Jonathan Scott dreamed about entertaining thousands like master illusionist David Copperfield. Twin brother Drew figured he’d have an NBA contract by the time he was 20. Plan B was to get their contractor and real estate licenses. Guess that worked out.

From variety hours to talk shows to dedicated specials, stand-up comedy on television is just about as old as television. Millions (I am guesstimating) who have never seen a comic work a nightclub or theater have seen dozens upon dozens of them on TV. Some of these people decide to become comedians themselves.

It was, not surprisingly, a night for politics, with everyone from host Stephen Colbert to Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Alec Baldwin getting in zingers about Donald Trump — all to be upstaged by Sean Spicer himself, in a controversial appearance that set social media afire. But Emmy night was not only about politics.

For the past year, Dylan O’Brien has been in hiding. He spent most of his time inside his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., wondering whether he’d ever be the same person he was before the accident. Not just emotionally, but physically too: After major reconstructive surgery that left him with four metal plates holding one side of his face together, he feared he’d never look the same again.

Lady Gaga has postponed her world tour’s European leg until next year because of ongoing health problems, the tour’s promoter said Monday.

The brassy, flashy American auteur has made a movie in a fugue state about the world’s current state. It’s set up as a marital drama and designed to feel like a horror movie. But those are just clothes, adornments to disguise the angry body throbbing underneath.

Were Ringo Starr the kind of guy to delve deep into the blues, he might well have taken a stab at Willie Dixon’s classic “I Can’t Quit You Baby” on his forthcoming album, “Give More Love.” Perhaps not in the original context of being unable to escape a toxic relationship with a romantic partner but more a heartfelt expression of his attitude about continuing to play music at age 77.

Greta Gerwig didn’t get much sleep leading to the premiere of her directorial debut, the coming-of-age dramedy “Lady Bird,” at the Telluride Film Festival. For the actress turned writer-director, previously best known for her work in such movies as “Frances Ha” and “20th Century Women,” the thought of screening “Lady Bird” in front of an audience of die-hard cinephiles and awards-season tastemakers — in the same opening-night slot that launched “Moonlight” last year, no less — was both thrilling and utterly frightening. On the flight to the festival, she’d read through the program and had felt a shudder of fear at the caliber of filmmakers she would find herself among.

Three years ago, all the signs pointed one way: Tinashe was on her way to pop stardom. In 2012, when she was just 19, she produced two critically acclaimed mixtapes that landed her a deal at RCA. A year later her debut single, “2 On,” made it to No. 24 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Her 2014 debut album, “Aquarius,” was met with critical acclaim, and she was nominated for a BET Award. Since then, the singer-songwriter has toured with Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry, collaborated with Britney Spears, earned praise from idol Janet Jackson and issued two buzzy projects, including last year’s digital-only work “Nightride.” Yet Tinashe’s career has hit an impasse.

New Line Cinema’s blockbuster horror movie "It," adapted from the Stephen King novel, is expected to dominate the box office for a second straight weekend after a record-breaking debut, further demonstrating the power of the horror genre to draw audiences.

Book review

Hillary Clinton was surrounded by women the moment she lost the 2016 presidential election. "Things had been going too well for too long" when, on the morning of Oct. 28, her spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri approached her and longtime aide Huma Abedin and said two words: Jim Comey. "I immediately knew it was bad," Clinton writes in her memoir "What Happened." There was a moment of mournful sisterhood as Abedin learned that the FBI was probing her husband Anthony Weiner’s computer, ensuring that the final week of the election was going to be about Clinton’s email server. "This man is going to be the death of me," Abedin said of Weiner. Clinton gave her a hug.

New Line Cinema’s adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel floated to the top in this weekend’s box office, breaking the record for the largest opening of a horror movie ever, and blowing past analysts’ $55 million projections to the tune of $123.1 million in the U.S. and Canada. The historic opening -- the third largest in 2017, if the estimate holds -- follows a sleepy Labor Day weekend that delivered the lowest ticket sales in years.

Q&A

Let’s say you’re a director who has a heralded comeback with the final chapter of a three-part, 18-year romantic film series. And you follow it up by releasing a 12-year epic project that nearly wins best picture. Then, barely a year later, you make an underrated comedy derived from your own college baseball career. You can’t really top all that if you’re Richard Linklater, the American auteur coming off the triple threat of "Before Midnight," "Boyhood" and "Everybody Wants Some," could you? Yet here comes the 57-year-old, riding into award season with his low-key intimacies and profound digressions once again.

After Jeff Bauman watched "Stronger" for the first time, he wasn’t sure how he felt. He was hot, that was for certain; he couldn’t stop sweating. He just wanted to go home and sleep.

After a summer of superhero movies, the serious fall season returns, with its roster of prestige films and Oscar-caliber actors-people like Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Idris Elba.

War is hell, or it could just be human

"I used to want to save the world, to end war and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light. I learned that inside every one of them, there will always be both.”

Tentatively titled "Iraqi Sniper," the film will follow the mysterious insurgent shown engaged in a battle with Chris Kyle's character in "American Sniper."

There was a time, not that long ago, when John Mayer was hardly thrilled with how his life and career were playing out. Sure, he was a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum recording artist, and one both championed by blues-guitar idols like Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy and dating Hollywood starlets in equal measure. But back then, suffocated by his place in mainstream celebrity culture, Mayer says he couldn't appreciate his success.

One day, during a recent rehearsal with his brothers, Zachary Hanson used the “F” word. This, in itself, should not be notable. Hanson has four children. He drives a pickup. He recently shed 35 pounds with Lose It! And lots of people use the “F” word. Except, for many, he is still Zac, the adorable, shaggy-haired preteen pounding out “MMMBop.”

It’s been a year of transition for Fifth Harmony: The pop stars parted ways with member Camila Cabello, switched management teams, negotiated a new contract with their label and won greater creative control of their brand. Luckily the newly-minted quartet, who released their third album last week, had the fairy godmother of girl groups to guide them through the tumultuous times: Destiny’s Child alum Kelly Rowland.

As Hollywood wraps up the all-important summer box office season this Labor Day weekend, a sobering reality has gripped the industry.

Jay Baruchel moves behind the camera with blood-on-the-ice hockey comedy ’Goon: Last of the Enforcers’

Scott Shepherd is a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Daryl Davis is a black R&B and blues musician who has been befriending white supremacists for 30 years, trying to convert them.

Analysis of this summer’s box office can properly be dubbed a postmortem, so gruesome were the overall numbers.

Q&A

Cathy Moriarty owes her acting career to a bathing beauty contest. A photo posted at a Bronx nightclub where she had won the competition -- all in pursuit of a pair of black heels with an ankle strap -- caught the eye of Joe Pesci, who in 1978 was working on a movie about a boxer named Jake LaMotta. That photo led to months of auditions for the role of the fighter’s wife, Vickie.

In need of a new cellphone number, the youngest member of Haim — the Los Angeles-based trio she shares with her older sisters, Este and Danielle — recently took herself to T-Mobile, where a worker informed her that her replacement digits would start with the area code 747.

Just hours after it was announced that Todd Phillips and Martin Scorsese are developing a Joker origin story for the screen, Warner Bros./DC says that Jared Leto will return to play the Clown Prince of Crime in a new movie.

You can finally shake it off: Taylor Swift has released her new single. The 27-year-old singer dropped the upbeat song “Look What You Made Me Do” — which uses an interpolation from Right Said Fred’s 1991 hit “I’m Too Sexy” — late Aug. 24 to streaming platforms and iTunes.

Gallery

Carla Hall and her husband just finished a Mediterranean cruise and agreed to visit Vicenza and Aviano in Italy and then Rota in Spain on Friday before she heads back to the States to resume taping “The Chew.”

Q&A

Ryan Reynolds hasn’t been getting a lot of sleep lately. In fact, he was so tired over lunch recently that he declined to eat the vegetables served with his salmon because it would require too much effort.

