Tonight on most PBS stations is the premiere of a new episode of the American Masters series, “Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth,” in honor of the acclaimed author’s 70th birthday and Black History Month. Walker is the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.
Here, in an outtake from the film, Alice Walker talks about taking a segregated bus to go to Spelman College.
She was a major force in bringing public attention to the work of Zora Neale Hurston.
American Masters salutes Mel Brooks on May 20 (check your local PBS station listings for details). I love this photo of Brooks with his 2000 Year Old Man collaborator (and fellow Sid Caesar “Your Show of Shows” writer) Carl Reiner. Brooks is an Oscar and Tony winner (for “The Producers”), one of the creators of the classic “Get Smart” spy spoof television series, and the mad genius behind “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Spaceballs.” He also produced the serious drama “The Elephant Man” and the bittersweet gem “84 Charing Cross Road,” both starring his wife, Oscar-winner Anne Bancroft.
Some great Mel Brooks quotes:
Why should I indulge myself and do a David Lean-ish kind of film? I could do my little Jewish Brief Encounter and disguise it – shorten the noses. But it wouldn’t be as much fun as delivering my dish of insanity.”
My movies rise below vulgarity.
Oh, I’m not a true genius. I’m a near genius. I would say I’m a short genius. I’d rather be tall and normal than a short genius.
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Tonight on PBS, the “American Masters” series will show “Inventing David Geffen,” the story of the agent, manager, record industry mogul, Hollywood and Broadway producer, and philanthropist who has helped shape American popular culture for the past four decades. Notoriously press and camera-shy, Geffen reveals himself for the first time in the new two-hour documentary. American Masters explores the highs and the lows in Geffen’s professional and personal life through more than 50 new interviews with his friends, colleagues and clients, including Irving Azoff, Jackson Browne, Cher, David Crosby, Clive Davis, Barry Diller, Maureen Dowd, Rahm Emanuel, Nora Ephron, Tom Hanks, Don Henley, Arianna Huffington, Jimmy Iovine, Elton John, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Calvin Klein, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Mike Nichols, Yoko Ono, Frank Rich, Steven Spielberg, Jann Wenner, Neil Young, and many others. Geffen launched the early successes of Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Tom Cruise in Risky Business (1983), and Guns N’ Roses. In 1994 he co-founded DreamWorks SKG with Spielberg and Katzenberg, the first new Hollywood studio in more than 50 years, which went on to release Oscar®-winning Best Pictures American Beauty (1999), Gladiator (2000) and A Beautiful Mind (2001), as well as animated features, including the Shrek franchise. Geffen also produced the Broadway musicals Cats (1982) and Dreamgirls (1981), and helped realize the Golden Globe-winning 2006 film adaptation. Witty and self-aware, Geffen admits, “I have no talent except for being able to enjoy and recognize it in others.”
