#THE MOST UNUSUAL TEEN-AGERS OF ALL TIME!

[tomoleary]

Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants!” The X-Men #4 Title Splash Original Art (Marvel, 1964) Source

Colorist uncredited

[keepsmagnetoaway]

X-Men 7 (Sept 1964)

Stan Lee/Jack Kirby.

HELL YEAH

"The most unusual teen-agers of all time" didn't really hold up as a tagline, but anyway. We're in issue 7 and the X-Men have, canonically, I think, seven villains - Magneto, the four members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants who work for him, the Blob and the Vanisher. Six of them are coming back for this issue and they're being celebrated like we haven't seen them in years. This is funny but it's especially funny how much of a dunk on the Vanisher this is.

Anyway, the X-Men "graduate" in this issue, which doesn't involve them leaving school, nor does it involve the Professor stopping constantly testing them or anything, but Professor X leaves for a while and Cyclops officially becomes team leader and gets introduced to Cerebro, which looks amazing.

The Vanisher isn't even on Cerebro's list of KNOWN HOSTILE MUTANTS! Owned!

The gang goes to Greenwich Village for some downtime and we get Stan Lee's spoof version of beatniks. This is 1964 so this stuff is already kind of out of date (this is very much a bunch of late 50s gags) but I can't tell if that was part of the joke, or whether Stan Lee just didn't keep up with this stuff, or whether he assumed his imagined audience wouldn't be keeping up with this stuff. Or whether he just liked laughing at beatniks. Anyway, I dig it.

It gets weirder. I haven't even really talked about the stuff with Beast's giant feet but...there's a lot of foot stuff in these comics.

Oh right, the plot. Magneto tries to recruit the Blob, which almost works, until the X-Men show up to interrupt him at a missile base (as usual). The Blob inadvertently shields the X-Men from the blast of a missile, then concludes that he hates both sides and goes home, with a bit of humanisation. We stan the Blob. The end.

[whileiamdying]

Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence

There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”

By Rachel Syme January 22, 2024

From Marie Antoinette to Priscilla Presley, Coppola’s protagonists enjoy enormous privilege but little autonomy.Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker

Wshen Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.

There are plenty of distinguished bloodlines in the history of Hollywood—the Selznicks and the Mayers, the Warners, the Hustons, the Bergman-Rossellinis, the Fondas—but very few, like the Coppolas, in which one famous director has spawned another. After an early life spent in front of the camera, Sofia Coppola made a career behind it, becoming one of the most influential and visually distinctive filmmakers of her generation, with eight features to her name. Her second, “Lost in Translation,” from 2003, earned her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a nomination for Best Director, making her the first American woman recognized in that category. Her career, of course, has been bolstered by an unusual wealth of resources. Francis’s company, American Zoetrope, has been a producer on all her movies. When she made her début, “The Virgin Suicides,” in 1999, she was able to cast an established star, Kathleen Turner, with whom she’d appeared as a teen-ager in her father’s movie “Peggy Sue Got Married.” She got permission to shoot “Somewhere,” her fourth film, inside the clubby Hollywood hotel the Chateau Marmont because in her youth she was a regular there, and even had a private key to the hotel pool. Still, no director can get a project green-lighted at a snap of the fingers, especially in today’s franchise-glutted Hollywood, and especially as a female director in an industry that remains dominated by men. Coppola is self-aware enough to know that it would be bad manners for someone in her position to complain. But she told me, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”

When we first met, in the fall of 2021, for breakfast near her home in the West Village, Coppola had spent the previous two years at work on her most ambitious venture to date, a miniseries, for Apple TV+, based on the Edith Wharton novel “The Custom of the Country,” from 1913. Coppola had adapted the book into five episodes and cast Florence Pugh in the lead role of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern arriviste on a desperate quest to infiltrate Gilded Age Manhattan society. Coppola, like Wharton, is known for her gimlet-eyed portrayals of a rarefied milieu, and for her insight into female characters who enjoy enormous privilege but little autonomy. “Marie Antoinette,” her most expensive movie, had a budget of forty million dollars, still modest by Hollywood standards; for “Custom,” she was planning for, as she put it, “five ‘Marie Antoinettes.’ ”

At breakfast, though, she told me, “Apple just pulled out. They pulled our funding.” Her voice was quiet, and her face—high cheekbones, Roman nose—was placid. “It’s a real drag,” she said. “I thought they had endless resources.” During the project’s development, she’d gone back and forth with executives (“mostly dudes”) on everything from the budget to the script. “They didn’t get the character of Undine,” she recalled. “She’s so ‘unlikable.’ But so is Tony Soprano!” She added, “It was like a relationship that you know you probably should’ve gotten out of a while ago.” (Apple did not respond to request for comment.)

Coppola grew up watching Francis do battle with movie studios. The success of the “Godfather” films hardly assured him funding equal to his ambitions, and he often went to harrowing lengths to get his projects made independently, driving himself to the brink of bankruptcy or nervous breakdown. “Hearts of Darkness,” a documentary co-directed by Eleanor about the notoriously tortured production of “Apocalypse Now,” is subtitled, only a bit hyperbolically, “A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.” (At the age of eighty-four, Francis is financing a new film, “Megalopolis,” with a hundred and twenty million dollars of his own money, freed up by the sale of a portion of the family’s wine business.) Coppola absorbed from her father the ethos that it was never worth it to cave to the creative demands of executives. In 2014, she agreed to make a live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” for Universal Studios, but amid disputes during development (including, she said at the time, an executive asking her, “What’s gonna get the thirty-five-year-old man in the audience?”) she walked away from the job. “I don’t actually want a hundred million dollars to make a movie,” she told me, of studio deals with strings attached. “I learned it’s better to do your own thing.” She refuses to take on projects unless she is guaranteed the right to choose her creative team and control the final cut.

In January of 2022, after trying in vain to secure alternative funding for “Custom,” Coppola moved on to a new project, an independent film adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me.” Presley’s relationship with Elvis began when she was just fourteen. Like Marie Antoinette, she found herself unhappily married to a King. Paging through the book while in bed with a case of covid, Coppola had begun to see the picture unfolding in her mind. “I just thought about her sitting on that shag carpet all day,” she recalled. She wrote a draft of the script quickly and told her longtime producer, Youree Henley, that she wanted to be done shooting by the end of the year. She was undeterred by the coming release of Baz Luhrmann’s eighty-five-million-dollar film “Elvis,” which was due out in a few months. A rhinestoned frenzy of a bio-pic, Luhrmann’s movie portrayed Priscilla as a marginal character and a happy helpmate. Coppola called Presley and said, “That’s not how I see you at all,” and after hearing Coppola’s vision Presley signed on as a producer.

“Marie Antoinette” was filmed inside the real Versailles, a cinematic coup. For “Priscilla,” the Elvis Presley estate, wary of a film told from Priscilla’s perspective, denied Coppola access to Graceland. Coppola’s production team instead constructed the façade and the interiors of Elvis’s Memphis mansion on a soundstage outside Toronto. I visited one afternoon in November of 2022, as the shoot was under way. Off set, Coppola, who is fifty-two, dresses with understated elegance—Chanel slingbacks, collared blouses. Now she was wearing her only slightly less polished “set uniform,” gray New Balances and a black Carhartt fleece over a Charvet button-down. She led me through the hangarlike space and into the ersatz Presley home. The entrance was flanked by two large lion statues. In the gaudy living room, she pointed to a floral arrangement. “Those are real orchids,” she said. “It surprised me, with our budget. How extravagant.”

Coppola’s team had budgeted for forty days of shooting, already a squeeze, but at the last minute a piece of financing had fallen through, and she’d had to slash the story to be filmed in just a month, for less than twenty million dollars. Much of the movie is set in the Memphis summer, but they were filming as winter approached, which was cheaper, so Coppola had to coach her cast, shivering through outdoor scenes in their bathing suits, to “act warm.” Instead of filming two long shots she’d wanted in Los Angeles, of Priscilla driving a convertible down a palm-lined street and swan-diving into a pool, Coppola saved money by borrowing footage from a Cartier commercial she’d shot in 2018, with an actress who kind of looks like “Priscilla” ’s lead, Cailee Spaeny, at least from behind.

Whether set in a luxury hotel in Tokyo, like “Lost in Translation,” or in suburban Michigan, like “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola’s films are sumptuous but also slightly clinical. One of her œuvre’s visual hallmarks is a protagonist gazing out a window, sealed off from the world beyond. “You know I can’t resist a trapped woman,” she said. Yet, even when her female characters are confined, they achieve a degree of self-definition through adventures in style. No filmmaker has so astutely depicted the cloistered atmosphere of teen-age girlhood or the expressive power of its trappings. She is a master of the messy-bedroom mise en scène: piles of clothing and impractical shoes, poster-plastered walls, vanities cluttered with perfume bottles and porcelain figurines. The director Chloé Zhao, who won Best Director at the 2021 Oscars for her film “Nomadland,” told me that she admires Coppola for “world-building that isn’t just based on facts but on emotions.” She added, “There’s a receptivity to her work. To have a commitment to that kind of femininity is hard.” The director Jane Campion, who counts “The Virgin Suicides” among her favorite films, told me that Coppola’s light touch with actors and her attention to surfaces can be deceptive. “Her work is very powerful to me, because it’s got deep roots,” she said. But Coppola’s films have sometimes struck critics as longer on style than on substance, and too close to the privileges they depict to effectively critique them. A few months ago, Coppola sent me an e-mail, unprompted, in which she took issue with a notion that has resurfaced throughout her twenty-five-year career: “I don’t understand why looking at superficiality makes you superficial?!”

Coppola told me she could see herself, in an alternative life, as the editor of a magazine, “like Diana Vreeland,” who commanded Vogue in the sixties. Coppola is an avid curator of images and looks; Campion recalled that once, when they were both judges at Cannes, Coppola offered to help style her, and the next day two huge boxes from the luxury fashion brand Celine arrived at Campion’s hotel. Coppola begins every film project by gathering visual inspiration. In her makeshift office on the soundstage, she had covered a large bulletin board with imagery including the Presleys’ wedding photographs, a glamour shot of Priscilla as a teen-ager, and several William Eggleston pictures of an empty Graceland. There is a famous Bruce Weber photo of Coppola’s stylishly bestrewn home office at the time of “The Virgin Suicides,” and this workspace bore some resemblance. On her desk were pink Post-it notes, a Fujifilm Instax camera, and a half-burned Diptyque candle; on the floor lay wine bottles from the Coppola vineyard (which also makes a “Sofia” champagne that comes in tiny pink cans with individual straws). The director Quentin Tarantino, whom Coppola dated in the two-thousands, recalled her once showing him the look book for “Marie Antoinette.” “It was exquisitely put together, yet you could still tell it was handmade,” he said, “by the loving hands of a fine artist.” He went on, “She had a page of donuts with a pink glaze. I asked her, ‘What’s with the donuts?’ She said, ‘I like that shade of pink, and I want her sofa to have that quality.’ And when I saw the film, sure enough, I wanted to eat the goddamn furniture.”

When conceiving a film about Priscilla Presley’s unhappy marriage to Elvis, Coppola says, “I just thought about her sitting on that shag carpet all day.”Photograph by Kate Cunningham / Courtesy MACK

Coppola led me down a hallway to a room where the film’s costume designer, Stacey Battat, was floofing out Priscilla’s wedding gown, which Coppola had asked the fashion house Chanel to design for the movie as a favor. The dress, with a high-necked lacy bib, closely resembles the original, but among Coppola’s assets as a filmmaker is a preternatural aesthetic assurance, even when it comes to taking liberties with her source material. “I’ve always known what I like,” she told me. The opening shot of the film is a closeup of Priscilla’s feet stepping across a fuzzy expanse of shag carpet, which she made a rosy hue, though in the real Graceland there was no such rug. “In my mind, it was pink,” she told me. She hadn’t visited Graceland to prepare for the film, but a friend had taken a tour and had sent her a picture of poodle-print wallpaper. Coppola decided to re-create it for a shot in which Priscilla languishes in the tub, waiting for Elvis to return.

“It probably wasn’t in a bathroom in Graceland,” Coppola said. “But whatever.”

The lighting on set was dim. A playlist of songs, selected daily by Coppola to “set a vibe,” played over the sound system—Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, and the French indie-rock band Phoenix, which is fronted by Coppola’s husband, Thomas Mars, who is also a music supervisor for her films. In one corner, crew members were playing pickleball on a court that Coppola had insisted on installing during the first week of shooting. She had played in the crew’s tournament, and her team, the Smashers, won. “Pickleball paddles are so ugly,” she commented. “Maybe I’ll design a new line of them.”

Coppola told me that she learned from her father how to create “a warm set,” and borrowed from him a ritual he picked up in drama school: to kick off every production, stand with the cast and crew in a circle, hold hands, and recite the nonsense word “puwaba” three times. But the elder Coppola has what Eleanor, who has been married to him for sixty years, described to me as “an Italian approach—very theatrical, throwing stuff up in the air and screaming.” Sofia said that she finds such flourishes “so unnecessary.” The protagonists in her films tend to observe more than they speak, and Sofia comports herself in much the same way. The people who’ve worked with her, however, describe an impressive resolve beneath the diffidence. The actress Elle Fanning, who starred in “Somewhere” and “The Beguiled,” told me, “She doesn’t freak out, ever. She’s not going to scream at you across the room. But she’s unwavering.” Bill Murray, a star of “Lost in Translation” and “On the Rocks,” gave Coppola the nickname “the velvet hammer,” for her subtle stubbornness about getting her way.

Henley, the producer, who was sitting in a director’s chair near a video monitor, recalled a day when he and Coppola were scouting ice rinks for “Somewhere.” Coppola said of one, “This is great—um, where should we have lunch?” Afterward, Henley mentioned a few more possible rinks to visit, and Coppola looked puzzled; she’d already chosen. Henley told me, “I wasn’t able to read her softness as well as I can now.”

Coppola and her team were rehearsing a scene in the Presleys’ bedroom, where a large mirror hung behind the bed. Jacob Elordi, the actor playing Elvis, took his place on the King-size mattress, his six-foot-five frame nearly dangling over the edge. Spaeny, who was twenty-four but petite enough to pass for a teen-ager, hovered in the doorframe. The scene takes place shortly after Priscilla’s arrival at Graceland. She has gone shopping and bought a dress, but returns it after Elvis deems it unflattering. “Once again I’d compromised my own taste,” Presley writes of that moment in the memoir, which in Coppola’s world is the worst kind of fate.

Kathleen Turner told me, of working with Coppola on “The Virgin Suicides,” “She would never tell an actor what she wanted specifically, and, boy, that can be very tough.” She added, “Francis is a bulldozer, a very good bulldozer who knows what he wants. Sofia lets you do, and then lets you know if that’s what she wanted.” Elordi, who is twenty-six, told me he interpreted Coppola’s lack of instruction as a sign of trust. She cast him after meeting him just once. “Sofia never checked in before we were filming. She never texted or called about the voice or the look or the walk,” he said. When he arrived on set, excited to show Coppola the Elvis accent he’d been working on for months, she said, “Wow, you really look and talk like him,” and left it at that.

Coppola called, “Action!,” and Elordi looked at Spaeny: “What is that dress? It does nothin’ for your figure.” He glanced toward Coppola, who was standing with her cinematographer. “Was that all right, Sofia?” he drawled, remaining in character. “Should I be laughing at her? I don’t want to be too dramatic.”

“It was not too much,” Coppola replied. She paused and placed her hand on her chin. “It might have been a little Elvis-y.”

Francis’s life as a director was peripatetic, and he did not believe in leaving his family behind for more than ten days at a time. So the rest of the nuclear unit—Eleanor, Sofia, and her brothers, Roman and Gian-Carlo, or Gio—lived away from their home in Northern California for months, and sometimes years. One of Sofia’s first memories is of riding in a helicopter in the Philippines during the filming of “Apocalypse Now.” During the making of “One from the Heart,” when she was in the fourth and fifth grade, they relocated to L.A. After that, for “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish,” they went to Tulsa, Oklahoma. “We were circus people, basically,” she said. “I kind of mark my childhood by the movies.”

