Links and commentary on media, politics and culture by Steve Rhodes.

 
(this was done for greencine, so there are a lot of links to their site)

Tonight many PBS stations will be showing Robert Capa: In Love & War. The excellent American Masters program on the photographer has more movie connections than you'd imagine. It features an interview with Steven Spielberg who used Capa's photos as a guide for the Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

Capa had an affair with Ingrid Bergman. Director Anne Makepeace interviewed Isabella Rossellini who would only talk about what her mother wrote about in her autobiography (she reads from a tattered copy). Capa urged Bergman to see Open City as an example of the kind of work she should be doing. He introduced her to Roberto Rossellini.

Also interviewed is Peter Viertel who wrote a number of films including Saboteur, The African Queen, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Night Heaven Fell (he is also married to Deborah Kerr).

Capa was friends with John Huston and the set photographer on Beat the Devil. At a Q&A when the documentary was shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Makepeace said Viertel and Huston had talked about doing a movie on Capa, but decided not to because people would picture the actor who played him rather than Capa. She said a movie is in development on Capa's experiences during World War II which will star Pierce Brosnan and be based on Alex Kershaw's biography Blood and Champaign. Makepeace looked at 70,000 of Capa's negatives to choose the images for the film.

Capa had a short-lived film production company with John Steinbeck and co-founded the Magnum photo agency.
On most PBS stations, it will be preceded by Charles Guggenheim's last documentary, Berga: Stories of Another War. Guggenheim was nominated for four Academy Awards and is perhaps best known for his tribute to Robert Kennedy which was shown at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If you miss them tonight, both documentaries will be out on DVD.

Online viewing tip. The website for the Capa doc has an interview with Makepeace and interviews not in the documentary including several clips of Isabella Rossellini. The website for Berga has an extensive multimedia section.




posted by Steve Rhodes at 5/28/2003 11:29:00 AM

 
I've been posting a bunch of stuff at TVBarn and Blogcritics including this:

Katha Pollitt won the National Magazine Award for commentary for her columns in the Nation (the complete list of winners and more detailed citations). The three columns submitted are online: God Changes Everything, Backlash Babies, and As Miss World Turns. There is also an exchange with Christopher Hitchens who she beat out for the award.

The jury wrote, "Katha Pollitt is a proudly reconstructed feminist, yet one who never shies from noting weaknesses and contradictions in conventional thinking about women?s issues and other issues of social importance. Her ability to combine wit and passion in a forceful argument is a model of concise commentary. These are gems of polished writing."

Pollitt has written 18 amazon reviews and earlier suggested ten books for Mother Jones.

posted by Steve Rhodes at 5/09/2003 06:00:00 PM