work

Remember the brave, talented theater students at Eliot Arts magnet school who lost their school, homes and theater to January’s Eaton fire and went on to perform their spring musical, “Shrek Jr.,” to a sold-out crowd at the Ahmanson Theatre?

Those kids are still displaced from their school, but not from the tenacious community spirit that guided them through the aftermath of that trauma. Their next chapter: a four-day, three-night class trip to New York City to see the sights and attend Broadway shows and workshops.

“After ‘Shrek’ last spring, I sat down with a group of my advanced theater students, and I said, ‘Dream big. What else would you want in your fantasy world?’ Big things have happened for us this semester after the fires,” their drama teacher, Mollie Lief, said in a phone interview. “And they said, ‘We want to go to New York City.’ And I just thought, ‘OK, we’re gonna make this happen.’”

The class has now met its initial $75,000 fundraising goal toward “Broadway Bound: A drama and dance trip to NYC,” which Lief will lead along with dance teacher Billy Rugh, who choreographed “Shrek Jr.” The funds, which will help cover the partial or full cost of taking 61 seventh and eighth graders to the Big Apple from April 7-10, were raised in about 28 days through a school fundraising campaign app called SnapRaise.

Lief credited actor Gillian Jacobs — who Lief calls “our fairy godmother” — with spreading the word to friends in film and TV, which is why the initial goal was met so quickly. Fundraising remains ongoing for the trip, as well as the school’s spring musical, but the class can now rest easy that everyone will be able to go.

“I think everybody was skeptical that we were going to be able to raise that much money and make it happen. But if Eliot’s good at anything, we are good at making big things happen,” said Lief.

Speaking of which: The other really big thing that Lief wants for the kids is a meeting with Broadway superstar and “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda sent a personal message of support to the students via video when they performed at the Ahmanson, so he’s aware of them and their extraordinary story.

“They just love him,” Lief said of Miranda. “We had a Lin-Manuel Miranda day for Hispanic Heritage Month, and everybody dressed up as him or a character from one of his shows. They are all obviously obsessed with ‘Hamilton,’ which is a show we’re trying to see when we’re in New York.”

Three Broadway shows are part of the trip’s itinerary, as well as a theater and dance workshop or two. Also on the agenda: plenty of New York pizza, a jaunt through Central Park, a sightseeing cruise and a Big Bus tour.

“They’re super pumped,” Lief said of the kids who are currently rehearsing for their newest show, “The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood.”

On our radar

Grant Gershon will conduct the Los Angeles Master Chorale in David Lang’s “before and after nature” Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

(Jamie Phan / Los Angeles Master Chorale)

before and after nature
The fall’s third and largest major environment-themed work is David Lang’s “before and after nature,” an evening-length score that was commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and had its premiere in the spring at Stanford University in conjunction with the Doerr School of Sustainability. Here, Lang explores, in his almost Hildegard-like glowing vocal writing, the human relationship with a nature that doesn’t need us, or want us, yet we insist on being the center of everything and making an inevitable mess of it. The instrumental ensemble is Bang on a Can All-Stars (Lang having been a founder of the New York music institution). The performance includes a video component by Tal Rosner, and Grant Gershon conducts.
— Mark Swed
7:30 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. lamasterchorale.org

A 1989 billboard poster about museum representation by the Guerrilla Girls.

(Getty Research Institute)

How to Be a Guerrilla Girl
The Guerrilla Girls famously shield their identity by wearing gorilla masks in public, but this show will unveil “how-to” information on their effective techniques of data research, distribution and culture jamming. Drawing on the witty protest group’s early archives, acquired in 2008 by the Getty Research Institute, their 40th anniversary will be celebrated by an exhibition of materials outlining the collaborative process that goes into their ongoing demands for art world equity for women and artists of color. A selection from their dozens of posters and ads will be displayed.
— Christopher Knight
Tuesday through April 12, 2026. Getty Center, Research Institute Galleries, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. getty.edu

The Broadway production of the musical “Suffs.”

(Joan Marcus)

Suffs
This musical by Shaina Taub, which won Tony Awards for book and original score, turns the history of the 20th century American women’s suffrage movement into a show that rallies the spirit of democracy. The plot follows Alice Paul and a new generation of radical activists who are testing new tactics in the fight to secure women the right to vote. During the Broadway run, Hillary Clinton, one of the show’s high-profile producers, went on the stump for “Suffs,” endorsing its much-needed lesson that progress is possible, if never guaranteed.
— Charles McNulty
Wednesday through Dec. 7. Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. broadwayinhollywood.com

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

Olga de Amaral, “Gran Muro, Panel 7B,” 1976. Cotton, wool, horsehair, sisal and/or jute, rayon, nylon, raffia. 130 x 175 in.

(Mark Waldhauser / Photo from Lisson Gallery)

Olga de Amaral
This solo exhibition of work from the Colombian artist’s six-decade career emphasizes her use of weaving, painting and sculpture, with variable scale, form and materials, including linen, wool, horsehair, Japanese paper, acrylic and precious metals.
Opening, 6-8 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Ave. Los Angeles. lissongallery.com

60 Miles East: Riverside’s Underground Punk Rock, Hardcore & Ska Scene, from the late 1980s to early 2000s
An exhibit of photography devoted to a distinctive music scene that made the most of its outsider existence in exploding exurbia.
Riverside Museum of Art, Art Alliance Gallery, 3425 Mission Inn Ave. riversideartmuseum.org

SATURDAY

Yaphet Kotto, Sigourney Weaver and Ian Holm in the 1979 film “Alien.”

(Robert Penn / 20th Century Fox)

Alien
Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic screens in 35 mm to capture all of its oozing, Xenomorphic chest-bursting glory. Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto and Tom Skerritt star.
7:30 p.m. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

Creative Continuities: Family, Pride and Community in Native Art
Three contemporary Plains Indian artists, John Pepion (Blackfeet), Brocade Stops Black Eagle (Crow) and Jessa Rae Growing Thunder (Dakota/Nakoda), each curated a section of this exhibition exploring aspects of Native culture through the lens of works created by their ancestors.
Saturday-June 2027. Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park. theautry.org

Jlin
A 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist, the electronic music composer a.k.a. Jerrilynn Patton’s latest album featured collaborations with Philip Glass, Björk and Kronos Quartet.
8 p.m. Saturday. UCLA Nimoy Theater, 1262 Westwood Blvd. cap.ucla.edu

Baratunde Thurston will perform Saturday at Carpenter Center.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty Images for Unfinished Live)

An Evening with Baratunde Thurston
The comedian and futurist ponders interrelationships between people, nature and technologies through stories.
8 p.m. Carpenter Center, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. carpenterarts.org

SUNDAY
Radical Histories: Chicano Prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Six decades of art featuring 60 works by 40 or so artists and collectives that reflects an era of rebellion and cultural solidarity.
Through March 2, 2026. The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. huntington.org

Something’s Gotta Give
The American Cinematheque’s tribute to Diane Keaton continues with director Nancy Meyers’ 2003 romantic comedy co-starring Jack Nicholson, Amanda Peet and Keanu Reeves. Meyers joins film critic Katie Walsh for a Q&A.
7 p.m. Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica. americancinematheque.com

Takács Quartet
The chamber music ensemble performs a program featuring works by Joseph Haydn, Clarice Assad and Claude Debussy.
4 p.m. Broad Stage at Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th St. broadstage.org

TUESDAY
Brahms Strings
Members of the L.A. Phil perform contemporary American composer Jessie Montgomery’s “Strum” as well as19th century masterworks by Johannes Brahms.
8 p.m. Tuesday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com

THURSDAY
Lonnie Holley and Moor Mother
The two artists collaborate for an evening of free jazz and spoken word rooted in Afrofuturism.
7:30 p.m. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. thewallis.org

Prieto
The L.A. premiere of poet and performance artist Yosimar Reyes dives into his experience growing up queer in East San Jose.
8 p.m. Thursday; 8 p.m. Nov. 21-22; 2 p.m. Nov. 23. The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., Los Angeles. brownpapertickets.com

New Original Works (NOW)
The third weekend of REDCAT’s annual festival of experimental performance features a program of works by Lu Coy, jeremy de’jon guyton and Luna Izpisua Rodriguez.
8 p.m Thursday-Saturday. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

Shelley Conducts Carmen and Daphnis and Chloe
Artistic and music director designate Alexander Shelley conducts the Pacific Symphony in a program of Bizet and Ravel, as well composer/pianist Gabriel Montero’s “Latin Concerto.”
8 p.m Thursday; 8 p.m. Nov. 21-22. Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. pacificsymphony.org

Culture news and the SoCal scene

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has officially set its opening date for Sept. 22, 2026. The Times got an exclusive peek at a few interiors, including the research library and the entrance lobby. We also took some great photos of the building as it currently looks and made a short video. Take a peek.

Times classical music critic Mark Swed weighs in on opera’s “long and curious fetish for the convent” in his review of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “sincere and compelling ‘Hildegard.’” L.A. Opera’s collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects is based on “a real-life 12th century abbess and present-day cult figure, St. Hildegard von Bingen.” The show, which premiered at the Wallis last week, “operates as much as a passion play as an opera,” Swed writes.

Swed also took in a show featuring Zubin Mehta, the 89-year-old Los Angeles Philharmonic’s conductor emeritus, as he led the orchestra in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. Swed calls Mehta “a living L.A. icon.”

Times theater critic Charles McNulty touched down in New York City to review “The Queen of Versailles,” an adaptation of Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about a family building a supersized American home. McNulty found the musical unwieldy despite Michael Arden’s superb direction, but he reserved special praise for its star, Kristin Chenoweth, “who is bearing the weight of a McMansion musical on her diminutive frame and making it seem like she’s hoisting nothing heavier than a few overstuffed Hermes, Prada and Chanel shopping bags.”

Sculptures by the entrance of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

I enjoyed writing about the $15-million renovation of the Norton Simon Museum, which has been unveiled in tandem with the organization’s 50th anniversary. In addition to new signage, improved curb appeal and a more accessible pedestrian entryway, the museum restored the 115,000 Heath tiles that clad the building’s exterior.

Times art critic Christopher Knight has the scoop on trouble at the Palm Springs Art Museum, which is facing a trustee revolt after hiring its new director, Christine Vendredi — the fourth such leader in just seven years. A week after the hire, “the chair of the search committee tasked with filling that position, trustee Patsy Marino, resigned from the museum’s board citing ‘inappropriate interference and attempts to influence the process’ on the part of the museum’s executive committee, individual trustees and other unidentified museum staff and donors,” Knight writes. To date, 22 trustees have exited, and it has been revealed that no other candidates were interviewed for the role.

Finally, read how the creators behind the new “Paranormal Activity” play are bringing jump scares to the Ahmanson Theatre. Hint: It’s all about what you don’t see.

Eddie Izzard arrives at the London premiere of “Moonage Daydream” in 2022.

(Scott Garfitt / Invision / AP)

British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard is bringing her solo performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” to L.A.’s Montalbán Theatre for seven nights from Jan. 22-31. While in New York, the show received a New York Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for outstanding solo performance, and a nomination for the New York Drama League’s Distinguished Performance Award.

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts announced a major departure: Robert van Leer is stepping down as executive director and chief executive of the Wallis to take on the role of the new performing arts program director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Van Leer has been at the Wallis since April 2023, and was instrumental in inviting a host of prominent performing arts organizations to make the Wallis their home, including Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, L.A. Dance Project, Los Angeles Ballet, BODYTRAFFIC, and Tonality.

“Specter,” a sculptural installation for Desert X by L.A. artist Sterling Ruby, just outside Palm Springs in 2019.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

Big changes are coming to Desert X as it plans its sixth exhibition in the Coachella Valley, and its 10th worldwide. Over the past decade, the organization has commissioned more than 100 artists to create site-specific work in the desert. For its 10th anniversary exhibition, Desert X has announced new dates and an extended timeline. The next show is scheduled to open on Oct. 30, 2027, and will run through May 7, 2028, to coincide with other important area cultural events including the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Modernism Week, Frieze Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

Carol Burnett has endowed a new scholarship at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. The annual award will support undergraduate students in the school’s Ray Bolger Musical Theater Program. The inaugural scholarship has been awarded to first-year theater major Alexa Cruz.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Looking for a decadent holiday gift for an art lover? How about a $295 chocolate bar made by andSons Chocolatiers in collaboration with Ed Ruscha? The 73% Peruvian dark chocolate bar is an edition of 300 and comes in a cloth-bound box, which, according to the Beverly Hills-based chocolate company’s website, features “a reproduction of Ruscha’s 1971 lithograph ‘Made in California’” and “bears the relief of the West Coast’s rugged topography from the Pacific Ocean eastward to the Santa Lucia Mountains.”

WASHINGTON — Time was — not that long ago — that after a mass shooting, gun rights advocates would nod to the possibility of compromise before waiting for memories to fade and opposing any new legislation to regulate firearms.

This time, they skipped the preliminaries and jumped directly to opposition.

“The most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said to MSNBC a few hours after a shooter killed at least 21 people in Uvalde, Texas. “Inevitably, when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it. You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work.”

The speed of that negative reaction provides the latest example of how, on one issue after another, the gap between blue America and red America has widened so much that even the idea of national agreement appears far-fetched. Many political figures no longer bother pretending to look for it.

Broad agreement on some steps

And yet, significant agreement does exist.

