In other words, the tone of the room is essentially applied like a filter to the raw sounds recorded from the artist onstage. This filter, known as impulse response, takes readings from actual physical places, then “synthetically reproduces the sound of a real space like a club or stadium,” said Jake Davis, the lead mix engineer at SeisMic Sound, an audio facility in Nashville that specializes in concert films.
Mixers like Jake and his father, Tom Davis, the SeisMic founder, have a lot of control over the sound in a concert film, and making adjustments is a large part of their job. Some are minor refinements. Others are more like corrections: They make the concert film sound more like what the artist wanted than what necessarily occurred on the night it was filmed. “When you lock something down for a DVD or for streaming or whatever it is, once it’s done, it lives forever,” Tom Davis said. “It never goes away. So you kind of want it to be as good as it can be.”
Mixers can blend parts of a song recorded on one night with parts from another night to create the best combined version. They can fix an errant flat note in a guitar solo by manipulating it in postproduction, or they can ask an artist to rerecord a weak vocal in a studio, layering it into the mix so that it sounds as if it had been delivered live. “We copy, cut and paste, like you do on a word processor,” Davis said. “If there was a little clam in the first chorus, but he did it fine in the second chorus in the same part, we can cut and paste that. We can do vocal maintenance. We can fix a little pitch issue, or bend a note a little bit.”
Although sound mixers record the crowd with a bevy of microphones hidden around the arena, it’s possible — and indeed, common — to exaggerate the sound of that audience, to artificially give the cheering fans some extra kick. “It’s kind of a dirty secret,” Davis said. “But the sound of the real audience is weak. It’s not enough. You end up adding to it, pumping it up. There’s something psychological to hearing other humans having a good time and reacting — it’s like a sitcom and a laugh track.” Jake Davis said that the ideal balance is to “start with the real reaction” and then simply “make it bigger and more obvious.”
Of course, part of the appeal of a live show, even on film, is the impression of reality, and a sense of truth is critical. “The goal of the mix is to enhance the energy of the performance that exists as it went down in the best way possible,” Jake Davis said. “You maintain some element of rawness while taking out things that are distracting, the nuances of a wrong note or a background singer being a little bit off.”
Sean S Cunningham’s teen horror classic from 1980 is now rereleased: this is the original movie, the ancestral prequel or origin myth machine-tooled to create a franchise, that readies the noisome and mostly offscreen figure of Jason Voorhees as an almost supernatural surviving villain of the future series – although this went against the idea of his supposed death in this film as the premise for a more rational psychological thriller. This franchise clearly arose from the wild popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween, although Friday the 13th openly borrows from a much more venerable model, Hitchcock’s Psycho, in the screeching Herrmannesque strings and the oedipal complex behind the horror – although this one being rather ingeniously showed from the point of view of the mother, Mrs Pamela Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer.
The action of the movie now seems markedly, even experimentally slow, as the summer camp counsellors (that is, the young adult supervisors hired to look after the children) show up early on the fateful date to help with last-minute building and decorating work on the recently re-opened Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey. The site is an Edenic paradise but notorious for being the location of an unsolved 1958 murder of two teenagers who were having sex; this outrage is shown in flashback from the killer’s point of view.
The young people in the present day (including a fresh-faced Kevin Bacon) fulfil their narrative function by hanging around in swimsuits or underwear until they are picked off one by one, generally with gruesome prosthetics work: seeping slash wounds on the throat and a decapitation revealing a horribly meaty circular stump. And of course there is the “final girl”: the character who is revealed to have artistic skills and a more substantial inner life, and whose final ordeal takes place on the rippling lake itself. Plus there is broad comedy in the figure of Crazy Ralph, played by Walt Gorney, a cranky old-timer who hangs around predicting disaster for everyone involved in Camp Crystal Lake like Pte Frazer in Dad’s Army, telling the incredulous kids: “You’re all doomed!”
There’s some bizarre fun in this (almost innocent) film, but maybe the fanbase are the ones to get most out of a revisit.
“Fair Play” is currently the most popular movie on Netflix, according to the streaming service’s public ranking system.
The new erotic thriller first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January but joined Netflix on Oct. 6 after a limited theatrical release on Sept. 29. So far, reviews from critics have been mostly positive.
“Fair Play” stars Phoebe Dynevor of “Bridgerton” fame and Alden Ehrenreich as a young engaged couple working at a cutthroat hedge fund. After one of the pair receives a promotion, their relationship begins to unravel in spectacular fashion.
Read on for more trending shows of the moment across streaming services, including Hulu, Apple TV+, Netflix and Disney+. And if you want to stay informed about all things streaming, subscribe to the Streamline newsletter.
The black comedy slasher film “Totally Killer” is currently trending on Amazon Prime Video following its release on Oct. 6.
Kiernan Shipka plays a teen who travels back in time to 1987 to help her mother prevent the brutal murders of her three friends. Olivia Holt, Julie Bowen, and Randall Park also star.
In keeping with the spooky season vibes, another scary movie is the top film on Hulu right now. “The Boogeyman” is based on a short story by Stephen King and follows a grieving family under attack by a supernatural being.
“The Boogeyman” was originally set to premiere on the streaming service but instead had a theatrical release in June after positive test screenings.
Also known as “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride,” this 2005 animated musical fantasy is the second most popular movie on Max at the moment.
Set in a fictional Victorian-era village in the U.K., the movie features the voices of Helena Bonham Carter (as the titular bride), Johnny Depp, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman and Albert Finney.
If your Halloween traditions involve watching the beloved Peanuts classic, take heed! “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” is streaming exclusively on Apple TV+ this spooky season.
The 1966 American animated television special centers around the children of the Peanuts comic and how they celebrate Halloween ― with Linus notably sitting in the pumpkin patch to await the mythical Great Pumpkin.
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Kristi Jacobson’s legal documentary “No Accident” opens with footage of the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va.: White supremacists march with tiki torches and shout slurs such as “Jews will not replace us.” The grotesque gathering remains unsettling and infuriating to watch, but plunging us into the proceedings has a way of stating the ugly facts upfront.
Some participants in the two-day rally faced criminal charges, but Jacobson documents the steps in a civil case filed that October in an attempt to hold rally leaders responsible for conspiring to commit violence. Tracking the litigation led by the attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, Jacobson’s civil rights procedural delves into both the legal work and the emotional strain involved in a case like this one.
Kaplan and Dunn’s team draws on damning excerpts from Discord, the social media site used by rally planners, and evasive, insulting depositions by conspirators such as Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, who represented themselves in court. Jacobson shows the toll on some of the lawsuit’s nine plaintiffs, who recall the rally and the peaceful counterprotests on Aug. 12, when James Fields Jr. murdered Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others by driving his car into a crowd of protesters.
The movie, which feels constrained by the trial’s pandemic-related restrictions, maintains a civilized tone throughout. But it’s hard to keep calm at the spectacle of white nationalists preaching hatred and violence one moment, then attempting to squirm out of responsibility and court the jury’s sympathy. Jacobson’s account does the necessary work of restating the facts and showing that people can be held accountable for fomenting this kind of terror and harm.
This comfortingly familiar Irish underdog sports movie deviates for not one single second of its running time from the formula. You can tell exactly where it’s going the moment you catch a glimpse of a rowdy women’s rowing team downing shots to celebrate a rare victory – they don’t have a hope in hell’s chance of making it to the tournament final. It’s a film so predictable that you could probably leave the room for 15 minutes and not miss a beat, but it has a big heart and enough easygoing banter to make it watchable. (The dialogue is Irish, and the English subtitles contain plenty of entertaining Irishisms: “Jesus Christ, I’m not completely fucking banjaxed!”)
Kelly Gough plays Aoife, a successful management consultant who has come back home to small-town Kerry to visit her dad, Bear, (Lorcan Cranitch) after he had a heart attack. (“I almost have to die for you to come,” he says, more resigned than bitter.) Aoife is brittle and emotionally distant with Bear. Then, one evening, down the pub, almost by accident, she joins the local women’s rowing team. But can she steer this scrappy mob – an exhausted mother of three, a failed actor and troubled but gifted teenager – to a stirring victory?
You already know the answer to that. Still, the film is directed with a steady hand by Declan Recks, who sensibly sets as much action in the pub as the rowing boat. The team hasn’t won in years. Under Aoife’s new management, we watch their hopeless practice sessions, the team bonding, a surprise win in the semis and an epic final. It’s gentle going and reasonably engaging, and the family dysfunction theme is nicely underplayed. When Aoife and Bear finally heal old wounds, it’s not with a sentimental speech but on a boat, Bear calmly passing his daughter a Wagon Wheel as a peace offering.
Sherry Cola’s stage name originated in a pretty mundane way.
“My legal first name is Sherry,” she told me in a recent interview. “Around 2011, I was making a Yelp account. I was asking my friend Kim from college — I was like: ‘What should my username be for Yelp? I want it to be food related.’ Immediately, after three seconds, she was like, ‘What about Sherry Cola?’ I was like: ‘Oh, that’s catchy. That’s cool. OK.’ So I put that as my Yelp username.”
She never ended up posting any Yelp reviews, but the name stuck. She started using it as her handle on social media and when breaking into stand-up comedy. The first time she performed, “the producer asked me what I wanted on the lineup,” she recalled. “I was like: ‘You know what? Let’s use Sherry Cola.’ Just because it’s fun, it’s bubbly, and when you think about stand-up comedy, people are named Cedric the Entertainer, Lil Rel [Howery] — it’s very nickname-based.”
It also ended up capturing her persona fairly well. “It was never intentional to not use my Chinese last name, but it just works out because ‘Sherry Cola’ really said it all,” she explained. “It’s caffeinated, it wakes you up, it’s sweet — it’s just all of these things.”
Now, her name is on marquees as a star of not one but two movies this summer: the broad and raunchy road trip studio comedy “Joy Ride,” premiering July 7, and the more understated, walking-and-talking indie comedy “Shortcomings,” out Aug. 4.
From left: Stephanie Hsu, Cola, Ashley Park and Sabrina Wu in "Joy Ride."
Though the bar is low and it’s all extremely overdue, the fact that two very different movies featuring a lot of Asian talent — both in front of and behind the camera — can coexist and premiere in the same season does indicate something resembling progress.
“Joy Ride,” in which Cola stars alongside Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu as a quartet of friends who encounter various shenanigans, marks the directorial debut of “Crazy Rich Asians” co-writer Adele Lim. “Shortcomings” is the feature directorial debut of “Fresh Off the Boat” and “Always Be My Maybe” star Randall Park, adapted from a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. Cola plays Alice, the best friend to protagonist Ben (Justin H. Min). Alice is the kind of friend who tells you that you’re being “a piece of shit,” as she says when Ben goes through a bit of an existential crisis accelerated by his girlfriend, Miko (Ally Maki), moving away for an internship.
Even as recently as five years ago, the rare movie or show starring Asian American actors carried an enormous weight and felt like a make-or-break moment. But now, as Asian Americans, we’ve got slightly more options to choose from and talk about, and each release no longer feels like it has to represent all things to all people. Perhaps we’re finally at a point where we can gradually let go of the scarcity mentality that comes with being excluded for so long. It’s a mindset that Cola is unlearning as well.
“I’m just over the moon. I could probably cry right now. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I get to exist right now and tell these stories and make an impact and shift the narrative and unlearn scarcity and practice abundance, because that really is my energy,” she said. “The more the merrier. We don’t have to elbow each other to the top. We don’t have to compete. We’re all so different.”
Cola and Justin H. Min in "Shortcomings."
It’s not unlike the mentality that comes with being an immigrant. Cola and her family emigrated from China when she was 4. She was raised in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, where her parents ran and still run a restaurant. Cola, now 33, said that although she grew up as a pop culture obsessive, she had internalized the idea that “Hollywood is for ‘Americans’” — not including people like herself.
She always loved performing and found ways to do it any way she could, like hosting her high school’s talent show and making videos for the film club. But it never felt attainable as an actual career.
“It was always like a hobby, realistically, because to actually pursue this as a career — as endgame — it felt like such a gamble because there was such a lack of representation,” she said. “I figured: ‘Oh, Jackie Chan exists, Lucy Liu exists. There couldn’t be room for me.’”
In a similar vein, when I kicked off our conversation by wanting to know what movies and shows influenced her, she asked, “Are we talking just in general or through the Asian lens?” After I clarified that I meant generally, since many of us did not grow up seeing our faces on screen, she remembered how she would take note when catching the rare Asian person on a major TV show, like “The Joy Luck Club” star Lauren Tom playing Ross’ girlfriend Julie on “Friends.”
“We had such little representation in the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community on screen that when we saw it — Margaret Cho doing stand-up, Jet Li in ‘Romeo Must Die,’ Lucy Liu in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ — when we saw those faces, we held on even tighter,” Cola said, naming some of her pop culture heroes.
Like many kids in the ’90s and early 2000s, Cola devoured the sitcoms and teen soaps of the time, including “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “My Wife and Kids” and “Degrassi,” and she watched a lot of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. “One of my dreams is to play the live-action version of Phoebe from ‘Hey Arnold!’ How iconic would that be?” she said.
She watched stand-up specials as an adolescent, noticing the ways that trailblazing comedians could change people’s perceptions of themselves and puncture stereotypes.
“Margaret Cho was the vision board for the queer, female Asian American stand-up comic. That’s exactly what I am. So just watching her, I remember being so blown away by how outspoken she was. Everything that came out of her mouth proved someone wrong,” Cola said. “That’s the energy that I hope to carry as well, just because of all the boxes we’ve been forced in.”
Margaret Cho (right) has appeared as a guest star on "Good Trouble," Cola's show on Freeform.
Eric McCandless via Getty Images
In high school, she approached everything with a “you won’t know unless you try” enthusiasm and confidence, which still define her now.
“I’ve always been very passionate and very unafraid of rejection, to be honest. I remember running for [student body] president against someone who had been president for three years. I just thought: ‘Why not? Who knows? Let’s see what happens,’” she said.
“I tried out for the basketball team, the tennis team. I just went for it,” she added. “That’s still the energy I keep today: ‘Just go for it, because who knows? You won’t know unless you try.’ That is genuinely my mantra because I’ve always been very curious and I’ve always had, maybe, FOMO about the potential outcome. If I don’t get there, then how will I ever know?”
That continued in college at California State University, Fullerton, where she went through different phases and tried on many hats. It took her seven years to finish her degree, joking that she “was not your ‘model minority’ by any means” and that, in retrospect, this helped set modest expectations for her parents.
“My mom was so frustrated and so disappointed in my ‘careless lifestyle’ that the bar was set so low. Now in 2023, she is on cloud nine. She can’t believe her eyes,” Cola said. “That’s my trick. You got to set the bar low for the parents. One day, you’re in a big-studio, R-rated comedy in theaters everywhere this summer. One day, you can take Randall Park to her restaurant.”
Throughout college, Cola remembered, she was “this ball of fire that wanted to do the most, but just didn’t know how.” Out of curiosity, she joined the campus radio station, playing music and giving commentary on news and pop culture — and found that she had a knack for it.
After graduating, she got a job at 97.1 AMP Radio in Southern California, eventually becoming an on-air host. Among her mentors at the time was Carson Daly, who presented the station’s morning show from 2010 to 2017. Her work involved everything from “giving out T-shirts on a Tuesday, and then suddenly escorting Taylor Swift at the Forum [arena] on a Friday,” she said. “It was such a bizarre job.”
She also started doing stand-up, making viral videos and short films, and taking improv classes at the famed Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles — once again, trying to create whenever and wherever she could. She still thinks of herself as a comedian first, performing frequently as a stand-up and at UCB’s Asian AF variety show, a showcase of Asian American comics.
Cola at the Los Angeles premiere of the animated film "Elemental" at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on June 8.
JC Olivera/GA via Getty Images
In 2017, Cola started acting on TV, landing a breakout role on the Amazon Prime Video series “I Love Dick,” followed by a bigger part on TNT’s “Claws.” For five seasons, she has starred on Freeform’s “Good Trouble” as Alice Kwan, a character with some similarities to herself as a queer Asian American comedian. And now, with two movies about to premiere and several projects cooking, Cola still embraces the same curiosity and go-getter approach that she’s leaned into all her life.
“When people ask me, ‘Oh, is there a moment when you thought, “I made it”’ — the ‘I made it’ feeling never ends, because you’re constantly unlocking new levels to this video game. You’re constantly realizing, ’Oh, I can do this too,’” Cola said. “You’re constantly elevating and evolving and just being more unlimited. Reaching your capacity and then breaking through, and creating another capacity and breaking through again.”
Cola is currently putting the finishing touches on an upcoming stand-up special. She’s also one of the voices in the Paramount Animation film “The Tiger’s Apprentice” — featuring another all-star Asian cast, including Sandra Oh, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding and Bowen Yang — set for release in January. She hopes to direct someday, having shadowed a few of her directors on “Good Trouble.” And she’s developing a show called “Dead Air,” based on her time working in radio, saying it’s full of “friendship and fighting and tension” — which all happen to be ingredients for a juicy TV series.
“It was a rollercoaster of emotions because it was just a bunch of us in our 20s, messy love triangles, a lot of hustle. We all wanted to make it,” she said. “It was bananas, an absolutely unhinged chapter of my life while trying to pursue my dreams.”
These days, seeing her name and face on billboards is a reminder to unlearn the idea that Hollywood isn’t for people like her.
“For so long, we were defined by others. We were defined by Hollywood, we were defined by society, we were defined by this country. Now, we’re finally reclaiming our identities and redefining ourselves,” Cola said. “It feels really liberating: ‘Let me make fun of myself. I’m done being the punchline. We’ll tell the jokes.’”
“Well, Hollywood does hate gay people, even still,” he said. “I mean, they pretend that they don’t, but they do.”
Still, he hoped that Lane’s A24 hot streak indicates that a younger generation of people, raised on Lane’s performances, have more exciting ideas of what do with him than the old guard Lane initially encountered: “He’s so good at acting that now they’re like, ‘Maybe we should let a gay person be a star.’”
In the meantime, there’s “Dicks.” “Our little baby is going out to the real world where people can’t wait to be offended,” Lane said. “When I saw it, I just said, ‘Well, either it’s going to be this cult hit, or we’ll all be deported.’”
Though he isn’t sure how the film will be received — “I’d like to show this to Mitch McConnell, then he’d really freeze” — Lane still offered some marketing suggestions. He told Sharp and Jackson they should record a video to warn that watching the film in a theater could make the audience gay, then ask a few willing football players to serve as the guinea pigs: “You send in Aaron Rodgers and a couple of others, and then they come out of there in caftans.”
The idea was vetoed when they heard that the recent comedy “Bottoms” might also be planning a turn-you-gay marketing angle, but Lane was just happy to have the company. “If you can get away with ‘Bottoms’ — if you can have a high-school comedy about teenage lesbians starting a fight club — you certainly can have ‘Dicks: The Musical,’” he said.
With that remark, our coffee date was over. And though we had met in the early morning, at an hour when some party-hearty A24 stars might finally be crawling into bed, Lane assured me it was no trouble at all.
“This was like therapy,” he said. “I cried, I laughed, I talked about ‘Dicks.’”
It’s funny how life works out. Liverpool-born actor Paul McGann had left school and was working in a shoe shop when he bumped into his old schoolteacher, Joe Hartley, who had given him the lead role in a school production of Antony and Cleopatra. Feeling McGann was wasting his talents fitting shoes, Hartley suggested he apply to Rada – which lead to a part in the snooker drama Give Us a Break opposite Robert Lindsay, then the lead role in Alan Bleasdale’s controversial first world war drama The Monocled Mutineer.
The rest is history. McGann went on to star as Marwood, the eponymous I to Richard E Grant’s Withnail in 1987 and then was cast as the eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV film, Doctor Who (the first attempt to relaunch the series following its 1989 cancellation).
McGann is now starring in a period gothic gangster thriller, The Undertaker, opposite Tara Fitzgerald and Lily Frazer, as a mild-mannered funeral director who gets caught up in a power-grab by a local gangster. To that end, McGann will be here to take your questions. Do ask about Withnail and Doctor Who, but don’t forget all his other roles. On TV he has been in everything from the ITV historical war drama Hornblower to Jonathan Creek, Holby City and Waking the Dead. In the theatre, he has done Much Ado About Nothing and The Seagull. And definitely ask him about Lesbian Vampire Killers from 2009. He’ll like that for sure. *wink emoji* Leave your questions in the comments belwo, and we’ll print his answers in Film & Music.
Jennifer Lawrence rose to fame as Katniss Everdeen in the “Hunger Games” film franchise, but her career could have taken a different path had she landed one big audition.
The Oscar winner recently revealed during an appearance on Spotify’s “The Rewatchables” podcast that she had auditioned for a role in “Twilight.”
“I auditioned for ‘Twilight,’” she said in the interview earlier this month. “They turned me down immediately. I didn’t even get a callback. But my life would’ve been totally different. I got ‘Hunger Games, ’ I think, like, a year later.”
But Lawrence said she almost didn’t accept the offer to play Katniss after witnessing the level of “fandom” surrounding the “Twilight” movies and its stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.
The first “Twilight” film premiered in 2008, and the final installment, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” was released in 2012. The first “Hunger Games” movie premiered in 2012.
“I almost didn’t do ‘Hunger Games’ because ‘Twilight’ had come out and that fandom had happened,” she said, adding that she was concerned that “Hunger Games” would bring a similar “level of fame.”
“I just assumed it was going to be like ‘Twilight’— the ‘Twilight’ level of fame, and that was just never something I had in mind,” she said. “I wanted to do indies, I wanted to do good films, but I didn’t want to be the most famous person on the planet. That’s a very different life than what I pictured for myself.”
Lawrence added that she would have been “miserable” had she endured the media frenzy and tabloid fodder the “Twilight” actors dealt with while making the vampire film saga.
Jennifer Lawrence at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" on Monday, Nov. 18, 2013.
Clearly, Lawrence’s casting in “The Hunger Games” film franchise was meant to be.
“If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent,” she said.
Lawrence starred in all four “Hunger Games” installments from 2012 to 2015. She will not appear in an upcoming sequel for the franchise, “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”
Pixar, once regarded by film critics and ticket buyers as a studio that could do no wrong, had misfired so immensely at the box office that its future as a cultural force was in doubt. Pixar’s creative spark had apparently blown out — poof.
An opposites-attract love story and parable about following your dreams, “Elemental” arrived to $29.6 million in domestic ticket sales in June — the worst opening in Pixar history, by a mile. Little by little, however, the $200 million film became a hit, collecting nearly $500 million worldwide. For the year to date, “Elemental” ranks No. 9 on the list of top-grossing films, ahead of Marvel’s latest “Ant-Man” sequel.
Moreover, “Elemental” has provided the Walt Disney Company, which owns Pixar, with one of the biggest streaming hits in its history. The movie arrived on Disney+ on Sept. 13 and had garnered 60 million views through Sunday, far surpassing results for Disney films like “The Little Mermaid” and “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3” for the same periods of availability, according to the company.
“I had no idea what ‘Elemental’ was about, but we decided to watch it as a family because I kept hearing good things,” said Rahela Nayebzadah, who lives in suburban Vancouver, Canada, and has two sons, ages 7 and 4. “The kids have been watching it nonstop ever since.”
Disney also expects to sell about 800,000 “Elemental” DVDs worldwide. About 1.7 million people will buy a digital copy through iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other online stores.
Predictably, Pixar executives are doing cartwheels. But the “Elemental” turnaround does not vanquish questions about the studio as much as raise new ones.
In a postpandemic, streaming-oriented movie marketplace, is the box office ceiling for original animated films simply lower? Pixar originals used to reliably take in more than $500 million worldwide — sometimes a lot more, including “Coco,” which collected $1 billion in 2017, after adjusting for inflation, and “Inside Out,” which sold an inflation-adjusted $1.1 billion in 2015.
And if that is the case — if Disney+ has eaten into Pixar’s theatrical audience — will Pixar need to spend substantially less? “Elemental” cost roughly $200 million to make, not including marketing. To compare, NBCUniversal’s competing Illumination Animation spent half as much to make its most-recent original movie, “Sing,” in 2016.
Pixar will know more in March, when it releases “Elio,” an original comedic adventure about an 11-year-old boy who gets inadvertently beamed into space and mistaken as Earth’s galactic ambassador. (Pixar’s sibling studio, Walt Disney Animation, will also provide clues later this year, when its “Wish,” an original musical, arrives in theaters.)
“I hope we can continue to be able to have budgets that allow our artists to do the best work of their lives,” Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, said in a Zoom interview. Hollywood as a whole needs to adjust its business models for the streaming era, he noted.
Pixar and Disney have spent a lot of time trying to understand the chilly initial response to “Elemental,” Mr. Docter said. For a start, he said, Disney had undercut Pixar as a big-screen force by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row online, bypassing theaters altogether. Those films were “Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca.”
“There has been an overall shift in viewing habits as a result of the pandemic, but it’s also specific to Disney+,” Mr. Docter said. “We’ve told people, ‘Hey, all of this is going to be available to you on Disney+!’”
Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.
In recent years, Pixar has allowed filmmakers like Peter Sohn, who made “Elemental,” to explore stories that are more personal. (Mr. Sohn’s immigrant parents inspired his film.) Yet many of Pixar’s biggest original successes, including “Toy Story” in 1995 and “Monsters, Inc.” in 2001, have grown from more universal concepts — “ideas that we all carried around as kids,” as Mr. Docter put it.
What if my toys come to life when I leave the room? What if there are monsters in my closet?
“I always felt that ‘Elemental’ would speak to a lot of people, and I’m so happy it has,” said Mr. Docter, whose credits as a director include “Inside Out,” “Up” and “Monsters, Inc.” “But we have also taken another look at the projects we’re working on now. What are the kinds of films we want to be making? I really think I want to double down on what allowed us to speak to audiences to begin with.”
There’s considerable competition of course, but Todd Haynes has a strong claim to be one of America’s greatest living auteurs, with a string of outstanding films to his name including the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol, Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, and Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven.
Haynes first made a name for himself with his Barbie-doll animated short film Superstar, about Karen Carpenter, and then acquired career momentum with his feature debut Poison in 1991, part of the early 90s New Queer Cinema movement. Safe, the creepy mid-90s fable about a woman afflicted by a mysterious allergy-like illness, marked his first collaboration with Julianne Moore; she would go on to appear in further films including the exquisitely art-directed Far From Heaven (as a woman whose picture-perfect marriage is undermined by her husband’s gay affairs), the YA fantasy Wonderstruck (as a silent movie star) and his new one, May December, as a woman who became a tabloid sensation decades earlier by marrying a much younger man.
Haynes’s other great collaborator, of course, is Cate Blanchett: she played one of multiple Bob Dylan personas in the tricksy I’m Not There, and then took the starring role in Carol, as a glamorous married woman who has an affair with Rooney Mara’s store assistant/photographer. And he furthered his interest in the music industry with, back in the day, the glam-rock fable Velvet Goldmine and a documentary about legendary art-rockers the Velvet Underground.
So what do you want to ask him? What does he think about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie? Did he anticipate Carol becoming one of the great Christmas films? Leave your questions in the comments below before Wednesday at 6pm, and we’ll print his replies in Film & Music.
On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.
The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.
The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.
“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s then-president and chief executive. “We were really impressed.”
Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.
“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”
Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer of renown, whose works include not just “West Side Story” but music for the concert hall.
He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.
Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film “A Star Is Born,” which he also directed.
But “Maestro,” in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style at the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct, but also to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.
Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.
Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”
Cooper, who wrote “Maestro” with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in “Tár” (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.”
He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms.
“My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”
Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in “Looney Tunes” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.
“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show” last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”
Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct “Maestro,” was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home.”
After a screening of “A Star Is Born,” Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand “Maestro” over to Cooper, with whom he shares a love of classical music.
“It only took me 15 minutes to realize this brilliant actor is equaled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.
Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (“Maestro” beat out a rival Bernstein project by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)
Jamie Bernstein said that Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story.” He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, like placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.
Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Conn., admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.
“He was just like a sponge soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.
Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to his children. (They defended him recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)
At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute,” a nickname that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)
Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in “Maestro”; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.
Cooper was eager to approach “Maestro” less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled.
While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart.”
The film, shot largely on location, recreates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for the ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.
At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, the Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.
In his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors’ union.)
Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Nézet-Séguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”
Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Schumann’s “Manfred” overture, which opened the Carnegie program in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of “Candide,” during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.
Last fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to recreate a 1973 performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.
Cooper, who chose the music in “Maestro,” had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.
“He would watch the videos,” Nézet-Séguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?”
Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an eight-minute section of the piece with a recording.
When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nézet-Séguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.
When Cooper took the podium, Nézet-Séguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold onto a moment or let go.
The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”
Throughout his work on “Maestro,” Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.
Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.
Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village townhouse for screenings of “Maestro.” The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut program.
“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.
Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channeling a supernova.” He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.
“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”
