Theatre and Film: More

The Voysey Inheritance

A recent WSJ column by Daniel Henninger referred to a play we've mentioned before on this page, The Voysey Inheritance, and its relevance to the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. His reference and quote from the play is in reference a son discovering that his business partner (his father) is a crook. The version we're noting is the original by Harley Granville-Baker's book scanned by Google and we include a few paragraphs:

Edward. [Making his point.~] But how does it happen, sir, that such a comparatively recent trust as young Hatherley's has been broken into?

Mr. Voysey. Well, what could be safer than to use that money? There's a Consol investment, and not a sight wanted of either capital or interest for five years.

Edward. [Utterly beaten.] Father, are you mad?

Mr. Voysey. Certainly not. My practice is to reinvest my clients' money when it is entirely under my control. The difference between the income this money has to bring to them and the income it is actually bringing to me I utilise in my endeavour to fill up the deficit in the firm's accounts . . in fact, to try and put things straight. Doesn't it follow that the more low interest bearing capital I can use, the better . . the less risky things I have to put it into. Most of young Hatherley's Consol capital is out on mortgage at four and a half and five . . safe as safe can be.

Edward. But he should have the benefit.

Mr. Voysey. He has the amount of his consol interest. Edward. Are the mortgages in his name?

Mr. Voysey. Some of them . . some of them. That's a technical matter. With regard to Mrs. Murberry . . those Fretworthy Bonds at my bank . . I've raised five thousand on them. I can release her Bonds to-morrow if she wants them.

Edward. Where's the five thousand.

Mr. Voysey. I don't know . . It was paid into my private account. Yes, I do remember. Some of it went to complete a purchase . . that and two thousand more out of the Skipworth fund.

Edward. But, my dear father

Mr. Voysey. Well?

Edward. [Summing it all up very simply.] It's not right.

Read the rest of the play at the Google books site.

 

Hitchcock Tips

A website, borgus.com, aimed mainly at filmmakers "who are sad and depressed because their movie is so average that nobody will watch it" advises their audience to "Stop crying and pay attention. What is written here will save your career ..." and goes on to dissect some of Alfred Hitchcock's directorial techniques, such as:

Hitchcock knew why people are drawn to a darkened theater to absorb themselves for hours with images on a screen.  They do it to have fun. In the same way people go to a roller coaster to get thrown around at high speeds, theater audiences know they are safe.  As a film director you can throw things at them, hurl them off a cliff, or pull them into a dangerous love story, and they know that nothing will happen to them.  They're confident that they'll be able to walk out the exit when its done and resume their normal lives.  And, the more fun they have, the quicker they will come back begging for more. (Gottlieb)
Frame for Emotion
Emotion (in the form of fear, laughter, surprise, sadness, anger, boredom, etc.) is the ultimate goal of each scene.  The first consideration of where to place the camera should involve knowing what emotion you want the audience to experience at that particular time.  Emotion comes directly from the actor's eyes.  You can control the intensity of that emotion by placing the camera close or far away from those eyes.  A close-up will fill the screen with emotion, and pulling away to a wide angle shot will dissipate that emotion.  A sudden cut from wide to close-up will give the audience a sudden surprise.  Sometimes a strange angle above an actor will heighten the dramatic meaning.  (Truffaut)  

and this:

Make all of your characters the exact opposite of what the audience expects in a movie.  Turn dumb blondes into smart blondes, give the Cuban guy a French accent, and the criminals must be rich and successful.   They should have unexpected personalities, making decisions on a whim rather than what previous buildup would suggest. These sort of ironic characters make them more realistic to the audience, and much more ripe for something to happen to them.

Hitchcock criminals tend to be wealthy upper class citizens whom you’d never suspect, the policeman and politicians are usually the bumbling fools, the innocent are accused, and the villains get away with everything because nobody suspects them.  They surprise you at every step of the plot.

A most amusing website and, yes, instructive. Try some of the points when you next look at a Hitchcock movie. We never tire of seeing his films.

