American actor, drama teacher, acting coach, theorist
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4 episodes with Lee Strasberg
4 episodes with Lee Strasberg
4 episodes with Lee Strasberg
5 episodes with Lee Strasberg
2 episodes with Lee Strasberg
2 episodes with Lee Strasberg
2 episodes with Lee Strasberg
2 episodes with Lee Strasberg
3 episodes with Lee Strasberg
Samantha Harper Macy joined me to discuss watching Perry Mason as a teen with her family; going to Ole Miss with James Meredith; being seen as a racist in Chicago because she is from the south; auditioning with Woody Allen; being shown around the city by strangers; modeling; taking acting classes from Lee Strasberg; hippies; sees Oh! Calcutta and for it; her sketch; meeting her husband, Bill Macy; Oh! Calcutta banned in her home town; Bill guests on All in the Family; Bill gets Maude and Samantha guest stars; her guest starring on Hot L Baltimore leads to Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; working with Victor Killian, Louise Lasser, and Mary Kay Place; playing a hooker on Hill St. Blues; her husband's work in The Jerk, Movers & Shakers, Bad Medicine and The Late Show; working with Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy and Terry Bradshaw and Mel Tillis on a TV pilot; being directed in two films by Hal Ashby; her memoir, Naked in Oh! Calcutta and other Stories; and her play Two Sisters Cafe
Wenn man den Namen Jane Fonda hört, denkt man zuerst an Schauspielerei und Hollywood, dann vielleicht an Aerobic. Spätestens seit der Wiederwahl von Donald Trump müsste man/frau aber mitgekriegt haben, dass Jane Fonda auch eine politische Meinung hat, die sie sehr lautstark kundtut und dafür auch eine Inhaftierung in Kauf nimmt. Ja, richtig gelesen! Angefangen hat alles am 21. Dezember 1937 in Manhattan, New York als Jane Seymour Fonda das Licht der Welt erblickte. Die Fondas waren eine richtige Schauspiel-Dynastie, und sind es noch. Nicht nur Janes Vater Henry (er starb 1982) ist natürlich weltweit bekannt, auch ihr Bruder Peter und ihre Nichte Bridget, die übrigens mit zweitem Namen „Jane“ heißt. Die Popularität ihres Vaters hat Jane auch ein paar wichtige Türen geöffnet – durchgehen musste sie freilich selbst! Dabei wollte sie eigentlich viel lieber Tänzerin statt Schauspielerin werden. Doch als der berühmte Lee Strasberg ihr schauspielerisches Talent bescheinigte, folgte sie seiner Empfehlung. Man könnte sagen „the rest is history“ und einiges von dem, was wir euch in dieser Episode erzählen, wisst ihr vielleicht auch schon. Aber es warten mit Sicherheit auch ein paar echte Knaller auf euch! Also, hört unbedingt rein und lasst euch inspirieren von dem bunten Leben der einzigartigen und starken Jane Fonda! Quellenauswahl:https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/the-dark-tie-between-jane-fonda-and-her-biographer.htmlhttps://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/jane-fonda/https://www.vogue.com/article/jane-fonda-vogue-cover-anniversary-activism-interviewJanes "Mug Shot" findet ihr hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20180921153111/https://www.janefonda.com/mug-shot/Ihre Oscar-Rede für ihren Vater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLnCNBu-2MYeines ihrer Fitness Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwQ1PrED9IE&pp=ygUXamFuZSBmb25kYSB3b3Jrb3V0IDE5ODI%3DUNSER TEAMHosts und Redaktion: Kim Seidler und Cathrin JacobScript: Daniel JacobSchnitt: Cathrin JacobAlle Infos zu unserem Podcast, alle Episoden und Kontaktdaten findet ihr hier: https://www.podcaststarkefrauen.de/Folgt uns gern auf Instagram und erzählt anderen von uns! Wir freuen uns, von euch zu hören! Photocredit: by Georges Biard is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Möchtest Du Cathrin oder Kim auf einen Kaffee einladen und dafür die Episoden werbefrei hören? Dann klicke auf den folgenden Link: https://plus.acast.com/s/starke-frauen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Today, I'm thrilled to announce my interview with Lane Bradbury, who played the role of Dainty June in the original Broadway cast of GYPSY. Tune in to hear some of the stories of her legendary career, including why Ethel Merman wasn't a good co-star, joining the Actor's Studio, method acting with Elia Kazan for J.B., why Bette Davis was suspicious of her during THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, watching Patrick O'Neill and Bette Davis in rehearsal, the moment in GYPSY that caused a rift between her and Jerome Robbins, Lee Strasberg's favorite acting exercises, why she didn't audition for FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, working with June Havoc herself on MARATHON '33, how an audition for GREENWILLOW led her to move to California, putting together her cabaret act, why Audra McDonald is Broadway's best Mama Rose, why she doesn't own the OBC of GYPSY, and so much more. You won't want to miss this episode with a true theater veteran.
Gay homosexuals Nick and Joseph discuss The Godfather Part II is a 1974 American epic crime film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Morgana King, John Cazale, Marianna Hill and Lee Strasberg.Additional topics include: -The 4th Annual Rubber Duckies -Don Lemon x Amanda Seales -Octopus Burger -Black filmmakers who are not Tyler Perry: Barry Jenkins, Radha Blank, Amma Asante, Cord Jefferson, and Raoul Peck -The death of Voletta Wallace and Peter JasonJoin us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FishJellyFilmReviewsWant to send them stuff? Fish Jelly PO Box 461752 Los Angeles, CA 90046Find merch here: https://fishjellyfilmreviews.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo @fishjellyVisit their website at www.fishjellyfilms.comFind their podcast at the following: Anchor: https://anchor.fm/fish-jelly Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/388hcJA50qkMsrTfu04peH Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fish-jelly/id1564138767Find them on Instagram: Nick (@ragingbells) Joseph (@joroyolo) Fish Jelly (@fishjellyfilms)Find them on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/ragingbells/ https://letterboxd.com/joroyolo/Nick and Joseph are both Tomatometer-approved critics at Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critics/nicholas-bell https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critics/joseph-robinson
TVC 679.4: Ed welcomes Harrison Page, the actor known around the world as Joshua in Lionheart, Captain Trunk on Sledge Hammer!, CPO Robinson on CPO Sharkey, and Niles in Russ Meyer's Vixen! Topics this segment include how Meyer first cast Harrison in Vixen!; working with Erica Gavin in Vixen! (and, particularly, how she and Harrison approached playing the controversial scene in the film in which Niles rapes Vixen); how Harrison came to be cast in Sledge Hammer!, and how he drew on some of his training with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio to ground his performance as Trunk, especially whenever the script called for Trunk to yell at Hammer. Severin Films has just released Russ Meyer's Vixen!, Russ Meyer's Supervixens, and Russ Meyer's Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens on Blu-ray for the first time as part of a landmark partnership with the Russ Meyer Trust. The Blu-ray release of Vixen! includes more than three hours of extra features (including a brand-new audio commentary by Erica Gavin, plus archival interviews with Erica Gavin and Harrison Page), while both Supervixens and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens are likewise chockful of extra features. In addition, both Russ Meyer's Up! and Russ Meyer's Motorpsycho are now available for pre-order at SeverinFilms.com.
