. latinotheaterco.org
Mahler’s Symphony No. 2: Resurrection Alexander Shelley conducts the Pacific Symphony with soprano Miah Persson, mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and the Pacific Chorale. 8 p.m. Thursday-Oct. 2. Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. pacificsymphony.org
The SoCal scene
Gov. Gavin Newsom mingles with guests at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening party.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
I spent my Saturday night at the Lucas Museum opening party where I got to stand in the lobby by the nifty elevators watching Gov. Gavin Newsom talk to Kim Kardashian. Later, I went to Skywalker Grill and saw U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi sitting at a table next to Leonardo DiCaprio and his entourage. It would be an understatement to say that the night was both bizarre and memorable.
Times theater critic Charles McNulty (the paper’s only remaining arts critic) has kept exceptionally busy this fall season. Late last week he wrote a review of “The Ford/Hill Project” At REDCAT, which transforms Senate testimony from Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford into a docu-play that explores the details of two of history’s most consequential Supreme Court confirmation hearings. “The restraint imposed by the production adds to its power. There’s no need to editorialize. The proceedings skewer themselves,” McNulty writes.
Huguette Caland in Stone Doorway, France, 1970.
(Huguette Caland Estate)
McNulty also drove to San Diego to see the Old Globe’s world-premiere musical adaptation of John Carney’s “Begin Again,” which explores the stories of two music-industry vets who embark on a grassroots recording project. The show features a score by rocker Pat Monahan and Train. “‘Heartwarming’ is a cliche of theater reviewing that I have studiously tried to avoid, but I’m tempted to use the word in my review of ‘Begin Again’,” McNulty writes.
McNulty penned one of his harshest reviews since last year’s take down of “Hamlet” after he went to Atwater Village Theatre to see Echo Theater Company’s world premiere production of “The Peterson Show,” by Janine Nabers. “Unfortunately, the production is hamstrung by fundamental problems in the writing, directing and acting, all pointing to a failure of control. Control of the story, control of the tone and control of the cast,” McNulty wrote of the show, which is about the impact of disgraced Bill Cosby-like star on his TV family.
Meanwhile contributor Tara Anne Dalbow wrote a beautiful story about the late, great artist Huguette Caland in advance of the largest U.S. retrospective of her work, opening Sunday at the Hammer Museum.
Ernest “Ernie” Wolfe III, owner of an eponymous gallery on Sawtelle, is dying of a traumatic brain injury and his family is looking for homes for his 15,000 pieces of African Art. Contributor Jane Horowitz writes about Wolfe‘s legacy and the (sometimes controversial) origins of his collection.
As one chapter closes with Swed’s retirement, a new one begins as we welcome our new entertainment and arts reporter, Laura Zornosa, who hit the ground running by writing three great arts stories: The first is about the private art collection of Armand Hammer (including Mary Cassatt’s “Summertime,”) coming up for auction at Sotheby’s; the second, covering opening day at the Lucas Museum where Zornosa interviewed guests on their thoughts about the place; and the third is a fun news brief about how Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra commissioned fanfares from half a dozen film composers, including John Williams and Ludwig Göransson, curated by “none other than Seth MacFarlane (best known as the creator and star of “Family Guy”).”
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Coy Middlebrook has been named the new artistic director of the Wallis.
(Jeff Lorch / The Wallis)
The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts announced the appointment of longtime creative staffer Coy Middlebrook as its new artistic director. “Coy brings an extraordinary depth of knowledge about The Wallis and its audiences, along with deep relationships throughout the performing arts nationally and internationally. He understands both the artistic possibilities of this institution and the importance of its relationship to our community. I am excited to work with him as we build a future that is artistically ambitious, deeply connected and open to everyone,” said Wallis Executive Director and Chief Executive, Jean Davidson, in a news release.
Meanwhile Theatre Commons LA (TCLA), the nonprofit organization created and launched a year ago as part of a concerted effort by some of the city’s most prominent theater leaders to unify the city’s sprawling theater scene, has announced its first Executive Director, David E. Shane. Shane previously served as director of program services at the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York where, according to a news release, “he set the strategic vision and goals for a robust suite of programs serving over 450 of New York’s nonprofit theaters.” He is tasked with doing the same thing in L.A. and we wish him the best of luck.
— Jessica Gelt
And last but not least
The Getty Museum has acquired the recently rediscovered 17th-century painting “Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares” by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). It will be displayed in the museum’s East Pavilion this fall. According to ArtNews, “The acquisition means a Velázquez painting will for the first time be represented in the collection of a West Coast museum.”
Amanda Thorpe has said previously she believes her husband would still be alive had he received more support from the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) after leaving his coaching role. Following the inquest into his death, the ECB said it was “a profound tragedy” and added Thorpe’s passing was a “stark reminder” of the challenges many face with mental health.
Matt Beard died a month after leaving his role as manager of Burnley Women. He had been in the post for only two months. When the inquest into his death was postponed indefinitely, Burnley said they were “aware of an ongoing legal process” and would “not be making any comment at this time”.
Amanda: “Graham had been struggling for the previous year to 18 months during Covid. Graham didn’t really like following rules and there were quite a few in Covid – like playing under bubble conditions. So he had been having some medication and therapy in his job. But then Graham lost his job and he didn’t see it coming.
“He did pride himself with having been in the game his whole life. He just couldn’t believe that he was blindsided by it.
“I think at least two other people were sacked at the same time, which does happen at the end of disastrous Ashes series.
“Also he was probably drinking too much and found the whole of the last trip in Covid very stressful. He then took a playful video at the end of the tour, when they had a few drinks with the opposition. One of the players sent it to two friends and someone unfortunately leaked it, so it was in the Sydney Morning Herald.”
Simon: “Going for a few drinks with the opposition – you would think that that happens in sport all the time, but they lost?”
Amanda: “Yes. It’s OK if you win but you’re not allowed to have a drink if you lose. He was probably in shock. He couldn’t believe it. And he was embarrassed and ashamed about this stupid video, which to me he blew way out of proportion. But he was in this tunnel where he thought he’d messed it all up. So he went into a quick and steep decline.”
Simon: “During that period, what could have been done? You said that he was seeking some help. What might have made a difference, do you think?”
Amanda: “He was havingtherapy sessions. He had 10 sessions. There’s obviously the confidentiality but I found out after he made a very serious attempt on his life, when he really hurt himself very badly, that he’d mentioned suicide. I didn’t know about that at the time. Of course, I feel that if I’d known, things could have been different. And I did feel that he wasn’t really getting better. It was difficult. I felt like maybe he did need more help – maybe residential but we didn’t really know where to find that.”
Simon: “Debbie, Matt also lost his job…”
Debbie: “He did.”
Simon: “Were there any signs that he was struggling with mental health, and then was there a steep decline afterwards?”
Debbie: “I think there were changes in behaviour, looking back. Performance-wise the team weren’t doing well so there was a lot of abuse on social media. He could never really speak his truth during media interviews of what was going on behind the scenes and he used to sound off to me at home.
“I’ve found out since that he had spoken to his brother quite a lot about his mental health. But whenever I would say to Matt ‘how are things?’, he’d be, ‘I’m all right, I’m all right’, because he always wanted the best for other people.
“He didn’t want to concern me and the family that he was having these thoughts and that he was going through these different struggles.
“The sackingcame out of the blue and there was a lot of speculation around that. He was starting to drink more than he would have done normally. In terms of his behaviour, I would say he was taking a lot of risks as well. So maybe that was the start of this with him.”
Actor D’Arcy Carden stopped by early, beating the cadre of guests crowding the main plaza beneath the now-famous oculus of the 300,000-square-foot Ma Yansong-designed building. A Stormtrooper drove by on a flatbed truck, shortly before R2-D2 greeted visitors in the courtyard, wearing an official staff badge. (The line for a selfie with the droll droid stretched as far as the eye could see.) Museum leaders have long said that “Star Wars” artifacts account for about 7% of the 100,000 square feet of gallery space, but one worker quipped 90% of opening-day attendees likely had a vested interest in the franchise.
This proved true, for the most part: Many visitors clearly knew and loved “Star Wars,” and Princess Leia buns and Yoda ears abounded. (Two Padmé Amidalas ran into each other, and according to a restaurant worker, one brave soul showed up in “Star Trek” gear.)
David Perez, 27, (right) donned his “Back to the Future” gear, hoping to see art from the movie. But he and his brother Carlos Perez, 28, (left) were quite pleased with the “Star Wars” artifacts in the Cinema section.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Still, the museum, as its famous co-founder George Lucas has repeatedly said, is about more than just one story, however beloved. That sentiment cropped up repeatedly in interviews, too: Early guests seemed to believe the museum’s brochure, which notes that the galleries are about the “narrative art” of illustrating stories.
Co-founders Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson (also Lucas’ wife) gave remarks early Tuesday to the first 100 visitors, consisting of students from USC, Los Angeles Technology Center, Otis College of Art and Design and Los Angeles City College, who were all handed free tickets.
A yellow Naboo N-1 Starfighter hangs above the education lobby, across from the main plaza, guarding the research library.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I’ve spent more than 50 years collecting the work of artists who don’t always get their due — illustrators, cartoonists, muralists, painters — because I believe their images are as vital as any other art form,” Lucas said. “They deserve to be in a museum.”
“This is a museum of the ‘people’s art’ — the images are illustrations of the beliefs we live with every day,” said Hobson, “and for that reason, this art belongs to everyone.”
Later that day, The Times asked visitors to share their impressions of a museum that, until now, has lived largely in the imaginations of fans and in abundant social media posts online. The museum has drawn loads of applause but also plenty of criticism, mostly for its lack of context via wall text, and for displaying art that not everyone agrees should be elevated.
Do the people love the “people’s art”?
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Alden Chang and his wife flew 6,800 miles from Taiwan to thank George Lucas for creating the “Star Wars” films and franchise. Chang told The Times that he also wrote an academic paper examining “Star Wars” fan culture in Taiwan.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Alden Chang, 32, green product engineer from Taiwan
You flew all the way from Taiwan, just for this?
Chang: Yeah, halfway across the world to meet George Lucas and Miss [Mellody] Hobson.
Did you get to meet them?
Chang: Yeah, I just shook hands with them this morning. It’s like a dream come true.
How long ago did you and your wife get here,and how long are you staying?
Chang: For eight days. We came here on Sept. 18.
Is this the highlight of the trip?
Chang: Sure. [Laughs.] It’s my main mission and my main goal.
(Later, in an email, Chang told The Times that he also wrote an academic paper examining “Star Wars” fan culture in Taiwan.)
Friends Robert Meier, left, and Marc Downing used to work as ushers at the Music Center together. Growing up, Marc rode his bike where the Lucas Museum now stands.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Marc Downing, 71, retired, from Exposition Park and Robert Meier, 70, educator, from Highland Park
Downing: I go to all the museums. This was the newest museum, so I had to come and see this.
How does this compare to the other L.A. museums?
Downing: This is ultra modern, ultra space-future. I’m glad the museum is here; highly recommend it. And I’m proud that it’s in my city, and I’m glad that it’s in the neighborhood that I grew up with.
What made you want to be a member of the museum, Robert?
Meier: It’s giving to the neighborhood. I’ve admired George Lucas — I used to have a relative in Marin County, and growing up, we’d go to lunch, and I’d see George Lucas and his family. We’d be at the same restaurant together.
Downing: Well, speaking of this neighborhood: This used to be a parking lot. I remember it very well. And I used to come here and ride my bike in this neighborhood as a kid.
C.S. Lee sits on a bench at the south viewpoint of the museum, gazing out onto the sculpture garden below. “This is why you live in Southern California. This is why you live in L.A.: for days like these.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
C.S. Lee, 54, actor, from Koreatown
Lee: “Star Wars” was the very first movie I ever saw in my life as a 4-year-old when I immigrated here from Korea. We landed in Hawaii, in Waikiki Beach. Our family friends took us to a drive-in movie cinema place, and they said, “You want to come see a movie?” And it was “Star Wars” and “King Kong,” double billing. And my mom said when I saw the screen, my eyes popped out of my head because I’d never seen a movie before.
