As strategists parse the nearly 20 Indian-Americans appointed in the Biden administration, what is noteworthy are those who didn’t make it.
An Obama administration staffer Sonal Shah as well as Amit Jani, who worked on the Biden campaign team have so far been excluded, allegedly due their RSS/BJP links which has been brought into the limelight by over a dozen Indian-American organisations.
Biden’s team has people like senior diplomat Uzra Zeya who had played a role in the Devyani Khobargade case or Samira Fazili who had joined protest rallies in the US against the CAA, NRC and the Kashmir lockdown. Those with RSS/BJP links have not found a place while secular Indian-American organisations have maintained the pressure on the Biden-Harris Transition Team to keep such individuals on the sidelines, said sources.
The Democrats may have been more circumspect over accommodating pro-BJP/RSS elements in the government following renewed activism by organisations opposed to the Hindutva project and also after witnessing the fate of such candidates, added the sources.
Congressional candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni lost the elections after strident opposition from Indian-American organisations and former US Congressperson Tulsi Gabbard also lost political ground because of this reason.
Sonal Shah has served on Biden’s Unity Task Force but her father was the President of Overseas Friends of BJP-USA and is the founder of RSS-run Ekal Vidyalaya for which she has raised friends.
Jani’s may have been the case of lax vetting. Named Biden campaign’s Muslim Outreach Coordinator, he was re-appointed as National Asian American and Pacific Islander Director after it was pointed out that his family has ties with PM Modi and other BJP leaders.
In order to ensure that the Biden administration does not backtrack on excluding those with RSS/BJP links, 19 Indian-American organisations have written to Biden pointing out that many South Asian-Americans individuals with ties to far-right Hindu organisations in India are affiliated with the Democratic Party.
An analysis of film tropes–common storytelling elements seen in different movies–explores combinations of tropes that tend to co-occur in films, identifying patterns that could help inform development of new movies. Pablo García-Sánchez and Juan Merelo of the University of Granada, and Antonio Velez-Estevez and Manuel Cobo from the University of Cádiz, Spain present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 31, 2021.
Many films incorporate tropes that have previously been successful, such as the Hero’s Journey or Chekhov’s Gun. Analyzing tropes in films and other cultural media can provide insights into the works themselves or how people consume them.
To deepen understanding of tropes in films, García-Sánchez and colleagues identified and analyzed tropes that tend to cluster in the same films. To do so, they developed a methodology based on two analytical techniques, scientometrics and complex network analysis, and applied it to data on 25,766 tropes found in varying combinations in 10,766 movies, and the movies’ ratings, genre, and popularity. The data came from the popular websites TVTropes.org and IMDb.org.
The analysis revealed the existence of 42 trope clusters, with some clusters appearing in thousands of films and some appearing in just one. Some clusters were associated with specific genres, and some with movies that had higher mean ratings and popularities than seen for other clusters. For instance, a cluster centered around the trope Dramatic Unmask also included the tropes Bad Liar and Face Framed in Shadow. This cluster was associated with movies that had a mean rating of around 6.51 and included Crazy Rich Asians and Saw IV.
The analysis also identified different levels of development between clusters. For instance, some trope combinations have appeared in many different films for a long time (including the Dramatic Unmask cluster). Other trope clusters may be declining in use and some just emerging, although further analysis is needed to understand these clusters.
The authors note that the data they used have a popularity bias toward more recent films. Nonetheless, their findings and the methodology developed to generate them could aid future research and help inform the creation of new films.
The authors add: “As they usually say, “every situation has already appeared in The Simpsons”. These repetitive situations or patterns in the media are called “tropes”. In this paper we propose the concept of “troposphere”, the network that models the relationships between the tropes and the works (films in this paper) in which they appear. The troposphere can give us a quantitative approach to the analysis of narrations. This can be easily turned into a methodology for story generation, as well as a critical analysis of narratives in the past.”
