Phyllis Coates, who became television’s first Lois Lane when she was cast in the classic Adventures of Superman series starring George Reeves, died yesterday of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills. She was 96.

Her death was announced by daughter Laura Press to our sister publication The Hollywood Reporter.

Born Gypsie Ann Evarts Stell in Wichita Falls, Texas, on January 15, 1927, Coates and her family later moved to Hollywood. Along with some vaudeville-style performances, Coates launched her showbix career as a chorus girl during the 1940s, often touring the the USO. Later in the decade, she landed small roles in such pictures as Smart Girls Don’t Talk (as the Cigarette Girl, 1948) and My Foolish Heart (1949), and appeared in a series of “Joe McDoakes” comedy shorts as Alice MacDoakes.

In 1951, Coates was invited to audition for the role of Lois Lane in the low-budget feature film Superman and the Mole Men. Starring Reeves as Superman, the film was a de facto TV pilot, and by the end of the year both Reeves and Coates were asked to join the upcoming TV series.

Coates stayed with the series for only one season – 1952-53 – a decision chalked up to conflicts with producers and other projects waiting. Noel Neill took over the role in the second season, and stayed until the final sixth season (a seventh was planned, but Reeves’ unexpected, and still mysterious, death in 1959 ended the show). Until her death, Coates was the last surviving regular cast member of the classic superhero series.

Though best remembered for Superman, Coates would build an extensive roster of TV and film credits in a career that lasted well into the 1990s. She appeared in the now-classic monster movie I Was A Teenage Frankenstein and on ’50s and ’60s TV shows like The Lone Ranger, Lassie, Leave It To Beaver, Hawaiian Eye, Rawhide, Perry Mason, The Untouchables, The Virginian, and Death Valley Days; in 1970’s TV-movie The Baby Maker with Barbara Hershey: and, during the 1980s, Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and, later, one 1994 episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, in which she played the mother of Teri Hatcher’s Lois Lane.

Coates was married four times, the first to Richard L. Bare, director of the McDoakes shorts and later of the TV hit Green Acres, and subsequent unions with jazz musician Robert Nelms, Leave It to Beaver director Norman Tokar and medical doctor Howard Press. All four marriages ended in divorce.

Coates is survived by daughters Laura and Zoe, and granddaughter Olivia.

A lot of people threaten to leave Twitter. Not many of them have actually done it.

This was true even before Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform a year ago. But the parade of calamities since — cutting back on moderation, unplugging servers, reinstating banned accounts, replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges, throttling access to news sites, blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising — has made stepping away more appealing, either because the timeline is toxic or because the site simply doesn’t function the way it used to.

Last April, the company gave NPR a reason to quit — it labeled the network “U.S. state-affiliated media,” a designation that was at odds with Twitter’s own definition of the term. NPR stopped posting from its account on April 4. A week later, it posted its last update — a series of tweets directing users to NPR’s newsletters, app, and other social media accounts. Many member stations across the country, including KUOW in Seattle, LAist in Los Angeles, and Minnesota Public Radio, followed suit.

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. “It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount,” says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR. But Twitter wasn’t just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it’s not impossible to replace.

The week after NPR and KCUR left Twitter, the Ralph Yarl shooting happened in Kansas City. Rosenberg says it was “painful” to stay off Twitter as the story unfolded. “We had just taken away one of our big avenues for getting out information, especially in a breaking news situation — a shooting, one that deals with a lot of really thorny issues of racism and police and the justice system. And a lot of that conversation was happening on Twitter,” Rosenberg says. Instead of rejoining Twitter, KCUR set up a live blog and focused on posting to other social networks. NPR’s editors worked with the station to refine SEO and help spread the story. Even though the station itself wasn’t posting to Twitter, Rosenberg says the story found an audience anyway because very engaged local Twitter users shared the piece with their networks. And while the station informed these users through its website, it also reached new users on Instagram, where Rosenberg says KCUR has “tripled down” its engagement efforts.

