Earlier this week, we brought you Audrey Hepburn’s Screen Test for Roman Holiday (1953). Next up, we have Katharine Hepburn appearing on the very 70s set of The Dick Cavett Show. In case you’re wondering, the two Hepburns were only distantly related. According to Salon, they shared one common ancestor, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Anyway, here’s the backstory on the Cavett interview that aired on September 14, 1973:
Hepburn rarely granted interviews, and when she did, she wanted them under her terms. When she agreed to appear on the Dick Cavett Show they went in the studio a day early so she could get the feel of things. They ended up doing the interview right then and there, without an audience.
Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The doctors told him he would gradually lose control of every muscle in his body.
“My dreams at that time were rather disturbed,” Hawking said. “Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved.”
The doctors gave the young man two and a half years to live. That was in early 1963. Over the next half century, Hawking defied all odds and went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of the era, making major contributions to quantum cosmology and the understanding of black holes. Along the way, the wheelchair-bound Hawking became a cultural icon, a symbol of disembodied intellect and indomitable spirit.
This coming Sunday, 49 years after his grim diagnosis, Hawking will turn 70. A scientific conference in his honor got underway today at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, and will culminate on Sunday with a public symposium, “The State of the Universe,” featuring some of the world’s greatest astronomers and physicists, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne and Saul Perlmutter. You can watch live streaming video of the events at the official website.
To help celebrate, we present Errol Morris’s 1992 film of A Brief History of Time (above), Hawking’s bestselling book. Morris weaves biography in with the science, interviewing members of Hawking’s family–his mother, sister and aunt–along with friends and colleagues, including Roger Penrose, Dennis Sciama and John Archibald Wheeler.
A Brief History of Time was Morris’s first film as a director-for-hire (he was recruited by Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment), which created some difficulties, but Morris was pleased with the outcome. He later said, “It’s actually one of the most beautiful films I ever shot.” The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking and the Documentary Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.
In 1992 Morris told the New York Times Magazine that A Brief History of Time was “less cerebral and more moving” than anything he had worked on before. “This feeling of time, of aging, of mortality combined with this search for the most basic and deep questions about the world around us and ourselves,” Morris said, “is pretty persuasive stuff.” Find it listed in our Free Movies Online collection, within the Documentary section.
Eve Arnold, one of the pioneering women of photojournalism, died Wednesday at the age of 99.
Widely known for her photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities, Arnold just as often photographed the poor and the unknown. “I don’t see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary,” she told the BBC in 1990. “I see them simply as people in front of my lens.”
Born Eve Cohen in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, she was one of nine children of Ukrainian immigrant parents. When she was 28 years old she gave up plans to become a doctor after a boyfriend gave her a camera. She studied photography for a brief time under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research before going out on her own and finding her style.
“I didn’t work in a studio, I didn’t light anything,” Arnold would later say. “I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn’t have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me.”
A series of photographs Arnold took of fashion shows in Harlem attracted the attention of Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and she was invited to contribute to the agency. In 1957 Arnold became the first woman photographer to join Magnum as a full member. She worked often for Life and later, after moving to England in 1961, for The Sunday Times Magazine, traveling to places like Afghanistan, South Africa, Mongolia and Cuba while always maintaining a personal point of view. In her 1976 book, The Unretouched Woman, Arnold wrote:
Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.
Arnold published 15 books in her lifetime, including the National Book Award-winning In China. In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elisabeth II, whom she had once photographed. In the 2007 book Magnum Magnum, photographer Elliott Erwitt summed things up:
Eve Arnold’s legacy is as varied as it is fascinating. It is hard to fathom how one person’s work can be so diverse. I covers the humblest to the most exalted, the meanest to the kindest, and everything in between. The subjects are all there in Eve Arnold’s photographs and they are treated with intelligence, consideration and sympathy. Most important is Eve’s ability to visually communicate her concerns directly, without fanfare or pretense, in the best humanistic tradition.
It started simply enough in 1999. Jeff Harris, a photographer based in Toronto, took his first self-portrait, something he has since repeated every day. His visual diary now amounts to 4,748 photos and they tell a very personal story. They show the passing of time, some fairly normal moments, but also some difficult ones. In November 2008, Harris was diagnosed with cancer, and his experience with it — his surgery, radiation treatment, eventual paralysis in one leg — all gets visually documented by his project. The video above, originally appearing on TIME’s web site, takes you inside Harris’ project. The clip runs 5 minutes.
Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs (click image below to get a free audio copy) covers a lot of ground in 571 pages. By design, it’s broad and comprehensive, but it doesn’t always go deep. One facet of Steve Jobs’ life that doesn’t get much coverage here was his relationship with Kobun Chino Otogawa (1938–2002), a Buddhist priest who taught Jobs the way of Zen and shared his passion for art and design. The two became close — close enough that Kobun presided over the Steve Jobs-Laurene Powell wedding in 1991. This relationship receives a fuller treatment in The Zen of Steve Jobs, a new 80-page graphic novel that uses stripped down dialogue and bold calligraphic panels to tell this story. The book was authored by Forbes writer Caleb Melby, and the artwork provided by the creative agency JESS3. The video above gives you a good introduction to the imaginative work. h/t BoingBoing
This amusing little creation lets users play vintage-style video games based on Ancient Greek mythology. You’re asked to toggle the “G” and “H” keys as rapidly as you can … until you realize something: the games, like the punishments meted out in Greek mythology, have no end. They go on for eternity.
Permit us to stay on our recent sci-fi tangent just a tad bit longer.…
Between 1951 and 1953, Isaac Asimov published three books that formed the now legendary Foundation Trilogy. Many considered it a masterwork in science fiction, and that view became official doctrine in 1966 when the trilogy received a special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, notably beating out Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (Don’t miss the vintage Tolkien documentary we featured yesterday.)
Eventually, the BBC decided to adapt Asimov’s trilogy to the radio, dramatizing the series in eight one-hour episodes that aired between May and June 1973. Years later, you can buy the radio drama on iTunes for $9.99. Or your can stream it on Spotify (above) or via the Internet Archive below.
Shortly after finishing film school, the young Belgian director Vincent Bal shot The Bloody Olive (1996), a 10 minute film based on a comic book by the French artist Lewis Trondheim. It was an instant hit, winning over 20 awards at film festivals worldwide. Wanting to keep things spoiler-free around here, let us just say this: the short film pays a fun little tribute to the film noir tradition — its aesthetic, conventions and all of the rest.
For more film noir fun, don’t miss Key Lime Pie, a 2007 animated film in the noir tradition, or our collection of 31 Free Noir Films. The noir collection features classics by John Huston, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, Ida Lupino, Otto Preminger, Orson Welles and others. You can find great classics from other genres within our list of Free Movies Online.
In the world of everyday experience we conceive of three dimensions of space. Through any point, no more than three perpendicular lines may pass. The notion that there might be more than three dimensions has traditionally been the domain of science fiction shows like The Twilight Zone.
In this engaging lecture (click image above to watch), theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the growing respectability of extra-dimensional theories in physics, tracing the evolution of the idea from Plato’s cave through Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, and from Einstein-Minkowski spacetime through Kaluza-Klein theory, on into modern-day string theory.
If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darklyand Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collections. Some of the stories collected here have also found their way into the recently-published book, Selected Stories by Philip K. Dick, which features an introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
Today is the birthday of J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien, author of the fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was born on January 3, 1892 to British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His father died when he was 3 years old, and he moved with his mother to England. The young boy took an early liking to stories of magic and myth. In his 1947 book On Fairy Stories, Tolkien wrote:
I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool. Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow), and strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and above all, forests in such stories. But the land of Merlin and Arthur were better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd and the Volsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable.
The urge to compose his own tales came early, but Tolkien became sidetracked by an interest in the subtleties of language. In a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955 he wrote:
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “A green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.
Tolkien became a philologist. He studied English Language and Literature at Exeter College, Oxford and–after a harrowing experience in the trenches of World War I–embarked on an academic career. He became an expert on Anglo Saxon and Norse mythology.
But the misty forests of Tolkien’s childhood imagination never left him. One day in the early 1930s, he was at home grading a large stack of student papers when his mind began to wander. On a blank sheet in one of the papers, the professor found himself writing, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He didn’t know what a hobbit was, but soon found himself spinning a tale, which he told to his young children. In 1937 it was published as The Hobbit.
The popularity of The Hobbit, not only with children but with adults, led to requests for a sequel, and in 1954 and 1955 Tolkien’s epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings was published. It went on to become one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, with over 150 million copies sold worldwide–and counting.
In celebration of Tolkien’s 120th birthday, we present a fascinating film on the author from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists. The 27-minute film was first broadcast in March of 1968, when Tolkien was 76 years old, and includes interviews and footage of the old man at his haunts in Oxford. H/T The Writer’s Almanac.
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