Bob Rafelson Appreciation: As Producer and Director, He Helped Craft the New Hollywood

STYLEMusic is woven into the very fabric of the building. Metal ropes run from floor to ceiling in the lobby atrium mimicking guitar strings, soundwave patterns are built into the marble flooring and even the push buttons in the lifts look like tiny cymbals. But the big attraction for music fans is the wealth of memorabilia on display.

Ellise Shafer When Wanuri Kahiu first received the script for Netflix’s “Look Both Ways,” the Kenyan director felt like she was, in a certain sense, reading her own story.The dramedy focuses on Natalie (Lili Reinhart), who takes a pregnancy test on the eve of her college graduation. Her life then diverges into two parallel worlds: one where she stays in Texas and becomes a young mother, and the other in which she isn’t pregnant and moves to L.A.

Bert Schneider, his partner in the independent production company Raybert, began kicking around the idea of a television show about a band “more interested in having fun than making a living”. Their Variety ad seeking “4 insane boys, [aged] 17-21” was answered by 437 hopefuls, and the successful applicants – Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork – were dispatched on a six-week improv course. The show’s goofily knowing house style did not arrive instantly – a pilot polled direly in testing.

Ellise Shafer Two years ago, songwriting and producing duo Nova Wav first chatted with Beyoncé over pizza about what would become her seventh full-length album: “Renaissance.”Released on Friday, the 16-track record is filled to the brim with infectious, danceable tracks, and Nova Wav — made up of Brittany “Chi” Coney and Denisia “Blu June” Andrews — are honored to have a hand in eight of the songs. The duo, who has produced and written for Jay-Z, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Kehlani, DJ Khaled, H.E.R., Jazmine Sullivan and more, first met Beyoncé in 2014.

Pontins and Parkdean have finished at the bottom of a league table of the UK’s best holiday parks. The Which? survey of more than 2,200 stays also saw Aria Resorts, which has a holiday park at Moffat Manor, named the best choice for Scotland with a top score of 85%.

filed suit against Bob Dylan last year, alleging that the musician had sexually abused her as a 12-year-old child in 1965, has withdrawn her case, according to. The move comes amid a series of chaotic developments in the case, culminating in Dylan's legal team accusing her of destroying key evidence.At a hearing on Thursday, Dylan's accuser asked to have the case permanently dismissed.«This case is over. It is outrageous that it was ever brought in the first place,» Dylan's lawyer, Orin Snyder, said in a statement to .

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaNo movie better captures the maverick spirit of Bob Rafelson and the impact he had on the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s than “Five Easy Pieces.” The film follows Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea, a former piano prodigy who has turned his back on his privileged lifestyle to embrace the life of a blue collar drifter. Dupea’s rejection of his upbringing struck a cord with the counterculture and turned “Five Easy Pieces” into a critical and commercial sensation, making it a rare film that tapped into and reflected the zeitgeist.Rafelson, who also directed “The King of Marvin Gardens” and helped create “The Monkees” television series, died on July 23 at the age of 89.

A.D. Amorosi Though regarded by cinephiles as one of the architects of the “New Hollywood” largely because of moody character studies like 1970’s “Five Easy Pieces,” filmmaker Bob Rafelson — who died Saturday at 89 — will also always be adored for his co-creation and production of the decidedly less moody, madcap television series “The Monkees,” and for further directing that makeshift band in the comically avant-garde 1968 film “Head.”Rafelson is very fondly remembered by vocalist and drummer Micky Dolenz, the final surviving member of the Monkees, who shared his thoughts about Rafelson’s role in the creation and development of the group with Variety.  A wildly silly sitcom about a faux teeny-bop band meant that its producer-showrunners, Rafelson and Bert Schneider (who died in 2011), had to find a willing quartet of actor-musicians.

“Weinstein Effect” is still lingering Monday, five years after mainstream reports of Harvey Weinstein’s dark sexual reign of terror first came to light.Author Ken Auletta’a bombshell new book, “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence,” dives deep into the ugly truth of the disgraced film producer’s downfall. “[He] had some notion in his head that his body was attractive,” the author, 80, told Fox News, despite witness testimony that he smelled of feces, had genitals scarred to the point they “looked like a vagina” and a back full of “uncomfortable” blackheads.Still, “he really thought he was God’s gift, a Don Juan,” added Auletta, who spoke to multiple former Miramax film studio employees, Weinstein accusers and even his business partner brother, Bob Weinstein, for the exposé.In one chapter, the famed media critic for New Yorker magazine recounts how Jessica Mann — an ex-actress who claimed Weinstein, 70, raped her — testified on the stand that he smelled like “poop” and his private parts looked “deformed.”“I remember the district attorney passed around pictures [at his 2020 trial] … and the jurors barely looked at them.

Bob Rafelson, the director, producer and writer who brought a European sensibility to American filmmaking with "Five Easy Pieces" in 1970, died Saturday evening at his home in Aspen, Colorado. He was 89 years old. Rafelson’s death was confirmed by his former personal assistant of 38 years, Jolene Wolff, who worked under Rafelson’s production banner Marmont Productions.

has died. He was 89.Rafelson died on Saturday at his home in Aspen, Colorado, according to multiple  reports.

Rafelson was one of the leading figures of the New Hollywood movement in the 1970s, working with stars like Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Jessica Lange. With “Five Easy Pieces” in 1970, Rafelson earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, with Nicholson earning a Best Actor nomination in a career-launching performance as an oil rig worker forced to reunite with his upper-class musician family after hearing the news that his father is dying.

Micky Dolenz, the drummer of the mid-1960s formed-for-TV band The Monkees that became a pop music staple and Emmy winners to boot, took to Twitter on Sunday to remember Bob Rafelson, one of the co-creators of the musical show.