Coppola never excelled academically, in part because of all the moving around. She left one school before learning multiplication, and by the time she enrolled in a new one she’d missed the same unit. Coppola recalled, “I never really learned math, and I’m what they call a ‘challenged’ reader.” Anahid Nazarian, a researcher and producer who has worked with Francis for forty years, remembers a time when Coppola didn’t turn in a paper: “Her teacher said she had the best excuse, which was ‘I left it on the plane coming back from the Oscars.’ ” On matters of taste, though, Coppola was precociously fluent. She gave herself the nickname Domino and insisted that she be credited as such in several of her father’s pictures. While on the set of “One from the Heart,” she created her own publication, The Dingbat News, to distribute among the cast and crew. She collected photography and decorated her walls with pictures from foreign magazines. “I was the only girl in Napa Valley with a subscription to French Vogue,” she said. Francis described her as having “very, very big opinions” even as a little girl, adding, “It was never difficult to know what she preferred and what she didn’t prefer.” Francis’s best-known films took place in hypermasculine precincts—the Army, the Mob. Coppola was drawn to high-femme self-expression. At her parents’ dinner parties, she was always more interested in the “wives and girlfriends,” she said. “They had the best Bakelite jewelry.”

Francis recalled that he and Eleanor maintained a home base outside of Hollywood to create a semblance of normality for the kids. Nonetheless, many of the stories Coppola told me about her childhood took place in the world of famous adults: Richard Gere, a star of Francis’s “The Cotton Club,” swam in the family’s pool; George Lucas was “Uncle George”; Anjelica Huston assured Coppola that she would grow into her nose. One afternoon last year, during a visit to an L.A. bookstore, Coppola showed me a volume called “Height of Fashion,” a collection of notable people’s most stylish snapshots. Coppola had submitted a picture of herself at fourteen—gawky and beaming, with an asymmetrical haircut—sitting at the tony Parisian restaurant Davé next to the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. “He was a friend of a friend of my parents,” she said.

“Marie Antoinette” sharply divided critics. Some dismissed it as an ahistorical powder puff. Others thought it was a masterpiece.Photograph by Andrew Durham / Courtesy MACK

There is an old-world flavor to the Coppolas’ relationship to the family business: just as cobblers beget cobblers, movie people beget movie people. Roman, Sofia’s brother and frequent collaborator, is a filmmaker and has written screenplays with Wes Anderson. Talia Shire, who starred in the “Godfather” movies and the “Rocky” franchise, is her aunt. Her niece Gia has directed two features. Her first cousins include the actors Jason Schwartzman, whom she cast as a dweeby Louis XVI in “Marie Antoinette,” and Nicolas Cage. Other Coppolas coach actors, write screenplays, make music, and produce or distribute films. Sofia ascribes the field’s popularity within the family to Francis’s contagious passion. “My father is just so into filmmaking that he thinks everyone should be doing it,” she said. Even Francis’s father, a composer, ended up working on scores for his films, winning an Oscar (with Nino Rota) for “The Godfather: Part II.”

One member of the family who struggled to find her way in the business was Eleanor. In “Notes,” the first of two memoirs she has written, she described meeting Francis on the set of his début feature, the horror film “Dementia 13,” in 1962. He was the director, she was the assistant art director, and she thought that they might work on films together for years to come. Instead, within a few months she found out she was pregnant with Gio. She and Francis were married the following weekend, and Francis, as Eleanor put it to me, “made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and the mother.” She writes in “Notes” of a feeling of living in waiting—“waiting for Francis to get a chance to direct . . . waiting to go on location, waiting to go home.” (“At that point, I didn’t even know I could have a career, much less whether my wife would,” Francis said, by e-mail, adding, “I knew she was creative and from day one I always provided full time childcare and a studio for Ellie’s artwork.”) Sofia described a time when her mother visited the set of “Priscilla” and observed a scene in which Elvis is preparing to go on tour, while Priscilla will stay with their daughter, Lisa Marie. Eleanor told her, “I’ve been there.” Eleanor recalled to me, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you need to be happy,’ that’s exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, ‘Why am I unhappy?’ Not one single person said to me, ‘You are a creative person.’ ”

With his daughter, however, Francis made a point of offering creative encouragement, including by exposing her, along with her brothers, to the technical aspects of filmmaking. “There’s a traditional Italian thing with women, but I wasn’t raised like that,” Coppola said. “I was raised the same as the boys.” She and her mother didn’t discuss the gap in their experiences at the time, and Coppola isn’t inclined to analyze the themes that she explores in her work. Roman told me, “I’ve never heard Sofia say, ‘I want to show this isolation through this thing.’ ” Francis has always advised her that filmmaking should be close to the bone—as he told me, “the more personal, the better.” But, when I asked about the personal element of her movies, Coppola often fell back on abstractions or let her sentences trail off mid-thought. (Other writers have speculated about whether her style of communication is cannily evasive or simply a natural product of valuing the visual over the verbal. “I think sometimes she gives people enough rope to hang themselves with just by not responding,” Fiona Handyside, a British film scholar and the author of “Sofia Coppola: Cinema of Girlhood,” has said.) When I told Coppola about the feelings of stuckness that Eleanor had shared with me, and that seemed to percolate through Coppola’s films, she said, “I think so many people can relate to that, especially women.” Then she added, of her mom, “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films, more than to a side of myself.”

One morning last July, I met Coppola in the lobby of the Ritz Paris, where she was staying before a meeting about an upcoming line of garments she’d designed for the Scottish knitwear brand Barrie, which is owned by Chanel. (She told me that her dad, who has earned much of his fortune through wine and hotels, “taught us how to make money doing other things, so that you don’t have to count on the movies for that.”) Coppola and Mars spend part of the year in Paris, and she could have just stayed in her apartment across town. But the Ritz was closer to Barrie’s offices, near the Place Vendôme, and she relished the opportunity to hole up there by herself. “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere” portray hotels as sites of both listless suspension and electric potential. “I love an in-between place,” she said.

When Coppola was fifteen, in 1986, Francis arranged a summer internship for her at Chanel. A month before she was supposed to leave for Paris, Gio, her oldest brother, was killed in an accident. He was twenty-two and had been assisting his father on the film “Gardens of Stone,” set at Arlington Cemetery, and on a day off had gone boating with one of the film’s co-stars, Griffin O’Neal. While driving between two other boats, O’Neal drove into a towline that struck Gio. (O’Neal was replaced in the film and later charged with manslaughter, but was ultimately acquitted.) Francis’s producers offered to shut down the film shoot, but he wanted to press on. In her memoirs, Eleanor recalls his hope that keeping busy “would prevent the torturous reality of Gio’s loss from pervading every moment.” Roman, then a film student at N.Y.U., cancelled his summer plans to step into Gio’s job on the film, but Coppola’s parents decided that she should still go abroad. Eleanor told me, “She was right at that age where she was trying to pull away from me, and so I thought she needed to get away from home, and all the things that surrounded the aftermath, and, frankly, me as a mom.”

There is an old-world flavor to the Coppolas’ relationship to the family business: just as cobblers beget cobblers, movie people beget movie people. Roman, Sofia’s brother and frequent collaborator, is a filmmaker and has written screenplays with Wes Anderson. Talia Shire, who starred in the “Godfather” movies and the “Rocky” franchise, is her aunt. Her niece Gia has directed two features. Her first cousins include the actors Jason Schwartzman, whom she cast as a dweeby Louis XVI in “Marie Antoinette,” and Nicolas Cage. Other Coppolas coach actors, write screenplays, make music, and produce or distribute films. Sofia ascribes the field’s popularity within the family to Francis’s contagious passion. “My father is just so into filmmaking that he thinks everyone should be doing it,” she said. Even Francis’s father, a composer, ended up working on scores for his films, winning an Oscar (with Nino Rota) for “The Godfather: Part II.”

One member of the family who struggled to find her way in the business was Eleanor. In “Notes,” the first of two memoirs she has written, she described meeting Francis on the set of his début feature, the horror film “Dementia 13,” in 1962. He was the director, she was the assistant art director, and she thought that they might work on films together for years to come. Instead, within a few months she found out she was pregnant with Gio. She and Francis were married the following weekend, and Francis, as Eleanor put it to me, “made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and the mother.” She writes in “Notes” of a feeling of living in waiting—“waiting for Francis to get a chance to direct . . . waiting to go on location, waiting to go home.” (“At that point, I didn’t even know I could have a career, much less whether my wife would,” Francis said, by e-mail, adding, “I knew she was creative and from day one I always provided full time childcare and a studio for Ellie’s artwork.”) Sofia described a time when her mother visited the set of “Priscilla” and observed a scene in which Elvis is preparing to go on tour, while Priscilla will stay with their daughter, Lisa Marie. Eleanor told her, “I’ve been there.” Eleanor recalled to me, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you need to be happy,’ that’s exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, ‘Why am I unhappy?’ Not one single person said to me, ‘You are a creative person.’ ”

With his daughter, however, Francis made a point of offering creative encouragement, including by exposing her, along with her brothers, to the technical aspects of filmmaking. “There’s a traditional Italian thing with women, but I wasn’t raised like that,” Coppola said. “I was raised the same as the boys.” She and her mother didn’t discuss the gap in their experiences at the time, and Coppola isn’t inclined to analyze the themes that she explores in her work. Roman told me, “I’ve never heard Sofia say, ‘I want to show this isolation through this thing.’ ” Francis has always advised her that filmmaking should be close to the bone—as he told me, “the more personal, the better.” But, when I asked about the personal element of her movies, Coppola often fell back on abstractions or let her sentences trail off mid-thought. (Other writers have speculated about whether her style of communication is cannily evasive or simply a natural product of valuing the visual over the verbal. “I think sometimes she gives people enough rope to hang themselves with just by not responding,” Fiona Handyside, a British film scholar and the author of “Sofia Coppola: Cinema of Girlhood,” has said.) When I told Coppola about the feelings of stuckness that Eleanor had shared with me, and that seemed to percolate through Coppola’s films, she said, “I think so many people can relate to that, especially women.” Then she added, of her mom, “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films, more than to a side of myself.”

One morning last July, I met Coppola in the lobby of the Ritz Paris, where she was staying before a meeting about an upcoming line of garments she’d designed for the Scottish knitwear brand Barrie, which is owned by Chanel. (She told me that her dad, who has earned much of his fortune through wine and hotels, “taught us how to make money doing other things, so that you don’t have to count on the movies for that.”) Coppola and Mars spend part of the year in Paris, and she could have just stayed in her apartment across town. But the Ritz was closer to Barrie’s offices, near the Place Vendôme, and she relished the opportunity to hole up there by herself. “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere” portray hotels as sites of both listless suspension and electric potential. “I love an in-between place,” she said.

When Coppola was fifteen, in 1986, Francis arranged a summer internship for her at Chanel. A month before she was supposed to leave for Paris, Gio, her oldest brother, was killed in an accident. He was twenty-two and had been assisting his father on the film “Gardens of Stone,” set at Arlington Cemetery, and on a day off had gone boating with one of the film’s co-stars, Griffin O’Neal. While driving between two other boats, O’Neal drove into a towline that struck Gio. (O’Neal was replaced in the film and later charged with manslaughter, but was ultimately acquitted.) Francis’s producers offered to shut down the film shoot, but he wanted to press on. In her memoirs, Eleanor recalls his hope that keeping busy “would prevent the torturous reality of Gio’s loss from pervading every moment.” Roman, then a film student at N.Y.U., cancelled his summer plans to step into Gio’s job on the film, but Coppola’s parents decided that she should still go abroad. Eleanor told me, “She was right at that age where she was trying to pull away from me, and so I thought she needed to get away from home, and all the things that surrounded the aftermath, and, frankly, me as a mom.”

Coppola’s book “Archive” includes behind-the-scenes photos from her films, including this one of her with her first daughter, Romy, on the set of “Somewhere.”Photograph by Andrew Durham / Courtesy MACK

When the film came out, Eleanor’s fears proved founded. In 1991, Coppola won two Razzie awards, for Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star. Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story with the teaser line “Is she terrific, or so terrible she wrecked her dad’s new epic?” Whatever one thought of Coppola’s performance (Pauline Kael appreciated her “unusual presence”), the fracas lent a metatextual poignancy to Coppola’s final moment in the film, when, just before she crumples on the theatre steps, Mary looks at Michael and utters a disbelieving “Dad?” Francis later admitted to the Times, “The daughter took the bullet for Michael Corleone—my daughter took the bullet for me.” Sofia absorbed the bad press with characteristic sangfroid. “It was embarrassing to be so publicly criticized for ruining my dad’s movie,” she said, but “I wasn’t devastated, because acting wasn’t my dream.” She went on, “I think that the experience helped me as a director. I know how vulnerable it feels to be in front of a camera.” Kirsten Dunst, who starred in “The Virgin Suicides” at the age of sixteen, and later in “Marie Antoinette” and “The Beguiled,” recalled, of first working with Coppola, “I remember her telling me how much she loved my teeth. I thought I had crooked teeth, but she was, like, ‘They are so cute.’ She gave me confidence about things I didn’t necessarily have, and I’ve carried that with me.”

In the following years, Coppola had the kind of aimless early adulthood particular to the offspring of the Hollywood élite. She enrolled in ArtCenter College of Design to study oil painting but dropped out after a teacher told her she was “no painter.” She audited a course with the photographer Paul Jasmin, whom Coppola cites as “the first person outside my family who told me I had any taste.” She became something of an L.A. It Girl, making cameos in music videos and being featured in newspaper style sections. In interviews, she made blithe pronouncements. (Likes: Karl Lagerfeld, hot rods. Dislikes: bras, Twelve Steppers.) At twenty-three, she bought herself a black Cadillac Seville and dubbed it her “Mafia princess car.” She spent a lot of time floating around the pool at the Chateau Marmont, making use of her private key. In 1994, she launched a fashion line called Milkfed, which produced ironic items like a baby tee printed with the phrase “I ♥ Booze.” That same year, she and her friend Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of the director John Cassavetes and the actress Gena Rowlands, hosted a Comedy Central series called “Hi Octane.” (When I asked Coppola if she has any friends who don’t have celebrities for parents, she said, somewhat vaguely, “It’s definitely not, like, a through line with all of my friendships,” but acknowledged a special affinity for others who have “big macho powerful artist dads.”) The series, in which the pair undertook stunty adventures and interviewed their famous acquaintances, was cancelled after a few episodes. Francis recalled that Sofia once asked him, “Dad, am I going to be a dilettante forever?”

A breakthrough came when Coppola wrote a short film, called “Lick the Star,” about a clique of teen-age girls who revere, and then violently ostracize, their queen bee. Her cast featured some of her father’s associates, including Peter Bogdanovich as a school principal. The finished film, released in 1998, runs only thirteen minutes and is shot in black-and-white, but it contains the seeds of Coppola’s lush cinematic vocabulary. She told me, “I knew a little bit about photography, a little bit about clothing design, and a little bit about music. I was annoyed that I could never pick one thing. And then, when I made my short film, I realized it was a way to work with all of it.”

In New York, Coppola lives with Mars and their two teen-age daughters in a red brick town house whose narrow façade makes it look deceptively humble from the outside. One morning last March, she met me at the entranceway with the family’s golden retriever, Gnocchi, and guided me into a wide, white-walled living room. Coppola’s home décor, like her fashion sense, is classic with a whimsical feminine touch. The mantel over a gray marble fireplace held a large porcelain chinoiserie vase filled with an architectural array of pink roses and anemones. (They were high-end fakes.) A floor-to-ceiling bookcase was organized into sections on fashion, New York, photography, and French history. In between books she had wedged framed art works, including a drawing made by the director Mike Mills for the poster of “The Virgin Suicides” and a Polaroid of Princess Caroline of Hanover taken by Andy Warhol.

Coppola told me that her least favorite film to make was “The Bling Ring,” her fifth feature, because the world in which it’s set was out of synch with her own sense of taste. The movie—based on the true story of a group of L.A. high schoolers who robbed the homes of the rich and famous—was shot partly inside Paris Hilton’s mansion, where the camera gawks at throw pillows emblazoned with images of Hilton’s face and a “night-club room” equipped with a dancer’s pole. The film is a note-perfect millennial period piece, channelling the haywire intersection of celebrity worship and consumerism at the dawn of social media. But Coppola said, of its milieu of Ugg-boot-wearing teens and the reality stars they worship, “I wouldn’t call it hideous—that sounds snobby—but a big part of my motivation is making beauty.” To her chagrin, “The Bling Ring” is her daughters’ favorite among her movies. “They think it’s really glamorous and cool,” she said, then added, with a shudder, “They’ve started asking me for boot-cut jeans.”

She did not show me the girls’ bedrooms, but she later told me that she’s begun photographing their messes for posterity. “It’s like set dressing for one of my movies,” she said. The girls are forbidden to have public social-media accounts until they’re eighteen, but Romy, the older child, had a rogue viral moment last year, when—sounding, many observers noted, a bit like one of Coppola’s restless protagonists—she posted a plucky TikTok video saying that she’d been grounded for attempting to charter a helicopter with her dad’s credit card “because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend.” Coppola, who values privacy and the mystery it can afford, called the video “the best way to rebel against me.” (She seemed excited, though, to confirm that Romy had filmed a small speaking role in Francis’s upcoming movie.)

Coppola considers “Lost in Translation,” her second film, to be her most personal.Photograph courtesy Sofia Coppola / Courtesy MACK

Coppola had set out scalloped shortbread cookies on a dainty plate (“I love Italian fancy-lady dishes”) and a floppy stack of paper, the manuscript of a coffee-table book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” which she released last fall. The finished volume, as thick and pink as a slice of princess cake, is a scrapbook of Coppola’s career, with short, elliptical introductions to each film followed by a cascade of Polaroids, hand-written notes, contact sheets, script marginalia, costume sketches, and other ephemera.

The first chapter opens with a behind-the-scenes image of Dunst smiling in the grass of a football field. Coppola was in her early twenties when she read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Virgin Suicides,” from 1993, about five adolescent sisters in nineteen-seventies Michigan, who languish under the strictures of their ultraconservative parents and all die by suicide in a single year. Coppola said that when she read the book she thought, I hope whoever makes this into a movie doesn’t ruin it. Then she realized that maybe she could be the one to do it.

Coppola had started writing the script before she learned that a pair of producers had already bought the rights to the book and were working with a male writer-director. “I could hear my dad saying, ‘Don’t ever try to adapt something you don’t have the rights to,’ ” she recalled. “He told me to move on to something else.” Instead, Coppola sent her script to the producers and asked them to consider her for the directing job should the current arrangement fall through. A year later, she got the call. “I was young and naïve and didn’t really know what I was getting into,” she told me, “but I was, like, ‘Shit, O.K., now I have to figure it out.’ ”

“Virgin,” filmed over a month in the summer of 1998, for a budget of four million dollars, was a remarkably assured début, from its opening shot: Dunst lingering on the hot street eating a cherry Popsicle, like a latter-day Lolita, as the synthy sounds of the band Air kick in. From there the film unfolds at an unhurried pace. The sisters’ sadness is scarcely externalized, but the creeping ooze of their despair pervades every frame, including a striking shot of a wooden crucifix with a pink lacy bra slung across it to dry. Eugenides formulated the story as a hazy memory, narrated by a chorus of neighborhood boys who idolize the sisters but know nothing of their inner lives. Coppola’s script used a single narrator and allowed the camera to peek into the private spaces where the boys could never go. “Archive” reproduces an e-mail she received from Eugenides in 1998, expressing concerns that the script lacked “the necessary support around that story, which of course means the boys, the passage of time, the disjunctive narrative, and the right tone.” (She also includes a recent message that Eugenides wrote in response to her request to print the letter, in which he says, “What a whiny little bitch I was in those days.”) The film premièred at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, but, according to Coppola, her American distributor, Paramount Classics, did little to promote it. “They thought teen-age girls were going to kill themselves if they saw it,” she said, adding, “It barely came out here.”

Coppola told me that every film she makes is a reaction to the one before. After “Virgin,” she wanted to work from an original story. She considers “Lost in Translation,” her next film, to be her most personal. She chose Japan as its setting based on trips she’d taken to promote her Milkfed line, and came up with the story of a twentysomething American woman, Charlotte, who bonds with a famous older actor named Bob at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. She wrote the script with Bill Murray in mind as Bob, then spent a year trying to track him down. (The actress Rashida Jones, a friend and collaborator of Coppola’s, recalled, “She had an assistant whose job it was to hold her phone and tell her if Bill Murray called.”) Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is smart but lacking direction. She tells Bob, “I tried taking pictures, but they’re so mediocre.” She is married to a hot-shot music photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), and she sits bored at the hotel bar as he schmoozes with Hollywood types.

At the time, Coppola was married to the director Spike Jonze, whom she’d met in the early nineties through her friends Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, of the band Sonic Youth. But the two were in the process of separating. Jonze released his own feature directorial début, “Being John Malkovich,” the same year that “The Virgin Suicides” premièred, and while Coppola’s film had a modest return his became an indie sensation. She recalled feeling, in their relationship, an echo of her mother’s experiences. Jonze and a few of his friends had discussed launching a directors’ collective, and, according to Coppola, they didn’t even invite her to join. “I don’t want to embarrass Spike and those guys,” she said. “I think it’s just about understanding the dynamic there, which was a very nineties, dudes’-club dynamic. I was going around with Spike to promote his films, and I was just kind of the wife.” (Jonze could not be reached for comment.)

She was surprised when “Lost in Translation” became a runaway hit, not only winning her an Oscar but earning more than a hundred million dollars worldwide on a four-million-dollar budget. “I thought I was writing this really indulgent piece,” she recalled. “I mean, who cares about some rich girl trying to find herself?” But audiences connected to the film’s fuzzed-out mood of dislocation and the tragicomic pleasures of two lost people finding each other for a moment in time. At the end of the film, Bob and Charlotte share a kiss, and he whispers something inaudible into her ear. “I never even wrote that line,” Coppola said. “Bill always said that it was something that should stay between them.”

There is an adage in Hollywood that actors want to win awards to boost their egos, whereas directors want to win awards to boost their budgets. After “Lost in Translation,” Coppola found herself courted by the major studios. The producer Amy Pascal, who was a top executive at Sony Pictures at the time, told me, “I was desperate to work with her.” When they met, in 2004, she asked Coppola what project she dreamed of making. Coppola answered immediately: “Marie Antoinette.”

Not long after the release of “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola had read an advance copy of a biography of the French queen, by the British historian Antonia Fraser, and had written to Fraser asking to option it. “I know I will be able to express how a girl experiences the grandeur of a palace, the clothes, parties, rivals, and ultimately having to grow up,” she wrote. “I can identify with her role of coming from a strong family and fighting for her own identity.” At first, Coppola endeavored to make her script biographically comprehensive, covering Marie Antoinette’s life all the way up to the guillotine. Fraser, writing later in Vanity Fair, recalled telling Coppola that the script seemed to lose energy in its final act, as if Coppola had been uninterested in “the mature woman’s tragic fate.” Fraser went on, “When she asked me lightly, ‘Would it matter if I leave out the politics?,’ I replied with absolute honesty, ‘Marie Antoinette would have adored that.’ ”

Coppola’s film, released in 2006, tells the story of the profligate, unfeeling monarch from the history textbooks as an intimate coming of age, following her from the time she was shipped to Versailles from her home in Austria as a fourteen-year-old peace offering between nations to her departure from the palace, nineteen years later, as the French Revolution set in. Coppola told me that she wanted to capture the idea of “the kids taking over the kingdom.” She allowed Dunst to retain her American accent and filled the film with anachronistic music and energetic montages, including a feverish shopping scene set to a remix of “I Want Candy.” (Roman, her brother, who shot most of the film’s closeups, planted a pair of Converse sneakers among the rococo mules.) When an angry mob grumbles about the queen’s infamous (and likely apocryphal) line “Let them eat cake,” Dunst tells her girlfriends, “That’s such nonsense, I would never say that!” The movie is almost obscenely beautiful; every shot has the composed lusciousness of a box of petits fours. The bracing opening sequence—Coppola has never missed on an opening shot—was inspired by a Guy Bourdin photograph of a model in repose: lounging in a petticoat, with an attendant massaging her feet, Dunst’s Marie swipes her finger through the frosting of a layer cake and then delivers the camera an insolent stare. When Coppola showed her father an early cut of the film, he advised her to give Louis XVI more lines. Like Eugenides, he was missing the male perspective. “I was, like, ‘Um, Dad, no,’ ” Coppola remembered, adding, “I honestly don’t care about anyone else’s point of view. Just hers.”

Coppola and Mars began dating during the film’s making. Mars, who was born and raised in the town of Versailles, recalled, “It’s like living in a museum. You can’t disturb anything. It’s not welcome.” With “Marie,” there was excitement in seeing Versailles ��embrace something new.” But not all French people appreciated the result. At a press screening at Cannes, some viewers booed. Many critics dismissed the movie as an ahistorical powder puff, an impudent exercise in vibes-first filmmaking. Others thought it was a masterpiece. The response was so divided that the Times made an unorthodox decision to publish duelling reviews from its two chief movie critics. Manohla Dargis, in the “anti” camp, wrote, “The princess lived in a bubble, and it’s from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story.” For some, though, the film’s reception only reinforced Coppola’s claim to its thematic substance, as a woman who knows a thing or two about the distorting effects of public exposure. (One of her close friends, the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, told me, “It’s so easy to throw around these titles like ‘nepo baby.’ What do you do, kill yourself because you come from a good family? Do you just not make art?”) Roger Ebert saw the movie’s slim perspective as a strength: “Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.”

How one feels about Coppola’s narrow approach to storytelling might depend, in part, on where one stands in relation to her field of vision. When “Lost in Translation” came out, some Asian and Asian American critics took issue with the film’s depiction of Japanese culture through the eyes of Western visitors. Accented English was played in the movie for laughs. Tokyo establishments were portrayed as “superficial, inappropriately erotic, or unintelligible,” as Homay King, a film-studies professor at Bryn Mawr, wrote in Film Quarterly. King wondered what level of awareness Coppola had brought to this portrayal: Did the tone of bewildered Orientalism belong to her characters or to her? Coppola defended her depiction to the Los Angeles Times by saying, “My story is about Americans in Tokyo. After all, that’s all I know.” But she didn’t seem to reckon with the inherent sensitivities of depicting another culture from a distance. “I did wonder if all the ‘r’ and ‘l’ switching would be offensive,” she said back then. “But my crew thought it was funny.” (“It was a different time,” she told me. “I haven’t thought about how I would approach it now, but probably not in the same way.”)

“My father is just so into filmmaking that he thinks everyone should be doing it,” Coppola says.Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker

Coppola confronted a similar backlash more recently, to a movie set on American soil. “The Beguiled,” from 2017, is a remake of a 1971 movie that takes place during the Civil War, about a group of white Confederate women who are driven into an erotic fervor when a wounded Union soldier arrives at their boarding school in an isolated mansion. Both the original film and the novel on which it is based also feature an enslaved Black woman who works in the house. Coppola, fearful of perpetuating stereotypes, decided to omit the character altogether, and explained away the absence with dialogue at the beginning of the film: it was nearing the end of the war, and “the slaves left.” In the U.S., the release was dominated by discourse about the character’s erasure; at Slate, the writer Corey Atad lambasted the film for its “whitewashing of slavery.”

The fallout forced Coppola to consider that there are hazards to writing only what you know, or “leaving out the politics,” if doing so means waving away inconvenient complexities. The critic Angelica Jade Bastién, of New York and Vulture, told me, “What Coppola does best is also her greatest weakness: she creates fables about modern white femininity.” She went on, “Art is political whether the artist wants it to be or not. Coppola is someone studying whiteness, but who doesn’t perhaps understand her own whiteness very well. It is because of that contradiction that her work doesn’t get deeper.” Coppola told me, “I admit it was probably stupid to do something on the Civil War.” But she also suggested that her “creative license” with the source material had been “misinterpreted as insulting.” She’d been interested in portraying the unravelling of a group of cossetted women when there were no men around or slaves left to tend to them. “It’s the kind of world I like, really claustrophobic,” she said, adding, “They were so used to being taken care of, and they didn’t know how to do anything for themselves.”

During one conversation, Coppola confessed, “Sometimes I feel like I make the same film over and over, and I’m probably becoming a cliché of myself.” In some ways, “Priscilla” resembles her previous movies, but in contrast to a film like “Marie Antoinette,” with its baubles and brocades, the new film is strikingly joyless in its depiction of life inside a gilded cage. In part because Coppola was denied the rights to Elvis’s music, the exuberance of rock and roll is all but absent from the film. Priscilla interacts with Elvis mostly at home, where he’s dressed down, needy, and sporadically abusive. Through the murmurings of tertiary characters, Coppola laces the film with reminders of Priscilla’s tender age, which was troubling even if you believe, as Presley claimed in her book, that she and Elvis did not consummate their relationship until they were married, when she was twenty-one. One of the film’s strongest sequences shows Spaeny trying to occupy herself in Graceland while Elvis is away. She ambles around in a doll-like white dress and too-big matching heels. She tries out various seats in the living room and plunks a single key on Elvis’s baby grand. She is less a kid taking over the kingdom than a child left home alone.

Just as Coppola rarely concerns herself with events beyond her characters’ sequestered worlds, she doesn’t show what happens to the ones who escape the waiting room of their lives. The final shot of “Priscilla” shows Spaeny driving out of the gates of Graceland. We hear Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” both mournful and triumphant. Coppola has hinted at a desire to, as she put it in one interview, “grow up and do other subject matter,” beyond adolescence, but she gave me little sense of what that might look like, besides, perhaps, teaming up again with Dunst, who is now in her early forties. Coppola’s past films have romanticized the bonds between famous older men and younger women, but she told me that her attitude about such connections has shifted with the times. Her project before “Priscilla,” “On the Rocks,” from 2020, centered on a fortyish writer, Laura (Rashida Jones, who is the daughter of the music producer Quincy Jones), and her big-time art-dealer dad, Felix (Bill Murray). The character of Felix, whom Coppola said she based on her “dada and his buddies,” is a gregarious man of style, who wears silk scarves and considers caviar a road snack. He is also an attention hog prone to errant flirting and chauvinist soliloquies. “Somewhere” was tinged with nostalgic sweetness about fathers and daughters: Coppola had the film’s protagonists—the divorcé movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his eleven-year-old, Cleo (Elle Fanning)—order every flavor of gelato from room service, “which is just the sort of thing my dad would do,” and enlisted the Chateau Marmont’s late “singing waiter” Romulo Laki to serenade Cleo with Elvis’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” the same song that Laki used to sing to Sofia when she was young. “On the Rocks,” by contrast, is both funnier and pricklier, charting Laura’s struggle to define herself outside of her dad’s overwhelming orbit. Drinking a Martini at Bemelmans, Felix tells Laura that he is going deaf to the frequency of female voices. Laura yells at the end of the film, “You have daughters and granddaughters, so you’d better start figuring out how to hear them!”

Eleanor has often shot behind-the-scenes footage on Sofia’s films, as she did for Francis. She has eighty hours from the making of “Marie Antoinette,” which Sofia told me she’s helping turn into a documentary. In 2016, at the age of eighty, Eleanor also released her first feature, a comedy called “Paris Can Wait,” becoming the oldest American woman to make a directorial début. But lately Eleanor has been ill, and the family has been shuttling back and forth to her bedside in California. On Sofia’s birthday last year, which coincided with Mother’s Day, the two “sat in the hospital and ate tuna sandwiches,” Eleanor told me. Last October, “Priscilla” had its American première at the New York Film Festival. The strikes in Hollywood meant that there were almost no actors on the red carpets, but, because “Priscilla” involved no major-studio funding, Coppola was among the few directors given special dispensation to have her film’s stars do promotion. Elordi and Spaeny were at the première, but Coppola herself was missing. Henley, her producer, read a statement in her stead: “I’m so sorry to not be there with you, but I’m with my mother, to whom this film is dedicated.”

One recent evening, hundreds of Coppola fans lined up at a Barnes & Noble in central L.A. for an “Archive” book signing. Coppola is, as her daughters recently informed her, “big on TikTok,” and some Gen Z fans have taken to calling her “Mother,” an influencer to the influencers. (One viral video shows a young woman ranting about cleaning her room: “When a boy’s room is messy, it’s, like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s filthy,’ ” she says, adding, “When a girl’s room is messy? It’s Sofia Coppola.”) At the bookstore, the crowd was largely made up of teen-agers, many of whom had donned costumes: gossamer pink tutus and oversized hair bows that evoked Marie Antoinette’s style; chokers with heart pendants like one Spaeny wears in the “Priscilla” trailer. One wore a vintage T-shirt by Milkfed, Coppola’s fashion line, which she sold years ago but which has, in recent years, become a cult brand among a new generation of fans, including the pop star Olivia Rodrigo.

A young woman wearing a skirt custom-printed with a still from “The Virgin Suicides” reached the front of the line and held her hand to her chest. “You literally invented ‘aesthetic,’ ” she said to Coppola, using slang for the kind of exquisitely curated look that teens strive for on social media. There was an amusing mismatch between the fans’ gushing and Coppola’s low-key energy. She did not say much more than a warm “oh, thank you” or “that’s so sweet” as she received their compliments.

Leaving the bookstore, at dusk, Coppola said that she was looking forward to ordering room service at the Beverly Hills Hotel, whose menu she knew from childhood breakfasts spent talking filmmaking there with her father. (The eggs Benedict is apparently first-rate.) We walked together toward a black car waiting for her at the curb. After the harsh fluorescent lighting in the bookstore, the L.A. streets looked pleasingly subdued. I pointed at the sunset, which was a shade of powdery pink.

“Oh, yeah,” Coppola said, her eyes moving lackadaisically toward the sky. “It’s a little like I directed it.” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated Jacob Elordi’s height and the year Sofia Coppola and Amy Pascal met.Published in the print edition of the January 29, 2024, issue, with the headline “Crème de la Crème.”

[papermoonloveslucy]

LOOK! TV: TURN ON OR TURN OFF?

September 7, 1971

The September 7, 1971 issue of LOOK Magazine (volume 35, number 18) dedicated their entire issue to the medium of television. Inside, there is a feature titled “Lucille Ball, the Star That Never Sets...” by Laura Bergquist on page 54. 

The photograph on the cover is slightly distorted to give it the look of an image through a TV screen.  The shot was taken by Douglas Bergquist in January 1971. 

The issue presents a variety of viewpoints about the state of television. Is it ‘tired’ or is there an infusion of new energy to take it into the new decade? John Kronenberger writes an article that asks if cable television is the future. Hindsight tells us that it was not only the future, but is now the past. 

“Lucille Ball, the Star That Never Sets...” by Laura Bergquist. 

Bergquist first interviewed Lucille Ball in 1956 for the Christmas issue of Look. 

The photograph is by Douglas Kirkland, a Canadian-born photographer, who not coincidentally, also took the photograph used on the cover. This shot was taken in the garden of Ball’s home in June 1971.  At age 24, Kirkland was hired as a staff photographer for Look magazine and became famous for his 1961 photos of Marilyn Monroe taken for Look's 25th anniversary issue. He later joined the staff of Life magazine.

Bergquist launches the article talking about her friend Sally, who is besot with watching Lucille Ball reruns, preferring Lucy over the news. Under the headline, she sums up the purpose of her interview: “Sorry, Sally. But Lucy is a serious, unfunny lady. So how come she’s a top clown of the fickle tube for twenty years, seen at home 11 times weekly and in 77 countries?”  

LUCILLE BALL: THE STAR THAT NEVER SETS...

(Lucille Ball’s quotes are in BOLD. Footnote numbers are in parentheses.)

My neighbor Sally, nine, turns out to be a real Lucy freak. Though she likes vintage-house-wife I Love Lucy best, she'll watch Lucille Ball 11 times a week, if permitted. That's how often Madame Comedy Champ of the Tube, come 20 years this October, can be caught on my local box. Ten reruns, plus the current Here's Lucy on Monday night, CBS prime time. Friends, that's 330 weekly minutes of Lucy, which should be rank overexposure. Did you know that even the U.S. man-on-the-moon walkers slipped in ratings, second time around?

Quel mystery. Variety last fall announced that old-fashioned sitcoms and broad slapstick comedy are passé, given today's hip audiences. With one big exception - Lucy. When the third Lucy format went on in '68, reincarnating Miss Ball as a widowed secretary (with her real-life son, Desi Jr., now 18, and Lucie Jr., 20), Women's Wear Daily said not only were the kids no talent, but the show was "treacle." "One giant marshmallow," quoth the Hollywood Reporter, "impeccably professional, violence-free, non-controversial . . . 100% escapism." 

Miss Ball: "Listen, that's a good review. I usually get OK personal notices, but the show gets knocked regular."

So why does Sally, like all the kids on my block, love slapstick, non-relevant Lucy? "Because she's always scheming and getting into trouble like I do, and then wriggling her way out of it." A 44-year-old Long Island housewife: "Of course I watch. I should watch the news?" When the British Royal Family finally unbent for a TV documentary, what was the tribe watching come box-time? Lucy, over protests from Prince Philip. (1)

"I've been a baby-sitter for three generations," says Miss Ball briskly. "Kids watch me during the day [she outpulls most kiddy shows]. Women and older men at night. Teen-agers, no. They look at Mod Squad. Intellectuals, they read books or listen to records.... You know I even get fan mail from China?" MAINLAND CHINA? "Hong Kong, isn't that China?" No. "Where is it anyway?"

The Statistics on the Lucy Industry are numbing. In recent years, she has run in 77 countries abroad, including the rich sheikhdom of Kuwait, and Japan, where, dubbed in Japanese yet, she's been a long-distance runner for 12 years. Where are all those funny people of yesteryear - Jackie Gleason, the Smothers Brothers, Sid Caesar, the Beverly Hillbillies - old reliables like Ed Sullivan, Red Skelton? Gone, all gone, form the live tube - except for reruns dumped by sponsors, out of fashion, murdered in the ratings.

Even this interview is a rerun. Fifteen years ago, I sat in Miss Ball's old-timey movie-star mansion in Beverly Hills, wondering how much longer, oh Lord, could Lucy last? She has a different husband, a genial stand-up comic of the fast-gag Milton Berle school, Bronx-born Gary Morton, 49. He replaced Desi Arnaz, her volatile Cuban spouse (and costar and partner) of 20 years, who lives quietly in Mexico's Baja California, alongside a pool shaped like a guitar, with a second redhead wife. "Ever been here before?" asks Gary, now her executive producer, who's brightened the house decor. "Used to be funeral-parlor gray, right?"

Otherwise, the lady, like her show, seems preserved in amber. Though newly 60, she could be Sally's great-grandmother. Of a Saturday, she's unwinding from a murderous four-day workweek. Her pink-orange-fireball hair is up in rollers. Her black-and-blue Rolls-Royce, inherited from her friend, the late Hedda Hopper, is parked in the driveway. But in attitude and opinion, she comes across Madame Middle America, despite the shrewd show-biz exterior. Good egg. Believer in hard work, discipline, Norman Vincent Peale. Deadeye Dickstraight, she talks astonishingly unfunny - about Vietnam, Women's Lib, about which she feels dimly, marriage to Latins, books she toted up to her new condominium hideaway in Snowmass, Colo. "Snow" is her new-old passion, a throwback to her small-town Eastern childhood. For the first time in family memory, this lifelong workhorse actually relaxed in that 9,700-foot altitude for four months this year, learning to ski, reading Pepys, Thoreau, Shirley MacLaine's autobiography, "37 goddamned scripts, and all those Irvings" (Stone, Wallace, etc.). She had scouted for a mountain retreat far away from any gambling. Why? Is she against gambling? "No, I'm a sucker. I can't stay away from the tables."

From yellowing notes, I reel off an analysis by an early scriptwriter. Perhaps she comes by her comic genius because of some "early maladjustment in life, so you see commonplace things as unusual? To get even, to cover the hurt, you play back the unhappy as funny?"

Forget any deep-dish theorizing. "Listen, honey," says Miss B, drilling me with those big blue peepers, "you've been talking to me for four, five hours. Have you heard me say anything funny? I tell you I don't think funny. That's the difference between a wit and a comedian. My daughter Lucie thinks funny. So does Steve Allen, Buddy Hackett, Betty Grable."

BETTY GRABLE THINKS FUNNY? "Yeah. Dean Martin has a curly mind. oh, I can tell a funny story about something that happened to me. But I'm more of a hardworking hack with an instinct for timing, who knows the mechanics of comedy. I picked it up by osmosis, on radio and movie lots [she made 75 flicks] working with Bob Hope, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges - didn't learn a thing from them except when to duck. Buster Keaton taught me about props. OK, I'm waiting."

Well, I hedge, I caught Miss Ball in a few funny capers on the Universal lot this week. Like one day, in her star bungalow, she throws a quick-energy lunch in the blender - four almonds, wild honey, water, six-year-old Korean ginseng roots, plus her own medicine, liver extract. "AAAGH," she gags, then peers in the mirror at her hair, which is a normal working fright wig, "Gawd," she moans, "it looks as if I'd poked my finger into an electric-light socket!" No boffo line, but her pantomimed horror makes me laugh out loud. Working, she is fearless - dangling from high wires, coping with wild beasts. She talks of animals she's worked with, chimps, bears, lions, tigers. "I love 'em all, especially the chimps, but you can't trust their fright or panic. Like that baby elephant who gave a press job to a guest actress." (2) What's a press job? "Honey, once an elephant puts his head down, he keeps marching, right through walls." Miss Ball puts her own head down, crooks an arm for a trunk, and voila, is an elephant. Funny as hell. So off-camera she's no great wit, but then is Chaplin?

Four days a week, through the Thursday night filming before a live audience, she labors like some hungry Depression starlet. Monday a.m., she sits at the head of a conference table, lined by 12 staffers, editing the script. Madame Executive Tycoon in charge of everything, overseeing things Desi used to do. Also the haus-frau, constantly opening windows for fresh air and emptying ashtrays. She wears black horn-rims, three packs of ciggies are at the ready. "Do I have to ask for a raise again?" she impatiently drills the writers, "I've done that 400 times." "QUIET!" she yells during rehearsal, perching in a high director's chair, a la Cecil B. DeMille. "Isn't somebody around here supposed to yell quiet?" She frets about the new set. "Those aisles - they're a mile and a half wide. What for?" The audience is too far away, she won't get the feedback from their laughs are her life's blood. (Once I hear Gary Morton on the phone, in his British-antiqued executive office, saying: "We need your laugh, honey. Go down to the set and laugh; that's an order.")

That physical quality about her comedy, a la the old silent movies or vaudeville - which were the big amusements of her youth - seems to transcend any language. (A Moscow acting school, I was told, shows old Lucy clips as lessons in comic timing.) So what did she learn from that great Buster Keaton?

"At Metro, I kept being held back by show-girl-glamour typing. I always wanted to do comedy. Buster Keaton, a friend of director Eddy Sedgwick, spotted something in me when I was doing a movie called DuBarry - what the hell was the name? - and kept nagging the moguls about what I could do. Now a great forte of mine is props. He taught me all about 'em. Attention to detail, that's all it is. He was around when I went out on a vaudeville tour with Desi with a loaded prop." What's that? "Real Rube Goldberg stuff. A cello loaded with the whole act - a seat to perch on, a violin bow, a plunger, a whistle, a horn. Honey, if you noodge it, you've lost the act. Keaton taught me your prop is your jewel case. Never entrust it to a stagehand. Never let it out of your sight when you travel, rehearse with it all week." Ever noodge it? "Gawd, yes. Happened at the old Roxy in New York. I was supposed to run down that seven-mile aisle when some maniac sprang my prop by leaping out and yelling 'I'm that woman's mother! She's letting me starve.'" What did you do? "Ad-libbed it, and I am one lousy ad-libber."

After 20 years, isn't she weary of playing the Lucy character? "No, I'm a rooter, I look for ruts. My cousin Cleo [now producer of Here's Lucy] is always prodding me to move. She once said Lucy was my security blanket. Maybe. I'm not erudite in any way, like Cleo. But why should I change? Last year was big TV relevant year, and I made sure my show wasn't relevant. Lucy deals in fundamental, everyday things exaggerated, with a happy ending. She has a basic childishness that hopefully most of us never lose. That's why she cries a lot like a kid - the WAAH act - instead of getting drunk."

Aha! Is Lucy the guileful child-woman, conniving forever against male authority - whether husband or nagging boss - particularly FEMALE? ("None of us watch the show," sniffed a Women's Libber I know, "but she must be an Aunt Tom." Still, I ponder, hasn't that always been the essence of comedy, the little poor-soul man - or woman - up against the biggies?)

"I certainly hope so. You trying to con me into talking about Women's Lib? I don't know the meaning of it. I never had anything to squawk about. I don't know what they're asking for that I don't have already. Equal pay for equal work, that's OK. The suffragettes rightly pressed a hard case - and when roles like Carry Nation come along, they ask me to play them, perhaps because I have the physical vitality. But they're kind of a laughingstock, aren't they? Like that girl who gave her parents 40 whacks with an ax? Didn't Carry Nation ax things, was she a Prohibitionist or what?" (3)

She'd just said nix to playing Sabina, in the movie of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. Why? "I didn't understand it." She turned down The Manchurian Candidate for the same reason. "Got that Oh Dad, Poor Dad script the same week and thought I'd gone loony." If she makes another movie, she'll play Lillian Russell in Diamond Jim with Jackie Gleason, "a nice, nostalgic courtship story that won't tax anyone's nerves." (4) 

Is Miss Ball warmed by the comeback of old stars in non-taxing Broadway nostalgia shows like No, No, Nanette? (5)

"Listen, I studied that audience. I saw people in their 60's and 70's enjoying themselves. That had to be nostalgia. The 30's and 40's smiled indulgently, that Ruby Keeler is up there on the stage alive, not dead. For the below 30's, it's pure camp. I don't put it down, but it’s not warm, working nostalgia, but the feeling 'Ye gods, anything but today'

"Maybe I'm more concerned about things that I realize. I told you politics is definitely not on my agenda - I got burned bad, back in the '40's signing a damned petition as a favor. (6) Just say the word 'politician,' and I think of chicanery. Too many subversive angles today. But I must be one of millions who are so fed up, depressed, sobbing inside, about the news...the atrocities, the dead, the running down of America. You can't obliterate the news, but the baddest dream is that you feels so helpless.

"I was sitting in this very chair one night, flipping the dial, and came to Combat! There were soldiers crouching in bushes, a helicopter hovering overhead. Nothing happening, so I make like a director, yelling, 'Move it! This take is too LONG!' It turned out to be a news show from Vietnam. That shook me. There I was criticizing the director, and real blood was dripping off my screen... That drug scene bugs me. It's ridiculous, self-indulgent. We're supposed to be grateful if the kids aren't on drugs. They're destroying us from within, getting at our youth in the colleges. OK, kids have to protest, but how can they accomplish anything if they're physically shot?

"One of the reasons I'm still working is that people seem grateful that Lucy is there, the same character and unchanging view. There's so much chaos in this world, that's important. Many people, not only shut-ins, depend on the tube, too much so - they look for favorites they can count on. Older people loved Lawrence Welk. They associated his music with their youth. Now he's gone. It's not fair. (7) They shouldn't have taken off those bucolic comedies; that left a big dent in some folks' lives. Maybe we're not getting messages anymore from the clergy, the politicians, so TV does the preaching. But as an entertainer, I don't believe in messages.

"Some Mr. Jones is always asking why am I still working - as if it were some crime or neurotic. OK, I'll say it's for my kids. But I like a routine life, I like to work. I come from an old New England family in which everyone worked. My grandparents were homesteaders in New York and Ohio. My mother worked all her life - during the Depression in a factory."

What does she think of the new "relevant" comedy like All in the Family? "I don't know... It's good to bring prejudice out in the open. People do think that way, but why glorify it? Those not necessarily young may not catch the moral. That show doesn't go full circle for me."

Full circle?

"You have to suffer a little when you do wrong. That prejudiced character doesn't pay a penance. Does he ever reverse a feeling? I'm for believability, but I'm tired of hearing 'pig,' 'wop,' 'Polack' said unkindly. Me, I have to have an on-the-nose moral. Years ago, the Romans let humans be eaten by lions, while they laughed and drank - that was entertainment. But I’m tired of the ugly. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing, that's my idea of entertainment. Anything Richard Burton does is heaven. Easy Rider scared me at first because I knew how it could influence kids. But at least that movie came full circle. They led a life of nothing and they got nothing. Doris Day, I believe in her. Elaine May? A kook, but a great talent. Barbra Streisand? A brilliant technician."

On her old ten-minute daily interview radio show, (8) she once asked Barbra, like any star-struck civilian: How does it feel to be only 21, a big recording artist and star of the Broadway hit Funny Girl? "Not much," said Barbra. "That cool really flustered Lucille. It violated everything she believes in," says cousin Cleo Smith, who grew up with Miss B in small-town Celoron, N.Y. "For her, nothing ever came easy. She didn't marry until she was 30, or become a really big star until she was 40. She's still so hard on herself, sets such rigorous standards for herself as an actress and parent. She honestly believes in all the old maxims, that a stitch in time saves nine, etc. She's literal-minded, a bit like Scarlett O'Hara. Does what needs doing today, and to hell with tomorrow."

Her self-made wealth a few years ago was reckoned at $50 to $100 million. After her divorce, she reluctantly took over the presidency of the Desilu studio and sold it six years later to the conglomerate Gulf & Western for nearly $18 million. Does that make her the biggest lady tycoon in Hollywood? (The 179 original I Love Lucy reruns now belong, incidentally, to a CBS syndicate; her second Lucy Show, to Paramount. She owns only the current Here's Lucy - OK, go that straight?)

"Hah! Like Sinatra, I owe about three and a half million bucks all the time. That figure is ridiculous. All my money is working. I lost a helluva lot in the stock market last year and haven't recouped it. It's an illusion that people in show biz are really rich. The really filthy rich are the little old ladies in Boston, the old folks in Pasadena, who've had dough for years and haven't been seen since."

The divorce from Desi Arnaz can still set her brooding. "It was the worst period of my life. I really hit the bottom of despair - anything form there on had to be up. Neither Desi nor I has been the same since, physically or mentally, though we're very friendly, ridiculously so. Nobody knows how hard I tried to make that marriage work, thinking all the trouble must be my fault. I did everything I could to right that ship, trotting to psychiatrists. I hate failure, and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes... Anything in excess drives me crazy. He'd build a home anyplace he was, and then never be around to enjoy it. I was so idealistic, I thought that with two beautiful babies, and a beautiful business, what more could any man want? Freedom, he said, but he had that. People don't know what a job he did building that Desilu empire, what a great director and brilliant executive he was yet he let it all go....Maybe Latins have an instinct for self-destruction..."

Was that the conflict, a Latin temperament married to an old-fashioned American female? "It has a helluva lot to do with getting into it and getting out. The charm. But they keep up a big facade and don't follow through. No, the machismo didn't bother me, I like to play games too.

"Desi and I had made an agreement that if either of us wanted to pull out of Desilu, the other could buy. I wanted to go to Switzerland with the kids, anywhere to run away, but he wanted out. The I found out that for five years, our empire had taken a nose dive, and if I wanted to get my money back, I had to rebuild it first. For the first time in my life, I was absolutely terrified - I'd never run any show or a big studio. When I came back from doing the musical Wildcat on Broadway, I was so sick, so beat, I just sat in that backyard, numb, for a year. I'd had pneumonia, mononucleosis, staph, osteomyletis. Lost 22 pounds. Friends told me the best thing I could do physically, psychologically, was go back to work, but could I revive Lucy without Desi, my old writers, the old crew?"

You didn't like being a woman executive? "I hated it. I used to cry so much - and I'm not a crier - because I had to let someone go or make decisions I didn't understand. There were always two sides to every question, and trouble was I could see both sides. No one realizes how run-down Desilu was. The finks and sycophants making $70,000 a year, they were easy to clean out. Then during the CBS Jim Aubrey regime, I couldn't sell the new pilots we made - Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Ethel Merman. I couldn't sell anything but me." (9)

Was it tough to be a woman bossing men? "Yeah. It puts men in a bad spot. I could read their minds, unfortunately, wondering who is this female making this decision, not realizing that maybe I'd consulted six experts first. I'm all wrong as an executive, I feel out of place. I have too many antennae out, I'm too easily hurt and intimidated. But I can make quick surgical incisions. I've learned that much about authority - give people enough rope to hand themselves, stand back, let them work, but warm them first. Creative people you have to give special leeway to, and often it doesn't pay off. Me, I'm workative, not creative. I can fix - what I call 'naturalize.' I'm a good editor, I can naturalize dialogue, find an easier way to do a show mechanically.

But I didn't make the same marriage mistake twice. Gary digs what my life is, why I have to work. We have tranquility. We want the same things, take care of what we have."

She shows me Gary's dressing room, closets hung with shirts and jackets - by the dozen. "My husband is a clothes and car nut, but it's a harmless vice. Better than booze or chasing women, right?" (His cars include a 1927 Model T Ford, a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, an Astin Martin, a Rolls-Royce convertible.)

"Anyone married to me has an uphill climb. Gary and I coped by anticipating. We knew we should be separated eight, nine months a year, so he tapered off his act, found other thing to do - making investments, building things. He plays the golf circuit, Palm Springs, Pebble Beach, and tolerantly lets me stay at Snowmass for weeks. Sun just doesn't agree with me. He didn't come into the business for five years. I didn't want to put him in a position in which he would be ridiculed. I could tell that he was grasping things - casting, story line. I said, 'You've been a big help to me. You should be paid for it.' "

On a Friday night, I dine with the Mortons. Dinner is served around 6:30, just like in my Midwest hometown. Lucille is still fretting about this week's show - "over-rehearsed; because there were so many props, the fun had gone out of it." Gary, just home from unwinding his own way - golfing with Milton Berle, Joey Bishop - asks if I'd like something to drink with dinner? Coke or ginger ale? "No? I think we have wine." No high living in this house, but the spareribs are superb. "Laura asked me an interesting question," he tells his wife. "Like isn't there a conflict when a husband in the same business - comedy - marries a superstar? I told her I'd never thought of it before."

They met the summer when Lucille was rehearsing Wildcat, and he was a stand-up comic at Radio City Music Hall, seven days a week. "We both came up the hard way," he says. "I got started in World War II, clowning for USO shows. I've been in show biz for 30 years and can appreciate what she goes through. Lucy can't run company by herself. Maybe with me around, when she walks on the set, her mind is at peace. I pop in from time to time, on conferences, rehearsals. I can tell from her if things are going well, if the laughter is there. She's a thoroughbred, very honest with me, a friend to whom I can talk about anything. She never leaves me out of her life; that's important for a man. Do you know how many bets were lost about our marriage lasting? It's been nearly ten years now, and I've slept on the couch only once."

Past dinner, we adjourn promptly to the living room, and a private showing of Little Murders. It's not a pretty movie of urban American life, and Lucy talks back indignantly to the screen. (10) The flick she rally like was George Plimpton's Paper Lion, with the Detroit Lions, which she booked under the illusion it was an animal picture. "At the end, 12 of us here stood up and cheered, and I wrote every last Lion a fan note. You know that picture hardly made a dime?"

On a house tout, I'd noted the Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth albums in the living room, and a memo scotch-taped to her bathroom wall: "Get Smart with N.V.P."

N.V.P. Is that Norman Vincent Peale, her old friend and spiritual mentor? "Yes. He marred me and Gary. I still adhere to his way of thinking because he preaches a day-to-day religion that I can understand. Something workable, not allegory. Like how do you get up in the morning and just get through the day?

"Dr. Peale taught me the art of selfishness. All it means is doing what's right for you, not being a burden to others. When I was in Wildcat, he dropped around one night saying, 'I hear you're very ill, and working too hard.' 'Work never hurt anybody,' I protested. But he reminded me I had two beautiful children to bring up, and if I was in bad shape, how could I do it? I've learned you don't rake more leaves than you can get into the wheelbarrow. I've always been moderate, but I was too spread around, trying to please too many people. You don't become callous, but you conserve your energies."

What about her kids? Passing a newsstand, I'd noted a rash of fan mags blazoned with headlines about Desi Jr., something of a teen-age idol, and at 18 a spitting image of old pop. (A rock star at 12, he'd recently garnered very good notices indeed for a movie role in Red Sky at Morning.) "Why Lucille Ball's Son Is So Bitter About His Own Mother," read the El Trasho covers. "Patty Duke Begs Desi Jr. To Believe Her: 'You Made Me Pregnant.' " Does the imbroglio bother this on-the-nose moralist?

"I worked for years for a quiet personal life and to have to personally impinged on, with no recourse, is hard. I brought Patty to the house, feeling very maternal about her, saying look at this clever girl, what a big talent she is. Now, I can thank her for useless notoriety. She's living in some fantastic dreamworld, and we're the victims of it. Desi being the tender age of 17 when they met, she used him. She hasn't proved or asked for anything. I asked Desi if he wanted to marry her and he said no. My daughter helped outfit the baby, which Patty brought to the house, but did she ever say thank you?

"Desi's going to CIA this fall." Not the CIA? No, the new California Institute of the Arts, where he'll study music. "Yes, he's very much like his father, too much sometimes - I just hope he has Desi's business acumen. I'm glad he didn't choose UCLA or Berkeley or a school full of nonconformists. Lucie just now wants marriage and babies - maybe she'll go on to college later.

"I took the kids out of school deliberately. Desi was at Beverly Hills High, Lucie at Immaculate Heart."

Why? "I didn't like the scene - it was the usual - pregnant girls, drugs." That goes on at Immaculate Heart? Sure. "A lot of girls who boarded there were unhappy misfits, and Lucie was already working in the nunnery. All the friends she brought home were the rejected. I'm that way myself."

Did they mind, well, your stage-managing their lives? "No, they were as sick of that weird high school scene as I was. I made them a proposition - told them to think it over for a month, while I was in Monaco. Do you want to be on the show? I told them the salary would be scale, that most would be put in trust. They'd be tutored and not able to graduate with their classes. They both thought they were going to the coast, but working with a tutor, they really got turned on by books for the first time. They wanted to be in show business, and I wanted to keep an eye on them."

Of course her show is nepotism, she grants. "Cleo thought a long time before becoming the producer, wondering if it wasn’t overdoing family. Nobody seems to be suffering from it, I told her." Thursday night show time is like a tense Broadway opening night. Gary Morton, in stylish crested blazer, warms up the audience, heavy with out-of-town tourists. "Lucy started out with another fellow, can't remember his name.... What is home without a mother? A place to bring girls." Lucille bursts out onstage, exuding the old MGM glamour, fireball hair ablaze, eyelashes inches long, in aquamarine-cum-rhinestone kaftan. "For God's sake," she implores, "laugh it up! We want to hear from you... Gary, have you introduced my mom?" Indeed he has. Loyal, durable, 79-year-old Desiree "DeDe" Ball, her hair pink as Lucille's, has missed few of the 409 Lucy shows filmed to date, and is on hand as usual with 19 personal guests. Gary also asks for big hands for Cleo, and her husband Cecil Smith, TV critic for the LA Times, who has also appeared on the show. (11) 

One day Desi Jr. wanders on the set, just back from visiting his father in Mexico. He'd gone with Patty Duke and the baby. The young man does have Latin charm, and apparently talent. I ask him a fan-mag query: Is it rough to be the spin-off of such famous show-biz parents?

"Well, I grew up with kids like Dean Martin, Jr., and Tony Martin, Jr., and we had a lot in common." What? "We all had houses in Palm Springs." Any generational problem with Mom? "She's found the thing she's best at, and sticks to it. As long as she has Snowmass, she has an escape, some reality. I realize she lives half in a man's world, and that must be tough on a woman. My father - he worked hard for years, and then he'd had it. This is silly, weird, he felt. He aged more in ten years than he had in 40. I'm like him. I feel life is very short. He's had major operations recently, and he's changed a lot."

Patty Duke is six years older than Desi Jr., paralleling the six-year age gap that separated parents Lucy and Desi. "Patty is a lot like my mother, the same drive, and strong will, a perfectionist...But I'm never going to get married. Marriage is unrealistic, expecting you to devote a whole life unselfishly to just one person. Do you know people age unbelievably when they marry? From what I've seen, 85 percent of married couples are miserable; 14 percent, just average; one percent, happy." (12) 

His mother's own childhood, in little Celoron, an outspring of Jamestown, N.Y., was oh-so-different from her kids'. "She was always a wild, tempestuous, exciting child," say Cleo, "doing things that worried people, plotting and scheming, though she knew she'd get in trouble." Interesting, because that's one basic of the Lucy format, Miss B forever finagling second bananas like Vivian Vance into co-trouble. "One summer, she conned me into running away. It was only to nearby Fredonia, but in her sneaky way she really wanted to catch up to a groovy high school principal who was teaching there. He played it very cool, calling Mom and telling her we were staying overnight in a boarding house. On his advice, when we got home, DeDe acted as if we hadn't been away. That devastated Lucille, no reaction, nothing."

The classic Lucy story line also has her conniving against male authority, whether husband or boss, now played by Gale Gordon. "I need a strong father or husband figure as catalyst. I have to be an inadequate somebody, because I don't want the authority for Lucy. Every damned movie script sent me seems to cast me as a lady with authority, like Eve Arden or Roz Russell, but that's not me.

"No, I don't remember my own father," says Miss Ball. "He was a telephone lineman who died of typhoid at 25, when I was about three. I do remember everything that day, though. Hanging out the window, begging to play with the kids next door who had measles... The doctor coming, my mother weeping. I remember a bird that flew in the window, a picture that fell off the wall.

"My brother Fred [who was born after her father's death] was always very, very good. He never did anything wrong - he was too much to bear. I was always in trouble, a real pain in the ass. I suppose I wasn't much fun to be around." To this day, says Cleo, Lucille suspects Fred is her mother's favorite, even though DeDe has devoted her whole life to this daughter.

Family ties were always fierce-strong. After her father's death, "We lived with my mother's parents, for a while. Grandpa Hunt was a marvelous jack-of-all-trades, a woodturner, eye doctor, mailman, bon vivant, hotel owner. [And also an old-fashioned Populist-Socialist.] He met my grandmother, Flora Belle, a real pioneer woman and pillar of the family, when she was a maid in his hotel. She was a nurse and midwife, an orphan who brought up four pairs of twin sisters and brothers all by herself. He took us to vaudeville every Saturday and to the local amusement park. When Grandma died at 51, all us kids had to pitch in, making beds, cooking.

"Yeah, I guess I am real mid-America, growing up as a mix of French-Scotch-Irish-English, living on credit like everyone else, paying $1.25 a week to the insurance man, buying furniture on time. But it was a good, full life. Grandpa took us camping, fishing, picking mushrooms, made us bobsleds. We always had goodies. I had the first boyish bob in town and the first open galoshes.

"My mother then married Ed Peterson, a handsome-ugly man, very well-read. He was good to me and Freddy but he drank too much. He was the first to point out the magic of the stage. A monologist came to town on the Chautauqua circuit. He just sat onstage with a pitcher of water and light bulb and made us laugh and cry for two hours. For me, this was pure magic. When I was about seven, Ed and mother moved to Detroit, leaving me with his old-fashioned Swedish parents, who were very strict. I had to be in bed at 6:30, hearing all the other kids playing outside in the summer daylight. Maybe it wasn't that traumatic, but I realize now it was a bad time for me. I felt as if I'd been deserted. I got my imagination to working, and read trillions of books."

The adult Lucille, talking to interviewers, used to go on and on about her "unhappy" childhood, little realizing that she was reflecting on her mother, to whom she is passionately devoted. "Just how long do you think you lived with the Petersons?" asked DeDe one day in a confrontation. "Three YEARS? Well I tell you it was more like three weeks."

"I left home at 15, much too early, desperate to break into the big wide world. Looking for work in New York show biz was ugly, without any leads or friends or training other than high school operettas and plays and Sunday school pageants. I was very shy and reticent, believe it or not, and I kept running home every five minutes. I got thrown in with older Shubert and Ziegfeld dollies and, believe me, they were a mean, closed corporation. I don't understand kids today who get easily discouraged and yap about doing their own thing. Don't they know what hard work is? Where are their morals? I always knew when I did wrong, and paid penance."

Yet she was venturesome enough to sit in on some recent Synanon group-therapy sessions for drug addicts. "They wanted me to raise some money, and I wanted to find out what it was about. The games were fascinating, wonderful, until I couldn't take it any more. The other participants kept bugging me: What are you here for? Are your children drug addicts? I had to start making up problems."

For two decades, she's been risking her neck in those murderous ratings, outlasting long-ago competitors like Fulton Sheen, and now up against such pleasers as pro football and Rowan and Martin. (13) 

Suppose the ratings drop, what would she do?

No idea. "Might take a trip on the Inland Waterway form Boston to Florida. In my deal with Universal, I can make specials, other movies, TV pilots. I wouldn't have to ski 'spooked' at Snowmass." What's that? "Honey, I have to be careful. If I break a leg 500 people are out of work. (14) I'd be happy in some branch of acting with some modicum of appreciation. Listen, it never occurred to me, in life that I'd fail ever, because I always appreciated small successes. I never had a big fixed goal. When I was running Desilu, it drove me wild when people asked, 'Aren't you proud to own the old RKO studio where you once worked as a starlet?' What $50-a-week starlet ever walked around a lot saying, 'I want to own this studio'?

