begats

Here is where it starts to read like the “begats” in the Bible: The Southern Pacific pretty obviously wanted a ready-made train system, not a trolley system.

And while much of what the man born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Ga., laid claim to had roots deep in African-American culture, his genius was to position himself like a throw-down ball queen decimating the competition as he played the dozens, naming himself the originator, the basis of all the begats.

Matt Tyrnauer’s absorbing documentary about the notorious New York fixer and mentor to Donald Trump, acts as a kind of cinematic begats, ostensibly profiling a man who may be long gone, but whose impulses and pursuit of power live on through his most famous protege.

Yet the history of renegade sexuality is often a story of missing begats and — in cases like that of, say, a pioneer like Mr. Gernreich, it feels obligatory both to retrieve them and to note for viewers that we have been down this road before.

Perhaps, too, Jackie Robinson served as an example for a series of begats.