ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Researchers, documentary filmmakers and others will soon be able to get their hands on screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan’s papers at his alma mater, the University of Michigan.
Archivists are about a quarter of the way through cataloging the 150-plus boxes of material that document the 76-year-old filmmaker’s role in bringing to life iconic characters like Indiana Jones and Yoda, and directing actors ranging from Geena Davis and Glenn Close to Morgan Freeman and Kevin Costner.
“All I wanted to ever do was be a movie director. And so, all the details meant something to me,” Kasdan said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I couldn’t be happier to have this mass of stuff available to anybody who is interested.”
The archive includes scripts, call sheets and still photos — including a few rarities.
Before Costner became an Oscar winner and Hollywood icon, he worked various studio jobs while taking nighttime drama lessons. His break — or so he thought — came when Kasdan cast him in 1983’s “The Big Chill.”
Costner played Alex, whose death brings his fellow Michigan alums together. Unfortunately his big flashback scene ended up on the cutting-room floor.
What are believed to be among the only existing photographs of the famously deleted scene are part of the Kasdan collection, now housed in Ann Arbor.
“Different people will be interested in different things,” Kasdan said, pointing to his work writing the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” screenplay as one possible destination for researchers. The archive features audio cassette recordings of Kasdan discussing the film with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. It also includes Polaroids taken of cast and crew members on the sets of his movies.
There are props, too, including a cowboy hat from the 1985 Western “Silverado,” worn by none other than Costner. Kasdan and the kid from California would work together again on “Wyatt Earp” in the ’90s. Costner also starred in “The Bodyguard,” which Kasdan wrote.
A number of unproduced scripts also are part of the collection.
“I’ve always considered myself a director and a writer. And if you are really interested in any particular movie, you can follow the evolution of that movie in the archive,” Kasdan said.
Library staff members are working chronologically through Kasdan’s material, meaning the papers for Kasdan’s earliest work — including “Body Heat” and “The Big Chill,” as well as the scripts for two “Star Wars” classics, “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” — can be accessed first.
The remaining material should be completely processed by late 2026, said Phil Hallman, the curator of the collection. Hallman hopes to have Kasdan visit, perhaps next fall, to see the archive and take part in a symposium.
Kasdan’s papers are part of the University of Michigan Library’s Screen Arts Mavericks and Makers Collection, which includes Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Jonathan Demme, Nancy Savoca and John Sayles. Kasdan, who grew up in West Virginia and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and a master’s two years later, is the lone Michigan alum among the group.
“To be there, held in the same place as those wonderful directors, is really a great honor,” Kasdan said.
McCarter’s audio adaptation of Hamlet embraces audio experimentation to renew one of theater’s most familiar texts. Courtesy Make-Believe Association and the Tribeca Festival
For early modern audiences, the question of how to represent Hamlet’s dead father was answered by trapdoors, white flour on an armored face or an actor playing a bloodied corpse. After lighting and sound technology standardized the spectral stage, film answered with the magic of superimposition and the green screen. More recently, the 2023 Public Theater production uniquely possessed Hamlet by putting the ghost inside him. In a rapturous performance, streaming on Great Performances through tomorrow, Ato Blankson-Wood rolls his eyes back into his head, fiercely mouthing his father’s fiery plea.
In a new audio production, Jeremy McCarter, disciple of Oskar Eustis’s Public Theater and founder of the production company Make-Believe Association, goes a step further than the Delacorte staging. McCarter places not the ghost but us, the listeners, inside the character of Hamlet. The sounds of his environment merge with the sounds of his body. We hear what he hears.
Readers might know McCarter as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s co-writer of Hamilton: The Revolution and as a public historian in his own right. But since the founding of Make-Believe in 2017, McCarter’s collaborative efforts have centered around original, live audio plays by Chicago writers. With the pandemic, the company shifted to longer form studio productions, including most recently Lake Song, which is something of a Waterworld for the modern ear. Listening through Make-Believe’s stream, I thought: Is this what would have happened if Studs Terkel, Norman Corwin and Octavia Butler got together and played around with 21st-century recording technology?