Poll after poll has shown for years that large majorities of the public agree on at least some, limited steps to further regulate firearms.

A survey last year by the Pew Research Center, for example, showed that by 87% to 12%, Americans supported “preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns.” By 81% to 18% they backed “making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks.” And by a smaller but still healthy 64% to 36% they favored “banning high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.”

The gunman in Uvalde appears to have carried seven 30-round magazines, authorities in Texas have said.

So why, in the face of such large majorities, does Congress repeatedly do nothing?

One powerful factor is the belief among many Americans that nothing lawmakers do will help the problem.

Asked in that same Pew survey if mass shootings would decline if guns were harder to obtain, about half of Americans said they would go down, but 42% said it would make no difference. Other surveys have found much the same feeling among a large swath of Americans.

The argument about futility is one that opponents of change quickly turn to after a catastrophe. It’s a powerful rhetorical weapon against action.

Esmeralda Bravo, 63, holds a photo of her granddaughter, Nevaeh, one of the Robb Elementary School shooting victims, during a prayer vigil in Uvalde, Texas, on Wednesday.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

“It wouldn’t prevent these shootings,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on CNN on Wednesday when asked about banning the sort of semiautomatic weapons used by the killer in Uvalde and by a gunman who killed 10 at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket 10 days earlier. “The truth of the matter is these people are going to commit these horrifying crimes — whether they have to use another weapon to do it, they’re going to figure out a way to do it.”

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made a similar claim at his news conference on Wednesday: “People who think that, ‘well, maybe we can just implement tougher gun laws, it’s gonna solve it’ — Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.”

The facts powerfully suggest that’s not true.

Go back roughly 15 years: In 2005, California had almost the same rate of deaths from guns as Florida or Texas. California had 9.5 firearms deaths per 100,000 people that year, Florida had 10 and Texas 11, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since then, California repeatedly has tightened its gun laws, while Florida and Texas have moved in the opposite direction.

California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.

Obviously, factors beyond a state’s laws can affect the rate of firearms deaths. The national health statistics take into account differences in the age distribution of state populations, but they don’t control for every factor that might affect gun deaths.

Equally clearly, no law stops all shootings.

California’s strict laws didn’t stop the shooting at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods earlier this month, and there’s no question that Chicago suffers from a large number of gun-related homicides despite strict gun control laws in Illinois. A large percentage of the guns used in those crimes come across the border from neighboring states with loose gun laws, research has shown.

The overall pattern is clear, nonetheless, and it reinforces the lesson from other countries, including Canada, Britain and Australia, which have tightened gun laws after horrific mass shootings: The states with America’s lowest rates of gun-related deaths all have strict gun laws; in states that allow easy availability of guns, more people die from them.

Fear of futility isn’t the only barrier to passage of national gun legislation.

Hardcore opponents of gun regulation have become more entrenched in their positions over the last decade.

Mostly conservative and Republican and especially prevalent in rural parts of the U.S., staunch opponents of any new legislation restricting firearms generally don’t see gun violence as a major problem but do see the weapons as a major part of their identity. In the Pew survey last year, just 18% of Republicans rated gun violence as one of the top problems facing the country, compared with 73% of Democrats. Other surveys have found much the same.

Strong opponents of gun control turn out in large numbers in Republican primaries, and they make any vote in favor of new restrictions politically toxic for Republican officeholders. In American politics today, where most congressional districts are gerrymandered to be safe for one party and only a few states swing back and forth politically, primaries matter far more to most lawmakers than do general elections.

Even in general elections, gun issues aren’t the top priority for most voters. Background checks and similar measures have wide support, but not necessarily urgent support.

Finally, in an era defined by “negative partisanship” — suspicion and fear of the other side — it’s easy to convince voters that a modest gun control proposal is just an opening wedge designed to lead to something more dramatic.

That leads to a common pattern when gun measures appear on ballots: They do less well than polling would suggest.

The same thing happens to measures in Congress. Nine years ago, for example, supporters of gun control made their last big push for legislation, after the slayings of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Then, as now, polls showed strong support for requiring background checks for sales that currently evade them. But support for the legislation was sharply lower than support for the general idea, Pew found.

Almost 8 in 10 Republican gun owners favored background checks in general, they found, but when asked about the specific bill, only slightly more than 4 in 10 wanted it to pass. When asked why they backed the general idea but opposed the specific one, most of those polled cited concerns that the bill would set up a “slippery slope” to more regulation or contained provisions that would go further than advertised.

Faced with that sort of skepticism from voters, Republican senators who had flirted with supporting the bill mostly walked away, and it failed.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden led the unsuccessful effort to pass that bill. Nearly a decade later, the political factors impeding action have only grown more powerful.

Texas school shooting

The recent string of devastating shootings has renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions. But as Kevin Rector reported, a loosening of gun laws is almost certainly coming instead, largely because of an expected decision from the Supreme Court, which is likely to strike down a broad law in New York that doesn’t allow individuals to carry guns in public without first demonstrating a “special need” for self-defense.

For all the impassioned speeches and angry tweets, for all the memes and viral videos of gun control proponents quaking with rage, most of the energy and political intensity has been on the side of those who favor greater gun laxity, Mark Barabak wrote.

The shooting has generated a lot of questions from parents about what their own schools are doing for safety. Howard Blume looked at what California officials say about school security.

The latest from Washington

Biden marked the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer by signing an executive order aimed at reforming policing at the federal level. As Eli Stokols reported, Wednesday’s order falls short of what Biden had hoped to achieve through legislation. It directs all federal agencies to revise their use-of-force policies, creates a national registry of officers fired for misconduct and provides grants to incentivize state and local police departments to strengthen restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

Sluggish response and questionable decisions by the Food and Drug Administration worsened the nation’s infant formula shortage, agency officials told lawmakers at a congressional hearing. “You’re right to be concerned, and the public should be concerned,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf. The agency’s response “was too slow and there were decisions that were suboptimal along the way,” Anumita Kaur reported.

Only a couple of months ago, U.S. and European officials said a renewal of the Iran nuclear deal was “imminent.” But with little progress since then, and a shifting global geopolitical scene, the top U.S. envoy for the Iran negotiations testified Wednesday that prospects for reviving the Iran deal are “at best, tenuous,” Tracy Wilkinson reported. “We do not have a deal,” the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Cuba will not attend next month’s Summit of the Americas, a major conference to take place in Los Angeles, after the U.S. refused to extend a proper invitation, the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced Wednesday. As Wilkinson reported, the decision throws the summit, which is crucial to the U.S.’ ability to demonstrate its influence in the Western Hemisphere, into further disarray.

The latest from California

GOP Rep. Young Kim would seem to have a relatively easy path to reelection in November — the national mood favors her party, she has a lot of money and the newly drawn boundaries for her Orange County district give her more Republican constituents. But Kim is suddenly campaigning with a sense of urgency, Melanie Mason and Seema Mehta report. She’s unleashed $1.3 million in advertising, and outside allies are coming to her aid with more spending. Most of it is aimed at fending off Greg Raths, an underfunded GOP opponent who has been a staple on the political scene in Mission Viejo, the district’s largest city.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and top legislative Democrats pledged Wednesday to expedite gun legislation. Among the bills are measures that would require school officials to investigate credible threats of a mass shooting, allow private citizens to sue firearm manufacturers and distributors, and enact more than a dozen other policies intended to reduce gun violence in California, Taryn Luna and Hannah Wiley reported. “We’re going to control the controllable, the things we have control of,” Newsom said during an event at the state Capitol. “California leads this national conversation. When California moves, other states move in the same direction.”

The Los Angeles mayor’s race has seemingly devolved in recent days into a rhetorical brawl between two of the city’s richest men, Benjamin Oreskes wrote. Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who supports Rep. Karen Bass, says Rick Caruso’s history of supporting Republican candidates and being registered as a Republican a decade ago disqualifies him from being mayor. That came after Variety published an interview with Caruso in which he attacked the former Walt Disney Studios chairman for “lying” about him in ads by a pro-Bass independent expenditure committee predominantly funded by Katzenberg.

The growing corruption scandal in Anaheim has cost the city’s mayor his job, endangered the city’s planned $320-million sale of Angel Stadium to the team and provided a rare, unvarnished look at how business is done behind closed doors in the city of 350,000. Read our full coverage of the FBI probe into how the city does business.

Sign up for our California Politics newsletter to get the best of The Times’ state politics reporting.

Gaza’s Civil Defence says 35 unidentifiable bodies uncovered in Gaza City as Hamas searches for dead Israeli captives.

Over the weekend, United States President Donald Trump promised Americans $2,000 each from the “trillions of dollars” in tariff revenue he said his administration has collected.

During his second term, Trump has imposed tariffs broadly on countries and on specific goods such as drugs, steel and cars.

“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” Trump said in a November 9 Truth Social post. “We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion. Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

How seriously should people take his pledge? Experts urged caution.

Tariffs are projected to generate well below “trillions” a year, making it harder to pay each person $2,000. And the administration already said it would use the tariff revenue to either pay for existing tax cuts or to reduce the federal debt.

Trump’s post came days after the US Supreme Court heard arguments about the legality of his tariff policy. The justices are weighing whether Trump has the power to unilaterally impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. If the justices rule against Trump, much of the expected future tariff revenue would not materialise.

What Trump proposed, and who would qualify

The administration has published no plans for the tariff dividends, and in a November 9 ABC News interview, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had not spoken to Trump about giving Americans a dividend payment.

Details about a potential payment have been limited to Truth Social posts.

Trump said “everyone”, excluding “high income people”, would get the money, but did not explain the criteria for high-income people. He also did not say whether children would receive the payment.

In a November 10 Truth Social post, Trump said his administration would first pay $2,000 to “low and middle income USA Citizens” and then use the remaining tariff revenues to “substantially pay down national debt”.

Trump has not said what form the payments might take. Bessent said the dividend “could come in lots of forms, in lots of ways. You know, it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda. You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. So, you know, those are substantial deductions.”

Analysts said it is a stretch to rebrand an already promised tax cut as a new dividend.

Trump has previously discussed paying Americans with tariff revenue.

“We have so much money coming in, we’re thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt,” he told reporters on July 25. “We’re thinking about a rebate.”

Days later, Senator Josh Hawley introduced legislation that would give $600 tariff rebate cheques to each American adult and child. Hawley’s bill has not advanced.

Tariff revenue collected versus cost of ‘dividend’ payment

Trump made the imposition of tariffs one of his signature campaign promises for the 2024 presidential election. Since taking office in January, he has enacted tariffs on a scale not seen in the US in almost a century; the current overall average tariff rate is 18 percent, the highest since 1934, according to Yale Budget Lab.

Through the end of October, the federal government collected $309.2bn in tariff revenue, compared with $165.4bn through the same point in 2024, an increase of $143.8bn.

The centre-right Tax Foundation projects that tariff revenue will continue to increase to more than $200bn a year if the tariffs remain in place.

Erica York, the Tax Foundation’s vice president of federal tax policy, estimated in a November 9 X post that a $2,000 tariff dividend for each person earning less than $100,000 would equal 150 million adult recipients. That would cost nearly $300bn, York calculated, or more if children qualified. That is more than the tariffs have raised so far, she said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected that Trump’s proposal could cost $600bn, depending on how it is structured.

The administration previously detailed other uses for tariff revenue

The Trump administration already promised to use tariff revenue for other purposes, including reducing the country’s deficit and offsetting the cost of the GOP tax and spending bill Trump signed into law in July.

As Trump announced new tariffs on April 2, he said he would “use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt”.

Bessent has made the same promise, falsely saying in July that tariffs were “going to pay off our deficit”.

The treasury secretary said in August that he and Trump were “laser-focused on paying down the debt”.

“I think we’re going to bring down the deficit-to-GDP,” Bessent said in an August 19 CNBC interview. “We’ll start paying down debt and then, at a point, that can be used as an offset to the American people.”

Tariffs’ current cost to Americans 

Tariffs are already costing Americans money, analysts say. Independent estimates range from about $1,600 to $2,600 a year per household. Given the similarity of these amounts to Trump’s proposed dividend, York said it would be more efficient to remove the tariffs.

Joseph Rosenberg, Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Centre senior fellow, said a $2,000 dividend in the form of a cheque would require congressional approval – and lawmakers have already declined to act on that idea once.

When members of Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “They had the ability to include a tariff dividend, but they didn’t”, Rosenberg said.

Director Kacho López Mari’s critically and culturally acclaimed portfolio includes over 40 music videos and short films that, if played at a YouTube watch party, could leave you and your primos feeling as if you just flip-booked through modern Latin music history.

Some of the music videos have captured the trophies of genres, like Tego Calderón’s “Abayarde” and Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,” both essentials on any reggaetón playlist. Other visuals were works of activism — like Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón — Aquí Vive Gente,” the 22-minute music video and investigative short that shed light on the economic crisis that Puerto Ricans continued to face after Hurricane Maria.

A music video has the power to capture today’s culture, tomorrow’s stars, and yesterday’s immediacy. And thanks to López Mari’s legendary lens, we’re able to behold many iconic Latin music moments. Here are 15 of his must-see videos.

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tego Calderón, “Abayarde / Gracias” (2003)

Filmed in Manatí, Puerto Rico

Before producing and directing music videos, López Mari produced “underground” parties in Puerto Rico — and commercials at Paradiso Films.

That changed when López Mari’s superior, Sigfredo “Freddy” Bellaflores, heard his young son, Sigfredo Jr. — who would go on to produce videos for Bad Bunny — listening to Tego Calderón’s music in the shower. The next day, Freddy came into the office and threw the Calderón CD at López Mari.

“ ‘If you can reach that guy, we’ll do a video for him for free,’ ” López Mari recalled Freddy telling him. “ And I’m like, OK, I’ll get that guy.”

A few days later, López Mari used his party-producing connections to set up a meeting with Calderón’s team, which told López Mari he could pick the song off Calderón’s debut album, since Paradiso Films was financing the video; the team then asked him to meld another song, “Gracias,” into the visual.

“ That’s why the video is a six-minute piece,” said López Mari. “Back in the day, the reggaetón videos would be two or three songs in each video.”

The young director scouted the location, created the storyline to connect the two songs and presented the treatment to Calderón. Soon afterward, López Mari shot his first music video.

“It was a big phenomenon,” he said. “When that came out, Tego was like a rocket going up to the moon.”

Ricky Martin, “Tal Vez” (2003)

Filmed in Buenos Aires

López Mari co-directed this video with Carlos Pérez, his childhood friend who would later direct the video for Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito.” Both 20-somethings at the time, López Mari and Pérez, recruited a “dream team” to execute it — including Andrzej Sekula, cinematographer for “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs,” as well as Brigitte Broch, Oscar-winning production designer and art director for “Amores Perros” and “Romeo + Juliet.” The editor was Jeff Selis, the most nominated editor in the history of the MTV Video Music Awards.

Ricky Martin needed ample star power for what would be his first Spanish release since “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Martin liked López Mari’s treatment so much that he would commission the same crew to make the video for 2003’s “Jaleo.”

Daddy Yankee, “Gasolina” (2005)

Filmed in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Released pre-YouTube, the original video for “Gasolina,” the lead single off Daddy Yankee’s 2004 album “Barrio Fino,” maximized MTV’s four-minute allotment by mixing in two additional songs into the same visual: “No Me Dejes Solo” (which featured Wisin y Yandel) and “King Daddy.”

Yet when the song blew up, Daddy Yankee needed a longer video — and fast. However creatively edited, the visual actually loops the minute-and-a-half of material originally shot, making it a controversial piece for the co-directors.

In a phone interview, Pérez said that he values the song’s cultural and historical impact, but the video “never felt reflective of our work.” López Mari agreed it wasn’t his finest piece, but it did introduce the world to reggaetón and helped establish an aesthetic for the genre.

Calle 13, “Adentro” (2014)

Filmed in Arizona and Puerto Rico (Barriada Morales in Caguas and Cantera Roca Dura in Manatí)

From Calle 13’s final album, the video for “Adentro” earned López Mari a Latin Grammy nomination for best short form music video. In it, frontman René Pérez Joglar, or Residente, raps regretfully about buying a Maserati as baseball legend Willie Mays hands him a bat, which he then uses to smash the car. It’s later pushed off a cliff.

“For me, it’s a work of art,” said López Mari. “It’s basically a piece to destroy a half-million-dollar car — that [Residente] bought as an anti-capitalist statement.”

Calle 13, “Multi_Viral” featuring Julian Assange, Kamilya Jubran, Tom Morello (2014)

Filmed in the West Bank

Art is a weapon for López Mari and Calle 13, who sympathized with the Palestinian struggle. López Mari told me he considered the “Multi_Viral” video, which was filmed in the West Bank in 2013, was “one of the most important projects” he’s ever worked on.

The video follows Palestinian children as they build a guitar from parts of a gun. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who’s featured on the song, joined them onset in the West Bank. López Mari’s brother, Santiago “Chago” Benet Mari, who served as deputy photographer, told me how filmmaking has taken him and his family places he would have likely never otherwise visited.

“Film is a universal language,” said Benet Mari.

Calle 13, “Ojos Color Sol” featuring Silvio Rodríguez (2014)

Filmed in Buenos Aires

“Ojos Color Sol” was filmed the same day as the memorable 2014 World Cup semifinal match in which Germany thrashed Brazil, 7-1, so concentration levels onset were “fragile” among die-hard soccer fans that day, López Mari recalled.

Still, López Mari’s video would go on to win him his first Latin Grammy for best short form music video, alongside Tristana Robles, López Mari’s life partner, as well as the producer and co-founder of Filmes Zapatero. The song featured Cuban musical legend Silvio Rodríguez, and the video starred Golden Globe Award-winning Mexican actor Gael García Bernal and Spanish actress María Valverde, who share a powerful kiss.

Juanes, “Loco de Amor (La Historia)” (2014)

Filmed in Puerto Rico (San Juan, Río Piedras, Bayamón)

The 16th annual Latin Grammy Awards were historic. After “Ojos de Sol” won best short form music video, “Loco de Amor (La Historia)” won best long form music video — a 16-minute project visualizing four of Colombian superstar Juanes’ songs. This made López Mari the winner of both categories in the same night — a feat never accomplished before or repeated since.

“I like the aesthetics of [López Mari]’s work and his way of working,” Juanes told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2014.

Calle 13, “La Vida (Respira el Momento)” (2015)

Filmed in Salinas, Puerto Rico

“La Vida (Respira el Momento)” was the final video López Mari released with Calle 13 before they disbanded. It featured López Mari’s daughter and nephew, Residente’s nephew, as well as pro boxer Miguel Cotto and MLB player Ángel Pagán. But there’s an even buzzier person who makes an appearance in this video — filmmaker, actor and poet Jacobo Morales, the director behind the 1989 film “Lo Que le Pasó a Santiago,” the only Puerto Rican film to earn an Oscar nomination to date.

Morales sits down in the middle of a road to look through a handful of photos, reflecting on his life’s most precious moments — inadvertently foreshadowing his later role in videos from Bad Bunny’s 2025 album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” such as “Baile Inolvidable,” which were also directed by López Mari.

Juanes, “Mis Planes Son Amarte” (2017)

Filmed in Mexico (Veracruz, Mexico City and its outskirts) and Medellín, Colombia

“Mis Planes Son Amarte” directly translates to “My Plans Are to Love You.” A play on words in Spanish, it could also be heard as “My Plans Are to Mars.” Using that double meaning, Juanes and López Mari innovated what’s considered to be Latin music’s first major visual album (every song has a video): a one-hour film of 12 songs that follows Juanes’ character as an archaeologist and astronaut, exploring the dimensions of life and love.

Chayanne, “Di Qué Sientes Tú” (2018)

Filmed in Mexico City

In 2018, López Mari added the actor and pop balladeer Chayanne to his roster of Puerto Rican icons he’s collaborated with. For the making of Chayanne’s music video for “Di Que Sientes Tú” (Say What You Feel), López Mari took the crew to Mexico City.

“It came at a time when I was falling in love with books again,” said López Mari. “I was surrounded by literature [by Gabriel García Márquez], [Jorge Luis] Borges, Luis Rafael Sánchez — and that literary energy made its way into the set. It all came together in a way that was beautiful and poetic.”

Bad Bunny, “Callaíta” (2019)

Filmed in Puerto Rico (Arecibo, Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan, Guaynabo)

In the first of many collaborations between Bad Bunny and López Mari, they created a “dream-like atmosphere” of summertime in Puerto Rico. In a 2023 video interview with Vanity Fair, Bad Bunny said it successfully conveyed the feeling of a “hug.” Bad Bunny also said he knew the actress, Natalia L. Garcia, was the right woman for the project as soon as he saw her.

López Mari discovered Garcia on Instagram. “I [loved] her look,” he said. “She reminded me of Uma Thurman in ‘Pulp Fiction’ because of the haircut.”

López Mari’s brother Benet Mari, served as the director of photography — and happened to have the resources to get a carousel on the beach. “Everything was perfect,” said López Mari, calling it a “beautifully executed video” that hit all the notes and goals of marrying image and song.

Don Omar, Residente, “Flow HP” (2021)

Filmed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Los Angeles

In the video for their first-time collaboration, “Flow HP,” Don Omar and Residente, both Puerto Rican industry veterans, amplify their pride for the motherland by rapping in front of the island’s flag, resulting in an unforgettably powerful visual. López Mari and Residente actually directed the video together.

Bad Bunny, “El Apagón — Aquí Vive Gente” (2022)

Filmed in Puerto Rico (San Juan, Güajataca, Rincón)

“[Taylor Swift] fills it [her videos] with Easter eggs,” said López Mari. “So, what does Benito do? He fills it with Puerto Rican history.”

In nearly six months, López Mari and his team worked to produce what began as a Bad Bunny video and expanded into a hard-hitting documentary. In collaboration with Puerto Rican investigative journalist Bianca Graulau, the short film shed light on the recurring blackouts in Puerto Rico after 2017’s Hurricane Maria and how the government’s lackluster recovery efforts exacerbated the greater infrastructural crisis — all of which they strongly consider to be byproducts of U.S. colonialism.

(Fun fact: This video also featured clips from López Mari’s directorial debut with Calderón.)

Juanes, “Canción Desaparecida” featuring Mabiland (official video) (2023)

Filmed in Medellín, Colombia, and rural outskirts

In this video, Juanes and singer-MC Mabiland call to mind more than 121,000 people forcibly disappeared between 1985 and 2016 in their native Colombia. After long shying away from political and social content that colored his first album, Juanes knew he wanted to make an impactful video with López Mari, who felt connected to the story because of his own political inheritance.

Bad Bunny, “Baile Inolvidable” (2025)

FILMING LOCATION: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Normally, López Mari listens to a song several times before he writes a treatment for the direction of a music video. Yet for “Baile Inolvidable,” he only got to listen to it once. He happened to be in the room when Bad Bunny presented the album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” to Apple Music executives and his crew for the first time.

López Mari says he met with Bad Bunny weeks later, in the Río Piedras music studio where the artist had recorded the song. There, López Mari presented his storyboard drawings and location ideas for the video and listened to the song “like 20 times,” he said.

López Mari shot the dance class portion at the Arthur Murray Dance Studios, a famous school for classic salsa in San Juan. The live performance portion of the video was filmed at the University of Puerto Rico’s auditorium, where Robles and López Mari had recently creative directed a Concert for Energy Independence for Casa Pueblo.

“As every artist evolves, the same happens to us directors,” said López Mari. “We keep learning… [And] hopefully, more videos will be made that are more relevant, [that] contribute more to the cultural exchange, [and] that aren’t just a bunch of flashy visuals and bells and whistles.”

The largest work of art in the Los Angeles area by a woman might just be a museum.

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena is covered almost entirely in 115,000 hand-crafted architectural tiles created by ceramicist Edith Heath in 1969. Those tiles, affixed to the facade of a curvilinear building designed by architects Thornton Ladd and John Kelsey, have recently been cleaned and refurbished as part of a $15-million renovation designed to reintroduce the underappreciated museum to the public by making its exterior match the quality and beauty of the rare art inside.

The Heath tile is one of Norton Simon’s “superpowers,” said project architect Liz MacLean, a principal at the firm Architectural Resources Group, which specializes in historic preservation. “I think people drive by this museum all the time and have no idea that it’s clad with Edith Heath tile.”

Edith Heath attaching her tiles to the Norton Simon Museum in 1969. Heath would go on to be the first non-architect to win the Industrial Arts Medal from the American Institute of Architects for her work on the building.

(The Brian and Edith Heath Foundation and the Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley)

It’s not just the tile made by a groundbreaking ceramicist and innovator of midcentury modern tableware that people often drive by without recognizing — it’s the museum itself, said Norton Simon Vice President of External Affairs Leslie Denk.

The 85,000-square-foot museum — housing a private collection of 12,000 objects including work by Rembrandt, Degas, Picasso, Fragonard, Goya and Vuillard — and its 79,000-square-foot sculpture garden, dotted with work by Jacques Lipchitz, Henry Moore and Robert Morris, are situated on a steeply graded wedge of land girded by bustling Colorado Boulevard, and the traffic-snarled 134 Freeway, near where it meets the 210.

The new signage at the entrance of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Improving the curb appeal of the museum was the original goal of the renovation, which expanded to include refurbishing the Heath tiles and beloved sculpture garden.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

The signage signaling the museum’s presence along one of Pasadena’s busiest thoroughfares was underwhelming and easy to miss, and the landscaping along Colorado Boulevard was overgrown and wide open. People would sometimes leave their shopping carts from a nearby Ralphs grocery store beside the entrance, not seeming to notice it at all. They also seemed unaware that French artist Auguste Rodin’s famed 1880 sculpture “The Thinker” had been sitting contemplatively along the street for decades — in a spot that no one appeared to realize was open to the public.

The sculpture was originally placed beside the main Norton Simon sign so that it would be visible to cameras filming the Rose Parade, but Denk said that when she recently watched a telecast, the sculpture was obscured by trees. That this iconic work was going unseen was representative of the museum’s problem as a whole.

Conversations about improving the Norton Simon’s curb appeal began a decade ago, said Denk, with the hope of unveiling new signage and entryways in time for the museum’s 50th anniversary celebration.

The space was built in the 1960s for what was originally called the Pasadena Art Museum, but that organization fell on rough times, and in 1974, industrialist Norton Simon — who had become a prominent art collector — took over the building, which reopened under his name in 1975. The last significant work on the museum — a $5-million renovation — was done in 1995 by architect and former museum trustee Frank Gehry.

The lobby of the Norton Simon Museum and its back garden pond, which was reduced in size and lined with concrete. It was also connected to a fountain that helps block the sound of nearby traffic.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Thirty years later, the need for more upgrades became paramount.

“What the museum was looking to do was to really improve our street presence, to elevate the way we present ourselves along Colorado Boulevard,” Denk explained. “There was a disconnect between the way we looked along the street to the experience of walking into the galleries.”

The renovation conceived to remedy this quandary naturally expanded to include a long-overdue restoration of the Heath tiles, as well as a refreshed sculpture garden with new resin-bound gravel pathways. A running fountain now connects to a concrete-lined pond with a reduced footprint to invite more foot traffic and allow for more community events, and walls have been erected to block traffic noise from nearby freeways. Crucially, a new pedestrian-friendly entryway has been constructed, alongside welcoming podium signage with fencing and pole banners that gaily announce the museum to the public.

The work, which took a total of 10 months, was scheduled to start on Jan. 7 — the same day that wildfires began tearing through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, which borders the museum to the north. The campus was locked down immediately and no smoke infiltrated the galleries, said Emily Talbot, vice president of collections and chief curator, but the sculpture garden looked as if a hurricane had torn through it.

The restoration took on added meaning in the days that followed, Talbot said.

“This building’s design was intended to be in dialogue with the mountains, and so its preservation now just feels all the more significant and important,” she said.

Project architect Liz MacLean, from left, Norton Simon Museum Vice President of External Affairs Leslie Denk and Vice President of Collections and Chief Curator Emily Talbot. “It really is a work of art,” MacLean said of the Heath tiles that cover the building.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

The mottled brownish-red of the Heath tiles is a huge part of that environmental dialogue, and on a recent sun-soaked Friday they shone with a radiant luster under an azure sky. Before the restoration they were cracked and dirty — some had fallen off altogether and others were marred by biological growth. ARG began the process of identifying which tiles needed the most remediation by doing a photorealistic laser scan of the building that MacLean described as a sort of high-tech x-ray.

Twelve artisans at Heath Ceramics, which still operates in the Bay Area, created 3,000 new tiles by hand. The process was complicated, MacLean and Denk note, because the workers had to re-create the tiles with a new formula. The original included materials like lead, which can no longer be used. So they had to test out different processes of glazing in order to make the tone and texture match the old tiles as closely as possible. They ended up using a two-part glaze and also created an entirely new mold since the tiles are not a standard shape.

After the first pressing in the clay, the final tiles shrank about 12%, said MacLean, so the fabricators had to conduct many trials to get just the right size. There were places on the facade where a single tile needed to fit in the grout on the wall. This work was done by Gardena-based company KC Restoration, which retouched and treated each damaged or cracked tile with the type of care and attention to detail used by painting conservators, Denk said.

The entrance and lobby of the Norton Simon Museum. “Our collection is at the heart of everything we do,” said chief curator Emily Talbot.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

“It’s interesting, because a lot of times building elements are seen as owned by the architect,” said MacLean of the Heath tiles. “And this is a finish done by someone outside of the architecture firm and architecture world, which is really exciting.”

Thanks to her work on the Norton Simon, Heath became in 1971 the first non-architect to win the Industrial Arts Medal from the American Institute of Architects, helping launch her career.

“It really is a work of art,” said MacLean. “It’s more than just a building.”

It’s also what’s inside that building, said Talbot, which is coming into focus with the 50th anniversary celebrations.

“Our collection is at the heart of everything that we do,” she said.

Fittingly, “The Thinker” has been moved to a prominent spot by the new pedestrian entrance, where everyone can see it — and take an obligatory selfie — on their way to the front doors.

Fans can’t get enough of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s limited edition Dodgers gear, decorated with colorful, cartoon flowers featuring smiling faces in surprisingly un-jockish colors like pastel pink and butter yellow. The merch sold out in a matter of minutes at a pop-up store in March before the two-game season opening in Japan. A second collection was released in April.

Three’s a charm — as always.

On Friday at 1 p.m. a final Murakami collection will go on sale, this time commemorating the Dodgers’ historic World Series Championship. The series of T-shirts and hoodies — decorated in Murakami’s distinctive flowers, and featuring the team name in Japanese Katakana characters — is being presented by the sports and youth culture platforms Fanatics and Complex. The merch can be found on their websites as well as MLBShop online stores, the MLB app, the Dodger Stadium Team Store and the MLB Flagship Store in New York City.

I know friends who spent hours trying to obtain a single Murakami-designed Dodgers baseball cap last spring, so I expect the merch to sell fast. I’d set an alarm for 12:55 p.m. and log in exactly at 1 p.m. if I were hoping to score an item or two.

Dodgers fans are more than fans after their team won in what many are calling a “series for the ages” — they are fanatics. I should know. I wrote a story that mentioned the game, and I referred to the Dodgers being one “point” down to the Toronto Blue Jays. I awoke to an inbox full of letters from readers alerting me to the fact that a “point” in baseball is called a “run.” Some said it not so nicely.

Point taken! I mean, run. Either way, I’ve made much worse mistakes and never gotten so much as a single letter. That’s how I know Dodgers fans are not messing around. Neither is the merchandising machine surrounding the team’s epic win.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, shooting baskets for baseball and scoring touchdowns for a home run. Here’s your arts and culture news this week.

On our radar

Joshua Francique with Alonzo King Lines Ballet.

(RJ Muna)

Alonzo King Lines Ballet
Choreographer and California Hall of Fame inductee Alonzo King brings his San Francisco-based contemporary ballet company to Long Beach for an evening of dance immersed in the spiritually rooted, avant-garde jazz stylings of Alice Coltrane, including her seminal album “Journey in Satchidananda.” In addition to this tribute to one of America’s only jazz harpists, the company will present a fresh take on Maurice Ravel’s suite of Mother Goose fairy tales, “Ma mère l’Oye,” which was originally written as a piano duet in 1910.
— Jessica Gelt
8 p.m. Saturday. Carpenter Center is located at 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. carpenterarts.org

Pacific Opera Project
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s funny, tuneful, gang-can’t-shoot-straight, long-out-of-fashion early 19th century comic French opera, “Fra Diavolo” is just the kind of thing on which Pacific Opera Project (POP) has made its irrepressibly wackier-than-thou reputation. While the company performs a range of operas, serious and not-so-serious, here and there (including Descanso Gardens and Forest Lawn), its heart is at the Ebell, a historic Highland Park club, where you sit at tables with wine and hors d’oeuvres, surrounded by dazzling singers, goofy costumes and sets, and the intoxicating hokum that the company’s irrepressible founder and director, Josh Shaw, comes up with.
— Mark Swed
7:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Wednesday and Nov. 14; 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15 and 16. The Highland Park Ebell, 131 S. Ave. 57. pacificoperaproject.com

A stage version of the horror franchise “Paranormal Activity” comes to the Ahmanson.

(Pamela Raith)

Paranormal Activity
The premiere of an original story set in the world of the film franchise, the show seems determined to scare you silly. The theater has caught the horror bug — and why not? Fear knows no bounds. Written by Levi Holloway, whose “Grey House” had a brief Broadway run in 2023, and directed by Felix Barrett, whose immersive “Sleep No More” captivated New York audiences for years, the production sets out to give new meaning to the term stage fright.
— Charles McNulty
Through Dec. 7, check days and times. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. centertheatregroup.org

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

The new play “Border Crisis” at City Garage.

(City Garage)

Border Crisis
A new absurdist comedy by playwright Charles A. Duncombe, based on “The House on the Border” by Sławomir Mrożek as translated by Pavel Rybak-Rudzki, about a typical U.S. family that finds itself at the center of an international crisis, has its world premiere.
8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 13. City Garage, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave. T1, Santa Monica, citygarage.org

Leah Ollman
In addition to a reading and book signing, the author will discuss her new publication, “Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography,” with poet Rae Armantrout.
6 p.m. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. mcasd.org

SATURDAY

Katherine Ross, Paul Newman, seated, and Robert Redford in the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

(20th Century Fox)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The American Cinematheque’s tribute to Robert Redford continues with the 1969 George Roy Hill-directed western that first paired the late actor with Paul Newman in one of Hollywood’s great buddy movies.
2 p.m. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com

The Butterfly Effect
The reopening of a secret cafe where people are rumored to have time traveled is the setting for the latest immersive and interactive audience experience from Last Call Theatre.
8 p.m. Saturday and Nov. 14-15, 20-22, Dec. 4-6. Stella Coffee, 6210 San Vicente Blvd. ticketleap.events

Comic Creators Block Party
A full day of signings, meet and greets, live panels, food and vendors featuring some of your favorite writers and artists, including Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum.
11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday. Revenge Of Comics, 3420 Eagle Rock Blvd., Suite A. comiccreatorsblockparty.com

iam8bit 20th Anniversary Art Show
The creative production company celebrates two decades of innovation with an exhibition heavy on video game and pop culture history.
10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Studio 8, 614 E. 12th St., Los Angeles. eventbrite.com

Redrawing the Rancho
The performance platform homeLA presents a program of interdisciplinary performance, dance and installation work by Nao Bustamante, Eva Aguila, Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier and Victoria Marks that evaluate the legacy of Southern California’s oldest surviving brick structure. the Rowland Mansion, and the complex history behind it.
1-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. John Rowland Mansion and Dibble Roundhouse Museum, 16021 Gale Ave., City of Industry. homela.org

“Sweet Nothings,” 2025. Aluminum and bowling balls. 223⁄4 x 183⁄4 x 221⁄4 in. (57.78 x 47.63 x 56.52 cm) by Kathleen Ryan.

(@ Kathleen Ryan. Courtesy the artist and Karma/Artwork photography by Lance Brewer)

Kathleen Ryan
Everyday objects become the stuff of dreams in the exhibition “Souvenir,” featuring nine sculptures rooted in the artist’s use of motifs, techniques and conceptual decisions.
Opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, through Dec. 20. Karma, 7351 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles. karmakarma.org

Wild Up
L.A.’s transformative new music chamber orchestra and collective was founded 15 years ago by Christopher Rountree with a seemingly limitless collection of inventive ideas for bringing classical music into the 21st century and beyond. This fall it begins a new series at the Nimoy, home of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, beginning with “What I Call Sound,” a look at the historic influence L.A. jazz has had on new music of all sorts. Given that Wild Up is composed of accomplished improvisers and composers, it is ideally suited to follow the course of the avant-garde jazz scene from Eric Dolphy in the late 1950s to such current leading figures as Anthony Braxton.
— Mark Swed
8 p.m. UCLA Nimoy Theater, 1262 Westwood Blvd. cap.ucla.edu

SUNDAY
Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures
The exhibition features more than 150 works from around the world exploring the medium as both a means of creative expression and a vehicle for mass production of both images and ideas, extending from the patterned fabrics of India to German Expressionist artists and contemporary makers like Christiane Baumgartner. Also includes the Los Angeles–based Block Shop demonstrating reinterpretations of the ageless art form.
Through Sept. 13, 2026. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Resnick Pavilion, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. lacma.org

Burt Lancaster
See the Hollywood legend in two very different films and performances: The American Cinematheque screens Luchino Visconti’s 1963 drama “The Leopard,” in which Lancaster stars opposite Claudia Cardinale; at the New Beverly, the actor appears in the delightful 1983 comedy “Local Hero” with Peter Riegert (on a double feature with another Bill Forsyth film, “Housekeeping”).
“The Leopard,” 2 p.m. Sunday. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com; “Local Hero,” 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd. thenewbev.com

TUESDAY
An Evening with Annie Leibovitz
The celebrated photographer discusses her new book, “Women,” which features Louise Bourgeois, Hillary Clinton, Joan Didion, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Michelle Obama, Rihanna, Patti Smith, Elizabeth Taylor, and Serena and Venus Williams.
7 p.m. The Wiltern, 3790 Wilshire Blvd. livenation.com

Recovecos
The LA Phil New Music Group, conducted by Raquel Acevedo Klein, explores works by Caribbean and Latin American composers in a program curated by Angélica Negrón and featuring vocalist Lido Pimienta.
8 p.m. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com

WEDNESDAY

Broadway star Melissa Errico performs Wednesday at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach.

(David Kenas)

Melissa Errico
In her new show “The Streisand Effect,” Errico, accompanied by a quartet that includes Streisand’s own 40-year pianist Randy Waldman, performs such favorites as “Send In the Clowns,” “I’d Rather Be Blue,” and “I Never Meant to Hurt You.”
7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday. Carpenter Center is located at 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. carpenterarts.org

THURSDAY
Celebrating 50 years of Laverne & Shirley
Producer Bob Boyett presents the Garry Marshall Theatre’s annual fundraiser, which this year marks a half-century since the debut of Marshall’s hit ABC sitcom and welcomes special guest Michael McKean, who had a breakout role on the show as Lenny. The event, which includes dinner and entertainment, also honors actor Yeardly Smith of “The Simpsons.” Tickets are $500-1000.
6:30 p.m. Verse Restaurant, 4212 Lankershim Blvd., Toluca Lake garrymarshalltheatre.org/50years

An Inspector Calls
Theatre 40 presents J.B. Priestley’s classic drawing-room mystery about the investigation of a young woman’s death that disrupts an upper-class British family’s engagement party in the industrial north Midlands in 1912.
7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday; also, 7:30 p.m. Dec. 3 and 10; dark on Nov. 27 and 28, through Dec. 14. Beverly Hills High school, Mary Levin Cutler Theatre, 241 S. Moreno Dr. theatre40.org

New Original Works (NOW)
The second weekend of REDCAT’s annual festival of experimental performance features a program of works by Gabriela Burdsall; Orin Calcagne and Jenson Titus; and Divya Victor, Carolyn Chen, AMOC (American Modern Opera Company). NOW 2025 continues with additional programming Nov. 20-22.
8 p.m Thursday-Saturday. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Hollywood, 1992, Silver Gelatin Photograph, Ed. of 25, 20 x 16 inches, by Herb Ritts.

