Archives for April 2018

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“Ink,” a new British play about the rise of Rupert Murdoch, will have its American premiere on Broadway next spring.

The play, which was a hit in London last year, is about an early chapter in Mr. Murdoch’s rise to moguldom — his takeover and tabloid transformation of The Sun, a British newspaper, starting in 1969.

“Ink” was written by James Graham, a Briton The Financial Times called “one of the country’s finest and funniest playwrights.” His one previous Broadway outing, as the book writer for the Harvey Weinstein-helmed musical “Finding Neverland,” was a flop, but beyond Broadway he has won acclaim for his politically charged dramas, including “Privacy,” which transferred from London to the Public Theater in New York.

Reviewing “Ink” in London, Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the play “both an entertaining epitaph for a lost age and a chilling prophecy of days to come.”

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The play will be directed by Rupert Goold (“King Charles III”) and presented by the nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club in collaboration with London’s Almeida Theater, where the play first ran, and Sonia Friedman Productions. The production is being partly financed by the foundation established by Roy Cockrum, a onetime Episcopal monk who won a $153 million Powerball jackpot and has been using some of the proceeds to support theater projects.

In the London production, Mr. Murdoch was portrayed by Bertie Carvel (“Matilda”); the casting for New York has not been announced.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/theater/ink-a-tale-of-rupert-murdochs-rise-is-coming-to-broadway.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“It was personally offensive,” Brian Kilmeade, a co-host of “Fox Friends,” said in the ballroom, minutes after Ms. Wolf ended her set.

“To me, that was an attack to impress Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert,” Mr. Kilmeade added, previewing a line of criticism that would be dominant on Fox News by Sunday morning. “Congratulations, when the three of you go out to dinner, I’m sure you’ll be laughing a lot. But in terms of the people here and the people at home — totally offensive, horrible choice. In fact, it’s the reason why the president didn’t want to go.”

Critics of President Trump — who is no stranger to lobbing insult-comic punch lines at his opponents and is the first president to outright skip the Correspondents’ gala since Jimmy Carter — wondered what the fuss was about.

“Before we criticize Michelle Wolf, let’s remember that Donald Trump has done and said some of the crudest things that any president in history has ever done,” said Howard Fineman, a left-leaning analyst at NBC News and MSNBC. “Just have a little perspective.”

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By Sunday, Ms. Wolf, a contributor to “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” whose Netflix talk show starts in May, had seemingly scandalized Washington’s intersecting political and media tribes.

In one Twitter exchange, Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary — who recently turned up at Madame Tussauds to promote a wax statue of Melania Trump — described the dinner as “a disgrace.”

“Thank you!” Ms. Wolf replied.

Prominent Washington journalists, meanwhile, took pains to defend Ms. Sanders — earning their own opprobrium from some liberals who asked why reporters were sticking up for an administration that routinely impugns their work.

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Andrea Mitchell, the NBC News correspondent, tweeted that an “apology is owed” to the press secretary. Her network colleague Mika Brzezinski wrote that “watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable.”

Several reporters who cover the White House approached Ms. Sanders in the Hilton ballroom to express sympathy in the immediate aftermath of Ms. Wolf’s monologue. Later, at a windswept after party hosted by NBC News, Ms. Sanders appeared in good spirits as reporters swarmed her. (She even took time to chastise one journalist for asking a question at a news conference that she disliked.)

Late on Sunday, Margaret Talev, president of the Correspondents’ Association, issued a statement acknowledging “dismay” from members about Ms. Wolf’s performance.

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“Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press,” Ms. Talev wrote. “Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.”

Ms. Talev said her organization would consider new ideas about the future format of the dinner — a sentiment echoed by Mr. Trump in a tweet about a half-hour later.

“The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a failure last year, but this year was an embarrassment to everyone associated with it,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, adding: “Put Dinner to rest, or start over!”

Going back to Stephen Colbert’s blistering monologue in 2006 — delivered as President George W. Bush sat unsmiling a few feet away — the comic portion of the Correspondents’ dinner has courted controversy. Roast-style humor is an odd fit for protocol-oriented Washington, and some comedians praised Ms. Wolf for discomfiting the audience of elite journalists and administration officials.

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“If you want to focus on the journalism do a boring award show,” tweeted Kathy Griffin, the comedian whose own brush with crude presidential humor — posting a photo of herself holding what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s decapitated head — led to her losing a CNN job. “Journalism is all about the 1st amendment. If you don’t see the import of what @michelleisawolf did tonight then you don’t get it.”

The doyens of Washington did not agree. Mike Allen, a prime voice of the city’s establishment, declared in his newsletter on Sunday: “Media hands Trump embarrassing win.” There were even whispers about a revolt against the Correspondents’ Association by news organizations displeased by the night’s events. (The New York Times stopped attending the dinner in 2008.)

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Ms. Talev, speaking on CNN on Sunday, noted that the dinner had praised Mr. Trump for meeting with aspiring journalists at the White House and featured the story of an Egyptian social activist who was freed from prison with the help of the Trump administration.

She said she regretted that Ms. Wolf’s monologue had overshadowed the rest of the evening, but added: “When the entertainer is a comedian — as has been the case for the last 30 years or so — they are often controversial, they are often to some extent polarizing, or provocative, and it’s a night about free speech.”

Ms. Wolf’s 19-minute set also took on Democrats and the news media itself. She quipped that “it’s kind of crazy that the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia when the Hillary campaign wasn’t even in contact with Michigan,” and joked about CNN’s hyperactive approach to coverage.

“You guys love breaking news, and you did it, you broke it!” Ms. Wolf said. “Good work! The most useful information on CNN is when Anthony Bourdain tells me where to eat noodles.”

Her most cutting joke came at the end, when the 32-year-old comic took direct aim at the journalists in the room. Mr. Trump, she said, “has helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster and now you are profiting from him.”

Kyle Pope, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, posted a message on Twitter suggesting that even journalists had had enough of the annual ritual. “The #WHCD debacle was inevitable, destined to be either sycophantic, on one extreme, or mean spirited, on the other. Neither is a good look at a time when trust in media is tenuous. Can we finally all agree to put an end to this thing?”

Speaking with The Times in February, after her selection as the evening’s entertainer was announced, Ms. Wolf said that comedians at the Correspondents’ dinner “are not necessarily performing for the room.”

“You’re performing for everyone that’s watching it,” Ms. Wolf said, adding: “If you’re willing to say something when someone’s not there, you should definitely be willing to say it to their face.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/business/media/michelle-wolfs-routine-sets-off-a-furor-at-an-annual-washington-dinner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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“Spider-Man: Homecoming” was a soaring success. “Thor: Ragnarok” opened even bigger. Then “Black Panther” crushed both of them.

But none of those Marvel movies could compare to the franchise’s shiniest jewel, “Avengers: Infinity War,” which rampaged through the weekend with $630 million worldwide — easily the biggest global opening of all time.

Expectations were high for “Infinity War,” the first installment of a two-part finale, which will wrap up a whopping 20-film Disney franchise. The movie features a litany of brand-name stars — Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Chris Pratt and dozens more — as the heroes assemble to take down Thanos (Josh Brolin), the series’ biggest baddie yet. Disney poured in around $300 million to make the movie and another $150 million or so to market it, sending the extensive cast around the world and to nearly every talk show.

The investments paid off. The $630 million global opening for “Infinity War” crushed the previous record-holder, “The Fate of the Furious,” which arrived last year to a now seemingly pedestrian $542 million. Incredibly, “Infinity War” sprinted to first place without the enormous markets of China or Russia, where it will open in the next two weeks. Domestically, the film put up a cool $250 million and was celebrated in Hollywood as the biggest opening ever. When adjusted for inflation, though, “Infinity War” lags slightly behind “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which arrived in 2015 to about $261 million in today’s dollars.

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Disney now holds nine of the top 10 domestic openings of all time — six of which are part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “The result is a reflection of 10 years of work: of developing this universe, creating stakes as big as they were, characters that matter and stories and worlds that people have come to love,” Dave Hollis, Disney’s president of distribution, said in a phone interview.

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“Avengers: Infinity War” will next set its sights on records like the fastest film to reach $1 billion and the highest gross ever. The film’s endurance should be lifted by mostly positive reviews from critics, as well as an A from audiences in CinemaScore exit polls. And it’s highly likely that superfans will boost the gross by returning to theaters multiple times.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/movies/avengers-infinity-war-biggest-global-opening-ever.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

On Saturday morning, Ms. Reid devoted about 30 minutes of her show to the controversy, speaking with a supportive panel of experts who fight for L.G.B.T. rights.

“I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for,” said Ms. Reid, 49. “I own that. I did it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.”

Most of Ms. Reid’s guests commended her for recognizing that her words had been hurtful, and redirected the conversation to Washington and the Trump administration’s policies.

“The reality is that while we’re having conversations about what may or may not have been said 10 years ago, we should be having conversations about what was tweeted 10 seconds ago,” said Danielle Moodie-Mills, a public relations executive who hosts “Woke AF” on SiriusXM, the satellite radio provider.

“There are bans that are still up at the Supreme Court right now to keep Muslims out of America,” she added, as well as efforts to “kick patriotic trans people out of the military. And that’s coming from the Oval Office right now.”

Ms. Reid’s posts emerged on social media this month via the Twitter user @Jamie_Maz. In December, the same account shared posts in which Ms. Reid taunted Charlie Crist, the Democratic former Florida governor, as a closeted gay man whose heterosexual marriage was a political front. Late last year, she apologized and Mr. Crist responded, “Long forgotten, but thank you, Joy. I appreciate you.”

It’s not the first time Ms. Reid’s words have stoked controversy.

On Saturday she apologized for some of her past tweets, including ones in which she mocked the conservative commentator Ann Coulter by “using transgender stereotypes.” Ms. Reid grew up in a household that had conservative values on L.G.B.T. issues, she said, but “those tweets were wrong and horrible.”

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“I look back today at some of the ways I’ve talked casually about people and gender identity and sexual orientation and I wonder who that even was,” she added. “But the reality is that like a lot of people in this country, that person was me.”

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She did not take ownership of the most recently surfaced blog posts, however. In a statement this week to Mediaite, Ms. Reid said that her website had been breached and that the posts were fabricated by hackers intending to defame her.

She said in the statement that “an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog,” and that she had retained an online security expert to investigate. “I can state unequivocally,” she wrote, that the resurfaced posts do “not represent the original entries.”

Ms. Reid’s former blog posts were discovered via the Wayback Machine, an archive of more than two decades of web history. On Tuesday, the Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine, responded to Ms. Reid’s claim that her posts had been hacked, saying in a statement that it had found no evidence of hacking in the archived versions of her site.

Ms. Reid’s security consultant, Jonathan Nichols, responded that “at no time has Ms. Reid claimed that the Wayback Machine was hacked” with an intention to alter her blog. Instead, he said Ms. Reid’s team detected a “breach” of her blog but that it was unrelated to the “fraudulent” posts.

Ms. Reid ran her blog, “The Reid Report,” in the mid-2000s while writing about politics for The Miami Herald, long before she started working at MSNBC, where she once had a daily show with the same name.

She has emerged as a rising star at MSNBC, galvanizing liberal viewers with her forceful interviews with supporters of President Trump and tough commentary on politics and race. “AM Joy,” her morning show, has risen in the ratings since its debut in 2016, and Ms. Reid was a frequent substitute for the network’s marquee prime time hosts, including Ms. Maddow.

Ms. Reid is also a columnist for The Daily Beast, whose executive editor said it “hit pause” on her columns while it investigated her claims that she had been hacked, CNN reported.

The Daily Beast said it found errors in Mr. Nichols’s methodology and concluded that “the indicators of hacked posts don’t bear out.”

On Saturday, Ms. Reid noted that she “should have known better” than to have ever written or tweeted words that were homophobic or transphobic, “even a decade ago, when the country was in a very different place.”

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“But I cannot take any of that back,” she added. “I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/business/media/joy-reid-hacking-msnbc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Then this month, she appeared in a Pennsylvania courtroom. Sitting on her hands because they were shaking so much, she became one of the few among Mr. Cosby’s dozens of accusers to face him again, helping secure his felony convictions on Thursday for sexually assaulting a former Temple University employee.

“I realized I had the strength to look in the face of somebody who would commit a crime like this,” Ms. Lublin, 51, said in a phone interview from her Las Vegas home. “I knew I was strong enough to say, ‘You won’t whip me, you won’t hold me down, and you won’t shut me up.’ ”

That the jury convicted Mr. Cosby on retrial, after a hung jury last summer, might be attributed in part to the new cultural awareness born out of the #MeToo movement. But in his remarks after the verdict, the Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, praised the witnesses for their courage, saying they were crucial to the case.

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He also called each of them separately to convey his gratitude and, choking up, told Ms. Lublin that because she and the other witnesses had stepped up, they were able to win the case.

In 1989, Ms. Lublin was 23, living in Las Vegas, her hometown, and modeling to help pay for college when she was summoned by her agency to meet Mr. Cosby. Guessing he had seen her portfolio pictures, she went.

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On their second meeting, she said, he invited her to his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton, because he wanted her to practice improvising, even though she wasn’t an actor. He gave her alcohol to relax, she said, and soon afterward she felt woozy and sick, like she might topple.

Mr. Cosby beckoned her over, she said, pulled her down between his legs, so that her back was against his groin, and began stroking her hair. Ms. Lublin remembers wondering why he was doing that, and that she couldn’t understand a word he was saying. She has a few fractured memories of being guided by him down a hallway of the suite, and then nothing, until she woke up at home in her bed.

Ms. Lublin was mortified, but not, at the time, because of anything Mr. Cosby might have done. “I looked at it as ‘Oh my god, Lisa, you got sick from alcohol; you don’t even remember how you got home,’” she said.

When Mr. Cosby reached out to her again, and even forged a friendship with her mother, she felt reassured: Maybe her blackout behavior hadn’t been that bad. Ms. Lublin said she and Mr. Cosby met several times after that — though never alone — and that at his urging, she began running at a track as he looked on.

When bystanders asked what Mr. Cosby was doing there, Ms. Lublin said he replied, “I’m out here with my daughter, Lisa.” (Lisa is the name she goes by.) Eventually they fell out of touch.

After Ms. Dickinson went public with her story late in 2014, Ms. Lublin began reconsidering what really happened at the hotel that night.

“I started to kind of accept that, yeah, something has happened to you,” she said. Her mother, outraged at feeling hoodwinked herself, began calling television shows, and Ms. Lublin found herself on “Dr. Phil,” publicly recounting her story for the first time.

It took her six weeks to muster the courage to file a police report, but when she did, a detective told her there was nothing they could do; too much time had passed.

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Ms. Lublin felt like she had been punched, but then rebounded. “I’m a fighter,” she said. In 2015, she successfully urged Nevada legislators to extend the statute of limitations for bringing forward rape charges to 20 years from four years, though the change does not apply retroactively.

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Ms. Lublin said she never hid what was going on from her children, a daughter who is now 11 and a son, now 13, or from her sixth-grade students, who sometimes came up after class, asking if was it her they had seen on TV. “Yes,” she said she replied, “And I’m working to change laws to protect you.”

When vicious online comments about her — detractors called her a “liar” and a “whore” — inevitably surfaced, one student wrote back, “Ms. Lublin’s my teacher, and she’s a wonderful person.”

In 2017, as prosecutors were preparing to try Mr. Cosby on charges of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, the former Temple employee, detectives contacted Ms. Lublin and told her she might be called as testify as a “prior bad acts” witness who could help prove a pattern of criminal behavior by Mr. Cosby.

“One of the reasons the district attorneys picked Lisa was when they heard her talking about him petting her hair,” her husband, Benjamin Lublin, said. “That was a marker for them.”

She wasn’t called for Mr. Cosby’s first trial. Then, in mid-March, just before the Lublins left for a spring break cruise to Mexico, the confirmation came. Ms. Lublin was going to be one of five women called to bolster Ms. Constand’s testimony. The district attorney’s office flew her and her husband to Philadelphia on a red-eye flight April 9.

A few days later, a detective picked them up from their hotel and drove them to the courthouse. They were deposited in a witness room, where they played with Turks, the russet Labrador therapy dog the prosecutors had brought in to soothe people’s nerves.

To further loosen things up, Mr. Lublin set up his Bluetooth speakers, began playing his favorite country singer, Jon Pardi, and pulled out a favorite card game, Sequence.

Early in the afternoon, a court officer came and escorted Ms. Lublin, her husband by her side, to a courtroom door near the jury box. Ms. Dickinson, who had just testified, emerged from the door. The pair embraced, and then Ms. Lublin stepped in.

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“Just get safely to the podium, and don’t trip,” she told herself. The witness stand seat surprised her — it was like a bar stool with a back. She sat down, and began slowly scanning the courtroom. “Take this in,” she said to herself.

She spotted Gloria Allred, the lawyer who had handled some of Ms. Lublin’s publicity and represented many of Mr. Cosby’s accusers, including some in the courtroom, women Ms. Lublin had become close with over the years. She avoided meeting their eyes. “Locking eyes would expose my vulnerabilities, and I’d either cry or laugh,” she said.

She wanted to come across as calm and poised, and sat tall. Only after that did she see Mr. Cosby, far off to her left, in the corner, not looking her way. “He looked pitiful,” she said.

The only person she felt slightly intimidated by, she said, was Mr. Steele, the district attorney. “He’s got eyes of steel, too,” she said.

She suddenly got the chills, and felt herself quaking, so she shoved her hands under her thighs. “The shaking was uncontrollable,” she said, “but my mind was clear.”

A prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, questioned her for an hour, and then turned it over to one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, Kathleen Bliss.

Ms. Lublin had girded herself for a grilling, but compared with Ms. Bliss’s questioning of Ms. Dickinson, whom she would later call a “failed starlet,” Ms. Lublin said her own cross-examination felt almost toothless.

She said Ms. Bliss pressed for inconsistencies in Ms. Lublin’s old statements about changing Nevada’s statues and about meeting with Ms. Allred. Ms. Lublin found herself bickering with Ms. Bliss, getting snippy and worn down, but she never wavered. “The story doesn’t change when you tell the truth,” she said in the interview last week.

Ms. Lublin was back in her classroom of 25 sixth graders on Thursday when her husband called with news of the verdict. Hours later, at home, she still found herself stunned, and pacing. “At some point,” she said, “I just gotta let myself feel.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/arts/television/bill-cosby-lublin-accuser.html?partner=rss&emc=rss