The cold open: In television, it’s a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood. Theater doesn’t really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main …
On an evening in mid-January, there were bouquets piled outside of Linda Lavin’s trailer on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif. Nearby, on a soundstage, a black ribbon was wrapped around her caricature. Lavin had died on Dec. 29, at age 87. Now the creators and cast of “Mid-Century Modern,” …
In a 1983 interview for a French television show, the actress Maria Schneider was asked whether she would mind if the program broadcast a clip from “Last Tango in Paris,” a film she had made 11 years earlier. “No,” she said, pleadingly. “I’d rather not.” Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, that …
