Month: March 2019

Iran’s many woes briefly went up in smoke on Tuesday as Iranians observed a nearly 4,000-year-old Persian tradition known as the Festival of Fire.

The celebration is held on the last Tuesday night before Nowruz, or the Iranian New Year, which will be celebrated Thursday. The annual ritual dates back to at least 1700 B.C. and is linked to the Zoroastrian religion.

To celebrate, people light bonfires, set off fireworks and send wish lanterns floating off into the night sky. Others jump over and around fires, chanting “My yellow is yours, your red is mine,” invoking the replacement of ills with warmth and energy.

The fire festival also features an Iranian version of trick-or-treating, with people going door to door and being given a holiday mix of nuts and berries, as well as buckets of water.

Arezou Abarghouei held hands with her daughter and husband as they leaped over a small fire in Tehran.

“Iranians love to celebrate, and they need it, especially now, when all of us are facing economic problems,” she said. “This is a way to forget these difficulties just for one night.”

This year Nowruz comes at a time of growing economic hardship following U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal and restore crippling sanctions. Iran’s currency has plummeted in recent months, sending prices skyrocketing and wiping out many people’s life savings.

The fire festival is one of two holidays with ancient roots that are still observed each year in the Islamic Republic, the other being a picnic day in early April.

The holiday offers a rare opportunity for Iranians to dance and celebrate in public, something authorities usually frown on. Police warned people to stay away from major streets and public squares, but largely ignored celebrations held inside neighborhoods.

Hard-liners discourage such celebrations, viewing them as pagan holdovers. The Western-allied monarchy that was toppled by the 1979 Islamic revolution had emphasized the country’s pre-Islamic past, presenting itself as heir to a Persian civilization stretching back to antiquity.

The semi-official Fars news agency quoted head of the country’s emergency committee as saying 155 people were injured during the celebrations, mainly from fireworks. It said 22 people lost limbs and 48 suffered eye injuries.
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It’s not uncommon for people to just look at Jodi Benson and burst into tears.

Sometimes they hyperventilate or scream. But mostly they break down and start sobbing. Benson will hold them, heaving in her arms, and pat their back gently.

Benson isn’t a household name, but for many she’s an intimate part of their childhood. She supplied the singing and speaking voice of Ariel, the heroine of the 1989 animated Disney hit The Little Mermaid, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

Benson says she will sometimes watch as the stunned movie’s fans virtually go back in time in front of her. “It triggers a memory for them,” she says.

“They remember who they were with when they saw the movie the first time. Maybe that sibling is no longer with them, that grandparent is no longer with them. It reminds them of a relationship that had been broken with a parent. So they have all sorts of emotions that go on.”

​The Little Mermaid has changed a lot of lives, not least of which is Benson’s, who has continued to perform Ariel virtually every weekend in concerts as well as on film in the Wreck-It Ralph franchise.

The Little Mermaid also had a big role in making Disney into an animation juggernaut and reviving the art form. Many believe we’d never have Anna and Elsa from Frozen without first having Ariel.

“Disney was starting to get into a groove that would continue, but I feel like a lot of that started with The Little Mermaid,” says Ron Clements, who co-wrote and co-directed the film.

Landing the part

Benson was a rising Broadway star when Ariel came into her orbit. She had been in a short-lived musical Smile when Howard Ashman, the musical’s lyricist and story writer, invited the out-of-work cast to audition for his next project, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Producers wanted the singing and speaking voice to be supplied by the same actress. So Benson, a lyric soprano, sang the signature Part of Your World on a reel-to-reel tape and was handed a few of pages of dialogue.

“I ran into the ladies’ room,” she recalls, “and waited for everybody to get out of the stalls and started talking to the mirror, sort of trying to come up with what would she sound like at 16.”

Benson, it turned out, was a master mimic. She had spent countless hours in her room as a child with her guitar, singing along to records by Barbra Streisand, Carole King and James Taylor, as well as Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line.

“I would start to just sing like them. But it wasn’t like I was trying to be them. It’s just that’s what I heard. And so that’s just what you do. You just sound like what you been listening to,” she says.

A year or so after auditioning for Ariel, she got the call that she’d won the role. “I completely forgot that I had auditioned,” she says. Back then, voiceover work wasn’t very glamorous and big celebrities wouldn’t consider it.

“It wasn’t a good job. Doing voiceovers was what you would do when your career was on the back half, when it was tanking,” says Benson. She thought Ariel would be just another notch on her resume. It was not.

“Things just changed overnight,” she says.

Breakthrough film

Propelled by such Alan Menken songs as Under the Sea and Kiss the Girl, the film won two Grammys and earned three Academy Award nominations. It was critically acclaimed, with Roger Ebert calling it a “jolly and inventive animated fantasy,” and would go to earn $211 million worldwide. Parents of children with learning disabilities have told Benson their child’s first words were from the film.

A live-action remake is in the works, featuring new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created Hamilton. He loved the 1989 animated film so much, its partly the reason he named his first child Sebastian — the mermaid’s crab friend.

It was the kind of hit that Clements and his animators at Disney had long been hoping for. He had started at Disney in 1974 and was part of a new generation of artists trying to change the notion that animation was just for kids.

Clements had pitched a two-page treatment of the musical to then-studio head Michael Eisner and was given the green light. For Clements and his partner, John Musker, the stakes were high: It was the first fairy tale Disney had done for some three decades.

“There was a feeling — all through Little Mermaid — that this film had potential to be the film that could break through and work the way we were all hungry for and hoping for,” recalls Clements, who went on to co-direct Aladdin and Hercules.

“It was really, really gratifying that it did break through. It broke through the stigma that animated films were just for kids. It became a date movie. People started taking Disney animation seriously again.”

Over the past 30 years, Ariel has become the bridge between classic princesses like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and modern ones like Mulan and Merida. And Benson has become the official Ariel ambassador, tapped to do sequels, video games and shorts, in addition to voicing other characters like Barbie in the Toy Story franchise.

Her arms are always open to fans and she’s now welcoming the fourth generation to The Little Mermaid. So feel free to cry on her shoulder.

“It doesn’t feel like a job. It just feels like a way of life more than more than anything else,” she says. “You have this multigenerational moment that families can share together. And I get to be a small piece of the puzzle of their story.”
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Jordan Peele’s sweet spot as a filmmaker are the “pit in your stomach” moments. That thing that happens when you realize the woman stirring the tea isn’t just there for conversation. When you notice that the help is a little off. Or, as in his new film Us, when you see that the family of four standing in your driveway late at night looks exactly like you.

Peele knows how to get under your skin and stay there, and it’s what made him the must-see horror filmmaker of the moment. Us, out nationwide Friday, is only his second and yet it’s been an event-in-the-making ever since it was announced. That’s what happens when your debut is Get Out.

Get Out wasn’t even finished when the former sketch-comedian started cooking up the idea for his follow-up about doppelgangers, loosely inspired by the Twilight Zone episode “Mirror Image.” Then the wild success of Get Out — four Oscars nominations, one win (Peele for original screenplay), over $255 million in tickets sold against a $4.5 million budget, and general cultural impact — put Peele on another level. So by the time Universal Pictures agreed to make Us, not only did he have a budget over five times higher than his first, but he had his pick of collaborators too.

“Because of Get Out, I was privileged enough to be able to tap the best talent in the industry,” Peele said recently.

Nyong’o and Duke

That goes for stars Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, who play dual roles as the nuclear American family, the Wilsons, and the terrifying red jumpsuit-wearing and gold scissor-wielding Red and Abraham, as well as the below-the-line talent: Production designer Ruth De Jong (Twin Peaks); cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (It Follows); and costume designer Kym Barrett (The Matrix) among them.

“I had an amazing team on Get Out,” Peele said. “But this group sort of allowed me to stretch a little bit more.”

