Artistic society tends to celebrate the young prodigy above the experienced craftsman. But a look around Hollywood reveals that many of the top directors of both our era and those past were in their 70s and beyond when they began turning out their best work.
Author: sbergman
Christmas Rock That Won’t Make You Retch
Depending on your viewpoint, this time of year is either a musical panacea… or a hellish monthlong sentence of forced caroling and treacly muzak. But assuming that we can all agree that some Christmas music is actually worth hearing, are there any new holiday albums that are actually worth the plastic they’re carved on? Surprisingly, John Harris says that there are.
Influential Record Exec Dies
Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary founder of Atlantic Records, has died following a head injury he sustained at a Rolling Stones concert earlier in the fall. “Ertegun, a jazz fanatic who came to the United States at the age of 11 when his father was named Turkish ambassador… helped make Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin stars and signed the Rolling Stones in the early 70s.”
Well, They Are The Hollywood Foreign Press
This year’s Golden Globe Award nominees seem to have a decidedly British flavor. Among other UK-born nominees, “three British actresses will vie for the Golden Globe award for best actress in next month’s ceremony,” and one of them, Helen Mirren, will also be up for awards for her television work.
Detroit Keeps The Good Fiscal News Coming
The Detroit Symphony ended its 2005-06 season in the black, posting a $53,000 surplus despite a modest raise in the base pay for the orchestra’s musicians. “The orchestra is now in the midst of its most sustained run of black ink since a three-year stretch of balanced budgets from 1999 to 2001.”
The Vibrant New Broadway?
The occasional Dylan/Tharp floperoo aside, Paul Taylor says that Broadway seems to be embracing a whole new type of musical theatre based on giving people not what they already know they like, but what they’ve yet to discover.
Hedging Their Bets
“In the fast-shifting sands of New York’s moneyed classes, the explosion of hedge fund wealth has created a new financial pecking order… Institutions like the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center are making a push for the newest money on the block as they try to lure hedge fund executives to join their boards. This effort has dovetailed with an emerging tendency by hedge fund moguls to spread their wings a bit in greater New York society.”
Spacey’s Redemption
“It’s three years since Kevin Spacey became artistic director of [London’s] venerable Old Vic Theatre, where John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier cast big shadows… Slammed repeatedly by the critics, roughed up by interviewers in glossy magazines, and condemned by outraged snobs for daring to take time away from the Vic to appear in a Superman movie, Spacey has had [a] bumpy showbiz ride… But this season, Spacey has become a hero, delivering such a moving and richly layered performance as O’Neill’s wasted, drunken womanizer that there is rarely an empty seat these nights at the Old Vic.”
Cleveland Museum Gets New Leader
The Cleveland Museum of Art has named longtime trustee Alfred Rankin Jr. as its new president. “Rankin, who has served on the board 14 years, succeeds former museum president James Bartlett, a retired venture capitalist, who will stay on as co-chairman, along with Cleveland lawyer Michael Horvitz.”
Not The Kind Of Visibility They’d Hoped For
There was a time, not so long ago, when blacks were nowhere to be found on American TV and movie screens, unless they were playing one-dimensional criminals. These days, blacks, as represented by the now-ubiquitous hip-hop culture, are everywhere in the mass media. But the incessant stereotyping is no less pernicious: “For all its universal cultural influence, hip-hop evokes the most negative representations of its creators – images of gun-toting drug dealers, the apathetic baby daddies, the irresponsible down-low brothers.”