When director Matt Spicer was casting the title role of his dark tale of obsession and identity “Ingrid Goes West,” he wasn’t sure if Aubrey Plaza would be the right fit.

How do you tell when a song has connected with people in a really big way? "Whenever it becomes a merch item," widely lauded country singer and songwriter Brandy Clark said before the Aug. 18 release of her album, "Brandy Clark: Live From Los Angeles," recorded last year at Hotel Cafe in Hollywood.

Q&A

Samuel L. Jackson isn’t just in the movies. He IS the movies.

When most people think of Baltimore, the blue light district comes to mind -- the area of the city doused in cobalt from police lights atop light poles in areas said to have high crime rates. This is what "The Wire" introduced millions to.

A heavy sadness hovers over the former Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, where prisoners were crammed into tiny cells amid the metal-on-metal mesh of containment and collected sweat, and where you can re-enact the chilling echo from the chakunnnggg of the door slamming shut in solitary confinement, leaving only disorienting darkness. The building is massive, ominous, haunting. It also provides a fascinating glimpse into a piece of Ohio’s past, and what the prison has become since it was shut down in 1990: a movie set and museum.

As "Roseanne" gears up for its return to television after more than two decades off the air, its creators opted to pretend a plot line taken in the original series’ finale never happened. It’s a tactic seen in other shows, too, such as "Will & Grace" and "Dallas."

The latest music video for a track off of the “4:44” album only features about a minute of rapping from Jay-Z. But the video serves as a sort of meta-commentary on black representation in media and artistic ownership.

Caroline Malaby works in Reston, Va., for Carahsoft, an IT company, and most of her colleagues are men. Many of Malaby’s co-workers are die-hard Washington Redskins fans and often talk about the team at the office. But that doesn’t bother Malaby — she follows the Redskins religiously herself. What she can’t stand is the nonstop chatter about a certain fantasy show.

Movies

What with “The Dark Tower” opening and Matthew McConaughey starring in it (and dressed exactly like he just stepped out of one of his Lincoln ads), we’re taking a look at eleven McConaperfomances and putting them into a definitive (yes, definitive) McConaranking.

TV review

There was a time when the nation was terrorized by a single man, and he was neither sitting in the White House with his hand on the Button nor holed up in a cave in Afghanistan plotting his next move against America. The Unabomber eluded capture for a decade and half, sending most of his deadly packages through the U.S. mail, ultimately killing three and injuring more than a dozen until he was finally captured in 1996.

Bringing animation's most fragile worrywart to life took a team of Twin Cities artists, financial backing from a red-hot streaming service and the support of showbiz heavyweights. But right now, all the voice of Phillip the Egg needs is water. Buckets of it.

Tucked behind a sleepy tree-lined road, David Senak's home gives the impression of suburban peace. A welcome flag hangs from the window. The garden is well-tended. On a recent afternoon, young neighbors were having a lacrosse catch.

Rather than the gray skies, beige overcoats and grim tension of many thrillers set during the Cold War, the new film “Atomic Blonde” exists in a boldly sensual world of neon-streaked lighting, high-glamour outfits, moody synth-pop and intense action. All of which is used to spotlight the hard-charging performance by star (and producer) Charlize Theron, who does much of her own on-screen fighting.

Remember back to a time, if you can, before widespread cellphones, before texting and email were preferred modes of communication. The new film "Landline" is set specifically in 1995 and brings back a world of pay phones, pockets full of change to pay for pay phones and the fact it once seemed much more likely to just not connect with someone.

When it comes to the big screen, Christopher Nolan is a true believer -- and with blockbusters like "The Dark Knight" trilogy, "Inception" and "Interstellar," he has translated that passion into more than $4 billion in grosses collectively at the global box office.

On a recent Wednesday morning, the staff of Rotten Tomatoes gathers in a Beverly Hills office, laptops open — steeling themselves for the next onslaught of reviews for Hollywood’s biggest upcoming movies.

Actor Bryan Cranston made stops in Germany and England this week in his first USO tour, giving him a chance to step out of the spotlight. "I gained so much today being with people who are excited about what they do.”

Stars and Stripes sat down with actor, writer, director and producer Bryan Cranston during a USO tour stop in Ramstein, Germany, for a chat about life in the arts and how military experience might lead to a career in Hollywood.

It was a weekend of movies surpassing expectations. Two non-franchise, non-superhero movies topped the box office for the first time this summer, beating “War for the Planet of the Apes” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” Christopher Nolan’s gritty World War II drama “Dunkirk” opened this weekend and ranks first at the box office, earning an estimated $50.5 million. And coming in second? Perhaps this summer’s biggest live-action comedy hit, Universal’s raunch-com “Girls Trip,” which earned an estimated $30.8 million.

Disney’s most famous duck family is preparing for a highly anticipated comeback.

Luc Besson was feeling a little discombobulated. On a recent afternoon, the French director of such films as “La Femme Nikita,” “The Fifth Element” and “Lucy” sat in a Los Angeles multiplex, where he had just introduced a preview screening of his latest movie, the gonzo space opera “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.” Besson himself was in the midst of hopping around the cities of this planet to promote the film, which opened stateside July 21. Hours earlier, he’d flown in from Paris. The day before, he had been in Shanghai.

Hollywood is in the midst of its stormiest summer in years. Box-office ticket sales since the first weekend in May are down 8 percent from a year earlier, according to data firm ComScore, prompting the stocks of major cinema chains to drop.

Oscar-winner Mark Rylance didn’t need to method-act his way into “Dunkirk” and his role as a civilian volunteer who crosses the English Channel in his own boat to rescue stranded soldiers.

John Mayer never relied on multicolored lighting, confetti and pyrotechnics to help him during his live shows, like some of his peers.

Having provided the blueprint for girl groups throughout the ’90s and the early 2000s, TLC’s brand of slinky, hip-hop-infused R&B-pop can be traced through a current generation of R&B talents, including Tinashe, Sevyn Streeter, Kehlani and Ella Mai.

Q&A

It’s been 25 years since Geena Davis starred in “A League of Their Own,” a film that broke ground not only for its strong, mostly female cast but because it was a major film directed by a woman, Penny Marshall.

With “War for the Planet of the Apes,” Steve Zahn has landed the biggest part in the biggest film of his career. There’s only caveat: He doesn’t actually appear on screen because he’s playing a chimpanzee.

“No more love ballads,” Charlie Puth declares. “That was people nudging me in a direction that I didn’t want to go in.”

Q&A

Alfred Molina has been a jack-of-all-stages, creating memorable characters and tackling multiple genres on the big and small screens as well as in the theater.

“Saturday Night Live” cast member Kyle Mooney admits that the idea of standing at a mic and telling jokes about himself makes him uncomfortable.

The maestro Leonard Cohen used to describe his ballads as little things designed to help “get you through the dishes.” Rico Nasty, a 20-year-old rapper raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, approaches her craft with the same sense of utility.

Q&A

To the easily offended, Trey Parker has long been a kind of comedic super-villain. For decades, Parker and his longtime collaborator Matt Stone have been blowing up taboos left and right on their Comedy Central show “South Park,” in films like “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” and “Team America: World Police,” and in their Broadway smash “The Book of Mormon.”

Commentary

It certainly looked like a bomb. “Transformers: The Last Knight,” which cost Paramount Pictures over $350 million to make and market, earned a lame $69 million during its first five days in U.S. theaters in mid-June. Paramount executives could overlook that performance because in China, where the “Transformers” series has enjoyed a decade of wild popularity, the film earned over $123 million during the same period. But the time when Hollywood filmmakers could count on Chinese viewers to rescue them from disaster might be rapidly coming to an end.

It’s been a wild ride for director Jon Watts. Tasked with bringing everyone’s favorite web-slinger to the big screen in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Watts has entered the swirling $11.7 billion-grossing maelstrom of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

After puttering around the track for several years in teen vehicles like “The Fault in Our Stars” and the Divergent series, Ansel Elgort’s film career is about to jump into overdrive. As the wheelman in the car chase crime spectacular “Baby Driver,” he shows the winsome charm of old but reveals the unexpected ability to deal with high-speed crashes, rampant violence and wide-ranging genres of essential pop music.

In the short term, sure: It’s well and good for Universal and Illumination Entertainment that “Despicable Me 3” just won the weekend in North American theaters. Yet what the solid debut of the fourth film in the Minion universe really illuminates is the rare larger commercial milestone being hit here.

Sony Pictures Entertainment was running out of options for its most valuable film franchise, Spider-Man. After 15 years and five movies of web-slinging, the studio was struggling to give the character a much-needed reset.

Edgar Wright tells an audience that has shown up for an early screening of his latest film, “Baby Driver,” that he’s had the idea for the movie spinning around in his head for more than two decades. The spark of inspiration that has burned all these years came one day when a 21-year-old Wright was cruising around listening to “Bell Bottoms” by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Ross Golan has written hit songs for Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and dozens of other stars. But his most important contribution to pop songwriting today might be a podcast.

Lifehouse will headline the festival on the North Carolina base and there will also be performances by Brett Young, Chord Overstreet, Muddy Magnolias, Temecula Road and DJ SpinDoc.

Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity’s amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature — to say nothing of our private insecurities —resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.

It’s not a good time for Jamie Foxx. It’s a GREAT time. A big reason the Oscar- and Grammy-winning performer is so happy is that he’s starring in “Baby Driver,” the latest feature film from director-writer Edgar Wright. His role in the car chase/romance/heist movie is as the psychotic Bats, a thief who is as violently crazy as he is deadly philosophical.

The trailer for CBS’s “Star Trek: Discovery,” the latest entry in the “Star Trek” universe, feature two women of color — Michelle Yeoh as the starship captain and Sonequa Martin-Green as her first officer — as they engage the Klingon people.

It’s official: Oscar-winning director Ron Howard is taking over the reins of Lucasfilm’s Han Solo “Star Wars” spinoff. Whether that’s a win for fans or the mark of a troubling turn to the dark side for the 40-year-old franchise remains to be seen.

Lizzo may be making some inroads into the mainstream, but she’s doing it by owning and often accentuating her differences. She’s that rare rapper-singer who can also lay down a flute solo. Her music blends everything from indie-rock to gospel, and accentuates her body-positive and feminist viewpoints with a sense of sassiness and sexiness that makes it not just empowering but fun.

Roxane Gay begins her new book — the hardest she’s ever had to write — by describing what it isn’t. “The story of my body is not a story of triumph,” Gay writes in the opening pages. “Mine is not a success story.”

The sun breaks across rooftops in the early days of a Brooklyn spring. The sidewalks are quiet, and Ethan Hawke is inside editing a movie about a shot-to-death singer most people have never heard of. The screen fills with a misfit’s raucous delight at banging on drums and mocking Richard Nixon. Hawke laughs. Then he leans forward, scratches his graying goatee and turns serious.

With her wide-ranging flair for serious drama, absurd comedy, nail-biting crime stories, legal thrillers and romantic roles of all categories, Rachel Weisz might be the most unclassifiable marquee actress in cinema today. She appears in more types of movies than is mathematically possible.

The new “Mummy” reboot is getting pilloried by critics — and that’s delightful news for one group of movie fans.

Music

Jade Jackson can recall every detail of the room in which she played her first gig — the size of the place, what it smelled like, the decor hanging on the walls. But of course she can: The venue, a cozy coffee shop in this tiny Central Coast city, sits just across the street from her parents’ restaurant, where the gifted young country-rock singer has waited tables since her family settled here the summer before she began seventh grade.

Marvel and Disney have created a sort of perpetual motion machine, churning out intellectually spare but critically and commercially successful films based on beloved properties. But DC has done them one better, creating a morally serious cinematic universe devoted to thinking about an interesting question: How would humanity react to the discovery that gods walk amongst us?

