Category: 5. Entertainment

Anna Kendrick, the star of Pitch Perfect and one of Hollywood’s most versatile performers, made a surprise appearance in New Haven over the weekend, stopping by Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana – a century-old institution known for its coal-fired apizza and fiercely loyal following.

Frank Pepe’s, founded in 1925, has become a cultural landmark in New Haven and beyond, often listed among the top pizzerias in America. Generations of families and food enthusiasts have made the pilgrimage to taste its iconic pies, and now Kendrick joins a long list of its celebrity visitors.

The restaurant shared a light-hearted post on Facebook marking the occasion, playfully referencing her most famous role with the caption that her pizza was “pitch perfect.” Alongside the words was a photo of Kendrick smiling, a moment that quickly spread online and captured attention far beyond Connecticut.

Fans were thrilled to see the actress, who has kept a relatively quiet public profile in recent months, enjoying something as simple as a pizza outing. Local residents filled comment sections with pride, praising both the pizzeria and Kendrick for embracing New Haven’s most celebrated culinary tradition.

Kendrick’s career, which has spanned critically acclaimed performances in films such as Up in the Air and popular franchises like Pitch Perfect, has earned her a reputation for versatility and wit. Her unexpected stop at Frank Pepe’s added a down-to-earth twist to her Hollywood image, with many noting how comfortably she blended into the historic setting.

As Frank Pepe’s celebrates its 100th anniversary, the visit has given the restaurant an extra moment in the spotlight. For Kendrick, it was a chance to enjoy a slice of New England history, proving that even Hollywood stars cannot resist the draw of New Haven’s most famous apizza.

Lee Radziwill—the late socialite, interior designer, and sister to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—once told ELLE Decor: “I’ve never had a place that didn’t have fantastic light.” A peek inside her former Upper East Side co-op reveals that this duplex was no exception.

Radziwill’s former home at 969 Fifth Avenue was most recently owned by philanthropist Suzanne von Liebig, who purchased it for $7.6 million when it was last on the market over 20 years ago, according listing broker Adam Modlin of Modlin Group. It was recently listed for just under $17 million. In a report from The Real Deal, Modlin calls the 4,600-square-foot duplex with views of both Central Park and Fifth Ave “a rare gem,” and praised von Liebig’s maintenance of the space, which included a paint and flooring refresh prior to listing.

The warm, darker palette of the library is a departure from the brightness of the rest of the duplex.

The duplex is on the fifth and six floors of a 12-unit prewar building between East 77th and East 78th streets, The Real Deal reports. With that placement comes the expected perks—24/7 doormen, a private elevator, private storage—and more elusive features, like wood paneled library that feels more European chateau than metropolitan apartment.

The foyer combines sleek and spare checkerboard floor tiling and white-washed walls with more intricate, gold-accented design elements

The apartment includes three bedrooms, four baths, and an invitingly informal eat-in kitchen. Rich, dark woodwork and cheerful yellow fabric accents are common through lines. With the Metropolitan Museum of Art less than four blocks away and Central Park as a humble 843-acre backyard, this home includes built-in access to culture and recreation that any New Yorker would covet.

The dining room features a statement wallpaper which correlates to the yellow-lined china cabinet and carpet (matching that on the foyer staircase).

Although Radziwill was not the most recent owner, photos make it easy to infer both the reasons she was drawn to the space, and the influence she left on its design. The wallpaper in the dining room is quintessentially Radziwill, who had an affinity for decking her walls in both Paris and New York with uniquely patterned fabrics, and favored chinoiserie and Indian art motifs.

The spacious primary bedroom offers plenty of room for additional seating, park views, and ample morning light.

The crown molding and sun-dappled lighting—made possible by a surplus of windows looking out into treetops—give the space a subtle Parisian ambiance, another quality Radziwill valued. “When New York gets too stressful, I know it’s time to come to Paris,” she told ELLE Decor. In addition to several Manhattan homes, she also owned a balconied Paris flat near the Jardins du Ranelagh.

The duplex is listed at $16.9 million with Adam D. Modlin of Modlin Group.

Grace McCarty is a freelance Associate Digital Editor at ELLE Decor, where she covers design trends, shopping, and culture. She previously held a staff position at SELF Magazine, where she focused on beauty, style, and wellness. Her work has also appeared in Glamour and Parade. 

Chiwoniso Kaitano has been the executive director of MacDowell since 2023. The oldest continuously operating artist residency in the United States, MacDowell’s mission is “to nurture the arts by offering talented individuals an inspiring residential environment in which to produce enduring works of the creative imagination,” according to its website. Located in the woody town of Peterborough, in Southern New Hampshire, MacDowell offers residencies in seven artistic disciplines for two to eight weeks year-round, awarding around 300 fellowships annually.

Prior to MacDowell, Kaitano was executive director of two arts education–focused nonprofits: Girl Be Heard, a global NGO, and Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy in Brooklyn. Over the past two years, Kaitano has focused on raising MacDowell’s profile within the larger art sector. Though MacDowell is among the most respected residency programs in the world, she feels that organizations like it have slowly been pushed to the fringes of the art world discourse, something she hopes to change. In a time when art and culture are under attack, particularly by the current presidential administration, Kaitano believes residency programs are key to supporting artists.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: Can you tell me a bit about MacDowell’s history and how you see it relating to our current cultural and political moment?

Chiwoniso Kaitano: We are the oldest artist residency continuously running in the United States, and certainly one of the older ones worldwide. We were founded in 1907 by Edward and Marian MacDowell, who were both pianists and composers themselves. We’re 118 years old, so we’ve managed to keep this enterprise going for almost 125 years. What we did over a century ago and what we do now hasn’t really changed. We’re a sanctuary, a retreat, a place for artists to come for two to eight weeks to create art. We have seven disciplines: architecture, film/video, interdisciplinary arts, literature, music composition, theatre, and visual arts. Every and any artistic medium is represented.

I’ve been in this job for two years—I’m starting my third year here—and I was new to the sector of [direct] artist support. I come from arts education, so it has been learning curve for me. The advantage of that is I’ve been able to bring relatively fresh eyes to a pretty old sector. Even in those two years, the cultural world has changed dramatically. From when I started this job and where we are now, being an artist-support organization is significantly different. The broader conversation along political and cultural lines is impacting us, and it’s certainly impacting many organizations that are smaller and younger than us. What we are trying to do, as a legacy organization or an organization of a certain age, is figure out how we can use that to help others in the broader art sector navigate and negotiate the space in this moment—and thrive in this moment and come out of it.

Being new to this community, one thing that has surprised me has been how residencies are on the fringe of the art sector. The big galleries and the big museums are the conversation now. The industry is really driving the direction and pace of creation for artists. Somehow in that whole mix, the place where art begins, which is the residency, has been relegated to the fringe of the ecosystem, and I’ve sort of made it my personal mission to bring us back to the center of the conversation.

What would you say are some of the biggest challenges that organizations like yours are facing right now?

Nonprofit arts institutions have always struggled with funding. I think that’s been true under any administration or any sort of cultural regime. That’s always been true. I think what’s different about this moment is that it’s not just a lack of arts funding, it’s the active deactivation of federal-level arts funding. That’s a problem, particularly to organizations that are much smaller than we are and rely on that resource. Coupled with that is—I’m going to call it censorship, the prescription on what art should be made, how artists are making it, what subjects they should be talking about. Artistic expression is definitely something that is a current challenge. Just look at Amy Sherald canceling her exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because [the museum] wasn’t sure this was the right moment to be showing some of her art. I thought that was extraordinarily courageous of her, and maybe a symbol of how individual artists and institutional organizations like ours need to be acting and reacting in this space.

Would you say an organization like MacDowell in its direct support for artists being essential right now?

Our formula for a long time has been time, space, and freedom to create—that’s our mission. The conversations we’ve had internally over the last couple of years is, do artists still need support in the same way? Are artists residency still relevant in the same way? And the answer to that is decisively, “Yes.” We’re absolutely still relevant. One thing I always talk about is that the public—ordinary people, citizens—is interacting with art every day, whether it’s reading a book or newspaper, whether it’s going to museum, watching a film, or listening to a song. The creator of what you’re consuming started somewhere, and it started in a place of solitude and reflection—maybe in their private studio or maybe in a place like MacDowell, where they had a condition that could foment creativity. For me, it’s a privilege to be able a small part of this arts ecosystem: the place where art begins.

A significant percentage of MacDowell’s residents likely come from urban centers. Can you talk about what it means for them to be able to travel to Southern New Hampshire and be away from their daily lives and networks?

That’s a huge part of our kind of artistic residency formula. Over the last couple of years, I’ve meet residency directors from all over, and some of them have urban residencies where, for example, an artist is in a townhouse in Brooklyn. These are all wonderful and valid and necessary experiences. But the difference with MacDowell, which is 500 acres in the woods of Southern New Hampshire, is that there is this distraction-free component. Coupled with that is nature and the feeling you get when you’re away from your hectic, everyday life, when you’re away from the urbanity of it all, and you go for a hike. Artists’ sanctuaries and residencies are spaces specifically created to immerse an artist in that environment. I mentioned our formula of time, space, and freedom to create. The other components to that formula are nature and community. You’re in the woods with a small group of other artists in a place where you’re completely away from your day job, if you have one; your life in the city; doing groceries—all of that. We try to peel that away, so you are alone with your thoughts and your creativity in your private studio, in wooded seclusion, with all your material needs getting taken care of. Our goal is, for that moment in time, to help you unlock the thing it is you need to be reflective and to create something that will have impact on the culture. What’s to say that this formula works? I can say that we’ve been doing this at this point for almost 125 years, and our results, as it were, speak for themselves—Pulitzers, Academy Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, Grammys.

You mentioned earlier that you have a background in leading an arts education organization. How have you applied your background is in arts education to your vision for MacDowell?

I have a very nonlinear career path. My academic credentialing is in law, specifically human rights law. I spent a brief amount of time working as a junior human rights advocate at Human Rights Watch. In between there somewhere, I worked in tech and software for 10 years. But the last 10 years of my life have been focused on arts administration. The intersection between arts education and artists residency perhaps is that arts education is a form of artist support. You are catching people when they are younger. I honestly think that some of the challenges we see now in the arts ecosystem—defunding, the lack of resources, artists struggling—is because we haven’t done enough to educate our public and audiences and our future publics and audiences about the importance of art in a functioning, healthy society. I certainly think there are some countries getting the mix right. Many of them tend to be in Europe, but the United States certainly has a long way to go in terms of educating audiences about how art can knit community and people together. We continue on the spot. This is a journey I’m on. I decided over a decade ago that this was a calling for me. It’s more than just a job. I feel called to work in the artist-support sector, to advocate and amplify as I am able to, and to make sure organizations that also see that as a responsibility for them as well.

I agree that the United States hasn’t done a good enough job about educating the public about the importance of art via arts education. It’s gotten even more dire with the recent cuts to the NEA and the NEH, which did bring art and culture to various communities across the country. Was MacDowell impacted by these cuts?

We were a recipient of NEA funding, and like many of our sister organizations in the sector, we received that letter a few months ago about termination of our grant. We are fortunate that it wasn’t a huge part of our budget, and because we do have generous supporters, they were able to step in and fill that gap for us. This is a community of artist-support organizations, and we know many smaller organizations that were severely impacted. For me and for MacDowell, the conversation is less “were we as an organization impacted?” Yes, we were. We were able to weather this particular storm, but we do have concern and care for the sector. I think there is power in numbers, and I think organizations like MacDowell do have a responsibility to lead in this moment and help and support them.

A woman dubbed the “Ketamine Queen” has agreed to plead guilty of selling the drugs that ultimately killed Friends actor Matthew Perry.

Jasveen Sangha, 42, will plead guilty to five charges in Los Angeles, including one count of distributing ketamine resulting in death or bodily injury, according to the Justice Department.

The American-British dual-national originally faced nine criminal counts. Federal prosecutors called her Los Angeles home a “drug-selling emporium” and found dozens of vials of ketamine during a raid.

Perry was found dead in a back yard jacuzzi at his Los Angeles home in October 2023, with an examination finding his death was caused by the acute effects of ketamine.

Sangha is one of five people – including medical doctors and the actor’s assistant – who US officials say supplied ketamine to Perry, exploiting his drug addiction for profit, and leading to his overdose death.

They include: Dr Salvador Plasencia and Dr Mark Chavez, two doctors who sold ketamine; Kenneth Iwamasa, who worked as Perry’s live-in assistant and both helped purchase and inject the actor with ketamine; and Eric Fleming, who sold ketamine he’d gotten from Sangha to Perry.

All five have since agreed to plead guilty to charges in the case. Sangha’s criminal trial had been pushed several times and currently was scheduled to begin next month.

She is expected to appear in federal court in the coming weeks to formally enter her guilty plea as part of the agreement with federal authorities.

Her attorney, Mark Geragos, told the BBC in a statement that “she’s taking responsibility for her actions”.

Sangha faces a maximum sentence of 60 years in federal prison, according to the Justice Department.

Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It can distort perception of sight and sound and makes the user feel disconnected and not in control.

It is used as an injectable anaesthetic for humans and animals because it makes patients feel detached from their pain and environment.

The substance is supposed to be administered only by a physician, investigators say, and patients who have taken the drug should be monitored by a professional because of its possible harmful effects.

Perry’s death and the investigation into how he obtained so much of the drug over multiple years offered a glimpse into Hollywood’s ketamine drug network, which one doctor called the “wild west” in an interview with the BBC.

Federal authorities accused Sangha of supplying ketamine from her “stash house” in North Hollywood since at least 2019, alleging in an indictment that she worked with celebrities and high-end clients.

More than 80 vials of ketamine were allegedly found there in a search before her arrest in March 2024, along with thousands of pills that included methamphetamine, cocaine and Xanax.

The home, called the “Sangha Stash House” in a federal indictment, was where she is alleged to have packaged and distributed drugs.

Sangha is said to have mixed with celebrities socially, with one of her friends telling the Daily Mail she attended the Golden Globes and the Oscars.

Her social media presence depicted an extravagant lifestyle, including parties and trips to Japan and Mexico.

As one of Taylor Swift‘s closest friends, Zoe Kravitz was one of the first people to hear songs from the pop star’s new album The Life of a Showgirl.

And according to the actress, her bestie’s upcoming LP is worth all of the hype it’s already garnered in the six days since Swift first announced it last week. “I’ve heard bits of it,” Kravitz recently told Extra during an interview alongside Austin Butler for their new movie, Caught Stealing.

“It’s fantastic,” she continued. “Yeah, of course … No skips.”

When the interviewer replied that a skip-less album is “rare,” Kravitz asserted, “For her it’s not.”

At this point, the Batman star is an expert in Swift’s music. In addition to being friends with the 14-time Grammy winner for years, Kravitz has co-written songs with Swift in the past, lending her pen to Midnights opening track “Lavender Haze.”

The two women are so close, in fact, that Kravitz stayed at one of Swift’s homes with mom Lisa Bonet after having to evacuate her own residence amid the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year. While there, the two women accidentally lost Bonet’s pet snake Orpheus inside the Eras Tour headliner’s bathroom, resulting in Swift’s house manager having to take apart the musician’s cabinetry in order to get the reptile out.

“We completely destroyed Taylor’s bathroom, and there was just this moment where I was like, ‘Either we destroy her bathroom, or I have to tell her that there’s a snake somewhere in her house,’” Kravitz recalled Aug. 12 on Late Night With Seth Meyers. “I remember calling her and saying, ‘Hey … I wanted to talk to you about something,’ and she was like, ‘Is it the fact that you almost lost a snake in our house and destroyed my bathroom?’”

Kravitz’s comments on Showgirl come less than a week after Swift announced that her 12th studio album is set to arrive Oct. 3. Produced by Max Martin and Shellback, the project features 12 tracks — including a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter.

“[The album is] a lot more upbeat, and it’s a lot more fun pop excitement,” Swift said of Showgirl on boyfriend Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast. “My main goals were melodies that were so infectious, you’re almost angry at it.”

Vought Rising marks another spinoff series in the world of The Boys, expanding off of Eric Kripke’s mothership series, which still has one more season on the way.

The prequel series was first announced over a year ago during San Diego Comic-Con 2024. Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash will lead the show with a stacked cast of supes.

For everything we know about Vought Rising, read on below:

When does Vought Rising come out?

A release date has not yet been specified for the prequel series to The Boys.

Has Vought Rising begun production?

Production is set to begin this month.

Who will be in Vought Rising?

 Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash are set to headline and produce Vought Rising, and which they will reprise their characters from The Boys, Soldier Boy and Stormfront, respectively.

Deadline broke the news of Elizabeth Posey’s casting in March 2025. Variety first reported the casting of Will Hochman (Blue Bloods).

Jorden Myrie (Sherwood), Nicolò Pasetti (Bel Canto), Ricky Staffieri (The Bear and Brian J. Smith (Sense8) were added as series regulars in August 2025.

RELATED: Everything We Know About ‘The Boys’ Season 5 So Far

Deadline first exclusively reported the additions of Mason Dye (Stranger Things) and Kiki Layne (The Old Guard 2) as series regulars in August 2025. Dye had previously been cast as Bombsight in Season 5 of The Boys.

Prime Video revealed some core cast members and their characters in costume in August 2025. Hochman will play Torpedo and Posey will play Private Angel.

What is Vought Rising about?

“It’s a twisted murder mystery about the origins of Vought in the 1950s, the early exploits of Soldier Boy, and the diabolical maneuvers of a Supe known to fans as Stormfront, who was then going by the name Clara Vought,” Kripke and showrunner Paul Grellong told fans at Comic-Con 2024. “We cannot wait to blow your minds and trouble your souls with this salacious, grisly saga drenched in blood and Compound V.”

RELATED: ‘The Boys’ & ‘Vought Rising’ EP Paul Grellong Inks New Overall Deal With Sony Pictures Television

Soldier Boy and Stormfront have similar origin stories. Ackles’ Soldier Boy is the first non-aging American Supe, created by Frederick Vought, during World War II. Stormfront was Vought’s first successful test subject for Compound V, and they got married before moving to the United States.

Who else is behind Vought Rising?

The Boys series executive producer Paul Grellong serves as executive producer and showrunner on Vought Rising, which comes from the main creative auspices behind The Boys franchise, led by the mothership’s developer, executive producer and showrunner Eric Kripke.

Kripke executive produces Vought Rising alongside Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur, Pavun Shetty, Ken Levin, Jason Netter, Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson, and Michaela Starr. The series is produced by Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios, in association with Kripke Enterprises, Point Grey Pictures, and Original Film.

Are there other spinoffs in the world of The Boys?

Yes. Other spinoffs include the animated The Boys Presents: Diabolical, the college-set spinoff Gen V, the second season of which arrives in September, and the upcoming The Boys: Mexico, executive produced by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal.

RELATED: Everything We Know About ‘Gen V’ Season 2 So Far

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was canceled less than two months after Late Night with Deborah Vance suffered a similar fate on HBO Max’s Hacks.

It’s a fate that has not gone unnoticed by the stars and creators of the latter.

“What’s happening in late-night happened on the show. Deborah left the show and in the world of Hacks, the franchise ended, so it’s very weird that this is happening with Stephen Colbert right now because a lot of our season [four] was building up to that moment,” Paul W. Downs, who is a co-creator and co-showrunner of the series who also plays manager Jimmy, told Deadline.  

Speaking at the Deadline Contenders at HBO Max event in Hollywood, Downs added that it’s been a “surreal moment for us, in light of what’s going on.”

Watch the panel conversation here.

But there’s good news for Jean Smart’s Vance as the show heads into Season 5, which is currently being written. “A lot of our Season 5 is going to be about her sort of reinventing herself and rewriting her legacy after she’s been blamed for the death of late-night,” he said.

Downs was joined at the event by Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, who co-created and co-showrun Hacks, as well as Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, and Smart, who appeared virtually. The event also included scripts from Hacks as well as music inspired by the series and costumes from the show, which TV Academy voters could peruse in between sessions. There was also a conversation with a number of the below-the-line folk from Hacks including cinematographer Adam Bricker, costume designer Kathleen Felix-Hager, casting director Linda Lowy, production designer Rob Tokarz and editor Susan Vaill.

In the show’s ninth episode, after having a sex-pest movie star on as a guest, Ava leaks the fact that a joke was cut to protect his reputation. This leads Vance to quit live on air in a special post-Oscars episode.

Aniello said, “We wanted to explore less so the exact what is late-night in this moment, even though we do explore that, but we really wanted to explore who is Deborah now, hosting late-night. It’s more interesting to explore the relationship with Ava in making this and of course, there is the battle of art, commerce and what happens with Bob Lipka.”

“We have a very optimistic perspective about the industry. What Deborah does in ‘A Slippery Slope’ — the ninth episode — when she leaves late-night, she does it because she wants to fight for an industry that works better for artists, and as a comedian, she doesn’t want to let herself be censored and capitulate to this tech company and her corporate overlords. We try to make it feel aspirational. We wish there were a female late-night host. We wish there was someone who stood up to corporate greed the way that Deborah does. It’s wish fulfillment,” added Downs.

Smart said that she loved watching Johnny Carson and Steve Allen host The Tonight Show when she was growing up. “I was very excited when I found it was going to be hosting the late-night show. It’s always something that I thought would be great fun, and for somebody like Deborah, it’s the perfect fit. She has control. She’s running a party. But also, too, because it was something that was unreachable for women, that made it more enticing for her,” she added.

Einbinder’s first entry into the business was doing a stand-up set on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She was also the youngest comedian to ever do a set on the CBS show and was the last onstage set for over a year as a result of the pandemic. “It was so meaningful. It’s an institution that has meant so much, and it’s such a vehicle for so many artists. We all have people in the comedy community that came up through the late-night systems. It is cool and fun to do it that justice. It was really an honor,” she said.

In fact, Statsky interned at Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O’Brien before landing a full-time job on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

“Late Night was my first official comedy writing job. I was 24 years old. I was scared out of my mind and it really forged in fire in terms of how those shows are made. When the three of us starting writing the season, we wanted to pay homage to what it’s like to host a late-night show, what a challenge that is, but also what it’s like to write a late-night show, make your show five days a week. We wanted to show just how hard these shows are to make and how much work goes into it,” she said.

In the season, Einbinder’s Ava quits after finding out that the writers were splurging on fancy lunches, on her dime, but not before throwing a $70 branzino at the window. Statsky was asked who actually hurled the fish. “It was a different kind of fish,” she joked.

Season 4 is clearly a homage to a genre that is struggling, but it’s also a homage to Los Angeles. Vance’s L.A. home was a house in Altadena that was affected by the wildfires earlier this year, and while some of the season was shot in Singapore and Las Vegas, there’s a lot of L.A., including a memorable plotline about Ava moving into the Americana.

Statsky joked, “I spent a lot of time at the Americana. It’s amazing. I’ve always wanted to live there, yeah, because I love the Cheesecake Factory. That’s it, actually.”

“We’re fighting for doing this the way we think it should be done. We’re lucky to make the show. We want to keep production here in Los Angeles. We want to keep this city and Hollywood working the way it has been for many years, and we feel lucky to be a part of doing that,” she added.

The team also paid tribute to some of the fantastic guest stars this season including Julianne Nicholson, who plays a cocaine-snorting TikTok star who gets famous as Dance Mom, except she’s not actually a mother; and Jimmy Kimmel, who kicks off at Vance for attempting to lure Kristen Bell onto her show even though he “got full custody when Conan died.”

Smart was charmed by both. “They both did performances that we did not see coming. Jimmy, Mr. Nice Guy, was so awful to Deborah and so hilarious and so shocking, that was a riot, and Julianne, no one’s ever seen Julianne like that. She’s amazing,” she said.

Hacks, which has been renewed for Season 5, scored 14 Emmy nominations this year including Outstanding Comedy Series, which it won last year.

The series, which also stars Megan Stalter, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Mark Indelicato and Rose Abdoo, along with Dan Bucatinsky, Helen Hunt, Tony Goldwyn, Kaitlin Olson, Jane Adams, Lauren Weedman, Christopher McDonald, Poppy Liu, Lorenza Izzo, Johnny Sibilly, Paul Felder, Polly Draper, Luenell and Aristotle Athari, is produced by Universal Television. It is executive produced by Downs and Aniello via their Paulilu banner, Statsky via First Thought Productions, as well as Michael Schur via Fremulon, David Miner for 3 Arts Entertainment, Morgan Sackett and Joe Mande.

The graphic designer responsible for the 007 gun logo as well as countless classic film posters has died, aged 103.

Joe Caroff, whose work can be seen on the posters for films including West Side Story, A Hard Day’s Night, Last Tango in Paris, Cabaret, Manhattan and The Last Temptation of Christ, died on Sunday.

His sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, told the New York Times he been under hospice care at his home in Manhattan, one day short of his 104th birthday.

Caroff worked on more than 300 campaigns during his career, but his first two commissions turned out to be among his most enduring – and lucrative.

First, United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961). The better to suggest rough brickwork, Caroff scuffed the lettering, then added fire escapes and perching balletic dancers.

Adapting the font to suit the material became a trademark. Other key examples include his poster for Manhattan (1979), one of more than a dozen collaborations with Woody Allen. In that image, Caroff assembled silhouettes of recognisable New York skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building, Chrysler building and the twin towers to spell out the word “Manhattan”.

The second task assigned to Caroff by Chasman was to design a letterhead for the publicity release for the first Bond film, Dr No, in 1962.

“He said, ‘I need a little decorative thing on top,’” Caroff recalled in 2021. “I knew [Bond’s] designation was 007, and when I wrote the stem of the seven, I thought, ‘That looks like the handle of a gun to me.’ It was very spontaneous, no effort, it was an instant piece of creativity.”

Taking inspiration from Ian Fleming’s favourite gun, a Walther PPK, Caroff extended the image with a barrel and trigger and was paid $300 – a fee never increased by any residuals or royalties.

As with much of his work, the logo was also uncredited, and Caroff never received the public acclaim or name recognition of his close contemporary, Saul Bass.

Other key posters included Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), as well as Last Tango in Paris (1972), Rollerball (1975), An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Gandhi (1982).

As well as working on graphics and posters, Caroff created a number of opening title sequences, including those for Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), Volker Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman (1985), and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

He sought above all else “effervescence” in his work, he said in the 2022 TCM documentary By Design: The Joe Caroff Story. “I want it to have a life, it doesn’t want to lie there flat.”