Deadline Hollywood - AwardsLine - Emmy Nominees - 08/09/2023

THE UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW

Ray Liotta

We always called each other goodfellas. Like, you said to somebody, ‘You’re gonna like this guy. He’s all right. He’s a goodfella. He’s one of us.’

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First Take

6 OUT OF OFFICE: Has the laugh-out-loud star-driven TV comedy become redundant?

10 QUICK SHOTS: RuPaul’s Drag Race rewinds to the ’90s and Beef blames it on the bougie.

12 STAR GAZERS: Emmy’s documentary darlings are wrapped up in celebrity sightings.

14 ART OF CRAFT: Reaching for the tsars in Hulu’s The Great

Cover Story

16 RAY LIOTTA: Remembering the late Black Bird star, a smokin’ ace goodfella whose legacy was something wild.

Features

26 KEN BURNS: The veteran documentarian confronts America’s WWII shame.

32 HOLLYWOOD ON STRIKE: What do they want? And when do they want it?

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38 HOUSE OF THE DRAGON: Once upon a time in Westeros: the show with skin in the Game of Thrones

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40 STRIKES AROUND TOWN: Scenes from the front lines of the biggest entertainment crisis in 60 years.

On The Cover

Ray Liotta photographed in 1992 by David Turner.

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OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A NONFICTION PROGRAM

ALLEN HUGHES, LASSE JÄRVI

F T I A R K S E T

By Lynette Rice

For just about every decade that there has been a sitcom on television, it’s always been easy to identify those stars who shine bright as the current face of comedy. In the ’50s, it was Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball. In the ’60s, it was Dick Van Dyke and Andy Gri ffi th. The ’70s brought us Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, followed by Sherman Hemsley, Bill Cosby and Michael J. Fox in the ’80s, Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr and the cast of Friends in the ’90s, Charlie Sheen and Bernie Mac in the early aughts and Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jim Parsons in 2006 and beyond.

But ever since Veep  and Te Big Bang Teory  went off the air in 2019, the spotlight has remained surprisingly vacant—the result of an expanding and ever-changing business in which multi-camera sitcoms have become vestiges of the past while contemporary comedies have evolved into minidramas with only a smattering of yuks. (More on this later). If you add in the fact that streamers are notoriously secretive about how many (or few) people actually watch their shows, it’s impossible to judge how traditional comedies resonate with audiences today.

“You think of all these names from Lucille Ball to Candice Bergen, Roseanne, Fran Drescher, even Alec Baldwin and Kelsey Grammer. They contributed to more than just their show. They contributed to the state of comedy,” opines Jim McKairnes, a former senior vice president of planning for CBS who’s spent the last 13 years teaching TV history at the college level. “There are just some things that are missing from the landscape that don’t have to disappear for the sake of evolution or revolution.”

So, who is the face of comedy in 2023? If the recent Emmy wins are to be believed, Jason Sudeikis is the reigning king for his work on Apple TV+’s  Ted Lasso , while Jean Smart wears the crown for headlining the

Max series  Hacks . Yet no matter how much critics heap praise on their performances, those shows are missing two key components: while undeniably charming, they’re not straight-up comedies. And more important, they’re not true commercial successes like the sitcoms of yesteryear.

Before you start arguing how it seems like ‘AFC Richmond’ fever is everywhere, consider this: Trends on social media aren’t an

accurate measurement of a show’s true commercial value, nor are magazine covers, appearances on latenight talk shows and yes—even awards. Only 5.92 million viewers tuned in to see Ted Lasso win its second Emmy for Outstanding Comedy in 2022—making it the least-watched ceremony in the history of the awards. And ask any of your non-coastal relatives if they subscribe to both Apple TV+ and Max: chances are good that they don’t.

Now that Ted Lasso  has for all intents and purposes ended its run with Apple TV+ (no matter how much the streamer would like us to believe that it may return), fans will likely follow Sudeikis to his next comedy. But does his success on Ted Lasso  make him a bona fide hitmaker? Maybe, but probably not in the way that  Seinfeld ’s Dreyfus was able to turn  Te New Adventures of Old Christine  into a hit for CBS and  Veep  for HBO, while Tim Allen parlayed his popularity from  Home Improvement  into nine seasons of  Last Man Standing  for ABC and Fox and a second season of  Te Santa Clauses  for Disney+. A true face sells both the specific show and the genre that it’s in—an important component to the viability (and future) of TV comedy. No slight to the extraordinarily talented Quinta Brunson, but her character, Janine Teagues, on  Abbott Elementary doesn’t yet have the same household name status as Jerry and Elaine or Sheldon and Penny. The same goes for the cast of  Ghosts ; like  Abbott Elementary , the show is considered a hit on its own merit as a whole, not because of any one of its stars.

We know what you are saying. Why does this matter? Isn’t this the same kind of mindless chatter that also drives cynics to say, why are there no original ideas on TV anymore? And, why are there so many projects based on old IPs? You’re right. Of course, you’re right. In the grand scheme of things, we should be celebrating how storytelling on television has evolved, and maybe consider that comedy ‘faces’ can now be found outside the traditional confines of a sitcom (here’s looking at you,  A Black Lady Sketch Show ’s Robin Thede, SNL ’s Keenan Thompson, and John Mulaney, whose Netflix specials have made him a favorite among many TV comedy writers today). But we also deserve a minute to reflect on how much

From far left: Quinta Brunson in Abbott Elementary ; Tim Allen in Home Improvement ; Ted Lasso ’s Jason Sudeikis and Hannah Waddingham.

Dick Van Dyke

has changed—and what we have lost.

Let’s get back to today’s notion of what constitutes a comedy, at least from the point of view of Emmy voters. Of the eight series nominated in the Outstanding Comedy category, only two are truly humor driven—the aforementioned  Abbott Elementary and  Jury Duty —the Amazon Freevee confection that features James Marsden. The rest of the nominees are, at best, dramedies, and at most, heavy dramas—as evidenced by the violent way Barry  wrapped its fourth and final season and the heavy talk that transpires each week in the Chicago kitchen of  The Bear

Today’s TV executives—who are influenced, in part, by television critics who generally tend to favor more esoteric fare over Chuck Lorre’s latest joint—aren’t really looking for the kind of knee-slapping romps that used to populate broadcast television. Veteran sitcom writers—and we’re talking about those pros who used to collect Emmys for sport and made big stars out of the likes of Ted Danson and Kelsey Grammer—now struggle to figure out what suits consider a good ‘laugh’ today. And more often than not, maybe those suits will turn their noses up at bust-a-gut punch lines.

“They want us to dig deeper,” one award-winning sitcom veteran says. “We’re getting hammered with, ‘Less jokes, make it about something.’ Or ‘We like more of this sweetness happening here.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’ll get to the sweetness, but can we be funny before that?’ I always come back to the writers’ room after a notes call saying, ‘They hate jokes.’”

And then there’s the disconnect with younger viewers, that programmers desperately need to reach if the television comedy genre is going to survive. But if Gen Z was asked to name the face of comedy today, they’d likely mention someone from TikTok, not from a show on a streamer or (God forbid) a broadcast network. In fact, most young people today wouldn’t even consider tuning into a so-called sitcom, unless it was a rerun of  Friends

For further proof, consider the students who attend McKairnes’ classes at Middle Tennessee State University. For years, he’s heard students comment on what they watch and don’t watch. More important, they’re quite specific about what they don’t find funny.

“That they weren’t watching linear TV at all was not a headline. What was surprising was that they rejected outright the lame half-hour sitcom form as a whole, a 70-year-old genre, due to its laugh track,” McKairnes says. “The on-screen sound of laughter as a response fat out turned them of. In some cases, it even ofended them. The arms-folded ready-to-fght

look-of-defance reason from one student was, ‘I don’t want to be told what’s funny.’”

“It’s a hard thing to say because there are still a lot of hardworking people in it,” McKairnes continues. “But TV comedy can be kind of lame, and they just reject it all as pretty lame. And when you see some of the shows that haven’t worked in the past 20 years to try to keep up with a changing world, you can understand why they say that.”

But there have been a few breakthrough moments in his class, which gave McKairnes some hope. When he exposed his classroom to some classic favorite multi-camera comedies, “they saw the appeal,” he says, “some even laughed.”

“Scenes of I Love Lucy were, let’s go with,  enjoyed It was the same for Sammy Davis Jr.’s famous All in the Family appearance too,” McKairnes says. “The  Cheers pilot from 1982, shown in its entirety, was universally accepted, and even praised by some. And they live for Te Ofce , even now.”

That’s funny; we do, too. ★

From left: Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Seinfeld ; Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy

Nasim Pedrad and John Mulaney in Mulaney

Scream Queens

RuPaul’s Drag Race production designer Gianna Costa pays homage to the ’90s in “Blame it on the Edit”

“The music video episodes are our main episode where we showcase the best queens from that season,” says production designer Gianna Costa. After winning an Emmy last year for Season 14’s music video episode “Catwalk”, Costa is nominated again this year for “Blame it on the Edit”, which is ideal for someone who grew up watching

music videos on MTV. “My favorite part of the music video episodes is getting to look back at all these music videos I love.”

“Blame it on the Edit” features the final four drag queens of Season 15—Sasha Colby, Anetra, Mistress Isabelle Brooks and Luxx Noir London— performing a remix of RuPaul’s titular song. Each queen

performs their own verse on the set of a spaceship. “It was very different from the rest of the season, but it was still in the Drag Race world.”

This year, the queens pay homage to the “Scream” music video, featuring Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson. “Taking that homage into our drag universe, we really wanted to create something that was out of this world, but also really cool in the way that it is shot in black and white,” she says.

Dressing For Revenge

How costume designer Helen Huang curated outfts for a woman scorned in Beef

In Netfix’s dramedy Beef, revenge is a dish best-served bougie—at least when procuring pristine attire for a woman dead set on vengeance. Following an intense road rage encounter, Beef showcases the contrasting lives of Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), an unsuccessful contractor, and Amy Lau (Ali Wong), an affuent self-made entrepreneur, as they become hellbent on destroying each other’s lives in the aftermath.