How do you think “Star Wars” impacted how you saw narrative and story?
Lee: I think I carried that all through my life: the story of “Star Wars.” I was like, “Oh, the good guys won!” And it was such an uplifting thing for me to hold on [to] all these years.
What did you think about the rest of the museum?
Lee: It’s so beautifully done: all the curves, all the light. You got the wind coming through the trees that they planted. I mean, honestly, I was just looking out, thinking to myself, “Wow, this is why you live in Southern California. This is why you live in L.A.: for days like these.”
The view of the sculpture garden and grounds beyond that C.S. Lee was contemplating from the south viewpoint.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
What about the building itself?
Lee: We rarely get to see architecture like this. But I think it’s good for people to see the artistry and the imagination of what people can build.
Janet Jacobs, 62, architect and Hanjin Jacobs, 25, audio equipment manufacturer technician, mother and son on a family trip from Portland (pictured at the top of the story)
I see you’re wearing a “Star Wars” T-shirt.
Janet: Yes, I am — actually from 1977.
Wow, really?
Janet: Yeah, I’ve had it for that long [laughs].
What was your overall takeaway from the museum?
Janet: I know George Lucas wanted to create this museum in a different way, like he didn’t have a sequence of events or a roadmap, he just wanted people to experience it the way they wanted to, so that’s all great. We do wish some of the things were explained a little more. Like, I know who Ralph McQuarrie is; [my kids] do not. So that would’ve been nice. Like in a typical museum, you do have a little blurb.
[My son] brought up a really good point: how ironic it is that it’s about storytelling, but yet there seems to be no storyline.
Andrew Liu, left, and Matthew Haak hang loose in front of a KAWS sculpture. They actually didn’t know it was opening day, but were happy to be there anyway.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Matthew Haak, 26, architectural designer, and Andrew Liu, 26, behavioral therapy assistant, both from University Park
Haak: We are not “Star Wars” fans. I haven’t watched a single “Star Wars” movie. I’ve somehow evaded them my entire life.
So, if not for “Star Wars,” why did you come out today?
Haak: I’ve been watching this building being constructed for the past two years. I’m just geeking out over the organic curvilinear forms. Not a single hallway has been straight. And they even have real expensive details, like light coves on the base [of the wall]. All of these things really stand out to me. Also, curved walls like this are so expensive; architects never get a budget to do stuff like that.
I was just surprised: It’s not just “Star Wars” stuff. There’s so much art; it’s so cool.
Nicole Garcia — dressed as Padmé Amidala in her lakeside gown — poses in front of a statue of Princess Leia.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Nicole Garcia, 24, cosplayer/costumer from Corona and Veronica Antonucci, 40, administrative assistant from Orange County
So, this might be an obvious question [given their fun outfits], but what brought you guys out today?
Antonucci: This little thing called “Star Wars”!
Garcia: Growing up with “Star Wars,” I always loved all the pieces, knowing that, for example, there’s miniature pieces that look just huge on-screen, and seeing them in-person is just, like, I want to shrink myself down and just be there.
Antonucci: It’s also amazing that it’s not just “Star Wars,” and it’s also so much more that everyone should come out and see.
Is there anything else you were particularly excited to see?
Antonucci: I was really excited to see the Frida [Kahlo]. I didn’t know she was gonna be here, so I think when I saw her, I gasped.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Garcia: I just hope the future generations of kids come back to see this, growing up with museums more often, and just learning how to make art — like, physically make art — and be inspired.
Antonucci: Actually, we talked about feeling jealous of all the kids who are going to be here on their school field trips, because we didn’t get to experience this.
Nikki Foster, left, loves a good field trip. She texted her group chat to visit the museum, and her bestie, Shalonda Dean, responded, so they both cleared their calendars for the visit.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
Shalonda Dean, 47, consulting business founder and president, and Nikki Foster, 45, live event production executive, both from Beverly Hills
Dean: Being a Black woman, I can identify with this little Black girl. Even in 2026, I think this painting depicts a lot of what Black women are going through today, whether it be in the workplace, navigating motherhood, navigating life. And I think this is an example of the barriers that we’re constantly breaking through every day, even today.
Foster: I’ve never seen it in person until now. So when we saw it, we were like, “It’s here, it’s here!” Just to be able to lay our eyes on it, and not have to go to another country, another state — here in Los Angeles. This is divine. It’s a divine day.
“I love meeting people,” Vincent Zabierowski said. “People are my main inspiration. I’m very lucky I get to be in a place where people want to be, and people want to soak up all that creative energy and just experience art.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Vincent Zabierowski, 23, host at the Skywalker Grill and freelance illustrator, lives near Downtown L.A.
As an artist yourself, what are your favorite pieces in the museum?
Zabierowski: I love a lot of the things that are in the graphic novel collection, like the Jack Kirby, the Garfields. My favorite is the Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. The Diego Rivera mural, that one was really amazing — and just the history here, having it be in L.A.
How does your work as an illustrator inform how you see these pieces?
Zabierowski: When I was going through it with some of my co-workers, I would [ask] “Do you know why they use a blue pencil?” And it’s because, when you take a photograph or a scan, that blue pencil disappears. So it was just really cool to see the behind-the-scenes and understand.
So seeing those blue pencil marks tells you that a piece is real?
Zabierowski: A person made it! I feel like a lot of people see artwork in textbooks, or they see artwork on their phones, or they see artworks on posters, and it takes a lot of skill and intelligence and training to be able to do those pieces of artwork.
At midseason in high school football, the Chaminade High passing duo of sophomore quarterback Jeremy Mellalieu and senior receiver Andrew Cordero has surpassed many of the players ranked higher in preseason forecasts. That’s what happens frequently when it’s time for gauging performance over potential.
Mellalieu, who won the starting job with three games left in his freshman season, has led the Eagles to a 5-0 start.
“He’s really letting the ball fly and trusting us, and we’re making good catches,” Cordero said. “He’s definitely running a lot harder when he breaks the pocket. He’s confident and when he has to, he’s tucking the ball and running.”
Mellalieu, who is 6 foot and 180 pounds, has passed for 1,071 yards and 12 touchdowns with three interceptions. Cordero, 6-0 and 175 pounds, has shown excellent speed in breaking away from defenders while catching 20 passes for 455 yards and seven touchdowns.
“I think he’s played on a different level of confidence,” Mellalieu said of Cordero. “I feel he’s really finding himself in being more elusive when he catches the ball and making plays. He’s turning a bubble screen into a 50-yard gain or first down.”
Together, the duo and their teammates have the Eagles ready for a competitive Mission League schedule. Sierra Canyon remains the overwhelming favorite, but the Eagles’ improvement after a 5-6 season in 2026 is noticeable.
Quarterbacks have been the story at midseason, with teams passing a lot more and quarterbacks showing off their ability to run and pass. The performance of JSerra quarterback Hayes Cloutier last week against Bishop Amat perfectly explains the trend. He ran for 124 yards and three touchdowns and passed for 190 yards and two touchdowns.
Calabasas quarterback Dominik Hardy threw four touchdown passes in 27-17 win over Birmingham.
(Craig Weston / For The Times)
Star Thomas of Orange, Chase Curren of Crespi, Chris Fields III of Carson, Ryan Rakowski of Palos Verdes, Jaden Jefferson of Corona Centennial, DJ Mitchell of La Habra, Dominik Hardy of Calabasas and Grady Long of La Serna have been showing off their ability to pass and run. Among the passers with strong five-week efforts have been Matthew Escobedo of Cantwell-Sacred Heart, Jordan Malikin of Warren, Gerald Torres of King/Drew, Seth Solorio of San Pedro and Nicholas Hoang of Culver City.
With quarterbacks throwing often, receivers are putting up impressive statistics. Landon Lattimore of Saugus has 11 touchdown receptions. Owen Martinez of Cantwell-Sacred Heart has 41 receptions. Paul Turner of Birmingham is separating himself from all City Section receivers with his big-play catching ability. Gavin Honore has been keeping the Mater Dei offense afloat. Quentin Hale of Corona Centennial has been close to uncoverable.
For running backs, AJ McBean of Gardena Serra, Jaxsen Stokes of Sierra Canyon, Adrian Petero of Santa Margarita, William Fredericksen of JSerra, Maliq Allen of St. John Bosco, Gatsbee Gumban of Nogales, Salvador Villa of Simi Valley, Arman Papazyan of Glendale, Brandon Hernandez of Panorama, Tru Warrior Casas of Fairfax and Ceasar Reyes of Garfield have been dependable running machines. Gumban has 926 yards rushing in five games.
There’s one blocker who has established himself as the best in Southern California. Lucas Rhoa of Orange Lutheran needs to be observed and copied the way he is using his size, strength and agility. If anyone resembles a future NFL player, it’s him.
It was the battle in the trenches between Orange Lutheran and Sierra Canyon, which won 28-10.
(Craig Weston / For The Times)
When it comes to delivering as expected, Sierra Canyon’s defensive line made up of the trio of Kasi Currie, Stephen Harrison and Marcus Fakatou can’t be stopped. They’re distrupting offenses similar to the lineman group that was at Santa Margarita last season during the Eagles’ successful Division 1 title run. Junior defensive end Kingston Sula of Carson has recorded five sacks.
Sophomore linebacker Eli Zamorano of Sierra Canyon gets tackle against Orange Lutheran.
(Craig Weston / For The Times)
Among linebackers, junior Luke Ulibarri of El Camino Real has been credited with 86 tackles in five games. Sophomore Eli Zamorano of Sierra Canyon and freshman Aydan Steen of Santa Margarita have been the best first-year varsity contributors. Mater Dei’s linebacker group, led by Mike Davis and Dailon Clanton, have led a very good defense.
Jalen Flowers of Palos Verdes takes off on punt return vs. Carson.
(Nick Koza / For The Times)
Special teams players have been coming through, from Tucker Murray of Corona del Mar (one punt return, one kickoff return for touchdowns) to Jalen Flowers of Palos Verdes. Among kickers, Charles Szares of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame is five for five on field goals and 23 for 23 on PATs. Mateo Akerman of Corona del Mar came out from the soccer team and has been booming almost every kickoff into the end zone for a touchback.
The impressive two-way contributors include sophomore Roshaun Brown of Jefferson. He has five interceptions and five touchdowns receiving. Nolan Scott of Corona del Mar continues to make impact as a tight end and defensive end.
There are 46 unbeaten teams left. Among the surprises are Harvard-Westlake, San Marino, St. Bernard, Royal, all of which have struggled to obtain winning records in recent years.
The shadow of Bill Cosby hangs over the “The Peterson Show,” a new play by Janine Nabers about the fallout of a disgraced TV dad on the grown-up cast members who played his children on the show.
Echo Theater Company, which is presenting the world premiere of this play in a production directed by Michelle Bossy, has reconfigured its Atwater Village Theatre space for the occasion. The refresh — in terms of the position of the stage and the audience and in the level of the design elements, including video monitors showing clips of Black sitcoms — promises a vital evening of theater.
Unfortunately, the production is hamstrung by fundamental problems in the writing, directing and acting, all pointing to a failure of control. Control of the story, control of the tone and control of the cast.
In my fall preview item for this show, I wrote that the “production is all but guaranteed to be more enlivening than an evening spent surfing Netflix.” Well, it’s certainly lively, but in a boisterous way that made me regret I had left my couch.
Not even Netflix would give “The Peterson Show” the greenlight. The story centers on the adult lives of the sitcom’s five child stars who are thrust once again into the spotlight after a reunion rumor goes viral and their TV mom, Valerie, kills herself.
Deanna Reed-Foster, left, and Tamberla Perry in “The Peterson Show” at the Echo Theater Company.
(Cooper Bates)
Ronika (Tamerla Perry), the troublemaker of the group, careens through life with faulty brakes. Zoe (Kristen Ariza), who has traded TV stardom for an academic career and motherhood, wants the normalcy that her former fame keeps threatening.
Dwight (Devere Rogers) is messy and loud as well as addicted to fame and other substances. Blair (Kelly McCreary), who pulled herself out of a miserable childhood, has made a successful career as an award-winning actor and isn’t going to let her flimsy talent or her TV siblings stand in her way. Elliot (John Clarence Stewart), who seems the best adjusted of this crew, left the business to become a lawyer and hasn’t looked back.
Haywood Peterson, the patriarch of the TV show who’s serving jail time for rape, doesn’t appear in “The Peterson Show.” But his voice tyrannically resounds with sadistic orders and conservative cultural commentary during the second-act flashback scene, in which a fateful day on the set of the show changes the lives of Ronika and Blair.
The unsettled first act, full of false starts, feels like an early draft of the play. Nabers, an Emmy-nominated TV writer and author of the play “Serial Black Face” (winner of the Yale Drama Series Prize), can’t figure out how to center the work.
Ronika is the protagonist, but her introduction is off-putting — not only to Zoe, whose home she has invaded, but to the audience, who isn’t given much reason to care about this abrasive, screechy and just-plain-annoying personality.
The cast members perform at a fever pitch of amateur sitcom acting. Ronika evolves as the scene shifts to Blair’s home (which confusingly has the same layout as Zoe’s house in Michael Kramer’s eye-catching scenic design) for the home funeral of their TV mom. But more thought is spent in reworking Ronika’s hairstyle and outfit than in developing her story.
Kristen Ariza, left, Devere Rogers, Kelly McCreary, John Clarence Stewart and Tamberla Perry in “The Peterson Show” at the Echo Theater Company.
(Cooper Bates)
Ronika’s resentment toward Blair, who has avoided condemning Haywood in public, seethes monotonously until her own backstory is finally unearthed. Ronika’s trauma plot, however, has to compete with Valerie’s related breakdown story, and neither is given its dramatic due.
In the meantime, there’s a lot of unwieldy comic commotion involving a missing corpse, a tweaking, naked Dwight and enough insipid TV sibling bickering to clog the airwaves for a decade.
“The Peterson Show” is exhausting. The play isn’t ready for prime time. Bossy’s direction raises the clamorous volume instead of sorting out the disordered structure or digging into the unexamined silences.
The actors are led completely astray. Echo has built its reputation on quirky plays idiosyncratically performed. The theatrical marching orders here seem to involve throwing spaghetti against the wall and laughing uproariously as it slides to the floor.
Is President Trump holding the Kennedy Center hostage? The allegation has been made at least twice, most recently by John F. Kennedy’s niece Kerry Kennedy, and earlier by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex-officio member of the board, who has sued to keep Trump’s name off the building.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “hostage” as, “a person taken by force to secure the taker’s demands.” Swap, “person” for the “Kennedy Center” and “taker” for “Trump,” and you have a pretty straightforward “yes.”
The ongoing Kennedy Center dumpster fire points to an unusual presidential obsession with the nation’s premier performing arts venue that dates back to Trump’s first term when he became the first sitting president in history to twice miss the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
In his second term, Trump turned that snub upside down by firing the board and strong-arming his way into being named chairman. If he expected to be welcomed into the arts community with open arms, he was gravely mistaken. His takeover resulted in a wave of high-profile cancellations that ultimately led to a massive dip in ticket sales. The exodus became even worse when the Trump-appointed board voted to add Trump’s name to the building late last year. The reaction, it seems, injured the president’s fragile ego and incurred his wrath.
By early February the president announced he would close the center for a two-year, $257-million renovation. Calling the historic venue “dilapidated,” Trump said he would be the one to restore it to glory. Behind the scenes another story was unfolding, and six months later the Washington Post reported that “ticket sales and fundraising collapsed” after Trump’s name was added to the building, “even as the center’s leaders publicly touted a financial turnaround.”
This week saw chaos at the venue that even the most seasoned journalists struggled to keep up with as the board voted to close the building on the same day that a federal judge upheld an order that Trump’s name could not be restored to its facade after he ordered it removed in late May.
Trump took to social media to decry the decision, threatening to withhold his support for the renovation and noting that the center could be “ripped down” if he wasn’t formally honored with his name on the building. Despite a preliminary injunction barring the venue from closing, people were kicked out of the building and barricades erected in the name of public safety that same day.
Those prone to hyperbole might be tempted to call this presidential tantrum disguised in procedural clothes a constitutional crisis. Or you could just say that Trump has taken the Kennedy Center hostage. The taker wants his name on the building, and the center will not be released for renovation or reopening if that doesn’t happen.
In the meantime an image of Trump on Air Force One was captured that shows him holding a large placard that reads, “Kennedy Center DEMO[LISHED],” leaving concerned parties to wonder just what exactly the chairman of the board has in mind. Is he using a Sharpie at this very moment to slash a line through the image at the center on that board, or is it just a prop to be trotted out in a cruel bit of future social media hazing?
Getting lost in all the drama: a beloved arts venue has gone pointlessly dark, and the people who loved it are heartbroken. If no one is inside to hear the wind whistle, does it make a sound?
I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt, willing to rustle up a ransom. This is your arts and culture news for the week.
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The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY
Oliver Lee Jackson: Form Follows Feeling The Bay Area painter, sculptor, and printmaker’s work, created over decades, is inspired by the human figure in its composition and structure. Opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Lisson, 1037 N. Sycamore Ave. lissongallery.com
“Vitruvian Figure (Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum),” 2026, 3D model by Paul Pfeiffer.
(Paul Pfeiffer/Perrotin)
Paul Pfeiffer: Olympia In new work focused on Los Angeles, the artist explores the intersection between media, spectacle, architecture and the body ahead of the city hosting the 2028 Olympic Games. Opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Friday; Pfeiffer in conversation with Britt Salvesen, 3 p.m. Saturday; exhibition, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, through Nov. 7. Perrotin, 5036 W Pico Blvd. perrotin.com
SATURDAY
“Couple walking, Park Avenue,” 1960.
(Estate of Roy DeCarava)
Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw The exhibition presents more than 130 images created between the late 1940s and 1960s, depicting the photographer’s intense interest in the relationship between the visual and the aural. Accompanying the exhibition, in the gallery next door, will be “SIDE B: the sounds,” a listening room featuring DeCarava’s personal playlists and favorite jazz album. Opening reception, 6-8 p.m.; exhibition runs through Oct. 31. David Zwirner Gallery, 606 and 6166, N. Western Ave. davidzwirner.com
Sutton Foster The two-time Tony winner and TV star performs Broadway hits and standards with Pacific Jazz Orchestra, featuring new arrangements by conductor Chris Walden. 8 p.m. The Soraya, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. thesoraya.org
Mia Middleton: Summoning Cleo New work by the artist explores interpreting familiar forms through a surreal lens. Opening reception, 5-7 p.m. Saturday; exhibition runs through Oct. 24. Roberts Projects, 442 S. La Brea Ave. robertsprojectsla.com
Mrs. Warren’s Profession Real-life mother and daughter Cyndy Fujikawa and Nell Murphy star in this production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play about a Victorian woman coming to terms with how she built a business empire. Directed by Michael Rothaar. Opening night, 8 p.m. Saturday; 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays (check website for exceptions), through October 25. Pacific Resident Theatre, 707 Venice Blvd, Venice. pacificresidenttheatre.org
Grammy Award-winning composer and bandleader Arturo O’Farrill and Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra open the Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ Jazz series.
(John Abbott)
Arturo O’Farrill & Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra The pianist and composer, a six-time Grammy winner, and his ensemble kick off the Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ 2026-27 Jazz series with Afro-Cuban rhythm, modern jazz harmony and big-band sounds. 8 p.m. Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scfta.org
Other Places An alternative art fair devoted to contemporary art spaces and projects, plus workshops, readings, talks and performances. Noon-7 p.m. Angels Gate Cultural Center, 3601 S. Gaffey St., San Pedro. opaf.info
Karma The gallery presents solo exhibitions by painters Randy Wray (“Hothouse”) and Felipe Suzuki, one featuring vivid abstractions, and the other, work created through the lens of memory . Opening reception 6-8 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, through Oct. 24. Karma, 7351 Santa Monica Blvd. karmakarma.org
SUNDAY
Alexander Apóstol “Regime: Dramatis Personae” (2017), a series of black-and-white portraits of archetypal figures in both populist and authoritarian governments, uses photography to analyze the intertwining of art and political power in Latin America. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday-Sunday; through Jan 3, 2027. Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. moca.org
Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudō and NUNO More than 100 limited-edition textiles, along with numerous objects, including drawings, sketches, raw materials, tools, mock-ups, and prototypes, are part of the largest retrospective ever of the Japanese designer’s work created with her textile collective and other collaborators from throughout Japan, Through March 7, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Resnick Pavilion, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. lacma.org
TUESDAY
The entrance of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles in Exposition Park.
(Ron De Angelis/For The Times)
Lucas Museum Of Narrative Art Where else will you see Luke Skywalker, Vincent Van Gogh, Norman Rockwell, Gordon Parks and Charles Schulz under one roof? The new museum officially opens Tuesday, featuring 100,000 square feet of space spread across more than 30 galleries, exhibiting a mind-bending range of visual storytelling. Check out our full coverage. Public opening, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday; regular hours, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Fridays; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturdays; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sundays. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Exposition Park, 3800 S. Vermont Ave. lucasmuseum.org
THURSDAY
Bilal The Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter delivers a blend of soul, funk, and jazz. Queens-born R&B musician Yaya Bey is the opening act. 8 p.m. Carpenter Center, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. carpenterarts.org
Each Other’s Hands: Trans Mutual Aid, 1966—1996 Oxy Arts, Occidental College’s community-based arts hub, presents an exhibition featuring the work of six L.A. artists. curated by Umi Hsu. The opening reception marks the launch of the 2026 CIRCA Queer Histories Festival hosted by One Institute. Opening reception, 7 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd. oxyarts.oxy.edu
Arts Anywhere
Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars The newly remastered 4K version of Howard Brookner’s 1987 documentary, the essential yet long elusive film about the 1984 L.A. Olympics Arts Festival, can finally be streamed courtesy of Criterion Channel. It is everything LA28 doesn’t want you know. criterionchannel.com
— Mark Swed
Culture news and the SoCal scene
Christian Barillas, Melinda Page Hamilton and John Lavelle in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.
(Jeff Lorch)
Pasadena Playhouse opened a new production of Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s revenge tragicomedy “The Visit,” and The Times got in on the action. Contributor Jenelle Riley wrote a preview about how the new show features more than a dozen creatives behind the Playhouse’s production of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” earlier this year, including director Darko Tresnjak and actor Jefferson Mays. “Amadeus” was a major hit, so Artistic Director Danny Feldman welcomed the team back with open arms.
Meanwhile, Times theater critic Charles McNulty attended opening night and declared the play a refreshing success (with a few caveats), and expressed “gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.”
Castulo Guerra as Tlahtoani Klion in a dress rehearsal ahead of its premiere of “Antigone: In the Language of the Kings” by the Latino Theater Company at the Getty Villa.
(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)
McNulty also headed to the Getty Villa for its annual outdoor theater production. This year, the Villa’s outdoor stage marks its 20th anniversary with a co-production with Latino Theater Company of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” reimagined to take place in pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and performed in English, Spanish and Nahuatl. “If the drama is oversimplified, it nonetheless makes for a gripping spectacle,” McNulty writes.
Finally, a very busy McNulty checked out out a revival of José Rivera’s “Marisol” in an Open Fist Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre. The play originally opened in the early 1990s around the same time as Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” and McNulty says this new staging is gratifying because it allows a new generation to “embrace the play’s kinetic freedom.”
There are as many acrobats as actors in “Water for Elephants,” which is running at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre through Sept. 27 before heading to Segerstrom Center for the Arts (Nov. 10-22, with stops in Portland, Seattle, Reno, Sacramento, Tempe, Fresno and Eugene in between). Contributor Jenelle Riley headed backstage before opening night to watch the high-stakes performers warm up with poles, hoops, ropes and more. When the curtain raises, there’s a real circus onstage.
