Category: cinema

Tyne Daly, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actress, is withdrawing from a starring role in the first Broadway revival of “Doubt: A Parable,” citing health issues.

Daly was set to star in the production of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play about a sexual assault accusation against a Catholic priest. She will be replaced by Amy Ryan, who will begin performances Feb. 13.

Roundabout Theater Company, the nonprofit producing the revival, announced the cast change on Tuesday, saying in a news release, “Ms. Daly was unexpectedly hospitalized on Friday and unfortunately needs to withdraw from the production while she receives medical care; she is thankfully expected to make a full recovery.” The organization did not provide further details.

The “Doubt” revival, also starring Liev Schreiber, was to begin previews last Friday, but that first performance was canceled by Roundabout. The production then began performances on Saturday, with the understudy Isabel Keating going on in Daly’s stead; Keating has been performing the lead role since then, and will continue to do so through Sunday.

Daly was to play Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun who serves as the principal at a Catholic school and who suspects the parish priest, Father Brendan Flynn, of misconduct. Schreiber is playing the priest. In 2008, the play was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; it was also adapted into an opera.

Daly, 77, has worked steadily onstage and screen. She has performed in seven previous Broadway shows, winning a Tony Award in 1990 for starring in a revival of “Gypsy,” and earning two more nominations since. She has also won six Emmy Awards, for the television shows “Cagney & Lacey,” “Christy” and “Judging Amy.”

Ryan, 55, has performed in five previous Broadway shows, and was nominated twice for Tony Awards in Roundabout revivals. Her last appearance on Broadway was nearly two decades ago, when she was featured in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Since that time she has worked primarily on film and television, earning an Oscar nomination for her work in “Gone Baby Gone.”

The “Doubt” revival, directed by Scott Ellis, will now open March 7, one week later than initially planned. The production, which is scheduled to run until April 14, also features Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Zoe Kazan.

Disney is deploying Taylor Swift and Moana as part of a campaign to revitalize its entertainment lineup.

The company said on Wednesday that it had reached a deal with Ms. Swift to bring her blockbuster “Eras Tour” concert movie to streaming for the first time. “The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version)” will include five additional performed songs, including the fan favorite “Cardigan,” and exclusively arrive on Disney+ on March 15.

The “Eras Tour” movie has sold more than $260 million in tickets at cinemas worldwide. In a statement, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, called it “electrifying” and “a true phenomenon.”

Separately, Disney said it would release a big-screen sequel to “Moana” in theaters on Nov. 27. The first “Moana” was released in 2016 and took in $687 million against a production budget of roughly $150 million. But streaming is where the characters have really taken off. “Moana” was the No. 1 streaming movie of last year on any service, according to Nielsen, with 11.6 billion viewing minutes. Nielsen said streaming customers have watched almost 80 billion minutes of “Moana” over the last four years.

Auli’i Cravalho (the Polynesian princess Moana) and Dwayne Johnson (the tattooed demigod Maui) are expected to reprise their vocal roles in “Moana 2.” The sequel is a musical directed by Dave Derrick Jr., whose credits include “Raya and the Last Dragon” and “Encanto.” The story line for “Moana 2” involves an unexpected call from Moana’s ancestors, which prompts her to travel “to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters.”

Disney struggled at the box office last year. Its animated “Wish,” the superhero sequel “The Marvels” and the ultraexpensive “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” were all box office failures, prompting concerns about the vitality of various Disney studios. Pixar’s “Elemental” had a disastrous opening, but was ultimately able to generate a decent $496 million worldwide.

The generally poor performance — in stark contrast with prior years, when Disney released one billion-dollar-grossing movie after another — has contributed to attacks on the company by activist investors. Trian Fund Management, for instance, is waging a proxy battle for multiple board seats. Disney is trying to fight off such attempts.

“Moana 2,” initially conceived as an animated Disney+ series, joins a theatrical lineup for the year that Walt Disney Studios believes will mark a dramatic turnaround. Other planned releases include “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “Deadpool 3,” “Inside Out 2” and “Mufasa,” a spinoff from “The Lion King.”

Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died on Jan. 19 in St. Marychurch, Torquay, England. He was 104.

His son-in-law Paul Barrett confirmed the death, in a nursing facility.

His family believes that Mr. Jennings was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian soldiers who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.