On the surface, Amy has a picturesque life with a doting husband, a sweet daughter, an artsy home and a lucrative career. But underneath Amy’s façade of happiness there’s a cutthroat ambition and desperation to live a life less polished. For costume designer Helen Huang, it was important to curate Amy’s complex

personality through a tastefully refned wardrobe that hid the cracks beneath the surface. “She’s a very chaotic person on the inside,” Huang explains. “But very calculated on the outside, which is what she needs to be a successful business owner. We put her in whites, creams and neutral textured clothes because it juxtaposed to what’s happening inside [her psyche]. When a person wears white, they have to be careful of their surroundings, and I wanted her to be that person while telling the narrative of something brewing underneath.”

Leaning into Amy’s Calabasas aesthetic, Huang took inspiration from local businesses. “I wanted Amy to look like a boutique dresser. She’s not going to the mall. She’s on [shopping sites] Ssense and Farfetch because

she’s very exact in how she wants the world to see her. Along with the production designer, we wanted to show this bougie upper echelon of good taste.”

Destiny Jackson

Costa’s vision for the production design was to blend her love of sci-fi with the drag world. “Not just drag, but also fun shapes that make it look like the ’90s,” she says. “In the late ’90s/ early 2000s, there was an upsurge of this sci-fi look,” which Costa used as inspiration for the spaceship’s white reflective surfaces that the lights would bounce off of in the monochromatic sequence.

Ryan Fleming

RuPaul’s Drag Race

Beef

WRITTEN IN THE STARS

By Matt Carey

When Ryan White’s phone jolted to life the morning of July 12, buzzing with texts and calls, the flmmaker wasn’t expecting it. Yes, it was Emmy nomination day, but no, he hadn’t counted on recognition for his Netfix documentary about Pamela Anderson.

Yet there it was, in black and white on the Emmys.com website: For Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special, Pamela, A Love Story , about the actress and former Playboy Playmate who swept from Canada onto television screens, magazine covers and scandal sheets in the 1990s.

“I think if you went back two and a half years or three years, whenever I first met Pamela, I think we would’ve both burst into laughter if you had told us that we were going make an Emmy-nominated film,” White says. “That was not the goal at all. And I don’t think either of us thought that was a possibility.”

White’s surprise owes something to the perception of documentaries about pop culture icons—surefire audience magnets, but not necessarily awards fodder. That script got tossed this year, as celebrity-driven films dominated the Documentary or Nonfiction Special category: in addition to Pamela, A Love Story , nominations went to HBO’s Being Mary Tyler Moore , Amazon Prime’s Judy Blume Forever , and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie from Apple TV+. The only non-celebrity themed film to make it in was My Transparent Life , from Elysium Media, about the journey of two transgender people.

“Not every celebrity story is interesting,” White observes. “I think it takes a great film and all those other films in our category—and there are many other celebrity docs that didn’t get nominated this year—are great too… I do wonder if we’ll see more of that over the coming years.”

Streaming platforms and cable channels, which used to produce a diverse array of documentary content, increasingly favor celebrity bios in the greenlighting process.

“I think it’s probably the most popular genre of documentary,” says

White, who has also directed films on Dr. Ruth and tennis legend Serena Williams. “Maybe true crime competes with celebrity docs, but I know that there’s a real interest in it from distributors, because of the built-in audience.”

Imagine Documentaries, a thriving unit of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s company, has produced films recently on Julia Child, celebrity chef and humanitarian José Andrés; its documentary about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, directed by Amy Poehler, earned two Emmys last year. Imagine also produced Judy Blume Forever , directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok.

The surge of celebrity-driven docs represents “a trend that we’ve seen really building over the last couple of years,” says Imagine Entertainment President Justin Wilkes. “I think audiences love discovering people who they might know or think they know, but then really getting to do that deep dive and learning something more about them. And as evidenced very much in the Judy Blume film and some of our past celebrity documentaries, there’s other issues and themes that can really get pulled out of their story. I think that’s where an audience can have a real emotional connection and a real sense of why this story is important today.”

The Judy Blume documentary could hardly be timelier, landing in a political environment that has seen conservative states ramp up efforts to ban books branded by some as objectionable. Forever , Blume’s YA novel published in 1975, is among dozens of books yanked from school library shelves in Florida’s Martin County earlier this year. Last year, Utah passed the Sensitive Materials in School Act, which also prompted the banning of Forever

“We thought book banning was a relic of the ’80s culture wars. It felt like it was going to be a segment of the film about something that happened in the past,” says Wolchok, co-director of the documentary. “And then all of a sudden, the world sort of fell apart. Everything devolved. The way Judy describes it now, it’s worse than it was in the ’80s.

Pamela Anderson leads the stellar names who are revealing all in Emmy’s nonfction categories

Pamela, A Love Story

Because back then it was a group of parents challenging books they didn’t want their kids to read, or they didn’t want in the classroom. And now it’s politicians, it’s leaders of government.”

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields —a double Emmy nominee, for picture editing and Lana Wilson’s direction—gains heft by situating the actress’s story within a societal re-examination of the sexualization of girls. In her first major movie role, Shields played a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 drama Pretty Baby . When she shot the film, she was 11.

“Before Shields even hit puberty, the media had taken to framing her as either a Lolita or a demure darling,” The New York Times wrote in its review of the Hulu documentary, “a Catch-22 that Wilson, through interviews with journalists and other actresses, positions within a history of Hollywood exploitation.”

Pamela, A Love Story redefines a woman long treated as a “caricature”, as White puts it, most famous for a grainy videotape—stolen from the home she shared with her then husband, rocker Tommy Lee—that showed the couple having sex. The purloined footage wound up on computer screens across the globe.

“I think she’s a person that’s been dismissed over and over… In a lot of ways, Pamela has been reduced to that stolen tape,” White says. “At least her public persona, it defined that.”

His documentary gives space for the private Pamela to emerge, revealing a free-spirited personality, self-aware and intelligent. “I still have trouble keeping up with Pamela. Her brain, her synapses fire in a really interesting way. She’s hilarious,” White says. “The massive response [to the film] is she is so likable. More than likable, she’s so lovable.”

The filmmaker says a celebrity documentary can’t plumb new depths unless the subject is willing to drop the protective carapace of image.

“My recipe when I’m making any celebrity documentary is fnding a celebrity that is completely raw and open and wants to give me that type of access. So, I’m very honest from the beginning, and I was with Pamela, saying, ‘I don’t want to make an arm’s length flm. I don’t want to make a one-or two-interview flm. I want to be all up in your business,’” he says. “There’s huge celebrities that deserve great documentaries, but I don’t know if they would give access the way a Pamela does or the way a Michael J. Fox does.”

Fox, who rose to superstardom in the ’80s on TV with Family Ties and on the big screen with the Back to the Future franchise, allowed director Davis Guggenheim to flm him at his most vulnerable, struggling with the efects of advancing Parkinson’s disease. The flm shows Fox tumbling on sidewalks, and his hand shaking violently as he tries to hold a toothbrush. Throughout, he maintains a sharp sense of humor and refuses ofers of pity.  “People are starting to really understand who Michael J. Fox is as a human being,” Guggenheim says with admiration. “He was so open in the movie, so emotional, so unafraid, so candid and so real—and that’s a big risk for someone to take to put himself in a documentary, and the world embraced him.”

Mary Tyler Moore, the subject of the Emmy-nominated documentary directed by James Adolphus and produced by Lena Waithe and Debra Martin Chase, died in 2017 at the age of 80. In the absence of fresh interviews with a living protagonist, the revelations in the film emerge from the star’s personal archives. The filmmakers were granted access to those by Moore’s widower, Dr. Robert Levine, who had turned down other pitches for documentaries about his late wife.

“In the April 2018 cover story of Vanity Fair that featured Lena Waithe, she mentioned as part of the interview that she’d really love to do something about Mary,” Levine explains about his decision to give Waithe and team the go-ahead for an MTM documentary. “That moved me because here is someone who’s coming up in the business who’s completely different than Mary and yet is influenced by her. And I wanted a new voice to tell Mary’s story.”

Waithe, the Emmy-winning writer, actor, and executive producer of The Chi and co-EP of Master of None , says her initial plan was to create a fictionalized biopic about the star of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show

“But then after meeting Robert and going to the house, I was like, no, this is actually a documentary,” Waithe says. “I found myself really fascinated by the fact that she was in two very important television shows and really occupied two very different spaces for women.”

Between Being Mary Tyler Moore, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, Judy Blume Forever, and Pamela, A Love Story, this year’s Emmy-nominated celebrity documentaries cover a period ranging from the 1960s to the present. The amber light of our collective memory sufuses them with a certain glow, ofering comfort especially valued, perhaps, by audiences desiring a measure of escapism in turbulent political times and in the lingering wake of the pandemic.

“All of them harken back to something that meant a lot to people in the past,” White says. “Pamela and Michael are legends from television from the ’80s and ’90s and Mary Tyler Moore is a legend for many, many decades. I think Judy Blume, for a lot of people my age and a little bit older, is such a defining part of our childhoods. Maybe that is escapism. Maybe the nostalgia is a way of escaping our present day lives to return to the past.

“A lot of the great celebrity documentaries we’re seeing now,” White continues, “sort of re-examine that celebrity’s experience or their impact on culture in a way that perhaps we weren’t aware of whenever we were going through that juncture.” ★

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Being Mary Tyler Moore

THE ART OF CRAFT

How costume designer Sharon Long crafted a bespoke style for an 18th Century Russian royal in The Great

BY RYAN FLEMING

AMBASSADORS’ DINNER DRESS

While Catherine (Elle Fanning) stood out with lighter clothing at the dinner for the ambassadors, Aunt Elizabeth’s dress was made to feel “much more decadent and dark”.

Long took Chinese and other Asian infuences for the print, as they started to become fashionable in the French court at the time.

The design and shape of the dress was present in the 18th Century, but the silk prints with the pagoda would not have been as prevalent in Russia at the time.