(Fahey/Klein Gallery)

Herb Ritts
The exhibition “Allies & Icons” presents the photographer’s portraits of activists, artists and cultural leaders who led the global fight against AIDS, including Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John, Magic Johnson, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Sharon Stone, Tina Turner, Keith Haring and many others. In celebration of STORIES: The AIDS Monument, which opens Nov. 16 in West Hollywood.
Opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Thursday; Regular hours, 1-7 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, through Dec. 21. ONE Gallery, 626 N. Robertson Blvd, West Hollywood. faheykleingallery.com

Culture news and the SoCal scene

The Scourged Back. The scarred back of an African American slave named Gordon who escaped from Mississippi and reached a Union Army camp in Louisiana in 1863. The photograph is one of many targeted for removal by the Trump administration.

(Getty Images)

National treasure
“In recent months, a small army of historians, librarians, scientists and other volunteers has fanned out across America’s national parks and museums to photograph and painstakingly archive cultural and intellectual treasures they fear are under threat from President Trump’s war against ‘woke’,” writes Times investigative reporter Jack Dolan in a recent story about the volunteers creating a “citizen’s record” of existing exhibits and more, “in case the administration carries out Trump’s orders to scrub public signs and displays of language he and his allies deem too negative about America’s past.”

Theater beat
Times theater critic Charles McNulty reviews a production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at A Noise Within. McNulty deems the script, “arguably the finest work in August Wilson’s 10-play series chronicling the African American experience in the 20th century,” and writes that the new show — set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911 — “seems like a gift from the other side, that mysterious, creative realm where history is spiritualized.”

McNulty also attended Lloyd Suh’s “The Heart Sellers,” at South Coast Repertory, for a production directed by Jennifer Chang, who staged the play’s 2023 world premiere at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre featuring the same two-person cast. The show explores the thorny, timely issue of immigration through the stories of two women — one from the Philippines, the other from South Korea — living in an unnamed mid-sized American city in 1973.

Angela Bassett arrives at the LACMA Art + Film Gala on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2025, at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles.

(Jordan Strauss / Invision/AP)

LACMA ups and downs
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was in the news again this past week. I attended its celebrity-packed Art + Film gala on Saturday night — and watched the room explode in celebration after the Dodgers won the World Series. The annual event, this year honoring filmmaker Ryan Coogler and artist Mary Corse, raised more than $6.5 million in support of the museum and its programs.

Less than a week later, LACMA management declined to voluntarily recognize LACMA United, after museum employees announced they were forming a union last week. The move greatly disappointed staff who had overwhelmingly signed cards in favor of organizing , and kicked collective bargaining efforts down the road while the union waits for a National Labor Relations Board election.

40 authors, 40 dinners
I also attended a dinner sponsored by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles featuring historian Rick Atkinson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2003. Called “Literary Feasts” the biannual event featured 40 authors spread out at 40 dinners hosted at private homes across the city on a single night in order to raise funds for the foundation’s mission in support of the library and its community-driven efforts including adult education and homework support for kids.

Yoko goes solo
It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true: Yoko One, 92, is staging her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles. The show, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” will open at the Broad museum on May 23 and will run through Oct. 11, 2026. The interactive exhibition is organized in collaboration with Tate Modern in London.

The Verdi Chorus

(T. Berreth)

Faustian
The Verdi Chorus is launching its 42nd season with a special, two-nights-only performance delving into Goethe’s “Faust.” Audiences can expect operatic renditions of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust,” Gounod’s “Faust,” and Boito’s “Mefistofele.” The concerts will take place at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica on Nov. 15 and 16. Artistic director Anne Marie Ketchum will lead the performances, and it should be noted has been leading the group for all 42 years of its existence. The Verdi Chorus dubs itself, “the only choral group in Southern California that focuses primarily on the dramatic and diverse music for opera chorus.”

Girl dad, the musical
My mother’s heart was touched when a father named Matt Braaten — who is also the artistic director of Eagle Rock Theatre Company — wrote to me about a new musical at the theater called, “Daddy Daughter.” The show features Braaten and his 11-year-old daughter, Lily, as they explore the music that has touched her life and informed her childhood to date. “This family-friendly musical comedy celebrates the different stages of Lily’s life through banter and songs, and takes a musical journey from Elmo to Elsa to Elphaba and beyond,” Braaten wrote. I’m getting teary just thinking about it. The show is at 4 p.m. on Sunday Nov. 9, and Sunday Nov. 16.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

“Gremlins 3” is coming! It’s true! Please, please let it be good. I could use the distraction of a cuddly Mogwai and its evil offspring.

Republicans are licking their wounds after Tuesday’s ballot box defeats. But there is a lesson to be learned here. The various elections in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia, viewed collectively, reminded us yet again of a perennial political truth: Americans still care first and foremost about their wallets.

Culture war-type issues often generate the most salacious headlines — and many of the Trump administration’s fights on these fronts, such as immigration enforcement and higher education reform, are just and necessary. Still, the economy remains the top political issue. Unless Republicans get more serious about advancing an actionable economic agenda to provide real relief to middle- and working-class Americans, the party risks losing even more ground in next year’s midterm elections.

When voters went to the polls in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia, they were often asking the simplest, most urgent questions: Can I pay the rent? Can I fill up my truck at the pump? Can I fill the fridge? Will my job still exist next year? Do I have reliable healthcare for my children? Across too many districts and communities, those answers remain uneasy. Inflation, while well down from its Biden-era peak, is still stubbornly higher than the Fed’s 2% target. Purchasing power is still eroded, and cost-of-living anxieties persist for far too many.

For Republicans, this is both a warning and an opportunity. Despite a concerted effort in recent years to rebrand as the party of the common man, including but hardly limited to Teamsters President Sean O’Brien getting a coveted speaking slot at last year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, too many voters still associate the GOP with tax cuts for the donor class and a general indifference toward the tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. That’s the blunt truth. The perception of corruption in some of the highest corridors of power in Washington, especially when it comes to the influence wielded by the über-wealthy emirate of Qatar, doesn’t exactly assuage voters’ concerns.

If the GOP wants to regain the public’s trust, it must present a compelling vision of what a sound conservative economic stewardship entails in the 21st century.

That redefinition begins with a renewed focus on work, dignity and resilience. The Republican Party must build an economic narrative that centers on taming inflation, boosting wages, rebuilding America’s industrial base and greater healthcare security for the paycheck-to-paycheck class. Conservatives should pursue a pragmatic economic nationalism — one that ties together trade policy, manufacturing, energy production, workforce development and family formation. All proposed economic policies must be explained in concrete, local terms. The relevant questions each and every time should be: How does this policy tangibly benefit the average American, and how can the policy be messaged so that the benefit is clearly understood?

The voters Republicans need to reach are not tuning in to wonky policy seminars. They want results: lower energy bills, affordable groceries, job security and an economy that rewards hard work. The GOP must speak directly to these priorities with honesty and humility.

If economic anxiety persists through next fall’s midterms, voters will punish whichever party appears more indifferent to their struggles. The Trump administration and Republicans across the country need to get to work fast. That means more Trump-signed executive orders, within the confines of the law, that can provide real economic relief and security to the working men and women of America. And it certainly means a concerted congressional attempt to bolster the economic prospects of the middle and working classes, perhaps through the Senate’s annual budget reconciliation process.

Inflation must finally be tamed — including the Fed raising interest rates, contra Trump’s general easy-money instincts, if need truly be. Private health savings account access must be expanded and the ease of acquiring private healthcare must finally be divorced from the particular circumstances of one’s employment. More jobs and supply chains must be reshored. Concerns about child care affordability and parental leave availability must be addressed. And even more of our bountiful domestic energy must be extracted. These are just some of the various policies that voters might reward at the ballot box next fall.

Our searing cultural battles will continue — and they matter, greatly in fact. But when a family can’t afford its groceries or gas, such debates tend to fade into the background. Republicans must rebuild trust with voters on the most fundamental issue in American politics: the promise of economic opportunity and security.

It’s always dangerous to over-extrapolate and glean clear national lessons from a few local elections. But all three of the biggest recent races — for New York City mayor and for New Jersey and Virginia governors — had final winning margins for Democrats greater than most polling suggested. That seems like a clear enough rebuke. Accordingly, the Trump administration and Republicans across the country must deliver real economic results on the real economic issues facing the American people. If they don’t present a compelling economic vision and execute that vision capably and efficiently, there likely will be even greater electoral damage next fall.

That could all but doom the remainder of the Trump presidency. And what a disappointment that would be.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer

The overriding questions remains, though. How long will O’Neill have to improve Celtic?

His return, alongside assistant Shaun Maloney, has brought back a feelgood factor but that was only going to last so long.

The laughs had over O’Neill’s matchday fit have faded, while Celtic’s deep-rooted problems have returned in stark fashion.

Captain Callum McGregor was at the heart of the happiness on Sunday, scoring in the extra-time win, but he was quick to assure no-one had got carried away.

“Nothing’s been solved after a really good game at the weekend,” the midfielder said after defeat in Denmark. “We know that we don’t get too up or too down.

“We come away here against a really good side, a good club, who do a lot of good things and they know what they are.

“There’s a lot of growth still left in our team as well. We know where we are and we know where we want to get to.”

It appears Celtic are far from the latter, and it’s lined up to be an almighty task to get them there, for whoever is charged with taking them there.

On a sobering night, it’s not the interim manager who will take the heat. It’s not even the players being taught by him.

It’s the board who have managed to quieten the clamour aimed in their direction for a few days with the reinstatement of O’Neill who will be feeling the pressure once more.

British actor Pauline Collins, who earned an Oscar nomination for her turn as the stuck-in-a-rut housewife of “Shirley Valentine,” has died. She was 85.

Collins’ family said in a statement Thursday that the actor died peacefully this week at her care home in north London after living with Parkinson’s disease for several years. In the statement, her family said Collins “was so many things to so many people, playing a variety of roles in her life.”

“A bright, sparky, witty presence on stage and screen,” the family described the versatile actor, whose career began in the 1960s.

Collins was well into her 40s when she starred in “Shirley Valentine,” a witty but disgruntled homemaker who accepts a girlfriend’s offer to travel to Greece to bring much-needed spice back to her life. “Sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea and sex for supper,” Shirley proudly declares in the 1989 film, directed by Lewis Gilbert.

For Collins, “Shirley Valentine” was more than just an ode to womanhood, self-love and self-discovery. It was also a chance to challenge the conventions of aging in entertainment, including by shooting a nude scene for the film.

“My only sorrow was that I wasn’t younger and thinner,” a 49-year-old Collins told The Times in 1989. “But if I were Jamie Lee Curtis, I wouldn’t have been right for the part.”

“Shirley Valentine,” which also starred Tom Conti as her on-screen Greek lover and Alison Steadman as her friend, led Collins to receive her sole Academy Award nomination, a nod in the leading actress category. The film also received an original song Oscar nomination for Patti Austin’s “The Girl Who Used to Be Me,” written by Marvin Hamlisch and husband-wife lyricist duo Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

Two years before the film’s premiere, Collins originated the role of Shirley Valentine in London for Willy Russell’s one-woman play of the same name. That led to her Broadway debut in 1989 and a Tony Award for best actress in a play the same year. She also won accolades for the play at the Laurence Olivier Awards and a BAFTA for her work in the film adaptation.

Beyond “Shirley Valentine,” Collins was also known for appearing in dozens of TV series including “Upstairs, Downstairs,” “Forever Green,” “The Ambassador,” “Mount Pleasant” and “Dickensian.” She also appeared in films including “City of Joy,” “Paradise Road” and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” counting Patrick Swayze, Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins among her co-stars.

Throughout her decades-long screen career, Collins also continued her work in theater, including productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “Woman in Mind” and “Cinderella.”

Collins, born in 1940, was raised near Liverpool by a schoolteacher mother and a headmaster father. She told The Times in 1989 that her dad “was one of the early feminists.”

“He had three daughters and always offered us everything that a boy would have — education and stuff,” she said. “[My parents] had a completely shared domestic situation, they both worked, cooked, did the washing. He even washed nappies [diapers] by hand.”

Her marriage to “Upstairs, Downstairs” co-star John Alderton — they married in 1969 — was not too different. “He just spent five months holding down the fort at home while I was on Broadway,” she recalled.

Alderton, 84, said Thursday that Collins’ “greatest performance was as my wife and mother to our beautiful children.”

While Collins was known for her scenic and romantic on-screen vacation to the Greek coast, she preferred a different kind of destination off-screen: St. Petersburg, Fla.

“It’s amazing, people think when you’re on your own you’re going off to have wonderful sexual adventures. Here I am, on my own, going off to Disney World,” she told The Times. “What does that say about me?”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

When Xavier “X” Atencio was plucked by Walt Disney in 1965 to be one of his early theme park designers, he was slotted on a number of projects that placed him out of his comfort zone.

Atencio, for instance, never would have envisioned himself a songwriter.

One of Atencio’s first major projects with Walt Disney Imagineering — WED Enterprises (for Walter Elias Disney), as it was known at the time — was Pirates of the Caribbean. In the mid-’60s when Atencio joined the Pirates team, the attraction was well underway, with the likes of fellow animators-turned-theme park designers Marc Davis and Claude Coats crafting many of its exaggerated characters and enveloping environments. Atencio’s job? Make it all make sense by giving it a cohesive story. While Atencio had once dreamed of being a journalist, his work as an animator had led him astray of a writer’s path.

Atencio would not only figure it out but end up as the draftman of one of Disneyland’s most recognizable songs, “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me).” In the process, he was key in creating the template for the modern theme park dark ride, a term often applied to slow-moving indoor attractions. Such career twists and turns are detailed in a new book about Atencio, who died in 2017. “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of an Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” (Disney Editions), written by three of his family members, follows Atencio’s unexpected trajectory, starting from his roots in animation (his resume includes “Fantasia,” the Oscar-winning short “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” and even stop-motion work in “Mary Poppins”).

For Pirates of the Caribbean, Atencio is said to have received little direction from Disney, only that the park’s patriarch was unhappy with previous stabs at a narration and dialogue, finding them leaning a bit stodgy. So he knew, essentially, what not to do. Atencio, according to the book, immersed himself in films like Disney’s own “Treasure Island” and pop-cultural interpretations of pirates, striving for something that felt borderline caricature rather than ripped from the history books.

Xavier “X” Atencio got his start in animation. Here, he is seen drawing dinosaurs for a sequence in “Fantasia.”

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

Indeed, Atencio’s words — some of those quoted in the book, such as “Avast there! Ye come seeking adventure and salty old pirates, aye?” — have become shorthand for how to speak like a pirate. The first scene written for the attraction was the mid-point auction sequence, a section of the ride that was changed in 2017 due to its outdated cultural implications. In the original, a proud redheaded pirate is the lead prisoner in a bridal auction, but today the “wench” has graduated to pirate status of her own and is helping to auction off stolen goods.

At first, Atencio thought he had over-written the scene, noticing that dialogue overlapped with one another. In a now-famous theme park moment, and one retold in the book, Atencio apologized to Disney, who shrugged off Atencio’s insecurity.

“Hey, X, when you go to a cocktail party, you pick up a little conversation here, another conversation there,” Disney told the animator. “Each time people will go through, they’ll find something new.”

This was the green light that Atencio, Davis and Coats needed to continue developing their attraction as one that would be a tableau of scenes rather than a strict plot.

Tying it all together, Atencio thought, should be a song. Not a songwriter himself, of course, Atencio sketched out a few lyrics and a simple melody. As the authors write, he turned to the thesaurus and made lists of traditional “pirating” words. He presented it to Disney and, to Atencio’s surprise, the company founder promptly gave him the sign off.

“Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me),” Atencio would relay, was a challenge as the ride doesn’t have a typical beginning and ending, meaning the tune needed to work with whatever pirate vignette we were sailing by. Ultimately, the song, with music by George Bruns, underlines the ride’s humorous feel, allowing the looting, the pillaging and the chasing of women, another scene that has been altered over the years, to be delivered with a playful bent.

The song “altered the trajectory” of Atencio’s career. While Atencio was not considered a musical person — “No, not at all,” says his daughter Tori Atencio McCullough, one of the book’s co-authors — the biography reveals how music became a signature aspect of his work. The short “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom,” for instance, is a humorous tale about the discovery of music. And elsewhere in Atencio’s career he worked on the band-focused opening animations for “Mickey Mouse Club.”

“That one has a pretty cool kind of modern instrument medley in the middle,” Kelsey McCullough, Atencio’s granddaughter and another one of the book’s authors, says of “Mickey Mouse Club.” “It was interesting, because when we lined everything up, it was like, ‘Of course he felt like the ride needed a song.’ Everything he had been doing up to that point had a song in it. Once we looked it at from that perspective, it was sort of unsurprising to us. He was doing a lot around music.”

Xavier “X” Atencio contributed concepts to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, including its famous one-eyed cat.

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

Atencio would go on to write lyrics for the Country Bear Jamboree and the Haunted Mansion. While the Haunted Mansion vacillates between spooky and lighthearted imagery, it’s Atencio’s “Grim Grinning Ghosts” that telegraphs the ride’s tone and makes it clear it’s a celebratory attraction, one in which many of those in the afterlife prefer to live it up rather than haunt.

Despite his newfound music career, Atencio never gave up drawing and contributing concepts to Disney theme park attractions. Two of my favorites are captured in the book — his abstract flights through molecular lights for the defunct Adventure Thru Inner Space and his one-eyed black cat for the Haunted Mansion. The latter has become a fabled Mansion character over the years. Atencio’s fiendish feline would have followed guests throughout the ride, a creature said to despise living humans and with predatory, possessive instincts.

In Atencio’s concept art, the cat featured elongated, vampire-like fangs and a piercing red eye. In a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” it had just one eyeball, which sat in its socket with all the subtlety of a fire alarm. Discarded eventually — a raven essentially fills a similar role — the cat today has been resurrected for the Mansion, most notably in a revised attic scene where the kitty is spotted near a mournful bride.

Xavier “X” Atencio retired from Disney in 1984 after four-plus decades with the company. He drew his own retirement announcement.

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

Co-author Bobbie Lucas, a relative of Atencio’s colloquially referred to by the family as his “grandchild-in-law,” was asked what ties all of Atencio’s work together.

“No matter the different style or no matter the era, there’s such a sense of life and humanity,” Lucas says. “There’s a sense of play.”

Play is a fitting way to describe Atencio’s contributions to two of Disneyland’s most beloved attractions, where pirates and ghosts are captured at their most frivolous and jovial.

“I like that,” Lucas adds. “I like someone who will put their heart on their sleeve and show you that in their art.”

As one century gives way to another, a child is born in Mumbai. “The millennium’s gift,” Chandni Contractor, is a source of joy to her parents. When Chandni turns 4 and reveals herself to be a musical prodigy, she becomes a source of wonder. At the age of 13, she dazzles audiences across India with her piano and sitar performances. Five years later, she enthralls Majnoo, the playboy son of billionaire parents, and the pair go on to have a spectacular wedding. But their marriage sours and her in-laws turn overbearing. Eventually Chandni snaps and wreaks havoc by playing a different kind of music, one that has the power to destroy livelihoods and lives.

“The Musician of Kahani” is one of five stories in a new collection by Salman Rushdie. “The Eleventh Hour” sees the acclaimed Indian-born British American author exploring the weighty matters of life and death. That he should choose to craft tales around these twin themes is hardly surprising. In 2022, he was nearly killed in a frenzied attack at an event in upstate New York. Two years later, in his up-close-and-personal memoir, “Knife,” he recounted his ordeal and told how he had come to embrace what he called “my second-chance life.” Rushdie’s brush with death and new lease on life renders his latest stories — his first fiction since the attack — all the more potent and poignant.

The collection’s opener, “In the South,” gets underway both innocently and ominously: “The day Junior fell down began like any other day.” What follows is a chronicle of a death foretold. Senior and Junior are two octogenarian neighbors in Chennai, India, who spend their time together arguing. The former has had a rich and fulfilling life, but as so many of his friends and family have died — or “gone to their fiery rest” — he now longs for death. The latter, afflicted by “the incurable disease of mediocrity,” has led a disappointing life yet still possesses a lust for it.

When a tsunami hits the city, it kills Junior. At first Senior is angry (“Why not me?” he rages), but his dominant emotion turns to sadness after he realizes he has lost a man who was his “shadow.” Or so he believes. For Junior’s passing is not the end. Senior continues to see, and quarrel with, his fallen friend. As Rushdie puts it: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”

One of the finest stories here, “Late,” involves another apparition. English academic S. M. Arthur wakes up in his university college (an unnamed King’s College, Cambridge) and discovers he is dead. Feeling like “a broken entity trapped in a kind of prison,” he finds peace by communing with the one person who can see him, Indian student and fellow lonely soul, Rosa.

The pair form a bond in the empty college over the Christmas holidays. Despite their affinity, Arthur harbors secrets. When Rosa is tasked with sorting his papers, she comes across a mysteriously locked box file, the contents of which he refuses to disclose. Then Arthur takes stock of his situation and decides he can’t rest until Rosa helps him get even with a past persecutor. What is in the box and why the need for revenge?

Weighing in at over 70 pages, “Late” constitutes more a novella than a story, as does “The Musician of Kahani” and the equally substantial “Oklahoma.” This last offering about writers, writing and elaborate vanishing acts is artfully structured and formally daring, made up of multiple layers, diverse references, literary ventriloquy and slick twists and turns. In a lesser writer’s hands, this novella might have been too clever for its own good; however, Rushdie, a seasoned pro, achieves the perfect balance.

He hasn’t done so in recent years in his long-form fiction. “The Golden House” (2017), “Quichotte” (2019) and his last novel, “Victory City” (2023), were blighted in places by digressive riffs and monologues, bottomless subplots, “humorous” character names (Evel Cent, Thimma the Almost as Huge) and excessive magic-realist high jinks comprising talking revolvers, ferocious mastodons, an Italian-speaking cricket and a demigoddess who grows a city from seeds and lives for 247 years. Sometimes this hocus-pocus worked wonders; at other times it felt like cheap tricks.

Rushdie has far more success in “The Eleventh Hour.” His narratives are more streamlined. His flights of fancy— malevolent music, undead scholars, imaginary brothers, a cult led by a guru with 93 Ferraris in an “experimental township” called the Moon — are more controlled and add subtle strokes of color. Some groan-inducing puns aside, Rushdie’s comic touches are deftly managed, appearing as sharp satirical swipes or witty repartee. “You look like a man who is only waiting to die,” says Junior to Senior, who in turn retorts: “That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.”

Rushdie exhibits further playfulness by scattering clues and inviting his reader to trace connections. Arthur is in part a crafty composite of the writer E.M. Forster and the computer scientist Alan Turing — all three being, like their creator, King’s College alumni. “And at midnight, the approved hour for miraculous births in our part of the world, a baby was born to a Breach Candy family,” Rushdie writes of Chandni, with a knowing nod to the key time, place and circumstances in his 1981 masterpiece “Midnight’s Children.”

The book’s last and shortest entry, the fabular “The Old Man in the Piazza,” makes for a somewhat slight coda. Otherwise, this is an inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer and critic from Edinburgh, Scotland, who writes for the Economist, the Washington Post and other publications.

Somehow in Los Angeles, everything comes back to traffic.

While making their works featured in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, artists Patrick Martinez, Freddy Villalobos and Gabriela Ruiz set out to capture the essence of the city’s crammed streets through different lenses.

For over a decade, the Hammer has curated its Made in L.A. series to feature artists who grapple with the realities of living and making art here. It’s an art show that simultaneously pays homage to legacy L.A. artists like Alonzo Davis and Judy Baca, and gives a platform to newer faces such as Lauren Halsey and Jackie Amezquita.

This year’s show, which opened last month, features 28 artists. As part of that cohort, Martinez, Villalobos and Ruiz bring their lived experiences as Latinos from L.A. to the West Side art institution, drawing inspiration from the landscapes of their upbringing.

While creating their displayed works, Martinez took note of the many neon signs hanging in stores’ windows, leading him to make “Hold the Ice,” an anti-ICE sign, and incorporate bright pink lights into his outdoor cinder block mural, “Battle of the City on Fire.” With flashing lights and a shuttered gate tacked onto a painted wooden panel, Ruiz drew on her experiences exploring the city at night and the over-surveillance of select neighborhoods in the interactive piece, “Collective Scream.” Villalobos filmed Figueroa Street from a driver’s perspective, observing the street’s nighttime activity and tracing the energy that surrounds the place where soul singer Sam Cooke was shot.

This year, Made in L.A. doesn’t belong to a specific theme or a title — but as always, the selected art remains interconnected. These three artists sat down with De Los to discuss how their L.A. upbringing has influenced their artistic practice and how their exhibited works are in conversation. Made in L.A. will be on view until March 1, 2026.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

All three of you seem to put a spotlight on various elements of L.A.’s public spaces. How is your art affected by your surroundings?

Ruiz: I really got to explore L.A. as a whole, through partying and going out at night. I prefer seeing this city at night, because there isn’t so much traffic. That’s how I started my art practice. I would perform in queer nightlife spaces and throw parties in cheap warehouses. With my commute from the Valley, I would notice so much. I wouldn’t speed through the freeway. I’d instead take different routes, so I’d learn to navigate the whole city without a GPS and see things differently.

Martinez: That’s also how I started seeing neons. I had a studio in 2006 in downtown, off 6th and Alameda. I would wait for traffic to fade because I was staying in Montebello at the time. I would drive down Whittier Boulevard at night. And you see all the neon signs that have a super saturated color and glow bright. I thought about its messaging. None of the businesses were open that late. They were just letting people know they were there.

