Search Results for: movies

In Conversation: Jon Stewart

Longreads Pick

An interview with the Daily Show host about making movies, the 2016 election, and why everybody loves Stephen Colbert.

Published: Nov 2, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,043 words)

Joan Rivers: 1933-2014

Joan Rivers, comedy legend, has died at age 81. Three stories from the Longreads Archive:

The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers (Terry Gross, NPR)

GROSS: So, like, that’s kind of a paradox to me that you live to be on stage and at the same time, there’s this dread of being on stage.

Ms. RIVERS: Not a dread of being on stage, a dread of not doing well, of disappointing them. I you know, I always you think I have one friend who’s a very good, very, very famous comedian, comic, who once said to me: I give them five minutes. If they don’t like me, I go on automatic.

And I thought: They have bought the tickets, they have paid for a babysitter, they have come out to see you. They want to have fun. I want them to walk out of a show and say, that’s the best show I’ve ever seen.

I fight to the end. I worry to the end, worry are they having a good time?

 

Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny (Jonathan Van Meter, New York magazine, 2010)

At the age of 76, it seems, she has been rediscovered. Much of it has to do with a new documentary about her life, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which opens in theaters on June 11. Roger Ebert wrote, in one of the film’s many rave reviews, that it is “one of the most truthful documentaries about show business I’ve seen. Also maybe the funniest.” The film comes at the end of a remarkable year for Rivers, one that began when she won The Celebrity Apprentice (after one of the uglier reality-TV showdowns), outfoxing all those bimbos, has-beens, and two-bit poker players to emerge—somehow—as the sympathetic character. At long last, not fired! It’s unfamiliar territory for Rivers: to be the one people root for.

 

The Playboy Interview: Joan Rivers (1986)

I didn’t realize what a liberated lady I was. I always said, “My life is liberated. Leave me alone. I have no time to join a movement, because I am the movement.” I didn’t have time to go up to anyone and say, “Go out and make it in a man’s world.” I just said, “Look at me and you can see what I’m doing.” I never wanted to say that because I was a woman, things were harder for me or I was judged separately. It took two incidents — my book and this business about leaving the Carson show — to turn me around. With my book, as I said, women seem to understand it more than men. And when I left The Tonight Show, I got such good wishes, such support from women. I didn’t realize how nice it was that women were behind what I did. It’s wonderful.

It’s 1969 And This Is Robert Lanza’s First Time Experimenting with Embryos.

His best friend’s mom laughed when Lanza told her he wanted to become a doctor. “You’d probably make a very good carpenter,” she said. When Lanza announced his plan for the school science fair—he would alter a chicken’s genetics and turn it from white to black—his classmates giggled and his teacher said it was impossible. It’s a word he’ll hear many times.

Down in the basement, wedged between the furnace and clothes dryer, a homemade Styrofoam incubator on the table in front of him, he’s decided the chicken experiment is challenging, but not impossible. He talked his way into syringes and penicillin at local hospitals and borrowed tabletop centrifuges from a guy across town who works for the state health agency. His neighbor drove him to local farms so he could gather eggs from white chickens and black ones. Now he’s been working in the furnace room for months, trying to introduce pigmented genes into white embryos while his mom stands in the kitchen telling her friends that “Robby is downstairs trying to hatch chicken eggs.” Not quite, Mom, he thinks.

Eventually several white chicks will emerge from their eggs with brown spots. Lanza will drop by Harvard Medical School to get help repeating the results, and in a scene straight out of the movies, he’ll mistake the founder of Harvard’s neurobiology department for a janitor. Stephen Kuffler, “the father of modern neuroscience,” won’t mind a bit. He’ll introduce Lanza to a graduate student who will later become director of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science, and who will spend hours chatting with the eager teen about his chicken project.

Molly Petrilla, writing in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the early life of Dr. Robert Lanza. Dr. Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells.

Read the story

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Let’s Be Real

Longreads Pick

Wesley Morris examines the depiction of race and police officers in movies, and juxtaposes it against the shooting in Ferguson.

Source: Grantland
Published: Aug 15, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,846 words)

The Believer Interview: Ice Cube

Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words)

 

The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community.

* * *

‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’

Before rap music, New York might as well have been:

Paris


Africa


Australia


A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube

* * *

Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.

Read more…

How Many People Does It Take To Power Times Square?

Times Square is one big, busy machine. Powered by American ingenuity and more than a few megawatts of electricity, these six square blocks stay bright 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve seen Times Square in movies and on TV a million times. A lot of you have probably seen it in real life, teeming with chaos and glowing with capitalism. But how exactly does all that work? The shops and restaurants are one thing, but what exactly makes Times Square such a functional, perpetual spectacle?

That’s a complicated question. Obviously there are the workers themselves. Times Square supports some 385,000 jobs, a little over half of which are in that bright sliver of Midtown, while the other half are strewn across the country supporting Times Square operations from designing the content on the signs to keeping the power plants that power them on line. All together, they help generate about 11 percent of New York City’s economic output, or about $110 billion annually, according to the latest figures. These are the men and women who man the ticket booths, who sell the T-shirts, who clean the hotel rooms, and who keep everyone safe. And since about 350,000 pedestrians pass through Times Square on an average day—that number jumps to 460,000 on the busiest days—that’s no small task.

Adam Clark Estes, writing in Gizmodo about how Times Square—”New York City’s biggest gadget”—operates.

Read the story

More stories from Gizmodo

Photo: Chalky Lives, Flickr

The Story of H.M.: The Amnesiac Who Profoundly Changed the Way We Think About Memory

Sam Kean | The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons | 2014 | 12 minutes (3,008 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, a new book from science reporter Sam Kean looking at stories about the brain and the history of neuroscience. Here’s Kean:

In our minds, we more or less equate our identities with our memories; our very selves seem the sum total of all we’ve done and felt and seen. That’s why we cling to our memories so hard, even to our detriment sometimes—they seem the only bulwark we have against the erosion of the self. That’s also why disorders that rob us of our memories seem so cruel.

In the excerpt below, I explore one of the most profound cases of amnesia in medical history, H.M., who taught us several important things about how memory works. Perhaps most important, he taught us that different types of memories exist in the brain, and that each type is controlled by different structures. In fact, H.M. so profoundly changed our ideas about memory that it’s hard to remember what things were like before him.

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

Read more…

Falling in Love, 30 Years Later

At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage:

The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The television was on in our living room. In front of it, my father sat on the couch, my mother cradled in his arms. She was fast asleep, her cheek pressed to his chest.

I went inside. Though I hardly made a sound, my mother woke up. She blinked quietly, than sprang up with the realization that I was there. “I was asleep!” she said, as if I’d accused her of something. Then she got up and took herself to bed, disappearing down the hallway. My father gave me a funny grin and followed her. I stood alone in front of the television clutching my heart, which I suddenly realized was not a mere figure of speech.

Flying back to New York, I could not stop thinking one thing: Why now? Why this sudden attraction to someone who had been there the whole time? Sure, it’s a plot staple in American movies, where clumsy, high-cheekboned beauties regularly realize their “best friend” just happens to be Justin Timberlake, but in real life? In real life, my parents had bypassed that kind of irresistible attraction with almost three decades of houses, children, and pets. In real life, their marriage had proved to be a patchwork of incongruities, the kind that were bound to exist between a cosmopolitan girl from Bombay and a small-town boy from outside Madras.

Read the story

Photo: Cindy Funk

A Brief History of Disney

Walt Disney, from the 1937 trailer for "Snow White," via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a reading list exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act. Read more…

Video Games and Their Potential for Storytelling

At The Awl, Maria Bustillos talks to Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward about the magic behind his wildly popular cartoon series that’s beloved by both children and adults. Here, Ward talks about his love of video games and their potential for storytelling:

Oh man, the intensely emotional storytelling in games like ‘Gone Home’… it’s through the roof! The wild goosebumps I experienced after ‘Gone Home,’ I felt like I was in the body of a different person… a VERY different person haha! I don’t want to spoil it, but it was wild to feel so intimately connected with the character in that game. Movies and books transport you to a place where you’re along for the ride, games make you drive the thing forward. That’s especially true in scary games, because instead of shouting “Don’t go in that room!” …you’re the one taking the steps forward towards that room. It’s huge. I think games are a thing you can’t fully appreciate until you play them.

I’ve been to game conventions where games are being projected on screens all around you, they all look nice and it’s fun to see how visually appealing they are… but unless you wait in line and play them… you’ll leave there without knowing how they can pull so many good feelings out of yah. But for emotional storytelling in games, Gone Home is the front runner at the moment…. There’s plenty of games play on moral decision making… in ‘Red Dead Redemption,’ a hermit sent me on a quest to decimate the wild Bigfoots who were terrorizing him. I sought out and killed all of the Bigfoots…. I killed them from a distance, they never attacked me. Then I found the final Bigfoot who was sitting by a tree and crying… he told me that I had murdered his ENTIRE FAMILY!!! I still feel HORRRRRIBLE ABOUT IT! He wanted me to SHOOT HIM because he no longer WANTED TO LIVE! It was miserable!!!

Read the story

Photo: Wikimedia Commons