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For Errol Morris, the 1960s hold a particular allure. The decade inspired the documentarian’s “The Fog of War,” which profiled Robert McNamara, an architect of the disastrous Vietnam War. His 2017 Netflix miniseries, “Wormwood,” was set among shadowy operatives responsible for MKUltra, the secret (and deadly) government program on mind control throughout the ’60s. His recent John le Carré doc, “The Pigeon Tunnel,” was similarly steeped in Cold War theatrics.

All of this to say that it’s not surprising that Morris decided to tackle Charles Manson and his infamous crimes in “Chaos: The Manson Murders.” Based on Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s nonfiction book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” the new Netflix film asks how an uneducated rube became a Svengali to a devoted cult and whether the answer could be tied to the CIA and the development of MKUltra. “Conspiracy...

Brian Knappenberger’s Turning Point: The Vietnam War, now streaming on Netflix, opens not with a sweeping battlefield panorama or a politician’s podium but with a quiet, trembling voice—that of Scott Camil, a Marine turned antiwar activist, remembering a marching song about killing Viet Cong. It’s an intimate beginning for a five-part docuseries that refuses to cushion any of its historical weight.

This installment in Knappenberger’s Turning Point franchise sidesteps the museum-glass detachment often found in war documentaries and instead builds its structure from first-person accounts, archival tapes, and political autopsies that reach from the early Kennedy years to the last helicopter out of Saigon in 1975.

What sets this series apart is how it doesn’t rely on military timelines or combat-heavy montages as narrative anchors. Instead, it allows memory—painful, fragmented, contradictory—to shape the story. American veterans, Vietnamese civilians, former Viet Cong, and White...

No film so perfectly encapsulates the generation gap in America in the '60s than John Wayne's corny Vietnam War epic, The Green Berets. The genre has reached such a level of ubiquity and cliché that soon it birthed its own parody in the form of Tropic Thunder. There’s no shortage of productions exploring the political nuances and the social ramifications of the war today, but that was a different story in 1968.

Adapting the 1965 best-selling novel of the same name to theaters, it boasted John Wayne in the lead, with The Fugitive star David Janssen, Jim Hutton, and George Takei in supporting roles. The Vietnam War was a travesty in many respects. Blame US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. For the movie, that is. Come to think of it, blame him for the war too. Reactions to the action flick were unkind. For screenwriters, journalists, and directors, it only...

Since this category contains nominations for neither Anora nor Wicked—the two films whose Oscar futures we have unceremoniously turned into game shows for, frankly, our own amusement—we’re tempted to just rerack our assessment of Conclave from two days ago and call it a day: “Its twists and turns may be more risibly unserious than those of the much derided Emilia Pérez…but it’s not lost on us that Edward Berger’s film is also among the rapidly dwindling adult entertainments that don’t overstay their welcome by at least two reels’ worth.”

This race has more best picture nominees in the mix than the one for original screenplay, but compared to that toss-up, this one is a done deal. Peter Straughan’s failure, as it were, to transcend Conclave’s airport-novel origins would already have been more of a virtue than a liability here. The unflappable...

Could Bill Clinton and other recognizable figures appear in Call of Duty Black Ops 6? The recent reveal trailer hints at a return to a dark corner of the franchise’s past. The original Black Ops featured the infamous level Five in which players faced off against zombies alongside world leaders including John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, and Robert McNamara.

The trailer has sparked many speculations, including a potential resurrection of the controversial Zombie mode, and with the Black Ops 6 official reveal set for June 9, more information will be available.

Bill Clinton in the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Teaser Trailer Bill Clinton in the Black Ops 6 live-action trailer.

Microsoft has released the trailer for the latest Call of Duty game in the form of a live-action movie under the title The Truth Lies. The video, which is under one minute long, shows many world leaders, including Bill Clinton,...

On Jan. 29, 1964, a triple premiere — in New York, London and Toronto — launched one of Stanley Kubrick’s signature masterpieces into the chilly Cold War atmosphere: Dr. Strangelove, with the marquee-challenging subtitle Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick described it as a “nightmare comedy.” Sixty years later, the comedy still works, but the immediacy of the nightmare may be missed.

Shot in Shepperton Studios outside of London from February through November 1963, Dr. Strangelove was conceived and realized in the shadow of a real-life nightmare scenario that no one laughed at: the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded over 13 terrifying days in October 1962.

On Oct. 14, 1962, a U-2 spy plane detected facilities for the launching of nuclear ballistic missiles from Cuba, a Soviet client state since 1959. President John F. Kennedy convened an executive committee of the National Security Council to consider options. The consensus from the Joint Chiefs...

Just over forty years ago, on November 20th, 1983, ABC aired the most influential TV movie ever made. The Day After, which starred Jason Robards, John Lithgow, JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenberg, was a riveting dramatization of the aftermath of a nuclear war, focusing on the residents of a small town dealing with the most terrifying outcome of all – surviving. Along with other movies of the era, such as Testament and the UK’s Threads, it was seen as a cry for disarmament, as no one could ever possibly “win” a nuclear war.

This week, PBS is airing a documentary on the film called Television Event, and in it, they put forward the notion that the movie may have helped prevent a nuclear war. In it, director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) relates the following intriguing anecdote (excerpted by THR):

“The movie may have indeed helped prevent a nuclear war.

Errol Morris is one of the greatest living documentarians, having created some of the best films of the past 45 years. Over the past three decades, most of his films have focused on singular individuals — Stephen Hawking, Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, Joyce McKinney, Steve Bannon. He continues that trend with The Pigeon Tunnel, though in several ways, it feels like a kind of autobiography, despite his subject being the legendary spy writer, John le Carré.

The film opens with an explicit mention of interrogations, something Morris is quite familiar with; after all, his clever 'intelligent camera' set-up for interviews is called 'The Interrotron,' which adds two-way mirrors and video monitors to the usual interview set-up and enables the subject to feel and look comfortable staring straight into the camera. The Pigeon Tunnel itself is notable for its kaleidoscopic use of mirroring and splitting, as if the nature of truth is...

The acclaimed Apple TV+ original alternative history series For All Mankind returns for its fourth season and officially brings its vision of the Space Race into the 21st century. Bringing in plenty of fresh faces, the science fiction drama welcomes a new generation as it expands the story's scope to include even more ambitious spacefaring missions and international intrigue. As consistently good as ever, For All Mankind rewards longtime viewers while it takes even greater creative risks and bigger swings with an even greater sense of confidence.

Jumping ahead in its timeline by approximately eight years, it is now 2003, and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union has finally begun to thaw in the face of new leadership and emerging partnerships shared by the rival nations. To help justify continued increased spending on missions in outer space, the Moon and Mars, NASA and the Soviet space program plan to mine asteroids,...

In 2016, John le Carré published a memoir called “The Pigeon Tunnel,” which the late spy novelist — who died in late 2020 — claims had been the working title of nearly all his books at some point. For le Carré, the term describes the passage through which naive birds of sport were forced from their nests, only to emerge as targets for marksmen waiting with rifles poised at a hotel in Monte Carlo. That’s just one of several metaphors Le Carré uses to communicate his cynical worldview in a playful portrait from Errol Morris, whose career-long interest in truth and delusion fits his subject so well, the whole film ultimately feels like a bit of a ploy.

For starters, there was no such person as John le Carré, a pseudonym adopted by David Cornwell, an Oxford-educated ex-spy who turned to literature to process the absurdity of England’s so-called “intelligence” industry, which Cornwell slyly dubbed “the Circus.

Errol Morris is not one for adversarial interviews. Whether he’s talking to alleged murderers or mourning pet owners, defense secretaries or political svengalis — the documentarian has no interest in moving deftly through a list of questions until he gets to some satisfying gotcha. He’d rather just talk it out, see where things go.

That’s not to say he isn’t up for some sparring, at least when he’s the one being interviewed. When we meet in a New York City hotel room turned press-junket base camp earlier this month,...

Documentary filmmaking legend Errol Morris has built his extraordinary reputation on two principle foundations: what might be called dramatizations (he rejects the terms reenactments or recreations) and interviews of incredible insight and verve. He has conversed with a fascinating array of people — Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, Steve Bannon, owners of pet cemeteries, a woman accused of kidnapping and raping a Mormon missionary, to name a few.

Now, on Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, it’s our turn to interview Morris, about his latest documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel. In the film, which is about to premiere on Apple TV+, the director trains his lens on perhaps his most elusive subject yet – the spy-turned-novelist David Cornwell, known to the world by his pen name, John le Carré.

Morris tells Doc Talk why his encounter with Cornwell made him question the very nature of documentary interviews. And he gets into whether any person...

Philip Glass has been composing soundscapes of ambient intrigue for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris for decades, from the groundbreaking true-crime doc “The Thin Blue Line” to the Robert McNamara portrait “The Fog of War.” Now, the three-time Oscar-nominated modernist composer and co-writer Paul Leonard-Morgan have crafted the original score for Morris’ John le Carré documentary “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the Apple TV+ documentary that opens Friday, October 20. Also premiering that day will be the film’s original soundtrack from Platoon, and IndieWire shares an exclusive track off the album below.