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Long Beach Opera will perform its 2026-27 season aboard the Queen Mary.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Long Beach Opera announced its 2026-27 season, which is slated to be performed aboard the historic Queen Mary. First up: three works by composer Georges Aperghis, with vocal performances from coloratura soprano Habin Kim. Next: soprano Amanda Forsythe and Opera Prima in a performance of “Tormento Seicento.” Four additional productions include: an Anna Schubert recital, Peter Brook’s “Impressions of Pelleas,” Handel’s “Tolomeo” and Ana Sokolović’s “Svadba.”
The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and Daniel Gryczman, the federation’s board chair, sued Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum for the return of the diptych “Adam and Eve,” a pair of 16th century masterpieces by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The suit was one of two filed in the state “since California and Congress passed a pair of laws bolstering U.S.-based claims to Nazi-looted artwork around the world,” reports the Times’ Kevin Rector.
For months, current and former high school coaches have been asked to respond to my simple question:
“What’s the best lesson a player taught you?”
It’s so hard to come up with an answer that many can’t do it immediately. They’re forced to think, which means the question is very good.
Stories are always written about lessons learned by students in the classroom and on the field, but what do coaches, most of them teachers, learn from their students?
Here are some answers.
Weeks before he died last March, Venice football coach Angelo Gasca told me the story of a player who wanted to quit and what he learned. That player later became one of his assistant coaches.
“I’m not accepting your resignation today,” Gasca told him. “You need to go home and think about it.”
Venice coach Angelo Gasca showing off the City Division I title trophy in 2021.
(Cliff Kensinger)
“He said he went home and thought about it and stayed on the team and was our starting center. He taught me the best thing we can teach is come to school and you never know what connections you’ll make at the school you grew up at. He taught me there’s more to coaching than winning games and scoring touchdowns. In our lives as teachers and coaches, we do learn from players. When we stop learning from our players, it’s time to stop coaching.”
Former Edison football coach Dave White remembers suspending his team’s best player before a trip to Hawaii for a team rule violation. He had to stay home even though his parents had paid money for the trip.
Dave White speaks to a crowd, including the football team, during the official naming of the Belcher White Strength Training Facility at Edison High School in 2022.
(Scott Smeltzer / Los Angeles Times)
“He taught me that I made the right decision and it was best for the team and in the long run best for him,” White said. “I was proud how he handled things. There are consequences for bad decisions. I really enjoyed and respected him more after that.”
Granada Hills girls volleyball coach Tom Harp said he had a player with a disability. She lost sight in an eye during an accident.
“She taught me how to overcome a difficult situation with a positive attitude,” he said. “She was a shining example of how to overcome adversity. It showed me my little problems aren’t as bad as they seem if she can overcome that.”
Lorenzo Hernandez, the football coach and athletic director at Whittier and former head football coach at Garfield, said a comment from a player made him realize to change tactics.
Former Garfield coach Lorenzo Hernandez runs onto the field with his players and assistant coaches.
(Hernandez family)
“You grow up in a certain era and have to adapt,” he said. “These kids want to enjoy themselves. They taught me to keep it as fun as possible. We worked on discipline. A kid said, ‘That’s great coach, but I don’t think we’re having fun.’ It made me take a step back. We have to understand it’s a different era of athletes and they require different ways to handle things. That’s helped me build better relationships. I’ll meet you halfway.”
Former Crenshaw football coach Robert Garrett said he learned to talk to students about their personal lives to understand why they are behaving in certain ways. He discovered one of his players had nowhere to wash his clothes.
Longtime Crenshaw football coach Robert Garrett talks to De’Anthony Thomas, one of his best former players, in 2011.
(Robert S. Helfman)
“Some don’t have a stable household,” he said. “You don’t learn that until you talk to them. I knew he was intelligent and studious but until I found out his hygiene wasn’t good, I realized the environment he was up against. It wasn’t until he shared with me what he was going through I offered assistance to wash his clothes.
“He didn’t need tough love. He needed kid gloves. Every day I try to find at least one child I didn’t know and have a personal conversation, ‘What middle school he went to, where does he live, are his studies OK.’ I try to learn the child before I learn the body. Adults never talk to kids. We just assume a kid is a certain way until you have a conversation and know their background and what they are going through.”
Former Hart baseball coach Jim Ozella, retired and watching his grandson play sports, told the story of his former player, Jack Ralston, reaching the major leagues this year taught him about perseverance.
“Everyone wants instant gratification,” Ozella said. “Here’s a kid who didn’t make the major leagues until he was 29. For us, he was an outstanding pitcher. We made it to the CIF final. Then he walked into UCLA, didn’t pitch as a freshman or sophomore, pitched a little as junior, then boom as a senior. He got drafted. His lesson has been off the charts for me.
Dodgers pitcher Tyler Glasnow with Hart coach Jim Ozella, who coached him in high school.
(Eric Sondheimer / Los Angeles Times)
“You can’t expect results immediately. You’re talented, put in all the work and effort. In this case, it didn’t work. He kept plugging along. His lesson is everyone is different. His was keep plugging away and it will happen. I called him after he gave up a home run. He said, ‘Today I woke up and it’s a new day.’ What a role model. Don’t expect everything overnight. It takes time. Be patient.”
Then Ozella quoted a famous line, “The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.”
Hall of Fame football coach Paul Knox had a situation early in his coaching days at Dorsey dealing with two brothers and figuring out what you’re supposed to do when they’re different.
“They were very close in age,” he said. “I learned by trying to coach them you can’t coach everyone the same. Whatever I tried, one was very coachable and his younger brother all the things I tried never worked with him. We went back and forth.
Dorsey coach Paul Knox celebrates a miracle win in the 2001 City championship game at the Coliseum.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“I found out I had to find a whole other way to reach him. I learned you can say how you treat everyone the same, but you approach some kids differently. You never really know precisely who’s listening to you and sometimes the satisfaction of being a teacher or mentor is delayed and you don’t know until years later.”
“High-stakes” psychological thriller American Hostage has finally landed on Prime Video.
Hayley Anderson Screen Time TV Reporter
12:16, 20 Sep 2026
American Hostage is now available to stream on Prime Video(Image: PRIME VIDEO )
American Hostage is the “harrowing” drama fans have been waiting for starring Mad Men and Land Man icon Jon Hamm.
Prime Video released the intense eight-part series that tells of a “high-stakes” kidnapping in 1970s Indianapolis on on Sunday (September 20).
A beloved radio reporter is thrown into a “life or death crisis” when a kidnapper, who continues to point a shotgun at his hostage, demands to speak to him live on air.
With listeners intensely tuning in to their ongoing conversation, the pressure is on as the radio presenter must try to talk down the kidnapper before it’s too late.
Is American Hostage based on a true story?
What makes this new Prime Video drama even more exciting is the fact that it is based on a real-life story.
The radio reporter in question is Fred Heckman (played by Jon Hamm) with American Hostage telling his “harrowing true story” of what happened between him and kidnapper Tony Kiritsis (Giovanni Ribisi).
In real-life, Kiritsis’ victim Richard Hall was an executive at Meridian Mortgage Co which loaned him money three years prior to buy land and set up a shopping centre.
Kiritsis claimed that Meridian steered shops and business owners away from the centre, so he was confronted with the prospect of closing down and forced to default on the loan.
In an act of revenge, Kiritsis took Hall as his hostage and tied a wire around his neck attached to a shotgun that would go off if he made any sudden movements.
Kiritsis then stated that the only person he would talk to was radio personality Fred Heckman of WIBC so he could vent his feelings about Meridian live on air.
He released Hall on February 10, 1977, after holding him hostage for 63 hours.
Kiritsis was charged with kidnapping, armed extortion and armed robbery but was acquitted by reason of insanity and spent the next decade in psychiatric care.
American Hostage is based on the first season of the scripted podcast of the same name from Shawn Christensen and brought to life for the small screen by Netflix ’s The Night Agent creator Shawn Ryan.
American Hostage is available to watch on Prime Video
RIYADH: David Livingstone, chief client officer at Citigroup, believes investor appetite for Saudi debt issuances reflects confidence in the Kingdom’s long-term story, while Gulf countries remain capable of maintaining their positive performance in debt markets despite higher yields and increased global supply.
Livingstone said in an interview with Nour Amache on the “East-West” program on Asharq Business with Bloomberg that the performance of Saudi sovereign issuances, as well as those of the Public Investment Fund, demonstrated the resilience of Saudi Arabia’s market and continued demand from international investors, despite the obstacles created by the Iran war this year.
Livingstone’s comments came after the Kingdom raised $3.25 billion through international sukuk in early September, attracting orders of around $16.5 billion, or more than five times the issuance size. Saudi Arabia tightened the pricing spread by about 30 basis points from the initial guidance.
The Citigroup head added that the pricing adjustment “demonstrates confidence in this long-term story,” placing it within the context of the transformations underway in the Kingdom under Vision 2030.
The comments came after Citigroup helped its clients in Saudi Arabia raise more than $40 billion since the beginning of the year. The bank also decided to increase its direct exposure limits to the Kingdom after it demonstrated “strong economic and financial resilience,” according to CEO Fahad Al-Deweesh.
Debt-market pressures
Higher global yields and increased government borrowing will give investors a wider range of choices in the bond market, Livingstone said, noting upward pressure on yields amid abundant debt supply in emerging markets, Europe, the UK and the US.
Despite this, he said that “Saudi Arabia, and Gulf countries as a whole, can continue this positive performance compared with the recent past.”
Yasir Al-Salman, chief financial officer at the Public Investment Fund, told Asharq Business with Bloomberg that international debt markets would remain the fund’s largest source of financing. The fund had around SR3.4 trillion ($906.1 billion) in assets under management after injecting about SR750 billion into the Saudi economy over five years.
Debt instrument pricing in the Kingdom is linked to US bond yields, which have recently been elevated. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury continued to rise for a fifth consecutive session on Sept. 14, exceeding 5 percent, its highest level since 2023.
Are investors affected by project reviews?
Asked about the effect of media reports concerning the postponement or reassessment of some projects in Saudi Arabia on foreign investor appetite, Livingstone said this did not change the fundamental basis of investor interest in the Kingdom. He said economic diversification remained “the attractive factor for investors,” as infrastructure development and projects connected to the economic transformation continued.
He added that the review was “justified” in light of the economic circumstances surrounding the projects being financed, with attention focused on their feasibility and sustainability.
TORONTO — Greetings from the Great White North, where the Toronto International Film Festival rolls to the end of its first weekend.
As packed as our viewing schedules have been, Amy Nicholson notices something lacking at this year’s festival: big Hollywood. In her first critical dispatch, she sees no “Frankenstein” or “Wake Up Dead Man” in the lineup.
Toronto has even resorted to rebooking the under-the-radar smash “Obsession,” the little movie that grew from a 2025 midnight TIFF launch into a global phenomenon.
Director Curry Barker and star Inde Navarrette delighted festgoers who lined up around the block to watch a special conversation.
Cynthia Erivo of the film “Prima Facie,” photographed in the Los Angeles Times Studio at RBC House during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Cynthia Erivo stunned us in our studio space, looking fierce in a dark ensemble and scary nails. We also saw the likes of the luminous Laura Linney and the dapper Korean cast of “Possible Love.” Click through for more celebrity photos and daily surprises.
It takes thermonuclear moxie to write, direct and star in your debut feature — and cast yourself as the cad. No wonder Jordan Firstman‘s uproarious dramedy “Club Kid” blew away expectations at Cannes and has landed in Toronto ready to shake up awards season.
Firstman plays Peter, an aging New York City party promoter whose scene-y shindigs and subsequent hangovers are starting to feel old.
Enter Arlo (a self-possessed Reggie Absolom) the 9-year-old kid he never knew he had and never fathomed he would have, given that women aren’t his thing (except for that one drug-fueled night with a British girl he barely remembers).
You may think you know where the story is headed and you aren’t entirely wrong, but the route there is a riot. — Amy Nicholson
‘Alpha Gang’
A scene from the movie “Alpha Gang.”
(TIFF)
The latest from filmmaking siblings Nathan and David Zellner rolls into Toronto after having just had its world premiere at Telluride.
Their oddball sensibilities and elastic imagination means that you never quite know what to expect from one of their films and this is no exception: a wholly unpredictable story of an alien invasion told from the aliens’ point-of-view that is inscrutably absurd and touched by a startling romantic fatalism.
Two alien cadres, having assumed the looks of 1950s biker gang members, bicker and fight with one another even as they largely overlook their common enemy, the humans.
The cast is likewise a preposterous mash-up of performers you would not wholly expect to see together, including Cate Blanchett, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Léa Seydoux, Riley Keough, Chris Pine, Dave Bautista and others, making the film’s very existence seem like something dropped from outer space. — Mark Olsen
‘The Spiral’
A scene from the movie “The Spiral.”
(TIFF)
Italian horror is my happy place and this is where I’ll be tonight at midnight, sopping up what many early viewers have already described as stylish and vicious.
Director Paolo Strippoli’s domestic drama got sharp reviews out of Venice; it sounds like a cross between a Bava film and “Parasite.” I’ll investigate. — Joshua Rothkopf
When her home burned down in the Eaton fire, artist Susannah Mills felt lost and adrift — but never alone. Her home was part of an Altadena artists collective called JJU, or John Joyce University, named after a beloved carpenter who lived there for 26 years. And although the residents were forced to scatter in the wake of the January 2025 devastation, they remained in contact, looking for ways to support one another through what is still an ongoing process of recovery.
A few months after her loss, Mills was accepted into an artist residency at BKN, a retreat in the northern Stockholm Archipelago, where she expanded her watercolor practice from relatively small works to large scale, and explored installation. Like JJU, BKN prides itself on building community, and while there Mills began talking with BKN curator Anna Viola Hallberg about bringing other L.A. fire survivors to Sweden to experience the same sense of connection and relief Mills was feeling.
Hallberg had already been thinking along those lines and suggested they create another residency to do just that. In the fall of 2025, Mills and Hallberg, with the help of another L.A. artist, Rick Gradone, started an organization named Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors, or L.A.W.S., and raised the funds to send 13 Eaton and Malibu-based artists to BKN for two months.
The result was life-altering for the artists, most of whom were still working to rebuild from the devastating loss — and some of whom had been so occupied with the logistics of recovery that they had not been able to make time to work.
“It creates a network, and people who work together in the residency continue to help each other,” said Hallberg in a recent interview. “So there’s a really true new arts community that lingers beyond the residency.”
It soon became clear to the team behind L.A.W.S. that more needed to be done, and they solicited another round of applications for a residency, set to begin later this month at Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state. Eight Eaton fire survivors have been selected in a competitive process, and plans are in the works to bring another cohort of artists to Sweden next Spring.
“We want to expand this outside of Los Angeles ultimately, because there are fires everywhere and there is climate disaster everywhere,” Mills said, explaining that the group’s mission is growing as changing weather patterns result in escalating cataclysm and displacement of artists globally.
“The media focuses on the disaster really fast, and they don’t understand just how long the recovery takes,” Gradone said in a recent interview. “So this puts some kind of resource in place where people can continue to to get help, especially artists who lose everything that they’ve made, lose their studio spaces and homes. That can’t be recovered in six months.”
L.A.W.S. operates as a not-for-profit and has applied for official nonprofit status, a process that can take some time in California. It is also actively looking for fiscal sponsorship. Up until now the group has relied on its personal connections to raise money to support its artist residencies. Mills’ partner, Brian Huskey, is a comedian and actor who has rallied celebrity friends to auction off small pieces of art on cards in support of L.A.W.S. But there is a need for more help as the group grows.
“Word has really caught on with people who want to have this experience, which I’m really happy about,” said Mills.
I’m arts editor Jessica Gelt, wishing I could turn back time, Cher-like, to an era before the world fast-tracked climate change with its laissez faire approach to global warming. This is your arts and culture news for the week.
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The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY
Bruce Willis, left, talks with director M. Night Shyamalan on the set of the 2000 film “Unbreakable.”
(Frank Masi / Touchstone Pictures)
Unbreakable M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 superhero thriller with a twist stars Bruce Willis, Charlayne Woodard, Robin Wright, Samuel L. Jackson and Spencer Treat Clark. 7 p.m. Vidiots, The Eagle, 4884 Eagle Rock Blvd. vidiotsfoundation.org
SATURDAY
“the wheat leaping constantly from the shute,” Marley Freeman (2026). Oil, acrylic on linen, 58 by 54 inches.
(Marley Freeman / Parker Gallery)
Marley Freeman The artist’s new exhibition of paintings, “worthless serpentine,” takes its title from the writings of Joan Didion. Opening, 6-8 p.m. Saturday; 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Tuesday–Saturday, through Oct. 31. Parker Gallery, 6700 Melrose Ave. parkergallery.com
SUNDAY
Doyle Lane: Master Of Clay The first major museum retrospective of the Los Angeles ceramic artist features more than 100 works from the 1950s through the 1980s, from functional pottery to monumental murals, as well as archival documents. Through Feb 22. The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. huntington.org
Marie Atoinette A 20th anniversary screening of the semibiographical period film with a postpunk- and new wave-fueled soundtrack with writer-director Sofia Coppola and star Kirsten Dunst in person. Coppola and photographer Andrew Durham will sign copies of their new book, “Making Marie Antoinette,” at the Academy Museum Store in a separately ticketed event prior the screening. 6:30 p.m. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org
TUESDAY
Andrea Bocelli performs live in Vienna on Aug. 22.
(Thomas Kronsteiner / Getty Images)
Andrea Bocelli The Italian tenor arrives at the Hollywood Bowl for two nights on his Romanza 30th Anniversary World Tour. 8 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com
WEDNESDAY
Elliott Hundley “Book of Sand” is an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures and tapestries focusing on the artist’s “own exuberant internal universe” created through compiling paint, paper cutouts, string, encaustic and other found materials. Artist led walk–through, 11 a.m.; opening reception, 6-8 p.m.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, through Oct. 24. Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. regenprojects.com
The Peterson Show The world premiere of Janine Nabers’ play about a group of former child stars from a beloved TV show about a Black family come together after a scandal entangles their famous TV father. Directed by Michelle Bossy. Previews, 8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, opens, 8 p.m. Saturday (sold out), runs through Oct. 26. Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave. echotheatercompany.com
THURSDAY
The Case-Book of C. Auguste Dupin The world premiere of a new play adapted and directed by John Strysik, based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Oct. 18. Mary Levin Cutler Theatre, 241 S. Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. theatre40.org
The Ford/Hill Project A Waterwell Production created by Lee Sunday Evans and Elizabeth Marvel, this documentary theater piece is based on the verbatim Senate testimony of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court confirmation hearings, 30 years apart. The cast includes Rosemarie DeWitt, Betty Gabriel, Dulé Hill and Jerry O’Connell. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org
The SoCal scene
A view of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles from a garden.
(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)
Hey, have you heard? The Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts will open Sept. 22 and began member previews late last week. Just kidding. Of course you have heard, because hot takes currently abound on the new $1-billion museum. Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay, and Team Arts spent the week rolling out a spate of stories explaining how we got here, as well as what you can find in the shiny new 300,000-square-foot Ma Yansong-designed building.
Randolph Thompson, Desiree Mee Jung, Adam J. Smith, Nicole Javier and Julanne Chidi Hill in “Pericles” at Boston Court Pasadena.
(Brian Hashimoto)
Times theater critic Charles McNulty spent an evening at Boston Court Pasadena watching Ellen McLaughlin’s modern verse translation of Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” which takes place at a disaster relief center, where anxious evacuees improvise a play to escape their fear of the storm they are fleeing. “It’s hard to allow yourself to fully believe in the incredible turn of events when the prevailing attitude is so emphatically tongue-in-cheek,” McNulty wrote of the West Coast premiere.
McNulty also had lunch in Manhattan with playwright Samuel D. Hunter, who has two plays running in L.A.: “Grangeville,” which McNulty calls “Los Angeles’ most acclaimed theatrical offering of the summer” and has been extended at Ruskin Group Theatre through Sept. 21; and “A Case for the Existence of God,” in a recently opened Rogue Machine production at the Matrix Theater’s Henry Murray Stage. “Drama in Hunter’s hands is built around an encounter. He doesn’t force his characters to jump through hoops,” writes McNulty in a profile. “He listens to them, as they navigate their complicated feelings, closely tracking the way their intersecting paths lead them toward incremental revelation.”
IAMA Theatre Company is set to launch its ninth annual New Works Festival, which will take place Sept. 14-28 at Atwater Village Theatre, and will feature staged readings of six new plays. Tickets are $18 for each reading and can be found at iamatheatre.com. This year’s festival includes “The Half-Sibling Play” by Agyeiwaa Asante; “All Remaining Assets” by Serena Berman; “The Starters” by Laura Winters; “Betta Mus Come” by Alicia Carroll; “Werewolves” by Liba Vaynberg; and “The Great Florida Python Challenge” by John Lavelle.
Additional tumult is coming for the Smithsonian Institution as secretary Lonnie Bunch announced he will step down from his leadership position. The news comes in the midst of President Trump’s pressure campaign on the organization and his administration’s attempts to alter what Smithsonian museums include in their exhibitions.
The biggest news to come out of two film festivals this week stemmed from documentaries about tech moguls gone bad.
When Alex Gibney’s film production “Musk” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, it received a five-minute standing ovation, shouts of “thank you” from the audience and endless play across social media. The nearly four-hour production chronicles the rise of the world’s first trillionaire out of the dot-com boom, and lays bare the dangers that the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive now presents as a plutocrat with questionable judgment and unchecked power.
Closer to home, at the Telluride Film Festival, it was comedian Nathan Fielder (“The Rehearsal”) and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything” that made breaking news. Their film features unfettered access to former Theranos Chief Executive Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she reported to federal prison to serve a sentence of 10 years and three months. She rode the early 2000s wave of venture-capitalism consumer-tech hype, defrauding investors and the public with a bogus new way to test blood. By 2014, she was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
A couple of decades ago, films about Musk and Holmes probably would have framed the pair as forward-thinking entrepreneurs and architects of a new era. Today, the pitchforks are out, and who else better represents the hubris and greed of late-stage capitalism?
There’s plenty of buzz around both films ahead of their October releases, yet the richest man in the world is helping promote the “Musk” doc by incessantly posting about Gibney and his “hit” piece.
Musk’s X posts have referred to the filmmaker as a “horrible human” and a “bitter old man” and declared, “Dogs— is worth more respect.” Always looking for a conspiracy to explain away the perfectly explainable, he wrote that the film was a “psy op.” He included in the post an image of Gibney as a puppet of the Democratic Party and George Soros. Musk also offered Trumpian prose: “Gutless Gibney’s fatal flaw of fabricating a false film.”
“Musk” is due for a theatrical release in the U.S. on Oct. 16 followed by a streaming launch on HBO Max.
Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro is threatening a lawsuit. He sent a letter to the Gibney-led Jigsaw Productions accusing the filmmaker of misrepresenting facts about the mogul. Spiro says the filmmaker suggested that Musk used his Starlink satellites to bend the 2024 election in favor of his friend and ally Donald Trump.
“You are … on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest,” Spiro wrote. Spiro claimed he contacted the production “multiple times” and “requested an opportunity to present the facts in the normal fact-checking process that is the hallmark of ethical journalism. You have refused to engage.”
Gibney says Musk declined to be interviewed for the film. In his absence, the documentarian created a digital avatar of the Tesla CEO and used statements pulled from decades worth of the entrepreneur’s interviews and public appearances. The film chronicles his childhood in South Africa and his time in Silicon Valley, and suggests that Musk’s genius is not as an inventor but as an investor. His talent, the film contends, is stock-pumping.
“Musk” also reportedly explores how the trillionaire had access to sensitive techno-surveillance data when he ran the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under President Trump in 2025. Geoffrey Hinton , often referred to as the Godfather of AI, is interviewed in the film and explains why Musk’s potential access to the data is such a problem: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” Hinton says. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
Gibney in interviews about the film has warned that Musk’s widespread, unchecked power is “extremely dangerous to world democracy.”
“What I discovered was that the story of Musk was not [a] new tech story,” Gibney said in a news conference at the Venice Film Fest. “[It’s] really the story of an old wine in a new bottle. His story turns out to be the story of the confidence man, the stock pumper, his wealth and power comes from inflated stock, and so I had told that story before with Enron and with Elizabeth Holmes, and so it was a story that was oddly familiar to me.”
Gibney is renowned for taking on big money, corruption and anything else that reeks of injustice. He’s tackled Wall Street, big pharma, Scientology, Guantanamo, and even Theranos founder Holmes.
The new film about Holmes, “You Can See Everything,” offers a quirkier, up-close take on Holmes. Produced by A24 and set for an Oct. 16 theater release, it follows the disgraced CEO post-conviction, and she appears more than comfortable in front of the filmmakers and their cameras. Audiences at Telluride were surprised by the access she gave to the filmmakers, and that Holmes spoke openly about her plans to launch a biotech comeback and revive Theranos from her cell in a Texas prison camp.
Forget the celebrity glitz of high-profile film festivals. In these eat-the-rich times, it’s the dark side of wealth, fame and alleged genius that satiate audience appetites. Enter two new documentaries that feed the beast.
On Sept. 11, 2001, there were no smartphones and no social media. What the country watched that morning — a jet airliner colliding with the south tower of the World Trade Center, the ash rolling through the streets, the paper still falling in the afternoon — was through a television set and the journalists who had to deliver the unfathomable details.
The jarring images shattered the peacefulness of a sunshine-filled late summer morning in New York.
“Everything seemed so perfect,” said MS NOW’s Chris Jansing, reflecting on the moments before anchoring her network’s continuous coverage. “It was another day of doing a job I loved, living in a city I loved.”
By nightfall, nearly 3,000 people were dead in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field outside Shanksville, Pa. The experience of covering the terrorist attacks and their grim aftermath transformed Jansing and other journalists who were there. Twenty-five years later, it’s never far from their minds.
“It’s with me in ways large and small,” said NJ Burkett, a correspondent who covered the tragedy for New York station WABC. “When I look at my phone and it says 9:11, it takes me back.”
The Times asked five of the on-air personalities who are still working today to look back on the day they were called to cover the tragedy and its lasting impact.
Bret Baier: “I just said yes to everything.”
Fox News anchor Bret Baier at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 25, 2026.
(Jared Soares/For The Times)
On every anniversary of Sept. 11, Fox News anchor Bret Baier uses the hashtag #NeverForget. He can recall every moment of that day.
Baier, 56, was driving to the Fox News bureau in Atlanta when he first heard on his car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He was a 31-year-old correspondent for the network, covering stories throughout the southeast U.S. and Latin America. When he arrived at the office, a call came from New York headquarters telling him to book a flight to the city so he could file reports from the World Trade Center site for Fox TV affiliates around the United States.
After a second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center 17 minutes later, all flights in the U.S. were halted. Baier and his producer were told to get a car and start driving.
“I just remember going really fast when I was driving,” Baier said. “I remember thinking what is happening with the world, and how big this story is. How big this moment is.”
By the time the duo reached northern Georgia, their plans changed again. A jetliner struck the Pentagon while a San Francisco-bound United Airlines flight crashed in Shanksville, Pa. Fox News executives told Baier and his producer to reroute to Arlington, Va.
After the 10-hour drive, Baier started the first of 10 straight days of reporting on the recovery efforts at the site. While the World Trade Center provided the most dramatic and enduring pictures of the stunning attack, the loss of life at the Pentagon was staggering as well, as 125 people died along with the 64 passengers and crew members on American Airlines Flight 77.
Baier was eventually pulled into the larger military story that followed 9/11. Fox News, just 5 years old, did not have a full-time Pentagon correspondent. Baier was offered the job while traveling overseas with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was making the case for war against Afghanistan.
“I called a buddy on a satellite phone to get me an apartment in Washington,” he said. “Fox packed up my stuff in Atlanta.”
But the unplanned move changed Baier’s life. In six years on the Pentagon beat, he traveled to 74 countries. He was embedded with the military in war zones. “I just said yes to everything,” said Baier, who has anchored Fox News’ Washington newscast “Special Report” since 2009.
Baier recalled it was in the weeks after Sept. 11 that he first wore an American flag pin on his lapel. He never felt conflicted about it, even though such displays were prohibited at other network news divisions. “I thought I could report on America, ask tough questions and still be an American, pulling for us to win,” he said. “I wanted to be tough but fair, but also show that as a country we were standing together against this horrible attack.”
Byron Pitts covering the terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan for CBS News on Sept. 11, 2001.
(CBS)
Byron Pitts: “It’s the only story I think about every day.”
A newcomer to New York 25 years ago, Byron Pitts, then a CBS News correspondent, admitted it took him a few moments to understand the massive scope of what happened the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He arrived early at the network’s headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan to screen an interview he did with entertainer and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte. Shortly after he started, a producer knocked on his door and told him there was a plane crash at the World Trade Center.
Pitts, 65, acknowledged the producer but kept working. “I thought it was a novice pilot bumping into a building,” he recalled. “I thought it would be three hours out of my day and it won’t make television.”
The producer came back shortly and said, “You need to go down there.”
An irritated Pitts hailed a cab and headed down the West Side Highway. While in the car, he learned a second plane had hit the south tower. Traffic was stopped and he had to head downtown by foot.
As Pitts got closer to the site, he tried to use his past experiences covering fires and other disasters during his career to judge the severity of the situation.
But the horrible scenes that unfolded before him were incomparable. One was a lifeless body near the lobby of the north tower. He thought it was a homeless man until he saw a uniform. He later learned it was Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York Fire Department killed by fallen debris. Judge’s body was later carried away by a group of first responders. Pitts saw a woman and a man standing at a window of one of the towers holding hands, and then jumping.
“Gravity takes over and their hands split, and he moves a little faster than she does,” Pitts said. “And we see them on the ground. That was the moment I realized something significant was going on.”
Pitts crossed paths with Mika Brzezinski, then a CBS News correspondent, now the cohost of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.” As debris came down and smoke filled the air, they headed into an elementary school that Pitts believes was a command post for the fire and police departments. They took turns calling into CBS News on a hard-line phone, one delivering accounts of the unfolding catastrophe while the other looked outside to gather details amid the blinding smoke and dust.
Pitts said from that day forward, he never went to a story assignment without a handkerchief.
Pitts was awed not just by the enormity of the event, but also by how despite the rigid hierarchy of CBS News, he was “the new kid on the block” who had to present the story on Dan Rather’s evening newscast that night.
“My approach became almost childlike, so I would not become overwhelmed,” he said. “I tried to make it as simple as possible. I said, ‘Dan, I’ve never heard New York City this quiet.’ I was thinking — what simple thing can I say that you would understand if you’ve never been in New York.”
A few weeks later, Pitts headed off to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. military action. His evening news report on Sept. 11 won an Emmy Award and his star rose at CBS News, leading to “60 Minutes” and then ABC News in 2014, where he is currently a co-anchor of “Nightline.”
Pitts knows the good fortune he’s had in TV journalism is linked to the tragedy that started with a producer’s knock on his door 25 years ago. “I feel some measure of guilt but mostly gratitude,” he said. “It’s the only story I think about every day.”
Pitts said he uses his 9/11 experience to provide perspective. “When we’re discussing politics, a mass shooting, or the latest awful day in Iran, I know for a fact there is one guy in the room who has seen worse and who can say, ‘we’ll be OK,’ ” he said.
Chris Jansing: “You had to balance the news response with the human response.”
Chris Jansing paid her dues as a local reporter in upstate New York before she joined MSNBC (now called MS NOW) as a daytime anchor in 1998. She loved living in Manhattan, and took friends from out of town to the World Trade Center observation decks and Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower.
“It was so iconically New York,” she said. “And I was proud to live in the city.”
Jansing, 69, had little time to process her emotions when she was told to “get in the chair” before 9 a.m. that morning at MSNBC’s Secaucus, N.J., studios after the first plane hit.
“You had to balance the news response with the human response,” she recalled.
For several hours, Jansing co-anchored the network’s coverage alongside Gregg Jarrett. The look of 24-hour cable news evolved that day, as the tsunami of information led to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN all adding running tickers at the bottom of the screen.
Jansing went to the roof of the network’s building after Brian Williams took over the anchor chair. Trauma centers in the area had been alerted, and she was told to watch for ambulances. “There was still a hope and a prayer that there would be injured folks who would overwhelm the hospitals in New York and would need to be brought to New Jersey,” Jansing recalled. She saw none.
Jansing has never watched the coverage of that day, which is now on YouTube. She had real-life reminders every day in her Manhattan neighborhood when she walked by the Rescue Company 1 firehouse that lost half its battalion at the crash site. She adopted a dog left behind by a 9/11 victim, a Dachshund named Baron. She remains friends with every producer she worked with on the story. The experience also reinforced her purpose in a career approaching its 50th year.
“I will always think that those moments are what keep you going,” said Jansing, currently chief political reporter for MS NOW. “They were an affirmation that’s kept me in the job,”
NJ Burkett, a correspondent for WABC, on the 13th floor of the Walt Disney Co. offices in Manhattan on Aug. 31, 2026.
(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)
NJ Burkett: “I put myself in increasingly dangerous situations.”
Burkett, 64, recalls how pedestrians were gathered around WABC’s windowed street level studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when he arrived for work on 9/11. He presumed the crowd was there for a big name guest on “Live with Regis and Kelly.” They were actually watching monitors showing news reports of the first plane that hit the north tower.
As Burkett and his cameraman Marty Glembotzky headed downtown in a truck, he already knew it was a terror attack. He recalled covering the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center and regretted not getting footage of the firefighters’ rescue efforts. This time around he wanted to go inside the buildings and document their heroism.
A police officer stopped Burkett and Glembotzky before they could get in, likely saving their lives. A short time later, they would escape death again.
Burkett was doing a second take for a taped report that would set the scene for viewers when he heard the rumbling that “sounded like Niagara Falls.” It was the south tower of the World Trade Center coming down behind him. “A huge explosion now raining debris on us — we better get out of the way,” he said in what may be the most terrifying video clip from that morning.
Burkett and Glembotzky took cover in an adjacent building. “We open up the door and in a weird way it’s sort of providential, right?” he said. “The door is a metaphor. It’s like the door into the rest of your life. If we had to run for half a block, we’d be dead.”
Glembotzky was so shaken by the experience, he stepped away from his career as a cameraman and became a wine seller before eventually returning. But Burkett took on more dangerous assignments in the Middle East, heading to Israel to cover the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. He later headed to Iraq to cover the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Burkett won a George Foster Peabody Award for his work on 9/11. In retrospect, he believes he took on assignments in war zones to avoid dealing with the trauma of the day.
“I would put myself into increasingly dangerous situations,” he said. “Looking back, I was running from 9/11. That was my way of coping. Sometimes I wonder did I allow myself feel it enough. Or did I just run too far and too hard and it will all come down and crash on me one day?”
Occasionally he worries about 9/11-related illnesses. “If I start to cough — the slightest little cough — I’ll think ‘is this it?’” he said.
But as a New York TV fixture since 1989, Burkett still feels the appreciation from viewers for his efforts. “To this day, almost 25 years later, people will come up to me on the street and ask to hug me and say ‘NJ Burkett I’m glad you’re alive,’ ” he said.
Carson Daly at NBC’s “Today” show studio at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan on Sept. 3, 2026.
(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)
Carson Daly: “I remember how motionless the room was.”
As continuous news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks saturated television for days, the makers of entertainment shows had to decide when it would be appropriate to go back to work. Carson Daly and the MTV executives mulled over the situation as their wildly popular program “Total Request Live” remained off the air for three days since the attacks.
