Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
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A new movie about WW II Japanese asks where the war-crimes buck stops
Iran’s Giant Shoe Box of Faded Photographs, Full of the Unexpected
Kei Kumai: Japanese film director who won acclaim for confronting his country's history (obit)
Who Shall Live And Who Shall Die?--Holocaust documentary now available on DVD
Elizabeth Kostova's 'The Historian' ... Author tried too hard
Disney's Upcoming Blockbuster to Spin a Fairytale of Black History
Those Tired, Those Poor: A Journey as Important as Its Destination: Golden Door (Movie review)
Manuscript That Inspired 'Titanic' Character Revealed in Paris
You're 100, pilgrim: John Wayne celebrated as actor and patriot on anniversary of his birth
The History Channel Orders up Fourth Season of Digging For The Truth
Anti-Semitic entertainment is being shown on Arab television
Venezuela giving Danny Glover $18m to direct film on epic slave revolt
Paul Simon Awaits Library of Congress Distinction, Says 'I Was Meant to Be a Songwriter'
Warhol painting fetches 71.7 million dollars at New York sale
Reviving a Nazi-era play to make a point (nudge, nudge) about today's politics
Classic Book About America’s Indians Gains a Few Flourishes as a Film
The new Newseum: A Museum for Artifacts of the News Media’s Hunters and Gatherers
Revisiting, and Revising, a Very Familiar Legend (Pocahontas Documentary/Nova)
Bollywood takes a chance on film on 1991 assassination of PM Rajiv Gandhi
The New World (Movie about Jamestown)--A disappointment, says critic
Robert Novack on "September Dawn" -- movie about Mountain Meadows Massacre
"From 12/7 to 9/11: Lessons on the Japanese American Internment"
History Channel show explores the cultural roots of Star Wars
"The Mormons"--Modern-Day Look at History of the Latter-Day Saints (Documentary/PBS)
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Aperture Foundation Photograph Exhibits
Source: AHA Blog (5-30-07)
The Aperture Foundation is sponsoring several major photograph exhibits of interest to historians and patrons of the arts in the New York City area during the summer of 2007. Two of these exhibits, New York Rises and The Black Panthers: Making Sense of History, will start touring in the fall of 2007 and will run until 2011. Both are looking for institutions willing to host them on their tour. For more information, or to inquire about hosting one of the exhibits, please contact Annette Rosenblatt, Apertures Exhibitions Coordinator, at (212) 946-7128, or e-mail: arosenblatt@aperture.org....
A new movie about WW II Japanese asks where the war-crimes buck stops
Source: Roger Pulvers in Japan Times (5-20-07)
Over the coming months in this column, I will return a few times to a film titled "Ashita e no Yuigon (Best Wishes for Tomorrow)." I have been very fortunate to be able to write the script for this together with its director, Takashi Koizumi, whose last film, "Hakase no Aishita Sushiki (The Professor and his Beloved Equation)," was released in January 2006.
The film, which starts shooting on June 2, concerns the postwar trial, in Yokohama, of Lt. Gen. Tasuku Okada, former commander of the 13th Area Army in the Tokai region (the area centered on the prefectures of Aichi and Mie). Nineteen of the general's subordinates were also on trial with him.
The court proceedings stemmed from the last months of World War II, when giant American B-29s carried out relentless and indiscriminate bombings of the region, using high-explosives, napalm and other incendiary ordnance. Tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, were burnt to death.
Thirty-eight American aircrew who parachuted out of their planes were captured, summarily tried and executed as war criminals in June and July 1945. The war ended with the Emperor's capitulation on Aug. 15, 1945.
The subsequent Yokohama War Crimes Trials garnered much less publicity than those held in Tokyo. For one thing, the latter dealt with alleged Class-A war criminals, such as wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. The trials in Yokohama were for alleged B- and C-Class war criminals.
Also, by the time the Yokohama trials were under way, the people of Japan, like the Allied Occupation forces governing them, were turning their attention to reconstruction and away from retribution.
Nonetheless, the claims against Okada and his cohorts were grave. They were that the American airmen had not been given fair trials, and they could hardly be held responsible for merely following orders.
Therein lies the crux of the film.
What is a war crime and who is responsible for one when it occurs?
Fairness of the proceedings
Okada was in his late 50s when he was confined, arraigned and tried. A graduate of the Tottori Military School in 1909, he later went to the Military Staff College and joined the ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army. He served for three years as a military attache at Japan's embassy in London.
We based the film's storyline on thousands of pages of court records, as well as on a book about Okada titled "Nagai Tabi (The Long Journey)" by Shohei Ooka. In the film, as in the real trial, Okada praised the fairness of the proceedings, telling the military commission that tried him between March 8 and May 19, 1948:
This trial has been very generous in its proceedings.
I firmly believe that my feelings of gratitude will be the basis of a spiritual bond between the elder brother, America, and the younger brother, Japan, uniting our two countries in the future.
In fact, having read virtually the entire record of the trial, I came away with a feeling of its utter fairness. Okada was defended with vigor and integrity by his defense team, led by Joseph Featherstone. The judges, who had ample reason to exact revenge from a brutal former enemy, ran the trial with admirable impartiality. I could not help but feel how profoundly American military justice has been degraded since those days.
The truly fine thing about Lt. Gen. Tasuku Okada the man resides in his exemplary character. He was the only general in the Imperial Army who, after the war, personally took responsibility for his actions and those of the men under his command.
Naturally, he did not believe that he was committing a crime by trying and executing men whom he regarded as mass murderers. But he accepted the verdict of the commission and considered it only fair that he pay his price.
This stands in stark contrast to the example of many leaders around the world today — leaders who routinely shirk responsibility for their countries' criminal actions in wartime, instead dumping it on those far below who acted in their name.
Okada and his 19 subordinates were all found guilty. The lower ranks were given long sentences at hard labor. Okada was handed the death sentence.
Appeals for clemency
After the trial, even Chief Prosecuting Attorney Richard Burnett, among many others, appealed for clemency. The commission itself recommended clemency. But Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, rejected all appeals for a lighter sentence, and Okada was hanged.
Awaiting his execution in his cell at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, Okada, who was a devout Buddhist, wrote to his wife, Haruko:
Please do not honor me after I am gone.
Haruko, has this life been short or long?
It has seemed both, and I am deeply indebted to you.
We have given two children to this world, too. I feel great contentment over this.
Were I to have had my remaining years, I would have dearly loved to look after my elderly wife, but I will do so now from the other world.
Was Lt. Gen. Tasuku Okada a hero?
It is a general rule of war that the conquered are disallowed heroes, however sincere their motives. In my mind, Okada serves as an example to history, and this makes his story heroic. If deeds done in wartime are subsequently, and fairly, deemed criminal, then the people who issued the command must be held accountable for them.
There was a time when American justice was genuinely that: justice.
In our present day, such justice is being manipulated by cynical leaders, and those far down the chain of command are being held accountable for those leaders' heinous misdeeds.
"Best Wishes for Tomorrow" is not a film about the wars being fought today in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But its message may just turn out to be as relevant to us today as it was to those, on both sides of World War II, who gave their lives to deliver it to the future.
Okada (who will be played by veteran actor Makoto Fujita) had hopes for a better world after he was gone. Yet he was a realist, too. He wrote in his Sugamo Prison diary, shortly before his death:
Humanity should eradicate war by whatever means necessary.
Nonetheless, I am afraid that wars will be with us in this world forever.
History Channel to launch in South East Asia on 15 June
Source: http://www.indiantelevision.com (5-30-07)
MUMBAI: AETN All Asia Networks (AAAN), a joint venture of A&E Television Networks and Astro All Asia Networks, will launch The History Channel (THC) and Crime and Investigation Network in South East Asia on 15 June.
The channels will be launched in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand.
"We are going to launch both brands in additional territories in the region throughout the summer, and plan to deploy our brands and programming via VoD, mobile, and broadband," says A&E Television Networks senior VP international Sean Cohan.
THC and Crime and Investigation Network will be carried on Astro in Malaysia and Brunei. In Singapore, both channels will be carried on StarHub. In Thailand, The History Channel will be available on TrueVision. Additional distribution arrangements will be announced in the coming months.
History of Modern Britain, BBC2
Source: http://www.thisislancashire.co.uk (5-30-07)
HE may look like a cartoon character but Andrew Marr has to be one of the most charismatic presenters on TV at the moment.
Since he left his post as the BBC's political correspondent, broadcasts from outside Number 10 haven't quite been the same.
Fans have been able to get a fix by getting up early on a Sunday morning but that has hardly been the best timeslot.
But now Andrew Marr is back and presenting a History of Modern Britain in his own inimitable style.
Marr has that great ability - so lacking in so many modern day presenters to both entertain and inform without resorting to any tricks or gurning incessantly at the camera.
This week his BBC2 series took us back the the Fifites, which Marr argued, wasn't the idyllic golden age as we are led to believe.
It was a black and white world of Suez, Harold Wilson and the birth of satire.
The great thing about this series is that you don't have to be a serious student of politics to appreciate it.
There is no need to dumb anything down, Marr simply covers the events and personalities, bringing a bygone era to life and then, using his own insight, putting it into context for a modern audience. *With Big Brother about to dominate the collective conciousness for the next three months, it's reassuring to know that alternatives do exist.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Iran’s Giant Shoe Box of Faded Photographs, Full of the Unexpected
Source: NYT (5-30-07)
TEHRAN, May 29 — When Shadi Ghadirian was 21, she got a student job printing old photographs at the small photography museum here. She was so drawn by the 19th-century pictures of women with thick black eyebrows wearing head scarves and short skirts over baggy pants that two years later, in 2000, she began incorporating the imagery into her own photography.
Using clothes from the late 1800s, she dressed female friends and posed them in front of painted backdrops to look like the women in the antique photos. But her women appeared with something modern: a newspaper, a tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner.
The shots became known as the Qajar series and made her one of Iran’s most famous female photographers.
“My pictures became a mirror reflecting how I felt: we are stuck between tradition and modernity,” she said in an interview here....
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Largest-ever exhibit of Frida Kahlo work to open in Mexico
Source: AFP (5-29-07)
The 100th birthday of artist and feminist icon Frida Kahlo will be honored with the largest-ever exhibit of her paintings, the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico said Tuesday.
"The 354 pieces will be the largest exposition of Frida Kahlo," director of the National Fine Arts Institute Teresa Franco told reporters.
It will also be Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico, she said: After Mexico proclaimed Rivera paintings to be national cultural heritage, foreign owners feared lending her work to Mexico.
Besides one-third of her artistic production, manuscripts and 50 letters that have not been displayed previously, she said.
Works are on loan from Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nayoga, Japan.
Kahlo (1907-1954) twice married muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and was a close friend of Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky.
Kei Kumai: Japanese film director who won acclaim for confronting his country's history (obit)
Source: Guardian (5-29-07)
Kei Kumai, who has died aged 76, was a distinguished Japanese film-maker whose work combined dramatic force with trenchant social criticism. He worked with many of Japan's most famous actors, and filmed a script left unrealised by world-renowned colleague Akira Kurosawa (obituary, September 7 1998). Yet he was neglected abroad, perhaps because he eschewed the fashionable experimentation of such New Wave contemporaries as Nagisa Oshima. Instead, he adopted a style of powerful simplicity, charting controversial themes with rare directness.