“Aunt Elizabeth (Belinda Bromilow) was established as eccentric and whimsical, but with a strong core,” says costume designer Sharon Long. “She’s quite a complex character, so we can go a little bit madder.”

Below: Aunt Elizabeth, right, and Catherine at the Ambassadors’ Dinner; right: Elizabeth’s fnished dress.

SWIMSUIT

Since Aunt Elizabeth was usually seen in large dresses, Long added the corset and frills to the thinner swimsuit to keep her style believable.

There was little reference to women’s swimwear at the time, especially with sub-zero temperatures, so Long looked at 17th Century acrobats to bring a “slight comedic element”, in line with the character.

The main material used in the swimsuit was an Armani fabric, woven with a sort of plastic that created a scale-like appearance and didn’t change color when exposed to water.

Aunt Elizabeth’s swimsuit.

Aunt Elizabeth preparing to swim in the freezing lake.

Ray Liotta passed away peacefully in his sleep in May of 2022. But for the iconic star of Goodfellas, Field of Dreams and Something Wild, it wasn’t the end of his legend. This year, after a rousing performance in Dennis Lehane’s Black Bird, he is Emmy nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series. For Mike Fleming Jr. the occasion called to mind a 2019 interview with Liotta that was never published, until now.

RAY LIOTTA PHOTOGRAPHED EXCLUSIVELY FOR DEADLINE BY CHELSEA LAUREN, 2016

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HEN WE LAST TALKED, Ray Liotta was thinking a lot about mortality. “I’m at the age now there are some things you just forget,” he mused. “60 was a motherfucker for me.” He was 64 at the time, soon to turn 65, but somehow his face, which once seemed older and wiser than its time, now seemed timeless. “Some people age better, and with some it’s like, ‘Whoa, what happened there!?’” he laughed.

“You’re like me,” he told me. “We look younger. You’ve got a babyface and you’re not lined. I have really oily skin. In high school it sucked because I had zits, so I have a whole complex about that to this day.”

He laughed with that twinkle in his eye that propelled his iconic turns in Something Wild, Goodfellas, Field of Dreams, not to mention Cop Land, Narc, Smokin’ Aces and Hannibal He did plenty of forgettable flms too, the kind any actor does to make a living, but he could always dial it up. I’d hoped to get a glimpse into the ups and downs and the long road of a working actor, and Liotta did not disappoint.

We met in Toronto, at the restaurant in the Marriott where the tables look over the left feld of the Blue Jays ballpark. Our view was directly obscured by a window that had a spider-webbing crack. Our server told us it came from a ball hit by Jays’ frst baseman, Vlad Guerrero Jr., who this July won the Home Run Derby during the AllStar Game weekend with 72 blasts over three rounds. “Now he realizes he can hit the glass, he tries to do it every time,” she said, noting that when Guerrero Jr. succeeds, plates and food fy, as diners are jarred by the collision of baseball and safety glass.

The flm we had met to discuss was Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, in which Liotta played a scene-stealing divorce lawyer. It was another triumphant performance, but then, so was Laura Dern’s, and the awards buzz for that season collected around her. So it goes, but I fgured it would be better to hold the interview and wait for Liotta’s next best picture. He had been going through such a signifcant second wind at the time that a late-career Oscar seemed possible, if not probable.

Next up was The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s Sopranos prequel. I fgured that would be the one, after witnessing the mastery with which Liotta played his dual roles. But when Jason Kilar dumped the entire Warner Bros.

flm slate onto HBO’s Max streaming platform during the pandemic, its awards hopes fzzled. For Chase, it was an ironic indignity: a carefully crafted big-screen prequel to the best series HBO had ever made, consigned to the small screen.

As I waited for the next bus, the story I would break instead was that Ray Liotta died in his sleep last May in the Dominican Republic, during the flming of Dangerous Waters

But that tragic news wouldn’t be the end of his story: this summer, Liotta received a posthumous Emmy nomination for his turn in the Apple TV+ miniseries Black Bird, created by crime novelist Dennis Lehane. He played Big Jim Keene, the cop who agonizes over his son Jimmy [Taron Egerton]’s jail sentence for drug dealing, convincing him to take an FBI deal to win the trust of a suspected serial killer and get a confession, in exchange for freedom.

In retrospect, Liotta now seems perfect for the role, but Apple had forced Lehane to offer the

part to three other actors frst, and Lehane was relieved when none said yes. “Apple let me choose every other character except Big Jim Keene,” he says. “It was a weird position to be in, me rooting against myself—I was like, ‘Boy, I hope they hate this script’—and by the time I got turned down by the third actor, I called Apple and said, ‘Can I fnally go to Ray, please?’ They said yes. I got the script to him where he was working in the Czech Republic, and within 24 hours he came back and said, ‘I’m in.’” It was a relief for Lehane, who began his career writing eminently flmable novels, from Mystic River to Shutter Island and Gone Baby Gone, before cutting his teeth on TV dramas such as The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, which led to him writing all six episodes and showrunning the fact-based Black Bird. “I wrote the part with Ray in mind,” he says. “Before I knew I was going to end up in this industry, he was on the top of the list of people I’d wanted to work with. I was a fanatic about Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, one

of my favorite flms. He’s the pivot, the axis on which the whole movie turns. It starts off as a madcap screwball comedy, and then he enters, and it turns into this pretty amazing evocation of the dark side of the American Dream.”

Lehane was a kid in college back then, when the flm premiered in the late ’80s. “I remember going, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ He just came out of nowhere. I can still see him when he frst enters frame, and he dances up beside Melanie Griffth. He also had that quality in Goodfellas, and almost anything he did except for the stuff where I thought the directors were weak, which is that when Ray’s playing a sensible bad guy, you still feel the sweetness in him, the little boy. That’s in his performance in Something Wild, without a doubt, and Goodfellas, where because of Ray and his boyish charm, you forget you’re watching a stonecold sociopath for two and a half hours. That’s because of Ray, and that boyish charm. And when he plays a good guy, you sense the malevolence

in him. You half expect that sweet guy to kick the puppy across the room. It’s that duality that I always found so appealing, and it’s what made every performance he ever gave so interesting.”

Liotta doesn’t have the screen time of fellow Emmy nominees Egerton and Paul Walter Hauser, but he grounds the series as the former cop gutted by his beloved son’s decade-long sentence.

“I thought, right from the beginning, that the central relationship was between a father and son who completely love each other, even though they may be very bad for each other,” says Lehane. “This is a guy who will run into a burning building for his son, but there’s a good possibility he’s also the reason the building’s on fre. I wanted Ray because there’s a history that comes from the lived-in myth of Ray Liotta, through his work. You can do a lot of shorthand to understand who this guy was back in the day: When Jimmy says to him, ‘You were so strong,’ you have no trouble believing that, even though you’re looking at a shell of a man. Ray and I had a bunch of conversations about that. How, for all his faws and his lack of any sort of self-awareness, Big Jim truly, truly loves his son. That dichotomy, that paradox, was really exciting to write. And it was super-exciting for him to play.”

Lehane was gutted by Liotta’s death—he says the actor was robust as hell and that Big Jim Keene’s haggard and tired look was just performance and makeup—but Lehane did get to tell the actor what those indelible performances meant to him. “I kept it close to my vest how much I admired him, and I heard he did the same with Bob De Niro when they did Goodfellas together; Ray didn’t tell him until the very end that he was one of his idols.”

Lehane chose his moment carefully. At a party he hosted, he ushered Liotta into a room and showed him a Japanese poster for Something Wild. “The original U.S. poster didn’t have Ray on it, just Melanie Griffn and Jeff Daniels, but I tracked down this Japanese poster, because it has Ray on it.” Lehane told Liotta it was his favorite flm and asked if he’d sign the poster. “He looked to his fancée and he was like, ‘Can you believe this fucking kid? He wants me to sign a fucking poster.’ He was so touched and it was really moving. That poster is on the way down to my basement, where I have my little home theater. I see it every day, and it just hits me every time. The last conversation we had, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll have something in the next one for you. No matter what, you’re with me now.’ And this sounds clichéd, but it’s really true. The last thing Ray said to me was, ‘Make it a bigger part.’ So, it hits me every time I see that poster. I’d thought, ‘I’ll work with you forever,’ but there is no forever. Forever’s over.”

So, here’s your interview, Ray, and I hope it helps. Since we broke the ice with a tale about a broken window, we started with Liotta’s turn as the banished superstar Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. And he began by describing his regret when thrown a creative curveball he was too inexperienced to handle properly.

Clockwise from left: Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams ; as DOJ official Paul Krendler in Hannibal ; with Jeff Daniels in Something Wild

I never even used to go to the movies when I was growing up. The only movies I saw were The Beatles or Clint Eastwood movies."

—RAY LIOTTA

Seeing as we’re in a baseball stadium, I guess we should start with Field of Dreams. What do you recall from that shoot?

[Laughs] For one thing, Shoeless Joe hit lefthanded and threw right-handed. I bat righty and I throw lefty. The director and the producers came down and they huddled up. They said they we going to fip [the negative] like they did when Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in the 1942 flm Pride of the Yankees. But they didn’t, and we left it wrong. It was only my third movie, so I didn’t have the confdence to say no. Anyhow, it seemed fne, and then one night I’m watching Monday Night Baseball, and the announcer says, “I just saw Field of Dreams, and Shoeless Joe didn’t bat that way.” [Laughs] Oh, fuck

You know, I’ve actually never seen the movie.

Why not?

Because my mother had cancer, and I was in the middle of doing Goodfellas. There was a screening one weekend. My dad and my mom came, and we were watching it, and she just started not feeling well. Her lungs started getting… She felt the fuid coming. She was having trouble breathing, so we just left. I don’t know why I’ve never seen it. It’s not like if I watched it, I’d cry. I mean, I’ve seen what I did, different clips, because for a while there, every paper was using it as Field of something… Whatever was going on in the government at one time or other. But that’s why I’ve never seen it.

This was the third movie in your career. Can you tell while making a movie like Field of Dreams that it has a shot at immortality?

