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Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

Peter Zinovieff, a composer and inventor whose pioneering synthesizers shaped albums by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, died on June 23 in Cambridge, England. He was 88.

His death was announced on Twitter by his daughter Sofka Zinovieff, who said he had been hospitalized after a fall.

Mr. Zinovieff oversaw the design of the first commercially produced British synthesizers. In 1969, his company, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), introduced the VCS3 (for “voltage controlled studio”), one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers. Instruments from EMS soon became a staple of 1970s progressive-rock, particularly from Britain and Germany. The company’s slogan was “Think of a sound — now make it.”

Peter Zinovieff was born on Jan. 26, 1933, in London, the son of émigré Russian aristocrats: a princess, Sofka Dolgorouky, and Leo Zinovieff. His parents divorced in 1937.

Peter’s grandmother started teaching him piano when he was in primary school. He attended Oxford University, where he played in experimental music groups while earning a Ph.D. in geology. He also dabbled in electronics.

“I had this facility of putting pieces of wire together to make something that either received or made sounds,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2015.

He married Victoria Heber-Percy, then 17, who came from a wealthy family. She and her parents were unhappy with the extensive travel that a geologist’s career required. After Mr. Zinovieff worked briefly for the Air Ministry in London as a mathematician, he turned to making electronic music full time, supported by his wife.

He bought tape recorders and microphones and found high-quality oscillators, filters and signal analyzers at military-surplus stores. Daphne Oram, the electronic-music composer who was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, taught him techniques of making music by splicing together bits of sound recorded on magnetic tape in the era of musique concrète.

But Mr. Zinovieff decided that cutting tape was tedious. He built a primitive sequencer — a device to trigger a set of notes repeatedly — from telephone-switching hardware, and he began working on electronic sequencers with the electrical engineers Mark Dowson and David Cockerell. They realized that early digital computers, which were already used to control factory processes, might also control sound processing.

Mr. Zinovieff’s wife sold her pearl and turquoise wedding tiara for 4,000 British pounds — now about $96,000 — to finance Mr. Zinovieff’s purchase of a PDP-8 computer designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Living in Putney, a district of London, Mr. Zinovieff installed it in his garden shed, and he often cited it as the world’s first home computer. He added a second PDP-8; the two units, which he named Sofka and Leo, could control hundreds of oscillators and other sound modules.

The shed was now an electronic-music studio. Mr. Cockerell was an essential partner; he was able to build the devices that Mr. Zinovieff envisioned. Mr. Cockerell “would be able to interpret it into a concrete electronic idea and make the bloody thing — and it worked,” Mr. Zinovieff said in the 2006 documentary “What the Future Sounded Like.”

In 1966, Mr. Zinovieff formed the short-lived Unit Delta Plus with Delia Derbyshire (who created the electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s theme for the BBC science fiction institution “Doctor Who”) and Brian Hodgson to make electronic ad jingles and other projects.

The programmer Peter Grogono, working with Mr. Cockerell and Mr. Zinovieff, devised software to perform digital audio analysis and manipulation, presaging modern sampling. It used numbers to control sounds in ways that anticipated the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard that was introduced in 1983.

On Jan. 15, 1968, Mr. Zinovieff brought his computer to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for Britain’s first public concert of all-electronic music. His “Partita for Unattended Computer” received some skeptical reviews: The Financial Times recognized a technical achievement but called it “the dreariest kind of neo-Webern, drawn out to inordinate length.”

Mr. Zinovieff lent a computer to the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Visitors could whistle a tune and the computer would analyze and repeat it, then improvise variations.

Continually upgrading the Putney studio was expensive. Mr. Zinovieff offered to donate the studio’s advanced technology to the British government, but he was ignored. To sustain the project, he and Mr. Cockerell decided to spin off a business.

So in 1969, Mr. Zinovieff, Mr. Cockerell and Tristram Cary, an electronic composer with his own studio, formed EMS. They built a rudimentary synthesizer the size of a shoe box for the Australian composer Don Banks that they later referred to as the VCS1.

In November, they unveiled the more elaborate VCS3, also known as the Putney. It used specifications from Mr. Zinovieff, a case and controls designed by Mr. Cary and circuitry designed by Mr. Cockerell (who drew on Robert Moog’s filter design research). It was priced at 330 pounds, about $7,700 now.

Yet the VCS3 was smaller and cheaper than other early synthesizers; the Minimoog didn’t arrive until 1970 and was more expensive. The original VCS3 had no keyboard and was best suited to generating abstract sounds, but EMS soon made a touch-sensitive keyboard module available. The VCS3 also had an input so it could process external sounds.

Musicians embraced the VCS3 along with other EMS instruments.

EMS synthesizers are prominent in songs like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” and the Who used a VCS3 to process the sound of an electric organ on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” King Crimson, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin and others also used EMS synthesizers.

“I hated anything to do with the commercial side,” Mr. Zinovieff told Sound on Sound magazine in 2016. He was more interested in contemporary classical uses of electronic sound. In the 1970s, he composed extensively, but much of his own music vanished because he would tape over ideas that he expected to improve.

He also collaborated with contemporary composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze. “I didn’t want to have a commercial studio,” he said in 2010. “I wanted an experimental studio, where good composers could work and not pay.” Mr. Zinovieff and Mr. Birtwistle climbed to the top of Big Ben to record the clock mechanisms and gong sounds they incorporated in a quadraphonic 1971 piece, “Chronometer.”

Like other groundbreaking synthesizer companies, EMS had financial troubles. It filed for bankruptcy in 1979 after branching into additional products, including a video synthesizer, a guitar synthesizer and a vocoder.

Mr. Zinovieff handed over his full studio — including advanced prototypes of an interactive video terminal and a 10-octave pressure-sensitive keyboard — to the National Theater, in London, which belatedly found that it couldn’t raise funds to maintain it. The equipment was dismantled and stored for years in a basement, and it was eventually ruined in a flood.

Mr. Zinovieff largely stopped composing for decades. During that time he taught acoustics at the University of Cambridge.

But he wasn’t entirely forgotten. He worked for years on the intricate libretto for Mr. Birtwistle’s 1986 opera “The Mask of Orpheus,” which included a language Mr. Zinovieff constructed using the syllables in “Orpheus” and “Eurydice.”

In 2010, Mr. Zinovieff was commissioned to write music for a sculpture in Istanbul with 40 channels of sound. “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of Mr. Zinovieff’s work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979 at Electronic Music Studios, was released in 2015.

Mr. Zinovieff learned new software, on computers that were exponentially more powerful than his 1970s equipment, and returned to composing throughout the 2010s, including pieces for cello and computer, for violin and computer and for computer and the spoken word. In 2020, during the pandemic, he collaborated with a granddaughter, Anna Papadimitriou, the singer in the band Hawxx, on a death-haunted piece called “Red Painted Ambulance.”

Mr. Zinovieff’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jenny Jardine, and by six children — Sofka, Leo, Kolinka, Freya, Kitty and Eliena — and nine grandchildren.

A former employee, Robin Wood, revived EMS in 1997, reproducing the vintage equipment designs. An iPad app emulating the VCS3 was released in 2014.

Even in the 21st century, Mr. Zinovieff sought better music technology. In 2016, he told Sound on Sound that he felt limited by unresponsive interfaces — keyboards, touchpads, linear computer displays — and by playback through stationary, directional loudspeakers. He longed, he said, for “three-dimensional sound in the air around us.”

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‘Final Summer season’ Assessment: Rising Pains

‘Last Summer’ Review: Growing Pains

The film “Last Summer” plays like an extended montage that advertises the breathtaking views and the clear Mediterranean waters of southern Turkey. Like a migratory fish, the teenager Deniz (Fatih Sahin) is lucky enough to spend the summers on this beautiful coast in the coastal town where his family owns a cottage. This wafer-thin coming-of-age film (on Netflix) is set in the summer of 1997, when Deniz is out with his cool older sister Ebru (Aslihan Malbora) while he feeds the puppy love for her teasing beast Asli (Ece Cesmioglu). .

Director Ozan Aciktan is interested in how Deniz’s crush on Asli, a flirtatious young woman, reflects his longing for the confidence and thrill of adulthood. When he accompanies Asli and her friends to a high cliff, Deniz shows him jumping into the sea. Although he survived the fall, the cut on his foot is a sign that growing up is exciting, but not without pain.

The movie’s attention to Deniz’s growing pains is useful as Asli, a beautiful but blurry character, meets a charming older man and Deniz’s shy longing takes a jealous turn. Tension builds up on sunny days and sweaty nights. But at its climax, the film fails to fulfill its purpose. Asli’s feelings seem to change on a whim, and Deniz suffers no consequences for his mistakes. For all the beauty of its dazzling holiday setting, “Last Summer” drives by, but not to a satisfying destination.

Last summer
Not rated. In Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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Utilizing the Knowledge of Dance to Discover Our Method Again to Our Our bodies

Using the Wisdom of Dance to Find Our Way Back to Our Bodies

Sometime in the middle of April I took up space in the world again, the bigger one outside of my apartment, outside of my neighborhood. Taking a seat is a bizarre feeling after a year inside. It’s sometimes exciting, sometimes terrifying. It’s always strange.

As we get out of the pandemic, not only do we walk around without masks, we learn how to re-enter our bodies. It’s wild out there – which means the happy, nerve-wracking combination of New York City and lifted restrictions – but it’s still time to hold on to whatever is slow.

