The director and provocateur on the afterlife of Empire, the limits of woke culture— and why Precious was really a comedy.
ONE AFTERNOON IN MAY, inside his modern Beverly Hills home, Lee Daniels digs his toes into a sitting room’s biscuit-colored flokati, visibly restless as he toggles between two iPhones while waiting for Fox to announce the fate of Star, his Empire spinoff. He’s in jeans and a black hoodie embossed with the word blackman in black letters. “ ‘Nothing so far,’ ” Daniels says, reading from his phone. “ ‘No love yet for Star.’ ” By day’s end, Star would be canceled. The following week, Fox announced that the upcoming sixth season of Empire would be its last and that, in light of his assault scandal, Jussie Smollett would not be returning as Jamal Lyon, the embattled gay son of the Berry Gordy–like Lucious Lyon. That the network declared his shows dead and dying could easily be seen as a career- torpedoing setback, but Daniels, a self- described “hustler,” views cancellation as just an invitation to test his ingenuity and nerve. “I’m NOT letting them STOP the CULTURE. SORRY!” he wrote on Instagram a week later (handle: @ theoriginalbigdaddy), when announcing his ultimately fruitless effort to locate a new home for Star.
この記事は New York magazine の June 10-23, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は New York magazine の June 10-23, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
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