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cowlovely · 10 months ago

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best nuwho episodes to show to someone who has never seen doctor who, but wants to get into it*

*i’m working off of very specific criteria here. this can’t just be another “best episodes” list, because an episode being good doesn’t necessarily mean it would make a good introduction to a series. for this reason, there will probably be very few episodes past s6 or so on here, as i feel like that’s around the time that many doctor who episodes become too steeped in the show’s own history/overarching plotlines to make the most effective starting points (definitely at least partially moffat’s fault lol)

1x01 rose — maybe too obvious a choice, but this episode is the pilot for a reason.

—pros: does a very good job establishing nuwho’s version of the doctor, as well as thoroughly and effectively introducing us to rose and her life; the autons are a good and fun choice for the first threat.

—cons: is definitely not AS good as some other episodes of the show, so maybe not the best if you only have one episode to show someone and you want to make the most of it

1x06 dalek

—pros: establishes one of Thee enemies of the series, demonstrates 9 and rose’s values, sets up/explains a bit of the time war in an easy to understand way, has a great emotional core

—cons: i genuinely can’t think of any

1x09/1x10 the empty child/the doctor dances

—pros: fabulous storytelling all around with plot, themes, and pacing, emotional but with a happy ending, great blending of tone throughout, and a complete standalone story

—cons: it’s always a bit of a risk to start with a two parter

2x04 the girl in the fireplace

—pros: great creature design, fun storytelling devices, pretty self contained as far as references/lore go, fantastic performances from everyone but especially from sophia myles

—cons: has some of steven moffat’s worst writing attributes, including 10 feeling out of character in several spots, and reinette being very clearly a Moffat Woman in many ways (though this is in my opinion somewhat saved by myles’ great acting)

2x08/2x09 the impossible planet/the satan pit — i really debated putting these ones on here, but this story was MY introduction to the series so. clearly it’s very effective

—pros: really immersive story and setting, great cast of guest characters/actors, another self contained story (as far as i remember), introduces the ood

—cons: another two parter, might be a bit intense as a first story for some people, 10 and rose’s dynamic/significant moments in this might not hit the same way for someone who hasn’t seen other episodes

3x01 smith and jones

—pros: new companion episode, so the audience gets things explained to them at the same time as martha, fun little mystery at the center, interesting conflict/non-antagonist antagonists, good chemistry between tennant and agyeman, the hole rose left emotionally can be felt but doesn’t cut into the story as much as it does in the runaway bride

—cons: is again maybe not one of the standout episodes of the whole series (but is still very solid)

3x03 gridlock — might be a bit controversial since i didn’t include new earth, but i’ll explain

—pros: really interesting setting and plot, and while i think seeing new earth first gives interesting context, i don’t think it’s necessary to enjoy or understand what’s happening in this episode, and it’s kind of cool to come at this one from martha’s pov. showcases a lot of different kind of creatures/people, has a really satisfying and emotional conclusion, has the doctor reintroduce the concept of gallifrey and what happened to it

—cons: could definitely have some confusing elements if you haven’t seen new earth, in particular novice hame and the face of boe, and the effect of the city being the way it is in gridlock could be a bit diminished without the context of 2x01

3x10 blink

—pros: considered to be one of if not the best episode of the series, and with good reason. carey mulligan KILLS it, the mystery is incredibly compelling from start to finish, and the weeping angels are undoubtedly one of the best additions to the series. this episode is crafted damn near perfectly

—cons: while this episode is incredible, i don’t think it’s actually the best possible intro to the show that many people think it is; it’s not a good microcosm of the show as a whole in terms of structure and tone, and the doctor is really hardly in this episode at all. it makes the episode really gripping and intriguing if you’re already familiar with the show, but i actually think that effect is slightly dulled if you’re somebody who isn’t. this doesn’t mean that it would necessarily be the WORST introduction to the show (i’m still including it on the list after all), but i also don’t think it’s the best

4x08/4x09 silence in the library/forest of the dead

—pros: do i have to keep mentioning the episodes are really good? anyway these are really good. really highlights donna’s complexities, story is tense and emotional and intellectually engaging all at once, introduces river/touches on relationship dynamics with a time traveler, great and genuinely scary monster

—cons: another two parter, river’s introduction and the emotional weight of her and 10’s dynamic might not hit the same if you don’t know the doctor as a character either, and the same goes for donna’s plotline in these episodes (it was really difficult in general to pick ANY donna episodes because so many of the ones that feature her are really tied up in series lore of some kind 😭)

4x10 midnight

—pros: genuinely SO brilliantly written, acted, and edited it is ACTUALLY crazy. i’m biased because this is my favorite episode of the series, but i really think it’s such an all around tight story, and definitely one of the more self-contained ones of the show (especially considering this is a one-off monster we don’t even really hear about afterwards, let alone see again). and really i cannot hype up the writing and acting in this episode enough—if you’re really into sociology as a focal point in your sci-fi this episode will be for you

—cons: kind of similar to blink in that this episode isn’t very emblematic of what the show normally is—both in its bottle setting and the fact that the doctor is totally solo for the majority of the runtime, which is not the norm. i love it, and i think it works really well for the episode, but it’s still an outlier (the tone is also more serious than most eps). and also as minor as they are, there are still a few lore moments/references that might be confusing if this were someone’s first episode (rose’s face coming through on the bus screen, for example)

5x01 the eleventh hour

—pros: new doctor, and similar to smith and jones in the new companion factor. great story, episode is filled with lots of great energy, and this really showcases some of moffat’s better attributes as a writer/showrunner, particularly the kind of fairytale vibe he brings to doctor who; first episode of nuwho with a new showrunner, so it kind of intentionally comes off as a bit of a soft reboot

—cons: while it IS a bit like a soft reboot, this is one that kind of rolls with the assumption that you sort of know the deal at this point when it comes to the doctor as a character. i wouldn’t say it’s necessarily confusing, but i could see it potentially being a bit annoying for a new viewer, or just not as effective as an episode. also this was made in 2010 by moffat, and it shows (the sherlock editing, in particular)

5x02 the beast below

—pros: continuing the fairytale vibe, engaging setting and mystery, absolutely heartbreaking in the best way possible, self-contained story

—cons: viewer might feel a bit lost if they don’t know anything about the doctor and amy or how they met. kind of pro british monarchy :/

5x08/5x09 the hungry earth/cold blood

—pros: introduces the silurians (to nuwho at least), has really good guest characters/dynamics, conflict is compelling and very nuanced (feels closer to a classic who episode if that’s something that compels you), and this is something i’ve refrained from mentioning so far, but these episodes in particular have absolutely fantaaaaaastic makeup/SFX, costuming, and production design

—cons: two parter (take a shot every time i say this), the dramatic conclusion of this one might be confusing and/or fall flat if you aren’t familiar with amy and rory or the overarching plot of the season, and i could definitely see some people finding these episodes boring with all the political talk (i definitely did as a kid)

6x09 night terrors

—pros: very self-contained (as far as i can remember), perfectly straddles the line of horror and sci-fi, has a good emotional core, and 11 with kids is almost always an a+ for me

—cons: honestly can’t really think of any? again maybe not like. an AMAZING episode, and it may have references to past episodes/events in it that i can’t remember that might be confusing to a new viewer

6x11 the god complex

—pros: GREAAATTTT episode hook that really quickly and effectively drops you into the setting and overall vibe of the episode, some great one off characters, encompasses a lot of doctor who’s themes and different blends of genre

—cons: the second half of the episode pretty significantly focuses on amy and her fears/insecurities related to the doctor, so much so that it almost made me not include this episode

7x07 the rings of akhaten

—pros: this episode is so good. great intro to clara’s character (despite it not being her first one), great setting, great alien designs + worldbuilding, great music, and oh my GOD the monologues…the damn monologues…chef’s kiss

—cons: the doctor’s monologue probably won’t have the same effect for a new viewer that it does for people who are already fans, but honestly it’s so good that i don’t think this is that big a deal

9x03/9x04 under the lake/before the flood

—pros: very similar vibes to the impossible planet/the satan pit, but honestly i think i’m even more compelled by this story than i was by that one. i LOVE all the moving parts in this, i love the characters, i love that we’re underwater, and i love that it’s GHOSTS!!

—cons: two parter (shot!), and specifically a two parter that—while i love it to bits—drags a bit more than other two parters that i’ve included on this list. a new viewer may also not totally get (or maybe even be put off by?) 12 and clara’s dynamic

10x01 the pilot

—pros: i’ll be honest i wouldn’t say this is one of my FAVORITE episodes or anything, but it’s still very solid, and i DO think it could make a good introduction into the series for someone

—cons: has multiple allusions to other characters/arcs that will probably feel kind of weird to a new viewer

eve of the daleks special

—pros: time loop lovers come get your juice!!! this episode fucks, it’s probably my favorite from chibnall’s era? top three at least for sure. features the daleks without being too steeped in the Lore/having them overshadow everything in the episode

—cons: this episode is an atypical structure flr the show, and is kind of like. is About 13 and yaz’s relationship, which will probably be kind of odd if you haven’t seen any of the show before

honorable mentions, aka episodes i really wanted to include, but which had one too many cons to justify: 1x02 the end of the world, 1x08 father’s day, 2x01 new earth, s3 xmas special the runaway bride, 3x08/3x09 human nature/the family of blood, s4 special the waters of mars, 5x07 amy’s choice, 5x10 vincent and the doctor, 5x11 the lodger, 6x04 the doctor’s wife, 6x05/6x06 the rebel flesh/the almost people, 6x10 the girl who waited, 10x10 the eaters of light, 11x06 demons of the punjab, 12x08 the haunting of villa diodati, 60th special wild blue yonder)

that’s it so far!! i may add onto this when we get more episodes with 15, we’ll see!

(also i promise i’m not as biased towards early seasons nuwho as this list implies, i was just trying to be as objective as i could possibly be with the criteria that i set 😭 (while obviously still being subjective to my opinions) a lot of the later seasons just don’t have very many easy entry points 😔 (which is i’m sure at least partly why the show is being soft rebooted with 15))

#ivy.txt #doctor who #nuwho #finally made this after wanting to do it for AGES #similar to my doctor who spreadsheet in that i don’t really expect anyone/many people to really read this #but if you do and you find it helpful then that’s awesome!!#the honorable mentions are mostly episodes i really like but that i didn’t feel fit the criteria well enough #there are also some episodes that are kind of the opposite #where i think they would work as an entry point to the series #but that i personally didn’t believe they were good enough as episodes to recommend as firsts for anyone #anyway!! god this took forever. i’m gonna go eat dinner now

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crescentcampbell · 8 months ago

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Wouldn't You Like to Know? Ch. 1

One

“I really think you should reconsider. He’s one of the biggest actors out there. I don’t see why you won’t sell to him.” Penelope sighed. Agatha Danbury was one of the most important literary agents out there, and she really did admire the elder woman for what she had done for her career. But how could she explain her history with Colin Bridgerton?

“I don’t feel comfortable working with someone that can’t keep their personal life together.” It was an absolute lie. Penelope knew about Colin punching the photographer for spreading lies about his ex-fiancé, Marina Thompson, and Penelope didn’t care.

“I thought you knew the family?” Agatha said. “Eloise Bridgerton. That journalist from The New York Times. She’s the one that gave you that great book review when you were first starting out.”

Penelope looked at the computer. Agatha was on vacation somewhere in the Bahamas, but when the offer for the movie rights to her book Wallflower got an offer, Agatha had demanded that they have a Zoom call. Aside from the scandal, Colin Bridgerton was one of the most popular actors out there. He’d had a Netflix mystery series that was super popular, been on the cover of GQ, and wrote a script that had been nominated for an Academy Award.

“I do know Eloise,” Penelope said, “but my history with the family is complicated. We didn’t part on good terms. I’m lucky if I get a call from Eloise on my birthday, and that depends what mood she’s in.”

Agatha raised an eyebrow. “This is about the social media account you ran?”

Penelope bit her lip. Running a gossip account online that targeted the rich and elite at her private boarding school had not been one of her finest moments. In order to distract from her own family scandal of her father being arrested for embezzling, she had started the account to let out steam on everyone else that had something to say about her. But then one of her rumors had gone too far, gotten someone kicked out, and it was someone close to the Bridgerton’s.

When Eloise Bridgerton had figured out what she had done, they had nearly stopped being friends. But then they both moved to New York and reconnected. Still, Colin Bridgerton had once been one of her friends too, and the terrible thing she’d posted had been on him. HE had never found out. But only because Eloise had threatened to tell the whole school it was her posting about them if she continued on with the gossip account.

Penelope had stopped and she and Eloise had barely spoken.

In college, at Columbia, Penelope had written a book called The Gossip. It had been all about her experience and she had managed to get a literary agent and a book deal. That was the first book Agatha had represented for her. Now, she was twenty-five, and had several books under her belt.

The most popular of them by far had been a book called Wallflower. It was about being a plus size girl at a prep school, and being friends with one of the richest families in America. Part of the book had included all of her wildest fantasies about Colin Bridgerton. The same actor who was looking to buy it now. And The Bridgerton’s had been the inspiration for the family in the book.

They owned one of the largest, organic honey operations in the U.S. Bridgerton: Sweet as honey, was their family slogan. Their mother, Violet Bridgerton, had started with the honey business, and went onto become a kind of Martha Stewart type figure in the world of home making. They had Bridgerton baking supplies, Bridgerton cookware, Bridgerton home décor, and Bridgerton cook books.

When YouTube had come along, Violet had made vlogs that showcased her life with her large family, raising them as a single mother after her husband had died. It had catapulted the family to fame and there wasn’t a single person that didn’t know who they were. They’d also been Penelope’s next-door neighbors, and classmates.

“It’s about a lot of things,” said Penelope.

“But they don’t even know that you wrote the book. Eloise certainly didn’t. You wrote The Gossip under a penname.”

“Yes, and I’m telling you, the minute that Colin Bridgerton finds out it was me that wrote that book, he’ll want nothing to do with the script. Especially since he’s the one that inspired Wallflower.”

Agatha paused, and raised an eyebrow. She was an older black woman who had the ability to make a whole room pause with the look she was giving Penelope now. She radiated authority with everything she did. Before she’d been a literary agent, she’d spent a few years as a teacher, and Penelope suspected that was where it had come from. “You mean to tell me all of those steamy scenes your heroine imagines herself in are about America’s Favorite Heartthrob?”

Penelope winced. “Yes, so you can see why it would be really awkward to have him in that movie. It’s everything Teen Penelope imagined doing to him so no, I don’t relish the idea of him making a movie about it and then the world finding out that’s who I was obsessing over. The internet is full of Swifties. They read romance and they’ll find out everything.”

Agatha snorted. “You aren’t wrong. But I think you need to do this. Does Colin know what you do for a living?”

Penelope thought about how most of her books had scenes in them that would make her mother blush. “No. Noone back home does. I told everyone that I am my assistant and she’s helping me make money while I’m working on a ‘real book’.” That was an absolute lie. Penelope loved what she wrote, only she didn’t exactly want her family and friends knowing that she used words like ‘cock’ and ‘cum’ in her writing. Especially when her mother had paid for her to have a fancy, Ivy League education.

“Then, keep on with the lie. Tell him that you’re the assistant. I’m sure he won’t even mind that you’re part of this.”

Penelope thought of the last time she had seen Colin. It had been the month of prom, and she’d gotten the nerve up to ask him to it. Colin had agreed and she’d been ecstatic but then she had heard him talking with his friends. He said he was only doing it because his mother had asked him to say yes. “You really think that will work?”

Agatha nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of the rest. Colin won’t even know why he never met Lulu.”

Penelope made a face. Reuniting with Colin was still the last thing she wanted, but she couldn’t deny that she liked the idea of Wallflowers being made into a movie. “Alright. Tell him yes. Have the paperwork sent over.”

“Lovely,” said Agatha, “you’re going to make so much fucking money. It will be brilliant.”

Penelope laughed. “Well, that part I like.”

“Good girl. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.”

“Bye.”

Penelope ended the Zoom call, and took a deep breath. Her book was going to get made into a movie starring Colin Bridgerton. “Fuck,” she muttered. It was like all of her teen fantasies were coming true.

#bridgerton #bridgerton fanfic #bridgerton fanfiction #polin fanfic #polin fanfiction

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f4nd0m-fun · 7 months ago

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Double Isekai Cryptids

@puppetmaster13u

Some images at the end BTW

@hallowsden helped me with this idea but basically...

||=====||=====|| Background ||=====||=====||

Gotham is a piece of Faerun that got warped to Earth decades if not centuries ago. While it's not connected to Faerun as much as it used to be, anyone there is more 'forced human' than 'actual human', at least in a general sense. If anyone happens to find themselves in Faerun though, their truer form or forms unlock, which can certainly be surprising for most. But as long as they're on earth, they seem almost entirely human, although it's best not to stare at a gothamite for too long, especially a stressed child (as those have the easiest time accidentally showing their truths).

Of course, Gotham wasn't the first planar warp, and wouldn't be the last. After all, the LoA were tied intrinsically to this as well, once a long proud line of demons, reduced to immortal humanity. No wonder Ras sought Bruce as a son-in-law, both his skills and his ties to the Before.

Alfred has technically been around since the planar warp, he just happened to decide to explore this 'new' world a few times, and see what it had to offer. Perhaps the closest equivalent to what he would be might be along the lines of an 'arch changeling' (essentially just an arch fey though).

What Thomas and Martha were, no one is really certain of, but after what happened with their first son, they tried for another. Unbeknownst to them, it died shortly after, and Alfred replaced the dead child with one of his own in an attempt to make his partners happy.

Bruce is a changeling. His parents suspected something was different, but didn't care to dig, they were just happy to have him. But when they died, his form glitched out, a partial change, the poor traumatized child being found by Gordon who was quick to wrap him up and out of sight until he calmed. Eventually, Leslie found out as well, but Bruce didn't find out for years.

Slade is a vampire. Not of the DC variety persay, but similar, just dampened by the lack of access to the Before. Due to this, his actions towards Dick caused the boy to be a hidden Dhampir, although his family already had a long line of dampened elven blood.

Jason is a Duegar, sturdy and good at tinkering, but quite used to darkness, although he may even have a little surface dwarf in him. It's not certain, but perhaps this is the true origin of that white streak he has.

Cass is a drow, showcased in her elegant movements and affinity for the darkness.

Tim is a probably a gnome, well known for their inventiveness.

Steph is a kenku, although that can change.

Duke is undecided.

Damien is technically a tiefling, altho the human in him is merely a mimcry due to the nature of his father.

||=====||=====|| Story ||=====||=====||

The exact reason is unknown, but Bruce and his children get scattered around Faerun during the events of BG3, Bruce taking the place as Tav. Due to the isekai plus tadpole alongside the fact that everyone got de-aged roughly a decade (time in the two realms runs differently), he has minor amnesia. As a funny not-funny, the Guardian takes the appearance of Joker, and Bruce is not happy. He's not entirely sure why he hates the figure but he knows he will annoy him as much as possible. He starts as a rogue, adds monk, focuses on monk, and then happens to notice he's apparently a warlock out of the blue? (more on that later) Idea is to have him Monk 5 Rogue 4 Warlock 3 (before any extra levels from mods).

Bruce 31, Dick 13, Jason 9, Cass 9, Steph 8, Tim 7, Duke 5, Damien 1

Jason and Cass are found in the underdark, and, even afterwards, keep (sorta jokingly) playing the twin card. Cass keeps calling Jason 'little brother' and he keeps telling her, and others, that he's older (saying how many weeks or months apart as minutes instead).

Dick and Damien are found at Last Light's Inn, having been kinda taken in by Jaheira. Dick still doesn't realize he's a Dhampir, just that he's been eating a lot more red meat. Meanwhile, Damien is far from happy in such a 'tiny, useless body' and gets into a habit of biting people (if he could speak fully, he would insist he's not teething, he's just defending himself!).

