There’s the time in 1968 when blues legend Muddy Waters declared Ivers – who sat in and played with Waters while still a student at Harvard University – to be the greatest living harmonica player.

Or maybe you start in the mid-’70s, when Ivers, now living in Los Angeles, dipped into film music with works such as co-writing and singing “In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)” for David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.”

Around that same time, he recorded several avant-garde pop albums, such as 1974’s “Terminal Love.” Ivers even opened for Fleetwood Mac at Universal Amphitheatre in 1976, but bombed. (Could it have been that he took the stage wearing only a diaper? Perhaps!)

Jump ahead to the early ’80s, and Ivers was the host of “New Wave Theatre,” the first show to put L.A. punk bands such as Fear, 45 Grave, Suburban Lawns, Angry Samoans, Grey Factor and Bad Religion on TV.

But all that crazy, beautiful, now mostly forgotten creativity ended up overshadowed by his death.

On March 3, 1983, Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his apartment. Four decades later, the crime remains unsolved.

“I mean, all of us thought Peter Ivers was going to go to the top of the charts, and then everything flopped,” says filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, a friend of Ivers through the punk rock scene she chronicled in the 1981 documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization.”

Spheeris, whose films include “Wayne’s World” and “Suburbia,” is the host of “Peter and the Acid King,” a new podcast about Ivers’s life and death from iHeartPodcasts and Imagine Audio.

However, given all the mystery and menace that still swirls around the circumstances of his death, at first she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved.

Spheeris signs on

TV producer Alan Sachs, the co-creator of “Welcome Back, Kotter,” was a close friend of Ivers. He’s also the creator of “Peter and the Acid King,” an outgrowth of his years of looking for the truth about Ivers’ death.

“I knew Alan Sachs from back in what I call the punk rock days,” Spheeris says. “So that would be right around ’79, ’80 through ’84. I knew him very well back then because we were at clubs together all the time.

“I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and I ran into him in a parking lot and he asked me I would do an interview about Peter, our mutual friend,” she says. “And I said, ‘Only if so-and-so is not alive anymore.”

Sachs told her that so-and-so, the person Spheeris had long thought might have killed Ivers, was dead. She did the interview, and that was that for a little while.

“A couple of years later – that’s how long Alan’s been working on this – I get a call,” Spheeris says. “And he said, ‘Can you maybe think about being the host for a podcast based on Peter’s life and that period of time?’

“I said, ‘I don’t know, I make movies, I’m not a podcast person,’” she says.

Eventually, and only after she was comfortable the podcast wouldn’t focus too much on the grim, grisly details of Ivers’s death, Spheeris was in.

“It was a concern, which has dissipated as I’ve gone through it and done narration,” she says. “I think the team over there at Imagine has done an amazing job at respecting Peter and the request I made about not getting into anything too graphic. I did have some apprehension about sensationalizing someone’s murder, you know.

“It’s a thin line; it’s like a tightrope here,” Spheeris says. “We’re trying to give respect to him and remember his legacy, and then not be too exploitive.”

An instant appeal

Spheeris isn’t quite sure when she first met Ivers. She thinks it was probably at the Zero Club, the notorious after-hours punk club at the time.

“He just sort of made you want to know him,” Spheeris says.

Before long, they were fellow travelers of the nightlife of Hollywood bars, punk circles, and house parties in Laurel Canyon.

“I bought a house in Laurel Canyon in 1974, which I still own, thank god,” Spheeris says. “So I know all the back roads here, and we used to have these lines of cars following each other, going to parties. So I would go to parties with him, and we’d see each other and got to know each other pretty well by hanging out.”

Ivers, who was born in 1946, was a decade or so older than most of the kids in the punk scene spun out of the Masque in Hollywood into clubs from the San Fernando Valley to Chinatown and the South Bay.

“He was so charismatic. It didn’t matter if he was really a punk or not,” she says. “He emitted this vibe like he was a star already. But he wasn’t. I think that’s what kind of drew everybody to him.

“Plus, you know, if you’re really a punk you’re not going to be judgmental about somebody. You’re just gonna let them be who they are.”

Trainwreck TV

“New Wave Theatre” was created by David Jove, a British expat in L.A. with musical aspirations, and Ed Ochs, a former Billboard editor. The show, which aired weekly on a little-viewed UHF channel, was only reluctantly embraced by punk bands such as the Dead Kennedys, the Plugz, and Ivy and the Eaters.

Part of that was the name – few self-respecting punks wanted to be called New Wave – and part of that was Ivers, who as host, wearing a sparkly pink jacket and rambling in a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness patter about life, art and music made them cringe.

“It was actually brutal to watch,” Spheeris says. “Because it was so bad – in my opinion. I’m sorry. I don’t want that to be a negative reflection on Peter, but it was really bad.

“I mean, the original, real deal punk groups had great objections to the show because it seemed like they were trying to out-weird the real punk scene,” she says. “And I think that’s what they were doing, and that’s why it was a bit offensive.”

Still, people watched it enough that the fledgling USA Network eventually picked it up as part of its “Night Flight” late-night arts and variety show. And the bands kept going on to perform.

“It was a train wreck, that’s a good way to put it,” Spheeris says. “The fact is there were no outlets for the music back then, visual outlets. The reason the DIY concept came about was because punk bands couldn’t get record deals. And punk bands certainly could not get TV broadcast time. There was no place to be seen other than that show.”

So who done it?

“New Wave Theatre” ended with Ivers’ death. For Spheeris, the L.A. party scene ended for her that day too.

“I remember the fear of thinking that there was somebody that we all knew that probably did it,” she says. “I remember being afraid. And even though there were other serial killers and all that around that time, to have someone so close get murdered was really shocking.

“It did change things,” Spheeris says. “It was a big wake-up call. Let me tell you, we were partying back then. I mean, I can’t believe I lived through it. Every single night and a lot of times every weekend during the day and night.

“But when he got killed, it was like a screeching halt. I didn’t want to go out. I was convinced that whoever killed him was in the room.”

Spheeris, who knows how “Peter and the Acid King” ends, says she did not expect the story to go where it did. She had her own suspicions about who murdered her friend.

“Here’s what has really surprised me,” she says. “Back in the day, after Peter died, if was going into a room and that person was there, in a party situation, I would turn around and leave. I remember going back to my house and my heart was beating so fast because I even laid eyes on that guy.”

“But now that people have done all this research, I have to say I’m not convinced anymore that who I thought did it did,” Spheeris says. “So it’s a little unnerving. I’ve learned that person could still be alive and still be dangerous.”

Even with that undercurrent of dread in the story the podcast tells, Spheeris says she’s glad that her friend is getting recognized for what he created during his life, even if it was just a bit too far outside the mainstream for his rock star dreams to have succeeded.

“It had a certain performance art aspect to it, ‘New Wave Theatre,’ and all of his work, really,” she says. “And that’s the thing about good art, you know. It breaks the rules. And good rock and roll, it breaks the rules.

“And Peter was always breaking the rules.”

“I started watching this as an author writing the book and trying to get material,” Leamer says on a recent call. “And after five minutes, his stuff is so fascinating I forget that and just watch it because I’m enjoying it so much.

“That’s how good he is,” he says. “That’s how he involves you. He knows just what he’s doing.”

Leamer persevered and “Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession” arrived on Tuesday, Oct. 10.

In it, Leamer explores the work of Hitchcock and eight actresses with whom he worked, from June Howard-Tripp in 1925’s “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog” to Tippi Hedren in “The Birds” and “Marnie” in 1963 and ’64.

In between, Leamer explores Hitchcock’s work with Madeleine Carroll (“The 39 Steps,” “Secret Agent”), Ingrid Bergman (“Spellbound,” “Notorious,” “Under Capricorn”), Grace Kelly (“Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief”), Kim Novak (“Vertigo”), Eva Marie Saint (“North by Northwest”), and Janet Leigh (“Psycho“).

Hitchcock’s life and career has been examined in numerous books from before and after his death at 80 in 1980. His infatuation with his leading ladies, particularly the blondes and his odd, sometimes cruel manner with them are well known.

But Leamer is the first biographer to shift the focus from Hitchcock in the foreground to zoom in on the women with whom the director achieved some of his greatest works.

