Curt Schleier is a freelance writer and author who covers business and the arts for a variety of publications. Follow him on Twitter at @tvsoundoff.
Curt Schleier
By Curt Schleier
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The Schmooze ‘Fiddler’ Lyricist Feted at 90
Sheldon Harnick isn’t going to be 90 until next April, but the celebration of that milestone kicks off October 27. That’s when Brooklyn’s Encompass New Opera Theater honors one of Broadway’s greatest lyricists at its annual gala. The group works with young composers of musical theater and opera. Harnick has been associated with the company…
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The Schmooze ‘Jerry Seinfeld of France’ Gets Serious
“A Costa-Gavras Film” atop a marquee or movie poster is the equivalent of the old Good Housekeeping magazine seal of approval: a guarantee that the movie will be well acted, intelligent and politically charged. In “Capital,” the Greek-French director probably best known for “Z,” “State of Siege” and “Missing” doesn’t disappoint. Here he targets the…
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The Schmooze Up Close and Personal With Israeli Prime Ministers
Moriah Films is a division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and is responsible for a dozen documentaries of Jewish interest. Filmmaker Richard Trank has been with Moriah from the beginning, a journey that included an Academy Award in 1997 for “The Long Way Home,” about Holocaust Survivors rebuilding their lives and the State of Israel….
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The Schmooze Kathryn Grody Doesn’t Do Dishes for Mandy Patinkin
Kathryn Grody is besieged. The actress, on her way home after a recent preview performance of “The Model Apartment,” hadn’t made it out of the lobby when several audience members waylaid her. What happened next is both a tribute to Donald Margulies’ play and to Grody. The play is intense and at times difficult to…
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The Schmooze Covered in John F. Kennedy’s Blood
There is likely not an American of a certain age who does not remember where he was on November 22, 1963 — the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That event is at the center of “Parkland,” the exciting new film from writer/director Peter Landesman. “Parkland” is the hospital where Kennedy was taken after being…
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The Schmooze Israeli TV Network Teams Up With American Producers
Keshet International, the distribution and production arm of Israel’s Keshet Media Group, and DC Productions, which owns Dick Clark Productions, have formed Keshet DCP, which makes it likely that more Israeli shows make it across the Atlantic to a TV set near you. Keshet, which owns a television network in Israel, is where the Showtime…
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The Schmooze Polio Couldn’t Stop Hit Songwriter Doc Pomus
“I was never one of those happy cripples,” is the way Jerome Felder described himself. Why would he be? He was just 6 years old when he contracted polio. And in a sad irony fit for a blues song, the young Brooklynite caught the virus at a country summer camp he’d been sent to specifically…
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The Schmooze Finding the Funny in Divorce
When Stuart Zicherman was 11 years, it seemed like every family in his suburban Long Island, N.Y., neighborhood was getting divorced. His parents sat him down and told him that wouldn’t happen in their household. A year later, his father moved out. This piece of personal trivia is relevant because Zicherman, now 44, is the…
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