The pandemic, devastating in many ways, was also an opportunity to explore the value of the body and the everyday, to refocus the eyes and to see, as dance critic Edwin Denby wrote, “Daily life is wonderfully full” of seeing things . Not only the movements of people, but also the objects around them, the shape of the rooms in which they live, the ornaments that architects make on windows and doors, the peculiar way how buildings end up in the air. “

In his 1954 essay “Dancing, Buildings and People in the Streets” (also the title of a later volume) Denby explores the art and the act of seeing both in performance and in the daily dance of life. During the pandemic, I put a lot of thought into Denby’s essay, a reminder not to stop looking at the details of everyday life. People slowed down. And you could study your body just as you could study the world.

With the increase in vaccinations, the world has changed, although it is not what it was and will not be. This spring there were again dances to be seen in person; In May, I wondered if it was time to buy an unlimited MetroCard. Some of it was great – like when members of the club world performed at the Guggenheim on Ephrat Asherie’s UnderScored, part of the Works & Process franchise. Some things were forgotten. But a lot seemed right at the moment: processions in nature, a participatory installation at MoMA, an intimate studio performance. In different ways, they all reflected the time we are in – a borderline in-between place that won’t last forever. (Hold on to it.)

Watching a performance is now not just about the dance itself, but about a glimpse into our position – maybe even a way to pause the world for a moment longer. What does it mean to watch dance like in life and to move through the room? How does your feeling affect your vision? What should be preserved from the pandemic and what could dance teach us about it?

Dance sprouts all around us; it’s purposeful, serious, healing, transgressive, inclusive and beautifully laid back. And while the theaters haven’t fully opened their doors yet, the choreography has spread to rooftops and parks, studios, cemeteries, and museums.

Processions, these performances with built-in cast, are also ubiquitous. Why now? They’re practical, of course – kept outdoors, they don’t require excessive choreographic construction. And they feel right for this time in between: They are not shows, but events that arise in the moment. And how they develop – that is, how they look and, more importantly, how they feel – depends on who shows up.

The last River to River Festival in 2021 in collaboration with Movement Research presented three processions led by Miguel Gutierrez, Okwui Okpokwasili and the Illustrious Blacks. What does it mean to inhabit our body – and the city – as individuals and as a group? “It was almost like opening doors of opportunity again as we come out of the pandemic and step into this new world,” said Lili Chopra, executive director of arts programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. “It is a participatory moment that you do together, but which you can take with you.”

A procession led by Gutierrez in Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan was about thinking about the land we were walking on; it was also about slowing down and seeing. Before we started, we performed a movement at Gutierrez’s instruction in which our outstretched arms cupped and scooped the air forwards and backwards.

For him the action could do many things; it could be a conjuring gesture or it could contain the idea of ​​conjuring. It could be about moving or banishing energy. He spoke of waving as a gesture of awakening: “Healing”, he sang, “there is no space for oblivion”.

At a time when it looks like a lot of people have pushed the past year and a half out of their heads, the gesture was grounding and reassuring. It also echoed: as we walked towards the park, two children were seen in a high-rise apartment with their arms curled in the same meditative slow motion; they stood behind a window, but their attention – they watched, they copied, they moved with us – made the procession important even before it really began.

Moving as a collective, especially after so much loneliness, has a hypnotic effect. This idea of ​​togetherness was the focus of the Global Water Dances 2021 in Locomotive Lawn in Riverside Park South in June, which drew attention to the cause of clean and safe water with movement. Martha Eddy, the dance teacher and one of the coordinators of the event, helped lead a dance in which participants, dancers and spectators alike made waves with their bodies.

“You’re starting to feel harmony,” Eddy said of the liberating power of moving with others. “And we build a kind of collective effervescence that both senses fear and releases joy in what humanity can create.”

But I’ve found that effervescence isn’t just about large groups; it’s not even about being outside. In a series of individual performances, dance artist Kay Ottinger played a solo by Melanie Maar as part of a larger project that she initiated with three mentors. Everyone passes on an exercise or a piece. For Maars Solo, Ottinger turned her body with a heavy wooden pearl necklace that was wrapped around her waist. As she circled her hips for 20 minutes, she rocked back and forth, transforming the room, a dingy studio in Judson Church, and the air in it.

There is something priceless about live performances: the energetic exchange between a dancing body and a quiet and attentive body. Mirror neurons – how a brain cell reacts to an action, either when it is performed or simply observed – are charged. I felt that with Ottinger and in “Embodied Sensations”, a participatory work by the Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams. Williams is trained as an architect and takes care of space; Her piece was one of my favorite experiences of bodies in space – and my body in space – of the past year.

Williams teamed up with Anna Martine Whitehead, a performance artist from Chicago, for “Embodied Sensations”, which is presented in the huge atrium of the Museum of Modern Art; The spectator’s job was to perform movement instructions amid a maze of piled furniture – benches and chairs that had been removed from parts of the museum due to social distancing protocols.

Each performance consisted of four prompts, which the audience performed twice over 30 minutes. One of me was, “Take three full minutes to do absolutely whatever you want in this room.” Another was more direct: “Imagine there is a black hole in the center of this room. Go to the edge of the black hole and practice resisting its pull. “

If the pandemic raised our awareness of our bodies, “Embodied Sensations” was a way to find out who has the freedom of movement and why. One instruction read in part: “Imagine you are a walking goal post or a moving target. Decide if you want to be caught. “

In an interview, Williams said, “I can imagine what my brother’s answer would be, what my 7-year-old’s answer would be, what my upper-middle-class white classmate would be from Cornell’s answer. Then it was incredible to see these people perform. “

But even when the instructions were less burdened, their execution had levels of meaning. During the first lap, I felt like I was carrying out the instructions; the second time I just did it and that had a relaxing effect. I was in space, wearing a mask, and could breathe. Deep.

Meanwhile, certain instructions were reminiscent of moments from the pandemic experience: “Choose any room,” one read. “Close your eyes, hear and smell intensely for about 2 minutes. Choose a new place and keep your eyes closed. Focus on how you are feeling for a minute. Repeat this even if you are bored or tired. “

In the past year and a half, haven’t we all been bored and tired? Alone with our feelings? Without the space to move much, we looked inward, at the body. And for those of us who normally see a lot of live performances, we had to pay attention to the bigger world – the angles in nature, the choreography of the everyday. Both were gifts. Now there is little shortage of dance events, and here are two: STooPS BedStuy, an annual arts event, takes place on July 24th; On August 7th, Dance Church, a guided improvisation class from Seattle, is making a tour stop in New York.

Or borrow a re-entry experiment from Williams. Close your eyes. Focus on how you feel. And then repeat. Think about how your body, not just buildings, ends up in the air. It’s about enjoying the in-between.

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Your Subsequent Summer time Learn Primarily based on Your Favourite Summer time Cocktail

Your Next Summer Read Based on Your Favorite Summer Cocktail

I can’t think of a better way to spend a summer day than by the pool with a captivating beach read and my favorite cocktail. I only have one (big) problem: I can stand in front of my bookshelf for the better half of the day and try to choose which book to read next. It’s basically the equivalent of scrolling through Netflix for two hours before settling on an hour and a half movie. From thrillers to new releases to intimate stories full of romance, I often have to close my eyes and randomly pick a novel, which isn’t a bad way, I might add. So this time I tried something different. I’ve chosen a book that goes with my summer cocktail. After all, drinks and books go hand in hand – what better way to choose my next reading than my favorite drink? Join me and find your next summer book and cocktail combo!

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Evaluate: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

Review: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France – “Innocence”, the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in a soft, gloomy gloom. A shadowy cymbal mist rises from long, ghastly tones in the bass and contrabassoon, before a screeching bassoon fragment penetrates the silence with melancholy singing.

It’s only a few seconds of music, but a mood has established itself – comprehensive, unforgettable and yet subtle. Before we know the plot of “Innocence”, we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, out of which the memory swings into an uncertain future, engraved with grief.

We feel it again and again in the following hundred minutes when we get to know a tragedy and its aftermath. Great yet reserved, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in his career in the fifth decade.

Seen here at the festival in Aix-en-Provence until July 12th (and streamed on arte.tv on Saturday), after its planned debut in 2020 was canceled, it would be the premiere of the year even in a normal season – even if his audiences weren’t so hungry for real, great, important live opera after so many months. It deserves to travel well beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

This is undoubtedly the work of a mature master who has mastered her resources so well that she can simply focus on telling a story and illuminating characters. In contrast to so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” – with the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki – does not seem like a sung piece with a more or less incoherent, artistically self-centered orchestral soundtrack.

In fact, during the performance I attended on Tuesday, I tried to listen only to the instrumental lines and their interplay from time to time, but despite the apparent virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting up to the stage, to the clear, relentless ones Action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; Boils under and around the voices; and only occasionally, exploding briefly, is this music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying the drama. It’s complex but confident enough not to exist just for its own sake.

With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen and translations in more than half a dozen languages ​​by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in Helsinki 21st. The plot alternates between a memory of the disaster by six students and a teacher who went through it , and a wedding reception that takes place 10 years later.

It quickly becomes clear that the two events are related. The bridegroom is the brother of the Sagittarius, and his family, ostracized and desperate about what happened, withheld the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress crept around the edge of the wedding with clenched jaws: She’s the mother of one of the victims.)

