Her first book, “Falling,” which famously was partially written on cocktail napkins while working long-haul flights, is the story of a pilot faced with an impossible choice from terrorists: Either crash the jet or the pilot’s family will be murdered.

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Her third thriller, “Worst Case Scenario,” which is out this month, was inspired by a pilot who told her his biggest fear was a commercial jet crashing into a nuclear power plant.

“It planted the seed,” Newman says from her Phoenix home as she packed for the red-eye flight that would launch her 17-day book tour. “I kind of tucked that away as a note to self: Circle back to that later.

“When I was thinking about what I wanted to write my third book about, I remember that interaction,” she says. “I started just Googling, doing some preliminary research just to see if there was anything there, if there was any validity to his fears.

“And it did not take long for me to realize there was a lot of validity to his fears,” Newman says. “The research terrified me, and it became very quickly apparent that what became the premise of the book is completely plausible.”

In “Worst Case Scenario,” a jumbo jet crashes into a nuclear plant near the small town of Waketa, Minnesota. It’s bad – all of nearly 300 people on board die on impact – but the reactors aren’t breeched so initially the plant seems to have survived the worst of it.

Then cracks and leaks are spotted in the pool where spent fuel rods are stored, and suddenly the entire Mississippi Valley faces a nuclear threat that could render it unlivable for generations to come.

With her second book, “Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421,” Newman struggled to figure out the circumstances under which a flight might land on open water, ultimately sink with passengers and crew still alive, and then be rescued.

“It wasn’t as difficult this time,” she says. “There are a lot of vulnerabilities in a nuclear power plant that I just wasn’t aware of, and it really shocked me.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Newman talked about why she worried about taking the action out of the plane and onto land in this book, how adapting her debut “Falling” as a screenplay helped her write “Worst Case Scenario,” and why she sometimes cries as she’s writing her books.

Q: Are there any nuclear reactors near you in Arizona?

A: Yeah, the largest power plant in the whole country is less than an hour from my front door. Which is real reassuring when I realized, as I was doing all this research, it’s practically in my backyard. They’re in all our backyards. I think there are 94 in the country and if something happens at one of them I don’t think the average person would know what they’re supposed to do.

Q: I always assumed they’re so encased in concrete and steel that it would all be kept inside. You show something else here.

A: That’s exactly what I thought, too. I thought, ‘Well, come on, we all have studied the prior accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. We know that the containment is 10-foot-wide concrete walls. But what I did not know, and I don’t think most people know, is that some of the most dangerous materials are stored outside of containment in really not fortified structures.

Q: Your first two books take place almost entirely inside planes. Here, the plane crashes and it’s done. What was it like moving onto land this time?

A: It was intimidating, to tell you the truth, for two reasons. One, my first two books take place either entirely on a plane or over the course of one flight. This, it’s no spoiler to say, by the end of the fifth page the plane has crashed and the rest of the time we’re in this small town. As a writer, it was daunting. Like, can I do this? If I expand it out bigger than just one set of passengers and one crew, can I still do this?

And two, it was nerve-wracking because I wondered if the readers would go along for the ride or am I just, you know, known as the flight attendant who writes aviation thrillers. What if I step outside of that? Will the readers want to go with me?

So far the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, and it seems like the readers are along for the ride. It was interesting, too. When I started writing this small town, I realized it feels like a crew and still feels like the passengers on the plane, in that they’re an isolated community themselves. They’re under-resourced, out-manned. Help isn’t coming. It was up to them to solve the problems.

Q: Was there a moment in the writing where you thought, OK, this is going to work?

A: Do other writers have that confidence in the writing process? That sounds pretty foreign to me. I feel like that point didn’t come until the book was printed. The first couple of readers came back and said, ‘Hey, this is a book!’ Like, that’s when I think I accepted, ‘All right, maybe this is working.’

Q: Are there things you learned writing your first two books that helped you here?

A: I feel like every day I sit down to write a new story is reinventing myself. And the education from the first book to the second book to the third book has been nothing short of total. I’m adapting the screenplay for ‘Falling’ and that process really, really changed, in a positive way, my novel writing. That education of taking a story that I thought I knew backwards, that took me nearly 40 drafts to get to the final product.

I thought I knew every way that you could tell that story, and to realize that there’s so much more there, and the task of taking a 300-page book and compressing it into a 100-page script? It forces you to have this relentless editor on your shoulder that’s just honing the focus constantly. And it changed the way I wrote ‘Worst Case Scenario.’ It is lean. I trimmed as much fat as I possibly could off of that and I think that is a result of adapting ‘Falling.’

Q: I want to ask you about building characters, because in addition to the action, you’ve created people who we care about here.

A: I’m thrilled to hear you did care what happened with the characters. That’s always the challenge with writing stories like I write. They’re action thrillers, but explosions and car chases and plane crashes, that’s not going to sustain a reader for 300 pages. It has to be about something more. It has to be about heart, it has to be about the people.

I find that I typically start with plot before character. I start with what is happening in this story, and once I know what’s going to happen I can sort of reverse engineer. Who would be the person you would want in that position? Or who would be the worst person to have in that position?

Q: In your genre, you have to kill off some people. Is that purely a writing thing for you or do you feel bad killing off people that you’ve gotten to know over the drafts of writing?

A: I wish you knew how many boxes of Kleenex I go through when I write, especially with this one. This one put me through the wringer. This was emotionally the hardest book for me to write. And, no spoilers, but I’m not always happy with how things end up for characters. It breaks my heart. I grieve, I mourn them.

But what does the story need? It’s not about what I want or it’s not even about what the reader wants. It’s what the story needs, and that is what determines who makes it or not.

Q: What’s the status of the first two books in development in Hollywood?

A: ‘Falling’ is with Universal Pictures, ‘Drowning’ is with with Warner Brothers. Like we said, I’m doing the adaptation for ‘Falling, which is just wild and such a rare privilege for an author to be able to adapt their own work. ‘Drowning,’ the update there is Paul Greengrass is directing ‘Drowning.’ He did ‘Captain Phillips,’ ‘United 93,’ ‘Bourne Supremacy.’

Steve Kloves, who is most know for ‘Harry Potter’ (is adapting). Which, having a man who took one of the most globally cherished franchises of all-time and adapted those books into a set of movies that are loved worldwide, I feel like my book couldn’t be in better hands.

Q: You’re going to fly a lot on this book tour. As a former flight attendant, do you have a preferred place to sit on a plane?

A: The hardest thing is to not want to get up and work. It’s still weird to me. When the cart goes by, I feel like I should be up, prepping in the back and running orders. I’m like, ‘Should I do a trash run?’ It’s weird to me still to be just sitting and being served a drink instead of serving them.

But you know, I’m a window-seat girl. I’ll always take the window. I like the view and like to daydream and come up with good stories.

“Those things that come back to haunt you?” Gilmour says and laughs.

But it’s no gotcha query; it’s this: Gilmour, who comes to Southern California for four shows at the end of October, has described the new album as his best work since Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece “Dark Side of the Moon.” So the question is, What is it about this album?

“Every album you do is your favorite at the time,” Gilmour says. “You obviously have to be a little careful about what you say and do about these things.

“But this one, the joy that I had making it, the joy that I still have listening to it every day,” he says. “I do listen to the whole album all the way through nearly every day still, months since we finished.

“Very often with a piece of work, with an album, you absolutely love every second of it, but when it’s done, you don’t really listen to it that much. And that’s a strange thing. But this one is not like that. I’m really loving listening to it. There’s a cohesion to it. I think I’ve written fewer lyrics on this than any other album for years, and that’s sort of given [his writer wife and longtime lyricist] Polly [Samson] the opportunity to make it into more of a cohesive body of work.

“I really have an image of it, a visual image of the album as one whole thing,” Gilmour continues. “I’m not talking concept albums here or anything as old-fashioned as that. But there is something that is tied together all the way through without being deliberate or forced or intentional.

“So that joy, which I hope other people will feel, is really the reason I think it’s so good.”

“Luck and Strange,” Gilmour’s fifth solo album and first new work since 2015’s “Rattle That Lock,” arrives on Friday, Sept. 6.

The tour behind the new record brings Gilmour to the Intuit Dome in Inglewood on Oct. 25, followed by three nights at the Hollywood Bowl from Oct. 29-31. Outside of five shows at Madison Square Garden in November, these are currently your only chances to see Gilmour in the United States.

Music and lyrics

“Writing music, writing these tunes, is a rolling process that goes on and on,” Gilmour says on a video call from the old barn he converted into a recording studio years ago at his English home.

“I’m constantly coming across pieces of music that I recorded five years ago, 10 years ago, in some cases as long as 30 years ago. Half-formed songs which haven’t quite made it onto something.

“Some of the ones on this new album are brand-spanking glossy new,” he says, but not all. “One of them has the chorus from a demo I recorded with my 2-year-old son in the room. He was going, ‘Sing, daddy, sing!’ very loudly in the room while I was trying to put this little thing down.

“Now he’s 29,” he adds.

About a year and a half ago, Gilmour and his wife decided to take a variety of works in progress and shape them into an album. They left their farmhouse in West Sussex for two rooms in London: one a studio, the other for Samson, a novelist and poet, to write lyrics in.

“We’d do four- or five-day working weeks every week because we wanted to knock the slowness on the head, get that snowball rolling down that big hill, and move on,” Gilmour says. “And that worked brilliantly well in my view.”

He and Samson have written songs together going back years, both for his solo albums and the final few Pink Floyd records. Typically, he’d play her pieces of music as he worked so she could pick and choose ones to provide lyrics for.

“I work on my own, making a tiny bedroom sound like the L.A. Sports Arena, and at the end of the day I’ll head into the house, have a glass of wine, maybe, and play what I’ve been working on for Polly and whoever else is there,” Gilmour says. “If something has that little spark that catches her ear, she’ll say, ‘Could I have that one on a piece of tape?’ as we used to call it.