“Hitchcock’s Blondes” is the second in a planned trilogy about male creative geniuses and their female friends, colleagues and confidants. Leamer, 81, is currently working on a book about artist Andy Warhol and his many muses.

The first book in his series, “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era” arrived in 2021. Its story of writer Truman Capote and the New York City circle of women in which he moved arrives as the second chapter of producer Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series “Feud” in 2024.

Q: Do you remember when you first became aware of Alfred Hitchcock?

A: He’s so much a part of our culture, I don’t even know. You know, if you go on Amazon Prime and plug in Hitchcock, there are over 40 of his films you can watch today. That’s the magnitude of that guy’s accomplishments.

Q: How did you arrive at the framework of the book, focusing on these eight women?

A: Well, chronology is God’s gift to a writer. You’d better have a damn good reason to do away with it. So the chronology is his life and the blondes are pretty obviously the candidates for telling it.

When I write a book, I always write the ending in my head and then I try to write the book that would justify that ending. And that’s what I did here. I wanted the ending to be that AFI tribute (in March 1979). I wanted the audience at that point, the readers, to appreciate his greatness, and also the dark part of it as well. And to appreciate the actresses as well.

Q: Three of the actresses are still living. Tippi Hedren doesn’t do interviews but you were able to talk with Eva Marie Saint from ‘North by Northwest’ and Kim Novak from ‘Vertigo.’ What was that like?

A: Eva Marie Saint was fabulous. You know, she’s 99 years old now, living by herself in her apartment. She wants to have her own life. I think that’s incredible.

Q: From her chapter in the book, she seems to be one of the most grounded of the Hitchcock actresses.

A: She was grounded, but she is calculating. And I don’t say that as a criticism, just the opposite. She knew the life she wanted early on. She had some success in television. Got a little apartment. She was lonely, she wanted to marry. She didn’t want to marry an actor. She married this producer. And they had the most wonderful marriage.

Then in her career, she loved her children. She liked to act, but when they were growing up, she’d do just one movie a year. She put her Academy Award statuette for ‘On The Waterfront’ in the closet and just forgot it. She really has immense character as far as I’m concerned.

Q: A lot of the stories of Hitchcock and the actresses are well known. I’m curious what your conversation with her provided that you didn’t already have?

A: She had some tidbits, but she’s told these stories many times. I found a few new things. It was just as much to get a real feeling of her emotionally. I think I wrote a much better chapter because I knew her in that way.

Q: Kim Novak, from your chapter on her, seems like perhaps the actress Hitchcock treated the worst. What was she like?

A: It’s inexplicable to me (how she was treated). He brings her up to luncheon and shows her his paintings, which he knows she won’t appreciate the way he appreciates them, and the vintage wine, which she doesn’t understand. Just to put her down. And the first day in the studio there’s this dead chicken attached to her mirror and Hitch and the other men standing around laughing at her.

She said she didn’t know what that was about. I don’t know what it’s about. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But it’s not a great thing to do to this vulnerable, insecure actress on the first day.

And then when she finished it, I think she deserved an Academy Award nomination because I think she’s magnificent. It’s a very difficult role. But Hitch put her down. Even when that putting down probably diminished the number of people wanting to see the movie.

Q: Was she candid and open about her treatment by him?

A: She really appreciated Hitchcock. She has nothing negative to say about it. It’s the best thing she did in her whole life, and she puts it in perspective.

Q: In recent years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to appreciate art made by men with problematic histories. Might this book change Hitchcock’s reputation?

A: If the things about Woody Allen are true – and I don’t know if they are, but if they are, well, I wouldn’t want to watch his films, right? This stuff about Hitchcock isn’t at that magnitude, in my opinion. In the #MeToo times, people are just too easily dismissed, and I don’t think it’s fair to him.

There was a biographer of him, Donald Spoto, who just focused on the darkness, and that had a big impact on Hitchcock’s reputation. I don’t think that’s fair.

Q: Of the Hitchcock films you watched featuring these women, do you have a favorite you go back to?

A: It depends on what you want. I mean, ‘To Catch a Thief’ is just pure fun. You can’t beat that. ‘Marnie,’ the dark brilliance of that is irresistible. And ‘Psycho,’ I mean, there’s nothing like ‘Psycho,’ right?

The story of Margo, a 20-year-old college sophomore, and Robert, an awkward 34-year-old man, who have a brief affair involving a few casual encounters and a whole lot of texting, didn’t just tap into the zeitgeist, it crashed right through it.

“I thought it was brilliant and so observant,” says filmmaker Susanna Fogel. “I had no idea who was going to try to make it a good movie, but because I had worked in the entertainment industry I knew someone would.

“Because it was so internal and it felt so resonant, I didn’t know how they would manage to make the movie feel big in scope, and not a small story,” she says.

As fate would have it, the job of figuring all that out eventually fell to Fogel, whose previous work includes co-writing the movie “Booksmart” and directing the first two episodes of the HBO Max series “The Flight Attendant.”

Though to her good fortune, even before Fogel signed onto the project, she says screenwriter Michelle Ashford had found the key to opening up Roupenian’s story.

“When I read Michelle’s script, I was blown away by how she had found a way to make the psychology of the story manifest itself in a genre crossover film,” Fogel says. “I felt it captured the humor but also really immersed you in this sense of danger and panic. The danger and panic of a woman. It kind of forced you to feel those feelings.”

Where the short story fueled online debates about the motives and morals of its two main characters – Was Robert a toxic creep? Was Margot foolishly naive? – the film added a third act that grafts elements of a psychological thriller onto the black comedy of the original.

It stars Emilia Jones, a breakout star in the Oscar-winning film “CODA,” and Nicholas Braun, who as Cousin Greg on HBO’s “Succession” experienced a surge of fame himself. Actors including Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis and Isabella Rossellini fill supporting roles.

“Cat Person” opens in limited theaters on Friday, Oct. 6 before expanding to more on Friday, Oct. 13.

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Fogel talked about the themes that the story in print and on screen explores, the expansion of the story to adapt it as a movie, finding her young stars, and more.

Q: Tell me more about your conversations with Michelle Ashford about the story you wanted to tell.

A: I think part of it is really that in the time between the short story coming out and the movie being made, the culture really did shift a lot. I think Kristen’s story hit right at the height of #MeToo. People had been talking about stories of assault and violence, and then Kristen’s story came out and was a story about a gray area. And it clearly felt like the next installment in that conversation.

Which is to say that there’s so much complexity in these encounters a lot of the time. There are the extremes, but so many more encounters are some horrible middle ground between a great love story and a story about overt violence. Most encounters are like some version of a mediocre, confusing gray area. That’s what we talked about a lot.

Q: You’ve also talked about making the character of Robert more fully formed.

A: In the story, it’s Margot’s perspective. We don’t ever have to account for Robert’s interior life, his motivations, at any point. But when you’re working with an actor playing the role of Robert, you have to answer questions as a filmmaker about why he’s saying things, doing things. I have an actor and I need to give him enough to chew on that he can be authentic, even if the answer I give him never ends up in the movie.

It was a big part of what we needed to shift to make it feel like a dimensional movie. And then we wanted to kind of play out the conclusion of the short story, and said, ‘Then what. Then what happens.’ It’s not an amendment of the story; it’s just the next chapter.

Q: Robert clearly does and says some bad things. But Margot makes some questionable decisions, too. What’s the challenge of working in the gray areas where there isn’t a hero or a villain?

A: It’s really about working with the actors to analyze the subtext of every encounter. Because it’s a movie about two people who are not saying what they think or want. And sometimes they don’t know what they want. The narratives they have in their heads, and sort of the interference of technology, just kind of muddles the story so much that it takes them a long time to come to the conclusion it’s not right.

And by then they’ve been their worst selves and they’ve been pushed to the limits. They haven’t been in each other’s space in a real way but both believe that they have. It’s like a splash of truth, and then a lot of projection.

Q: So much of their initial relationship is built through flurries of texting. Is their miscommunication a result of something uniquely modern like texting or something that people also experienced prior to the invention of cell phones?

A: I think certainly texting gives us a lot more room for miscommunication, but I think that not saying what we want is like a hallmark of being a woman. There’s a lot we’re taught to do or conditioned to do to make sure that we don’t inflame male tempers and egos and all that.

I don’t think it’s only the women who don’t say what they want in this movie, though. I think they both have a lot of unmet desires. We have a long history of not communicating properly even before we had cellphones.

Q: I’m sure all their emojis didn’t help communication either.

A: Emojis equalize everyone into being 13. In a great way. But also they neutralize any nuance.

Q: What made Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun the right actors for Margot and Robert?

A: Emilia was so perfect for it. Physically she has this incredible ability, even though she’s obviously a beautiful ingenue, to feel like somebody who could exist on your college campus or in your friend group. A woman who feels like a real person.

Nick also feels like a person you know. It’s really important to find a guy that men are like, ‘Oh, I love that guy!’ There’s just a certain kind of, ‘Oh, I love that guy’ to Nick that I wanted to have because I didn’t want guys to go in and just instantly be distancing themselves from him. I wanted men to sort of root for Robert enough that they could see themselves in him before he behaves in ways that were problematic.

Q: How much, if any, did you consult with Kristen Roupenian while working on the film?

A: I sought Kristen out before we were officially casting, in the middle of COVID. We’re the same age and we’re both from New England. It kind of felt like we had all of this cultural overlap. I found her on Facebook and reached out and was like, ‘Do you want to do a phone call and just kind of meet?’ And we did, and we became friends.

She was so open and actually not trying to control the process in any way. But it actually felt really good when I felt like I’d made the right choice on something to hear her say, ‘That’s exactly right. That’s exactly that guy. That is what he would wear.’

I wanted it to feel like it delivered the feeling that Kristen wanted the story to capture. And I wanted people to feel the same thing watching the movie that they did reading the story even if there’s different details in there.

So that was important to me, that I was delivering on that, and we weren’t just saying, like, ‘Thank you for the source material,’ and we’re gonna, you know, make a movie about dragons based on ‘Cat Person’ or whatever.

“I had bought a whole stack of cozy mysteries,” says Palahniuk on a call from his home in Portland. “Barnes & Noble just always has a giant wall of cozies – these mysteries typically set in England or Ireland where cats and vicars and old ladies solve these grisly mysteries and murders.

“And I just hated every single one of them,” he says, perhaps unsurprisingly for the author of “Fight Club” and other tales of horror beyond the milieu of the Miss Marples or Jessica Fletchers of the world.

But in them, Palahniuk says he saw something with which he could work.

“There was a common quality to them that I really loved,” he says. “Where these mild-mannered people would come across this brutally murdered person and instead of having any kind of shocked reaction it was almost turned into a good thing.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, great, now we have a mystery,’” Palahniuk says. “There was never any upset. There was never any trauma over the loss of the person.”

The lack of emotional response “seemed as bad as the murder itself,” he says. “So I just thought I’d take the cozy and kind of push it to its limit.”

That he did and then some in the horror satire of “Not Forever, But For Now,” which unfolds like a bad acid trip of an English cozy mystery, alternately shocking and hilarious, disturbing and ultimately beautiful in its own peculiar way.

It’s the story of Otto and Cecil, two brothers of indeterminate age, living mostly by themselves in a sprawling mansion in Wales. Their grandfather and mother are often away tending to the family business, which is assassinating the rich and famous and making their deaths look like anything but murder.

Father disappeared years ago, so the boys idle away the weeks, months and years watching gory nature documentaries and offing their maids, tutors and staff.

The book arrived on Tuesday, Sept. 5, ahead of Palahniuk’s event hosted by Book Soup at the Regent Theatre in Los Angeles.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Palahniuk talked about the voice of his narrator Cecil, themes of addiction and conspiracy theories, and why his over-the-top plans for his L.A. signing are a bit of a nightmare.

Q: Talk a little about Otto and Cecil and their obsession with nature documentaries.

A: Every once in a while, I’ll remember something that was really upsetting and just emotionally engaging as a kid. And one was always those nature documentaries where predators would come across a baby and its nest.

Whenever you saw a baby animal at risk, whether it was a kangaroo trying to get to the pouch or a baby fawn trying not to be torn apart, as a kid that just killed you. And so I wanted to revisit that because it hooked me so intensely.

Q: We’re never really sure how old Otto and Cecil are. They seem like kids at the start, and then suddenly perhaps they’re much, much older.

A: I was originally going to have them as little kids. And then one day, my editor, who was reading along as I was turning in chapters, he said, ‘How old do you see these guys being?’ I said, ‘You know, secretly I think they might be like 35 and 38, or in their 40s.’ He laughed so hard that I thought that’s what it’s gonna be.

And on another really powerful level, I wanted it to be a book about addiction and how, boom, once you kind of fall into that rut of addiction, 30 years can go by and you realize you’re still kind of emotionally trapped back in whatever time you became addicted. And it feels like this enormous waste and you can’t believe that so much of your life has just disappeared.

Q: Mother is addicted to opiates. What did you see as Otto and Cecil’s addictions – idleness, sex, killing the help?

A: I wanted to make it so nonspecific that it was all these euphemisms like ‘having a go’ and ‘having it off.’ Lemon syllabub and all those sweets and candied rose petals. All of those things that it would seem really non-threatening. It would seem not like a big painful book about addiction, but the second or third time it could be read that way.

Q: Grandfather’s assassination of Judy Garland – he made it look like a drug overdose – is repeatedly mentioned through the book. The boys know the story by heart and repeat it to each other often. Why did you use her in that prominent of a role?

A: I’m really fascinated with all the conspiracy theory stuff. Because when I see all these, primarily men, just sort of dwelling over these fantastically detailed aspects of conspiracy theory, it strikes me that these are the same guys 200 years ago who would be arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. All of these tiny, impossible, diminutive facts or details of theology.

In a way, when Grandfather goes to have this talk with Judy Garland, he is the archangel approaching the Virgin Mary, and saying, ‘I’m going to choose you to have Christ, and this is why you’ve been chosen and this is what the whole mission is. It is really the visitation that I’m putting on the page and sort of repopulating with contemporary figures.

Q: The casualness of violence, whether it’s baby animals or celebrities getting bumped off, has led some to label your work as nihilistic, though you don’t agree. How would you describe your writing?

A: In a way, I think of them all as romances, because it’s always about somebody who is just wildly in love with somebody. In this case, it’s Cecil who is just so in admiration of his older brother that he can depict all of Otto’s actions, but it never really dawns on him that Otto is pretty despicable.

Q: In terms of Cecil’s voice as the narrator, he sounds British, for sure, so I’m curious how you found his particular way of speaking.

A: It’s all over the place in terms of station. Sometimes it’s kind of ‘Upstairs Downstairs.’ Sometimes Cecil’s voice is very upstairs plummy, and sometimes the voice is very downstairs Cockney. So the slang is just all over the board.

That was the funnest part, when you know the voice is going to work, and you know that half the sentences are going to start with the word ‘here,’ or the phrase, ‘You see,’ or ‘Clever Otto.’ Those little two words, almost like a couplet: ‘Dismal mother,’ ‘Downtrodden mother.’ Those little pacing devices are just such a joy to work. I would read 100 books in that voice.

Q: The book is very funny at times, such as the Queen having an ATM card worth 6 billion pounds but it has a daily limit of 300 pounds. How fun are the funny bits for you to write?

A: I was more thrilled with the Queen falling victim for the old fish-and-chips delivery scam. That she would actually come to the door with her crown on and go, ‘Oh, what the hell, can you break a 500 pound note.’ By that point, the story is just writing itself. I’m kind of holding on. That was a toboggan ride at the end. Every moment was surprising me.

Q: The title – ‘Not Forever, But For Now’ – shows up in the text in different forms every so often. What did you hope that meant for readers?

A: I wanted it to be a kind of bittersweet acknowledgment of the transitory nature of love. That even the people we care for the most, are only here for parts of our lives. Or we’re only here for parts of their lives. It’s similar to the fatalism in ‘Fight Club.’ In a way, this was like ‘Baby Fight Club.’ Because Cecil has very much the narrator’s starry-eyed admiration that the narrator had in ‘Fight Club’ for Tyler Durden. And he does lead to the demise of the other character in the way that the narrator in ‘Fight Club’ led to the demise of Tyler Durden.

Q: You handed out autographed severed arms at Comic-Con a few years ago. What’ve you got planned for the book event in L.A.?

A: This is a nightmare. I’ve already shipped huge, huge cases of stuff down to poor Book Soup. Everybody who comes is going to get one of these enormous foam LED light-up batons. They’re going to let us turn off the lights periodically so the whole place will be just nothing but this sea of oscillating different colors of light that people will wave.

Then the kangaroo helpers (volunteers dressed in kangaroo onesies) will throw foam hoops out into the crowd and whoever catches a hoop gets something. I’ll be reading three stories and we’ll be playing different games. People who ask questions during the Q-and-A get a different kind of prize.

Q: It sounds like a K-pop concert crossed with a game show.

A: It’s kind of alternating readings with recess. So many of these people, this is the first author event they’ve ever been to. So I really want it to be something.

Yes, we know that it was released on Nov. 29, 1982, so technically it got a head start on the new year in music. But just look at what Michael Jackson and “Thriller” did by the end of 1983:

With 32 million copies sold by the time 1984 arrived, it became the top-selling album of all time, a record it still holds though the tally is now estimated at 70 million.

Its seven singles – the title track, “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” “The Girl Is Mine,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” and “Human Nature” – all were hits, setting a record for most singles in the Top 10 from a single album that stood until 2021.

Grammy Awards? Eight. Music videos? Iconic. By any measure, “Thriller” transcended pop music, becoming a cultural artifact worthy of its place on lists of the best albums of all time.

RELATED: Listen to a pair of new, previously unheard Prince songs

But 1983 as a whole was a particularly rich year for influential albums. Some were massive hits from the jump, flying out of record stores on the day of release. Others had a slower burn, overlooked until their power to inspire was revealed.

Here in no particular order are a dozen of the most influential albums of 1983, each of them paired with a thematically related record or two to know as well.

1. “Let’s Dance,” David Bowie: The album that provided hits with its title track, “Modern Love,” and “China Girl” was influential for Bowie more for its commercial success than the more muted critical acclaim it received. Even Bowie later downplayed its artistic merits. But by broadening Bowie’s audience – Serious Moonlight was the biggest tour of 1983 – more fans ultimately found their way to his greatest works before and after it. And c’mon, it was fun and you could dance to it!

Now hear this: With “An Innocent Man,” Billy Joel also found success with a makeover of his musical style, mining the doo-wop and soul of his adolescence to write hits such as the title track, “Uptown Girl,” “Tell Her About It,” and “The Longest Time.”

2. “Murmur,” R.E.M.: The quartet from Athens, Georgia released its debut album in April 1983 to rave reviews – it ended up Rolling Stone’s album of the year – for singer Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry. The songs enthralled listeners with moody mysteries and Southern rock far from that of the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd. If I could pick one band from 1983 to get back together today, R.E.M. would be it.

Now hear this: Violent Femmes released its self-titled debut one day after “Murmur” and while the words and music on “Violent Femmes” have their own distinct style there’s definitely common ground in the sometimes folk-infused rock of both bands.

3. “Synchronicity,” the Police: The fifth and final record by the Police spent 17 weeks at No. 1, and the single “Every Breath You Take” was the overall No. 1 of 1983. Here singer-bassist Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland expanded the use of synthesizers, sequencers and influences such as world music to make a record that sounded more perfect than anything they’d done before. It made them the biggest band in the world for a year or two, and then they were done.

Now hear this: Elvis Costello, like the Police, arrived in the New Wave of the late ’70s but quickly pushed beyond its confines to explore more challenging, eclectic music. With 1983’s “Punch The Clock,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions found their biggest commercial success (“Every Day I Write the Book”) without losing any of the sophisticated intelligence (“Shipbuilding”) of previous work.

4. “Pyromania,” Def Leppard: The English rock band and producer Mutt Lange found a way to make hard rock pop songs on “Pyromania.” The crunchy opening riffs of “Photograph” proved irresistible to fans and radio programmers alike, while “Foolin’” and “Rock Of Ages” were just as catchy.

Now hear this: Quiet Riot became the first heavy metal album to take an album to No. 1 on the charts when “Metal Health,” fueled in large part by the single “Cum On Feel the Noize,” bumped the Police and “Synchronicity” from the top spot in November 1983.

5. “War,” U2: “Sunday Bloody Sunday” kicks off U2’s third album and with it all the promise of the Irish group’s first two records locks into place. Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. became worldwide stars with the arrival of this LP. Forty years later, they still play songs from this record in concert and they are as thrilling as ever (as they are in 1983’s other U2 disc, “U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky.”)

Now hear this: Where U2 looked outward, Tears For Fears explored the internal on their 1983 album “The Hurting.” Today, it’s best known as the source of the single “Mad World,” but songs such as the title track, “Pale Shelter,” and “Change” also served to introduce the duo, who play the Hollywood Bowl in August and the Darker Waves festival in November, to the world.

6. “Madonna,” Madonna: It’s wild to read the Rolling Stone review of Madonna’s debut, which begins by dissing her voice and taking its time before offering a decent amount of praise for the songs on the record. And what songs they were: “Lucky Star,” “Borderline,” “Burnin’ Up,” “Holiday,” and “Everybody” among them. This was the sound of a fierce talent and a ton of ambition arriving. Step aside, Rolling Stone, Madonna’s coming through.

Now hear this: A few months later, fellow New Yorker Cyndi Lauper arrived with her own unique voice and distinctive songwriting on “She’s So Unusual,” another terrific debut with hits including “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” “All Through The Night,” and “When You Were Mine,” and “Time After Time.”

7. “Power, Corruption & Lies,” New Order: On the second album after New Order formed from the ashes of Joy Division the English electronic rock band hit their stride. The songs mostly mined a wistful romanticism with “Age Of Consent,” “Your Silent Face,” and “Leave Me Alone” remain as fresh and powerful today as they did the day the shrink wrap came of my copy of the album.

Now hear this: With “True,” Spandau Ballet perfected its own kind of lushly romantic pop. The title track and “Gold” find the English New Romantics at their swooniest.

8. “Touch,” Eurythmics: The second album released by Eurythmics in 1983 is the one that really pushed them to the top. And with songs such as “Here Comes The Rain Again,” “Who’s That Girl?” and “Right By Your Side” how could it not? Like many of the acts on this list, the rising power of MTV provided a boost. If you heard Annie Lennox, you loved her voice. If you saw her and partner Dave Stewart in a music video, you only fell harder for the duo.

Now hear this: What, you thought we were going to ignore their first album of the year? “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” is excellent too, with the title track one of Eurythmics’ signature songs and hidden gems scattered among the lesser-known tracks on the record.

Now hear this: The Talking Heads were considered oddballs when they first showed up at CBGB in New York City in the late ’70s. In 1983, NYC weirdness meant bands more like Sonic Youth, whose debut album, “Confusion Is Sex,” arrived in February.

10. “Can’t Slow Down,” Lionel Richie:  Lionel Richie’s second solo album made clear that mainstream pop could count on him for years to come. This is another of those records that just kept spinning off singles: “All Night Long (All Night”)” and “Hello” both reached No. 1, and “Running With The Night,” “Stuck On You,” and “Penny Lover” all reached the Top 10.

Now hear this: Huey Lewis and the News were local heroes in and around San Francisco until “Sports” turned them into stars. Like Lionel Richie’s record, this one was another singles machine with songs such as “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “Heart and Soul,””If This Is It,” and “I Need a New Drug.”

11. “… And a Time to Dance,” Los Lobos: There are only seven songs on this EP but they served to introduce the world outside of East Los Angeles to Los Lobos in 1983. With songs such as “Anselma” and the Ritchie Valens’ cover “Come On Let’s Go,” it found fans and rave reviews in the Village Voice, Rolling Stone and more.

Now hear this: The Southern California music scene also saw another pair of noteworthy releases in 1983. X released the album “More Fun in the New World,” which expanded their musical palette. And Orange County’s Social Distortion released its debut album “Mommy’s Little Monster,” kicking off a career that’s made them one of the region’s most beloved homegrown bands.

12. Kill ‘Em All,” Metallica: Formed in the metal clubs of L.A., refined after a move to San Francisco, Metallica made its debut LP in 1983 with one of the heaviest, fastest heavy metal albums the world had ever seen. Singer-guitarist James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, and then-bassist Cliff Burton made something new here. Others soon would follow.

Now hear this: Metallica contemporaries Slayer also released their debut album “Show No Mercy” in 1983, and, if anything, it’s heavier and darker than the Metallica album. Together the two bands represent half of the so-called Big Four of thrash metal, with Anthrax and Megadeth also part of that constellation of heavy metal thunder.

“I thought, ‘Well, this seems like it would be great for a young woman to know all the wonderful things about herself,” Simon says. “So let’s start now. And so every single day, before she got out of my car at school, we would do this set of affirmations.”

A decade later in the tumultuous summer of 2020, the pandemic and protests for racial justice were inescapable. Simon was now married to fellow actor Dulé Hill, who had adopted Kennedy, 15 at that time, and together they had 1-year-old son Levi.

“We were in a really dark place in our world and in our country,” says Simon, who is best known for her work on TV series such as “Ballers,” “Psych,” and “Raising Dion.” “It came to watching George Floyd get murdered over and over on TV. Our son was in my lap and I thought, ‘He can’t really articulate his thoughts yet, I wonder what he’s thinking by seeing this.

“So one, let’s cut off the TV off; and two, let’s ask Kennedy how she’s feeling about everything,” she continues. “She said, ‘I’m fine,’ and her dad said, ‘Well, fine’s not a feeling, so how are you feeling?’ She burst into tears and we have this really emotional conversation.”

Simon realized that even when kids seem outwardly fine they might not be. Especially in times like these.

“I turned to Dulé and said, “I don’t want people to see the worst of themselves when they see TV and believe that’s who they are,’” Simon says. “For young Black people, you saw George Floyd getting murdered. For young White people, you saw a White man killing a Black person on TV. It’s a two-sided coin and I didn’t want them to think that that was them.

“So I said, ‘We need to write a book to remind kids that they are the best of themselves and not the worst that they see on TV,” Simon says. “I ran to our junk drawer and I took out – and I’m not joking – I took out a yellow sticky notepad and a pen and I said ‘Let’s write a book.’

“And that’s how it all began.”

The book, “Repeat After Me: Big Things to Say Every Day,” is out now with words by Simon and Hill and illustrations by Shamar Knight-Justice.

Positively powerful

Hill, who currently stars on “The Wonder Years” and previously enjoyed long runs on “The West Wing” and “Psych,” says he’s used to his wife coming up with an idea and jumping into action.

“I probably was in shock at the audacity of the statement,” he says. “But knowing Jazmyn, it wasn’t surprising to me, because when she sets her mind to do something she gets it done. For myself, I said, ‘OK,’ and went along for the ride. ‘This what we’re doing, so here we go.’”

Both Hill and Simon laugh – “That’s exactly what he said,” she adds – before he continues.

“I say this often – it’s very easy for me to become a partner to Jazmyn Simon because she’s a wonderful writer,” Hill says. “All I have to do is say, ‘You know what, baby, I think you’re missing a period there. I think we need a comma. I don’t know if that rhymes as well as it could. Why don’t ‘we’ go back and revisit that.’”

Simon remembered many of the affirmations she’d used with Kennedy when she was a child. Now those were workshopped on Levi, and still are used with him today, to see which would best be used in the children’s book.

“If he’s feeling nervous about something, we’ll start with ‘I am brave’ or ‘I am courageous,’” she says of their son, who turned 4 this spring. “In the same way with Kennedy, ones we always used were, ‘We’re loved, worthy, ready.’”

The book, as with their at-home affirmations, avoids physical attributes and other subjective terms.

“We don’t want anybody to feel like their self-worth was determined, like ‘I am pretty’ or ‘I am beautiful’ or things like that,” Simon says. “Anything subjective, we tried to take it off the page, because everybody is beautiful and everybody is smart.

“We took all of those out and just tried to make it as pure as we could,” she says.

“We worked to make sure the message could reach everybody,” Hill says. “So that everyone who reads it, or everyone who has it read to them, can hear the words and find the value in themselves through the words that are being shared.”

Seeds for the self

The messages in the book can benefit not only the child to whom it is read but the adult reading it, Simon and Hill believe.

“It’s more than just saying these are the words that you can express yourself,” Simon says. “It’s that I am taking time with you to tell you how valuable you are, how important you are, how deserving you are. ‘I am deserving.’ What does that mean? You’re deserving of someone that’s going to listen to you. And that’s where conversations happen.”

To Hill, the purpose of the affirmations and the book is to “plant seeds of positivity,” he says.

“And hopefully, as life goes on, they will blossom up and have roots, take roots in young lives of the children who are hearing the words, and also in the lives of the adults who are reading the words,” Hill says.

“Because life is going to send you a whole bunch of negative messages,” he says. “The older you get the more you’re going to start hearing and seeing how you’re not enough, how you’re less than, how you need to be this or that.

“The whole goal of this is that hopefully it can plant some seeds as these children are growing up,” Hill says. “They will know that they are like every good thing. They are gifted, they are enough’ they are ready, they are light.

“And they can take that forward as they go forth into their life.”

“Their voice was very clear,” Arquette says of the “High Desert” creators’ vision. “And they were incredible with comedy and black comedy, and that sort of weird sense of humor that I have. So that was the beginning of this thing.”

That was in 2016, a year after Arquette won an Oscar, Golden Globe, and an armful of other prizes for her acting in Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.” And even though she went on to make such acclaimed TV series as “Escape at Dannemora,” “The Act,” and “Severance” in the years that followed, Arquette never abandoned “High Desert.”

“We tried to sell it everywhere and finally we found a home at Apple TV+,” she says. “You know, it’s risqué material. It’s a farce. It’s a counterculture comedy. It’s got all these strange characters who are, like, lost a little bit and making a lot of mistakes.”

“High Desert” premieres on Apple TV+ with three episodes on Wednesday, May 17; all eight episodes of the series are directed by Jay Roach.

Arquette plays Peggy Newman, a woman whose tribulations don’t ever entirely get her down, though her frustrating almost-ex-husband Denny, played by Matt Dillon, can frustrate her no end. The cast also includes Bernadette Peters as a ’70s TV actress who reminds Peggy of her mother, and Rupert Friend as Guru Bob, a former TV news anchor turned sketchy spiritual leader.

Weruche Opia is Peggy’s best friend Carol and Kier O’Donnell and Christine Taylor are her straight-laced brother and sister Stewart and Dianne. Brad Garrett is the morose private investigator who reluctantly agrees to let Peggy work with him.

All except Garrett recently talked on video calls about “High Desert,” speaking about everything from the appeal of their characters and the tone of the show to the significance of the California desert in it.

“There’s a lot of love in it, and there’s a lot of family in it,” Arquette says of the ensemble and the story that unfolds mostly in the high desert. “And a lot of people make a lot of dumb decisions and dumb mistakes and chaos ensues everywhere they go.”

A ‘criminal-ish’ couple

Peggy and Denny are a couple that shouldn’t really be together, though only Peggy seems to see that and even she can’t seem to quit her no-good husband.

“He’s constitutionally not able to be honest, you know, that’s the thing,” Dillon says on a video call with Arquette recently. “As much as he wants to – his heart’s in the right place – he can’t help manipulating because he’s got that criminal element to him.”

Not that he’s just a criminal, Dillon adds.

“There’s a lot of duality there,” he says. “He’s spiritual but he’s also a criminal. The spirituality is a kind of newfound thing, and there’s a little bit of B.S. in all this, but he really does believe it.”

Arquette says she sees the couple as perfectly suited for each other in both the best and worst ways.

“Her mother’s kind of a childlike figure and her dad was not the world’s greatest masculine figure, so Denny stepped into that position with the family as a provider,” she says. “Kind of the patriarch of this family through this skewed lens of a criminal-ish person with a beautiful heart.

“They both have these great hearts,” Arquette says. “They both tend to be a little bit of a criminal. They both can deceive you. They have their own rules for society. But she does know that Denny truly loves her and would die for her if need be.

“Like Matt said, Denny would be the one to put her in a position of having someone shoot at them. So he might take a bullet for her, but he’s also going to put her in the position where someone’s shooting bullets at her.”

Light and dark

While “High Desert” most closely resembles a comedy – think of the Coen Brothers’ films – its tone shifts in and out of darker moods as the episodes unfold. For many in the cast, that was part of the appeal of taking on their roles.

“It’s presenting the human condition of difficulties and addictions that some people may have,” Peters says. “And yet trying to overcome the obstacles even if you put the obstacles in your own way.

“I think it will be kind of subconscious for people when they see the show,” she says. “It is this funny show going on, and irreverent, and a murder mystery. And yet there’s this underlying loss that Peggy’s going through, and just trying to move forward.”

That blurring of the line between comedy and tragedy was attractive to Friend as he considered taking on the role of Guru Bob.

“The other day I was talking with my wife about the fact that 30 or 40 years ago in storytelling we had goodies and baddies,” the English actor says. “You had kind of big ’80s movies and there was a bad guy and there was a girl and there was a hero. And it was all quite sort of black and white.

“I’m really grateful that we’re working at a time when those edges have all been blurred,” Friend says. “People do good things for bad intentions. Peggy sometimes makes a hell of a mess of things but her heart is absolutely in the right place.

“We’re able to blend genres and I think the world is a richer place in storytelling for that,” he says.

O’Donnell and Taylor play the straight man and woman to Arquette as Peggy. They’re grounded and serious and yet love their sister, much as co-showrunner Nancy Fichman loved the sister on whom she loosely based the character of Peggy.

“The things that appeal to me are things based in some sort of a reflection of our own lives,” O’Donnell says. “And this show certainly has that. It was always trying to find that balance of how dark can we get with these pretty intense subjects without it dipping into full-blown drama.

“Peggy’s continually saying to us, ‘Remember the good old days, you guys?’ And it’s like, ‘What are you talking about it?’” he continues. “She has this sort of bizarre revisionist history.

“There’s something incredibly sad but sweet about that. So that was always the line we were trying to dance around.”

In the desert

Arquette says it was important to her to shoot as much of “High Desert” in locations as close as possible to its setting and much of the series is shot in Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and Palm Springs. (An exception: Pioneertown, where Peggy works in a Wild West Show, was recreated at the Sable Ranch movie backlot in Santa Clarita.)

“The people that gravitate to the desert are a little fringy sometimes,” she says. “A little living their own way. Or they didn’t quite work where they were with their families and they end up here. Their nature is the coyote nature. It’s the, ‘I’m gonna figure out a way to survive with very little resources.’”

To the rest of the cast, that felt right, too.

“It was lovely and picturesque to actually be in the desert,” she says. “I think that setting the show there definitely adds to the tone of the show. That juxtaposition of how life is, the highs and lows of what’s going on.”

Taylor, who as the proper Palm Springs resident shows up in the Yucca Valley desert in heels and a blazer, agreed that the locations worked to enhance the storytelling.

“It really was its own character,” she says. “Keir and I have talked about it, that the desert, there is this sort of magical, mystical, lawless aspect of sort of being out in the wild, wild west where Peggy is making these big decisions and we are very fish out of water.”

Peters says she’s not a desert person – its hot, dry clime makes her uncomfortable, she says – though the beautiful sunsets and the unexpected delight of cactus blossoms moved her.

“In the midst of it all, you’ll have a prickly cactus blooming with a beautiful flower,” she says. “You have those sunsets that are gorgeous. So here’s her life that’s really sort of falling apart, and yet there’s hope.

“Pretty remarkable,” Peters says. “When a cactus can bloom, it’s kind of breathtaking when you see something like that happening. It looks like it doesn’t even need water to survive, and yet here comes this beautiful flower. It’s kind of a miracle.”

“People always say, ‘I learned so much about him and I thought I knew him,’” Cortés says on a recent video call about the film, which arrived in theaters and on-demand recently. “It’s quite a revelatory journey.”

It was the same for Cortés, too, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker says of her journey to fully understand the life and career of the performer born as Richard Penniman.

“I didn’t learn about him and all of the layers until I made this film,” Cortés says. “My introduction was the music, the joy of dancing around to ‘Tutti Frutti’ with my cousins as a kid.

“Even to this day, I can put ‘Tutti Frutti’ on for my niece, who’s 3 years old, and she loses her mind and starts singing along and gets super excited,” she says. “Because there’s something in the music that’s so joyous.”

“Little Richard: I Am Everything” seeks to place the singer of hits such as “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Lucille” on the throne as the true king of rock ‘n’ roll, a title that eluded him during his lifetime.

Archival interviews with Penniman, who died at 87 in May 2020, show it’s clear he seldom felt he’d received his due. Through new interviews with a host of entertainers such as Mick Jagger, Billy Porter, Nile Rodgers and John Waters – all of whom profess their love, admiration and emulation of him – it’s clear many others agree.

“My connection was solely the music, and then seeing him on talk shows, where you never got a sense of his contributions to rock and roll,” Cortés says. “He was there to be fun and almost be a comic foil in a way.

“And so making the film was a tremendous opportunity to see how someone born in Macon, Georgia in 1932 was so bold in their vision,” she says. “Someone who was so provocative and transgressive that they not only ignited this music form but had a lasting effect on so many artists who followed him.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Cortés talked about the film and the role that God, sex and religion played in Little Richard’s life.

Q: Tell me how you came to make this film.

A: Well, here’s the thing. Richard passed away in May of 2020, which is the height of the pandemic. Whenever somebody dies and they are an artist who has such tremendous hits, you hear their music all the time. So at a time that was very dark and challenging, I heard this music that was so joyous.

That brought back memories of being a kid dancing around with my cousins in the summer. And I wanted to learn more. I was like, ‘Wow, I wonder if there’s a doc on him,’ and then discovered there wasn’t.

Q: So you were inspired to make one?

A: I think I was especially intrigued when he passed away. You’ve got Bob Dylan giving tribute. You have [Foo Fighters’] Dave Grohl. You have Elton John. You have so many artists who are like, ‘He was the king, he was so important.’ Bruce Springsteen gave him a tribute.

Then I did a quick Google search. I’m looking at the YouTube of him inducting Otis Redding into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is him actually inducting himself. That’s a very poignant piece of footage. He is calling out these stars in the audience, and he’s saying, ‘Why have you never given me anything? Why are you not recognizing me? I gave you your start.’

It’s humorous, but it’s also very painful because it’s an act of desperation. And I think many of us tap into this idea of being erased. Of being a part of something and losing that foothold.

Q: Why do you think he didn’t get the recognition he deserved? We know one reason is that the work of Black artists was often undermined as White artists rerecorded their work, often enjoying greater commercial support and success with White audiences. How did you come to see it?

A: I think you can’t deny that race and his queerness, that is a combination that was so threatening. The idea of putting a queer Black man in the ’50s on a pedestal, you know, was not going to happen. It’s unfortunate because those are the things that make him so incredible. That he’s a Black queer man who is elevating this art form, and adding so much passion and potency.

Q: Another fascinating part of the film is its exploration of his struggle to reconcile his passions for God, sex and rock ‘n’ roll. At different points in his life, he comes out as gay and then goes back in the closet; he plays rock and roll and then renounces it as the devil’s music, and so on.

A: I think most people don’t know that the renunciation of his queerness in the ’80s is predated by his renunciation of rock and roll in the ’60s. It is this really tragic pendulum that he’s on, and it’s this tension that is pulling him back and forth for a great portion of his life.

That was something that really stood out immediately when I spent the time doing my research. Because you see that he really is a divided soul.

Q: There’s so much wonderful footage in the film of Little Richard performing and giving interviews, things I’d never seen before. Are there things you found in your research that were particularly special finds for you?

A: I think it’s interesting when he tells us about his time after he’s kicked out of his home for being queer. That in downtown Macon, Georgia in the 1940s, there’s a place called Ann’s Tic Toc Room. A place where queer people, Black and White people, came together.

Because that is not in our kind of imagination about what could be possible in the South during this period. Homosexuality is illegal. Homophobia is rampant. But that he finds this community in this small city was pretty interesting.

I think the second part is when Little Richard tells us, ‘I go on the road, on the Chitlin’ Circuit, and I dress up as a woman.’ It tells you so much about all these different places and experiences that he is pulling from to create this musical gumbo.

Q: I was also fascinated by the musical dream sequences you included with musicians like singer-songwriter Valerie June, singer-pianist Cory Henry and gospel singer John P. Kee.

A: From the beginning of the project I knew I wanted to create dreamscapes. I see them as these seminal moments in Richard’s life, where these portals of possibility open. You know, he meets Sister Rosetta Tharpe (portrayed by Valerie June), who says, ‘Come sing with me,’ and then after being on stage with her at the Macon Auditorium, Richard’s like, ‘I want to go be a star.’

I chose all of those artists because they are a part of the legacy. The amazing Valerie June talked about her love of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The same thing with Cory Henry, who started in the church but now not only can play gospel music but jazz and hip-hop and R&B and pop. And, of course, John P. Kee knew Little Richard.

So each of them felt connected to him in some way. And the same goes for everybody else who was interviewed in the film. They had to have an intimate connection.

And the people who were interviewed were immediately like, ‘I want to talk about Little Richard because the world needs to know what he did for me.’ And in turn for music and culture.

But Sayles, 72, didn’t start his career with filmmaking in mind. By the time of his movie debut with “Return of the Secaucus 7” in 1980, Sayles already had written a pair of acclaimed novels, including “Union Dues,” a finalist for the 1978 National Book Award.

“There’s two big differences,” Sayles says of the challenges that a blank page presents at the start of a screenplay or novel. “One is that when you’re writing a movie, you have to deal with time.

“In a feature, you always have to think: ‘Am I 10 minutes into this? Am I an hour into this? What should people know by now? What do they think is going to happen next?’” he says.

“Whereas, when you’re writing a novel, nobody’s going to sit and read a 700-page novel in one sitting,” Sayles says. “So you have time to walk around in the story a little bit more. You can have chapters that are telling you more about the world that the people are in but don’t necessarily advance the plot. And you can have more points of view.”

His new work, “Jamie MacGillivray,” was intended to be a film before the vagaries of independent filmmaking left Sayles’ screenplay gathering dust for two decades.

Sayles never doubted that the story had good bones. Its fictional protagonist, Jamie MacGillivray, is a young Highland Scot whose clan backed the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which sought to overthrow King George II and restore the Stuart monarchy to the British throne.

When that uprising was crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, MacGillivray escapes the noose for banishment to the American colonies, where his story moves from indentured servitude to life with a Native American tribe and fighting the English in the French and Indian War.

“I just felt like it’s such a good story I should do something with it,” Sayles says of the decision to rework it into a historical novel. “It was a kind of interesting and nice process to be able to go deeper into the history and into the characters.

“Now, I would say it’s much more like a miniseries that lasts a couple of years instead of a feature.”

Scouting expeditions

The story behind the novel began more than 20 years ago when Sayles answered the phone to find Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, then not long removed from his successes in “Trainspotting” and “The Full Monty,” on the line.

Carlyle had been recommended to Sayles as a screenwriter who might be interested in a story he wanted to develop – the story of Jamie MacGillivray, whose imagined adventures reflect the real lives of ordinary historical figures.

“I liked the idea so much I wrote a screenplay on spec,” Sayles says, using the technical term for writing a screenplay without pay or a contract lined up. “Then Robert Carlyle and Maggie (Renzi), who I live with and was the producer on it, and I scouted the Highlands of Scotland with Robert, and then came back and scouted a bunch of locations that show up in the book here in the states and in Canada.

Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more

“And we just were never able to raise the money to make it, which is kind of the story of our lives as independent filmmakers,” he says.

Two decades later, not long before COVID-19 hit, Sayles dusted off the screenplay to see if it might work as a novel.

“In that process, of course, all those stops in between (in the script) became more stops and more characters,” he says. A young Scottish woman who briefly encounters Jamie as the book begins was chief among the characters whose stories grew as the novel expanded to 696 pages.

“Jenny was originally a very minor character who showed up only at the beginning and at the very end of the story,” Sayles says. “And doing the novel, I was able to follow her: How did she get to the New World? What was her path and how was it different than Jamie’s?”

History lessened

Sayles was raised in Schenectady, New York, a region over which the French, English and Native Americans fought before, during and after the time period of the novel.

“I kind of grew up with the official story,” he says of the French and Indian War in particular, and the early settlement of North America in general. “Which was interesting, but not the complete story, you know, or not the complex story that when you really jump into the history you realize.

“It was much more complicated than that,” Sayles says. “It was still being taught as these rough but civilized people coming over from Europe and encountering these savages. And when the two superpowers, the French and the English, got involved with each other, it became a dirty war because they had to enlist Native allies who murdered and scalped people.

“That was the official story for a long, long time, certainly in the mind of the public,” he says. “Doing the research for the screenplay gave me the basic historical structure that the novel is hung on. But doing it as a novel, I was able to get into much more of the real detail of what led to what, and just how complicated it was.”

From contemporary history, Sayles worked his way further and further back to the original documents of the times. He found the logs from sailing ships that transported convicts like Jamie and Jenny to America. He found records of an English convict ship seized by the French, its human cargo liberated and taken to the island of Martinique as happens in the novel.

There were court transcripts from the trial of Simon Fraser, the Scottish leader known as Lord Lovat, who backed the Jacobite rebellion and is a character in the book. Like Jamie, Lovat is taken to London and tried for treason, though his story ends not in the New World but on the executioner’s block.

Recent works by Native American scholars helped illuminate the history of the tribes who were squeezed between the French and English. “George Washington and the Indians,” a new history published around the time Sayles started work on the novel, provided fresh insights into the role played by the future Founding Father, who also appears as a character in the book.

Along with research, Sayles suggests that imagination can fill in the gaps if you’ve dug into the records enough.

“I always tell people, ‘Look, I adapted the novel ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear,’ where there’s like three skeletons that they’re basing everything on,” he says. “The 1740s and ’50s? That’s easy compared to that.”

Language lessons

One of the things that readers will notice throughout “Jamie MacGillivray” is Sayles’s use of dialect and other languages for the characters.

Jamie and his fellow Scots speak in the dialect of the Highlands, though Jamie himself also speaks English and French. When Jenny arrives in Martinique, she’s faced with a French-speaking populace. Later, in the colonies, Jamie realizes that to survive his time with the Lenape, or Delaware, Indians he will need to learn their language.

All of that can create a challenge for readers accustomed to standard English, no matter the period, people or place, but to Sayles it was an important way to get at the truth of the story.

“The main reason I went with it is because of Jamie and the other people who are kind of ripped out of the life that they thought that they were going to live,” he says. “They had to deal with new languages and people who didn’t speak their language. Even Highlanders would have had a hard time sometimes being understood in the Lowlands of Scotland.

“Jamie’s trying to survive, and if I don’t understand what they’re saying, I don’t know when to run away,” Sayles says. “I wanted the reader, the audience, to have to do some of that themselves.”

In a way, the verisimilitude of the dialogue helps Sayles deliver the feeling of truth that fiction can achieve and traditional history sometimes cannot.

“It’s one of the advantages,” he says of writing fiction that hews close to real events and serious research. “You can come at it from the inside out.”

A military history of the Battle of Culloden will provide the battalions and tactics and outcomes, Sayles says. The novelist’s imagination can fill in the thoughts and feelings of those who are there.

“You have a character who’s hoping to not get shot down and hoping to cover enough ground so that his side overruns the others,” Sayles says. “That character’s a warrior. He’s done this before. He knows what battle is.

“And you have a very personal experience of that battle.”

Searching for screentime

In the two decades since the story of Jamie MacGillivray began, cable networks and streaming services have expanded the landscape for limited series. For now, Sayles says there are no plans to adapt the novel.

He’s currently got a pair of movie projects he’d like to make if financing can be found. There’s a Western based on the 1926 novel “Pasó Por Aquí” – “I Passed This Way” – by the cowboy writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes. “Patronage,” an original screenplay, is set in a Chicago bar on the night that rioting broke out during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

And there’s also an almost-finished novel emerging from the bones of another unmade screenplay. “To Save the Man” is set at the Carlisle Indian School in the early 1890s.

“In an interesting way, I have to be much more visual when I’m writing a book than I do when writing a screenplay,” Sayles says, noting how his prose has to carry the descriptions that a camera might otherwise handle.

“You really have to provide much more visual detail,” he says. “On the other hand, if you want the sun to shine and you’re writing a book, the sun is shining. I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of times I wished I could do that as a director.”

Writer-director Brit McAdams’s new film is a comedy filled with funny performances by Michaela Watkins, Stephen Root, and Wendi McLendon-Covey, but it also includes brushstrokes of melancholy.

That’s part of what Wilson says attracted him to a role, which is superficially based on the real-life painter and posthumous pop culture icon Bob Ross, both in the huge halo of hair and fondness for basic landscapes that you –.yes, you, TV viewer! – can replicate at home.

That mix of comedy and pathos is part of what attracted Wilson to the role, he says.

“I tend to watch a lot of documentaries,” Wilson says on a recent video call. “It’s rare that I’d ever pick a comedy.

“The emotions that people are feeling have to be sort of real to me,” he says.

“Paint” lets Carl Nargle be both the source of much humor – how can you not laugh at that hair and wardrobe? – and its heart. When his world starts to crumble around him, you feel for him even though he’s largely brought all his troubles down upon himself.

“I think with Carl, it’s not funny, of course, to him,” Wilson says. “It’s painful. Now that can be why I enjoy documentaries. I can find it funny when you see people experiencing these real emotions that we all get hit with. Vanity and pride and insecurities, and the ways we try to hide those.

“And Carl is really having to face that,” he says.

Bob Ross, but evil

For writer-director McAdams, who told the audience at the “Paint” premiere recently that it took 13 years to get the movie made, inspiration for “Paint” came from his experiences watching and working in television.

As a boy growing up in the ’80s, he wasn’t allowed to watch much TV, though his mother made an exception for the soap opera “General Hospital.”

“I’m old enough and my family was cheap enough that we didn’t have a remote control, so the catbird seat was right in front of the TV set where there was a knob to change the channel,” McAdams says. “So as ‘General Hospital’ would end, I would have just a moment to keep the TV on. I’d turn that knob and it was like the clicking of a bomb: tick, tick, tick with each turn.

“And then Bob Ross would come on,” he says. “We would start by being like, ‘Who’s this guy with his hair and the whispering,’ and then he would start this with magical, just a brown brushstroke that would become a branch, and then a tree, and the tree would become a forest, and the forest an entire mountain-scape.

“You would go from sort of laughing or thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’ to just being completely transfixed by what he created,” McAdams says. “I just always loved the idea of someone having that power over everyone – where people wanted to hear that voice and be in that comfortable place.”

Years later, working at the VH1 cable network in his 20s, McAdams says he was first thrilled to meet so many of his idols, then dismayed to realize that not all of them lived up to his expectations.

“What I realized was that a lot of my idols are better on stage than off,” he says. “Then my thought was: If you are a rock star at 22, how hard would it be for you to evolve beyond that if you stayed a rock star? And who would I be if I had never evolved from a 22-year-old?

“That’s the genesis of this character in a lot of ways,” McAdams says. “He’s the biggest painter and the biggest star of PBS in Burlington, Vermont. He’s had the top show for 22 years and would he ever evolve into who he should be if people kept telling him he was everything to them?”

Bob Ross, he stresses, was not the stunted, self-absorbed character that Carl Nargle is in “Paint.”

“He was seemingly the nicest person and by all accounts always was,” McAdams says. “I liked the idea of, What if there was someone like him, not him at all, who came across as just the nicest person in the world and wasn’t? What if you use that whisper and that power of grabbing people’s attention to keep them hanging on his every word and every breath and every stroke?

“What would happen if you didn’t use that power for good? That’s basically the idea behind it.”

Vintage brushstrokes

Carl Nargle isn’t just stuck as an artist, though he does paint Mount Mansfield over and over again, having decided, after learning that the Burlington Art Museum doesn’t have a single painting of Vermont’s highest peak, that that’s how’ll finally get his work on its walls.

He’s also stuck in time – the haircut he picked from a ’70s poster in the barber shop years ago, sure – but also his clothes, his airbrush-painted ’70s van with sofa bed in the back, and his caddish behavior toward women, from his long-suffering ex Katherine (Michaela Watkins) to the much younger Jenna (Lucy Freyer).

Wilson described what it felt like slipping into his character’s skin – and wig and calico-yoked shirts and high-waisted jeans.

“My dad worked at the PBS station in Dallas, and in the late ’70s. If you went down and walked around that station, you saw some Carl Nargle-looking people,” he says. “For me, it was a little bit self-conscious at first putting on the wig and the wardrobe. I don’t know if it appealed to the little kid part that likes putting on a disguise or a costume, but I started to get into it.

“I would like to have a list of all the friends that I Facetimed with – or sometimes not even friends, but somebody that was almost like a business meeting that I’d call and not say anything about the way I looked,” Wilson says of the surreal transformation he experienced in full hair, makeup and costume. “That would make me laugh and entertain me sometimes up in Saratoga Springs (New York, where the film was shot).”

McAdams said the crew working on the production, working with a modest budget and only 20 days to shoot, outdid themselves in recreating Carl’s world. Including dozens of paintings purportedly by Carl and a younger, more talented painter Ambrosia (Ciara Renée).

Wilson says he took painting classes to prepare for the role. “They actually have a Bob Ross school for painters,” he says. “But I don’t think I ever completed a Carl Nargle original.”

McAdams laughs when asked whether he has any Carl Nargle Mount Mansfields that he brought home from the shoot.

“Yes, I do,” he says with a grin. “There’s some additional shots and stuff coming up so they’ve been used. But yeah, they will be on my walls for years.”

But not for long. In an instant, he was off, running down the curved white staircase that surrounded his band, throwing off the coat that looked a little reminiscent of Big Bird, and launching the show with the live debut of his recent single “As It Was.”

Styles, at 28, is a terrifically charismatic performer, and he delivered a very, very good performance to close out the festival’s first night.

If it fell a little short of a classic Coachella headliner’s set, well, that’s due more to the fact that his set felt more or less like any other tour date might, though the unexpected arrival of special guest Shania Twain an hour into the show certainly added some of that missing pizzazz.

The coat gone, Styles dazzled in a one-piece pantsuit covered in sequins, the large round sequins, which made him sparkle and flash like a human disco ball as he danced around the stage. Freddie Mercury would have approved.

The first half of the show focused mostly on songs from Styles’ 2019 sophomore album, “Fine Line.” Songs such as “Adore You,” “Golden,” and “Carolina” were solid, and well received, but again, nothing you wouldn’t hear at any other Styles show.

Things got more interesting, though, when Styles dropped a few brand-new songs into the set. The announcement of the first, “Boyfriends,” drew wild cheers from the crowd, and prompted Styles to chide them, jokingly, for their blind devotion.

“You haven’t heard it yet, you don’t know if you like it!” he told them.

Of course they were going to like it, and in fact, it was a strong acoustic folk rock number reminiscent of the Laurel Canyon era, with Styles joined by two harmony vocalists and a pair of acoustic guitarists.

The acoustic vibe continued with “Cherry,” an older song. A few songs later, Styles turned up the energy with a trio of upbeat hits.

“We’ve got 12 minutes of non-stop dancing, are you coming with me?” he asked the crowd. “Please say yes.”

“Canyon Moon” featured Styles’ horn section, who joined him at the end of a ramp that stretched out into the crowd. “Treat People With Kindness” followed with a similarly funky groove.

But the next number, “What Makes You Beautiful,” really got the audience engaged, the ridiculously catchy pop song the one tune from Styles’ former band One Direction included in the show.

Styles then brought out one of his apparent idols, the country pop legend Twain, to duet on a pair of her songs. “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” came first, a sassy, fun number that had the crowd singing along loudly.

“In the car, with my mother as a child, this woman taught me to sing,” Styles said almost reverentially after the song.

“I’m kind of lost for words,” replied Twain, whose outfit featured almost as many sequins’ as Styles. “I’m a bit star struck, what can I say?”

“You’re Still The One,” one of Twain’s loveliest songs, followed. At its close, gentleman Harry kissed Twain’s hand, and off she went, now the one performer to have performed headlining sets, or least contributed to one, at both Coachella and Stagecoach.

Another new song, “Late Night Talking,” came next, its bass line the kind of funky Chic-inspired riff in David Bowie’s “Let Dance.” “Watermelon Sugar,” another of Styles’ big hits, followed to close out the main set, though Styles and the band really didn’t leave the stage.

After “Kiwi,” and a first blast of fireworks, the night wrapped up with “Sign Of The Times,” one Styles’ best numbers, and as the wind sent the final rounds of pyrotechnics flying, the first day of Coachella, on the main stage, at least, came to a close.