“It is our pleasure to share ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ soundtrack,” said Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan, adding that “the orchestral journey this score took us on, combing the cimbalom of ’60s espionage soundtracks with symphonic orchestral work, led to 80 minutes of score, almost the entirety of the film.”

The film centers on four days of interviews with le Carré in 2019 that...

Most people don’t get a text from Bono in the middle of the night.

But Jon Kamen, the CEO, chairman and co-founder of RadicalMedia, found himself fighting off jet lag on a recent business trip to Japan as he fielded messages from the U2 frontman. That pair had worked together on the One campaign, the musician’s push to eradicate AIDS and poverty in Africa, and this time Bono needed help launching ticketing for the band’s upcoming residency at Las Vegas’ newly launched venue, the Sphere. Kamen assured him that there was someone on staff who could help him.

“I said, ‘let me call this guy and see if he can come up with something,'” he remembers. “We needed to turn this thing around in ridiculous time. I go to bed in Japan. Bono gives me a good recommendation for a restaurant in Kyoto. I’m dreaming of sushi,...

Less a last will and testament than a mischievously mutual final troll, Errol Morris’s documentary The Pigeon Tunnel sees both its director and its subject, the late spy turned novelist John le Carré (né David Cornwell), engage in a circuitous dialogue, shot over four days near the end of 2019, that’s as charming and playful as it is oblique and ominous.

Contradictions abound, beginning with the film’s title visual, which is taken from le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name. It refers to a hotel in the Mediterranean that a young le Carré would visit with his father Ronnie, a career swindler. Pigeons were bred on the roof, and at certain points of the day the birds were forced to fly through a tunnel where they would emerge over the ocean and be shot at from below by wealthy clientele. Those that survived, rather than break for freedom,...

In “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Academy-Award winning documentarian Errol Morris explores the life and career of former British spy David Cornwell — better known as John le Carré, author of such classic espionage novels as “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Constant Gardener.” Set against the backdrop of the Cold War leading into present day, the 94-minute docu spans six decades. Archival footage, dramatized vignettes and Morris’ expert interviewing skills allow viewers to see and hear the late spy and author in a very candid light. (Cornwell died in December 2020.)

“The Pigeon Tunnel,” which draws on Cornwell’s bestselling memoir of the same name, is an Apple Original Films production. The doc will debut at TIFF on Sept. 11.

I read that Cornwell really liked “The Fog of War,” which was part of the reason why he agreed to do this project. Is that accurate?...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris unveiled his new documentary The Pigeon Tunnel – about the spy-turned-novelist David Cornwell, aka John le Carré – at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday. Audience buzz afterwards ranked it among Morris’s best work, a canon that includes the classics The Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven.

Morris said it took years for The Pigeon Tunnel to be completed. But during a Q&a, he referenced a different endeavor that apparently isn’t fated to come together – a nascent documentary project on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The controversial figure who guided American foreign policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations recently reached the century mark.

Henry Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday in Bavaria, June 20, 2023.

“Someone wanted me to interview quite recently, on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, Henry Kissinger,” Morris told the audience at the Chuck Jones Theater in Mountain Village. “And as my wife has pointed out,...

At the beginning of “The Pigeon Tunnel,” British author and former intelligence officer David Cornwell – better known to millions of readers by his pen name, John le Carré – sits down in front of Errol Morris’ camera and immediately starts asking questions of the director. Morris is best known for coaxing damning admissions out of his subjects, most notably when former U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara admitted U.S. mistakes in Vietnam in “The Fog of War.”

But if the art of the interview is to get the subject to relax and disclose things they might not ordinarily do, forget it: Cornwell was once an interrogator for British intelligence and he never forgets the dance he’s involved in. “This is a performance,” he says, “and you need to know something about the ambitions of the people you’re talking to.”

But make no mistake, Cornwell brought some of...

Errol Morris is set to release his latest documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel, which provides an intimate look at the life of legendary spy-turned-writer John le Carré. The documentary explores le Carré's ability to distinguish friend from foe, a skill honed during his time with MI5 and MI6, and takes its name from his memoir inspired by a childhood memory of witnessing a pigeon hunt. The Pigeon Tunnel was significant for le Carré and served as his chance to put his ultimate persona on the record, while also carefully constructing his legacy.

Errol Morris, renowned documentarian, is set to unveil his latest work, The Pigeon Tunnel, at the Telluride Film Festival. This captivating documentary provides a close and personal look at the life of David Cornwell, more widely recognized by his pseudonym, John le Carré, the legendary novelist who transitioned from being a spy to a writer. Although the Telluride lineup has only recently been revealed,...

Daniel Ellsberg, a onetime advisor to Nixon Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Rand Corp. analyst who leaked the 7,000-word secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post, has died. That, according to multiple reports. He was 92.

Ellsberg’s decision to provide top secret report, officially known as the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, and the newspapers’ decisions to publish it proved a turning point in the public’s attitude toward the war, President Richard Nixon and trust in the government.

It was also a landmark moment for a free press in America, as the resulting Supreme Court decision upheld the right of the Times and Post to publish the documents.

The events attending the leak, publication and court clash over the papers have been the subject of multiple film and TV projects,...

Daniel Ellsberg was responsible for setting off the string of notorious events in White House Plumbers. Although Ellsberg is not portrayed on-screen by an actor in HBO's new limited series, his presence is known and felt by the characters. Ellsberg is most famously known as the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg coming forward as a whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers would quickly alter the political landscape of the United States at the time, particularly in regard to President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.

White House Plumbers follows the story of the White House Special Investigations Unit that was formed in 1971 in response to the leak of the Pentagon Papers. The so-called Plumbers were tasked with fixing the leaks that would compromise President Nixon's chances of getting reelected. However, they were later employed to break into the Democratic National Committee at Watergate to rig their offices with secret microphones and audio surveillance.

Diedrich Bader has played the best friend before. He did it for nine seasons of The Drew Carey Show. He did it two decades later on Pamela Adlon’s meditative Better Things. He also did it plenty of other times in between. But something about being the Bob Odenkirk’s wingman on Lucky Hank, the AMC series based on Richard Russo’s 1997 novel Straight Man, made it feel different for Bader — a man whose IMDb tally currently stands at 237 acting credits.

“I had stopped feeling like an artist and more like a craftsman making cabinetry,” Bader says of his mindset before taking on the black comedy about aging academics. “There’s a lot of artistry in making cabinetry, but maybe once you’ve made too many, it’s like “Here’s another cabinet!” With this, I felt like “Here’s everything I’ve got. I can bring comedy, but I can also bring some reality.

Exclusive: Airbnb’s damage control strategy when things go wrong during a vacation stay is to be explored in a docuseries from Queer Eye producer Scout Productions and Bloomberg Media.

The two companies have teamed up to produce the series, which is based on Bloomberg Businessweek’s recent cover story – Airbnb is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away, written by Olivia Carville.

The series will look at the company’s overall operational procedures regarding safety incidents and criminal activity at some of its six million plus rentals around the world and will uncover the high-stakes workload of Airbnb’s secretive trust-and-safety team.

Through interviews with several former safety team agents and more than 20 Airbnb guests and hosts who have experienced incidents at listed properties, the series explores how a brand known for hospitality and comfort has developed an elite rapid response team to handle vacations that turn into nightmares.

“There is a four-hour version if you want to dig deeper,” said Oliver Stone when introducing his documentary “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass” in the Cannes Premiere section on Monday afternoon.

Those words were reminiscent of that dull best man’s speech gag about if you haven’t struck oil after ten minutes, stop boring. Because even after this two-hour version of talking heads, photostats of redacted files and some shocking shots of President Kennedy’s brain, we are no closer to anything like the truth.

Stone’s film is not a companion piece, making-of or follow-up to his all-star 1991 drama “JFK” (a director’s cut of which played in the Cinema de la Plage section on the beach the night before) but a procession of white, male authors and experts in boring shirts hectoring you with their theories and old books. Tarantino cinematographer Robert Richardson is credited with the photography,...

The January 6 assault on the Capitol by insurrectionists left many Americans shocked, ashamed, and glued to their TV sets. Errol Morris was one of them. For years, the filmmaker has documented the tragic and dangerous actions of powerful men and the lies they tell the world, most prominently in his Oscar-winning portrait of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. But the violent outbreak on Wednesday echoed a more-recent subject of Morris scrutiny: Steve Bannon.

“He is one of the evil geniuses behind it all,” Morris said in a phone call from his office on January 7. He’s got the proof on film with his 2019 documentary “American Dharma,” which pitted the director against Bannon, Trump’s notorious campaign director-turned-senior advisor, the alt-right hero and former Breitbart News publisher who exploited raging and disenfranchised white conspiracy theorists and cemented the seditious rage at the core of Trump’s base.

Bannon relishes his role.

Need a good real-life mystery to solve? TV audiences love them.

And documentary maker Errol Morris famously investigated a murder with The Thin Blue Line, a government LSD conspiracy with Wormwood and Robert McNamara’s role in history in Fog of War.

But, with My Psychedelic Love Story, which debuted on Showtime on Nov. 29, if you’re looking for Morris to solve the mystery of whether Joanna Harcourt-Smith was a 1970s CIA sex spy in a LSD-laced romp with Timothy Leary to return him to a California prison cell, expect few clues from his first-person interview.

“If people are interested ...

Need a good real-life mystery to solve? TV audiences love them.

And documentary maker Errol Morris famously investigated a murder with The Thin Blue Line, a government LSD conspiracy with Wormwood and Robert McNamara’s role in history in Fog of War.

But, with My Psychedelic Love Story, which debuted on Showtime on Nov. 29, if you’re looking for Morris to solve the mystery of whether Joanna Harcourt-Smith was a 1970s CIA sex spy in a LSD-laced romp with Timothy Leary to return him to a California prison cell, expect few clues from his first-person interview.

“If people are interested ...

Bradley Whitford was on The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Canadian set in mid-March, getting ready to shoot a scene for Season 4, when he realized that the coronavirus might just be a bigger deal than everyone was thinking.

“We were kind of joking about it,” he recalls. “I’m sitting, reading my cell phone, and I open an article where I’m reading for the first time, ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch your face.’ And while I was reading it, [a costume staffer] came and tweaked my scarf. [A makeup staffer] came by. Somebody brushed the hair off my forehead.” He chuckles wryly. “Pretty quickly, it became clear.

Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War is officially this year’s installment in the popular first-person shooter franchise. Revealed in a teaser in late August after days of teasing the game’s announcement, the sequel focus on the tensions between the United States and Russia during the height of the Cold War.

Yet, although the teaser did a good job of setting up the general themes and conflict of the new game, it still left plenty of questions to answer. How will the new game work in tandem with Modern Warfare‘s current Warzone battle royale mode? Or will Cold War get its own battle royale mode for players to obsess over?

Most important of all, since Treyarch and Raven Software are developing Cold War together, does this mean that the new Call of Duty game will have a Zombies mode?

At the moment, we don’t know, but...

“There’s something about the nature of the writing on the show,” remarked The Handmaid’s Tale star Bradley Whitford. “It refuses to take an easy journey.”

Anyone who has been following June’s journey for the last three seasons would agree with that description. The finale of Season 3 left a cliffhanger when June, played by Elisabeth Moss, who successfully freed 52 children from the tyrannical Gilead, is shot in the process, but is saved by her fellow handmaids.

Whitford added, “I think we would all say that we’re beneficiaries of this very complex, writing, which refuses for the sake of a story to give June an easy way out, which I think is an effort to do justice to people who are in situations like this and have been in situations.”

The veteran actor called Commander Lawrence the most fascinating character he has ever played and revealed an inspiration.

“He reminds me of Robert McNamara,...

The director of Sergio and many docs talks about docs and movies taken from true stories.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Sergio (2009)

Sergio (2020)

Reds (1981)

The Two Popes (2019)

Rules Don’t Apply (2016)

Bulworth (1998)

Dick Tracy (1990)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

Innerspace (1987)

Ishtar (1987)

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

Man On Wire (2008)

The Fog of War (2003)

American Dharma (2018)

Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (2016)

The Killing Fields (1984)

The Year of Living Dangerously (1983)

Under Fire (1983)

Salvador (1986)

The Quiet American (2002)

The Quiet American (1958)

A Private War (2018)

The War Room (1993)

The Final Year (2017)

Independence Day (1996)

Citizen Kane (1941)

Bloodsport (1988)

Bloodsport II: The Next Kumite (1996)

When We Were Kings (1996)

Soul Power (2008)

High School (1968)

Hospital (1970)

Titicut Follies (1967)

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (2007)

Before Night Falls (2000)

At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

American Factory (2019)

Dina (2017)

Honeyland (2019)

The Act of Killing (2012)

The English Patient (1996)

Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Purple Noon (1960)

Other Notable Items

Sergio Aragonés

Wagner Moura

Narcos TV...

Bradley Whitford plays Commander Joseph Lawrence on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” He won an Emmy last year in Best Drama Guest Actor and is now competing as a supporting actor for the upcoming awards.

Whitford recently spoke with Gold Derby senior editor Rob Licuria about the complicated nature of Commander Lawrence, playing alongside Elisabeth Moss and his feelings on awards. Watch the exclusive interview above and read the complete transcript below.

SEEElisabeth Moss Interview: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Gold Derby: Bradley, the guy is really complicated. He’s in a position of power and privilege but there’s this fascinating undercurrent of sorrow and empathy with him. How did that side of him develop when you and the show’s writers were bringing him to life?

Bradley Whitford: I’m a very lucky guy in terms of the parts that I have been able to play. This role is absolutely the most fascinating to perform.

Veteran actor David Schramm, who portrayed airline owner Roy Biggins on Wings for eight seasons, has died at the age of 73, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Schramm’s passing was announced Sunday by his publicist, Rick Miramontez, who said the actor died in New York. No additional details were given.

More from TVLineTim Daly Memorializes the True Casualty of Wings' Big Plane CrashJoe Exotic Casting Call: Which Actor's Got the Eye of the Tiger (King)? Vote!TVLine Items: Genius: Aretha Delayed, Bernie Visits Late Night and More

The actor’s career spanned four decades, including his stint on Wings from...

David Schramm, a stage actor who was also a star on the NBC comedy “Wings,” has died. He was 73.

Schramm was a founding member of New York’s The Acting Company, which announced the news of his death on Sunday.

He played Roy Biggins, the rival airline owner on “Wings,” and appeared in all 172 episodes between 1990 and 1997. Throughout his 40-year career, Schramm also appeared in the TV movie “The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story” in 1990 and played Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the miniseries “Kennedy.” His film credits include “Let It Ride,” “Johnny Handsome” and “A Shock to the System.”

He graduated from New York City’s Julliard School and appeared in productions on and off-Broadway, at the New York Theatre Workshop, Pasadena Playhouse, George Street Playhouse, Washington D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company and more. His theater credits include Alan Ayckbourn’s “Bedroom Face” and the 2009 revival of “Finian’s Rainbow.

The Washington Post this week released a blockbuster expose called “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.”

After a lengthy legal battle, the Post got hold of documents compiled by Sigar, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. John Sopko, the Inspector General, interviewed over 600 people connected to the Afghan war effort to prepare a series of reports called “Lessons Learned,” which purported to explain what had gone wrong since America’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The “Lessons Learned” reports were critical, but “left out the harshest and...

The Library of Congress has revealed the 25 movies that will be preserved as part of the National Film Registry for 2019. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden revealed this year's selections, including seven titles directed by women, which is an unparalleled number. Some of the other key additions this year include Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Kevin Smith's directorial debut Clerks.

This year's Library of Congress selections directed by women include Kimberly Peirce's Oscar-winning Boys Don't Cry, Greta Schiller's documentary Before Stonewall, Claudia Weill's Girlfriends, Gunvor Nelson's My Name Is Oona, Elaine May's A New Leaf, Patricia Cardoso's Real Women Have Curves and Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody. 1971's A New Leaf is important, as May became the first woman to write, direct and star in a major feature released by an American studio. I Am Somebody also has a great deal of cultural significance,...

Purple Rain, The Last Waltz, Platoon, She’s Gotta Have It and Clerks were among the 25 films added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, the organization announced Wednesday.

2019’s list of motion pictures — selected for their “cultural, historic and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage” — include an “unprecedented” seven films by female directors, including Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, Elaine May’s A New Leaf and Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves.

In addition to Prince’s 1984 classic and Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the Band’s all-star farewell gig,...

The Library of Congress has unveiled its annual selection of 25 films added to the National Film Registry, with an unprecedented seven titles directed by women, the most in a single year since the inaugural registry in 1989. (Scroll down for the full list.)

Among those making the cut for 2019 are Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 Oscar winner Boys Don’t Cry; Greta Schiller’s 1984 documentary Before Stonewall; Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends; Gunvor Nelson’s 1969 avant-garde pic My Name Is Oona; Elaine May’s A New Leaf, which in 1971 made her the first woman to write, direct and star in a major American studio feature; the 2002 indie Real Women Have Curves, directed by Patricia Cardoso; and Madeline Anderson’s 1970 I Am Somebody, which is considered the first documentary on civil rights directed by a woman of color.

Also notably added to the Film Registry are such classics as George Cukor’s 1944 Gaslight, which won...

“Purple Rain,” “Clerks,” “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Amadeus,” “Sleeping Beauty,””Boys Don’t Cry” and “The Last Waltz” are among this year’s additions to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

The list also includes 1944’s “Gaslight,” starring Ingrid Bergman in an Oscar-winning performance; the 1955 film noir “The Phenix City Story,” based on a real-life murder in Alabama; Disney’s 1959 canine tearjerker “Old Yeller”; Oliver Stone’s 1986 Best Picture winner “Platoon,” based on his own experiences in Vietnam; and Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit,” which tells the story of the 1943 Sleepy Lagoon Murder and the racially charged riots that followed.

A place on the list — always made up of 25 films — guarantees the film will be preserved under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act. The criteria for selection is that the movies are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant.

“The National Film Registry has become...

Errol Morris’ American Dharma Screens at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium(470 E Lockwood Ave) Sunday December 8th through Tuesday December 10th. The film begins each evening at 7:00pm. A Facebook invite for the event can be found Here

MacArthur Genius Grant winner Errol Morris has long been attracted to those on the fringes of society and/or problematic figures. He has made past documentaries about people on death row (The Thin Blue Line), those involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal (Standard Operating Procedure), a Holocaust denier (Mr. Death), Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known), and Robert McNamara. And yet American Dharma, a feature-length interview with Steve Bannon, is the Morris film that has most struck a cultural nerve. Never one to shy away from tangling with controversy, and more than capable at holding his own in an interview when need be, Morris offers American Dharma as a vital text to...

As Robert Schenkkan’s The Great Society begins pulling you back back back to a cultural moment that rivals our own in meanness, division and barrel-scraping crumminess, Brian Cox would seem to have the toughest job on Broadway. Portraying the accidental president who succeeded the martyred one only to land waste deep in one big muddy after another, Cox must convince his audience that he can match, hog-tie and serve up like so much barbecue a personality as big as the Lone Star State itself.

I mean, just imagine having to follow Bryan Cranston.

If you’ve seen HBO’s robust Succession, you already know Cox seems up for just about any challenge tossed his way, including the role of Lyndon Baines Johnson in the second of Schenkkan’s two-part bio-drama. The first installment, All The Way, debuted on Broadway in 2014, winning Cranston a Tony Award for his uncanny performance...

Robert Schenkkan’s Broadway-bound The Great Society, his second Lbj play following the celebrated All The Way, has completed casting and set an opening night for Tuesday, October 1 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

Joining the previously announced Brian Cox (as Lyndon B. Johnson) will be Marchánt Davis as Stokely Carmichael, Brian Dykstra as Adam Walinsky, Barbara Garrick as Lady Bird Johnson, David Garrison as Richard Nixon, Ty Jones as Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Christopher Livingston as James Bevel, Angela Pierce as Pat Nixon, Matthew Rauch as Robert McNamara, Nikkole Salter as Coretta Scott King and Tramell Tillman as Bob Moses.

Previews begin on the previously announced Friday, September 6 for a strictly limited 12-week engagement.

The newcomers join the previously announced Cox, Grantham Coleman as Martin Luther King Jr., Marc Kudisch as Richard J. Daley, Bryce Pinkham as Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Frank Wood as Senator Everett Dirksen, Gordon Clapp as J. Edgar Hoover,...

Brian Cox, star of HBO’s “Succession,” will play Lyndon B. Johnson in this fall’s Broadway production of Robert Schenkkan’s “The Great Society” — the follow-up to his Tony-winning play “All the Way” that secured Bryan Cranston a Tony of his own as the Texas political giant who became the 36th president of the United States.

Performances will begin a 12-week run on September 6 for a still-to-be-announced official opening at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. The show includes two dozen locations and 50 characters, including Richard J. Daley, Martin Luther King Jr. and Hubert Humphrey (Richard Thomas).

Actors playing Richard Nixon, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Coretta Scott King, Lady Bird Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Governor George Wallace and Robert McNamara are still to be cast.

Bill Rauch (“All the Way”) will direct the production, which depicts the tumultuous times that led to the conclusion of the Johnson presidency...

He may not have sought nor did he accept a return to the White House, but Lyndon B. Johnson is coming back to Broadway: The Great Society, a companion play to Robert Schenkkan’s Tony-winning All The Way, will begin performances in September, with Brian Cox as the 36th President of the United States.

Also in the cast will be Richard Thomas, Marc Kudisch and Grantham Coleman (Amazon Studio’s upcoming Against All Enemies) making his Broadway debut as Martin Luther King Jr.

All The Way won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Play and Bryan Cranston took the Tony for his lead role as Lbj. All The Way director Bill Rauch will return in that capacity for The Great Society.

While the earlier play chronicled Lbj’s efforts on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new play depicts the tumultuous events building to the conclusion of the Johnson...

The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Commander Lawrence has shown an extreme willingness to aid women rebelling against the show’s misogynistic central regime. Which is ironic, Bradley Whitford muses, because the architect of Gilead literally never sticks his neck out for anyone.

The character wears a scarf wrapped up to his chin in nearly every scene, a concept Whitford recalls bubbled up during costume fittings. “I wanted a brazenness about him, but I wanted it to be protected,” he tells TVLine, adding that he’d just watched a piece about the language of necks in nature (“Human beings in bars,...

(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Season 3 of “The Handmaid’s Tale”)

Commander Joseph Lawrence is an enigma, even to Bradley Whitford, who plays the character — one of the architects of Gilead — on Season 3 of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“The fun thing about this guy, and the horrible thing, is that he is filled with contradictions,” Whitford told TheWrap. “And the basic way I think about this guy is like Robert McNamara, the guy who ran the war in Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson. He was a brilliant, brilliant businessman and economic thinker who revolutionized the auto industry and then took all that brilliance and exterminated a couple million people in Southeast Asia. And I think Lawrence is a guy with a big brain that has obliterated his humanity. And I think when you meet him, what you are seeing are the unconscious beginnings of his humanity coming back.

David Crow Oct 1, 2018

Errol Morris' new documentary, American Dharma, attempts to get honest answers out of Steve Bannon. That might be an impossible task.

There should be no fear of addressing a political opponent, even one as perilous as Steve Bannon, in an honest and genuine discourse. This principle (and the media attention it would generate) is precisely what the New Yorker Festival attempted to renew last month when Bannon was invited to share a dialogue about his frankly repugnant ideas. In a sincere debate of political beliefs—such as the kind Errol Morris pursues in his new documentary about the banished Trump advisor and happy nationalist—Bannon’s rooted ideology of bigotry, cynicism, and a crude rationalization for the worst excesses of greed masquerading as capitalism would disintegrate.

Yet while attempting to make that picture in American Dharma, Morris finds himself ultimately negotiating the finer points of a deal with the proverbial Devil.

The market at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival wasn’t sleepy, as some of the hottest sales titles found eager buyers over the course of the 10-day gathering: from Focus Features buying the campy Neil Jordan-Isabelle Huppert team-up “Greta” to Neon picking up Brady Corbet’s wild Natalie Portman pop star saga “Vox Lux” and A24 nabbing Clarie Denis’ space opera “High Life,” plenty of Tiff breakouts found homes. Nevertheless, Tiff features a massive lineup and many strong movies failed to close deals before the festival concluded. Here are some of the highlights that still need homes.

“Angelo”

Markus Schleinzer follows up his daring character study “Michael,” which focused on the experiences of a young child kidnapped by a pedophile, with another disturbing look at a boy kidnapped and forced to participate in a lifestyle beyond his control. This time, the setting is 18th century Vienna,...

It’s impossible to separate American Dharma, the latest film from legendary documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, from the controversy surrounding its subject. Steve Bannon—former Trump campaign/administration advisor and guru of the so-dubbed “alt-right” movement with his former far-right propaganda news site Breitbart that he helped popularize alongside the late Andrew Breitbart—recently found himself “pulled from” the New Yorker festival of “ideas” when people fairly questioned the point of giving his “ideas” a platform. The broad strokes of his rhetoric are saving America’s economy and bringing about jobs through racist dog-whistle nationalism, disrupting the elite class of bureaucratic politicians, and even more unregulated trickledown economics—a policy a lot of Democratic and Republican elites already agree with him on (remember that “tax bill”?) despite the evidence that it is responsible for creating more wealth inequality than ever.

Which is why going into Errol Morris’ third installment of...

After Ken Burns’ exhaustive, comprehensive documentary series The Vietnam War aired last year there was little in the way of answers to the lingering question of how something as catastrophic as the Vietnam War was allowed to happen. The most common answer is that the United States were afraid of the spread of communism as Mao and his following had seized China. With Russia in lock-step, they feared the rest of Asia falling and considered Vietnam the last stand. Everyone now in hindsight knows that this was not a just war or a civil one, but a battle of a hypothetical fear that hadn’t been proven. President Kennedy and Robert McNamara were going to end things before it got even worse and Vietnam became a chess piece in a long-gestating cold war, but what they hadn’t fully considered was that Vietnam had a right to govern itself, especially after France occupied the land,...