“She’ll sometimes go for a four-hour walk with it, playing her headphones, until what the song is about decides to reveal itself to her,” he says.

The title track “Luck and Strange,” like many of the tracks on the album, touches on themes of aging and mortality, blending wistfulness and hope over dreamy melodies and Gilmour’s lyrical guitar lines. (The song also features keyboards by the late Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, with whom Gilmour and others created the basic track while jamming in Gilmour’s barn in 2007.)

Samson’s lyrics reflect the seeming golden age as England recovered from World War II and social strictures loosened.

“Our prime minister, Harold Macmillan at the time, said, ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ and a lot of freeing of conventions happened,” Gilmour says. “A lot of great music happened. There was big change in our world for what at the time looked like for the better.

“But now I would say we are moving into a bit of a darker time,” he continues. “There are wars. There are lunatics running countries, naming no names.

“I guess the question is, was that normal? Or is this normal? Or is it a cyclical thing?”

For ‘Dark and Velvet Nights,” Gilmour discovered that Samson had unknowingly already written lyrics for one of the harder rock grooves on the record.

“I can’t quite remember where the groove came from, but it was banging away in my head, this particularly sort of rhythm,” he says. “I thought I’ll try and pop into my studio and waste some time putting it down. Didn’t turn out to be a waste of time.

“It was all sounding really great, I was really loving the groove of it, and I thought, ‘Right now, I want to sing, but I don’t have any words,’” Gilmour says. “And a poem that Polly had written for me for our wedding anniversary was sitting on my desk on top of a pile of papers and notes and bits of music, and I just picked it up.

“In that serendipitous way, the scansion fitted almost perfectly,” he says of how the words fit the rhythm of the music. “I just sang it and played it later for Polly. She said that’s brilliant and obviously adjusted things here and there. We fiddled with it as one does and turned it into that lovely song.”

Collaborators old and new

With the songs in good shape, Gilmour set about finding collaborators with whom to make the record. Some, such as keyboardist Roger Eno and bassist Guy Pratt, were old friends with whom he’d recorded in the past.

“I plucked up my courage and rang Steve Gadd,” he says of the legendary drummer who’s played on scores of classic songs from Paul Simon and James Taylor to Steely Dan and Chick Corea. “Said to him, ‘Could you give me a week in London?’ And he said, ‘Sure!’”

But perhaps the key decision he made, with a nudge from Samson, was hiring Charlie Andrew, a producer best known for his work with the modern British band alt-J, to oversee the album in the studio. Andrew, who is in his early 40s, is roughly half the age of the 78-year-old Gilmour, and that worked perfectly for what Gilmour wanted, he says.

“I’ve done a fair bit (of producing) myself, but I wanted another outside opinion and I couldn’t think who would be best for the job,” Gilmour says. “There are a lot of people around who I’ve worked with before, who I know and love. But this felt like something new was needed.

“I would sit and moan to my wife, Polly, about how hard it is to find someone,” he says. “She comes up with a lot of suggestions. Think about this guy. This guy did Paul McCartney. And she came across (Andrew), started playing some alt-J music to herself, and thinking, ‘This has really got something very nice to it.’ Played it to me and said, ‘Why don’t you give him a ring?’”

Gilmour called Andrew and invited him to the farmhouse to listen to the music he’d been making. Andrew came, listened, and said he’d be thrilled to do the record, Gilmour says.

Andrew brought along drummer Adam Betts, bassist Tom Herbert, and keyboardist Rob Gentry. Gilmour, who during the pandemic lockdowns, did regular livestream performances as the Von Trapped Family with his wife and kids, recruited his daughter Romany to sing and play harp.

“It was one of those lucky things,” he says. “I can’t tell you how great he has been for the project, for me. He has a very healthy lack of knowledge of my work, of Pink Floyd’s work, and anything else to do with it.

“So you’re starting off from a point of quite essential honesty, where there’s no sort of mythological barriers in the way. He felt free, and I was very thrilled that he felt free to offer his opinions in a very direct way. That was incredibly productive.”

Now and then

Gilmour was still finishing up plans for the music he’ll play on tour. As with his last shows in Southern California, two nights at the Hollywood Bowl and one at the Kia Forum in March 2016, he’ll likely play two sets divided by an intermission this time, too.

“What I sort of want to do is cover the whole period to some extent,” he says of the Pink Floyd songs he’ll play. “All the way through from that first incarnation I was part of (starting in 1967) through to ’85. And then the ’85 to ’95 years, there’s two albums in there. A bit from all those, and from some of my solo albums. Definitely from ‘Rattle That Lock.’

“I’m concentrating more on songs that I essentially was the driving force behind writing the music,” he says of the Pink Floyd catalog from which he’s often performed such songs as “Comfortably Numb,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V),” and “Wish You Were Here” on past outings.

The current shows and settings are light years from that which Gilmour and Pink Floyd experienced on their first trip to Los Angeles and the United States in the summer of 1968.

“We stayed in the Landmark on that drive north of Hollywood. It’s the one where Janis Joplin died,” he says. “It was a madhouse. And we didn’t bring much gear with us from England because we were on a tiny, tiny budget. We didn’t actually have a tour booked. We were picking up dates and doing them all over the States.

“It wasn’t like it became,” Gilmour says. “It was very, very, very belt and braces. But we got to know a bunch of very nice people. We spent some time hanging out with Alice Cooper and his band. They were very jolly, nice people. And the Chambers Brothers I hung around with for a while back in those days. Very nice, great guys. We went and hung out with Frank Zappa at Tom Mix’s cabin in Laurel Canyon.

After two nights at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles in July, the band drove north for four shows at the Avalon in San Francisco and two more at the Sound Factory in Sacramento in August. Returning to Southern California, they played another two shows at The Bank, a long-forgotten venue in Torrance.

“I can’t remember how long the whole tour was, but there wasn’t much of it in place before we left England,” Gilmour says. “All the gear that we had fitted in the back of a station wagon, and our roadie Peter Watts would drive it to the next town and then go to a music shop to rent amps and things like that for the shows.

“Not the way people think it was,” he says, and laughs. “Yeah, it was fun.”

Chairs crash over heads. Sharp objects are hurled. Nunchucks get chucked.

It goes without saying that many, many people are kneed, kicked, and kapowed in the crotch.

“First of all, it’s very universal,” says director Paul Feig of the physical comedy of the movie, which asks what if a billion-dollar lottery had the stakes of the Hunger Games. “I think we always find something – as long as they don’t get catastrophically hurt – somebody getting hurt is really funny to us.

“I mean, YouTube was built on that,” he says. “Nothing I love more than watching people get hit in the (soft bits) and fall over stuff, again, if they’re OK at the end of the day.

“I think when you put that into storytelling, and it becomes part of the stakes, there is a danger there, but since it’s comedy it’s also something freeing,” says Feig, director of movies such as “Bridesmaids,” “Spy,” and the 2016 remake “Ghostbusters.” “It’s like watching the Three Stooges. It’s just funny to a lot of us to watch Moe hit somebody in the head with a hammer because we know it’s a safe space.”

“Jackpot!” which arrived on Prime Video on Aug. 15, is set in a slightly dystopian near-future Los Angeles. There’s no money to run things, so the state of California is in economic ruin. To raise money, and give residents just a smidgen of perverse hope, the new Grand Lottery offers one lucky winner a chance at millions, even billions of dollars.

But there’s a catch: The holder of the winning ticket has to survive until sundown to collect. Until then, anyone willing to murder for millions can off the winner and without consequences claim the prize as their own.

Awkwafina, the stage name of actress, comedian and rapper Nora Lum, plays Katie, who accidentally ends up with the winning ticket. Cena plays Noel, a former mercenary who works as an amateur jackpot protection agent to atone for the warfare he came to regret, who offers to keep her alive for 10 percent of the money. Simu Liu is Louis Lewis, Noel’s rival, and the operator of the biggest jackpot protection group in Los Angeles.

In interviews edited for length and clarity, Cena, Awkwafina and Feig talked about what attracted them to the story, their early inspirations for physical comedy, what their different but equally unattractive costumes implied, and more.

Q: When you first read the screenplay was there a moment when you paused and thought, ‘I’m going to do this one’?

John Cena: I kind of have a litmus test with scripts. When I can read it in one shot, I’m interested. Or if I have to step away because I’m being called to something and it’s very tough to put down. This was one where I read cover to cover, man, in less than an hour. The movie flows fast, is high stakes, high anxiety. I get the point. I think it’s a concept the audience can understand. It just read incredibly well on the page.

Awkwafina: It was a build-up of moments. I think the elevator pitch, I didn’t really understand the world and more of the layered aspects of Katie’s character. In the script, the thing that really stuck with me is the kind of dystopian world it predicts. There was something about that that just really sat with me. I think it all came together when Paul came on board. It was like Christmas Day, man. Because John and I were already attached, and we were kind of looking for a leader.

Paul Feig: I kind of resisted reading it, because I wasn’t told they were attached right away. I was just given this script called ‘Grand Theft Lotto,’ and I was like, that sounds really stupid. So I actually kind of put it on the pile and wasn’t going to read it. It was my producing partner, Laura Fischer, who called up and said, ‘Just read it.’

So I picked it up, I got about 40 pages in – it was right when we got to her fighting in the dojo and then going into the yoga room – I was just like the opportunity for physical comedy is so big. This is the Jackie Chan movie I always wished I could make. I called her back 40 pages in and said, I didn’t care how this ends, I am in.

Q: The physical comedy in this is terrific – so many people getting thrown around and hit in entertaining ways. Why are we so entertained by that?

JC: I think physical performance transcends language. I think that speaks volumes to the global popularity of WWE. You can turn it on no matter where you are in the world and decide who you like and who you don’t based on their behavior. Now, it’s tough to do physical comedy in the WWE, because the stakes are wanting to be the best, wanting to be the champion.

But when you have a winning lottery ticket and I have to make it to sundown to claim my prize or the penalty is death, that’s not a sport, that’s a story. So in there, again, physical presentation is a universal language.