Screenonline, a UK site, further delves in Hitch's style with examples from The Lodger and Blackmail, films he directed before leaving England. Sadly, unless you have the status of a school, Screenonline video and audio content is only available to users on the premises of registered UK educational establishments.

Here, a comment about a film not known by US audiences:

At other times, Hitchcock lets the audience see things his characters cannot. In Young and Innocent (1938), Erica and Old Will are searching for an unknown murderer, a 'blinking man', in a crowded dancehall. The camera swoops over the dancers and zooms in on the 'blacked up' drummer in the band. As it approaches, he starts to blink uncontrollably. It is, as critic Charles Barr has noted, as if the camera itself is forcing him to reveal his guilt.

The site comments on Hitchcock's use of vulnerable women characters in his films:

Hitchcock saw female sexual vulnerability as a powerful dramatic device, which he exploited ruthlessly, as the example from Blackmail, in the previous section, illustrates. In Champagne (1927), the heroine — a silly rich girl whose father feigns bankruptcy to teach her a lesson — imagines that an attractive but sinister man, who she meets while waitressing in a nightclub, is sexually assaulting her. Only at the end of the scene does Hitchcock reveal that she is imagining it, and he withholds till the end of the film the information that the man is really in the pay of her father and has no evil intentions.

But like Alice in Blackmail, Hitchcock's women also fight back. The heroine of Sabotage (1936) murders her terrorist husband, while in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Jill is an expert markswoman, who uses her skills to shoot down the villain menacing her daughter, while the police look on helplessly. Both Young and Innocent (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) feature women whose resourcefulness and determination solve the mystery.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive's Moving Images consists of a collection of classic full-length movies, daily alternative news broadcasts and user-uploaded videos of every genre.

Some of the sub-collections listed are:

Movies
Watch full-length feature films, classic shorts, world culture documentaries, United States' WWII propaganda, movie trailers, or films created in just ten hours

Independent Lens

Paris, 1951 is the Grand prizewinner of the first annual Online Shorts Festival.

"Whenever I would ask my grandmother about the past, she would tell me I was far too curious ... "

So begins the short filmed by Jasmin Gordon:

"Jasmin Gordon’s mother makes a startling discovery 40 years after her father's death: she finds out that the man who raised her was not her real father. In midlife and without any physical remnants of the past, Jasmin's mother struggles to reconstruct her identity. This short film is a meditation on the process of reinterpreting personal history and the challenge of recollecting the past in the absence of images and objects."

Watch this film and the other winners at the site.

Magic Machines:  A History of the Moving Image from Antiquity to 1900

This Magic Machines site is a subset of a large site called Adventures in Cybersound, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The following are excerpts from this informative site:

In the 1671 Amsterdam edition of his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Athanasius Kircher includes an illustration of a strange device for recounting stories in circular form, the Smicroscopin. The container held the story of Christ's passion in eight dramatic tableaus or scenes (Kircher uses the word simulacrum - it was not in fact coined by him but belonged to the terminology of the pre-Socratic thinkers and their theories of vision). The appliance itself, hard- and software all in one, consisted of a round, flat, box construction, the lids of which were connected with a pin so that the picture wheel between could be rotated. One of the lids was inset with an ocular and the other had a round hole in it of the same diameter as the eyepiece of the optical cylinder. The speed and rhythm of the narrative was at the discretion of the user. It would have been easy to change the software wheel. This artefact was portable and did not require a particular kind of energy to operate it.

Eidophusikon - 1781

Painter and set designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg devises a device he calls the Eidophusikon. This uses moving pictures to represent natural phenomena. Loutherbourg, who is known for his collaboration with the actor and manager David Garrick, (who) exhibits his invention in London.

Ombres Chinoises - c.1775

In the 1770s a showman named Francois Domenica Seraphin produced what he called Shadow Plays, but was also called Shadow Theatre and most commonly by the French title Ombres Chinoises

Using a magic lantern at Versailles; another inventor, Guyot, demonstrated how apparitions might be projected onto smoke.

The Panorama -1788

Robert Barker, an Edinburgh artist, while in jail for debt, was struck by the effect of light shining through the bars of his cell through a letter he was reading, and out of this perception he invented the first Panorama, a concave, transparent picture view of the city. This invention was soon replaced by the Diorama, which added the illusion of movement by shifting the room. Also sounds and novel lighting effects. Daguerre's London Diorama still stands in Regent's Park, a rare survival, since these shows depended always on effects of artificial light, produced by lamps or gas jets, and nearly always ended in fire.

Phantasmagoria, (Phantasmagorie, Fantasmagoria,Fantasmagorie) - c.1798

Etienne-Gaspard Robert (aka. Robertson) began experimenting in the 1780s with similar techniques (to Francois Seraphin) for producing 'fantomes artificiels'. He soon devised several improvements for the magic lantern, including a method for increasing and decreasing the size of the projected image by setting the whole apparatus on rollers. Thus the 'ghost' could be made to grow or shrink on front of the viewer's eyes. Robertson recognised the uncanny illusionist potential of the new technology and exploited the magic lantern's pseudonecromantic power with characteristic flamboyance. He staged his first Fantasmagorie as a Gothic extravaganza, complete with fashionably Radcliffean decor.

Camera Lucida - 1806

Designed in 1807 by Dr. William Wollaston, was an aid to drawing. It was a reflecting prism which enabled artists to draw outlines in correct perspective. No darkroom was needed.

Kaleidoscope - 1816

Physicist Dr. Sir David Brewster invents the kaleidoscope, an optical device that uses mirrors to create colourful patterns in a viewing tube.

Diorama - 1822

A theatre for the display of large panoramas is designed by showman and scene painter Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Known as the Diorama, its effects are enhanced by dramatic lighting.

Many of the links are now outdated but the basic information was well gathered to document an online Ph.D. It now is accessed as an evolving resource for the study of historical communications devices and processes.

FiftyCrows and Social Change Photography

From the About Us section of Fifty Crows:

Images inspire people to act. Examples of socially rousing photography permeate our history: Vietnam, Rwanda, 9-11’s Ground Zero. Unfortunately, mainstream media narratives often work to envelop public perspective on these seminal issues by presenting limited viewpoints and images. Due to that fact that the focus of these media corporations is on creating profits rather than social justice, the many answers that we demand as conscious global citizens become conditional.

FiftyCrows Foundation eschews these media politics and prioritizes social awareness by using arrestingly real, timely photographic images as a catalyst for education, cultural understanding and social action. Founded in October of 2001, FiftyCrows couples visual stories from world-class documentary photographers with action and media campaigns in order to affect change. We leverage our gallery, website, television and various programs and partnerships to unite communities to work together in confronting current social, political, and environmental challenges around the globe.

One of the documentaries that was the 2003 PhotoFund winner from the Latin America Region is Mothers of the Disappeared. The documentarian is Marcos Adandia and the country is, of course, Argentina. The faces of the mothers will never be forgotten as is their cause to remember their missing children.

Don't overlook the film/photo essay of Jihan Ammar, Playing Cards With Nana: Intimate Stories from the Middle East:

During her years as a professional photographer, Jihan Ammar observed that the portraits of the Middle East that were popularized in the mainstream news media always favored the extreme. That which was 'news-worthy' was the underpriviledged and the uneducated, the fanatic and the religious zealot, and more often than not, the male. Playing Cards with Grandma is Ammar's attempt to re-present life in the Middle East. Instead of sensationalizing or exoticizing her subjects, she documents the Muslim women around her through the lens of the everyday, the ordinary. Expressly interested in "women's lives and their mixed bag of class, beauty, marriage, religion, and personal relationships", she captures these women in their most private, candid moments. Ammar suggests to her viewers an honest cultural relatedness, one that is derived from the fundamentality of human intimacy and proximity.

 

PFA Notes & Cine Files

The Pacific Film Archive, a part of the University of California contains an online resource, PFA Film Notes.