Not sure about the others.

Alfred, meanwhile, has been in a form much closer to his proper fey form recently. He spend a few Earth weeks letting the kids get up to whatever, then popped over and forced a warlock bond. Because of family among other things, it wasn't that hard to do without Bruce's explicit permission, and this way he can keep a better eye on his son. He's rather friendly with Withers, who likes to say that the After has made him soft. At the endgame party though, he shows up, and promptly drops into a more human looking form, although he feels comfortable enough around his family to keep a few otherworldly features.

||=====||=====|| Images ||=====||=====||

Human Alfred is slightly overweight and about 5'9; He has some wrinkles and hair that's peppered with grey; His eyes are a dark hazel; He looks like a standard human elder.

Mildly fey Alfred is a bit skinnier than would be healthy for a human and is roughly 6'5; He has a face of a man several decades younger and his hair has no grey; His eyes are an almost-glowing yellow; With double pointed ears and sharp nails, he looks even less human.

Changeling Bruce (mod) sticking as close to the appearance he knows, with some absurd proficiencies, still not sure how I ended up with such wild profs but it fits him. Starting as a rogue, with noble background of course.

Joker Guardian, Brucie will not be trusting him very much if at all.

#batman #double isekai #double isekai au #DI DC AU #DI Bats AU #pennywayne #past pennywayne #BG #bg3 #dnd #crossover

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aquillis-main · 2 years ago

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Been working on my own Yugioh! 5D's character - one that's the owner of a Water Attribute Singer dragon, because it always felt off to me that there was two Dark Attribute Dragons, but no Water Attribute one. I didn't want to use Trishula and the Ice Barrier because that dragon was too powerful for his own good, and I wanted to showcase this character to be versatile in ways the others aren't. Meaning that her deck can't be cancelled so easily. Her main draw is that all her monsters are defense based - They have high defenses for the purposes of their effects, which is to use their defense as their attack. It only works when they're in the defense position, however, and there's a good amount of cards that counteract this strategy easily.

About my OC - her name's Johana Crystalle, and her last name may be an indicator of something. Not entirely sure what it is.

As for her personality, I decided that because of her rough life in Satellite (as I want her placed there due to lack of female representatives besides Martha, IIRC) she's a bit spacey and in her own head, to escape the awful world that she grew up in. However, she seems very capable of leaving at any point in her head, and even shows a strong awareness of everything around her at any point, an implication that it's not entirely inescapable. Beyond that, her natural personality showcases her to be optimistic despite the world she lives in, as well as being very, very calm and smart in certain suituations.

I've done five different variations of her head to try and figure out which version I like of her. I'm leaning towards the ones with bunny ears as cowlicks more, but what does everyone else think? I plan on possibly reworking on her jacket a bit, as I feel it's still a bit close to Yusei's, and I don't want her to be entirely based off of him.

#Aquillis Draws #Yugioh 5D's #Yugioh 5Ds #Yugioh OC #Yugioh Original Character #Johana Crystalle #Yugioh

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gothamcitycentral · 2 years ago

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Batman: Into the Knight

My masterpost that answeres the question “What if I made a Batman animated series?”

Batmna: Into the Knight is a reboot of the Batman television series that came before it. It showcases the Dark Knight early into his carrier. He’s an enemy of the police and he’s meeting his rogues gallery for the first time. As the series goes on he’ll not only grow into the Batman we know, but so will his team. It takes visual inspiration from Rise of TMNT, The Spectacular Spider-Man, and The Batman 2004.

Central Characters

Bruce Wayne // Batman

Here’s very much an early twenty year old trying to keep his life from falling apart. He’s not very good at it. He has clearly watched too many horror flicks when he was growing up, judging by his Batman appearance. He’s trying to find a balance between his Bruce Wayne persona and Batman persona. This Bruce isn’t very top heavy, his fighting style being more focused on out-maneuvering his opponents and striking from the shadows than overpowering five people at once. Additionally, his detective skills are at front and center.

Alfred Pennyworth

Alfred Pennyworth served in the war as a medic before moving to America. Where he would meet the Wayne Family and become their butler. After the death of Bruce’s parents at age 9, he was the child’s only family left and raised him as his own, though they were never truest ready to call each other father and son. Now he’s basically Bruce’s backstage manager, stopping him from constantly throwing away his life to be perma Batman.

Barbara Gordon // Batgirl - Oracle

Barbara Gordon is the fifteen-year-old daughter of Police Commissioner Gordon, who properly debuts in the first episode of Season 2. She has a large interest in computer science (to the point that her talent outclasses Bruce’s), in addition to gymnastics. Though, the latter has faded overtime. She had recently developed an admiration for the Batman, as not only is her father now working with him, but she believes in him as symbol of what Gotham needs. In a homage to 2004, this Barbara is friends with teenage Pamela Isely. Both of their friend circle outside of each other is… limited. With each being rather passionate about the environment (one slightly more than the other) and Gotham being, well, Gotham, they act as passionate activists in ways some call ‘harassment’ or ‘vandalism’. After Poison Ivy’s transformation, and her father being out in danger, Barbara announces herself as Batgirl, Batman’s first partner. Despite his grievance. Additionally, in the last episodes of the series, she would transition into becoming Oracle.

Dick Grayson // Robin

Typical Dick Grayson backstory, except he’s 11 this time. Having Barbara as a first partner is what motivated Bruce to have the confidence to take Dick in. Dick is meant to finalize the arc that Alfred and Barbra started, who is Bruce (not Batman or Bruce Wayne). This Dick would really be “softened up” as a lot are. This is a child who very, very much wants revenge. And also to play video games. He’s processing a lot.

Cassandra Cain // Batgirl II

All of the Batkids are meant to tie into Bruce’s character which makes Cassandra, the biggest parallel to Bruce of any character, the perfect last Batkid to introduce in the series. She would debut in the Season 3 B premiere, being thirteen years old and a recent run away from her father. Since Barbara would be Batgirl during this, Cass’s story would focus on the groundwork of her character, her learning to speak, processing her values, and bonding with everyone. Only in the last few episodes though, as Barbara becomes Oracle, would Cass suit up to become the second Batgirl.

Significant Ally Characters

Lucius Fox

A friend of Thomas and Martha Wayne and tried his best to assist Bruce once he had to take charge of Wayne Industries. This led to him leading the production of most of Bruce’s Bat tech. He makes a very strong effort to keep his family far, far away from Bruce’s antics.

Commissioner Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon was a detective working for the GCPD. The police chief had drilled into him and his coworkers that a vigilante called “The Batman” was out in Gotham City and making them look like fools. The thing was their number one subject, and Gordon intended on delivering. Until he saw Batman properly in action, and began to realize he was doing more for Gotham any they were. Jim would be Bruce’s first supporter, ultimately paying off in the Season 1 finale where Batman is officially adopted as the full fledged protector of Gotham, where Gordon is promoted to the Police Commissioner.

Renee Montoya // The Question

Renee Montoya was a GCPD detective. While she’s partners with Gordon, she does feel that he has a sense of authority on her due to his age and that it was him who trained her. Not that she respects that authority all that much, but still. She’s the only other GCPD to trust Batman to any degree, ironically both her and Gordon came to the conclusion on their own. During Season 2 however, while Gordon was running the police, Renee would be discharged for disobeying orders. She takes it in stride and dons the moniker “The Question”.

Francine Langstrom

Francine and Kirk Langstrom are scientists at Wayne Enterprises. More of those detail are in Man-Bat’s summary. After Kirk’s transformation, Francine would feel broken. She would spiral into a self deprecating slog. Until Batman needed her help with a genetics issue, which would become her new stable, ie the team’s bio science expert. In addition to working on a cure for Kirk.

Rogues // Season 1

The Joker

The villain with no real name. This Joker goes all in on the comedy. He won’t do anything if there’s not a punchline to it. He exercises a high amount of cartoon physics. He’s the type to have a dramatic monologue that’s actually just a parody on a roof top before leaping off, but it turns out he planted whoopee cushions on his feet which bounces him over to the next building. He has a dark purple jacket and a yellow bowtie over a light purple straight jacket. A big part of why he fixates on Batman is because he acts as a “tether” for him. He’s a way for Joker to not lose his identity.

Oswald Cobblepot // The Penguin

Oswald Cobblepot’s family was once a wealthy name of England. However, they lost their family fortune and fled to America. Oswald was ridiculed for his appearance growing up, and so he believes that restoring his family’s fortune will give him the respect he deserves. He does this by creating an organized crime empire in Gotham. He has a habit of collecting rare and illegal birds to keep as pets.

Selina Kyle // Catwoman

Selina Kyle lost her mother as a young child, leaving her with her abusive father. This lead to her eventually becoming a foster kid, until she was sent to a juvenile detention center. Selina views the world (and Gotham especially) as overrun with people who can do harm without punishment. This is something she tries to correct as Catwoman, while also setting herself up quite nicely. She would start off as a theft for hire (one of her targets being Wayne Industries) before quickly becoming a full time “steals whatever they want ''. I imagine she would look like a slightly more toned version of her The Batman 2020’s portrayal. While her costume would take inspiration from her 2004 design, having yellow to compliment her black instead of red.

Harvey Dent // Two-Face

Harvey Dent was the only friend Bruce had in highschool, though there was the lingering feeling they could have been something else. However, did to Bruce’s nature of being himself, they’ve greatly lost touch. They’ve been brought back together as Harvey is trying to run for Gotham City Mayor, with hope of improving the city. Bruce wants him and Wayne Industries to act as strong supporters. However, the rerunning Mayor, seeing that Harvey is gaining popularity, enlists Penguin and his resources to ‘take him out of the running’. This results in Harvey being held over a more volatile version of the toxin that is rumored to have turned Joker. This ends with one half of Harvey’s face being deformed. He was rushed to the hospital. His doctor, however, saw Harvey’s condition as a potential experiment. They poked and prodded at him until he was eventually found out. Harvey would not have the opportunity to heal from the ordeal, losing a trust in himself to control his own autonomy. His only possession he had was his “lucky coin”, would he would use to make his decisions for him. Once he was out and about, Two-Face wanted to take the Penguin out, and he’ll do it by beating him at his own game. His scared half is a nasty red and he wears a half red and white suit outfit.

Edward Nygma // The Riddler

He has the usual Riddler backstory, however this Edward actually tried a normal outlet first by becoming a game show host. His host outfit being based on his usual costume. However, no one could actually win in his competition. Which resulted in him being fired and being replaced as host. He tried to enact revenge by trapping the network executive, the person who delivered the news to him, the replacement host, and the last competitors. Whoever could solve his riddles / puzzles would get to live. He was stopped by Batman. Seeing that said man could actually solve his riddles, Edward decided he had found his perfect intellectual opponent. In his Riddler outfit he wears a green screen suit over his whole body, with darker green jacket, gloves, and hat, all with gold highlights and small question marks. There’s a large, black question mark on his face.

Bridget Pike // Firefly

Bridget Pike is a pyromaniac who burned down her house when she was thirteen. Her parents died inside of it, along with her younger brother. Who seems to be the only one who’s mention of them that hurts Bridget. She is very interested in machinery, metal working, and combustion application. Which is what leads to her becoming Firefly. Firefly is an occasional fire for hire, but she’s mainly a self employed villain. She’s oddly laid back and she likes screwing with people, which makes her intelligence go under the radar. She also carries a lighter with her at all times. Her suit would combine elements from her comic design, the 2004 Firefly design, and her look in Gotham to a lesser degree.She would have ashy hair, short hair and be a lean and muscular woman with a burn scars on her left lower jaw and right hand. The latter being from her own doing with her lighter. Also she’s trans and her deadname is Garfield.

Johnathan Crane // Scarecrow

Johnathan Crane was “born wrong”. He was raised by his abusive, and very reglious, grandmother. Skipping past the standard backstory (bulling, crows, etc), he first appears with a few of his test subjects are discovered by Batman / the GCPD. After a long investigation, Bruce discovers Johnathan Crane opterating from his college occupation. Here, he fully becomes The Scarecrow. This Scarecrow primarly uses the Fear Toxin in gas form, but he experiements with different methods of injection and different affects. His costume is very a raggidity and torn up, with a face that identical to his future state design. He has a dark overcoat that drapes behind him, giving him a ghost-like presence. He also has a bent and damaged witch-ish hat. He also welds a sharp scythe. Johnathan is a very calculating and observant person, he believes that he is always collecting data, regardless of the situation. He also speaks with a more raspy voice as the Scarecrow. Batman becomes a particular interest to him, since him to him he’s his counterpart, someone who evokes fear all on their own through their persona.

Eduardo Dorrace // Bane

Bane was born inside a prison, and spend most of his childhood there, until he fomulated a plan to escape, long with other prisoners. He was the only one that… made it. He immediately worked to correct his lost years of study, quickly taking an interest in chemistry and biology, speicically in the human body. Not wanting to lose his physicality he built in prison, Bane took an intertest in the wresting ring. Additionally, he also used it to study not only his body, but majority of his opponents. Bane’s straitigentic mind and brutal strength allowed him to dominate the entire field every quickly. In what was supposed to be his advertised “ultimate match” he unveiled his venom. His opponent lost instantly. After that Bane travelled the world, establishing a name for himself. Bane arrived in Gotham City by invitation, hired to take out the Batman. In his debut, he nearly does, if not for Alfred’s intervention. After their first interaction, Bane declares the Bat a proper adversary. Bane has a mostly black outfit that doesn’t divgert too heavily from his usual designs. His tube system starts from his back. It goes into the back of his head, his lower back, his right shoulder, and left upper arm. His venom is a strong red. His mask would start as blank black with white eyes, but he would stain a skull like pattern onto it after gripping his face with a venom covered hand, following his first defeat. Also this feels like a good time to mention that Bane, Firefly, and Scarecrow end up in a heavily implied polycule relationship.

Rogues // Season 2

Pamela Isley // Poison Ivy

Pamela Isley grew up with neglectful parents. Lacking a talent for making friends, she desperately wanted some form of companionship. She needed a pet that she could A: afford and B: wouldn’t be noticed by her parents. Ergo, she got a pet plant. That was the start of a love for plants and the environment. As mentioned before, Pam would become friends with Barbara in highschool. After her and Barbara’s activism had little effect in stopping Power Industries’ volatile plant mutagen, she devises a plan to take it out from inside the building. Barbara immediately worries about their safety, as the plan would be more dangerous than anything they had before. Pam, being very on edge after hearing a yelling fit from her mother, panics and reacts seemingly in anger, and cuts off her call. She goes it alone, which ends in her being mutated into Poison Ivy. She starts riding off high, living her wildest dream. Until it all comes crashing down, that is. She’s stuck in Arkham, she lost her only support system, her parents have disowned her, and she’s constantly hearing plants whenever she’s around them. She’s very scrawny, and after her mutation she has india green skin and her red hair turns into vines, with a few leaves sticking out. Her clothes start as layers of leaves wrapping around her body.

Nora Fries // Mrs. Freeze

Nora Fries became sick with MacGregor’s Syndrome. Her husband, Doctor Victor Fries worked tirelessly to cure her, alongside other professionals. Once Nora entered stage four of the illness, she agreed with Victor for her to enter an experimental cryo-status until he could have a reliable cure. She was given a pair of circular goggles with red lens, to prevent the pod from damaging her eye lids. Some time later, one of the rogues took a fight with Batman towards the same building that Nora stayed in. Not only did the power short circuit, but the collapsing building cracked open her pod. Victor, trying to control his panic, knew that Nora needed out immediately, lest he lose her after all this time. The nature of the cryo-status, her illness, and the recent events resulted in Nora’s body constantly producing ice around her. Her skin turning ice blue. The spouses reach for each other, but on contact frost coates up Victor’s arm up to the rest of his body. To the degree of being inside him as Nora catches him in her arms. The other doctors in the building arrive at the sound of Nora’s panic. Victor is placed into a pod, meant to stabilize his body and keep him alive, though it’s unknown when he’ll be out, or if he’ll survive at all. Nora is given a containment suit. It’s very bulky, and a combination of black-ish blue, grey, and snow blue. Only her forearms are exposed, which often leek out a haze whenever they’re hot enough, as if they were dry ice. Her head is contained by a glass dome, which looks as if there was a constant snow storm inside it. Nora, driven by grief of swapping places with her husband, wants revenge; on Batman and the villain who caused this.

Waylon Jones // Killer Croc

Living with his abusive and alcoholic aunt and dealing with bullying because of his appearance, a kid with vitiligo’s life got a hundred times worse when he started growing scales. Waylon Jone’s father was working on an experiment to create a kind of super-soilders through DNA mutation, though he lacked a test subject. Until he voilentiered his son, who was still in his pregnate wife. His experimentation caused his wife to die during childbirth. Instead of being given a child with crocodilian features, he’s given a perfectly human child. His experiment had failed. He soon died in a “car accident”, leaving Waylon to be raised by his aunt, who was only doing so for the support money. At around ten years old, Waylon would endure a change. Scales would grow where teeth once was, his teeth would sharpen, he would stop being a kid. He would be a reptile, as far as anyone else would be concerned. After enduring years and years of increasingly worse treatment from everyone around him, Waylon would lash out during another confrontation. Though, it’s easiest to say that Waylon didn’t know what he could do. He was ran out of his home town, though he wanted out of Louisiana in general. He also ended a way to survive. He became a circus attraction. The owner set him up to fight alligators, giving him the stage name Killer Croc. Fighting alligators for demeaning entertainment was a bloody career, and his boss wasn’t very keen on paying their agreed amount. During a stop in Gotham City, Waylon “bit the hand that feeds” and fled into the city. Killer Croc is large, imposing, and deeply troubled. He struggles to maintain his humanity. After a life time of dehumanztion, its difficult for him to act as the monster people have always treated him as. He has a head that is almost a mix of Arkham Origins and Unlimited. He has traditional rows of crocodile spikes trailing from his head down his back. He has an underbelly skin that starts from his neck. On his shoulders and arms his scales have ingrown into small spikes. His only clothes are a pair of torn pants and wrappings over his right hand. His scale patterns are based off Nile crocodiles. His vitiligo white coloration appears on the upper left part his face, his right shoulder and pec, his left arm and half his hand, and his right leg.

Hugo Strange

Hugo Strange is the head psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. Strange considers himself above others, a genius who is the only capable of understanding the human mind. He sees the people around him as pawns to be experimented on. He technically debuts in Season 1, but he doesn’t become a ‘rogue’ until he takes an interest in the Batman himself. Gotham’s lack of care for the vulnerable allowed Strange to experiment on his patients.

Harleen Quinzel // Harley Quinn

Dr. Harleen Quinzel is one of the newest psychiatrists at Arkham Asylum. She truely believes in the humanity of every patient at Arkham. She’s the only doctor at the faceillity to oppose Hugo Strange. Bluntly, she’s exhausted, unappreciated, and fells trapped in a cycle of trying to help her patients but making no progress to do the nature of Arkham. However, she still believes in rehabilitating all of her patients, making her take interest in the asylum’s “untreatable” patient, the Joker. It starts simple, Harleen trying to reach out to his humanity, but it becomes something… else. He can read her, she feels seen, he has a promise of adventure and appreciation. He’s meant to seem like the old kidnapping fantasies, a romantic escape from a restrictive life that removes responsibility from the action. However, Joker truely and ultimately does not care about Harley. She’s just another facet to his grand comedy routine to him, completely disposable once she doesn’t land the joke.

In season 3, she doesn’t. Harley Quinn is thrown out, left for dead and presumed to be. This is where a redemption path would come in. Normally, at least. Here, Harley doesn’t want atonement, she wants revenge. She’s given up on her once grand hope for rehabilitation, instead she was every supervillain taken out. Harley has read every file on every villain. She’s analyzed each one. She knows how to wipe them out. Her Season 2 costume is very close to her BTAS appearance, albeit with a more blue-ish black and a slight diamond motif. Her ‘true villain’ transition gives her a costume change. She gets a diamond stylized half red and half black suit. She gets a partial face mask that gives her an ever smiling mouth of pointed teeth along with a white eyeless mask.