Born in the village of Azumino in mountainous Nagano prefecture, Kumai became interested in cinema while a student at Shinshu University. Upon graduation in 1953, he entered the industry as an assistant director. A decade-long apprenticeship at Nikkatsu studios preceded his directorial debut, The Long Death (1964), a thriller based on a notorious 1948 mass poisoning. Japanese Archipelago (1965), another thriller, dealt with the murder of an American serviceman. Both films used murder investigations to examine the legacy of Japan's wartime aggression and defeat; the latter also subtly criticised American foreign policy in Asia....
The early 1970s were his richest period. This Swarming Earth (1970) detailed the discrimination suffered by Koreans, atom bomb survivors and the burakumin under-class. His best-known film, Sandakan 8 (1974), examined the taboo subject of Japanese women sold into prostitution in south-east Asia early in the 20th century. The great actor Kinuyo Tanaka gave a poignant performance as a former prostitute ostracised because of her past.
Who Shall Live And Who Shall Die?--Holocaust documentary now available on DVD
Source: Press Release (5-29-07)
"Could the Jews of Europe have been saved?"
Documentary filmmaker Laurence Jarvik boldly confronts this question, exploring the actions and inaction of the Roosevelt Administration and American Jewish leaders and exposing the political tradeoffs that kept the doors closed to Jewish emigrants fleeing the Nazi regime. Requests were made to bomb Auschwitz, set up a Jewish army and construct rescue havens, yet no action was taken.
Containing previously classified information, contemporary interviews and rare newsreel footage, this film is a unique chronicle of important decisions made by the American political and Jewish establishments during World War II. "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? provides a much needed history lesson for all who are either too young to know, or who were never told the facts." (Neil Barsky, Jewish Students Press Service).
Russian space history exhibition in Pakistan
Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk (5-29-07)
ISLAMABAD: An exhibition of photographs on Russian space history that opened here on Monday features a string of interesting images, among them Laika the dog on board the second satellite launched from earth in 1957.
Russian Ambassador Sergey Peskov inaugurated the five-day exhibition at the Institute of Space Technology (IST).
The 57 photographs put up for display document Russian space history with images that include the maiden earth orbiting satellite, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space and cosmonaut Yuruy Romanenko seen on a treadmill aboard the Mir Space Station.
Also among the photographs, some of which are in black and white, is that of the Souyz TM 32 spacecraft crew along with the first space tourist Dennis Tito.
IST Vice Chancellor Imran Rahman told Daily Times that Russians had done really well in space programmes and that it was important that Pakistani students learnt from them. “As far as I am concerned, the Russians could come and teach at our institute,” he said.
Monday, May 28, 2007
New Yorker profiles 3 1960s documentaries re-released
Source: New Yorker (6-4-07)
The social and political upheavals of the nineteen-sixties are the subject of an extraordinary trio of new releases—a pair of documentaries [ “American Revolution 2” and “The Murder of Fred Hampton”] by Mike Gray and Howard Alk, made in Chicago in the heat of the moment and released by Facets, and “The Hours and Times” (Choices), a 1991 drama directed by Christopher Münch.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
The release of ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was a defining moment for rock -- and the world
Source: Sacramento Bee (5-27-07)
It was 40 years ago this week -- to be precise, June 1, 1967, in Britain, a day later in the former colonies of America -- that the Beatles changed the world.
Of course, the Beatles had changed the world many times before, but the release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was different.
It was called "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization," one of its tunes ("She's Leaving Home") was credited with being one of the three great songs of the 20th century, and in the week after the album came out, "the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young."
Because those comments were made by, respectively, the Times of London's noted critic Kenneth Tynan, New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein and New Yorker writer Langdon Winner, they signified the acceptance and triumph of "Sgt. Pepper" and the Beatles in the arts -- and adult -- community.
Young people, meanwhile, thought the album was cool and far out.
Elizabeth Kostova's 'The Historian' ... Author tried too hard
Source: http://denver.yourhub.com (5-25-07)
It usually can't be said that an author is trying to do too much with a book. These days, writers manufacture manuscripts at super-phonic speeds.
Reading books by big name authors like James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Dean Koontz, and Patricia Cornwell can be like springtime: It's beautiful while it lasts, but then you have to wait through the whole year again for decent weather. And popular books are always fast reads.
An anomaly titled The Historian appeared on fiction best-seller lists in 2006. Written by Elizabeth Kostova, this historical horror novel holds a heavy 600 pages. It isn't a fast read at all.
And with all the time, trees, and ink that went into producing The Historian, an optimistic reader might hope it at least contained compelling characters or an intriguing plot. Unfortunately, those wishes would be wasted. Kostova just tried to do too much with one book.
The Historian is about three historians, who seek to prove Vlad Dracula is undead and well in the 20 th century. Several European scholars aid the historians' quest to uncover Dracula's true legacy.
But sinister forces (represented most accurately by bloodsucking librarians) also threaten the heroes throughout their quest across time and the far reaches of Eastern Europe. By seeking Dracula's origins, the historians hope to find the secret to ending his unholy reign.
Kostova should get credit for trying to make a palatable genre stew with The Historian. She includes thrills, mysteries, histories, romances, adventures, and horrors all in one plot.
Love affair might have fueled Jane Austen's writings
Source: AP (5-27-07)
Jane Austen wrote some of English literature's most enduring romances, but she never enjoyed a passionate love affair of her own. Or did she?
A new film and biography suggest that the young writer of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility wasn't the solitary genius long imagined by historians but a free spirit whose imagination was fed by a passionate, ill-fated courtship.
The theory, presented by historian Jon Spence in his book Becoming Jane Austen, has been loosely adapted into a film (Becoming Jane) starring Anne Hathaway and Maggie Smith, one of seven Austen-inspired movies and TV miniseries due for release this year.
Audiences remain entranced by Austen's tales of love and loss, desire and disappointment, despite their seemingly outdated focus on the intricate courtship rituals of early 19th-century Britain.
But was Austen's ability to tap into these universal themes a product of her rich imagination, or was she inspired by unfulfilled longing?
Spence, like many historians before him, has attempted to answer the question by examining letters Austen wrote during the winter of 1795-96 to her sister, Cassandra, who was staying with her fiance's family in Berkshire.
NYT Critic: Drama Is Another Casualty of War
Source: Charles Isherwood in the NYT (5-27-07)
ON June 10 “Journey’s End” is likely to become the first show in recent memory to come to the end of its journey on Broadway on the very same day it takes home a major Tony award. The production is the favorite to win the prize as the best play revival of the season and is nominated in several other categories. But the producers have already set Tony Sunday, the industry’s annual festive rites, as the closing date....
What gives? A clue might be found in the fate of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” the acclaimed Clint Eastwood movie from last year. Few films were more enthusiastically reviewed than the second half of Mr. Eastwood’s somber diptych about the fiercely fought battle between American and Japanese troops in the waning days of World War II. But audiences gave it a skip, despite all the critical hosannas and Mr. Eastwood’s status as a popular star turned bona fide artiste. The same fate had already greeted “Flags of Our Fathers,” which focused on the same battle from the American perspective. The critics raved; audiences shrugged.
A potential conclusion: War in the newspapers isn’t necessarily good for war on movie screens and stages. The conflict in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is so much with us these days that maybe audiences have no inclination to engage with stories from old battlefields....
Friday, May 25, 2007
New Newt Gingrich novel concerns Pearl Harbor
Source: NYT (5-24-07)
December 8, 1941, is not normally known as a day that will live in infamy. That phrase of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s usually refers to the preceding day, on which the American Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor was savaged by a surprise Japanese air raid. But “Pearl Harbor,” the war novel that is Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen’s latest foray into what they call “active history,” deliberately calls attention to the fact that Japan and Hawaii were on different sides of the International Date Line.
When the attack began, it was Dec. 7 at Pearl Harbor but Dec. 8 in Japan. The book is subtly subtitled “A Novel of December 8th” to signal its attention to the Japanese point of view. On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”
And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would find phrases like “to withdraw backward was impossible,” sounds like “wretching noises” to accompany vomiting, or constructions like “incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted.” Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.
This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s....
Starring New York, City of Grit and Glamour (Exhibition)
Source: NYT (5-25-07)
To walk through the main concourse at Grand Central Terminal is to step onto a real-life movie set. Cary Grant passes through it while escaping his would-be killers in “North by Northwest.” Jim Carrey grabs Kate Winslet’s hand and dashes across it in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” watching people vanish one by one as his memory is erased. Most tellingly, it is the site of a pivotal moment in “The Fisher King,” when Robin Williams, as a pure-hearted, emotionally unbalanced man, spots the quite plain woman of his dreams heading for her train. Suddenly everyone in the room breaks into a waltz, as this grimy, everyday place becomes a scene of glittering romance.
Its magical role on screen makes Grand Central the ideal location for “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies,” an ambitious exhibition of films, photographs and sets that begins today in Vanderbilt Hall, adjacent to the main concourse. The project was put together by James Sanders, based on his 2001 book of the same title, which shrewdly observes that two New Yorks — the real city and the screen fantasy — feed each other in a never-ending circle.
The exhibition and its offshoots, including a series on Turner Classic Movies and special material added to Grand Central’s tours, do more than take viewers behind the scenes and through the city’s history on screen. They illustrate how film has made New York a communal experience, familiar even to people who have never been here.
NYT reviews the new Creation Museum in Kentucky
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT (5-24-07)
The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall....
Star Wars 30 years old
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (5-25-07)
When you can get ideological opposites like Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich to agree, you know you must have something that will stand the test of time.
That is what George Lucas managed to do with "Star Wars."
The current and former House speakers are just a couple of the two dozen fans and critics who offer their insights into the 30-year "Star Wars" phenomenon in a new documentary, "Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed," airing at 9 p.m. Monday on the History Channel.
From the outset, the documentary proves to be somewhat different from the usual History Channel fare. Comedian Stephen Colbert and filmmaker Kevin Smith start the discussion by revealing how "Star Wars" defined their childhood and how "life would never be the same" after they saw the original film.
From there, the documentary expands the "Star Wars" legacy from a childhood fantasy into an enduring yet thoroughly modern American myth.
As numerous clips from the six films roll, scholars, journalists and filmmakers offer up their varying opinions about the inspirations and influences behind the scenes.
From the Bible to Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to Laurel and Hardy to "The Lord of the Rings," almost every era and genre of literature and cinema seems to be represented somewhere in the sprawling "Star Wars" saga. Dan Rather invokes Homer. Pelosi compares the story to a fairy tale. Tom Brokaw talks about the influence of American Westerns.
HBO's 'Bury My Heart' exhumes a painful history
Source: USA Today (5-24-07)
When he first read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dick Wolf says "it shook me to my core."
"I had been watching cowboy and Indian movies growing up, and this was a completely different view of history -- the first point of view from Indians," says Wolf, executive producer of NBC's Law & Order franchise and spinoffs.
So when Wolf was approached by HBO to produce historian Dee Brown's seminal 1970 work about the displacement and slaughter of the late-19th-century American Indian for the screen, he says he jumped at the opportunity. Six years in the making, the film airs Sunday (9 ET/PT).
Brown's book was not easy to adapt to the screen, and Sunday's premiere is vastly cut back from the big-budget, six-hour miniseries originally envisioned. Wounded Knee cost "well south" of $20 million, Wolf says, and took 39 days to shoot. The story starts in 1876, after the Sioux annihilated Gen. George Custer's troops in the legendary battle at Little Big Horn.
Wounded Knee is the story many historians and anthropologists say represents the American Indian's holocaust, an interpretation not lost on Wolf. "If it wasn't physical genocide, it's certainly cultural genocide," Wolf says.
"Hopefully, this will become a real document of record of what we did to an entire race of people," he says. "I've seen it 12 times, and I still tear up at certain points."
Wounded Knee draws parallels over past and present U.S. policies concerning sovereign foreign nations. "The thing that resonates with me over what happened then and what's happening now (in Iraq) is that we seem to be duplicating our previous mistakes -- trying to impose our cultural values on people who not only don't share them, but don't want them."
Disney's Upcoming Blockbuster to Spin a Fairytale of Black History
Source: The Guardian (student newspaper, UC San Diego) (5-24-07)
"Blacks were never subservient to whites?" Kids say the darndest things.
At least, they will after viewing Disney's upcoming "The Princess and the Frog," the unwittingly controversial introduction of Disney's first black princess. Alas, nobody warned Mickey about portraying pre-Civil Rights Act blacks in today's Don Imus world. Now the company has a political nightmare on its hands, and in its continuing efforts to mollify the race police, Disney has rewritten American history against the interests of our nation's children.
In the past, Disney has smartly stuck to the safe territory of retelling European fairy tales, exploring the secret lives of animals and personifying objects. These stories easily avoided controversy. Mickey and Minnie were mice but never multiplied like mice; Aladdin and Co. were all the same race; and the beast didn't eat the beauty.
The backdrop for Disney's newest fable, though, is much different. The story takes place in New Orleans during the Roaring Twenties, when the jazz was hot, the gumbo was hotter and segregation thrived.
People get a little sensitive about that last part, and they've been fighting to excise it from the film.
In the original script, the black princess worked in a Cinderella-esque role as the chambermaid for a rich, spoiled, white Southern debutante. It was a role undoubtedly played by thousands of young black women at the time, and it fit well into the story.
Unfortunately, it also reminded people of the unpleasantness of past race roles. Some people objected to the portrayal, and instead of defending the story, the producers gave in and quietly changed the script.
You see, kids? It's like racism never even happened!
There's more lunacy where that came from. Originally, the princess was named Maddy. But the "moniker mafia" protested that Maddy sounded a bit too much like Mammy, the slang name given to the period's matronly black women, like Aunt Jemima and Scarlett O'Hara's slave in "Gone with the Wind." ...
Titanic achilles heal (Documentary/History Channel)
Source: PRNewswire (5-24-07)
When the 2006 History Channel special, TITANIC: MISSING PIECES, discovered missing pieces of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, it dramatically changed the tale of the ship's final, doomed moments. Now, further research of the find reveals a tangle of deception and half-truths that dramatically changes our understanding of the greatest maritime disaster in history. The dramatic re-writing of the tale continues exclusively on The History Channel(R) with the world premiere of TITANIC'S ACHILLES HEEL, Sunday, June 17, 2007 at 8:00pm ET/PT.
The missing pieces that were discovered in 2005 essentially indicated that the Titanic broke apart in the water before sinking, which had to be terrifying experience for those aboard. The unsinkable ship that was built to serve as its own lifeboat until help arrived broke apart in a manner never imagined by its engineers. TITANIC'S ACHILLES HEEL aims to find out why the ship broke apart as it did, and why the "official" details of the sinking seemed to make the truth so elusive.
Those Tired, Those Poor: A Journey as Important as Its Destination: Golden Door (Movie review)
Source: NYT (5-25-07)
In its basic outline the story told in “Golden Door,” Emanuele Crialese’s beautiful dream of a film, is hardly unfamiliar. Some version of this immigrant’s tale — setting out from the old country, crossing the Atlantic in steerage, arriving at Ellis Island — is part of the family history of millions of Americans. But what makes Mr. Crialese’s telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival.
His film takes its English title from the Emma Lazarus poem about the Statue of Liberty, but the lady in the harbor, like the rest of America (apart from Ellis Island), remains unseen as the director takes us up to the door but not through it. The Italian title, “Nuovomondo,” means “new world,” but this too is a bit misleading. It is the Old World that dominates this chronicle of Italian peasants striking out for a future they can barely imagine, and the achievement of the movie is to immerse the modern viewer in a way of perceiving the world that has nearly been forgotten. You may have looked at stiff, yellowing pictures of ancestors from a century ago and wondered what they thought and felt, and it is this kind of curiosity that “Golden Door” comes remarkably close to satisfying.
Paul Simon concert sponsored by Library of Congress
Source: NYT (5-25-07)
Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Mr. Simon’s South African collaborators, the Zulu choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo, brought back the past in two rare reunions in a concert sponsored by the Library of Congress at the ornate Warner Theater in Washington on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Celebrating Mr. Simon’s selection as the recipient of the library’s first Gershwin Award in recognition of excellence exemplifying the Gershwins, the concert was punctuated by high-fives and hugs. Mr. Simon joined Ladysmith Black Mambazo for the first time since 1999 in a performance of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” from the 1986 Grammy Award-winning “Graceland” album and said, “I haven’t performed with them for a few years, but they’re my brothers from South Africa.” And before launching into “Cecilia” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” from the 1970 studio album of the same title, he spoke of “My dear friend and partner in arguments, Art Garfunkel,” whom he also embraced.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Artist Ivan Sinnaeve uses remains of the millions of shells that fell on Flanders' killing fields to make his own tribute to the Scots who fought and fell in WWI
Source: Sunday Mail (UK) (5-20-07)
A LASTING symbol of hope has been created from the debris of death left in the World War One battlefields.
A Belgian craftsmen is using tiny pieces of lead shrapnel which still litter the killing fields of Flanders to make 10in models of brave Highland soldiers who fought and fell there in the Great War.
Wheelchair-bound Ivan Sinnaeve - known as Shrapnel Charlie - sells the detailed figures, complete with kilts and bagpipes, for £35 from Passchendaele Museum in Zonnebeke, Flanders.
And £25 from every sale is put towards the building of a Celtic Cross monument dedicated to the memory of Scotland's war dead.
Ivan's miniature army has already raised more than £5000 for the memorial, which will be unveiled at a ceremony in August likely to be attended by First Minister Alex Salmond.
The £30,000 cross commemorates more than half a million Scots who fought in the trenches - and the one in four who never came home.
Manuscript That Inspired 'Titanic' Character Revealed in Paris
Source: ABC News (5-23-07)
When Helen Churchill Candee wrote a 42-page memoir of the Titanic's maiden voyage, she had no idea she was writing herself into the role of a Hollywood heroine.
"Titanic" director James Cameron reportedly took his inspiration for the character Rose from that manuscript, which is on public view for the first time at the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris.
But unlike the young Rose, as played by Kate Winslet, Candee was a 50-year-old American divorcee who was also a writer, nurse and suffragette, returning home in 1912 after learning that one of her sons had been injured in a car crash.
Two days into the voyage, she was enjoying the company of her fellow first class passengers before disaster struck. Candee wrote, "All of my group were gathered together in the Ritz restaurant of the ship at 11 o'clock in the evening."
Hours later, the great ship hit an iceberg.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
You're 100, pilgrim: John Wayne celebrated as actor and patriot on anniversary of his birth
Source: AP (5-23-07)
On the 100th anniversary of John Wayne's birth, the Duke still swaggers through the American psyche as not just an actor, but a patriot his centennial spawning fond remembrance, and perhaps a few small protests on the side.
Wayne's legacy is unique because of the dual perspectives that pervade his memory. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Garry Wills, who wrote "John Wayne's America" in 1997, described Wayne as "the most popular movie star ever, but also the most polarizing."
It could be argued that no other film actor has ever come to symbolize so many things: rugged masculinity, the frontier, even America itself. The Duke has remained, in the truest sense, an icon.
For many, an entire way of life is epitomized in the tired, unblinking eyes that peered knowingly from his cocksure pose ("walks around like a big cat," said Howard Hawks). His voice, too, seems etched in the collective memory: With a simple "pilgrim," a whole lost world is summoned.
Documentary about Simon Wiesenthal panned by NYT
Source: NYT (5-22-07)
The legacy of the concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal is one of unimpeachable bravery, but "I Have Never Forgotten You," a new documentary, is a suspect monument to his courage.
Directed by Richard Trank, also its co-author, the film effectively sketches Mr. Wiesenthal's life, from his tenacity in surviving the genocide that claimed much of his family, to his determination to identify, find and punish ex-Nazis after World War II, at a time when many governments would have preferred to "move on."
Using file footage, photographs, newsreel snippets and interviews with friends, relatives and former colleagues, "I Have Never Forgotten You" is a testament to Mr. Wiesenthal's bulldog stubbornness. We learn, by his own admission, that he didn't spend nearly as much time with his wife and daughter as he might have wished, and that he demanded that they continue to live in his hometown, Vienna, despite decades of threats against the family by former Hitler supporters and neo-Nazi agitators.
Near the end of the movie Mr. Wiesenthal, now 90, breaks down while accepting an award and begs his audience not to characterize him as a hero because his good deeds came out of an epic sense of survivor's guilt.
Alas, Mr. Trank refuses to heed his subject's advice. "I Have Never Forgotten You" works overtime to make Mr. Wiesenthal seem quirky and lovable, and dilutes its complex, inherently dark subject matter by deploying every documentary film cliché in existence. (These include the still-photo-becomes-3-D gimmick popularized by "The Kid Stays in the Picture," which seems especially inappropriate when applied to the haunting sketches that Mr. Wiesenthal, a former architectural draughtsman, made in the camps. Didn't Mr. Trank think they were interesting enough as is?)
The History Channel Orders up Fourth Season of Digging For The Truth
Source: http://www.broadcastingcable.com (5-22-07)
The History Channel has picked up a fourth season of Digging For The Truth, which follows adventurers and scientists as they travel the globe searching for answers to come of civilizations greatest mysteries.
Former Navy pilot Hunter Ellis and adventurer Zay Harding will be taking over hosting duties for this season, replacing Josh Bernstein, who left the show to join the Discovery Channel, where he will serve as a producer and host on new shows for the network.
“Since launching in 2005, Digging for the Truth has become appointment viewing for our audience. After three successful seasons, we recognize the challenge to grow this series in this very competitive environment and this change in direction underscores our commitment to this dynamic franchise,” said Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager of The History Channel.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Anti-Semitic entertainment is being shown on Arab television
Source: Nonie Darwish at FrontpageMag.com (5-22-07)
[Nonie Darwish is an American of Arab/Moslem origin. A freelance writer and public speaker, she runs the website www.ArabsForIsrael.com. ]
The anti-Semitism of the Arab news media is a well-documented phenomenon. Less well known in the West is the extreme hatred of Jews that saturates much of the Arab entertainment world. Consider the Egyptian film, “A Girl from Israel” (“Fataah Min Israeel” in Arabic), which was shown earlier this month on Arab television. Featuring a cast of Egyptian movie stars, it is one of the vilest and most hateful examples of Arab anti-Semitic propaganda I have ever seen.
A jumble of anti-Semitic tropes, the film revolves around a conspiratorial plotline: A Jewish family vacationing in the Sinai hides the fact that they are Israeli, while at the same time conspiring against Egyptians. Each of the family members plays their respective sinister role. Thus, the sexually promiscuous daughter seduces “good” Egyptian young men, while the son rapes the fiancé of an Egyptian. The father, who is made to look like a pimp, works to further Israel’s interests.
Opposite the Israeli family is an Egyptian family. Where the Jewish family is constantly scheming against Egyptians, the devout Egyptian family represents all that is good. The Egyptian father and mother are conservative Muslims trying to protect their children from the immoral Jews, who, they claim, are “all liars, untrustworthy and [who] infiltrate good Egyptian families to cause divisions and friction.”
The theme that the Israelis are evil foreigners who do not belong recurs throughout. The Egyptian parents constantly refer to the Sinai as “our land,” and the mere presence of Israelis in Egypt, even as tourists, is portrayed as a form of invasion or occupation. When one of the Egyptian girls discovers that her Egyptian boyfriend has befriended the Israeli young man, she confronts the latter. “Are you Israeli?” she demands. When he answers that he is, she shoves him, telling him to “get lost.” Similarly, the Egyptian mother and father slap their adult children in the face for making friends with Jews. When an Egyptian businessman attempts to do business with the Israeli father, the outraged Muslim mother voices her disapproval. Business with Jews, she says, is “treason.”
The Muslim father is particularly disgusted by the Israelis. In the film’s most dramatic scene, for instance, the Egyptian family discovers the true origins of the Israelis. As a sinister, “Jaws”-like theme plays, the Egyptian father washes his hands in the bathroom. Previously, he had shaken hands with one of the Israelis, and he now imagines they are dripping with blood. On another occasion, the Egyptian father confronts his Israeli counterpart. “Jews have no honor, are sexually permissive, distrustful, conspirators and want to control us,” he says.
In keeping with the film’s theme that Jews are not to be trusted, the Israeli father is shown trying to shake hands with Egyptians, while talking about peace and the normalization of relations. The Egyptians, however, regard him with utter disgust, rejecting his extended hand. In this way, the Israeli father is understood to be insincere in his quest for peace. In a final act of Jewish treachery, the film ends with the killing of the Egyptian young man, the only character to befriend Jews, at the hands of his Israeli friend! T he message of the movie could not be clearer: Those who befriend and trust Jews end up getting killed by their Jewish friends.
Tasteless as such anti-Jewish propaganda is, it cannot be dismissed as insignificant or unusual. With even Israeli tourists portrayed as enemies of Arabs and Muslims, it is no wonder that terrorist attacks target Israeli visitors in the Sinai, and that Arab anti-Semitism, aided by today’s technology, is rapidly spreading. Equally worrisome is that such anti-Semitic fare is now offered, through Arab satellite channels, right here in America.
Many laughed at the hilarious movie “Borat,” which portrays the outrageous exploits of a fictional anti-Semite from Kazakhstan. But, as “A Girl from Israel” reminds us, real anti-Semitism is no laughing matter.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Venezuela giving Danny Glover $18m to direct film on epic slave revolt
Source: Guardian (5-21-07)
Venezuela is to give the American actor Danny Glover almost $18m (£9m) to make a film about a slave uprising in Haiti, with President Hugo Chávez hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression.
The Venezuelan congress said it would use the proceeds from a recent bond sale with Argentina to finance Glover's biopic of Toussaint Louverture, an iconic figure in the Caribbean who led an 18th-century revolt in Haiti.
It will also give seed money for a film version of The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez's novel about the last days of Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonialism.
Glover, 60, who starred with Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, and more recently with Eddie Murphy in the film DreamGirls, is a civil rights activist and supporter of Mr Chávez's radical leftwing policies.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Paul Simon Awaits Library of Congress Distinction, Says 'I Was Meant to Be a Songwriter'
Source: ABC (5-18-07)
Paul Simon has performed many great songs, but for him, writing one is an even better experience. Simon will be honored for that skill next week by the Library of Congress with its first annual Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
He's been singing since he was a child, and said while there are different ways to define a great song, some stand out for a very simple reason.
"I would say the simplest one is a song that other people can sing easily. And when they walk around and hum and sing it to themselves, that's the great accomplishment of the song. Gives pleasure to the greatest number of people," he told ABC News.
And for him, the pleasure is in the songwriting.
"The power of that feeling … It's like an addiction — you want to write again. You want to get it again," Simon said. "That pleasure and addiction is what keeps me writing into my 60s."
The Library of Congress is honoring the depth, range and beauty of his music and his ability to bridge musical cultures, as Simon pairs contagious melodies with the layered lines of a poet....
Frost/Nixon: What the NYC Play Gets Wrong (and Right)
Source: Robert Zelnick in the Weekly Standard (5-21-07)
[Robert Zelnick, professor of journalism at Boston University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as executive editor of the original Nixon/Frost interviews.]
With Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan confirms his place as the multi-media master of a strange but engaging genre of fiction. The writer behind such award-season heavyweights as The Queen and The Last King of Scotland--both of which garnered dual Oscar and Golden Globe wins for their respective leading actors--Morgan now tries his hand at a piece of Americana: the Richard Nixon-David Frost interviews of 1977. The play, which opened on Broadway late last month, is a compelling bit of theater. As a work of historical fiction, however, it shows too little allegiance to the facts that inspired it.
Morgan approaches the sessions as a kind of boxing match between two unequal opponents. In one corner, the disgraced though heavily favored former president, buttressed by his chief of staff Col. Jack Brennan and his agent "Swifty" Lazar. In the other corner, British talk-show host David Frost, depicted here as something of a dandy, and his team of researchers. Morgan uses Frost researcher James Reston (Stephen Kunken) and Brennan (Corey Johnson) as narrators, setting the scenes and underlining with commentary the points he wishes to make.
Frost's character is played by Michael Sheen, who has twice done Tony Blair in highly praised interpretations of Morgan's work. Here the collaboration has Frost anguishing over his cancelled American and Australian weekly gigs, and the resulting snub by Sardi's--long a hangout of Broadway celebrities--depriving him of his favorite table. Morgan's Frost is a cheeky playboy, all style and no substance, whose interest in the interviews stems more from ego than intellect.
In contrast, Morgan's Nixon, brought to life by the fine actor Frank Langella, is a lumbering caricature of a man bent and constricted by the weight of personal tragedy. His shoulders sink toward the stage, his "victory" wave is stiff and exaggerated. Under pressure from Frost, the face of Langella's Nixon freezes in an eerie smile, then dissolves into soft clay while a film of saliva glistens on his lower lip. His tortured mien--captured on a wall of TV screens--is a study in humiliation.
So thoroughly does Langella capture the internal life of Richard Nixon that I found myself recalling one point in the original interviews when a damning series of Frost citations of White House transcripts made Nixon's eyelids flutter like the wings of a moth shot through with electric current. Langella does not mimic this Nixon; the physical resemblance between the two is not striking. Instead, Langella finds the essence of the Nixon character and pours it into a physical form which one accepts as Richard Nixon. Even with the final curtain barely down, I had some trouble distinguishing which of my most memorable images of Nixon were those from our sessions 30 years ago versus the creature created by Langella.
In both the real-life interviews and on stage, Frost struggled in his early bouts with Nixon, losing points to long-winded answers and maudlin recollections. But when it came time for Watergate, the underdog came out swinging, piling up points against a Richard Nixon who became more combative and less credible with each blow struck. Did he not join a conspiracy to obstruct justice by ordering aides to approach the CIA about pulling the FBI off the case? No, says Nixon, misstating the law--not if his motive was to keep other embarrassing activities from coming to light.
In the 1977 interviews, Frost pounded this theme for a few minutes and then moved on to other areas of presidential culpability, including the payment of money designed to buy the silence of the Watergate defendants. But in Peter Morgan's re-creation of the confrontation, Nixon offers an additional argument.
Nixon: When you're in office, you have to do a lot of things that are not, in the strictest sense of the law, legal. But you do them because they're in the greater interests of the nation.
Frost: . . . Are you really saying that there are certain situations where the president can decide whether it's in the best interests of the nation and do something illegal?
Nixon: I'm saying that when the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
That response draws a sharp, prolonged laugh from audiences at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on West 45th Street. But in fact, Nixon's assertion of inherent presidential power came not in response to questions about Watergate but three sessions later, when the two were discussing the so-called "second story jobs" briefly authorized by Nixon as part of the Houston Plan to combat attacks on police, banks, campus ROTC facilities, and other targets by groups embracing political violence. Morgan apparently concluded that, transferring Nixon's claim from an area where there was some historical precedent to an area where there was none, would better establish the character of the man he was describing and the underlying political issues as well.
Between sessions, the Frost staff is shown strategizing, bickering, prodding their man to play it hard, not to get pushed around. The Nixon staff--Ken Khachigian, Frank Gannon, and Diane Sawyer (yes, that Diane Sawyer)--is mentioned by name but never shown. That is unfortunate because they, along with speechwriter Ray Price, played a critical role in persuading Nixon that, in order to begin the long climb toward his coveted elder statesman status, he would have to acknowledge his role in the Watergate coverup and apologize to the American people. Morgan not only ignores this community of interest between the two camps but also distorts Jack Brennan's role at a critical moment of the proceedings.
It came as Frost had taken a defensive, nit-picking Nixon and, with skillful questioning, brought him close to accepting responsibility for the Watergate disaster: "I gave them a sword," Nixon acknowledged, "and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish, and if I had been in their position I'd have done the same thing." But as Frost remained aggressive, Nixon once more became nit-picky and uncooperative.
Now Morgan has Brennan burst onto the interview set, forcing the startled Frost to take an unscheduled break to "change tape" and allowing Nixon time to confer with Brennan and other aides. The help, however, comes too late. Nixon, according to the narrator, was already like the bull who had "lost the fight, and by implication, the will to live." Within moments he would acknowledge his participation in the Watergate coverup, and apologize to the American people for having let the country down. The event was stamped on Nixon's face, "swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing, and defeat--filling every television screen in the country."
The truth is that Brennan never burst onto the set to stop the interrogation. Instead, he began waving an improvised little placard in Frost's line of vision reading LET HIM TALK. Mistaking the words as LET US TALK Frost called a short halt to the proceedings.
The delay, occasioned by Brennan's effort to get Frost to back off, allowing Nixon time to complete his apologia, wound up working because it gave the Nixon staff time to implore Nixon to go further than he had and for Brennan to urge Frost to be empathetic. The result was one of the most gripping moments in the history of television news, as Nixon finally conceded that he had participated in the coverup and had offered statements from the White House that were, at times, not true.
Yes, said Nixon, "I let the American people down. And I'll have to carry that burden the rest of my life." The pain was stamped on Nixon's face, as Morgan's narrator describes. But the Nixon staff had intervened to help make it happen rather than to block Frost's effort for a full accounting.
Morgan tampers with dates and facts for what appear to be marginal returns. Early in our research, some eight months prior to the interviews, my colleague Jim Reston discovered three previously secret tape transcripts, including a June 20, 1972 meeting between Nixon and his White House political aide, Charles Colson, in which the president describes Howard Hunt and his Cuban Watergate colleagues as "pretty hard-line guys" and says the plan should be "to leave this where it is, with the Cubans"--adding, "At times, I just stonewall it."
A reasonable interpretation of the tape is that it shows Nixon bestowing his blessing on the coverup three days prior to the "smoking gun" conversation with H.R. Haldeman, in which he seeks to have the CIA block the FBI probe. But it most emphatically does not do what Morgan has Frost claim in the fictional play: "You have always maintained that you first learned of the break-in on June the 23rd. This tape clearly shows that to be a falsehood." In fact, Nixon always acknowledged learning of the break-in within hours of its June 17 occurrence while returning with Haldeman from a visit to Key Biscayne. That claim was undisturbed by the new evidence and remains unchallenged to this day.
Further adding to the confusion, in Morgan's fictionalized version of events, the playwright has Reston discovering the new transcripts over Easter, just days before the "last" session on Watergate is scheduled to tape. (In reality, three additional sessions followed the Watergate sessions.) Hovering on the brink of failure, with no relief in sight, Frost is saved by the material, and at the end of the show seems less like a man who rose to meet a challenge than a guy who caught a lucky break.
Having worked with David Frost on the initial interviews, plus two mildly profitable writing ventures over the years, my (perhaps biased) view is that he is easily underestimated--and was certainly underestimated by Richard Nixon. Yes, he could be more selective in his choice of interview subjects; and yes, I was disappointed when, after his long-running Sunday morning interview program was dropped by the BBC, he jumped lovingly into the waiting arms of Al Jazeera. But I have also found him to be well-informed, a voracious reader, a fine writer and editor with a bear-trap memory of past events and conversations. And though charm may have been his weapon of choice in 1977, he was already a skilled interviewer who understood the give-and-take of probing dialogue. Over the years he would report first-hand on mass murder in Bangladesh, starvation in Africa, and the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.
The confession from Nixon--this moment of truth amidst so much subterfuge--was hard fought and hard won. To write Frost out of it is to rewrite history.
Still, Morgan puts the two characters on stunning display, and at times his inventions do elevate not only the drama, but also our understanding of both men. One particularly ingenious creation is a scene where a mildly intoxicated Nixon telephones Frost on the night before their fateful Watergate encounter to lament the inability of either man, despite lives of accomplishment, to win the respect of "them."
And who are "they"? "The smart-asses at college. The high-ups. The well-born," says Nixon. Now they are both down, both seeking the limelight again, brothers under the skin. But, as Frost chirps in, participants in a game only one can win. For the Frost presented by Morgan, the solution to all the world's problems is to have a good day at the office. But to Morgan's Nixon, one's past has already determined one's future, and there is nothing left but hatred, bitterness, hopelessness, self-loathing, rage, and despair, a corruption of the soul so deep as to be beyond redemption.
With Frost having bounced back from some early misadventures to score a decisive triumph, Morgan offers a final political judgment through the lips of Reston: "Despite being buried with full honors in 1994, Richard Nixon never again held public office of any kind, nor achieved the rehabilitation he so desperately craved. Today his name continues to be synonymous with corruption and disgrace, and his most lasting legacy is that any political wrongdoing is immediately given the suffix 'gate.'"
Few political observers in this country would think that assessment tells anywhere near the whole story. Rather, the Frost/Nixon interviews proved cathartic, providing Richard Nixon with the opportunity to acknowledge his role in the Watergate coverup and confess that he had betrayed the trust of the nation. It also gave Americans the opportunity to see him pained, contrite, and unthreatening.
True enough, Nixon never again held public office--hardly a novelty in a nonparliamentary system. But he soon returned from his place of exile in San Clemente and took up residence in the politically brisk environment of New York. Invitations to his dinner parties were cherished. Over a period of 16 years he wrote nine bestsellers, most dealing with profound questions of national security. He spoke to appreciative audiences. His appearances on the prestige network interview programs became routine. He traveled to more than 30 foreign countries. A highly regarded national security think tank in Washington bears his name. His political advice was publicly sought by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and Bob Dole. His insights on Russia and China were received over lunch at the White House by President George H.W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.
Yes, the term "-gate" is affixed to many a Washington scandal, but often with the help of the Nixonites themselves, a not-entirely-convincing way of treating all executive branch misconduct as no worse than Watergate. Nixon's striking return to public grace eventually encouraged political analysts and scholars to take a fresh look at his presidency--in particular, his moderation on race, his effort to achieve "peace with honor" in Vietnam, the opening to China, and his vital role in converting the South into secure Republican terrain while putting into play white Northern ethnic voters, long a bastion of Democratic strength.
Obstruction of justice and abuse of power still mar the Nixon name and record. But they are far from his complete legacy.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Rhett, Scarlett and Friends Prepare for Yet Another Encore
Source: NYT (5-16-07)
It’s taken 12 years, three authors and one rejected manuscript, but tomorrow will be another day when “Rhett Butler’s People,” the second sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” is published this fall.
Less a conventional sequel than a retelling from Rhett Butler’s point of view, the new book, to be published by St. Martin’s Press in November, is written by Donald McCaig, a former advertising copywriter turned Virginia sheep farmer who has written well-reviewed novels about the Civil War.
The book, at a little over 400 pages, will be a slip of a novel compared with the original, which ran more than a thousand pages. “Rhett Butler’s People” covers the period from 1843 to 1874, nearly two decades more than are chronicled in “Gone With the Wind.” Readers will learn more about Rhett Butler’s childhood on a rice plantation; his relationship with Belle Watling, the brothel madam; and his experiences as a blockade runner in Charleston, S.C.
Most of all, readers will get inside Rhett’s head as he meets and courts Scarlett O’Hara in one of the most famous love affairs of all time.
With the publication of “Rhett Butler’s People,” St. Martin’s will at last have the chance to begin recouping the $4.5 million advance it agreed to pay the Mitchell estate for the right to publish a second sequel. The publisher has high hopes for the book’s commercial prospects, with an anticipated first print run of more than a million copies.
Warhol painting fetches 71.7 million dollars at New York sale
Source: Breitbart (5-16-07)
A painting by American pop artist Andy Warhol sold at auction for 71.7 million dollars in New York late Wednesday, easily beating the previous record for the artist's works.
The 1963 painting, "Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)," narrowly missed the record for the most expensive post-war work to sell at auction -- a record set Tuesday when a painting by Mark Rothko sold for 72.8 million dollars.
Warhol's work, a surreal and gruesome image of an overturned car on fire, with the body of the driver impaled on a nearby post, comes from his "Death and Disaster" series. It had a pre-sale estimate of 25 to 35 million dollars.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Reviving a Nazi-era play to make a point (nudge, nudge) about today's politics
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (5-12-07)
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich: Docudrama. By Bertolt Brecht. Directed by Susan E. Evans and Charles E. Polly. (Through Sunday, Eastenders Repertory Company at Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. Thursday through 20 at Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley. Two hours, 40 minutes. Tickets $20. Call (510) 568-4118).
?
An eye-opening view of how the German people allowed themselves to be taken over and stampeded into war and horrendous atrocities by Hitler and his minions emerges from Bertolt Brecht's rarely seen "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich." In a loose collection of short scenes, mostly written between 1933 and '38, Brecht chronicled the erosion of rights, mutual trust and all forms of professional integrity in the homeland he'd had to flee.
SS men intimidate through casual insinuations. Apartment dwellers are stunned to see what a careless word has done to a neighbor. A teacher trembles in fear of being turned in for an unguarded comment by one of his students, perhaps his own son. Physicists huddle furtively, afraid to speak the name "Einstein" aloud. A doctor quickly accepts the Gestapo's diagnosis of the trauma on a corpse. A judge agonizes over a case in which he must decide whether the Jewish victim or the communist "provoked" an SS attack, having been warned that paid-off Nazi officials could be offended whichever way he decides.
The short scenes add up to a very different picture of Nazi Germany than usual -- one that focuses less on what happened to Jews and other minorities (though Brecht doesn't ignore "the Jewish question") than on the domination of the mass of Germans and elimination of dissent through the wily and heavy-handed use of the politics of fear. That alone is reason to be grateful to Berkeley's intrepid little Eastenders Repertory Company for a rare look at "Fear." But there's more.
Another chance for 'The Other Conquest' (The Mexican film depicting the Spanish clash with the Aztecs returns to theaters eight years after its premiere)
Source: LAT (5-12-07)
Its tagline could be "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Aztecs But Were Afraid to Ask Mel Gibson."
But writer-director Salvador Carrasco hopes that with the re-release of his movie "The Other Conquest" (La Otra Conquista) in U.S. theaters this month, comparisons or elaborate introductions won't be required. That's partly because Carrasco's much-extolled first feature film, set during the bloody encounter between the Spanish conquistadors and Aztec king Montezuma's empire, already has staked out a claim in the United States, or at least Los Angeles.
And though its story dates back nearly half a millennium, Carrasco believes his film may be more meaningful now than when it made its screen debut eight years ago. "With this kind of subject matter, the film is timeless," says the 39-year-old director, speaking by phone from his Santa Monica home. "Sort of like with good wine, it has gained through the years and become more relevant."
After "The Other Conquest" premiered in Mexico in April 1999, it became the top-grossing Mexican dramatic film at that time in the country, taking in $2 million. One year later, when it opened in Los Angeles, Times reviewer Kevin Thomas described it as "a boldly imaginative and enthralling evocation" of the conquistadors' ransacking of the Aztec empire, and the subsequent attempt to convert what was left of the Indian population to Roman Catholicism. Thomas subsequently named "The Other Conquest" one of the best films of 2000.
Hamilton: Passionate, puzzling founding father
Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com (5-13-07)
How much acting do you like in your documentaries?
If you want none, avoid PBS' Alexander Hamilton. This two-hour documentary, premiering at 9 p.m. Monday, enlists New York stage actors to speak the words of historical figures. The actors dress in period costume and deliver monologues directly to the camera.
These performers, especially Tony-winner Brian F. O'Byrne as Hamilton, bring edge and passion to their speeches. This is no dry history lesson. This is the past presented with theatrical flourish.
Purists will balk. But that flashy approach is appropriate for Hamilton, a reckless genius who shaped our world. He is the founding father who led the most incredible life and who deserves a more fitting tribute than merely decorating our $10 bills.
Director-producer Muffie Meyer uses the actors to enliven an era that had no newsreels or photographs. For all her efforts, though, historians and biographers are more crucial to the film's success. They can be as animated as the actors.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
'Last Confederate' filmmaker finally sees project released
Source: Pop Matters (5-10-07)
Aspiring filmmaker Julian Adams has finally seen a dream come true.
His production “The Last Confederate: The Story of Robert Adams,” formerly known as “Strike The Tent,” is being released by ThinkFilm for theatrical runs this month and in June. Then it is scheduled to be released June 26 on DVD ($27.98).
“I feel great about this,” Adams said in California during a telephone interview. “We had other offers, but ThinkFilm seemed like a good fit for us. I feel they will give the film the proper release.”
ThinkFilm specializes in independent productions and has issued such Oscar-nominated films as “Half Nelson,” “Being Julia” and “Murderball.”
“One thing I’m really pleased about is that I know about 99 percent of indies never get released anywhere,” said the South Carolina native, who directed and co-wrote the film.
The Civil War drama is based on the true story of the romance between Adams’ great-great grandfather, Confederate captain Robert Adams, and a Northern girl, Eveline McCord. Despite the tragic events and the bloodshed swirling around them, Adams fought hard to keep their love alive.
Much of the filming took place where the actual events unfolded, including the Civil War-era Wavering Place Plantation, located in the Midlands of South Carolina. Other locations included Lenoir, N.C., and Wilmington, N.C....
Japan's WWII "Kamikaze" Film Sparks Talk of Peace
Source: NYT/Reuters (5-12-07)
A film celebrating Japan's wartime ''kamikaze'' suicide pilots and written by Tokyo's nationalist governor opened in theatres on Saturday, sparking more of a pacifist than a patriotic response from audiences.
The movie comes as Japan's government edges towards a vote on revising the U.S.-drafted constitution that has strictly limited the country's military activities for six decades following its World War Two defeat.
``For Those We Love,'' written by Shintaro Ishihara, a 74-year-old writer-turned-politician, tells the true story of a restaurant owner who became a mother figure to many of the young men as they trained to crash explosives-laden aircraft into U.S. warships.
Tome Torihama's restaurant at Chiran on the southern island of Kyushu was a home from home for the trainees, mostly in their teens and early 20s, who were preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice as Japan tried desperately to avert U.S. invasion in the final months of World War Two.
Though Ishihara is known for patriotic policies, including introducing compulsory singing of the national anthem in schools, members of the audience took away a different message from the lavish 1.8 billion yen production.
``It made me think we should never go to war. War is terrible and all it leaves behind is bitterness,'' said a 58-year-old businessman, who gave his name only as Hiro, after watching the film in a central Tokyo theatre....
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A Film Rides The Hamilton Revival (American Experience/PBS)
Source: NY Sun (5-9-07)
Like the stock market, Alexander Hamilton has hit recent highs," the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, James Basker, told a crowd of history buffs gathered in Trinity Church.
The event was a sneak preview of the "American Experience" film "Alexander Hamilton," which will make its premiere on Monday on PBS. As Mr. Basker noted, the timing of the film is serendipitous: After long being caricatured as an elitist, and compared unfavorably with his political rival, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton is now enjoying the benefits of historical revision.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute, which co-sponsored the event last Wednesday evening with "American Experience," has played a significant role in the Hamilton revival. Mr. Basker was the projects director of the Alexander Hamilton exhibition that opened at the New-York Historical Society in 2004, and of which smaller versions have been traveling the country since.
The film, which includes dramatizations by prominent actors and interviews with historians, reflects the new attitude toward Hamilton. The film's writer, Ronald Blumer, and the actor playing Hamilton, Brían F. O'Byrne, portray Hamilton sympathetically — as brilliant, devoted to his country, and sincere, if also stubborn and indiscreet....
Berlin Exhibition Honors Little-Known Nazi Opponent
Source: http://www.dw-world.de (5-8-07)
A new exhibition at a Berlin museum -- a former brush factory run by a German entrepreneur during the Nazi era -- throws light on a network of people who tried to save Jews from deportation to Hitler's death camps.
Tucked away in a backyard in Berlin's downtown Mitte district amid art galleries, cinemas and bars, the museum "Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt" is a former brush workshop run by German entrepreneur Otto Weidt in the 1940s.
Wedt hired Jewish workers -- among them blind and disabled employees -- in order to save them from deportation to Nazi death camps.
Since 1999, the museum has been home to a documentary show of the factory's history. This week, the opening of a new permanent exhibition adds further details about factory owner Weidt and his string of friends and helpers who rallied to hire Jews and even hide some of them in the workshop rooms to save them from the Nazis.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
When Images Take on Lives of Their Own (Documentary)
Source: NYT (5-9-07)
This documentary by Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman about four World Press Photo contest winners defines icon to mean a still image so searing that it supplants memories of the event it was supposed to record.
The selected pictures pass the test: a South Vietnamese brigadier general executing a Vietcong guerrilla in 1968; a 1973 image of President Salvador Allende of Chile, soon to be assassinated; the 1989 snapshot of a Chinese protestor blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square; and a 1991 Gulf War photograph of a United States soldier in a helicopter, weeping near the body of his best friend.
The film offers vivid thumbnails of the stories behind the pictures. It notes, for example, that Eddie Adams, the Associated Press photographer whose execution image became an antiwar touchstone, supported intervention in Vietnam and regretted that his photograph made the killer — his friend Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then serving as the national police chief of South Vietnam — seem coldblooded. Mr. Adams believed he was a decent man who snapped under pressure.
Classic Book About America’s Indians Gains a Few Flourishes as a Film
Source: NYT (5-9-07)
When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but from that of the Indians.
But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman.
“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.
The added character is based on a real person: Charles Eastman, part Sioux and descended from a long line of Santee chiefs but who was sent away by his father to boarding school and then held up as a model of the potential assimilation of 19th-century Native Americans. But the film fictionalizes significant portions of his life. In the HBO version he dodges bullets at the Battle of Little Bighorn. In reality he was far away, in grade school in Nebraska.
The new Newseum: A Museum for Artifacts of the News Media’s Hunters and Gatherers
Source: NYT (5-8-07)
Time magazine’s armored truck from the Balkans, pockmarked with bullet holes, has been hoisted into place. The laptop used by Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Pakistan in 2002, has arrived. So has the vest that Bob Woodruff of ABC was wearing last year when he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
These stark reminders of the hazards of newsgathering will be displayed at the new Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, scheduled to open on Oct. 15. Cranes still hover over its steel-and-glass structure, but workers have now installed the facade’s showstopper — a 50-ton, 74-foot-high marble engraved with the First Amendment — and are preparing the exhibitions.
Slowly, the Newseum — a bigger, more dramatic, higher-tech reinvention of of the former Newseum in Arlington, Va. — is taking shape. More than six years in the making and costing $435 million, it may be one of the world’s most expensive museums now under construction. It is certainly among the most prominent, perched on the last buildable site on the presidential inaugural parade route between the Capitol and the White House.
Revisiting, and Revising, a Very Familiar Legend (Pocahontas Documentary/Nova)
Source: NYT (5-8-07)
She was bright and curious, probably between 10 and 14. He was a cocky adventurer, short and hairy, about 28 when they met.
They were Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith. Many details of their lives remain unknown, despite their often controversial branding as a fabulous multicultural couple. Most historians say it was unlikely that they were lovers, although legend has it that she saved him from death at the hands of her people. The two connected near the Jamestown colony of Virginia within a year of its founding in 1607.
Tonight the documentary “Pocahontas Revealed,” part of the “Nova” science series on PBS, uses science to examine more broadly the lives of both Native Americans and the 17th-century newcomers to their land.
The documentary, which relies heavily on dramatic re-enactment, turns to the archaeological site at Werowocomoco, a village about 17 miles north of Jamestown. Archaeologists declared about four years ago that this 45-acre site, on private land on Purtan Bay, was the seat of power for Pocahontas’s father, Chief Powhatan, whose domain of more than 30 tribes encompassed much of coastal Virginia. “Nova” received exclusive access to the excavation from the team of archaeologists from the College of William and Mary.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Picasso work found in Oxfam book
Source: BBC (5-6-07)
A donated first edition book on ballet featuring a lithograph by Pablo Picasso and a design by Matisse could raise more than £500 for Oxfam Cymru.
Charity worker Marilyn Willis was sorting through contributions at Bangor's Oxfam shop when she found the copy of Le Ballet by Boris Kochno.
The book will now be sold in the charity's Valued in Wales auction in Cardiff in July.
Mrs Willis said: "It was a very special book - you could not miss it."
The copy of Le Ballet, which was compiled in the 1950s, is covered in red cloth and is still kept in the original acetate and cardboard cover.
The Picasso lithograph depicts a dancer and the book also features photographs of Nijinsky and set designs by Parisian artist Toulouse-Lautrec.
Bollywood takes a chance on film on 1991 assassination of PM Rajiv Gandhi
Source: Reuters (5-8-07)
MUMBAI, India -- The investigation into the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is the subject of a Bollywood thriller which promises to reveal new facts about the suicide attack, a report said on Tuesday.
Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber while he was on his way to address an election meeting near the southern Indian city of Chennai.
The assassination was blamed on neighboring Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels. It was seen as revenge for Gandhi sending Indian soldiers to the island nation as peacekeepers but who eventually got embroiled in the bloody ethnic conflict there.
"It will be a celluloid investigation of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, tackling questions that were never asked," director Anubhav Sinha was quoted as saying by the Times of India newspaper.
Monday, May 7, 2007
New NOVA Documentary: Pocahontas Revealed
Source: Press Release -- PBS (5-1-07)
For centuries, Americans have celebrated her as a romantic fairy-tale heroine, but who was the real Pocahontas? As the US marks the 400th anniversary of its first successful colony at Jamestown, VA, NOVA investigates the Pocahontas story and reveals an entirely new version of the epic events that helped found our nation.
At the center of this dramatic reevaluation is the discovery of Werowocomoco, the site of Pocahontas’ village, 17 miles from Jamestown. Long sought by archaeologists, Werowocomoco is the very spot where, according to English colonist John Smith, a smitten Pocahontas saved him from execution by her father, the powerful Indian chief Powhatan. Ever since Werowocomoco was discovered four years ago, NOVA has had exclusive access to its excavation by archaeologists from the College of William and Mary. Last summer, the dig yielded thrilling traces of what is likely to be Powhatan’s long house, where John Smith had his fateful encounter with Powhatan and Pocahontas.
But did the young princess really save Smith from certain death? And has the English view of its earliest struggle to colonize the New World distorted the truth behind this epic confrontation of cultures? NOVA’s search for answers involves sequences dramatized by Pocahontas’ descendants, today’s Virginia Indians, who vividly reenact the clash with the English colonists and recreate the traditional ways of life of their ancestors at Werowocomoco four centuries ago. Together with the compelling new archaeological evidence, the result is a fresh and gripping new take on the Pocahontas story that NOVA presents in Pocahontas Revealed, premiering during Jamestown’s Anniversary week, Tuesday, May 8, 2007 at 8pm ET/PT on PBS (check local listings).
The history book version of these events begins on May 13, 1607, when three English sailing vessels dropped anchor beside a small island in the James River, Virginia. On board were 104 colonists who, in their struggle to gain a foothold at Jamestown, would soon confront disease, starvation, and their greatest obstacle of all, the people who had lived in Virginia for millennia. This struggle has come to be symbolized by the exploits of the brash, swashbuckling John Smith, the powerful, venerable Powhatan, and his bold, beautiful daughter Pocahontas. The adventure first recounted by Smith has since been recited and embroidered until it has gathered the status of an epic founding myth of the new nation. But just how much of the saga is true?
Some of the most exciting revisions to the story have come from a dozen years of digging at Jamestown itself. Long thought to have washed away into the river, the remains of the colonists’ fort were revealed in 1994. The dig has since yielded more than a million artifacts, making it one of America’s richest and most significant excavations and overturning many myths about the colonists. For instance, relations with the Indians were at first more than friendly: the evidence suggests that Indian women were actually living inside the fort, presumably co-habiting with Smith’s comrades. NOVA finds an equally surprising clue to why good relations fell apart so quickly by burrowing into centuries-old Virginia trees. The record of tree rings indicates that both colonists and Indians had to endure the worst drought in 700 years. Parched conditions meant that the Indians had no surplus corn to trade with the colonists, a situation which soon led to open conflict.
But the heart of NOVA’s story is the discovery of Werowocomoco, which began with the sharp eyes of Virginia landowner Lynn Ripley and her curiosity in finding broken pottery and worked stone scattered all over her newly acquired farmland. Over the last four years of digging at the site, the College of William and Mary’s team has unearthed fascinating clues about the fragile relations between colonists and the Indians at the time when John Smith met Pocahontas. NOVA’s cameras are on the scene as the archaeologists unearth the first traces of what was almost certainly Powhatan’s longhouse. It was here that the captive Smith was threatened with execution until the chief’s daughter rushed in and, in Smith’s words, took his “head in her arms and laid her own upon his to save him from death.”
Pocahontas’ popularizers—from the Disney cartoon to Terrence Malick’s recent movie The New World—have embroidered on Smith’s account and depicted this event as a courageous act of love. But the Werowocomoco excavations are encouraging historians and anthropologists to consider a more provocative explanation. Just as John Smith hoped to take advantage of the Indians to exploit his colonizing goals, so Powhatan may have hoped he could exploit the newcomers to consolidate his hold over the many communities subject to his chiefdom. One way Powhatan exerted dominance was by adopting subject rulers into his vast family. (He is said to have had over 100 wives!) What John Smith experienced on that fateful day may have been a mock execution typical of Indian adoption ceremonies. According to this theory, Powhatan adopted John Smith as Pocahontas’ brother—and Pocahontas, who was then between the ages of 10 and 14, was simply playing out her sisterly role in the ritual.
As contemporary Virginia Indians help NOVA reenact Pocahontas’ story, a fresh, dramatic portrait emerges of who she was—an unusually bright and brave young girl, nicknamed for her mischievous spirit, who befriended a man nearly three times her age from another culture and made a lasting impact on Jamestown. Not a princess in the European sense, Pocahontas was a favorite daughter who might well have taken a leadership role in Indian society if the colonists had not landed in her father’s realm. As things turned out, she helped bring about a momentary interlude of peace between the Indians and the Jamestown settlers. Then, as relations deteriorated, she was kidnapped by the colonists and married to John Rolfe, a pioneering tobacco farmer. In a final ironic twist, Pocahontas was brought to England to become a living advertisement for the Virginia Company and the civilizing it had imposed on the Virginia Indians. Bringing the tale full circle, NOVA recreates Pocahontas’ bittersweet final encounter with John Smith in England, shortly before her death.
On the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, science, scholarship and Native American insights are transforming the story of Pocahontas and her powerful impact on our nation’s beginnings in NOVA’s Pocahontas Revealed.
Now in its 34th year of broadcasting, NOVA is produced for PBS by the WGBH Science Unit at WGBH Boston. The director of the WGBH Science Unit and senior executive producer of NOVA is Paula S. Apsell. Funding for NOVA is provided by David H. Koch, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and public television viewers.
NOVA is closed captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. The descriptive narration is available on the SAP channel or stereo TVs and VCRs. Pocahontas Revealed will be available on DVD wherever videos are sold. To order direct from WGBH Boston Video, visit shop.wgbh.org or call 800.949.8670.
Production Credits
Senior Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell
Written and Produced by Matthew Rocky Collins
Produced and Directed by Kirk Wolfinger and Lisa Quijano Wolfinger
Edited by Jed Rauscher
A NOVA Production by Lone Wolf Documentary Group for WGBH/Boston
Pressrooms
pressroom.wgbh.org
pbs.org/pressroom
Press Contacts
Eileen Campion
Dera, Roslan & Campion PR
212.966.4600
eileen@drcpublicrelations.com
The New World (Movie about Jamestown)--A disappointment, says critic
Source: David Price at Britannica Blog (5-7-07)
With the upcoming 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, I can’t help looking back at the lost opportunity of its latest film adaptation. As a Jamestown enthusiast, an author of a recent history of Jamestown, and author of Britannica’s entries on the colony and John Smith, Pocahontas, and Powhatan, I’d been avidly looking forward to The New World from the day New Line Cinema announced it back in 2005.
It seemed as if it would have everything: a celebrated director, a boatload of stars (Colin Farrell as John Smith, Christopher Plummer as Christopher Newport, Christian Bale as John Rolfe), and, word had it, scrupulously recreated versions of the English settlement and the natives’ villages. Surely it would spark a nationwide craze for early colonial history. What more could a Jamestown historian ask for?
A lot, as it turned out. I left the premiere in Williamsburg that December feeling glum. At the reception afterward, held under a sprawling tent near the theater, I could see I wasn’t alone. The faces of the other guests seemed to register the same reaction as mine: What the heck was that?
It’s not that I expected historical purity, Lord knows. Sure, it would’ve been nice if the film hadn’t given new life to the myth of John Smith and Pocahontas’s love affair (it never happened; she was 10 or 11 when Smith was in Virginia). It was jarring to see Smith depicted in a scene during the Starving Time when, in reality, he’d gone back to England by then.
What really bothered me, though, wasn’t the history; it was the disjointed narrative, the voice-overs full of leaden profundities, the habit of Smith’s character to switch freely between modern informality and Ye Olde English, and above all, the languid (if not sleepy) pace of the film’s storytelling....
Friday, May 4, 2007
Alexander Hamilton documentary (PBS)
Source: PBS (5-1-07)
One of the most controversial men of his age, Alexander Hamilton was a gifted statesman brought down by the fatal flaws of stubbornness, extreme candor, and arrogance. His life and career were marked by a stunning rise to power, scandal, and tragedy. He had one of the most notorious love affairs of any public figure in American history, and met his death in a startling act of political violence - the famous duel with Aaron Burr.
But his contributions as a statesman survive. As first Secretary of the Treasury during the tumultuous early years of the republic, Hamilton led the transformation of the young country into a commercial and industrial powerhouse. He was the one founder who had a vision, not of what America was, but of what it could become.
This two-hour American Experience tells the story of the underappreciated genius who laid the groundwork for the nation's modern economy - including the banking system, Wall Street, and an "opportunity society" in which talent and hard work, not birth, determined success.
Robert Novack on "September Dawn" -- movie about Mountain Meadows Massacre
Source: WaPo (5-3-07)
Opening Friday, a motion picture called "September Dawn" depicts a brutal American massacre that has been forgotten. On Sept. 11, 1857, in Utah Territory, Mormons slaughtered more than 120 California-bound settlers from Arkansas. Retelling at this time the Sept. 11 carnage of 150 years ago does not help Mormon Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
The basic facts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre are not in dispute. Mormons mobilized Paiute Indians, accompanied by Mormons disguised as Indians, to attack a peaceful wagon train. The settlers beat back the attack but were left short of food and ammunition. They disarmed at the request of the Mormons, who said they would lead the settlers to safety but instead turned on them, murdering every man, woman and child above age 8. All that is in doubt historically is whether this was ordered by Brigham Young, president of the Mormon Church and territorial governor of Utah. "September Dawn" says he was responsible; the church denies it.
Today's Mormons, including Romney, cannot be blamed for those events. Nevertheless, the candidate has followed the church's example and ignored the movie. Romney will not comment on "September Dawn" and indeed will not watch it. That follows his decision not to defend his faith or actively fight religious bias that has impeded his candidacy.
I attended an April 11 screening of the movie at the Motion Picture Association of America headquarters in Washington hosted by its lead actor: Academy Award-winner Jon Voight (who plays a fictional Mormon bishop). A conservative, Voight said this was no hit on Romney. "I didn't even know he was running when we began this," he told viewers after the screening. But he said this terrible story is important considering America's war against terrorists.
Brigham Young -- played by the British actor Terence Stamp -- is portrayed in the film as a 19th-century Osama bin Laden. Calling himself a "second Muhammad," he insists on the "shedding of blood" of "gentiles." He is seen fighting the United States, which was sending troops to Utah.
The church has always accepted Young's plea that he had nothing to do with the massacre. But Voight is certain that he did based on research for the movie. "If any miserable scoundrels come here, cut their throats," Young said in his "Blood Atonement Sermon" (which concluded that he would not fight "unless they come upon us and compel us"). The movie's researchers found in the church's archives a generic threat against interlopers: "I will loose the Indians on them, and I will slit their throats from ear to ear."...
"From 12/7 to 9/11: Lessons on the Japanese American Internment"
Source: Press Release -- UCLA (5-1-07)
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized his secretary of war to establish military areas in which certain people were not allowed. Issued in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the order mentioned no ethnic groups, but its execution focused exclusively on individuals of Japanese ancestry.
"From 12/7 to 9/11: Lessons on the Japanese American Internment," on view at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library through June 30 and organized in conjunction with the 65th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, traces the effects of the order‚s implementation and suggests troubling present-day parallels. The exhibit uses photographs, artwork and archival materials to tell personal stories that raise serious questions about loyalty, racism and goverment expediency and that plead for tolerance and understanding of other cultures, religions and points of view.
Within a year of the executive order, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including 175 UCLA students, had been uprooted from their homes and communities and imprisoned in camps ranging from California to Arkansas. The vast majority of these so-called "internees" were American citizens or legal residents on the West Coast whose only „crime‰ was being of Japanese descent.
The U.S. government has since acknowledged that racism rather than military necessity motivated these actions. In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an order repealing Executive Order 9066, stating that the removal was wrong. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a civil liberties act that authorized payments of $20,000 to each surviving person who had been incarcerated. The first of these checks was issued in 1990, accompanied by an apology signed by President George H.W. Bush.
The lessons of Dec. 7, 1941, and Executive Order 9066 continue to resonate today. Some have drawn analogies between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and those analogies extend to the government‚s subsequent treatment of people based solely on their ethnicity. Hoping to preserve civil liberties and keep the government from repeating its mistakes, many Asian American leaders, organizations and individuals have, since Sept. 11, spoken out for tolerance and understanding and against discrimation and wrongful detention of Muslims, South Asians and Arab Americans.
Among the exhibit‚s contents are proof prints by Ansel Adams of photographs he took at the Manzanar internment camp; oil and watercolor paintings by George Matsusaburo Hibi and Kango Takamura that both document camp life and evoke its bleakness; and intimate drawings by Estelle Ishigo, a Euro-American woman who voluntarily accompanied her husband to the camps, which focus on the lives of families and children. Photographs and publications provide an overview of the military service of Japanese Americans, which included the most decorated unit of its size in the U.S. Army. The experiences of UCLA students are reflected through campus memos, personal correspondence and UCLA yearbooks from the 1940s.
Selected pages from a 1983 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel that overturned the 1942 conviction of Japapnese American Fred Korematsu for disobeying the executive order, as well as materials documenting research conducted by lawyer Jack Herzig and his wife, Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig, on behalf of Korematsu and his defense team, explore the actions that led to the government‚s acknowledgment that its actions under Executive Order 9066 were wrong.
Photographs, artwork and personal stories of post-Sept. 11 detainees suggest that racial and ethnic profiling by the government in times of perceived danger is not a thing of the past. And books and articles by scholars who have studied or taught at UCLA expand on many of the subjects raised throughout the exhibit.
The exhibit draws from the holdings of the Research Library and its Department of Special Collections, the Asian American Studies Center Reading Room/Library, the University Archives, and various private collections. It is organized by Lane Hirabayashi, Marjorie Lee, Robert Nakamura, Don Nakanishi and Irum Shiekh of the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies and the Asian American Studies Center, and by Norma Corral, Dawn Setzer and Ellen Watanabe of the UCLA Library.
Admission to the library and exhibit is free. Library hours are: Through June 3: MondayˆThursday, 7:30 a.m.ˆ11 p.m.; Friday, 7:30 a.m.ˆ6 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m.ˆ5 p.m.; Sunday, 1ˆ10 p.m. (May 28, 9 a.m.ˆ5 p.m.).
Brad Pitt's 'Jesse James' comes under fire
Source: LAT (5-2-07)
Every great western has a duel, and there's a showdown at the center of Brad Pitt's new movie about gunslinger Jesse James. The struggle hinged on the film's tone and length — at one point its running time was more than three hours — according to several people close to the production.
But running time wasn't the main issue. The thornier challenge was to come up with a cut of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" that satisfied audiences and Warner Bros., the studio making and distributing the film. At one point there were competing versions — one from writer-director Andrew Dominik and another from producer and star Pitt, according to a person familiar with the making of the movie. It's unclear which version of the film will be released.
Warner Bros. only recently announced a Sept. 21 release date for "Jesse James," about two years after it was filmed. (In the time since, Pitt has had daughter Shiloh Nouvel and completed two other movies, "Ocean's 13" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." "Ocean's" will be in theaters more than three months before "Jesse James.")
Adapted from the novel by Ron Hansen, the film follows the last heist committed by James (Pitt), and Ford's (Casey Affleck) devoted and then vengeful relationship with the legendary outlaw.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
David Greenberg: How Frost/Nixon gets Nixon right
Source: Slate (3-2-07)
In 1983, Paul Berman called Richard Nixon "the richest, most promising character the American theater has ever seen." Recalling the scores of Nixons that had, even then, already appeared on stage and screen, Berman noted, "His personality descends to almost oceanic depth, plunging from bright intelligence through piety, vulgarity, maudlinity and paranoia to the murky floor of violent criminality. His quivering cheeks and humped back are an actor's dream."
Some years later, Daniel Aaron offered a different view. "Writers for the most part have used him as a whipping boy rather than as an object for contemplation," he observed. Their "clever exercises in political denigration haven't weathered well because the topical allusions once so devastatingly apt are largely lost on today's readers, and because they weren't all that funny to begin with."
Both men are partly right. Aaron unfairly dismisses some gems, such as Philip Roth's brilliant Our Gang and Dan Aykroyd's enduring Saturday Night Live performances. He neglects others, such as Philip Baker Hall's delicious Nixon in Robert Altman's Secret Honor, and he wrote too early to account for still others, such as Nixon's Nixon (a 1996 play, recently revived) and Dick (a 1999 movie). But he's right (as I've suggested before in Slate) that plays and films about Nixon have largely failed to capture the Shakespearean traits that Berman enumerates. Now, the latest Nixon effort, Frost/Nixon, has come to Broadway from London with much fanfare. Does it capture the dramatically complex Nixon that both Berman and Aaron relished?
Written by Peter Morgan—a Briton best known as the screenwriter of The Queen—Frost/Nixon tells the story of how, in 1977, British talk-show host David Frost, considered a lightweight (and a washed-up one at that), nabbed the first interviews with Nixon after his resignation and how the two men, both seeking rehabilitation, jousted before and during their series of televised parleys. Frost wanted to gain respectability by exacting an apology and admission of guilt from the unrepentant president. Nixon, convinced the news media had railroaded him, craved a prime-time forum to tell his version of events—a version that would downplay Watergate and stress his foreign policy.
The premise, therefore, is great—at least for hard-core Nixonologists. Yet Frost/Nixon begins inauspiciously. Unlike, for example, Nixon's Nixon, in which director Jim Simpson permitted "no latex noses," Frost/Nixon puts Frank Langella through the paces of a full-on impersonation—replete with gravelly voice, jowls, and even an exaggerated hunch. The choice suggests we're in for broad comedy, not psychological drama. Moreover, the play's early scenes include re-creations of several stock Nixon highlights, including his self-pitying resignation speech, which are by now so well-trodden as to border on cliché.
Yet Frost/Nixon quickly leaves the realm of the familiar as it shifts to the characters of Frost and James Reston Jr.—the latter a journalist, son of the great New York Times columnist, and research assistant to Frost on the Nixon interviews. Frost, played by Michael Sheen (Tony Blair in The Queen), is the best kind of fictional hero—a highly unappealing one. Frost's vanity, superficiality, and bad 1970s tummy-hugging shirts are on full display. He preens, bluffs his way into his meeting with Nixon, and sidles up to a leggy passenger on his flight to Los Angeles. But he develops during the play, discovering that he actually has deeper motives for wanting to spar with Nixon than mere careerism.
Once the interview tapings begin, Langella's Nixon portrayal deepens and tension builds. For Nixon, the series of four face-offs serves as a repetition of his four debates with John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential contest: Again, he is squaring off mano a mano against a fair-haired rival who is better-looking, more popular, more sexually accomplished. (Morgan has the good sense to draw his biggest laugh lines from reality—he includes the question that Nixon asked Frost before one of their interviews: "So, did you do any fornicating this weekend?") But if Nixon is reliving the "Great Debates," this time he means to win. He's even put it in the contract that he can stop the filming and dab his sweaty lip or apply new makeup as needed. As the first few interviews proceed, Nixon seems headed for a victory. He artfully parries Frost's questions. He turns a query about the emotionalism of his White House farewell into a filibuster about his utterly banal feelings on the occasions of Dwight Eisenhower's death and his daughter's wedding. The research team squirms, Frost slumps in his chair, and Nixon prattles on merrily—with Langella conveying the subtle sadistic pleasure that Nixon takes in besting his antagonists.
As anyone acquainted with the actual interviews knows, Frost ultimately prevails, and Reston's quiet heroism proves responsible. For all his sleeve-borne political commitments—the kind we normally distrust as prejudicial in a reporter—Reston turns out to be right about Nixon, and his instincts serve him well. His hatred of Nixon is vindicated, not because we feel no sympathy for Nixon (we do), but because Nixon's pathos never obscures his villainy. Reston helps Frost slay Nixon by finding a transcript from Nixon's White House tapes that becomes a second smoking gun, further implicating the president in the Watergate coverup. Nixon never saw it coming.
Frost's contribution to Nixon's slaying, ironically, resides in an aspect of his own superficiality: his intuitive grasp of television's power. Although Frost never actually gets Nixon to apologize, he comes close. More important, he elicits from Nixon a series of pained, remorseful facial expressions—portrayed beautifully by Langella and magnified for the theater audience via a mammoth TV screen—that speak volumes. "The power of the close-up," Reston marvels, with both disillusionment and satisfaction. "The first and greatest sin of television is that it simplifies. … Tranches of time, whole careers, become reduced to a single snapshot." Television—Nixon's friend and aide so often in his career, from the 1952 Checkers speech to his 1972 trip to China—this time did him in. It was 1960 all over again.
The play's irony is true to life. Everyone expected Frost's interviews to offer Nixon an easy platform on which to grandstand. The four programs that resulted drew 45 million viewers, or 42 percent of the TV audience, the same as a typical episode of Happy Days, the No. 1 show that year. But the polls detected no improvement in Nixon's public standing. Even old loyalists were unsympathetic. John Ehrlichman judged Nixon's performance a "maudlin rationalization that will be tested and found false," H.R. Haldeman called it an effort "to rehabilitate himself over the prostrate bodies of his aides," and Sen. Bob Dole, who had chaired the Republican Party under Nixon, sniped: "It takes more than four interviews to properly rehabilitate Richard Nixon."
Morgan's grasp of Nixon's place in American culture is confirmed near the play's end, when Reston endorses an opinion that one seldom hears in routine journalistic commentary but that I believe is undoubtedly true: Nixon was never rehabilitated. He never came back. Despite the pomp and fine words at his funeral, his name remained a synonym for presidential corruption and crime, and the "-gate" suffix attached to scandals ever since certified Watergate's cultural importance. Earlier in the play, Nixon fumed to his aides that the audiences at his speeches were asking questions only about his wrongdoing. That tendency continued years afterward. Indeed, as late as 1990, after Nixon had published another memoir, his third, he sighed to his research assistant: "None of the other stuff in there, like on the Russians or the other personal stuff, made it into the news or even the reviews. Watergate—that's all anyone wants."
James Reston Jr. and Nixon haters everywhere can sleep easy.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
History Channel show explores the cultural roots of Star Wars
Source: Press Release -- Terry Goldman (5-2-07)
We are pleased to be working on a new special from the History Channel, Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed ! Premiering May 28th at 9 PM EST, the show examines not only the cultural impact of the Star Wars films but also reveals parallels to their historic connections. The show will feature interviews with some famous Star Wars fans as well other important voices in today’s culture. Here is some info on the show:
The special makes the argument that Star Wars’ intensely compelling stories—borrowed from diverse traditions, from Greek mythology and American westerns to the Bible and even Vaudeville—compel us to explore some of the biggest questions of our time. STAR WARS: THE LEGACY REVEALED explores that view through interviews with politicians, academics, journalists and critics, who all weigh in on the creations of George Lucas. The special shows how seldom a movie can make us laugh and think about our role in the universe—which may be why it has stood the test of time.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
"The Mormons"--Modern-Day Look at History of the Latter-Day Saints (Documentary/PBS)
Source: NYT (4-30-07)
A proposition: If your beliefs are any good, you needn’t be afraid to bring them out into the light. The proof: “The Mormons,” a thoughtful two-part series tonight and tomorrow on PBS. The tenets of the Mormon church may not be to everyone’s tastes, but the church members and leaders who speak in this program are admirably forthright about their religion’s history, strengths and challenges. It’s great to hear people who believe in something and can articulate it without sounding crazy or defensive.
“The Mormons” is the first joint production of “American Experience,” the history series, and “Frontline,” the public-affairs program. The history side, which dominates tonight, is the strongest.
The installment would be interesting enough if it merely related the fascinating story of the founding and evolution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion more commonly known as Mormonism. But it also manages to mix in, through some well-chosen talking heads, an intriguing discussion of what faith is, what religion is and what the Mormon story has in common with Judaism, Islam and early Christianity.
Hollywood tackles Hitler's Leni
Source: Observer (4-29-07)
Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster will play the leading role of Riefenstahl in a work that is bound to generate immense argument, as it examines the beautiful woman who became Adolf Hitler's favourite director and whose slick propaganda helped the Nazi war machine.
The on-again, off-again project has been in the works for at least seven years, but now a script is being written - by British writer Rupert Walters - and a director is being negotiated. People involved in the movie say the director should be announced within two or three months and shooting should start by the end of next year at the latest. 'I am hoping to be shooting before then,' said Gabriele Bacher, a producer at Primary Pictures, who will make the film along with Foster's own company.
Foster is no stranger to controversial roles, including her award-winning portrayals of a rape victim in The Accused and a child prostitute in Taxi Driver. But few parts in modern Hollywood history will generate as much debate as Riefenstahl. It will open Foster to charges of lionising an anti-Semite who played a key role in the Third Reich.
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