Duke was impressed by his calm. He knew there were “sophomore pressures” — he had his own set following his breakout role in Black Panther — but said Peele never brought any of that to set.

“Day one, [Peele] said, ‘Before we do anything I just want to let you guys know that I’m here for you. I won’t stop until we get the shot. When I say cut, we got the shot. So trust me, believe in me,”‘ Duke said. “And I was like, that’s all I need.”

Duke and Nyong’o already had a short hand working together. Yes, they had just both been in Black Panther, but they were also Yale Drama School graduates and have seen one another do everything from clown work to Chekov.

“It was great to be able to perform with someone who I value as much more than a friend — I value her as a cohort. I value her as an ally. I went to work every day trying to make sure we could create a space where she could excel. I thought that was my duty,” Duke said. “We had a female lead and in our climate in Hollywood we were doing the work and leading by example.”

And Peele put them both through the wringer. The days on set as the Wilsons were full of laughter and fun. But the days as the murderous doppelgangers known as The Tethered, Peele said, felt like “a morgue.”

“The air getting sucked out of the room is an understatement. But it was kind of cool,” Peele said. The actors went “pretty method” on those days.

Nyong’o had it especially hard. She’d chosen to affect a strained vocal condition — spasmodic dysphonia — to make Red even more haunting. And she had to do Red’s first big monologue 11 times with that raspy, painful sounding voice.

Horror movie

Us is chock full of pop culture references, subtle and overt: A Jaws T-shirt here, a C.H.U.D. VHS there.  Even the setting, the Santa Cruz boardwalk, is a callback to The Lost Boys. And every reference works “on two different levels and hopefully more,” Peele said. But don’t stress if you don’t catch or decipher them all.

“There are many of these things that only I will ever know,” Peele revealed.

Although one thing is not really up for interpretation: the genre. He tweeted the other day that “Us is a horror movie.”

“I can see the debate already beginning and people are calling it different things. I have a little bit of fun with the big genre conversation,” he said. “But I saw enough little pieces of like ‘horror-thriller,’ ‘horror-comedy,’ ‘social-thriller,’ out there that I just want to make it nice clean and defined: It’s a horror movie.”

Race

Peele hasn’t tired of explaining that Us isn’t about race, either. Though he understands why people might think it would be, considering Get Out.

“I know the way we are, the lack of representation in the industry and genre has led us to this point where it’s almost impossible to not see race in a movie with a black family in the center. And I wanted people to be ready to expand their expectations,” Peele said. “My fear was if I didn’t say anything, that people would take away that this was a movie about black-on-black violence which was not my intention.”

As for whether Peele has felt internal or external pressures to match Get Out’s magic?

“There are, but it’s OK,” he laughed. “It’s just movies.”
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Warner Bros. chief Kevin Tsujihara, one of the highest ranking Hollywood executives to be felled by sexual misconduct allegations, stepped down from the studio Monday following claims that he promised roles to an actress with whom he was having an affair.

WarnerMedia chief executive John Stankey announced Tsujihara’s exit as chairman and chief executive of Warner Bros., saying his departure was in the studio’s “best interest.”

“Kevin has contributed greatly to the studio’s success over the past 25 years and for that we thank him,” said Stankey. “Kevin acknowledges that his mistakes are inconsistent with the company’s leadership expectations and could impact the company’s ability to execute going forward.”

Earlier this month, WarnerMedia launched an investigation after a March 6 Hollywood Reporter story detailed text messages between Tsujihara and British actress Charlotte Kirk going back to 2013. The messages suggested a quid pro quo sexual relationship between the aspiring actress and the studio head in which he made promises that he’d introduce her to influential executives and she’d be considered for roles in movies and television.

In a memo to Warner Bros. staff on Monday, Tsujihara said he was departing “after lengthy introspection, and discussions with John Stankey over the past week.”