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Citation: García-Sánchez P, Velez-Estevez A, Julián Merelo J, Cobo MJ (2021) The Simpsons did it: Exploring the film trope space and its large scale structure. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0248881. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248881
Funding: This work has been partially funded by projects DeepBio (TIN2017-85727-C4-2-P, lead by JJM) (Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Gobierno de España (ES)) and project iScience (PID2019-105381GA-I00, leaded by MJC) (Ministerio español de Ciencia e Innovacíon). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Flick Pick is a podcast about movies. In today’s episode, Andrew Green reviews The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, a movie that’s currently in theaters. This is the third installment of the spooky Conjuring series.
Andrew has seen all of the Conjuring universe films, and generally likes them. Did this latest entry into the main Conjuring series measure up?
Scroll and and find out by listening to this very demonic edition of Flick Pick!
India’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi (upper right), and three of Bollywood’s biggest Muslim stars (left to right): Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Aamir Khan ( Illustration by Geoff Kim; Raveendran / AFP; Visual China Group / Getty; Chirag Wakaskar / Getty; Manoj Verma / Hindustan Times / Getty )
This article was published online on June 10, 2021 and updated at 10:15 a.m. ET on June 11, 2021.
The Bandra-Worli Sea Link connects central Mumbai with neighborhoods to the north. If you’re driving from downtown, the bridge brings you into the orbit of Bollywood, the Hindi-language segment of India’s vast movie industry. Actors, makeup artists, special-effects people—they cluster in a handful of seaside neighborhoods. The superstars live in great bungalows, with devoted crowds stationed outside.
Bollywood has been central to the creation of India’s national myth. Its movies are full of dance and song, but their genius lies in the ability to weave serious issues—social justice, women’s rights, gay rights, interreligious marriage—into entertainment. Bollywood films are at once commercial and political. They epitomize the pluralism of India.
And in today’s political climate, that makes them a target. In ways reminiscent of the old Hollywood blacklist, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using powerful tools to curtail the creative freedom of Bollywood—in particular the influence of Muslims, who have an outsize presence in the industry. The measures pushed by the Modi government include indiscriminate tax investigations, trumped-up accusations against actors and directors, intimidation and harassment in response to certain movies and TV shows, and the chilling rap of law enforcement at the door. Fearing worse to come, Bollywood has remained mostly silent in the face of the government’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Everybody is just shit-scared and wanting to lie low,” a woman who is closely involved with the industry told me recently. “This is such a vindictive government.” The day before we spoke, tax authorities had raided the home and offices of one of the country’s finest directors, along with those of an actor he worked with. Both are outspoken government critics, and the raid was widely seen as politically motivated.
As we talked, a director friend sent me a vanishing message on Signal, the encrypted-communications platform, about a case before India’s Supreme Court. A senior Amazon executive in India was facing arrest, along with others, for a nine-part political drama called Tandav, which includes a portrayal of the Hindu god Shiva that some found objectionable. The director of the series had apologized, and removed the offending scene. And according to the message I received, the court had declined to offer protection (a decision it later revised). “The problem,” one senior executive for a major streaming service told me later, “is that the director is Muslim and the actor is Muslim.”
Soon, another show—Bombay Begums—was under fire, with India’s National Commission for Protection of Child Rights calling on Netflix to pull the series on the grounds that it would “pollute the young minds of the children” by “normalizing” drug use. The more credible motivation was that the series normalized interfaith relationships, as well as LGBTQ ones.
I got to know India’s movie industry starting in 2013, when I was dating a Bollywood director, a protégé of Karan Johar—one of the city’s biggest producers, known as KJo. Johar is the Hindu half of a storied collaboration with Shah Rukh Khan, a Muslim and one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. Their partnership began in the 1990s—at first yielding popcorn-and-bubblegum films, and then moving on to iconic post-9/11 dramas such as My Name Is Khan (2010), which dealt with growing Islamophobia worldwide.
Bollywood, in its upper echelons, is tight-knit, and through my boyfriend I met the whole A-list in a matter of days. It was a world of blacked-out SUVs that swept into underground garages, where men with walkie-talkies conveyed you up to palatial apartments overlooking the Arabian Sea.
The Indian film industry turns out more than 2,000 movies a year. Bollywood, its largest component, produces as many as Hollywood. The intensity of Bollywood celebrity is unmatched. One night, Ranbir Kapoor—India’s Ryan Gosling, you might say, and the leading man in a movie my boyfriend was directing—picked me up at my hotel in a tinted SUV. Kapoor was with his then-girlfriend, the actor Katrina Kaif. Soon we were speeding to a private dinner. Word traveled along the Mumbai streets that Ranbir was on the move, and by the time we had arrived at our destination, a crowd of several dozen had gathered.