Ruiz: Specifically in this piece [“Collective Scream”], there’s a blinking street lamp. It reminds me of when I would leave raves and would randomly see this flickering light. It’s this hypnotizing thing that I would observe and take note of whenever I was on the same route. There’s also a moving gate, [in my piece,] that resembles the ones you see when you’re driving late at night and everything’s gated up.

Villalobos: You do experience a lot of L.A. from your car. It’s a cliche. But f— it. It’s true. When I moved out of L.A., I felt a little odd. I missed the bubble of my car. You can have what seems to be a private moment in your car in a city that’s packed with traffic and so many people. It made me think about what that means, what kind of routes people are taking and how we cultivate community.

Patrick Martinez’s “Battle of the City on Fire,” made in 2025, was inspired by the work of the muralist collective, named the East Los Streetscapers.

(Sarah M Golonka / smg photography)

It’s interesting that you all found inspiration in the biggest complaints about L.A. Maybe there’s something to think about when it comes to the way those born here think of car culture and traffic.

Martinez: I see its effects even with the landscapes I make. I’ll work from left to right, and that’s how we all look at the world when we drive. I always think about Michael Mann movies when I’m making landscapes, especially at night. He has all those moments of quiet time of being in the car and just focusing on what’s going on.

Beyond surveying the streets, your works touch on elements of the past. There’s a common notion that L.A. tends to disregard its past, like when legacy restaurants shut down or when architectural feats get demolished. Does this idea play any role in your work?

Martinez: The idea of L.A. being ashamed of its past pushed me to work with cinder blocks [in “Battle of the City on Fire”]. One of the main reasons was to bring attention to the East Los Streetscapers, the muralists who painted in East L.A. [in the 1960s and ‘70s as a part of the Chicano Mural Movement]. There was this one mural in Boyle Heights that was painted at a Shell gas station. It was later knocked down and in the demolition pictures, the way the cinder blocks were on the floor looked like a sculptural painting. It prompted me to use cinder blocks as a form of sculpture and think about what kind of modern-day ruins we pass by.

Villalobos: Speaking about L.A. as a whole feels almost too grand for me. But if I think about my specific neighborhood, in South Central, what comes to my mind is Black Radical Tradition. It’s where people are able to make something out of what other people might perceive as nothing. There’s always something that’s being created and mixed and mashed together to make something that, to me, is beautiful. It’s maybe not as beautiful to other people, but it’s still a new and creative way to see things and understand what comes before us.

Ruiz: Seeing my parents, who migrated to this country, come from nothing and start from scratch ties into that idea too. Seeing what they’ve been able to attain, and understanding how immigrants can start up businesses and restaurants here, speaks so much to what L.A. is really about. It’s about providing an opportunity that everybody has.

So it’s less about disregarding the past and more about making something out of nothing?

Martinez: It ties back to necessity, for me. Across this city, people come together by doing what they need to do to pay rent. It’s a crazy amount of money to be here. People need to regularly adjust what they do to survive. Recently, I’ve been seeing that more rapidly. There are more food vendors and scrolling LED signs, advertising different things. Once you understand how expensive this backdrop can be, that stuff sits with me.

Freddy Villalobos’ “waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of aventure,” is an immersive work in which viewers can feel loud vibrations pass as they, figuratively, travel down Figueroa Street.

(Sarah M Golonka / smg photography)

We’ve talked a lot about how the past affects L.A. and the role it plays in your art. Does a future L.A. ever cross your mind?

Villalobos: I feel very self-conscious about what I’m gonna say. But as much as I love L.A. and as much as it helped me become who I am, I wouldn’t be too mad with it falling apart. A lot of people from my neighborhood have already been moving to Lancaster, Palmdale and the Inland Empire. When I go to the IE, it feels a little like L.A. and I’m not necessarily mad at that.

Ruiz: It’s really difficult to see what the future holds for anybody. Even with art, what’s going to happen? I don’t know. It’s really challenging to see a future when there’s a constant cycle of bad news about censorship and lack of funding.

Martinez: It’s murky. It’s clouded. This whole year has been so heavy, and everyone talking about it adds to it, right? We’re facing economic despair, and it’s all kind of heavy. Who knows what the future will hold? But there are definitely moves being made by the ruling class to make it into something.

You may not know Eliot Mack’s name, but if a small robot has ever crept around your kitchen, you know his work.

Before he turned his MIT-trained mind to filmmaking, Mack helped lead a small team of engineers trying to solve a deeply relatable problem: how to avoid vacuuming. Whether it was figuring out how to get around furniture legs or unclog the brushes after a run-in with long hair, Mack designed everything onscreen first with software, troubleshooting virtually and getting 80% of the way there before a single part was ever manufactured.

The result was the Roomba.

When Mack pivoted to filmmaking in the early 2000s, he was struck by how chaotic Hollywood’s process felt. “You pitch the script, get the green light and you’re flying into production,” he says, sounding both amused and baffled. “There’s no CAD template, no centralized database. I was like, how do movies even get made?”

That question sent Mack down a new path, trading dust bunnies for the creative bottlenecks that slow Hollywood down.

In 2004 he founded Lightcraft Technology, a startup developing what would later be known as virtual production tools, born out of his belief that if you could design a robot in software, you should be able to design a shot the same way. The company’s early system, Previzion, sold for $180,000 and was used on sci-fi and fantasy shows like “V” and “Once Upon a Time.” But Jetset, its latest AI-assisted tool set, runs on an iPhone and offers a free tier, with pro features topping out at just $80 a month. It lets filmmakers scan a location, drop it into virtual space and block out scenes with camera moves, lighting and characters. They can preview shots, overlay elements and organize footage for editing — all from a phone. No soundstage, no big crew, no gatekeepers. Lightcraft’s pitch: “a movie studio in your pocket.”

A series on how the AI revolution is reshaping the creative foundations of Hollywood — from storytelling and performance to production, labor and power.

The goal, Mack says, is to put more power in the hands of the people making the work. “One of the big problems is how siloed Hollywood is,” he says. “We talked to an Oscar-winning editor who said, ‘I’m never going to get to make my movie’ — he was pigeonholed as just an editor. Same with an animator we know who has two Oscars.”

Eliot Mack, CEO of Lightcraft, an AI-powered virtual-production startup, wants to give creators the power and freedom to bring their ideas to life.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

To Mack, the revolution of Jetset recalls the scrappy, guerrilla spirit of Roger Corman’s low-budget productions, which launched the early careers of directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. For generations of creatives stuck waiting on permission or funding, he sees this moment as a reset button.

“The things you got good at — writing, directing, acting, creating, storytelling — they’re still crazy useful,” he says. “What’s changing is the amount of schlepping you have to do before you get to do the fun stuff. Your 20s are a gift. You want to be creating at the absolute speed of sound. We’re trying to get to a place where you don’t have to ask anyone. You can just make the thing.”

AI is reshaping nearly every part of the filmmaking pipeline. Storyboards can now be generated from a script draft. Lighting and camera angles can be tested before anyone touches a piece of gear. Rough cuts, placeholder VFX, even digital costume mock-ups can all be created before the first shot is filmed. What once took a full crew, a soundstage and a six-figure budget can now happen in minutes, sometimes at the hands of a single person with a laptop.

This wave of automation is arriving just as Hollywood is gripped by existential anxiety. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes brought the industry to a standstill and put AI at the center of a fight over its future. Since then, production has slowed, crew sizes have shrunk and the streaming boom has given way to consolidation and cost-cutting.

According to FilmLA, on-location filming in Greater Los Angeles dropped 22.4% in early 2025 compared with the year before. For many of the crew members and craftspeople still competing for those jobs, AI doesn’t feel like an innovation. It feels like a new way to justify doing more with less, only to end up with work that’s less original or creative.

“AI scrapes everything we artists have made off the internet and creates a completely static, banal world that can never imagine anything that hasn’t happened before,” documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis warned during a directors panel at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, held in the midst of the strikes. “That’s the real weakness of the AI dream — it’s stuck with the ghosts. And I think we’ll get fed up with that.”

How you feel about these changes often depends on where you sit and how far along you are in your career. For people just starting out, AI can offer a way to experiment, move faster and bypass the usual barriers to entry. For veterans behind the scenes, it often feels like a threat to the expertise they’ve spent decades honing.

Past technological shifts — the arrival of sound, the rise of digital cameras, the advancement of CGI — changed how movies were made, but not necessarily who made them. Each wave brought new roles: boom operators and dialogue coaches, color consultants and digital compositors. Innovation usually meant more jobs, not fewer.

But AI doesn’t just change the tools. It threatens to erase the people who once used the old ones.

Diego Mariscal has seen first hand as AI has cut potential jobs for grips.

(Jennifer Rose Clasen)

Diego Mariscal, 43, a veteran dolly grip who has worked on “The Mandalorian” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” saw the writing on the wall during a recent shoot. A visual effects supervisor opened his laptop to show off a reel of high-end commercials and something was missing. “There were no blue screens — none,” Mariscal recalls. “That’s what we do. We put up blues as grips. You’d normally hire an extra 10 people and have an extra three days of pre-rigging, setting up all these blue screens. He was like, ‘We don’t need it anymore. I just use AI to clip it out.’”

Mariscal runs Crew Stories, a private Facebook group with nearly 100,000 members, where working crew members share job leads, trade tips and voice their growing fears. He tries to keep up with the steady drip of AI news. “I read about AI all day, every day,” he says. “At least 20 posts a day.”

His fear isn’t just about fewer jobs — it’s about what comes next. “I’ve been doing this since I was 19,” Mariscal says of his specialized dolly work, which involves setting up heavy equipment and guiding the camera smoothly through complex shots. “I can push a cart in a parking lot. I can push a lawnmower. What else can I do?”

Who wins, who loses and what does James Cameron think?

Before AI and digital doubles, Mike Marino learned the craft of transformation the human way: through hands-on work and a fascination that bordered on obsession.

Marino was 5 years old when he first saw “The Elephant Man” on HBO. Horrified yet transfixed, he became fixated on prosthetics and the emotional power they could carry. As a teenager in New York, he pored over issues of Fangoria, studied monsters and makeup effects and experimented with sculpting his own latex masks on his bedroom floor.

Prosthetics artist Mike Marino asks a big question related to generative AI: What role do the human creatives play?

(Sean Dougherty / For The Times)

Decades later, Marino, 48, has become one of Hollywood’s leading makeup artists, earning Oscar nominations for “Coming 2 America,” “The Batman” and last year’s dark comedy “A Different Man,” in which he helped transform Sebastian Stan into a disfigured actor.

His is the kind of tactile, handcrafted work that once seemed irreplaceable. But today AI tools are increasingly capable of achieving similar effects digitally: de-aging actors, altering faces, even generating entire performances. What used to take weeks of experimentation and hours in a makeup trailer can now be approximated with a few prompts and a trained model. To Marino, AI is more than a new set of tools. It’s a fundamental change in what it means to create.

“If AI is so good it can replace a human, then why have any human beings?” he says. “This is about taste. It’s about choice. I’m a human being. I’m an artist. I have my own ideas — mine. Just because you can make 10,000 spaceships in a movie, should you?”

Marino is no technophobe. His team regularly uses 3D scanning and printing. But he draws the line at outsourcing creative judgment to a machine. “I’m hoping there are artists who want to work with humans and not machines,” he says. “If we let AI just run amok with no taste, no choice, no morality behind it, then we’re gone.”

Not everyone sees AI’s rise in film production as a zero-sum game. Some technologists imagine a middle path. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and one of the world’s leading AI researchers, believes the future of filmmaking lies in a “human-machine partnership.”

AI, Rus argues, can take on time-consuming tasks like animating background extras, color correction or previsualizing effects, freeing up people to focus on what requires intuition and taste. “AI can help with the routine work,” she says. “But the human touch and emotional authenticity are essential.”

Few directors have spent more time grappling with the dangers and potential of artificial intelligence than James Cameron. Nearly 40 years before generative tools entered Hollywood’s workflow, he imagined a rogue AI triggering global apocalypse in 1984’s “The Terminator,” giving the world Skynet — now a cultural shorthand for the dark side of machine intelligence. Today, he continues to straddle that line, using AI behind the scenes on the upcoming “Avatar: Fire and Ash” to optimize visual effects and performance-capture, while keeping creative decisions in human hands. The latest sequel, due Dec. 19, promises to push the franchise’s spectacle and scale even further; a newly released trailer reveals volcanic eruptions, aerial battles and a new clan of Na’vi.

A scene from “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Director James Cameron differentiates between using machine-learning to reduce monotonous movie-making work and generative AI.

(Courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

“You can automate a lot of processes that right now tie up a lot of artists doing mundane tasks,” Cameron told The Times in 2023 at a Beyond Fest screening of his 1989 film “The Abyss.” “So if we could accelerate the postproduction pipeline, then we can make more movies. Then those artists will get to do more exciting things.”

For Cameron, the promise of AI lies in efficiency, not elimination. “I think in our particular industry, it’s not going to replace people; it’s going to free them to do other things,” he believes. “It’s going to accelerate the process and bring the price down, which would be good because, you know, some movies are a little more expensive than others. And a lot of that has to do with human energy.”

Cameron himself directed five films between 1984 and 1994 and only three in the three decades since, though each one has grown increasingly complex and ambitious.

That said, Cameron has never been one to chase shortcuts for their own sake. “I think you can make pre-viz and design easier, but I don’t know if it makes it better,” he says. “I mean, if easy is your thing. Easy has never been my thing.”