For an innocent young woman who is blindly led by her lover into a world of violence and deception, there are plenty of role models in opera: think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”. In its relatively modest, non-stop length, “Innocence” is reminiscent of this as well as the cruel economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra”.

But “Innocence” is a large part of our time and – in its play with several languages ​​and speaking and song registers – very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; It was inspired by “The Last Supper”, from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the wider guilt questions of the piece and the related but separate experiences of people who shared a trauma.

Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in loud admonitions; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyrics. A priest, the family’s only friend, mumbles ominously about his lost faith.

The surviving students and teachers, on the other hand, speak – but in precise rhythms that are artfully coordinated with their respective languages ​​Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom and sings in the incredibly simple style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir sings backstage, a touch of a world beyond the feverish hustle and bustle of the action. All these disparate vocal worlds are connected by the orchestra, which wraps itself easily and smoothly around the singers – never underlining them explicitly, never competing.

The cast matches Saariaho’s score in their dedication and discipline, their refusal to lapse into dubbing or grand guignol. As a waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; As the groom’s mother, Sandrine Piau conjures up the eerie effect of a voice thinned to a thread from suffering.

Saariaho’s previous operas – beginning with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) – were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who even gives canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, however, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style “Innocence” anchors in reality without losing its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-changing two-story set, a terrifying mix of school and restaurant, is a key player in the drama.)

The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability – and disgusting surprises – of ancient Greek drama. Different feelings of guilt slowly seep out from the Sagittarius to encompass even seemingly impeccable characters. A weapon was accidentally provided; suspicious behavior was not reported; a boy was mercilessly bullied and attacked.

This is not an unknown plot, and like any great opera, “Innocence” would appear flat if its text were delivered as a play. It is thanks to the music that it has brooding nuances instead; the varieties of utterance; Saariaho’s suggestion, though it gives a clear story, that there is much more than what is being said. The opera here is still a home for emotions that can seem flat, implausible, extreme, but are now mysterious and natural.

“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it emerged. When you watch events of this kind happen in and around an international school during this period, it is difficult not to think of Europe itself and its formation as a Union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have gradually come to realize that the opposite is the case. In the transition from earlier times – mother tongues and folk songs – to the lingua franca of English and musical modernity, this stage company seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.

But the last moments of the opera are not without a certain hopeless hope. Students describe small steps they took to overcome tragedy; the daughter’s vision prompts the waitress not to buy her birthday presents anymore, to let them go. The music simmers sadly, but the dissonance runs through a sublime moment of consonance – around the sunshine – before it drifts back into tension and then fades up into pure shimmer, almost tonelessly. So it is through both the music and beyond the music that Saariaho comes to an end that, if not happy, is oddly completely exhilarating.

innocence

Until July 12th at the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, France; and livestream on arte.tv July 10th; festival-aix.com.

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Robert Downey Sr., Filmmaker and Provocateur, Is Useless at 85

Robert Downey Sr., Filmmaker and Provocateur, Is Dead at 85

Robert Downey Sr., who made provocative movies like “Putney Swope” that avoided mainstream success but were often critical favorites and were always attention getting, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Rosemary Rogers, said.

“Putney Swope,” a 1969 comedy about a Black man who is accidentally elected chairman of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, was perhaps Mr. Downey’s best-known film.

“To be as precise as is possible about such a movie,” Vincent Canby wrote in a rave review in The New York Times, “it is funny, sophomoric, brilliant, obscene, disjointed, marvelous, unintelligible and relevant.”

The film, though probably a financial success by Mr. Downey’s standards, made only about $2.7 million. (By comparison, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” that same year made more than $100 million.) Yet its reputation was such that in 2016 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, an exclusive group of movies deemed to have cultural or historical significance.

Also much admired in some circles was “Greaser’s Palace” (1972), in which a Christlike figure in a zoot suit arrives in the Wild West by parachute. Younger filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (who gave Mr. Downey a small part in his 1997 hit, “Boogie Nights”) cited it as an influence.

None other than Joseph Papp, the theater impresario, in a letter to The New York Times after Mr. Canby’s unenthusiastic review, wrote that “Robert Downey has fearlessly descended into the netherworld and come up with a laughing nightmare.” (Mr. Papp’s assessment may not have been entirely objective; at the time he was producing one of Mr. Downey’s few mainstream efforts, a television version of the David Rabe play “Sticks and Bones,” which had been a hit at Mr. Papp’s Public Theater in 1971.)

Between “Putney Swope” and “Greaser’s Palace” there was “Pound” (1970), a political satire in which actors portrayed stray dogs. Among those actors, playing a puppy, was Robert Downey Jr., the future star of the “Iron Man” movies and many others, and Mr. Downey’s son. He was 5 and making his film debut.