Kirk Langstrom // Man-Bat

Kirk and Francine Langstorm were scientists and employees at Wayne Interprises. Both were biologists, with Kirk also having experience in zoology. Said science being used to develop his cure for deafness, including his own. His idea was to create a small mutagen with bat DNA to enhance the recipient’s audio receptors. There was enmence trial and error with the partners’s work, but Bruce did always fight for them to have funding. Eventually though, they needed to have it working. Unfortunately, the serum had been made with slight malfunction. Kirk, against Francine’s concerns, used himself as a test subject. Resulting in him becoming Man-Bat. Kirk would still be conscious in his transformation, but unable to fully control himself. After a long time of prowling Gotham during the night, avoiding almost everything, Kirk is trackened down, successfully captured, and cured. That doesn’t mean it’s a plain happy ending Kirk’s body is experiencing serious withdrawal from the Man-Bat serum. Making him desperate to take to the skies again, especially since he and Francine are.. fractured apart after the ordeal. In a dramatic chain of events, Kirk has the serum, ready to take it to save Bruce and Dick from falling to their deaths. Francine, however, isn’t one for making a mistake twice. She swiped it, taking to save them and transform herself into She-Bat. Kirk then has to deal with the aftermath of losing his wife, wanting to be ease the pain by becoming Man-Bat, dealing with withdrawal, and trying to create a cure for her.

Rogues // Season 3

Alexis Kaye // Punchline

Alexis Kaye is a classmate of Dick Grayson and a wannabe class clown. They consider themselves sworn rivals. During a fateful encounter with the Joker and Harley Quinn, not thinking to run away Alexis responded to the clown prince with a joke. He absolutely loved it, exciting her that someone found her funny. The Joker has a habit of trying to match Batman (getting Harley after he got Batgirl), so with him having Robin he thought it time to have a third partner. Harley hid her discomfort as Joker suited her up to become ‘Punchline’. She, however, couldn’t cross the line that Joker could, so he decided it was time for a third chemical path. He’s stopped by not only the Bats, but also a rebelling Harley. Joker doesn’t take the interruption to his routine lightly, and throws her out of the building through the glass windows, leaving her for dead.

Derek Powers // Blight

Powers Industries was the original business that Pam and Barbara had tried to stop, and where the former was transformed into Poison Ivy. Now, Barbara spots Ivy creeping around the city, and tracks her down. Once found, Ivy explains that she only wishes to stop the company from dumping a failed product into a river that leads to Gotham’s water supply. Hesitantly, they agree to work together. The owner of this company is Derek Powers, who is determined to eliminate Poison Ivy after the terror she caused during her first escapade. This results in him being mutated into Blight. He’s a one episode wonder, as he’s defeated by the combined efforts of Batgirl and Poison Ivy.

Drury Walker // Killer Moth

In order for Harley Quinn’s grand plan to eliminate the other rogues to work, she needs numbers. She mainly recruits average civilians that the rogues have wronged, but she still needs more fire power. Two of grander recruits are Two-Face and Freeze, as they will most likely stop their escapades once the other rogues are dealt with. One of her other recruits is Drury Walker, the self proclaimed Killer Moth. Drury was a studying entomologist when Firefly crashed into his apartment, burning to death most of his moths. He vowed revenge and created a flight suit to become Killer Moth, Firefly’s greatest enemy. Well, maybe he would be if she didn’t constantly forget about him. Killer Moth’s suit is slick and is made of dark purple metal with orange details. He has poofy, dark grey fur collar that sticks out from his suit, giving him moth-like fuzz. He has four robotic wings.

Jaina Hudson // White Rabbit

Jaina Hudson was originally a member of Gotham’s high society. She working on cloning technology that she thought would earn her fame, so it wasn’t something she was just lucky to be born into. However, a scheme of Bane targeted her like, resulting in her and a few others losing almost every penny to their name. She wanted pay back, and decided her cloning technology was how she going to do it. It works by duplicating that matter it is attached to, created a copy of even itself. However, after a short while the clones pull themselves back together. She called herself White Rabbit, multiplication and all. She’s the forth and final villain to be a part of Harley Quinn’s scheme. Yeah, there’s no playboy bunny aspect or race swapping in this.

Season 1’s main idea is to see Bruce stumble through this life, both as Batman and Bruce Wayne, while also dealing with being police enemy #1. Season 2 is more focused on Bruce adapting to having partners and building the Bat Family. While Season 3 is meant to bring it all together, and have Bruce battle over his conviction that everyone and anyone deserves a chance for redemption.

Thanks for reading so far. I hope you’ve liked some of the concepts I’ve put out. I’m always open to elaboration.

#batman reboot au

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meanstreetspodcasts · 4 years ago

Text

Diamond in the Rough

“I was sitting in my office shooting paper clips at a King size horse fly. It was a little sadistic but he was bigger than I was. Well, about the time I had him down on his knees begging for mercy, the door opened…”

There’s nothing in Dick Powell’s early career to suggest he was destined to play hard-boiled private eyes. Had his bosses at Warner Brothers had their way, he’d have stayed in the song-and-dance roles on which he built his career. But thanks to a gamble by a director, Powell kicked off a new chapter to his career and the result were some great radio shows, including one of the medium’s best - Richard Diamond, Private Detective.

Powell got his start in Hollywood in the 30s as a singer in Warner Brothers musicals, including 42nd Street, and On the Avenue. He was frequently cast in the role of a boyish crooner, even as he approached his 40s. Despite his success, Powell was eager to expand into other roles. His efforts were resisted by Warner Brothers, who wanted to keep Powell right where he was, even if he thought it was the wrong place to be. He pursued the lead role in Double Indemnity, but it ultimately went to another actor pegged in “nice guy” roles - Fred MacMurray.

But later in 1944, RKO and director Edward Dmytryk gave Powell the role he’d been waiting for - Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, the film adaptation of the Marlowe novel Farewell, My Lovely. The film was a success, and Powell received rave reviews for his performance. In a flash, he had shed the crooner image he’d been desperate to shake and he embarked on the next stage of his career.

Powell recreated his role as Marlowe on the June 11, 1945 Lux Radio Theater broadcast of Murder, My Sweet, and he starred as private detective Richard Rogue in Rogue’s Gallery from 1945 to 1946. While it was a fine series, it failed to stand out from the crowd of hard-boiled private eyes littering the airwaves in the postwar years. For his next radio effort, Powell wanted to “make something a little bit different of a standard vehicle.” He recorded an audition show as “the man with the action packed expense account,” Johnny Dollar, but he passed on the series for a show that sprang from the mind of Blake Edwards. Edwards would later create the outstanding police procedural The Line-Up for radio, develop Peter Gunn for television, and would become a celebrated writer and director of film arguably most famous for the Pink Panther film series with Peter Sellers.

Powell and his producer, Don Sharp, asked Edwards if he had any ideas for a vehicle for Powell. Edwards said he did (a lie), and went home to write what would become the pilot for Richard Diamond, Private Detective. In Edwards’ original script, Diamond was a former OSS agent; he would evolve into an ex-cop. One trait he would retain as the script evolved was that Diamond was as quick with a quip as he was with his fists. This played to Powell’s natural comedic strengths, and it helped to give the show a unique voice in the sea of detective programs from the era. Unlike other radio shamuses, Diamond would keep up a friendly relationship with his old colleagues on the force - Lt. Walt Levinson, his former partner; and the oafish Sgt. Otis Ludlum, the long-suffering butt of Diamond’s jokes. Diamond flirted with every skirt that came through his office door, but he only had eyes for his Park Avenue girlfriend, Helen Asher. Shows would often close at her apartment, where Diamond would sum up his case and (in a nod to Powell’s old career) Helen might coax him to do a little singing.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective premiered on NBC on April 24, 1949. Powell was supported by Virginia Gregg as Helen; Ed Begley as Levinson; and Wilms Herbert doing double duty as Sgt. Otis and as Helen’s butler, Francis. Joseph Kearns, Peggy Webber, Bill Johnstone, Jack Kruschen, and other West Coast actors filled out the cast. Later in the show’s run, Frances Robinson would take over the role of Helen, and Ted de Corsia, Arthur Q. Bryan (Elmer Fudd), and Alan Reed (Fred Flinstone) would rotate in and out as Levinson.

The show ran without a sponsor for the first year before being picked up by the Rexall Drug Company (“Good health to all from Rexall!”) in June 1950. In January 1951, the show switched networks and picked up Camel cigarettes as its new sponsor. The show took its final bow on June 27, 1952 (although repeats popped up in the summer of 1953). Powell pulled the plug on the show as he entered a third phase of his career as a successful director and producer.

It was in this capacity that Powell brought Richard Diamond to television in 1957 for a four-season run starring David Janssen in the title role, minus the crooning of the radio series. Janssen would later star as Dr. Richard Kimble on The Fugitive. The Diamond TV show is perhaps best known today for its character of Diamond’s secretary, Sam, who was only shown from the waist down to show off her legs. The first actress to furnish Sam’s legs was a young Mary Tyler Moore.

In honor of his anniversary, here are ten of my favorite Richard Diamond radio adventures. Sit back and enjoy some sleuthing and singing with Dick Powell and company in these sensational stories.

"The Lillian Baker Case" - This one is a good showcase for Diamond's girlfriend Helen Asher, who gets to take a rare role in the case of the week. At a department store, Helen witnesses an elderly woman shoplifting. It turns out she's a wealthy eccentric, and later that afternoon she dies - allegedly after leaping from her balcony. (9/3/49)

"The Jerome J. Jerome Case" - Joseph Kearns plays the titular eccentric character - a man who claims to be a millionaire, a genius inventor, and a private detective. He wants to partner with Diamond, but as soon as the gumshoe tries to dismiss him it turns out the kook may have information about an actual murder. (9/17/49)

"The Louis Spence Case" - An unusual, but very exciting, episode finds Diamond racing against time to save his old friend Lt. Walt Levinson. A deranged bomber has escaped from prison, and he's taken the lieutenant hostage. Unless the mayor jumps to his death from city hall within the hour, the bomber will blow the precinct - and Walt - to kingdom come. (3/5/50)

"The Statue of Kali" - It's Richard Diamond's version of The Maltese Falcon (complete with Paul Frees doing his best Sydney Greenstreet). An ivory statue is delivered to Diamond by a dying man, and it's being hunted by nefarious characters from all around the world. (4/5/50)

"The Martha Campbell Kidnap Case" - Diamond is hired to deliver the ransom when a wealthy woman is kidnapped, but both he and the lady's nephew are knocked out, the ransom money is taken, and the kidnap victim is killed. Rick has to use some creativity and theatricality to figure out what happened. (7/26/50)

"The Oklahoma Cowboy Murder Case" - Diamond trades the bright lights of the big city for the clear skies of the plains in this episode that was later adapted as an episode of Peter Gunn. Rick heads west to investigate a suspicious death - a wealthy rancher who expired when he fell from his horse. (9/27/50)

"The Cover-Up Murders" - Rick and Walt partner again when a serial killer stalks the city. Part of his MO is to call the police and boast that he'll kill someone that night at eight o'clock. But what appears to be random madness may have a clear motive, and it's up to Diamond to stop the killings before more bodies drop. (11/22/50)

"Blue Serge Suit" - Jim Backus (later Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island) is Diamond's new client - a tailor whose supply of blue serge is raided and stolen by intruders. When Diamond's own suit is snatched, he's on the trail of a gang of spies. (2/9/51)

"Lady in Distress" - A beautiful woman hires Diamond, and then she drops dead in his office. With nothing to go on - he didn't even know her name - Rick takes the case and tries to learn what had her so scared and what led to her death. It's a story that was recycled quite a few times. Jeff Regan and Johnny Dollar both solved variations of this script, but the Richard Diamond version is my favorite. (2/23/51)

"The Red Rose" - In another story later reworked as a TV episode of Peter Gunn, Diamond is hired to keep a client alive. The man hired a hit man to do away with himself, but he's had a change of heart. Unfortunately, the hit man is a committed professional and he intends to finish the job. (3/2/51)

Check out this episode!

#old time radio #golden age of radio

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ivystjamess · 4 years ago

Audio

WHEN IVY RECEIVED THE EMAIL that the spring show would be spring awakening, her gut told her ‘i can’t do this show.’ eventually, her brain kicked in and told her that was a stupid thought, and she settled on the idea of playing martha. she had a couple of great moments and an emotional story ivy knew she could pull off. additionally, martha’s story was one she could portray without risking her own emotional well being. . .like she might with lead roles such as wendla. as far as ivy was concerned, it was a pretty great plan! that was until she called to share it with her dad. first, he laughed. then, when jesse st.james realized his youngest co-production was being serious, he had no hesitations reminding her just what her last name was. jesse dismissed ivy’s fabricated excuse of girls like molly pearce, margot stanley, or kenna giardi going for the lead and assured her that going for wendla was the right choice. or the only one. between the sting of disappointing her parents or directly causing herself distress, in a heartbeat, ivy would take the latter. so it was settled. come wednesday, ivy would walk into the tibideaux theater, chin held high, resume in hand, and eye on the prize that was wendla bergmann.

auditioning, to ivy, was a science that began long before stepping on stage in front of a director. step one was research of the show and material selection. and step two was rehearsal. typically, ivy would tirelessly run through her song and monologue with her parents or friends, but considering her parents were busy in new york with hello dolly! rehearsals and most of her relationships were currently on the rocks, it looked a little different for this show. this go around, she opted to recording herself on her phone and picking apart her performance, facetiming her parents when they had a free moment to give limited feedback, and insisting eli give harsher criticisms after running her audition materials for her. despite these hurdles, ivy arrived at her audition wednesday feeling comfortable and confident with her selections.

step three was focus. although waiting room etiquette was often debated, ivy didn’t bother chatting with the other auditioners like many advised one should do. she needed to keep a level head and maintain her precision before stepping into the “arena.” in fact, the entire day leading up to an audition or big performances, ivy rested her voice and hydrated to the extreme. today was no exception. she only broke that rule for vocal adrenaline rehearsal, which she had just left, and to do some vocal warm ups in the car before entering the building. by now, the regular circuit of auditioners knew not to bug ivy as she sat quietly in her chair, drank lots of water, and reviewed her song and monologue in her head. book open in her lap, ivy ran her finger over a line in hopelessly devoted to you (just in case she was asked to sing it) when the audition facilitator called her name. with a deep breath out, ivy rose to her feet, rolled her shoulders back, clutched her black binder to her chest, and entered through the doors.

this was step four. the moment she stepped inside, she flashed a bright smile in bryan ryan’s direction as she made her way to the stage. “good evening.” she greeted, pausing only when she reached him to pull out her resume and headshot to give him. it was an entirely unnecessary precaution, but one that ivy always practiced. it was only professional! what wasn’t professional though, was bryan ryan musing about how she had been a joy to work with during into the woods as she walked down the rest of the ramp, and up the steps to the stage. sure, ivy loved the compliment, but did mr.ryan have no tact? still, she thanked him with another picture perfect smile and began her slate.

“hello, i’m ivy st.james, and today i will be performing say the word by kerrigan and lowdermilk, from their groundbreaking first album, our first mistake.” it had been an easy choice once ivy had dug it out from her mom’s sheet music collection in the basement. the song musically sounded enough like some of the softer moments in the show, but lyrically it was easy to envision wendla singing about melchior, how much he taught her, how she thought of him, and how deep her love truly was. there was a lingering queasiness ivy had when thinking about stepping into wendla’s shoes like that, but there was definitely a couple of boys she could think of who had taught her a couple of things.

carrying on with her slate, ivy announced, “i will also be performing juliet’s monologue from act two, scene two. written by william shakespeare.” a charming smile, and then, “obviously.” of course ivy knew shakespearean monologues were often hit or miss, but she had a decent grasp on the material, and while the spring awakening musical was rather progressive, it’s time period was not. if all went as planned (which it should) it would showcase her ability to convey one of the most tragic love stories of all time, and wendla shared a love with melchior that was nothing if not tragic.

as she moved to the final portion of her slate, ivy faltered as a rare pit of nerves pooled in her stomach. was she suddenly agitated at the notion of solidifying her grab for wendla or was it the idea of embodying her for the course of her actual audition that left her thrown off? nevertheless, ivy was quick to shake away the feeling and conclude her slate, “i would like to be placed in any role, but i would love it for you to consider me as wendla. thank you.” and with that, she was moving to provide sheet music for the accompaniment while bryan ryan looked over her audition information. now onto what she had been brought up to do: perform.

reaching center stage, ivy looked over to the accompaniment and nodded when she was ready. as soon as the instrumentals began, the lights around her dimmed to dark, leaving her standing in a single spotlight with her feet solidly planted and a series of emotions playing across her face: gratitude, longing, love, and loss.

“sometimes when i look at you, i don't know why you’d wait. school girl in a little world, who learns everything late.”

ivy sang gently, not daring to move her feet a single step. this song would be one where she communicated feelings through her face, vocals, and sparing hand gestures. it wasn’t hidden that ivy could thrash around outrageously like some numbers in the show required, but this song wasn’t a moment like that. it was tender, soul baring, and not to be overdone. hands now rested delicately over her chest, the next lyrics slipped off her tongue in a soft stream that floated down to mr.ryan’s ears and hopefully tickled whatever he was looking for in a wendla. “i turn the light out under the covers all I think of is you. just you.”

“say the word and i just might listen. say the word, and you might get your way. loving you should be easier, but say the word, and i might have to stay.”

at the chorus, ivy revealed the faintest of smiles and continued singing with her heart as she tilted her head sideways up towards the spotlight, acting as if it’s beam were the sunny warmth of love. fully in her zone now, fleeting thoughts of the boys she’d loved raced through her mind and added a realistic quality to her performance before she reached the second verse and snapped her eyes open for the first time since she began. making eye contact with the “audience” from the second verse onward, ivy became more generous with belting and vocal runs as she tried to capture the essence of the doe eyed and naive wendla bergmann. there weren’t many roles ivy couldn’t pull off, but it was relatively easy to get in touch with this one. after all, at one point she’d been a similar type of girl as wendla.

reflecting on that time built a tightness in her chest, but only fueled her performance to be all the more powerful. was she stronger with or without that part of her in tact? as she sang, she seemed to be trying to find the answer to that question. ivy came up empty handed, emotionally and physically. all she had now was a regionals trophy and a laundry list of things that made her sad. but what was it that she really wanted? if ivy really thought about it, it was simple...

“i want to be the girl there by your side. just tell me when, just tell me how. tell me i’m ready now. today. say…”

by the emotional climax of the song, ivy was still center stage as she belted out with everything she had. with outstretched arms and tears rolling down her cheek, she utilized her vibrato and used her voice to try and push all the non-character related feelings she was currently having from her mind. it wasn’t exactly successful in the way she wanted it to be, but it certainly enhanced her performance. reaching the final set of lyrics, ivy skillfully pulled all of that energy back in and slowly brought her arms in with it as she concluded on stay.

ivy gave bryan ryan a moment to sit with the song before transitioning into her monologue. following say the word, ivy felt like she had emotional whiplash, but also, an odd sense of clarity. shortly after, she made it through the monologue as juliet with expert delivery and all the necessary elements to make it relatable to her desired role. and if anything, it was easier for ivy to get through. she was able to have fun with it. not often was it that one got to revisit a role they played in middle school!

truth be told, when all was concluded, ivy might have turned to mr.ryan with that same rehearsed smile, but she was ready to get off stage and breathe after that taxing performance. it left her a lot to sit with. fortunately, he dismissed her with an excellent job and a you’ll hear back by friday. so again, ivy thanked him, grabbed her book from the accompanist and hurried out so the next individual could head in.

now came step five, the waiting.

THE END.

#crhq:spring #mentions: molly #mentions: margot #mentions: kenna #//sorry for the background noise #//and sorry for the length!!#tldr: ivy wants wendla. she sang say the word + did a monologue from romeo and juliet while going on a bit of an emotional journey

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vanessakirbyfans · 4 years ago

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Ignore the cringeworthy title, which brings to mind several lives’ worth of Lifetime movies — Pieces of a Woman, a portrait of personal disintegration and the from-the-ashes process of piecing things back together, gives you three distinct reasons to pay attention to this late-breaking entry in the seasonal Pretty People in Pain sweepstakes. (It hit theaters on December 30th for a qualifying run; it starts streaming on Netflix on January 7th.) The first is The Shot, a set piece that kickstarts the drama in motion. We’ve already briefly met Martha (Vanessa Kirby), an expectant mother days away from her due date. And we’ve been introduced to her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf), a construction worker who’s building a bridge in Boston. She is warm, witty, nurturing; he is rough-hewn, earthy and, per his own description, boorish (“now there’s a Scrabble word,” he adds). Martha’s middle-class family, especially her brittle and controlling mother (Ellen Burstyn), doesn’t much care for this blue-collar dude, but the couple love each other. They’re ready to eagerly embrace parenthood.

So when Martha’s water breaks, Sean distracts her with dumb jokes — already with the dad humor! — and places a call to their midwife. The woman they’ve prepped with, who the two have trusted to guide them through a home birth, is unavailable. A substitute named Eva (Molly Parker) will be assisting them in her stead. She shows up, helps with what turns out to be a somewhat fraught delivery … and then things suddenly, inexplicably take a turn for the worse.

The fact that the Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó presents this entire sequence of events in what’s designed to resemble a continuous 24-minute shot sounds, on paper, like just another virtuoso move designed to induce a “how’d they do that?” shock and awe more characteristic of magic shows. Yet the director, making his English-language debut, isn’t indulging in hollow, look-ma-no-cuts showing off for its own sake; by letting viewers experience these wrong turns in real time, he’s both establishing your bond with these characters and letting his actors dictate the scene’s free fall from joy to tragedy. Cowritten by his longtime collaborator Kata Wéber, Pieces draws from her play of the same name (along with a very personal experience), and you can see the theatrical origins in this extended set-up. But that aspect works in the movie’s favor here. It’s not the fluid, snaking and craning camera that draws you in but Kirby’s animalistic grunts and cries, LaBeouf’s manic running around and tender encouragement, Parker’s authoritative earth-mother commandeering that slowly turn hesitant as the situation spirals out of everyone’s control. The “single” take is not the showcase itself so much as the stage for it.

Mundruczó’s breakthrough film, the 2014 Cannes prizewinner/canine-payback parable White God, proved he could meld feeling onto feats of incredible technical prowess — just try to direct an actual pack of 30 dogs to behave like an organized, vengeful army. Displaying your chops while also giving your performers room to do their best work, especially in a story that threatens to tiptoe into maudlin territory at any moment, is far more impressive then how much you can whip a Panaflex around. Not to mention that he’s marshaling a truly odd and unique cast: Name another drama that features LaBeouf, Burstyn, one of the Safdie brothers, Succession‘s Sarah Snook and stand-up comic Iliza Schlesinger in the same scene, much less the same movie. It’s a delicate balance, and this is where the second and third stand-out aspects enter the picture.

Everyone deals with the tragedy in their own way, from chilly disassociation to bad-habit relapses to furtive stabs at fucking the grief away. (To say that a sequence involving LaBeouf aggressively pursuing sex with Kirby before angrily storming away plays … incredibly uncomfortably in light of recent news is to put it mildly. There’s a fury in his work here that makes you feels like a voyeur, and not in a good way.) Martha’s mother chooses to pursue her catharsis by holding Eva accountable via legal means. Cue: The Monologue.

The matriarch has gathered the family together for dinner, in the hopes of, among other things, convincing Martha to go forward with a lawsuit. There is resistance. So Mom recounts the story of how sheer luck saved her as a baby, at which point Burstyn hand-delivers an elderly woman reopening a decades-old wound. There is so much kindness and sorrow, survivalist grit and a pleading sense of grace in the reading; Burstyn herself has said that she improvised part of the speech as the cameras were rolling. No one needs convincing that she’s a national treasure, yet to observe the veteran Oscar-winner elevating what could’ve been a clichéd exercise in pushing emotional pressure points is to observe the power of acting. It’s a showstopping turn in miniature, from someone with a career already bursting with them.

Pieces of a Woman largely belongs to the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown at its center, however, and it’s Vanessa Kirby who gifts the film with The Performance. London theatergoers were lucky enough to catch the 32-year-old on stage, doing Shakespeare and Chekhov; the rest of us have been content to watch her flex as a clutch supporting player (The Crown) and action-movie femme fatale/hero (Mission: Impossible — Fallout, Hobbs & Shaw). But her profoundly traumatized Martha is something unique, a fully formed and in-focus picture of someone falling apart. She is a walking, talking, dead-eyed raw nerve, and after being partially responsible for the most realistic screen labors in recent memory, Kirby plays the bulk of her scenes in the key of shellshocked. It’s less a performance of repression than recession, as Martha keeps drawing back into herself or numbly shuffling through her interactions and routines. When she does occasionally lash out, it’s like the flailing gestures of a drowning person.

This is an extraordinary example of how to craft an empathetic take on psychic agony bit by bit, piece by piece, and without pandering for easy points. And it’s the sort of achievement that doubles as a coronation of Kirby as a first-rate actor, that next-gen star willing to crack herself open for a role. She’s a much-needed anchor here as well, notably when Weber’s script and Mundruczó’s conceptual choices veer off into shaky territory. There’s surely a way to express the ginger process of healing other than the heavy-handed visual metaphor of a bridge that, as we see the dates go by, slowly comes together as a solid structure; should you think you’re imagining some of those Biblical signifiers that pop up, an ambiguous Garden-of-Eden coda lets you know you’re not losing your mind. Not even Kirby can keep a late-act courtroom address from collapsing under its own weight.

But riding shotgun with her maternal phoenix makes up for a lot, and out of the trio of reasons to seek this work out, it’s the experience of shuffling miles in Martha’s blood-flecked boots that compels you to stay with it. So many movies deal with grief, anguish and personal reformation as little more than a chance for performative grandstanding. Pieces of a Woman has some of those moments, too. What’s fueling it, however, is a very real sense of what’s happens underneath all of the things we associate with melodrama — the tiny implosions beneath the surfaces. You merely see the impact instead of the demolition itself, but you see the damage done nonetheless. And when it’s all over, you see the hard work of someone succeeding in, hopefully, becoming whole again.

#Vanessa Kirby #Pieces of a Woman #Articles #Review

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gravecinema · 5 years ago

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Why Heathers is the Best High School Movie of the 80's - 06/03/2020

The 1980’s brought forth many a high school movie. The most famous movies were the John Hughes movies such as Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. These are all great movies in their own right, but it was a movie by director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters in 1989 that would prove to be the defining high school movie of that decade. That movie was Heathers.

Heathers is anchored by a career performance from Winona Ryder. Winona Ryder has said she was motivated to make this movie because of her strong feelings about girl cliques, the pervasive bullying that goes on in high schools and the "hellishness" of the high school experience. With a character name of Veronica, she is the black sheep in the group of four popular girls at school, with the other three girls are all named Heather, which is where the title of the film comes from. Unlike the more teen-friendly John Hughes movies, Heathers is an R-rated dark comedy covering the themes of body image, depressive isolation, date rape, murder, suicide, and toxic relationships. Veronica is just trying to be like one of the other Heathers at the start of the movie, even though she hates the peer pressure of doing things she’s morally against. All that is about to change though, when she starts a relationship with the new bad-boy student at school named JD, played by a young Christian Slater.

Christian Slater has a star-making performance in the movie, and his character of JD is the main driver of the plot. JD uses his influence on Veronica after hooking up with her to push her towards killing everyone whom he considers to be a bad element in the school, while having the idea of making them all look like suicides. Even though when they kill the first Heather it can be considered somewhat of an unintended accident, JD starts to like the idea of killing everyone that he feels deserves it. JD is an immensely tragic character, which is part of what makes him such a great antagonist. After witnessing the suicide of his mother when he was a kid, JD carries that trauma along with being an outcast wherever the next place his dad moves him to. He is also the only character in the movie to successfully commit suicide at the climax of the film. He’s a character that especially has a much deeper meaning today after school and mass shooting events such as Columbine in 1999.

One great strength of Heathers that always stands out to me is the memorable lines from the fantastic script by Daniel Waters. It contains great quotable lines such as “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” “Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count,” and “Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.” The best and most memorable line of all though has to be when the father of one two football players who they believe were killed in an apparent gay suicide pact is giving a eulogy. “My son’s a homosexual, and I love him. I love my dead gay son.” You’ll be quoting Heathers for a while with friends long after you’ve seen it.

Heathers also has a memorable and distinct soundtrack with a score by David Newman. An opening and closing song of “Que Sera, Sera” also provides a nice theme for the movie. It bookends the start and ending of the film and gives the story a nice whimsical feel to it. The only other featured song used in the film provides the main message of the whole movie. The name of the song: “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).” Fairly on the nose if you ask me.

One thing that always stands out to me when I watch this movie is the wonderful display of 80’s fashion. The blazers, designs, and hairstyles could only have come from the 80’s. The character of JD is the only one who looks the most timeless out of the bunch, since a dark trench coat never goes out of style. The most interesting costume choice though is whatever the hell the spirit of Heather Chandler was wearing in a dream sequence. I guess that’s the beauty of dream sequences. You can do weird stuff in them.

The best thing about the costume design in Heathers aside from its 80’s-ness has to be the use of colors. The five major characters each have a prominent color and by extension a certain emotion attached to them. Veronica is dressed in pure blue, the alpha Heather Chandler is dressed in power red, Heather McNamara in innocent yellow, Heather Duke in secondary green, and JD in evil black. One thing I love about this is that it shows character transitions at certain points in the film. After Heather Chandler is killed and taken out of the top of the high school hierarchy, Heather Duke stops wearing green and adopts the color of red in her wardrobe to signify her stepping into the role of the new Queen of the colony. The red hairband that she takes after Heather Chandler’s demise also represents a sort of crown for this role. This symbolism is further cemented when at the end of the film Veronica takes the hairband off Heather Duke and puts it on herself proclaiming that there’s a new sheriff in town.

The real staying-power of Heathers rests in the major themes that it tackles. Even though the script plays the movie up as more of a satire with how the high school faculty is represented in their reactions to the suicides, the major commentary on teenage suicide and toxic relationships carry heavy weight. It shows how peer pressure can carry a heavy influence on the major social groups in school, and how being an outcast from that group can cause major depression and lead to suicidal thoughts. The scene where Veronica stops Heather McNamara from committing suicide in the bathroom is the main showcase of this. It tackles the questions of why a teenager would feel that they have no choice but to commit suicide, and also why doing so would be stupid. We also see the outcasted Martha attempt to commit suicide, only to later reveal that she was unsuccessful in her attempt, which prompts Heather Duke to mock her even more for being a failure at that.

The relationship that starts between Veronica and JD is a textbook example of how one partner can have a toxic effect on the other, leading them both down a path of self-destruction. They practically beat you on the head with it as JD literally self-destructs at the end of the film. Veronica is ultimately saved by her rejection of JD and his codependent bullshit. She sees the futility of the path JD is taking and is doing her best to get away from it. JD lost the love of his mother when was young and shows his disconnect with his dad. He then shows a need for the love of Veronica and her acceptance of him with his views and choices. When she stops giving him both, that’s the trigger that leads him down his final path of self-destruction. It was only through the direct actions of Veronica that he is prevented from taking the rest of the school and the people that he hates with him.

There were originally several alternate endings for the film than the one they ultimately decided on. The original ending from scriptwriter David Waters had JD being successful in blowing up the entire school, and then ending the movie with everyone getting together in a sort of prom in heaven where everyone got along and accepted one another just as JD proclaimed while trying to blow up the school. When that was rejected for being too dark since they all died, the writer then had Martha stab Veronica when she was trying to make peace with her at the end, claiming that she is a Heather while Veronica is denying it. In the end, we ultimately got the ending that was used in the film when Martha accepted the peace offering, and the movie ends on a more upbeat and hopeful note.

The more upbeat ending was a good choice, since the cult following that would grow with the movie over time would eventually lead a successful stage musical adaptation in 2014. The musical is great at expanding on the themes from the movie, using the power of musical numbers to help highlight them. The great and iconic line of “I love my dead gay son” even gets its very own song. I recommend listening to the West End version of the show, since that version replaces one song with a better one and adds two of the best songs in the whole show. Musicals always have songs containing certain emotional themes and the “Fuck you” song is always my favorite song in any musical, and “I Say No” is the best “Fuck you” song from a musical that I’ve heard in a long while.

Heathers will always be a great movie and one of my favorites to rewatch. The themes contained within will continue to resonate with high schoolers today. While there are other high school movies made during the 80’s that teens can also identify with, none of them quite have the biting satire and dark themes that Heathers provides. For me, Heathers will always be the best high school movie of the 80’s.

#heathers #grave cinema #review #video essay #high school #80's #winona ryder #christian slater #1989 #critique

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ty-talks-comics · 5 years ago

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Best of DC: Week of February 12th, 2020

Best of this Week: Pennyworth R.I.P. One-Shot - James Tynion IV and Various Artists and Colorists

Some people think Dick Grayson is the glue that holds the Batfamily together, some say that it's really Tim Drake, but we all know that it has always been Alfred.

Alfred has been by Bruce's side since the day that Thomas and Martha Wayne were killed in Crime Alley. Alfred raised the boy from a young age and watched as he became a hero that Gotham City could truly be proud of. Alfred even got to see Bruce raise many kids of his own over the years and sas there to pick up the slack when Bruce was too injured, angry or didn't know how to talk to them. Alfred was patient. Alfred was loving. Alfred was amazing and will be sorely missed.

Alfred met his tragic end during the recent City of Bane arc and even after that wrapped up, it still took time for the rest of the family to get together and mourn his passing. Bruce has been trying to cope with it all by throwing himself into his Gotham Renovation Project and various superheroics. Barbara’s been dealing with her own issues in the form of a rogue Oracle. Damian has the Titans, Jason is on the outs with the family and Dick (Ric) doesn’t even really remember Alfred.

In the end, Bane managed to do what he set out to accomplish in the first place: He Broke the Bat.

Not only did he break Batman, he broke the entire family as a whole as shown from the very first shot of this book. Eddy Barrows presents us with a pulled out shot, showing a statue of Alfred in the middle of the new Alfred J. Pennyworth Children’s Hospital - a momentous honor meant to save kids just like Bruce. However, this scene also symbolizes the distance between all of the family. Tynion IV does a great job of scripting their inner thoughts as told by an unseen narrator.

Damian, being the one who was there, feels the weight of his disobedience and sees things as his fault. Tim hearkens back to the time after Jason died and fears for Bruce, knowing the darkness inside of him. Jason was told to NOT come, but Alfred had always treated him right and Barbara feels like she knows how to fix things, but who’s to say that she’s in the right mind to do so either? And Ric… well, Ric doesn’t know why he’s there, but he feels obligated.

Barrows does an amazing job of showing the pain through their forlorn expressions and lowered heads. I assume that Adriano Lucas was the one who colored these scenes because they make excellent use of cold blues to emphasize the sadness of the Family. Barrows also does something that a few artists struggle with in distinguishing each of the boys from each other. They each have distinct hairstyles and facial structures and it’s a nice touch for such a tragic event. Soon after, Tim finds a little dive bar for them to meet in and they each bicker a bit before Bruce arrives for toasts and memories.

This book also does an excellent job of showcasing personal moments that we never see between the kids and Alfred. Beginning with Damian, Chris Burnham draws a flashback to one of the first times that Alfred bails Damian out after he disobeys Batman about going out on patrols. Tynion IV and Burnham capture Damian’s early petulance through his childish pouting superiority complex. We see that Damian loved Alfred because he was willing to be patient with the young boy and Bruce was just getting used to having a trained assassin as a son.

Damian is still widely considered the worst Robin, but that idea has long passed its expiration date as the young lad has grown significantly over the years. In the beginning he could have killed anyone and not felt a lick of remorse for it, but over time, thanks to the softening of Bruce and Alfred, the boy has learned to care and take responsibility for things that weren’t even his fault. He tears up thinking that the rest of the family blamed him for Alfred’s death and regrets that he didn’t do more to stop Bane before leaving the bar.

Tim speaks next and Marcio Takara takes over art for Tim’s flashback. The third Robin is still arguably the smartest, but during a hectic fight with Firefly, he leaves some of his gear and Alfred bails him out by sneaking into the GCPD to retrieve the items. It’s very action packed and does well to show that sometimes Tim loses his cool too, but after the recollection, Tim says that he would step in for Alfred if Batman ASKS him to do so. When Bruce refuses, Tim makes a point that this is exactly like how Bruce was after Jason, but this time he has to pull himself through like an adult before he too leaves.

Tim is usually the Robin that’s touted as being the one who saved Batman during his most destructive period. He’s always been the level headed one, but in recent years he’s been put through the ringer. From being kidnapped by an unseen entity and thought dead for almost a year (Detective Comics, 2017), to fighting an alt-future, villainous version of himself (Detective Comics, 2018) and finally reuniting with his Young Justice friends and dealing with the chaos of that (Young Justice, 2019). Tim is tired and even more so of the darkness that shrouds Bruce and the Family.

Jaybird raises his glass to Alfred next and offers a counter to Tim. He says that maybe Batman would have worked out his issues after Jason’s death if a new kid didn’t swing in and just try to relieve him of the pain. Jason has always been the most extreme of the family, but he’s never been above asking Alfred for help. As a street urchin, Jason doesn’t trust most people, but despite this Alfred always thought to check up on Bruce’s second son and tried to bring him back to the side of the angels. Jason never bit, but he appreciated the effort.

He tells Barbara that he won’t chastise Bruce for how he feels because they’re all in that same spot right now, but he does want Bruce to work towards fixing it. Jason knows better than the rest of them what it feels like to have lost (Heroes in Crisis, 2018), but he also knows what it’s like to be there on the fringes with no one there to help.

Batgirl is often lost in the conversations that usually revolve around the boys, but she shouldn’t be. Barbara’s intellect exceeds that of Tim by a wide margin, but that intelligence also comes with an intuitiveness given to her by her father, James Gordon, as they live in the heart of Gotham. Barbara makes the most logical statement about the general fear swelling in Gotham after Bane’s rise and defeat and the lack of trust in Bat themed heroes given everything that The Batman Who Laughs has done. Bruce’s reconstruction project isn’t helping either as it’s just another shiny coat of paint over a city whose problems run down to its roots.

Babs may not have grown up in the mansion like the boys, but Alfred cared for her just the same, effectively being Batman’s first daughter...niece maybe the better description? David Lafuente does the art for her flashback and it’s a more cutesy style with thick defining lines and lots of faraway shots as we see Alfred and Barbara hiking up a mountain just outside of Gotham City. The actions of Killing Joke absolutely still happened and to celebrate the anniversary of Barbara leaving spine rehab, Alfred wanted to celebrate with a hike and a cupcake.Barbara says that they need Bruce to come back and be the person that they all need him to be before she leaves as well.

Finally, we hear from Ric Grayson. The former Dick Grayson was another victim of Bane’s vendetta, getting shot in the head by the KGBeast in an attempt to further hurt Batman. Aside from his Flying Grayson memories and a few scant ones with Alfred and Bruce, he doesn’t remember his life as Nightwing, with the Titans or the rest of the Batfamily and that probably makes this book harder to swallow. Dick has always been the elder brother to each of them and truly is Batman’s voice of reason after Alfred, but Dick is gone.

So Ric, knowing he needs to step up and say something to get Bruce to help himself, asks him to tell whatever story Dick Grayson might have if he were still around. Bruce then speaks up about a time where Dick found out that Alfred had been leaving flowers at the sight of the Waynes murder to celebrate the anniversary of their marriage where Bruce had been leaving flowers on the anniversary of their deaths. Dick tells Bruce that Alfred always wanted to tell him that their deaths had saved countless lives and even the world at times.

It’s grim and kinda dark, but in the grand scheme of things, Ric is right. Batman has given everything he can to the world under his mission of Justice and that never would have happened if the Waynes survived, just look at Batman: The Gift (Batman #45 - #47, 2018). In that timeline, the Waynes did survive and it was a nightmare world where crime was rampant, Dick was crazed Batman like Flashpoint Thomas Wayne and everything was just wrong. Ric may not have known all of tht, but he did know that Alfred was right and that Bruce needed to be strong for him.

Before Ric leaves, he hangs a picture on the bar wall while Tynion IV and Barrows convey the emotional impact of Ric’s act through four panels without dialogue. Bruce looks at the picture and not only can readers feel the tears swelling up in the corners of their eyes, but we almost feel as if Bruce is as well as he stars upon a picture of the core Batfamily with Alfred as the focus between them.

I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know if I’m emotionally ready to deal with a Batman future without Alfred. He’s always been such a faithful companion and foil to our dour hero and his passing has only made Batman that much darker. The cynic in me knows that DC Won’t keep him dead forever, especially with an incoming Crisis that may undo everything from the last four years of storytelling, but at the same time it might not. I think the idea to kill Alfred was a good one to create awesome moments like it did in this book, but who will take his place?

Could this really be Tim’s time to step away from the masks and go behind the scenes like Oracle did? Could Alfred’s daughter, Julia, see a return since she hasn’t been seen since I think All Star Batman in 2016? Will Lucius Fox actually stay in the position as he’s there now in Detective Comics? Who knows?

All that matters is the life of Alfred and the mark he left on our favorite characters.

Also, support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TyTalksComics

#alfred pennyworth #bruce wayne #damian wayne #dick grayson #barbara gordon #tim drake #jason todd #dc comics #james tynion iv #eddy barrows #peter j tomasi #comics #comic review

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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How All in the Family Changed the TV Landscape

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All in the Family is roundly considered a touchstone for television achievement now, but when it debuted 50 years ago, even the network carrying it hoped it would fizzle quickly and unnoticed. CBS put an army of operators at phone lines expecting a barrage of complaints from offended middle Americans demanding its cancellation. Those calls didn’t come. What came was a deluge of support from people hoping this mid-season replacement was a permanent addition to the network’s lineup. The premiere episode contained a considerable list of “television firsts.” One of these rarities continues to remain scarce on network TV: creator Norman Lear trusted the intelligence of the viewing audience. To celebrate All in the Family’s 50th anniversary, we look back at its journey from conception to broadcast, and how it continues to influence and inform entertainment and society today.

Actor Carroll O’Connor, who was a large part of the creative process of the series, consistently maintains he took the now-iconic role of Archie Bunker because All in the Family was a satire, not a sitcom. It was funny, but it wasn’t a lampoon. It was grounded in the most serious of realities, more than the generation gap which it openly showcased, but in the schism between progressive and conservative thinking. The divide goes beyond party, and is not delineated by age, wealth, or even class. The Bunkers were working class. The middle-aged bigot chomping on the cigar was played by an outspoken liberal who took the art of acting very seriously. The audience cared deeply, and laughed loudly, because they were never pandered to. They were as respected as the authenticity of the series characters’ parodies.

Even the laughs were genuine. All in the Family was the first major American series to be videotaped in front of a live audience. There was never a canned laugh added, even in the last season when reactions were captured by an audience viewing pre-taped episodes. Up to this time, sitcoms were taped without audiences in single-camera format and the laugh track was added later. Mary Tyler Moore shot live on film, but videotape helped give All in the Family the look of early live television, like the original live broadcasts of The Honeymooners. Lear wanted to shoot the series in black and white, the same as the British series, Till Death Us Do Part, it was based on. He settled for keeping the soundstage neutral, implying the sepia tones of an old family photograph album. The Astoria, Queens, row house living room was supposed to look comfortable but worn, old-fashioned and retrograde, mirroring Archie’s attitudes: A displaced white hourly wage earner left behind by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

“I think they invented good weather around 1940.”

American sitcoms began shortly after World War II, and primarily focused on the upper-middle class white families of Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. I Love Lucy’s Ricky Ricardo, played by Cuban-American Desi Arnaz, ran a successful nightclub. The Honeymooners was a standout because Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden was a bus driver from Bensonhurst (the actual address on that show, 328 Chauncey Street, is in the Bedford–Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn). American TV had little use for the working class until the 1970s. They’d only paid frightened lip service to the fights for civil rights and the women’s liberation movements, and when the postwar economy had to be divided to meet with more equalized opportunities there was no one to break it down in easy terms. The charitable and likable Flying Nun didn’t have the answer hidden under her cornette. It wasn’t even on the docket in Nancy, a 1970 sitcom about a first daughter. The first working family on TV competing in the new job market was the Bunkers, and they had something to say about the new competition.

Social commentary wasn’t new on television. Shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek routinely explored contemporary issues, including racism, corporate greed, and the military action in Vietnam, through the lens of fantasy and science fiction. The war and other unrest were coming into the people’s living rooms every night on the evening news. The times they were a-changing, but television answered to sponsors who feared offending consumers.

Ah, but British TV, that’s where the action was. Lear read about a show called Till Death Us Do Part, a BBC1 television sitcom that aired from 1965 to 1975. Created by Johnny Speight, the show set its sights on a working-class East End family, spoofing the relationship between reactionary white head of the house Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), his wife Else (Dandy Nichols), daughter Rita (Una Stubbs), and her husband Mike Rawlins (Anthony Booth), a socialist from Liverpool. Lear recognized the relationship he had with his own father between the lines.

CBS wanted to buy the rights to the British show as a star vehicle for Gleason, Lear beat out CBS for the rights and personalized it. One of the reasons All in the Family works so well is because Lear wasn’t just putting a representative American family on the screen, he was putting his own family up there.

“If It’s Too Hot in The Kitchen, Stay Away from The Cook.”

Archie Bunker dubbed his son-in-law, Michael Stivic, played by Rob Reiner, a “Meathead, dead from the neck up.” This was the same dubious endearment Lear’s father Herman called him. The same man who routinely commanded Lear’s mother to “stifle herself.” Lear’s mother accused her husband, a “rascal” who was sent to jail for selling fake bonds of being “the laziest white man I ever saw,” according to his memoir Even This I Get to Experience All three lines made it into all three of the pilots taped for All In the Family. When Lear’s father got out of prison after a three-year stretch, the young budding writer sat through constant, heated, family discussions. “I used to sit at the kitchen table and I would score their arguments,” Lear remembers in his memoir. “I would give her points for this, him points for that, as a way of coping with it.”

All in the Family, season 1, episode 1, provides an almost greatest hits package of these terse and tense exchanges, which also taught Lear not to back away from the fray. He served as a radio operator and gunner in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, earning an Air Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters after flying 52 combat missions, and being among the crew members featured in the books Crew Umbriag and 772nd Bomb Squadron: The Men, The Memories. Lear partnered with Ed Simmons to write sketches for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s first five appearances on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1950. They remained as the head writers for three years. They also wrote for The Ford Star Revue, The George Gobel Show, and the comedy team Rowan and Martin, who would later headline Laugh-In.

Lear went solo to write opening monologues for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, and produce NBC’s sitcom The Martha Raye Show, before creating his first series in 1959, the western The Deputy, which starred Henry Fonda. To get Frank Sinatra to read Lear’s screenplay for the 1963 film Come Blow Your Horn, Lear went on a protracted aerial assault. Over the course of weeks, he had the script delivered while planes with banners flew over Sinatra’s home, or accompanied by a toy brass band or a gaggle of hens. Lear even assembled a “reading den” in Ol’ Blue Eyes’ driveway, complete with smoking jacket, an ashtray and a pipe, an easy chair, ottoman, lamp, and the Jackie Gleason Music to Read By album playing on a portable phonograph. After weeks of missed opportunities, Lear remembers Sinatra finally read the script and “bawled the shit out of me for not getting it to him sooner.”

The creative perseverance Lear showed just to get the right person for the right part is indicative of the lengths Lear would go for creative excellence. He would continue to fight for artistic integrity, transforming prime time comedy with shows like Good Times, One Day at a Time, and the first late-night soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. He brought legendary blue comedian Redd Foxx into homes with Sanford and Son, also based on a British sitcom, Steptoe and Son, which starred Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, best known for playing Paul McCartney’s grand-dad in A Hard Day’s Night. But before he could do these, and the successful and progressive All in the Family spinoffs The Jeffersons and Maude, he had to face battles, big and small, over the reluctantly changing face of television.

“Patience is a Virgin”

After Lear beat CBS to the rights to adapt Till Death Us Do Part he offered the show to ABC. When it was being developed for the television studio, the family in the original pilot were named the Justices, and the series was titled “Justice for All,” according to a 1991 “All in the Family 20th Anniversary Special.” They considered future Happy Days dad Tom Bosley, and acclaimed character actor Jack Warden for the lead part, before offering the role to Mickey Rooney. According to Even This I Get to Experience, Lear’s pitch to the veteran actor got to the words “You play a bigot” before Rooney stopped him. “Norm, they’re going to kill you, shoot you dead in the streets,” the Hollywood icon warned, asking if Lear might have a series about a blind detective with a big dog somewhere in the works.

Taped in New York on Sept. 3, 1968, the first pilot starred O’Connor and Jean Stapleton as Archie and Edith Justice. Stapleton, a stage-trained character actor who first worked as a stock player in 1941, was a consistent supporting player for playwright Horton Foote. Stapleton originated the role of Mrs. Strakosh in the 1964 Broadway production of Funny Girl, which starred Barbra Streisand. Lear considered her after seeing her performance in Damn Yankees. She’d made guest appearances on TV series like Dr. Kildare and The Defenders.

O’Connor was born in Manhattan but grew up in Queens, the same borough as the Bunker household with the external living room window which wasn’t visible from the interior. O’Connor acted steadily in theaters in Dublin, Ireland, and New York until director Burgess Meredith, assisted by The Addams Family’s John Astin, cast him in the Broadway adaptation of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. O’Connor had roles in major motion pictures, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Point Blank (1967), The Devil’s Brigade (1968), Death of a Gunfighter (1969), Marlowe (1969), and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). O’Connor appeared on television series like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, That Girl, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He’d guest starred as a villain in a season 1 episode of Mission Impossible, and was up for the parts the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island and Dr. Smith on Lost in Space.

The first pilot also starred Kelly Jean Peters as Gloria and Tim McIntire as her husband Richard. ABC liked it enough to fund a second pilot, “Those Were the Days,” which shot in Los Angeles on Feb. 10, 1969. Richard was played by Chip Oliver, and Gloria Justice was played by Candice Azzara, who would go on to play Rodney Dangerfield’s wife in Easy Money, and make numerous, memorable guest appearances on Barney Miller. D’Urville Martin played Lionel Jefferson in both pilots. ABC cancelled it after one episode, worried about a show with a foul-mouthed, bigoted character as the lead.

CBS, which was trying to veer away from rural shows like Mayberry R.F.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres, bought the rights to the urban comedy and renamed it All in the Family. When Gleason’s contract to CBS ran out, Lear was allowed to keep O’Connor on as the main character.

Sally Struthers was one of the young actors featured in Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 counterculture classic starring Jack Nicholson. She’d also recently finished shooting a memorable part in the 1972 Steve McQueen hit The Getaway. Struthers had just been fired from The Tim Conway Comedy Hour because executives thought she made the show look cheap, which was her job. The premise of the show was it was so low-budget it could only afford one musician, who had to hum the theme song because they couldn’t afford an instrument, and one dancer, as opposed to a line of dancers like they had on The Jackie Gleason Show. Lear noticed her as a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a counterculture variety show which Rob Reiner wrote for with Steve Martin as a writing partner. Reiner’s then-fiancée, the director Penny Marshall, was also up for the role of Gloria, but in an interview for The Television Academy, Reiner recalls that, while Marshall could pass as Stapleton’s daughter, Struthers was obviously the one who looked like Archie’s “little girl.”

Reiner, the son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, was discovered in a guest acting role on the Andy Griffith vehicle series Headmaster, a show he wrote for, but had also played bit roles in Batman, The Andy Griffith Show, Room 222, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., The Beverly Hillbillies and The Odd Couple. Reportedly, Richard Dreyfuss campaigned for the role of Michael, and Harrison Ford turned it down. Mike Evans was cast as Lionel Jefferson, the Bunkers’ young Black next-door neighbor who sugar-coated nonviolent protests with subtle and subversive twists on “giving people what they want.”

“We’re just sweeping dirty dishes under the rug.”

The very first episode tackled multiple issues right away. It discussed atheism, with Michael and Gloria explaining they have found no evidence of god. The family dissects affirmative action, with Archie asserting everyone has an equal chance to advance if they “hustle for it like I done.” He says he didn’t have millions of people marching for him to get his job, like Black Americans. “His uncle got it for him,” Edith explains, with an off-the-cuff delivery exemplifying why Stapleton is one of the all-time great comic character actors. The family argues socialism, anti-Semitism, sausage links and sausage patties. The generation gap widens as Archie wonders why men’s hair is now down to there, while Gloria’s skirt got so high “all the mystery disappears” when she sits down.

All in the Family would continue to deal with taboo topics like the gay rights movement, divorce, breast cancer, and rape. Future episodes would question why presidential campaign funds are unequal, how tax breaks for corporations kill the middle class, and weigh the personal price of serving in an unpopular war as opposed to dodging the draft. When Archie goes to a female doctor for emergency surgery a few seasons in, All in the Family points out she is most certainly paid less than a male doctor. When skyjackings were a persistent domestic threat in the 1970s, Archie suggested airlines should “arm the passengers.” It is very prescient of the NRA’s suggestion of arming teachers to combat school shootings.

But the first showdown between Lear and the network was fought for the sexual revolution. The first episode’s action begins when Edith and Archie come home early from church and interrupt Michael and Gloria as they’re about to take advantage of having the house to themselves. Gloria’s got her legs wrapped around Michael as he is walking them toward the stairs, and the bed. “At 11:10 on a Sunday,” Archie wants to know as he makes himself known. According to Lear’s memoir, CBS President William Paley objected, saying the line suggested sex. “And the network wants that out even though they’re married–I mean, it was plain silly,” he writes. “My script could have lived without the line, but somehow I understood that if I give on that moment, I’m going to give on silly things forever. So, I had to have that showdown.”

The standoff continued until 25 minutes before air time. CBS broadcast the episode, but put a disclaimer before the opening credits rolled, which Reiner later described as saying “Nothing you’re about to see has anything that we want to have anything to do with. As far as we’re concerned, if you don’t watch the next half hour, it’s okay with us.” Lear knew, with what he was doing, this was going to be the first of many battles, because this was the first show of its kind. Television families didn’t even flush toilets, much less bring unmentionables to the table. “The biggest problem a family might face would have been that the roast was ruined when the boss was coming over to dinner,” Lear writes. “There were no women or their problems in American life on television. There were no health issues. There were no abortions. There were no economic problems. The worst thing that could happen was the roast would be ruined. I realized that was a giant statement — that we weren’t making any statements.”

“What I say ain’t got nothing to do with what I think.”

Politicians and pundits worried about how the series might affect racial relations. The country had experienced inner city riots, battle lines were drawn over school desegregation, busing children to schools was met with violent resistance. Did All In the Family undermine bigotry or reinforce racism? Were people laughing at Archie or with him? Was it okay to like Archie more than Mike?

Lear believed humor would be cathartic, eroding bigotry. Bigots found a relief valve. Lear always insisted Archie was a satirically exaggerated parody to make racism and sexism look foolish. Liberals protested the character came across as a “loveable bigot,” because satire only works if the audience is in on the joke. Bigoted viewers didn’t see the show as satire. They identified with Archie and saw nothing wrong with ethnic slurs. Mike and Gloria come off like preachy, bleeding-heart liberal, hippie leeches. Lionel handled Archie better than Michael did.

O’Connor humanized Archie as an old-fashioned guy trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Bunker gave bigotry a human face and, because he hated everyone, he was written off as an “equal-opportunity bigot.” Not quite a defensible title. Archie was the most liked character on the show, and the most disliked. Most people saw him as a likable loser, so identifiable he was able to change attitudes. In a 1972 interview, O’Connor explained white fans would “tell me, ‘Archie was my father; Archie was my uncle.’ It is always was, was, was. It’s not now. I have an impression that most white people are, in some halting way, trying to reach out, or they’re thinking about it.” It sometimes worked against O’Connor the activist, however. When he backed New York Mayor John Lindsay’s 1972 anti-war nomination for the Democratic presidential nomination, Archie Bunker’s shadow distanced progressives.

Archie was relatable beyond his bigotry. He spoke to the anxieties of working- and middle-class families. Archie was a dock worker in the Corona section of Queens, who had to drive a cab as a second job, with little hope of upward mobility. He didn’t get political correctness. The character’s ideological quips were transformed into the bestselling paperback mock manifesto The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker. White conservative viewers bought “Archie for President” buttons.

“If you call me Cute one more time, I swear I’ll open a vein.”

As cannot be overstated, All in the Family set many precedents, both socially and artistically. The Bunker family is an icon on many levels, Archie and Edith’s chairs are at the Smithsonian. But Archie Bunker is also the Mother Courage of TV. The antithesis of the bland sitcom characters of the time, he also wasn’t the character we hated to love, or loved to hate. Archie was the first character we weren’t supposed to like, but couldn’t help it. This phenomenon continues. The next TV character to take on the iconic mantle was probably Louis De Palma on Taxi. Audiences should have wanted to take a lug wrench to his head, but Danny De Vito brought such a diverse range of rage and vulnerability to that part it was named TV Guide’s most beloved character for years.

We shouldn’t like Walter White, especially when he doffs that pretentious Heisenberg hat, on Breaking Bad. And let’s face it, Slipping Jimmy on Better Call Saul isn’t really the kind of guy you want to leave alone in your living room while you grab a drink. Families across the United States and abroad sat down to an Italian-style family dinner with Tony Soprano and The Sopranos every Sunday night. But on Monday mornings, most of us would have ducked him, especially if we owed him money. Even the advanced model of the Terminator guy was scared of Tony.

The best example of this is South Park’s Eric Cartman. While we don’t know who his father is on the series, he’s got Bunker DNA all over him. He’s even gotten into squabbles with Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner. This wasn’t lost on Lear, who contacted creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to say he loved the show in 2003. Lear wound up writing for South Park’s seventh season. “They invited me to a party and we’re partying,” Lear told USA Today at the time. “There’s no way to overstate the kick of being welcomed by this group.”

“I hate entertainment. Entertainment is a thing of the past, now we got television.”

Television can educate as much as it wants to entertain, and All in the Family taught the viewing audience a whole new vocabulary. The casual epithets thrown on the show were unheard of in broadcast programming, no matter how commonplace they might have been in the homes of the people watching. When Sammy Davis Jr. comes to Bunker house in the first season, every ethnic and racial slur ever thrown is exchanged. In another first season episode, and both the unaired pilots, Archie breaks down the curse word “Goddamn.” But a large segment of the more socially conservative, and religious, audience thought All in the Family said whatever they wanted just because they could get away with it.

All in the Family debuted to low viewership, but rose to be ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings for five years. The show undermined the perception of the homogeneous middle-class demographic allowing shows like M*A*S*H to comment on contemporary events.

All in the Family represented the changing American neighborhood. The show opened the door for the working poor to join situation comedies as much as when the Bunkers welcomed Lionel, Louise (Isabel Sanford), and George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) when they moved into Archie’s neighborhood. Lear reportedly was challenged by the Black Panther Party to expand the range of black characters on his shows. He took the challenge seriously and added subversive humor. Sanford and Son was set in a junkyard in Watts. Foxx’s Fred Sanford rebelled against the middle-class aspirations of his son, Lamont (Demond Wilson). Good Times was set in the projects of Chicago, and took on issues like street gangs, evictions and poor public schools.

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Married With Children, The Simpsons, and King of the Hill continued to explore the comic possibilities of working class drama. Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a successful, upwardly mobile television producer. Working-class women were represented on sitcoms like Alice, but didn’t have a central voice until 1988 when Roseanne debuted on ABC, and Roseanne Barr ushered in her brand of proletarian feminism. All in the Family’s legacy includes Black-ish, as creator Kenya Barris continues to mine serious and controversial subject matter for cathartic and educational laughter. Tim Allen covets the conservative crown, and is currently the Last Man Standing in for Archie. But as reality gets more exaggerated than any satire can capture, All in the Family remains and retains its most authentic achievement.

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sparrowsabre7 · 4 years ago

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Thoughts on the Snyder Cut Chapter 6 of 6

The awful “you smell good” line is changed back to the original “you spoke” which clearly couldn’t be used in the Josstice cut since dark Superman was a lot more chatty there, whereas he is entirely silent in the Snyder Cut to this moment.

We take a bit more time to breathe on Clark’s return before going into the Batcave for what I think is the first time as a group in this version. I actually quite enjoyed Barry whizzing round the cave in Josstice as a bit of humour that actually made sense to me. Here he just says “wow!” which is now coloured a little by the death mere minutes before or his new friend’s dad...

There is a nice “This is Alfred, I work for him” from Bruce and Alfred despairing of where he’s going to find enough tea cups, a wry commentary on the fact he’s never really needed more than 2.

More breathing with Clark, though this movie seems to do nothing but breathe sometimes... he mentions Lois’s ring which I don’t think was brought up in Josstice, but despite spending more time with Lois, the moment still doesn’t really feel earned. Martha is then reunited with her boy too, again feeling unearned since this is actually the first we see of her this film.

Bruce acknowledges the dream sequences from Batman V Superman in a scene that adds nothing but act as an ominous teaser before they embark on the Flying Fox (fixed by Cyborg in another addition with little actual purpose not least because the exchange between Cyborg and Bruce makes no sense “It wanted to fly, it’s in her nature” “Yours too” - we’ve already seen Cyborg fly like 20 times already). We get a brief planning scene and then it’s off to the final boss!

But not before we have another fatherly advice montage - this time for Clark from the disembodied voices of his two dads as he sadly wanders around the ship before emerging in the infamous silver and black suit.

This scene is nice though, mirroring the emergence from “Man of Steel” and showcasing his improved mastery of flight, paying homage to the films that came before. Ah spoke too soon, ruined with a jesus shot that smacks you over the head so hard you’ll get concussion.

The team disembarks and zooms into battle, the batmobile sequence is still a highlight and I don’t think much has changed from it, nothing that jumped out at me at least.

There’s a scene added back in with Clark visiting Alfred, which was on the original disc as a deleted scene. I understood why it was deleted then and it adds little here too, save for logistically explaining how Superman knows where the team is.

Wonder Woman, Cyborg and Aquaman confront Steppenwolf. REALLY fucking sick of that wail now. This doesn’t seem dramatically altered, meanwhile Barry is off doing a big run to charge up Cyborg.

While this may have more narrative purpose than the saving the Russian family scene from Josstice (which I loathed, that family sideplot was SO dumb) it still relegates Barry to basically not doing much. Also, he gets tripped up by a blast from a gun, he’s faster than fucking sound, there should be no reason he got hit by that. Also, oh my goodness is Ezra Miller (who is otherwise pretty solid) gurning it up over his injury...

Superman appears and it is a lot more badass than in the 2017 cut, but it does IMMEDIATELY raise the question (again) of what is the point of the other League members. He tears Steppenwolf apart with greater ease than he fought Zod or Doomsday and yet, this guy is meant to be this incredible force to be reckoned with.

Meanwhile the mother box pulling apart doesn’t go so well, so all the other Leaguers literally stand and watch as Cyborg fails to pull them apart waiting on Barry as a portal to Darkseid opens. The boxes explode and Barry goes back in time to undo it, forcing me to ask again, my god, why DOES he move his arms like that when he runs?

Jesus we’re still 30 minutes from the end and we’re still doing vision sequences fuck me. I am so tired now. I just want it to end.

Ok the mother boxes are freaky demons in the vision showing Victor a life he could have. He ultimately rejects it and pushes them apart with Superman’s help (this seems to take basically no effort on Superman’s part compared with Josstice where it knocked both of them to the ground.) They then decapitate the basically beaten Steppenwolf (and use what I hope to christ is the last Amazon wail) for the body to fly through the portal and the team to have a good stareoff with Darkseid before he teases a now defunct sequel with generic bad guy statements.

A very slow mo team pose closes out the battle and still doesn’t accomplish the same level of “fuck yeah” in 1 minute and 34 seconds (I counted) that “Avengers” did in 10 seconds with the 360 degree shot.

The epilogue begins and Cyborg magics his dad’s tape recorder back together to listen to his message. I don’t know how, I guess because he’s part motherbox? Arthur heads off to find his own solo movie, hopping in the back of a truck amusingly paralleling the scene in “Endgame” where Hulk visits New Asgard (though unintentional of course). Ryan Choi is there to remind us Ryan Choi was in this movie. Bruce and Alfred set up the Hall of Justice which seems unchanged, and then Barry showing his father he’s got a job in a crime lab, which now has added “foot in the door” content. Bruce helps Clark’s mum move back in, “I did a mistake” and “bought the bank” quotes still intact. Wonder Woman looks mournfully at the amazon arrow (sans wail) and then Barry manages to look even sillier when running. Batman stands atop the bat-tank from “The Dark Knight Returns” in another neat piece of fanservice that makes little sense, before Clark removes his specs and rips open his shirt to the S; something which definitely has less of an impact in the black and silver than in the red, blue, and yellow.

We now come to the post-credity end of the movie (even though it’s pre-credits) with Luthor having escaped jail. Deathstroke also heads up to Luthor’s yacht as in Josstice’s post-credits but the context is changed dramatically, with it being about a personal hit on Batman (who took Slade’s eye apparently) rather than building the legion of doom.

Ok, boy, still not done, more endings than Return of the King this one. We’ve jumped into the Knightmare world again, apropos of nothing. IN fairness, trenchcoat Batman is absolutely a look. Mera and Cyborg are there because reasons. As is Jared Leto Joker who sounds and overacts like an anime villain. A reacharound joke. hilarious. I actually tried defending Leto’s Joker back in the Suicide Squad era, but there’s no salvaging him. I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt but he’s just so cringeworthy. Oh apparently Harley Quinn is dead in this timeline. Batman also says “make no mistake I will fucking kill you” with all the conviction of a man establishing his consumer rights to a no questions asked refund. Ok Deathstroke is there too. With a mohawk. Barry has his time travel armour from BVS and then Superman shows up.

Bruce now wakes up (jesus fuck, let it END) and Martian Manhunter is at his window which doesn’t seem to phase Bruce in the slightest, dispensing “an army is coming, we need to fight” platitudes. Ben Affleck seems to be playing this scene like he’s Ryan Reynolds (and tbh that’s actually working for me).

And it’s over. I’ve ranted long enough here so I will summarise in a final post

#snyder cut #justice league #films #reviews

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livlepretre · 5 years ago

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A, N, S, W

A. What was the first fandom and/or pairing that you wrote for?

Officially? It was for Inuyasha back when I was 16-- it was an InuKag fic that quickly diverged into what in retrospect was some extremely disturbing NarKag because I was kind of a sicko even then, lol. It’s still posted on FFN along with my other old fics from high school, which are all labelled as DARK FIC in the summary so everyone would know they were written by an emo kid lololol (unofficially I think I wrote some reallllllyyyyyy even more terrible unpublished spuffy fic when I was 12)

N. If you were stuck on a desert island with only two characters, which would you pick?

Okay I had a mild identity crisis this morning as I contemplated this, because of course, all of my favorite characters are terrible or difficult or generally just depressed-- and I think there’s probably only room on this island for one of us to be severely emotionally compromised, and that’s going to have to be me. So. After some serious thinking, on who I would actually be able to live with day after day, I arrived at:

Perrin Aybara from Wheel of Time, because he’s:

kind

helpful

good listener

very methodical problem solver

knows how to hunt/catch fish/other handy skills

I could climb him like a tree

he narrowly meets my monster fucker criteria for hotness

Martha Jones from Doctor Who, because

well first off I love and adore and admire her, so this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who remembers when this blog was basically dedicated to her

also tremendously kind

level head

funny af (let’s be real, we’ll need that)

I feel like her sheer inner resolve to never give up would keep all of us alive and going

medical skillllzzzzz

also I think we would probably get off the island real fast if she were there with us; I literally have no doubt

(This led to some deep level speculation about how useless my skill sets are since I picked Perrin and Martha partially because they have helpful skills (literally I can forage for pigment and grind paint from raw materials, NOT USEFUL) but then I did remember I’m a fairly accomplished woodworker/builder, so, assuming it’s a desert with SOME kind of vegetation/not completely barren, I guess I could build us a shelter ha)

S. Who is the easiest/hardest character for you to write about? Why?

Easiest has got to be Klaus. Literally there’s no such thing as going over the top, and all I have to do is consider the most fucked up/twisted/selfish possible motive/course of action, while also accusing everyone else of being disloyal and cruel, and BOOM, there, that’s exactly what Klaus will say or do or think.

Hardest has got to be Damon. Anyone who’s read my fic may have noticed that he’s... mostly absent from it, despite the fact that I rather like delena/feel like it’s narratively important. I think the really hard thing about Damon is actually writing his humor-- it’s not really situational, but more about being intentionally witty and flip. While also being intensely other and weird and a bit menacing. I’m getting more confident with him as time goes on, but I’m still shaky at best.

W. If you had to remix one of your own fics, which would it be and how would you remix it?

Oh geez. Tough question. I would probably remix FE to be honest-- I would get rid of both of the New Orleans arcs and so much of that surrounding plot/get rid of ever referencing Mikaelson as a last name (because I hate hate hate hate hate it) and just keep the fic dreamy and at the manor and emotionally tense the way I originally envisioned it to be. More in line with the mood of the first 14 or so chapters. I don’t per se regret expanding the stage of the fic-- it’s been a great opportunity to really showcase Elena’s strengths and her weaknesses by actually putting her into dynamic and difficult moral and action situations, and to pull her deeper into some character decisions that have interested me for a very long time. But I regret losing a lot of the dreaminess of this fic to the plot elements and intricacies of the New Orleans politics, and I think the ebb and flow of her relationship with Klaus is a little more muddled than I envisioned. Also, some of the stuff in the final arc is going to have a radically different setting than when I first wrote those scenes, and saying goodbye to those settings is hard after working on it so long. (I will say, though, that the New Orleans arc and some of those plot elements have ended up giving me the inspiration for the ending which I think is rather more beautiful and satisfying than the originally intended ending-- so that’s one thing I’m GLAD has already been remixed.)

Thanks so much for asking!

#anonymous #ask game

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dislocatedskeleton · 5 years ago

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Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity

For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world?

by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker

Fiona Apple was wrestling with her dog, Mercy, the way a person might thrash, happily, in rough waves. Apple tugged on a purple toy as Mercy, a pit-bull-boxer mix, gripped it in her jaws, spinning Apple in circles. Worn out, they flopped onto two daybeds in the living room, in front of a TV that was always on. The first day that I visited, last July, it was set to MSNBC, which was airing a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book.

These days, the singer-songwriter, who is forty-two, rarely leaves her tranquil house, in Venice Beach, other than to take early-morning walks on the beach with Mercy. Five years ago, Apple stopped going to Largo, the Los Angeles venue where, since the late nineties, she’d regularly performed her thorny, emotionally revelatory songs. (Her song “Largo” still plays on the club’s Web site.) She’d cancelled her most recent tour, in 2012, when Janet, a pit bull she had adopted when she was twenty-two, was dying. Still, a lot can go on without leaving home. Apple’s new album, whose completion she’d been inching toward for years, was a tricky topic, and so, during the week that I visited, we cycled in and out of other subjects, among them her decision, a year earlier, to stop drinking; estrangements from old friends; and her memories of growing up, in Manhattan, as the youngest child in the “second family” of a married Broadway actor. Near the front door of Apple’s house stood a chalkboard on wheels, which was scrawled with the title of the upcoming album: “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.”

One afternoon, Apple’s older sister, Amber, arrived to record vocal harmonies. In the living room, there was an upright piano, its top piled with keepsakes, including a stuffed toucan knitted by Apple’s mother and a photograph of Martha Graham doing a backbend. Apple’s friend Zelda Hallman, who had not long ago become her housemate, was in the sunny yellow kitchen, cooking tilapia for Mercy and for Hallman’s Bernese mountain dog, Maddie. In the back yard, there was a guesthouse, where Apple’s half brother, Bran Maggart, a carpenter, lived. (For years, he’d worked as a driver for Apple, who never got a license, and helped manage her tours.) Apple’s father, Brandon Maggart, also lives in Venice Beach; her mother, Diane McAfee, a former dancer and actress, remains in New York, in the Morningside Heights apartment building where Apple grew up.

Amber, a cabaret singer who records under the name Maude Maggart, had brought along her thirteen-month-old baby, Winifred, who scooched across the floor, playing under the piano. Apple was there when Winifred was born, and, as we talked about the bizarreness of childbirth, Apple told me a joke about a lady who got pregnant with twins. Whenever people asked the lady if she wanted boys or girls, she said, “I don’t care, I just want my children to be polite!” Nine months passed, but she didn’t go into labor. A year went by—still nothing. “Eight, nine, twenty years!” Apple said, her eyebrows doing a jig. “Twenty-five years—and finally they’re, like, ‘We have to figure out what’s going on in there.’ ” When doctors peeked inside, they found “two middle-aged men going, ‘After youuuu!’ ‘No, after youuuu! ’ ”

Amber was there to record one line: a bit of harmony on “Newspaper,” one of thirteen new songs on the album. Apple, who wore a light-blue oxford shirt and loose beige pants, her hair in a low bun, stood by the piano, coaching Amber, who sat down in a wicker rocking chair, pulling Winifred onto her lap. “It’s a shame, because you and I didn’t get a witness!” Apple crooned, placing the notes in the air with her palm. Then the sisters sang, in harmony, “We’re the only ones who know!” The “we’re” came out as a jaunty warble, adding ironic subtext to the song, which was about two women connected by their histories with an abusive man. Apple, with her singular smoky contralto, modelled the complex emotions of the line for Amber, warming her up to record.

“Does that work?” Apple asked Winifred, who gazed up from her mother’s lap. Abruptly, Apple bent her knees, poked her elbows back like wings, and swung her hips, peekabooing toward Winifred. The baby laughed. It was simultaneously a rehearsal and a playdate.

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a reference to a scene in “The Fall,” the British police procedural starring Gillian Anderson as a sex-crimes investigator; Anderson’s character calls out the phrase after finding a locked door to a room where a girl has been tortured. Like all of Apple’s projects, this one was taking a long while to emerge, arriving through a slow-drip process of creative self-interrogation that has produced, over a quarter century, a narrow but deep songbook. Her albums are both profoundly personal—tracing her heartaches, her showdowns with her own fragility, and her fierce, phoenix-like recoveries—and musically audacious, growing wilder and stranger with each round. As her 2005 song “Extraordinary Machine” suggests, whereas other artists might move fast, grasping for fresh influences and achieving superficial novelty, Apple prides herself on a stickier originality, one that springs from an internal tick-tock: “I still only travel by foot, and by foot it’s a slow climb / But I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time.”

The new album, she said, was close to being finished, but, as with the twins from the joke, the due date kept getting pushed back. She was at once excited about these songs—composed and recorded at home, with all production decisions under her control—and apprehensive about some of their subject matter, as well as their raw sound (drums, chants, bells). She was also wary of facing public scrutiny again. Fame has long been a jarring experience for Apple, who has dealt since childhood with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety.

After a while, she and Amber went into a small room—Apple’s former bedroom, where, for years, she had slept on a futon with Janet. After the dog died, she’d found herself unable to fall asleep there, and had turned the room into a recording studio, although it looked nothing like one: it was cluttered, with one small window and no soundproofing. There was a beat-up wooden desk and a computer on which Apple recorded tracks, using GarageBand. There was a mike stand and a Day of the Dead painting of a smiling female skeleton holding a skeleton dog. Every surface, from the shelves to the floor, was covered in a mulch of battered percussion instruments: bells, wooden blocks, drums, metal squares.

The sisters recorded the lyric over and over, with Apple at the computer and Amber standing, Winifred on her hip. During one take, Amber pulled the neck of her turquoise leotard down and began nursing her daughter. Apple looked up from GarageBand, caught her sister’s eye, and smiled. “It’s happening—it’s happening,” she said.

When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being unhappy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.

In the nineties, Apple’s emergence felt near-mythical. Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart, the musically precocious, emotionally fragile descendant of a line of entertainers, was a classically trained pianist who began composing at seven. One night, at the age of sixteen, she was in her apartment, staring down at Riverside Park, when she thought she heard a voice telling her to record songs drawn from her notebooks, which were full of heartbreak and sexual trauma. She flew to L.A., where her father was living, and with his help recorded three songs; they made seventy-eight demo tapes, and he told her to prepare to hustle. Yet the first tape she shared was enough: a friend passed a copy to the music publicist she babysat for, who gave it to Andrew Slater, a prominent record producer and manager. Slater, then thirty-seven, hired a band, booked a studio in L.A., and produced her début album, “Tidal.” It featured such sophisticated ballads as “Shadowboxer,” as well as the hit “Criminal,” which irresistibly combined a hip-hop beat, rattling piano, and sinuous flute; she’d written it in forty-five minutes, during a lunch break at the studio. The album sold 2.7 million copies.

Slater also oversaw a marketing campaign that presented his new artist as a sulky siren, transforming her into a global star and a media target. Diane McAfee remembers that time as a “whirlwind,” recalling the day when her daughter received an advance for “Tidal”—a check for a hundred thousand dollars. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is unbelievable!’ ” McAfee told me. They were in their dining room, and Apple was “backing away, not excited.” Because Apple was not yet eighteen, her mother had to co-sign her record contract.

The musician Aimee Mann and her partner, the musician Michael Penn, who was also signed with Slater at the time, remember seeing Apple perform at the Troubadour, in West Hollywood, at a private showcase for “Tidal,” in 1996. Mann glimpsed in the teen-ager the kind of brazen, complex female musicianship that she’d been longing for—a tonic in an era dominated by indie-male swagger. Onstage, Apple was funny and chatty, calling the audience “grownups.” After the show, she did cartwheels in the alley outside. Mann recalled Apple introducing the song “Carrion” with a story about how sometimes there’s a person you go back to, again and again, who never gives you what you need, “and the lesson is you don’t need them.” As Apple’s career accelerated, Mann read a Rolling Stone profile in which Apple spoke about having been raped, at twelve, by a stranger, who attacked her in a stairwell as her dog barked inside her family’s apartment. Mann said that it was unheard of, and inspiring, for a female artist to speak so frankly about sexual violence, without shame or apology. But Apple’s candor made her worry. Mann had experienced her own share of trauma; she’d also collapsed from exhaustion while on tour. “I was afraid of what would happen to her on the road,” she said. “It’s an unnatural way to live.”

In fact, the turn of the millennium became an electric, unstable period for Apple, who was adored by her fans but also mocked, and leered at, by the male-dominated rock press, who often treated her as a tabloid curiosity—a bruised prodigy to be both ogled and pitied. Much of the press’s response was connected to the 1997 video for “Criminal,” whose director, Mark Romanek, has described it as a “tribute” to Nan Goldin’s photographs of her junkie demimonde—although the stronger link is to Larry Clark’s 1995 movie, “Kids,” and to the quickly banned Calvin Klein ads depicting teens being coerced into making porn. When Apple’s oldest friend, Manuela Paz, saw “Criminal,” she was unnerved, not just by the sight of her friend in a lace teddy, gyrating among passed-out models, but also by a sense that the video, for all its male-gaze titillation, had uncannily absorbed the darker aspects of her and Apple’s own milieu—one of teens running around upper Manhattan with little oversight. “How did they know?” Paz asked herself.

Apple’s unscripted acceptance speech at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, in which she announced, “This world is bullshit,” further stoked media hostility. The speech, which included her earnestly quoting Maya Angelou and encouraging fans not to model themselves on “what you think that we think is cool,” seems, in retrospect, most shocking for how on target it is (something true of so many “crazy lady” scandals of that period, like Sinéad O’Connor on “Saturday Night Live,” protesting sexual abuse in the Catholic Church). But, by 2000, when Apple had an onstage meltdown at the Manhattan venue Roseland, instability had become her “brand.” She was haunted by her early interviews, like one in Spin, illustrated with lascivious photographs by Terry Richardson, that quoted her saying, “I’m going to die young. I’m going to cut another album, and I’m going to do good things, help people, and then I’m going to die.” Apple’s love life was heavily covered, too: she dated the magician David Blaine (who was then a member of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Pussy Posse”) and the film director Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom she lived for several years. While Anderson and Apple were together, he released “Magnolia” and she released “When the Pawn . . . ,” her flinty second album, whose full, eighty-nine-word title—a pugilistic verse written in response to the Spin profile—attracted its own stream of jokes.

During this period, Mark (Flanny) Flanagan, the owner of Largo, a brainy enclave of musicians and comedians within show-biz L.A., became Apple’s friend and patron. (In an e-mail to me, he called her “our little champ.”) One day, Apple visited his office, wondering what would happen if she cut off her fingertip—then would her management let her stop touring? Flanagan, disturbed, told her that she could get a note from a shrink instead, and urged her to refuse to do anything she didn’t want to do.

As the decades passed, Apple’s reputation as a “difficult woman” receded. After she left Anderson, in 2002, she holed up in Venice Beach, emerging every few years with a new album: first, “Extraordinary Machine” (2005), a glorious glockenspiel of self-assertion and payback; then the wise, insightful “The Idler Wheel . . .” (2012). She was increasingly recognized as a singer-songwriter on the level of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. The music of other nineties icons grew dated, or panicky in its bid for relevance, whereas Apple’s albums felt unique and lasting. The skittering ricochets of her melodies matched the shrewd wit of her lyrics, which could swerve from damning to generous in a syllable, settling scores but also capturing the perversity of a brain aflame with sensitivity: “How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone?”

Today, Apple still bridles at old coverage of her. Yet she remains almost helplessly transparent about her struggles—she’s a blurter who knows that it’s a mistake to treat journalists as shrinks, but does so anyway. She’s conscious of the multiple ironies in her image. “Everyone has always worried that people are taking advantage of me,” she said. “Even the people who take advantage of me worry that people are taking advantage of me.”

Lurking on Tumblr (where messages from her are sometimes posted on the fan page Fiona Apple Rocks), she can see how much the culture has transformed, becoming one shared virtual notebook. Female singers like Lady Gaga and Kesha now talk openly about having been raped—and, in the wake of #MeToo, it’s more widely understood that sexual violence is as common as rain. Mental illness is less of a taboo, too. In recent years, a swell of teen-age musicians, such as Lorde and Billie Eilish, have produced bravura albums in Apple’s tradition, while young female activists, including Greta Thunberg and Emma González, keep announcing, to an audience more prepared to listen, that this world is bullshit.

Apple knows the cliché about early fame—that it freezes you at the age you achieved it. Because she’d never had to toil in anonymity, and had learned her craft and made her mistakes in public, she’d been perceived, as she put it to me ruefully, as “the patron saint of mental illness, instead of as someone who creates things.” If she wanted to keep bringing new songs into the world, she needed to have thicker skin. But that had never been her gift.

As we talked in the studio, Apple’s band member Amy Aileen Wood arrived, with new mixes. Wood, an indie-rock drummer, was one of three musicians Apple had enlisted to help create the new album; the others were the bassist Sebastian Steinberg, of the nineties group Soul Coughing, and Davíd Garza, a Latin-rock singer-songwriter and guitarist. Wood and Apple told me that their first encounter, at a recording studio two decades ago, was awkward. Apple remembered feeling intimidated by Wood and by her girlfriend, who seemed “tall and cool.” When Wood described something as “rad,” Apple shot back, “Did you really just say rad?” Wood hid in the bathroom and cried.

Now Wood and her father, John Would, a sound engineer, were collaborating with Apple on building mixes from hundreds of homemade takes. (Apple also worked with Dave Way and, later in the process, Tchad Blake.) The earliest glimmers of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” began in 2012, when Apple experimented with a concept album about her Venice Beach home, jokingly called “House Music.” She also considered basing an album on the Pando—a giant grove of aspens, in Utah, that is considered a single living being—creating songs that shared common roots.

Finally, around 2015, she pulled together the band. She and Steinberg, a joyfully eccentric bassist with a long gray beard, had played live together for years, and had shared intense, sometimes painful experiences, including an arrest, while on tour in 2012, for hashish possession. (Apple spent the night in a Texas jail cell, where she defiantly gave what Steinberg described as “her best vocal performance ever”; she also ended up on TMZ.) Steinberg, who worked with Apple on “Idler Wheel,” said that her new album was inspired by her fascination with the potential of using a band “as an organism instead of an assemblage—something natural.”

The first new song that Apple recorded was “On I Go,” which was inspired by a Vipassana chant; she sang it into her phone while hiking in Topanga Canyon. Back at home, she dug out old lyrics and wrote new ones, and hosted anarchic bonding sessions with her bandmates. “She wanted to start from the ground,” Garza said. “For her, the ground is rhythm.” The band gathered percussive objects: containers wrapped with rubber bands, empty oilcans filled with dirt, rattling seedpods that Apple had baked in her oven. Apple even tapped on her dog Janet’s bones, which she kept in a pretty beige box in the living room. Apple and the other musicians would march around her house and chant. “Sebastian has a low, sonorous voice,” Garza said, of these early meetings. “Amy’s super-shy. I’m like Slim Whitman—we joke my voice is higher than Fiona’s. She has that husky beautiful timbre, and she would just . . . speak her truth. It felt more like a sculpture being built than an album being made.”

Steinberg told me, “We played the way kids play or the way birds sing.” Wood recalled, “We would have cocktails and jam,” adding that it took some time for her to get used to these epic “meditations,” which could veer into emotional chaos. Steinberg recalls “stomping on the walls, on the floor—playing her house.” Once, when Apple was upset about a recent breakup, with the writer Jonathan Ames, she got into a drunken argument with the band members; Wood took her drums to a gig, which Apple misunderstood as a slight, and Apple went off and wrote a bitterly rollicking song about rejection, “The Drumset Is Gone.”

There were more stops and starts. A three-week group visit to the Sonic Ranch recording studio, in rural Texas—where some band members got stoned in pecan fields, Mercy accidentally ate snake poison, and Apple watched the movie “Whiplash” on mushrooms—was largely a wash, despite such cool experiments as recording inside an abandoned water tower. But Garza praised Apple as “someone who really trusts the unknown, trusting the river,” adding, “She’s the queen of it.”

Once Apple returned to Venice Beach, she finally began making headway, rerecording and rewriting songs in uneven intervals, often alone, in her former bedroom. At first, she recorded long, uncut takes of herself hitting instruments against random things; she built these files, which had names like “metal shaker,” “couch tymp,” and “bean drums,” into a “percussion orchestra,” which she used to make songs. She yowled the vocals over and over, stretching her voice into fresh shapes; like a Dogme 95 filmmaker, she rejected any digital smoothing. “She’s not afraid to let her voice be in the room and of the room,” Garza said. “Modern recording erases that.”

The resulting songs are so percussion-heavy that they’re almost martial. Passages loop and repeat, and there are out-of-the-blue tempo changes. Steinberg described the new numbers as closer to “Hot Knife,” an “Idler Wheel” track that pairs Andrews Sisters-style harmonies with stark timpani beats, than to her early songs, which were intricately orchestrated. “It’s very raw and unslick,” he said, of the new work, because her “agenda has gotten wilder and a lot less concerned with what the outside world thinks—she’s not seventeen, she’s forty, and she’s got no reason not to do exactly what she wants.”

Apple had been writing songs in the same notebooks for years, scribbling new lyrics alongside older ones. At one point, as we sat on the floor near the piano, she grabbed a stack of them, hunting for some lines she’d written when she was fifteen: “Evil is a relay sport / When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” “My handwriting is so different,” she marvelled, flipping pages. She found a diary entry from 1997: “I’m insecure about the guys in my band. I want to spend more time with them! But it seems impossible to ever go out and have fun.” Apple laughed out loud, amazed. “I can’t even recognize this person,” she said. “ ‘I want to go out and have fun!’ ”

“Here’s the bridge to ‘Fast as You Can,’ ” she said, referring to a song from “When the Pawn . . . .” Then she announced, “Oh, here it is—‘Evil is a relay sport.’ ” She continued reading: “It breathes in the past and then—” She shot me a knowing glance. “Lots of my writing from then is just, like, I don’t know how to say it: a young person trying to be a writer.” Written in the margin was the word “Help.”

Whenever I asked Apple how she created melodies, she apologized for lacking the language to describe her process (often with an anxious detour about not being as good a drummer as Wood). She said that her focus on rhythm had some connections to the O.C.D. rituals she’d developed as a child, like crunching leaves and counting breaths, or roller-skating around her dining-room table eighty-eight times—the number of keys on a piano—while singing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

But Apple brightened whenever she talked about writing lyrics, speaking confidently about assonance and serendipity, about the joy of having the words “glide down the back of my throat”—as she put it, stroking her neck—when she got them exactly right. She collects words on index cards: “Angel,” “Excel,” “Intel,” “Gel.” She writes the alphabet above her drafts, searching, with puzzle-solver focus, for puns, rhymes, and accidental insights.

The new songs were full of spiky, layered wordplay. In “Rack of His,” Apple sings, like a sideshow barker, “Check out that rack of his! / Look at that row of guitar necks / Lined up like eager fillies / Outstretched like legs of Rockettes.” In the darkly funny “Kick Me Under the Table,” she tells a man at a fancy party, “I would beg to disagree / But begging disagrees with me.” As frank as her lyrics can be, they are not easily decoded as pure biography. She said, of “Rack of His,” “I started writing this song years ago about one relationship, and then, when I finished it, it was about a different relationship.”

When I described the clever “Ladies”—the music of which she co-wrote with Steinberg—as having a vaudeville vibe, Apple flinched. She found the notion corny. “It’s just, like, something I’ve got in my blood that I’m gonna need to get rid of,” she said. Other songs felt close to hip-hop, with her voice used more for force and flow than for melody, and as a vehicle for braggadocio and insults. There was a pungency in Apple’s torch-and-honey voice emitting growls, shrieks, and hoots.

Some of the new material was strikingly angry. The cathartic “For Her” builds to Apple hollering, “Good mornin’! Good mornin’ / You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” The song had grown out of a recording session the band held shortly after the nomination hearings of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; like many women, Apple felt scalded with rage about survivors of sexual violence being disbelieved. The title track came to her later; a meditation on feeling ostracized, it jumps between lucidity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple muses, “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend / I thought it was, then— / But it wasn’t, it wasn’t genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,” her voice doubles, harmonies turning into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden “meow” sound. In the final moments, dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever happens, whatever happens.”

Partway through, she sings, “I thought that being blacklisted would be grist for the mill.” She improvised the line while recording; she knew that it was good, because it was embarrassing. “It sounds bitter,” she said. The song isn’t entirely despairing, though. The next line makes an impassioned allusion to a song by Kate Bush, one of Apple’s earliest musical heroines: “I need to run up that hill / I will, I will, I will.”

One day during my July visit, Ames, Apple’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by, on his way to the beach. “Mercy, you are so powerful!” he said, as the dog jumped on him. “I’m waiting for her to get calmer, so I can give her a nice hug.” Apple had described Ames to me as her kindest ex, and there was an easy warmth between them. They took turns recalling their love affair, which began in 2006, when Apple attended a performance by Ames at the Moth, the storytelling event, in New York.

For years, Ames had written candid, funny columns in the New York Press about sex and his psychological fragilities, a history that appealed to Apple. They were together for four years, then broke up, in 2010; five years later, they reunited, but the relationship soon ended again, partly because of Ames’s concerns about Apple’s drinking. Ames recalled to Apple that, as the relationship soured, “you would yell at me and call me stupid.” He added that he didn’t have much of a temper, which became its own kind of problem.

“You would annoy me,” Apple said, with a smile.

“I was annoying!” he said, laughing.

They were being so loving with each other—even about the bad times, like when Ames would find Apple passed out and worry that she’d stopped breathing—that it seemed almost mysterious that they had broken up. Then, step by step, the conversation hit the skids. The turn came when Ames started offering Apple advice on knee pain that was keeping her from walking Mercy—a result, she believed, of obsessive hiking. He told her to read “Healing Back Pain,” by John Sarno. The pain, he said, was repressed anger.

At first, Apple was open to this idea—or, at least, she was polite about it. But, when Ames kept looping back to the notion, Apple went ominously quiet. Her eyes turned red, rimmed with tears that didn’t spill. She curled up, pulling sofa cushions to her chest, her back arched, glaring.

It was like watching their relationship and breakup reënacted in an hour. When Ames began describing “A Hundred Years of Solitude” in order to make the point that Apple had a “Márquezian sense of time,” she shot back, “Are you saying that time is like thirty-seven years tied to a tree with me?” Ames used to call her the Negative Juicer, Apple said, her voice sardonic: “I just extract the negative stuff.” She spun this into a black aria of self-loathing, arguing, like a prosecutor, for the most vicious interpretation of herself: “I put it in a thing and I bring out all the bad stuff. And I serve it up to everyone so that they’ll give me attention. And it poisons everyone, so they only listen to it when they’re in fucked-up places—and it’s a good sign when they stop listening to me, because that means that they’re not hurting themselves on purpose.”

Ames pushed back, alarmed. If he’d ever called her the Negative Juicer, he said, he didn’t mean it as an attack on her art—just that she could take a nice experience and find the bad in it. Her music had pain but also so much joy and redemption, he said. But Ames couldn’t help himself: he kept bringing up Sarno.

Somehow, the conversation had become a debate about the confessional nature of their work. Was it a good thing for Apple to keep digging up past suffering? Was this labor both therapeutic and generative—a mission that could help others—or was it making her sick? Ames said that he didn’t feel comfortable exposing himself that way anymore, especially in the social-media age. “It’s a different world!” he said. “You take one line out of context . . .” For more than a decade, Ames has been working in less personal modes; his noir novel “You Were Never Really Here” was recently made into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix.

Apple said, “I haven’t wanted to drink straight vodka so much in a while.”

“I’m triggering you,” Ames responded.

“You are,” she said, smiling wearily. “It’s not your fault, Jonathan. I love you.”

When Ames stepped out briefly, Apple said that what had frustrated her was the idea that “there was a way out”—that her pain was her choice.

Zelda Hallman, Apple’s housemate, had been sitting with us, listening. She pointed out that self-help books like “The Secret” had the same problem: they made your suffering all your fault.

“Fuck ‘The Secret’!” Apple shouted.

When Ames came back and mentioned Sarno again, Apple interrupted him: “That’s a great way to be in regular life. But if you’re making a song? And you’re making music and there is going to be passion in it and there is going to be anger in it?” She went on, “You have to go to the myelin sheath—you know, to the central nervous system—for it to be good, I feel like. And if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted my fucking life and ruined everything.”

She recalled a day when she had been working on a piano riff that was downbeat but also “fluttering, soaring,” and that reminded her of Ames. She said that he had asked her to name the resulting song “Jonathan.” (The lovely, eerie track, which is on “Idler Wheel,” includes the line “You like to captain a capsized ship.”) “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t!” As Ames began telling his side of the story, Apple said, icily, “I think that water is going to get real cold real soon. You should probably go to the beach.”

He went off to put on his bathing suit. By the time he left, things had eased up. She hugged him goodbye, looking tiny. After Ames was gone, she said that she hated the way she sometimes acted with him—contemptuous, as if she’d absorbed the style of her most unkind ex-boyfriend. But she also said that she wouldn’t have called Ames himself stupid, explaining, “He doesn’t talk the way that I talk, and like my brother talks, and get it all out, like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? That’s stupid!’ I’m not necessarily angry when I’m doing that.”

The next day, she sent me a video. “We’ve been to the beach!” she announced, panting, as Mercy ran around in the background. “Because it’s her birthday!” Apple had taken Ames’s advice, she said, and gone for a walk, behaving as if she weren’t injured. So far, her knees didn’t hurt. “Soooo . . . he was right all along,” Apple said, her eyes wide. Then she glanced at the camera slyly, the corner of her mouth pulled up. “Orrrrr . . . I just rested my knees for a while.”

Apple goes to bed early; when I visited, we’d end things before she drifted into a smeary, dreamy state, often after smoking pot, which Hallman would pass to her in the living room. Late one afternoon, Apple talked about the album’s themes. She said, of the title, “Really, what it’s about is not being afraid to speak.” Another major theme was women—specifically, her struggle to “not fall in love with the women who hate me.” She described these songs as acts of confrontation with her “shadow self,” exploring questions like “Why in the past have you been so socially blind to think that you could be friends with your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by getting her a gift?” At the time, she thought that she was being generous; now she recognized the impulse as less benign, a way of “campaigning not to be ousted.”

The record dives into such conflicting impulses: she empathizes with other women, rages at them, grows infatuated with them, and mourns their rejection, sometimes all at once. She roars, in “Newspaper,” “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me / To make sure that we’ll never be friends!” In “Ladies,” she describes, first with amusement, then in a dark chant, “the revolving door which keeps turning out more and more good women like you / Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” In “Shameka,” she celebrates a key moment in middle school, when a tough girl told the bullied Apple, “You have potential.”

As a child, Apple longed to be “a pea in a pod” with other girls, as she was, for a while, with Manuela Paz, for whom she wrote her first song. But as an adult she has hung out mainly with men. She does have some deep female friendships, including with Nalini Narayan, an emergency-room nurse, whom she met, in 1997, in the audience at one of her concerts, and who described Apple as “an empath on a completely different level than anyone I’ve met.” More recently, Apple has become close with a few younger artists. The twenty-one-year-old singer Mikaela Straus, a.k.a. King Princess, who recently recorded a cover of Apple’s song “I Know,” called her “family” and “a fucking legend.” Straus said, “You never hear a Fiona Apple line and say, ‘That’s cheesy.’ ” The twenty-seven-year-old actress Cara Delevingne is another friend; she visited Apple’s home to record harmonies on the song “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” (She’s the one making that kooky “meow.”)

But Apple has more complicated dynamics with a wider circle of friends, exes, and collaborators. Starting with her first heartbreak, at sixteen, she has repeatedly found herself in love triangles, sometimes as the secret partner, sometimes as the deceived one. As we talked, she stumbled on a precursor for this pattern: “Maybe it’s because my mother was the other woman?”

