Jason Bailey

Many, like the sensationalistic 1973 documentary “Manson” or the 1971 fictionalization “Sweet Savior,” are mere exploitation (and are harder to track down these days), but most of the essentials are available to stream or download. Here are a few.

‘The Family’

By Ed Sanders

Published in 1971, when Manson was still on trial, “The Family” benefits not only from Ed Sanders’ meticulous investigative techniques but also from his proximity to the scene in question; as a counterculture figure himself (he was a poet, a member of the band the Fugs and columnist for The Los Angeles Free Press), he was able to tell this story from the inside out, much of it from time spent embedded with the Manson family. His own anti-authoritarian streak and resistance to dictated narrative gives his findings an extra edge.

‘Helter Skelter’

By Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry

If “The Family” is a dispatch from a Family insider, “Helter Skelter” is the work of the definitive outsider: Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor who put Manson and several followers away. Bugliosi’s emphasis is on the nuts and bolts of the murder case, from crime to investigation to punishment, with an emphasis on procedure rather than psychology. It became the best-selling true crime book in history and, alongside “In Cold Blood,” one of the most influential.

‘Helter Skelter’ (1976) and ‘Helter Skelter’ (2004)

Bugliosi and Gentry’s no-nonsense style carried over to the first TV miniseries adaptation of their book, which plays, in spots, like a ’70s cop show. But the director Tom Gries finds the telefilm’s pulse in the convincing performances (particularly that of Steve Railsback, genuinely frightening as Manson) and the eerie score by Billy Goldenberg. The 2004 version, directed by John Gray, is less a remake than an expansion, with its first half focusing on the history and complex dynamics of the Family, the second on the investigation and prosecution. The juxtaposition of halves is awkward, but Jeremy Davies makes a chilling Manson.

‘Aquarius’ (2015-2016)

If the ’76 “Helter Skelter,” feels in places like a lost episode of the Los Angeles cop classic “Dragnet,” this two-season NBC police procedural turns those conventions on their heads. David Duchovny stars as a homicide detective whose path crosses frequently with that of Manson (Gethin Anthony, who played Renly Baratheon on “Game of Thrones”), who was years away from the murders that made him a household name but was already a small-time criminal with a peculiar band of hippie followers.

‘Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson’

By Jeff Guinn

If earlier books and films presented Manson as the ultimate boogeyman — a dark, devilish shaman who single-handedly ended the 1960s with his black magic — Jeff Guinn’s 2013 tome attempts to demystify the monster. Deeming Manson “an opportunistic sociopath,” Guinn painstakingly charts Manson’s criminal education in reform schools and prisons, and how he accumulated the strands of religion, apocalyptic thought, brainwashing techniques and hippie ethos he used to attract and control his followers.

‘Charlie Says’ (2019)

Drawing from “The Family” and the 2001 book “The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten,” by Karlene Faith, the screenwriter Guinevere Turner (who also spent her own childhood in a cult) focuses this scripted feature on the women in Manson’s sway, creating a portrait of the man closer to Guinn’s than Bugliosi’s. She and the director, Mary Harron (“American Psycho”), key in on how he deployed humiliation, manipulation and misogyny, playing the murders as an extension of those strategies and drawing the line from his psychological violence to their physical savagery.

‘You Must Remember This: Charlie Manson’s Hollywood’ (2015)

The second season of this podcast from Karina Longworth frames the Manson narrative, as Tarantino later did, as a Hollywood story: A man with dreams of making it big strikes back against the city that rejected him. He certainly had the proximity to the entertainment industry for success, and Longworth paints on a wide, Altman-like canvas, tracking the music industry big shots and Hollywood also-rans who somehow found themselves in Manson’s sights.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/movies/charles-manson-family.html" id="c467820e-ac68-37eb-a2b7-9cc14728c944">The New York Times</a>.

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” is far from the first piece of popular culture since 1969 to draw inspiration from the Manson family murders. For 50 years, that story has offered up a seemingly irresistible mix of star power, sex, gore and sociology, spawning countless films, books and other ephemera.

The Manson Murders: What to Read, Watch and Listen To

Few animated films have charged onto the screen with the confidence of Disney’s 1994 smash “The Lion King.” Eschewing opening titles, a giant red sun rising over the Serengeti filled the screen, as the soundtrack blasted the majestic opening song, “The Circle of Life.” The anthem of birth and death gathered intensity as giraffes, elephants and zebras assembled to witness the presentation of the newborn lion, who was held aloft as the music swelled; the zebras stomped, the monkeys whooped, and the sun shone down upon the cub.

That opening sequence — so iconic that the teaser trailer for Jon Favreau’s new “Lion King” remake is, in effect, a shot-for-shot recreation — is a kickoff of such brashness and bravado, feverish anticipation and enthusiastic reception, that it’s easy to read as a metaphor for “The Lion King” itself, one of the most profitable and culturally inescapable films of the 1990s. It’s also easy to forget that at the time of its release a quarter-century ago, this was one of the riskiest ventures of Disney’s history, and it was met with some resistance. But “The Lion King” would not only change the way Disney did business, but also contribute to a shift in the industry itself.

Under the guidance of chief executive Michael Eisner and motion picture division head Jeffrey Katzenberg, the studio had bounced back from a period of borderline irrelevance in the 1970s and 1980s. The so-called Disney Renaissance began with 1989’s “The Little Mermaid” and continued with “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991 and “Aladdin” the following year, a series of critical and commercial successes that achieved three important goals: They reminded audiences of the power and beauty of the studio’s classic animation style; they integrated catchy, original songs with a deftness rarely seen outside Broadway theaters; and they drew in adult audiences, which had long treated Disney animation as a “for kids only” proposition (there weren’t many couples taking in “The Great Mouse Detective” or “The Fox and the Hound” on date night).

But for “The Lion King,” the studio was, mostly out of necessity, breaking from the traditions of its predecessors. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the stage composers whose songs had given those pictures such vivid life, were unavailable; Ashman had died during the production of “Aladdin,” and Menken was working on the studio’s 1995 release, “Pocahontas.” The directors responsible for those features were likewise committed, leaving those duties to a pair of first-timers, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff.

They weren’t the only gambles. This was the first Disney animated feature populated solely by animals; even “Bambi” featured a world that humans touched, and occasionally infringed upon. And unlike that film, the traumatic death at the center of this story would occur on-screen.

Chanciest of all (especially for a studio that has become, in the ensuing years, even more concerned with brand familiarity), this was the first Disney property not based on existing material — though it wasn’t hard to trace its inspirations. “It’s a combination Moses-Hamlet-King Arthur Meets Elton John in Africa,” producer Don Hahn told Premiere magazine (“half in jest,” according to the reporter, Ari Posner).

The picture had a difficult birth, first envisioned, by original director George Scribner, as a serious-minded, noble nonmusical titled “King of the Jungle.” The success of Disney’s Renaissance films turned it into a light, comic, pop-tinged musical, and the studio was willing to do whatever it took to make the music work without Ashman and Menken.

When Ashman fell ill during “Aladdin,” Broadway lyricist Tim Rice had stepped in, and he was drafted for “The Lion King.” He told Premiere, “They asked me who I wanted to work with, and I said, ‘Elton John would be great, but you won’t get him.’ But they did.” John’s involvement gave the picture a boost in credibility, a marketing hook, and (most profitably) a 10-times platinum soundtrack album.

When the time came to put the film into theaters, Disney took one more risk: a summer release. Its three previous hits had all come out during the year-end holidays, an ideal window for pictures intended as family outings. A summer release could be eaten alive by the adult and teen fare typical of that season. Summer 1994 promised Arnold Schwarzenegger in “True Lies,” Keanu Reeves in “Speed,” Harrison Ford in “Clear and Present Danger” and Tom Hanks in something called “Forrest Gump.”

So the studio’s unparalleled marketing machine went to work, with a monthslong ballyhoo campaign of breathless behind-the-scenes reports and all-access press events. The hype took. Reviews were positive, and box office was astonishing; its $42 million opening weekend more than doubled predictions. Within six weeks, it had eclipsed “Aladdin” to become the studio’s highest-grossing feature to date at the domestic box office, and it would replicate that feat worldwide in the fall. Back home, Disney decided to pull the film from theaters at the end of September, and rerelease it in late November, to bring in more bucks over the holidays. When it hit home video the following spring, it became the best-selling VHS tape in history.

Over the next quarter-century, “The Lion King” would be referenced by everyone from Chance the Rapper to Titus Andromedon on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Yet for all the enduring affection and nostalgia, it’s worth noting that the movie’s march toward cultural ubiquity was also dogged by controversy. (Conversations about problematic art didn’t begin with Twitter, you know.) Concerns over the considerable amount of violence and terror in the G-rated film raised alarms for parents and educators within days of its release; adults were genuinely asking whether it was safe to take their children to see the latest Disney movie. (Judging by the grosses, many seem to have decided it was.)

But as the summer wore on, more questions were raised. “The movie is full of stereotypes,” Harvard psychologist Carolyn Newberger said at the time. “The good-for-nothing hyenas are urban blacks; the archvillain’s gestures are effeminate, and he speaks in supposed gay clichés.” Writer Janet M. Walker, of the New York Amsterdam News, likewise criticized the “Sambo-ish hyenas,” and noted that while James Earl Jones and Madge Sinclair, two actors of color, voiced the king and queen of this African narrative, Simba was voiced by white actors Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick.

Jones shrugged off the question, explaining to Premiere: “There’s no reason to cast only Africans. I’m no more African than Jeremy Irons is, quite frankly.” The official word from the studio was even more blunt. “It’s a story. It’s fiction,” Disney spokeswoman Terry Press said. “These people need to get a life.”

An unsigned editorial in The Wall Street Journal cheered on Press (“A good idea, that”) while sneering, “For the ideologically devout, there are, it is clear, no summer vacations.” But the critics were not wrong. It is bizarre to hear Thomas and Broderick veer into “Def Comedy Jam”-style “white people talk like” tones to play an African prince. There is something discomforting about the way that such a character is pitted against the hyenas voiced by a decidedly othered Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin; the entire elephant graveyard sequence is barely less subtle than the “lost in the ghetto” scene in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” And while Irons’ evil Scar doesn’t have the clear camp overtones of, for example, Ursula in “The Little Mermaid,” he certainly feels of a piece with mainstream cinema’s troubling history of prescribing queer qualities to villainous characters.