“We had such a massive audience that the question was raised, ‘do we have a responsibility to simply show up?’ ” Daly, 53, recalled in a recent interview.
Daly, now a feature anchor on NBC’s “Today,” was not a journalist by trade. But he understood the trust that young viewers had in him and “TRL,” a live show that counted down the most popular music videos of the moment. The show had dealt with tragedy a few years before after the high school shooting in Columbine, Colo.
But 9/11 happened on the home turf of “TRL,” which aired from New York City’s Times Square. With the bridges and tunnels closed, getting a crew to the studio was a challenge.
“Everybody wore multiple hats,” said Daly, who also served as an executive producer.
By Sept. 14 of that week, the MTV studio on Broadway was filled with young “TRL” fans, but lacked the energy viewers were used to seeing on the screen. “They were frozen,” Daly recalled. “That was in such stark contrast to what the show was every day. I remember how motionless the room was and feeling like, ‘What am I doing on television?’ ”
Carson Daly shows a tattoo he got after the 9/11 attacks in New York.
(Roshni Khatri/For The Times)
Daly leaned on the MTV News team to update the audience on the 9/11 story developments. Music stars including Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Kid Rock called into the program to share their thoughts with Daly. Instead of music videos, the screen showed email messages from viewers expressing their feelings about the tragedy.
MTV News personality Sway delivered a music news report that noted how two new CD releases — “Party Music” by the American hip-hop group The Coup and Dream Theater’s “Live Scenes from New York” — were delayed because both used cover artwork that depicted the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Daly has a permanent remembrance of the week. When he arrived at the MTV offices the day before “TRL” returned, the building was evacuated after it received a bomb threat.
“I remember walking around Hell’s Kitchen,” he said. “I ended up getting a tattoo. A red, white and blue NYC on my right wrist.”
It’s pronounced “human.” Yet writer-director Siân Heder acknowledges that the unusual spelling of the title of her new movie, “Being Heumann,” is something people might give a puzzled second look, unsure of how to say it and possibly dismissing it altogether.
Which, the more she sat with it, made it perfect as the title for a portrait of real-life disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who, while being in a wheelchair, made herself undismissable.
More specifically, the film looks at the pivotal 1977 protest in which Heumann led a group in a 26-day sit-in at a federal office building in San Francisco until the government began enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the first federal law that recognized disability as a civil rights category.
“The fact that her last name was ‘human’ has so many beautiful layers of meaning,” says Heder, 49, during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “I think Judy was asking for the world to see disabled people as human beings who were worthy of rights and being looked at and being included.”
A world premiere and the opening-night selection of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, “Being Heumann” will hit theaters Nov. 6 and begin streaming on Apple TV Nov. 13. It is also, crucially, Heder’s first film since 2021’s “CODA,” the bittersweet drama about a young woman in a Deaf family (the title is an acronym for “child of Deaf adults”) that won three Academy Awards including adapted screenplay for Heder and best picture.
Actor Ruth Madeley and filmmaker Siân Heder during production on “Being Heumann.”
(Apple TV)
In Heumann, a wheelchair user after contracting polio as a child, Heder found a subject who was in the process of discovering herself as a leader: learning when to hold firm and when to cede ground and empower other people. And for someone who was grappling with the aftermath of unexpected success, that felt familiar.
“I think I was making a movie about myself, honestly,” Heder says. “When you’re moving forward on a massive project or a movement or anything, there’s a necessary drive and ambition and focus that is needed. And if you look at any major change that’s happened in human history, it takes a certain kind of person to push that through. I’m not identifying myself with great leaders of the civil rights movement, but directing a movie is a similar thing.”
Heder is tucked into a quiet corner of a busy coffee shop in L.A.’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, where she has long lived. She is in the process of moving from one historic house to an even older one a few blocks away. Heder didn’t want to disrupt the schooling of her two young children, ages 10 and 12, and has become too enmeshed in the area to want to leave it.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says of “CODA,” her Oscar-winning best picture. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Community is a word that comes up often over the course of a conversation with Heder, who has a warm manner and a quiet self-possession. Though “CODA” may have brought her wider attention, she was far from a novice by the time she made that film. She won a Peabody Award as a writer on the series “Men of a Certain Age” and was a writer, director and producer on the acclaimed “Orange Is the New Black.” She expanded her 2006 short film “Mother” into her first feature “Tallulah,” about a young woman who takes a baby from a reckless mother and tries to pass it off as her own. It premiered at Sundance in 2016.
Winning the Oscar created changes in her life both big and small. Heder at first kept it on her desk at home, but had to move it because she began to feel the statuette’s crossed arms quietly judging her as she worked. When she drove herself to the Spirit Awards the year after “CODA’s” triumph and spontaneously gave a ride to an afterparty to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Heder suddenly realized her 10-year-old Subaru wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
“I have a nicer car now,” she says, laughing at the memory. “It’s baby steps.”
The day after the Oscars, Heder recalls that she couldn’t stop crying, all the pressure built up from months of campaigning events and Q&As finally letting itself out.
She says two things changed almost immediately after winning the Oscar. One was a sense of expectation, wanting to make the most of whatever the moment might allow.
“This was not a part of my plans,” she says. “I didn’t ever intend to have so many eyeballs turn to me and go, ’What are you doing now?’”
The second was simply the volume of material and opportunities incoming. Heder says she met with Marvel “so many times” about different projects but none of them felt right. As an independent filmmaker “you’re always pushing against the no,” she puts it, moving projects forward against all odds. But now she felt she had to be the resistance, the one to ask whether something was worthwhile.
“Suddenly there are a lot of voices chiming in too because your reps have an idea of what you should do next and the industry has an idea of what you should do next,” Heder says. “And it was really important for me to center myself back in a feeling of: I’ve always been drawn to stories because they move me. And that hasn’t changed.”
Her Oscars triumph was also the night of the notorious Will Smith-Chris Rock on-stage slap, which overshadowed coverage. Heder is online enough that she knows that some film fans would want an asterisk next to the Oscar wins for “CODA,” as if to note some sort of COVID-era exception for the first film from a streaming service to win Hollywood’s top award.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says with a edge of defiance. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story. And then audiences embraced that story and that story took off in a way that was unexpected and surprising even for me.”
Siân Heder holds her Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “CODA” backstage during the Oscars in 2022.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Heder had been developing “Being Heumann” before “CODA” was released. A friend encouraged Heder to see the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” which includes Heumann as a subject, and the filmmaker was so struck by that story, she followed up by reading Heumann’s 2020 memoir.
She sent Heumann a cold email expressing interest in the book. As it turned out, Heumann was deciding that very day who should direct a movie of her life. Heumann gave the filmmaker a last-minute chance to pitch herself. After saying she’d cast authentically disabled performers as she did on “CODA,” Heder got the job.
Heder would work for two years on researching and developing the project with Heumann, interviewing dozens of people involved in the actual Carter-era protest. When Heumann died unexpectedly in 2023, Heder did not think she could continue, but it was “Crip Camp” co-director James Lebrecht who convinced her otherwise.
“I think Judy’s death, which was sudden — it made me feel like she had left her legacy in my hands,” remembers Heder.
After developing other scripts post-Oscars that never quite became her next film, Heder eventually found herself in the enviable position of having two projects greenlit at once: “Being Heumann” at Apple and an adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s popular novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” at Paramount.
As she was trying to make a decision, she went to a meeting with several other directors about the relaunching of the Village Theater in Westwood. She found herself having coffee with Guillermo del Toro and asked him how he decided between potential projects.
“And he said, ‘Make the movie that can’t get made without you,’” she recalls. “And that was very clarifying for me. When you are the element that gets that story told, it takes on an importance and urgency.”
As can often be the case, Del Toro’s advice confirmed what she already felt and she began to move forward with “Being Heumann.” (She is currently prepping “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” so there will not be another five-year gap between releasing films.)
“I was having a rare moment of power in the industry to push something forward,” Heder says, “and it felt like there was a path to go make a big paycheck and have that kind of jump up, or I could use that moment of power and success to try to push through the hardest project I could think of. It was in that moment, after ‘CODA,’ where I really realized: I could make this incredibly difficult movie that no one might make.”
Andrew Pilkington, from left, Siena Rafter, Charlie Rush-Reese, Dylan O’Brien, Roberta Colindrez, Ruth Madeley and Madeline Delp in the movie “Being Heumann.”
(Apple TV)
Following what Heder describes as “the casting Olympics,’ she arrived at BAFTA-nominated actor Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair user, to play the lead role. “Being Heumann” was shot in Toronto, largely on a soundstage built to stand in for the San Francisco federal office building where the sit-in took place.
“Hollywood might be the least accessible industry out there,” Heder notes while beginning to explain the accommodations that needed to be made for a cast that included performers with a wide range of disabilities. Custom-built trailers were created and the set had to be made accessible in ways that a filming location typically is not. An accessibility team oversaw everything, from large-scale logistics to the personal needs of individual background actors.
Rather than a more conventional biopic, Heder wanted to tell the more specific story of the 504 sit-in, building out an ensemble of characters around Heumann.
“I said, “It’s almost like ‘Bad News Bears’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ together,” says Heder. “There’s an underdog-sports-team feeling and bank-heist-gone-wrong.”
But a filmmaker friend asked her: Is making movies about disability now her “thing”? It is a question Heder had already considered.
“Of course it was on my mind if it starts to feel like: Oh, is Siân Heder a social justice warrior who’s just out to try to make these movies that have some kind of message behind them,” she says preemptively. “But I think this is just a great story. Outside of disability, outside of anything else, it is a great story.”
Heder remains interested in stories about outsiders, about class and people generally ignored by or on the fringes of society. And it remains important that she herself feel a part of a larger community in her life and her work.
“My daughter said to me the other day, ‘Mom, I think you’re the right kind of famous because you are important to people who know who you are, but you can still just be in the world and be anonymous.” And I think there’s something true about that.”
Her daughter has obviously inherited Heder’s deep well of empathy, one that is more concerned with bringing new, unseen stories to the screen than with the pursuit of cool points or pure fame.
“‘Earnest’ has become a dirty word,” says Heder. “And what earnest actually means is direct and truthful.”
“Dang!,” an amiably chaotic new adult animated comedy premiering Tuesday on Netflix, tells the story of the Dangs, three Chinese American siblings living in New York City. Eunice (Poppy Liu, “Hacks”) and older brother Andrew (Andrew Law) share a walk-up apartment in Chinatown; at 26, she’s still determinedly the baby, with little practical knowledge and dependent on him for the tiniest things. He’s the anxious middle child. (Therapist to Andrew: “I’m getting the sense that you’re an anxious people pleaser.” Andrew: “I’m cool with that if you are. Oh my God, are you?”) Somehow Andrew, who is gay, has a lot of casual sex, and only casual sex, despite being incredibly (and comically, obviously) awkward.
Both Andrew and Eunice, who makes money from a live stream in which “horny men and a few women with eating disorders pay me to step on bread,” are relationship averse. When it’s suggested she might like someone she’s been seeing, Eunice panics, “Am I catching feelings? Can it be stopped? Is there a vaccine? Damn whoever the president is.” There is little romance in this comedy.
Where Andrew and Eunice are aspirational slackers who spend off hours watching reality TV and taking whatever drug comes to hand, their older sister, Ruthie (Stephanie Hsu, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), is a high-powered lawyer, more than comfortable defending evil corporations from the common people; she recoils at a community garden or free library, which she regards as socialism. (“I don’t even like fire departments.”) Though she’s seemingly the successful one, her life has taken an unexpected turn; she’s left her husband, Warren, a weedy Briton overeager to please her, and is pregnant by a colleague, a creep she idealizes. Her fall from perfection delights her brother and sister, who chant, “One of us!” She moves to New York and into the series.