"I don't know what you've been driving at, what's your story line? But it's been interesting, talking."

FOOTNOTES: HINDSIGHT IS 20/20

(1) This refers to a rare 1969 BBC documentary about Britain’s royal family that gave the public an inside look at the life of the Windsors. In one scene, the family was watching television, and on the screen was “I Love Lucy”, much to the chagrin of Prince Philip. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were mentioned on the series, especially in the episode “Lucy Meets the Queen” (ILL S5;E15).  

(2) Lucy is referring to a 1967 episode of “The Lucy Show” titled “Lucy The Babysitter” (TLS S5;E16) in which Lucy Carmichael babysits three rambunctious chimps for their parents, played by Jonathan Hole and Mary Wickes. In the final moments of the show, Wickes reveals a fourth sibling - a baby elephant!  The animal went wild and pushed Wickes (what Ball described as a “press job”) into one of the prop trees. The trainer had to physically subdue the elephant to get it away from Wickes, who injured her arm. The final cut ends with the entrance of the baby elephant.

(3) Lucy is conflating (probably intentionally) the stories of real-life prohibitionist Carrie Nation (1846-1911), who famously hacked up bars and whisky barrels with an axe, and Lizzie Bordon (1860-1927), who famously hacked up her parents with an axe. (Photo from the 1962 TV special “The Good Years” starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.) 

(4) There was never a film version of Thornton Wilder’s play Skin Of Our Teeth which was on Broadway in 1942 starring Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina, the role offered to Ball.  There were several television adaptations; one in Australia in 1959; one in England the same year starring Vivian Leigh as Sabina;  one in the USA in 1955 starring Mary Martin (above) as Sabina; and a filmed version of a stage production starring Blair Brown as Sabina in 1983. Although it is possible that Lucille Ball might have been considered for the role of the sexy housemaid Sabina in 1955, the article says that the role was “just” offered to her, so it probably refers to a 1971 project that never materialized. Wilder’s story tracks a typical American family from New Jersey from the ice age through the apocalypse. 

(5) In 1971, there was a popular revival of the 1925 musical comedy No, No, Nanette on Broadway. The cast featured veteran screen star Ruby Keeler and included Helen Gallagher (playing a character named Lucille, coincidentally), Bobby Van, Jack Gilford, Patsy Kelly and Susan Watson. Busby Berkeley, nearing the end of his career, was credited as supervising the production, although his name was his primary contribution to the show. The 1971 production was well-reviewed and ran for 861 performances. It sparked interest in the revival of similar musicals from the 1920s and 1930s. The original 1925 cast featured Charles Winninger, who played Barney Kurtz, Fred’s old vaudeville partner on “I Love Lucy.” In that same episode (above), they sing a song from the musical, "Peach on the Beach” by Vincent Youmans and Otto Harbach. Like the revue in the episode, the musical is set in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  

(6) Lucy is referring to her 1936 affidavit of registration to join the Communist Party.  Lucille said she signed it to appease her elderly grandfather. The cavalier act caught up with Ball in 1953, when zealous red-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy tried to purge America of suspected Communists. Although many careers were ruined, Ball escaped virtually unscathed.  

(7) The popular big band music series “The Lawrence Welk Show” (1955) was unceremoniously canceled in 1971 by ABC, in an attempt to attract younger audiences. What Lucy doesn’t mention is that four days after this magazine was published, the show began running brand new shows in syndication, which continued until 1982. Welk, despite not being much of an actor, played himself on “Here’s Lucy” (above) in January 1970. 

(8) “Let’s Talk To Lucy” was a short daily radio program aired on CBS Radio from September 1964 to June 1964. Most interviews (including Streisand’s) were spread over multiple installments.  

(9)  To showcase possible new series (pilots) Desilu and CBS aired “Vacation Playhouse” (1963-67) during the summer when “The Lucy Show” was on hiatus.  This would often be the only airing of Lucy’s passion projects. “Papa GI” with Dan Dailey as an army sergeant in Korea who has his hands full with two orphans who want him to adopt them. The pilot was aired in June 1964 but it was not picked up for production. “Maggie Brown” had Ethel Merman playing a widow trying to raise a daughter and run a nightclub which is next to a Marine Corps base. The pilot aired in September 1963, but went unsold. “The Hoofer” starring Donald O’Connor and Soupy Sales as former vaudevillians aired its pilot in August 1966. No sale! 

(10) Little Murders (1971) was a black comedy based on the play of the same name by Jules Feiffer. The film is about a young nihilistic New Yorker (Elliott Gould) coping with pervasive urban violence, obscene phone calls, rusty water pipes, electrical blackouts, paranoia and ethnic-racial conflict during a typical summer of the 1970s. Definitely not Lucille Ball’s style of comedy!  Paper Lion (1968) was a sports comedy about George Plimpton (Alan Alda) pretending to be a member of the Detroit Lions football team for a Sports Illustrated article. 

(11) Cecil Smith appeared in “Lucy Meets the Burtons” (HL S3;E1) in 1970 playing himself, a member of the Hollywood Press with a dozen other real-life writers. The casting was a way to get better coverage of the episode (featuring power couple Dick Burton, Liz Taylor, and her remarkable diamond ring). The gambit worked and the episode was the most viewed of the entire series. 

(12) Desi Jr.’s 1971 views on marriage did not last. He married actress Linda Purl in 1980, but they divorced in 1981. In October 1987, Arnaz married dancer Amy Laura Bargiel. Ten years later they purchased the Boulder Theatre in Boulder City, Nevada and restored it. They lived in Boulder with their daughter, Haley. Amy died of cancer in 2015, at the age of 63.   

(13) From 1952 to 1957, Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen hosted the inspirational program “Life Is Worth Living”, winning an Emmy Award in 1953, alongside winners Lucille Ball and “I Love Lucy.”  “Here’s Lucy” was programmed up against “Monday Night Football” on ABC and “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” on NBC.  Instead of ignoring her competition, Ball embraced them by featuring stories about football and incorporating many of the catch phrases and guest stars from “Laugh-In.” 

(14) Lucy spoke too soon!  Just a few months after this interview was published Ball did indeed have a skiing accident in Snowmass and broke her leg. With season five’s first shooting date approaching, Ball was faced with either ending the series or re-write the scripts so that Lucy Carter would be in a leg cast.  She chose the latter, even incorporating actual footage of herself on the Snowmass  slopes (above) into "Lucy’s Big Break” (HL S5;E1). 

Elsewhere in the Issue...

“This Was Our Life” by Gene Shalit includes images of Lucille Ball in the collage illustration. 

A week after this issue of Look hit the stands, the fourth season of “Here’s Lucy” kicked off with guest star Flip Wilson and a parody of Gone With the Wind.  Three days later, Ball guest-starred on his show. 

Not to be outdone, LOOK’s rival LIFE also devoted an entire issue to television, on news stands just three days later.  

Naturally, “I Love Lucy” didn’t escape mention!  I’m not sure why the show’s run is bifurcated: 1952-55, 1956-57.  Actually, the show began in 1951 and ran continually until 1957. 

Click here for more about Look, Life and Time! 

[anyaaponte982-blog]

How Do I Convert MIDI To MP3?

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[ihopeulikereallygayships-blog]

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[xtruss]

The TikTok Fiasco Reflects the Bankruptcy of Trump’s Foreign Policy

— By Evan Osnos | September 25, 2020 | The New Yorker

President Trump’s strong-arm effort to force a sale of the Chinese social platform’s U.S. operations has resulted in little discernible improvement in data security.Photograph by Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg / Getty

At first glance, the Trump Administration’s decision to ban the popular Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat had the look of hard-nosed diplomacy. China, after all, already blocks more than ten of the largest American tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, out of fear that they facilitate unmanageable levels of free speech and organization. In Washington, U.S. officials have been increasingly worried about the rise of TikTok, which is best known for its minute-long videos of people dancing, and WeChat, the vast social-media platform that allows users to text, call, pay bills, buy things, and, of course, swap videos of people dancing. Like similar apps, they collect valuable data on the viewing habits of millions of Americans and could, it is feared, allow the Chinese Communist Party to expose Americans to propaganda and censorship. Under Chinese law, authorities have broad power to intervene in the work of private companies; a spy agency, for instance, could examine the private chats of an American user, or, in theory, direct a stream of TikTok videos and advertisements that could shape the perceptions of viewers in one part of the United States.

Last month, in an unusual intervention in the operations of a business, President Trump ordered ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok, to find an American owner for its U.S. operations. That touched off a chaotic scramble for a sale, culminating last Saturday, when Trump abruptly announced a deal involving Walmart and Oracle, which is headed by one of his major supporters, Larry Ellison. The announcement was vague and grandiose: it heralded the creation of a new U.S.-based company, TikTok Global, which would shift ownership into American hands while creating both twenty-five thousand new jobs in the U.S. and a very ill-defined five-billion-dollar educational fund. As Trump put it, that money would be applied so that “we can educate people as to [the] real history of our country—the real history, not the fake history.” Within days, those promises were unravelling. In Beijing, TikTok’s parent company said that it would retain control over the algorithms and the code that constitute the core of its power. Analysts could discern hardly any improvements in data security or protections against propaganda, and people involved let reporters know that the education fund was a notion added, at the last minute, to assuage Trump.

All sides agreed that Oracle and Walmart would gain a stake worth twenty per cent of the new U.S.-based company, and data from American users would reside in Oracle’s cloud. But the parties agreed on little else, especially who would own what; ByteDance said that it would retain eighty per cent of TikTok, while Oracle countered that the stake would belong to ByteDance’s investors, many of whom are American. Many critics noted that Oracle, led by a Trump supporter, potentially stood to earn a huge windfall in revenue, such that, as one put it, “the very concept of the rule of law is in shambles.” Taking stock of the mess, Bill Bishop, a China analyst and the author of the Sinocism newsletter, commented, “Struggling to find the right Chinese translation for clusterf$$!”

Meanwhile, the effort to bar WeChat also has, for the moment, run into objections. On Sunday, a federal judge in California issued an injunction against regulations issued by the Commerce Department, which seeks to bar U.S. companies from offering downloads or updates for TikTok and WeChat. Free-speech advocates had raised questions about whether the ban would harm First Amendment rights. For the moment, WeChat and TikTok would remain accessible to American users, but their futures were as unclear as Trump’s purported deal. Taken together, what Trump presented as a bold expression of American values and power has turned out to be precisely the opposite: a gesture of wall-building and retreat, suffused with the aroma of potential corruption.

In a new book, “An Open World,” the foreign-policy scholars Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper begin the process of planning for a “day after Trump”—which they compare to a period of “post–natural disaster recovery”—in which the United States should focus on keeping “the international system open and free.” Lissner, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told me that the threat to ban TikTok and WeChat “has put the United States on the wrong side, and set an unfavorable precedent.” There are plausible concerns, she said, that the Chinese Communist Party could use popular apps to collect data on American users, or continue to bar American companies in the name of governing the Internet according to its political anxieties. But the response should not be “replicating a C.C.P.-style approach to assertions of cyber sovereignty, as Trump has done.” Instead, she said, the U.S. should seek to be a leader in establishing rules that protect privacy and the free flow of information “regardless of the nationality of programs they’re using.” Lissner added, “Trump’s whack-a-mole approach doesn’t actually address the underlying risks, which reach far beyond TikTok and WeChat. Even worse, it makes it more likely that China’s preferred approach to Internet governance will triumph.”

The implications of this dispute extend far beyond the question of whether American teen-agers will be able to post to Chinese social-media sites. It represents what the Financial Times’ Tom Mitchell called the latest “proxy wars between the two reigning superpowers.” In contrast to America’s showdowns with the former Soviet Union, these battles are stirring not in Afghanistan and El Salvador but in corporate boardrooms. The Trump Administration opened its first front, in the spring of 2018, by banning American tech companies from selling components to ZTE, a Chinese telecom company that had been caught violating U.S. export controls on shipments to Iran. But Trump, who was eager to make a big trade deal with China, cut the pressure on ZTE, which settled with the U.S. Commerce Department. The battles have continued, though, and, as Mitchell observed, “it is China that has the early lead.”

The effort to wrest TikTok from China’s grip has been a boon for nationalist media sources in Beijing, which cited it as evidence that the U.S. is determined to prevent China from challenging American primacy. On Chinese state television last week, the news anchor Pan Tao derided the “hunt” for TikTok, asking, “Isn’t that behavior akin to a hostage situation? A deadline to sell on their terms, or else?” The opening of this “Pandora’s box,” Pan suggested, would make it impossible to trust American intentions. “If someone does this on Day One, who knows what they’re capable of doing on day fifteen?” Global Times, a nationalist state tabloid newspaper, called it a “thorough exhibit of Washington’s domineering behavior and gangster logic,” and predicted that leaders in Beijing would not ratify the agreement.

To Trump’s admirers in Washington, the move against Chinese tech companies is an act of reciprocity, an acknowledgment that China was the first to splinter the Internet into separate domains divided by a digital iron curtain. That sequence, of course, is true—but it does not follow that the right response to China’s fear is to impose additional barriers, instead of demonstrating that Americans have the capacity and the confidence to win on the strength of our competition. David Wertime, the author of the China Watcher newsletter at Politico, likened Trump’s decision to bar Americans from access to WeChat to the discomfiting new era in which America’s failure in the face of the coronavirus pandemic has left its people unwelcome at foreign borders. A U.S. passport “no longer ranks among the world’s most powerful,” he wrote. “A series of moves away from global institutions like the World Health Organization signal an inward retreat, keeping foreign elements out while also trapping Americans further within their homeland.”

Trump’s approach to TikTok and WeChat, like much of his foreign policy, is a gesture of defeatism camouflaged as strength. From his earliest days in politics, he has stood for the closure of the American mind, and the withdrawal of American power and confidence. He exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord, and the Iran nuclear agreement; he ordered American troops in Syria to abandon the Kurds and other American allies, a move that James Mattis regarded as so disloyal and imprudent that he resigned as Secretary of Defense. In the present case, Trump would rather wall off Americans digitally and philosophically than establish guidelines on privacy, free speech, and data collection.

The TikTok fiasco is a product of cronyism, empty bombast, and nationalism—a political recipe that, historically, America has tended to criticize in its opponents. But, as a Pew survey reported this month, global confidence in the United States, especially among allies, is as low as it has been since the measurements began, nearly two decades ago. In the most damning indicator, Trump inspires less confidence than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

It takes some doing to earn less trust than those leaders, but Trump has achieved that. In a similar spirit, it is not often that one finds a note of prudent prediction in Global Times. But it’s hard to disagree with one of the paper’s observations in an editorial this week, in comments on the TikTok case. “As cybersecurity becomes more of a universal issue,” the paper observed, “there will be imitators around the world who will take action against U.S. companies. The bad precedent set by the United States will eventually come back to bite it.”

— Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008 and covers politics and foreign affairs. His book on China, “Age of Ambition,” won the National Book Award in 2014.

[theracoonlodge]

At Lunch With Joyce Randolph & Audrey Meadows

AT LUNCH WITH: Joyce Randolph and Audrey Meadows; Trixie and Alice, on Their Own By BRYAN MILLER Published: October 13, 1993

SOMETIMES an actress becomes so identified with one role in her career that the character clings to her as stubbornly as puppy hair to a navy blazer, impossible to brush off.

"For years after that role, directors would say: 'No, we can't use her. She's too well known as Trixie,' " said Joyce Randolph, who was immortalized as the wife of Ed Norton, the rubber-limbed sewer worker in the 1950's television sitcom "The Honeymooners."

A similar fate befell Audrey Meadows, who played the wisecracking wife of a blustering bus driver named Ralph Kramden, portrayed by Jackie Gleason. "After the series, I was lucky to do guest shots with Dinah Shore and Red Skelton, but almost all of the stuff I was offered was something in the kitchen, always in the damn kitchen," Miss Meadows recalled over lunch recently at Le Cirque in Manhattan.

For both women, still close and affectionate, their famous television personae hover above them like giant balloon characters at a Macy's parade, attracting throngs of nostalgic admirers and prompting dozens of letters a week.

Since "The Honeymooners," Miss Randolph's acting career has been limited to commercials and occasional musical summer stock. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Richard L. Charles, a retired advertising executive. Miss Meadows, who lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., and has been divorced once and widowed once, has made many guest appearances on television shows and was in two subsequent sitcoms, "Too Close for Comfort" and "Uncle Buck." She has recently completed a book about "The Honeymooners" titled "Love, Alice," which is to be published by Crown next year.