PF: It’s like watching a horror movie. You go, OK, I know nobody really got killed in this so I can kind of enjoy everybody’s misery, and, you know, everybody’s fear and panic and all that. So I think it’s very freeing for an audience.

Q: When you were young, before you were a performer, what kinds of physical comedy made you laugh?

JC: Oh my God, like Tom and Jerry, all the Warner Brothers cartoons. Anything that was larger than life and could be exaggerated. The Saturday morning cartoons. That is the wheelhouse and those lean so heavily on physical comedy.

A: I grew up absolutely worshipping Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. I feel like they were two women that were really able to harness it in a very visceral way. And then I like Mr. Bean. I would love the Three Stooges. I think it’s something that it’s hard to do. Like, if you’re not really willing to commit and really to also possibly fail. I think that kind of defines physical comedy.

Q: We love the gross scenes in “Bridesmaids” but it’s also a very heartfelt movie, too. Here, there are all these fights but there’s some sweet emotional moments. What does that bring to a movie?

JC: I just think it’s the commitment to story. A punchline comic can be very successful. I’m a fan of Jimmy Carr and Rodney Dangerfield. I love me a punchline comic. But the storytelling comics, they let you in on their lives and are vulnerable, and talk about things that frustrate them or a difficulty in their lives. I think when you’re trying to do comedy, if you can allow people to attach to your character and either want to root for or against your character, then when they go through comedic situations, we laugh along with them.

I think that’s where Paul’s strength is. He has punchlines for days, but he doesn’t lose sight of the characters and their development. And he won’t punchline himself out of character development. He stays true to the story.

Q: It’s clear from the outtakes in the credits that there was a lot of room for improv on this shoot. What was that like?

JC: Please, if you’re watching ‘Jackpot!’ stay for the credits. It really was fun. Awkwafina’s never short of material. She’s always got a joke. Then you add in Paul running in jokes every five minutes. Comedies are supposed to be fun. The great Pete Farrelly said that and he was not kidding. Both Pete and Paul make it a fun set.

PF: Yeah, the most dangerous thing you can do if you’re making a comedy is to only shoot the script. Because we can sit around all day and say, ‘That’s really funny, that’s really funny.’ Once it’s in the air and it’s being said by people, and then it’s in the context of the movie, it might not be funny. I can’t tell you the number of jokes that I thought were gonna destroy in a test screening that just get nothing. And then a joke that I was like, ‘That’s stupid,’ that just goes through the roof.

So I just want to make sure I’ve got the biggest amount of ammo going into the editing room. We go, ‘Take that one out, try this. Try this.’ Because as a commercial filmmaker, I need to make sure that the majority of the audience is going to always find this funny. So having the skill and talents of these amazingly funny people to add into that, and make it even better, that’s everything to me.

Q: John’s costume is a drab suit with white socks. Awkwafina’s is a flashy gold number. What’d you think about the clothes you wore in this?

A: I mean, at a certain point it just feels sort of like a uniform. It was definitely spray-painted gold.

PF: It was heavy. [laughs] I know just from picking it up before she put it on. Our costumer was like, ‘She’ll be fine.’

JC: Every project, people can can get their own perspective. You noticed the color scheme (of the movie) and you also noticed Noel in a drab color scheme. I don’t want to tell anyone how to feel. I want them to see ‘Jackpot!’ and enjoy it. But my perspective of that is we’re in this dystopian society where everyone wears bright and vibrant colors, but they have little faith in humanity.

And the one symbol of faith in humanity is the one person who doesn’t appear bright and vibrant. That’s only my perspective, but little things like that are a way to make the character stand out.

We’ll pause while that sinks in,  because, frankly, it’s such an unexpected thing to hear that it feels like it can’t possibly be true.

“I’ve had people argue with me: ‘No, no, no, you’re wrong,’” said Mona Scott-Young, Elliott’s manager since 1996, just before that first album arrived. “And I’m like, ‘No, I think I would know. I was there.’

“It’s pretty unimaginable,” Scott-Young continued. “Because she’s had so many milestone accomplishments, right? Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, every imaginable songwriter’s award. And you think of touring as just a natural extension of an artist that has had such an illustrious career.

“But yeah, historically she just has never felt that the time was right. Until now.”

Elliott has periodically popped up at festivals and as a guest artist. But the only multi-city tour she’s ever done was two decades ago, in 2004, when she opened for Alicia Keys and Beyoncé on the Verizon Ladies First Tour.

Accompanying Elliott on the “Out of This World: Missy Elliott Experience” tour are longtime friends and collaborators Busta Rhymes, Timbaland and Ciara. The tour kicked off July 4 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and includes stops Aug. 2 at the Hampton Coliseum and Aug. 8 in Washington. 

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Scott-Young talked about Elliott’s decision to finally headline her own tour now, her reasons for not doing so earlier, and how she has many albums’ worth of new music recorded yet has not released a new studio album since 2005.

___

So how did this happen? How did you learn she was ready to tour?

Well, we get offers constantly, which she goes, “Mmm, no, mmm, no.” And a big part of it is because she has such an incredible imagination in terms of what she wants to see happen. I often say it’s like a spectacle. She doesn’t just step onto a stage. It’s got to be all the bells and whistles because she comes from thinking that people pay good money, and they should get entertained.

For years, she had thought about Vegas. It would be an opportunity for her to plant herself in a space and build out whatever her mind can conceptualize. We would do something where she was static. And so we had taken a quick trip and taken a look at some of the shows that were out there.

And then one day she just called and said, “We should go on tour.” I was like, “Oh, wait, we weren’t just going to be in Vegas? What happened to that?” But our partnership has always been, “You conceptualize it and I will figure out how to make it happen.” And that’s where this crazy journey we’ve been on began.

___

In the past, how has she decided when she wanted to play a festival or a stand-alone show?

It’s been very random. It could be because of a song that she saw kind of regaining popularity. We had the “Cool Off” (dance) challenge and people really responded well to that. Or she’ll see dance crazes and she’s like, “Oh, I’d love to have my dancers out there on stage.” And I’m like, ‘”Wait, we’re gonna do this show mainly because you wanted to give your dancers an opportunity?” [She laughs.]

Like we did the FYF festival (in Los Angeles in 2017) and that was kind of an opportunity for her to have 25-plus dancers on stage with her. She was like, “That feels like it could be a lot of fun.”

___

So for this headlining tour, what had to take place to put it together?

Oh, good Lord, that is a loaded question. We probably have no less than 30 individual group text chains going on every single element. Because again, it’s not just getting on stage with a mic and some dancers, it’s the content that has to be conceptualized. The fans experience this show. It is not going to be something you watch. This is not a passive show, this is a fully immersed experience.

You’re going to go through a range of emotions. And the content, the wardrobe, the choreography, the music, the transitions, everything plays into that to paint this picture that lives in her head.

And the scariest thing to me is this picture is ever-evolving, it’s ever-changing. I’ll get middle of the night texts (from Elliott): “I have an idea.” That’s the scariest words that Missy Elliott can say to me. Because I never know where this idea is going to take me and what it’s going to entail in terms of execution.

___

One of the things fans will be excited about is that Missy is bringing Busta Rhymes and Ciara and Timbaland.

It’s family. That’s what we say all the time, it’s a family affair. When she decided to do this there were so many artists that you could think of that would be great to go with Missy, right? But it was important for her that she delivered on the fans’ expectations. People have wanted to see her and Busta do anything together because they are such kindred spirits.

Ciara has been Missy’s protege and they’ve done some incredible music together. And Timbaland is everyone’s longtime collaborator. He’s going to be taking us in and out of the sets, doing his own set. It’s going to be a seamless experience.

___

After she played the Friends & Lovers festival in Las Vegas last year she did the one show at Yaamava’. Was that a test for a tour or just a tag-on to the festival?

It’s funny, it was just the tag-on to the festival. To be perfectly honest, everything that she put on at the festival was not cheap. So it was like, “OK, Missy, let’s see, we’re going to need another show to help underwrite all of this stuff.” So it was really in support of the festival show.

___

She was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year — the first solo female hip-hop artist to go in. Did that play a role in the tour this year?

It kind of pulled her out. I say a lot she’s like a hermit. She goes into that Bat Cave, she’s making music, you know. You very rarely see her out and about, just a few select appearances. But with that Rock Hall of Fame there was a lot of press and she was out there a lot. And people just kept expressing appreciation and love, and she responds to wanting to kind of deliver on her gift.

So when people kept saying to her again and again, “Oh my God, it would be so great to see you, I’ve been dying to see you,” it made her feel like, “Oh, you know, I probably should do something to give back to the fans.” All the conversations were around Vegas. I think the tour just came about spontaneously because she realized this would give her the opportunity to get out there and meet them where they are.

___

She told Variety recently that she had six albums’ worth of music recorded. What’s your sense of that as her manager?

The difference with Missy is she does nothing until she feels it’s absolutely the right time. One of her favorite phrases is “My spirit says,” because she really is not only intuitive, but very spiritual. And she’s always looking for those signs and looking to feel 100% reconciled with whatever decision she makes.

And if there is anything that just doesn’t have her feeling that the time is absolutely right she just won’t do it. It’s never motivated by the financial, which, for a manager, it’s kind of like, “Are you kidding me? Are we really saying no to this?” [She laughs.] And she’s like, “It just doesn’t feel right.”

She’s probably got more than six albums’ worth of material. I am sure that one day she will wake up and text me at 3 a.m. and say, “I have an idea,” and it’ll be let’s do the album. She just isn’t moved by anything other than her internal clock.

Thelma sends the money and then she discovers she’s been scammed. She’s so outraged that she recruits her friend Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in one of his final roles, and sets off across the San Fernando Valley on a two-seat electric scooter to get her money back.

The so-called “grandparent scam” is a common con perpetrated on seniors who instinctively want to help their grandchildren out of trouble.

And for writer-director Josh Margolin, it got personal when his own grandmother, Thelma Post, now 103 years old, was targeted about a decade ago with a call purportedly from Josh in jail.

“It just really shook up my sense of her,” says Margolin, who admired his grandmother for her seemingly unstoppable ability to care for herself. “She has always been so unflappable and so sharp and so tough in a way. So to see her get duped, especially with my name being used, it just felt like maybe we were entering this new moment.”

For Post, the scam was caught before she actually lost any money. But Margolin, who’d been filming his grandmother almost as a documentary subject for years, the “what ifs” of that moment set his imagination in motion.

“I started wondering what might have happened if she sent it and then set out to get it back, which I think is something she very well may have done,” he says. “Many of the things June did (as Thelma in the movie) are things she might have done if given the chance.”

The movie he wrote celebrates the grit and determination he admired in his grandmother. It mines the humor in the family dynamic – Squibb and Roundtree are far more capable than her hapless heirs, Thelma’s daughter and son-in-law, played by Parker Posey and Clark Gregg, and grandson Danny, played by Fred Hechinger.

And it lets the film’s Thelma be an action hero, albeit one moving a little slower, OK, a lot slower, but just as gamely as Tom Cruise, whom she’s seen watching in a stunt-filled movie early on.

“That cocktail of things is what sort of got me really excited about it,” Margolin says. “It made me realize I had to write it.”

But first, he’d need to find his leading lady.

A star is born – at 94

Squibb says she was on board to play Thelma by the time she reached the final page of the screenplay.

“My initial reaction was: I must do this,” she says. “I think I just reacted to her. I understood her age, certainly. And I felt that I would probably do these very things if something was done to me. It was just all there.”

For Margolin, Squibb, who was nominated for best supporting actress for 2013’s “Nebraska,” wasn’t just No. 1 on his list. She was his entire list.

“I had her in mind because I’ve just been a longtime fan of her as an actress,” he says of Squibb, a character actor whose films include “The Age of Innocence,” “About Schmidt,” and “Far From Heaven,” as well as dozens of guest star turns on television. “She just has a wonderful mix of qualities that to me felt essential to the character, and at a certain point, I had a lot of trouble imagining anybody else doing it.”

Margolin and Squibb were mutual friends of the actress Beanie Feldstein, who not only had worked with Squibb in “The Humans” but knew Margolin’s grandmother too.

“She basically said, ‘Well, I hope you’re going to send this to June,’” Margolin says of Feldstein. “I said, ‘That’s my dream casting,’ and she very generously read it and then sent it to June, and we connected from there.”

Squibb’s early life was spent on stage; in 1960, she appeared in the original Broadway run of “Gypsy.” She made her film debut at 71 when she was cast in Woody Allen’s 1990 movie “Alice.” Supporting roles and character parts kept her busy ever since. Now “Thelma” is her first-ever leading role.

“I think that’s funny,” she says of making her debut as a leading lady at 94. “It never occurred to me I was doing a leading role, something different.”

“The biggest difference is probably that you’re on set more days in a row,” Margolin says.

“I think I was on set 27 out of 29 days or something like that,” Squibb replies.

“I think for us, or for me, having you as the lead just set the tone,” he adds. “Being the leader, your presence on set was what set the lone.”

Can you dig it?

Squibb wasn’t the only one breaking new ground with “Thelma.” For Margolin, the film was his feature directing debut, a task he says was made easier by the veteran actors in his cast.

“I think a big part of having a cast that you trust, and who are kind of these consummate pros, who show up and really give themselves to the work, it puts you at ease,” he says. “You realize there are times when you can take a step back.

“There are times when you’re obviously going to get involved to make sure things are the way they need to be,” Margolin says. “There’s other times where if something’s not working, sometimes they know that at the same moment you do, and they’re like, ‘Let me take that again.’”

In addition to Squibb, Posey and Gregg, “Thelma” also features Malcolm McDowell as the scammer that Thelma finally tracks down. But it’s Squibb and Roundtree who share the most screen time, becoming something like the classic partners in a buddy movie – Thelma charging ahead, Ben more cautious – and their chemistry shines throughout.

“He was a wonderful, warm human being, and such a good actor,” Squibb says of Roundtree, who died in October at 81. “You never forgot, though, that he was Shaft. I don’t think there’s any way you could. He is so strong and so straight and so noble in his own way.

“Riding that scooter, I just was so aware, always, who was on the back of the scooter with me,” she says. “We had a great time, we really did. I think we ended up with a wonderful relationship, he and I.”

And she does stunts!

About that scooter – in most scenes, the driver really is Squibb, who like Tom Cruise, did most of her own stunts, even if they were performed at much lower intensity than Cruise works in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

“In reading it, I got all excited that I was going to be able to drive that scooter,” Squibb says, laughing. “I was a dancer in New York for years, and I physically kept my body going. I swam a lot. I do Pilates now. And I just felt I could do most of the things that I was reading, that Josh had written.”

Margolin and his stunt coordinator were nervous, though, she adds.

“But I proved to them in my complex here that I could drive the thing,” Squibb says. “I had the stunt coordinator running alongside me the whole time. He was so frightened that I was gonna kill myself. But you know, after a while they relaxed, and they got used to the idea I could do this.”

When your star is in her 90s, it’s natural to want to keep her safe and healthy, but Squibb says she surprised the crew more than once with her abilities, climbing atop a bed to reach on tiptoes to the top of a cabinet to retrieve a gun in one scene, crashing her scooter during a chase scene in another.

“The scooters were supposed to clash, and they told me, ‘Now don’t do that, just go up to it and we’ll fix it,’” Squibb says. “I decided, ‘Well, what the hell.’ So I clashed with Richard’s scooter, and everybody, ‘Oh my God!’ You could just hear the reactions going on.

“But I did it, and I zoomed off afterwards. And the only thing I could think was, ‘Well, they got that on camera.’”

Respect for the elders

One of the loveliest aspects of “Thelma” is the dignity with which it treats seniors of different ages and abilities. Yes, Thelma fell for a scam, but that doesn’t define her as much as her go-get-’em attitude does. Sure, some of her friends in the film need more assistance as they age, and that’s fine, too.

“I think both Josh and I look at film as reality, and we want to see lives shown to us that are somewhat real,” Squibb says of the realism the film portrays even when she’s on the hunt on that scooter. “If they’re not, they can become funny, and it’s not good.

“I just think we both went into this with the attitude that we wanted to show this woman in her reality,” she says of the real-life Thelma. “She’s a hell of a woman, Thelma herself is. She could sit and talk to you probably longer than Josh or I could, and she’s going to be 104.”

Margolin, who says Grandma Thelma has slowed down a little as she entered her second century of life, agreed.

“Her old age, to your point, is not a monolith,” he says. “Like, she’s been ‘old’ my whole life. She’s gone from 70 to 103, and each chapter had its own needs, its own stories.”

The inclusion of seniors in the film extended to one of its key shooting locations, the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s independent and assisted living campus in Woodland Hills. It’s where Squibb and Roundtree have their scooter chase,  and some of its residents, all of them veterans of film and TV careers, show up in passing shots.

“There’s a ton of people there with these incredible, sort of storied careers in film and television,” Margolin says.

“They know what you’re doing,’” Squbbs says of the interest of residents in the film shoot.

“Exactly,” he replies. “People know, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be in the shot, we’re gonna go this way.’ They were all so interested and curious and excited that it was happening there.

“Some of the residents appear in some of the establishing shots, which was fun. This one old guy who crosses frame I found out later was the assistant director on ‘The Godfather.’ You’re like, ‘Oh, amazing!’”

‘Thelma’ and Thelma

Residents of the Motion Picture and Television Fund community recently got their own special screening of the film partly shot where they live. Grandma Thelma also has seen a finished cut of the film, Margolin says.

“I think she’s both very touched by it and excited about it, and also, it’s a little bit surreal,” he says of her reaction. “Kind of out of body, like, ‘What is this? There’s a movie? And it’s my name.’ “

Not long ago Squibb got to meet the woman whose she loosely inhabits in “Thelma.” They hit off famously, not least in their mutual pride in what Margolin accomplished with “Thelma.”

“She’s proud of you,” Squibb tells Margolin. He laughs.

“When I walked in I said, ‘I’m Thelma Post,’” Squibb says of their meeting. “She said, ‘No, I’m Thelma Post.’ And we laughed.

But she could sometimes pick up clues.

“I knew of a volcano story,” she says. “That would probably come up in our conversations when we were on one of the many beautiful hikes in Kauai. He would give me fun facts about volcanic activity and the evolution of different volcanoes all over the world.

“He was always spitballing in his head where he was in his story,” she says. “So I got these little breadcrumbs of knowing that there’s a volcano story out there somewhere.”

When Michael Crichton died at 66 in November 2008, he left a legacy that included nearly 30 novels, including “The Andromeda Strain,” “Congo” and “Jurassic Park,” many of which became Hollywood blockbusters. He wrote and directed films such as “Coma” and “Westworld,” and created and produced the TV series “E.R.,” which ran for 15 seasons.

After his death, Sherri Crichton, then pregnant with their son, found herself in charge of his archives and literary legacy. But with grief and an infant, it was 2010 before she really dug into the work he’d left behind.

There, she found an unfinished manuscript for the volcano story, and suddenly things shifted into focus.

“It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, this takes place on the Big Island — Michael loved the Big Island,” Crichton says. “And there was this painting in our home of Mauna Loa. He loved that painting, but I never knew the reasons why.

“But when I had this manuscript in my hands, I realized why,” she says. “And then I was on a pilgrimage to find all the pieces of the story to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

“It was the ultimate cliffhanger,” she says. “Where is it?”

More than a decade later, Crichton found a writer to help finish the volcano story. Not just any writer, either, but James Patterson, one of the best-selling writers of thrillers ever.

“Eruption,” by Michael Crichton and James Patterson, is the fifth posthumous novel from Crichton, The previous four include “Pirate Latitudes” and “Dragon Teeth,” two complete manuscripts found in his papers; “Micro,” completed by writer Richard Preston; and “The Andromeda Evolution,” a new sequel to “The Andromeda Strain,” written from scratch by Daniel H. Wilson.

In an interview, Sherri Crichton talks about the book’s long journey to its publication June 3, why she was nervous about letting it go, how it feels to spend so much time with her late husband’s words and memories, and more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: So what else did you find to help piece together “Eruption”?

A: I found so many things along the way. So much research. Like videos that had to be converted because they’re completely out of date. And it’s Michael with a research team at the top of the Mauna Loa. Or driving through the streets of the Big Island, pointing out landmarks of what’s going to make it in the book.
Because Michael always wrote in reality. These streets are really there, the library’s there, the banyan tree. It was just a phenomenal experience to start putting all of these pieces of this puzzle together.

Q: When did you start thinking about what you could do with this manuscript?

A: I found the manuscript, it was probably 2010. There was a lot of work (after his death). I was pregnant with our son when he passed. And my focus was trying to keep the memory of Michael just so alive and present as I was now raising a son by myself.

It’s not that I wasn’t prepared to do that. I just didn’t want to do that. I needed to stay connected to Michael and his voice, his work. But when I found this project, it really was just so tender to my heart, because I knew how much it meant to him. And I knew how much Hawaii meant to him. (The Crichtons had homes in Los Angeles and Kauai.)

And it was clearly a passion project for him. Something that truly resonated with him on so many levels. Because volcanos pop up in a lot of Michael’s books. You’ve got volcanos in “Jurassic” and “Congo,” you name it. So I wanted to find everything I could to put the pieces together.

Q: How did you go about finding the right person to help finish the book?

A: It’s like, “Now what?” I have all the pieces, but I actually didn’t — there’s a part of me that didn’t want to let it go. Because to let it go, now it becomes a collaboration, and it really does become almost forming a new relationship with a new person that would honor and respect Michael’s work, his vision, his research.

Who would be able to be his equal on the page to carry this story to fruition? Who would that be? And I thought of a lot of different people. But it really dawned on me: Wait a minute, it’s very clear: James Patterson is bigger than big. He has the chops.

When we reached out to Jim’s agent, they immediately put us in contact. He said yes to everything. I’m still nervous. This is one of my favorite jewels in the jewel box and I was nervous — until Jim. He wanted everything I had. He wrote an outline. And it wasn’t a two- or five-page outline. I’m talking a voluminous outline of what he would do.

That outline, it was so clear to me that not only did he keep Michael’s work, he expanded it to such a place that I felt so content. I thought, “You know what, I’m in the right hands.”

Q: So without giving away too much, what kind of story is “Eruption” today?

A: It’s really clear that this book is just a reminder of the fragility and the intensity of nature. How human interference can be weaponized in the wrong hands. It harkens back to Michel’s worlds of “Jurassic” — “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

It’s these two ticking clocks. One is the possibility of the Mauna Loa erupting, and what state of emergency that is going to take on the island. The other is this kind of secret. I’m not going to give it away. But there’s something else that is actually more dangerous than the eruption of the Mauna Loa, and it’s something that has been planted by the military that could wreak havoc. And it would just be the people on the island, it would be a worldwide catastrophe.

It’s an amazing, heart-thumping, exhilarating book. Jim just did a phenomenal job taking this over the finish line.

Q: When you mentioned “just because we can doesn’t mean we should,” I was thinking about AI and wondering what Michael would have thought of it.

A: That’s a great thing you brought up. With AI now, I’m like, “Oh, Michael’s all over this.” By the time he was 30, he had already written and directed a movie and was the best-selling author of “Andromeda Strain,” which was talking about — then 50 years ago — a pandemic. Then he went into “Westworld,” and “Westworld” is talking about how humans go to this playground and interface with robots.

He was so prolific and so ahead of his time that these jewels last. it almost feels like in perpetuity. Because he had the mindset to create these worlds so futuristic.

Q: When he died, you’d been married just three years, still relative newlyweds, and then you’re a new single mom. What has it been like working with his materials, spending time with him that way?

A: Neither Michael or I ever thought it was going to end so quickly. I mean, he had already beat his diagnosis and he was on the road to recovery, and we got pregnant. Then something happened and he fell back on treatments. We were in denial that anything could have happened. So there was a lot when Michael passed.

No. 1, I’m a new mother. But No. 2, how do I teach his son about him? So not only did I want to connect to Michael through his words in his work, I knew Michael on a very human, soulful level of what he gave me. But I didn’t know all the details of his work. He was completely established by the time I came into his life. You don’t ask all the questions, especially the questions necessary to teach a child about their parents.

Fortunately for me, he had the roadmap in the archives. The importance for me was I want to create the archive so that I can put all the pieces of his life in one line together. Not only for me, but for our son, and for Michael’s daughter, Taylor. And then for all of Michael’s fans. So that there is, it’s a voice from Michael, not other people’s recollection of what they recall the story to be.

I wanted the facts, and I wanted to be able to teach them to our son. It’s been quite a journey because I have been very successful teaching my son about his father, and I’ve learned so much about Michael myself.

Songs of the summer anchor us in a time and place. You remember who your friends were, what you did, and where you went.

There are absolutely people this summer who will always remember their love for Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” or Billie Eilish’s “Lunch,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” or Post Malone and Morgan Wallen‘s “I Had Some Help.”

It’s too early to evaluate those, though. Come back in 40 or 50 years when I, or some AI simulation, will tell you how the summer and history turned out for those songs.

This, though, we know: The Summer of ’74 was wild, man, with classic songs alongside some ‘what-were-we-thinking?’ tunes. The Summer of ’84 was much better, with breakthroughs by a number of artists still relevant today.

(And what of 1994? Check out our piece on the classic albums of that year celebrating their anniversary in 2024 here: https://bit.ly/3VjWROD.)

Summer songs are in the ears of the beholder. I picked 10 songs for each year, and yes, your list might differ. But I did try to cast a wide net and survey as much as personal memory and online research turned up.

So tune in, and drop out of 2024 for the spin of the dial through summers past.

Summer songs of ’74

“Band on the Run,” Paul McCartney & Wings / Released in April, peaked at No. 1 in June

“Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash, as we fell into the sun!” Oh my, what a terrific song this is. A suite in miniature, it opens with our heroes in the band sorrowful for their confinement, shifts into a second movement making plans for breaking out, and then, pow! Two minutes and 22 seconds into the song’s 5:13 run time, they’re off, and we’re off too, singing, “And the first one said to the second one there, I hope you’re having fun. Ba-a-nd on the run!”

“Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods / Released in April, peaked at No. 1 in June

“Billy, don’t be a hero, don’t be a fool with your life!” There was a time when I would, uninvited, entertain a party with my rendition of this classic. (I never did figure out why everyone’s drinks needed refilling just then.) There’s no rule, you know, that a summer song has to be good. It just to be memorable, and that’s what we had here. “Billy, don’t be a hero, come back and make me your wife!”

“Rock The Boat,” the Hues Corporation / Released in May, peaked at No. 1 in July

“So I’d like to know where you got the notion …”. Not only was this a call to the dance floor the moment the needle dropped, it’s also considered by some to be the first disco song to top the charts. A perennial favorite at weddings and parties in Ireland, it’s so beloved there’s a dance fans do, as seen on Netflix’s “Derry Girls,” that includes sitting on the floor to rock an imaginary boat. “Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby.”

“Annie’s Song,” John Denver / Released in June, peaked at No. 1 in July and August

“You fill up my senses, like a night in a forest …’: We’ll confess we considered making up a rule that a summer song had to have more oomph than this limp little love song has. It’s just so … weak. But according to Billboard, this baby was the biggest cumulative hit of the summer of ’74. Maybe it was the come-down from the Vietnam War, Watergate and all needed something soft on the ears. “You fill up my senses, come fill me again.”

“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” by Elton John / Released in May, peaked at No. 2 in July

“I’d just allow a fragment of your life to wander free.” Exhibit A in the case against “Annie’s Song”: It blocked this Elton John classic at No. 2 in the summer of ’74. It’s a beautiful, melancholy song with some of John and lyricist Bernie Taupin‘s most poetic work of the period. Gorgeous piano, glorious harmonies, it remained a staple of John’s sets thereafter. “But losin’ everything is like the sun goin’ down on me”

“Feel Like Makin’ Love,” by Roberta Flack / Released  in June, peaked at No. 1 in August

“Strollin’ in the park, watchin’ winter turn to spring.” Now this is how you do a soft summer song. Flack’s mellow vibes are as cool as a summer breeze, and the love song here is something you’d play at a party or for your special lady or dude in the mood. It was also No. 1 for five weeks on the Hot Soul Singles, so, yeah, it was huge that summer. “Ooh-oo-oo, that’s the time, I feel like makin’ dreams come true.”

“The Night Chicago Died,” by Paper Lace / Released in June, peaked at No. 1 in August

“In the heat of the summer night, in the land of the dollar bill.” A fitting bookend to ‘Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” both as guilty pleasures but also authorship: Paper Lace wrote and recorded “Billy,” which flopped, only for Bo Donaldson to take it No. 1. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was not a fan, his rep suggesting that the band “jump in the Chicago River, placing your heads under water three times and surfacing twice.” “Brother what a night it really was.”

“Tell Me Something Good,” by Rufus / Released in April, peaked at No. 3 in August

“You ain’t got no feeling insi-i-de …”. Stevie Wonder wrote this and gave it to Rufus for his friend Chaka Khan to sing, and man, does she sing it. After this hit, the band changed its name to Rufus and Chaka Khan. The funky wah-wah guitar, one of the very uses of a guitar talk box, and just a groove that lasts all day long. “Tell me something good, tell me that you like it, yeah.”

‘Waterloo,’ by ABBA / Released in March, peaked at No. 6 in August

“Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war.” The breakout single from ABBA, “Waterloo” uses Napoleon’s fateful defeat as a metaphor for a love affair. They’re Swedish, they knew their European history, and, smartly, that might have helped win the Eurovision Contest in 1974. To American audiences, that didn’t matter as much as the bouncy run of the up-tempo ballad. “Waterloo, promise to love you forevermore.”

*(You’re) Having My Baby,” by Paul Anka and Odia Coates / Released in June, peaked at No. 1 in August and September

“What a lovely way of saying how much you love me.” People loved this song, and yes, I can sing this at your party, too. There’s no defense for how bad it is other than that Anka really loved his wife and their four daughters, all of whom it was inspired. Interesting side note: One of Anka’s daughters Amanda is married to actor Jason Bateman. “I’m a woman in love, and I love what it’s doing to me.”

Also on the Summer of ’74 jukebox: “Sundown,” by Gordon Lightfoot; “Rock Your Baby,” by George McCrae; “Hollywood Swinging,” by Kool and the Gang; “I Shot the Sheriff,” by Eric Clapton; “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” Barry White

Summer songs of ’84

“Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” by Phil Collins / Released in February, peaked at No. 1 in April and May

“How can I just let you walk away? Just let you leave without a trace.” Phil Collins’ moody ballad from the film of the same name connected deeply listeners, in part due to the massive clout the still-new MTV had on the pop chart then. The song became Collins’ first U.S. No. 1, bumping Kenny Loggins’ springtime hit “Footloose” off the top spot. “And you comin’ back to me is against all odds, It’s the chance I’ve gotta take.”

“Relax,” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood / Released in March, peaked at No. 67 in May, but …

“Relax, don’t do it, when you want to go to it.” The English duo’s innuendo-filled single didn’t make it far up the Billboard 100, but listeners to KROQ-FM in Southern California heard it in heavy rotation. It was voted the alternative rock station’s No. 1 song of 1984 in a year-end listeners poll. And if there were a poll of popular T-shirts that summer, those white “Frankie Say Relax” tees were pretty popular. “Got to hit me (hit me!), hit me with those laser beams.”

“Time After Time,” by Cyndi Lauper / Released in March, peaked at No. 1 in June

“Lyin’ in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you.” Cyndi Lauper‘s debut single, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” climbed to No. 2 at the end of 1983 and start of 1984. This ballad, which Lauper co-wrote, not only did that one better, one better being all there was to do, it’s also become her signature song even more than its predecessor. (Even jazz legend Miles Davis covered it.) “If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me. Time after time.”

“The Reflex,” by Duran Duran / Released in April, peaked at No. 1 in June

“Oh, why-y-y-y don’t you use it? Try not to bruise it.” The glamourous synth-fueled rock of Duran Duran was at its peak in the early ’80s, but it was “The Reflex,” not songs such as “Hungry Like the Wolf” or “Rio,” to achieve their first No. 1 in the U.S. Simon Le Bon’s vocals sparkle as the rest of the band race to the finish in fine form. “The reflex is a lonely child who’s waiting by the park / The reflex is in charge of finding treasure in the dark.”

“Dancing in the Dark,” by Bruce Springsteen / Released in May, peaked at No. 2 in July

“You can’t start a fire. You can’t start a fire without a spark.” The debut single from “Born In The USA” lit the fuse for Bruce Springsteen‘s rocket into superstardom. It was blocked from No. 1 by “The Reflex” and the next song on this list. In this classic age of MTV, the music video was directed by filmmaker Brian De Palma with an unknown Courteney Cox featured. “This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark.”

“When Doves Cry,” by Prince / Released in May, peaked at No. 1 in July and August

“Dig, if you will, the picture, of you and I engaged in a kiss.” Even more than “Born in the USA” boosted Springsteen’s fame, the release of the film and soundtrack to Prince‘s “Purple Rain” transformed him into a global superstar. This song, written in one night to fit a scene in the movie, is classic Prince, funky, sexy, and cool as cool can be. “Why do we scream at each other? This is what it sounds like when doves cry.”

“Eyes Without a Face,” by Billy Idol / Released in May, peaked at No. 4 in July

“I’m all out of hope. One more bad break could bring a fall.” Billy Idol‘s first single off “Rebel Yell” was its title track, a hard rocking number like “Dancing With Myself” and “White Wedding” before it. Here, though, he slowed things down with a ballad that still finds space for some meaty guitar riffing by his musical partner Steve Stevens. “Eyes without a face, got no human grace, your eyes without a face.”

“State of Shock,” by the Jacksons with Mick Jagger / Released in June, peaked at No. 3 in August

“She looks so great every time I see her face.” Two things you must know about this song. First, when it was released on June 5, 1984, DJs at KIQQ (100.3 FM) decided it would be fun to play it over and over again. And they did, for 22 consecutive hours. Second, the Insane Clown Posse has covered it. Juggalos! Can I get a “Whoop Whoop”? “She put me in a state, a state of shock.”

“People Are People,” by Depeche Mode / Released in March, peaked at No. 13 in August

“People are people, so why should it be, you and I should get along so awfully?” Here’s another one that Southern Californians surely heard more than the rest of the nation thanks to KROQ’s alternative rock programming. The British electronic band Depeche Mode uses everything in its toolbox – melancholy vocals, clanging percussion – as well as ever it did. “I can’t understand what makes a man hate a man, help me understand.”

“What’s Love Got to Do with It,” by Tina Turner / Released in May, peaked at No. 1 in September

“What’s love got to do, got to do with it? What’s love but a second-hand emotion?” Tina Turner‘s well-deserved comeback started with the 1984 album “Private Dancer,” and this single from the record was a large part of her success. Sultry and sleek, the modern pop instrumentation behind Turner’s powerhouse vocals still thrills. “What’s love got to do, got to do with it? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

Also on the Summer of ’84 jukebox: “Cruel Summer;” by Bananarama, “Hello,” by Lionel Richie; “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” by Deniece Williams; “Drive,” by the Cars; “The Longest Time,” by Billy Joel; “Sister Christian,” by Night Ranger; “Jump (For My Love),” by the Pointer Sisters; “The Warrior,” by Scandal featuring Patti Smyth; and, because bustin’ makes me feel good, “Ghostbusters,” by Ray Parker Jr.

“Yesterday, I was driving on the Hollywood Freeway with my family, and my son said, ‘Look, there’s a billboard with “The Sympathizer” on it!’” Nguyen said a little more than a week before the limited series premieres on HBO on Sunday, April 14.

“We immediately pulled over, thankfully, to a safe place, and everybody spilled out of the car to take pictures with a billboard,” he says. “And you don’t do that with a book. Books don’t get billboards, usually.

“That’s just an example of how vast the scale is, that you can drive on a freeway through L.A. now and literally see gigantic billboards with the whole cast’s faces. And that’s amazing. Absolutely amazing.”

“The Sympathizer” is the story of The Captain, a South Vietnamese spy for the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, a man of two minds, as he says of himself in the novel, whose communist leanings push against his fondness for the United States where he’d studied before the war. The seven-episode limited series follows The Captain from the fall of Saigon to his journey to the United States and eventual return to Vietnam.

Its cast consists almost entirely of actors of Vietnamese origins. Most, such as Australian actor Hoa Xuande, who plays The Captain, are unfamiliar to American audiences, though some will be familiar such as the acclaimed actress Kieu Chinh, who plays The Major’s Mother, and “Paris By Night” emcee Ky Duyen, who plays The General’s Wife.

“The story is about refugees, a traitor, heroes, a spy, and love and relationships,” says Chinh, 86, on a call from her Huntington Beach home. “This is the first time a Vietnamese novel is brought to the screen, and most of the characters are played by Vietnamese for the first time.

“So, you know, we are all very excited about that,” she says.

Sandra Oh and Robert Downey Jr. also star in the series, with Oh playing university secretary Ms. Mori, and Downey, playing four different characters – a CIA agent, a professor, a filmmaker, and a congressman – who are antagonists of The Captain in the series.

Part black comedy, part spy thriller, “The Sympathizer” was co-created by Canadian writer-producer Don McKellar and South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook.

Page to screen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel was a literary sensation on publication, earning acclaim for its subversion of genre tropes such as spy novels and war stories while telling a serious, entertaining and often funny story from the point of view of the Vietnamese side of the war.

After it won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Nguyen, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, set about seeking a home for the story in Hollywood. In 2021, A24 optioned it as a series for HBO, with other producers, including Team Downey, Robert and Susan Downey’s production company, also coming on board.

Nguyen served as an executive producer on the project. McKellar joined as showrunner after Nguyen mentioned he thought Park Chan-wook would be a dream director, and a fellow producer who knew McKellar had written a script with the South Korean filmmaker, reached out to McKellar.

He also mentioned Sandra Oh as a possible choice for Ms. Mori, and McKellar, a close friend of Oh’s, reached out and got her on board.

To the writer, spending time with producers, cast and crew on set and location left Nguyen in awe of the work that went into making his book into a thrilling spectacle of a series.

“I mean, it literally involves hundreds of people working well over a year at a huge cost to make this, whereas I wrote the whole thing sitting in a little room by myself,” Nguyen says.

“Reading and watching are very different experiences and very hard to compare,” he says. “But they’re both immersive in their own ways. The process of interacting with someone’s words, but then conjuring, in my own mind, whatever’s happening is quite different than sitting more passively in front of a screen.

“But when the screen experience works, it can be really incredible, and I think it does work in this series.”

And the literary world seems awed by the adaptation, too, Nguyen says.

“The degree of excitement that this TV series has generated amongst book people is is interesting,” he says. “It’s a little bit humbling, like, ‘OK, well, I did publish a book, and people were excited about that.’ But not at this level.”

Casting in Southern California

While much of the cast was found through a global search of the Vietnamese diaspora, the two primary actresses in this story were found much closer to Hollywood, both residents of Huntington Beach.

Chinh laughs when she’s asked how she came to be cast in the series. Shortly after “The Sympathizer” was published, she went to Irvine to a book event for Nguyen and the author recognized her in the audience.

“At that time, he doesn’t know that the book will turn to onscreen,” Chinh says. “So he just says, ‘Oh my God, we have the legendary actress Kieu Chinh in the audience.’ And he said, ‘Hopefully one day if the book turns into a series, you must be one of the characters.’”

Flash-forward five or six years, Chinh and Nguyen are friends, and one day her manager calls her to a meeting with McKellar and Chan-wook.

“We just talked a little bit and they gave me the part,” she says.

Duyen, after 30 years as host of the musical variety show “Paris By Night,” wanted to try something new. Through her friendship with Chinh, she was referred to an agent. A week or so later, the agent asked her to do a self-recorded audition for “The Sympathizer.” A Zoom audition with Chan-wook soon followed.

“I thought, ‘OK, it’s probably several months that we hear whether or not (she got the part),” Duyen says. “An hour later, my agent told me you got the role, and I started to realize how big this thing is.”

Both Chinh and Duyen left Vietnam at the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, a searing time for the Vietnamese people who fled their homeland, an experience that is recreated in the series. Duyen was only 9, and her memories of that time are vague. For Chinh, the series’ imagined version of those days hit harder.

The loneliness that The Major’s Mother feels in “The Sympathizer” reminded Chinh of her own feelings as a refugee living alone in a North Hollywood apartment when she arrived in the United States after the fall of Saigon, thanks to actress Tippi Hedren’s sponsorship.

“Some scenes I don’t think that I’m doing the job of an actor, but I just relive my real life,” Chinh says. “The huge scene that director Park created for the last days of Saigon, the evacuation. The mortar attacks, the panic of the people pushing each other to get onto that flight. That is exactly what happened to my own life.

“That night, you can imagine, I was overwhelmed with sadness, scared, and tears keep coming out to my eyes,” she says. “My heart was beating fast and I had a heavy feeling. I just relived my past.”

A different view

As a prestige TV series, “The Sympathizer” is made to entertain, and it does that with the multilayered storylines that stretch from The Captain’s present into his future and his past.

But the series also presents a fresh and unfamiliar perspective on the war, that of the Vietnamese people rather than that of American soldiers, as has been seen in films like “Platoon,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Full Metal Jacket” and others. By showing the perspective of the Vietnamese people, whose lives and land were torn apart by the war, it can’t help but educate viewers, too, those involved in the project say.

“I think that this war was unique,” McKellar says. “The first case, but I think still the only real case, where our conception of the war is through the movies. So this show, the first thing it’s doing is saying, ‘OK, Americans, OK, world, let’s look at this from the other side,’ and remind yourself that it was on Vietnamese soil. That the people who suffered most and the people who suffered longest were the Vietnamese people.

“Which isn’t to say that Americans didn’t suffer,” he says. “They did. But it’s saying, ‘Sympathize with this other side. Put yourself in the other side.’ And then recognize that side also has divisions and also has complexity, and that is much more complicated than you think.”

Susan Downey said she and Robert Downey Jr. were drawn to the project by that same fresh perspective.

“There are so many moments where you’re wrestling with alliances based on preconceived notions,” she said. “You have the hero, the Captain. But wait, he’s a communist sympathizer, but he’s got this love for America. So it’s just all of these swirling conflicts. I think that if we’ve succeeded at all we make people feel all the emotions – there is humor, there is real drama, maybe some tears. More than anything, it gets people talking.”

And when Park Chan-wook suggested Robert Downey Jr. play four different characters, the actor was all in, Susan Downey says.

“He really relished the opportunity,” Susan Downey says. “He had just come off of ‘Oppenheimer’ and playing Lewis Strauss, who was a very grounded, very real person. And so the opportunity to play these sort of toxic male symbols of the American patriarchy was a lot of fun for him. He didn’t want to shy away from it.”

Duyen noted that the series mocks the hawkish Americans who pushed for the war, but also satirizes the Vietnamese political and military leadership whose actions led to the downfall of South Vietnam.

“It’s a satirical look at every different side,” she says. “And I think every side will come out feeling a little bit good about themselves, and then a little bit bad about themselves.

“I think also what it does is bring out a better understanding, so that every side can see its effect on the other side,” she says. “Try to have an open mind. Try to laugh about it. Then I think maybe you can understand each other more.”

Just as American movies such as “Platoon” shaped impressions of the Vietnam War in the ’70s and ’80s, so will “The Sympathizer” shape views of it today, Nguyen says.

“For better and for worse, this TV series will not just be an entertainment, but also function as a history lesson for many, many people,” he says. “This will be their first exposure to the war in general, and for those who know anything about the American perspective, it’ll be their first exposure to any Vietnamese perspective.

“I think it would obviously be better if people read history books,” Nguyen says, laughing. “Because this TV series cannot offer that same depth as a history book.

“On the other hand, what the TV series can offer, as with literature, is a deep immersive identification through narrative and characters,” he says. “And that is actually, really, really powerful. American Vietnam War movies made an enormous emotional impact on a lot of people. So I think this TV series will have that same kind of impact.”

“I hadn’t seen her art until I was a freshman in college,” says Gutierrez, a film editor who makes her directorial debut with the new documentary “Frida.” “Then I found one piece, one painting in a book in the library.

“It was of her standing between the United States and Mexico,” she says. “You can see her full body – we actually use that painting in the film. And I was a pretty new immigrant. I had been in the States for, I think, two to three years.

“I really saw my experience reflected there,” she says. “A little bit of hesitation about my new surroundings and really missing home.

“So I feel like the story for me, it started back then,” says Gutierrez, who also co-edits the film, a role she’s previously done on such documentaries as “RBG” about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and “Julia,” about chef Julia Child. “When I came back to her story at 47 years old, I was actually the same age [she was when she died] when I started looking into her story. Which was kind of shocking to me.”

By then, Gutierrez had explored beyond Kahlo’s 1932 oil painting “Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States” that had originally inspired her.

“I spent a couple of decades or more, really connecting to some of her paintings,” she says. “Really following her life very closely.

“Then I went back to the material that had I read back then, and I realized that her voice existed in writing from a lot of different sources,” Gutierrez says. “The books that I was reading at that time just kind of showed me that a story about her could be told through her voice, some of it.”

“Frida,” a colorful, creative portrait of the artist told and illustrated in her own words and brush strokes, is streaming now on Prime Video.

Searching for Frida

Gutierrez says from the start she wanted to avoid the contemporary talking heads that populate many documentaries on historical figures.

“We never wanted to do interviews, or kind of look at her life from that historical perspective in the sense of art historians or artists who had been inspired by her,” she says. “We wanted for the film to feel as present and as much of her as possible.

“So that’s how it started, with this idea that we could offer an intimacy into her life that had maybe not been shown on film,” Gutierrez continues. “Like really, truly focusing on her words and her voice as much as we could.

“And then it surprised us that by leaning into mostly her emotions, and not necessarily a factual list of what happened in her life, she really took over,” she says. “We just started being guided by her writings as much as we could.”

While Kahlo’s fame as both artist and icon didn’t fully blossom until years after her death, the filmmakers were fortunate that she was nonetheless a well-known and well-documented figure throughout her life. Born in 1907 in a village on the edge of Mexico City, her father, a professional photographer, documented her childhood and young adulthood through the lens of his camera.

After her marriage to the Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1929, she traveled with him extensively in Europe and the United States, where his fame and her striking looks and style made her a favorite of journalists and photographers.

For Gutierrez, the detective work the film required to track down both visuals and words for the film was a delight.

“The research that went into collecting all of her writings was really intense,” she says. “We not only collected all her writings, but we also did a lot of research on contextual material. We tried to gather every interview from people that knew her that we could find. And the research took us into some interesting places.”

Biographer Hayden Herrera, who wrote the seminal 1983 biography on Kahlo was an obvious choice for Gutierrez and her researchers. Her papers had been donated to the Smithsonian, Gutierrez says, but on going there they discovered that none of the material for “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo,” including scores of interviews with people who knew Kahlo, was there.

“So then we very nicely asked if we could visit her house in Cape Cod,” Gutierrez says. “She’s about 85 years old. And we went up to her attic, and we cleaned her attic, and we found these enormous boxes with all the original research that she did on that book.”

Letters Kahlo sent her San Francisco doctor, who became a close friend, were tracked down in the Oaxaca Museum of Art, she says. Letters she wrote to her mother were located in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.

“There was a couple called the Crommies, who are in San Francisco, who made a film about Frida,” Gutierrez says of the 1966 short documentary “The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo as Told to Karen and David Crommie.” “They did a lot of interviews with people, like with the nurse that took care of Frida in the last years of her life.

“When I went to their house, they brought up a box full of quarter-inch tapes that hadn’t seen the light of day for 50 years,” she says. “We just lifted up every potential rock out there to find as much as we could.”

An intimate voice

Gutierrez says she started the project well aware of the outward facts of Kahlo’s life. Making the film, and focusing on Frida’s own words, most of which she never expected would be read by those outside her intimate circles, allowed Gutierrez to enter the heart and mind of the artist.

“I knew the facts of her life really well because of the books that I had read,” she says. “Really listening to the texture of her personality was special. That was really new and refreshing to get to know her in a new way, through her own words.

“Like, I knew about her feelings on America, and I knew some of her feelings of Paris intellectuals. But to be able to read everything that she had said about them, and the sharp language that she used was really special.”

That unfiltered voice, at different times funny, poignant or salty, adds greatly to the narration of Kahlo’s words delivered in the Spanish or English in which they were written.

“There were two letters, one written in Spanish, and the other one written in English, with a lot of flowery language about Parisian intellectuals,” Gutierrez says. “That the only thing they do is talk and talk and talk among themselves in cafes and parties. I don’t think she ever got tired of insulting them.

“So really, (we found) the intimacy of her voice itself, but also kind of the messiness of her feelings, and the messiness of being able to really read about her fragility and her fears,” she says. “For example, in the scene about her miscarriage, her letters talking about, or questioning, what decision she is going to make.

“Really, the tenderness of a woman just dealing with regular, but really heavy and important things in her life was really special.”

Art and movement

Beyond the choice to use Kahlo’s own words as the main narration of the film, Gutierrez’s second big decision was to animate some of Kahlo’s art, adding motion to paintings and sketches that had been static works of art on museum walls or artbook pages.

“It was a bold decision,” Gutierrez says. “It could be seen as a controversial decision to touch Frida’s art. But it was a decision I made at the very beginning because I knew that we were working in this cinematic universe. And we were thinking from the very beginning, you know, Frida’s paintings kind of carry her mind and carry her heart, so how do we immerse our audience in this kind of cinematic space into that internal world?

“I really wanted for the film to be able to highlight the emotions that we wanted to underline in the art,” she says. “As we’re talking about moments in her life that made art possible. It was essential for the film to make that really strong connection. What had her lived experiences brought to her art?”

Gutierrez, who was born and raised in Peru before immigrating to the United States, felt comfortable working with the culture of Latin America, but she wanted to find as many Mexican collaborators as possible, given Kahlo’s roots there, and ended up with a mostly Mexican, mostly female team of animators on the film.

She says none of the animations used in the film added elements to the artwork Kahlo had created. Instead, elements already in the paintings now move to underscore the words they accompany.

“For example, where you see the painting of her cutting her hair,” Gutierrez says. “You know it’s coming from a place where she actually felt a lot of self-hate for being in the situation. She didn’t love herself that much. There was desperation. There was a lot of hate. There was a lot of anger.

“So I wanted the movement that we created with the painting to really capture that,” she says. “Then you end up with a painting that really carries all of that anxiety and anger and, you know, desperation that she was living in that moment. So that was the decision.”

“I’ve been telling that in many ways, I’ve been writing this book since I was 9 years old,” the University of Southern California professor says. “Before I knew I was writing it, I was writing it.”

Boyd turned 9 in 1973, the year generally accepted as the birth of rap, and that’s where “Rapper’s Deluxe” begins, at an apartment party in the Bronx, where a DJ named Kool Herc showed a new way of spinning records.

The book ends, neatly, if not entirely by intent, 50 years later, when hip-hop culture had reached a peak far from its underground origins, a handful of its biggest stars playing the halftime show at the Super Bowl, a sign of the music’s dominance of the culture.

“The fact that coincides with the anniversary is one thing,” says Boyd, the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture, and a professor at its School of Cinema and Media Studies. “But I think it’s a story that unfolded from the ’70s to the present. I needed all that time in order to tell the story.

“Ten years ago, 20 years ago, this book couldn’t have been written,” he says. “It could only have been written now. One of the main reasons is because you needed all that time for this to kind of fully unfold and reveal itself. And that’s where I came along.

“As I was watching that Super Bowl halftime performance that I ended the book with – at SoFi Stadium with Dr. Dre and Snoop and Kendrick Lamar and that group – I realized, you know, this is it,” Boyd says. “This is the most mainstream stage in American culture. And, you know, 30 years ago, there’s no way possible that Dre and Snoop would have been performing at the halftime show of the Super Bowl.

“When you get to that Super Bowl stage, it’s a strong indication that you’ve reached the sort of center of mainstream society. And you can talk about things happening afterward, but the sort of larger point has been made.”

‘Root to the fruit’

“Rapper’s Deluxe” traces the evolution of rap music and hip-hop culture with chapters organized by decades, each packed with photos around Boyd’s essays on artists, trends, history and pop culture.

Its name is a play on “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 Sugar Hill Gang track that’s credited as the first rap single. But Boyd makes clear that while its success put rap on the radio and exposed its new sounds to listeners far from its birthplace in New York City, there was a whole lot more going on that decade behind the music.

“The point I was trying to make in that ’70s chapter was we’ve had examples of, if not rap specifically, hop-hop culture for a long time before a lot of people even knew it,” he says. “The seeds for what we would later call rap music were being planted. And if you use that metaphor, you know, you plant seeds, they don’t grow right away. That takes time.

“So listening to Muhammad Ali rhyme before his fights to me is part of what would later be identified as hop-hop culture,” Boyd says. “Listening to Richard Pryor on his comedy albums. Watching blaxploitation movies.”

“Rapper’s Delight” is a historical marker, he says. But the groundwork was laid in communities where Ali and Pryor and “Super Fly” and “Shaft” were popular, neighborhoods where Black veterans came home changed by Vietnam and Black Panthers and activists such as Angela Davis had support.

“I like to say we go from the root to the fruit,” Boyd says. “The seeds were planted and eventually those seeds bore fruit. All of those things were happening in the ’70s. Later, they’re very visible in hip-hop.

“I start the ’70s chapter with that story about the week that DJ Kool Herc threw the sort of legendary party,” he says. “The No. 1 movie at the box office that week is Pam Grier’s film ‘Coffy.’

“Twenty years later, there’s a rapper named Foxy Brown” – after the Pam Grier title role in the 1974 blaxploitation film of the same name – “and Quentin Tarantino is making ‘Jackie Brown’ starring Pam Grier,” Boyd says. “There’s a connection there that nobody anticipated in 1973, but you can see the influence of that by the time you get to the ’90s.”

‘Suburbs to the hood’

Rap, like many musical genres before it, experienced growing pains on its way to its worldwide popularity. But throughout the ’80s, Boyd writes that a combination of factors, including the rise of hip-hop-themed movies, fashion, and art, as well as rap’s appeal to celebrities and sports figures and their fans, helped it burst into the mainstream in unprecedented ways.

Unlike earlier Black American music such as blues and jazz, rap had freer access, and an unlikely ally, as it reached young listeners in every corner of the country, Boyd says. Rap emerged from the Black community, and soon spread far and wide.

“Historically, there were barriers to the expression of some of those older genres of music,” he says. “In spite of that, they still found loyal White fan bases who would be influenced by that music. But it didn’t have the same sort of free form of expression and access that would be available for rap music by the 1980s.

“Which is why I talk about the role of MTV,” Boyd says. “Which, of course, originally was hostile in terms of playing Black music, but by the late ’80s, ‘Yo MTV Raps,’ a hugely popular show, is what allows the music to spread throughout the country, whether or not the people listening to it had any direct connection to that experience or not.

“It didn’t matter,” he says. “Everybody was watching MTV whether you’re in an urban area, a suburban area, a rural area. If you had cable and you got MTV you could look at ‘Yo MTV Raps.’”

Rap music, like many genres before it, was a way for younger listeners to rebel against the tastes of their parents’ generation, he writes. Where early rock and roll saw White performers co-opt Black artists and find huge commercial success, rap was largely impervious to that kind of appropriation.

“When you get to rap music, so much of this is about lived experience,” Boyd says. “So as the music becomes more personal, a White person can’t come and claim that this is their own. They can listen to it and appreciate it and celebrate it. But it becomes kind of a minstrel show if you’re saying this is my life.”

A White rap star such as Eminem succeeded because he didn’t appropriate hip-hop culture as much as become part of it, something recognized by his early mentor Dr. Dre, which gave him credibility that a rapper like Vanilla Ice couldn’t touch.

“Eminem is the anti-Vanilla Ice,” Boyd says. “I think it speaks to just how things changed from, say, the time that Elvis was popular as someone appropriating Black music, and Eminem, who came along and said, ‘I want to be part of this culture. I want to be in it.’

“So when Jay-Z says we didn’t crossover, I think it’s important,” he says, referencing the line “I ain’t crossover I brought the suburbs to the hood’ in 1999’s “Come and Get Me.” “When you think about the ’80s, it’s the era of crossover, from Michael Jackson, Prince and Tina Turner. Whitney Houston.

“Hip-hop didn’t cross over. Instead, people outside the culture came to hip-hop.”

‘Evolution of the culture’

The latter chapters in “Rapper’s Deluxe” move through the ways in which rap and hip-hop sent deeper roots into every aspect of American and global culture.

The ’90s trace the rise of influential artists such as NWA, Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G., as well as chapters on offshoots of rap such as the Dirty South and trap music. It looks at artists such as Outkast and Three 6 Mafia – the latter of whom became the first rappers to win an Oscar – T.I. and Lil Wayne.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the book doesn’t focus so much on artists as impacts: the election of President Barack Obama, the shift of rappers into other businesses such as fashion and art, and finally, that landmark Super Bowl halftime show, produced for the NFL by Jay-Z’s entertainment company.

“I was not trying to write hip-hop’s greatest hits,” Boyd says. “I was not trying to write, ‘These are the new important rappers.’ Honestly, to me, once Obama gets elected? I mean, you want to talk about cultural influence? What is a better demonstration of hip-hop’s influence than the election of a president?”

In the final chapter, Boyd says he was more interested in spotlighting the unexpected ways in which rap and hip-hop have fully joined the larger culture.

“So, you know, the National Symphony with Nas performing ‘Illmatic,’” he says. “Or Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize. Or Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’ art collection, the Dean Collection. Jay-Z’s connection to Basquiat and more broadly contemporary art. “Rappers talking about their art collection the way they used to talk about their cars and their sneakers? To me that’s major.

“People can decide for themselves who the hot new artists are; we’ve covered that,” Boyd says. “That’s almost not as significant. What is significant, however, we can talk about hip-hop going into these previously elite White cultural spaces, and dominating in those spaces, because it speaks to the full evolution of the culture in ways that maybe pointing out who the hot new rapper is doesn’t address as significantly.”

Todd Boyd in conversation with Chuck D

What: Author Todd Boyd will be in conversation with Chuck D of Public Enemy, as well as signing his new book, “Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made The World.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7

Where: Oculus Hall at The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

How much: Tickets are with reservation.

For more: See Thebroad.org/events for information and to reserve tickets