How Beauty and the Beast Made Me the Gay Man I Am Today

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1351 words  |  Sherie Connelly

I wanted adventure in the great wide somewhere. I first became aware that Disney was doing an animated version of Beauty and the Beast the same way we all did: by seeing a set of teaser images of Belle in her town square at MGM Studios in 1991, a trip my 12-year-old brown face had begged for until it turned purple. I was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and my bowl cut was secure under an oversize baseball cap that Huey, Dewey, and Louie would have envied until their beaks fell off. [Read More]

How Blinding Lights Used Retro Sounds and Modern Bass to Break Records

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  893 words  |  Zora Stowers

Wouldja look at that, Vulture got a new podcast. We’re delighted to welcome the superlative music show Switched on Pop and its hosts Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan to our digital shores. Today they kick off their Vulture tenure with a look at the Weeknd’s megahit “Blinding Lights.” After you’ve listened (… and subscribed?), you can enjoy their vast back catalogue.  This article originally ran on February 2, 2021. It has been updated and republished following The Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show performance. [Read More]

How Did Adam Driver Become a Movie Star?

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1469 words  |  Janel Helmers

Driver in Paterson, Silence, and The Force Awakens. If you, in 2012, watched Adam Driver on Girls — an unhinged, distasteful walking id, as magnetic as he was bizarre — and said to yourself, “This guy is going to be the cast’s biggest star,” you should probably start betting on horses. In recent memory, few actors have been marked by such a contradiction between the way they first broke out and the career they managed to forge as Driver. [Read More]

How Food Network Created and Lost Foodies

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  8 minutes  |  1498 words  |  Zora Stowers

The Food Network, which launched twenty years ago this week, was the Starbucks of TV networks. To wit: It has been argued there have been three waves of American coffee consumption: (1) Supermarket brands like Maxwell House and Folgers. (2) Chains of decent quality, like Starbucks, that taught consumers that there is something better out there. (3) Increasingly discriminating and artisanal coffee vendors like Stumptown who treat beans as proper ingredients, not commodities, subsequently attracting more discriminating consumers. [Read More]

How FXs Versace Created Wardrobes Without the Versace Estates Help

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  667 words  |  Janel Helmers

Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace. For a show dedicated to one of the world’s most-influential fashion designers, people may be surprised to learn that The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story didn’t get any support from the actual Versace family. In fact, the estate has expressed their disgust about Ryan Murphy’s anthology series on numerous occasions, going so far as to call its treatment of Versace’s death “sad and reprehensible. [Read More]

How High Maintenance Found Itself in Conversation With This American Life

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2312 words  |  Sherie Connelly

This American Life co-creator and host Ira Glass appears in “Cycles,” the fourth-season premiere of HBO’s High Maintenance. As High Maintenance enters its eighth year of existence, the web series turned HBO anthology faces the hazards any long-running creative project inevitably encounters, primarily the potential for stagnancy. Even correcting for the flexibility of its format — each episode follows the lives of different New Yorkers who all buy from the same nameless weed delivery guy — High Maintenance has a specific tone and structure that could easily devolve into self-parody. [Read More]

How I Wrote My Novel: Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  10 minutes  |  2007 words  |  Sherie Connelly

Boys in the Band by Geoffrey Chadsey, 2006. I wrote my second novel, A Little Life, in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else. The book, which was published last month, is about four male friends who age from their mid-20s into their early 50s in an undated New York. The characters — Jude, JB, Willem, and Malcolm — aren’t based directly or consciously on anyone I know, and their professional worlds (law, art, acting, and architecture, respectively), aren’t ones I know firsthand. [Read More]

How Little Fires Everywhere Expanded the Novels Meditations on Motherhood

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  8 minutes  |  1583 words  |  Elina Uphoff

Making Mia (Kerry Washington) a black woman in the Hulu series was more than just a casting decision, says showrunner Liz Tigelaar. “Really it’s a fundamental change to the story.” Liz Tigelaar hadn’t read Little Fires Everywhere when Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine called her with the opportunity to adapt Celeste Ng’s best-selling 2017 novel into a TV series starring Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Lauren Neustadter, head of Film and TV for the company, gave Tigelaar the book and told her if she wanted the job it was hers. [Read More]

How Martin Scorseses Elmore Leonard Movie LaBrava Is One That Got Away

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  757 words  |  Zora Stowers

When Elmore Leonard died this week at 87, he left behind a legacy of not only dozens of great crime and Western novels, but an array of taut and colorful film adaptations, including The Tall T, 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Jackie Brown. But one could-have-been classic was never realized: LaBrava. The details of the project are scattered to the wind, but we’ve pieced it together as well as we could from various books and periodicals: Nick Dawson’s Being Hal Ashby, Walter Mirisch’s I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, Paul Clarence Challen’s Get Dutch, and various articles in the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, American Film, and Variety. [Read More]

How Michael Bays Underwear-Clad Transformers Actress Proved Herself

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  343 words  |  Sherie Connelly

What would North by Northwest’s famous crop-dusting scene look like if Michael Bay had directed it? Perhaps it would have resembled Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s harrowing first meeting with Michael Bay, the man who would eventually cast her to replace Megan Fox in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The two first met on the set of a 2009 Victoria’s Secret commercial Bay was directing, when Huntington-Whiteley showed up in what she described to GQ as “a bra and underwear and a big, billowing, black, floor-length cape and high heels. [Read More]