On Instagram, KCUR’s strategy is less about driving clicks and more about sharing information within the app. “Instagram doesn’t drive traffic, but frankly neither did Twitter,” Rosenberg says. NPR, meanwhile, has been experimenting with Threads, a new app built by Instagram that launched in July, where NPR is among the most-followed news accounts. Threads delivers about 63,000 site visits a week — about 39 percent of what Twitter provided. But NPR’s memo notes that clicks aren’t necessarily the priority, and the network is “taking advantage of the expanded character limit to deliver news natively on-platform to grow audiences — with enough information for a reader to choose whether to click through.”

NPR posts less to Threads than it did to Twitter, and the team spends about half as much time on the new platform as it did on the old. Danielle Nett, an editor with NPR’s engagement team, writes in the staff memo that spending less time on Twitter has helped with staff burnout. “That’s both due to the lower manual lift — and because the audience on Threads is seemingly more welcoming to publishers than on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign,” Nett writes.

These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

There were signs of social media’s waning importance before the Twitter sale as well as predictions that the era of social media-driven news is coming to an end. But changes to X in the last year have only accelerated these trends, underlining that social media is less rewarding to publishers and less fun for users than it used to be. “The quality of our engagement on the platform was also suffering” before April, Nett wrote in a followup email. “We were on average seeing fewer impressions and smaller reach on our tweets, despite keeping a similar publishing cadence. And I know this is anecdotal, but as someone looking at the account every day, spam replies were getting much more frequent — starting to overpower meaningful feedback and conversation from audiences.” Musk’s now-retracted relabeling of NPR could be seen as a last straw, or as an open door to leave a platform that had lost its utility.

By many estimates, active daily users on Twitter/X are in decline. Not everyone who leaves does it like NPR, in a flurry of headlines and with a final post pinned to their timeline. Instead, it’s more mundane. They check less and less often, finding it less useful, less compelling. It’s not easy to decide to back away; there’s still a fear about leaving — a fear of missing out on a great conversation or a new joke. But as a platform becomes less reliable — either editorially or technically — staying becomes more fraught. And as NPR has demonstrated, you may not be giving up all that much if you walk away.

Jewish schools across England are taking extra precautions to protect their staff and students after the attack on Israel, as the body that provides security advice to Jewish communities in the UK said it had recorded 89 antisemitic incidents between Saturday and Tuesday.

Extra security patrols have been posted at school gates, and trips and after-school detentions have been cancelled.

Several schools said they had carried out “invacuation” drills, where pupils practise sheltering in safe areas or reinforced rooms in the event of a threat. Pupils have been told to avoid wearing identifying school uniform on public transport.

The Community Security Trust reported that the number of antisemitic incidents in the four days from Saturday morning had increased by 324% compared with the same period last year.

“This is a provisional total that is almost certain to increase further as we receive more delayed reports of incidents covering this period, and while we continue to verify and log all the reports that we have currently received,” the CST said.

“Make no mistake: these are anti-Jewish racist incidents and hate crimes in which Jewish people, property and institutions are singled out for hate, including death threats and abuse.

“In many cases, the perpetrators of these disgraceful incidents are using the symbols and language of pro-Palestinian politics as rhetorical weapons with which to threaten and abuse Jewish people.”

The 89 incidents included six assaults, three cases of damage to Jewish property, 14 direct threats and 66 cases of abusive behaviour, including verbal abuse, graffiti, hate mail and online abuse.

Among the examples given by the CST was an Orthodox Jewish man on a London bus being hit in the face by a man who tried to take his religious hat. A Jewish person walking to a synagogue in London was called “dirty Jew” by a stranger, who said “no wonder you’re all getting raped”.

Graffiti reading “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” was daubed on the former home of a rabbi in Nottingham. A group of children in a school blamed a Jewish pupil for the killing of Palestinians.

Most of the incidents took place in London and Greater Manchester.

The CST has recorded spikes in the number of antisemitic incidents during previous conflicts involving Israel and Gaza. In May 2021, it recorded 70 incidents in the first four days, and in July 2014, 29 were noted.

John Dalziel, the headteacher of King David high school in Manchester, said there was a drop in attendance on Monday as parents kept their children at home but numbers had since risen.

“We have 800 Jewish students at this school and almost all of them have family and relatives there who have been affected directly or indirectly,” Dalziel said. “Our main priority is that our school is a place of safety where normal life is continuing away from the 24-hour news cycle.”

Dalziel said Greater Manchester police and the CST had increased their patrols around the school, while trained parent volunteers had been in place, especially at the start and end of the day, to reassure parents.

The school has also held assemblies to discuss the attacks, sharing examples of resilience and kindness. Pupils have been given lessons on online safety, stressing the need to be aware of social media disinformation and graphic images.

The highly visible ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, north-east London, said the aftermath of the atrocities in Israel had “regrettably seen a rise in hate crimes in the UK, which is a cause for extreme concern.

“We commend the police for their increased patrols and reassurances, which play a crucial role in ensuring the safety of our community.”

Edward Daniel, the spokesperson of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), said the group was working with CST’s security team and assessing university Jewish events “on a case-by-case basis”.

Daniel said: “UJS held a briefing for Jewish student leaders on Monday to advise them how to safely proceed with events during this crisis. While there sadly is a need for Jewish students to be more vigilant of their personal security, UJS maintains that university campuses are safe for them to attend, and our team are available to support them.”

Pupils have been told they can take off blazers and ties while travelling on public transport, as have students attending JFS in north London, Europe’s largest Jewish school, which has about 2,000 pupils.

“The most important thing is to ensure the safe passage of students between home and school and to make sure that this school is set up to care for our children during the school day,” JFS’s headteacher, David Moody, said in an email to parents.

A former JFS pupil, Nathanel Young, who was serving in the Israel Defence Forces, was killed on the Gaza border on Saturday. Another former pupil, Jake Marlowe – who had been missing while providing security at a music festival near the Re’im kibbutz close to the border – has been found dead, his family confirmed on Wednesday.

The Jewish community secondary school in Barnet, north London, has introduced extra checks on people entering its site. Melanie Lee, the headteacher, told parents: “There will be heightened vigilance, an increase in the numbers of our own school security team and also enhanced security checks at entry points into the school.”

Broughton Jewish Cassel Fox primary school in Salford is among those that have cancelled school trips and put extra security in place during the school day.

Suella Braverman has urged chief constables to clamp down on any attempts to use flags, songs or swastikas to harass or intimidate members of the Jewish community. Chanting and the waving of a Palestinian flag could be offences, the home secretary said.

Within hours of the attack, the Metropolitan police said they had increased patrols in London “in order to provide a visible presence and reassurance to our communities”.

On Tuesday evening, two protesters scaled Sheffield town hall to replace an Israeli flag flying at half-mast with a Palestinian flag.

Elon Musk allegedly came to Amber Heard‘s defense amid talks his former partner would be fired from “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.”

Per a new Variety report, the Tesla and X (formerly known as Twitter) owner is reported to have strong-armed Warner Bros. into keeping Heard cast as Mera in DC’s long-delayed “Aquaman” follow-up.

According to Variety, Warner Bros. and “Aquaman” director James Wan sent a letter to Heard’s attorney Karl Austen after the film‘s 2018 release to share the decision that Heard would be dropped from the sequel, citing a lack of chemistry with star Jason Momoa.

However, per Variety, Warner Bros. decided not to fire Heard after her former boyfriend Musk and his attorney sent a “scorched-earth letter to Warner Bros. threatening to burn the house down” if Heard was not back in the sequel.

DC Studios could not immediately be reached by IndieWire for comment.

Rumors that Heard would be fired from the “Aquaman” franchise resurfaced amid the defamation trial with Heard and her ex-husband Johnny Depp, with the suit filed in 2019 followed by televised court proceedings in 2022. Heard alleged Depp led a PR “smear campaign” against her, resulting in a “very pared-down version” of her original “Aquaman 2” role.

“I fought to keep my job and the biggest movie opportunity I had to date [with] ‘Justice League’ with the option to [star in] ‘Aquaman.’ I had to fight really hard to stay in ‘Justice League’ because that was the time of the divorce,” Heard said while on the stand. “I was given a script [for ‘Aquaman 2’] and then given new versions of the script that had taken away scenes that had action in it, that depicted my character and another character, without giving any spoilers away, two characters fighting with one another, and they basically took a bunch out of my role.”

Reportedly, Heard appears in only 10 minutes of the sequel. Wan told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year that the sequel was never meant to focus on Heard’s character.

Also during the trial, notes of Heard’s therapy sessions were included in court documents, which Depp fans later paid to access and shared online. Heard claimed while in therapy that “Aquaman” co-star Jason Momoa drunkenly harassed her on set, including, per her point of view, dressing up as Depp.

Heard’s notes read, “Jason said he wanted me fired. Jason drunk — late on set. Dressing like Johnny. Has all the rings too.”

A DC spokesperson told Variety, “Jason Momoa conducted himself in a professional manner at all times on the set of ‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.'”

An insider who was on the London set in 2021 told Variety, “He isn’t dressing like Johnny Depp. He has always dressed in that bohemian style.”

“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” is set for a December 20 release date.

Thirty years ago today, Demolition Man first hit theaters, pitting Sylvester Stallone against Wesley Snipes in a crime-free but killjoy future where even minor vices have been declared illegal. The passage of time hasn't quite elevated this sci-fi action comedy to the legendary status of Die Hard or Lethal Weapon, but it's still an under-appreciated gem of '90s action movies, precisely because it unapologetically leans into the massive explosions and campy humor with wild abandon.

(Spoilers below, because it's been 30 years.)

Demolition Man started out as a spec script by Peter Lenkov, then a recent college grad eager to break into Hollywood. (Lenkov went on to create his own shared fictional TV universe with the interconnected reboot series Hawaii 5-0, MacGuyver, and Magnum P.I.) Lenkov was a Lethal Weapon fan and envisioned an action movie about a cryogenically frozen "super cop" who wakes up decades in the future in a world largely free of crime, where he must battle his criminal arch-nemesis. As for the title, Lenkov had been listening to Sting's "Demolition Man" constantly because the cassette player in his car was broken. Inspiration strikes in nonlinear ways.

Warner Bros. ultimately optioned the spec script and hired Daniel Waters (Heathers) for the rewrites. It was Waters who brought the comedic elements to the story, along with other substantial changes. The studio hired Marco Brambilla to direct; it was his first feature film. Originally, Steven Seagal was supposed to star, with Jean-Claude Van Damme playing the villain; Brambilla chose to cast Stallone and Snipes instead and their acting styles meshed well. The same could not be said of Lori Petty, originally cast as the plucky female cop and love interest Lenina Huxley. She and Stallone didn't get along—Petty described their dynamic as "oil and water"—and she was ultimately replaced by Sandra Bullock.

The film opens in a dystopian version of 1996 Los Angeles as LAPD Sergeant John Spartan (Stallone)—aka the "Demolition Man" because of the major property damage that typically results when he's on the job—tracking psychopathic crime lord Simon Phoenix (Snipes) to an abandoned building, where Phoenix has holed up with a busload of hostages. Spartan successfully arrests Phoenix, but not before the entire building blows up. When the corpses of the hostages are found in the rubble, Spartan is charged and convicted of manslaughter, joining Phoenix in "cryoprison," where they remain frozen until 2032. That's when Phoenix is thawed out for a parole hearing, only to escape into what is now a megalopis called San Angeles.

San Angeles is a seemingly utopian society headed by one Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), with almost no violent crime. So the San Angeles police are simply not equipped to deal with Phoenix, who commits multiple "murder-death-kills" within his first few hours of freedom. Lenina Huxley (Bullock) suggests they unthaw Spartan, since he captured Phoenix the first time. And Spartan finds himself trying to hunt down a homicidal maniac while navigating a brave new world where alcohol, swearing, eating anything that's bad for you, and intimate exchanges of precious bodily fluids (i.e., kissing, sex), among other things, are now illegal. Plot twist: Cocteau actually masterminded Phoenix's escape so that the latter could take out the leader of an underground group of rebels ("scraps"), Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary).

Demolition Man topped the box office in its opening weekend and went on to gross $159 million worldwide against its $77 million budget—not a blockbuster hit, but not a colossal failure either. It was widely viewed as a comeback vehicle for Stallone, whose career had flagged somewhat after a string of box office disappointments. (Stallone is currently enjoying yet another "comeback" in the streaming crime drama Tulsa King.) Critical reviews were mixed; not everyone was a fan of producer Joel Silver's over-the-top approach to action flicks. But this is the man behind the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and The Matrix franchises—now all classics—plus the first two Predator films. Whether you appreciate his extensive oeuvre or not, there's no denying he was a major influence on film in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The fictional future of Demolition Man is one where the Oldies radio station plays jingles from 20th century commercials and where all the restaurants are Taco Bell, which apparently won the "franchise wars." (It was changed to Pizza Hut in the film's European release, because Taco Bell was less well known overseas.) The ultra-processed food served therein isn't even remotely appetizing, but it did inspire the real Taco Bell to recreate the fictional version at the 2018 San Diego Comic-Con for the film's 25th anniversary.

And who can forget the meme-worthy mysterious three seashells Spartan encounters in the bathroom in lieu of toilet paper? How they work is a running gag that is never explained, but one assumes it's some kind of futuristic bidet. Waters said in a 2018 interview that initially he couldn't figure out a good future restroom concept and started calling his screenwriter friends for ideas. He reached Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood) when Karaszewski was literally on the toilet and mentioned a bag of seashells on the shelf. "I was like 'seashells! I’m gonna work with that,'” Waters recalled, and the rest is pop culture history.

Stallone built his career on macho tough-guy roles in films like Rambo and Rocky and Spartan is very much in that vein, but it's nice to see him show his comedic chops in Demolition Man—sometimes poking gentle fun at his macho tough guy image. Spartan's rehabilitation program while in cryoprison trained him as a seamstress and his bemusement at being compelled to knit Huxley a sweater is spot-on. There's even a bit of Hollywood insider humor when Spartan learns about the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. (Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were longtime rivals and Schwarzenegger did indeed enter politics ten years later as governor of California.) Stallone's low-key deadpan delivery makes a nice foil to Snipes' scenery-chewing portrayal of Simon Phoenix. Phoenix is a bit of a one-note villain, but Snipes makes him entertaining and always fun to watch, plus he gets to show off his killer martial arts moves.

Demolition Man was Sandra Bullock's big Hollywood break, and while she was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award (Worst Supporting Actress) for her troubles, a lesser actress would have fared much worse. Bullock was perfect for the role of Lenina Huxley and her bubbly on-screen charisma easily marked her as a budding major star. (It didn't take long. Speed debuted the following year, rocketing her to the A-List.) Huxley finds her SAPD job rather dull until Phoenix and Spartan burst onto the scene. She idolizes the late 20th century—even if she can't get the slang quite right ("you can take this job and shovel it!")—and learned to fight by watching Jackie Chan movies. She's the perfect guide to help Spartan (and the audience) navigate the near future.

The film holds up surprisingly well even 30 years later. Sure, "political correctness" is now "wokeness," and socio-political divisions are arguably a bit more hardened. But Cocteau's San Angeles provides an always-relevant cautionary tale of how unscrupulously opportunistic "leaders" can take advantage of tragedy (in this case a devastating earthquake) to sow chaos and fear to gain and maintain power. Some have interpreted Demolition Man as being some kind of Libertarian manifesto, embodied in Leary's epic rant about wanting the freedom to eat a cheeseburger and run naked through the streets if he feels like. I think that's a misguided take that misses the film's true point (although I love Leary's rant as much as anyone).

Waters has said that he had no intention of being overtly political when penning the script; he was just having fun and it's easier to mine schmaltzy fake peace and love for laughs than a brutal dystopian regime. The film ends with the inevitable fall of Cocteau's dictatorial New World Order—a future that absolutely nobody wants, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum. Water's ultimate "message" is that the people of San Angeles must now figure out how to balance those two extremes (overly controlled order vs. chaotic anarchy) and build a new functional democratic society where individual freedom will sometimes give way to the greater good, and vice versa, so that everyone can thrive. That remains a timely message—one might even say it's timeless.