Jewish History & Culture
171 posts found
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Delightful Offensiveness Key to 'Producers' Genius
src="http://www.s121907096.onlinehome.us/tommywood/articleImages/producers.06.06.03.jpg" width="200" height="222" align="right" vspace="5" hspace="10"/>To understand something of the success of "The Producers," it helps to understand something of its history. There is probably no person on the planet who doesn’t know the story of how this sensation of a musical came to pass, but let me quickly recap: In the early ’60s, Mel Brooks writes the book for the Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical "All American." Their last musical "Bye Bye Birdie" was a hit. "All American" was not.… -
Campus Campaign
Hollywood launches ads to spark student support for Israel. While leafing through their college newspapers Monday morning, students at several major Southern California universities came across a full-page advertisement featuring Barad Zemer, a 23-year-old Israeli film student. Beneath Zemer’s photograph it read: “I love filmmaking, jazz and photography. I hate the image I carry of my classmate and his pregnant wife dying in a terrorist’s hail of bullets.†The appearance of the ad marked the launch of a $400,000 marketing… -
Polanski Hits a Sour Note in 'Pianist'
Truth to tell, I didn’t start to despise “The Pianist†— Roman’s Polanski’s Oscar-nominated film of concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs of Warsaw during World War II — until the very end of the film: The war has ended and a friend has taken Szpilman to a farm in the Polish countryside. There used to be a Soviet POW camp there, where the Nazi officer who spared Szpilman was asking for him. Now there is no trace of that internment…