It’s a story that might easily slip into lurid melodrama or sensationalism. But as Scanlen read writer-director Laurel Parmet’s screenplay, she realized the film had more sensitive, complicated things in mind.

“I thought it was a unique portrayal of relationships that have an age gap,” the 24-year-old Australian actress says on a recent video call. “It didn’t fall into a stereotype, which is very easy for that to occur. I think often people eroticize those relationships or they are reduced to simply the aggressor/victim of abuse dynamics.

“I also think Laurel illustrated Jem as someone who wielded agency whilst at the same time there was an abuse of power in the relationship. Both were truths in the story, which I found really fascinating,” says Scanlen.

This dynamic can leave viewers uncertain and uncomfortable at times, Parmet says on a separate video call. That’s a good thing, she says, because it allows viewers to think about the story without being told what to think.

“All the filmmaking choices were coming from this place of wanting it to feel immediate and wanting the audience to really be with Jem moment to moment,” Parmet says. “But at the same time not pushing an opinion onto the audience. Letting the audience come to their own conclusions.

“So, you know, not wanting to linger too much on things that were emotional or overwrought, or not telling the audience through music what to feel,” she says. “Just really letting the audience live with the characters and experience it organically.

“That sort of restraint I think was the real backbone of the filmmaking.”

Universal experiences

For Parmet, inspiration for “The Starling Girl” came out of her own complicated feelings about her own experience as a teen.

“It started for me from a personal place,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I had a relationship with an older man. I hesitate to call it a relationship even. It was what it was. And I, at the time, didn’t see myself as a victim. I felt like I had agency. Like I was mature enough.”

Many years later, she started to see it more clearly for what it really was.

“After it ended, I had a lot of negative feelings about it, and I’ve had a lot of guilt about it,” Parmet says. “But I don’t think I’d really even realized it. I kind of just put the truth to the side and didn’t want to think about it.”

Then while in Oklahoma doing research for a project on rodeos, she met and befriended a group of women from a patriarchal church there. While their lives and situations at first seemed entirely different than her own, Parmet says she came to see similarities in their stories and hers.

“At first, I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of twisted,’” she says of the way in which the women she met were expected to subsume their own needs and desires to those of the men in their lives. “But the more I thought about it, the more I was struck by how we have a lot of similarities. Just in terms of growing up to have shame about our desires and the responsibility to not tempt men. That it was always the woman’s fault.

“It made me reflect back on my relationship in ways that I hadn’t before,” Parmet says. “It made me recognize this guilt that I had had, and made me question why I have this guilt despite the fact that he took advantage of me. Where does that come from? Where did I learn that?”

The commonality of experience inspired Parmet to write.

“I wanted to tell a story looking at the universal experiences for women,” she says. “Experiencing sexual shame and seeking approval in men no matter how you grew up.

“And in doing so, I honestly ended up finding so much empathy and admiration for faith that I was not expecting.”

Fiery and naive

Parmet was still writing “The Starling Girl” in 2018 when she saw Scanlen in the HBO limited series “Sharp Objects” and was struck by the then-teenaged actress’s performance as Amma, the younger half-sister of Amy Adams’ character Camille.

“I saw her and I was like, ‘Who is this?’” she says. “This is like exactly who I picture in my film. She’s able to straddle this lightness and darkness so well. She can be so sweet and young and naive looking. And then like on a dime, she’s this fiery, ferociousness boiling underneath. And I really needed that in this character.”

Years later, after the pandemic had slowed progress on the project, Parmet got the screenplay to Scanlen, who says she was as excited to play Jem as Parmet was to have her.

The fire within Jem that pushes her to pursue the decade-older youth pastor Owen (Lewis Pullman) is countered by the vulnerability of a sheltered teen girl, Scanlen says.

“I wanted to straddle both sides to her,” she says. “This naivety that makes her jump headfirst into situations without really – it’s not even that she’s not thinking of the consequences, it’s that she doesn’t understand the consequences because she’s very young. That’s what I was trying to achieve, I suppose.”

God and faith

Despite setting the story in a rural Kentucky church community, “The Starling Girl” treats the religious backgrounds of its characters with care and respect.

“The film doesn’t blaspheme God,” Parmet says. “It’s not about that. It’s looking at a more complex way to look at religion and to suggest that maybe there are multiple ways to connect with God.”

Jem is seen at the start of the film performing in church with a worship dance troupe. By the end, she’s dancing by herself in a mostly empty Memphis bar where her father had played gigs before giving up his band for church.

“It’s such a beautiful visual tool to mirror Jem’s awakening and search for self,” Scanlen says. “The dancing in the beginning of the film is a lot more restricted than the dancing we see at the end of the film. But she never loses the dancing, and to me that sort of represents her relationship with God, and how it evolves over the film.

“At the beginning of the film, her relationship with God is fraught, and it’s colored by this internal struggle with her own desires,” she says. “She’s constantly trying to suppress these desires and dancing is her greatest joy. Yet at the same time, she worries that her joy and love for dancing gets in the way of her relationship with God.

“As the film progresses, things fall apart,” Scanlen says. “She’s picking up the pieces throughout but God never leaves her and she’s forced to reckon with her faith. And she comes to an understanding that her relationship with God is changing, and her conception of God moving forward has to be different.”

“The Starling Girl” ends without spelling out what happens next in Jem’s life. Scanlen believes Jem will be OK in whatever comes after the credits roll.

“It really touched me that Laurel wrote it that she didn’t lose her faith,” Scanlen says. “Her faith became her own and she took control of it. It’s quite an empowering ending even though we don’t know exactly what happens.”

The broadcast of the 2015 Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Cincinnati featured the introduction on the field of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, and Sandy Koufax – the four greatest living baseball players as determined by a fan vote.

Berra looked at Grampa Yogi sitting next to her on the couch and knew that wasn’t right.

“I’m thinking, Wait a second,” Berra says in the opening moments of “It Ain’t Over,” a new documentary on Yogi Berra’s life and career playing in select theaters. “He’s got more MVPs than any of these guys. He’s won more World Series rings than all four of them combined.