Apple’s parents met in 1969, during rehearsals for “Applause,” a Broadway musical based on “All About Eve.” Her mother, McAfee, was cast as Eve; her father, Maggart, as the married playwright. Maggart was then an actor on the stage and on TV (he’d been on “Sesame Street”); the sexy, free-spirited McAfee was a former June Taylor dancer. Throughout Apple’s childhood, she and her sister regularly visited the home, in Connecticut, where Maggart’s five other children and their mother, LuJan, lived. LuJan was welcoming, encouraging all the children to grow close—but Apple’s mother was not invited. Apple, with an uneasy laugh, told me that, for all the time she’d spent interrogating her past, this link had never crossed her mind.

Her fascination with women seemed tied, too, to the female bonding of the #MeToo era—to the desire to compare old stories, through new eyes. In July, she sent me a video clip of Jimi Hendrix that reminded her of a surreal aspect of the day she was raped: for a moment, when the stranger approached her, she mistook him for Hendrix. During the assault, she willed herself to think that the man was Hendrix. “It felt safer, and strangely it hasn’t ruined Jimi Hendrix for me,” she said. Years later, however, she found herself hanging out with a man who was a Hendrix fan. One night, they did mushrooms at Johnny Depp’s house, in the Hollywood Hills. Depp, who was editing a film, was sober that night; as Apple recalled, he “kind of led” her and her friend to a bedroom, then shut the door and left. “Nothing bad happened, but I felt kind of used and uncomfortable with my friend making out with me,” she said. “I used to just let things happen. I remember I wrote the bridge to ‘Fast as You Can’ in the car on the way home, and he was playing Jimi Hendrix, and my mind was swirling things together.”

That has always been Apple’s experience: the past overlapping with the present, just as it does in her notebooks. Sometimes it recurs through painful flashbacks, sometimes as echoes to be turned into art. The evening at Depp’s house wasn’t a #MeToo moment, she added. “Johnny Depp was a nice guy, and so was my friend. But I think that, at that time, I was struggling with my sexuality, and trying to force it into what I thought it should be, and everything felt dirty. Going out with boys, getting high, getting scared, and going home feeling like a dirty wimp was my thing.”

Apple came of age in a culture that viewed young men as potential auteurs and young women as commodities to be used, then discarded. Although she had only positive memories of her youthful romance with David Blaine, she was disturbed to learn that he was listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. In high school, Apple was friends with Mia Farrow’s daughter Daisy Previn, and during sleepovers at Farrow’s house she used to run into Woody Allen in the kitchen. “There are all these unwritten but signed N.D.A.s all over the place,” she said, about the entertainment industry. “Because you’ll have to deal with the repercussions if you talk.”

She met Paul Thomas Anderson in 1997, during a Rolling Stone cover shoot in which she floated in a pool, her hair fanning out like Ophelia’s. She was twenty; he was twenty-seven. After she climbed out of the water, her first words to him were “Do you smoke pot?” Anderson followed her to Hawaii. (The protagonist of his film “Punch-Drunk Love” makes the same impulsive journey.) “That’s where we solidified,” she told me. “I remember going to meet him at the bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and he was laughing at me because I was marching around on what he called my ‘determined march to nowhere.’ ”

The singer and the director became an It Couple, their work rippling with mutual influences. She wrote a rap for “Magnolia”; he directed videos for her songs. But, as Apple remembers it, the romance was painful and chaotic. They snorted cocaine and gobbled Ecstasy. Apple drank, heavily. Mostly, she told me, he was coldly critical, contemptuous in a way that left her fearful and numb. Apple’s parents remember an awful night when the couple took them to dinner and were openly rude. (Apple backs this up: “We both attended that dinner as little fuckers.”) In the lobby, her mother asked Anderson why Apple was acting this way. He snapped, “Ask yourself—you made her.”

Anderson had a temper. After attending the 1998 Academy Awards, he threw a chair across a room. Apple remembers telling herself, “Fuck this, this is not a good relationship.” She took a cab to her dad’s house, but returned home the next day. In 2000, when she was getting treatment for O.C.D., her psychiatrist suggested that she do volunteer work with kids who had similar conditions. Apple was buoyant as Anderson drove her to an orientation at U.C.L.A.’s occupational-therapy ward, but he was fuming. He screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her seat belt, and shoved her out of his car; she fell to the ground, spilling her purse in front of some nurses she was going to be working with. At parties, he’d hiss harsh words in her ear, calling her a bad partner, while behaving sweetly on the surface; she’d tear up, which, she thinks, made her look unstable to strangers. (Anderson, through his agent, declined to comment.)

Anderson didn’t hit her, Apple said. He praised her as an artist. Today, he’s in a long-term relationship with the actress Maya Rudolph, with whom he has four children. He directed the video for “Hot Knife,” in 2011; Apple said that by then she felt more able to hold her own—and she said that he might have changed. Yet the relationship had warped her early years, she said, in ways she still reckoned with. She’d never spoken poorly of him, because it didn’t seem “classy”; she wavered on whether to do so now. But she wanted to put an end to many fans’ nostalgia about their time together. “It’s a secret that keeps us connected,” she told me.

Apple was also briefly involved with the comedian Louis C. K. After the Times published an exposé of his sexual misconduct, in 2017, she had faith that C.K. would be the first target of #MeToo to take responsibility for his actions, maybe by creating subversive comedy about shame and compulsion. When a hacky standup set of his was leaked online, she sent him a warm note, urging him to dig deeper.

One of the women C.K. harassed was Rebecca Corry, a standup comedian who founded an advocacy organization for pit bulls, Stand Up for Pits. Apple began working with the group, and, once she got to know Corry, she started to see C.K. in a harsher light. The comedy that she’d admired for its honesty now looked “like a smoke screen,” she said. In a text, she told me that, if C.K. wasn’t capable of more severe self-scrutiny, “he’s useless.” She added, “I SHAKE when I have to think and write about myself. It’s scary to go there but I go there. He is so WEAK.”

At times, Apple questioned her ability to be in any romantic relationship. Last fall, she went through another breakup, with a man she had dated for about a year. “This is my marriage right now,” she said of her platonic intimacy with Zelda Hallman. Apple told me that they’d met in a near-mystical way: while out on a walk, she’d blown a dandelion, wishing for a dog-friend for Mercy, then turned a corner and saw Hallman, walking Maddie. When Apple’s second romance with Ames was ending, she started inviting Hallman to stay over. “I’d have night terrors and stuff,” Apple recalled. “And one day I woke up and she was sitting in the chair—she’d sat there all night, watching me, making sure I was O.K. I was feeling safer with her here.” Apple fantasized about a kind of retirement: in a few years, she and Hallman might buy land back East “and move there with the doggies.”

Hallman, an affable, silver-haired lesbian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after studying engineering at Stanford, she worked in the California energy industry. In the mid-aughts, she moved to L.A. to try filmmaking, getting some small credits. Each woman called their relationship balanced—they split expenses, they said—but Hallman’s role displaced, to some degree, the one Apple’s brother had played. In addition, Hallman sat in on our interviews and at recording sessions; she often took videos, posting them online. They slept on the daybeds in the living room. Apple had made it clear that anyone who questioned her friend’s presence would get cut out. Hallman described their dynamic as like a “Boston marriage—but in the way that outsiders had imagined Boston marriages to be.”

Hallman said that she hadn’t recognized Apple when they met. Initially, she’d mistaken the singer for someone younger, just another Venice Beach music hopeful in danger of being exploited: “I felt relieved when she said she had a boyfriend in the Hills, to take care of her.”

“Oh, my God, you were one of them! ” Apple said, laughing.

After my July visit, Apple began to text me. She sent a recording of a song that she’d heard in a dream, then a recording describing the dream. She texted about watching “8 Mile”—“doing the nothing that comes before my little concentrated spurt of work”—and about reading a brain study about rappers that made her wonder where her brain “lit up” when she sang. “I’m hoping that I develop that ability to let my medial prefrontal cortex blow out the lights around it!” she joked. Occasionally, she sent a screenshot of a text from someone else, seeking my interpretation (a tendency that convinced me she likely did the same with my texts).

In a video sent in August, she beamed, thrilled about new mixes that she’d been struggling to “elevate.” “I always think of myself as a half-ass person, but, if I half-assed it, it still sounds really good.” She added that she’d whispered into the bathroom mirror, “You did a good job.”

In another video—broken into three parts—she appeared in closeup, in a white tank top, free-associating. She described a colorized photograph from Auschwitz she’d seen on Tumblr, then moved on to the frustrations of O.C.D.—how it made her “freak out about the littlest things, like infants freak out.” She talked about Jeffrey Epstein and the comfort of dumb TV; she held up a “cool metal instrument,” stamped “1932,” that she’d ordered from Greece. Near the end of the video, she wondered why she was rambling, then added, “Oh—I also ate some pot. I forgot about that. Well, knowing me, I’ll probably send this to you!”

Apple’s lifelong instinct has been to default to honesty, even if it costs her. In an era of slick branding, she is one of the last Gen X artists: reflexively obsessed with authenticity and “selling out,” disturbed by the affectlessness of teen-girl “influencers” hawking sponcon and bogus uplift. (When she told an interviewer that she pitied Justin Bieber’s thirsty request for fans to stream his new single as they slept, Beliebers spent the next day rage-tweeting that Apple was a jealous “nobody,” while Apple’s fans mocked them as ignoramuses.)

Apple told me that she didn’t listen to any modern music. She chalked this up to a fear of outside influences, but she had a tetchiness about younger songwriters, too. She had always possessed aspects of Emily Dickinson, in the poet’s “I’m Nobody” mode: pridefulness in retreat. Apple sometimes fantasized about pulling a Garbo: she’d release one final album, then disappear. But she also had something that resembled a repetition compulsion—she wanted to take all the risks of her early years, but this time have them work out right.

When I returned to Venice Beach, in September, the mood was different. Anxiety suffused the house. In July, Apple had been worried about returning to public view, but she was also often playful and energized, tweaking mixes. Now the thought of what she’d recorded brought on paralyzing waves of dread.

To distract herself, she’d turned to other projects. She accepted a request from Sarah Treem, the co-creator of the Showtime series “The Affair,” to cover the Waterboys song “The Whole of the Moon” for the show’s finale. (Apple had also written the show’s potent theme song—the keening “Container.”) Apple agreed to write a jokey song for the Fox cartoon “Bob’s Burgers,” and some numbers for an animated musical sitcom, “Central Park.” She was proud to hit deadlines, to handle her own business. “I have a sense of humor,” she told me. “I’m not that fucking fragile all the time! I’m an adult. You can talk to me.” But, before I arrived one day, she texted that things weren’t going well, so that I’d be prepared.

That afternoon, we found ourselves lounging on the daybeds with Hallman, watching “The Affair.” Apple had already seen these episodes, which were from the show’s penultimate season. In August, she’d sent me a video of herself after watching one, tears rolling down her face. That episode was about the death of Alison, one of the main characters. Played by Ruth Wilson, Alison is a waitress living in Montauk, an intense beauty who is grieving the drowning death of her son and suffers from depression and P.T.S.D. She falls into an affair with a novelist, and both of their marriages dissolve. The story is told from clashing perspectives, but in the episode that Apple had watched, only one account felt “true”: an ex-boyfriend of Alison’s breaks her skull, then drops her unconscious body in the ocean, making her death look like a suicide.

As we watched, Apple took notes, sitting cross-legged on the daybed. She saw herself in several characters, but she was most troubled by an identification with Alison, who worries that she’s a magnet for pain—a victim that men try to “save” and end up hurting. In one sequence, Alison, devastated after a breakup, gets drunk on a flight to California, as her seat partner flirts aggressively, feeding her cocktails. He assaults Alison as she drifts in and out of consciousness. She fights back, complaining to the flight attendant, but the man turns it all around, making her seem like the crazy one; she winds up handcuffed, as other passengers stare at her. Apple found the sequence horrifying—it reminded her of how she came across in her worst press.

Her head lowered and her arms crossed, she began to perseverate on her fears of touring. She ticked off potential outcomes: “I say the right thing, but I look the wrong way, so they say something about the way I look”; “I look the right way, but I say the wrong thing, so they say something mean about what I said.” She went on, “I have a temper. I have lots of rage inside. I have lots of sadness inside of me. And I really, really, really can’t stand assholes. If I’m in front of one, and I happen to be in a public place, and I lose my shit—and that’s a possibility—that’s not going to be any good to me, but I won’t be able to help it, because I’ll want to defend myself.”

Later, we tried to listen to the album. She played the newest version of “Rack of His,” but got frustrated by the tinny compression. She worried that she’d built “a record that can’t be made into a record.” When she’d get mad, or say “fuck,” Mercy would get agitated; wistfully, Apple told me that she sometimes wished she had a small dog that would let her be sad. Despite her fears, she kept recording—at the end of “For Her,” she’d multitracked her voice to form a gospel-like chorus singing, “You were so high”—and said that she wanted the final result to be uncompromising. “I want primary colors,” she said. “I don’t want any half measures.”

We listened to “Heavy Balloon,” a gorgeous, propulsive song about depression. She had added a new second verse, partly inspired by the scene of Alison drowning: “We get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row / The bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know.” Apple, curling up on the floor, explained, “It’s almost like you get Stockholm syndrome with your own depression—like you’re kidnapped by your own depression.” Her voice got soft. “People with depression are always playing with this thing that’s very heavy,” she said. Her arms went up, as if she were bouncing a balloon, pretending to have fun, and said, “Like, ‘Ha, ha, it’s so heavy! ’ ” Then we had to stop, because she was having a panic attack.

Apple has tried all kinds of cures. She was sent to a family therapist at the age of eleven, when, mad at her sister, she glibly remarked, on a school trip, that she planned to kill herself and take Amber with her. After she was raped, she spent hours at a Model Mugging class, practicing self-defense by punching a man in a padded suit. In 2011, she attended eight weeks of silent Buddhist retreats, meditating from 5 a.m.to 9 p.m., with no eye contact—it was part of a plan to become less isolated. She had a wild breakthrough one day, in which the world lit up, showing her a pulsing space between the people at the retreat—a suggestion of something larger. That vision is evoked in the new song “I Want You to Love Me,” in which Apple sings, with raspy fervor, of wanting to get “back in the pulse.”

She tried a method for treating P.T.S.D. called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, and—around the time she poured her vodka down the drain, in 2018—an untested technique called “brain balancing.” Articles about neurological anomalies fascinated her. The first day we met, Apple spread printouts of brain scans on the floor of her studio, pointing to blue and pink shapes. She was seeking patterns, just as she often did on Tumblr, reposting images, doing rabbit-hole searches that she knew were a form of magical thinking.

Apple doesn’t consider herself an alcoholic, but for years she drank vodka alone, every night, until she passed out. When she’d walk by the freezer, she’d reach for a sip; for her, the first step toward sobriety was simply being conscious of that impulse. She had quit cocaine years earlier, after spending “one excruciating night” at Quentin Tarantino’s house, listening to him and Anderson brag. “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,” she joked. She loved getting loose on wine, but not the regret that followed. Her father has been sober for decades, but when Apple was a little kid he was a turbulent alcoholic. He hit bottom when he had a violent confrontation with a Manhattan cabdriver; Apple was only four, but she remembers his bloody face, the nurse at the hospital. When I visited Apple’s mother at her Manhattan apartment, she showed me a photo album with pictures of Apple as a child. One image was captioned “Fiona had too much wine—not feeling good,” with a scribbled sad face. Apple, at two, had wandered around an adult party, drinking the dregs.

For decades, Apple has taken prescription psychopharmaceuticals. She told me that she’d been given a diagnosis of “complex developmental post-traumatic stress disorder.” (It was such a satisfyingly multisyllabic phrase that she preferred to sing it, transforming it into a ditty.) In December, she began having mood swings, with symptoms bad enough that she was told to get an MRI, to rule out a pituitary tumor. In the end, Apple said, she had to wean herself off an antipsychotic that she had been prescribed for her night terrors; the dosage, she said, had been way too high. As she recovered, she felt troubled, sometimes, by a sense of flatness: if she couldn’t feel the emotion in the songs, she said, she wouldn’t be able to tell what worked.

Earlier that fall, she had given an interview to the Web site Vulture, in which she was brassy and perceptive. People responded enthusiastically—many young women saw in Apple a gutsy iconoclast who’d shrugged off the world’s demands. She won praise, too, for having donated a year’s worth of profits from “Criminal”—which J. Lo dances to in the recent movie “Hustlers”—to immigrant criminal-defense cases. But the positive response also threw her, she realized. “Even the best circumstances of being in public may be too much,” she told me.

By January, the situation was better. Apple was no longer having nightmares, although she was still worried, at times, by her moods. One layer of self-protection had been removed when she stopped using alcohol, she said; another was lost with the reduction in medication. And, although she was enthusiastic about some new mixes, she felt apprehensive. She could listen to the tracks, but only through headphones.

So we talked about the subject that made her feel best: the dog rescues she was funding. She paid her brother Bran to pick up the dogs across the country, then drive them to L.A., for placement in foster homes. She and Hallman followed along through videos that Bran sent them. The dogs had been through terrible experiences: one was raped by humans; another was beaten with a shovel. Apple felt that she should not flinch from these details. Rebecca Corry, of Stand Up for Pits, had given her advice for coping: “You have to celebrate small victories and remember their faces and move on to the next one.”

Then, one day, Apple’s band came to her house to listen to the latest mixes. The next afternoon, her face was glowing again. She had wondered if the meeting would be awkward—if the band might disagree on what edits to make. Instead, she and Amy Aileen Wood kept glancing at each other, ecstatic, as they had all the same responses. At last, Apple could listen to the album on speakers.

Afterward, I texted Wood. “Dare I say it was magical?!” Wood wrote. “Everything is sounding so damn good!” Steinberg told me that the notes were simple: “Get out of the way of the music” and let Apple’s voice dominate. Apple knew what she wanted, he said. He described his job as helping her to recognize “that she was her own Svengali.”

It reminded me of a story that Bran had told me, about working in construction. One day, when he was twenty-eight, he strolled out onto a beam suspended thirty-five feet in the air—a task that he’d done many times. Suddenly, he was frozen, terrified of falling. Yet all he had to do was touch something—any object at all—to break the spell. “Because you’re grounded, you can just touch a leaf on a tree and walk,” he said.

Seeing her band again had grounded Apple. She felt a renewed bravado. She’d made plans to rerelease “When the Pawn . . .” on vinyl, but with the original artwork, by Paul Thomas Anderson, swapped out. “That’s just a great album,” she told me. Looking back on her catalogue, she thought that her one weak song might be “Please Please Please,” on “Extraordinary Machine,” which she wrote only because the record company had demanded another track: “Please, please, please, no more melodies.”

In the next few weeks, she sent updates: she was considering potential video directors; she was brainstorming ideas for album art, like a sketch of Harvey Weinstein with his walker. She’d even gone out to see King Princess perform. One night, after petting Janet’s skull and talking to her, Apple went into her old bedroom: she was able to sleep on the futon again, with Mercy. She’d also got a new tattoo, of a black bolt cutter, running down her right forearm.

On the day that Jonathan Ames came over, Apple had pondered the exact nature of her work. Maybe, she suggested, she was like any other artist whose body is an instrument—a ballerina who wears her feet out or a sculptor who strains his back. Maybe she, too, wore herself out. Maybe that’s why she had to take time to heal in between projects. In “On I Go,” the first song she’d written for “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she chanted about trying to lead a life guided by inner, rather than outer, impulses: “On I go, not toward or away / Up until now it was day, next day / Up until now in a rush to prove / But now I only move to move.” In the middle of the track, she screwed up the beat for a second and said, “Ah, fuck, shit.” It was a moment almost anyone making a final edit would smooth out. She left it in.

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