‘The Answer Man’ — Trailer
Posted on July 5, 2009 at 3:48 pm
This looks great!
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YouTube Reporters Center
Posted on July 5, 2009 at 8:00 am
YouTube has a fascinating new section with top reporters explaining how they get, organize, verify, and tell their stories. Katie Couric explains how to conduct an interview. Bob Woodward talks about investigative journalism. NPR’s Scott Simon talks about how to tell a story. Ariana Huffington explains citizen journalism. Tavis Smiley talks about “digging deep and getting more.” This is an outstanding resource for anyone who wants to understand — or make — news.
Gertrude Berg, Television Pioneer
Posted on July 3, 2009 at 3:58 pm
A forthcoming book and documentary about Gertrude Berg tell the story of this pioneering broadcaster, producer, and actress. According to a story in Flow Magazine,
Gertrude Berg was the founder of the family situation comedy on radio and television. She was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz rolled into one, a business genius and negotiator as well as performer, writer, director and auteur of her own show — and this during an era when women in up-front power positions were rare. She was known as “Molly Goldberg” on her show The Goldbergs, which ran from 1929-49 on radio and from 1949-56 on television. Kempner’s film gives a fascinating multi-sided portrait of Gertrude Berg, the demons that drove her and the undeniable imagination and talent that made her such a prolific writer-producer and star of early television. Gertrude Berg had extraordinary powers of observation, love for her grandparents’ generation, and an innate drive to write and perform evident from her teenage years when she entertained the children of guests at her father’s Catskills hotel.
Berg came from the vaudeville-era tradition of ethnic comedy, but she avoided caricature and created a warm and affectionate portrait of a three-generation Jewish family living in the Bronx.
On one side of Molly Goldberg and her husband Jake was the first-generation “Uncle David,” with the characteristic shrug of the shoulders and Yiddish theater inflection that made him endearing. On the other side were the third-generation “kids” who were becoming fully American. But it was Molly Goldberg herself, placed squarely in the middle, still speaking the Yiddish-inflected language of the Bronx when she moved to the suburbs years later, who created the central vitality of the show as she opened it each week from her window in the Bronx.
In an era when women and Jews were seldom given opportunities in business of any kind and almost never in television, Berg was so successful that her radio program was broadcast simultaneously on all three networks. Kempner’s new documentary bills itself as the story of “The most famous woman in America that you never heard of.” Kempner, the creator of the award-winning 1998 documentary about Hank Greenberg, is the ideal film-maker to tell this story and I look forward to seeing it when it opens later this month.
Profile in the Washington Post
Posted on July 2, 2009 at 6:56 pm
There’s a lovely profile of my two jobs as corporate governance analyst and movie critic in this weekend’s Washington Post Magazine. It has lots of information about my background, my family, and how I got to where I am in two different careers. Let me know what you think!
Summer Camp Movies
Posted on July 2, 2009 at 9:16 am
Nametapes ironed on? Bugspray and sunscreen packed? As kids depart for camp, it is fun to watch some classic movies about the joys and terrors of life among the bunk beds and color wars.
1. Meatballs 
2. Camp Nowhere
3. The Adventures of Spin & Marty
4. Indian Summer
5. Little Darlings
6. The Parent Trap
7. Space Camp
8. Camp
9. Summercamp
10. Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown