KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

In honor of Pride Month, an interview with Armistead Maupin, recorded in January 2015 with host Richard Wolinsky.

Armistead Maupin is the author of the legendary “Tales of the City Series.” The final book in the series, “The Days of Anna Madrigal” was published in 2014 and at the time of the interview had just been released in trade paperback. In this interview, Maupin talks about the entire Tales series, about the musical version that played in San Francisco, about the TV series, and about the various characters. “Tales of the City: the Musical,” which played at ACT’s Geary Theatre in 2011, streams as part of Pride festivities June 21 through June 27, 2021. For more information, go to the ACT website.

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Paul Rudnick, author of the novel “Playing the Palace,” and the teleplay for the HBO film “Coastal Elites,” in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Playwright, screenwriter and novelist Paul Rudnick’s latest novel, “Playing the Palace,” is the story of a gay man living in New York who falls in love with a gay Prince of Wales, and what ensues. His recent film, “Coastal Elites,” with Bette Midler, Dan Levy and others, is a contemporary account of life during the first half of 2020 when the awfulness of Donald Trump met the awfulness of the Covid-19 pandemic, seen as five separate monologues.

Paul Rudnick has a long career as a playwright, with such plays as “Jeffrey,” his view of the AIDS epidemic and how an HIV-negative man deals with the crisis, “I Hate Hamlet,” and “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.” His screenplays include “Addams Family Values,” “In and Out,” and “Sister Act.” He is currently working on a musical version of “The Devil Wears Prada,” based on the screenplay, for which he was one of several script doctors.

Paul Rudnick is also the author of film reviews by Libby Waxman-Gellmer, which have appeared in both Premiere Magazine and The New Yorker.

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An interview with legendary author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), conducted for KPFA’s Probabilities radio program in 1988, digitized and re-edited in 2016 by Richard Wolinsky. This podcast was previously posted on May 13, 2016.

J. G. Ballard, who died in 2009 at the age of 78, was one of the greatest of all British speculative fiction writers, and one of the major writers of the period known as the British New Wave. In novels such as The Crystal World and The Drowned World, and in short story collections like Vermillion Sands, he dissected our present world through looking at disaster scenarios. Two of his novels became well-known films. Crash was directed in 1996 by David Cronenberg, and his fictionalized memoir Empire of the Sun, was turned into a film by Steven Spielberg, introducing a young actor named Christian Bale. A filmed version of High Rise, starring Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons, is now streaming via an Amazon Prime subscription.

On May 8th, 1988, the Probabilities crew (Lawrence Davidson, Richard A. Lupoff and Richard Wolinsky) had a chance to sit down with J. G. Ballard while he was on tour for his novel, The Day of Creation. It turned into a fascinating career retrospective.

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Kate MacKay is the curator of a retrospective of the Four Seasons cycle of films by the great French New Wave director Eric Rohmer, streaming on the BAM/PFA website through July 28, 2021. She talks about the films and about Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive’s year during the Covid shutdown with host Richard Wolinsky.

Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) was one of the contributors of the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, along with Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and was one of the founders of the French New Wave. His success came later than that of his colleagues, finally arriving in 1969 with My Night at Maud’s, and continued both commercially and artistically into the 21st Century.

The films streaming in this Tales of the Four Seasons cycle, A Tale of Springtime, A Winter’s Tale, Summer Tale and A Tale of Autumn were all filmed between 1990 and 1998 when Rohmer was into his seventies. Despite that, the films all feel like the work of a young independent film-maker, and not an old master.  Eric Rohmer Wikipedia page.

Kate MacKay has been as Associate Curator of Film since 2016, and has programmed several film retrospectives over the course of her career in Berkeley and previously in Toronto.

This brilliant and incisive essay by Richard Brody from the New Yorker discusses the four films, and Rohmer.

(cover page photo from Summer Tale, Janus Films)

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