Category: people

While he is remembered for such movies as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and L.A. Confidential, Wolper’s biggest impact was made with the miniseries Roots, “one of the turning points of American television.”

Once the Broadway producers purchased a country estate with the profits from their revival of Chicago (and its various offspring), as Barry puts it, “I thought it would be great to have a private outdoor theater.” And now they have one, just past the French-style formal garden.

The last pagan Roman emperor’s rear-guard action against the “Galilean” religion was a “protest against what he saw as his culture’s progressive abandonment of the traditions that had sustained it from time immemorial … a history of incomparable achievements in philosophy, the arts, law, warfare, and civil administration.”

“This is my forty-sixth summer here. I came here for the first time when I was seventeen. I hitchhiked and then stayed two weeks and lived in a tree fort. … The rest of Provincetown: everyone else says, ‘it’s changed, blah, blah, blah.’ I don’t think it has, I feel like if I dropped a piece of gum there in 1971 it would still be there.”

Creator of Beijing’s Bird Nest stadium says he was attacked while trying to report a previous assault by security forces

“[He] was one of the West’s foremost and most outspoken public intellectuals … a leading historian of postwar Europe and outspoken political essayist who also wrote movingly about his struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

“[He] was a drummer, a popular bandleader in the 1950s, and went onto become musical director at Associated Television. In this capacity he had musical responsibility for the whole of ATV’s output, from Sunday Night At The London Palladium to The Muppet Show.“

“After working together and separately as mimes in San Francisco … they moved to Los Angeles in 1975 and their career took off when they became regulars on The Mac Davis Show. A stint as regulars on CBS’ The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour led the network to give them their own show in 1977.”

“Hiaasen’s novels have brought him fame, of course, and over the years he’s come to claim musicians, writers and celebrities… as pals or acquaintances. Yet Hiaasen, with his tidy haircut, Bass Weejuns and neatly pressed checked shirt, remains very much the aw-shucks/awe-struck fan who’s still thrilled when someone just as famous — or more so — proclaims his or her fandom for him.”

“Neal was already an award-winning Broadway actress when she won her Oscar for her role as a housekeeper to the Texas father (Melvyn Douglas) battling his selfish, amoral son (Paul Newman).”