You can’t tell. Not the way Field of Dreams and Goodfellas have aged. Goodfellas, really, it’s been like 28, 30 years later and I have kids coming up to me as if the movie had just come out. These kids who see it when they’re old enough. That’s just unbelievable. Even this one, Marriage Story This is a really, really good movie. You seen it?

Not yet. It’s interesting that you’ve come to Toronto for a movie you made for a streamer, coming off a TV series. Back when you were making Goodfellas and Field of Dreams, wouldn’t all this other stuff have been considered a step down?

Doing a series? Oh, totally. I started out doing a soap opera. I never even wanted to do this, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I thought I’d work construction, and my dad said, “Go to college, wherever you can get in.” I walked out of my SATs. I got into the University of Miami, because, at that time, you just needed a pulse to get in there. I was just going to take regular Liberal Arts, just general stuff. When I got to the front of the line, they said I had to take a math and history class. I didn’t even want to be in fucking college! I looked up and there was the drama department. So, I took a step over there, because I had a class in high school with my friend Gene, it was an elective. It was just fun.

We laughed. I didn’t want to be an actor, but we didn’t have to do a lot of homework or anything.

Typical actor story. I’m in line. There’s a really pretty girl. She says, “You’re going to the audition tonight?” “No,” I said. I didn’t think. I’d just played sports my whole life, and she just berated me. Like, “What do you mean? You’ve got to do the plays! It’s all about doing the plays. That’s how you really learn.” Anyhow, I went out for the play. They did a production of Cabaret the year before. The leads were still there, but some people had graduated, so there were openings. So, I did the audition and I got it.

The frst thing I did was a dancing waiter in Cabaret. I’m just this jock from Jersey, but because I didn’t know anybody the auditions were in front of people. I didn’t know you had to have the music memorized. There’s this piano player there, a real typical theater piano player, and he had the music, with the lyrics, in front of him. I took it. He says, “What are you doing?” I

Field of Dreams came along. I said, This is the stupidest fucking movie I've ever read... I was still not seasoned enough to really get it."

—RAY LIOTTA

said, “I’ve got to sing a song.” He says, “What, do you think I have this music memorized? No! Put it back there and just get up there and sing.” I got up and I couldn’t remember a thing… I grew up in New Jersey. We were, like, 45 minutes to the city. My parents took me to see [the 1972 musical] Pippin there. So, I remembered one song, but all I remembered was, “We got magic to do…” I couldn’t remember the words. Then they’re yelling up at me, everybody’s watching, it wasn’t like private auditions. They said, “You’re supposed to be dancing…” [Laughs] Do you remember the [’60s British pop] group Freddie and the Dreamers? They had that song “Do the Freddie”. I started doing the Freddie dance and singing “We got magic to do! We got magic to do!”

You got the job, though.

The acting teacher was this guy called Buckets, and they called him Buckets because he used to play basketball. He had these glasses, thick, with

a blue tint, and he would wear his hat backwards and be coaching or directing as a coach. Because I had never done this before, I just thank God he really knew what he was talking about, because if it was somebody else, I would have believed their method because I didn’t know anything

That’s when it started, so I decided to go back the next year in between freshman and sophomore. I worked in a cemetery that, coincidentally, was called Hollywood Park. I went back and I started getting the leads in most of the shows and it kept going. Like anything, when someone’s saying you’re doing a good job you think, ‘Oh, wow, alright,’ and you keep doing it.

Now, I never even used to go to movies when I was growing up. The only movies I saw were The Beatles movies or Clint Eastwood movies. My parents would take us on Sundays to go see a movie. That’s back when they had an intermission. We’d see Bridge Over the River Kwai with an intermission, and The Sound of Music with an

intermission, in these big, beautiful theaters. So, when I was there, I just started watching movies from the ’70s because that was when I was in school. [Pauses] I forgot where I started this story.

Well, you were talking about college. Oh, so I went back, and I just started to do it. I just liked it. The third day I was in New York I got a commercial. Within a week I got an agent, the next week I had a manager.

Luckily, I was prepared, because back then… Well, now everything is more serious. My daughter is an actress and she’s got to do self-tapes, and that’s how they do it now. I was from the school where you just brought your picture to them, and you put it in a basket. A friend of mine from college was doing Jaws 2 or something like that. She had to sign her contract, so I went with her, and the agent said to me, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m an actor?” She said, “Oh, really? Why don’t you come back in a week or two and do a monologue for us.” I said no, because by the time I was a senior, I was going to fucking do this right now, hell or high water. I said, “Just give me a minute.”

I went to the bathroom. I’d done Mice and Men—I played George—and there’s a really nice monologue in there that I knew from that. I came out and I just fucking nailed it, and she signed me.

So, I was starting to go out for stuff. Within a month, I was being fown to LA for Beatles Are Forever. It was later called something else [I Wanna Hold Your Hand], it was Robert Zemeckis, one of his frst movies. I didn’t get that. Then on a rainy day they gave me an audition for a soap. I said, “I don’t want to be on a fucking soap opera.” They said, “Well, you’re going to make money doing it.” So, I ended up doing it.

Which soap was it?

It was Another World, and I played the nicest character in the world, Joey Perrini. The producer would go to Broadway shows, go to the people backstage that had parts he knew that were coming up, and he’d ask them, “Why don’t you come and do this? You’ll make some money, because you’re not making money here in the theater, and whatever time you need to get to the theater, I’ll make sure your stuff is done and you get there.” So, I was working with really good actors. Kathleen Widdoes was my mother. She was just great. So, I really was learning in front of the camera. Doing a soap, you don’t take it that serious, which is great because you’re looser to do whatever you want.

Then I moved to LA in ’81. I said, “I’m not doing a fucking TV show,” but that was also a way in. I did a guest slot in Ralph Waites’ show The Mississippi [in 1983]. I played a brain-damaged kid, and Michelle Phillips, from The Mamas and the Papas, played my mom in it. I did the series, Casablanca, that David Wolper produced, then I did a series called Our Family Honor. Ken McMillan was the head of the cops, Eli Wallach was the head of the mafa, and they grew up

Clockwise from left: Liotta as NYPD officer Gary Figgis in Cop Land ; as divorce attorney Jay Marotta in Marriage Story ; with Melanie Griffith in Something Wild .

together. That got canceled. My dad handled my money from the soap, so I was living off that.

For fve years nothing really happened. I was going to an acting class with this guy called Harry Mastrogeorge, who was just great. I went for 12 years, even when I started doing movies. I’d do Something Wild, go back to class, do Field of Dreams, go back to class, do Goodfellas, go back to class. It was like working out.

Your frst big break was Something Wild. You were shot out of a cannon. That was my frst movie. I was 31. I left to come to LA at 26, and for fve years nothing was happening, but I still was going to class. I went home for Christmas, and I was like, “I’m 30 years old and, fuck, I don’t have a movie yet.”

The only reason I got Something Wild is, thank God, because of the other guys there—we were all friends. They said, “Did you go up for this movie, Something Wild? Why don’t you call

talked, Tuesday, they had me read with an actor. Wednesday, I read with an actress. Thursday, they said, “We want you to come in and read with Jeff Daniels.” I’m watching Johnny Carson the night before. Who’s on? Jeff Daniels. He’s talking about Woody Allen, because he’d just done Purple Rose of Cairo, which was a great fucking movie. And Jack Nicholson, because he’d made a movie with him and Shirley MacLaine. He was talking about working with them on…

Terms of Endearment

Yeah. I said, “Oh, my god.” I got down. I was doing pushups. I was looking at the script. I was like, I really got to fucking be on my A-game. Luckily, I was working on it so much anyway. I went and did a scene that I just explode on. I just went for it, and on Saturday I get a call saying, “Jonathan wants to meet you. He’s coming from New York. He wants to meet you tomorrow at Hugo’s on Santa Monica Boulevard for breakfast. He’s fying out

But that happened to every actor that I really liked. I was really fortunate to work with Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins, De Niro, Pacino, really good people. So yes, it did [shoot me out of a cannon], because no one knew who I was, and suddenly here I was, this guy in this funky movie that I take over. Do you remember the movie?

Of course. So, what was your second flm? Dominick and Eugene. I waited for a year, because I didn’t want to get typecast as ‘that guy’, because I knew enough. I would read everything about actors. Back then the only magazine was Premiere, so I wanted to hear what actors were saying, like, how it was working.

You didn’t want to be stereotyped?

Yeah. I waited, like, a year. It got the same distributor, Orion, who got Something Wild Dominick and Eugene came. I read it, and I was

Melanie [Griffth] and ask her?” They knew I knew her because I went to college with Steven Bauer, who she was married to then. When I moved to LA I stayed at her house, and she took my place in New York. My parents were involved in politics, so they’ll call anybody for favors [laughs]. But I didn’t want to do it that way. Still, I called Melanie up and said, “Do you think you can get me an audition for Something Wild?” She said, “Yeah, sure, Ray.” I didn’t know then but the year before, the actor who played her husband in a movie was, like, an asshole, so she wanted to have approval to the guy who was going to play her husband.

So, she called up Jonathan Demme, and he said, “Melanie, I’ve got it down to three people. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s been really hard to cast this.” She said, “Jonathan, you said I could [have a say]…” So, I went in. Monday, I

that afternoon.” I went, met with him, we talked. He said, “As you know, I have three other guys that I’m looking at. I’ve got to think this through, and I’ll let you know in the middle of the week.”

To me, the middle of the week was the next day, Monday. Nothing. Tuesday, nothing, Wednesday, nothing. Oh, fuck. Then Thursday I get a call. These directors, their assistants call to say, “Will you be home at three o’clock because Jonathan wants to talk to you at three?” Well, yeah. I’ve been sitting on the phone waiting for three days here. Of course.

Doing pushups.

Exactly [laughs]. The pushups again. He said, “Ray, I would like you to play Ray Sinclair.” That was the name of the character. I said, “Oh, wow. Thank you so much.” I hung up the phone and just cried. After years of trying.

playing a medical student. I had a brain-damaged fraternal twin brother played by Tom Hulce, who was fucking great. So, this is the one I want to do.

The producers weren’t sure—they thought I was the guy from Something Wild—so I said, “Let me read for it.” I mean I still tell people now, “If you have a doubt, I’ll come in and read. I don’t care about that.”

Nobody really saw that movie, but it was going to flm festivals with Something Wild. So, I was the new kid. I was getting lots of scripts by then. I changed agents, I’m at CAA and all of a sudden Field of Dreams came along. It was being produced by the guys that I did the series with, Our Family Honor. They just offered it to me. I read it and I said, “This is the stupidest fucking movie I’ve ever read. He’s got a cornfeld, and he’s going to put in a baseball feld and he hears voices?” That wasn’t

Below: Liotta with Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams ; right: as FBI agent Donald Carruthers in Smokin’ Aces

my mentality. I was still not seasoned enough to really get it. But Kevin Costner was in it. When I frst started out, Kevin, Andy Garcia, Steven Bauer, we all played paddle tennis and we were all auditioning. None of us had gotten a job yet. Kevin was the frst one. It just so happened that we all became friends and things happened.

So, then I was swinging the bat for Field of Dreams. Then Goodfellas. I was the frst person that Marty met, and it took a year to get it. I was at the Venice Film Festival with Dominick and Eugene and [Scorsese] said, “Let me see it.” Back then it was these big video cassettes. My dad and I were at the Excelsior Hotel. We were looking down and there was this whole big crowd of people, and my dad is like, “What the hell is going on?” I said, “Dad, that’s Marty Scorsese. That’s the director.” He was there with Last Temptation of Christ. He was getting threats, so he had all these bodyguards around him, and as I came up, they [got in the way]. I said, “I just want to talk to Marty.” He saw

me do that, and he said that’s when he knew he wanted to cast me [as Henry Hill], because he’d just assumed I was the aggressive guy from Something Wild. I was like, “Whatever you want, I’ll do it.” So that’s what happened, and I was off and running. I didn’t know it would turn out how it did.

Now, you have so much voiceover dialogue, delivered rat-a-tat-tat. We learn from you what is missing in many mob movies: how the system works. That’s true, because The Godfather was just, “That’s the way it was.” You didn’t see the journey to get there.

And it was interesting because it was the frst time I kind of understood how you make money and how you shake people down and how you basically take somebody’s restaurant and then you light it on fre because you’ve bled them dry but still can cash in on the insurance.

She was a big woman. She was laying there, and she was sleeping. I put the other bed next to her and said, “Hi, Mom,” and then, maybe within 30 seconds or whatever, fat line.

Oh, my. What did she ultimately die from? It was the cancer. But she was waiting for me to say goodbye. I didn’t want to go because I knew what was coming.

So, I’m crying my eyes out. By myself. I call my best friend Gene. That’s who I took the acting thing with in high school. Then I fnally went. I could have gotten there maybe an hour or two earlier, but she still waited.

Then, cut to years later, my dad, at 98, he died with me sitting next to him. I was sitting next to him, but he was just old, and all his vitals were going down, so they put him in hospice. I started falling asleep. It was like seven in the morning and my sister was just washing up. She comes out. I nodded. She says, “Ray, look at Dad.” He

That scene you just mentioned, that’s when they came up to tell me, “You’ve got to get home and see your mom this weekend.” I said, “I get home every…” And they said, “No, you’ve really got to get home.” It hit me. I was outside, and they say that when you get information like that, your knees buckle. Well, my fucking knees buckled, and I was gone. I went to Marty, who’s not real emotional. We go to the trailer. He said, “Just get yourself together. We’ve got to fnish this thing now.” But that was the scene that was happening, after the “do you think I’m funny” thing with me and Paul Sorvino and the guy with the restaurant who is afraid of Tommy [Joe Pesci].

Wow. So, then you rush home, and your mom was… She waited for me. My mom was a big cuddler.

was gone. I heard that last breath. There really is a last breath. I’m adopted, so I don’t have those genes, but my mom died when she was 63.

I didn’t go to the premiere. I didn’t even know anything about doing PR. I mean they asked, but I said no. Goodfellas, Field of Dreams, I think they sent me to places and I was getting a taste of it. It was the same feeling then of what’s happening with Marriage Story. A lot of people are talking about how it’s a really, really good movie. I play a lawyer, which is great because I’m a shark, you know.

You play Adam Driver’s character’s lawyer, Jay Marotta.

Yeah. He wants to do it really nice and easy, this divorce, but his wife goes and hires a really high-powered lawyer. He meets me and I’m

Below: Liotta with Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land ; right: with Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas

Definitely had ups and downs, no question... Luckily, I got my dad's influence for taking care of my money and putting it aside for a rainy day."

—RAY LIOTTA

really aggressive, so he says, “Oh no, this is not the way I want to do it.” So he goes to Alan Alda, and he’s just obviously older and says, “We’ll take care of the kid—no big deal.” He doesn’t really prepare. When they go to court, Laura Dern just chews him up and spits him out. He realizes, “Oh, fuck, I need somebody like [Jay].”

Did you see Quentin’s movie, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood? Yeah.

I watched that movie, and frst time I connected with Brad Pitt’s stuntman character. He was great, but then the second time I watched it I was totally wrapped up in Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of this actor who is awakened to his falling star by Al Pacino’s agent character. Then it’s all about the insecurity of an actor. I wonder, now you’ve been doing this for a really long time, how you feel about that. I mean, you’ve had times when you were winning big and then others where you might be like, ‘What’s going on, what am I doing wrong?’ Thank God for Avi Lerner. He would hire people that still had some foreign value and that’s how I got through it. Going to fucking Bulgaria for movies. Yeah. Defnitely.

So, he was a bit of a lifeline. Yeah. Even just lately, up until I did the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark Defnitely had up and downs, no question.

Is it better for an experienced actor now, given all the streaming opportunities, than maybe when you were a movie star and did only that until you got cold, and the phone stopped ringing? Yeah. But you also remember the ‘up’ times, too. I’ve had this feeling before, what’s going on with those other movies. But commercials, that got me through a downtime.

What commercials did you do?

The frst one that I did was 1800 Tequila. Those were really great spots. It was really well done. Then just lately I did Chantix [an anti-smoking treatment]. I was reading Rolling Stone, and there was a thing about me doing the Chantix commercial. They said, for some reason, it draws you in.

When you watch Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and see DiCaprio’s character hoping things will turn around, is it painful when you’ve gone through those uncertain periods yourself and maybe wondered, Am I going to have to sell my house?

Yeah. It’s scary as shit. Luckily, I got my dad’s infuence for taking care of my money and putting it aside for a rainy day. But there’s periods. It’s true. It’s like Henry Fonda said, after every movie, you wonder if they’re going to call again. I was going through that period not that long ago, before people started seeing this movie

[Marriage Story]. There’s a joke that I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Two agents are walking down the hall. One turns to the other and says, “What did you think of the script that you read this weekend?” The other says, “I don’t know, I’m the only one who’s read it.” That’s what’s happening now. It’s fucking crazy. It’s true. It’s really true.

So, you’re getting a lot of offers then. Not a lot, but a lot of, “I hear the new movie is really good, you’d be right for this. I’m going to send you a script.” One was just a few days ago. You’re happy about it, but part of me is saying, ‘Motherfucker!’ I’m the same actor as I was before!’ But they need the selling point. So, with Leo’s thing [in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood], that was a different time, when doing a TV show meant your movie career was ending.

So why did you do the TV series Shades of Blue with Jennifer Lopez?

That’s a great question.

Was the stigma already removed by that point? Yeah. This whole thing started with Netfix, with Kevin Spacey and that president thing.

Yeah, there was House of Cards, and the frst True Detective with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson really showed what good actors could do exploring characters and having more than two hours to do it. That was later on, but to go and do it with Jennifer, that was fucking tough. They wanted me because I had legitimacy with what they wanted, for the thing to be edgy. With Jennifer… That’s a big question mark. I really like her. She was really good in it, but it’s not ideal. The part was so good; I really had to go after the producers and say, “You guys have got to start writing for me or just get me the fuck out of here. I’m not her valet.” This was a really interesting character. I

wasn’t saying, “Give me, Ray, more screen time.” It was just a really good character to explore: a bisexual cop who’s married, with an estranged son, who does bad things but good things.

How does the writing in TV compare with the movies? You mentioned Kevin Costner: Yellowstone is an addictive show and it feels like a lot of TV is as good as, or better than, what I’m seeing on movie screens. What happened is, the studios changed. So, you’ve got to then fnd your way. If you say, “No, I’m never going to do that,” then, fne, don’t do it. But don’t complain if you sit at home and nothing’s happening. You’ve got to play the game to beat them at the game. And that’s what the game is now. They started with the Batman stuff and triggered the whole comic book genre, and now most of the studios are putting an unbelievable amount of money into things like that. But movies like this one, Marriage Story… Thank God for Netfix. Like

I said, “Thank God for Avi Lerner,” now it’s “Thank God for Netfix,” because they’ll fnance your movie. I don’t know who else would give money for Marriage Story. It’s a great movie, but it’s thoughtprovoking and emotional. So, you’ve got to do it because they’re doing all those kinds of movies. Like Saints of Newark. That was a lucky one.

I’ve been able to hang on to keep doing these movies because it’s been hard for me in my head to go, “Now let me be the bad guy in a comic-book movie.”

How is it that you never were in a Batman or some other superhero movie, back when your star was rising? Because I was an idiot.

Were you offered?

Something Wild came out, so I was getting attention from that. My agent called me up and said, “Tim Burton would like to meet you. He’s

doing a movie, Batman.” There were never any superhero movies then. That was pretty much the frst one. I said, “Are you fucking nuts? Batman?!” I’m going, “No, that’s stupid.” Who was stupid? I was stupid because I didn’t know.

I’ve done a lot of coverage on The Sopranos, and spoke at length with David Chase for the 20th anniversary of the show…

I really worked my ass off on [The Many Saints of Newark]. I just wanted to please David. It was really like I felt working with Marty. You just want to do the story, get down to what it’s about.

Did you watch The Sopranos?

I watched the frst year or so. The only thing I watch all the time is Family Guy. Edie Falco, her frst movie was a movie that I did, Cop Land, and I had a scene with her where she gives me dynamite that I was going to use to blow up something. What’s crazy is, half the time I don’t know where my keys are, but if you give me a scene, I’ll remember the day and what happened. You remember things that are really important…

[He looks at the broken window]. This is unbelievable, how cool it is talking with you about this. It’s easy to talk when you’re looking out over a baseball feld. It’s like talking to my daughter. If I really want to tell her something as a dad, it’ll be while we’re taking a walk, or sitting down. It becomes too heavy when it’s face-to-face.

I guess that’s why they put a couch there when people go to shrinks, so you don’t have to look at the guy, and this way you can open up. It’s not like you’re talking. You’re just letting thoughts go.

[Pauses] Imagine we were sitting here when Vlad hit that ball?

I’d probably fall out of my chair, I think. [Laughs] That’s a hell of a shot. ★

Clockwise from top left: Liotta with, from left, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich and Ayoola Smart in Cocaine Bear ; with Joey Diaz, left, and John Borras in The Many Saints of Newark ; with Taron Egerton in Black Bird ; in Fool’s Paradise

I really worked my ass off on The Many Saints of Newark. I just wanted to please david Chase. It was really like I felt working with Marty."

—RAY LIOTTA

As Ken Burns Turns 70,

By Matt Carey

“I Won’t Work On A More Important Film”

Ken Burns lives just where you might imagine.

The documentary filmmaker, who has spent a lifetime exploring American history, long ago made Walpole, New Hampshire his home, a bucolic village founded before the American Revolution. It’s dotted with old inns and quaint shops, and democracy is practiced there the old-fashioned way, through the traditional Town Meeting.

He dwells in an 1820s farmhouse ringed by rolling hills and green valleys, a place of “magnificent isolation” where he can apply uninterrupted focus to his work. On a recent summer afternoon, he ascended to the vaulted loft of a barn on his property to discuss, over Zoom, his latest series for PBS, the Emmy-nominated  Te U.S. and the Holocaust . “I won’t work on a more important film,” he declares.

With the intellectual rigor characteristic of his canon, the series delivers a penetrating examination of the country’s tragic failure to intervene in a timely way to save millions of Jews in Europe threatened with annihilation by the Nazi regime in Germany.

“There were kind of daily revelations, hundreds of them,” Burns says of the research process for the series, “a kind of blizzard that buried you at times.”

Over a span of three episodes and six-anda-half hours, the series investigates the political environment in the U.S. that saw FDR’s administration, Congress, and most of the American public willfully ignore the plight of Jews, and the catastrophic consequences of that inaction. In Episode 1, a narrator signals the dark national mood of the time, reading from verse by Thomas Bailey Aldrich that abhorred “a wild motley throng” of immigrants streaming into the U.S., “Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes… bringing with them unknown gods and rites.”

The poem was published in 1892, but the anti-immigrant sentiment it articulated only increased in the first three decades of the 20th century. The tide of immigrants entering the country—25 million from Southern and Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1914—led to a nascent

“replacement theory”, the inchoate fear that native-born Americans would be eclipsed by growing populations of Jews, Asians and other newcomers. In the early part of the century, the eugenics movement also gained traction, a racist and unscientific theory that America’s gene pool was being degraded by the newly arrived.

At the same time, leading public figures like automotive titan Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh were spreading antisemitic rhetoric. And as the Great Depression tightened its grip and unemployment skyrocketed, many Americans took a hostile view of immigrants who might become “a public charge” or nab a scarce job. It all conspired to make the country ill-disposed to welcome Jews

seeking refuge from the madness that was descending on Europe.

“We knew and we did nothing,” Burns says. “We were asked to help when we even had room within the narrow confines of a pernicious immigration law to let in more than we did. And we didn’t. We let in more [Jews] than any other sovereign nation, about 225,000. But we could have let in five times that.”

Te U.S. and the Holocaust contends for Emmys in three nonfiction categories—Outstanding Series, Outstanding Directing for Burns and co-directors Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, and Outstanding Writing for Geoffrey C. Ward. The team began work on it in 2015, the same year Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign with an express appeal to anti-immigrant fervor. As president in 2017, he defended white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia—who carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us”—by declaring there were “fine people on both sides” of the demonstrations.

Witnessing the direction of the country, Burns says he pivoted, hastening the production timetable for the series.

“I just told [the team], we’re going to accelerate the process by a year. And that’s because when we started this in 2015, it was a different country,” he explains, referencing a line attributed to Mark Twain (the subject of an earlier Burns documentary): “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” In the tenor of the Trump era, he saw a distinct parallel to the time he was documenting in  Te U.S. and the Holocaust

“I’m used to every film that I’ve worked on, no matter whether it was  Brooklyn Bridge  or  Horatio’s Drive , or  Vietnam  or  Prohibition , ‘rhyming’—as Twain would say—with the present. And this was just getting more and more uncomfortably rhyming. Not just every other page, but every sentence. And so I just said, we just have to get it out… It was really tough on everybody, but we made it.”

Our conversation took place on the eve of an annual gathering on Burns’ property, an event he dubs “the midsummer barn bash” that doubles as a birthday celebration. This one took on special significance, as the filmmaker approached a milestone anniversary—turning 70. Guests by the hundreds were traveling from near and far.

“People are coming from LA, all across the country and then local people here, and relatives,” he tells us. “We have somebody who’s 1—my youngest grandchild—and someone who’s 100, William Leuchtenburg, the dean of American historians.”

Gray has long since gained purchase in Burn’s chin whiskers, and crow’s feet encroach upon his hazel eyes. But at 70, he retains a startlingly boyish appearance. More important to documentary enthusiasts, he hasn’t lost any of his youthful zeal for exploring American history on film, a passion first manifested in his 20s.

More than 40 years on from the debut of his inaugural film for PBS— Brooklyn Bridge —he’s got several major projects in the works, including series on Leonard da Vinci (his first to focus on a non-American subject), the American Revolution, and another under the working title Emancipation to Exodus , about

BROOKLYN BRIDGE

JAZZ

THE VIETNAM WAR

the ultimate failure of Reconstruction to remake the country into a place truly dedicated to “the idea of universal rights”, as Burns puts it. The latter project, co-directed by Burns’ daughter Sarah Burns, his son-in-law David McMahon, and Erika Dilday, isn’t expected to premiere on PBS until 2027.

“We’re already well into it,” Burns says. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do for 30 years,” since the debut of his groundbreaking series  Te Civil War , the nineepisode epic that transformed Burns into a major cultural figure.

But in another instance of history rhyming, as Burns and team work on Emancipation to Exodus  conservative states are restricting how race in America can be broached in classrooms. The Florida Board of Education recently approved education materials that would inform middle schoolers “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

None of this revisionism sits well with Burns.

“This is white supremacy trying to erase history, just as the Confederacy tried to reconfigure itself as the writer of the history rather than the losers,” he insists. “Germany, which arguably has the worst history, does the best job of teaching it. And us, who think about ourselves as so exceptional [as a nation], we can’t hear anything, we can’t see anything, we can’t say anything. If you’re exceptional, you don’t get to stay exceptional if you’ve got that attitude. That’s my feeling. Teach it all.”

During our chat, a visitor made an unannounced entrance behind Burns, the filmmaker’s dog Chester, a goldendoodle.

“He’s my executive producer,” he says of Chester. “He’s been here the last eight and a half years. This is the most active he’s ever been [during an interview]. I’ve been on live TV, on Te Today Show —he’s asleep on the sofa.”

The dog seemed to register mild interest in the conversation, accepted a nuzzle on the chin from Burns, then settled quietly behind him on the couch— the same shade as his curly coat.

Chester might spend much of a typical day in search of a place to snooze, but Burns’ productivity won’t admit any indolence. After our conversation, and the pause for his birthday celebration, he would be back at it—diving deeply into complex and consequential subject matter.

“We never stop researching and we never stop writing. We shoot stuff that we don’t know whether it’s going in any script—because we don’t have the script—and we’re doing interviews that don’t have a place. We don’t say to somebody, ‘Can you get me from paragraph three to paragraph four on page seven of Episode 2?’

“Every time you see a talking head, it’s a happy accident. Then we find out where they work [within the narrative]. It attenuates the process, but at the same time, it permits us to catch up with all the scholarship and to also see it from many different angles.

“This is really hard work,” Burns says. “This is labor intensive.”

Fortunately, he adds, “I live in rural New Hampshire. I just am not distracted.”  ★

We never stop researching and we never stop writing

JACKIE ROBINSON

THE CIVIL WAR

Hollywood on Strike

It’s been more than six decades since we last saw double trouble like this. Back in 1960, when the WGA downed tools and Ronald Reagan led SAG, it seemed compensation had not caught up with the business of new technology, namely, television. Today, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are fighting a similar scenario, as streaming and AI render existing pay structures obsolete. Lynette Rice reports from the picket lines.

This isn’t Veronica Cartwright’s frst rodeo. In 1980—one year after her career-defning turn as the navigator Lambert in Ridley Scott’s Alien—Cartwright hit the picket line in Hollywood after the studios refused to share profts from the burgeoning home video business. She was one of the 160,000 or so members of the Screen Actors Guild who wielded their pro-union placards in front of

studios like 20th Century Fox and MGM, all in hopes that the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) would abandon its antiquated practice of paying out one-time salaries and start granting residuals when their movies were rented or aired on TV, instead.

“The turnout was huge,” Cartwright recalls of those picket lines featuring the likes of Charlton Heston, Alan Alda, Ed Asner and Patty Duke. “Sometimes, these things take a long time.”

She just didn’t expect it to take 43 years. Now, the veteran actress is back on a picket line. This time, in front of Warner Bros. on a particularly hot July morning, protesting some of the same issues that drove her and her fellow actors in 1980.

“Unfortunately, with the streaming platforms, we never had to deal with that before,” says Cartwright, who picked WB because of the movies and shows she once made for them, like The Witches of Eastwick, the series

Spencer’s Mountain, and the most recent CW drama Gotham Knights. “I mean, these CEOs are just sitting back on their yachts saying, ‘Oh no, we’re struggling, too.’ It’s just ridiculous, because we don’t make tons of money.”

For the frst time in 63 years, both the actors and writers are walking the picket lines in hopes of achieving better pay and job protections. Back in 1960, it was due to the innovations of mainstream television. Now, it’s because Hollywood has bought into the notion that digital streaming is the future of the industry. And at frst, actors and writers seemed to love the new paradigm: tired of the Sturm und Drang of cranking out 22 episodes for broadcast television, actors and writers fed to Netfix where they enjoyed shorter seasons and more lead time to make great shows. They were also too busy pinching themselves over their huge upfront payouts to notice how those residual checks they used to collect for being on linear TV were no longer part of the equation. With every streamer following a similar business model when it comes to making TV shows and movies—more of a payout upfront, next to nothing on the backend—they’re noticing now.

“I wrote on the frst season of Cobra Kai, which

RED CARPET REVOLUTION

The actors strike has put a "stranglehold" on talent publicity. Where do we go from here?

WHEN SAG-AFTRA LAUNCHED its strike on July 14, members received stringent guidelines making it clear that, much as with production on projects from struck companies, publicity of any kind would be forbidden until a new deal with the AMPTP is secured. Actors in violation will be subject to disciplinary action, guild leaders cautioned.

Some will beneft from the caveat of an interim agreement, stating that works from “truly independent producers” may be shot or promoted amidst the strike. The problem, though, is yet another dilemma for actors stemming from an atmosphere of anger, confusion and fear—if you promote in strike times, you will perhaps help the viewership of your work, as those at the studio level are hit hard by the lack of PR. Accompanying opportunity, though, is the consequence that one might be labeled a scab.

is one of the biggest shows in Netfix history,” Jason Belleville, a co-executive producer on ABC’s Home Economics, says on the picket line. “I think I have more money in my pockets right now than any residuals I’ve seen from that. I was also an executive producer of a show for Netfix called Sneakerheads, which was a smaller show, but it premiered at No. 1 in a bunch of countries for a little while. I have yet to see $1 from that. And I was a writer and EP on that, in comparison. Some of them [broadcast shows] you can still get some money from, but obviously, it’s not like it was. But there’s always a steady trickle that comes in to remind you that you once worked, right? The [residual] formats for cable and for networks are clear and transparent. Whether they’re as much as we want them to be or not, they’re at least something that you can rely on. This whole strike is about having money you can rely on through the years so you can pay for your mortgage, you can take care of your kids, as opposed to opening an envelope and going, ‘Oh, it’s a nickel this time.’”

If you listen to the CEOs, the writers and actors are living in a fantasyland. Chief among those rolling their eyeballs is Disney CEO Bob Iger, who told CNBC’s David Faber in a

Illustrating the issue is a recent move by Viola Davis to state that she won’t so much as shoot MRC pic G20, even with a waiver, given her conviction that going to set right now, while so many others are unable to, would not be “appropriate”. (Among the projects getting ahead of the issue recently was MGM’s Zendaya starrer Challengers, a prestige title that pushed its release back from September to next April, leaving the Venice Film Festival to cast around for a new opening fm.)

Publicists have implored SAGAFTRA to “loosen” an as-yet unyielding “stranglehold” on PR, given the impact of its absence on not only stars, but entire ecosystems of laborers, part of the frustration being that while WGA began its strike with a similar policy, those rules have subsequently been relaxed.

In a scenario like this, where one’s every move is scrutinized, the next big question is, which A-list actor will be the frst to do promotion, even on an exempted project? The ripple effect in decision-making that will bring this whole section of the business back to life may depend on it. —Matt Grobar

Left: Actress Veronica Cartwright, center, is on the picket line for her second SAG strike, joined my actor Jeff Rosenthal and his wife writer Theresa Mulligan; former SAG President Patty Duke at a SAG animation strike rally in 1987.

now-infamous July 13 interview that the unions aren’t being realistic about the current fnancial climate and that the strike is “adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” Aside from the fact that Iger’s comments were astonishingly tone deaf—that same week, his Disney contract was extended through 2026 and he was awarded a $27 million pay package—it’s virtually impossible to factcheck Iger’s claims about that particular set of “challenges”.

While the stock market doesn’t lie—Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are all down single and double digits since the strike began—we still don’t know how well (or poorly) their digital platforms are doing because they don’t share ratings. How then to negotiate how much—or how little —an actor or writer deserves?

Case in point: Orange is the New Black, which by all appearances was a huge success for Netfix from 2013-19. It was watched worldwide and won four primetime Emmys. But several recurring stars told The New Yorker recently that you’d never know it was a massive hit by looking at their residual checks. Actress Kimiko Glenn, who played inmate Brook Soso, received a foreign-royalty statement that listed tiny amounts

WHAT THEY SAY

“I want to see a fair deal. This is not war; this is some basic requests for some completely understandable contract points. So many people are out of work, it is absolutely appalling that they are not negotiating right now… The fact they are not around the table right now is utterly disgusting.”

JOHN OLIVER

“The studios have been making a lot of free money for a really long time, and the time for that to come to an end is now.”

—KYRA SEDGEWICK

“Writers and actors are the reason this whole industry exists and we need to be taken care of. I love this too much to not see it through.”

KUMAIL NANJIANI

of income. We’re talking two cents and four cents, because it aired somewhere overseas.

“I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s just so sad,’” said Glenn on social media.

OITNB Writer and EP Tara Herrmann also recalled a moment when she and co-creator Jenji Kohan were brought into a conference room and told just how successful the show really was: a hundred million users had seen at least one episode, at least half had completed all six seasons. “After revealing the numbers, the executive asked us, ‘How does hearing this make

“That type of greed, as the CEOs are making more and more money, isn’t tenable. And I think what the unions are asking for is a rational conversation about how to move forward together in this business we all love.

It’s a real shame that the companies aren’t willing to have that conversation, knowing full well that the nature and the dynamics of our industry—streaming, AI—aren’t going anywhere. So it’s important for people to rationally sit down.”

—KAL PENN

“We can’t have people with the streaming capturing your image using it in perpetuity. Some people will never have insurance or [be able to] send their kids to college.”

—DEBBIE ALLEN

“I’m in a position, [my wife] Kyra’s in a position to be able to negotiate a lot of these points. But we’re in here for the base contract, for the middleand working-class actors in our union, of which there are many. As you know this union has great disparity between wages.”

—KEVIN BACON

“Guessing when this strike will end is a fool’s errand, but I know this, we’re prepared to last however long it lasts.”

—AMBER RUFFIN

“If it wasn’t for the folks who fought for me to have residuals, I would’ve been living on ramen for the rest of my life.”

ROSARIO DAWSON

“Paying writers a day rate is an abomination. We are skilled professionals and deserve to be paid that way… stop being cheap.”

—ROBIN THEDE

“Streaming has changed the game so much and our contracts have not caught up with that. It’s absolutely imperative that we get as much language in there that protects us, our faces, our voices, so that they can’t just be fabricated at will by the studios.”

—JOSH GAD

“I’m double striking because things have to change, it’s really just that simple. There are people who are not in as fortunate positions as me and those are the people that we’re

you feel?’ Jenji was silent and looks to me, and I said, ‘Like I want to renegotiate my contract.’”

It’s anecdotes like these, along with the AMPTP’s refusal to meet union demands like streaming transparency, that drove SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher to channel her inner Howard Beale when announcing the start of the actor’s strike. “At some point, the jig is up,” The Nanny star said in a July 13 televised press conference. “We are being dwindled and marginalized and disrespected and dishonored. The entire business model has been changed by

trying to change things for and for all of us.”

—QUINTA BRUNSON

“[With] the description of the terms under which you are being asked to write now, it makes me wonder how they ever got any writers to work at all.”

—LILY TOMLIN AT A RALLY AT NETFLIX’S LA HQ

“We are not in the same business model that we were in even 10 years ago, and yet, even though they [AMPTP] admit that that is the truth in today’s economy, they are still fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated. They want us to step back in time and we cannot, and we will not do that.”

—BRYAN CRANSTON AT AN NYC RALLY

“As comedy writers, we’re goofy but we’re not stupid. I know when I’m being robbed.”

—ZIWE AT A WGAE PICKET AT 30 ROCK, NYC.

“If Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and I were making 9 to 5 today, we’d be gig workers. Contracted out by one company to another. We probably wouldn’t know who our boss was. We wouldn’t know who to complain to when there’s wage theft; we’d likely be working two to three jobs to make ends meet… Your fight is our fight. We share the same concerns. All of us need employers, studio executives, who earn such huge salaries, to rethink their business models. If writers who provide them content, and the actors who bring it all to life, are having a harder and harder time making a decent living, while the executives can a ord mega-mansions and yachts and fancy vacations, then their business model is not sustainable, and it’s certainly not humane.”

—JANE FONDA AT A RALLY AT NETFLIX’S LA HQ

—Reporting by Baz Bamigboye, Katie Campione, Rosy Cordero, Max Goldbart, Matt Grobar and Sean Piccoli.

From left: Charles S. Boren and B.B. Kahne of the AMMP with Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston in 1960; Bob Iger.

streaming. This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

Yes, let’s talk about that: one of the other major sticking points with both the actors and writers is the omnipresence of artifcial intelligence and how it will be used in the future.

Before the strike, advocates like CAA’s chief metaverse offcer Joanna Popper talked about the upside of such technology, and how it could be a convenient tool for busy talent. “If the actor isn’t available for the reshoots a director needs, you can have a stand-in for the actor and then use this technology for face replacement and still get the job done in the needed timeline,” Popper said. “If you wanted the actor to speak in a different language, you could use AI to create an international dub that sounds like the actor’s voice speaking various other languages.”