“And I look at him and I said, ‘Are you dead?’” she says. “And he said, ‘Not yet.’”

“It Ain’t Over,” for which Lindsay Berra was executive producer, seeks to set the record straight on Berra, whose remarkable feats on the field as a catcher for 19 seasons and a manager for seven more never received the respect they were due.

“He was a giant,” actor-comedian Billy Crystal says of Berra in the film. “He was the most overlooked superstar in the history of baseball.”

It’s a sentiment shared by everyone interviewed in director Sean Mullin’s film, a cast of baseball royalty that includes Yankee legends, such as Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Don Mattingly, players and managers Joe Madden and Joe Torre, and the late Dodger broadcasting legend Vin Scully.

The records are in the record books. The problem in some measure was that Berra’s modest, self-effacing nature, his unusual way with words, and his successful second act as a TV pitchman obscured his greatness on the field.

Mullin says that juxtaposition between perception and reality was a big part of what drew him to the project, which he’s been working on for the past five years.

“I jumped at it, because the more I read about Yogi, the more I learned,” he says on a recent video call with Lindsay Berra. “I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a tremendous amount of tension that’s going to exist between the perception and the reality of who this person was.’

“And that allows me as a director then to build on that,” Mullin says. “To dig into that tension and really get the audience behind somebody to root for.”

Berra by numbers

Let’s establish a baseline of baseball greatness before we go any further: Berra won three MVP awards in his career. He won 10 World Series titles. He was an all-star in 18 of his 19 seasons.

But there’s much, much more as Mullin and Lindsay Berra demonstrate when asked about their favorite Yogi achievements. Like the time in 1962, when Berra, then 37, caught all 316 pitches in the Yankees’ 22-inning win over the Detroit Tigers.

“At the time, it was the longest game in history,” Lindsay Berra says. “Could you imagine any catcher today catching 22 innings? No way.”

Apparently, that wasn’t uncommon for Yogi, she says, noting that 117 times he caught both ends of a doubleheader for a total of 18 innings on the day.

Growing up a Yankees fan in New Jersey near her grandparents Yogi and Carmen Berra, Berra says the Yankees’ Mount Rushmore was always Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle.

“Nobody ever puts Grampa on the Yankees’ Mount Rushmore – or even in the same sentence as Joe DiMaggio,” she says. “So one of my favorite stats is that there are only two players in the history of baseball to have more than 350 homers and fewer than 500 strikeouts. And it’s Grampa and Joe DiMaggio.”

About those strikeouts: Berra simply didn’t miss. In 1950, he went to the plate 656 times, hit 28 homers and 124 RBIs – and struck out only 12 times all year.

Mullin’s favorite baseball factoid has a Southern California connection.

“There’s only two players in history to finish Top 4 in MVP voting for seven years in a row,” he says. “Yogi and the only other person is Mike Trout (of the Angels).

“To excel at that level for that long, sustained period, it’s just really incredible,” Mullin says.

The team player

Yogi Berra grew up in St. Louis, playing sandlot baseball with broomsticks and bottle caps. He served in the Navy during World War II, including time on a rocket boat during the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Yet at home, as Lindsay Berra was growing up, the oldest of the grandkids, he was just Grampa Yogi, she says.

“When I was young, I didn’t know Grampa Yogi was any different than anybody else’s grandpa,” Berra says. “His job was to manage the Yankees and I thought that was the same as being an accountant or a tailor. It was just a different thing to do for a living.

“And by the time I was old enough to realize he was Yogi Berra, they stayed as two separate people in my mind,” she says. “Grampa Yogi is the guy that I grew up with playing Wiffle ball and Yogi Berra is the guy that did all the amazing things on the baseball field.”

Sure, sometimes strangers would approach and ask for his autograph. But in every other way, he was as down-to-earth as any other grandfather on the block.

“My grandfather didn’t think of himself as famous, so I think that went a long way to all of us not thinking he was a big deal,” Berra says. “His entire life, he never had a personal assistant or an agent. He picked up his own dry cleaning, went to the grocery story. Was in church every weekend.

“He just went about his life as if he was not famous,” she says.

If you did get him talking about baseball, which wasn’t easy, Berra says, he was more likely to talk about his teammates than himself.

“You’d say, ‘Tell me about 1962,’” Berra says of the year the Yankees won their 20th World Series.

“Like, what about?” Yogi would reply.

“You’d really have to ask him a pointed question,” Berra says. “He was always more comfortable talking about what Mickey (Mantle) had done, or this homerun Moose Skowron hit, or a play Phil Rizzuto had made.

“He was very proud of the team accomplishments, what they were able to accomplish together,” she says. “He had 10 World Series rings; he only ever wore the 1953 ring.”

That one represented the fifth consecutive World Series the Yankees won. The 13 players who’d been on all five winning teams had a special ring made for themselves.

“He wore that one because it was super important to him as a team accomplishment.”

In the end

While Yogi Berra, who died in September 2015 at 90, never enjoyed talking of his exploits on the diamond, “It Ain’t Over” had no trouble finding people to do that for him.

Some share funny stories about things Yogi said – the so-called Yogi-isms – such as, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over” and “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

“I love the philosophical ones,” Mullin says. “Like, ‘We’re lost but making great time’ is great. ‘Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore. It’s too crowded.” Those are two of my favorites.”

Lindsay Berra had her own picks.

“I like, ‘If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be,” and ‘The future ain’t what it used to be.’” There’s one that’s not in the film that’s one of my favorites. It’s 1959-ish and he’s doing a press conference for Yoo-hoo.

“A female reporter in the front row raises her hand and says, ‘Excuse me, is that hyphenated?’ And Grampa Yogi said, ‘Lady, it ain’t even carbonated.’”

But the old-timers who played with Yogi or saw him play make the best case for the paradoxical idea that Berra was both a superstar and underappreciated.