A private in the First Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi Prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).

To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.

In his memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” published in 2011, Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.

“Two men generally guided the pile from a perched situation near the top,” he wrote. “This was a slow, punishing job, jolting your whole body when the weight suddenly dropped and the pile sank lower.”

He survived the searing heat of the Indochinese jungle; a daily diet of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar, and a battery of ailments: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required skin grafts, which were performed without anesthesia.

“At least 15 soldiers died each day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings told the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in camp just counting the days I had left to live. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”

The brutality inflicted by Japanese soldiers was at least as bad during the railway work as it was in the camps.

“If you weren’t working like they thought you should, you’d get a stick or the butt of a rifle,” he added. “But I had to keep going. I had a friend who slept next to me. I woke up one morning and he was dead.” Four men who tried to escape were beheaded.

“My feeling for the Japanese guards who were with us, and all who allowed them to commit such barbaric crimes, stays the same,” Mr. Jennings wrote. “I will never forgive or forget.”

Amid those torturous conditions, Mr. Jennings, who had worked as a wood joiner in England, carved a chess set out of wood he found in the camps, using a pen knife. He carried the chess pieces home.

Jack Jennings was born on March 10, 1919, and grew up in West Midlands, England. His father, Joseph, a brickworker, died of cancer when Jack was 8; his mother, Ethel (Dunn) Jennings, who had worked in a foundry before she had children, took in laundry to earn money after her husband’s death. She also picked hops during the summer, along with Jack and his two sisters.

At his mother’s request, Jack left school at 14 to earn money for the family. He fared poorly as an office trainee before finding his métier at a local joinery works. He eventually enrolled in classes in cabinet making at a local art college.

Mr. Jennings was drafted into the British Army in 1939 and, after lengthy training, traveled by boat to Singapore, arriving in January 1942. The British Army was soon overwhelmed by the Japanese and surrendered Singapore on Feb. 15.

“They knew where to strike, and strike hard,” he wrote in his memoir, adding that “there was nowhere to hide or to retreat to. We were trapped, civilians and soldiers.”

The Japanese herded about 500 soldiers, most of them from the Cambridgeshire regiment, onto a tennis court. At each corner a Japanese soldier stood guard with a machine gun. The prisoners drank dirty water and ate “hard Army biscuits and ration chocolate” tossed at them by their captors, Mr. Jennings wrote.

After five days, they were marched to Changi Prison and later to prison camps that the prisoners themselves had to hack out of the jungle. Mr. Jennings said he spent his time building bridges and being treated for his illnesses. An estimated 12,000 to 16,000 P.O.W.s died during construction of the railway. Many civilian prisoners perished as well.

Mr. Jennings learned of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 from leaflets dropped in a prison camp that said, “To All Allied Prisoners of War: The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered Unconditionally and the War is Over.”

He arrived home in October and, two months later, married his girlfriend, Mary. Three days later, he celebrated his first Christmas with his family in six years.

In 1954, Pierre Boulle, a former French soldier and secret agent who had served in China, Burma and Indochina, published “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a novel about the construction of a bridge by Allied prisoners. It was turned into a film in 1957 starring Alec Guinness, as the delusional colonel in charge of the British prisoners at a Japanese prison camp, and William Holden, as an American Navy commander who escapes the camp and joins a commando mission to destroy the bridge. The movie, directed by David Lean, won seven Oscars, including for best picture.

Mr. Jennings is survived by his daughters, Hazel Heath and Carol Barrett; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Jennings wrote his memoir in the early 1990s, although it would not be published until years later. He made several trips back to Singapore and Thailand.

One of them, in 2012, to Thailand, near the Burmese border, was paid for by Britain’s National Lottery, which produced a television advertisement featuring Mr. Jennings for a campaign called “Life Changing.”

In it he appears to walk slowly with his cane through a re-enactment of a jungle battle scene that was intended to be haunting memories to him, which fades into a visit to a cemetery for the Allied soldiers who died during construction of the railway.

“We left him to have his own private time amongst the massive cemetery,” John Hillcoat, who directed the advertisement, wrote in an email. “It was daunting how many died. Jack seemed to have carried a lot of guilt being a survivor.”

In an interview for the National Lottery, Mr. Jennings said that the Thailand he visited was “completely different” from the one he remembered. “So the old dreams just faded, you know — so I was quite surprised and relieved,” he said. “The place is really a nice tourist area now.”