Film notes is a collection of over 14,000 critical and historical texts about films presented in the PFA Theater from 1979 to the present. Enter the title of the movie, the name of the director or other search words that will bring up many entries that might fit the film you're looking for. But, in the meantime, here are parts of some entries that recall favorites films of ours:

From Here to Eternity: "This was the movie of its year, as On the Waterfront was to be the next year ... because these films brought new attitudes to the screen that touched a social nerve ... Yet ... Clift's innovative performance was buried in the public praise for Sinatra and Lancaster. It was almost as if the public wanted to forget Prewitt's troublesome presence." From a Pauline Kael book, 5001 Nights at the Movies

One of the most talked-about films of the fifties, On the Waterfront was (and is) the center of great controversy for its implication that the dockers' union was run by gangsters, coming at a time when the union was hounded by McCarthyism; and for its defense of informing, coming from Elia Kazan, a "friendly witness" at the HUAC hearings (as were author Budd Schulberg and actor Lee J. Cobb, who plays the vicious union boss Johnny Friendly).

A Matter of Life and Death (US Title: Stairway to Heaven): Michael Powell, a writer-director-producer of enormous visual wit and imagination, whose films are great favorites of PFA audiences, died in February 1990 at the age of 84. Apart from Peeping Tom, he made his best known films (among them, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) in partnership with Emeric Pressburger. And they, in turn, did some of their best work in the narrative netherworld between fantasy and realism, moving fluidly between the two. Their mastery of visual irony was never so complete as in A Matter of Life and Death, in which an elaborate stairway connects a Technicolor earth with a monochrome Heaven ("Less optimistic directors might have reversed the process" as William K. Everson notes). David Niven plays a downed bomber pilot in WWII who senses that his having eluded a fiery death was arbitrary at best. On the operating table he finds himself suspended between Heaven (where he is summoned to argue his case in the celestial courts) and earth (where he has fallen in love with a heavenly WAC in the person of Kim Hunter). This is existential fantasy at its finest. "The doctor who befriends him diagnoses a 'highly organized hallucination' and much the same could be said of the film, with its bewildering alternations of microcosm and macrocosm, poetry and pathos, monochrome and color. A stunning, subversive masterpiece" (British Film Institute).

Cine Files, the Pacific Film Archive's film document image database, can be searched by either a simple search mechanism or by:

Go to the Document Search screen to search for documents by title, author, date or publisher, or for documents about specific films, people, or subjects.

Go to the Filmographic Search screen to search for films by title, subject, genre, director, year, country, or studio. Your search will retrieve film title records, from which you can link to related documents.

Summer Reading & War of the Worlds

Guy Dobson, Internet Services Librarian at the Bergen County Cooperative Library System in Hackensack, NJ distributes a service of Useful Internet URL groupings. This is one highlighting the release of Steven Speilberg's film, The War of the Worlds. A few of the books are online, the rest can be read at your own library:

The War of the Worlds / H. G. Wells

The Martian Chronicles / Ray Bradbury
The Martians aren't always the bad guys.

Stranger in a Strange Land / Robert Heinlein
"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man."

Grokker
No, this isn't a book to read on Mars, but it is pretty nifty.
"Grokker presents topically organized query results in the zooming space on the left side of the screen. Circles in the zooming space are the categories into which results are grouped. Categories may contain many levels of subcategories. Larger circles contain more subcategories and links than smaller ones. Click on any category or subcategory to explore (or zoom into) your Grokker map."

C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy The following blurbs are from Into the Wardrobe, a C. S. Lewis web site

Out of the Silent Planet
First novel of the Space Trilogy. The main character, Ransom, is kidnapped and taken to Malacandra (Mars) as a kind of human sacrifice. Ransom escapes his captors and discovers the inhabitants are friendly. This voyage of philosophical adventure culminates in a trial scene between Ransom and his former captors.

Perelandra
Second novel of the Space Trilogy. Ransom travels to Perelandra (Venus) where he must fight with the Devil (who has taken possession of Weston, the scientist from the first novel) for the soul of the Green Woman (the Eve of Venus). Ransom succeeds and thus prevents a repetition on Venus of the Earth's fate - the fall and loss of Eden.

That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups
The third novel of the Space Trilogy. Back on Earth, Ransom heads a loosely formed society, Logres, which opposes NICE, Lewis' satiric portrait of a modern power-mad bureaucracy. The NICE hopes to recall Merlin and use him in their plot to recondition society but succeeds only in constructing a modern Tower of Babel.

The John Carter series / Edgar Rice Burroughs
I enjoy everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Especially these titles which are all set on Mars: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, The Chessmen of Mars, The Master Mind of Mars, A Fighting Man of Mars, Swords of Mars, Synthetic Men of Mars, Llana of Gathol, & John Carter of Mars.

The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs' honor. To learn more about the red planet check out ...

Mars Observing Facts & Links and/or Mars Exploration

A Theater Diary

Bloomsbury describes Richard Eyre's National Service: Diary of a Decade as a "diary of a decade as the director of the Royal National Theatre, charting his own personal and professional dramas, from mutinous actors and budgetary nightmares to the devastating illness of his father."

"In this extract, from 1989, he prepares for a production of Hamlet, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Judi Dench, and a fatwa is pronounced upon his friend Salman Rushdie."

April 21 Max Rayne [former chairmen of the NT Board] took me to lunch with Lord Goodman. He’s a mountainous creature like a prehistoric animal — mammoth or coelacanth — with hair sprouting from ever extremity. He said Harold Wilson never went to the theatre and had only read one novel: The Spreading of — something or other. A Yorkshire Tale.

April 23 I wrote to John O about his play. I said I couldn’t remember looking forward to receiving any play more than his, and my disappointment was perhaps due to my exaggeratedly high expectations. The play is really Jimmy Porter’s speeches, essentially monologues, which are depressing, heroic cries from another world.

May 1 I ended the week in exhaustion and thought seriously of canceling my production of The Voysey Inheritance which I start rehearsing in two weeks’ time. My heart isn’t in it.

May 3 I’m beginning to feel like a courtier. Went to Aspects of Love with Princess Margaret and Max [Rayne] and [his wife] Jane with Norman St John-Stevas in attendance. The show is clunky and humorless, with pitifully bad lyrics. But it does have a well-meaning heart and its premise isn’t a contrived one: that love changes everything. In the interval, Princess Di appears with her friends and, one gathers, her lover, giving us the opportunity to compare and contrast two princesses at close quarters. Princess Margaret gestures emphatically and rather self-consciously, keen to establish the persona of a ‘jolly’ girl, but if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady: small, frowning, drawn and unhealthy. Diana is pretty but not beautiful, tall, slightly awkward and faintly pitiable. Margaret talks to me about opera: ‘Can’t stand it. A lot of frightfully boring people standing still on stage and yelling.’

Read the rest of the extract of National Service: Diary of a Decade by Richard Eyre at the Bloomsbury website.

Virtual Theater Tours

Some of us have been lucky enough to visit the sites of ancient theater. For those who can't travel to those locations, a site, Theatre Tours, employs a virtual reality technique to look at theaters in Turkey, Italy, France, Greece and Spain. Each of the listings include history, maps and directions, a timeline that places the theaters historically and a glossary of Greek and Roman terms.

Here are three examples from the site, still under construction, from the Whitman College Department of Theater.

The ancient city of Aspendos (modern city of Belkis, ancient city of Pamphylia) is located on Turkey's southern Mediterranean coast forty-seven kilometers from the modern city of Antalya. Its spectacularly well-preserved theatre is one of the best examples of Roman theatre construction in the world. While there was probably an earlier ancient theatre on the site, it was completely obliterated by the Roman theatre, which was built during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD).

The history for the Great Theatre at Ephesus (which we've been to) includes the following:

In later Roman times a high peripheral wall was built around the orchestra to protect the audience from injury during the often-violent gladiatorial contests and circus-like entertainments that had become popular. Before the wall was built there had been an iron railing between the orchestra and the cavea.

 

According to the Bible, St. Paul argued with the silversmith Demetrius at the theatre at Ephesus. Demetrius responded to Paul's preaching by encouraging the crowd in a chant of "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" Demetrius' alleged motive was to protect the business he had selling silver statues of the Goddess. The theatre was probably still under construction when Paul spoke at Ephesus in the mid-1st century AD.

Opéra National de Paris was built between 1862 and1875, its architect was Charles Garnier. Large by any standards, it has a total area of 11,000 square metres (118,404 square feet) and a vast stage with room for up to 450 artists. The auditorium itself comprises roughly half of the total space, most of the rest being used to house necessary logistical support.The House seats over two thousand and has seventeen stories, taking up three acres of land. Seven of these are below the ground.

Al Hirschfeld Celebrated

For New York Times readers, Al Hirschfeld's drawings defined the theater season in that city. Invariably the reader started counting the Ninas, Hirschfeld's homage to his own daughter, as soon as they opened the Arts section. The artist would signal the count total and it was a race to find them all ... few would give up before that goal was reached.

Now The Times has put online a selection of the line drawings he did for the newspaper (first time registration required). Browse by title of play, performer or date.

A Shakespeare Link

PBS unveiled a site, In Search of Shakespeare, that highlighted their four-part series, documenting a rather thorough life history of the Bard on TV. There's a timeline/dossier painstakingly researched including such details as (in 1572) when Will's father John, a glover and public servant, "is fined for making an illegal wool purchase (a practice known as brogging)."

Another annotation accompanying Will's marriage to Anne Hathaway reveals that, "It is believed that as many as a third of Tudor women were pregnant when they married, and extramarital sex took place at every level of society."

A device used by the site is the "The Fribbling Reports, an exploration of the life and times of the most famous writer in history. Set in 1584, we follow John Fribbling, an entirely fictional agent of the State, in his dogged and ineffectual pursuit of one William Shakespeare, suspected Papist, known thinker."

If you'd like another challenge, the Playwright Game's introduction begins, Vacancy: One writer of Plays Needed for gainful employment in a Major Theatre of 16th Century London. No experience needed. Apply within. You can choose between Murderous Romans and Oriental Warlord as themes to use for your playwriting assignment.

A quiz about 60s films

We seemed to spend the late 50s and the decade of the 60s in movie theaters showing foreign films. Each week brought new entries in a lengthening list of favorites. This Faber quiz, inspired by a critical examination of that time entitled Revolution recalls the films and their directors from that time.

Here is a sampling (and a link) to that quiz:

1. In which film does the character Arthur Seaton declare 'What I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda'?

Billy Liar
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Look Back in Anger

2. The costumes for Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad were designed by which iconic fashion designer?

Coco Chanel
Yves Saint Laurent
Pierre Cardin

3. Which Godard film, first screened in March 1960, is generally considered to have heralded 'la nouvelle vague'?

Bande à part
A bout de souffle
Pierrot le fou

4. When talking about which fellow film-maker did Federico Fellini say 'a mixture of magician and prestidigator, of prophet and clown, tie salesman and priest who preaches. That's what an entertainer must be'?

François Truffaut
John Cassavetes
Ingmar Bergman

Theatre History Link

Theatrehistory.com - From The Scout Report: Lovers of the dramaturgical arts will want to take a look at Theatrehistory.com, which offers a host of resources on the long and storied past of this performing art. The homepage for the site features links to a script archive, a Today in Theatre History section, a featured topic area, and a listing of the other areas covered within the site. The script archive is worth a look by aspiring thespians, as it includes a number of monologues, 10-minute plays, and full-length plays, most of which are in the public domain. The general theatre section is divided by country or region, and includes full-length articles about the tradition of the theatrical arts in Britain, Ireland, Russia, and Spain, among other countries.

None Without Sin

In light of Elia Kazan's death, we decided to make note of a PBS site for its film, Miller, Kazan, and the Blacklist: None Without Sin, even though the air dates for this particular episode of the American Masters series may have already been shown in your area.

A paragraph from the essay accompanying the PBS site:

Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan never regained the close friendship they shared in the late 40's and early 50's. Too much had intervened. In fact, the two men had come to embody the deep divisions that tore this country apart during the McCarthy era. Miller, who struggled at the time so mightily with his personal moral failing, emerged as the exemplar of courage in face of the Red scare. He has even taken on an aura of saintliness over the years. Kazan occupies the other end of the spectrum: a man defined almost entirely by his decision to name names. For many, Kazan's brilliant career-all that he contributed to the theater, to film, to letters — will be tainted by a single decision he was forced to make some fifty years ago.

Kazan's reputation rests on a number of excellent films including Gentlemen's Agreement, On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden.

The KQED site also includes an interview with Kazan about the filming of On the Waterfront

24 Hour Plays: New York, the Twin Cities, Oakland and Atlanta

The 24 Hour Play Company process begins at 10pm in New York City the night before the show, when a group of about fifty writers, directors, actors and designers gather at a theater for the latest round of what has become a highly anticipated ritual. After everyone has been briefed (and Polaroided), the writers are left alone to each compose a ten-minute play. At 7am, the directors return, read the plays, make their bids, and begin casting. The actors arrive at 8am, meet with their respective writer/director teams; rehearsals start promptly at 9am. Tech rehearsal runs from 5 to 7:30pm - doors open at 7:45. At 8 pm, ink barely dry, the new plays are performed for a live audience. Since its inception in 1995, The 24 Hour Plays have produced well over 200 new short plays in this manner.

Woman's Will Annual 24-Hour PlayFest was comprised of seven female playwrights, seven female directors and 30 actors of all persuasions who had 24 hours to write, rehearse, and perform seven exciting new plays. Woman's Will is the Bay Area's all-female Shakespeare company. The company's artistic director explains the genesis of the group:

"Every year, I work with a few women whose work I admire, but every year there are many more with whom I cannot work because there are so few good roles for women out there. This company arose from a desire to overcome this problem, to pull together talented women and create a supportive environment where we could grow and play. The decision to use Shakespeare's plays seemed an obvious one - his universal themes allow us to be relevant without any major textural changes, and our use of a unisex cast preserves the gender-bending reality of his original productions while allowing our audience to hear these classic lines from an entirely new perspective."

Theatre Unbound of Minneapolis-St. Paul was formed in June 1999 by a group of seven female theatre artists who discussed the concept of a theatre company by and for women. It is their belief that only through this collaboration of women artists in all aspects of the theatre, can the female voice be fully heard on stage. They, too, put on a 24-Hour Play Project, last performed in March. As the local CityPages states in its story, A Woman's Work is Never Done: Women make up well more than half of the Guthrie's [Theater] audience, but less than 10 percent of its produced playwrights. Is this a tragedy or a farce?

Katharine Hepburn

Excerpt from Scott Berg's Katharine Remembered at GP Putnam's Sons site:

Upon re-entering the room, I instinctively adjusted a picture on the wall, a floral painting which was slightly askew.

Oh, I see,” said Miss Hepburn with great emphasis; “you’re one of those.” She smiled approvingly and added, “Me too. But nobody was as bad as Cole Porter. He used to come to this house, and he’d straighten pictures for five minutes before he’d even sit down. Listen, while you’re still up, I’m ready for another drink. How about you?”

Again I made mine the weaker. It was not that I was afraid of falling on my face. It was more that I felt as though I were now walking through an RKO movie starring Katharine Hepburn, and I — didn’t want to miss a single frame of it.

One day we followed our daughter (one of two who graduated from Bryn Mawr College) to a small room that, in a way, had become a special place in the college's history. The room was one that Katharine Hepburn lived in at the college.

Here is Hepburn's profile from Bryn Mawr:

Katharine Houghton Hepburn '28

A four-time Academy Award-winner, Katharine Houghton Hepburn '28 has long been a symbol of women's independence and autonomy, especially during the years when there were no active feminist movements (1920s-mid 1960s). Her mother, also a Bryn Mawr alumna, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, A.B. 1900, M.A. 1900, was a leading social activist for women's suffrage and birth control. But the younger Hepburn did not choose the role of militant public crusader in making her opinions known on civil rights, human rights in living and dying, issues of equality — especially for women — and statements on behalf of those involved in the arts and in political life. The exception was for Planned Parenthood, for which she lobbied and composed cogent appeals. It was in her acting profession, especially in the 43 often-saluted films, that the actress gave character, depth and stunning immediacy to an array of the social issues of our own and other times.

Hepburn majored in history and philosophy at Bryn Mawr. As an undergraduate, she played parts in several College productions, crowned by a tremendous success as Pandora in John Lyly's The Woman in the Moone, at Bryn Mawr's Grand May Day celebration in 1928. "I don't remember being stage struck, but I obviously was — wildly," she told The Washington Post in 1990. She performed briefly at a stock company in Baltimore the summer after graduating; then it was on to New York, and in 1932, Hollywood. Her first movie role was in the 1932 A Bill of Divorcement, starring John Barrymore. The following year, she won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in Morning Glory. She went on to win three more Oscars for Best Actress in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, co-starring Spencer Tracy, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond.

In 1977, Hepburn was awarded Bryn Mawr's highest honor, The M. Carey Thomas Award. At the age of 84, she wrote her autobiography, Me, an often poignant book of stories about the life behind her performing personality, which she called The Creature, and her "real" self, whom she named The Private Secretary. In this book, she described the tragedy of finding her brother dead when she was a teen-ager and her long relationship with actor Spencer Tracy.

At Bryn Mawr's Centennial Commencement Convocation on May 18, 1985, Hepburn addressed the rumor that she used to swim naked in a fountain pool in the Cloisters of Bryn Mawr's Thomas Library. "The truth is that I was desperately trying to study and retain what I'd studied," she said. "I'd spend the night in the library, get exhausted, then dip into the Cloister pool in a mad effort to stay awake. It was an act of the greatest virtue. And a fact that I had no bathing suit." She lived in Pembroke West dormitory, but her greatest friend was classmate Alice Palache Jones and a group of others in Merion Hall, who tried to help her study. "I was not a good student," Hepburn told Bryn Mawr undergraduates in 1973. "Bryn Mawr isn't plastic, it isn't nylon, it's pure gold. ... I came here by the skin of my teeth; I got in and by the skin of my teeth I stayed. It was the best thing I ever did. Bryn Mawr was my springboard into adult life. I discovered that you can do anything if you work hard enough. I feel that I was enormously lucky to come here. I am very proud when I see the name, very proud."

Over the years, she often said that she would have preferred to be a writer or artist. Marriage and motherhood were out — at least on any terms she found acceptable. In the theater and Hollywood, however, there was "complete equality between men and women," she observed in 1942. In the late 1920s, Hepburn married Philadelphian Ludlow Ogden Smith, whom she persuaded to change his name to Ogden Ludlow, so that she would not be called "Kate Smith" like the well-known singer. After their amicable divorce in 1934, "Luddy" remained a member of the Hepburn family.

Hepburn loved to paint. She began in the 1930s: "I was on a boat, a great big yacht, with Howard Hughes," she told Barbara Auchincloss Thacher '40 during an interview in 1992. "We were down in Nassau, and I just thought it was rather boring. I saw some paints, bought them and began. I still have my first two paintings. I still love to paint. Find it relaxing."

Asked what film she enjoyed making the most, she told Bryn Mawr undergraduates, "The film I enjoyed making most is a very difficult thing to answer because it's always the last one! ... I loved working with Spencer. He was a great actor. A great, great actor. And in the first scene I ever played with him, we were sitting at a table and I was very nervous because I thought he was wonderful, and I knew he thought my nails were dirty. And I knocked over a glass of water in the scene. Now ordinarily I would've stopped and said, 'Oh, God damn it.' And he just took his handkerchief out of his pocket, handed it to me and went on with the scene. His concentration was so total, you see, and I thought, 'That's really the way to do it.'"

(Photos of Katharine Hepburn from the Bryn Mawr College Library Archives)

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