KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), discusses the current retrospective of the films of the great Belgian-French film maker Agnes Varda (1928-2019) with host Richard Wolinsky.

Agnes Varda began her career as a stills photographer and became a director with La Point Courte (1954), having seen very few films in her life. She went on to international fame with Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond, but her late life films The Beaches of Agnes and Faces, Places established her as one of the most important directors of the modern era.

All the films discussed in this interview (except the new documentary Viva Varda!) are available to stream on the Criterion app, save for Faces, Places, which can be streamed on Kanopy. Cleo from 5 to 7 can also be streamed on Max.

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Roz Chast, New Yorker cartoonist, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky.

A regular cartoonist for the New Yorker since 1978, Roz Chast has developed a following for her quirky, strange and funny cartoons.. She started out in the National Lampoon and Village Voice but has since become a regular and familiar artist in the New Yorker.

Roz Chast website

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​​​​​Burton Lane, Broadway and Hollywood composer and sometime lyricist, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, August 17, 1992 in New York.

Burton Lane, who died at the age of 84 in 1997, was best known for composing the scores for the hit Broadway shows Finian’s Rainbow (with E.Y. (Yip) Harburg) and On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (with Alan J. Lerner). As a teenager, he was considered a protégé of George Gershwin, and was close to the Gershwin family until he moved to Los Angeles to compose songs for a variety of different musicals, including the Fred Astaire film, Royal Wedding . His other Broadway show, Carmelina, was produced in 1979.

In 1992, after creating a radio documentary about Leonard Bernstein,Richard Wolinsky embarked on another documentary on the life and music of George Gershwin, which started with a Morning Concert program featuring Ira Gershwin’s nephew Michael Strunsky and Gershwin expert Deena Rosenberg. That was followed followed with interviews with Michael’s father English Strunsky, with Ira Gershwin’s archivist, later a noted cabaret performer, Michael Feinstein, and New York Grande Dame Kitty Carlisle, who dated George Gershwin in the 1930s. This interview as the fifth of seven interviews, after which for personal reasons, the project was abandoned.

Burton Lane’s dreams of a new Broadway show never reached fruition, and he died at the age of 84 five years after the interview. However, three songs he wrote for the film version of On A Clear Day that were cut for the original Broadway production found their way into a revival in 2011, which had a very short run but which is performed in regional theaters from time to time.

Special thanks to Ernie Harburg, son of Burton Lane’s lyricist E.Y. Yip Harburg, and to Gershwin historian Deena Rosenberg Harburg for their assistance in setting up this, and the other interviews in the Gershwin Project.

George Gershwin was born in 1898 and his brother Ira two years earlier. At the age of 15 he took a job as a song-plugger, playing other people’s songs on a piano for Remick Music Publisher for the sale of their sheet music. His first composed song was published when he was 17, and at 21 he scored his first big hit, Swanee. But it wasn’t until 1924 when he teamed up with his brother Ira as lyricist that George Gershwin became, what we might call a superstar, which he remained until his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1937. Ira Gershwin, who went on to work with other composers until he retired in the early 1960s, died in 1983.

The Gershwin Project

Interview I: English Strunsky, Ira Gershwin’s brother-in-law and George’s wingman in the 1920s.

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David Thomson, film critic and historian, discusses his latest book, “The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film” with host Richard Wolinsky.

Author of over forty books, most of which deal with film and film history, David Thomson here discusses how movies have influenced how our society sees and understands war. He is hosting war films at Pacific Film Archive on March 13 (Paths of Glory), March 20 (They Shall Not Grow Old) and March 27 (1917).

In the interview, he talks about how war films rarely focus on the reasons why individual wars are fought, the soldier mentality, the two World Wars on film, fascism and resistance on film, along with such films as Black Hawk Down, The Deer Hunter and A Man Escapes.

Special thanks to AJ Fox and Susan Oxtoby of Pacific Film Archive, where the interview was recorded. Photo of David Thomson: Richard Wolinsky.

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Otessa Moshfegh, recorded while on tour for the acclaimed short story collection, “Homesick for Another World, in the KPFA studios on February 2, 2017. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky. First posted March 28, 2017.

The author of the highly acclaimed novel, short-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, “Eileen,” Otessa Moshfegh is the daughter of an Iranian father and Croatian mother, both forced out of Iran following the 1979 revolution. Her stories are filled with dark humor, focusing on how we feel about our bodies and our lives in this physical universe. Her vision is very idiosyncratic.

She is currently the author of four novels, most recently Death in her Hands in 2020 and Lapvona in 2022. Otessa Moshfegh is also listed as co-writer for the 2022 film “Causeway,” which is now streaming via an Apple+ subscription.

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Robert Stone (1937-2015), author of “Dog Soldiers,” “A Flag for Sunrise” and “Damascus Gate,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios on January 25, 2007 during the book tour for  his memoir, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.”

