tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26493719270628067712024-03-18T15:28:54.808-04:00THE COMMITTEE ROOMReporting on books having to do with movies, theater and television. tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.comBlogger122125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-30463853261192849502017-06-09T16:52:00.001-04:002017-06-10T11:35:09.232-04:00TCR on Films: Roger Moore (1927-2017), Actor and Surprisingly Busy Author<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Actor Roger Moore, who died two weeks ago at age 89, became a prolific author in his last decade. Semi-retired and dividing his time between homes in Monaco and Switzerland, the octogenarian Moore turned out three books -- <i>My Word is My Bond: A Memoir</i> (2008), <i>Bond on Bond: Reflections on 50 Years of James Bond Movies</i> (2012), and <i>One Lucky Bastard: Tales from Tinseltown</i> (2014).<br />
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According to <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/roger-moore-dead-autobiography-book-two-weeks-before-a7752871.html">The Independent</a>, shortly before his death Moore sent a manuscript for a fourth book to his publisher.<br />
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Moore writes in a droll, anecdotal manner similar to the authorial style of his old friend, David Niven, who penned the bestselling memoirs <i>The Moon's a Balloon</i> (1971) and <i>Bring on the Empty Horses</i> (1975).<br />
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In <i>My Word is My Bond</i> Moore offers a full life story beginning with his lower-middle class London childhood and ending with his volunteer work for UNICEF. In between, of course, is the acting career that started when he was still a teenager and cast as an extra in the British produced film <i>Caesar and Cleopatra</i> (1945) starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains. The first half of the book has lots of name dropping, especially those of long bygone British stars. Following the trajectory of Moore's career, his twelve-year stint as James Bond isn't addressed until the second half of the book.<br />
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The follow up book, <i>One Lucky Bastard; Tales from Tinseltown</i>, focuses entirely on Moore's interactions with famous show biz personalities. Seemingly with an eye to U.S. sales, more weight is given to big name Hollywood stars than in the earlier book. Chapter headings include "The Fun -- and Feisty -- Leading Ladies" (among these are Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, and Lana Turner) and "The Rat Pack." Moore points out that he was able to write freely knowing that almost all of the luminaries he writes about are dead. The British edition of <i>One Lucky Bastard</i> is appropriately titled <i>Last Man Standing</i>.<br />
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Though Moore's reminiscences in both of these books make for breezy, often amusing reading, greater introspection might have made for more compelling narratives. Moore seems to have taken in stride his rise from son of a London policeman to wealthy movie star. His often messy private life comes across as a series of events mostly beyond his control. As to why he was chosen to take over the Bond role, he offers no particular reason.<br />
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Moore's best book is the coffee-table style<i> Bond on Bond: Reflections on 50 Years of James Bond Movies</i>, an engaging photo and fact filled volume covering the Bond film series from <i>Dr. No</i> (1962) up to <i>Skyfall</i> (2012). Moore rates Sean Connery as the best Bond "apart from myself" but admits that his opinion may be of limited value as he has truthfully never been much of a Bond aficionado nor is he "necessarily an avid repeat viewer" of any of the Bond films other than his own. It hard not to get the impression that with this book Moore, though he is the credited author, just sort of vaguely participated in its creation.<br />
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In the 1950s, Moore was a contract player at MGM and made his first Hollywood screen appearance in <i>The Last Time I Saw Paris</i> (1954), as a dashing tennis player tempting an unhappily married Elizabeth Taylor. After being dropped by MGM, Moore was signed by Warner Bros which used him mostly in its television division. He had lead roles in two failed series, <i>Ivanhoe</i> (1958) and <i>The Alaskans </i>(1959). Dropped by Warners, Moore returned to England and found success in a television version of <i>The Saint</i>, about a debonair thief who leaves a calling card depicting a stick figure with a halo. <i>The Saint</i> was tired material. George Sanders starred in a B movie series as <i>The Saint</i> in the early 1940s and several actors, including Vincent Price, had played <i>The Saint</i> on radio in the U.S. and Britain. Moore, however, had sufficient charisma to make the character seem fresh. <i>The Saint</i> premiered in 1962 (the same year the big screen Bond franchise began with Sean Connery in <i>Dr. No</i>) and lasted until 1969. It was popular around the world, even in the U.S. where foreign-made TV programs rarely got airtime. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Moore with <i>Bond on Bond </i>, 2012.<br />
Photo/<i>Daily Mail</i></td></tr>
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In <i>My Word is My Bond</i> Moore writes that in 1967 he was asked to take over the role of James Bond from Sean Connery who had grown tired of playing 007 but his commitment to <i>The Saint</i> kept him from accepting the offer. With Moore unavailable, the unknown Australian fashion model and sometime actor George Lazenby was given what turned out to be a poorly received shot at the Bond role in <i>On Her Majesty's Secret Service</i> (1969). A huge salary lured Connery back to Bond in <i>Diamonds are Forever</i> (1971), then Moore, finally, took over the part beginning with <i>Live and Let Die</i> (1973). "Sean wanted to distance himself from 007 and the associated hysteria and potential typecasting, to tackle other acting roles. I, on the other hand, was just grateful for a job," Moore writes in <i>Bond on Bond</i>.<br />
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Moore's other Bond films are <i>The Man with the Golden Gun</i> (1974), <i>The Spy Who Loved Me</i> (1977), <i>Moonraker</i> (1979), <i>For Your Eyes Only</i> (1981), <i>Octopussy</i> (1983) and <i>A View to a Kill</i> (1985).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Moore with Elizabeth Taylor in <i>The Last Time I<br />Saw Paris</i> (1954), his first Hollywood film.</td></tr>
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Moore was in his mid-forties -- older than his weary predecessor Connery -- when he began as Bond. Among the actors who have played Bond (if we don't count Moore's old friend David Niven in the 1967 comedy version of <i>Casino Royale</i> and Niven usually isn't counted) Moore came to the part with the largest measure of already established fame. Moore's Bond is Bond as played by Roger Moore. He blends the 007 role with the suave Englishman characters he'd been playing on screen and television for twenty years. Moore's tongue in cheek style and matinee idol screen presence gave Bond a sense of humor and old fashioned glamour.<br />
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By mutual agreement with the Bond series producer, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, Moore stepped down as Bond in 1985. At age fifty-eight, he was too old to convincingly go on in the part. "There are only so many stunts an aging actor can tackle, and only so many young girls he can kiss without looking like a perverted grandfather," Moore writes in <i>Bond on Bond</i>.<br />
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Without Bond it seems likely that <i>The Saint</i> would have remained the high point of Moore's career. A non-Bond Moore might have shown up on <i>Dynasty</i> or dusted off his stage acting skill and toured the provinces in as Henry Higgins in <i>My Fair Lady</i>. Instead, the middle aged and not particularly fit looking Moore was up on the big screen executing implausible feats of daring (in <i>My Word is My Bond</i> he gives due credit to his stunt man double) and romancing youthful Baby Boomer generation starlets such as Jane Seymour, Barbara Bach, and Lois Chiles.<br />
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Moore is also the author of a much earlier and now out of print paperback, <i>Roger Moore's James Bond Diary</i> (1973), a behind the scenes account of making his first Bond film, <i>Live and Let Die</i>, that is written in the same casual style of his later books. <br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com413tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-88561639543216244112017-05-16T23:45:00.001-04:002017-06-10T12:27:39.118-04:00TCR Celebrates National Classic Movie Day, May 16.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>The Committee Room</b> wishes you a Happy National Classic Movie Day! To celebrate classic movies, <b>TCR</b> is taking part in the <a href="http://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/2017/03/national-classic-movie-day-blogathon-2017.html">Five Stars Blogathon</a>, hosted by <a href="http://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/2017/05/five-star-blogathon-cary-grant-tops-my.html"><i>Classic Film and TV Cafe</i></a>.<br />
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Five Stars Blogathon participants list five of their favorite classic-era stars and offer a brief explanation as to why these stars are favorites. In putting together its list, <b>TCR</b> chose to move past stardom's top, instantly recognizable folks (the level depicted in the illustration above) and give a nod to five less exalted but highly deserving performers. Perhaps reflecting their B list status, all of <b>TCR</b>'s favorites may be best known more for their work on television than on the big screen.<br />
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<b>The Committee Room's Five Favorites List</b> (in alphabetical order)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joan Bennett in <i>The Reckless Moment</i> (1949)</td></tr>
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<b>Joan Bennett</b> -- The more you live, the more you learn. The more Joan Bennett movies you see, the more you're struck by how consistently good she is. Bennett, a far better actress than her more glamorous sister Constance, did her best work in film noir where her no-nonsense, I don't care if you don't like me manner made her an unsettling presence. This vaguely scary quality also stood Bennett in good stead in the hokey Gothic horror soap opera <i>Dark Shadows</i> on TV in the 1960s. Recommended film: <i>The Reckless Moment</i> (1949), a great little film noir with Bennett as an ordinary suburban mom trying to protect her daughter from a murder rap.<br />
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<b>James Garner</b> -- Handsome leading men can have a sense of humor. Are you reading this Ryan Gosling? Alas, probably not. The genial Garner was a TV star who became a movie star (a pioneer traveler on this now well-trodden career path) then returned to TV which was probably his true home. Unlike the lunky and stiff Rock Hudson or the aging sophisticates Cary Grant and David Niven, Garner was a leading man you could actually believe Doris Day was married to. Recommended film:<i> Grand Prix</i> (1966), a beautifully filmed in Europe tale of Formula One drivers. Garner at his movie star apogee.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carolyn Jones (left) with Natalie Wood in<br />
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<b>Carolyn Jones</b> -- Remembered now pretty much only for her two year stint on TV's <i>The Addams Family</i>, Jones shined in a variety of secondary roles in a passel of feature films before she put on that long, black Morticia wig. Jones might have eventually found another niche but her death from cancer at age 53 sadly places her on the list of stars gone too soon. Recommended film: <i>Marjorie Morningstar</i> (1958), where Jones is a middle class Jewish girl working at a summer camp along side the title character played by Natalie Wood.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Angela Lansbury (right) with Katharine Hepburn<br />
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<b>Angela Lansbury</b> -- Lansbury could be beautiful or plain, classy or a floozy, young or old, British or American, sympathetic or a shrew. Whatever was required. Hollywood gave Lansbury a lot of work but never sufficient appreciation. Multiple Tonys and Emmys she has but not a single Oscar. Almost unbelievably, Lansbury is still working in her 90s. She has a role in <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i>, slated to open in 2018, seventy-four years after she made her screen debut in <i>Gaslight</i> (1944). Recommended films: there are so many choices it's almost impossible to choose but <i>State of the Union</i> (1948) and <i>The World of Henry Orient</i> (1964).<br />
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<b>Fred MacMurray</b> -- Believe it or not, that toupee-wearing, aging actor who sleepwalked through his role as wisdom dispensing dad Steve Douglas on the 1960s sitcom <i>My Three Sons</i> was once among of Hollywood's most in-demand and highest paid leading men. Never a truly first rank star in his own right at the level of Clark Gable or Henry Fonda, MacMurray's specialty was playing opposite famous leading ladies but not stealing the show from them. MacMurray acquitted himself masterfully in numerous pictures with Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck, among many others Recommended films -- <i>Alice Adams</i> (1935) with Katharine Hepburn and <i>Remember the Night</i> (1940) with Stanwyck, and, of course, <i>Double Indemnity</i> (1944), also with the great Stanwyck, who, if this Five Stars list had focused on first rank stars would be on it. <br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com225tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-64267943999535501482017-05-15T15:17:00.000-04:002017-06-10T12:08:34.609-04:00TCR on Film: An Interview with Mark A. Vieira, author of "Into the Dark -- The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941-1950."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the excellent new book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AFE3B2O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">Into the Dark: The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941 -1950</a> </i>(Running Press, 2016) veteran author<a href="http://www.markavieira.com/"> Mark A. Vieira</a> uses first hand accounts to take readers back to the 1940s. Instead of latter day critical analysis, we get reviews and comments from the film noir era along with the reminiscences of performers, including noir specialists Jane Greer and Claire Trevor, and other personnel who were part of the film noir world.<br />
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"I determined that film noir truly began in 1941 by reading <i>Los Angeles Times</i> articles of the period," Vieira explained to <b>The Committee Room</b>. "They cited <i>Citizen Kane</i> and <i>The Maltese Falcon </i>as the first of the 'hard-boiled' trend."<br />
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As Vieira points out in <i>Into the Dark</i>, the term <i>film noir</i> was unknown to those who made these films. The term was coined by a French critic in 1946 to describe the large number of crime thrillers and murder dramas coming out of Hollywood but did not come into general use until the 1970s when these stylish films were rediscovered by a new generation of critics and moviegoers.<br />
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And what exactly makes a film <i>noir</i>? "The criteria are straightforward," Vieira told <b>TCR</b>. "A film noir protagonist must be (1) alienated, (2) obsessed, and (3) doomed. Of course you can point to <i>Murder, My Sweet</i>. Detective Phillip Marlowe exhibits none of these qualities. But everyone in the film does! So it qualifies."<br />
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A few of the eighty-two films covered in <i>Into the Dark </i>were generously budgeted pictures based on bestselling novels such as <i>Leave Her to Heaven</i> (1945), shot by Twentieth Century-Fox in state of the art Technicolor. The vast majority, however, were modest productions with literary origins in pulp fiction. RKO, the smallest and most cash-strapped of the major studios of the classic Hollywood period, has the strongest representation in <i>Into the Dark</i> with seventeen entries including one of the progenitors <i>Citizen Kane</i> along with a film that is often seen as perhaps the noir-est of noirs, <i>Out of the Past</i> (1947), featuring a young Robert Mitchum as a private eye double-crossed by a shady businessman's girlfriend. "RKO was willing to do more film noirs because the films could be made quickly and cheaply, including the purchase of the story," Vieira told <b>TCR</b>. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Garfield and Lana Turner in<br />
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At the other end of the spectrum, MGM, the biggest and richest of the studios, and the most dedicated to looking at the sunny side of life (a characteristic utterly incompatible with film noir) has just a few entries, though that handful includes <i>The Postman Always Rings Twice </i>(1946), a superbly dark vehicle for a spectacularly white-clad star Lana Turner.<br />
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Joan Crawford, a major star since the early 1930s won her much longed for Oscar in the film noir <i>Mildred Pierce</i> (1945). Barbara Stanwyck, also a long established star, appeared in several top-notch noirs including <i>Double Indemity</i> (1944), <i>The Strange Love of Martha Ivers </i>(1946), and <i>Sorry, Wrong Number </i>(1948). Generally speaking though, the biggest box office names stayed out of the "crime cycle" that came to be known as film noir, leaving the territory clear for young newcomers and established but second-tier stars."[The top stars] images didn't allow for the kind of roles that Gene Tierney [newcomer] or Joan Bennett [second-tier] could play in film noir vehicles..After writing the book, I have to say that the Queen of Film Noir was Joan Bennett!" Vieira told <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Reckless Moment</i> (1949) with "Queen of<br />
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Initially, Vieira gave <i>Into the Dark</i> a cutoff date of 1950 simply as a way of keeping the book to the size desired by Turner Classic Movies which sponsored the book. Later, Vieira came to think that ending at 1950 is appropriate. He explained to <b>TCR</b> that "the film noirs of the forties deal with lone detectives, melodrama, and women's stories. After 1951, those types rarely appear; the emphasis shifts to crime syndicates, corrupt police, Cold War paranoia...The forties film noirs are a different species than the fifties film noirs."<br />
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<i>Into the Dark</i> is chockablock with stunning photographs. One of the most striking -- of a youthful Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in <i>The Killers</i> (1946) -- graces the book's cover. "If I did a book of still photos from 1940s women's films, you'd be seeing just as many gorgeous images," Vieira says. "It wasn't film noir per se that was responsible. It was the studio system. In order to sell films that were beautifully photographed, the publicity department made sure that the 'unit stills photographer' captured the most noteworthy camera setups after they had been shot by the movie camera. That's why the photos in the book are so impressive."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Beyond the Forest </i>(1949).</td></tr>
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Among Vieira's personal favorite film noirs are <i>The Lost Weekend</i> (1945), <i>Smash-Up</i> (1947), <i>The Big Clock</i> (1948),<i> Beyond the Forest </i>(1949) and <i>Sunset Boulevard</i> (1950). He owns 16mm prints of all of these favorites. "Owning a 16mm print of a film shows that you love that film. You don't buy it to watch it only one time," Vieira says.<br />
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Can film noir be made today? Vieira thinks not, telling <b>TCR</b> -- "Film noir needs the alienated, obsessed, and doomed character. People are just too busy on the Internet to take time for obsession, don't you think? You have to pay attention to people to be obsessed."<br />
<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com163tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-81003990580841676772017-03-02T15:38:00.000-05:002017-06-10T12:15:56.201-04:00TCR on Film: "Unsinkable: A Memoir" by Debbie Reynolds<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In tribute to the late Debbie Reynolds, one of the last stars produced by the old Hollywood studio system, <b>The Committee Room</b> takes a look at her memoir <i>Unsinkable</i> (William Morrow, 2013).<br />
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In the preface to <i>Unsinkable</i>, Reynolds mentions her first book, <i>Debbie:</i> <i>My Life</i> (William Morrow, 1988), written when the actress was in her fifties and, it would seem, still had a lot of living left to do. "I can't believe how naive I was when I wrote it," Reynolds in <i>Unsinkable</i> says of the earlier book. She explains that at the time she was writing the first book she was in what she believed was a happy marriage to her third husband, a Virginia real estate developer named Richard Hamlett. <br />
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In <i>Unsinkable</i>, Reynolds offers a detailed portrait of Hamlett as a handsome, smooth-talking scoundrel who, she maintains, cold-heartedly entered into marriage with the intention of swindling her. The first third of the book is Reynolds' painstaking and angrily told account of how Hamlett's unscrupulous behavior led to the bankruptcy of her Las Vegas hotel, a venture which she hoped would provide a regular venue for her talents along with a steady income. Consequently, in <i>Unsinkable</i> there is much talk, perhaps too much talk, of lawyers and property deeds and promissory notes.<br />
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After her movie career dried up in the late 1960s, Reynolds focused on her nightclub act. Reading <i>Unsinkable</i>, one gets the feeling that variety entertainment -- song and dance, jokes, imitations -- before live audiences was the ebullient Debbie's first love and true calling, not the isolated world of movie acting. Hollywood stardom was just an avenue to being famous enough to sell out a Vegas showroom or some regional auditorium. Anywhere she was wanted. Despite serious health issues in her later years, Reynolds continued to perform concert dates up to just a few months before her death.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, 2011.<br />
(Photo: Jason LaVeris/Film Magic)</td></tr>
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Reynolds' famous offspring, the writer/actress Carrie Fisher, contributes the foreword to <i>Unsinkable</i>. She calls her mother "a good person, a kind person -- which would be a fine thing if these were the qualities that are consistently rewarded. But as most of us know, they are not." Media coverage of the recent deaths of Fisher and Reynolds, which occurred one day after the other, made much out of their mother-daughter bond. However, Carrie is only briefly mentioned in <i>Unsinkable</i>. It is Reynolds' not famous child, Todd Fisher, a sometime director and lighting designer, who stalwartly stands at his mother's side through the tribulations detailed in the book. Todd plays a major role in her business affairs -- rather reluctantly on his part, it seems. The dutiful son escapes to his ranch in Northern California whenever possible.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reynolds with her costume collection, 2011.<br />
(Photo Kirk McKoy/<i>Los Angeles Times</i>)</td></tr>
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Moving on from the dastardly Hamlett, Reynolds devotes the middle part of <i>Unsinkable</i> to detailing her lengthy but ultimately futile efforts to establish a museum built around her extensive collection of movie costumes and memorabilia. Here Reynolds seems more heartbroken than angry as plan after plan falls through. She also finds herself broke again. In keeping with the title of her book, Reynolds bobs back to the surface when the collection -- often dismissed as of minimal value -- fetches millions of dollars when sold piece by piece at auction. The money restores Reynolds' pride as well as her solvency.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reynolds, at age 19, with Donald O'Connor (left) and Gene<br />
Kelly in <i>Singin' in the Rain</i> (Photo/Warner Home Video)</td></tr>
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In <i>Unsinkable</i> Reynolds is more interested in venting about post-1980 happenings than reminiscing about her heyday as a movie star in earlier decades. But that bygone-era stardom is ultimately why this book exists. Therefore, Reynolds somewhat obligatorily devotes the final third of the book to an overview of her speedy rise from working class Los Angeles teenager with no show business connections (she landed a movie contract when an agent happened to catch her in a Burbank beauty contest doing karaoke to a Betty Hutton novelty song) to big name Hollywood personality.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reynolds in her movie star prime, 1959.</td></tr>
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Following a chronological list, Reynolds comments on each of her fifty-plus film appearances Not surprisingly, the classic musical <i>Singin' in the Rain</i> (1952) rates several pages, mostly unhappy memories of gruelingly hard work filming the dance numbers under the direction of an unfriendly Gene Kelly. A cameo role in a Dan Dailey-Cyd Charisse vehicle called<i> Meet Me in Las</i> <i>Vegas</i> (1956) gets a just a few lines, including -- "Honestly, I don't remember doing it."<br />
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One doesn't need to go far out on a limb to say that <i>Singin' in the Rain</i> is probably the only film in the Reynolds oeuvre that is considered of lasting value. Nevertheless, <b>The Committee Room </b>offers the following list --<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Essential Films of Debbie Reynolds (Besides <i>Singin' in the Rain</i>)</span><br />
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<i><b>The Catered Affair</b></i> (1956) -- A very 1950s, kitchen-sink style, domestic drama that offers up a Debbie so uncharacteristically reserved that if you missed the opening credits you may not realize it's her. Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine co-star as Reynolds' parents, making one of filmdom's most unlikely family groupings. A frumped-up Davis is a blue collar Irish-American Bronx housewife obsessed with giving her daughter the kind of grand wedding that she herself never had. Reynolds is the sensible and sort of glum daughter who doesn't want the big wedding. Debbie's only black and white movie and an oddly serious outlier in her career.<br />
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<i><b>Tammy and the Bachelor</b></i> (1957) -- This implausible tale of an illiterate girl brought up in rural poverty on the bayou by an irritable, moonshining grandfather is depressing if you give it any thought but you aren't supposed to give it thought. <i>Tammy and the Bachelor </i>was a box-office smash that<i> </i>solidified Debbie's star status. The title tune (which she inexplicably sings in the middle of this otherwise non-musical film) gave her a hit record and became her signature song. "Who played he bachelor?" makes a good movie trivia question. The answer is Leslie Nielsen, inappropriately glowering and too mature looking. Where was Robert Wagner when they needed him?<br />
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<i><b>How the West Was Won</b></i> (1962) -- Filmed in the three-screen novelty process Cinerama. This mega-movie about the folks who tamed the frontier looks back to pageant-style epics like <i>The Ten Commandments</i> and forward to the 1970s TV mini-series <i>Roots</i>. All roles are played by recognizable performers and Reynolds' character is at the center of the sprawling multi-generational story line. For this reason <i>HTWWW</i> can justifiably be considered the apogee of Debbie's film career though it is unlikely to come to mind when conjuring up the idea of a Debbie Reynolds movie. Reynolds travels by flatboat down the Ohio River with her farmfolk parents (Agnes Moorehead and Karl Malden) crosses the plains on a wagon train (led by Robert Preston), becomes a California dance hall girl, marries a caddish gambler (Gregory Peck), and finally ends up as an elderly woman in Arizona. The final scene offers a hamming it up Reynolds, in a gray wig and old person makeup, atop a horse drawn wagon. She cackles and back slaps away to her nephew and his wife played by George Peppard and Carolyn Jones who were probably struggling not to laugh.<br />
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<i><b>The Unsinkable Molly Brown</b></i> (1964) -- This so-so film version of a minor Broadway musical about a Colorado farm girl who falls into a silver mining fortune and ultimately survives the sinking of the Titanic earned Debbie her only Oscar nomination and it was her own favorite of her films so it must be included on this list. In <i>Unsinkable</i> Debbie writes about how she saw so much of herself in the spunky character of Molly Brown and was determined to play the part on film. She discredits rumors that she stole the part from the director's choice, Shirley Maclaine, by offering to work for no salary. Whatever really happened behind the scenes, Maclaine, despite or perhaps because of her more citified air would have made a more interesting Molly Brown. Better yet, the oddly croaking voiced, upper crust accented Manhattan chanteuse Tammy Grimes who starred in the original Broadway production. Coincidentally, Grimes passed away in October 2016, just two months before Reynolds died.<br />
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<i><b>The Singing Nun</b></i> (1966) -- About a guitar-playing nun who becomes a recording star. Very, very loosely based on a real-life Belgian nun who topped the charts in the early 1960s. This movie was the last film directed by studio-era old pro Henry Koster and also marks the beginning of the end of Reynolds' run as a movie star. <i>The Singing Nun</i> was released at approximately the same time as the Production Code breaking <i>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i> The following year, the watershed year of 1967, brought <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i> and <i>The Graduate</i> and ushered out reminders of the 1950s, including Debbie Reynolds, no matter that she was not much older than many "New Hollywood" avatars such as Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, A linkage between the end of the Old Hollywood and the beginning of the New is Katharine Ross of <i>The Graduate</i> appearing in <i>The Singing Nun</i> as a wayward young woman who Debbie's nun character helps keep on the path of righteousness. <b>The Committee Room</b>, when just a little tyke, saw this movie in the theater and a song Reynolds sings in it "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2x5GxgOZuA">Brother John</a>" left an earworm that remains lodged in the brain more than a half-century later. So beware.<br />
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<b>The Committee Room. Time spent with TCR, like time spent with a cat, is never wasted.</b><br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com383tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-86483906226281236472016-10-13T00:00:00.001-04:002017-06-10T12:16:59.867-04:00An Interview with Brian Kellow, author of "Can I Go Now? The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood's First Superagent."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Superagent Sue Mengers. Do any other three words better conjure up the enormous energy, creativity and free-wheeling social life of Hollywood in the 1970s?<br />
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Mengers is the subject of an excellent new biography <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Can-Go-Now-Hollywoods-Superagent/dp/0143108875">Can I Go Now? The Life of Hollywood's First Superagent</a></i> by <a href="http://briankellow.com/">Brian Kellow</a>. The title of the book comes from Mengers' passive-aggressive way of ending phone conversations.<br />
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Kellow's previous work includes books on Broadway legend Ethel Merman (<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ethel-Merman-Life-Brian-Kellow/dp/0143114204/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476328925&sr=1-2">Ethel Merman: A Life</a></i>, 2007) and film critic Pauline Kael (<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pauline-Kael-Life-Brian-Kellow/dp/0143122207/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476328925&sr=1-4">Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark</a></i>, 2011). He was also on the staff of <i>Opera News</i> for many years.<br />