“It has become clear that my continued leadership could be a distraction and an obstacle to the company’s continued success,” said Tsujihara. “The hard work of everyone within our organization is truly admirable, and I won’t let media attention on my past detract from all the great work the team is doing.”

Tsujihara’s attorney, Bert H. Deixler, earlier stated that Tsujihara “had no direct role in the hiring of this actress.” He declined further comment Monday.

Tsujihara, who has headed the Burbank, California, studio since 2013, earlier pledged to fully cooperate with the studio’s investigation and apologized to Warner Bros. staff for “mistakes in my personal life that have caused pain and embarrassment to the people I love the most.”

The scandal unfolded just as Warner Bros. was restructuring on the heels of AT&T’s takeover of WarnerMedia, previously known as Time Warner. Tsujihara’s role had just been expanded on Feb. 28 to include global kids and family entertainment including oversight of Adult Swim and the Cartoon Network.

Kirk appeared in Warner Bros.’ “How to Be Single” in 2016 and “Ocean’s 8” in 2018. She has denied any inappropriate behavior on the part of Tsujihara or two other executives, Brett Ratner and James Packer, who she communicated with. “Mr. Tsujihara never promised me anything,” Kirk said in an earlier statement.

But the details of the leaked text messages between Tsujihara and Kirk immediately put his future at Warner Bros. in jeopardy. Kirk wrote in one 2015 message to him: “Are u going to help me like u said u would?” Tsujhara responded, “Richard will be reaching out to u tonight,” referring to Richard Brener, president of Warner Bros.’ New Line label.

Other exchanges suggested the kind of give-and-take of Hollywood’s “casting couch” culture. Kirk was introduced to Tsujihara by James Packer, the Australian billionaire. Warner Bros. was then finalizing a $450-million co-financing deal with Packer and Brett Ratner, the director-producer. In a message to Ratner, Kirk said she was “used as icing on the cake.”

WarnerMedia, the studio’s parent company, said Monday that its internal investigation into the situation, carried out by a third-party law firm, will continue.

Tsujihara’s exit follows other high-profile executive departures in the post-Harvey Weinstein (hash)MeToo era. CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves was pushed out after numerous women accused him of sexual harassment. Walt Disney Animation chief John Lasseter was ousted after he acknowledged missteps in his behavior with employees.

The 54-year-old Tsujihara, the first executive of Asian descent to head a major Hollywood studio, presided over a largely positive Warner Bros. era with little fanfare. A former home video and video game executive at the company, Tsujihara focused on franchise creation, some of which have worked, some of which haven’t.

After poor marks from fans and critics, the studio’s DC Comics films have recently been retooled and found their footing in hits like “Wonder Woman” and “Aquaman.” Other franchises — like “The Lego Movie” and the “Harry Potter” spinoff “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” — have seen diminishing returns on their latest incarnations. The studio has also fostered its connection with filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (“Dunkirk”) and Bradley Cooper (whose “A Star Is Born” was Warner Bros.’ top Oscar contender). Warner Bros. last year amassed $5.6 billion in global ticket sales, its best haul ever.

The studio will now begin a search for a new chief as it also prepares to launch a streaming service designed to compete with Netflix.
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Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) chief Tsunekazu Takeda, who is expected to announce plans to step down on Tuesday, is also set to resign as a member of the International Olympics Committee, Kyodo News reported.

French prosecutors questioned Takeda in Paris and placed him under formal investigation in December for suspected corruption in Japan’s successful bid to host the 2020 Summer Games.

French investigators have led a years-long probe into corruption in athletics and in early 2016 extended their inquiry into the bidding and voting processes for the hosting of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

Multimillion-dollar payments made by the Tokyo bid committee to a Singapore consulting company are under probe and Takeda is suspected of paying bribes to secure the winning bid.

Takeda has denied any wrongdoing, saying that there was nothing improper with the contracts made between the committee and the consultancy and that they were for legitimate work.

Although there was no formal announcement of the 71-year-old’s resignation, Takeda is expected to announce his decision at the JOC’s executive board meeting in Tokyo later on Tuesday.

The IOC’s ethics commission has opened an ethics file on Takeda, who chairs the IOC’s marketing commission. Takeda has been a member of the IOC since 2012 and was president of the Tokyo 2020 bid committee.
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Like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” the Southern California city of Lake Elsinore is being overwhelmed by the power of the poppies.

About 150,000 people over the weekend flocked to see this year’s rain-fed flaming orange patches of poppies lighting up the hillsides near the city of about 60,000 residents, about a 90-minute drive from either San Diego or Los Angeles.

Interstate 15 was a parking lot. People fainted in the heat; a dog romping through the fields was bitten by a rattlesnake.

The lure of poppies was used in the “Wizard of Oz” when the wicked witch infuses them with poison knowing Dorothy cannot resist them. She falls asleep in a vibrant field and the good witch casts a spell to make it snow to break the spell after her friends fail at trying to carry her out of the fields on their way to Oz.

Lake Elsinore had tried to prepare for the crush of people drawn by the super bloom, a rare occurrence that usually happens about once a decade because it requires a wet winter and warm temperatures that stay above freezing.

It offered a free shuttle service to the top viewing spots, but it wasn’t enough.

Sunday traffic got so bad that Lake Elsinore officials requested law enforcement assistance from neighboring jurisdictions. At one point, the city pulled down the curtain and closed access to poppy-blanketed Walker Canyon.

“It was insane, absolutely insane,” said Mayor Steve Manos, who described it as a “poppy apocalypse.”

By Monday the #poppyshutdown announced by the city on Twitter was over and the road to the canyon was re-opened.

And people were streaming in again.

Young and old visitors to the Lake Elsinore area seemed equally enchanted as they snapped selfies against the natural carpet of iridescent orange.

Some contacted friends and family on video calls so they could share the beauty in real time. Artists propped canvasses on the side of the trail to paint the super bloom, while drones buzzed overhead.

Patty Bishop, 48, of nearby Lake Forest, was on her second visit. The native Californian had never seen such an explosion of color from the state flower. She battled traffic Sunday but that didn’t deter her from going back Monday for another look. She got there at sunrise and stayed for hours.

“There’s been so many in just one area,” she said. “I think that’s probably the main reason why I’m out here personally is because it’s so beautiful.”

Stephen Kim and his girlfriend got to Lake Elsinore even before sunrise Sunday to beat the crowds but there were already hundreds of people.

The two wedding photographers hiked on the designated trails with an engaged couple to do a photo shoot with the flowers in the background, but they were upset to see so many people going off-trail.

“There were lots of disrespectful tourists flying drones, letting their dogs off leash, taking photos in the fields, stomping on flowers to get on top of a rock for a selfie,” said Kim, 24, of Carlsbad. “Looking at all these people, I realized this is not sustainable. This bubble is going to burst and it’s going to get taken away because people are taking advantage. Four hours later I looked at Facebook and saw it was closed.”

Kim said they were also distraught to see so much garbage. They picked up as many discarded water bottles as they could carry.

“You see this beautiful pristine photo of nature but then you look to the left and there’s plastic Starbucks cups and water bottles on the trail and selfie sticks and people having road rage because some people were walking slower,” he said.

Andy Macuga, honorary mayor of the desert town of Borrego Springs, another wildflower hotspot, said he feels for Lake Elsinore.

In 2017, a rain-fed super bloom brought in more than a half-million visitors to the town of 3,500. Restaurants ran out of food. Gas stations ran out of fuel. Traffic backed up on a single road for 20 miles.

The city is again experiencing a super bloom.

The crowds are back. Hotels are full. More than 6,000 people on a recent Saturday stopped at the visitor’s center at the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California’s largest park with 640,000 acres (1,000 square miles).

But it helps that the masses of blooms are appearing in several different areas this time, and some sections are fading, while others are lighting up with flowers, helping to disperse the crowds a bit.

