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Michael Schulman Profile
Michael Schulman

@MJSchulman

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Staff writer at The New Yorker. Author of "Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep" and "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears."

New York, NY
Joined October 2011
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
3 months
Hello, paperback! Out Feb. 20.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
6 months
Kind of funny that Sofia Coppola has made two movies about a teenage girl trapped in a luxurious mansion (Marie-Antoinette, Priscilla), while her teenage daughter is most famous for making a TikTok about being bored and grounded in a multimillion-dollar townhouse.
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Michael Schulman
4 years
This is purely anecdotal, but is anyone else noticing a trend of baby-boomer parents who aren't taking this seriously as their kids because they think they're immortal and want to keep going out for dinner and don't think of themselves as "old"? (Hi, mom.)
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 months
Ayo Edebiri may have broken new ground in acceptance speeches by thanking her managers' and agents' assistants who answer her "crazy, crazy e-mails." WELL PLAYED.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
"He's not playing it like a comedy. He's playing it like he’s Hamlet." My New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong, the dark prince of "Succession."
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Michael Schulman
7 months
"It was a pretty poor thing for Miss Barrymore to do." Here's a story I learned while researching "Oscar Wars" about how Drew Barrymore's great aunt, Ethel Barrymore, was pivotal in blocking a Hollywood labor action exactly 94 years ago, and the HUGE consequences it had. Ready?
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
11 months
What if Willa is our omniscient narrator and the entirety of "Succession" is her play that's having a reading in 6-9 months?
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
10 months
NEW from me: With a SAG strike looming, some actors from "Orange Is the New Black" are speaking out about how they were never fairly compensated for a formative show of the streaming revolution.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
11 months
Something poetic about the "HBO Max becomes Max!" ads before and after "Succession." Like, the "We here for you" vibes are coming from inside the house.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
RIP Sam Gross. This one never doesn’t make me laugh.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
So Luca Guadagnino, Timothée Chalamet, and Michael Stuhlbarg all got together and made an erotic cannibalism movie after "Call Me By Your Name" and didn't put their one cannibal friend in it? Rude.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
In 1980, Terrence McNally was at Stephen Sondheim's 50th birthday party, so drunk that he spilled a drink on Lauren Bacall. "Then someone I hardly knew, Angela Lansbury, waved me over to where she was sitting,” McNally recalled later. "And she said..."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
Amanda Seyfried can't be here tonight because she is “deep in the process of creating a new musical this week” DO GO ON??
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
..."'I just want to say, I don’t know you very well, but every time I see you, you're drunk, and it bothers me.' I was so upset. She was someone I revered, and she said this with such love and concern. I went to an A.A. meeting, and within a year, I had stopped drinking."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
3 years
Anyone else noticing an ambient anxiety about reopening—not about getting sick but people having to face the next phase of their lives after a year of paralysis? I've anecdotally seen an uptick in irrational behavior and dread along with the hope and excitement.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 months
I’m riding in with Anatomy of a Fall’s Milo Machado-Graner. He has never watched the Oscars but wants to meet Martin Scorsese. Follow my night at @NewYorker ’s Instagram.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
Live across the street from her, have given her trick-or-treat candy when she and her friend were dressed as “Gilmore girls,” have no choice but to stan.
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savannah eden
1 year
this tiktok of sofia coppola’s daughter… this means so much to me
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
11 months
"Somebody Somewhere" manages to be so warm, tender, and heartfelt without a single drop of sentimentality. It's all earned. You guys are watching it, right???
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
"I was just shocked that anyone would want to leave. I’m not leaving. In fact, I feel that I am like the designated New Yorker." My conversation with Fran Lebowitz, the patron saint of staying at home and doing nothing.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 years
SPOILER: SHE WON A PULITZER PRIZE MINUTES LATER.