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The idea of writing a biography of Mengers came to Kellow from his own (literary) agent. At first Kellow was skeptical, thinking that there wasn't enough substance in the life of Sue Mengers to warrant a biography. "My last book had been a biography of Pauline Kael, and I was very keen to follow it up with another biography of a writer," Kellow told <b>The Committee Room</b>. "To write a book about an agent seemed like a questionable project, especially after having written about someone as complex and brilliant as Pauline. But I was wrong: Sue was complex and brilliant in her own right, and once I began the research, I knew that this was a great topic. It was also a wonderful opportunity to write about the films and stars and filmmakers of the late '60s, the '70s and early '80s--still, to my mind, the most stimulating era in American movie-making."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sue Mengers with Jack Nicholson, 1977.<br />
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Even by Hollywood standards Mengers had an outsized personality. As a young woman in New York in the early 1960s, she earned her stripes as an agent by booking B list clients in theater and television gigs. A zaftig, blue-eyed blonde and highly ambitious, Mengers was willing to do whatever it took -- incessant phone calls, sleeping with a producer -- to get a client a part or to land a new client.<br />
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In her Hollywood prime, the middle aged Mengers worked and partied non-stop in a haze of tobacco and pot smoke, and offered blunt, profanity-laced career advice to those she considered worthy enough to be her clients. Kellow told <b>TCR</b> -- "[Mengers] wielded enormous power. So many stars wanted to be represented by her, and a lot of studio heads and producers hated and feared her, with good reason...She also had a very keen gut-level understanding of the New Hollywood--of the change in material, the move toward more provocative and unusual topics. She knew that there was an audience for that sort of thing. And it was a great audience, while it lasted."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sue Mengers with Christopher Walken, 1989.<br />
Photo/Ron Galella/Wire Image/Getty Images</td></tr>
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Mengers wasn't interested in discovering and developing young unknowns. Her forte was making very big movie stars out of performers already possessing some measure of fame on television or on Broadway or in supporting film roles. Gene Hackman is a prime example. He was a character actor approaching middle age when Mengers took him on. "Sue was relentless in getting Gene Hackman the role of Popeye Doyle in <i>The French Connection</i> when no one else wanted him. She was <i>relentless</i>...that movie was the one that really put him over the top, and I don't think she felt he was ever properly appreciative of her efforts," says Kellow.<br />
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British star Michael Caine, under the guidance of Mengers, joined the ranks of Hollywood's big time leading men. "In the case of Michael Caine, the game was to put him on a level with some of the top American actors," Kellow told <b>TCR</b>. "She also wanted to show audiences his versatility; she encouraged him to play gay men in <i>California Suite</i> and <i>Deathtrap</i> at a time when a lot of movie actors wouldn't have gone near [such roles]."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mengers with Barbra Streisand, c. 1980.<br />
Photo/Los Angeles Examiner</td></tr>
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Other performers benefiting from the Mengers magic include Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Faye Dunaway, Dyan Cannon, Candice Bergen, Elliott Gould, and Ali MacGraw, along with directors Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin. In other words, a <i>Who's Who</i> of 1970s Hollywood.<br />
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Kellow says that Mengers' greatest strength was her honesty. "She could tell her clients the truth, even when they might not want to hear it. In Hollywood, that's a rare gift," Kellow told <b>TCR</b>. "She was also brutally tough: she delighted in holding studio heads over a barrel. The story of how she got Gene Hackman $1 million for that awful movie <i>Lucky Lady</i> is hilariously funny. She knew the studio was in a bind and she made them pay."<br />
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For most of her career Mengers was employed by Creative Management Associates (CMA), founded in the early 1960s by Freddie Fields and David Begelman. Though Fields and Begelman were Mengers' bosses, the pair are barely mentioned in <i>Can I Go Now?</i> This is in stark contrast to <i>Judy + Liza + Robert + Freddie + David + Sue + Me</i>, a memoir by Stevie Phillips, another 1970s superagent and Mengers' CMA colleague <i> </i>(discussed in <b>TCR</b> in October 2015), in which these two wheeler-dealers are major characters. Kellow told <b>TCR</b> -- "Freddie Fields and David Begelman really let Sue build up steam on her own, They weren't at all jealous of her, and they didn't try to keep her in her place. I think they too were quite intrigued by her and wanted to see exactly how much she could pull off. And then they could get credit for backing a winner."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>What's Up Doc?</i> poster, 1972.</td></tr>
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Mengers encouraged her stable of stars to keep busy and not wait around for perfect scripts that may never come along. She reminded them that being out of sight usually means being of out of mind and that a large body of work is bound to contain treasures among the junk. And, of course, if you work a lot you make more money. Some clients, such as Caine, embraced this just-do-it style, with his film appearances running the gamut from the killer bees disaster pic <i>The Swarm</i> to Woody Allen's urbane <i>Hannah and Her Sisters.</i><br />
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Mengers' favorite client was Barbara Streisand, whom she considered something akin to a sister. Despite this closeness of agent and star, Streisand was among those clients who resisted lending her time and talent to low quality material just for the sake keeping in the public eye and fattening the wallet. One of Mengers' biggest triumphs was <i>What's Up Doc?</i>, a sendup of 1930s screwball comedies, that teamed Streisand with two other premier Mengers clients, Ryan O'Neal and director Peter Bogdanovich. The movie was smash with both critics and the public. Still, Streisand only reluctantly agreed to reteam with O'Neal in <i>The Main Event</i>, a lame romantic comedy directed by journeyman Howard Zieff. Though savaged by critics, <i>The Main Event</i> was another box office smash but it was also the kind of commercial schlock that led Streisand to eventually seek another agent.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mengers with Woody Allen, 1981.<br />
Photo/Ron Galella/Wireimage</td></tr>
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"I spoke with Barbra Streisand for the book, and she was very candid about the fact that they often didn't agree on the quality of material Streisand was being offered." Kellow told <b>TCR</b>. "Streisand had very mixed feelings about <i>The Main Event</i>, and Sue just saw it as a nice, big, juicy commercial hit. Sue had intense respect for Streisand's talent, always--even after they had broken up as client and agent. But she had nothing to do with the musical end of Streisand's career at all, only with the movies. And some of them -- <i>Funny Lady</i>, <i>A Star is Born</i>, and <i>The Main Event</i> --were pretty crummy. It's a shame that Sue couldn't have gotten her more material on the level of <i>The Way We Were</i>. The best thing Sue did was get her a lot of money--$4 million for a month's work on <i>All Night Long</i>."<br />
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By the 1980s, most of the performers Mengers' had taken to the top had moved on to other agents. Such changes are par for the course in show business but Mengers took it personally. In <i>Can I Go Now?</i> Kellow writes -- "Sue's contempt was fearless, epic, freely vented and unleashed and indiscriminate. It was one thing to be angry that a client had left; it was another to wish that he would get cancer and die."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Young Mengers with Anthony Perkins, an<br />
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The film world was becoming more smoothly corporate and less personality driven. Mengers' flamboyant style, genuine love for movies, and adolescent-like thrill at being with movie stars (even stars she had created herself) didn't fit in with business school trained, balance sheet oriented executives who considered motion pictures just another profitable venture. In 1986, Mengers, in her mid-fifties, went into an early retirement. A brief comeback at the rival William Morris agency two years later came to nothing. Kellow told <b>TCR </b>-- "Sue's stint at William Morris came too late in the game. She had gotten burned out on the business by then and lost her taste for the fun and wildness of it. She took the job mostly because she was seduced by the money. And she thought she could get a lot of her old clients to come back, and only one--Christopher Walken--did. Toni Howard, a prominent agent herself, and someone who was enormously helpful to me on the book, told me that you can't say 'I hate actors!' as often as Sue did and not have people remember it and resent it. And the agenting game had changed by then. The emphasis was becoming all about numbers and the back end, and she couldn't care less. She was interested in the creative end of it, and setting a top salary--and then she was finished, for the most part."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Author Brian Kellow</td></tr>
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Before her death in 2011, Mengers arranged for her business records to be destroyed. With little written material available, Kellow had to rely mainly on interviews to put the biography together. With the door-opening help of some of Mengers' longtime friends including the literary agent Boaty Boatwright (a Mengers pal from their New York days), Kellow gathered an impressive array of interviewees. The long list includes those who knew Mengers well such as Streisand, Caine, MacGraw (or "My Ali," as Mengers liked to say) and Candice Bergen along with others, such as Woody Allen, whose interactions with Mengers were occasional and all business. "People wanted to talk about her because she was absolutely not like anyone else. How many times can you say that someone doesn't remind you of anyone else? Not very often, really. She made an enormous impact in people's lives. They were shocked by her, delighted by her, intrigued by her, angered by her. She was exasperating, yet people had great affection for her, and they wanted to talk about it with me. I could feel a lot of her former clients working through their complicated feelings about her while they spoke to me," Kellow explained to <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/08/30/15/2BCE0AC100000578-3216073-Premiere_Songwriter_Kris_Kristofferson_right_and_Sue_Mengers_lef-m-26_1440944663991.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/08/30/15/2BCE0AC100000578-3216073-Premiere_Songwriter_Kris_Kristofferson_right_and_Sue_Mengers_lef-m-26_1440944663991.jpg" height="316" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mengers with Kris Kristofferson at premiere of <br />
<i>A Star is Born</i>, 1976. Photo/Wireimage</td></tr>
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Though she no longer wielded power, in her long retirement Mengers could still draw big names and new faces (Jennifer Anniston became a friend) to her parties but it was nothing like the old days. "Sue's last years were a sad waste," Kellow told <b>TCR</b>. "She ate a lot, gained weight, smoked way too much weed, and alienated a lot of her friends with rude, sadistic comments. It's a very painful section in my book--it was painful to write, and I'm sure it's painful to read. And yet, she still had her lacerating wit, and people from all over Hollywood, young people too, continually sought out her professional advice. Again, her behavior was appalling much of the time, yet many people were deeply loyal to her."<br />
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Is there any equivalent to Mengers in today's Hollywood? Kellow says -- "I"m sure it's likely that someday someone will do a definitive biography of Ari Emanuel. But that person won't be me. I've done my one and only book about an agent!"<br />
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tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com184tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-22708464368104045742015-10-26T13:37:00.000-04:002017-06-10T12:17:57.960-04:00TCR on Show Business: "Judy + Liza + Robert + Freddie + David + Sue + ME" by Stevie Phillips<div style="text-align: left;">
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"What is an agent?" asks Stevie Phillips in her recently published memoir <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Judy-Liza-Robert-Freddie-David/dp/1250065771">Judy + Liza + Robert + Freddie + David + Sue + ME</a> </i>(St. Martin's Press). Phillips knows the answer. She was once among the most powerful talent agents in the entertainment industry, having shepherded Liza Minnelli and Robert Redford to superstardom.<br />
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"An agent is a fraud, but a fraud with good intentions...someone totally willing to sublimate herself to be the person the client wants her to be. Do you want me to be angry on your behalf? Here I am. Do you want me to be docile for you? Here I am. But regardless of what role-playing takes place, an agent must always maintain integrity and never lead a client knowingly in the wrong direction," Phillips writes. <br />
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Unlike the legendary agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, whose Oscar night parties were the height of Hollywood A-list gatherings. or the world class schmoozer Sue Mengers, such a big personality that she was brought back to life in 2013 by Bette Midler in the one-character Broadway play<i> I'll Eat You Last</i> and is the subject of a just published biography (<i>Can I Go Now?</i> by Brian Kellow) Phillips never became more famous than a lot of her clients. Her stock in trade was cool, calm, behind the scenes efficiency.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stevie Phillips, 2015.</td></tr>
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In classic pre-feminist days style, Phillips begins her career in a secretarial pool, this one at ABC-TV in New York in the late 1950s. Her competence, willingness to work long hours and, she admits, her good looks, get her a temporary gig as a production assistant on the ABC game show <i>Who Do You Trust?</i>, hosted by a not yet famous Johnny Carson. The pretty and hardworking Phillips is included in regular pre-showtime drinks at Sardi's. "The way that guy knocked back two double shots showed me he'd had a lot of practice," Phillips recalls of Carson.<br />
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Carson appears only fleetingly in Phillips' narrative and he doesn't seem to have done anything bad to her, yet she pauses to take a swipe at him. Hostility runs through the whole of Phillips writing. This still contemptuous after all these years edginess gives Phillips' memoir a compelling vitality. Decades old events seem as if they happened yesterday.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Judy Garland, c. 1960</td></tr>
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Leaving ABC, Phillips moves to the Music Corporation of America (MCA), the most powerful talent agency of the time, where she is assigned to type and file and get coffee for rising agents Freddie Fields and David Begelman. "Both were in their late thirties, both were sharp-witted, smart, flamboyant hotshots...They were both the most amusing men I'd ever met, and they liked that I liked them," Phillips writes. When Fields and Begelman (in the book, to simplify things, Phillips calls them F&D, short for Freddie and David) start their own agency, Phillips jumps at the chance to go with them as a kind of agent in training.<br />
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F&D get their new company (which eventually becomes the powerful Creative Management Associates or CMA) off the ground by engineering a comeback for Judy Garland via an extensive concert tour. At this point -- 1960 -- Garland is seriously overweight and living in relative isolation in London. As soon as Garland lands back in the USA, Phillips is given the task of looking after this extremely high maintenance star. "Judy was needy to the point of desperation, and they [F&D] had to find a way to handle it," Phillips writes.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Liza and Judy, 1960 (photo/Getty Images).</td></tr>
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Tending to Garland's needs both professionally and personally becomes Phillips' job for two years. And a demanding, depressing, and sometimes dangerous line of work it is. Phillips does everything for Garland from stage managing performances on her concert tour -- the highlight of which is a triumphal show at Carnegie Hall in 1961 -- to taking her children to the zoo. Phillips makes sure a cold bottle of liebfraumilch -- the sweet German wine that Garland swigs like water -- is always at hand and keeps a watchful eye on the precious carrying case full of the pills that Garland can't live without. Phillips laughs at Garland's usually mean-spirited jokes and listens over and over again to stories about the old days at MGM. When Garland decides to slit her wrists just before a performance, Phillips rushes out to find bangles needed to cover the bandages. When a drug crazed Garland comes at Phillips with a knife, Phillips manages to escape and is coaxed back to work by F&D with a promise of a salary increase.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stevie Phillips, 1960s.</td></tr>
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To Phillips, Garland is, more than anything -- more than a drunk or a drug addict or a raving lunatic or a legendary star -- a supremely self-involved bore. "I was a prisoner yearning to be free," Phillips says of her time with Garland.<br />
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Occasionally, the tough talking Phillips exhibits some sympathy for the troubled star. "Put her in an institution. Get her the help she needs! That's the scream that was raging inside me. It never came out of my mouth. Could anyone have institutionalized Judy without her permission? Maybe not, but it didn't matter because there we no candidates. Everyone was too busy exploiting her," Phillips writes.<br />
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Garland, despite her selfish excesses, isn't the villain in Phillips' book. That role goes to the D in F&D, David Begelman, who is portrayed as a scoundrel of the first order. "He was a slime," Phillips writes of Begelman, who later became a leading Hollywood film studio executive. At first, Phillips is captivated by Begelman's sophistication and his beautifully tailored suits. As the years pass, the dazzle fades. "He was toxic," Phillips says."His was the charm of a psychopathic personality: totally flamboyant, witty, intelligent, and intellectual on the one side; a liar, a cheat, a complete fraud, irresponsible, and self-destructive on the other."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Begelman. "He was a slime," says Phillips.</td></tr>
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Phillips calls Garland's on again, off again husband Sid Luft an "ape" but in retrospect she thinks Luft was correct in believing that Begelman was stealing money from Garland. In the late 1970s, Begelman was ousted as head of Columbia Pictures while facing charges of embezzlement. In 1995, a bankrupt Begelman committed suicide. "I did not shed a tear," Phillips writes.<br />
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The F in F&D, the handsome Freddie Fields, is a "sport-coated, charming smart aleck." Phillips praises Fields, who died in 2007, as a "wonderful mentor" and "one of the all time best agents on the planet." She also calls Fields a "user" and suggests that he must have known about the illegal and immoral activity Begelman was engaged in while they were business partners but chose to look the other way.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj7iJ71J2c90f4qilrrzzLhyphenhyphenu-o-4Xn5g6wN7bvWT8yaqYsLCNCG1BRfea-W6VQJJbJryk6kapwWlsTgJ0h50Yagflw1WoI2Oq4IuQ8zJ_jbJrubgPCfUuABTFmOQsGWNgNg_G52AgqM48qAaggLUNlYghpUNpw6eb-xhxuCgNH=" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj7iJ71J2c90f4qilrrzzLhyphenhyphenu-o-4Xn5g6wN7bvWT8yaqYsLCNCG1BRfea-W6VQJJbJryk6kapwWlsTgJ0h50Yagflw1WoI2Oq4IuQ8zJ_jbJrubgPCfUuABTFmOQsGWNgNg_G52AgqM48qAaggLUNlYghpUNpw6eb-xhxuCgNH=" width="235" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Liza Minnelli in <i>Flora, the Red Menace</i>,<br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Broadway, 1965 (photo/Friedman-Abeles).</span></td></tr>
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When finally released from the Judy detail, Phillips is rewarded by F&D with the status of fully-fledged agent at the New York office of the thriving CMA. The first client Phillips signs is none other than Garland's daughter, Liza Minnelli, a "dirty and unkempt" teenager with tons of ambition but no proven talent. "Liza was a mess. Her waist length hair often looked as if it might have been home to both animate and inanimate things...My two bosses thought she was a waste of time," Phillips writes of the youthful Minnelli. <br />
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Initially acting out of pity, Phillips helps Minnelli -- whom she refers to as "Li" -- get a part in an Off-Broadway revival of the musical <i>Best Foot Forward</i>. To the surprise of all, Minnelli shines in the production. Phillips capitalizes on this success by booking Minnelli as a guest on television variety and talk shows (abundant in the 1960s) and getting her on Broadway in the musical <i>Flora. the Red Menace</i>. <i>Flora</i> is a flop but earns Liza a Tony Award.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Liza's wedding to Peter Allen, New York, 1967. "I was<br />
heartbroken for Liza," Phillips writes</td></tr>
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Despite her burgeoning stardom, Minnelli remains something of a little girl lost. Phillips allows Minnelli -- homeless since her mother decamped to the West Coast -- to stay at her apartment. "She slept on the couch in my living room for the best part of a year. She co-opted my wardrobe, ate solid food from my fridge, and didn't have to struggle...not all celebs are freeloaders, but Judy and Liza were," Phillips says.<br />
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Phillips organizes Minnelli's 1967 wedding to singer-composer Peter Allen, mainly because nobody else is interested in doing it. "I watched and waited, but there was only shattering silence. I was heartbroken for Liza," Phillips writes. The wedding is the last time Phillips sees Garland, who dies two years later. "She was wrinkled and pale and so wasted that I momentarily lost the ability to speak...she was macabre," Phillips recalls.<br />
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Phillips isn't directly responsible to the two projects that propel Minnelli to superstardom -- the television special <i>Liza with a Z</i> and the film version of <i>Cabaret.</i> "All I can boast about is that I brought Liza, along with her hard work and considerable talent, to a place where the sale of this show [<i>Liza with a Z</i>] could profitably be made," Phillips explains.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robert Redford, 1960s. Before the Sundance shagginess.</td></tr>
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The other big name on Phillips' roster is Robert Redford. He is already a hot property, if not a first rank star, when she gets him to sign with CMA in 1968 after helping him land the coveted part of Sundance in <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i>, directed by another CMA client (and Phillips' friend) George Roy Hill. "When I delivered Redford's signature, my stock at the agency shot up sky high," Phillips writes. "Sign an actor who has both good looks and real ability, and you've a managed a minor miracle. That actor can go on for forty years easily."<br />
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Or more than forty years. In the summer of 2015, at approximately the same time Phillips released her memoir, Redford, who is, along with Phillips, approaching age eighty, released his latest film, <i>A Walk in the Woods</i>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redford, 1974. He looks great <br />
but the movie "wasn't good."</td></tr>
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The self-assured Redford doesn't require Liza-style micro-managing. For the most part, he chooses the projects he wants to do. "He had a strong sense of what suited him -- playing interesting Americans from different walks of life -- and he chose well," Phillips writes. She does talk Redford into <i>The Great Gatsby </i>-- a film which she admits "wasn't good" -- and tries to talk him out of <i>The Way We Were</i> because the final script isn't finished. Though Phillips doesn't choose Redford's material, she does handle his business negotiations."I did all his deals [which] helped burnish my image," Phillips writes.<br />
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In 1975, Redford leaves Phillips and CMA for another agency. Phillips admits that his departure is mostly due to her failing to understand that he needed to be challenged. "I dropped the ball by not knowing he wanted to direct, by not pushing the envelope with him...I was on automatic pilot," Phillips writes in a rare display of humility. Indeed, Phillips speaks of Redford in an almost reverential tone. She thanks him for giving her "the American West as a present...he showed me the beauty of that part of our country for the first time. I owe him."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://gs.columbia.edu/files/gs/imagecache/profile-thumbnail/stevie_liza_owl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://gs.columbia.edu/files/gs/imagecache/profile-thumbnail/stevie_liza_owl.jpg" width="262" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phillips and Liza, c. 1972<br />
(Photo/Stevie Phillips via Columbia University website)</td></tr>
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Minnelli breaks with Phillips. too, but under more contentious circumstances. In the mid-1970s, F&D move on to become producers (according to Phillips, all agents want to be producers) and CMA merges with another agency to become International Creative Management (ICM). Phillips decides it's time to strike out on her own, taking star client Minnelli with her. But Minnelli, giving no warning or reason, backs out of the deal. This leaves Phillips, who has resigned from ICM, with no job and no star client be a foundation for her new agency. "I'd been unceremoniously dumped by an actress who could not have cared less." Phillips writes. <br />
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The new agents send Minnelli, who Phillips depicts as something of a dimwitted party girl, out on concert tours that are lucrative but do nothing for her long term career."They weren't film packagers trained by Freddie Fields; they were merely order takers," Phillips says. The pressures of touring leave Minnelli vulnerable to bad habits. "[I]t was rumored that most of Liza's earnings were going right up her nose," Phillips says. Minnelli's movie stardom, which Phillips had planned to carefully nurture, dies from neglect. In the ensuing decades, an increasingly pathetic Minnelli occasionally contacts Phillips, sometimes for career advice, sometimes just looking for a shoulder to cry on. "I had been the most stable person in her life. We both knew that," Phillips writes.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bette Midler as superagent Sue Mengers in <i>I'll Eat You</i><br />
<i>Last</i>, Booth Theater, Broadway, 2013.</td></tr>
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"Sue" of the book's title is Sue Mengers. For many years, Mengers was Phillips' colleague and friendly rival at CMA. "She was forever burnishing her image and trying to get her name in the papers. She was a publicity hound [but] it was the right decision for her, and it served her well," Phillips says of the flamboyant Mengers who died in 2011. Mengers stayed on at CMA after it became ICM and was a leading agent in the 1970s and 1980s.<br />
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All agents want to be producers, Phillips says. Eventually Phillips becomes a producer, too, by working out a deal for Universal Pictures to back the Broadway musical <i>The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas</i>. The show, opening in 1978, is a smash. Following through with the deal Phillips helped to craft, Universal comes out with a screen version. The movie, released in 1982, is a dud. Phillips blames the failure of the movie on star Burt Reynolds. "He was tasteless," Phillips says of Reynolds "He made changes to the script and the casting that turned a funny and touching show into a sadly second-rate movie." <br />
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Phillips is Al Pacino's agent for a time in the late 1960s. "I'd always found Al difficult to talk to, and consequently we never grew close," Phillips' writes. Her recollection of watching Pacino, not exactly a song and dance man, auditioning for a part in the Broadway musical <i>Zorba</i> is the book's comic highlight. <br />
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A question that Phillips leaves unexplored is why some performers with potential don't become big stars. F&D's very first client back in 1960 was Freddie Fields' then-wife, the actress/singer <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000917/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm">Polly Bergen</a>. Bergen, who died in 2014, had a long but haphazard career that included major roles on television, Broadway, and in films but nothing panned out sufficiently to take her to first rank stardom. Another early F&D client was the actress <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0352466/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm">Joan Hackett</a>. Hackett, who died of cancer in 1983 at age forty-nine, appeared regularly in films and on television in the 1960s and 1970s and is always interesting to watch if you happen to catch her in reruns. "Joan was an actress with [a] wonderful voice and a certain quirkiness that separated her from the rest of the blond beauties," Phillips writes but adds nothing more other than a mention that she and Hackett became "great pals" and that it was Hackett who first introduced her to Redford. One is left to wonder whether the machinations of superagents like Phillips and Freddie and David and Sue may not matter so much if good luck isn't part of the deal.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara plays a big part in husband Jerry<br />
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In recent months, American television lost two of its most familiar faces: Dick Van Patten and Anne Meara. The careers of these hard-working performers began in television's earliest years. Their passing takes us farther away from the days of huge audience broadcast TV, when even flop shows (and both Van Patten and Meara had their share of failures) drew more viewers than the biggest hits of today.<br />
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Van Patten, who died on June 23 at age 86, is best remembered as the father on <i>Eight is Enough</i>, a comedy-drama that ran on ABC from 1977 to 1981. However, those four years were just a short chapter in a remarkably busy career in theater, television, and film that spanned more than seven decades.<br />
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Meara, who died on May 23 at age 85, rose to fame in the early 1960s as partner to her husband Jerry Stiller in the comedy team Stiller and Meara. However, she always considered herself an actress, not a comedienne. Meara made numerous appearances in both comedic and dramatic acting roles mainly on television but also on film and stage from the early 1950s onward.<br />