There is a heartbreaking inevitability to the confrontation between Bollywood and Modi’s BJP. Modi does not view India as a composite culture, to which Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians have all contributed, but rather as an essentially Hindu entity whose destiny lies in bringing about a Hindu cultural renaissance. Modi’s record as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat included complicity in a pogromlike riot in 2002, in which more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed.
Muslims have always had a disproportionate influence in Bollywood. Actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan have towered over the landscape of Indian cinema for the past 30 years: Of the 10 highest-grossing films in Bollywood history, six feature one of the Khans. (The three are not related.) Several of Bollywood’s most influential studios have been owned by Muslim families.
If Modi has the most Twitter followers of any man in India, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan are in the top rank, with more than 40 million each. At No. 2 is a legend named Amitabh Bachchan, whose career illustrates how inextricably Muslim lives are bound up with the movie industry.
Though not Muslim himself, Bachchan grew famous on the screen in the 1970s by inhabiting an angry-man character named Vijay, a persona created by two Muslim screenwriters. The films he made told stories of an India whose very survival depended on Hindu-Muslim unity. Bachchan’s father, a Hindi poet, grew up in a world steeped in Urdu and Persian poetry. It was this shared culture, in which Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus all participated, that fed Bollywood in its early days. It is Bollywood’s DNA.
The BJP has a very different origin story. The party began in the 1980s as the political face of an organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS was founded in 1925, at a time when European fascist movements were gaining ground. Its early leaders, men such as M. S. Golwalkar, whose birthday the Modi government recently celebrated with a Twitter announcement, brimmed with regard for Nazi Germany. Golwalkar wrote in 1939 that India could learn from Germany’s efforts to “keep up the purity of the race and its culture.”
The RSS in recent years has sought to move past its ugly beginnings. But fixations remain, including an insistence on racial purity and a horror of interreligious marriage. A spate of new laws restricts marriages between Hindus and Muslims in BJP-controlled states. Interreligious marriage, meanwhile, is far more common in Bollywood than in Indian society at large. Two of the three Khans are married to Hindu women.
During Modi’s first term, which began in 2014, the BJP’s “IT Cell”—a network of online influencers and hate-mongers—made some of its most serious social-media attacks on Muslims in Bollywood. In 2015, Aamir Khan was hideously trolled when he expressed alarm at growing intolerance and mentioned that his wife had broached the idea of leaving the country. The following year, Saif Ali Khan—another leading man—came under orchestrated social-media attack when he and his Hindu wife, Kareena Kapoor, named their first son Taimur. (Taimur was the Muslim ruler known in the West as Tamerlane.)
In 2018, Hindu nationalists offered a bounty to anyone who cut off the nose of the actor Deepika Padukone, because she was starring in a historical movie rumored to depict an intimate scene between a Muslim king and a Hindu queen.
The following year brought a now-infamous photo op between Modi and Bollywood elites—an episode of appeasement or perhaps opportunism by elements of the industry. The stunt was arranged by a man named Mahaveer Jain, whom no one had heard of until then. Somehow he managed to corral a mighty figure like KJo into taking a group of A-listers on a private plane to Delhi to meet the prime minister. The stars were encouraged to post selfies with Modi. Not a single Muslim actor or director was included. The message was clear: Modi wanted a new Bollywood, one that was Muslim-rein. Soon Jain was working with major producers and directors, including Johar, on film projects with nationalistic themes.
Modi’s reelection, in 2019, emboldened the prime minister to press his cultural agenda. The suicide by hanging last summer of an actor named Sushant Singh Rajput gave the government a new opportunity. Rajput was a talented young actor who had risen in an industry with a reputation for being clubby. He also had a history of mental illness. People spoke of his struggle with substance abuse. “I hadn’t seen him sober once in the last three years,” a mutual friend told me.