Don Murray, the boy-next-door actor who made his film debut as Marilyn Monroe’s infatuated cowboy in “Bus Stop” in 1956 and played a priest, a drug addict, a gay senator and myriad other roles in movies, on television and onstage over six decades, died on Friday at his home near Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 94.

His son Christopher confirmed the death.

In the postwar 1950s, when being sensitive, responsible and a “nice guy” were important attributes in a young man, Mr. Murray was a churchgoing pacifist who became a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He fulfilled his service obligation by working for two and a half years in German and Italian refugee camps for $10 a month, assisting orphans, the injured and the displaced.

Back from Europe in 1954, he settled on an acting career focused on socially responsible themes. He appeared in a television drama about lawyers serving poor clients, and he had a part in the 1955 Broadway production of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder’s comedic vote of confidence in mankind’s narrow ability to survive, which starred Helen Hayes and Mary Martin.

The director Joshua Logan saw that production and cast Mr. Murray in “Bus Stop,” his adaptation of William Inge’s play about a singer who is pursued by a cowpoke from a Phoenix clip joint to a snowbound Arizona bus stop, where a spark of dignity and character flame into a moving and humbling love. The film established Marilyn Monroe as a legitimate actress and Mr. Murray as an up-and-coming star.

“With a wondrous new actor named Don Murray playing the stupid, stubborn poke and with the clutter of broncos, blondes and busters beautifully tangled, Mr. Logan has a booming comedy going before he gets to the romance,” Bosley Crowther wrote in a review for The New York Times. “And the fact that she fitfully but firmly summons the will and strength to humble him — to make him say ‘please,’ which is the point of the whole thing — attests to her new acting skill.”

Mr. Murray’s performance in “Bus Stop” earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. He won many other honors for a body of work that included more than 35 Hollywood films, some 25 television movies and scores of other credits for starring in television and stage productions, as well as for writing, directing or producing for movies and television. But he was never again nominated for an Academy Award.

His best-known early films also included “A Hatful of Rain” (1957), the story of a tormented drug addict hiding his secret from his wife, played by Eva Marie Saint; “Shake Hands With the Devil” (1959), a tale of the 1921 Irish rebellion, which also starred James Cagney; and “The Hoodlum Priest” (1961), in which Mr. Murray, who co-wrote the screenplay, portrayed a Jesuit who counsels former convicts.

“Don has become identified with what might be called social significance and ‘appeal to reason’ film dramas,” Cue magazine noted in 1961. “He won’t play in a drama that glamorizes evil or glorifies violence. ‘I’m no nut on that,’ he says, ‘my pictures don’t have to carry a message — but they do have to say something.’”

Mr. Murray played a memorable role in “Advise and Consent” (1962), Otto Preminger’s hugely successful film of Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning political novel set in the halls of the Capitol. It starred Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon; Mr. Murray portrayed a married United States senator with a gay encounter in his past, who is blackmailed for his vote in a Senate confirmation fight over a nominee for secretary of state.

Mr. Murray’s Hollywood roles dwindled in the late 1960s, and he turned increasingly to television. His most notable role was in “The Outcasts,” an ABC series in which he and Otis Young starred as a team of post-Civil War bounty hunters — Mr. Young as a former slave and Union soldier, and Mr. Murray as a former slave owner and Confederate officer.

One of the first television shows with Black and white co-stars, “The Outcasts” ran for 26 weeks in the 1968-69 season. Broadcast after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were slain, it was widely criticized at the time for its depictions of racial tensions and violence. But in later years, seen in reruns and on home video, it was hailed as a forgotten classic.

Mr. Murray co-wrote and directed “The Cross and the Switchblade” (1970), a film that starred Pat Boone as a street minister who brings two city street gangs to Christ — a character based on the work of an actual New York preacher. “Is it convincing?” Howard Thompson asked in a review for The Times. “And how hard does it hit? Answers: convincing and hard enough. I liked it.”

From 1979 to 1981, Mr. Murray played Sid Fairgate, a husband and father, on the long-running CBS prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing.” He then returned to the big screen, appearing with Brooke Shields in “Endless Love” (1981), Denzel Washington in “License to Kill” (1984) and Barbara Eden in “The Stepford Children” (1987).

Mr. Murray and Ms. Eden also co-starred in “Brand New Life” (1989-90), an NBC series about a wealthy widowed lawyer and a divorced waitress, each a parent of three teenagers, who marry and make a new life together in Bel Air, the affluent enclave of Los Angeles, with the blend of two families from contrasting social backgrounds leading to conflicts and comedy.

Lean and youthful-looking nearly all his life, Mr. Murray was still appearing in movies in his 70s, including “Internet Love” (2000) and “Elvis Is Alive” (2001). After a 16-year hiatus, he resurfaced in 2017 in eight episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the Showtime continuation of David Lynch's 1990-91 ABC series. His character, Bushnell Mullins, was a Las Vegas insurance man endlessly at odds with clients and the authorities.

Donald Patrick Murray was born in Hollywood on July 31, 1929, one of three children of Dennis and Ethel (Cook) Murray. His father, a singer and dancer, and his mother, a former Ziegfeld Girl, had moved from New York to work in talking pictures but returned to Broadway as the Great Depression settled in.

Don and his siblings, William and Ethelyn, grew up in the village of East Rockaway on Long Island. He was a football and track star at East Rockaway High School, from which he graduated in 1946. After graduating in 1948 from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, he worked as a waiter and house painter, acted in summer stock and had small parts on television.

His first break on Broadway was the part of a sailor in “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), Tennessee Williams’s play about a widow (Maureen Stapleton) returning to life and love.

Mr. Murray was drafted by the Marine Corps in 1952, but he refused induction as a conscientious objector, citing his affiliation first with the Congregational Christian Church and later with the pacifist Church of the Brethren. He was allowed to fulfill his service obligation by assisting European refugees.

While filming “Bus Stop” in 1956, he married the actress Hope Lange, a fellow cast member. They had two children, Christopher and Patricia, and were divorced in 1961. In 1962, he married the actress Elizabeth Johnson, known as Betty. They had three children, Colleen, Sean and Michael.

In addition to his son Christopher, he is survived by two other sons, Michael and Sean; two daughters, Colleen Otcasek and Patricia Murray; a sister, Ethelyn Allison; and four grandchildren.

In an interview for this obituary in 2017, Mr. Murray said that, inspired by his work with postwar refugees in barbed-wire camps in Italy, he and Ms. Lange founded the Homeless European Land Program and bought 150 acres on the island of Sardinia in 1956. With financial aid from international agencies and Protestant charities, he said, they brought more than 100 refugees out of the Italian camps — people from Communist countries in Europe and Franco’s Spain — to Sardinia, to settle in what became a permanent self-supporting community.

“They planted crops and built homes,” he said. “The town is still there, with children and grandchildren of the original refugees.”

Early in his career, Mr. Murray refused to sign an open-ended contract with 20th Century Fox. “They could put you in whatever picture they wanted,” he told a U.C.L.A. film soiree celebrating his work in 2014. He agreed to make two pictures a year if given time off to act on Broadway, and he bought out his contract to produce “The Hoodlum Priest” independently.

“He didn’t play the game in the studio age,” the author and film authority Foster Hirsch told the gathering. “He never did get typecast and had great versatility.”

When Albee Zhang received an offer to produce cheesy short-form features made for phones last spring, she was skeptical, and so, she declined.

But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.

Since last summer, she has produced two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that are creating cookie-cutter content aimed at women.

Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.

The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.

ReelShort is owned by Crazy Maple Studio, a company in Northern California that is backed by the Beijing-based digital publisher COL Group.

ReelShort’s titles include “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” “I Got Married Without You” and “Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy.” The shows are formulaic: The plotlines include romance and revenge, the characters are archetypical and the dialogues are simple.

The extremely short genre became popular in the Asia-Pacific region during the pandemic, and Joey Jia, the chief executive of Crazy Maple Studio, took notice.

ReelShort aims to get people hooked as quickly as possible, with much of the action happening in the first few super short episodes. “This is a pay-as-you-go model,” Mr. Jia said. “If people are confused by the story, they leave.”

The cost of making these features is relatively low, $300,000 or less, according to Crazy Maple Studios. The crews are small and partly made up of recent film graduates in Los Angeles, according to actors who worked on the productions.