Most importantly, Macuga said, the town’s businesses prepared this time as if a major storm was about to hit. His restaurant, Carlee’s, is averaging more than 550 meals a day, compared to 300 on a normal March day.

“We were completely caught off guard in 2017 because it was the first time that we had had a flower season like this with social media,” he said. “It helps now knowing what’s coming.”
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When you think of a chess champion, you generally picture a serious gentleman in a suit and tie, stroking his beard while he stares at the board, contemplating his next move.

New York’s newest champ defies all those categories — he’s an 8-year-old smiling Nigerian refugee who lives in a Manhattan homeless shelter with his family.

Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi was crowned New York State’s chess champion in the kindergarten through third-grade age group last week.

Coaches at the tournament were dazzled by Tani’s aggressive style and stunned to find out that he’s been playing chess for about a year, learning the game at public school.

He and his family, including an older brother, fled Nigeria in 2017 to escape Boko Haram terror threats against Christians. 

Tani’s father works two jobs and his mother is hoping to find work as a home health aide so the family can move out of the homeless shelter into their own place.

Then Tani can have his own room to store his seven chess trophies, including one that is almost as big as he is.

His next goal is a national championship for elementary school students in May. He said his ultimate goal is to become the world’s youngest grandmaster.
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Country hit-making duo Brooks & Dunn are riding a resurgence of interest in ’90s-era country music with a new album celebrating their top-selling singles, a longstanding Las Vegas residency and now an invitation to join the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The duo, along with comedic singer Ray Stevens and record label head Jerry Bradley, were announced Monday as this year’s inductees and will be formally inducted during a ceremony later this year.

“There’s a lot going on at this stage that generally doesn’t happen,” Ronnie Dunn told The Associated Press after the press conference inside the Hall of Fame’s rotunda featuring plaques honoring the icons of the industry. Their new album, “Reboot,” out April 5, features the duo on new versions of their hits with today’s country stars such as Kacey Musgraves, Luke Combs and Kane Brown.

With more than 20 No. 1 country hits, the Grammy-winning pair is the most awarded duo by the Country Music Association, earning 14 vocal duo awards over their careers. They started as solo singers but were encouraged to join up as a duo and had immediate success with a string of hits, starting with “Brand New Man,” “My Next Broken Heart,” “Neon Moon” and “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.”

With multi-platinum sales, they became one of country’s biggest touring acts for decades, combining Brooks’ big personality and guitar work and Ronnie’s singing.

“Back in the day, in the ’90s, everything was sensationalized and country had hit arenas and stadiums,” Dunn said. “We jumped right in on all fours.”

“We were just weird enough that I think fans got that. These two guys don’t really belong together, but they are up there doing it,” Brooks said.

The duo split up in 2010 and they both started working on solo projects, but reunited in 2015 for what’s turned into a four-year residency in Las Vegas with Reba McEntire.

Stevens, 80, is known for singing zany hits like “The Streak,” but also sentimental ones like the Grammy-winning “Everything Is Beautiful.” Stevens is a multi-faceted artist who started as a session musician in Nashville and has been a TV personality, producer, publisher, songwriter and entertainer for six decades. He recorded comedy albums and videos and opened a theater in Branson, Missouri. He currently has a dinner theater show in Nashville called “CabaRay.”

“I love what I do. My dad used to say, ‘When are you going to get a real job?'” Stevens told The Associated Press on Monday. “And I never wanted to get a real job.”

Bradley was the former head of RCA Records’ Nashville office and worked with Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Milsap, Charley Pride and Alabama. Under his helm, the label produced the first platinum-selling country record, “Wanted! The Outlaws,” a compilation album among Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser.

Bradley came from a dynasty of Music Row leaders, including his father, Owen Bradley, an influential producer, and uncle Harold Bradley, an acclaimed musician, who died in January. Jerry Bradley started to tear up as he talked about being inducted alongside his father and uncle, calling it the greatest honor that anyone can receive in country music.
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