Rajput’s suicide was a tragedy, but in the hands of a pliant press, known in India as the “godi media”—godi means “lap,” as in lapdog—his death became a way to put the entire movie industry on trial. With an election looming in Bihar—Rajput’s native state—the BJP made his suicide seem like a murder at the hands of a nepotistic and druggy elite. Rajput’s picture appeared on posters, with the words We haven’t forgotten. We won’t let them forget. His girlfriend, Rhea Chakraborty, was thrown in jail on charges of abetting his suicide. Soon, the Narcotics Control Bureau raided her home and those of other major figures in the movie industry, ostensibly in search of drugs but mainly to intimidate and sully reputations.
Modi used Rajput’s suicide to exploit Bollywood’s internal fissures and launch an outright culture war. One actor in particular led the charge.
I first met Kangana Ranaut in 2014, in New York City. I remember her as having a tremendous sense of fun. I recently came across a picture of us in Brooklyn, where she is wearing a summery white dress and silver sunglasses, and smiling broadly.
Ranaut looks very different in her WhatsApp profile picture, which presents her as a fierce figure of piety, wearing a blue sari and offering ablutions to Shiva. In 2019, before an audience of executives, journalists, and intellectuals, Ranaut defended a previous statement in which she had called for the destruction of Pakistan. (Her earlier comment had come in the wake of a deadly suicide bombing in Kashmir, for which a Pakistan-based extremist group claimed responsibility.* On hearing that news, Ranaut said, she had felt like going to the border and killing Pakistanis herself.) On another occasion, she described the movie industry as “full of such anti-nationals who boost enemies’ morals in many ways.” (Ranaut’s incitements to violence have led to her being banned from Twitter.) Last year, in response to unspecified threats, Ranaut was given a high personal-security designation by the Ministry of Home Affairs—a level that, according to news reports, is generally reserved for “someone who holds a position of consequence either in the government or in civil society.”
It’s hard to know whether Bollywood will emerge with its character intact. Johar, a child of the old Bollywood, is both a casualty of this new time and an enabler, trying frantically to remake himself in the image of Modi’s India. It’s an exercise doomed to fail. Johar has an incriminating body of work: movies with gay themes (Johar does not discuss his own sexual orientation, even though, as he has written, it is something that “everybody knows”) and movies that resist Islamophobia. My director friend recalls telling him simply, “Dude, you’re going to get fucked. You’re a fake.”
Last fall, after months of attacks, the movie industry showed a rare bit of gumption. Jaya Bachchan—Amitabh’s wife, and a member of the upper house of Parliament—described a “conspiracy to defame the film industry.” A few weeks later, a group of producers filed a defamation suit against cable channels allied with the government. Bollywood’s only chance of survival, given the weakness of India’s institutions, lies in its ability to stick together and marshal its star power.
Bollywood’s influence stretches well beyond India. The BJP knows this, and wants to bring it into line. In 1935, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels went to see It Happened One Night, and later wrote enviously in his diary, “The Americans are so natural. Far superior to us.” Authoritarians always want that megaphone for themselves. One way to seize it is by making an example of a few while stirring fear and self-censorship among the rest.
This article appears in the July/August 2021 print edition with the headline “Can Bollywood Survive Modi?”
* This article previously misstated the nationality of the suicide bomber in Kashmir.
Mark your calendars, Rocky fans. We officially have a premiere date for the “Rocky IV” director’s cut that has long been teased by Sylvester Stallone.
“Rocky vs. Drago — The Ultimate Director’s Cut” will debut in theaters on Nov. 11, the actor and screenwriter revealed on his Instagram account.
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“So proud of all the technicians that did a great job in bringing this film battle back to life in an amazing way,” Stallone said.
Accompanying Stallone’s announcement is a movie new poster. It features Ivan Drago punching Rocky Balboa, with “Rocky IV Director’s Cut” written across the middle. “Rocky vs. Drago” is printed along the bottom along with two stars, one with the American flag and the other with the Soviet Union flag .
Last month, Stallone teased that the re-edited film would be “coming pretty soon” and that it would premiere in the Italian Stallion’s home city of Philadelphia.
Stallone announced in August that he would be releasing a new version of “Rocky IV” for the movie’s 35th anniversary – it originally was released in November 1985. He said then that the storyline of Paulie Pennino and his robot maid, a gift Rocky’s family gave Paulie for his birthday, will be cut from the re-edited version.
