Category: people

Malone, who won her Oscar for playing the unapologetically sexy woman in Written on the Wind, was a fighter for her own rights, perhaps to the detriment of her career. After she made a splash on TV’s Peyton Place, “She was written out of the show’s final season after she complained that her character’s story lines were lackluster. Ms. Malone sued the producers, and the matter was settled out of court.”

She walks an interesting line between unconventionality and orthodoxy. Apart from Kaija Saariaho, whose music she played at her Kennedy Center recital in November, most of her favorite composers are white and male; she reacts vehemently to the idea of selecting a composer by any criteria other than her own visceral response (like, for instance, gender).

“Many within Hollywood, like Albert Lewin, director of The Moon and Sixpence, were keen to work with the famed surrealist, yet these offers of collaboration rarely came to much. ‘Man Ray was very firm,’ [curator Max] Teicher says. ‘If he was going to do a film, he was going to do everything: the lighting, the set design, everything. They [Hollywood insiders] looked at him like he was crazy, because that’s not how Hollywood worked.”

“As a playwright, with two ten-play dramatic cycles inspired by classical Greek drama to his credit, he enlarged the ambition and dimensions of theatre … Through his work as a director, and above all as a teacher, [he] changed the way we play and hear Shakespeare. His editing and literary carpentering restored neglected Shakespeare plays to the theatrical canon. He was a dramaturg, a literary manager, before the term was imported from the theatrical world of Bertolt Brecht.”

Mr. Wilson worked his way into comedy writing after starting out in advertising, and in 1978 he graduated from writer to creator when WKRP made its debut. … [He] introduced a different brand of misfits in Police Academy, his first feature-film directing assignment, for which he was also one of the screenwriters.”

“There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.”

“[She] a polished jazz vocalist who began her recording career in 1955, had a strong second career in the 1960s and ’70s as a prolific jingle singer, sang backup on Frank Sinatra’s Trilogy album, recorded solo albums throughout the ’80s and ’90s, and had a third career recently as she toured and performed to critical acclaim in the States and abroad.”

“[He] served as music director and executive director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the early 1970s, and subsequently headed orchestra programs at the University of North Texas and Southern Methodist University.” Earlier in his career, he was concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy and assistant concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell.

What I’m really trying to do is find the person’s comfort zone. Some people are great on craft — the process of writing, the process of making the film. Some people are great on anecdote. Some people are great on biography, their personal story. So I’ll just keep looking for that spot.

He began his career in free-form radio at WBAI, New York City’s Pacifica affiliate, and – after a brief, unlikely stint as host of NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered – spent decades at Southern California’s KCRW. Ira Glass was once one of his production assistants; he and host Madeleine Brand remember Frank in this audio segment from Press Play.