Robert Stone, who died on January 10th, 2015 at the age of 77, won the National Book Award in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers and was a finalist four other times, and twice was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among his other books were the critically acclaimed A Flag for Sunrise, set in war-torn Central America, and Damascus Gate, set in the conflicted city of Jerusalem. His memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, is one of the best books written about the counterculture.

Robert Stone’s books tend to have complicated characters existing during complex political and social turmoil. Two of his books became films, Hall of Mirrors became WUSA, and Dog Soldiers became Who’ll Stop the Rain, an excellent film that was dumped by the studio.

Following the interview, only three books were published. In 2010 it was a collection of short stories referred to in the interview, Fun with Problems. The novel Death of the Black Haired Girl, was published in 2013, and a collection of non-fiction The Eye You See With, was published posthumously in 2020.

Interview from 2003.

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Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded November 8, 1993 while on tour for the novel “Sacred Clowns.” This is the second of four interviews.Digitized, remastered and edited in February 2024 by Richard Wolinsky. This interview has not been heard in three decades.

Tony Hillerman, who died in 2008 at the age of 83. Was a master of the detective genre and an important writer in detailing life on the Navajo reservation. His several novels featuring Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee have been acclaimed for their accuracy and for their ability to combine Navajo history and thought into strong plot-driven novels.

Notes on the interview:

The film The Dark Wind, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Chee and Fred Ward as Joe Leaphorn was directed by Errol Morris, who became better known as a director of documentaries such as The Fog of War. It can be rented via Apple or Amazon. The second season of Dark Winds is based on the novel People of Darkness and features the character based on the killer that Tony Hillerman met in prison.

A Thief of Time became a film in 2003 with Adam Beach as Chee and Wes Studio as Joe Leaphorn. The book Tony Hillerman talks about as an example of a literary mystery is The Late Man by James Preston Girard, published in September 1993. According to Amazon, that is and was his only novel. The non-Navajo novel he was writing at the time of the interview, Finding Moon, was published in 1996 and is discussed in the third Tony Hillerman interview, from 1997, which has yet to be digitized. Anne Hillerman has continued the Leaphorn Chee series, and the next book, Lost Birds, will be published in April 2024.

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Walter Mosley in conversation with Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, recorded October 25, 1992 in the KPFA studios while on tour for the novel, “White Butterfly.”

Today, Walter Mosley is one of America’s leading authors. He is best known for his series of mystery novels featuring the characters of Easy Rawlins and Mouse, now numbering fifteen, seventeen novels in other series, sixteen other novels, a collection of short stories, six works of non-fiction, plus screenplays and teleplays.

But on October 25th, 1992, he was at the beginning of his career when Probabilities co-hosts Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky spoke with Walter Mosley in the KPFA studios about his latest Easy Rawlings novel, White Butterfly, his third book and the third in the series following Devil in a Blue Dress and A Red Death.

Black Betty would follow White Butterfly in 1994. The most recent Easy Rawlins novel is Blood Grove, published in 2021. Devil in a Blue Dress became a film released in 1995 using the screenplay discussed in the interview, directed by Carl Franklin and starring Denzel Washington. Mouse was played by Don Cheadle in a career breakout role. Thus far, that’s the only Easy Rawlins film. In 2022, Samuel L. Jackson starred in a TV miniseries titled The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray, based on Walter Mosley’s book, and primarily written by Walter Mosley. At present, an adaptation of his novel The Man in My Basement is in pre-production. The next Easy Rawlins novel, Farewell Amethystine will be published in June 2024.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited on February 10, 2024 by Richard Wolinsky. It has not been heard in thirty years. This is the first of five interviews, to date, with Walter Mosley.

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Kate Wilhelm (1928-2018), award-winning science fiction and detective novelist, in conversation with Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios, August 5, 1996. while on tour for her novel, “Malice Prepense,” (later renamed “For The Defense”).

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Bushman, a film by David Schickele

Film director Rob Nillson, Activist and Environmentalist Gail Schickele, and Film Archivist Jon Shibata in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded January 25, 2024 at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

Released in 1971 but filmed in 1968, the film “Bushman” is a masterpiece detailing the story of a Nigerian educator in San Francisco. The film vanished following its showing at various film festivals, and has now been digitized and restored, and will be shown at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley on February 4th and 24th, with a theatrical release coming across the country from Kino/Lorber and Milestone Films.

This discussion with Gail Schickele, wife of the late director David Schickele (1937-1999), his friend, colleague and collaborator director Rob Nillson, and BAMPFA film archivist John Shibata focuses first on “Bushman” and David Schickele, how the film came about and what happened during and after the filming, and later with the film’s restoration, and a look at Rob Nillson’s career as film-maker.

Special thanks to AJ Fox and Susan Oxtoby of Pacific Film Archive.

Front photo: BAM/PFA. Inside photo: Richard Wolinsky.

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