Since unveiling that news, Stallone has occasionally posted updates to his Instagram about the re-editing process, taking fans behind the scenes of what he’s working on.
To accompany the director’s cut, Stallone also will release a full length, behind-the-scenes documentary called “Keep Punching: The Present Meets the Past” that he said takes fans inside the re-editing process.
“Rocky IV,” tells the story of Balboa’s match against Soviet boxer Drago in an epic fight in Moscow that is positioned not only as Rocky’s revenge for Creed’s death but also as a statement about U.S.-Soviet relations in the waning years of the Cold War. “Rocky IV” is the most financially-successful movie in the Rocky franchise, having earned $300 million at the box office.
Along with reprising his role as the southpaw from Philadelphia, Stallone wrote and directed “Rocky IV.” Stallone wrote all six Rocky films and also directed “Rocky II,” “Rocky III” and “Rocky Balboa.”
All six Rocky movies currently are available to stream on HBO Max.
“Even by action-comedy standards, the villain’s plan is pure nonsense,” he said. “It involves a deep-sea drill, a computer virus, and the notion that all of Europe’s data is stored in a single, highly protected hub.”
The inauguration ceremony of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (A.M.M.A)’s new building at Kochi, has brought to light a massive Malayalam film project, that will see Mammootty, Mohanlal and several other stars act together.
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AMMA president Mohanlal revealed that the film is a crime-thriller to be directed by Priyadarshan and Rajeev Kumar, and will have around 140 artistes working on it. He also added that the film would be a philanthropic gesture which is being made to help the Malayalam film industry, its artistes and technicians, in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
The movie’s script is by director Rajeev Kumar as well, who had earlier directed Pavithram and Kolaambi. It will be produced by Aashirvaad Cinemas.
Mohanlal and Mammootty unveiled the poster of the movie, and also inaugurated the building along with others actors such as Ganesh Kumar, Siddique, Baburaj, Jagadish, and others, who were at the event.
The last time a collaboration of this instance happened was for the film Twenty: 20 in 2008, which featured Mammootty, Mohanlal, Suresh Gopi, Dileep, and Jayaram among others.
Narratives have long used framing devices when it comes to telling stories. What is “Arabian Nights” if not Scheherazade introducing the concept of episodic storytelling under the guise of staying her own execution?
Television is no exception and while there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with choosing to communicate your story using such methods, recent circumstances have left some to wonder if it’s possible to use such devices as a cheat, sending audiences a certain message without doing the hard work of showing, rather than telling.
Perhaps the most misguided framing device betrayal came in the form of the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” which already stated its premise in the title, as well as buoying episodes with scenes from an undefined future where protagonist Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) was relaying tales of his past to his children — stories that purportedly explained the show’s title.
And while the show abided by that model for most of its nine seasons, the series finale pulled a massive betrayal, revealing that though the children’s mother was met and married along the way, the story really began and ended with their father’s love for his ex-girlfriend/ex-wife of a close friend/best friend Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders). The reveal sparked outrage amongst fans and critics alike, many of whom found the reveal unconscionable given the series’ title and, in the years since, have seen the finale regularly listed amongst the worst in TV history.
Currently, there are two shows airing that seem as though they might be playing with fire with regards to framing devices, for two distinctly different, though equally concerning ways.
On Disney+, Marvel’s “WandaVision” appears to be a crowdpleaser — at least amongst audiences pre-disposed to like any adventure into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe — though some critics have pointed out that it’s not yet clear if the series understands how to be a TV show.
Those individuals aren’t entirely off base. Though divided into nine episodes, the first six entries in the limited series have amassed approximately 170 minutes of running time. Based on comments from those involved in the creation of the series, there’s likely to still be 180 minutes of show remaining, all of which will be divided into just three episodes. Based on runtime alone, it suggests the series is about to take a hard left turn from whimsical sitcom parody into hardcore cable drama; a transition that few shows could attempt, much less succeed at.
Paul Bettany, Evan Peters, and Elizabeth Olsen in “WandaVision”
Courtesy of Disney+
One of the nagging problems with “WandaVision,” though, is its use of classic TV as a framework for its storytelling. While it’s all well and good that the show tries to ape what TV looked like in the ’50s or ’70s or ’90s, that’s profoundly different than understanding what makes episodic TV work.
“WandaVision” wants viewers to believe that it’s a TV nerd, but it is, for lack of a better term, a fake TV geek girl. The sitcom homages only go so far, and often end before the episode does. The story is built on teases, rather than substantial character development. Because if “WandaVision” understood as much as it thinks it does about television, it would spend a lot more time dedicated to proper storytelling structures and a lot less time revisiting emotional ground that it covered the week before.
Perhaps the series needs to be much shorter or much longer. “WandaVision” could work as a film, even keeping the TV trappings. It would be action-packed and lovely, while doing a cursory examination of Wanda’s grief which at this point seems like all the more soul-searching the series is willing to do for the bereft superhero. Or “WandaVision” could be an incredible 22-episode comedy, which would allow for a deeper and more meaningful exploration of TV themes and the comfort gleaned from the facade of fiction, as well as a more profound opportunity to work through the incomprehensible global grief that must have ensued in the aftermath of the Snap and the Blip as depicted in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame.”
Dwayne Johnson in “Young Rock”
Frank Masi / NBC
Also troubling is NBC’s promising family comedy “Young Rock,” which depicts adventures from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s tumultuous childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, as framed by a presidential campaign for the former pro-wrestler in the year 2032. Johnson is as charismatic as ever — there’s a reason he’s a huge superstar — and the series is helmed by brilliant showrunner and storyteller Nahnatchka Kahn (“Fresh Off the Boat”).
Their shared sensibilities make for a charming series. Honestly, maybe too charming.
It wasn’t that long ago that NBC had another charismatic personality on their network who relished the spotlight and made feints at getting into politics. And then he did. And then he was elected president. And things devolved from there.
That’s not to say that “Young Rock” is doubling as pro-Rock propaganda, airing out the actor’s dirty laundry in the guise of a family sitcom, the better to preempt any potential blowback should Johnson choose to pursue politics in the future. But it’s not not saying that either. After all, what better way to ease your sins into popular conversation then by getting adorable child actors to do it for you?
Framing devices are meant to do just that: Frame the stories to come. But while Scheherazade might have been duplicitous when putting her stories to good use, it’s not good practice for TV shows to follow suit. A TV series is a relationship that grows out of trust between the audience and the story being told. To betray an audience before you’ve even begun is an egregious breach of trust and makes viewers less likely to invest in future stories.
For more dissection of the sins and saints of “WandaVision” check out this week’s episode of IndieWire’s TV podcast “Millions of Screens” as hosts Deputy TV Editor Ben Travers, Creative Producer Leo Garcia, and, myself, TV Awards Editor Libby Hill, explore the Disney+ series as we head into the show’s endgame.
Also, the crew expresses excitement for new shows on the horizon, including an Amazon TV adaptation of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover, as well as the cast announcement for Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends.”
Gather some friends together or grab a date for the Friends of Laurel Hill West Laurel Hill Cemeteries’ annual Cinema in the Cemetery series.
On select summer nights, you can watch movies among the gravestones. There’s also an upcoming special screening accompanied by live music.
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The first movie in the series will be “The Philadelphia Story.” The event will take place at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd. “Wall-E” also will be screened there later in the summer.
“Little Shop of Horrors” will take place at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, as well as the 1925 classic “The Phantom of the Opera,” which will include live music by the Not-So-Silent Cinema.
Tickets to each movie night are $20 for adults. Seniors, students, Laurel Hill members and children receive a discount. Attendees are encouraged to pack a picnic to enjoy during the movie, and bring a blanket or chair.
Cinema in the Cemetery Series Schedule
Saturday, June 26 – “The Philadelphia Story” at 8:30 p.m. (buy tickets here) Saturday, July 17 – “Little Shop of Horrors” at 8:30 p.m. (buy tickets here) Saturday, Aug. 14 – “Wall-E” at 8 p.m. (buy tickets here) Saturday, Aug. 28 – “The Phantom of the Opera” with Not-So-Silent Cinema at 8 p.m. (buy tickets here)
A rain date is set for the following day in the case of inclement weather.