We’re not saying that Taylor Swift just released all her music on streaming services at midnight June 9 just because her nemesis, Katy Perry, dropped her new album at midnight June 9. However ... let’s take a look at this intriguing sequence of events.

Q&A

It’s all fun and games until they haul out the gas masks.

“The challenge I present myself with is to get out of my own way,” says Benjamin Montalbano, founder and frontman of Matthaus. “At the end of the day, that’s my MO and my reason for doing this project: to present songs that are digestible but also satisfy my own inner nerdiness.”

“A-leeeee-shaaaa!” The voice is unmistakable. It’s the same one that has announced the giveaway of dozens of free cars. The one that can make anyone - “John Tra-vol-tahhhh!” “Tom Cuh-ru-ooze!” “Celine Dee-onnnn!” - sound as if they’re about to enter the gladiator’s arena.

TV

Don’t keep up with the inner workings of Kevin James’ latest sitcom? It might be time to pay attention, because something odd just happened behind the scenes.

Q&A

Ubisoft announced May 26 that its upcoming video game, "Far Cry 5," will set the series in the United States for the first time. The story pits a player’s band of Heartland resistance fighters against a charismatic doomsday cult leader who kidnaps townspeople all while proclaiming a love of freedom, faith and firearms (not necessarily in that order).

Q&A

At his core, Jay Chandrasekhar, 49, is a storyteller. The actor/writer/director/comedian has been telling stories all his life — often raunchy, hilarious ones with his collaborators in Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that formed at Colgate University in 1990 and went on to make the cult films “Super Troopers” and “Beerfest” in the 2000s.

On a recent spring evening, Tony Kanal and his bandmates prepared to take the stage at the Roxy in Los Angeles. It’d been 21 years since the Southern California-based bassist last performed at the famed Sunset Strip venue, and it was under decidedly different circumstances. At the time, Kanal’s band, No Doubt, was arguably one of the hottest live acts in the world, thanks in large part to the success of its multi-platinum breakout album, 1995’s “Tragic Kingdom.” This time, however, with a brand-new band, he and three other musicians were hoping for little more than a chance to prove their worth.

David Hasselhoff wasn’t actively stalking Zac Efron on the way to the beachside port-a-potty. But now that they were both there he figured, well, why not make the most of it?

Hollywood’s summer has flopped so far.

Hollywood just suffered its worst Memorial Day weekend in 18 years, an eye-popping omen for what’s shaping up to be a bleak summer box office.

Diana, princess of the Amazons, better known as Wonder Woman, has spent 75 years saving the world in DC comic books and TV shows, and has fought alongside Batman and Superman with her sword and Lasso of Truth. Still, her male counterparts have hogged the big-screen glory.

Movies

Hollywood loves a Cinderella story, and Stella Meghie has a real one. In 2009, Meghie quit her job as a publicist for fashion and beauty brands to go back to school and follow her dreams of being a writer-director. In 2011, she completed her screenwriting degree at London’s University of Westminster; the years that followed have been a film student’s dream.

Danny McBride has a special flair for playing obnoxious loudmouths — the kind of outwardly cocky yet inwardly tragic jerks that he’s brought indelibly to life in films like “The Foot Fist Way,” “Pineapple Express,” “This Is the End” and the HBO series “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals.”

There was a time when Hollywood executives were convinced that television would end the movie industry. They were certain no one would want to pay for entertainment when there was free TV to watch.

Stepping inside Disney’s latest theme park attraction, Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission BREAKOUT!, is like being thrust into one of blockbuster films’ pulsating, action-packed trailers.

Max Harwood and Danny Miller have been friends since they attended the same grade school in Washington, D.C. In high school, the two started a garage-rock/punk band.

Book review

Special to The Washington Post

Eddie Vedder stands alone now. Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell’s death May 17 left rock fans reflecting on the grunge era, and many came to a sorrowful realization: Vedder, the frontman of Pearl Jam, is one of the movement’s only icons who is still alive.

TV

Add another TV reboot to the long list of shows back from the dead: “Dynasty” will debut on the CW this fall.