Viewers can watch dozens of minute-long episodes on ReelShort for free via multiple platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But at some point, they must either pay or watch ads to unlock subsequent episodes.

Sometimes people pay as much as $10 or $20 to keep watching, Ms. Zhang, the producer, said. “Isn’t that a crazy business?”

In December, Mr. Jia told The Wall Street Journal that the company had already made $22 million in revenue.

In the United States, ReelShort is trying to succeed where the short-form content company Quibi failed. Quibi launched in early 2020 and shut down that same year, partly because of what its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg called bad timing: The app offered five- to 10-minute videos of news and entertainment for people on the go, right as people stopped going anywhere because of pandemic lockdowns.

And while Quibi focused on more highbrow content with A-list stars, ReelShort is doing the opposite: It’s giving people juicy plot points, from werewolves to evil step mothers to secret billionaire husbands to more werewolves.

“We learned a lot from Quibi,” said Mr. Jia, the Crazy Maple Studio executive. ReelShort isn’t trying to appeal to everyone, like Quibi tried to do, he added.

“To build a successful mobile app, you need to find out your core audience,” he said. And that audience is women who love soap operas. (ReelShort’s audience is roughly 75 percent female, Mr. Jia said.)

Mr. Jia said he wasn’t trying to compete with streamers like Netflix. If you’re free to sit on your couch for a few hours, ReelShort is probably not the app you’re opening. It’s for those in-between moments: at a bus stop, in the bathroom.

“We are using a very different business model,” Mr. Jia said, “and serving a different time.”

ReelShort is hardly the first app owned or partly owned by a Chinese company to break through in the United States. TikTok and the shopping apps Shein and Temu have been among the most downloaded in recent months in Apple’s American app store.

But for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, this has been problematic. Lawmakers in the United States, Europe and Canada have expressed concerns that TikTok and its parent company may put people’s sensitive personal information into the hands of the Chinese government, and they have worked to restrict access to the wildly popular app. ReelShort has not faced the same kind of pressure.

Last month, ReelShort was downloaded one million times and earned $5 million in revenue in Apple’s app store, according to the data firm Sensor Tower, and it was downloaded three million times in the Google Play Store, earning $3 million in revenue there. Since November, ReelShort has ranked somewhere in the top 15 of most popular entertainment apps in both app stores on most days. (For a few days in November, ReelShort even surpassed TikTok as the most popular entertainment app in Apple’s app store.)

In total, more than seven million people downloaded ReelShort in the United States in 2023, on Apple and Android phones combined, according to data.ai. Worldwide, there were more than 24 million downloads last year. After the United States, India is ReelShort’s next-largest market, followed by the Philippines.

Kasey Esser, a Los Angeles-based actor who has worked on short-form shows for ReelShort and other apps, described the format as this generation’s soap opera. He drew a comparison to channels with made-for-TV content, such as Hallmark.

“People know exactly the story they’re going to be getting, but they will still watch it,” Mr. Esser, 34, said. “They will still love it.”

For the actress Samantha Drews, ReelShort was a chance to play different types of characters. “I can say now that I’ve been cast in 15 to 16 features in the last few years,” Ms. Drews, 25, said. “That’s not something every actor can say.”

Camille James Harman, 57, had a supporting role in the 2018 movie “Vice,” the Dick Cheney biopic starring Christian Bale that received several Oscar nominations. But she said she received a lot more responses for her starring role as an evil stepmother in the 2023 ReelShort production “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”

Other apps with names that are still unknown to many — Sereal+, ShortTV, DramaBox, FlexTV — have started producing such features, hoping to cash in on ReelShort’s formula.

The quantity of new titles coming out on these platforms is greater than that of many traditional streaming services. And if it’s up to Mr. Jia, that will continue in 2024: “The goal this year is to deliver another 100 titles,” he said.

As ReelShort pumps out its content, the quality of the productions is getting better, said Leomax He, who directed three productions for the app last year. Some shoots now employ a stunt or intimacy coordinator.

“Budgets have gotten larger, the cameras are better, the crews are getting larger,” said Mr. He, 27.

Major studios have not yet dabbled in the genre, but some actors and filmmakers speculated that American companies would soon enough start creating their own short-form content.

“That’s why I am doing so many of these,” Mr. Esser, the actor, said. “It’s a unique opportunity to be the first guy known from these in the U.S.”