Entering the restaurant wearing a shimmering pink-and-white Chanel suit and oversize tinted glasses, Miss Meadows was hardly recognizable as the tough-as-steel-wool spouse who fended off many threatened flights to the moon, courtesy of Ralph. Her once crystalline voice has taken on a cigarette-induced gruffness, but her distinctive inflection, familiar to all "Honeymooners" addicts, remains.

Miss Meadows began her career in musical comedies. The daughter of a missionary, she lived in China until age 5, when her family moved to California so that the children could be educated in the United States. "I first got into musical comedy as a teen-ager as the result of singing in church," she explained. She eventually joined road tours of shows like "High Button Shoes."

Miss Randolph had a similar theatrical background. After performing in local theater in her hometown of Detroit, she made the mythical trek to New York City in search of fame. In 1945, after several years of touring and appearing in Broadway shows, she found herself in Schenectady, N.Y., where the General Electric Company had some of its early television production studios.

"Mostly I remember the lights, which were so harsh, and that terrible black lipstick," she said, rubbing her lips as if trying to remove it.

The first television sketches were largely reworks of popular radio mysteries. "For a while I was publicized as the most murdered girl on television," Miss Randolph said, laughing.

Acting jobs were easier to find then than they are today. "We all were in the same kinds of bars and restaurants -- Sardi's, Lindy's, the Blue Angel," Miss Meadows recalled.

Miss Randolph found her way to the DuMont television network, where she was asked to do a Clorets commercial. She was such a hit that CBS asked her to do the same commercial on "Cavalcade of Stars," a variety show whose host was Mr. Gleason, a former nightclub comic who was a rising star.

It was on this show that Mr. Gleason began developing characters like Reginald Van Gleason 3d, Rudy the Repairman and Ralph Kramden. "Cavalcade of Stars" opened in 1950 and ran for two seasons, followed by two years of "The Jackie Gleason Show" and then, in 1955, "The Honeymooners."

Mr. Gleason liked the young "Clorets girl." So when he began casting "The Honeymooners" he offered the part of Trixie to Miss Randolph. For his stage wife, named Alice, he chose a seasoned actress named Pert Kelton. The part of the sewer worker went to Art Carney.

Miss Meadows, who eventually replaced Miss Kelton as Alice, was a pioneer in the early days of television, too, in both Chicago and New York City, doing bit parts in skits on variety shows as well as commercials. Her mellifluous voice won her a job in the comedic sketches of the radio duo Bob and Ray. While working on radio, she was asked to take a leading part in the Broadway musical "Top Banana," starring Phil Silvers.

On Broadway she became acquainted with Mr. Gleason's manager, Bullets Durgom. "He actually looked like a bullet -- bald, short, roundish," she said.

By this time, Mr. Gleason had moved his variety show, which included a "Honeymooners" sketch, to CBS. Just two weeks before the first show, he had to find a new actress to portray Alice because Miss Kelton had fallen ill.

Mr. Gleason supposedly rejected Miss Meadows for being "too young and too pretty." As Miss Meadows relates the story, she went home that evening, put on a frumpy housedress, changed her hair and had a photographer take pictures. Mr. Gleason saw the photos and hired her on the spot, not knowing he had rejected her the day before.

Did the two young actresses have any idea they were about to make television history?

"Heavens, no," Miss Randolph said, placing an open hand on her cheek, a la Trixie Norton. "Everything was so casual in those days, you never thought it would be important." In fact, Miss Meadows was the only one of the supporting cast who drew up a contract calling for residuals.

"The Honeymooners" achieved immortality with the 1955-56 television season, when 39 episodes were filmed at the Adelphi Theater on West 54th Street in Manhattan. The cast performed twice a week, Tuesday and Friday nights, before an audience of about 1,000.

Mr. Gleason loved spontaneity; hence, there was little or no rehearsal. Often the cast received the script the night before performing; it was not unusual for them to try on their costumes just before going on the air.

"I remember some nights when we had guests on the show, and I saw some of them vomiting in the wings from nervousness," Miss Randolph added.

Both actresses recalled one memorable fiasco on stage, during an episode called "Better Living Through TV," in which Ralph buys a warehouse full of fancy can openers and tries to sell them fast by appearing in a television commercial with Norton.

"The two of them are making the commercial, and the can opener is supposed to come down on Jackie's hand so he can do his pain bit," Miss Meadows recalled. "Then he starts running around the room, and he hits a prop wall that isn't fixed securely. He knocks down the wall and lands on his face. Then, Artie goes to help him and Artie lands on his face. That scene, just as it happened, was left in and is still being shown today."

Neither woman has anything nice to say about the most recent biography of Mr. Gleason, "The Great One," by William Henry 3d (Doubleday), which portrays Mr. Gleason as a moody, booze-soaked egomaniac who bullied his writers and abandoned his family.

While both contend that the book presents a flawed portrait, Miss Randolph concedes that Mr. Gleason sometimes mistreated his staff. "He was very mean to the writers," she said. "He kept them isolated. He didn't get to know them."

Miss Meadows, to this day Mr. Gleason's greatest defender, attacked Mr. Henry's emphasis on Mr. Gleason's drinking. "Jackie did not drink on the show, ever, not one sip," she asserted.

About the book's accusation that Mr. Gleason tried to thwart the richly talented Art Carney, both women strongly disagree.

"Never, never," Miss Meadows said. "There were times when he would say in rehearsal: 'Give that line to Artie. It would be funnier coming from him." Added Miss Randolph: "Art didn't want to be top banana. He was always so low-key and shy."

When Mr. Gleason was once asked why "The Honeymooners" was so popular nearly 40 years later, he replied, "It's funny." Miss Meadows concurred. "We had such good writing," she said. "The money people running the industry today don't know good scripts."

Moreover, "The Honeymooners" was a mini-morality play, in which the characters always learned lessons about things like greed, vanity, trust, love and the importance of sharing.

"You know what I thought was interesting about 'The Honeymooners'?" Miss Meadows said. "There we were, blowing whatever money we had from his driving a bus. The Nortons lived a little better than we did because they put everything on credit. We were both lower middle-class people, but we had class. 'Roseanne,' even though it's funny, do you think they have class?"

Both women think "Murphy Brown," "Seinfeld" and "Mad About You" are also funny.

After lunch, Miss Meadows and Miss Randolph did what their fictional counterparts never would have done: they shopped on Madison Avenue, taking time out to explore the new Barneys. They were spotted by an adoring sales clerk at the Estee Lauder counter and soon attracted a large crowd of autograph seekers -- so many that Estee Lauder herself came to see what the fuss was all about. "You see," Miss Randolph declared. "It can happen anywhere."

Copywritten NY TIMES

[chyna9]

Best Friends

There have been many "unlikely duos" in World Wrestling Federation history. Whenever a tag team contains two dissimilar members, they're labeled as such. However, perhaps the most "unlikely duo" of all has no interest in winning the Tag Team Championship. In fact, the wrestling ring has nothing to do with this seemingly unusual combination.           

Debra and Chyna are real-life best friends. Sure, one's a blonde bombshell and the other is big and strong enough to wrestle men. But it turns out that, once they got to know each other, they're not all that unlikely of a duo, after all.           

"We just started talking and started hitting it off," Debra says.             "Our personalities were so compatible," adds Chyna, putting emphasis on the word "so," a la Edge & Christian.             Not a day goes by that the two women don't hear each other's voices. They're as close as close can possibly be. Sitting together for an interview with WWF.com, they interacted like a pair of hyper teen-agers -- in a good way -- constantly giggling, leaning against each other, draping their arms around each other, finishing each other's sentences. Anyone lucky enough to see them interact can't help but smile. It's a wonderful, healthy and refreshing relationship.             It didn't start out that way.             Chyna was already an established Federation Superstar when Debra came on board. Debra was set to debut on a live RAW IS WAR on Oct. 19, 1998, one day after the Federation's Judgment Day Pay-Per-View. Although Debra didn't work at Judgment Day, she was backstage during the show. She recalls the first time she spotted Chyna.             "I thought, 'Well, I need to go over there and introduce myself,'" Debra said. "I walked over. I said, 'Hi Chyna. I'm Debra McMichael. Nice to meet you.' She snarled at me. She wouldn't even shake my hand. I turned around and I thought, 'This girl hates me. I'm doomed. She hates me.' And I walked away."             Chyna pleads guilty to acting standoffish the first time she met Debra.             "These new women who had come in had no locker-room etiquette," she said, referring to some of the Godfather's Hos, among others. "They didn't have respect for the locker room. They weren't like the men, who have respect for one another.               "Every time somebody new came in, we had to go through this whole scenario again, about not touching other people's things, about not hogging the mirror, about sharing, about little things that you have to go through like kids. I just started getting fed up with it a little bit. So I saw Debra coming over, and she was in her typical beauty queen mode -- smiling, introducing herself -- and I guess I had just had it at that point."

[dekierey153]

On the outskirts of this lovely Italianate capital, the Government recently built an unusual steel plant. There is no iron ore nearby. Instead, former rebel soldiers are melting down the Ethiopian tanks once used to crush them and turning them into construction girders. The plant, called Orota, is the namesake of a military base run by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front where, cut off from international help, rebels made bullets and spare weapons from scrap during the 30-year war against Ethiopia. The officer who oversaw that shoestring operation is now in charge of beating battle debris, if not into plowshares, into badly needed construction material. It's a pleasure to be making something for peace," said the former officer, Tekeste Ghebre-Egzihbher. "It was only a matter of time." Five years after winning the war that led to independence, former Eritrean rebels are rebuilding their shattered country with the same tenacity and self-sacrifice that served them well in the longest civil war in recent African history. When the Ethiopian Government of Lieut. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam finally fell and the Eritrean front's soldiers marched victorious into Asmara in May 1991, they found a faded and crumbling capital. Nothing had been painted or fixed since the 1960's. Few people dared go out at night for fear of crime. The palm-lined main boulevard was crowded with beggars and prostitutes. There were hundreds of dingy bars and discotheques where there had once been clean, bustling cafes. Five years later, the city has been restored to something like its old state. New streetlights illuminate the avenues, where bright red late-model Mercedes-Benz buses and yellow Opel taxis cruise along. There are no beggars or prostitutes in sight. The police, sporting new uniforms and riding new Honda motorcycles, have cracked down on crime. At night, crowds of well-dressed people parade along the avenues, stopping in cafes and restaurants that look as if they were transported from prewar Italy, the onetime colonial ruler. Since ratifying its independence in a referendum in 1993, Eritrea, with a population of more than three million, has become an African oddity, a country that works well despite receiving little foreign aid and having an average per capita income of $140 a year, diplomats say. It is poorer than Ethiopia, yet it has none of the street crime and beggars that mark Addis Ababa. It receives a fraction of the aid Kenya gets, but it has none of the corruption. It is divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians like the Sudan, but that has not led to a religious war like the one afflicting the Sudanese. Though in ancient times Eritrea was part of the Kingdom of Axum, over the centuries its nine ethnic groups -- some Christian, some Muslim -- were conquered by various powers like the Turks and the Egyptians, so they did not see themselves as Ethiopians. Still, the region only began to emerge as a distinct national territory during the Italian colonization from 1885 to 1941. After Italy's defeat in World War II, the United Nations overlooked the desire of the much of the population and, in 1952, made the region a semi-autonomous part of Ethiopia, with its own constitution. A decade later, Ethiopia annexed the land and abolished the constitution, prompting the Eritreans to begin their long fight for independence. Leaders' Discipline And National Pride Eritrean officials and diplomats here say that what has set this country apart is the discipline of its leaders and the strong sense of national identity forged during the long war for independence. The entire Government, from President Isaias Afwerki down to foot soldiers, has worked for years without normal salaries, subsisting on small monthly stipends. "There is almost a demonic determination to get things done," said Dr. Bereket Habte Selassie, the chairman of the commission drafting a new constitution. "It's one of those things I think comes out of suffering. The 30 years of war -- one of the dividends of that was this tremendous sense of discipline." President Isaias has been restrained in accepting financial help from abroad, keeping international borrowing at a minimum and limiting the power of international relief groups working here. Rather than hire foreign contractors, he created a national youth service and put teen-agers to work, along with idle troops, to rebuild roads. When the Government found that it would cost $400 million to rebuild the railroad from the capital to the main port, Massawa, it decided to do the job itself. The President called septuagenarian railroad men out of retirement to rebuild steam engines brought by the Italians in the 1930's. But critics say country's success has come partly at the expense of personal freedoms. There is a reason there are no beggars on the street. The police have rounded up all of the ragged and disabled street people and virtually imprisoned them in an old tuberculosis hospital. A reporter who visited was not allowed to enter. Officials say other able-bodied beggars were put to work on public projects. "It doesn't mean that we don't have poor people or beggars, but they get the assistance properly, not by begging in the streets," said the Tourism Minister, Worku Tesfamichael. "Those who can't work get assistance. Those who can work but prefer to beg are sent to work." Jehovah's Witnesses Suffer Reprisals One group that has felt the darker side of Eritrea's nationalist fervor is the Jehovah's Witnesses. For religious reasons, they refused to fight in the war and abstained from the 1993 referendum on independence. In response, the Government closed shops owned by members of the church, evicted them from public housing, dismissed those who had Government jobs and took away their passports. An official statement said the actions were being taken because the group had "dissociated themselves from the liberation of their country" and had "acted as disinterested spectators, oblivious to the injustices meted out to their people." There has been no outcry here about the treatment of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are believed to number no more than a few thousand, or anything else the Government is doing, for that matter. No one has organized a political party opposing the front, which enjoys enormous popular support. The only newspaper is Government-owned, and there is little open debate. Politically, the country is still in the grip of postwar euphoria and nationalism. The new constitution being drafted will guarantee freedom of speech and assembly as well as the right to form political parties, Dr. Bereket said. But the President has said he wants to ban parties based on ethnicity or religion, and it is unclear how that conflict will be resolved. Elections in '97 For a Parliament If adopted, the constitution will set up parliamentary system under which a powerful chief executive will be elected by Parliament from among its members. Elections are scheduled for 1997. For now, the only viable political party is the People's Front for Democracy and Justice, as the front was renamed last year. "Frankly, I think it will be several years before we see the emergence of credible political parties in this country," said Yemane Gebreab, a senior party official. "Right now there is a high degree of consensus in the society." The biggest threat to stability so far has come from the front's own rank and file -- disgruntled demobilized soldiers who are having trouble finding jobs. Last June, disabled former fighters at the Mai Habar rehabilitation center outside Asmara blocked a highway, hijacked several trucks and took hostages to protest meager severance benefits. Troops were called to quell the protest. Three disabled veterans were shot to death. That incident followed another protest in 1993, on the eve of the independence referendum, when thousands of soldiers marched against the Government's announcement that they would have to work for another two years without pay. The Government relented and gave the soldiers a $25 monthly allowance. Racing Against Time To Revive Economy In a sense, the Government is racing against time to revive the economy and create jobs before the legions of former guerrilla fighters lose patience. "I think our biggest problem is the economy," Mr. Yemane said. "For ordinary people that's the main issue for them." Officials here have pinned their hopes on tapping Eritrea's considerable natural resources, which have been off-limits to development for three decades because of the war. The country possesses oil deposits under the Red Sea, substantial gold deposits in its mountains and miles of pristine beaches and secluded islands, perfect for resort operators. Already there are signs that the economy is poised to take off. Several high-rises are under construction in the capital, including a $65 million housing complex near the airport. Shops in Asmara are full of European goods hard to find elsewhere in the region, and the city market is booming. In the capital's streets and markets, many people said they were willing to give the current leaders more time. Though most said they earned barely enough to put food on the table, much less to save money, they said the peace and stability they have enjoyed since independence were more important to them. Even disabled veterans are reluctant to criticize the President, their former commander. Girmai Woldeab, 35, lost his sight when a bullet hit him in the head during an offensive against Massawa in 1977. Now he scrapes by on a monthly disability check worth less than $20. "The Government cannot yet stand on its own two feet," he said. "It's unable to provide everything we need. Sometimes the money runs out, but I try to live on it, even though I may not eat my fill."

Eritrea: African Success Story Being Written

By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR.APRIL 30, 1996

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/30/world/eritrea-african-success-story-being-written.html

An article written 23 years ago on Eritrea...

[clementina438blog-blog]

What I Would like I Realized a 12 months In the past About Fortnite gold

How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds

The trend with the 3rd-person shooter sport has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and eating Tide Pods.

