by Lawrence Bush on October 21, 2011
Spike Jonze (Adam Spiegel), director of the films Being John Malkovitch, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are, was born on this date in Rockville, Maryland in 1969. Jonze helped created the youth culture magazines Homeboy and Dirt while in high school, and made his mark as a video artist creating skateboard videos, advertisements, and music videos (with Bjork, the Beastie Boys, Weezer and others). MTV’s television series Jackass and Jackass: The Movie are also his brainchildren. Jonze has several alter egos, including “Richard Koufey,” the leader of the Torrance Community Dance Group, an urban troupe that performs in public spaces.
“I don’t want to differentiate between ‘this is work that I’m getting paid for’ and ‘this is work that I’m not getting paid for.’ It’s all the same.” —Spike Jonze
by Lawrence Bush on October 9, 2011
Playwright Harold Pinter, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, was born on this date in London in 1930. He was evacuated from the city during World War II and experienced numerous instances of British anti-Semitism in the course of his childhood, but he was always reluctant to identify passionately as a Jew except in dissent on Jewish political issues such as the 18-year imprisonment of Mordechai Vanunu and Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. Pinter’s twenty-nine plays for the stage include The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), The Homecoming (1964) and other “comedies of menace” that feature pedestrian situations that erupt into absurdity and danger; Landscape (1968), No Man’s Land (1975) and other “memory plays”; and a series of plays on political themes that include Precisely (1983, about nuclear annihilation), The New World Order (1991, about torture), and Celebration (2000, about class culture). Pinter also wrote nearly thirty screenplays for film and television and was very active as an actor. The Nobel Academy cited his work for “uncover[ing] the precipice under everyday prattle and forc[ing] entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” In his Nobel address, he called the U.S. war in Iraq an “arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public,” and condemned Great Britain for its participation in the war.”
“Pinter’s polemic is rude, it knows no boundaries. It ruptures decorum and taste. . . . It is offensive. It is meant to be. It is the voice of a man disgusted with those in power, with the jailers and torturers, with Bush and Blair. He has no fear of standing up in public, no caution that it might be better to keep your head down.” —Michael Kustow
by Lawrence Bush on September 15, 2011
Actress Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske) was born in New York to immigrant parents on this date in 1924. She worked as a fashion model and set out to be an actress at a young age, and was brought out to Hollywood in 1941 by Howard Hawkes and his wife Nancy, who renamed her, cultivated her, and got her to retrain her voice to achieve its famously husky and low-pitched sexiness. Bacall’s best-known films co-starred Humphrey Bogart, twenty-five years her senior, who became her husband: To Have and Have Not, Key Largo, The Big Sleep, and Dark Passage. Other hits in which she starred or co-starred include How To Marry a Millionaire, Young Man with a Horn, and The Mirror Has Two Faces. Bacall was a strong opponent of McCarthyism (through Hollywood’s Committee for the First Amendment) and an avid campaigner for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and for Robert Kennedy in 1964 — yet she and Bogart (who died in 1957) allowed their publicists to distance them from the Hollywood Ten and left-wing circles in order to preserve themselves from the blacklist. In 2009, Bacall received an honorary Academy Award; three years earlier, she was awarded Bryn Mawr’s first Katharine Hepburn Medal, which recognizes “women whose lives, work and contributions embody [Hepburn's] intelligence, drive and independence . . .”
“Being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you’re a liberal. You do not have a small mind.” —Lauren Bacall
by Lawrence Bush on August 18, 2011
Samuel Goldwyn (Shmul Gelbfisz), one of the earliest and best-known film producers in American history, was born in Warsaw on this date in 1882 (his birthdate is variously cited as August 27 and even as July 26, 1879). Goldwyn was a penniless emigrant to England and then the U.S. (in 1898), where he became a successful glove salesman. In 1913, he teamed up with his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, as well as Cecil B. DeMille and Arthur Friend to create Hollywood’s first feature film, The Squaw Man. After brief partnerships with Adolf Zukor and with Marcus Loew and Louis B. Mayer, Goldwyn formed his own independent studio that hired such writers as Ben Hecht, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker and produced such films as The Best Years of Our Lives, The Little Foxes, The Best Years of Our Lives, Hans Christian Andersen, Guys and Dolls, and Porgy and Bess. During the McCarthy period, Goldwyn was summoned to testify as a friendly witness before HUAC. He never appeared, but in his prepared remarks he wrote, “The most un-American activity, which I have observed in connection with the hearings, has been the activity of the Committee itself.” His studio was sold to Warner Brothers in the 1980s; Goldwyn lived to 94.
“When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.” —Samuel Goldwyn
Spike Jonze (Adam Spiegel), director of the films Being John Malkovitch, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are, was born on this date in Rockville, Maryland in 1969. Jonze helped created the youth culture magazines Homeboy and Dirt while in high school, and made his mark as a video artist creating skateboard videos, advertisements, and music videos (with Bjork, the Beastie Boys, Weezer and others). MTV’s television series Jackass and Jackass: The Movie are also his brainchildren. Jonze has several alter egos, including “Richard Koufey,” the leader of the Torrance Community Dance Group, an urban troupe that performs in public spaces.