That movie, the senior Mr. Downey told The Times Union of Albany, N.Y., in 2000, was something of a surprise to the studio.

“When I turned it into United Artists,” he said, “after the screening one of the studio heads said to me, ‘I thought this was gonna be animated.’ They thought they were getting some cute little animated film.”

Robert John Elias Jr. was born on June 24, 1936, in Manhattan and grew up in Rockville Centre, on Long Island. His father was in restaurant management, and his mother, Betty (McLoughlin) Elias, was a model. Later, when enlisting in the Army as a teenager, he adopted the last name of his stepfather, Jim Downey, who worked in advertising.

Much of his time in the Army was spent in the stockade, he said later; he wrote a novel while doing his time, but it wasn’t published. He pitched semi-pro baseball for a year, then wrote some plays.

Among the people he met on the Off Off Broadway scene was William Waering, who owned a camera and suggested they try making movies. The result, which he began shooting when John F. Kennedy was still president and which was released in 1964, was “Babo 73,” in which Taylor Mead, an actor who would go on to appear in many Andy Warhol films, played the president of the United States. It was classic underground filmmaking.

“We just basically went down to the White House and started shooting, with no press passes, permits, anything like that,” Mr. Downey said in an interview included in the book “Film Voices: Interviews From Post Script” (2004). “Kennedy was in Europe, so nobody was too tight with the security, so we were outside the White House mainly, ran around; we actually threw Taylor in with some real generals.”

The budget, he said, was $3,000.

Mr. Downey’s “Chafed Elbows,” about a day in the life of a misfit, was released in 1966 and was a breakthrough of sorts, earning him grudging respect even from Bosley Crowther, The Times’s staid film critic.

“One of these days,” he wrote, “Robert Downey, who wrote, directed and produced the underground movie ‘Chafed Elbows,’ which opened at the downtown Gate Theater last night, is going to clean himself up a good bit, wash the dirty words out of his mouth and do something worth mature attention in the way of kooky, satiric comedy. He has the audacity for it. He also has the wit.”

The film enjoyed extended runs at the Gate and the Bleecker Street Cinema. “No More Excuses” followed in 1968, then “Putney Swope,” “Pound” and “Greaser’s Palace.” But by the early 1970s Mr. Downey had developed a cocaine habit.

“Ten years of cocaine around the clock,” he told The Associated Press in 1997. His marriage to Elsie Ford, who had been in several of his movies, faltered; they eventually divorced. He credited his second wife, Laura Ernst, with helping to pull him out of addiction. She died in 1994 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mr. Downey drew on that experience for his last feature, “Hugo Pool” (1997).

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by a daughter, Allyson Downey; a brother, Jim; a sister, Nancy Connor; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Downey’s movies have earned new appreciation in recent decades. In 2008 Anthology Film Archives in the East Village restored and preserved “Chafed Elbows,” “Babo 73″ and “No More Excuses” with the support of the Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation. At the time, Martin Scorsese, a member of the foundation’s board, called them “an essential part of that moment when a truly independent American cinema was born.”

“They’re alive in ways that few movies can claim to be,” Mr. Scorsese told The Times, “because it’s the excitement of possibility and discovery that brought them to life.”

Mr. Downey deflected such praise.

“They’re uneven,” he said of the films. “But I was uneven.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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Processing the Pandemic on the Manchester Worldwide Competition

Processing the Pandemic at the Manchester International Festival

Gregory Maqoma’s varied choreography for these dancers (as well as Thulani Chauke on two large screens on the sides of the stage – a nod to travel problems during Covid-19) and Garratt’s ventriloquism were the best parts of the uneven show that meandered from one set to another.

Join The Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, see a Shakespeare play in the park, and more as we explore signs of hope in a transformed city. The “Offstage” series has been accompanying the theater through a shutdown for a year. Now let’s look at his recovery.

Surprisingly, the strongest performance piece was a film installation. In the huge Manchester Center (a former train station), flashing lights and buzzing, breathy electronic surround sound (by Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Jon Hopkins) pervaded the cavernous space before the start of “All of This Unreal Time,” a collaboration between the Actor Cillian Murphy (“Peaky Blinders”) and writer Max Porter directed by Aoife McArdle.

Murphy and Porter previously worked on the stage adaptation of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, and like that work, the lyrics here are a strange and wonderful collection of narrative, reflection, self-talk, myth and poetry. “I came here to apologize,” says the screen before we see Murphy trudging through a dark, dripping tunnel.

As he walks through the night, through dilapidated streets and past fluorescent cafes, Murphy’s character speaks of his shame, anger and fears as he confesses his flaws as a man (“Sisterhood, that’s one thing to be envied “). “I’m sorry that I took and took and took and took and took and enriched myself without a break and left deep scars on the skin of the earth,” he says towards the end as he walks through a field outside the city , the sky brightens, trains go by, birds flock.

McArdle keeps the pace high, the focus on Murphy, her cutaway shots are fleeting and pointed. Seen on a giant screen that swells and fades like the echoes of nature itself, along with the musical rhythms of the lyrics, All of This Unreal Time (available online) is a captivating, truly immersive journey that – like all good art – keeps the possibilities of the meaning completely open.

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Watch The Kissing Sales space Three Trailer

Watch The Kissing Booth 3 Trailer

Goodbyes are often bittersweet, and Elle Evans (Joey King) has a lot to do before she’s ready to say farewell to her friends in The Kissing Booth 3 trailer — a whole bucket list to complete, to be exact. The summer before she’s set to head off to college, Elle is faced with the hardest decision she’s ever made: fulfill her lifelong promise to go to college with her best friend Lee (Joel Courtney) or move across the country to be with her boyfriend Noah (Jacob Elordi). Either way, she only has a few months before she has to decide whose heart to break, and they’re not making it easy for her. “Maybe your choices have more to do with what other people want,” says Noah’s mom Mrs. Flynn (Molly Ringwald). “Maybe it’s time to think about what you want.”

During their last summer before college, Elle and Lee set out to take on a massive bucket list fit for the season, complete with a massive neon pool party at the Flynn family beach house, base jumping, sky diving, rock climbing, flash dances, and life-size sandcastles. Caught up in choosing between Lee and Noah and enjoying what’s left of her summer, Elle finds solace in confiding in Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez), who helps her realize that “people pass through our lives. Some of them fade into memories, but a few become part of who you are.”

See the full trailer above and watch The Kissing Booth 3 on Netflix when it premieres on Aug. 11.

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With Venues Reopening Throughout New York, Life Is a Cabaret As soon as Once more

With Venues Reopening Across New York, Life Is a Cabaret Once Again

“Thank you for risking your life by coming out tonight,” joked Joe Iconis, welcoming a socially distant crowd to the Feinstein’s / 54 Below cabaret reopening in Manhattan in June.

Iconis, a composer, lyricist and performer popular with young music theater fans, joked before diving into an alternately silly and poignant set with actor and singer George Salazar – a star of Iconis’ first Broadway production, “Be More Chill”. He seriously added, “It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real people, not computer screens.”

Wet-eyed meetings between artists and fans have been held across the city as Covid-19 restrictions gradually eased. “I hope you are prepared for how emotional it will be when you are on stage because it will be emotional for us to support artists we love again,” said a fan of the band Betty. In the intimate spaces that house these shows, the interaction between artists and those who love them is an integral part of what downtown Sandra Bernhard calls “the instant, visceral experience.”

Traditional eateries such as the Birdland and Blue Note jazz clubs, newer eateries such as Green Room 42 and the City Winery in Hudson River Park (both reopened in April) as well as the old cabaret oases Pangea and Club Cumming in the East Village are back with food, drink and carnal entertainment, while veterans of cabaret – along with other jazz and pop acts and drag performers – return to the work that is their bread and butter.

“Seeing people react physiologically to music again – tapping toes, shaking heads – that’s almost better than applause,” said pianist and singer Michael Garin, one of many who used social media to connect with fans during the pandemic to keep in touch, and to resume the performances for the live audience initially.

However, Garin noted, “It’s not like we flip a switch and get things back to normal.” Especially in the spring, not everyone was ready to pick up where they left off. “Some musicians were willing to book as soon as possible and others said, ‘Let me see – I don’t know if I want to be indoors now,'” said Steven Bensusan, President of Blue Note Entertainment Group.

Producer and host Scott Siegel, creator of the virtual Scott Siegel’s New York Nightclub, said some guests are still anxious: “Everyone is hopeful, but I hear people are nervous. There are also many who come from outside the Tristate area and it is more difficult to get in. “

With regulations still in flux, both vigilance and adaptability are vital. Before Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced in mid-June that the state could reopen almost entirely, Birdland had planned to return on July 1 with only 50 percent capacity. Instead, all 150 seats were accessible from the start, with Diversity show hosts Jim Caruso and Susie Mosher returning with theater and cabaret luminaries like Chita Rivera and Natalie Douglas returning in the first week. (The club’s lower room, the Birdland Theater, will remain closed until September.) The Blue Note, which reopened in mid-June with about two-thirds capacity, has since made all of its 250 seats available. Proof of vaccination against the coronavirus is not required in either club, although masks are recommended for unvaccinated in Birdland.