Fortnite Cheat

It was acquiring late in Tomato City. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the bottom. Gizzard Lizard had created his way there following plundering the sparsely populated barns and domiciles of Anarchy Acres, then by preventing the Wailing Woods and retaining the storm just off to his still left. He spied an enemy combatant on substantial floor, who appeared to possess a sniper’s rifle. In the hollow underneath the sniper’s perch was an abandoned pizzeria, with a large rotating register the shape of a tomato. Gizzard Lizard, who experienced speedily designed himself a redoubt of salvaged beams, reported, “I feel I’m about to assault. That’s one among my principal issues: I would like to get started on becoming much more intense.” He ran out in the open, pausing ahead of a thick shrub. “This is definitely a very good bush. I could bush-camp. But naw, that’s what noobs do.”

Two Males enter, 1 male leaves: the fighters closed in on each other. Within the video clip match Fortnite Struggle Royale, the late-recreation period is usually by far the most frenetic and enjoyable. Quickly, the sniper released himself into a close-by area and commenced attacking. Gizzard Lizard rapidly threw up A different port-a-fort, amid a hail of enemy hearth. The aim is often for getting, or make, the higher ground.

A moment later, Gizzard Lizard was dead—killed by a grenade. Afterward, he replayed the ending, from numerous vantages, to research what experienced gone Improper. To become so near profitable and however arrive up short—it was annoying and tantalizing. Just one wants to go again. The urge is powerful. But it had been time for my son to try and do his research.

I invested much more time as a kid than I care to recollect seeing other Young ones Participate in video games. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Guy, Donkey Kong. Normally, my close friends, over my objections, favored this to actively playing ball—or to other common, if significantly less edifying, community pursuits, which include tearing hood ornaments off parked cars and trucks. Every so often, I performed, far too, but I had been a spaz. Insert quarter, match about. The moment gaming moved into dorms and apartments—Nintendo, Sega—I uncovered which i could just depart. But occasionally I didn’t. I admired the feat of divided notice, the knack that some guys (and it was often fellas) looked as if it would have for remaining alive, both in the sport and within the fight of wits over the couch, as though they ended up both of those taking part in a Activity and doing “SportsCenter” at the same time.

I thought of this another day when a pal explained seeing a gaggle of eighth-grade boys and girls (amid them his son) hanging close to his apartment participating in, but largely seeing Many others Perform, Fortnite. A single boy was participating in on a considerable TV monitor, with a PlayStation four console. One other boys were being on their telephones, possibly participating in or viewing a specialist gamer’s Stay stream. And the girls were enjoying or looking at by themselves telephones, or looking about the shoulders of the boys. On the list of girls instructed my friend, “It’s enjoyment to see the boys get mad once they eliminate.” No person reported much. What patter there was—l’esprit du divan—came from the youngsters’ small screens, in the form of the pro gamer’s mordant narration as he vanquished his opponents.

Fortnite, for any person not a teenager-ager or even a parent or educator of teens, will be the third-man or woman shooter match which includes taken more than the hearts and minds—and time, both discretionary and in any other case—of adolescent and collegiate The us. Produced past September, it's at this moment by quite a few measures the preferred online video game on this planet. At times, there happen to be greater than 3 million people taking part in it without delay. It has been downloaded an approximated sixty million instances. (The sport, readily available on Laptop, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and cellular units, is—crucially—free, but lots of players spend For added, cosmetic characteristics, such as costumes referred to as “skins.”) When it comes to fervor, compulsive habits, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite fad has components of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and also the ingestion of Tide Pods. Moms and dads speak of it as an habit and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: under the desk at college, at a memorial support, in the toilet at 4 A.M. They beg one another for remedies. A friend sent me a video he’d taken one afternoon even though attempting to halt his son from taking part in; there was a time when frequently contacting 1’s father a fucking asshole might have brought about big trouble in Tomato Town. Within our family, the large danger is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Sport fads appear and go: Rubik’s Dice, Dungeons & Dragons, Indignant Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What individuals appear to concur on, whether they’re seasoned avid gamers or dorky dads, is usually that there’s a thing new rising all-around Fortnite, a style of mass social gathering, open to a Considerably wider array of people in comparison to the games that came just before. Its relative lack of wickedness—it seems to be primarily free of the misogyny and racism that afflict all kinds of other online games and gaming communities—can make it more palatable to your broader audience, and this charm each ameliorates and augments its addictive electricity. (The sport, in its basic manner, randomly assigns gamers’ skins, which may be of any gender or race.) Prevalent anecdotal proof implies that women are actively playing in broad quantities, each with and without boys. You will find, and possibly ever shall be, some gamer geeks who gripe at such newcomers, just as they gripe when there http://shengrongdq.com/idrose6q00/post-ten-websites-that-69178.html aren't any newcomers in any respect.

A friend whose 13-12 months-previous son is deep down the rabbit hole likened the Fortnite phenomenon to the Pump Household Gang, the crew of ne’er-do-very well teenager surfers in La Jolla whom Tom Wolfe occurred on during the early nineteen-sixties. As opposed to a clubhouse to the beach, there’s a virtual international juvenile corridor, where Little ones Collect, invent an argot, undertake change egos, and shoot one another down. Wolfe’s Pump Dwelling Youngsters went on beer-soaked outings they termed “destructos,” where they would, at nearby farmers’ behest, demolish abandoned barns. Now it’s Juul-sneaking small homebodies demolishing virtual walls and properties with imaginary pickaxes. Teenagers all over the place are swinging away at their planet, tearing it down to survive—Resourceful destruction, of A form.

Shall I demonstrate the game? I need to, I’m afraid, Regardless that describing video clip games is a bit like recounting goals. 100 players are dropped on to an island—from a traveling faculty bus—and battle one another to your death. The winner is the last one particular standing. (You'll be able to pair up or form a squad, also.) This is certainly what is meant by Battle Royale. (The first Variation of Fortnite, introduced last July, for forty pounds, wasn’t combat towards the Demise; it's the new iteration which includes caught fireplace.) A storm encroaches, progressively forcing combatants into an at any time-shrinking place, where by they need to get rid of or be killed. Along the best way, you seek out caches of weapons, armor, and healables, while also collecting setting up elements by breaking down present structures. Hasty fabrication (of ramps, forts, and towers) is A necessary facet of the sport, and this is why it is usually described as a cross amongst Minecraft and also the Hunger Video games—and why aggrieved mom and dad have the ability to inform them selves that it's constructive.

Right before a sport starts, you wander all around inside a sort of purgatorial bus depot-cum-airfield waiting right up until another hundred have assembled for an airdrop. This can be a Unusual spot. Players shoot inconsequentially at one another and pull dance moves, like actors going for walks aimlessly around backstage training their traces. Then appear the airlift plus the drifting descent, by using glider, to the battleground, with a mild whooshing sound that is certainly into the Fortnite addict what the flick of the Bic is usually to a smoker. It is possible to land in one of 20-a single locations on the island, Each individual using a cutesy alliterative name, some suggestive of mid-century gay bars: Shifty Shafts, Moisty Mire, Lonely Lodge, Greasy Grove. In patois As well as in temper, the sport manages being equally dystopian and comedian, darkish and lightweight. It may be alarming, in the event you’re not accustomed to this sort of issues or are attuned on the news, to listen to your darlings shouting so merrily about head shots and snipes. But there’s no blood or gore. The violence is cartoonish, not less than relative to, say, Halo or Grand Theft Car. These will be the consolations.

The island alone has an air of desertion but not of extreme despair. This apocalypse is rated PG. The abandonment, precipitated because of the storm, which has both killed or scattered most of the planet’s inhabitants, seems to are actually new and comparatively speedy. The grass is lush, the Cover whole. The hydrangeas are abloom in Snobby Shores. Buildings are unencumbered by kudzu or graffiti and have tidy, sparsely furnished rooms, as if the inhabitants experienced only just fled (or been vaporized). Evidently, All people within the island, in those prosperous pre-storm times, shopped in the identical aisle at Concentrate on. Each time I check out a player enter a bedroom, be it in Junk Junction or Loot Lake, I Be aware the multicolored blanket folded through the bed. These cobalt-blue table lamps: are they available for purchase? It's possible at some point They are going to be.

[maris457vbucks-blog]

Fortnite generator: It isn't really as Difficult as You're thinking that

How Fortnite Captured Teenagers’ Hearts and Minds

The trend for the 3rd-particular person shooter game has things of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and eating Tide Pods.

V Bucks For Free Fortnite

It had been acquiring late in Tomato City. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the ground. Gizzard Lizard had designed his way there soon after plundering the sparsely populated barns and domiciles of Anarchy Acres, then by keeping away from the Wailing Woods and maintaining the storm just off to his left. He spied an enemy combatant on higher ground, who appeared to have a sniper’s rifle. Inside of a hollow below the sniper’s perch was an abandoned pizzeria, with an enormous rotating sign up the shape of the tomato. Gizzard Lizard, who had swiftly constructed himself a redoubt of salvaged beams, explained, “I think I’m about to assault. That’s amongst my principal challenges: I want to begin being more aggressive.” He ran out into your open up, pausing ahead of a thick shrub. “This is actually a really excellent bush. I could bush-camp. But naw, that’s what noobs do.”

Two Adult men enter, one male leaves: the fighters closed in on one another. Within the movie game Fortnite Fight Royale, the late-game phase is often one of the most frenetic and fascinating. Suddenly, the sniper launched himself into a nearby field and commenced attacking. Gizzard Lizard rapidly threw up One more port-a-fort, amid a hail of enemy fire. The aim is usually for getting, or make, the high ground.

A minute later, Gizzard Lizard was dead—killed by a grenade. Afterward, he replayed the ending, from several vantages, to investigate what experienced absent Mistaken. To become so near to successful and however appear up brief—it absolutely was discouraging and tantalizing. A person really wants to go once more. The urge is powerful. But it had been time for my son to do his research.

I expended far more time as A child than I care to recall observing other Young children Perform video game titles. House Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Person, Donkey Kong. Ordinarily, my buddies, above my objections, favored this to playing ball—or to other preferred, if fewer edifying, community pursuits, for example tearing hood ornaments off parked autos. Just about every so normally, I performed, far too, but I used to be a spaz. Insert quarter, match around. After gaming moved into dorms and apartments—Nintendo, Sega—I realized which i could just depart. But at times I didn’t. I admired the feat of divided awareness, the knack that some guys (and it was often fellas) looked as if it would have for keeping alive, each in the game and inside the fight of wits around the sofa, as though they have been each taking part in a Activity and executing “SportsCenter” at the same time.

I thought of this one other working day when an acquaintance explained looking at a group of eighth-grade boys and girls (amid them his son) hanging all around his apartment taking part in, but primarily seeing Other people play, Fortnite. Just one boy was playing on a significant Television display, using a PlayStation 4 console. The other boys have been on their own telephones, either actively playing or viewing a specialist gamer’s live stream. And the ladies were actively playing or viewing on their own telephones, or on the lookout around the shoulders from the boys. Among the list of ladies explained to my Good friend, “It’s enjoyment to see the boys get mad if they shed.” No one explained Considerably. What patter there was—l’esprit du divan—arrived from the kids’ minimal screens, in the shape of the pro gamer’s mordant narration as he vanquished his opponents.

Fortnite, for any person not a teen-ager or a parent or educator of teens, could be the third-man or woman shooter game which includes taken above the hearts and minds—and some time, both of those discretionary and if not—of adolescent and collegiate The us. Launched last September, it is right this moment by quite a few actions the preferred movie recreation on the planet. From time to time, there are already much more than three million individuals taking part in it at once. It has been downloaded an believed sixty million moments. (The game, readily available on Laptop, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and mobile devices, is—crucially—free of charge, but many gamers pay back For added, beauty attributes, including costumes generally known as “skins.”) When it comes to fervor, compulsive habits, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has factors of Beatlemania, the opioid disaster, plus the ingestion of Tide Pods. Mom and dad converse of it being an dependancy and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen display-time abuse: under the desk at school, at a memorial assistance, in the toilet at 4 A.M. They beg each other for solutions. A pal sent me a video clip he’d taken a single afternoon though wanting to quit his son from enjoying; there was a time when frequently contacting a single’s father a fucking asshole would have brought about massive difficulty in Tomato Town. Within our family, the massive risk is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Game fads appear and go: Rubik’s Dice, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What persons manage to concur on, whether they’re seasoned avid gamers or dorky dads, is the fact there’s one thing new rising about Fortnite, a type of mass social accumulating, open to your Significantly wider array of people as opposed to video games that arrived prior to. Its relative lack of wickedness—it appears to be primarily freed from the misogyny and racism that afflict many other video games and gaming communities—makes it much more palatable to your broader audience, which attractiveness both equally ameliorates and augments its addictive electrical power. (The sport, in its basic method, randomly assigns players’ skins, that may be of any gender or race.) Prevalent anecdotal evidence implies that girls are enjoying in wide numbers, each with and with out boys. You will find, and possibly at any time shall be, some gamer geeks who gripe at these newcomers, equally as they gripe when there aren't any newcomers in the slightest degree.

A friend whose thirteen-yr-old son is deep down the rabbit hole likened the Fortnite phenomenon to your Pump Home Gang, the crew of ne’er-do-well teenager surfers in La Jolla whom Tom Wolfe occurred upon inside the early nineteen-sixties. As opposed to a clubhouse to the beach, there’s a Digital worldwide juvenile corridor, exactly where kids Obtain, invent an argot, undertake alter egos, and shoot each other down. Wolfe’s Pump Dwelling kids went on beer-soaked outings they termed “destructos,” wherein they might, at neighborhood farmers’ behest, demolish abandoned barns. Now it’s Juul-sneaking very little homebodies demolishing virtual walls and properties with imaginary pickaxes. Children everywhere are swinging away at their planet, tearing it down to outlive—Resourceful destruction, of who plays fortnite A sort.

Shall I clarify the game? I should, I’m fearful, Regardless that describing movie video games is a little like recounting desires. A hundred gamers are dropped onto an island—from the traveling school bus—and combat one another towards the Dying. The winner is the last one standing. (You'll be able to pair up or type a squad, also.) This is what is supposed by Battle Royale. (The original Edition of Fortnite, launched last July, for forty bucks, wasn’t fight to your Loss of life; it's the new iteration that has caught fire.) A storm encroaches, steadily forcing combatants into an ever-shrinking spot, wherever they must get rid of or be killed. Along just how, you request out caches of weapons, armor, and healables, while also accumulating constructing products by breaking down existing buildings. Hasty fabrication (of ramps, forts, and towers) is A necessary facet of the sport, which is why it is commonly called a cross concerning Minecraft and also the Hunger Online games—and why aggrieved mom and dad are able to tell on their own that it's constructive.

Before a sport starts, you wander all-around in a sort of purgatorial bus depot-cum-airfield waiting around until finally the following hundred have assembled for an airdrop. This can be a Unusual location. Players shoot inconsequentially at one another and pull dance moves, like actors strolling aimlessly all-around backstage practising their strains. Then appear the airlift and also the drifting descent, by way of glider, on the battleground, with a gentle whooshing seem that is certainly towards the Fortnite addict what the flick of the Bic is to a smoker. You can land in a single of 20-one particular locations over the island, Each and every which has a cutesy alliterative identify, some suggestive of mid-century gay bars: Shifty Shafts, Moisty Mire, Lonely Lodge, Greasy Grove. In patois and in temper, the game manages to be the two dystopian and comic, dark and light-weight. It might be alarming, if you’re not accustomed to these kinds of points or are attuned for the news, to hear your darlings shouting so merrily about head shots and snipes. But there’s no blood or gore. The violence is cartoonish, at the very least relative to, say, Halo or Grand Theft Car. Such tend to be the consolations.

The island by itself has an air of desertion although not of maximum despair. This apocalypse is rated PG. The abandonment, precipitated via the storm, which has either killed or scattered many of the globe’s populace, appears to have already been current and comparatively fast. The grass is lush, the Cover full. The hydrangeas are abloom in Snobby Shores. Buildings are unencumbered by kudzu or graffiti and have tidy, sparsely furnished rooms, as though the inhabitants experienced only just fled (or been vaporized). Seemingly, everyone around the island, in those prosperous pre-storm times, shopped in exactly the same aisle at Concentrate on. Every time I look at a participant enter a Bed room, be it in Junk Junction or Loot Lake, I Be aware the multicolored blanket folded throughout the mattress. Individuals cobalt-blue table lamps: are they for sale? It's possible one day They are going to be.