He draws a line between the machine-learning techniques his team has used since the first “Avatar” to help automate tedious tasks and the newer wave of generative AI models making headlines today.

“The big explosion has been around image-based generative models that use everything from every image that’s ever been created,” he says. “We’d never use any of them. The images we make are computer-created, but they’re not AI-created.”

In his view, nothing synthetic can replace the instincts of a flesh-and-blood artist. “We have human artists that do all the designs,” he says. “We don’t need AI. We’ve got meat-I. And I’m one of the meat-artists that come up with all that stuff. We don’t need a computer. Maybe other people need it. We don’t.”

Reshaping creativity — and creative labor

Rick Carter didn’t go looking for AI as a tool. He discovered it as a lifeline.

The two-time Oscar-winning production designer, who worked with Cameron on “Avatar” and whose credits include “Jurassic Park” and “Forrest Gump,” began experimenting with generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway during the pandemic, looking for a way to keep his creative instincts sharp while the industry was on pause. A longtime painter, he was drawn to the freedom the programs offered.

“I saw that there was an opportunity to create images where I didn’t have to go to anybody else for approval, which is the way I would paint,” Carter says by phone from Paris. “None of the gatekeeping would matter. I have a whole lot of stories on my own that I’ve tried to get into the world in various ways and suddenly there was a way to visualize them.”

Midjourney and Runway can create richly detailed images — and in Runway’s case, short video clips — from a text prompt or a combination of text and visuals. Trained on billions of images and audiovisual materials scraped from the internet, these systems learn to mimic style, lighting, composition and form, often with eerie precision. In a production pipeline, these tools can help concept artists visualize characters or sets, let directors generate shot ideas or give costume designers and makeup artists a fast way to test looks, long before physical production begins.

But as these tools gain traction in Hollywood, a deeper legal and creative dilemma is coming into focus: Who owns the work they produce? And what about the copyrighted material used to train them?

In June, Disney and Universal filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the company of generating unauthorized replicas of characters such as Spider-Man, Darth Vader and Shrek using AI models trained on copyrighted material: what the suit calls a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” It’s the most high-profile of several legal challenges now putting copyright law to the test in the age of generative AI.

“Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis, left, with production designer Rick Carter at an art installation of the movie’s famed bench. (Carter family)

(Carter family)

Working with generative models, Carter began crafting what he calls “riffs of consciousness,” embracing AI as a kind of collaborative partner, one he could play off of intuitively. The process reminded him of the loose, improvisational early stages of filmmaking, a space he knows well from decades of working with directors like Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg.

“I’ll just start with a visual or a word prompt and see how it iterates from there and what it triggers in my mind,” Carter says. “Then I incorporate that so it builds on its own in an almost free-associative way. But it’s still based upon my own intuitive, emotional, artistic, even spiritual needs at that moment.”

He describes the experience as a dialogue between two minds, one digital and one human: “One AI is artificial intelligence. The other AI is authentic intelligence — that’s us. We’ve earned it over this whole span of time on the planet.”

Sometimes, Carter says, the most evocative results come from mistakes. While sketching out a story about a hippie detective searching for a missing woman in the Himalayas, he accidentally typed “womb” into ChatGPT instead of “woman.” The AI ran with it, returning three pages of wild plot ideas involving gurus, seekers and a bizarre mystery set in motion by the disappearance.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I would never have taken it that far. The AI is so precocious. It is trying so much to please that it will literally make something out of the mistake you make.”

Carter hasn’t used generative AI on a film yet; most of his creations are shared only with friends. But he says the technology is already slipping into creative workflows in covert ways. “There are issues with copyrights with most of the studios so for now, it’s going to be mostly underground,” he says. “People will use it but they won’t acknowledge that they’re using it — they’ll have an illustrator do something over it, or take a photo so there’s no digital trail.”

Carter has lived through a major technological shift before. “I remember when we went from analog to digital, from ‘Jurassic Park’ on,” he says. “There were a lot of wonderful artists who could draw and paint in ways that were just fantastic but they couldn’t adapt. They didn’t want to — even the idea of it felt like the wrong way to make art. And, of course, most of them suffered because they didn’t make it from the Rolodex to the database in terms of people calling them up.”

He worries that some artists may approach the technology with a rigid sense of authorship. “Early on, I found that the less I used my own ego as a barometer for whether something was artistic, the more I leaned into the process of collaboratively making something bigger than the sum of its parts — and the bigger and better the movies became.”

Others, like storyboard artist Sam Tung, are bracing against the same wave with a quiet but unshakable defiance.

Tung, whose credits include “Twisters” and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey,” has spent the last two years tracking the rise of generative tools, not just their capabilities but their implications. As co-chair of the Animation Guild’s AI Committee, he has been on the front lines of conversations about how these technologies could reshape creative labor.

To artists like Tung, the rise of generative tools feels deeply personal. “If you are an illustrator or a writer or whatever, you had to give up other things to take time to develop those skills,” he says. “Nobody comes out of the womb being able to draw or write or act. Anybody who does that professionally spent years honing those skills.”

Tung has no interest in handing that over to a machine. “It’s not that I’m scared of it — I just don’t need it,” he says. “If I want to draw something or paint something, I’ll do it myself. That way it’s exactly what I want and I actually enjoy the process. When people tell me they responded to a drawing I did or a short film I made with friends, it feels great. But anything I’ve made with AI, I’ve quickly forgotten about. There’s basically nothing I get from putting it on social media, other than the ire of my peers.”

What unsettles him isn’t just the slickness of AI’s output but how that polish is being used to justify smaller crews and faster turnarounds. “If this is left unchecked, it’s very easy to imagine a worst-case scenario where team sizes and contract durations shrink,” Tung says. “A producer who barely understands how it works might say, ‘Don’t you have AI to do 70% of this? Why do you need a whole week to turn around a sequence? Just press the button that says: MAKE MOVIE.’ ”

At 73, Carter isn’t chasing jobs. His legacy is secure. “If they don’t hire me again, that’s OK,” he says. “I’m not in that game anymore.” He grew up in Hollywood — his father was Jack Lemmon’s longtime publicist and producing partner — and has spent his life watching the industry evolve. Now, he’s witnessing a reckoning unlike any he, or anyone else, has ever imagined.

“I do have concerns about who is developing AI and what their values are,” he says. “What they use all this for is not necessarily something I would approve of — politically, socially, emotionally. But I don’t think I’m in a position to approve or not.”

Earlier this year, the Palisades fire destroyed Carter’s home, taking with it years of paintings and personal artwork. AI, he says, has given him a way to keep creating through the upheaval. “It saved me through the pandemic, and now it’s saving me through the fire,” he says, as if daring the universe to test him again. “It’s like, go ahead, throw something else at me.”

‘Prompt and pray?’ Not so fast

Many in the industry may still be dipping a toe into the waters of AI. Verena Puhm dove in.

The Austrian-born filmmaker studied acting and directing in Munich and Salzburg before moving to Los Angeles, where she built a globe-spanning career producing, writing and developing content for international networks and streamers. Her credits range from CNN’s docuseries “History of the Sitcom” to the German reboot of the cult anthology “Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction” and a naval documentary available on Tubi. More recently, she has channeled that same creative range into a deepening exploration of generative tools.

Puhm first began dabbling with AI while using Midjourney to design a pitch deck, but it wasn’t until she entered a timed generative AI filmmaking challenge at the 2024 AI on the Lot conference — informally dubbed a “gen battle” — that the creative potential of the medium hit her.

“In two hours, I made a little mock commercial,” she remembers, proudly. “It was actually pretty well received and fun. And I was like, Oh, wow, I did this in two hours. What could I do in two days or two weeks?”

What started as experimentation soon became a second act. This summer, Puhm was named head of studio for Dream Lab LA, a new creative arm of Luma AI, which develops generative video tools for filmmakers and creators. There, she’s helping shape new storytelling formats and supporting emerging creators working at the intersection of cinema and technology. She may not be a household name, but in the world of experimental storytelling, she’s fast becoming a key figure.

Verena Puhm, a director, writer and producer, has used generative AI in a number of her projects, says it’s breaking down barriers to entry.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Some critics dismiss AI filmmaking as little more than “prompt and pray”: typing in a few words and hoping something usable comes out. Puhm bristles at the phrase.

“Anybody that says that tells me they’ve never tried it at all, because it is not that easy and simple,” she says. “You can buy a paintbrush at Home Depot for, what, $2? That doesn’t make you a painter. When smartphones first came out, there was a lot of content being made but that didn’t mean everyone was a filmmaker.”

What excites her most is how AI is breaking down the barriers that once kept ambitious ideas out of reach. Luma’s new Modify Video tool lets filmmakers tweak footage after it’s shot, changing wardrobe, aging a character, shifting the time of day, all without reshoots or traditional VFX. It can turn a garage into a spaceship, swap a cloudy sky for the aurora borealis or morph an actor into a six-eyed alien, no green screen required.

“It’s such a relief as an artist,” Puhm says. “If there’s a project I’ve been sitting on for six years because I didn’t have a $5 million budget — suddenly there’s no limit. I remember shopping projects around and being told by producers, ‘This scene has to go, that has to go,’ just to keep the budget low. Now everything is open.”

That sense of access resonates far beyond Los Angeles. At a panel during AI on the Lot, “Blue Beetle” director Ángel Manuel Soto reflected on how transformative AI might have been when he was first starting out. “I wish tools like this existed when I wanted to make movies in Puerto Rico, because nobody would lend me a camera,” he said. “Access to equipment is a privilege we sometimes take for granted. I see this helping kids like me from the projects tell stories without going bankrupt — or stealing, which I don’t condone.”

Puhm welcomes criticism of AI but only when it’s informed. “If you hate AI and you’ve actually tested the tools and educated yourself, I’ll be your biggest supporter,” she says. “But if you’re just speaking out of fear, with no understanding, then what are you even basing your opinion on?”

She understands why some filmmakers feel rattled, especially those who, like her, grew up dreaming of seeing their work on the big screen. “I still want to make features and TV series — that’s what I set out to do,” she says. “I hope movie theaters don’t go away. But if the same story I want to tell reaches millions of people on a phone and they’re excited about it, will I really care that it wasn’t in a theater?”

“I just feel like we have to adapt to the reality of things,” she continues. “That might sometimes be uncomfortable, but there is so much opportunity if you lean in. Right now any filmmaker can suddenly tell a story at a high production value that they could have never done before, and that is beautiful and empowering.”

For many, embracing AI boils down to a simple choice: adapt or get cut from the frame.

Hal Watmough, a BAFTA-winning British editor with two decades of experience, first began experimenting with AI out of a mix of curiosity and dread. “I was scared,” he admits. “This thing was coming into the industry and threatening our jobs and was going to make us obsolete.” But once he started playing with tools like Midjourney and Runway, he quickly saw how they could not only speed up the process but allow him to rethink what his career could be.

For an editor used to working only with what he was given, the ability to generate footage on the fly, cut with it immediately and experiment endlessly without waiting on a crew or a shoot was a revelation. “It was still pretty janky at that stage, but I could see the potential,” he says. “It was kind of intoxicating. I started to think, I’d like to start making things that I haven’t seen before.”

After honing his skills with various AI tools, Watmough created a wistful, vibrant five-minute animated short called “LATE,” about an aging artist passing his wisdom to a young office worker. Over two weeks, he generated 2,181 images using AI, then curated and refined them frame by frame to shape the story.

Earlier this year, he submitted “LATE” to what was billed as the world’s first AI animation contest, hosted by Curious Refuge, an online education hub for creative technologists — and, to his delight, he won. The prize included $10,000, a pitch meeting with production company Promise Studios and, as an absurd bonus, his face printed on a potato. But for Watmough, the real reward was the sense that he had found a new creative identity.

“There’s something to the fact that the winner of the first AI animation competition was an editor,” Watmough says. “With the advent of AI, yes, you could call yourself a filmmaker but essentially I’d say most people are editors. You’re curating, selecting, picking what you like — relying on your taste.”

Thanks to AI, he says he’s made more personal passion projects in the past year and a half than during his entire previous career. “I’ll be walking or running and ideas just come. Now I can go home that night and try them,” he says. “None of that would exist without AI. So either something exists within AI or it never exists at all. And all the happiness and fulfillment that comes with it for the creator doesn’t exist either.”

Watmough hasn’t entirely lost his fear of what AI might do to the creative workforce, even as he is energized by what it makes possible. “A lot of people I speak to in film and TV are worried about losing their jobs and I’m not saying the infrastructure roles won’t radically change,” he says. “But I don’t think AI is going to replace that many — if any — creative people.”

What it will do, he says, is raise the bar. “If anyone can create anything, then average work will basically become extinct or pointless. AI can churn out remakes until the cows come home. You’ll have to pioneer to exist.”

He likens the current moment to the birth of cinema more than a century ago — specifically the Lumière brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” the 1896 short that famously startled early audiences. In the silent one-minute film, a steam train rumbles toward the camera, growing larger. Some viewers reportedly leaped from their seats, convinced it was about to crash into them.

“People ran out of the theater screaming,” Watmough says. “Now we don’t even think about it. With AI, we’re at that stage again. We’re watching the steam train come into the station and people are either really excited or they’re running out of the theater in fear. That’s where we are, right at the start. And the potential is limitless.”

Then again, he adds with a dry laugh, “I’m an eternal optimist, so take what I say with a grain of salt.”