In contrast, a vaccination certificate is necessary at 54 Below, where a full crowd of around 150 is to be gradually built up, as the 60-seat cabaret hall in Pangea still has a capacity restriction of 80 percent. Both venues were among those developing streaming series while they were closed. “We originally tried to stay active, but it became a way to pay staff and expand the audience,” said Richard Frankel, one of the owners of 54 Below, who is responsible for the new “Live From Feinstein’s / 54” series. will start below, ”with live streams straight from the venue on July 11th. “Right now we’re focused on reopening live, but it’s definitely something we should explore further after the dust settles.”

Ryan Paternite, Director of Programming at Birdland, was similarly encouraged by the response to Radio Free Birdland, though he added, “My feeling is that people are pretty burned out watching shows on their computer or phone – especially when they did it to pay for tickets. “

Artists generally remain optimistic about what technology can do. “I’m very pro-streaming,” said Tony Award-nominated singer and actress Lilli Cooper, who will appear on 54 Below on July 28 and August 15, that’s so important. “Caruso plans to keep his” Pajamas “weekly Cast Party ”; he noted that the virtual program enabled him to explore both his audience (“It’s literally and figuratively more colorful”) and talent pool (“I’ve been looking at TikTok and Instagram and discovered some exciting new artists”) ).

Many hope that diversity and inclusivity will be emphasized even more in an art form that includes colorful artists like Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short as historical icons. “My art is often based on what I’ve been through, and being black is part of it,” said Broadway veteran Derrick Baskin, who put R&B classics on his setlist for recent 54 Below dates.

Justin Vivian Bond, slated to reopen Joe’s Pub in October, said: “The great thing about cabaret is that if you can do it, you can react to what’s going on in the world.” For Bond, the pandemic posed equally sobering challenges like that of the LGBTQ community during another plague: “When AIDS happened, even when people died, you could be with them. What we just went through was a very isolating trauma. I don’t know if I’ll get any brilliant insight on this, but hopefully what I’m saying will resonate with the audience. “

Bernhard, who will return to Joe’s Pub in December for the annual vacation engagement she missed in 2020, is still unsure of the insights she will offer. “In the headspace I’m in, I don’t even know what the next two months will bring,” she said. “I just want to perform like everyone else is doing right now.”

Artists and fans are greeted with renovations at specific venues and other enticements. Birdland cut its admission price to 99 cents in July, the fee when the club opened in 1949. 54 Below is a new menu created by “Top Chef” winner Harold Dieterle. The Laurie Beechman Theater in the West Bank Café is getting a “facelift,” said its owner Steve Olsen – fresh paint, new carpet and bar furnishings, improved sound and lighting technology – in preparation for a reopening after Labor Day. The Triad Theater also used its forced downtime to “upgrade, repaint, and get new equipment,” said Booking Director Bernie Furshpan.

But it’s the love of the performance itself and the perspective gained after a year of lost shows that drives many artists’ emotional response to returning to the stage. Michael Feinstein, the American multitasking songbook champion and namesake for clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York, believes “that everyone who is a performer comes out in a completely different place, with a deeper sense of connectedness and joy and gratitude. “

“I can’t imagine an artist taking a moment of what we’re doing for granted,” he added.

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They Resurrected MGM. Amazon Purchased the Studio. Now What?

They Resurrected MGM. Amazon Bought the Studio. Now What?

Producer Matt Tolmach, who has two projects in the works at MGM, including the horror film Dark Harvest due out on September 23, said De Luca’s passion for good stories is contagious. “He read the script and called me and we had an hour long talk about the possibilities and how great it would be and how we can push the envelope,” he said of Dark Harvest. “That’s what he does. He makes your film better. “

From Mr De Luca’s point of view, the new MGM is about “treating the filmmakers like the franchise,” he said. When he and Mrs. Abdy first met, the duo put together a list of 36 directors they wanted to lure into the studio. In 15 months they caught 20 percent of them, including Darren Aronofsky, Sarah Polley, Melina Matsoukas, and George Miller.

“We don’t mind making big swings and playing because I think it’s either big or home,” he added. “I think the audience will reward you if you are really original, innovative, brave and creative.”

At a shareholders meeting last month, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, called the reason for the takeover “very simple”. He said MGM has a “huge, deep catalog of much-loved” films and shows. “We can rethink and develop this intellectual property for the 21st century.”

This contradicts the approach that Mr De Luca and Mrs Abdy have primarily followed.

“Mike and I didn’t sit down and say we’d go through the library and do it all over again,” said Ms. Abdy. “Our focus is on original ideas with original authorship and real filmmakers, but you know that every now and then something will come out that is fun and we will pursue it when we see fit.”

These ideas include a hybrid live-action / animated remake of “Pink Panther”; Michael B. Jordan as director of the third part of the “Rocky” spin-off “Creed”; and “Legally Blonde 3” starring Reese Witherspoon and a script co-written by Mindy Kaling.