Al Pacino is a screen and stage actor. Emerging from New York's underground theater scene in the 1960s, he refined his craft under mentors including Lee Strasberg and Charlie Laughton. Best known for his iconic portrayals in The Godfather trilogy, Scarface, and more recently, House of Gucci, he is cited as one of the most respected actors of his generation. In his career spanning over five decades, Pacino has earned an Academy Award for Scent of a Woman, two Tony Awards for his stage work, and two Emmy Awards for his television roles. In addition to his on-screen appearances in television and film, Pacino has also taken on various directorial and production roles, and he currently serves as co-president of The Actors Studio alongside Ellen Burstyn and Alec Baldwin. His New York Times bestselling memoir, Sonny Boy, serves as a reflection of his life, craft, and the roles that shaped his extraordinary career. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA25' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter
SEASON 3 EPISODE 77: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump's return to the world of TV interviews is important (and crazy) but the shooting of the head of United Health Care just blocks from my home actually seems to be one of the watershed moments of 21st Century American Politics. We have often descended into the slough of despond that all political parties, voting, law, government, the entirety of the power structure mean nothing and that the only way to change things is violence. I think we're entering such a stage. If so: fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night. AS TO TRUMP apart from his latest threat to imprison opponents (everybody on the January 6 House Committee should go to jail) did anybody notice his insistence that we are "subsidizing" Mexico and Canada by $100 Billion a year and at those rates they should become states. Wait. What? Mr. Numb Nuts Psycho President? If Mexico is a STATE in the United States – you know, where you are right now – the people LIVING there become CITIZENS of the United States, so not only can't you deport people from the US State of Mexico… but you can't put up a wall between Texas and the state of Mexico and in fact you can't inhibit movement BETWEEN Mexico and any state of the union. I hope somebody told MAGA about Trump's new Mexico solution: make it a state. That'd be two senators from Mexico and if New York has 20 million people, 26 congressmen, Mexico with130 million people at 13 congressmen per 10 million residents would get 169 Congressional seats. Trump proposes giving Mexico 169 seats in the US Congress. Also a GOP Senate operative uses the A-word on Tulsi Gabbard, and a Trump operative is ready to blackmail Republican Senators to get Pete Hegseth confirmed anyway. B-Block (25:00) THE OTHER WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: "Democratic" Governor Polis again sides with Sideshow Bob Kennedy. Laura Loomer isn't just hateful, she's stupid. And Marshal Petain would be proud: Jeff Bezos, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski all double down on collaborating with the Trump Regime. C-Block (35:55) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: My Lunch With Elie. How a delightful afternoon getting to meet Elie Mystal meant I did NOT meet Martin Scorsese. That, in turns, evokes the story of Francis Ford Coppola unintentionally paying a former colleague of mine something like a million dollars to be in the background of one scene in Godfather II.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this special episode of The Right Intention, its a celebration of the 88th birthday of Wowza, who is a transformative figure in expressive arts therapy and holistic wellness, who has spent over six decades helping people embrace self-expression and healing.Wowza embodies a spirit of agelessness and vitality, which she attributes to connecting with her "larger self" or "the beloved," an inner source of strength that transcends time and societal expectations.Reflecting on her journey, Wowza shares how she transformed a challenging childhood marked by bullying and isolation into a life of beauty and resilience. Embracing her unique path led her to win Miss Florida and become a runner-up in the Miss America pageant. By the time she reached the Miss America stage, she began to feel the limitations of external validation. When she blanked during a final question, she knew her calling was beyond pageants and moved to New York to pursue acting.In New York, Wowza trained at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, who taught her to embrace every role authentically, integrating light and shadow. This foundation inspired her to create expressive arts therapy, a method allowing people to explore their “social roles” as characters, releasing limiting beliefs and accessing their true essence.Today, Wowza remains a beacon of unity, founding the "Church of Wow" to encourage people to see each other as living art. Her mantra, "wow," reflects wonder without judgment. In relationships, she advocates for balancing masculine and feminine energies, empowering individuals to embody their authentic selves for deeper, harmonious connections.One of her signature practices, “curtain up, curtain down,” helps people briefly embody and release emotions, fostering mindful self-awareness. In her book, The Sacred Actor: Igniting the Performance Art of Living, she invites readers to view life as a divine play, where each role brings meaning within a larger, universal flow. Her "great hum" practice—a simple daily humming—connects people to the vibration of life, grounding them in unity and love.As Todd and Wowza close, they reflect on love as a universal, transformative force. Wowza encourages listeners to embrace every part of themselves, live authentically, and connect with others from the heart. Her journey and wisdom remind us that by living from this larger self, we find freedom and harmony.Connect with Todd Tononi:Follow Todd on Instagram: @ToddTononiSubscribe to The Right Intentions for more thought-provoking conversations and insights into leadership, personal growth, and living with purpose.Connect with Wowza: https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Actor-Igniting-Performance-Living/dp/B0D2P73WJ8 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
SERIES 3 EPISODE 24: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Will Trump be insane mass murderer Trump at the debate tonight, or just STRATEGIC mass murderer Trump at the debate tonight? Because the debate transpires against the backdrop of what SHOULD have been the lead story everywhere yesterday and today, the Rolling Stone “effing kill them all story,” but nine years in, our political media STILL can't process it, STILL thinks – institutionally and individually – that in a reversal of the famous H-L Mencken if they pretend it isn't true often enough it'll stop BEING true – that no one could have become president of the United States or try to stay in office extra-constitutionally or eventually become so insane and so damaged that he would openly boast that not only will he imprison in concentration camps millions of immigrants and others he intends to deport but that quote “getting them out will be a bloody story”– and that he SAID that on Saturday only because the self-protective animal-cunning filter that used to STOP him from saying the Hitlerian mass murder “bloody story” part OUT LOUD is now breaking or broken and there is a chance – however small – that it could break a little more tonight and he could make it worse tonight, that if Kamala Harris has the courage to push this particular button she could not only win the debate and win the election but destroy Trump once and for all and maybe even present a scenario in which Joe Biden only becomes the candidate who dropped out merely the SECOND closest to the election. Bloomberg's resident Trump expert (and victor in a lawsuit Trump filed against him) Tim O'Brien has seven pieces of advice for Vice President Harris. And a British newspaper claims she got Lee Strasberg to play Trump in the simulated debates. He died in 1982. If she can really pull that off, she should be elected unanimously. Don't forget our live podcast on YouTube immediately following the Harris-Trump debate tonight at approximately 10:30 EDT. B-Block (22:39) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: David Zaslav tops off his two years of humiliation by being caught seated next to Leon (Elon) Musk. The Russian Stooge scandal sideswipes Marsha Blackburn and Clay Travis. And as RFK Jr warns liberals that they're now on the same side as Dick Cheney, I must remind my former friend that he's now on the same side as our Proto-Hitler. C-Block (36:51) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Tomorrow's podcast will be devoted entirely to tonight's debate, so I'll do my 9/11 reminiscences here. And instead of trying to recapture how I felt that day and on the days that followed, I will simply present the tapes of my radio reporting from 2001 for KFWB all-news radio in L.A., and the ABC Radio Network.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode, we are honored to welcome Shelley Mitchell, a renowned acting coach, actress, andcreative midwife who has been inspiring and guiding actors, filmmakers, and writers for over 30years. Shelley's unique approach to dramatic art, deeply rooted in the legacy of Eleonora Duse andthe teachings of Lee Strasberg, encourages artists to build their performances from the inside out,tapping into the depths of their intuitive minds and emotional cores.Shelley is best known for her critically acclaimed stage performance in TALKING WITH ANGELS:BUDAPEST, 1943, a role that showcased her profound understanding of character and emotion. Onthe big screen, you may recognize Shelley from SORRY TO BOTHER YOU and GREEN IS GOLD,both films written and directed by her students, demonstrating the lasting impact of her mentorshipon the next generation of filmmakers.Throughout this episode, Shelley shares her extensive knowledge of Method Acting, a techniquethat has shaped some of the most memorable performances in the history of cinema and theater. Herapproach combines traditional Method techniques with applied kinesiology and energy healing,offering a holistic way to reduce stress, increase focus, and express emotions with authenticity andfreedom. Shelley's teachings are not just about acting—they are about living fully, with dignity andan unwavering connection to one's authentic self.Educational Value: Having Shelley on the show is an invaluable opportunity for listeners to gaininsights from one of the most respected voices in the world of acting. Her decades of experienceand her innovative methods provide emerging and established actors alike with tools to elevate theircraft. Whether you're looking to deepen your understanding of character, improve your scene work,or simply find new inspiration, Shelley's wisdom will guide you to new heights in your artisticjourney.What You'll Learn in This Episode:• The foundations of Method Acting and its relevance in today's acting landscape.• How Shelley's approach, inspired by Eleonora Duse, can transform your performance frompresentational to experiential.• The importance of building performances from the inside out, and how this technique canlead to more authentic and powerful portrayals.• Insights into reducing stress, enhancing focus, and unlocking emotional freedom in yourwork.• The value of mentorship and continuous learning in the pursuit of artistic excellence.Praise for Shelley Mitchell:• “With the wisdom of the ancients and the vibrancy of the moment, Shelley's offerings ignitethe fire within, to bring honor to the work.” — Sam Corlett (Vikings: Valhalla)• “Behind every great actor there's almost always a great teacher. If you are eager to up yourgame as an actor, Shelley Mitchell's class is a must!” — Rita Moreno, EGOTShelley's Programs:• Monthly Mentoring: Ideal for actors looking to stay inspired, improve audition techniques,and expand their horizons. Includes private coaching and weekly workshops.• Six Month Makeover: A deep dive into character archetypes, emotional arcs, anddeveloping an unshakable connection to your authentic self through twice-weekly privatecoaching.Whether you're an aspiring actor or a seasoned professional, this episode with Shelley Mitchelloffers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to help you take your craft to the next level. Don'tmiss this chance to learn from one of the best in the industry.https://www.shelleymitchell.org/
durée : 02:15:14 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda - Par Claude Frère - Avec Max Gallo (historien), Guy Deleury (écrivain), Georges de Caunes (journaliste), Michel Tournier (écrivain), Guy Drut (athlète et homme politique), Lee Strasberg (comédien), André Delvaux (cinéaste), Simone Daymas (psychanalyste) et les carmélites sœur Marthe et sœur Simone - Lectures Roger Blin, Maria Cabral, Louis-Charles Sirjacq, Miguel Mascarinas et Robert Rimbaud - Réalisation Janine Antoine
We had a great conversation with Actress Charlotte Kirk on The Chris & Sandy Show. We talked about several of her upcoming movies, her life plus a whole lot more!Award winning Actress, Writer, and Producer, Charlotte Kirk co-wrote, produced and stars in the British gangster movie Duchess directed and co-written by Neil Marshall (The Descent, The Lair, The Reckoning, Dog Soldiers) being released by Saban Films on August 9th and portrays Nicole Brown Simpson in writer/director Joshua Newton's true crime drama The Juice to be released in 2025. As part of the Scarlett Productions slate, Charlotte co-wrote, produced and stars in the British gangster movie Duchess and follows Charlotte Kirks character Scarlett Monaghan's rise from a working class criminal to a ruthless crime leader. This is to be released in 2024 directed by Neil Marshall. The film also starred Colm Meaney, Stephanie Beacham, Phillip Winchester and Sean Pertwee. Charlotte is an award-winning actress having won 13 awards and received 12 nominations. She enjoys singing and performed the end title track for No Panic with a Hint of Hysteria. Charlotte also just completed starring in the erotic thriller movie Compulsion opposite Anna Maria Sieklucka to be released in 2025 and just completed shooting an indie thriller opposite Jesse Metcalfe and and an action film starring Dolph Lundgren.In early 2015, Charlotte landed a starring role in Vice, (Lionsgate 2016) a sci-fi thriller, opposite Bruce Willis and Thomas Jane. In 2018 Charlotte co-wrote, produced & starred in Award winning movie The Reckoning directed Neil Marshall. The movie was shot in the summer of 2019 in Budapest, Hungary and released theatrically around the world throughout 2020. It was #2 in theatre's and on iTunes during its opening week. Charlotte won multiple awards for her intense dramatic performance in the film. In 2020, Charlotte completed the action horror hit movie The Lair, also co-written, produced & starred in and directed by Neil Marshall, and was released in 2022. The Lair had its world premiere in Leicester Square IMAX as the opening night gala presentation at 2022's FrightFest film festival.Charlotte returned the UK in 2021 to focus on creating her own projects. Charlotte formed Scarlett Productions and Primal Empire studios Ltd. and has several feature film projects currently in development and production.Charlotte has completed seven feature films since, including the female lead opposite Stephen Baldwin in film-noir comedy No Panic with a Hint of Hysteria'(Dir. Tomasz Szafranski), the female lead in psychological drama The Depths (award winner at 7 film festivals), alongside appearances in How To Be Single (Warner Bros 2017) and Ocean's 8 (Dir. Gary Ross, Warner Bros. 2018) opposite Sandra Bullock.Charlotte took her first steps in theatre (aged nine) she performed in Greek tragedies Agamemnon and Arturo Ui, following hot on the heels with West End musical theatre productions of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Hairspray having attended the prestigious Italia Conti School of Acting in London, her skills were further refined training with Jigsaw Performing Arts in the UK and renowned method acting coaches Susan Batson and Lee Strasberg in New York City. Having grown up in South East London, Charlotte moved to the US in her early 20's to pursue her career; first to New York, then to Los Angeles where she spent the next 10 years.She currently resides between London and Los Angeles.
1962 – Muere Marilyn Monroe en una misteriosa escena que reforzaría su leyenda, sin embargo, para nadie es un misterio ya que detrás de esa preciosa aparición platinada, corría a raudales la tristeza. Poco antes de morir, le escribió a su maestro de acutación Lee Strasberg, esta carta.
Bonnie Bartlett's impressive career spans half a century beginning with three starring years on the 50s soap, Love of Life and building towards guest starring parts in Gunsmoke, The Waltons, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Home Improvement, and starring turns in St. Elsewhere, Little House on The Prairie and Boy Meets World. Additionally, she played the infamous Barbara Thorndyke on The Golden Girls. Bonnie and William Daniels have been married for over 73 years, often playing husband and wife and even winning Emmys together for St. Elsewhere!Bonnie's bold and honest new book is called Middle of the Rainbow. In it, she describes her journey to pull life lessons from her troubled childhood, build a career, sustain a loving relationship, raise her kids and cherish her life's many gifts. In an era long before #MeToo, Bonnie used therapy and Lee Strasberg acting classes to process her tangled emotions, heal her scars and find her best path forward. Plus, Fritz and Weezy are recommending The Grab, now streaming and Andrew McCarthy's Brat Pack doc, Brats, on Hulu.Path Points of Interest:Middle of the Rainbow by Bonnie BartlettBonnie Bartlett on WikipediaBonnie Bartlett on IMDBWilliam Daniels' Book - There I Go AgainSt. ElsewhereLittle House on the PrairieBoy Meets WorldShe Drinks a LittleGift of DemocracyMedia Path PodcastThe Grab - StreamingBrats
Fast-talking and feisty-looking John Leguizamo has continued to impress movie audiences with his versatility: he can play sensitive and naïve young men, such as Johnny in Hangin' with the Homeboys; cold-blooded killers like Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way; a heroic Army Green Beret, stopping aerial terrorists in Executive Decision; and drag queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.Arguably, not since ill-fated actor and comedian Freddie Prinze starred in the smash TV series Chico and the Man had a youthful Latino personality had such a powerful impact on critics and fans alike. John Alberto Leguizamo Peláez was born July 22, 1960, in Bogotá, Colombia, to Luz Marina Peláez and Alberto Rudolfo Leguizamo.He was a child when his family emigrated to the United States. He was raised in Queens, New York, attended New York University and studied under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg for only one day before Strasberg passed away.The extroverted Leguizamo started working the comedy club circuit in New York and first appeared in front of the cameras in an episode of Miami Vice. His first film appearance was a small part in Mixed Blood, and he had minor roles in Casualties of War and Die Hard 2 before playing a liquor store thief who shoots Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry.His career really started to soar after his first-rate performance in the independent film Hangin' with the Homeboys as a nervous young teenager from the Bronx out for a night in brightly lit Manhattan with his buddies, facing the career choice of staying in a supermarket or heading off to college and finding out that the girl he loves from afar isn't quite what he thought she was.The year 1991 was also memorable for other reasons, as he hit the stage with his show John Leguizamo: Mambo Mouth, in which he portrayed seven different Latino characters. The witty and incisive show was a smash hit and won the Obie and Outer Circle Critics Award, and later was filmed for HBO, where it picked up a CableACE Award.He returned to the stage two years later with another satirical production poking fun at Latino stereotypes titled John Leguizamo: Spic-O-Rama. It played in Chicago and New York, and won the Drama Desk Award and four CableACE Awards. In 1995 he created and starred in the short-lived TV series House of Buggin', an all-Latino-cast comedy variety show featuring hilarious sketches and comedic routines.The show scored two Emmy nominations and received positive reviews from critics, but it was canceled after only one season. The gifted Leguizamo was still keeping busy in films, with key appearances in Super Mario Bros., Romeo + Juliet and Spawn. In 1998 he made his Broadway debut in John Leguizamo: Freak, a "demi-semi-quasi-pseudo-autobiographical" one-man show, which was filmed for HBO by Spike Lee.Utilizing his distinctive vocal talents, he next voiced a pesky rat in Doctor Dolittle before appearing in the dynamic Spike Lee-directed Summer of Sam as a guilt-ridden womanizer, as the Genie of The Lamp in the exciting Arabian Nights and as Henri DE Toulouse Lautrec in the visually spectacular Moulin Rouge!.He also voiced Sid in the animated Ice Age, co-starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage and directed and starred in the boxing film Undefeated. Subsequently, Leguizamo starred in the remake of the John Carpenter hit Assault on Precinct 13 and George A. Romero's long-awaited fourth "Dead" film, Land of the Dead.There can be no doubt that the remarkably talented Leguizamo has been a breakthrough performer for the Latino community in mainstream Hollywood, in much the same way that Sidney Poitier crashed through celluloid barriers for African-Americans in the early 1960s.Among his many strengths lies his ability to not take his ethnic background too seriously but also to take pride in his Latino heritage.Please enjoy my conversation with John Leguizamo.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/indie-film-hustle-a-filmmaking-podcast--2664729/support.
The guys talk about one of the greatest movies of all time! Does the talking make sense? Do the guys share great new insights about a masterpiece that has been discussed by much smarter people? Maybe? Tune in to find out! The Godfather Part 2, 1974. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Talia Shire, Morgana King, John Cazale, Mariana Hill and Lee Strasberg. Follow us on all of the social things HERE.