Maybe so. But even today’s listeners will need to warm up to any version of Hamlet told only from the main character’s perspective. And McCarter knows this. Episode 1 begins not with the “Who’s there?” of the famous sentinel scene (Hamlet’s absent from it, after all), but instead with listening directions for the modern commuter: “The tale that you’re about to hear, with its carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,” whispers Daveed Diggs, in a playful pastiche of the playtext, “will come most vividly to life, if you listen to it…on headphones.”
And so it does. When we first encounter Hamlet, sound designer Mikhail Fiksel conjures a scene reminiscent of an actor readying to enter a stage. We hear footsteps echo across the solitary silence of the stereo soundscape, a deep inbreath and then a heavy door opening unto Claudius’s coronation scene. Suddenly, the social space—the music, the laughter, the chatter—of Elsinore is upon us. Daniel Kyri, who plays Hamlet with a subtleness rarely afforded to stage actors, pummels himself, right from the get-go, with the wish that “this too too solid flesh would melt.” Soliloquies, under McCarter’s direction, are not private thoughts uttered aloud but instead long-running interior monologues.
Adapting Hamlet to audio is not a new thing. Orson Welles’s Columbia Workshop took it up in fall 1936, and the BBC 12 years later. These adaptations sound dated to us today, but they were part of a vibrant auditory culture of their time. As Neil Vermahas written, radio dramatists constructed a fourth wall for listeners at the same time that stage dramatists attempted to break it down for spectators. Contemporary productions on Audible tend to eschew the declamatory style of these earlier works, and also, sadly, their acoustic experimentation. This is where McCarter’s production is a welcome intervention into this overproduced yet underheard play: a return to the imaginative possibilities of the acoustic medium.
Daniel Kryi, who plays the titular character, at the “Hamlet: World Premiere Listening Event” during the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
The series doesn’t sacrifice the visual sense but instead spatializes it: a complex arrangement of lavalier, shotgun and binaural mics captures sound in all directions. Purists might cry that McCarter slashes up the text to highlight Hamlet’s point of audition, but they are posers. Any Shakespeare scholar knows that the text we read today is itself highly mediated, a composite of at least three different versions. In the age of Grand Theft Hamlet, this version offers remarkable fidelity despite its formal innovation.
Intimacy might just be the word to describe what the Make-Believe team achieves here. And it’s true: We do hear Hamlet’s heartbeat, breath and memory against the backdrop of his social world. I think the experiment works best when we hear Hamlet not foregrounded but embedded in the specificities of his place and time; when the mic is not inside him, or even him, but instead on his lapel, capturing the soundscape as it merges with his fractured perceptions. This happens most memorably in Episode 3, when the sound of bells decreasing in half steps tells not just the time of day but also the scale of mental descent.
Yet there is a danger in achieving this intimacy by reducing Hamlet the play to Hamlet the character. We might call this McCarter’s “Hamilton-ization” of Hamlet: the individualizing of the character against his social world. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy, for instance, is done completely underwater. It makes for riveting audio, methinks, but it erases the fact that most of the soliloquies of the play are overheard. This includes the usurping King Claudius’s speech, where he laments that his “O limèd soul, that struggling to be free / Art more engaged.” This speech is translated as overheard noise in the audio, but we’d do better to listen broader. Claudius is comparing his soul to an animal caught in a glue trap, and at times, Make-Believe’s production, too, becomes more ensnared as it attempts to become more free.
McCarter’s stated aim is to resist the commonplace that Hamlet, as Laurence Olivier famously voiced over the 1948 film, “could not make up his mind” by, well, getting us into his mind. But this rhetoric ends up perpetuating that romantic individualism instead of challenging it, making what is social—primogeniture, murder, love—solely a problem of the conscience. In doing so, the artwork, too, ends up privatizing very public questions: What system do we resort to when an injustice has been enacted? How do we test the truth of our beliefs when we cannot trust our own perceptions? As McCarter explains in his New York Times op-ed, he is most interested in this question: “Who among us hasn’t felt,” he writes, “that ‘the time is out of joint’?” But in making the play into a universal coming-of-age narrative, we lose out on asking what an “us” is.
And so, how does this production stage “Enter Ghost”? I won’t give it away. It sounds awesome, even if it doesn’t quite make sense. (Especially if you’re a nerd like me and study the script along with the audio. How exactly does Hamlet write something down when he’s in the ocean?) But that’s no matter, because this adaptation is less about making sense than remaking the senses.
Indeed, the most compelling adaptation of the stage direction “Enter Ghost” is not an adaptation at all, but Isabella Hammad’s 2021 novel Enter Ghost. It tells the story of a British Palestinian actress caught up in a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The novel doesn’t aim to make its characters like us but instead attempts the opposite: to force readers like me to confront a world that is radically different from their own. This is what all great art should do. Or so I’ve heard.
Anthony Bourdain once called Le Veau d’Or, New York’s longest-running French bistro, “a restaurant that time forgot.” The restaurant arrived on the Upper East Side in 1937, from the same family behind Benoit Paris. It quickly became a New York society favorite and A-list haunt—Orson Welles preferred the corner booth by the bar, while Audrey Hepburn and former presidents’ names and numbers were frequently penned in the reservation book. For decades, bon vivants folded themselves into red banquets and drifted, for the night, to a bygone era.
While time may have forgotten—and incidentally, institutionalized—Le Veau d’Or, Frenchette’s Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson did not. Beginning in 2012, they periodically rang owner Catherine Tréboux (whose father, Robert Tréboux, ran the restaurant from 1985 until his death in 2012) for seven years, resolute in their efforts to purchase, renovate and reopen the iconic restaurant. In 2019, Tréboux finally conceded and closed the restaurant to solidify the sale.
While Nasr and Hanson hoped to restore the tired kitchen, worn floors and other aging details of the historic bistro and open within a year, the coronavirus pandemic stymied their efforts, and Le Veau ended up under construction for another five years.
The same, but different. Erica Chayes Wida
On July 16, 2024—12 years after Nasr and Hanson first began their mission to take over Le Veau d’Or—“The Golden Calf” finally reopened its doors.
I entered the back-streets-of-Paris-sized bistro between Lexington and Park for the first 5 p.m. seating on a steamy Tuesday evening, two weeks after the reopening. I held the door for a younger couple in baggy denim, half-buttoned dress shirts and glasses as we made our way through the rouge velvet curtain. Joe Cocker’s saturated howl crackled over the speakers as the soles of my sandals tapped against the replicated red-checked linoleum. Petite floral arrangements in white and blush porcelain calves perched on each table (I spotted one gold outlier in the farthest corner of the snug space), and the original handwritten dinner menu, tattered under conservation glass above my table, included dishes like Filet de sole Grenobloise for $2.50.
An original menu hangs on the wall. Erica Chayes Wida
The Art Deco light fixtures, red vinyl booths and pint-sized bar; the faded oil painting of the iconic sleeping calf; the large mirror etched with the wine regions of France: everything was an echo of the past. The art display thinned out in this incarnation to allow the inlaid wood walls, one of the only salvageable components of the original build, to exhale warmth into the room. Many pieces, including the faux French street sign and a collection of black and white photos, had been there since the Benoits started Le Veau.
The coat closet was filled in under the stairs, and Tréboux’s upstairs office was transformed into a private dining room, but everything else looked the same, just refreshed and restored.
Within the hour, the cozy, U-shaped restaurant was packed. A group of women caught up quietly in the corner while friends in their 70s and 80s greeted fellow patrons as if they’d all been coming there every Tuesday for the past forty years. A couple arrived so elegantly dressed that it seemed athleisure never made its way north of 60th Street, as a man with a beard that screamed Brooklyn hipster ordered round after round for his table. By dessert, many patrons roared with glee, bumping into familiar faces from one table to the next.
I was seated at the center of the U-shaped restaurant, along the wall, which contained enough space for just two tables. The four-top had one outward-facing booth with no chairs, urging parties of two to sink into their courses—and one another—with an intimacy Parisians know best. For $125, the three-course menu delivered by chefsJeff Teller and Charles Izenstein had plenty of options: 16 appetizers (a few vegetarian), nine entrees (fish and meat), a salad for the table and seven desserts, including a cheese plate, Les Fromages Assortis. There were familiar dishes for the decades-long regulars, as well as some Frenchette-esque takes.
Pommes Soufflées Caviar Rouge à la Crème. Erica Chayes Wida
As many New Yorkers know, fine dining establishments with a who’s who reputation can sometimes take themselves a bit too seriously. Le Veau, refreshingly, does not. Remaining true to its history, dishes were inked on the menu in blue and red French without descriptions. The ebullient server, clad in a dusky pink chore coat, relished the opportunity to elaborate on any ingredient or cooking technique I requested. She remained as attentive in the mellower moments as she did with the bustling 7 p.m. crowd, and swept over at the same time as the maître d’ (Tréboux’s son) to pull the table out from its tight position when it was time for me to exit.
I began with a dry, deep white; one of two light colors available by the glass. To start, one classic was a must: the Pâté en Croûte. Guinea hen and duck provided a nutty, not overpowering profile balanced by the creamy, albeit gelatinous, aspic. A thin forkful of crust grounded each bite. The Pommes Soufflées Caviar Rouge à la Crème was presented a stack of airy potato vessels and a silver bowl of crème fraîche and trout roe. With each constructive crunch, I could hear the clap of inner satisfaction from some friturier who mastered the art of agitating oil. I made a mental note for a future reorder.
The Duck Magret aux Cerises, an entrée reviewed during Tréboux’s reign, was tender in a sharp vinegar sauce. Tart cherries touched by heat oozed a subtle sweetness that encouraged the crisp peppered skin to enliven a good cut of duck without much fuss. The summery Sea Scallop Rosace Sauce Vièrge was a wonderful addition to enduring selections such as Les Délices “Veau d’Or” Sauce Moutarde, Gigôt of Lamb and Onglet Frites. Thinly sliced, flame-kissed scallops on a bed of bright, briny vegetables spoke for themselves without the amplification of superfluous butter or spice.
Duck Magret aux Cerises. Erica Chayes Wida
For dessert, I relished an Île Flottante so light it would’ve floated off the gingham tablecloth, if not tethered to teardrop almond slivers and crème anglaise. Of all the dishes, my favorite— possibly informed by the oppressive 90-degree heat on this New York City summer night—was the Soupe de Melon. Orbs of watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe floated like Monet’sWater Lilies amidst sorbet, blancmange and mint in a chilled melon soup. Following the precursor courses, it was an ethereal composition that was, if I may, la fin parfaite.
Did Nasr and Hanson call upon the culinary gods or Golden Calf herself to insist time forget, once again, this little Upper East Side bistro? Perhaps. But between the hum of patrons hugging from table to table and the balance of established, thoughtful French fare, I don’t think Le Veau d’Or will be seeing la fin anytime soon.
Today is Monday, Oct. 10, the 283rd day of 2022. There are 82 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Oct. 10, 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was established in Annapolis, Maryland.
On this date:
In 1911, Chinese revolutionaries launched an uprising that led to the collapse of the Qing (or Manchu) Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.
In 1935, the George Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess,” featuring an all-Black cast, opened on Broadway, beginning a run of 124 performances.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy, responding to the Thalidomide birth defects crisis, signed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act requiring pharmaceutical companies to prove that their products were safe and effective prior to marketing.
In 1964, entertainer Eddie Cantor, 72, died in Beverly Hills, California.
In 1966, the Beach Boys’ single “Good Vibrations” by Brian Wilson and Mike Love was released by Capitol Records.
In 1973, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, accused of accepting bribes, pleaded no contest to one count of federal income tax evasion, and resigned his office.
In 1981, funeral services were held in Cairo for Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, who had been assassinated by Muslim extremists.
In 1985, U.S. fighter jets forced an Egyptian plane carrying the hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro (ah-KEE’-leh LOW’-roh) to land in Italy, where the gunmen were taken into custody. Actor-director Orson Welles died in Los Angeles at age 70; actor Yul Brynner died in New York at age 65.
In 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its coordinator, Jody Williams, were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2001, U.S. jets pounded the Afghan capital of Kabul. President George W. Bush unveiled a list of 22 most-wanted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden.
In 2004, Christopher Reeve, the “Superman” of celluloid who became a quadriplegic after a May 1995 horse riding accident, died in Mount Kisco, New York, at age 52.
In 2014, Malala Yousafzai (mah-LAH’-lah YOO’-suhf-zeye), a 17-year-old Pakistani girl, and Kailash Satyarthi (KY’-lash saht-YAHR’-thee), a 60-year-old Indian man, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for risking their lives for the right of children to receive an education and to live free from abuse.
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama conceded he did poorly the previous week in his first debate with Republican rival Mitt Romney, telling ABC he’d “had a bad night”; Romney, meanwhile, barnstormed battleground state Ohio and released a new commercial pledging not to raise taxes. Football star-turned-actor Alex Karras died in Los Angeles at age 77.
Five years ago: The U.S. soccer team failed to qualify for the World Cup, eliminated with a 2-1 loss to Trinidad and Tobago; it ended a run of seven straight U.S. appearances at soccer’s showcase event. A flood of new allegations poured in against movie executive Harvey Weinstein, including testimonies from Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie. Reacting to reports that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called him a “moron” after a classified briefing, President Donald Trump challenged Tillerson to “compare IQ tests;” the White House insisted Trump was only joking.
One year ago: After the first direct talks between U.S. officials and Afghanistan’s new Taliban leaders, the Taliban said the U.S. had agreed to provide humanitarian aid while refusing to give political recognition to the new rulers; the U.S. said only that the two sides had discussed the provision of U.S. humanitarian aid to the Afghan people. After more than 18 months of pandemic delays, Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film, “No Time to Die,” was the top earner at the box office on its opening weekend, grossing $56 million in North America.
Today’s Birthdays: Actor Peter Coyote is 81. Entertainer Ben Vereen is 76. Actor Charles Dance is 76. Rock singer-musician Cyril Neville (The Neville Brothers) is 74. Actor Jessica Harper is 73. Author Nora Roberts (aka “J.D. Robb”) is 72. Singer-musician Midge Ure is 69. Rock singer David Lee Roth is 68. Actor J. Eddie Peck is 64. Country singer Tanya Tucker is 64. Actor Julia Sweeney is 63. Actor Bradley Whitford is 63. Musician Martin Kemp is 61. Actor Jodi Benson is 61. Rock musician Jim Glennie (James) is 59. Actor Rebecca Pidgeon is 57. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is 55. Rock musician Mike Malinin (mah-LIHN’-ihn) (Goo Goo Dolls) is 55. Pro Football Hall of Famer Brett Favre is 53. Actor Manu Bennett is 53. Actor Joelle Carter is 53. Actor Wendi McLendon-Covey is 53. Actor/TV host Mario Lopez is 49. Retired race car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. is 48. Actor Jodi Lyn O’Keefe is 44. Singer Mya is 43. Actor Dan Stevens is 40. Singer Cherie is 38. MLB outfielder Andrew McCutchen is 36. Actor Rose McIver is 34. Actor Aimee Teegarden is 33.
