On January 12, HBO will broadcast “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.” For filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, this marks the end of an 18-year, three-movie odyssey that resulted in the freeing from prison of three apparently innocent young men. In June 1993, high school students Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley — known as…
Television’s golden age ran roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1960s — a quaint period in which not a single Jersey housewife or Kardashian made it on the air. Instead, viewers were treated to classical theater and original productions from the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal and Rod Serling. Great actors and…
Joel Rooks was raised in Swampscott, Mass., in a Jewish family that owned a women’s retail clothing store. George Nathan Birnbaum grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family at 259 Rivington St., on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Birnbaum grew up, took the stage name George Burns and became a star of vaudeville, films and television….
In a Broadway season remarkable for its number of quality productions, Jon Robin Baitz’s brilliant “Other Desert Cities” stands a step above the rest. The play is set in 2004 in Palm Springs, where the Wyeth clan is in the midst of a troubled family reunion. Polly (Stockard Channing) and Lyman (Stacy Keach) are wealthy…
Film still courtesy of Joel Fendelman Is the small-budget gem “David” a parable for peace in the Middle East? It might — or might not — be. But in either case, it is an engaging, intelligent film that wisely resists the temptation of formulaic, diabetes-inducing sweetness or, conversely, knee-jerk bitterness. “David,” screening December 10 at…
Image courtesy of PBS Woody Allen has always been something of an enigma, slipping effortlessly and Zelig-like from one persona to the next. He started as a gag and television writer (most famously for Sid Caesar), became an extremely successful stand-up comic, wrote humorous essays for The New Yorker (many of which were collected into…
Journalist Calvin Trillin is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker who has written over two dozen books. But he is perhaps best known as a humorist, a career that began in 1978 when then-editor of The Nation, “the parsimonious Victor Navasky,” took him to lunch. As Trillin recalls, Navasky wanted to “discuss his…
Brett Ratner not only provides material for a good story, he even writes the headlines. “Your headline should be: ‘Yeshiva Prepared Ratner To Be Director,’” he said during a phone interview with The Arty Semite. Happily, yeshiva did a good job. Ratner is most famous for the “Rush Hour” trilogy of films. His latest comedy…
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