Disney might have scoffed in 1994, but the studio had to know times were changing; it had just gone through a quiet public relations flap over anti-Arabic lyrics in “Aladdin,” which had been altered for that film’s home video release. In the years that followed, the company would rarely treat similar concerns with such dismissiveness. Disney films became more culturally sensitive and inclusive; within a few years, audiences would get their first Native American, Asian, African-American and Polynesian Disney princesses.

“The Lion King” itself was done no harm by the controversies, of course (nor subsequent whispers about another, unattributed source for its story, nor that popular rumor of subliminal messaging hidden within). It has had one of the healthiest afterlives of any Disney property, spawning not only that best-selling (and still-selling) soundtrack, but also tie-in merchandise, rereleases (for Imax in 2002 and 3D in 2011), and a Tony Award-winning, record-breaking Broadway stage adaptation. And then there is the new remake — in which Simba (and Nala and Scar) are all voiced by actors of color. Sometimes these things just take time.

Aside from its own products, “The Lion King” contributed to a new sense of commercial aspiration among major studios in the mid-1990s, as one of a handful of films (along with “Jurassic Park,” “Forrest Gump,” “Independence Day” and finally, “Titanic”) that earned the kind of money “Star Wars” had in the 1970s and “E.T.” in the 1980s. They proved that films like that weren’t occasional cultural outliers, but the kind of successes that could be delivered every year, if they were engineered carefully enough. And that may be why the new “Lion King” feels like such an empty exercise. It’s a painstaking, meticulous recreation, so carefully calculated to capitalize on familiarity and good will, that it cannot reproduce what made the original film special: a sense of freedom, spontaneity and, above all, risk.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/movies/disney-lion-king.html" id="f8acc306-ca80-3431-adef-0494e6e03c57">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

The Risky Coronation of 'The Lion King'

Even as details were finally released this past week about “Guava Island,” the secret project that Donald Glover debuted at Coachella in advance of its Amazon Prime premiere Saturday, there was some confusion as to what exactly it would be.

It’s not a “visual album,” in the style of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” or Janelle Monáe’s “Dirty Computer,” nor is it a feature-length jukebox narrative, à la “Purple Rain.” (It runs just shy of an hour.) But if we learned anything from Glover and director Hiro Murai’s previous collaborations on the FX series “Atlanta,” it’s that they don’t mind if their work is difficult to classify — if anything, they seem to revel in it.

Dubbed a “tropical thriller” by Amazon, “Guava Island” has the formal ingenuity and freewheeling tonality of “Atlanta,” but Glover and Murai are playing in a very different key here. If anything, it’s an expansion, musically and stylistically, of “This Is America,” the much-seen and much-discussed Murai-directed music video for Glover’s musical alter ego, Childish Gambino. (The song is remixed and restaged here.)

But the overall approach is lighter and poppier, appropriate to the tropical setting. Glover’s co-star, Rihanna, narrates the opening sequence, an animated history of the island framed as a folk legend and bedtime story, with a dash of fairy tale: she explains how young Deni (Glover) would come to her window every night to sing to her, as if she were some kind of Caribbean Rapunzel.

Now a struggling musician, Deni dreams of writing a song that will unite his people, though they seem a fairly close-knit community already — it’s the kind of place where everyone bids him a cheerful good morning as he hustles to the first of his many jobs, singing jingles on the radio. But it’s not all a fairy tale; the ruthless Red Cargo (Nonso Anozie, from “Game of Thrones”) rules the island with an iron fist, and machine gun-slinging men patrol his factory floors.

The plot of “Guava Island” is as thin as the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musicals of its distant heritage: Deni has planned a secret all-night music festival (not unlike, say, a secret musical film), but its attendees would consequently not work on Sunday, which is deeply unacceptable to Red Cargo. He offers Deni $10,000 to cancel the event, explaining, “I’m in charge of the people of this island. I have to do what’s best for everyone.” No prizes for guessing whether the show goes on, though the consequences of that decision carry more weight than usual.

Thus, it’s one of those stories where the musical numbers are “realistic” (kinda, sorta) because the protagonist is a musician, and Murai takes thankful pains to work the songs into the fabric of the narrative. Yet there’s not as much music as one might expect, considering the pedigrees of its stars. Aside from Deni’s radio songs, there are only a handful of musical numbers, most of them reworking existing Gambino tracks. (Rihanna, even more surprisingly, doesn’t sing at all.)

But there’s real juice to those sequences, which include a lovely, beachside rendering of “Summertime Magic” and a concert performance of “Saturday” that manages to stage the kind of joy that’s spontaneously captured in the best concert documentaries, like “Wattstax” and “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.” Onstage, Deni frames his event as “a celebration of life — I want everyone here to feel as free as you possibly can tonight,” and above all else, “Guava Island” is a paean to the pleasures of taking it easy. “We live in paradise,” Deni fumes, “but none of us have time or means to actually live here!”

Glover has pinpointed “Purple Rain” and “City of God” as the film’s key influences, but it’s also filled with echoes of the 1973 Jimmy Cliff vehicle “The Harder They Come,” another story of an island musician’s brushes with the criminal underworld. The casually gorgeous, sun-soaked photography apes that film’s grainy, 16-millimeter aesthetic (the cinematographer is Christian Sprenger, who also shoots “Atlanta”), and delivers a timeless, throwback quality; if not set in the past, the picture is rooted in a world that’s stuck there, where no one has a smartphone and everyone still listens to the radio.

The film’s primary shared attribute with “Atlanta” is its cockeyed, eccentric worldview, a matter-of-fact acceptance of everyday absurdity. (When Deni is kidnapped and taken to see Red Cargo, he’s sternly told to make a nametag.) That approach proves adaptable to the thriller elements, particularly considering Glover’s gift for reactive comedy — he can get a laugh with something as simple as a shifted gaze or even a dumbfounded deadpan.

Rihanna, rather depressingly, has little more to do than to be “the girl”: inspire Deni with her beauty, worry about his safety, and (the oldest and moldiest of tropes) try to decide when and how to tell him she’s pregnant. It’s a dispiriting waste of such a fiery, complicated performer. But she and Glover have movie-star chemistry and charisma to burn, and Murai knows to lean into the glorious, off-the-cuff moment when she succumbs to her love’s pleas and dances, ever so briefly, alongside him. Letitia Wright, so frisky and engaging in “Black Panther,” likewise doesn’t get much to do, but the chillingly affable Anozie makes the most of his minimal screen time.

“Guava Island” was made in Cuba, and a remote, location shoot with a chummy, insular crew could have resulted in an Adam Sandler-style throwaway, merely an excuse for a paid vacation in a sunny locale. But in this light, playful effort, the offhanded breeziness is a feature, not a bug. The script is by Glover’s brother Stephen, also of “Atlanta,” but the story is credited to both men and three more “Atlanta” writers. And that tracks; it feels very much like a movie a bunch of friends thought up late one night, perhaps while sharing a blunt, as a party was winding down. This is meant as a compliment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/movies/guava-island-review-donald-glover.html" id="e170470b-2979-3615-a23f-f47430a36386">The New York Times</a>.

(Streaming Movie Review)

'Guava Island': Donald Glover's Island Getaway Is a Casual Charmer

March 5, 2018

The morning after the 90th Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and ABC (the ceremony’s regular network) are hit with “the doomsday ratings scenario”: the show’s 26.5 million viewers were the lowest ever recorded in the show’s history, a nearly 20 percent drop from the previous year.

Academy and ABC/Disney execs meet shortly thereafter to discuss changes that might halt the ratings free-fall.

Aug. 8, 2018

The Academy announces its proposed changes: a three-hour cap for the 2019 telecast (the 2018 show clocked in at nearly four), the presentation of “select categories” during commercial breaks and the addition of a category for “outstanding achievement in popular film.”

The later proposal draws the most immediate and negative response, prompting criticisms of “pandering” to the wider audience with a “stupid, insulting and pathetically desperate” attempt at a “tainted” award.

Sept. 6, 2018

The academy’s 54-member board votes to table the new award, at least for this year’s ceremony, recognizing “the need for further discussion with our members,” according to a statement from Dawn Hudson, the academy’s chief executive.

Dec. 4, 2018

The Academy announces that comedian Kevin Hart will host the 2019 ceremony. “I am blown away simply because this has been a goal on my list for a long time,” Hart writes on Instagram.

Dec. 6, 2018

Hart announces on Twitter that he will step down as host, following the discovery and discussion of several homophobic tweets and jokes.

Jan. 4, 2019

Hart appears on the daytime talk show of two-time Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres, who offers up a lengthy defense of the comedian, and claims that members of the Academy would still like him to host.

But in a “Variety” interview posted the same day, Hart insists the door is closed: “Would I ever do it? No, it’s done. It’s done.” (In a strange postscript, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson later claims he was the Academy’s “first choice to host this year,” but was unable to take the job because of his commitment to filming “Jumanji 2” — with Kevin Hart.)

The 2019 Oscars will not have a host, for the first time since the disastrous 1989 ceremony, aka the “Rob Lowe Sings with Snow White” show.

Jan. 24, 2019

Variety reports that only two of the five Best Original Song nominees — “Shallow” from “A Star is Born” and “All the Stars” from “Black Panther” — will be performed during the ceremony, leaving the other three nominees to be “acknowledged only during the announcement of the song nominees.”

Jan. 31, 2019

The Academy walks back the decision, announcing the performances of two more nominated songs, with the final number added the following day.

Feb. 1, 2019

By then, an entirely new controversy has bubbled up: Deadline reports that the previous year’s four acting honorees — Frances McDormand, Gary Oldman, Allison Janney and Sam Rockwell — have not been contacted to hand out this year’s acting prizes (per Oscar tradition), with The Hollywood Reporter subsequently confirming that Rockwell and Janney’s reps were told by the Academy that the actors would not be presenting. In a (later deleted) Instagram post, Janney writes, “It’s looking like they are not going to honor the tradition this year. It breaks my heart.”

Feb. 6, 2019

The Academy announces via Twitter that the four actors in question will, in fact, “be presenters at this year’s show.”

Feb. 11, 2019

After five controversy-free days, the Academy leaps into its biggest fracas yet with the long-delayed announcement of the four categories deemed unworthy of live broadcast: cinematography, film editing, live-action short, and makeup and hairstyling.

Criticism is swift and virulent, with Twitter condemnations, angry interviews and open letters abounding.

Feb. 15, 2019

The Academy, once again, walks back the decision, issuing a statement that “All Academy Awards will be presented without edits, in our traditional format.”

In an interview with The Times published two days later, the show’s lead producer, Donna Gigliotti, seems relatively unfazed: “Any producer worth her salt is used to these kinds of things. You find a new way.” And in a way, her calm is understandable. After all, what else could go wrong?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/movies/oscars-2019-timeline.html" id="d86debd2-86e7-3dab-a652-8a3166321354">The New York Times</a>.

The Baffling Road to the Oscars: An Academy Timeline

The 91st annual Academy Awards are Sunday night, the culmination of one of the strangest Oscar seasons in recent memory, in which the Academy’s attempts to deliver a shorter and more ratings-friendly broadcast has resulted in a baffling series of ill-advised decisions, meek reversals and avoidable controversies.

Brenda Jenkyns and Catherine Van Tighem said they drove 13 hours from Alberta, Canada, to protest the debut of the docuseries, which HBO will broadcast this spring. Though three more protesters showed up after the screening, the two friends said but they felt compelled to speak out. “I’ve never actually heard of Sundance before that,” Jenkyns said. “I just know about Michael Jackson, and we also know about the two people who are featured in this film. So we knew that it would be not true, basically.”

Van Tighem added that the film was “not a voice for victims,” saying, “There’s another side to the story. The information is there for people, if they want to take the time to look at it.” She carried a cardboard poster featuring a photo of Jackson, as well as copies of a pamphlet titled “Protect Michael,” with a storybook-style illustration of the pop singer leading a group of children through a garden of flowers.

“Leaving Neverland,” directed by Dan Reed, paints quite a different picture of Jackson’s interactions with young people. In two parts running nearly four hours, it details the singer’s history with Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who both spent time with Jackson in the late 1980s, at the height of his post-"Thriller” fame.

Under 10 at the time they began their “friendships” with the pop star, they say that they were showered with gifts, trips and backstage passes; slowly isolated from their families; and “groomed” for sexual abuse that lasted several years. The now-adult Robson and Safechuck describe their sexual interactions with Jackson in graphic detail — far more explicit than the euphemisms typical of earlier news reports and documentary accounts.

In 2003, Jackson was indicted on child molestation charges when a young cancer patient accused the singer of groping him at the Neverland estate in California. Jackson was acquitted of all charges. He died six years later at the age of 50.

Jackson supporters like Jenkyns and Van Tighem question the credibility of the documentary’s accounts, noting that the men had previously defended Jackson from accusations by other young men, and that their subsequent efforts to sue Jackson’s companies were dismissed by courts. “I don’t feel any requirement to see it; I don’t feel any desire to see it or to benefit anybody who’s trying to make money,” Jenkyns said of the documentary. " I don’t have respect for people who do things without a pure heart.”

And that, to her, includes Robson and Safechuck: “I feel it’s taking advantage of real victims of child abuse, because it does not respect them, who should be believed, when someone like this who shouldn’t be believed is representing them.”

At the Q&amp;A; after the screening, Robson said with a hint of sadness that he understood it was hard for them to believe “because in a way, not that long ago, I was in the same position they are. Even though it happened to me, I still couldn’t believe it. I still couldn’t believe that what Michael did was a bad thing.”

He added, “We can only accept and understand something when we’re ready, and maybe we’ll never be ready, and maybe we will. But that’s their journey.”

The women said they were not disappointed by the meager turnout for the protest. “I just knew in my heart that I had to be here and speak out,” Van Tighem said, adding, “A friend came to join me; there’s only two of us that I know that are here today. If there’s others that are coming, that’s great, but there’s no organized protest.”

The news cameras were long gone when the other protesters showed up. “I’ve never been to a protest, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect at all,” Jenkyns said. “I believe it was made to sound bigger than it was, with huge police and angry fans. So we wanted to be here to show that a real Michael Jackson fan is about love and not about fighting.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/movies/michael-jackson-movie-sundance.html" id="282b77b6-826c-3b13-a274-43c739125a39">The New York Times</a>.

PARK CITY, Utah — Amid breathless reports of protests, disruptions and personal threats, news outlets swarmed to the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Leaving Neverland,” a new documentary miniseries detailing accusations of sexual abuse against pop star Michael Jackson. But the protesters outside the Egyptian Theater found themselves vastly outnumbered by reporters, photographers and camera crews, as teams from Variety, “Extra,” and, yes, The Times waited patiently for their turns to inter...

Michael Jackson Movie at Sundance Draws Protesters: 2 to Start With

Audiences at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn will get much more. The preshow for “The Favourite” includes a selection of director Lanthimos’ short films and commercials, plus several samples of star Olivia Colman’s offbeat TV sketch comedy work. The theater, which has run preshow reels since its opening in June 2011, has a practical use for these inventive clip collections: food and beverage service is available at patrons’ seats, so background entertainment encourages them to show up early to order their drinks and snacks.

But the staff at Nitehawk sees the preshows as more than simple advertisements or background noise. “When our house lights fade out for showtime, we want people to feel excited for what they’re about to see, not exhausted by the theatergoing experience,” said Kris King, the theater’s creative manager and associate film programmer.

And they’re not the only ones offering up vintage trailers, shorts, newsreels, in-house bumpers, singalongs and other bonuses to engage their audiences. Here’s what some other theaters are programming.

Alamo Drafthouse

Austin, Texas (and nationwide)

The Drafthouse preshows are perhaps the best known in the country, primarily because of their Internet-friendly “no talking” spots. But the typical Drafthouse preshow is a sprawling, oddball affair, consisting of “anything from vintage movie and TV ephemera, old trailers, public domain oddities, weirdo found footage, music videos, clips from bizarre foreign films, animation, web videos, and increasingly, supercuts and custom editorial content,” according to the chain’s video content lead, Laird Jimenez.

“We bought our first video projector about four months into operation in 1997. From that day forward, preshows were part of the show,” said Drafthouse’s chief executive, Tim League. Jimenez explained how the preshows have changed over the years: “A decade ago they were looser, longer and ‘anything goes.’ More recently, we pick a handful of target titles every month and make custom, themed compilations.”

Recent highlights have included surveys of African-American horror for “Get Out”, a history of Asian-Americans in film for “Crazy Rich Asians”, and a mashup titled “What if Wookiees Sounded Like Pee-Wee Herman?” for a “Star Wars” preshow, created by Zane Gordon-Bouzard.

"Ideally they serve the same purpose as the video monitors that hang over the lines at a theme park,” Jimenez said. “They entertain, they add a bit of context or humor, they set the mood, and more than anything, they get people pumped to watch the feature they came to see.”

Sun-Ray Cinema

Jacksonville, Florida

Tim Massett and Shana David-Massett opened Sun-Ray Cinema in late 2011, and Tim Massett knew from previous experience that preshows would be part of the package: “I formed my approach to exhibition during my time working for Tim League at the first Alamo Drafthouse [in Austin] on Colorado Street in 1997,” he said.

To help create the Sun-Ray’s distinctive videos, he reached out to Nic Maier of online video collective Everything Is Terrible; Maier’s highlights have included a very edited version of the 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s “It,” which the theater ran the 2017 big-screen version, and a weirdo wrestling video compilation for 2014 drama “Foxcatcher.”

“On occasion I’ll toss that one back in front of a feature having nothing to do with wrestling,” Tim Massett said.

Sun-Ray has also created memorable “no talking” bumpers, including one with Stan Lee.

“The time before a feature starts can be an excruciating experience if you are bombarded with ads or if the screen is just dark, but it can also be an opportunity to engage an audience in an unexpected way from the moment they sit down,” Tim Massett said.

The Royal Cinema

Toronto

The Royal is an Ontario institution — it opened in 1939 — but its preshows are a relatively new feature, added a few years ago when the venue shifted to retrospective and one-off screenings. “There’s no hard and fast rule for the preshow creation,” said programming director Richelle Charkot, “just as long as it’s fun and/or interesting, and appropriate.”

Charkot’s favorite preshow told a story of its own. “When I programmed the Monkees’ anti-war experimental comedy ‘Head’ a few years ago, my preshow started with early Monkees cutesy material,” she said. “Then as every clip passed I found something where they were ever so slightly more irreverent and weird, and ever so slightly more politically minded, until the very end when the band was entirely different than where it started in the preshow.”

A closing clip from “The Simpsons” brought it home, with Marge’s therapist assuring her, “The Monkees weren’t about music, Marge. They were about rebellion, about political and social upheaval!”

Old Town Music Hall

El Segundo, California

Originally established in 1921 as the State Theater, this venue reopened as Old Town Music Hall in 1968. “We don’t even call the preshow a preshow anymore; it’s such an integral part of the Old Town Music Hall experience,” said James Moll, a filmmaker who volunteers for the theater. “Since our first shows back in 1968, we have always started with music on the Mighty Wurlitzer, an audience singalong, and a comedy short, followed by a 15-minute intermission and then our feature presentation.”

The aim of this tradition, Moll said, is simple: “We hope that we can give audiences a small taste of what it must have been like to visit movie houses back in the classic era of cinema, especially back in the silent days when the Mighty Wurlitzer theater pipe organ was the crown jewel of so many movie palaces.”

Student Life Cinema, Florida State University

Tallahassee, Florida

The influence of theaters like the Drafthouse and Nitehawk can already be seen in the next generation of film programmers and curators. The Student Life Cinema program began at FSU in 2000, with preshow programs for its midnight movies starting up in 2005. That series combines such mainstays as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with more recent cult fare like “The Room,” and the preshow is a compilation of related internet comedy and meme videos.

“I love that my preshows encourage people to come out earlier to the theater and add excitement before the film,” said Midnights programmer Austin Smith. “It’s not always easy to stay awake at midnight, so I always try to hype the audience as much as possible.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/movies/nitehawk-cinema-alamo-drafthouse-preshows.html" id="e99b72d0-79ca-39c2-a94e-f96ef5d9ee9c">The New York Times</a>.

Now Playing: The Movies Before the Movies

Most of the filmgoers who seek out Yorgos Lanthimos’ awards contender “The Favourite” over the holiday break will see it at a multiplex, with the traditional before-feature presentation: copious trailers, commercials for the chain and perhaps a slick package of advertisements for upcoming releases packaged as “behind the scenes” content.

<h1>Steven Soderbergh’s electrifying new film “High Flying Bird,” which debuted Friday on Netflix, tells the story of a fictional NBA lockout set in the Instagram Age, in which longstanding concerns about money, race and social justice are galvanized by disputes over players’ personal images, and who has the right to control them. (Appropriately, the entire film was shot on an iPhone.)</h1>

The film’s dense but fast-moving script, written by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (“Moonlight”), is also replete with references to the game’s history — not least to the currents of protest and politics that have coursed through pro basketball since it was segregated. There’s a rich subtext here, much of it only hinted at. Below is a spoiler-filled guide.

What were the all-black leagues?

As in baseball, football and most areas of American life, segregation kept black players out of the white pro basketball leagues, confined to amateur and semipro all-black teams, which formed in schools, churches, community centers and the like. Games were frequently paired with ragtime dances to make for a full evening of entertainment.

The best known of these barnstorming teams, often called “Black Fives” by historians, were the New York Renaissance and the Harlem Globetrotters. The Renaissance — or, as they were better known, the Rens — were so impressive that in 1947, coach Joe Lapchick of the New York Knicks lobbied the Basketball Association of America to admit the team into the young league, a precursor of the National Basketball Association. The owners voted him down. The next year, a competing league, the National Basketball League, brought the team in instead.

How did the Harlem Globetrotters help spur integration?

Indirectly. The Rens and the Globetrotters, in particular, were internationally known for their dazzling play, often besting white teams when matched up for exhibition games. The Rens, for example, beat the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars in the first integrated tournament championship in 1939; the Globetrotters beat the Minnesota Lakers in a celebrated 1948 exhibition game that The Chicago Tribune pinpointed as key to the integration of the game.

As Spencer (Bill Duke) explains in “High Flying Bird”: “There’s a reason why the NBA started integrating as the Harlem Globetrotters exhibitions started going international. Control. They wanted the control of a game that we played, and we played better.”

How did the NBA integrate?

Lapchick, however, did not give up. In 1950, the year after the Basketball Association of America absorbed the smaller National Basketball League and became the NBA, he signed Nat (Sweetwater) Clifton, who had played for the Rens and the Globetrotters (as well as in baseball’s Negro leagues), to join the Knicks. That same season, West Virginia State’s Earl Lloyd joined the Washington Capitals and Chuck Cooper was drafted out of Duquesne by the Boston Celtics. (Another black player, Hank DeZonie, played five games with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks in December of that season.)

Talking to The Times in 2008, Lloyd told stories of being heckled and spat upon by fans, although the abuse he encountered was “no comparison,” he said, to what Jackie Robinson withstood three years earlier in professional baseball.

Wasn’t there an actual NBA lockout?

Yes — in fact, there were four. (One lasted only a few hours.) In the first dialogue scene of “High Flying Bird,” sports agent Ray Burke (André Holland) tells a client, “Last time this happened, folks was broke left and right!” That “last time” was the 2011 lockout, which lasted five months and resulted in the loss of 16 regular-season games, the entire preseason and an estimated $400 million in revenue for team owners and players.

A 10-year deal was announced late that November, which heavily favored owners. It reduced player salaries by nearly $300 million and shifted an estimated $3 billion to the owners over the course of the contract. The truncated 66-game season finally got underway on Christmas Day.

What about those exhibition games?

Much screen time in “High Flying Bird” is spent contemplating the legality of public appearances and exhibition games by league-signed players during the lockout. The 2011 lockout was threaded with similar concerns. The film’s fictional team owners grouse over the attention attracted by a “lockout street ball event in Las Vegas,” presumably inspired by the “lockout league” in Vegas, which comprised two weeks of pickup games with more than 70 NBA players in September 2011, according to The Las Vegas Sun. (Profits from ticket sales were donated to charity).

Dozens of players filled the pay gap by picking up spots on teams in Europe and Japan. As The Times’s Howard Beck noted at the time, however, “a vast majority of them are rookies, middling veterans and fringe players.”

Who is Michele Roberts?

As New York magazine and others have noted, the character Myra (Sonja Sohn) strongly resembles Michele Roberts, who became the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association in 2014. The first woman in history to head a major sports union, Roberts made waves from the beginning. A Times profile a few months into her tenure noted that she had already “forcefully questioned the league’s pay model and labeled its entire cadre of owners as replaceable.”

Like the character she inspired, Roberts is a tough-as-nails negotiator who is undaunted by working in a male-dominated world. “My past,” she told players while making her case for the job, “is littered with the bones of men who were foolish enough to think I was someone they could sleep on.”

Who is Dr. Harry Edwards?

In the film’s first scene, Ray gives a client a mysterious package, calling it “the Bible.” It contains the book “The Revolt of the Black Athlete” by the sports sociologist and civil rights advocate Dr. Harry Edwards, who also appears briefly in Ray’s office near the end of the film. Edwards first came to national prominence for organizing the Olympic Project for Human Rights, whose members Tommie Smith and John Carlos made headlines for raising their gloved fists while receiving medals at the 1968 Olympics.

Edwards has spent the ensuing years teaching, writing, consulting and leading protests. “Revolt,” published in 1969, argued that racism is as prevalent in sports as in any other section of society. “The sports world is not a rose flourishing in the middle of a wasteland,” he writes. “It is part and parcel of that wasteland, reeking of the same racism that corrupts other areas of our society.”

What’s the story behind the music?

“High Flying Bird” is bookended by recordings of two folk-rock classics, both performed by Richie Havens as part of his opening set at Woodstock. The title track, Havens’s recording of a folk song written by Billy Edd Wheeler, was praised by the musicologist Richie Unterberger for its “arresting minor-keyed melody and brooding lyrics, contrasting the freedom of a bird to the singer’s earthbound misery.” It isn’t hard to connect those lyrics to Ray’s notion that his clients should free themselves from the earthbound constraints of the sports industry and bring the game back to its roots.

“Handsome Johnny,” which Havens wrote with Oscar-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr., closes the film, telling the story of a young man who marches off to a series of wars. Given the movie’s themes, the song’s refrain is appropriate: “It’s a long hard road, hey, before we’ll be free.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="bb9e3ba8-0da1-4c3d-9e6b-8590a282d076" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/movies/high-flying-bird-nba-history-netflix.html">The New York Times</a>.

'High Flying Bird' Is Rich With Historical References. Here's a Closer Look.

The film’s dense but fast-moving script, written by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (“Moonlight”), is also replete with references to the game’s history.

'High Flying Bird' is rich with historical references, here's a closer look

<h1>M. Night Shyamalan’s “Glass” was, as expected, a box office smash over the weekend, taking in more than $46 million domestically over a four-day period. Shyamalan has sent mixed messages over whether this story — thus far an original superhero trilogy that also includes “Unbreakable” (2000) and “Split” (2017) — might continue beyond “Glass,” and with that film already profitable, he may feel pressure to do so. (Shyamalan self-financed “Glass” for a modest $20 million.)</h1>

But based on where “Glass” left us, the “Unbreakable” trilogy would be a tricky tale to continue, and not only because of the fates of its main characters. It also left a lot of unanswered questions, not least of which was: Why did it feel so anticlimactic?

Why was Raven Hill Memorial so understaffed?

For the bulk of the picture, our three key characters — superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and super villains Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) — are held at a psychiatric research hospital for observation and testing by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson). She tries to convince them that they’re merely mentally ill, but even so, they’re all dangerous men responsible for assaults and deaths ... so why, as far as we can tell, are all three left in the care of a single orderly for hours at a time? Has the hospital been abandoned? (Staple keeps saying she has only “a few days,” though she never indicates why.) If it has, why, suddenly, are other patients and employees there to herd around during the film’s climax?

Why the red herring of Osaka Tower?

Speaking of that climax: Why go to the trouble of setting up a big final confrontation at a huge public event (the unveiling of a new Philadelphia skyscraper), only to have our heroes duke it out in the parking lot? Was there some kind of budget revision once shooting was underway? Was a set not finished in time? Was Shyamalan just trying to create the biggest “get to the fireworks factory” moment in contemporary cinema?

Was our hero really killed by ... drowning in a puddle?

“Unbreakable” took great pains to establish Dunn’s Kryptonite: He is rendered powerless by water, the result of a near-drowning as a child. (Shyamalan has weakness for water himself; it also kills the aliens in “Signs,” and it incites the action of “Lady in the Water.”) So when he finds himself fighting in a swimming pool at the end of “Unbreakable,” or battling the Beast in a giant tank at the end of “Glass,” the stakes are high and the danger is real.

Does it not seem a little anticlimactic, then, that he is apparently snuffed out for good when a thug holds his face in a puddle? It’s not even a deep puddle! He’s very strong! Stronger than the guys holding him down!

Did Shyamalan really do that to Casey Cooke?

Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) was, to borrow the horror terminology, the “Final Girl” of “Split,” kidnapped by Kevin, terrorized and tortured, but alive at the end to tell the tale. Her survival was thanks to keen survival instincts that were partly a response to a lifetime of sexual abuse by her uncle. The trauma of her experience with Kevin prompts her to confront that other monster in her life, and by the time we get to “Glass,” she has reported him to police and found a new home with a foster family.

It is especially troubling, then, that “Glass” makes her into a sympathetic shoulder for a man who literally almost ate her — the good woman who will bring out the best in poor Kevin just as long as he can “stay in the Light.” Casey’s journey was part of what made “Split” more than just another monster movie. Her regression in “Glass” is an outright betrayal.

And how powerful would those videos actually be?

Although our three marquee stars are wiped out by the end of “Glass,” its concluding scene assures us that their legacy will live on thanks to Mr. Glass, who ingeniously preserved the security camera feed of the events at Raven Hill. And thus, the world will see Kevin (as the Beast) galloping and transforming; they’ll see David bending steel; and they’ll see those evil agents drowning him to death. And those images will change the world!

But would they? The videos look like the kinds of manipulated content that pops up on Facebook feeds every day. And videos capturing police abuse, sad to say, rarely create lasting change.

This article originally appeared in <a id="5bfed128-4600-4c2c-a97e-fb4d502753cf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/movies/glass-shyamalan-problems.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Glass': 5 things that left us scratching our heads