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TORONTO (AP) — You may find yourself in a movie theater with “Stop Making Sense” playing and the members of Talking Heads in the audience.

That was the once-in-a-lifetime scenario when the new 4K restoration of “Stop Making Sense” premiered recently at the Toronto International Film Festival. On screen was a young, elastic David Byrne. In the theater, he was dancing, too, along with a crowd who couldn’t stay seated for “Burning Down the House.”

“For a moment I thought, ‘Is it OK for me to get up and dance at our own movie?” Byrne says, laughing, the morning after. “But how could you not?”

For nearly four decades, “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme, has exerted an inexorable pull on all who encounter the frenetic fever of arguably the finest concert film ever made. Its power to bring together — it opens with Byrne alone on a spare stage and swells into an art-funk spectacular — is such that it’s even managed to reunite the Talking Heads, too.

For the first time in 21 years, the Talking Heads are a band again, even if only in movie theaters. Byrne, the band’s principal songwriter and singer, keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz — who last gathered together in 2002 for their induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — have assembled once more for the rerelease of “Stop Making Sense.”

“It feels normal,” says Weymouth. “I mean, this is our tour. We’re touring this movie.”

Since they officially broke up in 1991, the four members of Talking Heads have often squabbled, bitterly. Byrne has said he regrets his role in the band’s “ugly” dissolution. Frantz, who’s married to Weymouth, published a 2020 memoir that described some of the discord and lingering hurts. When Byrne mounted the acclaimed Broadway show “American Utopia” a few years ago, featuring many Talking Heads songs, Frantz was stung not to even be invited.

As the group congregated the morning after the “Stop Making Sense” premiere for an interview, though, they were cordial with each other. They're now all in their early '70s. “How you livin’, Jerry?” greeted Frantz. Byrne gazed out the window, contemplating a possible cycling route for the afternoon. He and Harrison sat on one couch, Weymouth and Frantz on another.

Their spirits were high. The film remains in light, a potent reminder of Talking Heads’ uniquely transfixing power. Harrison helped oversee the restoration from the long-lost original negatives. It opens on IMAX screens Friday and in other theaters Sept. 29.

“One of the things that happened to me in rewatching it and working on it, was realizing: ‘Oh my God is everybody good,’” says Harrison.

“I didn’t know I was cute,” smiled Weymouth, who nimbly bounces from one foot to the other throughout the film. “The whole band, they were so attractive, so beautiful.”

“Stop Making Sense,” filmed over four nights at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theater in 1983, hasn’t dimmed with time. “Same as it ever was,” you could say. What begins with a solitary Byrne, with an acoustic guitar and boombox, steadily accumulates as the members of the band join him, then others like Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell and guitarist Alex Weir. This jittery, wide-eyed musician singing of psycho killers to a syncopated beat attracts a legion. His movements are malleable and constant. The music grows euphoric. This IS a party. This IS a disco.

“It’s the unbridled joyousness of the performance, which snowballs,” says Frantz. “It starts off with ‘Psycho Killer,’ which is a thing unto itself. But it snowballs into this ecstatic experience. You can see it very clearly with the band members. They’re gettin’ more and more fever.”

“They’re going to church,” adds Weymouth.

Demme , who died in 2017, once called shooting live music “the purest form of filmmaking.” And much of “Stop Making Sense,” with an eagerly responsive Demme and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth catching all the interactions between the band, approaches a perfect harmony of sound and image.

Now THAT, Byrne said after watching the film on IMAX, is why you go to the movies.

Byrne had choregraphed the Talking Heads tour that year, for the album “Speaking in Tongues.” Their concert came ready-made for Demme, a devoted Heads fan and an ardent music listener who approached the band with producer Gary Goetzman after seeing them perform in 1983 at the Hollywood Bowl.

“The great thing about Jonathan Demme was he had this amazing enthusiasm,” says Weymouth.

For several weeks beforehand, visual consultant Sandy McLeod came along on tour to plot out how the filmmakers might document the concert. Byrne’s concept stemmed from, he says, “showing people what it takes to put on a show.”

“We start with an empty stage and gradually add each part, each musician. As they come in, you hear what their contribution is,” Byrne says. “You see how it all gets done. It’s like a magician showing how the tricks are done, but the trick still works. We’ve seen behind the curtain, but the trick still works.”

And the “tricks” are grand. There’s, of course, Byrne’s iconic, Kabuki-influenced big suit in “Girlfriend Is Better”– now even bigger in IMAX. (The big suit, itself, resides in a big box in Byrne’s office.) There’s also his achingly gentle dance with a floor lamp in “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” — a sumptuous echo to Gene Kelly's tap dance around a lamp post in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

The lamps were made specially to be a little taller than the typical size, so they would illuminate faces.

“We bought a few of them. They’d break all the time. I’d drop them and all the light bulbs would break,” says Byrne, laughing. “We’re kind of lucky that the ones in the film held up.”

Other elements of “Stop Making Sense” have also proved remarkably resilient, though they can be harder to pin down. The songs, particularly something like “Life During Wartime,” synthesized a modern discombobulation that was only just emerging in the tech-nascent ’80s. “Stop Making Sense” — shot on film with six cameras but mixed digitally in Hal Ashby’s editing room — heralded a disorienting information age future while at the same time making the case that this strange new world could also be funky as hell.

“There’s most definitely a prescient nature in David’s lyrics,” Harrison says. “David seemed to capture, you might say, the future zeitgeist.”

That can be heard in what Byrne was singing about but it’s also embodied in his constant, live-wire physicality. It was only a few years before “Stop Making Sense,” on tour in 1980, that Byrne began to find his a stage persona.

“Before that, I didn’t move much. I just thought: It’s OK to move but you have to find your own way to do it. You can’t be imitating other performers,” he says. “So I just listened to the songs and thought: How does this groove make you move? On ‘Life During Wartime,’ I felt like running.”

Unlike most concert films, Demme elected not to cut away to the audience until the final moments of the film. He wanted to preserve the pure experience of a live concert, and not mix in interviews along the way.

“U2 wanted to make a film that was better than ‘Stop Making Sense’ and then they went and ruined it by doing all those interviews,” Weymouth says. “The art should be separate from the personalities. So you don’t get all the dysfunction.”

To her, “Stop Making Sense” derives from a different era when not everything was self-documented. It was a vividly artful presentation that left it up to the viewer to interpret, or dance to.

Talking Heads never participated in another film, though Byrne’s “American Utopia” was captured thrillingly by Spike Lee in a 2020 film. (Lee, in attendance at the Toronto premiere, pronounced “Stop Making Sense” “the GOAT" of concert films.)

The 1983 tour was the last time Talking Heads hit the road, and Byrne has consistently said he has no interest in a reunion tour. After their experience with Demme, a career-spanning documentary also seems unlikely.

“It would have to take something pretty extraordinary to make us want us to do something like that,” says Harrison. “If the right filmmaker came along and you could then imagine yourself in the framework he or she sets up, it’s possible. It certainly wouldn’t be now.”

Besides, who needs legacy burnishing when “Stop Making Sense” is still so alive? In conversation, the band again and again marveled at how deeply in tune they were with one another then — perhaps especially in contrast to the years that followed.

“This is going to sound really ridiculous but I think about the fusion of the sun,” says Weymouth. “It implodes and explodes. And I think that push and pull was so magical to our creative forces, the way that we worked together, the way we were supportive of each other. It was very special and none of us has found it again. If we sat down and played music, we’d be connecting again.”

The Talking Heads members are now, a little surreally, part of the audience gazing back at “Stop Making Sense.” It remains the defining encapsulation of what the Talking Heads were and what they achieved. If there's one thing they can all agree on, it's an abiding love for it.

“Having had two near-death experiences in the past couple of years – one with Tina in a head-on car crash -- who’s the guy who said ‘Enjoy every sandwich’? Warren Zevon," Frantz says. "That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s a good legacy. Now I can die,” says Weymouth, before adding: “I don’t want to.”

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Negotiations between striking screenwriters and Hollywood studios are set to resume Wednesday, the latest attempt to bring an end to pickets that have brought film and television productions to a halt.

The two sides have been divided on issues of pay, the size of writing staffs on shows and the use of artificial intelligence in how scripts are created. Actors, who joined the writers on strike in July, have their own issues but there have been no discussions about resuming negotiations with their union yet.

The key players in the two strikes that have brought Hollywood to a halt include little-known leaders, labor lawyers, entertainment tycoons and the actor who played “The Nanny.”

Here's a look at the figures who brought on the walk-off of actors and screenwriters, and who have the power to send them back to work:

Her name is little known outside the industry, and she nearly never speaks to the media, but as head of the opposition in both the writers and actors strikes, Carol Lombardini is arguably the most important single figure in Hollywood's labor stoppage.

For 14 years, she has led negotiations for studios in contract talks with all of Hollywood's unions and guilds. Many of the negotiations she’s headed have come to the brink or run past deadlines, but none ever led to a strike, much less two, before now.

Since 2009, Lombardini, a lawyer has been president and chief negotiator of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the conglomeration of studios, streaming services and production companies that creates contracts with unions.

She grew up in a working class suburb of Boston, got a degree in Renaissance history from the University of Chicago, and earned a law degree from Stanford. She worked for a pair of private firms before joining the AMPTP as an attorney when the group was first formed in 1982.

A respected if adversarial figure in years past, she has become the target of much of strikers' vitriol. She appears often on picket signs and is the subject of many parody social media accounts.

Ellen Stutzman was the one sitting across the table from Lombardini in the failed negotiations that led to the writers strike. It is not a seat she expected to occupy when the year began.

Stutzman, also an attorney, took over as chief negotiator for the Writers Guild on Feb. 28, just two weeks before contract talks began. She entered the role after longtime lead negotiator David Young, who led the guild through the 2007-2008 strike, stepped down for health reasons.

She still has the title from her previous role: assistant executive director for the Writers Guild of America West. Stutzman joined the union as a researcher in 2006. Researching the union's issues and educating union members, government officials and the public on them are a specialty.

“We would tell the viewers and the public that writers are fighting to have a career, and to have a viable profession, and to continue to create the shows and movies that people in this country and around the world love,” Stutzman told The AP on the first day of the writers strike in May. “We hope that they’ll support them in that fight.”

Generally regarded as more low key and less combative than Young, Stutzman played a key role in writers' 2019 fight with agents, in which WGA members fired their representatives en masse over plans by Hollywood's major talent agencies to expand into production. The union also sued the agencies, calling the potential move a conflict of interest and a violation of antitrust law. That battle — which the writers won — in some ways served as a dress rehearsal for the current strike.

Stutzman graduated from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in 2004 and worked for the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers before joining the Writers Guild.

Lombardini and the AMPTP represent a coalition of more than 350 companies, but as in the entertainment industry itself, a few giants dominate. Three leaders have come to embody the group: Disney CEO Bob Iger, Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos.

As chief executive of entertainment’s biggest behemoth, Disney’s Bob Iger would always have been a target for strikers. But a new contract reportedly worth more than $30 million annually, the day before the actors strike was called, and his comments the following day, made him the first name on the lips and signs of many strikers. Iger said that it was "the worst time in the world” to add to the disruptions the industry's already facing.

The industry's shift to a streaming model is behind most of the issues that led to the strike. Netflix pioneered that model, and its leader Ted Sarandos has come to signify it for strikers. Sarandos joined Netflix in 2000, shortly after its founding, and initiated its move into original programming with “Lilyhammer,” “House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black.”

As CEO of Warner-Discovery, David Zaslav, for strikers, embodies the entertainment executive who shifts away from elite creative programming toward reality TV and other less vaunted programming, most manifest on Max, the streaming service that under his watch dropped “HBO” from its name.

Before the strikes began he was already scorned by many on the creative side for shelving nearly finished projects like “Batgirl” and turning them into tax write-offs.

The three executives have attempted to take a more direct role in the standoff, meeting in person with Writers Guild negotiators last month in an effort to restart talks. But the WGA said in a statement afterward that they were “met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was."

Fran Drescher is the strikes' most famous face, both for her starring role in the 1990s sitcom “The Nanny” and for the speech she made that gave a spark to actors as their strike was announced.

Drescher was re-elected last week as president of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television, a job she's had since 2021.

She shook the leadership reins of SAG-AFTRA with her fiery speech at the news conference announcing the strike on July 14. Drescher told The Associated Press in an interview that she had scrapped a written statement moments before, and improvised.

“When you speak from the heart, people are so responsive,” Drescher told The AP in an interview. “Because I guess they see a lot of people that don’t. And so it kind of cuts through the noise when it does.”

Drescher was born, raised and went to community college in Queens, New York. She had a series of increasingly memorable small roles, usually playing brash New Yorkers, starting with “Saturday Night Fever” in 1976.

She became a household name when she co-created and starred in “The Nanny.” The series ran on CBS from 1993 to 1999 and took much of its inspiration from her life.

As always, writers toil in (relative) anonymity compared to the famous actors they write scripts for. Drescher's less-known counterparts on the writers' side — technically two unions that unite for negotiations and strikes — are Michael Winship and Meredith Stiehm. Winship is president of the Writers Guild of America East and Stiehm president of its counterpart in the West.

Both have long careers as Emmy-winning television writers. Stiehm was creator of the early 2000s CBS crime procedural “Cold Case” and co-creator of “The Bridge” on FX. Winship has worked more in news and educational programming, writing shows for PBS, the Discovery and Learning Channels and the Sesame Workshop. He's soon stepping down and will be replaced by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, who has developed drama series for several networks and streamers.

Stiehm overwhelmingly won reelection to another two-year term Tuesday.

All three have put down their pens and picked up picket signs.

Hollywood's guilds operate like cities that have an elected mayor who sets the agenda, and a city manager who oversees operations more directly. If Drescher is SAG-AFTRA's mayor, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland is its city manager.

Crabtree-Ireland, who has worked for the guild for more than 20 years, became its national executive director and chief negotiator shortly after Drescher took office.

He took an unlikely path to get there. Born in Memphis and raised in London and Dallas, Crabtree-Ireland went to college at Georgetown and law school at the University of California, Davis. He worked for several years as a criminal prosecutor in Los Angeles before taking a left turn and becoming a staff attorney for SAG-AFTRA in 2000.

“I get asked to talk to law students about careers from time to time, and I always preface the story by saying I can’t, I don’t encourage you to try to replicate this because I’ve no idea how it happened,” Crabtree-Ireland told the AP in an interview. “I never thought I’d be here.”

He would be tested quickly after getting the job. The first contract talks for film and TV actors under his role as chief negotiator resulted in their first strike in more than 40 years.

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Associated Press Writers Krysta Fauria and Damian Dovarganes contributed.