But the fear is that studios will routinely scan the likeness of actors and use their image in perpetuity, without any knowledge or permission from the actual talent (not to mention the potential absence of any pay). The picket lines are rife with horror tales about background actors being scanned so they can be digitally inserted later, or the words of talented writers being fed into a computer so it can spew out electronic scripts.

“I think that from a perspective of the writer, we just want to make sure that we’re all on the same page, that AI is going to be used as a tool for everyone not as a replacement,” Producer/ Writer Damon Lindelof says, speaking from the picket line. “I’m sure that if someone said to Jeff Bezos or David Zaslav, or Bob Iger, ‘Hey, an artifcial intelligence could do your job. It could make decisions about what movies to greenlight and not

to greenlight or who to hire and fre,’ they would fnd that incredibly offensive, and they’d want some kind of protection to make sure that that wasn’t going to happen. So, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to get some language of understanding.”

With both sides currently at a standstill— though the AMPTP insists it offered “historic pay and residual increases” to both unions—it has made for a very angry, restless and drama-flled picket line. First, there were threats of tickets and penalties for drivers who honked too much in support. Then, there were reports of angry passersby who threatened to hit the strikers, and a producer on the set of Starz’ BMF in Atlanta who slammed his brakes within six feet of the picket line.

And then, there was Treegate—the day that someone at NBC/Universal Studios in Burbank made the foolhardy decision to trim a row of fcus trees outside of Gate 8 that had provided a shady respite for hot and sweaty picketers. The newly pruned trees went viral and even attracted a stern response from Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who slapped the studio with a fne for failing to pull a tree-trimming permit (though that fne was a mere $250).

Between the lack of starry, A-list talent, the increasingly impatient studio neighbors, and the hotter-than-hell temperatures, it’s a wonder that anyone has the gumption to walk the picket line these days. But actors like Cartwright couldn’t imagine being anyplace else. “And now there are rumors that the studios will wait 100 days so people who had contracts before have to renegotiate everything," she said outside of Warner Bros. "It’s really shifted. We have to fght for everything.” —Additional reporting by Katie Campione.

JAN. 16-JUNE 12, 1960

WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA STRIKE

MARCH 7-APRIL 18, 1960 ACTORS STRIKE, LED BY SAG PRESIDENT

RONALD REAGAN

MARCH-JUNE 30, 1973

WGA

SCREENWRITERS’ STRIKE

JULY 21-OCT. 24, 1980

SAG AND AFTRA (AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TELEVISION AND RADIO ARTISTS) STRIKE

APRIL 11-JULY 12, 1981

WGA STRIKE

MARCH 6-20, 1985

WGA STRIKE

AUGUST 1-2, 1986

SAG AND AFTRA STRIKE

JULY 14, 1987

DGA

3 HOURS, 5 MINUTES, THE SHORTEST OF ALL HOLLYWOOD STRIKES

MARCH 7-AUG. 8, 1988

WGA STRIKE

154 DAYS, THE LONGEST STRIKE IN THE GUILD’S HISTORY

NOV 5, 2007-FEB 12, 2008

WGA STRIKE

MARCH 30, 2012

SAG AND AFTRA MERGE INTO SAG-AFTRA

MAY 2, 2023-PRESENT

WGA STRIKE

JULY 14, 2023-PRESENT

SAG-AFTRA STRIKE

The trimmed ficus trees that once gave shade to strikers.

“If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble."

- Fran Drescher

Designing Dragons

The craft skills behind House of the Dragon and its expansion upon Game of Thrones

By Ryan Fleming

As a prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon posed a creative challenge: how to develop a new and distinctive style while respecting the set-up of the previous series. This challenge fell mainly to the craftspeople, whose work resulted in eight Emmy nominations for HBO this year, including Outstanding Drama Series.

Of the 10-episode season, two episodes garnered the bulk of the nominations. The first is “The Heirs of the Dragon”, which introduces the series and brings the audience into the world of the Targaryen royal line. The second is “The Lord of the Tides”, which sets up the devastating war of succession, known as the “Dance of the Dragons”. Here, those Emmynominated craft department heads give insight into how they recreated the world of Westeros.

“The Heirs of the Dragon” sets the stage for the series and establishes the design of the world. “The approach was to embrace and expand the world while at the same time retaining an audience familiarity with that world,” says production designer Jim Clay. The design of King’s Landing was similar to that of Game of Thrones , but this version of the castle was created in a time when dragons were more prevalent, so it needed to be able to house them and give more reverence to fallen dragons.

“We owed it to the audience to make sure we reference the visual legacy from Game of Thrones , both in design and quality,” visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton says. While taking the past into consideration, Bickerton also says they needed to deal with one major difference between the two series—dragons are an accepted part of Westeros in this time. “It was always George R. R. Martin’s intention that the dragons were diverse and colorful, so the primary design goal at the start of pre-production was to create the distinct characters.”

Accompanying the visuals, sound supervisor Al Sirkett had some Game of Thrones veterans on his team to help flesh out the world. “I knew having them on the team would help create a world that was not specifically identical to that of Game of Thrones , but it definitely helped to have them as part of the continuing DNA of this new show,” he says. “With Paula [Fairfield]’s fantastic work on creating the dragons’ voices and personalities, and the rich textured crowd work and attention to detail that Tim [Hands] always brings to his work, building these new grand scale environments was always going to come from the same headspace as Game of Thrones .”

The presence of dragons also influenced a lot of the decisions in creating the costumes for the Targaryen house, such as the helmet and engravings of Daemon [Matt Smith]’s jousting armor. The blacks and reds were taken from the Targaryen crest, as costume designer Jany Temime wanted the royal outfits to reflect their position of power. “The story happens hundreds of years earlier, when the Targaryens were at the top

Daemon in Targaryen jousting armor.

Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) with his dragon Caraxes.

Altar to a fallen dragon.

of their power, so the look had to feel powerful, luxurious and slightly decadent,” she says.

The tournament held in the first episode also presented an opportunity for Temime and costume supervisor Joanna Lynch to give a sense of the rich history of Westeros, as royals from all over attended. “[The tournament] showcased a wide variety of costumes on both principal cast and the crowd—handmade bespoke armor, castle life, King’s Landing citizens, royal courtiers and our lords and ladies from all over Westeros,” Lynch says.

Although the emphasis on dragons gives the series a fantasy tone, cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt’s approach to the story was more in line with a historical epic. “The color palette of Game of Thrones was constantly shifting to define the different worlds, but House of the Dragon is about one family in one place, so the palette could be more connected to character and story rather than location,” she says. “That meant grounding our choices in reality as much as possible, and striving for a more classic and considered approach to camerawork.”

“The Lord of the Tides” is a prime example of that approach, as the long dramatic scenes of the Velaryon succession hearing and the family dinner were more character focused. “Our challenge was to visually show the shifting relationship dynamics between them,” she says. “Director Geeta Patel and I chose to focus our camera choices mostly on the hero triangle of King Viserys [Paddy Considine], Rhaenyra [Emma D’Arcy] and Alicent [Olivia Cooke], and their character arcs in particular informed our choices for blocking, lighting and lensing.”

Throughout the season, the declining health of King Viserys as he succumbs to leprosy was a major story point and needed to be shown visually. Prosthetics designer Barrie Gower, who previously worked on Game of Thrones , was responsible for repurposing some of his

old designs in a subtler way. “King Viserys’ disease was reminiscent of some of the prosthetics we created for Game of Thrones , such as The Mountain who also wore decomposing prosthetics,” he says. “We were able to tell Viserys’ story in several stages, from very subtle prosthetics to extensive facial and body appliances.”

There were five stages of makeup for Viserys up until the most aggressive stage of his disease which is shown in “The Lord of Tides”. To create the looks, Gower says his team of artists used “subtle thin prosthetic textures and art work, hair-punched silicone bald pates and extensive silicone facial and body appliances.” ★

King Viserys in the late stages of leprosy.

Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) defending her child’s legitimacy as an heir.

DATE - July 21

LOCATION - Fox

1. Aisha Tyler

2. Annette Bening

3. Alan Ruck

4. Andy Serkis, David Oyelowo and Hayley Atwell

5. Strikers at Comic-Con

6. The picket line at Disney

7. The picket line at Amazon

8. Anthony Edwards

9. Cynthia Nixon

10. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

11. Brian Cox

Strikes Around Town

DATE - July 21

LOCATIONS - Paramount, Leicester Square (London), San Diego Comic-Con, Disney, Amazon, Netflix, Warner Bros.

Strikes Around Town

DATE - July 20, 21, 24

LOCATIONS - Leicester Square, Fox, Netflix, 30 Rock

1. Jason Sudeikis

2. Gina Torres

3. Hasan Minhaj

4. Daniel Radcliffe and Erin Darke

5. Pickets at Netflix

6. Marching in London

7. Dermot Mulroney

8. F. Murray Abraham

9. Fran Drescher

10. Denis O’Hare

11. Tatiana Maslany

STRIKE TALK

with BILLY RAY and TODD GARNER with BILLY RAY and TODD GARNER with BILLY RAY and TODD GARNER with BILLY RAY and TODD GARNER

with with BILLY RAY RAY and TODD GARNER

Join Academy Award nominated writer, director and showrunner Bill Ray as he hosts Deadline’s Strike Talk. Each weekly episode takes listeners behind the scenes of the current Hollywood strike. Featuring stories and insights from behind the picket lines and uncover the struggles and experiences of those involved in this pivotal moment in Hollywood history.

Guests include writers, producers, and other industry insiders who provide a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on the situation.

Available on Deadline.com and podcast streaming platforms.

Strikes Around Town

DATE - July 20, 21, 24

LOCATIONS - Netflix, Leicester Square, Warner Bros., Paramount

1. Sarah Silverman

2. Michael Imperioli, Steve Schirripa and Kevin Wade

3. Rob Delaney

4. Jeremy Allen Whte

5. Striking at Paramount

6. Jessica Hecht

7. Jameela Jamil

8. Jack Black

9. Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton

10. Susan Sarandon

11. Lupita Nyong’o

Outstanding Reality Competition Program & Outstanding Host For A Reality Or Competition Program