Co-created by Law, who wrote for “Hacks,” “The Good Place” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and has acted a little, and Matt Murray (a smorgasbord of 21st century smart comedies are on his resume), the show was originally conceived as live-action. If anything like the present product, it would have to have been a very particular kind of comedy — something like “30 Rock,” whose beats were borrowed from cartoons in the first place. In any case, animation is the place it ought to be. The grotesqueness of Eunice’s boss, Jane, a product-damaged monster who is all face and very little body, if not unachievable in live-action — Katherine Helmond in “Brazil” comes to mind — isn’t really sustainable. You could not have a dead old man’s head come loose from his body and roll across a conference table with quite the same air of insouciance, or melt a rat walking across an overheated microwave oven, if actual people and rats were involved. On the other hand, the fact that Warren is so annoying reminds us that unreal people can elicit genuine repulsion. I ground my teeth at his every appearance; for Ruthie’s sake, I wanted him gone, and she isn’t real, either. It’s the magic of animation.
The show is generally amusing, sometimes very funny and easy to watch as an evolving story of family. (A visit to the Dang parents in Episode 8 is especially productive.) One’s mileage will vary depending on generation and experience. (“I was born in 1999,” says Eunice, who has never heard of Facebook. “Anything before ‘Skibidi Toilet’ is just cave paintings to me.” Of course, I had to look up “Skibidi Toilet,” and I don’t feel bad about admitting that.) There are sex jokes, fart jokes and pop culture jokes; there are jokes I don’t even want to describe. But there is a satisfying specificity to the humor, especially as involves Asian American culture, gay life, New York City and New York City gay Asian American life, which is not overexplained. The city itself is rendered with some light-handed detail — its delis, drug stores, coffee shops (why did I especially like the paper sleeves on the to-go cups?), Central Park on “Freaquinox,” “the first day that everyone decides it’s spring” when citizens turn into sex-crazed zombies. (Eunice: “Last year, I woke up next to an Uber Eats delivery robot.”)
As a situation comedy, its characters will spend their days and nights getting in and out of scrapes, enduring self-inflicted humiliations, experiencing minor triumphs; they are all a little stupid, and a little smart. And as a cartoon, its job is not just to tell you a story, but to give you something fresh to look at, something to set itself apart while offering easy access to its world and people. The character design, which borrows from anime, is elegant and a little odd — hands and feet are drawn tiny, which has the paradoxical effect of drawing your attention, making them more expressive.
Beyond the three stars and Noël Wells (as Greta, Jane’s cowed assistant), neither the producers nor the publicists nor the onscreen credits nor the usual websites have identified who played whom. But I copied down these names down from the screen: Al Roberts, Sungwon Cho, Jared Goldstein, John Michael Higgins, Adam Pally, Jaboukie Young-White and Mary Holland.
Dambrauskas says he had known since the age of 12 he would not make it as a player, but coaching would keep him close to football.
He arrived in London in August 2002 aged 25 on a student visa with limited English.
What followed would be eight years of hard work where he would coach for community projects, at a semi-professional club, within professional youth programmes – and hold down multiple jobs while raising two children.
In 2004 he enrolled on a course in sports science and coaching at London Metropolitan University, the first real step in his career.
Then he started out coaching by volunteering with the Access to Sports Project for deprived children in Finsbury Park.
He went on to work with London Tigers, a charitable community organisation which runs teams from junior level right through to semi-professional.
Starting out as a volunteer, across five years he progressed to manage the first team in non-league football in the Spartan South Midlands League, FA Cup and FA Vase.
Dambrauskas became the first Lithuanian to achieve a Uefa coaching licence through the London Football Association.
“I went on every possible course, every possible conference, London Football Coaches Association meetings,” Dambrauskas said.
“Everywhere I could go just to gain some information, some knowledge, some extra diploma, extra course.
“That was very important for me and I took my chances.”
He got his first break at a professional club when Manchester United Soccer Schools took a chance on him in 2004.
Dambrauskas spent five years coaching on residential courses in the UK and in Europe.
“That was the best thing that could happen in my life,” Dambrauskas said.
“I went through three or four interviews. I will be forever grateful to [Foundation chief executive] John Shiels, the way he gave me this chance, because I didn’t have experience.
“I’d never been in a place with so many great personalities as I got in the Manchester United Soccer Schools.”
After a short spell with Fulham, Dambrauskas moved to Brentford. He credits academy director Ose Aibangee as one of the biggest influences on his career, pushing his limits.
All the while he was juggling home life and working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
“I was a gardener, a handyman, doing newspaper rounds at the beginning, also polishing floors in a pub,” Dambrauskas said.
“So many jobs. Working in retail, and then as a sports development officer, then a sports development manager, and the central YMCA.
“I was doing two, three, sometimes four jobs.”
As well as the trip to Manchester United this week, Sabah will complete their Champions League group games at Arsenal in January.
This also feels like fate for Dambrauskas – one of the buildings at London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road overlooked Emirates Stadium.
When asked about his time in England, Dambrauskas’ face lights up.
“When I hear this word ‘England’, it for me sounds like opportunities,” Dambrauskas said.
“It was really amazing. England gave me all this and I’ll forever be grateful.”
It was 1963 and up-and-coming freelance journalist Gloria Steinem had been a working writer in New York City for roughly three years when Show magazine sent her on an undercover assignment that she was uniquely qualified for: to infiltrate Manhattan’s “greatest new showbiz gimmick,” the Playboy Club. She already had the beauty and brains, all she’d need was an alias, a leotard and a notebook. The assignment would change the course of her career, but not in the way that she’d hoped.
“GIRLS:
Do Playboy Club Bunnies Really
Have Glamorous Jobs,
Meet Celebrities, And
Make Top Money?
Yes, it’s true! Attractive young girls can now earn $200-$300 a week at the fabulous New York Playboy Club, enjoy the glamorous and exciting aura of show business, and have the opportunity to travel to other Playboy Clubs throughout the world.”
Armed with the above ad and welcomed by a grinning private guard calling, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny!” Steinem set out to expose the working conditions and interior lives of the bunnies slinging booze to the playboys who patronized the club. She subjected herself to the wardrobe fittings, which included getting her bunny suit stuffed to boost her breast size; she was poked and prodded during an invasive physical exam; she strutted through the club near-naked with sore feet and a suit so tight, she had to wrap gauze around her midsection where her skin had been rubbed raw; and various other indignities she underwent for the sake of journalism.
Documenting a lunch shift at the club, Steinem wrote, “Somehow, the usual tail pullings and propositions and pinching and ogling seemed all the more depressing when, outside this windowless room of perpetual night, the sun was shining.”
Steinem’s article accomplished what it set out to do, and not only were the working conditions at the club exposed, but some were subsequently improved because of her work. In her essay collection “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” Steinem wrote that in response to the story, Hugh Hefner wrote her a letter saying that her “beef about the physical given [to] the girls before they start work at the club prompted my eliminating it.”
Also as a result of her piece, she was slapped with a $1-million libel suit, subpoenaed as a witness in a liquor laws case against the Playboy Club, and received “obscene and threatening” calls.
Most notable, of the short-term results of the story, was the immediate impact it had on her career. Sure, in a lot of ways it had put her on the map, but she struggled to land serious journalistic assignments because, as she put it, “I had now become a Bunny — and it didn’t matter why.”
Steinem, a feminist icon and one of the most widely recognized leaders of the second-wave women’s movement, died on Wednesday at 92. Since she shed the bunny suit after her 11-day stint on the job at the Playboy Club, she went on to cofound New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine, which changed the course of the abortion rights movement with its “We Have Had Abortions” petition in which high-profile women admitted to having illegal abortions, Steinem among them. She played a pivotal role in spearheading some of the most influential and successful women’s rights efforts. And in 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of work as a journalist and activist.
Still, with all the aforementioned accomplishments, and decades later, Steinem said that her naysayers used her bunny work in an attempt to discredit her. For decades she considered the story a “professional error of gigantic proportions.” But later, she changed her tune.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” she told Ronan Farrow in 2020, when she was 86 years old. “But it is true that as old as I am, when anybody wants to put me down, they say, ‘Well, she was once a bunny.’ ”
In Steinem’s “Famous Last Words” interview, released on Netflix following her death, she closed the segment by addressing the audience. “Please tell your own story,” she said. “This is the most important thing we can do for each other: is to know each other through stories.”
I was hesitant to tell this story, and stewed over the potential risks I would be taking by telling it, but then I thought of the risk Steinem took. She dealt with fallout and she grappled with the ways the article may have hurt her career more than helped. But of the ample wisdom she imparted, its the power of women’s stories to shift culture, change policy and empower other women that feels most resonant.
I didn’t discover Steinem’s “I Was a Playboy Bunny” exposé until I was in college. I was in my late twenties at the time because I’d taken a few detours after I left high school, most of them dead ends.
One such detour led me through the massive hedge-lined gates of the Playboy Mansion. I was 18, and the E! reality series “The Girls Next Door” sparked renewed interest in Playboy bunnies. I wish I could say that I’d arrived at the mansion on an undercover magazine assignment, but the reality was different. I’d been watching a rerun of the E! show from a bedbug-ridden townhome in downtown Los Angeles, and earlier that day I grappled with whether I should pay my parking debt or buy a burrito.
I watched as the girls bounced around the mansion, appearing carefree, bedbug-free and parking ticket-free. Their lives, produced and edited as they were, appeared to be stable and glamorous, and I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should do that.” If Hefner was good at anything, it was creating a facade.
Like Steinem found, applying to be a Playboy bunny was surprisingly simple. I emailed a photo of myself in a swimsuit and shortly afterward, an invitation to a casting call at the mansion arrived.
At the casting call, I was handed a satin robe and pointed toward a small tent where I could change and a large tent with the photo crew inside. Steinem had likened wearing the bunny suit to feeling like meat on a hook. I, too, couldn’t shake the thought of a meat factory and almost instantly, realized I wanted off the conveyor belt.
My trip to the mansion and endeavor to become a bunny was short-lived. I’d driven there feeling like a femme fatale, and left feeling naive and out of my depth. Worse, it was just another humiliating misadventure that I’d carry around for years with shame.
Steinem said that she was pigeonholed because of the story. She struggled afterward to be taken seriously and that may be true, but I’d argue an opposite point. Because Steinem was ultimately held in such high regard as a journalist and activist, and because she was an undercover bunny along the way, she helped the bunnies of the world to take themselves a little more seriously, to see that beyond the bunny suit, there is a world of possibilities waiting for them.
In the collection, originally published in 1983 and reprinted several times, Steinem wrote that after a town-hall meeting in New Bedford, Mass., a little girl of 6 or 7 gave her a crayon drawing of her in the bunny costume copied from a photo that had circulated online. “ ‘Even if a girl looks silly,’ she said, ‘boys should know that’s she’s smart.’ ”
“This story may outlast me,” she wrote. “but it’s not going to outlast or outsmart that little girl.”
In the book, Steinem wrote that one longer-term result of the article was “realizing that all women are Bunnies. After feminism arrived in my life, I stopped regretting that I had written the article.”
The line “All women are Bunnies” stands out. But what I imagine she meant is, bunnies are just women.
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani has not played since Wednesday, when he struck out four times and winced noticeably at the plate.
On Saturday, the Dodgers held him out of the lineup for the third consecutive game because of pain in his right biceps.
Manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani’s path back to the field is predicated on how he responds to hitting in the cage, which he planned to do before Saturday night’s game against the Washington Nationals at Dodger Stadium.
“My expectation is that he’s going to hit today in the cage,” Roberts told reporters. “Once he hits and how he comes out of it, that’ll be telling for tomorrow.”
The injured list becomes a consideration if Ohtani is not trending in a positive direction Sunday, Roberts said.
Ohtani falls under the 15-day category for the IL, which covers pitchers and two-way players, as opposed to the 10-day list for position players. The Dodgers can backdate the move up to three days, akin to time served. So a 15-day window would be reduced to 12 days.
Although Roberts said he has not spoken to Ohtani about how he feels physically, the manager said he can get a hint from the player’s demeanor.
“When he doesn’t feel well physically, he gets more short and he’s not the same personality,” Roberts said, adding that Ohtani has seemed looser and more easygoing the past couple of days.