“Vin Scully was just so enamored with Yogi in every single way,” Mullin says of the 30 minutes he spent with Scully in the owner’s box at Dodger Stadium not long before Scully’s death. “Yogi was a hero to Vin, this kind of stickball kid in the street.”

Lindsay Berra said all of the players who shared a bench in the dugout with Yogi were special interviews. That’s a group that includes older Yankees such as Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek and younger ones such as Don Mattingly, Willie Randolph and Ron Guidry.

But it’s former Yankee Bobby Brown who felt most special to her.

“He was my grandfather’s roommate with the Newark Bears in 1946 and they broke into the big leagues on the same day,” Berra says of Brown, who in addition to his Yankee career became a cardiologist and eventually the president of the American League for a decade.

“He was able to talk about being Grampa’s roommate when he was reading comic books after World War II and they were playing in Newark,” Berra says. “I mean, that’s pretty incredible.”

“What is surprising and scary to me is how relevant it feels,” Thurston says. “The questions that this exhibition is asking – through using the blacklist as a case study – give us a critical lens in the present.

“The tensions between security and privacy,” she continues. “Can we be held accountable in our professional life for private associations? Can our political opinions be held against us?

“These feel just as fresh to me in 2023 as they do looking at 1947. I think there’s a certain degree of shock when you really immerse yourself in it because of how contemporary this issue feels.”

“Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” revisits a dark time in American history. As fears of communist influence in America flourished in the years after World War II, the House Un-American Activities Committee convened hearings of suspected communists in Hollywood in 1947.

Ten witnesses – eight screenwriters, one director and one producer – refused to answer the committee’s questions. The so-called Hollywood 10 each were sentenced to a year in jail.

In reaction to the sensationalized hearings, Hollywood bigwigs, meeting in secret, agreed to make an unofficial blacklist. If there was a hint of communist activity or associations about you, you ended up banned from working in the film industry. Lives and livelihoods were destroyed in the years that followed.

The exhibit originated at the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. The Skirball Museum’s director Sheri Bernstein and deputy director Michele Urton saw the exhibit when it traveled to Baltimore and decided to bring it to Los Angeles.

“They thought it was such a good fit for us,” Thurston said. “It’s a local story. It certainly makes sense for our Jewish cultural center.

“There were some really rich threads there, both in the people involved as well as a threat of antisemitism that pervades much of the hearings,” she says. “We thought it was a really dynamic show for us.”

Expanding the exhibit

One issue – the Skirball space is much larger than the exhibit – got quickly resolved when the Milwaukee Museum agreed to let the Skirball expand the exhibit with new material. The Los Angeles show, which runs May 4 to Sept. 3, added about 100 artifacts to the exhibit, Thurston says.

“We start a little bit earlier now – before the 1947 hearings,” she says. “We wanted to paint a picture of what Hollywood was like in the ’30s and ’40s to contextualize one of the show’s many questions, which is: What does it mean to be a patriot?”

Many in the Hollywood 10, and many more who found themselves on the blacklist, had produced or worked on films that were part of Hollywood’s war effort doing World II, for instance.

“And just a few years later, their activism in anti-fascism and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was held against them,” Thurston says. “We wanted to play with that question and expand it.”

Other new sections in “Blacklist” included a section called Talented & Targeted, which looks at the role racism and antisemitism played in the Hollywood blacklist, or its less-strict sibling, the graylist.

“It teases out players like (Black actor-singer-activist) Paul Robeson, or Hazel Scott, who was the first Black woman to have a show on television, and it was canceled two days after the hearings,” Thurston says.

“John Garfield is one of those people who’s really interesting because, I mean, he was a star,” she says of the Jewish actor. “He may be underrecognized today, but one of the ways I’ve been describing him to people is he was all of the Chrises. He was Pine, he was Hemsworth, he was everything.”

Fronts and affronts

The show also helps clear the fog of history from the Hollywood blacklist and its place in the anti-communist fervor of the times. For instance, the House committee that held the 1947 hearings that led to the Hollywood 10 and the Hollywood blacklist had nothing to do with U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose anti-communist witch hunts arrived three years later.

“Larry Ceplair, who organized a blacklist exhibition for the Academy in the aughts had this great line about just that,” Thurston says. “It was that McCarthyism predates McCarthy.

“I think that’s a really smart way to frame that,” she says. “One of the things I think the show does really well is make it clear, the sort of swirling elements between the FBI, Congress, additional players like that. While we are focusing on HUAC, there are other players involved carrying those threads forward.”

Thurston grew up with a measure of personal insight into the topics the Skirball show covers. Her grandparents were studio story analysts who wrote on the side. When they were graylisted for their political beliefs, they were forced to leave the Benedict Canyon home they built in the ’30s, she says.

“They sold the house and they lived in a little beach shack on a stretch of coastline right before Carpinteria,” Thurston says. “They went from having studio jobs to my grandfather fishing and trading the fish for vegetables. But even with that background, I didn’t really know the depth of it until I started working on this project.”

Some who were blacklisted found work under assumed names – “fronts,” as they were known. The blacklist started to weaken in the late ’50s. The 1960 film “Spartacus” carried the true name of its writer, Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10, thanks in large part to producer and star Kirk Douglas’s influence.

Many point to that as the end of the blacklist, but its damage to lives and careers reverberated for years after.

Tangible effects

The Skirball exhibition explores both the big themes of the Hollywood blacklist and the small, personal ways in which it touched individual lives, with hundreds of artifacts complementing the text on walls and in displays that tells its history.

Thurston is quick to answer when asked to discuss a few of her favorite pieces of the exhibit.

“I think one of the things that really stands out to me is a memo – and I know, you’re asking for exciting things and I’m like, ‘Let me show you a memo!’” she says, laughing.

But the memo in question is a powerful piece of history, she explains, written in 1945 by someone who overheard Mississippi congressman John Rankin, chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, talking loudly in the congressional lunchroom about his plans to “do a quick job on Hollywood.”

“He’s going to call in, particularly, screenwriters and the goal is to attack guilds and weaken unions,” Thurston says. “It’s so naked, seeing it written out. And then two years later, that’s exactly what they did.”

