Carrie Rickey
By Carrie Rickey
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Culture How telling the heartbreaking story of a boy in wartime turned Steven Spielberg into a grown-up filmmaker
Editor’s Note: The director Steven Spielberg turns 75 on Dec. 18. To mark that momentous occasion, the Forward is running a series of essays reassessing his films. Read more of our “Spielberg at 75” series here. On the eve of Steven Spielberg’s 75th birthday, consensus holds that he is America’s most beloved director, its leading…
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Culture How a penniless immigrant named Igor skyrocketed to Broadway and Hollywood fame
Mike Nichols: A Life By Mark Harris Penguin Press, 688 pages, $29.99 After six days on the S.S. Bremen in 1939, the little Berliner fleeing the Third Reich disembarked in New York. Igor Michael Peschowsky was seven, “a self-contained, unsmiling child,” and bald as an egg – the unexpected result of a whooping-cough vaccine. At…
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Culture Weirdly awful and compulsively watchable — few hurrays for ‘Hollywood’
“Equality and progress – that’s what we should stand for!” said no 1940s studio mogul ever. But that’s exactly what Avis Amberg (Patti Lupone) proclaims as she hoists a martini as big as the Hollywood sign in “Hollywood,” the seven-part Netflix series set in 1947 Tinseltown. (It comes from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, co-creators…
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Culture Screenwriter for Garbo, savior for exiles fleeing Hitler
The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood By Donna Rifkind Other Press, 560 pages, $30 Imagine this alternate history of movies: Had Hitler not become a political force during the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin rather than Hollywood could have been the epicenter of film. So many…
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Culture The Nine Lives of Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher, A Life on the Edge By Sheila Weller Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 386 pp. $28 She was a Hollywood daughter, ingénue, actress, muse, novelist, screenwriter, script doctor, comedienne and eloquently funny spokesperson on behalf of bipolar disorder. That’s just nine of the lives of Carrie Fisher that Sheila Weller unpacks in her sympathetic,…
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Film & TV Zionist, Author, Screenwriter, Newspaper Man: The Inimitable Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures By Adina Hoffman Yale University Press, 232 pages, $26 In 1947 Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles crime boss, paid a visit to Ben Hecht, the journalist, screenwriter and propagandist for a Jewish state, to ask how he might best support Jews in Palestine. When the mobster and his henchmen…
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Film & TV Why Elaine May Is A National Treasure
When “The Waverly Gallery” makes its official Broadway debut on October 25, Elaine May will appear as Gladys, the Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother in Kenneth Lonergan’s 1999 comic drama that brings multiple meanings to the term “memory play.” Fans of the comedian/actress/writer/director, who has been American comedy’s insurgent genius as well as its Jewish mother, have greeted…
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Culture 10 Sharp Women Who Should Be Part Of The Intellectual Canon
SHARP: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion By Michelle Dean New York: Grove Press. 362 pages, $26.00 Atop the Acropolis in Athens is the Erechtheion, where six caryatids — pillars in the form of female figures — support the structure sacred to Athena. Michelle Dean’s “Sharp,” the incisive and engaging stories…
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