KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

Film critic and historian David Thomson discusses his latest book, “A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors” with host Richard Wolinsky.

David Thomson is the author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, How to Watch a Movie, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, Have You Seen… and several other books examining film and the people who make movies.

This book discusses directors and their role in the making of films. In the interview, he talks about reassessment of films and directors, directors Fritz Lang, D.W. Griffith and Alfred Hitchcock, and changes in how we watch films in the past several years, focusing on how our lives have changed during the pandemic.

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Cherilyn Parsons is the founder and Executive Director of the seventh annual Bay Area Book Festival, held digitally this year from May 1 through May 9, 2021. She is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky.

In this interview she presents highlights from this year’s festival, focusing in on writers such as Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, China expert Orville Schell, Joyce Carol Oates, KPFA’s Davey D, and others. She also discusses the future of the Festival, which promises to be both live and streamed in coming years.

Festival video teaser

Bay Area Book Festival website

Bay Area Book Festival You Tube channel

The post Cherilyn Parsons, The Bay Area Book Festival 2021 appeared first on KPFA.

This podcast was originally posted on June 14, 2016

A conversation with director, screenwriter and author Whit Stillman, whose latest work, Love & Friendship, is both a film and book. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky.

Early in his career, after directing such films as Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, Whit Stillman was called “the WASP Woody Allen.”  Then he hit what he calls “director’s prison,” and it took him well over a decade before he returned to directing with Damsels in Distress. His latest film, Love & Friendship, is based on an early Jane Austen novella, and not only has been getting the best reviews of his career, but has become an arthouse hit. At the same time as the film was released, his novelization was also published. The book contains not only his work, but the original Jane Austen story.

Love and Friendship is based on the Jane Austen story, Lady Susan, and features a heroine who seems far more contemporary than most characters of the same era. It’s why Whit Stillman was drawn to the story. That it was in the public domain obviously helped, as Stillman points out. The result is a witty film that forces the audience to think. The book takes the screenplay and reimagines it as a defense of Lady Susan written by her nephew several years after the events take place.

In this wide-ranging interview recorded on June 9, 2016, Whit Stillman discusses the book, the film, Jane Austen, and his career as a director.

Love and Friendship is streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription. IMDb lists no new Whit Stillman film to date.

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