In her autobiography Billie Whitelaw… Who He?, however, she acknowledged it was her work with Beckett that generated the most interest.
Without their association, she wrote, “nobody would have been remotely interested in my autobiography.”
R.I.P Mike Nichols
6 November 1931, (Berlin, Germany) – November 19, 2014
Back in Berlin, Mike’s father was part of a young intellectual circle that included Russian immigrants such as Vladimir Nabokov’s sister and Boris Pasternak’s parents. (via IMDB)
Jack, Arthur and Carol from Carnal Knowledge. (Arthur G was also in Catch-22, Paul Simon’s part was cut.)
According to Jack Nicholson’s April 1972 Playboy Magazine interview, Nichols asked Nicholson and other cast members not to smoke marijuana while filming Carnal Knowledge (1971) on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, where cannabis was easily available. Nichols thought that it dulled an actor’s performance. (via IMDB bio)
On Elaine..
Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball wanted to give us our own show, and we flew all the way out to L.A. with our lawyers and manager. We got to this room with a big desk, and I said: “You know what? I don’t want to do it.” And Elaine laughed so hard, she fell on the floor. The two of us on a TV series would have been a catastrophe. We were too weird. We weren’t made for that.
I liked doing the stand-up. I only stopped because Elaine wanted to stop. I’ve never understood it. I thought: “Why? It’s not a very long show. It doesn’t cost us anything emotionally.” But it was hard for her. She was much more inventive than I was. I was plot, she was character. (via)
Mr. Holder directed a dance troupe from his native Trinidad and Tobago, danced on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera and won Tony Awards in 1975 for direction of a musical and costume design for “The Wiz,” a rollicking, all-black version of “The Wizard of Oz.” His choreography was in the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Dance Theater of Harlem. He acted onstage and in films and was an accomplished painter, photographer and sculptor whose works have been shown in galleries and museums. He published a cookbook.
This lavish ballet choreographed, composed and designed by Geoffrey Holder depicts real and imagined events in the life of the renowned Haitian painter, Hector Hyppolite. The goddess Erzulie and St. John the Baptist appear to the central character in a vision, inspiring his vivid, exotic illustrations of the African gods and goddesses that populate Holder’s mystical theater and dance drama.
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, released in 1996, was the first feature-length film by the Brothers Quay. It is based on Jakob von Gunten, a novel written by Robert Walser. It stars Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, and Gottfried John.
Rylance, 54, won Best Featured Actor in a Play for his portrayal of Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, after taking home awards for Jerusalem and Boeing-Boeing in previous years.
In his screenplays Pinter constantly returns to fascism’s pyschological and historical origins . It is that that makes his movies as significant as his plays and elevates him from the ranks of a master-stylist into an auteur.
“I think definitely. But it’s worth noting that Havel and Pinter were close friends. During the communist period Pinter, along with other playwrights, really tried to lobby for Havel’s release, to help – he was active. In terms of the plays I think that the only major difference was that Mr Havel wrote more from the ‘lived’ experience of the absurd whereas with Pinter it’s almost a philosophical question. I mean, he was living in a democracy and not under a communist system. But there are areas where they meet.
R.I.P Vaclav Havel – a leader of the Velvet Revolution and the first democratically elected President of the Czech Republic… He wrote plays, Letters to Olga and many theater works.. Vaclav Havel1936-2011
(Vaclav Havel was his friend, Milos Forman)
Václav Havel in front of his favorite painting, Master Theodoric’s portrait of St. Matthew, at Prague’s National Gallery in 1992. Pavel Štecha
December 29, 1989: Havel became the President of Czech Republic
Shy and bookish, with wispy mustache and unkempt hair, Havel came to symbolize the power of the people to peacefully overcome totalitarian rule.”
Based on his own play, Leaving is “about — what else? — a politician trying to adjust to a new life after leaving politics.” It “tells the story of Vilém Rieger, the former chancellor of an unnamed country, locked in a battle of wills with his successor, the unsavory Vlastík Klein. It’s a King Lear-like contemplation on a politician’s frustrating impotence at finding himself slowly being forced out of his beloved government villa, with several of Havel’s favorite actors among the cast. They include his wife Dagmar [Havlová], who plays the chancellor’s wife, Irena.”
On the day of Havel’s death, Czech novelist Milan Kundera said, “Václav Havel’s most important work is his own life.” There’s a moral there somewhere, one that Havel would have appreciated very much indeed.
Havel was still the President when I took this photograph of the
toilet paper in the Prague Castle
This photo was presented as The Articles of Faith here.
#47 in holyoke MA is the victory theater. I am part of a group documenting the restoration efforts, which are already underway. one early project was to interview very elderly people from the area (before they died!) about their memories of the space, to aid in an accurate restoration. these interviews are all on film.” Cicily Corbett
I have identified the Buffalo theatre (#43). It was called The Sattler Theatre, also known as The Casino and The Broadway (or Dipson’s Broadway), located at 512-516 Broadway. The Sattler was built in 1914, and was in continuous use as a movie theater until the mid-60s, when it was converted first into a mosque, then a Christian revival church (“God’s Holy Temple”) for the local African-American community. It was designed by Henry L. Spann , who also designed other Buffalo theatres, including the North Park (which is still operating as an art-house theatre, near my home Jeff O’Connell
Queen Theater Honolulu
I saw the Russian Hamlet in this theater and my late mother saw Bergman’s Silence here.
They evoke many feelings of beauty, majesty, longing for the memory of decades of experienced magic, tragedy of neglect for ornate architecture that was once common and taken for granted, and wish that they could all be brought back to life as performance art and cinema spaces. Perhaps some say these are examples of “ruin porn” (the voyeuristic and exploitative celebration of decay), but I disagree. They are certainly motivators to reconsider and reclaim the urban landscape as a resource and not symbols of crime, death, and the Death Of America. Jeff O’Connell
Cyrus I. Harvey R.I.P.
a quirky entrepreneur who created two significant brands in disparate fields — Janus Films, a distributor of movies by international directors like Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, and Crabtree & Evelyn, the purveyor of aromatic soaps and botanicals — died Thursday in Dayville, Conn. He was 85 and lived in Woodstock, Conn.
The founders of Janus Films, Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey Jr. (both actors), eventually purchased the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, converting it into an art film movie house. Haliday and Harvey continued to show Janus titles at the Brattle until 1966, when they sold Janus Films to its new owners, Saul Turell and William Becker.
Kantor is to Polish art what Joseph Beuys was to German art, what Andy Warhol was to American art. He created a unique strain of theatre, was an active participant in the revolutions of the neo-avant-garde, a highly original theoretician, an innovator strongly grounded in tradition, an anti-painterly painter, a happener-heretic, and an ironic conceptualist. (Via)
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