Category: people

Robertson played JFK in 1962 and won an Oscar for “Charly,” but got blacklisted in Hollywood for years after turning an embezzling Columbia exec.

“With titles such as I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960), Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), The Devil’s Cleavage (1975) and Insanitorium (1987), Mr. Kuchar’s films have been labeled campy, avant-garde, underground and simply indescribable. He used friends, relatives and students as actors, hastily constructed props and shot in whatever shabby locations he could find.”

“Wishes for my early demise seemed to be everywhere. … I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot of people mad. It was not unusual for fans to randomly come up and hug me and say, ‘I’m so happy you’re still here!’ They didn’t mean in the building. Why was I still alive?”

The Kennedy Center announced on Wednesday that Meryl Streep will be honored this year alongside the singers Barbara Cook and Neil Diamond, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

“Sir David Hare is in a quandary. He doesn’t know how to write about today’s politics. … ‘It’s very hard to write when it seems that individual countries or governments are not in control of their own destinies. They seem to be at the whim of a system that failed catastrophically, and which is held to be faulty by those who supported it in the first place’.”

“Brownback is viewed as the enemy by arts supporters in Kansas City and across Kansas, which became the first state in the country to effectively do away with its state arts agency. In February he signed two executive orders, one abolishing the state arts commission and transferring its duties to the Kansas Historical Society, the other creating the Kansas Arts Foundation, envisioned as a nonprofit corporation that would be funded privately.”

“Silencio, David Lynch’s new Paris nightclub-cum-salon-cum-laboratory of the weird … is inspired by the deeply strange Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. Everything from the toilet bowls – black on black – to the saltiness of the nuts on the bar was decided on by the master himself.”

“The question of the relationship between Houellebecq’s poetry and his controversial novels raises the central problem of his career: is he poet, novelist or prophet, or does he not give a damn?”

“More than 250 letters and cards sent by John Lennon to his family and friends are to be published for the first time. Author Hunter Davies, who wrote the only official biography of The Beatles in the 1960s, is trying to track down every missive written by the singer.”