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In his breezy autobiography, <i>Eighty is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment</i> (2009), the upbeat Van Patten shares happy memories of being one of Broadway's top juvenile actors of the 1930s and 1940s. Billed as Dickie Van Patten and sporting a great shock of blond hair, Van Patten made his Broadway debut at age seven in a play called <i>Tapestry in Grey</i>. While still a boy Van Patten appeared the original productions of the classics <i>On Borrowed Time </i>by Paul Osborn and Thornton Wilder's <i>The Skin of Our Teeth. </i>As a teenager Van Patten spent three years on Broadway and on tour with the legendary acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Terence Rattigan's <i>O Mistress Mine</i> and became one of the many young actors over the years, including Montgomery Clift, who the Lunts took under their wing.<br />
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"I enjoyed my life as a child actor," Van Patten writes in<i> Eighty is Not Enough</i>, adding that his employment provided his family with a comfortable existence while others were suffering through the Depression and gave him the opportunity to work with legendary stars of the era. He points out that while many child actors, including some of those who played his children on <i>Eight is Enough</i>, fall prey to drug addiction and other misfortunes, such problems are also widespread among people with supposedly normal childhoods. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dick Van Patten (r.) with Alfred Lunt and Lynn<br />
Fontanne, c. 1946.</td></tr>
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In 1949, Van Patten got in on the ground floor of television by taking the part of son Nels in <i>Mama</i>, one of the first situation comedies on American television. <i>Mama </i>was based on the long-running Broadway play <i>I Remember Mama</i> by John Van Druten. The part of Nels was originated on the stage in 1944 by a very young Marlon Brando who, for a few years, was in competition with Van Patten for juvenile roles in the New York theater. Produced in New York by CBS, <i>Mama</i> ran until 1957. In all but its final season it was broadcast live, hence, the series had no life in reruns and is not well remembered today.<br />
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In the late 1960s, after some post-<i>Mama</i> lean years during which he sold real estate in his native Queens when acting jobs were scarce, Van Patten relocated to Los Angeles. By now middle aged and balding, he quickly became an ubiquitous presence on the small screen, making appearances in everyman-style roles on almost any show one may think of from the period (<i>I Dream of Jeannie</i>, <i>That Girl</i>, <i> Medical Center</i>, <i>Adam-12</i>, <i>The Doris Day Show</i>, to name just a few) and some one may not be able to think of (<i>Sierra</i>, <i>Thicker Than Water</i>, <i>Chopper One</i>). He was a regular cast member on a revised version of the flailing <i>New Dick Van Dyke Show</i> in 1973-74. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Van Patten (left) with cast of the legendary flop<br />
<i>When Things Were Rotten</i>, 1975.</td></tr>
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Van Patten played Friar Tuck on <i>When Things Were Rotten</i>, Mel Brooks' off the wall Robin Hood parody that lasted for half a season in 1975. "You have a round, fat man's face," Brooks told the slender Van Patten who was an avid tennis player. Brooks and Van Patten were close friends in real life. Van Patten also appeared in Brooks' movies<i> High Anxiety</i> (1977) <i>Spaceballs</i> (1987), and <i>Robin Hood: Men in Tights </i>(1993).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Van Patten with cast of <i>Eight is Enough</i>, c. 1979</td></tr>
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Van Patten finally advanced to stardom with <i>Eight is Enough</i>, an ABC comedy-drama about a middle class, suburban California family -- the Bradfords -- led by Van Patten as wise dad Tom Bradford. The show was basically a contemporary version of <i>The Waltons</i>, the series about a rural, Depression-era, large family that was a major hit on CBS at this time. Though the shows were on different networks both were produced by Lorimar. <i>Eight is Enough</i> began as a mid-season replacement in the spring of 1977 and quickly became one of the most popular shows on television.<br />
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In <i>Eighty is Not Enough</i> Van Patten writes that he was almost replaced as Tom Bradford early in the show's development because the producers wanted a fresh face "and that wasn't me." ABC chief Fred Silverman stepped in on Van Patten's behalf, saying Van Patten was a naturally funny performer who would keep the show from going too far to the serious side.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Van Patten with Jason Bateman on<br />
<i>Arrested Development</i>, 2005.</td></tr>
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In the spring of 1981, <i>Eight is Enough</i> was abruptly cancelled by ABC as part of a house cleaning at the network. <i>Soap</i> and <i>Charlie's Angels</i>, two other once mighty ABC shows with declining ratings, were also canceled at this time. Van Patten went back to being a journeyman, though now as a guest star instead of a familiar but nameless character actor. Among the many shows he appeared on later in his career are <i>Murder She Wrote</i>, <i>That 70s Show</i>, and <i>Arrested Development.</i> The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists an as his final acting credit an appearance on the TV Land sitcom <i>Hot in Cleveland</i> in 2011, a spectacular seventy-five years after his first acting role.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara onstage with Stiller, c. 1969.</td></tr>
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Anne Meara never wrote an autobiography or memoir but she looms large in Jerry Stiller's autobiography <i>Married to Laughter</i> (2000). Stiller tells readers that he was had a lot of therapy over the years. This perhaps explains the book's unexpectedly serious and pensive tone. Stiller credits Meara with being a more technically polished and disciplined performer than he is himself. <br />
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"'How can you do a scene ten times in a row the same way while I do it differently each time?" Stiller quotes himself asking Meara in <i>Married to Laughter</i>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara in the 1950s. Her son Ben Stiller posted<br />
this photo on Instagram after she died.</td></tr>
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As a young actress in New York in the 1950s, Meara found steady employment if not celebrity in secondary roles in stage and television productions. She appeared in <i>A Month in the Country</i> directed by Michael Redgrave, acted for Joseph Papp's fledgling Shakespeare in the Park, and won an Obie award for the prison drama <i>Maedchen in Uniform. </i>Among her earliest television roles was a regular part on a daytime soap opera called <i>The Greatest Gift</i> in 1954.<br />
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Meara wed Stiller, another struggling young New York actor, in 1953. Stiller had a bent toward variety entertainment (his idol was Eddie Cantor) and worked with an improvisational comedy group. In 1959, when the other members of the group moved on, Meara stepped in. She had no experience with or genuine interest in this type of performing but she proved to excel at it. "Her love was theater, the stage," Stiller writes rather wistfully of Meara in<i> Married to Laughter</i>. "Somehow I'd schlepped this beautiful young acting wunderkind into by dream world, and she'd married me into the bargain. She was living my dream."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara in her failed starring vehicle<i> Kate McShane</i>,<br />
with co-stars Charles Haid (left) and Sean McClory, 1975.</td></tr>
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After successful stints in nightclubs, an environment which Meara disliked, Stiller and Meara made their nationwide television debut as a comedy team on Merv Griffin's syndicated talk show in 1961. On TV they dropped improvisation and did set comedy routines, most notably material based on Catholic-Jewish inter-religious romance. Stiller was Jewish and Meara, who was of Irish ancestry, was brought up as a Catholic. Though Meara generously drew upon her Irish Catholic background as a performer, Stiller writes in <i>Married to Laughter</i> that in private life Meara rarely talked about her upbringing. She converted to Reform Judaism several years after her marriage. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara with Valerie Harper in <i>Rhoda</i>, c. 1976.</td></tr>
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Throughout the 1960s and 70s Stiller and Meara were a staple on talk and variety shows (they were a particular favorite of Ed Sullivan on whose show they appeared dozens of times) and were frequent celebrity contestants on game shows. They also wrote and performed in witty radio commercials, most memorably for Blue Nun wine, that were so successful the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency provided them with a Manhattan office in order to keep the ad campaigns coming.<br />
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Some obituaries listed as Meara's chief claim to fame being the mother of actor/director Ben Stiller. However, to anyone who watched television in the 1960s and 1970s, Ben Stiller is, more than anything else, the son of Stiller and Meara.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara on <i>Alf</i>, c. 1987.</td></tr>
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Apart from her comedy team work with Stiller, Meara somehow managed to maintain a separate identity as an actress though it was not the heavyweight career to which had originally aspired. In <i>Married to Laughter</i> Stiller recalls Meara, in 1987, participating in a staged reading of James Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i> along with noted Irish and Irish-American actors and cultural figures. "Anne might have been part of that crowd but she took another route," Stiller says. As an example of that other route, at the time of the Joyce reading, Meara had a recurring role on the television comedy <i>Alf</i>, about a lovable E.T.-like creature residing with a normal American family. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Carroll O'Connor on <i>Archie Bunker's Place</i>, c. 1980.</td></tr>
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Meara made countless guest appearances on episodic television on shows such as <i>The Courtship of Eddie's Father</i>, <i>Love American Style</i>, and <i>Medical Center</i>. Her only starring vehicle, <i>Kate McShane</i>, a drama which presented her as a crusading lawyer, lasted only a few weeks in the fall of 1975. After its demise, Meara picked herself up, brushed herself off and joined the cast of <i>Rhoda</i> in a recurring role as Rhoda's stewardess friend Sally Gallagher.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meara with famous son, Ben Stiller, c 2010.<br />
(Photo/Bruce Gilkas/Filmmagic)</td></tr>
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From 1979 to 1982, Meara was a regular cast member on <i>Archie Bunker's Place</i>, a popular but unnecessary continuation of <i>All in the Family.</i> Meara and <i>Archie Bunker</i> star Carroll O'Connor had been friends since they acted together in a celebrated Off-Broadway production of <i>Ulysses in Nighttown</i> in 1958. Meara did a stint on the daytime soap opera <i>All My Children</i> in the 1990s. She also made guest appearances on many shows including <i>Murphy Brown</i>, <i>Will and Grace</i>, <i>Homicide Life on the Street </i>and <i>Sex in the City</i>.<br />
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According to IMDb, Meara's last professional credit was the voice of the character Winnie in the animated Disney film<i> Planes: Fire and Rescue</i> in 2014. Her final episodic television credit was a guest shot on <i>Law and Order Special Victims Unit</i> in 2012. According to Broadway World.com her final theater credit was a stint in the rotating celebrity cast of Nora Ephron's Off-Broadway hit comedy <i>Love, Loss, and What I Wore</i> in 2009.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Van Patten with sort of famous son, actor and <br />
tennis pro Vincent Van Patten, 2007<br />
(Photo/WireImage.com)</td></tr>
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Van Patten and Meara, who were only a few months apart in age, traveled the same roads throughout their long careers. It is surprising then that a 1983 episode of <i>The Love Boat</i> is the only instance <b>The Committee Room</b> could find of their professional paths crossing. Even in this case, they were in different storylines of the episode so they likely didn't actually work together.<br />
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Both Van Patten and Meara gave lengthy filmed interviews to the <a href="http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/all-interviewees">Archive of American Television's Legends of TV</a> series. In his interview, which was filmed in 2011, octogenarian Van Patten shows the same cheerful attitude he displays in his autobiography. To question after question he smilingly responds along the lines of "oh, it was wonderful" and "I had a great time." His happy countenance does momentarily turn quizzical when he draws a blank when asked (for some reason) to recall his appearance on the short-lived 1970s series <i>Kolchak, the Night Stalker</i>.<br />
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Meara's interview was filmed in 2005. Perhaps because she did not have the kind of acting career she really wanted or perhaps because it was husband Jerry and not her who got to be part of the cultural phenomenon <i>Seinfeld</i> or maybe because she was just having a bad day back in 2005, Meara is cranky in the interview. She takes the interviewer to task for mispronouncing the name of fellow ubiquitous character actor Martin Balsam. She still seems genuinely angry, many decades later, at <i>Medical Center</i>'s pretty-boy star Chad Everett for not bothering to show up on the day she was scheduled to film her big dramatic scene with him, forcing her to act opposite a piece of tape stuck to a pole. She lightens up when recalling her work with the highly professional Laurence Olivier on the movie <i>The Boys from Brazil</i>. Olivier told Meara that he was a great admirer of her work. "He didn't know who the hell I was," Meara says to the interviewer. "But such a gent."<br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com285tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-47357612109846011862015-06-02T12:23:00.000-04:002017-06-10T12:26:08.910-04:00TCR on Film: An Interview with Edward Z. Epstein, author of "Audrey and Bill: A Romantic Biography of Audrey Hepburn and William Holden" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Audrey-Bill-Romantic-Biography-Hepburn/dp/0762455977" style="font-style: italic;">Audrey and Bill: A Romantic Biography of Audrey Hepburn and William Holden</a>, just published by<i> </i><a href="http://www.runningpress.com/">Running Press</a>, veteran film journalist Edward Z. Epstein creatively uses the personal relationship between Hepburn and Holden as a starting point for a wider look at how these two very big stars of the 1950s maneuvered through the changes that came to their lives and to the film industry in the 1960s and beyond.<br />
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"Both stars are charismatic screen personalities, favorites of mine, and I’d thought for a long time about writing a book on the largely untold story of their romance," Epstein, who is the author of numerous books on film subjects including <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Joanne-Biography-Newman-Woodward/dp/0491032099">Paul Newman</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Incredible-Story-Clara-Bow/dp/0440041279/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8">Clara Bow</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brando-Unauthorized-Biography-EPSTEIN-MORELLA/dp/0171420144/ref=la_B0028ET3UO_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1433259439&sr=1-7">Marlon Brando</a>, told <b>The Committee Room</b>. "As New York press contact for MCA/Universal, I worked with many people, over the years, who knew both Audrey and Bill, and who were familiar with the problems they faced and the pressures of the business they were in."<br />
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Today Hepburn is an icon recognizable even to those not so familiar with her film work. Holden, though he had a much longer career than Hepburn and his once tremendous box-office clout earned him the nickname "Golden Holden," has not been so well remembered.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bogart, Audrey and Bill in publicity shot for <i>Sabrina </i>(1954). <br />
Bogie seems left out.</td></tr>
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"Hepburn’s iconic stature, to a large degree, is a result of the revolutionary impact she’s had on the world of fashion," Epstein told <b>TCR</b>. "Young women still strive for her 'look' in <i>Sabrina</i>, <i>Funny Face</i> and <i>Breakfast at Tiffany’s. </i>Combined with her radiance on screen, her talent as an actress (although she never thought she was a good actress!), and her lilting, unique speaking voice, her appeal has stood the test of time It’s tougher for a man to achieve iconic stature. Those that attained it -- Wayne, Bogart, Cagney among them -- were archetypes of their age, projecting an appeal that went beyond their looks and their films. Holden was the ideal All-American man [and] every bit the superstar that George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Bradley Cooper are today."</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Audrey and Bill filming <i>Sabrina</i> on location in Manhattan, 1953.</td></tr>
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Hepburn and Holden met in 1953 when they co-starred in the comedy <i>Sabrina</i>, director Billy Wilder's screen adaptation of Samuel Taylor's hit Broadway play <i>Sabrina Fair</i>, about a chauffeur's daughter who becomes involved with the two sons of her father's wealthy employer. The film's third star, playing the serious older brother, was an oddly cast Humphrey Bogart. The older brother part had been turned down by a more plausible Cary Grant. Used to gritty fare at his home studio Warners Bros, Bogart was very much out of his milieu in this glossy Paramount-produced light comedy.<br />
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Hepburn, a twenty-four year old, Anglo-Dutch newcomer to Hollywood at the time of <i>Sabrina</i>, had recently shot to stardom in her first major film, <i>Roman Holiday</i>. At age thirty-five, the Illinois-born, California-bred Holden was an established, much in demand performer who, along with Gregory Peck and Marlon Brando, was in the top-tier of Hollywood's younger leading men<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill on the cover of <i>Time</i> in his "Golden Holden"<br />
days, with cast of <i>Picnic</i>, 1956. (Cover credit Boris Chaliapin)</td></tr>
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The making of <i>Sabrina</i> was not a happy experience overall. There were frequent script changes and a disgruntled Bogart made no secret of his contempt for his attractive young co-stars and for director Wilder, sometimes referring to them collectively as "you Paramount bastards."<br />
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Despite tension on the set, love blossomed between Hepburn and Holden. "It was obvious to observers...that their interest in each other was intense," Epstein writes in <i>Audrey and Bill</i>. To back this up, the book includes several candid photos of the dreamy eyed couple. By the completion of <i>Sabrina</i>, the two stars seemed headed for the altar. The fact that Holden was already married and had three children -- his wife was Brenda Marshall, a striking brunette who had been a contract player at Warner Bros in the 1940s -- was a complication and possible career threat that the movie star lovers were willing to face. <br />
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"[Hepburn] would have been labeled a 'homewrecker.' It would have been a scandal...but neither [Hepburn nor Holden] had gotten where they were by playing it safe." Epstein told <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Audrey on <i>Life</i>, 1953, the first of several <i>Life</i> covers<br />
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Hepburn was extremely ambitious career-wise but also determined to have a family. Epstein reports that what ended her relationship with Holden was her sense of betrayal at discovering, rather late in the course of things, that Holden had had vasectomy and could not father any more children. "The trusting, simple part of their relationship was gone for good," Epstein writes in <i>Audrey and Bill</i>.<br />
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In the spring of 1954, Hepburn and Holden both won Academy Awards for their work in the previous year -- she for best actress in <i>Roman Holiday</i> and he for best actor in <i>Stalag 17</i>. Their affair was over but they dutifully posed for photos together clutching their Oscars. Hepburn ignored Holden's efforts to win her back, including an affair with rival young beauty Grace Kelly that he hoped would provoke Hepburn's jealousy-driven return.<br />
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With the title subjects of <i>Audrey and Bill</i> breaking up about one-quarter of the way through the book, Epstein allows himself space to offer up a fast-paced but thorough examination of the separate trajectories of the personal and professional lives of these two megastars.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03004/rexfeatures_209411_3004090a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03004/rexfeatures_209411_3004090a.jpg" height="288" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Audrey with Mel Ferrer and their son, Sean, c. 1962.<br />
(photo/Rex).</td></tr>
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"The most challenging aspect of writing <i>Audrey and Bill</i>, after assembling the information -- a daunting task in itself -- was to have them emerge as human beings. The general perception, that stars are gods and goddesses who live in a bubble, barely affected by life’s vicissitudes, is of course not true. Audrey and Bill had to face countless personal crises in the course of their lives -- for me, how they each dealt with the doubts and fears that plague us all was the core of the book," Epstein explained to <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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In the autumn of 1954, just as <i>Sabrina</i> was being released, Hepburn, still on the rebound from Holden, married actor and director Mel Ferrer. Serious-minded, Princeton-educated Ferrer appealed to Hepburn's careerist-side with visions of the two of them becoming a sophisticated husband and wife acting team in the manner of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. "He had big plans regarding work he planned to do with Audrey. In effect, he became her manager," Epstein said of Ferrer to <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill and wife Brenda Marshall, c.1950. Note the resemblance<br />
between Marshall and Audrey.</td></tr>
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The controlling Ferrer guided Hepburn through triumphs -- <i>The Nun's Story</i>, <i>Breakfast at Tiffany's</i>, <i>Charade</i>, and<i> My Fair Lady</i> -- and failures, most notably <i>War and Peace</i> in which they both appeared, and <i>Green Mansions</i> which Ferrer directed. Ferrer also gave her a much longed for child, a son born in 1960. The great acting couple dream never materialized. Ferrer was a dour, non-charismatic screen presence and producers were not interested in pairing him with the incandescent Hepburn.<br />
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Holden's career continued to flourish with blockbusters such as <i>Picnic</i>, <i>Love is a Many Splendored Thing,</i> and <i>The Bridge on the River Kwai</i> but by the early 1960s his star began to fade. Fresher faces including Paul Newman and Rock Hudson were making inroads into handsome leading man territory but Holden's ever-worsening drinking problem was probably a bigger reason for his premature decline. Epstein told <b>TCR</b> that alcoholism had "a devastating effect" on Holden's looks and on the willingness of top producers and directors to work with him.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.filmsdefrance.com/img/Paris_When_It_Sizzles_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.filmsdefrance.com/img/Paris_When_It_Sizzles_01.jpg" height="242" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Audrey and Bill in <i>Paris When It Sizzles</i> (1964). Bill<br />
is beginning to look worse for wear.</td></tr>
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In 1962, Hepburn and Holden made a second film together, <i>Paris When It Sizzles</i>, a satirical comedy, beautifully shot on location in Paris, about a screenwriter and his secretary concocting a screenplay on short notice. Holden's drinking was so out of control that he went into rehab during the production of <i>Sizzles</i>. Hepburn was shocked at Holden's condition. She was also committed to her uneasy marriage to Ferrer and rebuffed Holden's now somewhat pathetic attempts to rekindle their romance. Released in 1964, <i>Paris When It Sizzles</i> was a box-office flop that that did nothing for the career of either performer.<br />
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"Audrey told her agent that it had been a mistake to re-team her with Bill, and to try to not let it happen again," Epstein writes in <i>Audrey and Bill</i>. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://teepee12.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/sob3.jpg?w=321&h=500" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://teepee12.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/sob3.jpg?w=321&h=500" height="400" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A haggard Bill in his final film<i> S.O.B.</i> (1981)</td></tr>
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Holden soldiered on in his stormy marriage to Marshall. an alcohol and anger-fueled union that Epstein told <b>TCR</b> was "described by friends as sometimes reminiscent of George and Martha’s marriage in <i>Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf</i>." Holden and Marshall ultimately divorced but not until 1971, after thirty years of marriage.<br />
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In the last two decades of his life Holden worked less than in earlier years. He devoted much time to African wildlife conservation and was in and out of substance abuse facilities trying in vain to get his drinking under control. In <i>Audrey and Bill</i>, Epstein mentions that in the late 1970s, Holden made the acquaintance of newly-minted star John Belushi at a posh California treatment center. The elegant, aging Holden and the coarse young comedy actor of <i>Animal House</i> fame were nothing alike as performers but, as Epstein writes "they were there for the same purpose -- to dry out."<br />
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The standouts among Holden's later films are <i>The Wild Bunch</i> (1969), director Sam Peckinpah's ultra-violent and critically-acclaimed New Hollywood-style Western, in which Holden leads a band of aging outlaws, and<i> Network</i> (1976), a supremely cynical look at television news, directed by Sidney Lumet. In <i>Network</i> Holden -- looking haggard and elderly even though he was still in his fifties -- plays a demoralized broadcasting executive. <i>Network</i> was a box office smash that represented a comeback for Holden. He earned an Oscar nomination for best actor but his characteristically low-key work lost out to the histrionics of his <i>Network</i> co-star Peter Finch.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsH/7862-524.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsH/7862-524.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Audrey played a celestial barber in her final film <i>Always</i> (1989).</td></tr>
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Holden died in November 1981. He bled to death after gashing his head on a table while alone and drunk in his Santa Monica apartment. His quiet passing was soon overtaken in show biz news by the still much discussed even today drowning of Natalie Wood only two weeks later.<br />
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On Hepburn's part, as the 1960s progressed, she held onto her position as a top rank star. In 1967, the year of seminal New Hollywood films <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i> and <i>The Graduate</i>, she delivered an Oscar nominated performance in the popular thriller <i>Wait Until Dark</i>.<br />
<br />
Her private life was not running as smoothly. With her marriage to the overbearing but useful Ferrer ended, she took a break from her career. "To her consternation, she was on her own -- without a protector -- and she didn't like it," Epstein writes in <i>Audrey and Bill</i>,<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://41.media.tumblr.com/45461aaab61c4cbb3f597be6e1d016ce/tumblr_mvhgt3eHW81r96uqyo1_500.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://41.media.tumblr.com/45461aaab61c4cbb3f597be6e1d016ce/tumblr_mvhgt3eHW81r96uqyo1_500.png" height="400" width="305" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill and Audrey on the<i> Sabrina</i> set, 1953:<br />
"we will always have the romance."</td></tr>
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Hepburn's break lasted almost a decade. During her time away from the screen she married an Italian doctor. It was an unhappy marriage that ended in divorce but produced Hepburn's second son, born in 1970. When Hepburn returned to acting in the mid-1970s, she found there was no place for a middle-aged Audrey Hepburn save for having her presence add some class to a production. The handful of films she made in her later life -- including <i>They All Laughed</i> (1981), directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and <i>Always</i> (1989) directed by Steven Spielberg -- are irrelevant to her screen legacy. Like Holden, she spent much of her time in her final years working for a charitable cause, in her case, UNICEF.<br />
<br />
Hepburn died of cancer in January 1993 at her home in Switzerland.<br />
<br />
At the close of the irresistibly readable <i>Audrey and Bill</i>, Epstein writes that Hepburn and Holden "both possessed in abundance, 'that little something extra' that defines star quality. Although they both died relatively young, and their love story came to an end, thanks to <i>Sabrina</i>, we will always have the romance."<br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com106tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-23129220429624057982015-05-01T16:54:00.001-04:002015-05-06T17:04:15.244-04:00TCR on Television: An Interview with Mike Thomas, author of "You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman"<br />
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In the recently published <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/You-Might-Remember-Me-Hartman/dp/1250027969">You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman</a></i>, journalist Mike Thomas examines the life of a major figure in American comedy. This engrossing read is at once a knowledgeable show biz biography and, considering Hartman's violent death, a sensitively put together true crime story.<br />
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Phil Hartman was all over American television in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably as a pivotal cast member on <i>Saturday Night Live</i> from 1986 to 1994. He also appeared on the sitcom <i>News Radio</i>, the children's show <i>Pee Wee's Playhouse</i>, and voiced numerous characters on <i>The Simpsons</i>.<br />
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The book's tentatively worded title -- taken from a line spouted by one of Hartman's <i>Simpsons</i> characters, a has-been actor named Troy McClure -- reflects the fact that Hartman, even at the height of his career, was more of a reliably humorous presence than a big name comedy celebrity.<br />
<br />
"Even though Phil never became a huge star, he still looms large — as is immediately apparent if you plug his name into Google, Twitter or any number of online portals — in the consciousness of countless fans," Mike Thomas told <b>The Committee Room</b>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mike Thomas, author of <i>You Might Remember Me: The </i><br />
<i>Life and Times of Phil Hartman</i>.</td></tr>
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A 2015 <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/lists/saturday-night-live-all-141-cast-members-ranked-20150211" style="font-style: italic;">Rolling Stone ranking</a> of the nearly one-hundred-fifty <i>Saturday Night Live</i> cast members over the show's four decades on the air, put Hartman at a lofty number seven, behind only John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Mike Myers, Dan Ackroyd, and Bill Murray. Even more impressive is a <a href="http://grantland.com/features/saturday-night-live-greatest-cast-member-ever-nbc-40-years/"><i>Grantland</i> reader's poll</a> that placed Hartman second only to Will Ferrell as<i> SNL</i>'s greatest of all time. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://grantland.com/features/the-glue-understanding-the-comedy-of-phil-hartman-saturday-night-live-newsradio-the-simpsons/">Bryan Curtis in <i>Grantland</i> wrote</a> -- "Hartman was so good at playing smarmy, air-quoting, golden-voiced sharpies...that it’s difficult to catalogue all the comic notes he left behind in the universe. You know when Stephen Colbert jogs across the stage and gives the audience a significant look? Or when Ron Burgundy exclaims, 'By the beard of Zeus!?' These aren’t quotations, or even conscious homages. But make no mistake. What you’re observing is Hartmanism — the art of being unctuous."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/ClintonHartman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/ClintonHartman.jpg" height="247" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phil Hartman (right) as Bill Clinton, <i>Saturday Night Live</i>.</td></tr>
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Sadly, what is often remembered first about Hartman is the shocking way he died. In May 1998, Hartman was shot to death by his wife, Brynn, while he slept at the couple's relatively modest Encino, California home. Hours later, a distraught Brynn took her own life.<br />
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Pulling Hartman's often brilliant career out of the shadow of his horrific death was part of what prompted Thomas, a longtime entertainment writer for the <i>Chicago Sun-Times</i>, to write <i>You Might Remember Me</i>. Thomas' biggest motivation, however, was being a longtime Hartman fan.<br />
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Thomas began watching <i>Saturday Night Live</i> regularly in 1986, the year that Hartman joined the cast. "Almost from the start, Phil was my guy," Thomas told<b> TCR</b>. "He never overplayed roles, did subtle impersonations rather than caricature-ish impressions, and nearly every sketch he was in succeeded on some level...He’s the most versatile cast member in the show’s history. He could hold any sketch together by dint of his talent and extreme commitment to character — no matter how minor that character was."<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.adequatulence.com/hartman/vault/pictures/sinatra2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.adequatulence.com/hartman/vault/pictures/sinatra2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phil Hartman as Frank Sinatra, <i>Saturday<br />Night Live</i></td></tr>
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Hartman was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1948, a middle child in a large Catholic family. By his teenage years, his family had settled in southern California. Young Phil quickly adapted to the local culture and developed lifelong loves of surfing, sailing, and pot smoking. A talented visual artist, Hartman had a successful career as a graphic designer before moving full time into comedy writing and performing. He spent years honing his skills at the Los Angeles improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings. By the time he made it to the cast of <i>SNL</i> he was in his late thirties, a senior citizen by the standards of the youth oriented show.<br />
<br />
Other members of the <i>SNL</i> cast during Hartman's tenure include Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, and Adam Sandler.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/138433852.jpg?w=360" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://timeentertainment.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/138433852.jpg?w=360" height="218" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phil Hartman (center) on <i>News Radio</i><br />
(photo/J. Delvalle/NBC/Getty Images)</td></tr>
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Hartman's calm and mature offstage demeanor, as well as his onstage ability to make the most out of whatever material he was given, led his colleagues to call him the 'Glue.'<br />
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In <i>You Might Remember Me</i>, Hartman's<i> SNL</i> castmate Jay Mohr explained to Thomas -- "Phil wasn't sittin' around with Farley and Tim Meadows and Sandler, making fart jokes and trying to curry favor with the writers. You had to write for Phil. If Phil was in your sketch, it had a much better chance of getting on the air because there really wasn't anything he couldn't do."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/08/31/1409512573041_wps_39_CENTURY_CITY_CA_NOVEMBER_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/08/31/1409512573041_wps_39_CENTURY_CITY_CA_NOVEMBER_.jpg" height="320" width="221" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phil and Brynn Hartman<br />
(photo/WireImage/Daily Mail)</td></tr>
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After leaving <i>SNL</i>, Hartman worked hard on getting his own sketch comedy show on the air. When the proposed show didn't pan out, Hartman accepted the role of self-important broadcaster Bill McNeal on the new situation comedy <i>News Radio</i>, a dry-witted ensemble show that drew critical praise but was never a ratings blockbuster.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
As on <i>SNL</i>, Hartman was a calming influence on the sitcom's younger cast members. Hartman's <i>News Radio</i> co-star Vicki Lewis told Thomas -- "[Phil] seemed too smart and too logical to me, at times, to be an actor. And I think that's what made him particularly funny in the way that he was funny."<br />
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The equanimity Hartman showed in the workplace didn't fully crossover into his personal life. In private, Hartman was an uncommunicative loner who drifted out of romantic relationships when the going became at all rocky. He was twice-divorced and childless when, in 1987, he married Brynn Omdahl. Tall, slender and blonde, Omdahl had worked as a model but aspired to a career as an actress or screenwriter. She also had a history of alcohol and drug abuse. Hartman and Omdahl had two children together.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/24500000/Phil-and-The-Simpsons-phil-hartman-24520630-267-189.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/24500000/Phil-and-The-Simpsons-phil-hartman-24520630-267-189.jpg" height="226" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hartman with his<i> Simpsons</i> characters</td></tr>
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Thomas presents a nuanced portrait of Hartman and Omdahl's ultimately tragic marriage. The beautiful but troubled Omdahl, who a less insightful writer might simply dismiss as a train wreck, comes across as a three-dimensional person. "Achieving that took a considerable amount of reading and interviewing to understand her as a troubled human who did a horrible thing as opposed to merely a cold-blooded villain. It turns out she was actually a great friend and mother whose personal demons including anger management issues and a re-ignited battle with substance abuse, raged out of control," Thomas told <b>TCR</b>.<br />
<br />
The passage of time made many of Hartman's colleagues, friends, and family members more willing to open up to a reporter.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2007/archive/covers/98/6_15_98_205x273.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2007/archive/covers/98/6_15_98_205x273.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>People</i> cover June 15, 1998</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"Phil’s death was, and remains, shocking and deeply saddening to those who knew him and many of those who didn’t," Thomas told <b>TCR</b>. "Right after it happened, amid the swirl of tabloid stories, emotions were running high and his inner circle was in lockdown/protective mode — necessarily so. ... I don’t believe that time heals all wounds — not completely, anyway — but in this case enough years had passed that people (to my great delight) were ready to talk."<br />
<br />
In regard to <i>SNL</i> generally, does Thomas, whose other writings include <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Second-City-Unscripted-Revolution-World-Famous/dp/0810128446/ref=la_B001KCTZSU_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430506456&sr=1-1">a history of Chicago's celebrated comedy troupe Second City,</a> think the legendary NBC show still matters as much as it did back in the twentieth century? <br />
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"The short answer is no," Thomas told <b>TCR</b>. "Thanks to cable and the Internet, there are countless other outlets these days for great comedy — parody, satire, social commentary — in an increasingly fragmented marketplace, Kind of a typical answer, I know, but it’s true. Naturally, then, <i>SNL</i> is no longer the comedic force or arbiter it once was. But that’s just one writer’s take. Lorne Michaels might disagree."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://baselineimages.s3.amazonaws.com/images/260363/260363_full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://baselineimages.s3.amazonaws.com/images/260363/260363_full.jpg" height="320" width="219" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phil Hartman in <i>CB4</i> (1993), one of his<br />
"dud" movies. (photo/Universal Pictures)</td></tr>
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What more would Hartman have accomplished had be lived longer?<br />
<br />
"I hope he would have landed bigger roles in movies. Better movies than the ones he starred in, most of which were duds," Thomas says. "And who knows? Maybe he would have gone the dramatic route. Instead of Bryan Cranston as the lead of <i>Breaking Bad</i> it might have been Phil. Bryan, by the way, is my first choice to play latter-day Phil in a biopic. Please let him know."<br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-21917749116845493962015-03-17T17:08:00.000-04:002017-06-10T12:29:39.824-04:00TCR on Films -- "Life Could Be Verse: Reflections on Love, Loss, and What Really Matters" by Kirk Douglas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In <i>Life Could Be Verse</i>, a brief and often affecting volume, actor Kirk Douglas, who recently turned ninety-eight years old, shares poems he has written over the course of his long life and recounts the experiences that inspired the verses.<br />
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Kirk wrote his first poem -- about a sailing ship, though he had never seen the ocean -- for an English class assignment as a high school student in upstate New York back when he was still Issur Danielovitch, the child of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants. He discovered that versifying helped him better understand his thoughts. "Throughout my life I have written poems that express my true feelings," Kirk explains in the book's acknowledgments.<br />
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The poems are simple but perceptive reflections set in singsong rhyme and might be called wise doggerel. Here are the opening lines from "Luck" -- <i>They call it 'luck'/It can't be taught/It can't be borrowed/It can't be bought'</i>. Kirk's movie stardom, though discussed in the book, takes a back seat to his roles of son, husband, father, and grandfather.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kirk Douglas now (photo/Dan MacMedan/USA TODAY)</td></tr>
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Kirk Douglas is among the few classic studio-era stars still with us in this second decade of the twenty-first century. Olivia de Havilland, Maureen O'Hara, and Doris Day are others. His trademark thick blond hair has turned thin and white and is worn in a ponytail.<br />
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In <i>Life Could Be Vers</i>e Kirk quickly runs through the highlights of his acting career which began on the New York stage in the late 1930s. There were a few years of struggle and a stint in the Navy during World War II. The big break came in 1945 when producer Hal Wallis (following a tip from young Lauren Bacall, who Kirk had briefly dated when she was a Manhattan teenager named Betty) caught Douglas's performance in the play <i>The Wind is Ninety</i> and lured him to Hollywood.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://filmforum.org/do-not-enter-or-modify-or-erase/client-uploads/thumbs/STRANGE-LOVE-OF-MARTHA_MAIN1520.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://filmforum.org/do-not-enter-or-modify-or-erase/client-uploads/thumbs/STRANGE-LOVE-OF-MARTHA_MAIN1520.jpg" height="197" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kirk Douglas then. With Barbara Stanwyck in <i>The<br />Strange Love of Martha Ivers</i> (1946).</td></tr>
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To illustrate one of the main points of <i>Life Could Be Verse</i> -- that blunders big and small are inevitable and the best we can do is learn from them and move on carrying greater wisdom -- Kirk relates how he showed up on the set of his first film, <i>The Strange Love of Martha Iver</i>s, having memorized the wrong part on his train trip west. "I apologized and picked up the script as I tried not to hear the tittering laughter of [the film's leading lady] Barbara Stanwyck," Kirk recalls.<br />
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The boxing drama <i>Champion</i> (1949) established Kirk as a major star. He went on the make approximately ninety films but his turns as Vincent Van Gogh in <i>Lust for Life </i>(1956) and a slave revolt leader in <i>Spartacus</i> (1960) may be the only Kirk Douglas roles that a non-movie buff can name.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Doris Kappelhoff (left) Issur Danielovitch, and<br />
Betty Joan Perske, in <i>Young Man with a Horn</i> (1950).</td></tr>
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<b>The Committee Room</b>'s favorite Kirk Douglas film is <i>Young Man with a Horn </i>(1950), about a brilliant but troubled jazz musician and loosely based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke. His co-stars were old friend Lauren "Betty" Bacall, as a wealthy sophisticate the young man unwisely marries, and Doris Day as the band singer who really loves him. This was the only time any of these performers, whose careers were concurrent, ever worked together. That Kirk appeared only once with Bacall is somehow surprising. That he worked with Doris even this once is more surprising. Kirk and Doris seem to come from different planets in the movie universe.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kirk's autobiography (1988). was<br />
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Kirk's own favorite of his films is<i> Lonely Are the Brav</i>e (1962) about a modern day cowboy trying to live by the code of the Old West. "I love the theme that if you try to be an individual, society will crush you," Kirk wrote in <i>The Ragman's Son</i> (1988), his frank and decidedly unpoetic autobiography. <br />
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The film that proved most important to Kirk's personal life is <i>Act of Love</i> (1953), a now forgotten melodrama set during World War II. While in Paris making the film Kirk met his second, and it would seem final, wife Anne Buydens, an attractive and worldly young publicist assigned to the film. Kirk and Buydens married in 1954. "I have made many mistakes in life. This was not one of them," Kirk says of his second marriage in <i>Life Could Be Verse </i>which is dedicated to Anne. <br />
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Among the most touching of Kirk's poems was written after Anne was injured in a fall in their home and had to be hospitalized. Kirk pleads -- <i>Let me go before my wife/Without her I have no life</i>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kirk Douglas (center) with wife Anne, son Michael,<br />
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The uxoriousness on display in <i>Life Could Be Verse</i> contrasts sharply with the tone of <i>The Ragman's Son</i>, in which Kirk's candor, some might call it braggadocio, in regard to his busy life as a ladies' man makes it easy to forget he has been married for most of his adult life. Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ann Sothern, Gene Tierney, and Rita Hayworth, are among the A-listers who seem to have been more than friends with Kirk.<br />
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Kirk's first wife, the actress Diana Douglas, to whom he was married from 1943 to 1951, is the mother of his famous son Michael. For the record, Diana Douglas, a working actress in stage and television, penned her own entertaining memoir <i>In the Wings</i> (1999). The acerbic Diana, who refers to Kirk somewhat dismissively as "Doug," writes about her affair with Errol Flynn and the challenges she faced raising her sons while maintaining a busy but relatively modest acting career. With perhaps a tinge of envy, she questions whether the level of stardom held by her ex-husband, her son, and other celebrated people she has known, is really something to be desired.<br />
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Today, Kirk's oldest boy, no whippersnapper himself at age seventy, is perhaps more famous than his father. There is, as readers will likely expect, a poem about Michael in <i>Life Could Be Verse. </i>In "Michael" Kirk writes -- <i>I became a 'good father'/It took me too long to see/When I needed him/More than he needed me.</i><br />
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Kirk Douglas was once among the most driven and abrasive of Hollywood's top performers. These qualities are very much in evidence in <i>The Ragman's Son</i> but almost entirely absent from <i>Life Could Be Verse</i>. In the quarter century between the autobiography and the book of poems, Kirk survived a helicopter crash, suffered a stroke which left him having to relearn how to speak, and experienced the death of his youngest son, Eric, from a drug overdose. In the poem "Eric," Kirk writes -- <i>Tell me, Eric, what did I do wrong?/What should I have done to make you strong?/Now I sit here and cry/Waiting to be with you when I die.</i><br />
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Other books by Kirk Douglas include <i>My Stroke of Luck</i> (2002),<i> Let's Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning</i> (2007) and two novels: <i>Dance with the Devil </i>(1990) and <i>The Gift</i> (1992). He has also performed a one-man autobiographical stage show, <i>Before I Forget</i> (2009).<br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-51625332510359778122015-02-10T14:47:00.001-05:002015-03-19T11:49:56.654-04:00TCR on Films: "Watch Me: A Memoir" by Anjelica Huston<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the recently published <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Watch-Me-Memoir-Anjelica-Huston/dp/1476760349">Watch Me: A Memoir</a></i>, actress and sometime director Anjelica Huston picks up where she left off in her first book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451656297/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1944687542&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1476760349&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0G76PSV8VMY5JDJ4VNVV">A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York</a></i> (discussed in <b>TCR</b> in <a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2014/03/a-story-lately-told-by-anjelica-huston.html">April 2014</a>).<br />
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At the start of this second volume Huston is in her early twenties and has just arrived in Los Angeles. She has been a successful fashion model in Europe and New York but is eager to commence a new life in sunny SoCal after finally extrapolating herself from a difficult relationship with a mentally ill photographer old enough to be her father. <br />
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Anjelica is a new girl in town but, being the daughter of legendary film director and bon vivant John Huston, she is an extremely well-connected one. It isn't long before she meets rising star Jack Nicholson and they begin a lengthy reign as Hollywood's coolest couple. Woody Allen immortalized their partnership in <i>Annie Hall</i> in which Annie's acceptance by the in-crowd is represented by her being invited to a party at Jack and Anjelica's.<br />
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Jack and Anjelica are an unequal pair. Nicholson essentially replaces John Huston as the charismatic, energetic and famous man dominating over Anjelica's life. As Jack ascends to superstardom in <i>Chinatown</i>, <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest</i>, and <i>The Shining</i>, Anjelica hangs around and smokes -- sometimes on Jack's movie locations, sometimes back home at Jack's house on Mulholland, sometimes at the homes of friends in Paris, London, New York, and Aspen. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack and Anjelica back in the day, 1976,<br />
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A serious car accident leaves Anjelica with a badly broken nose (that has to be rebuilt with plastic surgery) and puts her, as she approaches age thirty, on a path to finding an independent identity. "After I broke my nose, something changed in me -- I made up my mind to take greater advantage of my life," she writes. She takes acting lessons with Method acting coach Peggy Feury and lands some small roles, including bits in<i> This is Spinal Tap</i> and the TV sitcom<i> Laverne and Shirley</i>. Within a few short years she wins a best supporting actress Oscar for a scene stealing turn in <i>Prizzi's Honor</i>, a black comedy starring Nicholson and directed by the elderly John Huston who was slowing dying from emphysema. Anjelica points out that producer John Foreman, who she considers a mentor of sorts, hired her first. Her illustrious dad and big-name boyfriend signed on only after she was already involved.<br />
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The Oscar earns Anjelica increased respect as an actress and raises her profile but did not send her to the top rank of Hollywood stars. Still, she works regularly in major productions and has carved out a career that is her own. She is often part of ensemble casts as in Francis Ford Coppola's <i>Gardens of Stone</i>, the television mini-series<i> Lonesome Dove</i>, and the Wes Anderson films -- <i>The Royal Tenenbaums</i>, <i>The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou </i>and <i>The Darjeeling Limited</i>. Occasionally there are lead roles. Anjelica calls the part of Lilly Dillon, a cold-hearted conwoman in <i>The Grifters</i> (1990) "arguably the best role of my life" and admits that director Stephen Frears contacted her only after the part had been turned down by Melanie Griffith (who was a big star back in the 1980s, it should be remembered). About another plum role -- Morticia in Barry Sonnenfeld's <i>The Addams Family </i>and <i>Addams Family Values</i> <i>--</i> Anjelica wryly wonders why the producers wanted her and not Cher.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://thebestpictureproject.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/prizzishonor2.jpg?w=627" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://thebestpictureproject.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/prizzishonor2.jpg?w=627" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anjelica in <i>Prizzi's Honor</i>, 1985.</td></tr>
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As Anjelica moves toward middle age her independence grows stronger. Her father dies. Her relationship with Nicholson, which had been withering away for some time, in part due to Jack's increasingly flagrant womanizing, finally ends when he fathers a child with young actress Rebecca Broussard. "Although in many ways in was not logical, the sense of betrayal was overwhelming; I felt abandoned and dejected and humiliated...I was very lonely at this period of my life. But I realized that it had been Jack's life, for the most part; I had existed in in it. That was over now," Anjelica writes. She coolly adds that Nicholson and Broussard's second child, a boy, is "named Raymond. Which is odd, since we'd once owned a dog by that name." Though their almost two decade long romance ended badly, Anjelica makes it clear that she remains fond of Nicholson who she calls "a fair and true friend."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anjelica with unfriendly co-star Bill Murray in<br />
<i>The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou</i>, 2004.</td></tr>
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Thrown into the brisk narrative of <i>Watch Me</i> are Anjelica's impressions of some of her famous co-workers. Bill Murray is cordial during the making of<i> The Royal Tenenbaums</i> but is inexplicably frosty a few years later on <i>The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou</i> and doesn't ask her to a dinner he hosts for the cast. Woody Allen, who hires Anjelica for <i>Crimes and Misdemeanor</i>s without ever having met her, rebuffs her suggestion that they get together for a get-acquainted drink before starting work on the movie. "Was it boredom or anxiety?" Anjelica wonders about Allen's anti-social reaction. Visiting Jack on the set of<i> Ironweed,</i> Anjelica finds Nicholson in his trailer with his co-star Meryl Streep. "They were speaking in the lingo of their characters, alcoholic lovers. There was no doubt they were very comfortable in each other's presence, because neither one broke character to greet me," Anjelica recalls. In the relatively long discussion of <i>Prizzi's Honor</i>, Anjelica is conspicuously terse in regard to Kathleen Turner, the film's leading lady, who is mentioned only in passing.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anjelica with husband, the sculptor<br />
Robert Graham, in 2000.</td></tr>
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In 1992, a couple of years after ending things with Jack, Anjelica marries for the first and so far only time in her life. The groom is Mexican-born sculptor Robert Graham. Like Nicholson and John Huston, Graham is an older man with a strong personality and a successful career that he puts above all else. Unlike Jack and John, however, Graham is something of a brooding loner. Anjelica and Graham build a fortress-like house for themselves in Venice Beach. The marriage has its difficulties (he goes for long periods without speaking; she has an affair while making <i>Ever After</i> in the South of France) but endures until Graham's painful death from a rare illness in 2008.<br />
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Anjelica's life as presented in <i>Watch Me</i> lacks the usual components of a Hollywood memoir. No difficult climb out of obscurity. She is a Huston, after all. No divorces. Though she says she sometimes pressed Nicholson to legalize their relationship, they both seem to have been too self-aware to ever have thought that things would really be till death do us part. Drug use and drinking are alluded to but don't turn problematic. Anjelica even manages to permanently overcome a forty-year long heavy smoking habit with a day-long seminar at a hotel conference room in 2006. "I haven't had a cigarette since, and have had no desire to smoke," she tells us. Whether this is true or not, it's not dramatic. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anjelica in 2014 (photo/David Livingston/Getty Images)</td></tr>
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<i>Watch Me</i> has many moments of interest but lacks the charm of Anjelica's briefer and more engaging earlier memoir, <i>A Story Lately Told</i>, which recounts her strange, isolated upbringing on a rural Irish estate, then her busy adolescence in Swinging Sixties London. The first book, though written with the same cool detachment of <i>Watch Me</i>, offers up a child's eye view of the larger than life John Huston's extraordinary home life replete with children legitimate and not, foxhunts, functional alcoholism, unpaid bills, famous authors including John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers coming to visit, and ex-wives turning up. There is also the tragedy of Anjelica's mother's death in a car accident.<br />
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-46235345973903721892014-10-16T14:03:00.002-04:002017-06-10T12:35:02.852-04:00TCR on Broadway: Interview with Author Peter Filichia on Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the recently published <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strippers-Showgirls-Sharks-Opinionated-Broadway/dp/1250018439">Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks: A Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award</a></i> author and theater critic Peter Filichia takes a vibrant and extremely well-informed look into why so many classic shows failed to win Broadway's biggest prize. The book's title refers to three especially admired non-winners -- <i>Gypsy</i> (strippers),<i> Follies</i> (showgirls) and <i>West Side Story</i> (Sharks, a street gang).<br />
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The Tony Awards are given out by the <a href="http://americantheatrewing.org/">American Theatre Wing</a>, a service organization founded during World War II to oversee Broadway's contribution to the war effort. The Wing ran the famous Stage Door Canteen. After the war, the Wing remained in existence, shifting its mission to supporting the theater generally and bringing theater resources to communities. The Tony Awards -- named in honor of the Wing's co-founder, director and actress Antoinette Perry -- began in 1947. The first awards ceremony was a relatively modest affair in a hotel ballroom. Only a handful awards, many of them honorary, were presented.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.talkinbroadway.com/spot/Icons/filichia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.talkinbroadway.com/spot/Icons/filichia.jpg" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="210" height="320" width="186" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Author Peter Filichia</td></tr>
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Over the years more competitive categories were added along with the practice of selecting winners from a list of nominees. In 1949, the first best musical award went to <i>Kiss Me, Kate</i>, veteran composer Cole Porter's take on Shakespeare's <i>Taming of the Shrew</i>. By the mid-1950s, the Tony Awards ceremony had become a larger, more formal event broadcast live on local New York television. <br />
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<a href="http://www.masterworksbroadway.com/blog">Filichia, a theater blogger</a> and columnist who was for many years the theater critic for the <i>Newark Star-Ledger</i>, points out that it was nationwide television exposure, beginning in 1967, that truly boosted the Tony above other theater accolades. "Looking at print ads for Broadway in the 1950s and early 1960s prove that shows that had won prizes used to advertise first and foremost 'Pulitzer Prize Winner!' or 'New York Drama Critics Circle Winner!' much more often that 'Tony-winner!'" Filichia told <b>The Committee Room</b>. "Now no other theatrical award can touch the power of the Tony, because of that two-hour television infomercial that runs on a Sunday in June. And while ratings are a fraction of what they used to be (which, to be fair, is true of every network television show), the broadcast still reaches millions of people who say, 'Hmm, that show looks good' and reach for their telephones to call Telecharge."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ep.yimg.com/ay/playbill/wicked-the-musical-broadway-poster-20.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://ep.yimg.com/ay/playbill/wicked-the-musical-broadway-poster-20.gif" height="400" width="253" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Tween girls love <i>Wicked</i> but the<br />
Tonys preferred <i>Avenue Q</i> in 2004.</td></tr>
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Other popular shows that did not win the Tony for best musical are <i>Oliver!</i>, <i>Mame</i>, <i>Sweet Charity</i>, <i>Hair</i>, <i>Promises, Promises</i>, <i>Pippin</i>, <i>Grease</i>, <i>Chicago</i>, <i>Sunday in the Park with George</i>, and that mega-hit of the past decade, <i>Wicked</i>.<br />
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Filichia reminds us that the Tonys reflect how shows were seen in its time, not what we think of them years later. Lerner and Loewe's <i>Camelot</i> is a beloved classic but it opened on Broadway in 1960 under the shadow of Lerner and Loewe's earlier <i>My Fair Lady</i>, a critical and commercial smash that was still going strong at the box office nearly five years after it opened. <i>Camelot</i> wasn't even nominated for best musical. The snub was heightened by the Tony Award committee leaving a nomination slot empty. "Is there any fact that better proves what a tremendous disappointment <i>Camelot</i> was at the time?" Filachia writes in <i>Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks</i>.<br />
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Some theater seasons present stronger competition than others. Filichia cites the example of <i>Big</i>, David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr.'s musical version of the Tom Hanks movie. <i>Big</i> opened on Broadway in the spring of 1996. "The money was in place to produce it during the 1994-1995 season, but that was the same season in which <i>Sunset Boulevard</i> was opening," Filiachia told <b>TCR</b>. "The producers said, 'Oh, we’ll never win the Tony against that Andrew Lloyd Webber juggernaut, so why bother even trying? Let’s wait a season.' Well, yes, <i>Sunset Boulevard</i> indeed <i>did</i> win the Tony as Best Musical, but in a season where its only competition was <i>Smokey Joe’s Café</i>. I will always maintain that if <i>Big</i> had opened that season, it would have won the Tony, because the time was right for a Lloyd Webber backlash and many would have said 'Oh, <i>Big</i> is so all-American, so fresh and breezy!' But the producers waited until the next season, when <i>Rent</i> opened – which had the emotion attached that its author [Jonathan Larson] had prematurely died as well as the incontrovertible fact that the Baby Boomers now rich enough to attend the theater wanted to hear rock music – and <i>Big</i> didn’t have that."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.playbillvault.com/images/cover/B/i/Big-Playbill-06-96.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.playbillvault.com/images/cover/B/i/Big-Playbill-06-96.jpg" height="400" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Big, The Musical</i>. Did it open a year<br />
too late?</td></tr>
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Back in the 1957-1958 season <i>West Side Story</i> and <i>The Music Man</i> competed for best musical along with three lesser offerings -- <i>New Girl in Town</i>, <i>Jamaica</i>, and <i>Oh, Captain!</i>. The winner was <i>The Music Man</i>. Whether this tale of a conman inadvertently bringing joy to a dour little town in turn of the century Iowa was superior to <i>West Side Story</i> and its tragic gang rivalry in a contemporary Manhattan slum, is arguable but it was certainly more cheerful. Filichia notes that the best musical Tony usually goes to upbeat shows. He recalls gasps from the audience at the Tony Awards ceremony for the 1971-1972 season, when Stephen Sondheim's <i>Follies</i>, a gut-wrenching masterpiece of despairing middle aged couples attending a reunion of former showgirls, lost the best musical award to a lighthearted and now mostly forgotten musical version of Shakespeare's <i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>.<br />
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The spectacularly strong 1959-1960 season ended up in a tie with <i>The Sound of Music</i> and <i>Fiorello!</i> both getting the Tony for best musical. These two uplifting shows crowded out <i>Gypsy</i>, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's lively but bleak story of Burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee and her ferocious stage mother, Mama Rose. Indeed, <i>Gypsy</i>, which has been revived on Broadway more than any other non-Tony winner, did not win any of the eight Tonys for which it was nominated, a record-setting collection of losses.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.julestyne.com/images/showimages/Gypsy-1959-Broadway-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.julestyne.com/images/showimages/Gypsy-1959-Broadway-2.jpg" height="400" width="250" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Gypsy</i>, a favorite of Broadway <br />
aficionados, was shut out by the Tonys in 1960<br />
. </td></tr>
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Filachia calls <i>Fiorello!</i>, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock's tale of the rise of Fiorello LaGuardia, New York City's charismatic mayor in the 1930s and 1940s, "a real New York show in a time when New Yorkers routinely attended musicals. Now the mayor who’s been out of office for almost seventy years is an unknown quantity with tourists who comprise most of the Broadway audience."<br />
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The Tonys also favor shows that are still running when awards night comes around. "Out of sight, out of mind," Filichia says. Only once in Tony history has the best musical award gone to a show that had already closed -- <i>Hallelujah, Baby!</i>, a chronicle of African-American social progress, written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green with music by Jule Styne, that opened in the weak 1967-68 season.<br />
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Only shows that are presented in one of the three dozen or so theaters designated "Broadway" houses are eligible for the Tony. Broadway offerings in the 1980s were so paltry that Filichia thought that the Tonys would, if only out of desperation, begin to include more theaters. "There were so few new worthy shows that some categories had to be eliminated, I would have sworn that the Tonys were on their way to welcoming off-Broadway," Filichia told <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://gd-cdn.playbill.com/images/cache/private/gdimages/cache/remote/http_s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/playbillimages/photo/g/e/george2_444_333.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://gd-cdn.playbill.com/images/cache/private/gdimages/cache/remote/http_s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/playbillimages/photo/g/e/george2_444_333.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sunday in the Park with George</i> won the Pulitzer Prize but not<br />
the Best Musical Tony (photo/Martha Swope).</td></tr>
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Broadway has rebounded since those dire times. Though Off-Broadway has gained enormously in prestige in recent decades, with major playwrights and star performers frequently working there, being showcased on the actual Great White Way still matters.<br />
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"Getting people to pay attention to Broadway is hard enough, what with diminishing [theater] coverage in diminishing newspapers," Filichia explained to <b>TCR</b>. "Many writers now <i>only</i> cover Broadway, because their editors know that most people who spend exorbitant sums on theater tickets want to feel they’ve had a 'night on the town.'" </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://jerseyboysblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/jb500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://jerseyboysblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/jb500.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Jersey Boys</i>, a Tony Winner with "second-hand music."<br />
(photo/Jersey Boys blog). </td></tr>
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Filachia points to "the paucity of new scores" as a primary reason why he thinks the quality of Broadway musical fare has declined in the past decade. <br />
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"Second-hand music rules the day," Filichia told<b> TCR</b>. "In eight of the last ten Tony races, there has been at least one score that featured music that had first been heard elsewhere, be it on film or radio. Those who think things are getting better might notice that last season three of the four musicals featured music that had already been heard elsewhere. To be fair, however, the musical that won – <i>A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder</i> – was the one original score of the four nominees. So maybe originality still matters. Many decry the adaptations of movies as musical fodder but that doesn’t bother me at all. As long as the show is good, I don’t care what the source is – be it book, comic book or television series."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f3/Annie_Musical_Poster.jpg/215px-Annie_Musical_Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f3/Annie_Musical_Poster.jpg/215px-Annie_Musical_Poster.jpg" height="400" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Annie</i>, a show with "great heart,"<br />
Best Musical Tony winner, 1977</td></tr>
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Filichia finds that rock music, with its lack of emphasis on clear enunciation, does not lend itself well to the musical theater where songs convey plot. <br />
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"If enough lyrics aren’t understood, each time it happens, it chips away a bit of the enjoyment; in the end, people think the show was 'just all right' when they might have been more enthusiastic if they could have better understood what the authors were saying. On the other hand, in musicals that use old rock songs – be they <i>Rock of Ages</i>, <i>Jersey Boys</i>, <i>Smokey Joe’s Café</i> or <i>Mamma Mia!</i> – it doesn’t matter as much because people come into the theater knowing those lyrics, anyway," Filachia told <b>TCR</b>.<br />
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Filachia's theatergoing experience began when he was a teenager in Boston in the early 1960s. What are his favorites among the countless musicals he has seen over the years?<br />
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"I’m going to mention <i>Annie</i> first for a specific reason," Filachia says. "I saw it try out at the Goodspeed Opera house in October, 1976, six months before it opened on Broadway, and while it wasn’t one-hundred percent there yet, it won me over because of its great heart. Who knew that we would care so much for a comic strip character? But we did, because the creators made her human with the most basic need: finding your family. Most everyone liked <i>Annie</i> until it became a smash and a juggernaut. Then criticizing it for its success became hip and de rigueur. But when I love a show, I love it for life...I will always fondly remember how I felt that long-ago Sunday afternoon."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6e/MerrilyWeRollAlong.jpg/215px-MerrilyWeRollAlong.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6e/MerrilyWeRollAlong.jpg/215px-MerrilyWeRollAlong.jpg" height="400" width="253" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sondheim's <i>Merrily We Roll Along</i>. This<br />
Filichia favorite wasn't even nominated <br />
for the best musical Tony Award.</td></tr>
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Other Filachia favorites are <i>My Fair Lady</i>, <i>How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum</i>, <i>Fiddler on the Roof</i>, <i>Cabaret</i>, <i>1776</i>, <i>Company</i>, <i>Follies</i>, <i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>, <i>A Little Night Music</i>, <i>Merrily We Roll Along</i>, <i>Les Miserables</i>, <i>Grand Hotel</i>, <i>City of Angels</i>, <i>Once on This Island,</i> <i>Urinetown</i> and <i>Avenue Q</i>.<br />
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For the record, all but four of these -- <i>Merrily We Roll Along</i>, <i>Grand Hotel</i>, <i>Once on This Island</i>, and <i>Urinetown</i> -- won the Tony for best musical.<br />
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As to what goes into making a hit musical, Filachia says "It has to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Ideally, there should be something to appeal to every generation. The reason that <i>Bye Bye Birdie</i> [1961 best musical winner] is still getting done more than half-century after its Broadway opening is because it deals with adults, teens, and even makes room for a mother of an adult. Something for everybody – and somebody that everyone can recognize."<br />
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tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com67tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-45867664753069223312014-09-26T14:06:00.000-04:002014-09-26T22:49:00.202-04:00"Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave" (Interview with biographer Dan Callahan)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE_RdGT0jYJdPZwTaDZJu39vSx1I-B0B9FWgc_b9a07ITIEbJuMabV8MBnZ2ObipijrGeyvrTEr3TT9WDreiuxy-y2fETOyBmpAsfIw1vLEY6tjzXaoRzSytzWRDmQq2xbHcgdxiSRGCs/s1600/Vanessa.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE_RdGT0jYJdPZwTaDZJu39vSx1I-B0B9FWgc_b9a07ITIEbJuMabV8MBnZ2ObipijrGeyvrTEr3TT9WDreiuxy-y2fETOyBmpAsfIw1vLEY6tjzXaoRzSytzWRDmQq2xbHcgdxiSRGCs/s1600/Vanessa.jpeg" height="400" width="266" /></a></div>
At the opening of his superb new biography <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vanessa-The-Life-Redgrave/dp/1605985570">Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave</a></i>, author <a href="http://callahandan.wordpress.com/">Dan Callahan</a> takes readers back to 1997 when he was a drama student in New York. From a discount-price, obstructed view seat the young Callahan watched the great Vanessa Redgrave as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>. At the end of the performance, a matinee at the Public Theater, Redgrave solemnly informed the audience that she had just received word of the death of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fred-Zinnemann-Autobiography-Life-Movies/dp/0684190508">Fred Zinnemann</a> who had directed her Oscar winning performance in <i>Julia</i> two decades earlier. Redgrave praised Zinnemann's Western film classic <i>High Noon</i>, citing it as a brave statement against the obsessive anti-Communism that pervaded American society in the early 1950s. Then, in her soft British accent, Redgrave astonished the audience by launching into a rendition of the theme to <i>High Noon,</i> a twangy ballad ("Do not forsake me, oh my darling!...") originally sung by Tex Ritter.<br />
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The crowd drifted out of the theater as Redgrave continued through the verses of the song but Callahan was transfixed. Nearly twenty years later, his fascination with Redgrave has not diminished.<br />
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"I just can’t get enough of watching her. I think that there is something very special going on when she acts, and I wanted to celebrate that," Callahan told <b>The Committee Room</b>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Author Dan Callahan (photo/Edward Vilga).</td></tr>
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There have been a number of books about Redgrave and her illustrious acting family including <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-House-Redgrave-Theatrical-Dynasty/dp/1845136233">The House of Redgrave</a></i> by Tim Adler (2013), and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Redgraves-A-Family-Epic/dp/0307720144/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09JQYZM963QJY5WSXGAX">The Redgraves: A Family Epic</a></i> by Donald Spoto (2012). Callahan skillfully stakes out territory for himself in <i>Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave</i> by focusing on the actress' busy professional life. He offers an enormously entertaining and insightful critical review of her long and varied career.<br />
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Redgrave's autobiography, simply titled <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vanessa-Redgrave-Autobiography/dp/0679402160/ref=la_B001HMNJAS_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411739105&sr=1-1">Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography</a></i>, was published in 1994.<br />
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"It’s an odd book," Callahan told <b>TCR </b>in regard to the autobiography. "There is a lot of information, but it seldom feels like the right information in the right place at the right time, if that makes sense. She skips over things a lot. And then she will linger over things that don’t seem at all important, particularly towards the end. So it is, I think, unsatisfactory in many ways. That’s part of why I wanted to do my book."</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave with Richard Harris in <i>Camelot</i>, 1967.</td></tr>
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For more than half a century, Redgrave has worked steadily, bouncing between stage, screen, and television, doing superb work in each medium. Her left-wing political activism has at times, especially during her association with the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s, captured as much attention as her numerous acting assignments.<br />
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"It was the work that fascinated me, and there’s so much of it," Callahan explained to <b>TCR</b>. "As far as her private life goes, I didn’t want to pry. I think there are some things that are none of our business unless the person involved wants to share it. On the other hand, when it came to her politics, which have been very public, I felt free to press as much as I wanted."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/67/6722/DLUA100Z/posters/julia-jane-fonda-vanessa-redgrave-1977.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/67/6722/DLUA100Z/posters/julia-jane-fonda-vanessa-redgrave-1977.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave with Jane Fonda in <i>Julia</i>, 1977.</td></tr>
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After concentrating on stage work in the earliest years of her career, Redgrave earned an Oscar nomination for her first major film role, that of a young London socialite pursued by her working class -- and perhaps insane -- estranged husband in the absurdist comedy <i>Morgan!</i> (1966). Leading roles followed in big time productions such as <i>Camelot</i> (1967), a screen version of Lerner and Loewe's Broadway musical; <i>Isadora</i> (1968), with Redgrave as famed dancer Isadora Duncan, and <i>The Devils</i> (1971), Ken Russell's outlandish adaptation of Aldous Huxley's novel of hysteria in a seventeenth-century French convent.<br />
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But fully-fledged movie stardom never quite happened for Redgrave.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/kNDsOOp8M9H1SMkPwa9ucmQQzZx.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/kNDsOOp8M9H1SMkPwa9ucmQQzZx.jpg" height="400" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Playing for Time</i>, TV movie, 1980.</td></tr>
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"I think that Redgrave had the potential to be a major film star in the late 1960s and early 1970s," Callahan told <b>TCR</b>. "My feeling is that she deliberately distanced herself from that possibility. I don’t think that she ever thought about this consciously, but I think that the wellspring of her creativity comes from feeling like an outsider, or outside the mainstream. In the 1970s, when she was consumed by working for the Workers Revolutionary Party, I don’t think there were too many film roles for women that she could have played. And then in the 1980s, Meryl Streep took all the roles she might have played. I think it’s partly her, but it’s also partly the time she was a young actress. She has always found her most challenging work on the stage, and later on TV. You may need to look for her best work, but it is there, and it is still outstanding."</div>
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In sorting through Redgrave's fabulous hodgepodge of a career, Callahan found two of her greatest performances came in relatively modest films made for American broadcast television -- <i>Playing for Time </i>(1980), featuring Redgrave, her head shaved, her face scarred, as one of a group of female musicians in a Nazi death camp who stave off the gas chamber by forming an orchestra to entertain their captors; and <i>Second Serve</i> (1986), starring an unrecognizable, dark-haired Redgrave as the transgendered tennis star Renee Richards.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave unrecognizable in <i>Second Serve</i>, TV movie, 1986.</td></tr>
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Another outstanding performance came in the "1961" segment of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/If-These-Walls-Could-Talk/dp/B00004ZBX8">If These Walls Could Talk, Part 2</a></i> (2000), a cable television movie offering stories about lesbian couples in three different decades. Redgrave played an aging woman who, after the death of her beloved longtime partner, is brushed off as irrelevant by the partner's family. In his book, Callahan calls Redgrave's work in "1961" a "master class in acting" that is "purely didactic, purely felt, and pure Vanessa Redgrave at her empathetic best."<br />
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Callahan's admiration for Redgrave does not prevent him from pointing out instances where her formidable instincts seem to have gone astray. Of a 1988 American television version of Robert Bolt's play <i>A Man for All Seasons</i>, starring Charlton Heston as Sir Thomas More, Callahan says Redgrave's portrayal of More's assertive but uneducated wife is done in the manner of a "schizophrenic llama."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave with Philip Seymour Hoffman in O'Neill's <i>Long Day's Journey<br />Into Night</i>, New York, 2003.</td></tr>
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Redgrave's eagerness to keep busy has led to her involvement in projects of dubious value ranging from appearances in incomprehensible European art films in the late 1960s to voicing the role of a talking dog from outer space in the movie comedy <i>Good Boy!</i> in 2003.<br />
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In his book Callahan notes that is it is characteristic of the up and down nature of Redgrave's career that soon after completing the talking dog role -- "at this very lowest point in her filmography" -- Redgrave signed on to play the "most testing and difficult theater role of her career," that of Mary Tyrone in a Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's classic drama <i>Long Day's Journey into Night. </i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave in <i>The Ballad of the Sad Cafe</i>, 1991.</td></tr>
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Callahan concedes that Redgrave's lavish talents do not include a gift for comedy. "She can bring tremendous joy and gaiety to a scene, and she can be very ethereal...she can be 'light'...But she isn’t funny," Callahan told <b>TCR</b>. "I don’t think I laughed once the whole time I was watching and writing about her. It’s all very serious. But that’s all right. Lots of other people are funny, particularly her rival Maggie Smith. Not many other people can be as intense and romantic and imaginative as she can be."<br />
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Among Redgrave's finest screen performances is her turn as the mannish, slow-witted Miss Amelia in <i>The Ballad of the Sad Cafe</i>. "In her best work, and Miss Amelia definitely counts among her best, Redgrave's performances are made up of almost nothing but risks...Her total immediacy, yoked to a huge imagination, is an exceedingly rare quality on stages or screens," Callahan writes in his biography. Actor and director Simon Callow directed <i>The Ballad of the Sad Cafe</i>, a little-seen 1991 screen adaptation of the Carson McCullers novella.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave campaigning for seat in Parliament, 1974.</td></tr>
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"I wanted desperately to interview Simon Callow," Callahan told <b>TCR</b>. "I wanted his insights. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Laughton-A-Difficult-Actor/dp/0880641800">Callow’s critical biography of Charles Laughton</a> was a great inspiration to me. It took a while to set up a phone interview, because he is very busy, and I started to think I might not get it; he had to cancel once. But then finally I did get it, and he was so insightful, so sensitive, that some of his thoughts about her are at the end of the book, too."<br />
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Callahan is also the author of a book on classic Hollywood star Barbara Stanwyck (<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Barbara-Stanwyck-Miracle-Hollywood-Legends/dp/1617031836">Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman</a></i>, 2012). Is it more difficult to write about a living and still very much active subject?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vanessa Redgrave and brother Corin at anti-Vietnam<br />
war rally, London, 1968 (photo/AP).</td></tr>
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"Yes, I would say so," Callahan told <b>TCR</b>. "I didn’t really picture [Redgrave] reading [the book]. If I had, I don’t think I could have gone forward. She requested a copy of the book shortly after it was published. Though I haven’t heard anything more from her, her agents wrote me a nice, brief email thanking me for sending the book."<br />
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At first Callahan sought Redgrave's cooperation with his biography. "I sent her a letter telling her I was planning on doing a book. I had a vague hope that I might get a response, but I didn’t," Callahan says. "To be honest with you, once I started, I knew I didn’t want to talk to her. She’s very intimidating, and there is no way I could have done an honest book if I had been influenced by her in any way, particularly when it came to writing about her years as a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave with James Earl Jones in <i>Driving Miss<br />Daisy</i>, New York, 2010 (photo/Rosegg-AP).</td></tr>
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In the early 1970s, Redgrave joined the Workers Revolutionary Party, a cult-like British Marxist group, at the encouragement of her brother Corin, a political activist and sometime actor, who died in 2010. Vanessa and Corin, Callahan says, were "about as close as a brother and sister can be...By all accounts, Corin was the biggest influence on her political life. They had a kind of pact with each other that didn’t let anybody else in, and that went back to the time they were kids. There were many times, as I was writing this, that I wished that that hadn’t been the case."<br />
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The WRP broke up in the 1980s after its domineering leader, Gerry Healy, was accused of sexually abusing female members of the party. Both Vanessa and Corin remained loyal to the discredited Healy.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Redgrave with Jesse Eisenberg, co-star in the play <i>The<br />Revisionist</i>, New York, 2013.</td></tr>
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"Well, I must admit, there were times when I was researching [Vanessa's] time in the WRP when my heart sank," Callahan told <b>TCR</b>. "I would be talking to someone who had been in the group with her, and they would be telling me her attitude then, and the way she related to the group’s leader, Gerry Healy, and I would be surprised and saddened. But that didn’t last too long. She moved past all that. And I must say, I love her work more than ever. I still can’t get enough of it."<br />
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<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b></div>
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<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com77tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-24758996113539013112014-09-17T13:29:00.000-04:002014-09-17T13:29:03.849-04:00TCR Remembers Penelope Niven, author of books on Thornton Wilder and James Earl Jones<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Thornton Wilder: A Life</i><br />by Penelope Niven</td></tr>
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<b>The Committee Room</b> notes with sadness the death of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/arts/penelope-niven-carl-sandburg-biographer-dies-at-75.html?_r=0">Penelope Niven</a>, biographer of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder (<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thornton-Wilder-Life-Penelope-Niven/dp/0060831375">Thornton Wilder: A Life</a></i>). Niven died unexpectedly on August 28, 2014. At the time of her death, Niven was working on further Wilder projects, including a book titled <i>Wilder on Writing</i>.<br />
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In early 2013, Niven generously gave an engaging and in-depth interview to <b>TCR</b> in regard to the recently published <i>Thornton Wilder: A Life</i>.<br />
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<i>Kirkus Reviews</i> called <i>Thornton Wilder: A Life</i> "satisfying and insightful...a perceptive, indispensable portrait of a productive and restlessly intellectual life" and the <i>Boston Globe</i> praised it as "a sweeping look into the life of a man who left an indelible mark on the American theater...a vital work of scholarship."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Co-written by<br />Penelope Niven</td></tr>
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Niven beautifully sums up Wilder's writings as a search for answers to the fundamental questions -- "How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual life?"<br />
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Among Niven's other theater related work is <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/VOICES-SILENCES-SOFTCOVER-James-Jones/dp/0879109696">Voices and Silences</a></i>, which she co-authored with the actor James Earl Jones. The book offers both an exploration of Jones' personal history and a text on acting. <br />
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To read <b>TCR</b>'s interview with Penelope Niven <a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2013/02/tcr-spotlight-on-theater-thornton.html">click here</a>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait</i> by Kendra Bean.</td></tr>
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This autumn marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the release of what is by most estimates the most popular movie of all time -- producer David O. Selznick's lavish screen version of Margaret Mitchell's bestselling Civil War saga <i>Gone with the Wind</i>.<br />
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At the center of this immortal film is the performance of Vivien Leigh as the scheming Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara. While it may be possible to imagine another actress as Scarlett, it is difficult to see <i>Gone with the Wind</i> achieving such tremendous success if Leigh had not been cast. Leigh's remarkable ability to convey steely determination underscored with trembling fragility is an essential element. Even in the capable hands of Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, both of whom were among the many actresses who wanted to play Scarlett, Selznick's grandiose production may have come down to us as an overblown, dated melodrama.<br />
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As <a href="http://kendrabean.com/">Kendra Bean</a> shows in her excellent new book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vivien-Leigh-An-Intimate-Portrait/dp/0762450991">Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait</a></i> (Running Press) as brilliant as Leigh was as Scarlett, there was far more to this English beauty than that one role. "Vivien is like the gift that keeps on giving. There are so many angles to explore and new information is always coming out of the woodwork," Bean told <b>The Committee Room</b>.<br />
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There have been major biographies of Leigh by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vivien-Leigh-Biography-Anne-Edwards/dp/0671224964">Anne Edwards</a> (1977), <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vivien-The-Life-Leigh/dp/1555840809/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1HDWW5YHSVEDAVS33N3S">Alexander Walker</a> (1987), and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vivien-Leigh-Biography-Hugo-Vickers/dp/0316902454/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1HDWW5YHSVEDAVS33N3S">Hugo Vickers</a> (1989). Bean, a young American film historian based in London, represents a new generation of film scholars. She told <b>TCR</b> that she was drawn to write about Leigh, who died from a badly treated case of tuberculosis at age fifty-three in 1967, "because she’s interesting, often misunderstood, and nothing I’d read about her before seemed to satisfy my curiosity about her life or her work."<br />
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Bean is the first major Leigh biographer to have access to the papers of the actor Laurence Olivier, acquired by the British Library in 2000. Leigh and Olivier were married for twenty years before divorcing in 1960.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The recently wed Oliviers as Lord Nelson and<br />
Emma Hamilton in <i>That Hamilton Woman</i>, 1941.</td></tr>
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Bean's biography is a coffee-table style book built around a spectacular collection of photographs and other visual material. The title <i>Intimate Portrait </i>is, Bean says, "a sort of a play on words. What I set out to do from the very beginning was an illustrated biography that was largely photo-based, while at the same time offering a more in-depth narrative than one would typically get with a book of this format...Doing a photography book is tricky because writing the text is only part of the battle. Photos can present quite a challenge that I don’t think many non-authors are aware of."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Leigh as Cleopatra in the screen version of<br />
Shaw's <i>Caesar and Cleopatra</i><i>, </i>1945.</td></tr>
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Leigh was a rising young star in Britain but little known in America when she was selected by Selznick (at the last minute; scenes of <i>Gone with the Wind</i> were already being shot) to play Scarlett O'Hara. After picking up a well-deserved Oscar for her work in <i>Gone with the Wind</i>, Leigh essentially walked away from her newly-minted Hollywood stardom. She made a pair of high-profile films -- <i>Waterloo Bridge </i>(1940), a romantic tear-jerker set during World War I, with Robert Taylor, and <i>That Hamilton Woman</i> (1941), playing a magnificently costumed Lady Emma Hamilton opposite her new husband Olivier (Leigh and Oliver wed in 1940 after divorcing their original spouses) as Lord Nelson -- then returned to England and focused her attention on the stage. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Oliviers in Shakespeare's <br />
<i>Titus Andronicus</i>, 1957.</td></tr>
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"Vivien was never really concerned with being a film star," Bean explained to <b>TCR</b>. "It’s important to remember that when she began her career, attitudes toward film and theater were still largely polarized, with theater considered the higher art form. Vivien was of a generation of British actors who believed that an actor’s real place was on the stage. Films were a directors’ medium and a way to make money. Laurence Olivier was one of the big proponents of this school of thought. He was quite a snob about films until he became a director himself during the war. But Vivien also subscribed to this ideology from the beginning."<br />
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Bean points to Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, and Jennifer Jones, all under contract to Selznick, as the main career beneficiaries of Leigh's departure from the Hollywood scene.<br />
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Leigh and Olivier were "the golden couple of British theater in the 1940s and 1950s," says Bean. Often partnered with her husband as co-star or director, Leigh tackled classic roles from Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Shaw and appeared in new works by top playwrights of the time, including Thornton Wilder, Noel Coward, and Terrence Rattigan. She kept her hand in the movie world by starring in the British films <i>Caesar and Cleopatra</i> (1945) and <i>Anna Karenina</i> (1948).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leigh (left) with Claire Bloom in Giraudoux's<br />
<i>Duel of Angels</i>, 1958.<br />
(photo/Victoria & Albert Museum)</td></tr>
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In 1949, Leigh originated the role of Blanche DuBois in the London production of Tennessee Williams' <i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i>, directed by Olivier, and later returned to Hollywood to co-star with Marlon Brando in the 1951 film version directed by Elia Kazan. The <i>Streetcar</i> movie earned Leigh a second Oscar for best actress, an astonishing accomplishment for a performer who appeared in only nineteen films in her entire career.<br />
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Nearly fifty years after Leigh's death there are not many people left who knew the actress well. "All of her close friends are long dead, sadly," says Bean. "But there are still a few people who acted with her or knew her briefly." <a href="http://vivandlarry.com/gone-with-the-wind/olivia-de-havilland-remembers-vivien-leigh/">Bean corresponded with actress Olivia DeHavilland</a>, a top Hollywood star of the 1940s, who played the supporting role of Melanie Wilkes, a docile counterpoint to Leigh's tempestuous Scarlett, in <i>Gone with the Wind</i>. DeHavilland, who is nearly a hundred years old, is one of the few people involved with the making of the classic film who are still around.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Film historian and biographer<br />
Kendra Bean.</td></tr>
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Actress Claire Bloom co-starred with Leigh in Jean Giraudoux's drama <i>Duel of Angels</i> in both London and New York in the late 1950s. "Claire was one of the first people I interviewed for the book," Bean told <b>TCR</b>. "After our initial phone conversation, she told me to call her if I had any more questions. When the book was nearly finished a year later, I rang her up and asked if she’d write the foreword, and luckily she agreed. She came to my book launch, too, which was a treat!"<br />
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Leigh's only child, a daughter from her first marriage (to London barrister Leigh Holman), is now in her early eighties. Bean says that Leigh's daughter "gave me permission to quote from some of Vivien’s letters and was aware of the project from early on, but that was the extent of the connection."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leigh with a youthful Warren Beatty in her next <br />
to last film <i>The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone</i>, 1961.</td></tr>
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In the early 1950s, Leigh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, then called manic depression. Leigh's erratic behavior harmed her professional reputation but her enduring bankability as a star along with her eagerness to work kept employment offers coming in. Mental health issues were a major factor in the break up of her marriage to Olivier. </div>
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"If she hadn’t struggled with mental illness, something else may have gotten in the way — or not. It’s impossible to answer," says Bean. "I do know that leaving was a difficult decision for Olivier to make. It wasn’t like he just woke up one day and decided he was done with things; it was a drawn out and painful process." <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8GJ9V0Q5unaolVlJDnUQd8roCpDSAXqCTGdJ8o0VIjNFXWpCGHQ" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8GJ9V0Q5unaolVlJDnUQd8roCpDSAXqCTGdJ8o0VIjNFXWpCGHQ" width="310" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tovarich</i>, original Broadway cast album, 1963.</td></tr>
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Leigh was often dismissed as an attractive and ambitious but limited performer who was not in the same league talent-wise as Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft and other great British actors of the twentieth century.<br />
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"Some critics argued that her stage career lacked depth, but there’s certainly no denying the breadth of her accomplishments," says Bean.<br />
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In 1963, Leigh took on the enormous challenge of starring in a Broadway musical. Based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood, <i>Tovarich</i> offered Leigh and co-star Jean-Pierre Aumont as exiled Russian aristocrats working as a maid and butler for an American family in Paris. <i>Tovarich</i> ran for several months but folded soon after Leigh withdrew from the production due to a flare up of her mental problems.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://m5.paperblog.com/i/66/666295/your-comprehensive-guide-to-the-vivien-leigh--L-L0RgVt.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://m5.paperblog.com/i/66/666295/your-comprehensive-guide-to-the-vivien-leigh--L-L0RgVt.jpeg" height="400" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poster from the British Film Institute's Vivien<br />
Leigh retrospective, 2013.</td></tr>
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In the fall of 2013, to mark the centenary of Leigh's birth, the British Film Institute held a <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/film/derek-malcolm-recommends-vivien-leigh-at-the-bfi-8952550.html">retrospective of fourteen of Leigh's nineteen films</a>. The National Portrait Gallery (London) offered the exhibit "<a href="http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2013/starring-vivien-leigh-a-centenary-celebration.php">Vivien Leigh: A Centenary Celebration</a>. The exhibit, which Bean co-curated, showcased vintage photographs and other images of the actress.<br />
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Considering all this recent hoopla, it is surprising that greatest challenge Bean faced when initially putting together <i>Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Biography</i> a few years ago was finding a publisher. "A lot of people thought that Vivien was no longer relevant enough to sell, or that they couldn’t make the coffee table book format work for their publishing house," says Bean, adding that after getting the go ahead from Running Press the biggest problem was "making sure everything was turned in on time (it was, I’m happy to say)."<br />
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<a href="http://vivandlarry.com/">Bean also runs a website</a> dedicated to Leigh, Olivier, and classic cinema.<br />
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tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com53tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-81141524328674437242014-09-10T09:09:00.000-04:002014-09-10T09:09:01.941-04:00The Committee Room's New Focus: Film, Theater, and Television<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>The Committee Room</b> is pleased to announce that books pertaining to film, theater, and television are now our focus. This isn't entirely new ground for us. <b>TCR</b>'s original subject -- the world of literature in general -- included discussion of writing done for and about the stage and screen. Articles on these subjects proved to be some of our most popular offerings.<br />
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Below are links to some of the articles on film, theater, and television that we have already published.<br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2014/08/tcr-spotlight-on-theater-great-moments.html">TCR Spotlight on Theater: <i>Great Moments in Theatre</i> by Benedict Nightingale</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2014/07/david-thomson-film-dictionary.html">TCR Recommends: <i>The New Biographical Dictionary of Film</i></a> (Sixth Edition) by David Thomson<br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2014/05/writing-for-televison-interview-with.html">Writing for Television: An Interview with Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of <i>Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted and All the Brilliant Minds Who Made 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' a Classic</i></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2014/03/a-story-lately-told-by-anjelica-huston.html"><i>A Story Lately Told</i> by Anjelica Huston and (Other Books By Hustons)</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2013/11/how-to-teach-your-children-shakespeare.html"><i>How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare</i> -- An Interview with Playwright Ken Ludwig</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2013/06/tcr-recommends-play-that-changed-my.html">TCR Spotlight on Theater: <i>The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them</i>, edited by Ben Hodges</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2013/02/tcr-spotlight-on-theater-thornton.html">TCR Spotlight on Theater: An Interview with Penelope Niven, author of <i>Thornton Wilder: A Life</i></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2012/12/tcr-recommends-backward-ran.html">TCR Recommends: <i>Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs</i> (theater and film critic): An Interview with editor Thomas Vinciguerra</a><br />
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<a href="http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/w/wendy-and-the-lost-boys/9780143121398_custom-6e967b12f857dc2f824bfac685301b43cdcda79f-s15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/w/wendy-and-the-lost-boys/9780143121398_custom-6e967b12f857dc2f824bfac685301b43cdcda79f-s15.jpg" height="200" width="130" /></a><br />
<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2012/10/tcr-spotlight-on-theater-wendy.html">TCR Spotlight on Theater: An Interview with Julie Salamon, author of <i>Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein</i></a><br />
<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com259tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-37232376611305161422014-08-25T16:04:00.003-04:002014-09-04T11:58:44.334-04:00TCR Spotlight on Theater: "Great Moments in the Theatre" by Benedict Nightingale<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Drama critics come in all kinds, besides, of course, good and bad. There are those who regurgitate the plot and those who gallop off on hobby-horses. There are those with sound ideas but no style; those with impressive styles but no taste...Then there are the really good ones, like Britain’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Benedict-Nightingale/e/B001HOIAPU/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1">Benedict Nightingale</a>, whose song should be heard far beyond Berkeley Square," <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Benedict-Nightingale">writes John Simon in <i>The Weekly Standard</i></a>.<br />
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Benedict Nightingale reviewed plays for the <i>Times</i> (London) for twenty years before retiring in 2010. Prior to joining the <i>Times</i> he spent nearly as long a period as theater critic for <i>The New Statesman</i>. In between these lengthy stints he came stateside to write for the <i>New York Times</i>. Nightingale began his career as a drama critic while still a teenager with a review of a local production in a suburban London newspaper and earned his stripes as a professional critic covering regional theater in the North of England for <i>The Guardian</i>.<br />
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Nightingale has used his vast theatergoing experience and knowledge of theater history to write <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Great-Moments-Theatre-Benedict-Nightingale/dp/1849432333/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408986262&sr=1-2">Great Moments in the Theatre</a> </i>(recently published by Oberon Books). Behind the prosaic title is a lively look at more than one-hundred significant theater productions through the centuries. Understanding that here today, gone forever tomorrow temporariness is part of the magic of theater but also its biggest weakness, Nightingale doesn't simply talk about these great moments; he places the reader in the audience.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Benedict Nightingale <br />
(photo/Tom Stockill for <i>The Times</i>)</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/books/great-moments-in-the-theatre-by-benedict-nightingale.html?_r=0">Jason Zinoman of the <i>New York Times</i></a> praises <i>Great Moments in the Theatre</i> as "more a theater lover’s journal than a history lesson...it’s also a convincing argument for the importance of a long life in theater criticism...debate about plays can often be myopic and lacking the context necessary for real passion. I find it delightful, even inspiring, to read Mr. Nightingale discussing Shakespeare revivals with the argumentativeness of sports talk radio."<br />
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Many legendary stage performances (Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, Brando's Stanley Kowalski, Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins, to name just a few) have made their way to film versions and in some cases entire theatrical productions have been recorded. Nightingale believes, however, that nothing matches actually being there in person and the potential for "connection between actors and audience" gives live theater "a potency and therefore an importance denied to any electronic medium."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00052/dominic_52678c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00052/dominic_52678c.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A great actress's greatest performance? Nightingale<br />
thinks so. Helen Mirren in Turgenev's <i>A Month in the Country</i>,<br />
London, 1994 (photo/Donald Cooper)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Not limiting himself to the countless productions he has actually seen, Nightingale begins with the premiere of <i>The Oresteia</i> in Athens in 458 B.C. and reminds us that this original production was "quite a spectacle" with masks, paintings, trumpets, and terrifying snake-haired Furies. He then moves up the centuries to the comparatively recent <i>Hamlet</i> at London's Globe Theatre in 1601. In Richard Burbage, the first Hamlet, Nightingale sees an "intelligent, deft, measured...and surprisingly modern actor" accomplishing the daunting task of portraying an introspective character "on a stage thrust out amid the groundlings, sharing daylight with spectators perched in half-circles high above." Under these rowdy conditions, Burbage offered not "just anguished introspection" but an "intense debate with those watching him: should I be or not be?...while staying firmly in character."<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://imageweb-cdn.magnoliasoft.net/nattheatre/fullsize/an%20inspector%20calls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://imageweb-cdn.magnoliasoft.net/nattheatre/fullsize/an%20inspector%20calls.jpg" height="400" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>An Inspector Calls</i> by J.B. Priestley, <br />
National Theatre revival, 1992.<br />
"An antiquated thriller had become a modern<br />
morality play," says Nightingale.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Though Nightingale starts with the long view, the majority of the productions discussed are from the British and American theater in his lifetime. Nightingale calls the post-World War II decades -- the years that witnessed the rise of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, John Osborne and Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet, the National Theatre, the Royal Court, and the Royal Shakespeare Company "the most exciting period in our theatrical history since the Jacobean era."<br />
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As to what constitutes theatrical greatness Nightingale says that great theater "can move you, exhilarate you, delight you, deepen you, transport you and your imagination to other worlds, tell you fascinating things about your and others' society, culture, history...It can be excellent or unforgettably bad or strikingly in between. It can doubtless be cathartic, whatever that means, and very occasionally it can be magical, whatever <i>that</i> means."<br />
<br />
An example of greatness without excellence is John Osborne's seminal <i>Look Back in Anger</i> which revolutionized British drama in the 1950s with the bitter rantings of its working class protagonist Jimmy Porter. Nightingale acknowledges that <i>Anger</i> is historically important but at the same time is "a formal, rather old-fashioned" work with a plot involving the "hoary subject" of martial infidelity. <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</i>, "the play that made Tom Stoppard's name" in the 1960s and one that is widely studied in British schools, is "a philosophically spurious, cute and whimsical rip-off" of Samuel Beckett's <i>Waiting for Godot</i> and inferior to Stoppard's "later, more exhilarating works, notably <i>Jumpers</i> and <i>Arcadia</i>."<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2014/1/23/1390495095761/The-king-of-kings---Paul--008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2014/1/23/1390495095761/The-king-of-kings---Paul--008.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Greatest actor" Paul Scofield as a "revolutionary"<br />
King Lear, 1962 (photo/Ronald Grant Archive).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Famous names and top drawer venues are plentiful among the <i>Great Moments</i> but not essential for a production to create magic. Nightingale recalls one of his most thrilling experiences as a theatergoer was delivered by a touring company's staging of Racine's <i>Phedre</i> at a North of England theater that was "actually a shabby old cinema with disintegrating seats and somewhere at the back of the quarter-filled stalls, a urinal which every few minutes flushed so loudly that an ugly whooshing noise carried through the audience." Despite surroundings that "couldn't have been more unfriendly to classical drama" what passed between the stage and spectators was "strange and almost unworldly."<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://dx9rjq5h30myv.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Johnny-Rooster-Byron-Mark-Rylance-in-Jerusalem-at-the-Apollo-Theatre-photo-by-Simon-Annand-250.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://dx9rjq5h30myv.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Johnny-Rooster-Byron-Mark-Rylance-in-Jerusalem-at-the-Apollo-Theatre-photo-by-Simon-Annand-250.jpg" height="320" width="245" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mark Rylance in <i>Jerusalem</i> by Jez<br />
Butterworth, London, 2009.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The most recent production discussed is <i>Jerusalem</i> by Jez Butterworth, presented at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2009, and starring Mark Rylance as a swaggering, opinionated, but ineffectual libertine living in a filthy "American-style trailer" and scratching out a living by selling his blood. "Rylance brilliantly embodied what Butterworth's marvelous play made clear: the remnants of an old, ribald, pagan England are sinking under the weight of twentieth-century 'progress,' and there's nothing we can do about it," Nightingale writes.<br />
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Nightingale calls Paul Scofield, the dark and burly British actor remembered mainly for his Oscar-winning turn as Sir Thomas More in <i>A Man for All Seasons</i>, "the greatest actor of my lifetime...beside him John Gielgud lacked physical energy and a sense of danger, Laurence Olivier was wanting of soul and Ralph Richardson hadn't the versatility." Scofield's interpretation of King Lear, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, was "revolutionary" offering a "grizzled, savage, utterly unsentimental" Lear who "raged and bullied...only to end up discovering the humanity he'd always despised."<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a0/TWANG_(2).jpg/215px-TWANG_(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a0/TWANG_(2).jpg/215px-TWANG_(2).jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Original cast album from Lionel Bart's <i>Twang</i>,<br />
a musical great in its awfulness, 1966. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A handful of musicals earn a place in Nightingale's great moments and one of them -- <i>Twang!</i>, a disastrous, short-lived take on the Robin Hood legend by <i>Oliver!</i> composer Lionel Bart -- is included because it was so "memorably awful." Nightingale praises Schonburg and Boublil's <i>Les Miserables</i> as a "large-hearted epic not often found in our cynical, stingy times" that "has had me battling tears on each of the five occasions I've seen it." He counts among his personal greatest moment in the theater attending <i>Les Mis</i>' premiere at London's Barbican Theatre in 1985 and finding himself along with the rest of the audience "linked in some mysterious secular communion." He was among the few critics to give the show a favorable review. Nightingale says -- "Thank God I hadn't read the original book, or maybe I too would have been supercilious and sneery at the expense of a musical the audience itself clearly loved."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.geekadelphia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/les-mis-stage-to-screen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.geekadelphia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/les-mis-stage-to-screen.jpg" height="320" width="299" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nightingale so loves <i>Les Mis</i> he co-wrote a<br />
book about it. -- <i>Les Miserables: From Stage<br />to Screen.</i></td></tr>
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Nightingale's admiration for <i>Les Miserables</i> led him to co-write with Martyn Palmer <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mis%C3%A9rables-Stage-Screen-Benedict-Nightingale/dp/1476886830/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408985337&sr=1-1">Les Miserables: From Page to Screen</a></i>, a photo-filled book which covers the history of this international crowdpleaser from its inception to its 2012 film version.<br />
<br />
Other books by Nightingale include <i>The Future of the Theatre: Predictions</i>, (1999), <i>Fifth Row Center: A Critics Year On and Off Broadway</i> (1986), and <i>Fifty Modern British Plays</i> (1983).<br />
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<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b>tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-46727232966526291812014-08-11T11:04:00.000-04:002014-08-11T14:51:17.914-04:00TCR Great Essays (#2): "How I Lost My Pen-Pal; or, Toward a Luddite Manifesto" by John Crutchfield<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-zLduCWt8SMd1-H5_NqsY8YWazQGyTBpdQEnAOuTk-YZBCm9aeu8ybkUmRxBJtZbpCYGy7egNhLTVueT7A_oKYfX5JgPoxQNbiFSFuZtPDLqhc1YSIzxj5dc27UNJUpyvmmdvm9IcGxc/s1600/NewPortrait.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-zLduCWt8SMd1-H5_NqsY8YWazQGyTBpdQEnAOuTk-YZBCm9aeu8ybkUmRxBJtZbpCYGy7egNhLTVueT7A_oKYfX5JgPoxQNbiFSFuZtPDLqhc1YSIzxj5dc27UNJUpyvmmdvm9IcGxc/s1600/NewPortrait.JPG" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Writer and theater artist John Crutchfield</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">"In the age of e-mail</span></i></b> and text-messaging, of Twitter and Facebook and their spin-offs, and of whatever has already come next that I don’t yet know about, hand-written letters have become a bit like dropping in on your neighbors unannounced: the idea sounds wholesome and warm and humane in a <i>Leave It To Beaver</i> kind of way, but the reality freaks people out," writes <a href="http://www.johncrutchfield.com/">John Crutchfield</a> in "How I Lost My Pen-Pal: or, Toward a Luddite Manifesto."<br />
<br />
In this superb essay, Crutchfield recalls how his correspondence with a young woman he met at a theater festival abruptly ended after he shifted his side of the exchanges from e-mail to paper and pen. He uses this experience as a starting point from which he examines, with great insight and a generous amount of wit, the vast differences between communicating electronically and sending a letter.<br />
<br />
"[I]f scary old Marshall McLuhan is right,and the medium really is the message, then writing someone a letter, regardless of its content, carries the meta-communicative meaning of: 'I am a real person, and you are a real person to me.' An email or text-message, by contrast, because of its digital and hence abstract form, says only, 'I am language,'" writes Crutchfield.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>John Crutchfield is a writer and theater artist. His play <i>Come Thick Night</i>, a mash-up of Shakespeare, Ingmar Bergman, and Elvis, will be presented at the <a href="http://www.fringenyc.org/basic_page.php?ltr=C">FringeNYC</a> theater festival in New York later this month.<br />
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A long time resident of North Carolina, Crutchfield currently lives in Germany. The theme of "How I Lost My Pen-Pal" was on his mind for two decades, roughly since the internet began making inroads into his home turf in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He started writing the essay several years ago. "The real impetus to finish it came when I moved to Berlin toward the end of last year," Crutchfield explained to <b>The Committee Room.</b> "All at once the theme of correspondence gained a renewed importance for me, an existential importance, as it were, and I found myself with both the time and the peculiar state-of-mind necessary for thinking essay through to its end." <br />
<br />
Crutchfield's interest in books and writing began in childhood. "Even before I could write I used to fashion little books out of scraps of paper. When I was old enough, my parents gave me a stapler for Christmas, which made my bookbinding work much more efficient," Crutchfield recalls. An undergraduate creative writing course at the University of North Carolina got him writing in earnest. "I wasn't any good, but it felt good to write, and somehow I knew I had begun something I would give up only at my own grave spiritual peril--an even graver peril than if I didn't give it up, which I suppose is what makes one a writer," he says. <br />
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When asked about working in so many different genres Crutchfield says that "all my 'public' writing (poems, plays, essays, stories) originates in trouble: something troubles me, upsets or disturbs me, something won't leave me alone. And while there may be an objective thing in the world that sets it off, really the trouble is on the inside, or rather, on the 'other' side. I write to try to open up a dialogue with it, invite it to come forth, give it objective form in language, turn it over, see if I can arrive at some kind of understanding, even if it's only the 'negative' understanding of the limits of my own understanding. Most things are, after all, pretty mysterious." </div>
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Crutchfield cites James Agee's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Let-Now-Praise-Famous-Men/dp/0618127496">Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</a></i> as his favorite work of non-fiction. "It is simply the most preposterously beautiful, weird and devastating book I've ever read. It's the only book I've ever read cover-to-cover-to-cover-to-cover-to-cover-to-cover. (That's right: three times in a row)," he says. Other favorites when it comes to non-fiction are David Foster Wallace, the 18th century essayists Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, Walter Benjamin, Robert Walser, and Albert Camus. "You will rightly object: all men, all white, all dead, some more so than others. To which I have no adequate answer, but can only say that the wind bloweth where it listeth. But the simple fact remains that a couple of Camus' lyrical essays are enough to light one's way through a very dark time." </div>
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To read Crutchfield's great essay "How I Lost My Pen-Pal; or, Toward a Luddite Manifesto," which was published in <i>berfrois</i> (April 4, 2014), <a href="http://www.berfrois.com/2014/04/john-crutchfield-how-i-lost-my-pen-pal/">click here</a><br />
<br />
<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b></div>
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tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-4365133871101674042014-07-30T15:54:00.001-04:002014-07-30T16:10:06.926-04:00TCR Story of the Month for July: "Readers and Writers" by Ryan Boudinot<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRTS86les9GaKzS_kmtOB6WZrZejGcOJkzxj730U6srVRWsIMBcd1FfE3GLf_arBpyxOEFgDLj9OuQlMrKdiu0Y_jrf12m2I_1DAqBinqFHQ6-7WFTvqEeFpA0fEu0fiD-0X2Wpx43WbY/s1600/boudinot+author.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRTS86les9GaKzS_kmtOB6WZrZejGcOJkzxj730U6srVRWsIMBcd1FfE3GLf_arBpyxOEFgDLj9OuQlMrKdiu0Y_jrf12m2I_1DAqBinqFHQ6-7WFTvqEeFpA0fEu0fiD-0X2Wpx43WbY/s1600/boudinot+author.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ryan Boudinot</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>The Committee Room</b> proudly offers "Readers and Writers" by Ryan Boudinot as <b>TCR Story of the Month</b> for July. In this superb work of magic realism, a man reading on his daily bus commute strikes up a conversation with another man, a stranger, who happens to be reading the same book. Ensuing events raise fascinating questions of identity and life's purpose. <br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>TCR Story of the Month</b> highlights an outstanding work of short fiction published online within the preceding twelve months.<br />
<br />
Ryan Boudinot is Executive Director of <a href="http://seattlecityoflit.org/">Seattle City of Literature</a>. He's the author of the novels <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blueprints-Afterlife-Ryan-Boudinot/dp/0802170919/ref=la_B001JRV5Y8_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406748865&sr=1-1">Blueprints of the Afterlife</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Misconception-A-Novel-Ryan-Boudinot/dp/080217065X/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=17DHTAFS5JRHDXH306H2">Misconception</a></i> and the story collection <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Littlest-Hitler-Ryan-Boudinot/dp/1582433801/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=17DHTAFS5JRHDXH306H2">The Littlest Hitler</a></i>.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>"Readers and Writers" was published in <i>Post Road Magazine</i> (Issue 24, 2013).<br />
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<i><b> I was standing in the aisle on page 238 of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals when a guy tapped me on the arm. Heavy-set, looked my age, shaved head, slightly tinted glasses, walrus mustache. He held up his copy of the same book.</b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>"Funny," I said, "What page are you on?"</b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>"Just got to 239."</b></i><br />
<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>We had a laugh over this. The Republican National Convention of 1860 was getting underway and soon it would be my stop. Before I hopped off, I told him my name was Phillip. He said his name was Marty...</b></i><br />
<br />
To read all of "Readers and Writers" <a href="http://www.postroadmag.com/24/fiction/boudinator.phtml">click here</a><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">TCR Chats with Author Ryan Boudinot</span></b><br />
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<b>Q:</b> How long have you been writing?<br />
<b>A:</b> I've been writing since I was six years old.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Where did you get the idea for "Readers and Writers?"<br />
<b>A:</b> I just started thinking about how there are other people who happen to be reading whatever book I happen to be reading at the same time. Then I thought it would be fun to push that idea further.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Who are some of your favorite classic authors?<br />
<b>A:</b> Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Kafka, Borges...<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Who are some of your favorite contemporary authors?<br />
<b>A:</b> Matthew Simmons, Karen Finneyfrock, Rebecca Brown, Andri Magnason, Sjon, Gary Lutz... Poets, too. I just picked up the new book by Patricia Lockwood. Mary Ruefle is fantastic.<br />
<br />
<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b><br />
<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-71371874050094112562014-07-22T11:41:00.000-04:002014-07-22T14:52:39.143-04:00Short Fiction Thrives in Magazines That Aren't Literary Journals: Hothouse Magazine, Queen's Quarterly, and Tikkun <div style="text-align: left;">
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"Oral story telling is a deeply human tradition, but it was only with the blitzkrieg of nineteenth century mass publishing that the written short story became a specific art form. Magazines served up stories as snacks for readers, and did so with relish," <a href="http://www.themillions.com/2011/05/publish-or-perish-the-short-story.html">wrote Paul Vidich, co-founder of <i>Storyville</i>, in <i>The Millions</i></a>.<br />
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Fiction was an essential part of American general interest magazines such as <i>McClure's</i>, <i>Liberty</i>, <i>Collier's</i>, and the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>. These popular magazines published fiction (by writers from Mark Twain and Edith Wharton to J.D. Salinger and Ray Bradbury) alongside articles on social issues, politics, fashion, and sports.<br />
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Over the course of the twentieth century, the introduction of movies, radio, and, television, led to a decline in magazine reading as a form of entertainment. By the 1960s, general interest magazines had mostly disappeared and short fiction publishing shifted into the domain of small circulation literary journals most of which are based in academia.<br />
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<i>Queen's Quarterly</i>, <i>Tikkun</i>, and <i>Hothouse</i> are contemporary publications that break with the prevailing model. None of these publications is primarily a literary journal yet they all consider publishing short fiction an important part of their mission. <br />
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<a href="http://www.hothousemagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/BLogo1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.hothousemagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/BLogo1.jpg" height="66" width="400" /></a></div>
Founded in 1893 and based at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, <i><a href="http://www.queensu.ca/quarterly/">Queen's Quarterly</a></i>, is Canada's oldest scholarly publication. In the 1930s, in order to expand its cultural influence and readership, <i>Queen's Quarterly</i> began publishing fiction. The work of top Canadian writers including Mavis Gallant, W.P. Kinsella, and Carol Shields has appeared in its pages.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
In more recent years, under the leadership of editor Boris Castel, <i>Queen's Quarterly</i> refreshed itself with a more appealing visual layout and began tackling an even wider range of subject matter including economics, nationalism, free trade, and science. Its commitment to fiction has stayed firm.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.queensu.ca/quarterly/1212.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.queensu.ca/quarterly/1212.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Queen's Quarterly</i>, current issue (Summer 2014).</td></tr>
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"It’s never been an issue for us," Joan Harcourt, fiction editor of <i>Queen's Quarterly</i>, told <b>The Committee Room</b> in regard to continuing to offer fiction. "Our readers enjoy the short fiction. Even some who read the <i>QQ</i> mainly for the articles, find themselves reading the stories. And the authors are pleased to have an outlet that draws in a wider circle of readers than is available through strictly literary publications." <br />
<br />
Harcourt says it is difficult to characterize the fiction that appears in <i>Queen’s Quarterly</i>. "In general we look for an 'intelligent' story, one that says something interesting in an interesting way, plot definitively subordinate to theme," she explains. "Many of the literary mags publish stories by authors we have also published, so our criteria for selecting for publication must overlap."<br />
<br />
<i>Queen's Quarterly</i> is a print publication but Harcourt believes that advances in online technology give short fiction a fairly bright future. "There are lots of short stories showing up on the internet, whole sites devoted to them," Harcourt says. "Radio is increasingly devoting chunks of time to reading short fiction - NPR is particularly good at this. So, far from [short fiction] being in a perilous state, these new delivery systems - especially the net - are probably exposing more writers of short fiction to a much larger audience than the printed page ever did."<br />
<br />
Based in San Francisco, <i><a href="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/">Tikkun</a></i> was founded in 1986 as a forum to bring a spiritual dimension rooted in the Jewish tradition to progressive ideas on issues of world peace, social justice, and environmental policy. In its early years, <i>Tikkun</i> published fiction by Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, and other noted authors but financial pressures led to the magazine eliminating fiction. The introduction of an online version (<i><a href="http://tikkun.org/">tikkun.org</a>)</i> brought <i>Tikkun</i> back to publishing fiction.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/spring2014_front_cover_web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/spring2014_front_cover_web.jpg" height="400" width="306" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tikkun</i> print edition (current issue above); fiction<br />
can be found at <i>Tikkun</i>'s online edition (tikkun.org). </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"Although <i>Tikkun</i> is focused on spirituality and social change, we tend to see good literature as good literature, regardless of whether it serves those aims. That said, we try to find pieces that will resonate with our readers, who are mainly interested in fiction not to learn new social change strategies but to deepen their own psychological, spiritual and literary understandings," says Joshua Bernstein, fiction editor at <i>Tikkun</i>, told <b>TCR</b>.<br />
<br />
According to Bernstein, the fiction that appears in <i>Tikkun</i> is diverse in terms of outlook and does not openly advocate for social justice. However, Bernstein notes that most <i>Tikkun</i> stories "remain at least somewhat skeptical of the status quo, materialism, and the general complacency that might be said to characterize modern America."<br />
<br />
Unlike <i>Queen's Quarterl</i>y, which Harcourt says receives "quite a lot" of reader reaction to its fiction, <i>Tikkun</i> finds that its fiction offerings do not elicit a great deal of feedback. "We receive far more responses to our political writings," Bernstein says. "Which is a shame, because I think good fiction can be as divisive, if not more so, than the best political writing...I like to think that we just have to work harder as writers and editors to produce stories that will excite our readers, and that's why we're always looking for new talent, as well as older and under-appreciated talent."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://newfound.newfound.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Logo23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://newfound.newfound.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Logo23.jpg" height="66" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hothouse</i> offers news and opinion with some short fiction; its<br />
sister publication, <i>Newfound</i>, is a literary journal. </td></tr>
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Bernstein agrees with Harcourt that the future of short fiction is on the internet but he points out that, at least for the present time, online reading habits are not friendly to stories of considerable length. "I have a feeling that in the future, as more people become accustomed to reading on screens, attention spans will lengthen," he says. "But for now...digital reading means shorter reading, I'm afraid. On the plus side, we can run work by a lot more writers, from the new to the long-established. In fact, throughout its history, <i>Tikkun</i> has been a launching pad for a number of prominent writers, and I think the online platform will only continue that."<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.hothousemagazine.org/">Hothouse</a>,</i> established in 2011, is an online-only news and opinion magazine that is dedicated to positively transforming how we relate to the natural world and to our human-made communities. In between articles on subjects such as why organic produce is so expensive and how the infrastructures delivering power and water to our homes alter the environment, <i>Hothouse</i> serves up flash-fiction, microfiction, and poetry-hybrid work.<br />
<br />
<i>Hothouse</i> is a creation of Newfound, an Austin-based organization that also sponsors the literary magazine <i>Newfound</i> (<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2014/05/tcr-literary-journals-series-newfound.html">featured in <b>TCR's Literary Journals Series</b></a>).<br />
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With a sister publication that is a literary journal, why, then, does <i>Hothouse</i> also offer fiction?<br />
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"I think good fiction aims to present a unique, distinctly subjective portrait of a setting. In doing so, stories highlight how place shapes a character’s identity, imagination, and understanding—and, by extension, illustrates how place shapes our own," Daniel Levis Keltner, managing editor of <i>Hothouse</i>, explained to <b>TCR</b>.<br />
<br />
Keltner says that <i>Hothouse</i>'s fiction differs from that of <i>Newfound</i> in that it is aimed at an "audience whose attention is perhaps more attuned to shorter bits...they come to the site by-and-large to read concise web articles."<br />
<br />
Consistently offering excellent material, Keltner points out, is ultimately the most important way to earn reader interest and loyalty. "A good web article—one that is current, contemporary, and cultural—is hard to beat in terms of site-traffic [but] I also believe that the only people most authors and publishers can count on to read any story longer than two hundred fifty words in its entirety, without skimming, print or digital, are our friends and the fans we’ve won through our dedication to quality."</div>
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<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b></div>
tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-42938534000094762982014-07-09T17:40:00.000-04:002014-07-09T22:46:23.516-04:00TCR Recommends: "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" (Sixth Edition) by David Thomson <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://knopfdoubleday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/978-0-375-71184-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://knopfdoubleday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/978-0-375-71184-8.jpg" height="400" width="286" /></a></div>
David Thomson has been writing and publishing books, essays, and reviews on film for nearly half a century. His quirky, highly subjective style can infuriate but he is so deeply knowledgeable that he never fails to hold one's attention. <br />
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"Witty, expansive, convincing, honest, more than a little mischievous and, so often, absolutely on the money, Thomson’s voice is one of the most distinctive and enjoyable in film criticism," says <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8176321/The-New-Biographical-Dictionary-of-Film-by-David-Thomson-review.html">Benjamin Secher in </a><i><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8176321/The-New-Biographical-Dictionary-of-Film-by-David-Thomson-review.html">The Telegraph</a>.</i><br />
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A sixth edition of Thomson's best known work, <i>The New Biographical Dictionary of Film</i>, was recently released by Knopf. In the introduction to the sixth edition, Thomson writes -- "Opinion can be emphatic, self-indulgent, cruel, tasteless -- and at times this book has suffered in those ways. But it can be creative, provocative, the start of a conversation." Thomson has mellowed and says that he no longer believes (as he did when writing the first edition of the <i>Biographical Dictionary</i>, published in 1975) that "not only must one like the right films but one must also like them for the right reasons" but the book remains a "mechanism for alerting you to films you have not seen and may never have heard of."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2014/05/david_thomson_s_new_biographical_dictionary_of_film_sixth_edition_is_the.html">Dana Stevens of <i>Slate</i></a> calls <i>The New Biographical Dictionary of Film</i> the "book every movie lover should own" but warns that it is "the most idiosyncratic and deeply personal of a filmgoer’s journals masquerading as a reference work."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.trbimg.com/img-50a55531/turbine/la-1106278-ca-1029-thomson-2-lkh.jpg-20121115/600" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.trbimg.com/img-50a55531/turbine/la-1106278-ca-1029-thomson-2-lkh.jpg-20121115/600" height="249" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Thomson <br />
(photo/Lawrence K. Ho, <i>Los Angeles Times</i>).</td></tr>
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The biographical information in the <i>Biographical Dictionary</i> is sketchy and seems randomly selected. Do we really need to know that Jamie Lee Curtis is the godchild of superagent Lew Wasserman? Career credits are kept up to date (to early 2014) but Thomson's comments sometimes seem to have been written long ago. The entry on Katharine Hepburn, who died in 2003, includes the line "her health has been bad for several years." Of Goldie Hawn, who is now approaching seventy, we are told "she will soon be too old to play the gamine." <br />
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"It is important to understand that perfection was never quite the point here," <a href="http://www.buffalonews.com/life-arts/editors-choice/editors-choice-david-thomsons-new-biographical-dictionary-of-film-20140608">writes Jeff Simon of the <i>Buffalo News</i></a>. "To find unimpeachable biographical accuracy, other film encyclopedias – literary and digital – beckon...The successive new editions of Thomson’s biographical dictionary have, literally, had no equal since the first edition was published in 1975. Nothing quite stirs up debate among film’s most passionate audience the way a new edition of Thomson does."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ6zNWwUzYKS3YuVJIsABc0H2ykpo84ZXNFxFSbV6DXw4Xv0nSHZ-XZnxT3DXt5ZyYGN7RKJM8P_6QHCF5K09kixf-Hj2YgQiObjDAElDNqI3qExlYSKnPLEE8cDtrO1ApqVfvWSPxWaS2/s1600/55445_kyeri-grant_or_cary-grant_1600x1200_(www_GdeFon_ru).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ6zNWwUzYKS3YuVJIsABc0H2ykpo84ZXNFxFSbV6DXw4Xv0nSHZ-XZnxT3DXt5ZyYGN7RKJM8P_6QHCF5K09kixf-Hj2YgQiObjDAElDNqI3qExlYSKnPLEE8cDtrO1ApqVfvWSPxWaS2/s1600/55445_kyeri-grant_or_cary-grant_1600x1200_(www_GdeFon_ru).jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cary Grant, the "best and most important actor in the history<br />
of the cinema."</td></tr>
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Thomson is an Englishman who has lived for decades in the United States. He currently lives in San Francisco and writes for <i>The New Republic</i>. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that he considers Cary Grant, another Brit who found his fortune in America, the "best and most important actor in the history of the cinema." The essence of Grant's genius, Thomson says, was his ability to be "attractive and unattractive at simultaneously: there is a light and dark side to him but, whichever is dominant, the other creeps into view...He was, very likely, a hopeless fusspot as man, husband, and even father. How could anyone <i>be</i> Cary Grant? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?"<br />
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Another Thomson favorite is Robert Mitchum. "How can I offer this hunk as one of the best actors in the movies?...But, since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods," Thomson writes.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.morningafterpost.com/images/resources/tom-hanks.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.morningafterpost.com/images/resources/tom-hanks.jpeg" height="320" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tom Hanks. the "American Actor."<br />
(photo/Dodge Enburn).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Actors who are still living and working are harder to sum up but Thomson meets the challenge. Johnny Depp is "too languid, too inclined to follow the money." Tom Hanks has "become the American Actor, rather than someone actually involved in character and story...a figure who walks through his own films as if they were on parade for him." Missouri-bred Brad Pitt has "farmboy charm" but seems worn down by "the labor of being a movie star" and hasn't lived up to the promise of his early films <i>Thelma and Louise</i> and <i>A River Runs Through It.</i><br />
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Thomson writes perceptively on the enduring, and to some perplexing, popularity of Tom Cruise. He praises Cruise as a hard-working, risk taking actor who "survived the black-hole narcissism of Dustin Hoffman in <i>Rain Man</i>" and, in the style of old time stars such as Clark Gable, has refreshingly "little wish to impose himself or his attitude upon his pictures." <br />
<br />
Thomson calls Clint Eastwood someone who "leaves us feeling fortunate to be in his presence (a true attribute of stardom)" and recalls attending a London event where Eastwood was presented with an award by Prince Charles. Thomson writes -- "A visitor from another planet, advised on how to recognize modern royalty -- its natural eminence, its grace and authority, its sense of divine right made agnostic in simple glamour -- would have no doubt which man was the prince...Nearly everything that comes to Eastwood now is rendered fitting by his majesty."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1815/2264/320/thomson-kidman.0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1815/2264/320/thomson-kidman.0.jpg" height="320" width="216" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomson's book on the "lovely <br />
stranger" Nicole Kidman.</td></tr>
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In regard to women, Thomson is at his most Thomsonesque. He shamelessly favors actresses who arouse his libido. Nicole Kidman, about whom Thomson wrote a book (<i>Nicole Kidman</i>, 2006) brings him close to incoherence -- "The cinema would never have had its glory without the urge in many of us to go crazy over the look of these lovely strangers and their insolent, reckless hint that they know we are watching."<br />
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Thomson gives Rebecca DeMornay, a blonde starlet of the 1980s, almost as long an entry as he gives to pioneering director Cecil B. DeMille. He also goes on at undue length about other beautiful but minor performers who have captured his fancy such as Jacqueline Bisset, Greta Scacchi, and Nastassja Kinski.<br />
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It somehow doesn't come as much of a surprise to discover that Thomson's favorite of all actresses is Angie Dickinson. "Not that one thousand words of analysis would carry more weight than a well-chosen still," he writes in defending his choice and goes on to praise Dickinson's performance in the Howard Hawks directed western <i>Rio Bravo</i> as "one of the truest female characters in modern cinema " and one that characterizes her ability to "inhabit a man's world without asking for concessions and without needing to rock the conventions."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.vintageculture.net/images/angie-dickinson-rio-bravo11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.vintageculture.net/images/angie-dickinson-rio-bravo11.jpg" height="230" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Angie Dickinson in <i>Rio Bravo</i>: "one of the truest<br />
female characters in modern cinema."</td></tr>
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Thomson writes beautifully about Greta Garbo as the "extreme definition of stardom in the cinema" and a "gloomy woman made radiant by artificial light." He credits Meryl Streep as a superb actress of enormous range but one who has "shown no instinct for organizing her career." Thomson notes the "great skin tone" and "considerable screen presence" of newer star Jennifer Lawrence but thinks it remains to be seen "whether she can act." Amy Adams is a talented but too cute "polished-cheeked sweetheart" who "leaped to life, sexiness, and fun, like a trout snapping at bait" in <i>American Hustle</i>. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.tvgcdn.net/MediaBin/Content/120402/News/5_fri/120406bryan-cranston-breaking-bad1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://static.tvgcdn.net/MediaBin/Content/120402/News/5_fri/120406bryan-cranston-breaking-bad1.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bryan Cranston in TV's <i>Breaking Bad</i>: "Long-form<br />
television is the narrative form that has<br />
transcended movies."</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Thomson can be funny without going over into mean-spirited ridicule. John Cusack, he says, "has been adorably promising for close to thirty years now." Joanne Woodward in her films with husband Paul Newman "is like a dutiful wife who goes along on the husband's fishing trips." Ben Stiller "does everything except find a comfortable self." The stardom of Julie Andrews, Thomson writes, "should teach me that many people find enormous pleasure at the movies for reasons that baffle me" and adds that the "sixty-plus" Andrews has done films "the way the Queen tours, smiling and waving to a lucky public, refusing to notice its shrinkage." <br />
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The sixth edition includes many new entries on performers, such as Bryan Cranston, whose primary work has been on television. In his introduction, Thomson acknowledges that "Today, there may be enthusiastic readers of this book who have seen very few movies on 35mm, in a large theatre, with a big crowd." In his entry on Cranston, Thomson writes -- "Long-form television is the narrative form that has transcended movies in a way, once, the novel surpassed cave paintings."<br />
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<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b>tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com81tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-39735494105871083882014-06-26T14:42:00.002-04:002014-07-02T09:55:35.868-04:00TCR Spotlight on Theater: Most Produced Plays in American Theaters, 2013-2014 <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGe45chLRIpC5G_V3QxFeRXtxPROyW1IFQAH4POu2loEThpENup65XcSJMSeJ6rmycgIH0OYMe2m0aMPehvayvgxkRqgFGpe3USUOaCkX7H0SsyTFQ1aXuo-HZj40kH2lNHtu7U6peOEk9/s1600/venusinfur1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGe45chLRIpC5G_V3QxFeRXtxPROyW1IFQAH4POu2loEThpENup65XcSJMSeJ6rmycgIH0OYMe2m0aMPehvayvgxkRqgFGpe3USUOaCkX7H0SsyTFQ1aXuo-HZj40kH2lNHtu7U6peOEk9/s1600/venusinfur1.jpg" height="400" width="242" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Playbill from <i>Venus in Fur</i>, <br />
Goodman Theatre, Chicago, March 2014<br />
(Image/Seth Saith).</td></tr>
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The most produced play in America during the now ending 2013-2014 theater season was <i>Venus in Fur</i> by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/David-Ives/e/B001H6GUB4">David Ives</a>.<br />
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In this two-character black comedy, which runs for an intermission-less ninety minutes, a theater director is having trouble finding the right actress to play the lead in his stage version of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Venus-Furs-Leopold-Sacher-Masoch/dp/1492334502">Venus in Furs</a></i> (note the plural), the 1870 novella of female sexual domination and male submission by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (and the origin of the word masochist). When a disheveled and seemingly lame-brained actress shows up late for her audition, she and the director's interaction strangely begins to blend with the themes of Sacher-Masoch's racy novella.<br />
<br />
David Ives is a veteran playwright whose work has been produced professionally since the 1970s. His collection of one-act comedies, <i>All in the Timing</i>, was the most produced play of the 1995-1996 season.<br />
<br />
A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/movies/in-venus-in-fur-polanski-adapts-a-sexually-charged-play.html?_r=0">film version of <i>Venus in Fur</i></a>, directed by Roman Polanski, with a screenplay by Ives and Polanski, was released in June 2014. <br />
<br />
According to <a href="http://www.tcg.org/">Theater Communications Group</a>, an organization of American regional theaters, <i>Venus in Fur</i> was produced by twenty-two of its member theaters, during the 2013-2014 season.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.bwwstatic.com/upload10/584417/tn-500_venus_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://images.bwwstatic.com/upload10/584417/tn-500_venus_01.jpg" height="251" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reese Madigan and Greta Wohlrabe in <i>Venus<br />in Fur</i>, Milwaukee Rep, September 2013<br />
(photo/Milwaukee Rep).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://seattletimes.com/html/thearts/2022905360_venusinfurxml.html">Misha Berson in the <i>Seattle Times</i></a>, reviewing the Seattle Repertory Theatre production, calls <i>Venus in Fur</i>, "an explosive, erotic and cerebral dialectic" that is "a banquet for actors."<br />
<br />
In her review of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater's production of <i>Venus in Fur</i>, <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_25432892/review-venus-fur-has-sex-power-humor-at">Karen D'Souza of the <i>San Jose Mercury News</i></a> calls the play "a metatheatrical game of cat and mouse laced with titillation and plot twists" but adds that the "primary flaw in this play within a play is how easily you see into the heart of the matter. Loud echoes of everything from Genet's <i>The Balcony</i> to <i>50 Shades of Grey</i> ensure that you see where this is going from the first kiss to the last slap."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.bwwstatic.com/upload7/281048/tn-500_wm825288.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://images.bwwstatic.com/upload7/281048/tn-500_wm825288.jpg" height="320" width="216" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Playwright David Ives<br />
(photo/Broadwayworld.com).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Other theaters staging <i>Venus in Fur</i> this past season include the Milwaukee Rep, the Cleveland Playhouse, Chicago's Goodman Theatre, the Huntington Theater in Boston, Houston's Alley Theatre, and Curious Theatre Company of Denver.<br />
<br />
<i>Venus in Fur</i> premiered Off-Broadway in January 2010 and was produced on Broadway in the 2011-2012 season where it was nominated for a Tony Award for best play and its co-star, Nina Arianda, won the Tony for best actress.<br />
<br />
With the exception of the children's play <i>The Cat in the Hat</i>, an adaptation of the Dr. Seuss book, all of the plays on this past season's most produced list were recently staged either on or Off-Broadway.<br />
<br />
"The impetus to produce plays that have succeeded in New York stems, to various degrees, from a capitalist impulse to make money, an increasingly dated impulse for culture to flow outward from our country's largest cities, and risk-aversion among producers. Luckily, more and more regional theaters are beginning to experiment with (if not embrace) locally-grown and locally-relevant culture," <a href="http://www.suilebhan.com/">Gwydion Suilebhan</a>, a Washington, DC based playwright and DC's representative to <a href="http://www.dramatistsguild.com/">The Dramatists Guild</a>, told <b>The Committee Room</b>.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://htarts.s3.amazonaws.com/files/2014/01/fareview07a-300x199.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://htarts.s3.amazonaws.com/files/2014/01/fareview07a-300x199.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robert Douglas (left), Taurean Blaque and Drew<br />
Foster in <i>The Whipping Man</i> by Matthew Lopez, <br />
Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, Sarasota. FL, January 2014<br />
(photo/WBTT).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Andrea Torrence of <i><a href="http://stlouistheatresnob.blogspot.com/">St. Louis Theatre Snob</a></i> told <b>TCR</b> in regard to regional theater's New York emphasis -- "Of course that's going to be true of the Fox and the Peabody [large St. Louis venues that focus on producing musicals] but I think a mix of both is great." Torrence adds that "St. Louis is getting better about trying to encourage new play festivals."<br />
<br />
The most produced list often includes at least one "modern classic" such as <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>, <i>Our Town</i>, or <i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i>. This past season's list, again excepting <i>The Cat in the Hat</i>, is made up of recent material. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.therep.org/!userfiles/ClybournePark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.therep.org/!userfiles/ClybournePark.jpg" height="320" width="278" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cast members of <i>Clybourne Park</i> by Bruce Norris,<br />
Arkansas Repertory Theatre, January 2014<br />
(photo/John David Pittman).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"It's a great thing," says Suilebhan in regard to the lack of older work. "New plays are the lifeblood and future of our art form. Classics have a place, of course, but not (I believe) at the center of what we do...My heart -- and, I believe, the future of the American theater -- is with new work."<br />
<br />
Writing an enduring work for the theater is notoriously difficult. Over the past two centuries the English language has produced many great novelists and poets but only a handful of great playwrights. Will any plays on the current most produced list still be produced thirty, fifty, or one-hundred years from now?<br />
<br />
"Of the plays I've seen on the list, about the only ones I could imagine being performed far into the future are <i>The Whipping Man</i> and <i>Clybourne Park</i>," says Torrence.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The Whipping Man</i> by Matthew Lopez is a three character drama about a Jewish officer in the Confederate army returning to his family home at the end of the war to find it ruined and uninhabited except for two former slaves. Bruce Norris' satire <i>Clybourne Park</i>, a sort of sequel to Lorraine Hansberry's <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i>, looks at race relations through the mirror of housing and urban gentrification issues. <br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://capitalrep.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/13-14-cap-rep-season_mtop_0.jpg?itok=PHhL6i8a" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://capitalrep.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/13-14-cap-rep-season_mtop_0.jpg?itok=PHhL6i8a" height="400" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Mountaintop</i> by Katori Hall, Capital <br />
Repertory Theatre, Albany, NY, January 2014.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"Maybe <i>The Mountaintop</i>?" suggests Suilebhan as a contemporary play that might have staying power. "But I'm not big on prognostication. I'm also not big on revivals."<br />
<br />
<i>The Mountaintop</i> by Katori Hall presents a tense Martin Luther King, Jr. interacting with a talkative motel maid on what turns about to be his last evening alive. Like <i>Venus in Fur</i>, <i>The Mountaintop</i> is a two character piece that runs for an intermission-less hour and a half.<br />
<br />
In his review of the 2011 Broadway staging of <i>The Mountaintop</i> -- a highly touted production starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett -- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/theater/reviews/the-mountaintop-with-samuel-l-jackson-angela-bassett.html?pagewanted=all">Ben Brantley of the <i>New York Times</i> said</a> "it’s hard not to feel that <i>The Mountaintop</i> might have worked better in a smaller, lower-profile production. Its charms are those of an ingenious sketch. Mounting it on this scale turns out to be a bit like spinning gossamer into Dacron."<br />
<br />
This leads to the familiar question -- Is the creativity of the contemporary theater hindered by having to keep the cast list short due to economic concerns?<br />
<br />
"To some extent, yes, though perhaps I should say 'possibly.' I'd love to see data, if it exists, to support this oft-cited claim," says Suilebhan.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site569/2014/0328/20140328__140331ae-newMountaintop1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site569/2014/0328/20140328__140331ae-newMountaintop1.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Erika LaVonn and James T. Alfred in <i>The Mountaintop</i>,<br />
Penumbra Theatre Company, Guthrie Theater,<br />
Minneapolis, March 2014.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"Actors don't grow on trees, right?" says Torrence, adding that "there are still a lot of [good] plays that only require a few players."<br />
<div>
<br />
Theaters around the United States produce many of the same plays but do the tastes and habits of American regional theater audiences vary from city to city?</div>
<br />
"That's not an easy question to answer," says Suilebhan. "Audiences in DC have been fed a steady diet of Shakespeare and classics and 'well-made plays' for a generation or two. But the last decade in particular has seen the emergence of a robust new play sector in the city, so theatergoers are learning to value a different kind of theatrical experience. Still: this is predominantly a politically liberal but aesthetically conservative place in which to make theater."<br />
<br />
"I think St. Louisans in general may not be as spontaneous when they're planning their activities, and that certainly extends to the theater they attend," says Torrence. "A lot of the smaller regional companies are sadly losing audiences to bigger, more well known venues like the Fox, the Muny and Stages. I think the theater in this town is its best kept secret."<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<i><br /></i>Most Produced Plays in the United States, 2013-2014 season*<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Venus in Fur</i> by David Ives (22)<br />
<i>Clybourne Park</i> by Bruce Norris (16)<br />
<i>Good People</i> by David Lindsay-Abaire (14)<br />
<i>Other Desert Cities</i> by Jon Robin Baitz (13)<br />
<i>The Mountaintop</i> by Katori Hall (13)<br />
<i>4000 Miles</i> by Amy Herzog (12)<br />
<i>Tribes</i> by Nina Raine (12)<br />
<i>Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike</i> by Christopher Durang (11)<br />
<i>The Cat in the Hat</i> adapted by Katie Mitchell from Dr. Seuss (8)<br />
<i>Detroit</i> by Lisa D'Amour (7)<br />
<i>God of Carnage</i> by Yasmina Reza (7)<br />
<i>Red</i> by John Logan (7)<br />
<i>The Whipping Man</i> by Matthew Lopez (7)<br />
<i>Water by the Spoonful</i> by Quiara Alegria Hudes (7)<br />
<br />
*List omits works by Shakespeare and holiday-themed productions<br />
<br />
Here's more information --<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.thecommroom.com/2013/04/tcr-spotlight-on-theater-most-produced.html">TCR Spotlight on Theater: Most Produced Plays in America, 2012-2013</a>." <i>The Committee Room</i>, 10 April 2013.tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com317tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-5403720318412000322014-06-19T13:27:00.000-04:002014-06-19T13:34:03.142-04:00TCR Story of the Month for June: "The Fortunate" by C. Dale Young<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3UvRZNlxkcAztXcHpoWx5Wx2yQgaTvHPzvr1sOnBs3K-xdHfXn7vlsxmYebvoLPzX97dLVKR49JAFkPo_sWtn0HcdraoVI9gpCJvb5BjVbs5FteB6xcHvVAvEAfflDTYYC584gPDSu4M/s1600/CDYnew300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3UvRZNlxkcAztXcHpoWx5Wx2yQgaTvHPzvr1sOnBs3K-xdHfXn7vlsxmYebvoLPzX97dLVKR49JAFkPo_sWtn0HcdraoVI9gpCJvb5BjVbs5FteB6xcHvVAvEAfflDTYYC584gPDSu4M/s1600/CDYnew300.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">C. Dale Young</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>The Committee Room</b> <b>Story of the Month</b> for June is "The Fortunate" by C. Dale Young.<br />
<br />
<b>TCR Story of the Month</b> highlights an outstanding work of short fiction published online within the preceding twelve months.<br />
<br />
"The Fortunate," an intense, suspenseful story of woman who lives in dread of learning all of a fortune teller's prophecy, was published in <i><a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v13n1/">Blackbird</a> </i>(Spring 2014).<br />
<br />
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for <i><a href="http://www.nereview.com/">New England Review</a></i>, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, he is the author of four books of poetry. He recently completed the collection of stories <i>The Affliction</i>, which includes "The Fortunate." He lives in San Francisco.<br />
<br />
"<i>Some are good at digging up the past, and some are gifted with the ability to divine the future. Most people live squarely in the present without even the slightest knowledge that all of time coexists, that each era is simply a thin rind circling the current moment. Rosa Blanco was one of those people who lived in the present, but she was always obsessing about the past. In her small kitchen, she would, sometimes for hours, replay a moment in the past ten, maybe fifteen, times. Each time, she checked and rechecked what she had said, how she had said it, what she had done. But the old woman who lived a few doors away was a different type of woman. She lived in the present, but she lived for the future..." </i><br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
To continue with "The Fortunate"<b> <a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v13n1/fiction/young_c/fortunate_page.shtml">click here</a></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">TCR Talks to Author C. Dale Young</span><br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> How long have you been writing?<br />
<b>A:</b> As a kid, I wrote stories and poems, but I never really imagined then that writing would become an essential part of my life. In many ways, I didn't really remember writing as a child until when I began publishing as an adult and my parents reminded me of this. I began writing "seriously" as an undergraduate in my junior year of college. I applied to medical schools and MFA Programs in my senior year, partly because I feared I wouldn't be accepted to medical school. I was fortunate to be accepted to graduate programs in both medicine and creative writing. I decided at the end of my senior year of college that I wanted to continue writing and that I wanted to become better at it. I enrolled in the MFA Program to study poetry at the University of Florida. Coincidentally, I stayed there for medical school. Even during my time in graduate school for poetry, I would write stories. They were never any good. But then, a little over six years ago, I went to give a poetry reading at Oregon State University. During a panel, several people commented on the fact they thought I could be a good story writer. On the way home, I wrote the first sentence of what would become my first published story. I only recently finished the entire collection of linked stories from which "The Fortunate" comes. So, I have been writing now for almost twenty-five years, but I have only been seriously writing fiction for a little over six years.<br />
<br />
<b>Q: </b>Where did you get the idea for "The Fortunate?"<br />
<b>A:</b> As I mentioned, "The Fortunate" is part of a larger collection of linked stories. By the time I wrote it, I already knew several of the characters. But one character I didn't know well was Rosa Blanco. I knew her husband (the first story I wrote was about him leaving his wife)...I knew her sons from having written a story about them....I knew Flora Diaz tangentially from a story about her sister...I sit down with an idea about a character, but the resulting story is almost never just about that, sometimes not at all.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Who are some of your favorite classic authors? <br />
<b>A:</b> I have an unnatural love for the novels of Dostoyevsky. I read his <i>Crime and Punishment</i> every three years. I also love Chekhov's stories, his clinical eye. And I have always loved the way Joyce handles memory in <i>Dubliners</i>. I don't think I have encountered a Flannery O'Connor story I didn't like. Likewise for Eudora Welty.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Who are some of your favorite contemporary authors? <br />
<b>A:</b> The novels of Garcia Marquez are important to me, as are the many stories by Alice Munro. I care deeply for both the novels and short stories by Charles Baxter. And I have a deep respect for Padgett Powell's stories. I am always surprised by Mavis Gallant's stories. A recent discovery and infatuation I have are with Peter Cameron's novels. Junot Diaz's stories blow me away. As do Manuel Muñoz's stories. I have loved deeply all three of the novels by Christopher Castellani. From early childhood, I have always loved losing myself in books. There is just so much amazing work out there.<br />
<br />
<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b><br />
<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-40862356412594527712014-06-12T12:16:00.002-04:002014-08-12T14:38:47.749-04:00TCR Great Essays (#1): "Nature Walk" by Stephen Dau<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirhTZrdXX4pA-Ymb64bARuQqG2z5IiT9ZRtrt_eszFonrrt5LnOW3LlQQ0DdTqzm3gr1cNdyMnSdFI0PK_SJ8g4mAiybYzDwQBCKeyMsH2uVWIqpTEvKpK5z8f1fz6dbo3qHucuhke5Ck/s1600/Stephen+Dau+Author+Photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirhTZrdXX4pA-Ymb64bARuQqG2z5IiT9ZRtrt_eszFonrrt5LnOW3LlQQ0DdTqzm3gr1cNdyMnSdFI0PK_SJ8g4mAiybYzDwQBCKeyMsH2uVWIqpTEvKpK5z8f1fz6dbo3qHucuhke5Ck/s1600/Stephen+Dau+Author+Photo.jpg" height="320" width="248" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen Dau</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>The Committee Room</b> inaugurates its <b>TCR</b> <b>Great Essays</b> series, which highlights outstanding works of non-fiction recently published online, with "Nature Walk" by <a href="http://www.stephendau.com/Home.html">Stephen Dau</a>.<br />
<br />
"Nature Walk" was published in <i>Ploughshares</i> (Spring 2014).<br />
<br />
Dau, who worked in post-war reconstruction in the Balkans, recalls with masterful detail and a wry sense of humor the absurdities and dangers of everyday life in Sarajevo in the aftermath of war.<br />
<br />
"'Nature Walk' is an excerpt from a longer work based around a period of time I spent in Bosnia in the 1990s," Dau explained to <b>The Committee Room</b>. "The excerpt consists of several early sections which have been reworked to make one stand-alone essay. In the book, however, these sections act a little differently, more as scene setting pieces than as a self-contained, free standing story. It comes directly from my experience, and as much as anything it is an effort to make sense of what I was doing there, and by extension what America and the West were doing there after the fall of communism and the Yugoslav wars, and by further extension what America and the West tend to do in lots of places around the world."<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Dau is the author of <i>In a Foreign Country</i> (forthcoming) and the novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Book-Jonas-Stephen-Dau/dp/B00B1L8S5Q">The Book of Jonas</a></i> (Blue Rider Press) which was a semi-finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Prize and was named one of the best books of 2012 by <i>Kirkus Reviews</i> and <i>Booklist</i>. He received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has been featured on NPR and appeared in <i>McSweeney’s</i>, <i>The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</i>, and MSNBC, among other places.<br />
<br />
"I've been writing on-and-off since I was a child," says Dau, an American who currently lives in Belgium. "But I've been serious about it (by which I simply mean taking a focused and consistent approach to submissions and to trying to improve as a writer) for around ten years."<br />
<br />
Dau finds that from a "craft perspective" there is little difference between writing fiction and non-fiction. "In theory, the difference is that in fiction you're describing images and events you imagine, whereas in non-fiction you're describing things that really happened. But it's not nearly as clear cut as that," he says. "When you're writing a personal essay, which is technically non-fiction, you're dealing with memory, which is a notoriously fallible vehicle. In effect you're not writing about what happened, you're writing about your subjective experience of what happened. But you're not really even writing that. The very act of accessing a memory changes it. So you're writing about your memory of your subjective experience of what happened. The line between fact and fiction is incredibly blurry, especially in a personal essay. Maybe because of this, I tend to approach fiction and non-fiction similarly." <br />
<br />
When asked to name some of his favorite non-fiction works, Dau says -- "There are so many! I love the kind of comprehensive long-form journalism found in <i>The Believer</i> and <i>The New Yorker</i> and lots of other places. I'm amazed at the quality and thoroughness of some of them. Some of my favorites in book form include <i>Homage to Catalonia</i> by George Orwell, <i>A Moveable Feast</i>, Michael Ondaatje's <i>Running in the Family</i>. As you might imagine I also love work that blurs the line between fiction and reality, like <i>The Things They Carried</i> by Tim O'Brien and <i>The Cat's Table</i>, again by Ondaatje. This is just off the top of my head. There are lots more." <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
To read "Nature Walk" <a href="https://www.pshares.org/read/article-detail.cfm?intArticleID=9858">click here</a><br />
<br />
<b>TCR Great Essays</b> highlights outstanding works of non-fiction published online within the preceding twelve months.<br />
<br />
<div>
<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b></div>
<br />tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com97tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2649371927062806771.post-39658798381209547192014-06-04T11:40:00.002-04:002014-06-12T12:39:38.575-04:00Bestsellers List Revisited: 1974 (Fiction) -- An Interview with Jay Parini About "Burr" by Gore Vidal <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Burr_by_Gore_Vidal_-_first_edition_cover.jpg/220px-Burr_by_Gore_Vidal_-_first_edition_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Burr_by_Gore_Vidal_-_first_edition_cover.jpg/220px-Burr_by_Gore_Vidal_-_first_edition_cover.jpg" height="400" width="266" /></a></div>
"In a novel like <i>Burr</i> I’m not composing a polemic about the founding fathers. Rather, I am describing the way men who want power respond to one another, to themselves," Gore Vidal told <i>The Paris Review</i>.<br />
<br />
In the spring of 1974, as the Watergate scandal that would bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon was playing out in the halls of Congress and across the news media, Vidal's <i>Burr</i>, a look at the American Revolution and Early Republic through the eyes of its darkest figure, Aaron Burr, was at the top of the <i>New York Times</i> fiction bestsellers list. <br />
<br />
"How diabolically well-timed is the appearance of Gore Vidal's latest novel, <i>Burr</i>; just at this most disillusioning moment in American history when all the old verities are beginning to seem hollow, Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with. And what a tour de force is the result!...What an employment for the usable past! What hagiography for the Nixon era!" <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-burr.html">wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the </a><i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-burr.html">New York Times</a>.</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://media.salon.com/2012/08/gore_vidal_bw_rect-620x412.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://media.salon.com/2012/08/gore_vidal_bw_rect-620x412.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gore Vidal</td></tr>
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<a href="http://jayparini.com/">Jay Parini</a>, the novelist, poet, and literary critic was a long-time friend of Vidal. Parini told <b>The Committee Room</b> that "Gore's great strengths as a novelist are his quick wit, a sense of good fun, and a prose style that combines both elegance and clarity. It’s a very balanced and classical form of English prose. The weakness is a lack of interest in plot – his books are stories (one thing happens, then another), not plots, where suspense and causality play a role."<br />
<br />
New Jersey-born Aaron Burr served as an officer in the Revolutionary War. He was later a prominent attorney and a United States Senator from New York. After losing the presidential election in 1800 to Thomas Jefferson in a deadlocked election decided by the House of Representatives, Burr served as Jefferson's vice-president. Today Burr is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as a self-promoting scoundrel who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later charged with treason for attempting to set up an empire with himself as its leader in American "western" territory along the Mississippi River.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aaron Burr</td></tr>
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Parini told <b>TCR </b>that "of all figures in the American past, I think Gore most identified with Aaron Burr: a wily iconoclast and idealist who might have been president, who got himself into deep trouble, who had some wry assessments of the American scene."<br />
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<i>Burr</i>, widely regarded as Vidal's best novel, is set in Manhattan in the1830s, the final years of the Andrew Jackson presidency, when the Revolutionary era seemed like ancient history. An elderly and mostly forgotten but still active Aaron Burr, who has outlived most of his contemporaries -- friends and enemies alike -- shares his memories with an aspiring young writer. The first person narration alternates between the young writer -- a fictional character named Charles Schuyler -- and Burr himself. There is plot business about Schuyler's personal life and uncovering clues to prove that Burr is the biological father of Jackson's handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren. The main attraction of the novel are Burr's audaciously entertaining opinions. Vidal's Burr knocks the Founding Fathers off their pedestals and slashes them with a razor-sharp tongue.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jay Parini</td></tr>
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The man Burr killed, his fellow New Yorker Alexander Hamilton, is presented as a clever and cravenly ambitious schemer but someone who was in the end not really important. "I made Hamilton a giant by killing him. If he had lived, he would have continued his decline. He would have been quite forgotten by now. Like me," Burr says.<br />
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The focus of Burr's scorn are the iconic Washington and Jefferson, leaders of what Burr contemptuously refers to as the "Virginian junto." Washington is a vain, waddling, dullard and an incompetent commander. "I found irritating the slowness of his mind; not to mention his awesome gift for failure in field," Burr says. "In three years he has lost every engagement with the enemy except for a small victory at Trenton and that had been an accident." Burr calls Thomas Jefferson "the most charming man I have ever known, as well as the most deceitful. Were the philosopher's charm less, the politician's deceit might not have been so shocking."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Burr</i> reissue, 2000.</td></tr>
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<i>Burr</i> entered the top ten list in November 1973, taking the number four position on a list headed by <i>The Hollow Hills</i>, the second installment in a trilogy about the Arthurian legends, by Mary Stewart. Kurt Vonnegut's <i>Breakfast of Champions</i> was also in the top ten. Vidal is reported to have called his World War II generation coeval Vonnegut "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3664769/God-bless-you-Mr-Vonnegut.html">the worst writer in America</a>." At Vonnegut's death in 2007, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/13/books.booksnews">Vidal was more diplomatic</a> -- "Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made [literary realism] sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."<br />
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Another book that <i>Burr</i> joined in the top ten list was <i>Theophilus North</i> by Thornton Wilder. Wilder was a generation older than Vidal and published his first novel, <i>The Cabala</i>, in 1926, the year after Vidal was born. Vidal told <i>The Paris Review</i> that "Except for Thornton Wilder, I can think of no contemporary American [other than Vidal himself] who has any interest in what happened before the long present he lives in."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Young Gore Vidal with Anais Nin, c.1946.</td></tr>
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Vidal, subject of the recently released documentary <i><a href="http://www.gorevidaldocumentary.com/">Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia</a></i>, grew up in Washington, DC. His father, Eugene Vidal, was a former Army officer and Olympic athlete who headed an early version of the Federal Aviation Administration during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. His mother was the daughter of Thomas Gore, a United States Senator from Oklahoma. When Vidal was a child his parents divorced and his mother married the wealthy stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss. After that marriage ended, Auchincloss married Janet Lee Bouvier, the mother of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Vidal would quip that he and Onassis were "related by divorce." His relationship with Onassis is part of the autobiographical material offered up in Vidal's <i>Two Sisters</i>, which he subtitled a "novel in the form of a memoir."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vidal with Jay Parini, Key West Book Festival,<br />
2009 (photo/Carol Tedesco, AP).</td></tr>
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Vidal attended the swanky New Hampshire prep school Philips Exeter Academy where a fellow student was John Knowles, author of the classic coming of age novel <i>A Separate Peace</i>. In his memoir <i>Palimpsest</i>, Vidal writes that Knowles told him that he was the model for the character Brinker Hadley in <i>A Separate Peace</i>. "I don't see the slightest resemblance," Vidal writes of his connection to this student leader character who tries to determine whether one boy caused another boy's fall from a tree. "I had almost no interest in any of my classmates...My time was spent writing and reading and counting to days to my deliverance not only from the school - and later army -- but from the control of others. Nevertheless, <i>A Separate Peace</i> remains an eerily precise reconstruction of how things were in that long-ago world before the Second War."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vidal's 1968 bestseller.</td></tr>
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In 1946, at the age of twenty, Vidal published his first novel, <i>Williwaw</i>, based on his wartime service on a U.S. Army supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. He went on to write more than two dozen novels covering an astonishingly wide range of subject matter including the wildly satirical <i>Myra Breckinridge</i>, a shocking in its day 1968 bestseller about a transgender Hollywood starlet, and <i>Lincoln</i>, a 1984 bestseller about the Civil War president seen through the eyes of a variety of his contemporaries.<br />
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"<i>Burr</i> is the best of Gore’s work. <i>Lincoln</i> is different, probably as good in many respects," Parini' told <b>TCR</b> in regard to Vidal's novels. He adds that <i>Julian</i>, Vidal's 1964 novel about Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century Roman emperor who abandoned Christianity in favor of a return to paganism, is "a rival for one of the top three books by Vidal."<br />
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Vidal also wrote plays -- most notably <i>The Best Man</i>, about an aloof intellectual and a charismatic young populist vying for their party's presidential nomination -- screenplays, teleplays, and countless essays. The most comprehensive collection of Vidal's essays is the nearly 1,300 page volume <i>United States: Essays 1952-1992</i> (1993). Parini edited and wrote an introduction to a shorter collection -- <i>The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal</i> (2008).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vidal (left) with Tennessee Williams and John<br />
F. Kennedy, Palm Beach, 1958.</td></tr>
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Parini believes that Vidal's chief talent was as an essayist and historian, not as a novelist. "Gore came of age when the novel was the premier form of expression in literature," Parini told <b>TCR</b>. "Novelists – Hemingway, Faulkner, etc. – had cultural power. Gore wanted that kind of power. The essayist has always been a kind of peripheral figure in American letters. Biographers don’t have much standing as writers. This is a pity, but it’s also true. Gore was, in fact, a magnificent historian in books such as <i>Inventing a Nation</i>."<br />
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In December 1973 <i>Burr</i> took the number one spot on the <i>New York Times</i> bestsellers list and held onto it through the following spring.<br />
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"I had assumed that <i>Burr</i> would be unpopular," Vidal told <i>The Paris Review</i>. "My view of American history is much too realistic. Happily, Nixon, who made me a popular playwright (the worst man in <i>The Best Man</i> was based on him), again came to the rescue. Watergate so shook the three percent of our population who read books that they accepted <i>Burr</i>, a book that ordinarily they would have burned while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag."<br />
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In 2012, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, during her short but highly publicized campaign for the Republican nomination for president, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/12/30/michele_bachmann_gore_vidal/">told supporters that as a college student she read</a><i> </i>"this snotty novel called <i>Burr</i> by Gore Vidal [that] mocked our Founding Fathers...people that I revere, and the country that I love" and it turned her from Democrat to Republican.<br />
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In early May 1974, <i>Burr</i> was displaced to number two on the <i>New York Times</i> bestsellers list by Richard Adams' <i>Watership Down</i>, an epic fantasy about a warren of rabbits. The following week <i>Burr</i> dropped to number three, giving the number two position to Peter Benchley's shark-attack thriller <i>Jaws</i>.<br />
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Also in the top ten list in May 1974 were <i>The Partners</i> by Louis Auchincloss, who was a cousin of Vidal's former stepfather Hugh Auchincloss, and <i>Postern of Fate</i> by Agatha Christie. Like Thornton Wilder, Christie had been publishing since the 1920s and was nearing the end of her career.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of Vidal's mysteries written<br />
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In the early 1950s, Vidal, writing under the pseudonym Edgar Box, wrote several mysteries strongly influenced by Christie's style. "I like Christie because I thought she was a great naturalist — those are real villages she writes about — and it’s fascinating. I used to like to read not for the mysteries but I read her for the characters. They are of no use to an American writer, but anyway they are very nice to read," <a href="http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/gore-vidal-p-i/">Vidal told Stephen Heyman of <i>The New York Times Magazine</i></a> in 2011, when the Edgar Box mysteries were reissued by Vintage.<br />
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<i>Burr</i> remained in the top ten through mid-August 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency and the <i>New York Times</i> fiction list was headed by John LeCarre's <i>Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy</i>, a "thinking man's spy story" about Soviet espionage.<br />
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Vidal died in 2012 at age eighty-six. As did Burr, he outlived most of his friends and adversaries. Vidal has been likened to Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken as a public intellectual. Could anyone on the current scene be likened to Vidal? Parini told <b>TCR</b> that "I don’t myself see anyone on the scene who is like Gore or Twain or Mencken. Nobody comes close."<br />
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Here's more information --<br />
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"<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3917/the-art-of-fiction-no-50-gore-vidal">Gore Vidal, The Art of Fiction, no. 50</a>." (Interview). <i>The Paris Review</i> (Fall 1974).<br />
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"<a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-contradiction-of-being-gore-vidal/">The Contradiction of Being Gore Vidal</a>." <i>The American Conservative </i>(1 August 2012).<br />
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"<a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/08/02/gore_vidal_the_virgil_of_american_populism/">Gore Vidal: The Virgil of American Populism</a>." <i>Salon</i> (2 August 2012).<br />
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"<a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-14/gore-vidal-s-burr-is-antidote-to-tea-party-myths">Gore Vidal's <i>Burr</i> is Antidote to Tea Party Myths</a>." <i>Bloomburg View</i> (14 August 2012).<br />
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"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/postscript-gore-vidal.html">Postscript: Gore Vidal</a>." <i>The New Yorker</i> (2 August 2012).<br />
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"<a href="http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/remembering-gore-vidal-10-quotes-on-writing">Ten [Vidal] Quotes on Writing</a>." <i>Writer's Digest</i> (1 August 2012).<br />
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<b>The Committee Room. Time Spent with TCR is Never Wasted.</b>tvmoviefanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06587253219668532386noreply@blogger.com49