The NFL averaged 22.3 million viewers per game during the league’s opening week, making it the most-watched Week 1 on record for the second straight year. The per-game average on TV and digital platforms was a 5% increase from the 21 million Week 1 average of last season, according to the league and Nielsen. Some…
NEW YORK — Songwriter and producer Bert Berns, who had a hand in some of the biggest hits of the 1960s, including co-writing “Twist and Shout” for the Isley Brothers and the plaintive “Piece of My Heart” sung by Janis Joplin, has been inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Berns, who died in…
TORONTO — Anyone will tell you it’s the audiences that make the Toronto International Film Festival. They aren’t purely industry folks, like they are in Cannes or Venice, but more boisterous, enthusiastic moviegoers with their own rituals, like growling like buccaneers at the piracy warning that plays before each screening. That real-moviegoer energy has always…
NEW YORK — It sounds impossible, but that’s the magic of it. On Thursday, a new Whitney Houston song arrives 13 years after her death. English singer Calum Scott is responsible. The single is a duet between Scott and Houston, a balladic reinterpretation of the timeless “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” using…
Change comes slowly to the Downton Abbey universe and its Crawley family. Just watch Robert Crawley go flat-hunting in London. Wait, what? FLAT-HUNTING? The Earl of Grantham? Well, yes, and it’s the most amusing scene in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” (a self-announcing title if there ever was one). Just look at proud and starched…
NEW YORK — Polly Holliday, a Tony Award-nominated screen and stage actor who turned the catchphrase “Kiss my grits!” into a national retort as the gum-chewing, beehive-wearing waitress aboard the long-running CBS sitcom “Alice,” has died. She was 88. Holliday died Tuesday at her home in New York, said her theatrical agent, Dennis Aspland. She…
LONDON — When David Bowie died in 2016, he left a vast musical legacy – and a trove of unrealized projects. Tantalizing details of those abandoned and unfinished ideas are revealed in Bowie’s archive, which opens to the public this week. The 90,000 items acquired from Bowie’s estate by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum include…
Movie theaters across the country are pulling out the stops for Dick Van Dyke’s 100th birthday in December. A new documentary about the song and dance man’s life, “Dick Van Dyke: 100th Celebration,” will be in theaters over his birthday weekend on Dec. 13 and 14, Fathom Entertainment said Wednesday. “It’s wonderful; a total surprise…
Charlie Sheen said fatherhood quickly occupied his life when he got sober eight years ago. “It turned into just an interesting daily grind of just sudden responsibility and, you know, having to answer the call and it was amazing,” Sheen said Monday, telling an audience that once he “finally put down the bottle,” his children…
CLEVELAND — Christoph von Dohnányi, a conductor acclaimed for performances as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1984 to 2002, has died at age 95. Dohnányi died in Munich on Saturday, the Cleveland Orchestra said in a statement Monday. “A grand seigneur among the great international conductors to whom the Salzburg Festival owes its…