After years of citing him as a potential series, we're finally Brest men. In this inaugural episode of our “Podverly Hills Cast” series, we're taking a look at Martin Brest's debut feature, 1979's understated and deeply enjoyable old man heist film “Going in Style.” James Urbaniak joins us to chat through the beginning of Brest's career, and the storied personas of George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg. Cream cheese and jelly sandwiches on toasted rye for everyone! This episode is sponsored by: AuraFrames.com (CODE: CHECK) ExpressVPN (ExpressVPN.com/check) Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram!
New York Lee Strasberg Institute ist Teil des neuen Platin Programms. Erfahre unter Anleitung professioneller Coaches und Schauspieler, wie Du noch besser wirkst und Dich noch besser präsentierst. Dir hat diese Podcast-Folge gefallen? Du hast Anregungen oder Wünsche? Dann freue ich mich über eine Bewertung bei Apple Podcasts:https://www.hermannscherer.com/podcast----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Über 3.000 Vorträge vor rund einer Million Menschen in über 3.000 Unternehmen in über 30 Ländern, mehr als 50 Bücher in 18 Sprachen, 1.000 Presseveröffentlichungen, 50.000.000 Euro Umsatz, 9.000 Hotelübernachtungen, 10.000.000 Flugmeilen, Forschung und Lehre an 18 europäischen Universitäten, über 30 erfolgreiche Firmengründungen, die meist zur Marktführerschaft führten, eine anhaltende Beratertätigkeit, immer neue Impulse und Inspiration für Welt und Wirtschaft – das ist Hermann Scherer.Die größten Learnings meines LebensDas Video gibt es hier: www.hermannscherer.com/learnings Mein Geschenk an DichMein "sichtbar"-Buch: https://www.hermannscherer.com/sichtbar Meine Büchermein neuestes Buch "Pole Position": Pole Position: Mit der richtigen Positionierung zu Marktpräsenz und Mehrumsatz – Scherer ganz persönlich: Die wichtigsten Learnings aus 30 Jahren Expertise "Find your frame": Find your frame - Wie dich der richtige Rahmen zum Glänzen bringtMeine Online-KurseOnline-Kurs: In wenigen Tagen zum eigenen BuchOnline-Kurs: Qualität sichtbar machenOnline-Kurs: Soforthilfe Online KursMeine Social-Media-KanäleFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hermannscherer/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hermannscherer_officialExklusive Facebook-Community: https://www.facebook.com/hermannscherer/communityNewsletter per WhatsAppwww.hermannscherer.com/whatsappnews Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
David and Katherine look back 60 years ago to a year that was full of exciting works from Al Hirschfeld: 1964! Fiddler on the Roof, Hello Dolly!, Funny Girl and more premiered on Broadway; My Fair Lady and The Best Man hit the big screen; and Hirschfeld introduces two new series of drawings: "Famous Feuds" and "Unlikely Casting". Follow along with the show notes to view the works mentioned in this episode: Bedtime Story, 1964 What's My Line David Niven The Best Man, 1964 The Best Man ("Movies to Remember" Series), 1979 The Best Man (Broadway), 1960 My Fair Lady (Film), 1964 The Train, 1964 Tribute to Harold Mirisch, 1964 The Yellow Rolls Royce, 1964 "Famous Feuds" Series Famous Feuds: Mona Lisa and Rembrandt's Aristotle, 1963 Famous Feuds: The Beatles vs. the Singing Nun, 1964 Famous Feuds: Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, 1964 Jimmy Durante as Alfred Smith, 1937 Mary Pickford as Adolf Hitler, 1937 "Be A Television Writer, Earn No Money", 1964 S.J. Perelman with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, 1964 Walter Kerr, 1979 Alec Guinness in Dylan, 1964 Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, 1964 Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl with Fanny Brice Photo, 1964 Original Cast of Fiddler on the Roof, 1964 Josephine Baker, 1964 Richard Rodgers The King & I Revival, 1964 The Merry Widow Revival, 1964 Porgy & Bess Revival, 1964 Donald Pleasance in Poor Bitos", 1964 King Lear, 1964 Hamlet, 1964 Bajour, 1964 Joe Gould, 1941 Tiny Alice, 1964 Ready When You Are, C.B., 1964 "Unlikely Casting" Series for Playbill, 1964 David Merrick Fade Out Fade In Poster, 1964 Carol Burnett Moon Over Buffalo, 1995 El San Juan Hotel Ads ------------------------------------------------------------------ Visit our website Visit our shop Like us on Facebook Subscribe to our Youtube Channel Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram
Episode 66: THE GODFATHER, PART II For this week's episode, we dive into Francis Ford Coppola's epic crime sequel, The Godfather, Part II. Al Pacino returns to the role of Michael Corleone. Also returning, John Cazale, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and Talia Shire. Joining the cast for this installment we have, among many others, Lee Strasberg, Michael V. Gazzo, and Robert De Niro, who plays a young Vito Corleone in a flashback timeline. Lots of characters, lots of plot and lost to discuss. The Godfather, Part II won Best Picture for 1974 and ranks here as number 4 on our countdown.* Spoiler Alert: We talk about the movie in its entirety, so if you haven't yet seen it, check it out. Or not. That ball is in your court. Come back next week for another entry with lots of characters, lots of plot, and lots to discuss, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. *What is this list? We explain it in more detail in our Trailer and its Description, but as a high-level answer: we aggregated several different lists that rank the ninety-four winners of the Best Picture Academy Award in a rough attempt to get a consensus. It is not intended to be rigorous or definitive. It's just a framework to guide our journey through cinema history.
For the first Backstage Babble episode of 2024, I'm thrilled to present my conversation with Oscar-nominated actress Lesley Ann Warren. Tune in to hear her tell some of the stories of her legendary career, including how Lee Strasberg helped with her part in DRAT! THE CAT!, how 110 IN THE SHADE taught her the meaning of a showstopper, the trouble with rehearsing GONE WITH THE WIND, how she almost played a different role in CLUE, why Blake Edwards was a great director, the challenges of playing a sociopath on screen, returning to Broadway with DREAM, why CINDERELLA was a dream come true, and so much more.
we are happy to welcome back friend of the show and man about time James Balsamo to talk about one of his new films Karate Ghost 2 Dojo of Death! James Balsamo is a jack-of-all-trades; a songwriter, an actor, a sculptor, but most importantly, a filmmaker extraordinaire. From the time he was just a lad, and like so many others, James became fascinated with the Horror genre, attending his first Horror convention at the age of 8. As a youngster, James knew what he wanted to do when "he grew up" - follow in the footsteps of his star slasher icons, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Fueled by his ambitions, James convinced his parents to enroll him in Acting School. As a student in many prestigious New York acting schools, including Lee Strasberg, James' passion for film and acting continued to grow. A New Yorker all his life, Balsamo continued his professional career at Professional Performing Arts High School in New York City. James grew tired of theatrical acting after high school, and knew it was time to make the transition to the big screen. He left his Shakespearean tights at the door, and spilled big screen blood all the way through Five Towns College. Balsamo appears on both sides of the camera in many of his works, including his most recent project, Hack Job. Hack Job, with a budget under $60,000 has made its international debut, is selling worldwide, as well as exciting mentions during the NYC Tour of music icons GWAR and Ghoul. For now, James continues the "I Spill Your Guts" push, as he prepares for his newest project "Cool As Hell". This episode is sponsored by Deadly Grounds Coffee, head over to https://deadlygroundscoffee.com/ and grab a bag if you want to support the show head over to http://tee.pub/lic/xagxfUg22qI and grab a shirt! We are part of The Dorkening Podcast Network https://www.thedorkeningpodcastnetwork.com/ Want to create live streams like this? Check out StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5657902597799936 Want to create live streams like this? Check out StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5657902597799936 Find out more at https://wicked-horror-show.pinecast.co Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/wicked-horror-show/57fff955-5f89-4684-bcfc-af66d855f876 This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
GGACP celebrates October's Italian-American Heritage Month by presenting this ENCORE of a 2016 interview with Johnny Ola and Corrado "Junior" Soprano himself, actor and musician Dominic Chianese. In this episode, Dominic joins Gilbert and Frank to talk about his early career struggles, his love of music, his days as a folk club emcee and working with legends Lee Strasberg, Sophia Loren, Sidney Lumet, and lifelong friend Al Pacino. Also, Dominic gets a break from George C. Scott, a card from Burt Reynolds, a plum role from David Chase and a backstage visit from Paul Newman. PLUS: Sam Jaffe! The genius of Yip Harburg! Dominic does Dickens! Gilbert does Durante! And Dominic remembers his friend James Gandolfini! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Our guest this episode is Lola Cohen, a long time acting teacher at The Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute. A student of Lee Strasberg, Lola shares his technique both at the Institute in New York and internationally. She has written two books on Method Acting: “The Lee Strasberg Notes” and “The Method Acting Handbook”. In this podcast, Lola dives deep, sharing untold stories about her life, Lee Strasberg, acting, teaching and much more. She is candid, funny and poignant. A mini master acting class! Enjoy!Watch the Podcast on YouTube | Read the DiariesHost, Author of Diary of an Actress,. Executive Producer: Rachel BailitEditor, Producer : Max BugrovYouTube: @diaryofanactresspodcastInstagram: diaryofanactresspodcastTikTok: @diaryofanactresspodcastFacebook: diaryofanactress
Have goals of getting your story or brand recognized in top tier publications like Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, the BBC and more? Don't skip out on this episode with Brie Hogan. Today's guest with writer Brie Hogan, tells you everything you need to know about pitching from the perspective of a writer. Yup, she's a person you'd be pitching if you're representing your own brand for media exposure. Grab a pen + start taking notes because Brie shared some gems with us in this episode. About Brie: She is a writer, author and podcast host. She graduated from NYU with a degree in Dramatic Literature, Theatre History & Film Studies. She didn't know what to do with that either so she waitressed a lot. Then she studied acting at Lee Strasberg in New York City, and wrote her first play. Hardly anyone saw it, but it was enough for her to think, “Hey, I should give this writing thing a try!” So she tried her luck on Craigslist (she doesn't recommend searching for a job there by the way) and landed her first writing gig (which, thankfully, was legitimate and didn't involve any weird couches or sketchy rooms to rent). Since then her writing has appeared in over 60 online publications, including The Washington Post, the BBC, Men's Health, Elle Canada, and BuzzFeed. She's also the author of two books published with Adams Media and Running Press, respectively. Links: https://instagram.com/briehogan https://www.briannehogan.ca/ https://briannehogan.substack.com/ Connect with us on and off the pod! website: www.visibilityonpurpose.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/visibilityonpurpose/ Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/toptiermedia
In the penultimate episode of the HEY VANITY series, Heaven gets into Marilyn Monroe's second half of her career, as she pivots to being taken seriously as an actress and show off what she has learned from studying at the Actor's Studio under Lee Strasberg. Heaven also discusses Marilyn's marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and how these two marriages would intersect with her film career and how she navigated those waters. And lastly, we chip away at the beginning phases of Marilyn's demise as she gets deeper into pill addiction, and her mental health steadily goes into decline.Support Me:https://linktr.ee/FromMyLipsPod
Hoy te contamos un detalle de los menos conocidos sobre Marilyn Monroe, nacida un 1 de junio de 1926. Y es que la “tentación rubia” fue una gran poeta. Sus poemas recopilados en la obra “Fragmentos: poemas, notas personales y cartas” descubren una faceta de la famosa actriz que nos permite conocer su rico y sorprendente mundo interior, y que pone de manifiesto los miedos de esta mujer legendaria y las inseguridades a las que se enfrentó durante su intensa vida. Fue tras la muerte de Marylin, en 1962, cuando su íntimo amigo y profesor de interpretación Lee Strasberg heredó algunas posesiones personales de la actriz. Décadas después, concretamente en 2007, la mujer de Lee, Anne Stasberg, también amiga de la actriz, se topó con estos documentos en el fondo de un armario de la habitación de sus hijos. Su marido los había guardado ahí celosamente…
Unlike many, Jaime chose to break from the Broadway scene early in his career, setting his sights on the silver screen. He is geared up to producer his feature film script entitled: "NOT JUST AN ORDINARY GIRL." I'm your host, Kerry Ruff and today, we are incredibly fortunate to have a special guest whose work spans over a quarter of a century in the industry. Our guest today is none other than the phenomenal Mr. Jaime Perry. Jaime's acting roots are deeply embedded in the rich soil of the Joseph Papps New York Shakespeare Public Theatre, where he made his first appearance in Elizabeth Swados' play, "Runaways", starring opposite the likes of Diane Lane and Trini Alvarado at a tender age. But before he delved into film, he took a pause to focus on his education at The City University of New York, studying film and screenwriting. Here, his talent shone brightly as he not only starred in, but also co-produced a thesis film, "Familiar Differences", which took home all three Diamond Awards for Directing, Acting, and Best Short Film. With his Bachelor of Arts degree in hand and a slew of awards under his belt, Jaime headed to the City of Angels to hone his directing skills at the renowned American Film Institute. His impressive filmography includes standout performances in films like "The Message", "Warriors", "Jacob's Ladder", and notably, starring opposite music legend Michael Jackson and acclaimed actor Wesley Snipes in the Martin Scorsese film, "BAD". Not only is Jaime a talented actor and director, but he is also a dedicated student of his craft. He's studied method acting with Lee Strasberg at the Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute and HB Studios in New York. Jaime also ventured into television, playing a recurring role on "New York Undercover" and making several other guest appearances on network television. His body of work is both diverse and impressive. From the stage to the silver screen, to behind the camera, Jaime's contributions to the industry are truly remarkable. So without further ado, let's dive into this captivating conversation with the multifaceted and immensely talented, Mr. Jaime Perry. Stay tuned, you won't want to miss this. Kerry Ruff Connection & Relationship Strategist kruff@aol.com Kerry Ruff is a distinguished professional in the field of professional development, with a focus on blending visionary leadership, connecting-relationship communication, and personal growth. Over the years, he has built a reputation for his engaging game-like style and ability to motivate and inspire individuals, groups, and organizations to reach their full potential. Kerry has dedicated his life to empowering individuals and organizations to unlock their true potential and transform their lives in a wide range of areas including business, and education. Kerry Ruff will captivate you with his engaging stories of loosing over one million dollars and getting his abundance back, challenge your selling style only because you choose to and motivating you to act. Most of which you can watch right here on this channel. Find Kerry here: Director of Success Conference NYC (Experts Speak on Life & Business Advancement) Watch videos and visit the website if you choose for more details: WEBSITE: http://www.kerryruff.com INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/kerryjruff/ TWITTER https://twitter.com/KerryRuff LINKED IN https://linkedin.com/KerryRuff YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kerry+ruff YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm-suYHIPxK3UGVTffmNZOQ PODCAST / SIDE HUSTLE with PERSONALITY on ANCHOR https://anchor.fm/kerry-ruff https://open.spotify.com/show/6G2EqSic1fz4zF14C5LX4F https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/ZY5erHKJWyb https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/side-hustle-with-personality-host-kerry-ruff/id1383758254 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kerry-ruff/message
Occasionally fun, often interesting, and mostly peculiar, 80 for Brady does for old women what Last Vegas does for old men, but with half the stakes and one-third the jokes. Of course, the “old person” comedy has been in and out of cachet ever since George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg wore Groucho glasses in 1979's Going in Style, although has seen a big resurgence since 2007's The Bucket List (even a Going in Style remake in 2017).
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
For the fifth and final episode in our Comfort Crime month, we continue the Corleone family saga with The Godfather Part II, which manages to be both a prequel and a sequel in one. We talk sibling rivalry, evil clownish buffoon antagonists, Al Pacino's masterful Michael Corleone and his complex game of chess, the tragedy of John Cazale's ignoble yet pathetic Fredo, whether it's possible for a criminal to go legitimate, Lee Strasberg's Hyman Roth and his vicious vengeance, the acceptable criminality of politics, and Robert De Niro's stellar, Oscar-winning turn as young Vito Corleone, a storyline that takes the Godfather films from brilliant to totally epic. Give us a listen or break our hearts!
Henry Jaglom trained with Lee Strasberg at The Actor's Studio in New York, where he acted, wrote, and directed plays. And at age 21, he was best friends with an equally young Richard Pryor, as both struggled to break into stand-up comedy. Henry went to Hollywood to become famous. After appearing in TV series like, “The Flying Nun,” Henry wanted more and worked with Jack Nicholson to edit the movie, “Easy Rider.” Easy Rider's game-changing success launched Henry into a filmmaking career that continues today. He's written and directed 21 films, including “A Safe Place”, “Sitting Ducks”, “Tracks”, “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie,” and “Train to Zakopané.” He worked with Hollywood greats like Lee Grant, Maximillian Schell, Dennis Hopper, Roddy McDowell, Vanessa Redgrave, Faye Dunaway, David Duchovny. Henry made three movies with his best friend, Orson Welles. Their recorded, weekly lunches at Hollywood's “Ma Maison” resulted in Peter Baskind's revealing book, “My Lunches with Orson.” Henry is as funny as he is brilliant. Click now for a wild conversation!
Bertila Damas Voyage Through Acting Bertila Damas is a two-time Star Trek veteran with some tremendous roles on stage and screen under her belt. Bertila played the Vulcan Sakonna in the two-part DS9 episode "The Maquis" and returned to Trek for a role in the tragic Voyager episode "Survival Instinct" as Three of Nine while a Borg and Marika as a Bajoran. We learn all about her time on Star Trek, including the arduous makeup routine as a Borg, working with Armin Shimerman, Avery Brooks, Marc Alaimo, and Tony Pilana on DS9, and some great stories about Jeri Ryan on VOY. "Survival Instinct" is one of my favorite VOY episodes, and if you like it even a fraction as much as I do, you will love Bertila's stories about this one! Plus, Bertila's training with Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and some amazing lessons she learned with her fine education in performing, including doing a stage adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet" with Robert Beltran, working on The Golden Girls spin-off "The Golden Palace" with Cheech Marin, and working on what is considered by many to be the worst film ever, "Nothing But Trouble" with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Please subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@trekuntold . There you will see all the old episodes of this show, as well as new episodes and all of our other content, including shorts and some other fun things planned for the future. Visit my Amazon shop to check out tons of Trek products and other things I enjoy - https://www.amazon.com/shop/thefightnerd View the Teespring store for Trek Untold gear & apparel - https://my-store-9204078.creator-spring.com Support Trek Untold by becoming a Patreon at Patreon.com/TrekUntold. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a rating if you like us! Follow Trek Untold on Social Media Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/trekuntoldTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/trekuntoldFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/trekuntold Follow Nerd News Today on Social Media Twitter: Twitter.com/NerdNews2Day Instagram: Instagram.com/NerdNewsToday Facebook: Facebook.com/NerdNewsToday Trek Untold is sponsored by Treksphere.com, powered by the RAGE Works Podcast Network, and affiliated with Nerd News Today. The views expressed on air during Trek Untold do not represent the views of the RAGE Works staff, partners, or affiliates.
Trek Untold: The Star Trek Podcast That Goes Beyond The Stars!
Bertila Damas is a two-time Star Trek veteran with some tremendous roles on stage and screen under her belt. Bertila played the Vulcan Sakonna in the two-part DS9 episode "The Maquis" and returned to Trek for a role in the tragic Voyager episode "Survival Instinct" as Three of Nine while a Borg, and Marika as a Bajoran. We learn all about her time on Star Trek, including the arduous makeup routine as a Borg, working with Armin Shimerman, Avery Brooks, Marc Alaimo, and Tony Pilana on DS9, and some great stories about Jeri Ryan on VOY. "Survival Instinct" is one of my favorite VOY episodes, and if you like it even a fraction as much as I do, you will love Bertila's stories about this one! Plus, Bertila's training with Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and some amazing lessons she learned with her fine education in performing, including doing a stage adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet" with Robert Beltran, working on The Golden Girls spin-off "The Golden Palace" with Cheech Marin, and working on what is considered by many to be the worst film ever, "Nothing But Trouble," with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Please subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@trekuntold . There you will see all the old episodes of this show, as well as new episodes and all of our other content, including shorts and some other fun things planned for the future. Visit my Amazon shop to check out tons of Trek products and other things I enjoy - https://www.amazon.com/shop/thefightnerd View the Teespring store for Trek Untold gear & apparel - https://my-store-9204078.creator-spring.com Support Trek Untold by becoming a Patreon at Patreon.com/TrekUntold. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a rating if you like us! Follow Trek Untold on Social Media Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/trekuntoldTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/trekuntoldFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/trekuntold Follow Nerd News Today on Social Media Twitter: Twitter.com/NerdNews2DayInstagram: Instagram.com/NerdNewsTodayFacebook: Facebook.com/NerdNewsToday Trek Untold is sponsored by Treksphere.com, powered by the RAGE Works Podcast Network, and affiliated with Nerd News Today.
Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with Henry Jaglom, Renowned Writer & Director About Harvey's guest: Today's guest, Henry Jaglom, is a renowned and highly respected writer, director and playwright, whose body of work reflects his life long dedication to truth, honesty and authenticity in his artistic expression. He trained with Lee Strasberg at The Actor's Studio in New York, where he acted, wrote and directed plays. He then made his way to Hollywood, first as an actor in movies including “Psych-Out”, “Drive, He Said”, and “The Last Movie”, and then as a filmmaker. He wrote and directed such classics as “A Safe Place”, “Sitting Ducks”, “Tracks”, “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie”, “Eating”, “Last Summer in the Hamptons”, “New Year's Day”, “Hollywood Dreams”, “Deja Vu”, and my personal favourite, “Train to Zakopané”. He's worked with some amazing actors including Jack Nicholson, Lee Grant, Maximillian Schell, Dennis Hopper, Roddy McDowell, Vanessa Redgrave, Faye Dunaway, David Duchovny – and he made 3 movies with Orson Welles, with whom he formed a deep friendship. In fact, in 2014, a fascinating book by film historian Peter Biskind was released, entitled, “My Lunches with Orson”, based on a series of previously unreleased recordings, of private conversations between our guest and Orson Welles every week over lunch at the famous “Ma Maison” restaurant in Hollywood. The book provides the most riveting and revealing insight into the enigmatic, wickedly witty and restlessly intelligent person that Orson Welles really was. Our guest is widely considered to be a cinematic genius and a true maverick of American cinema – so much so, that he's the subject of a fascinating 1995 documentary entitled, “Who is Henry Jaglom?” Well, my friends, you're about to find out. For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ https://www.facebook.com/henry.jaglom/ https://mobile.twitter.com/henryjaglomhttps://www.youtube.com/user/HenryJaglom #henryjaglom #harveybrownstoneinterviews
This week we welcome actress Bonnie Bartlett Daniels who discusses her new book which chronicles her varied acting career. From studying under the famous Lee Strasberg alongside Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, to starring in the hit show “St. Elsewhere” alongside her real life husband William Daniels (also Kit from “Knight Rider”). She won two Emmys and survived a sexist and toxic entertainment industry way before #metoo was a thing. Her new book “Middle of the Rainbow” is available now. It's full of fascinating BTS Hollywood stories. https://www.bonniesmiddleoftherainbow.com/Join our patreon for exciting bonus content. https://www.patreon.com/LE2B
Happy New Year!!! For the final episode of 2022 we welcome notorious acting coach, director, producer, and all-around Hollywood talent Michelle Danner on the show! She and Joe discuss her history in acting, what current projects she is focused on, and how her unique approach to teaching actors has lead to her specific style of crafting a "golden toolbox" of resources for each individual. We hope you had a fantastic end to the year, this year was a really great one which reflected a lot of growth for the show. We're excited to show everyone what we have planned for 2023. Enjoy! About Michelle Danner Based on Michelle Danner's last 30 years of supporting both A-List and up and coming actors to fulfill their maximum potential, film director and international acting coach Michelle Danner has distilled the best ideas and practices of the major acting techniques; Stella Adler, The Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, Chekhov, & Stanislavsky so artists can draw upon them and utilize the strengths of each. Every actor is unique, so you will learn to form a toolbox of your own, your very own “Golden Box”. Through studying Michelle Danner's acting technique you will accumulate a comprehensive set of “acting tools” you can use when approaching a role or a scene, whether it be for film, television, or theatre. Make sure to check out the NEW Dtalkspodcast.com website! Thanks to Empire Toys for this episode of the podcast! Nostalgia is something everyone loves and Empire Toys in Keller Texas is on nostalgia overload. With toys and action figures from the 70's, 80's, 90's, and today, Empire Toys is a one-stop-shop for a trip down memory lane and a chance to reclaim what was once yours (but likely sold at a garage sale) Check out Empire Toys on Facebook, Instagram, or at TheEmpireToys.com AND Thanks to Self Unbound for this episode of the podcast: Your quality of life: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, is a direct reflection of the level of abundant energy, ease, and connection your nervous system has to experience your life! At Self Unbound, your nervous system takes center stage as we help unbind your limited healing potential through NetworkSpinal Care. Access the first steps to your Unbound journey by following us on Facebook, Instagram, or at www.selfunbound.com The DTALKS Podcast has also been ranked #9 in the "Top 40 Detox Podcast You Must Follow in 2020" according to Feedspot.com for our work in the Cultural Detox space. Thank you so much to the Feedspot team! https://blog.feedspot.com/detox_podcasts/
Inbar Lavi is an Israeli actress who will next be seen in the 4th season of Netflix's FAUDA, streaming later this year. She also recently wrapped the indie films VRONIKA opposite Jake Kesy and BLACK DIAMOND with Jake McLaughlin & Ray Panthaki. Previously, she can be seen as “Eve” in the final season of LUCIFER. Her breakout role was the lead on the Bravo original IMPOSTERS, in which she played a con artist assuming multiple identities. Additional television credits include ABC's STUMPTOWN, Fox's PRISON BREAK, TNT's THE LAST SHIP, and GANG RELATED. Inbar shares the how she values her artistic worth, the gratuitous way to run a set and gaining the confidence to have her Beyonce moment. These are the unforgettable stories that landed Inbar Lavi right here. INBAR LAVI'S CREDITS: Lucifer Imposters Fauda Stumptown Prision Break The Last Ship Castle Sons of Anarchy Gang Related INBAR LAVI'S LINKS: IMDB: Inbar Lavi INSTAGRAM: @inbarlavi Resources THAT ONE AUDITION'S LINKS: For exclusive content surrounding this and all podcast episodes, sign up for our amazing newsletter at AlyshiaOchse.com. And don't forget to snap and post a photo while listening to the show and tag me (@alyshiaochse)! TNTT ACTING MEMBERSHIP: The New Triple Threat Membership PATREON: @thatoneaudition CONSULTING: Get 1-on-1 advice for your acting career from Alyshia Ochse COACHING: Get personalized coaching from Alyshia on your next audition or role INSTAGRAM: @alyshiaochse INSTAGRAM: @thatoneaudition WEBSITE: AlyshiaOchse.com ITUNES: Subscribe to That One Audition on iTunes SPOTIFY: Subscribe to That One Audition on Spotify STITCHER: Subscribe to That One Audition on Stitcher
In this weeks episode Rachel talks with legendary Director Henry Jaglom. The conversation spans Henry's life and includes intimate stories of Henry's life, class with Lee Strasberg and Marilyn Monroe, lunches with Orson Welles, working with Jack Nicholson and much more. We discuss how to stay alive & prepared as an actor.Read the DiariesCo-Host - Author of Diary of an Actress - Executive Producer: Rachel BailitEditor - Producer : Max Bugrov
In late December 1954 Marilyn Monroe came to New York City wearing a disguise.Monroe -- the biggest movie star in the world when she arrived -- came to the East Coast to reinvent herself and her career. The year 1955 would be a turning point in her life and it all played out on the streets of the city. She intended to spend most of her life here.It was a year of discovery -- exploring the city, working on her craft and being the toast of the town.She came to New York to become a better actress via the Actors Studio and the influence of Lee Strasberg. But she also managed to see the most glamorous corners of New York and eventually -- she fell in love.Contemporary portrayals of her life have focused on the most salacious, most intimate details of her biography. Many tend to rob her of her personal agency. But in this show we hope to show a very different side to Monroe's life. And a deep connection with New York City that never left her.FEATURING: Hip New York in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich and many others.PLUS: As an extra treat we'll be joined by Alicia Malone of TCM (and Tom's co-host on “The Official Gilded Age Podcast”) and author of the 2021 book Girls on Film: Lessons from a Life of Watching Women in MoviesVISIT THE WEBSITE for images and more information
Lin Shaye talks being named the Godmother of Horror, her wide range of acting roles, becoming the face of the Insidious franchise, and the time she auditioned for Jack Nicholson! About Lin: Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Lin Shaye loved “storytelling” so much that even as a child and knew that she was destined to act. She performed in plays at the University of Michigan and later was accepted into Columbia University's Master of Fine Arts program in acting, from which she graduated. While in NY she also studied with Uta Hagan, Stella Adler, and Lee Strasberg. After graduation, she worked with the best and brightest in New York theater, including the infamous Joseph Papp. Shaye made her film debut in New York in “Hester Street” where she portrayed a Polish prostitute, to her mother's chagrin. Shortly thereafter, she took a gamble and flew to Los Angeles after hearing that Jack Nicholson was interested in meeting her for the role. She was cast in his film “Goin' South.” Shaye has become undoubtedly one of the industry's greatest chameleons. The Farrelly Brothers cast her in a series of memorable characters beginning with their 1994 hit comedy “Dumb and Dumber”, and then as the infamous landlady in “Kingpin” opposite Woody Harrelson, and again as the character Magda, the sun-withered neighbor of Cameron Diaz in their hit film “There's Something About Mary.” Shaye was also unforgettable as the KISS-hating mom in “Detroit Rock City” and as Sonia, the tough German/Swedish coach in “Boat Trip” with Cuba Gooding, Jr. In a dramatic change of pace, she received critical acclaim in "The Hillside Strangler" as the alcoholic mother opposite Nick Turturro and C. Thomas Howell. The horror genre also found Lin starting with a cult favorite "Critters" and then on to Wes Craven's “Nightmare on Elm Street” which paved the way for more in the genre. She worked on a trio of movies with director Tim Sullivan:, “2001 Maniacs,” starring opposite Robert Englund, its sequel, “2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams” and Sullivan's "Chillerama". Shaye also starred in the cult classic “Snakes on a Plane” opposite Samuel L. Jackson, and the independent films "The Signal", "Jack Goes Home", "Abattoir", "Buster's Mal Heart" and "The Midnight Man" reuniting with Robert England.. In 2010 she found herself in the blockbuster hit “Insidious” directed by James Wan, which led to “Insidious Chapter 2, “Insidious: Chapter 3,” and the successful 4th film in the series "Insidious: The Last Key" in which Shaye had now had become according to James Wan: “the name of the franchise.” She also starred in Sony's “The Grudge" directed by Nicolas Pesce and the feature "Dreamkatcher" which she served as an executive producer. Shaye served as a producer and starred opposite horror icon Tobin Bell in “The Call” directed by Timothy Woodward. She most recently starred in “Ted Bundy:American Boogeyman” and next appears in the film “Frank & Penelope”. Shaye has a solid resume in television as well with guest appearances which include "American Gothic", and "Still the King". She appeared in recurring role as “Dottie” in Showtime's “Penny Dreadful:City of Angels” series. She received a 2020 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Performer in a Digital Drama Series for “Eastsiders” on Netflix. She most recently completed shooting the lead role in the series “Ellen” directed by Clif Prowse and Derek Lee. Shaye resides in Los Angeles and is a lifetime member of The Actors Studio. Lin's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mslinshaye Follow the show on social media! Instagram: https://instagram.com/thanksforcominginpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfci_podcast Facebook: http://facebook.com/thanksforcominginpodcast/ Theme Music by Andrew Skrabutenas Producers: Jillian Clare & Susan Bernhardt Channel: Realm For more information, go to thanksforcominginpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
GGACP celebrates (and closes out) Hispanic Heritage Month by revisiting this memorable 2020 conversation with Emmy and Tony-winning writer-director-actor John Leguizamo. In this episode, John discusses Latin history, defunct comedy clubs, the freedom of voice acting, the films of Barry Levinson and George Romero and the debacle of "Super Mario Bros." Also, Wesley Snipes plucks his eyebrows, Gilbert envies Raymond Burr, Lorne Michaels disses Steven Seagal and John runs afoul of Al Pacino, F. Murray Abraham and Patrick Swayze. PLUS: "House of Buggin'"! Saluting Mel Blanc (and Al Hirschfeld)! Remembering Tony Scott! Toulouse-Lautrec wows the ladies! And John "kills" Lee Strasberg! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rarely do fake guest attorneys return to the Law Offices of Quibble, Squabble & Bicker (for reasons that should be obvious) so it is a great coup to welcome the return of veteran character actor, Larry Hankin. You might recognize him from recurring roles in Breaking Bad, Seinfeld and Friends, which gives him valuable insight in addressing our client, Sitcoms ON TRIAL. While promoting his book The Loopholes Dossier, his doggedness brought the following concepts to light: Sometimes Jones, dickish, the Pontiac of cohosts, boogie Ramadan, that was hard, Gandalf Street Magic, ready for Google, Larry Hankin's penis, wife swapping, an insertion slot, China Woman, Lee Strasberg, Vince Gilligan, monkey business, bartendress, Bavarian Pine Vole, pancake soup, Curb Your Enthusiasm, the Penguin, Bojack Horseman, Poor Richard's Almanac and no splash. Buy our merch here: https://my-store-11556994.creator-spring.com/ To access special content go to www.patreon.com/qsblaw and for other episodes, go to www.qsblaw.org. We are also internettable on: Instagram - @lawofficesofquibble; Twitter- @qsblaw; TikTok - @qsblaw; Uhive - https://www.uhive.com/web/shares/z/QTTCLFU; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quiblle.bicker.3; Tumblr- quibblesquabblebicker; Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/user/QuibbleSquabble or watch us on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/LawOfficesofQuibbleSquabbleBicker --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/qsb/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/qsb/support
Special thanks to Jefferson Moore, independent filmmaker, for providing the guest intro for this repeat episode. Episode Tie-In: The film “Blonde,” which is the subject of controversy due to its NC17 rating and graphic nature, airs on Netflix on September 23. For more details on the controversy, listen to our SW update episode posted on August 30th. CW: Adult themes/descriptions of violence; listener discretion is advised. Although often stereotyped as the ‘dumb blonde' character, Marilyn Monroe was actually a complicated woman who overcame a traumatic childhood, studied acting with Lee Strasberg, co-founded her own production company, and formed relationships with a number of high-profile, powerful men. Sadly, Marilyn's promising career was cut short in 1962 when she was found dead, nude in her bed with a telephone receiver in hand, the victim of an apparent overdose. She was only 36. But was Marilyn's death really the result of an overdose and ‘probable suicide,' as the coroner declared at that time? Or was Marilyn intentionally silenced, as many did and still believe, including her close friend Frank Sinatra?
Diane and Sean discuss the second installment of The Godfather saga. Episode music is, "End Title" by Nino Rota, from the OST.- Our theme song is by Brushy One String- Artwork by Marlaine LePage- Why Do We Own This DVD? Merch available at Teepublic- Follow the show on social media:- IG: @whydoweownthisdvd- Twitter: @whydoweownthis1- Follow Sean's Plants on IG: @lookitmahplantsSupport the show
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Isaac Butler about the history of method acting in the 20th century. They discuss who was Stanislavski and how he started his theater studio and system. They discuss the impact of Tolstoy and Chekhov on Stanislavksi. They explain the expansion of the method globally and how Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler became involved with the method. They talk about the differences between the system and the method and what is composed of the Method. They discuss how Marlon Brando was a genius and legend, origins of the actors legend, and some of the current modern actors that use the actors studio. They talk about current-day method acting and many more topics. Isaac Butler is a cultural critic, historian, theater director, and podcaster. He is the co-author of The World Only Spins Forward (with Dan Kois) and of his most recent book, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. He is the host of the Slate's podcast, Working. Twitter: @parabasis
Fast-talking and feisty-looking John Leguizamo has continued to impress movie audiences with his versatility: he can play sensitive and naïve young men, such as Johnny in Hangin' with the Homeboys; cold-blooded killers like Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way; a heroic Army Green Beret, stopping aerial terrorists in Executive Decision; and drag queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.Arguably, not since ill-fated actor and comedian Freddie Prinze starred in the smash TV series Chico and the Man had a youthful Latino personality had such a powerful impact on critics and fans alike. John Alberto Leguizamo Peláez was born July 22, 1960, in Bogotá, Colombia, to Luz Marina Peláez and Alberto Rudolfo Leguizamo.He was a child when his family emigrated to the United States. He was raised in Queens, New York, attended New York University and studied under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg for only one day before Strasberg passed away.The extroverted Leguizamo started working the comedy club circuit in New York and first appeared in front of the cameras in an episode of Miami Vice. His first film appearance was a small part in Mixed Blood, and he had minor roles in Casualties of War and Die Hard 2 before playing a liquor store thief who shoots Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry.His career really started to soar after his first-rate performance in the independent film Hangin' with the Homeboys as a nervous young teenager from the Bronx out for a night in brightly lit Manhattan with his buddies, facing the career choice of staying in a supermarket or heading off to college and finding out that the girl he loves from afar isn't quite what he thought she was.The year 1991 was also memorable for other reasons, as he hit the stage with his show John Leguizamo: Mambo Mouth, in which he portrayed seven different Latino characters. The witty and incisive show was a smash hit and won the Obie and Outer Circle Critics Award, and later was filmed for HBO, where it picked up a CableACE Award.He returned to the stage two years later with another satirical production poking fun at Latino stereotypes titled John Leguizamo: Spic-O-Rama. It played in Chicago and New York, and won the Drama Desk Award and four CableACE Awards. In 1995 he created and starred in the short-lived TV series House of Buggin', an all-Latino-cast comedy variety show featuring hilarious sketches and comedic routines.The show scored two Emmy nominations and received positive reviews from critics, but it was canceled after only one season. The gifted Leguizamo was still keeping busy in films, with key appearances in Super Mario Bros., Romeo + Juliet and Spawn. In 1998 he made his Broadway debut in John Leguizamo: Freak, a "demi-semi-quasi-pseudo-autobiographical" one-man show, which was filmed for HBO by Spike Lee.Utilizing his distinctive vocal talents, he next voiced a pesky rat in Doctor Dolittle before appearing in the dynamic Spike Lee-directed Summer of Sam as a guilt-ridden womanizer, as the Genie of The Lamp in the exciting Arabian Nights and as Henri DE Toulouse Lautrec in the visually spectacular Moulin Rouge!.He also voiced Sid in the animated Ice Age, co-starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage and directed and starred in the boxing film Undefeated. Subsequently, Leguizamo starred in the remake of the John Carpenter hit Assault on Precinct 13 and George A. Romero's long-awaited fourth "Dead" film, Land of the Dead.There can be no doubt that the remarkably talented Leguizamo has been a breakthrough performer for the Latino community in mainstream Hollywood, in much the same way that Sidney Poitier crashed through celluloid barriers for African-Americans in the early 1960s.Among his many strengths lies his ability to not take his ethnic background too seriously but also to take pride in his Latino heritage.
This week, we bring you Part 2 of Milton's conversation with actor and former student Chris Carmack at Culture Connection at Queen's Public Library in NYC, moderated by Taylor Purdee. Highlights include: how producing documentaries affected Milton's understanding of acting, how directors can benefit from learning more about the actor process, and the differences between Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg. Have an acting question for Milton? Email him at questionsformilton@gmail.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/actingclass/support
Fast-talking and feisty-looking John Leguizamo has continued to impress movie audiences with his versatility: he can play sensitive and naïve young men, such as Johnny in Hangin' with the Homeboys; cold-blooded killers like Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way; a heroic Army Green Beret, stopping aerial terrorists in Executive Decision; and drag queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.Arguably, not since ill-fated actor and comedian Freddie Prinze starred in the smash TV series Chico and the Man had a youthful Latino personality had such a powerful impact on critics and fans alike. John Alberto Leguizamo Peláez was born July 22, 1960, in Bogotá, Colombia, to Luz Marina Peláez and Alberto Rudolfo Leguizamo.He was a child when his family emigrated to the United States. He was raised in Queens, New York, attended New York University and studied under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg for only one day before Strasberg passed away.The extroverted Leguizamo started working the comedy club circuit in New York and first appeared in front of the cameras in an episode of Miami Vice. His first film appearance was a small part in Mixed Blood, and he had minor roles in Casualties of War and Die Hard 2 before playing a liquor store thief who shoots Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry.His career really started to soar after his first-rate performance in the independent film Hangin' with the Homeboys as a nervous young teenager from the Bronx out for a night in brightly lit Manhattan with his buddies, facing the career choice of staying in a supermarket or heading off to college and finding out that the girl he loves from afar isn't quite what he thought she was.The year 1991 was also memorable for other reasons, as he hit the stage with his show John Leguizamo: Mambo Mouth, in which he portrayed seven different Latino characters. The witty and incisive show was a smash hit and won the Obie and Outer Circle Critics Award, and later was filmed for HBO, where it picked up a CableACE Award.He returned to the stage two years later with another satirical production poking fun at Latino stereotypes titled John Leguizamo: Spic-O-Rama. It played in Chicago and New York, and won the Drama Desk Award and four CableACE Awards. In 1995 he created and starred in the short-lived TV series House of Buggin', an all-Latino-cast comedy variety show featuring hilarious sketches and comedic routines.The show scored two Emmy nominations and received positive reviews from critics, but it was canceled after only one season. The gifted Leguizamo was still keeping busy in films, with key appearances in Super Mario Bros., Romeo + Juliet and Spawn. In 1998 he made his Broadway debut in John Leguizamo: Freak, a "demi-semi-quasi-pseudo-autobiographical" one-man show, which was filmed for HBO by Spike Lee.Utilizing his distinctive vocal talents, he next voiced a pesky rat in Doctor Dolittle before appearing in the dynamic Spike Lee-directed Summer of Sam as a guilt-ridden womanizer, as the Genie of The Lamp in the exciting Arabian Nights and as Henri DE Toulouse Lautrec in the visually spectacular Moulin Rouge!.He also voiced Sid in the animated Ice Age, co-starred alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage and directed and starred in the boxing film Undefeated. Subsequently, Leguizamo starred in the remake of the John Carpenter hit Assault on Precinct 13 and George A. Romero's long-awaited fourth "Dead" film, Land of the Dead.There can be no doubt that the remarkably talented Leguizamo has been a breakthrough performer for the Latino community in mainstream Hollywood, in much the same way that Sidney Poitier crashed through celluloid barriers for African-Americans in the early 1960s.Among his many strengths lies his ability to not take his ethnic background too seriously but also to take pride in his Latino heritage.
Scott Glenn is convinced that every good thing that's ever happened to him has been an accident. That includes serving in the Marines, getting his start in acting, meeting his wife, finding religion, gaining Lee Strasberg as a mentor, moving to Idaho, and getting the part in Apocalypse Now that kickstarted his confidence as an actor. Scott tells Marc about the serendipitous circumstances behind those moments in his life, as well as stories from the sets of The Right Stuff, Nashville, Urban Cowboy and Training Day. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast.
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