One display includes a 1970 letter from screenwriter Alvah Bessie, an Oscar nominee for the story for the patriotic war movie “Objective Burma,” asking for help finding an agent for a formerly blacklisted writer.

“I mean, my God, that’s 20 years of his life where he’s been struggling to get by,” Thurston says. “We also have some beautiful letters from him while he was incarcerated, poems he wrote to his children.”

The show includes several items related to screenwriter Trumbo. There’s the Oscar he won for the 1956 film “The Brave One,” written under the blacklist pseudonym Robert Rich, and only given to Trumbo in 1975.

More poignantly, there is a collection of typewriter ribbon tins that Trumbo used to store mementos during his year in prison, which he spent for refusing to testify about the political activities and beliefs of his friends, colleagues and himself.

Occasionally, despite the seriousness of the topic, small moments of levity shine through in the displays.

“We have this really funny memo from Lenny Bruce, the comedian, to Alvah Bessie asking him to help him rework a script,” Thurston says. “He’s saying, ‘The characters are weak; I need your help,’ but then he says, “And none of that social activism stuff. It’s bad enough everyone thinks I’m a drug addict, I don’t want them to think I’m a commie.’”

“History informs our national imagination in a way that few disciplines do,” Thurston says of the role the exhibit can play in understanding the past and illuminating the future. “I often think though that when we focus on the macro we lose what makes it meaningful.

“We lose the ability to imagine ourselves in it and to imagine how people would act,” she says. “And by telling these stories, these really personal stories, I don’t think the lives feel so far away from us.”

The late star’s daughter, Billie Lourd, wearing her mother’s portrait printed on her metallic dress, accepted the star on behalf of Fisher. She threw glitter, her mother’s favorite, on the newly unveiled star.

“My mom used to say you weren’t actually famous until you became a Pez dispenser. Well, people eat candy out of her neck every day. I say you aren’t actually famous until you get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” she said. “My mom is a double-whammy — a Pez dispenser and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame now. Mama, you’ve made it.”

Mark Hamill, who played Fisher’s space brother, Luke Skywalker, was also on hand, and recalled meeting the young actor when she was just 19.

“She played such a crucial role in my personal and professional life and both would have been far emptier without her. Was she a handful? Was she high-maintenance? No doubt! But everything would have been drabber and less interesting if she hadn’t been the friend that she was,” Hamill said.

Several in the crowd were dressed as characters from the space franchise, and C-3P0 and R2-D2 were present for the unveiling. “Never forget the droids!” Lourd said on a wet day that gave way to sun.

Fisher — who died in 2016 — joins “Star Wars” co-stars Harrison Ford and Hamill on the Hollywood tourist attraction that recognizes luminaries from film, television, music and other entertainment industries. The trio’s stars are all located on the 6,800 block of Hollywood Boulevard, near where the original film debuted in 1977.

Fisher played Leia Organa, who over six films morphed from a princess to a general leading the forces of good in its fight against oppressive regimes aiming to control a galaxy far, far away.

“No one will ever be as hot or as cool as Princess Leia,” said Lourd. “Leia is more than just a character. She’s a feeling. She is strength. She is grace. She is wit. She is femininity at its finest. She knows what she wants and gets it. She doesn’t need anyone to rescue her because she rescures herself and even rescues the rescurers. And no one could have played her like my mother.”

Fans had long campaigned for her to receive a Walk of Fame star. The honor comes on May the Fourth, essentially an official holiday for Star Wars fans that’s a play on a line that Fisher said often in the films, “May the Force be with you.”

Devotees worldwide celebrate with a variety of tributes, while retailers hold special sales on Star Wars merchandise.

Fisher was given the 2,754th star on the Walk of Fame. Ford received his star in 2003 and Hamill was similarly honored in 2018.

Walk of Fame stars are given to performers who are nominated, and a $75,000 fee is now required to create the star and maintain it.

“People always say, ‘I learned so much about him and I thought I knew him,’” Cortés says on a recent video call about the film, which arrived in theaters and on-demand recently. “It’s quite a revelatory journey.”

It was the same for Cortés, too, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker says of her journey to fully understand the life and career of the performer born as Richard Penniman.

“I didn’t learn about him and all of the layers until I made this film,” Cortés says. “My introduction was the music, the joy of dancing around to ‘Tutti Frutti’ with my cousins as a kid.

“Even to this day, I can put ‘Tutti Frutti’ on for my niece, who’s 3 years old, and she loses her mind and starts singing along and gets super excited,” she says. “Because there’s something in the music that’s so joyous.”

“Little Richard: I Am Everything” seeks to place the singer of hits such as “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Lucille” on the throne as the true king of rock ‘n’ roll, a title that eluded him during his lifetime.

Archival interviews with Penniman, who died at 87 in May 2020, show it’s clear he seldom felt he’d received his due. Through new interviews with a host of entertainers such as Mick Jagger, Billy Porter, Nile Rodgers and John Waters – all of whom profess their love, admiration and emulation of him – it’s clear many others agree.

“My connection was solely the music, and then seeing him on talk shows, where you never got a sense of his contributions to rock and roll,” Cortés says. “He was there to be fun and almost be a comic foil in a way.

“And so making the film was a tremendous opportunity to see how someone born in Macon, Georgia in 1932 was so bold in their vision,” she says. “Someone who was so provocative and transgressive that they not only ignited this music form but had a lasting effect on so many artists who followed him.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Cortés talked about the film and the role that God, sex and religion played in Little Richard’s life.

Q: Tell me how you came to make this film.

A: Well, here’s the thing. Richard passed away in May of 2020, which is the height of the pandemic. Whenever somebody dies and they are an artist who has such tremendous hits, you hear their music all the time. So at a time that was very dark and challenging, I heard this music that was so joyous.

That brought back memories of being a kid dancing around with my cousins in the summer. And I wanted to learn more. I was like, ‘Wow, I wonder if there’s a doc on him,’ and then discovered there wasn’t.

Q: So you were inspired to make one?

A: I think I was especially intrigued when he passed away. You’ve got Bob Dylan giving tribute. You have [Foo Fighters’] Dave Grohl. You have Elton John. You have so many artists who are like, ‘He was the king, he was so important.’ Bruce Springsteen gave him a tribute.

Then I did a quick Google search. I’m looking at the YouTube of him inducting Otis Redding into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is him actually inducting himself. That’s a very poignant piece of footage. He is calling out these stars in the audience, and he’s saying, ‘Why have you never given me anything? Why are you not recognizing me? I gave you your start.’

It’s humorous, but it’s also very painful because it’s an act of desperation. And I think many of us tap into this idea of being erased. Of being a part of something and losing that foothold.

Q: Why do you think he didn’t get the recognition he deserved? We know one reason is that the work of Black artists was often undermined as White artists rerecorded their work, often enjoying greater commercial support and success with White audiences. How did you come to see it?

A: I think you can’t deny that race and his queerness, that is a combination that was so threatening. The idea of putting a queer Black man in the ’50s on a pedestal, you know, was not going to happen. It’s unfortunate because those are the things that make him so incredible. That he’s a Black queer man who is elevating this art form, and adding so much passion and potency.

Q: Another fascinating part of the film is its exploration of his struggle to reconcile his passions for God, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. At different points in his life, he comes out as gay and then goes back in the closet; he plays rock and roll and then renounces it as the devil’s music, and so on.

A: I think most people don’t know that the renunciation of his queerness in the ’80s is predated by his renunciation of rock and roll in the ’60s. It is this really tragic pendulum that he’s on, and it’s this tension that is pulling him back and forth for a great portion of his life.

That was something that really stood out immediately when I spent the time doing my research. Because you see that he really is a divided soul.

Q: There’s so much wonderful footage in the film of Little Richard performing and giving interviews, things I’d never seen before. Are there things you found in your research that were particularly special finds for you?

A: I think it’s interesting when he tells us about his time after he’s kicked out of his home for being queer. That in downtown Macon, Georgia in the 1940s, there’s a place called Ann’s Tic Toc Room. A place where queer people, Black and White people, came together.

Because that is not in our kind of imagination about what could be possible in the South during this period. Homosexuality is illegal. Homophobia is rampant. But that he finds this community in this small city was pretty interesting.

I think the second part is when Little Richard tells us, ‘I go on the road, on the Chitlin’ Circuit, and I dress up as a woman.’ It tells you so much about all these different places and experiences that he is pulling from to create this musical gumbo.

Q: I was also fascinated by the musical dream sequences you included with musicians like singer-songwriter Valerie June, singer-pianist Cory Henry and gospel singer John P. Kee.

A: From the beginning of the project I knew I wanted to create dreamscapes. I see them as these seminal moments in Richard’s life, where these portals of possibility open. You know, he meets Sister Rosetta Tharpe (portrayed by Valerie June), who says, ‘Come sing with me,’ and then after being on stage with her at the Macon Auditorium, Richard’s like, ‘I want to go be a star.’

I chose all of those artists because they are a part of the legacy. The amazing Valerie June talked about her love of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The same thing with Cory Henry, who started in the church but now not only can play gospel music but jazz and hip-hop and R&B and pop. And, of course, John P. Kee knew Little Richard.

So each of them felt connected to him in some way. And the same goes for everybody else who was interviewed in the film. They had to have an intimate connection.

And the people who were interviewed were immediately like, ‘I want to talk about Little Richard because the world needs to know what he did for me.’ And in turn for music and culture.

NEW YORK — Television and movie writers soured by Hollywood’s low pay in the streaming era went on strike for the first time in 15 years on Tuesday, meaning late-night and variety shows would be the first programs to go dark.

The labor dispute could have a cascading effect on TV and film productions depending on how long the strike lasts, and it comes as streaming services are under growing pressure from Wall Street to show profits.

The Writers Guild of America’s 11,500 unionized screenwriters prepared to picket after negotiations with studios, which began in March, failed by Monday’s deadline to yield a new contract. All script writing is to immediately cease, the guild informed its members.

The guild is seeking higher minimum pay, less thinly staffed writing rooms, shorter exclusive contracts and a reworking of residual pay — all conditions the WGA says have been diminished in the content boom driven by streaming.

Writers Guild of America picket outside of Paramount Studios in Hollywood on day one of their strike. #WritersGuildofAmerica #strike pic.twitter.com/iQerYtDTzw

— Hans Gutknecht (@HansGutknecht) May 2, 2023

“The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing,” the WGA said in a statement.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the trade association that bargains on behalf of studios and production companies, said it presented an offer with “generous increases in compensation for writers as well as improvements in streaming residuals.”

In a statement, the trade association said that it was prepared to improve its offer “but was unwilling to do so because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the guild continues to insist upon.”

A shutdown has been widely forecast for months due to the scope of the discord. The writers last month voted overwhelming to authorize a strike, with 98% of membership in support.

At issue is how writers are compensated in an industry where streaming has changed the rules of Hollywood economics. Writers say they aren’t being paid enough, TV writer rooms have shrunk too much and the old calculus for how residuals are paid out needs to be redrawn.

“The survival of our profession is at stake,” the guild has said.

Streaming has exploded the number of series and films that are annually made, meaning more jobs for writers. But WGA members say they’re making much less money and working under more strained conditions. Showrunners on streaming series receive just 46% of the pay that showrunners on broadcast series receive, the WGA claims.

The guild is seeking more compensation on the front-end of deals. Many of the back-end payments writers have historically profited by – like syndication and international licensing – have been largely phased out by the onset of streaming. More writers — roughly half — are being paid minimum rates, an increase of 16% over the last decade. The use of so-called mini-writers rooms has soared.

Hollywood’s trade assocation said Monday that the primary sticking points to a deal revolved around those mini-rooms — the guild is seeking a minimum number of scribes per writer room — and duration of employment restrictions. The guild has said more flexibility for writers is needed when they’re contracted for series that have tended to be more limited and short-lived than the once-standard 20-plus episode broadcast season.

Many studios and production companies are slashing spending. The Walt Disney Co. is eliminating 7,000 jobs. Warner Bros. Discovery is cutting costs to lessen its debt. Netflix has pumped the breaks on spending growth.

When Hollywood writers have gone on strike, it’s often been lengthy. In 1988, a WGA strike lasted 153 days. The last WGA strike went for 100 days, beginning in 2007 and ending in 2008.

The most immediate effect of the strike viewers are likely to notice will be on late-night shows and “Saturday Night Live.” All are expected to immediately go dark. During the 2007 strike, late-night hosts eventually returned to the air and improvised material. Jay Leno wrote his own monologues, a move that angered union leadership.

On Friday’s episode of “Late Night,” Seth Meyers, a WGA member who said he supported the union’s demands, prepared viewers for re-runs while lamenting the hardship a strike entails.

“It doesn’t just affect the writers, it affects all the incredible non-writing staff on these shows,” Meyers said. “And it would really be a miserable thing for people to have to go through, especially considering we’re on the heels of that awful pandemic that affected, not just show business, but all of us.”

Scripted series and films will take longer to be affected. But if a strike persisted through the summer, fall schedules could be upended. And in the meantime, not having writers available for rewrites can have a dramatic effect on quality. The James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” was one of many films rushed into production during the 2007-2008 strike with what Daniel Craig called “the bare bones of a script.”

“Then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do,” Craig later recounted. “We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, ‘Never again’, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes — and a writer I am not.”

With a walkout long expected, writers have rushed to get scripts in and studios have sought to prepare their pipelines to keep churning out content for at least the short term.

“We’re assuming the worst from a business perspective,” David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, said last month. “We’ve got ourselves ready. We’ve had a lot of content that’s been produced.”

Overseas series could also fill some of the void. “If there is one, we have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-chief executive, on the company’s earnings call in April.

Yet the WGA strike may only be the beginning. Contracts for both the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, expire in June. Some of the same issues around the business model of streaming will factor into those bargaining sessions. The DGA is set to begin negotiations with AMPTP on May 10.

The cost of the WGA’s last strike cost Southern California $2.1 billion, according to the Milken Institute. How painful this strike is remains to be seen. But as of late Monday evening, laptops were being closed shut all over Hollywood.

“Pencils down,” said “Halt and Catch Fire” showrunner and co-creator Christopher Cantwell on Twitter shortly after the strike announcement. “Don’t even type in the document.”

SALT LAKE CITY — Gwyneth Paltrow will not recoup the attorneys’ fees she paid to successfully defend herself against a lawsuit from a 76-year-old retired optometrist who claimed she was at fault for crashing into him at a posh Utah ski resort in 2016.

In a final judgment published on Saturday, a Utah judge affirmed the jury’s unanimous verdict finding Terry Sanderson — the man who collided with Paltrow — to be “100% at fault,” awarding Paltrow the $1 she sought in a countersuit, and leaving attorneys’ fees for District Court Judge Kent Holmberg to decide.

The judgment said Paltrow would not seek attorneys’ fees and Sanderson would not appeal the verdict, effectively ending a protracted legal battle seven years after the two crashed on a beginner run near the base of Deer Valley Resort in Utah.

Representatives for both Paltrow and Sanderson were not immediately available to answer questions about the final judgment or the money at stake. Neither side has publicly disclosed how much it cost to sustain a yearslong legal battle with a team of attorneys, expert witnesses from around the United States and, for Paltrow’s side, high-resolution animated recreations of her recollections of the crash.

The “Shakespeare in Love” and “Ironman” star’s eight-day court battle last month emerged as the most closely watched American celebrity trial since actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard faced off last year. Sanderson’s lawsuit accused Paltrow of negligence and crashing into him from behind, and then leaving the scene of the accident without ensuring he was in good physical condition. He sought more than $300,000 in damages — a threshold in Utah civil court that allows parties to introduce the most evidence and depose the longest list of witnesses.

Paltrow subsequently countersued for the symbolic $1 and attorneys’ fees — claiming Sanderson had crashed into her from behind and was suing to exploit her fame and celebrity.

Under the glare of live Court TV cameras and extensive scrutiny from fans and detractors, Paltrow sat intently in the Park City courtroom throughout the proceedings last month, at and testified that at first, when the crash happened, she thought she was being “violated.”

“I felt that acquiescing to a false claim compromised my integrity,” the founder-CEO of the beauty and wellness brand Goop said.

There’s a wealth of new movies and series hitting streaming services this week, from acclaimed indie films to reboots of classics to intriguing crime stories ready to binge. Here’s a rundown of what’s new to rent, buy, and stream on digital platforms this week.

First up: timed to release with the first big screen adaptation of her most beloved book, “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret,” the warm and lovely documentary “Judy Blume Forever” premiered last week on Prime Video. Directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, the film tells the life story of beloved author Judy Blume, and underlines the radical and influential nature of her writing about the intimate inner lives of girls and women, and how she continues to touch readers with her work.

On Tuesday, two recent indie films became available to rent or buy on digital platforms. Andie MacDowell stars in “My Happy Ending,” about an American movie star contending with a grim cancer diagnosis and finding unexpected support from a group of strangers who relate to her plight. Also available to rent or buy is “Return to Seoul,” the remarkable film by French Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou, starring artist Park Ji-Min as a French woman adopted from South Korea who returns to Seoul in an effort to find her lineage, and herself. Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and undoubtedly one of the best films of the year, the vibrant, prickly, and deeply felt “Return to Seoul” is a must-watch.

On Wednesday, stream the new series “Saint X” on Hulu, a juicy crime series based on the novel by Alexis Schaitkin and seemingly inspired by the cases of young women who have gone missing or been murdered on tropical vacations. West Duchovny stars as Alison, who mysteriously dies on vacation with her family, while Alycia Debnam-Carey stars as her younger sister, Emily, who contends with her elder sibling’s death years later. Stream it Wednesday on Hulu.

David Lowery’s “Peter Pan & Wendy” premieres Friday on Disney+. The new take on the beloved children’s book by J.M. Barrie is a live-action remake of the Disney animated feature, with Ever Anderson as Wendy, and Jude Law as Captain Hook. Yara Shahidi co-stars as Tinkerbell, with Jim Gaffigan as Smee in this dark and lyrical take on the well-known adventures of Never Never Land.

Also premiering on Friday is the psychological horror thriller “Clock,” written and directed by Alexis Jacknow, about that elusive “biological clock” that is weaponized against women. Dianna Agron stars in the film, which arrives on Hulu Friday.

And Sunday night gets a new series, with the premiere of “Fatal Attraction” on Paramount+. Joshua Jackson, Lizzy Caplan and Amanda Peet star in this adaptation of the 1987 erotic thriller directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, with Caplan taking on the role of Alex Forrest, which Close made iconic. The first three episodes drop on Sunday, with one episode a week following until the finale on June 4. The original movie is streaming on Paramount+ as well if you need a refresher or comparison point before starting the series.

As always, happy streaming.

—

©2023 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

“We’re coming to Los Angeles because Showtime wants to show this thing to the Academy of Television Arts or something,” says Johansen, 73, a cofounder of the glitter-meets-punk New York Dolls, and later creator of the louche lounge singer Buster Poindexter.

“The people that vote on the Emmys,” he continues. “They’re very concerned about getting an Emmy.”

And why shouldn’t they be? “Personality Crisis” is the first documentary feature on Johansen, a figure in modern music whose interests and work in modern music tie together disparate strands that range from proto-punk to standards, opera to American roots music.

It’s co-directed by Martin Scorsese (and David Tedeschi), himself an iconic New Yorker whose music documentaries have previously included such artists as the Band, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and George Harrison.

And it’s very good, seamlessly blending footage of Johansen’s show as Buster Pointdexter at the Café Carlyle in New York City on his 70th birthday in January 2020 with archival footage and photos, vintage talk show chats and new interviews conducted with Johansen by his stepdaughter Leah Hennessey during the pandemic lockdown.

“Personality Crisis” arrived on Showtime earlier this month. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, and only occasionally interrupted by the flight crew’s admonishments to store overhead luggage and fasten seatbelts, this is what we learned.

Q: How did you come to make the documentary? Was it something you wanted to do or something you had to be talked into?

A:  Well, we were doing this two-week run at the Carlyle, and we had – my wife and I – this novel idea of having Buster do Johansen as opposed to what Buster usually does, like a lot of curated covers, you might say.

So we wanted to keep it going. We were looking for some off-Broadway kind of something. And my wife, Mara (Hennessey), she called Marty (Scorsese) and asked him to come and see it so he could kind of advise us about where to go with it.

And when he saw it, the same night, he said, ‘Oh, I want to shoot this.’ So to make a long story short, that’s how it came about.”

Q: Did it start as a concert film or was it always going to be a concert mixed with archival and interviews?

A: This was like January of 2020 and you know the plague was about to break out. So they shot the concert and then they kind of fooled around with it for a little while. I think they were still doing some Fran Lebowitz editing (for Scorsese’s 2021 docuseries “Pretend It’s a City”) as I recall.

Then they got an archivist who was very good, I think, who started digging up stuff and – voila. I mean, there was no plan in the beginning. Essentially, I think their idea was, ‘Let’s shoot the concert and then we’ll figure it out.’

Q: What was it like for you to spend time in your past, singing songs from the New York Dolls, your solo career, from Buster?

A: It was fun to do. I wanted to keep doing it. Though we didn’t go into a theater because then COVID came. And now I’m glad that we filmed it. I was reluctant at first, you know. But then I was persuaded to be whatever you want to call it, the subject – or the victim.

Q: I’ve seen you talk about your reluctance to appear in documentaries on punk or rock or New York City in the ’70s. Why is that?

A: I’ve said this many times. Often, I’m asked to be in documentaries about certain aspects of show business. And I usually just say no because every time – I’ve done one or two in the past – I saw myself I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, who is this guy and what’s he talking about?’

Q: How was this one different?

A: Well, our daughter Leah was the inquisitor in those sections. She just asked me questions and we had – I guess you could say it was a dialogue, but I guess maybe they edited it so that it was mainly me talking. It was nice talking to her, because I was able to get a word in edgewise.

And this one, when I saw it I thought it’s kind of interesting to me. It’s something I can live with. I only cringed two or three times, and usually that was just about a turn of phrase as opposed to something that I actually did. I said this is a good take on an aspect of my life.

Q: There’s a line in it that caught my attention where you say, ‘It’s best to leave an incomplete picture of yourself’ – why do you feel that way?

A: Anyone who’s in the public, no matter how much of it or how small, would eventually wind up scorned. You have to decide whether you’re going to wind up scorned or forgotten or leave an incomplete picture of yourself.

You know it’s impossible for a person to leave a complete image of themselves anyway because there’s so much going on in our heads. We’re constantly evolving and constantly transcending one moment to the next moment yet including everything that we’ve ever been.

Q: Your love of Harry Smith’s American folk music anthologies was something I wasn’t entirely familiar with. What else do you think the film might bring out that your fans are less familiar with?

A: I don’t know. I mention a lot of different kinds of music. So I think the documentary kind of gives a hint of that kind of breadth of my interests in music. I’m very attracted to vocalists especially, but also instrumentalists, who just like touch me in some way.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not in English even, you know. It’s something about the soulfulness of a voice and how it’s expressing, just for lack of a better term, the human condition.

Q: Another thing that struck me in the film was both the song “Maimed Happiness” and your explanation of how that came from a line in a book by the philosopher William James. What was it about the idea of ‘maimed happiness’ that attracted you?

A: It’s something that if you think about it you know it’s kind of true. A lot of people don’t really want to, don’t have sufficient leisure time to think about these things.

You know, I’m half Norwegian, so my wife always says that. We saw a movie about this kind of horrible guy named [Knut] Hamsun, who at one point was a famous author in Norway. I guess they tried to rehabilitate his image because of some really bad scandal that he was involved in. [Hamsun supported Adolf Hitler and the German occupation of Norway during World War II, and gifted his Nobel Prize for Literature to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.]

But anyway, one of his kids said, ‘How are you?’ And he said, ‘Almost happy.’ Max von Sydow played him. He said, ‘I’m almost happy.’

Q: The film’s been finished for a while – what else are you working on now?

A: We’re working on an audio version of the concert (in the film) which is going to come out soon. Working on that. And we’re gonna hopefully start doing some more shows this summer.

Q: I think the last time you played here might have been the Hollywood Bowl with the Dolls in 2011, so it would be great to have you come here again.

A: Yeah, that’d be great. It’s rough, the hard traveling. It’s the schlep that kills you. So hopefully we’re gonna be able to work things out so that it’s not so difficult to get around. I think the film will help. More people will be interested and we might play theaters and auditoriums.

But Blume, who is also the subject of the documentary “Judy Blume Forever,” has largely resisted giving permission to filmmakers for adaptations… until now.

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” is the classic tale of a pre-adolescent girl concerned with puberty and boys while also searching for meaning in life and coping with a move to the suburbs. The adaptation, which arrives in theaters on April 28, stars Abby Ryder Fortson, Rachel McAdams, and Kathy Bates. 

It was directed by Whittier native and UC Irvine alum Kelly Fremon Craig, who is equally excited about the idea that more films will follow.

“It gives me hope and joy that there will be more adaptations made, because no one should go through adolescence without Judy Blume,” Craig said in a recent video interview.

Growing up, Craig loved reading, and Blume’s “Forever” – forbidden fruit for sixth graders across the generations – was the first book she read in one sitting.

She also developed her filmmaking chops under the influence of MTV music videos. “I was running around Whittier with one of those huge old dinosaur video cameras with the whole VHS tape that goes inside and shooting music videos with my friends, trying to re-enact what we’d seen on MTV,” she recalled.

Craig’s first feature film was “The Edge of Seventeen” about a high school girl, played by Hailee Steinfeld, coping with the turbulence of teenage life. 

“I wanted to write things that made other people feel less alone,” she said of the throughline between that film and this new one. “I wanted to write truthfully about the experience of being a girl or a woman. I didn’t feel those experiences were being represented very often in film.”

Q. What drew you to adapt this book?

After I made “The Edge of Seventeen,” I was thinking about what came next and the authors that I loved. Judy Blume was the first person who came to mind, so I started re-reading all her work. 

Part of what makes her so incredible is that she writes with such brave honesty about all the little embarrassing details of life. There’s an electrifying honesty that feels a little scary

When I got to “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” I was bowled over. It was a childhood favorite and there were so many things that I recalled feeling when I read it at 11 but there were new feelings and discoveries reading it as an adult, in particular Margaret’s profound spiritual search, which I was oblivious to when I was 11. 

There’s something beautiful about the way the uncertainty of adolescence makes you start to ask those larger life questions. It’s logical – everything is changing, your body is changing and you’re not quite a child but not quite an adult – that you start reaching out for a sense of something solid

Q. Early in your career, you’d sold some screenplays that didn’t get made or were made but were heavily rewritten. Was that difficult to accept?

As a young screenwriter starting out, it’s very easy not to trust your own instincts because you’re around people who have so much more experience than you. Instead of having your own compass, you write while thinking “What would so-and-so think is good,” which is death to creativity.

I grew very frustrated. One movie was made I went to the theater and didn’t recognize it. After seeing my work put on the conveyor belt and moved through the meat grinder, I had a moment where I said, “I think I’m done.” Then a friend said, “Just give it one more shot and write something just for you. And that was “Edge of Seventeen.” 

Q. Was it easier to get your second movie made because of the success of that film?

That one was hard to get backing for because I was a first-time director and a young female director, and it was a subject matter – about an adolescent girl – that people did not have a ton of desire to make.

I cannot explain the dramatic difference between 2016 and today and a lot of that has to do with #MeToo. There was a huge cultural shift and suddenly the industry went from making it seem like they were taking a big chance on a female director telling female stories – that was seen as a liability – to today where there’s more of a spirit of celebrating those stories and women telling them. We still have a ways to go but we’ve come a long way. 

Q. But first you had to persuade Judy Blume to let you adapt it so you wrote her a very persuasive letter. 

I knew she had not let a lot of her books get made into movies, but I didn’t know she was starting to open up her material to be adapted but had said the one she absolutely would not adapt was “Margaret.”

My letter had two parts. First, I told her how much her work meant to me and how when I made “Edge of Seventeen” she was always in the back of my mind. I was trying to make a film that would make people feel the way her books made me feel, which is to say, understood and less alone.

Then I talked about re-reading “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” and how it knocked me flat and made me sob. I spent days trying to figure out why and came to realize it’s about this kid’s spiritual search and how that will continue for her. It was about asking questions that aren’t usually talked about in movies and that have no easy answers.

Q. The film is largely faithful to the book. What changes did you make?

Re-reading the book I was interested in the adult characters who I never noticed when I was 11. There were certain seeds in the book about her mother being a square peg in a round hole when they move to the suburbs that I started to tease apart. A lot of those ideas came out of my own personal experience of motherhood, about being the type of mom you want to be while also wanting to have a career doing something you love. A lot of times I feel like I’m doing one but neglecting the other. It’s not easy and there’s a lot of guilt involved. Giving Barb this arc is my own therapy

Q. Did you consider switching it to present day or wonder how modern girls will relate to something set in 1970?

I was curious about how things had changed and interviewed a bunch of 11- and 12-year-old girls. Aside from social media, there wasn’t a ton of difference in what they went through. There was still that real awkwardness about talking about bras and periods and it all just feels familiar.

There’s something to be gotten out of watching someone go through this 50 years ago knowing it’s something your mom and grandma went through – it’s a connection that’s reassuring.