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Lynn Nottage
7 years
Ugh. Just spent 3 hours reformatting & proofing. Lost all of my work. I wish there was a hotline to call to help cope w/ this kinda loss.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Brian Cox: "I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare...It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
8 months
Why does Miranda still not have a place to live? Why does Wyatt need to be watched two years into adulthood? Why does the poet whisper everything? Why can Seema go to Greece but not Egypt? Who’s watching the cat??? #AJLT
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Heads up: I have a new New Yorker profile coming out tomorrow, reported over six months and in three different countries. The subject is one of the most intense people I have ever met in my life.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
If I remember 2016 correctly, this is the second VP debate with Mike Pence in which LGBTQ rights never came up.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
3 years
RIP Charles Grodin, so good and sly in so many things, but burned in my memory for his unbridled lust for Miss Piggy.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Kieran Culkin: "After the first season, he said something to me like, 'I'm worried that people might think that the show is a comedy.' And I said, ‘I think the show IS a comedy.' He thought I was kidding."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
In this week's New Yorker, I tell the story of six roommates in Bushwick who suddenly found themselves quarantining together. I started following them in early April...and then watched it all unravel in epic fashion.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 months
Wow, what if “The Holdovers” didn’t have boarding school or 1970 or New England or a son killed in Vietnam or any of the things that make it “The Holdovers”? The resemblance to a generic movie plot with a three-act structure would be uncanny.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
@dankois My theory: she’s not real and the city of Florence ghostwrote this to keep American college kids away.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Succession finale spoiler alert. (thread)
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Then he had an impulse to sit on the gravel instead, knowing that it would instantly render the first nine takes unusable, because of the change in continuity. So he sank to the ground and saw the white mineral dust on his hands and "the whole scene opened up."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
(This all coincided with the birth of the Oscars and the Academy’s anti-union efforts. But I had to cut 90% of this from “Oscar Wars” so thank you DREW for giving me a reason to dig it up from my files.)
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 months
This is art. #heragain
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
Whoops, you’re right! Here’s Ethel the Elder.
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Byron Bunch
7 months
@MJSchulman That's not Ethel Barrymore. That's Ethel's daughter, Ethel Barrymore Colt.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
5 years
My New Yorker Interview with Linda Ronstadt, who at 73 is mostly housebound with Parkinson's disease and can no longer sing. But she has a lot to say.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
8 days
The reviews of this show have caused a stir, but here's a good reminder that without criticism what you're left with is...marketing. And, in this case, deceptive marketing. Neither of these phrases appear in the reviews as written. Scroll for context.
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LEMPICKA
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No one gets the world talking like Tamara de Lempicka.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
No one leaves for good.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
5 years
Every 40 years we get Meryl Streep breaking down on the witness stand during a custody hearing, and it is glorious.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
Just sat next to a nighmare woman on a 5-hour flight, which began with her looking at our shared outlet, in which I was charging my phone, and pronouncing, “I expect to use that.” Downhill from there.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Elisabeth Moss is one of the most unconventional stars of her generation, and her career traces the trajectory of the last quarter century of television. But also...what's with the Scientology? My profile for The New Yorker.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
Two months later, Equity was so fed up with Hollywood that it refused a petition from 46 screen actors begging it to come back. But there was talk of forming a "body of screen actors independent of Equity." It took four more years to materialize, and it was called...SAG. The end.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
Union members were PISSED, especially after it was reported that she'd met with Irving Thalberg & Jack Warner in her dressing room. One actor said, "If Miss Barrymore could not say anything beneficial for us the least she could have done would have been to keep still."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
In 1929, there was no SAG. Actors' Equity represented stage actors, and Ethel Barrymore had been very involved in its fight for recognition ten years earlier. With talkies ascendent, Equity president Frank Gillmore was actively trying to unionize Hollywood actors under Equity.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
The result: "EQUITY BADLY WHIPPED." In August, Equity folded, after a tearful meeting that "developed into a bitter harangue of Ethel Barrymore, upon whose shoulders the entire blame for the failure of the campaign was placed by the speakers." Film actors remained un-unionized.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
I’m at the Vanity Fair party watching Will Smith boogy to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.” Oscar in one hand, huge smile on his face. What is happening.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
Can every awards show please just be Jennifer Coolidge narrating everything she did over the previous week?
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
Ethel Barrymore, as Equity's VP and in L.A. doing a play, released a "bombshell" statement undermining Gillmore's effort and claiming there had been a settlement between Equity and the studios. Gillmore called this intrusion "regrettable."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
Thank you to all the people who've worked their entire lives toward this news.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Exactly a year ago, I went under general anesthesia, had my gallbladder removed, woke up five hours later, checked my phone, and went, "WHAT?"
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
That June, Gillmore made a shock announcement: NO Equity actors could appear in a sound picture without an all-union cast. Under sustained pushback from the studios, actors walked off sets and got jobs picking fruit. The standoff lasted 11 summer weeks. UNTIL...
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
For my new Notes on Hollywood column, I profiled Todd Field—whose life story is wild—and I *made* him tell me how Lydia Tár won her EGOT (sort of). 🧵
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
In 2018, Louise Fletcher welcomed me to her home and we talked for two hours about her extraordinary, Oscar-winning performance as Nurse Ratched, for Vanity Fair. Her deconstruction of the character was riveting. I'm so sorry to hear she's gone. RIP.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Next season of “The Baby-Sitters Club” should be a “Succession”-style power struggle in which each girl tries to wrest control of their babysitting empire.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
10 months
I spoke to ten actors from OITNB who had much to say, but this quote from Alysia Reiner, aka “Fig,” sums it up:
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 months
Matthew Macfadyen thanking the "human grease stain that is Tom Wambsgans" is very Tom Wambsgans, and Kieran Culkin starting his speech with a self-conscious belch is very Roman Roy, so this is kind of like an extra season of "Succession."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
3 years
Choosing to believe that “Diana: The Musical” was written by the characters from “Smash.”
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
5 years
"He just seemed to be from another universe.” My profile of Adam Driver, who stars in the terrific "Marriage Story," is in this week's @NewYorker .
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
6 months
At the “Friends Building” in the West Village.
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Michael Schulman
2 years
If you noticed the moment in tonight's episode where Kendall suddenly has a buzzcut when he arrives in Italy, here is the extremely Jeremy Strong reason.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
"I sometimes lament how much more writing Sondheim could have done if he weren’t such a generous mentor to so many generations of artists, myself included." - @Lin_Manuel , two weeks ago
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Michael Schulman
6 years
This is the first mass shooting I can think of where the survivors have more name recognition than the killer.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
6 years
Daniel Radcliffe, who's playing a fact checker on Broadway, came to the New Yorker offices two weeks ago to embed in the fact-checking department. A very meta Talk of the Town.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
On the cusp of a potential strike, an investigation: Why are TV writers so miserable?
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
The horrific "Don't Say Gay" bill reminds me of my sixth-grade Hebrew school teacher, Mr. Kessler. This was in the ancient year 1992, and my class decided, somehow, that Mr. Kessler was gay. One day, the kids erupted in the chant "MR. K! HE IS GAY! MR. K! HE IS GAY!" (cont)
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Jeremy told me about that incredible scene in the parking lot, which he said had a "cathartic event" but didn't say what. Originally, Kendall was sitting on a stone pillar that Jeremy asked the production designer to make. They did nine takes and he just wasn't feeling it.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
3 years
I just read a TV review on a major website that says the actions of the antagonists in a teen soap opera "raise some ethical questions" in a storyline that is deemed "problematic." Have people lost the plot on...plot?
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
@RottenInDenmark These pieces are both self-negating (because the writer is by definition not being silenced) and self-fulfilling (because they then get roasted on social media). It’s like Schrodinger’s cancellation.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
playing Good Tweet, Bad Tweet
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
Me: And who are you? Her: We live across the street. Sofia (hovering nearby): He means who are you dressed as. Her: Oh. We're Gilmore girls.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 months
He’s on the red carpet and ready to slay.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
7 months
Glad to hear Drew has "paused" her show. Meanwhile, it's not every day I have a history thread go viral, so here's a link to my book, which has 100 years of spicy Hollywood tales.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
One thing I learned during my COVID sick week is that if you want a perfect movie that 100% holds up, watch "My Cousin Vinny." No notes.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
11 months
When a Sondheim song shows up halfway through the Tonys to remind you that there can be other emotions in a musical number besides "HI!"
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
@kurtsoller Tiger King
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
Meryl could not attend your little zoom show.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
Heads up! I've got a wild & crazy story coming out in tomorrow's New Yorker that I started work on in 2019. It involves: the 1970s San Francisco leather scene, Robert Mapplethorpe, gay liberation, sex, drugs, murder, and—naturally—the Oscars.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
6 years
@TimFederle Wear shoes while working at home. Once you're in socks you're halfway to a nap.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Oh great, now we're doing Gay Replacement Theory. This era of anti-LGBT backlash is real and infuriating.
@billmaher
Bill Maher
2 years
If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Barbra is having the best 80th birthday. She gets great Broadway reviews and she doesn't have to leave Malibu.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
11 months
How did a once-bankrupt comic-book company take over Hollywood? And who *really* came up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe? For this week's New Yorker, I went long—as in, long!—on entertainment history's biggest franchise.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 months
At some point in the last 20 years everyone started thanking "my team," so this is a long awaited evolution of the genre.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
He was in a "place of despair" and thought he had failed as an actor. He was facing his ultimate test and didn't want to contrive emotion that wasn't there. He thought he had "come to the limits of what I can do."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
"In 'The 2000 Year Old Man,' Carl says, 'What’s the secret to your longevity?' I say, 'Don’t die.' That’s it. Don’t die. And it gets the laugh." My long conversation with Mel Brooks, who, at 95, has written his life story.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
5 years
Searingly written and reminds me of the NY Times Magazine cover accompanying Susan Sontag's 2004 essay on Abu Ghraib: "The Photographs Are Us."
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
No one told me that "Drive My Car" was such a *theater* movie. You see "Waiting for Godot" in Japanese, "Uncle Vanya" in Korean Sign Language. I thought it was all about driving a Saab but it's also about play rehearsal?
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
500+ replies later, I’d say we have a problem.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
Here's an Adam Driver thread for people who want hints on what happens in #TheRiseOfSkywalker . When I interviewed him in Belgium this fall, he said that J.J. Abrams originally persuaded him to play Kylo Ren by laying out his arc over the three films. /
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
3 years
Here's my list of ten great performances from 2020, including Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris, Michaela Coel in "I May Destroy You," and the pandemic comedy queen, @sarahcpr .
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
6 years
A cool Oscar move would be to have Ashley Judd, Mira Sorvino, Annabella Sciorra and Rose McGowan present awards.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
4 years
I’m a single-issue voter and that issue is windows.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Just saw Into the Woods…one row behind Bernadette Peters nbd.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
11 months
Reopening Pandora’s box to say farewell to Kendall Roy, one of the great characters of contemporary television.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
1 year
What does "The Whale" say about fatness, and how should we feel about Brendan Fraser wearing a fat suit? In my new column, I wrestled through these questions with the help of its writer, Samuel D. Hunter, and insights from @yrfatfriend and @guybranum .
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
2 years
Kids say gay whether it’s condoned or not. The question is whether they know what it means.
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@MJSchulman
Michael Schulman
5 years
Scotty Bowers, Hollywood's "Male Madame," has died at 96. I don't know what to make of all his wild claims about the sexual escapades of the stars, but he got me to use the phrase "foot-fucked" in The New Yorker, so God bless.
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Michael Schulman
1 year
"So long as fat people are being represented by half a puppet, you're never going to be able to see that character as wholly human." - @guybranum
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