[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Friday, March 5th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Watch 12 Seasons of the Dick Cavett Show, 18 Seasons of Johnny Carson & Many Other Classic Shows on Shout! Factory
Dick Cavett was sometimes called the “thinking man’s Johnny Carson,” and he came up in a similar fashion—a stand-up, a joke writer for hire— until he was given a chance to host a late night show. But compare a Cavett episode to any late night host today, and it feels like a very different time. Sure, stars were booked to talk about their upcoming movie or album or television show, but Cavett was so laid back, so chatty and conversant, that it often felt like you were eavesdropping. It’s a style you find more on podcasts these days than television—Cavett is genuinely inquisitive. He never got high ratings because of it, but he certainly got an impressive guest list. We’ve been writing about some of the clips here on Open Culture, but Shout! Factory, the DVD company that has pivoted to streaming, offers full episodes of Dick Cavett’s show to watch for free. They sometimes have ads, but these days so do most YouTube channels we feature. (Of the episodes I let run, I didn’t really see any commercials so your mileage may vary as they say).
And what a cultural trove is there on their site: a selected history of Cavett’s show, arranged into themed “seasons” that stretch from 1969 to 1995. There’s “Rock Icons” (Sly Stone, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, George Harrison, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, etc.), “Hollywood Greats” (Alfred Hitchcock, Groucho Marx, Betty Davis, et al), authors, sports icons, politicians, visionaries (from Jim Henson to Terry Gilliam), film directors (including Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ingmar Bergman), and one called “Black History Month” although it’s from different months and different years, featuring interviews with Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, and James Earl Jones. (Let’s also mention that Cavett’s interview with John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara is one of the most anarchic television interviews in history). Enter the Cavett collection here.
Along similar lines, Shout! Factory features 18 themed “seasons” of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the man who refined the talk show template that late night has followed ever since. There’s “Animal Antics” with Carson encountering various zoo animals brought on by Joan Embery and Jim Fowler; a wide selection of stand-up comedians—The Tonight Show was considered the big break for any comedian (and sometimes future host); and a selection of Hollywood legends. (View the episodes here.) In fact, the whole website is a fantastic time-suck of the first order: a huge assortment of Mystery Science Theater 3000, episodes of Ernie Kovacs, The Prisoner and its prequel of sorts Secret Agent, and much more.
And a special mention to hosting the first season of Soul! the 1968-69 performance/variety hour that exclusively focused on the African-American experience. In its heyday, Soul! was watched by nearly three-quarters of the Black population. And why not: guests included Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Bill Withers, Al Green, Gladys Knight, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, and jazz legends Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, and Bobbi Humphrey. Explore the entire Shout! Factory media collection. Related Posts: Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning to America in His Final Interview (1996) Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here. Watch 12 Seasons of the Dick Cavett Show, 18 Seasons of Johnny Carson & Many Other Classic Shows on Shout! Factory is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 3:07p | “The Cinematic Universe”: A Video Essay on How Films Cinematize Cities & Places, from Manhattan to Nashville, Rome Open City to Taipei Story
Los Angeles in Chinatown, Rome in Rome Open City, Manhattan in Manhattan: you could say that each of these films’ cities becomes a character in the story. You could say it, but you’d be making a cinematic observation that has, at this point, become severely clichéd. What do we actually mean when we call a setting something more than a setting? This question is at the heart of “The Cinematic Universe,” the new video essay from The Cinema Cartography, a MUBI-sponsored series by Channel Criswell creator Lewis Bond and Luiza Liz Bond. It explores not just how cities appear in film — a subject, to some of us, hardly without interest of its own — but the “cinemazation” of place itself. Many count Fargo among the Coen Brothers’ masterpieces, but who counts it among the great city films? Its geographical scope exceeds the boundaries of the North Dakotan metropolis, granted, but more importantly, its concerns run deeper than telling a tale of kidnapping and extortion there. In a picture like Fargo, says Bond, “something has invaded what the place truly was and altered its very being”; its ostensible genre story is “elevated by the fact that it’s the least likely and least accommodating place for a crime narrative to take place.” Where “most people’s concern lies in staying warm, inertia “makes it nearly impossible for any progression to occur at all,” as both the people and the land have become frozen. Far from Fargo‘s icy highways and snow-covered lots, Robert Altman’s Nashville depicts another America entirely. Less a portrait of the Tennessean capital than a series of “colossal showcases of humanity,” the film’s bustling action and overlapping voices, noises, and songs suggests the existence of a grander, even more flamboyant socio-cultural pageant carrying on, unseen and unheard, throughout the rest of the country. “We can learn a bit more about the United States as long as we understand Nashville first,” says Bond, and the same holds for a much quieter, smaller-scale movie like Edward Yang’s Taipei Story. “The more we learn about its people, the deeper the anatomy of the city reveals itself,” and the more clearly we see a changing Taiwan whose citizens “can’t decide, on either micro- or macrocosmic levels, where they want to be.” A film can be about its city, but it can also be about the society that created that city. A film can be about a place, but it can also be about a place in time — that is, a place remembered, as in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. For some auteurs, the realization of a vision demands not just the return to a place in memory or the use of a place as it is, but the creation of a place unlike any seen before. In building a whole city for his magnum opus, Jacques Tati inhabited the role of the auteur to its fullest, crafting in cinema “a modern world we’re more than familiar with now, and how the change of the old world to the new can bring change within its people.” Playtime “is not a film where the setting is the character,” says Bond. “The main character is the futility of how we interact with our settings.” Naturally, it’s a comedy. Related Content: Watch Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, the 8th Best Film Ever Made Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. “The Cinematic Universe”: A Video Essay on How Films Cinematize Cities & Places, from Manhattan to Nashville, Rome Open City to Taipei Story is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:00p | The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mural on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde
It would be difficult to think of two artists who appear to have less in common than Bob Ross and Banksy. One of them creates art by pulling provocative stunts, often illegal, under the cover of anonymity; the other did it by painting innocuous landscapes on public television, spending a decade as one of its most recognizable personalities. But game recognize game, as they say, in popular art as in other fields of human endeavor. In the video above, Banksy pays tribute to Ross by layering narration from an episode of The Joy of Painting over the creation of his latest spray paint strike, Create Escape: an image of Oscar Wilde, typewriter and all, breaking out jail — on the actual exterior wall of the decommissioned HM Prison Reading. “The expansive and unblemished prison wall was a daring and perfect spot for a Banksy piece,” writes Colossal’s Christopher Jobson. “It’s best known for its most famous inmate: Oscar Wilde served two years in the prison from 1895-1897 for the charge of ‘gross indecency’ for being gay.” This experience resulted in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture as read by Wilde himself. Where Wilde converted his misfortune into verbal art, Banksy references it to make a visual statement of characteristic brazenness and ambiguity. As with most of his recent pieces, Create Escape has clearly been designed to be seen not just by passersby in Reading, but by the whole world online, which The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross & Banksy should ensure. “I thought we’d just do a very warm little scene that makes you feel good,” says Ross in voiceover. But what we see are the hands of a miner’s-helmeted Banksy, presumably, preparing his spray cans and putting up his stencil of Wilde in an inmate’s uniform. “Little bit of white,” says Ross as a streak of that color is applied to the prison wall. “That ought to lighten it just a little.” In fact, every sample of Ross’ narration reflects the action, as when he urges thought “about shape and form and how you want the limbs to look,” or when he tells us that “a nice light area between the darks, it separates, makes everything really stand out and look good.” With his signature high-contrast style, Banksy could hardly deny it, and he would seem also to share Ross’ feeling that in painting, “I can create the kind of world that I want to see, and that I want to be part of.” Related Content: Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Painting Free Online: 403 Episodes Spanning 31 Seasons Experience the Bob Ross Experience: A New Museum Open in the TV Painter’s Former Studio Home Banksy Strikes Again in London & Urges Everyone to Wear Masks Banksy Debuts His COVID-19 Art Project: Good to See That He Has TP at Home Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Section of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897) Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mural on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| << Previous Day |
2021/03/05 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |