Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues

Pete Docter, the director of the Disney/Pixar movie UP, is one of the top creative figures in contemporary animation. He directed Monsters, Inc. and was a writer for Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Wall-E. Docter spoke at a Museum of the Moving Image event following a preview screening for the Museum's new family member group Red Carpet Kids. The discussion includes questions from some of the young children in the audience. The event took place just days after Docter returned from France, where UP became the first animated movie to open the Cannes Film Festival.

The Mexican hit comedy Rudo y Cursi reunites Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, the stars of Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 road movie and sex comedy Y tu mama tambien. Rudo y Cursi is about stepbrothers who escape life on a banana farm and find fame, fortune, and rivalry as soccer stars. The film is the directorial debut of Carlos Cuaron, who wrote Y tu mama tambien. Bernal's and Luna's friendship and chemistry is on display in this lively discussion, which took place just days before the U.S. theatrical release. Note: some audio from the beginning of the program is missing.

To celebrate the release of his remarkable movie The Limits of Control, the Museum of the Moving Image presented an evening with Jim Jarmusch. The director talked about his entire body of work, starting with his NYU student feature-length film Permanent Vacation. His 1984 breakthrough film Stranger than Paradise, an eccentrically deadpan road movie was also a surprise commercial success that inspired the growth of the American independent film movement. With films such as Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Coffee and Cigarettes, Jarmusch has maintained his distinctly idiosyncratic vision. This raw audio includes the film clips in their entirety.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the classic independent film Putney Swope, an outrageous satire about race, commercialism, and corporate life, the Museum of the Moving Image teamed up with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to present a special screening with director Robert Downey, Sr. The discussion was moderated by independent producer and Museum trustee Warrington Hudlin. In the film, the head of an ad agency drops dead during a meeting of executives. Through a tangled voting process, the agency's token black man, Putney Swope, wins the election to head the company.

As a director, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker, James Toback (Fingers, Bugsy, Black and White, The Big Bang) has consistently explored the extremes of human behavior. For his intimate and innovative documentary Tyson, he found a perfect subject in Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champion who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and went through a rollercoaster career filled with fame and controversy. Toback's empathy with his subject results in a remarkably candid and revealing portrait of a man filled with surprising contradictions. Toback discussed the film at a special preview screening for the Museum of the Moving Image. Please note that some of the audience questions are inaudible.

With his critically acclaimed low-budget independent film The Daytrippers, and his raunchy blockbuster hit Superbad, Greg Mottola established himself as a gifted director of comedies. On the occasion of the release of Adventureland, a personal film that invests the teen comedy genre with emotional depth and insight, Museum of the Moving Image presented a daylong retrospective. Writer/director Mottola and producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey discussed the film following a preview screening.

Dennis Hopper is one of the most iconoclastic and accomplished actors and directors in American cinema. He has appeared in nearly 300 films and TV shows, with credits including Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, and Blue Velvet. 2008 was a particularly good year for Hopper; he received great reviews for his performance in Elegy, starred in the TV series Crash, and was the subject of an exhibition at the Cinematheque Francaise. In this evening of conversation and clips, introduced by artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel and moderated by Chief Curator David Schwartz, Hopper talked about his remarkable career.

Jerry Lewis has been one of the most popular and inventive figures in American show business since the late 1940s. As a performer, director, writer, and producer, he has created an enormously entertaining body of work in film, television, and live performance that is deeply personal while offering a fascinating view of American culture. In this Museum of the Moving Image special event, Lewis discussed his career in a conversation with the film director, actor, and author Peter Bogdanovich. The two have been friends for more than forty-five years. In 2009, Lewis received an Academy Award for his humanitarian work.

Saturday Night Live has provided an irreverent yet influential perspective on American presidential politics since its debut season in 1975. Two days after kicking off its fall 2008 season with a sketch portraying Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, SNL was the subject of a panel discussion with series creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels (pictured left, selected by Time Magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people; cast members and Weekend Update co-anchors Amy Poehler (center) and Seth Meyers (right); and veteran SNL writer James Downey. The program celebrated the launch of the 2008 edition of the Museum's website The Living Room Candidate, an archive of American presidential campaign commercials.

The HBO series The Wire, a panoramic view of Baltimore through its drug world, schools, government, seaport, and newspaper, has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest television dramas ever produced. To mark the DVD release of the final season, Museum of the Moving Image presented a panel, Making "The Wire", with David Simon, the series creator and co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who wrote several episodes; and four of the show's stars: Seth Gilliam (who played Ellis Carver), Clark Johnson (city editor Gus Haynes), Clarke Peters (Lester Freemon), and Wendell Pierce ("Bunk"), moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator.