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tvguidancecounselor · 1 year

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TV Guidance Counselor Episode 582: Ian Brownell

March 25-31, 1989

This week Ken welcomes old friend, new fan, writer (film blog www.film5000.com) and host/producer of The Brattle Film Podcast Ian Brownell.

Ken and Ian discuss Siskel and Ebert, podcast heroes, movie freaks, the religion of cinema, growing up outside of New Bedford, Providence RI stations, growing up on a farm, not having cable, Evening Magazine, The Big Dan's Rape Trial, Big Pinball, The Accused, going to boarding school, Jim Henson, The Storyteller, The Jim Henson Hour, being obsessive, not being able to watch things out of order, how the magic is gone after the creator leaves, voice actors aging, A Muppet Family Christmas, only being moved to tears by television, having two VCRs, anthology shows, film directors moving to television, The Oscars, the first gay Oscars, the infamous Snow White opening, a hatred of LA, Drew Barrymore's substance abuse struggles, After School Specials, CBS Playhouse, 15 and Getting Straight, campaigning for yourself, Bob Hope's Easter Vacation in the Bahamas, Red Skies, Satan's Children, Easter, Star Trek Original Series, Ken Burns, The Golden Girls, Beyond Tomorrow, being a life long Saturday Night Life nerd, The Smithereens, Quantum Leap, It's Gary Shandling's Show, The Tracy Ulman Show, LGBQT representations on television, The Wire, Fringe, Rex Reed, Barbara Eden in Your Mother Wears Army Boots, Private Benjamin, Bonnie Hunt, how crazy it is that Ken gets to talk to and befriend his heroes, Barney Miller, Kate & Allie, Larraine Newman, Who's the Boss, Soap, Matlock, Roseanne, taping comedy specials off HBO, tornados, Anything But Love, Ann Magunson, My So-Called Life, Bess Armstrong, Barbara Walters, bad drawings of Nick Nolte, Cheers, Taxi, Friends, bad comedy, Family Ties, dumb characters, Scott Valentine, Unsolved Mysteries, how good spirited pranks make bad TV, and the legend of Dana Hersey's TV38 Movie Loft.

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brokehorrorfan · 2 years

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Ants will be released on Blu-ray on July 5 via Kino Lorber. The 1977 made-for-TV horror film is also known as It Happened at Lakewood Manor. Vince Evans designed the new cover art; the original poster art is on the reverse side.

Robert Scheerer (Star Trek: The Next Generation) directs from a script by Guerdon Trueblood (Jaws 3-D). Robert Foxworth, Lynda Day George, Bernie Casey, Barry Van Dyke, Karen Lamm, Myrna Loy, Brian Dennehy, and Suzanne Somers star.

Ants has been newly restored in 2K. Both the 1.85 theatrical and 1.33 television aspect ratios are included. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film critic Lee Gambin (new)

Audio interview with production assistant and daughter of producer Alan Landsburg, Valerie Landsburg (new)

Audio interview with actress Barbara Brownell (new)

Audio interview with actor Barry Van Dyke (new)

Audio interview with actress Anita Gillette (new)

Audio interview with actor Moosie Drier (new)

Lakeside Manor is not yet open to the public, but the resort's owner, Ethel Adams (Myrna Loy), has invited a select group of elite guests to the opening of her new venture, including a disreputable businessman (Gerald Gordon) and his luscious partner Gloria Henderson (Suzanne Somers). But everyone's expectations of a peaceful and luxury-filled visit are smashed when the nearby construction site unleashes millions of deadly ants on the hotel. Infected by pesticides and highly aggressive, these ants provide a grisly end to anyone who crosses their path. The guests are scrambling to get out of the hotel but an unlucky group end up trapped inside, moving up higher and higher in an attempt to escape the ants, but the ants are moving up, too!

#ants #horror #70s horror #1970s horror #eco horror #kino lorber #dvd #gift #made for tv movie #tv movie #myrna loy #brian dennehy #suzanne somers #robert scheerer

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lgbt-history-archive · 7 years

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“SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT” – “SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO ANY EMPLOYMENT” – “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL,” Barbara Gittings (front), Ernestine Eckstein (fourth from front), and other East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO) members, The White House, Washington, D.C., October 23, 1965. Photo by Kay Tobin, c/o @nyplpicturecollection. . On April 27, 1953, sixty-four years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order (E.O.) 10453, which gave the Civil Service Commission (the precursor to today’s Office of Personnel Management) and the heads of the federal agencies—supported by the powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the authority to investigate federal employees to determine if they posed security risks based on a broad definition of “risk” that included “[a]ny criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.” . Without explicitly referencing homosexuality, the order responded to the growing Lavender Scare, with Attorney General Herbert Brownell explaining that, “[e]mployees could be a security risk and still not be disloyal or have any traitorous thoughts, but it may be that their personal habits are such that they might be subject to blackmail by people who seek to destroy the safety of our country.” It was, as Michael Long has explained, “the first time that the federal government officially sanctioned the identification of homosexuality as a behavior threatening to national security,” and “federal agency heads increased efforts to purge their agencies of homosexuals.” . E.O. 10453 had the practical effect of officially banning LGBTQs from federal employment until 1975, when the Civil Service Commission announced it would consider applications from gays and lesbians on a case by case basis. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Resist (at The White House)

#haveprideinhistory #resist #lgbthistory

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orcinus-ocean · 7 years

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TIJUANA, Mexico — It was not the first time Robert L. Brownell Jr. had seen a dead vaquita, the rare and endangered porpoise that was lying on the stainless-steel necropsy table inside the Tijuana Zoo on Monday. But it might well be one of the last.

Mr. Brownell, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had in effect discovered the porpoise, finding the first full, dead specimen in 1966. The world’s smallest member of the cetacean grouping, which includes whales and dolphins, the vaquita was the most recent cetacean to be recognized by modern science.

Now it may well become the latest to go extinct.

A high-level, bilateral panel of Mexican and American scientists met this week and is expected to announce that it believes efforts to save the animal have, essentially, failed. That announcement would mean that the only hope for the vaquita’s recovery would be to capture the surviving animals, if any can be found. Some of the scientists involved think the surviving vaquitas now number as few as two or three, and the latest two vaquitas found dead could even be the last ones — though it could take years to confirm that.

The vaquita has been described, by some of the few people who have seen one of the elusive porpoises alive, as the smiley-faced sea panda because of the dark outlines around its mouth and the black circles around its eyes. Its plight has drawn in celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Leonardo DiCaprio, and spurred cooperation among scientists and environmentalists, north and south of the border, in and out of government.

But the push has been imperiled by traffickers in the body parts of endangered species, unscrupulous fishermen and uneven enforcement efforts.

The problem can be traced to Chinese demand for a rare swim bladder from the endangered totoaba fish, which shares the vaquita’s range, in the northern tip of the Gulf of California. According to Mexican scientists, that demand has grown so much that prices for the bladders, used for a homeopathic remedy, rival the wholesale price of cocaine — as much as $10,000 per kilogram. Mexican officials and those from the Mexican-American panel, the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita, say Mexican drug cartels have been attracted to the trade by the high profits, and by the assurance that no fisherman has ever gone to jail for trafficking in swim bladders.

The nets used to catch the totoaba have trapped the much less numerous vaquita as well, to devastating effect. The Mexican government has banned the nets and even paid some fishermen not to fish in the vaquita’s range, but those efforts have not helped.

The results on the necropsy table at the Tijuana Zoo were only too evident. A 1-year-old female, a little over three feet long — full-grown vaquitas are nearly five feet — the porpoise had the imprint of the net in which she died stamped in six-inch squares on the grayish skin on her left side. On her right side, the skin was flayed off, probably as the porpoise struggled while drowning in the net.

The specimen was labeled PS7, because it was the seventh vaquita (scientific name: Phocoena sinus) to be found dead since a survey last summer, which determined that only 30 vaquitas remained at the time. Then on Tuesday, PS8 was found by a NOAA scientist, washed up on a beach at the northern end of the gulf. Scientists say there are likely to be many more undiscovered dead ones.

Budget cuts from the Trump administration may add to the vaquita’s woes. Both Mr. Brownell and the scientist performing the autopsy, Dr. Frances Gulland, a veterinarian from Sausalito, Calif., who is also a commissioner on the federal Marine Mammal Commission, now work for offices with zero budgets proposed for the coming year.

Not since the Yangtze River dolphin went extinct in 2006 in China has a cetacean gone over the brink. “We always thought that what happened in China would not happen here,” Dr. Gulland said. “We have the U.S. government’s prize laboratory and it’s on their doorstep. We have all these experts and scientists — we have everything. We thought, ‘This won’t happen, we can fix this problem.’”

She was referring to NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, a San Diego community just a short day trip from the northern Gulf of California. “It has taken on a huge symbolic importance.”

Alarmed about the new vaquita deaths, her commission paid to put out acoustic listening devices on a limited scale in February, focusing on where vaquitas were last found in 2016. The devices pick up the animals’ echolocating clicks, a form of sonar they use to navigate and communicate. By analyzing the number and frequency of the clicks, compared with previous years, scientists can calculate the number of animals in their fairly limited range.

In February two or three animals were believed to still be active, Dr. Gulland said. Since then four more vaquitas have been found dead, two in March and the two this week, one of which was recovered by a monitoring vessel from the Sea Shepherd environmental group.

Capt. Oona Layolle, who runs the group’s vaquita campaign, said their ships had recovered 183 totoaba nets just since December. She disagrees, though, with the vaquita panel’s proposals. “I don’t think by putting an animal in a cage you are saving it,” she said.

“There was another dead vaquita found yesterday,” said Barbara Taylor, a marine conservation biologist at the science center, and a member of the vaquita recovery committee, on Wednesday. “We’re all very depressed about that. The committee meeting will be making very clear that any vaquita that’s basically not taken out of its dangerous habitat is probably going to die.”

The extinction of the vaquita is a sensitive political issue in Mexico, where President Enrique Peña Nieto has made it an issue of pride that his country could save the animal. “The president has said that even if there is only one vaquita left, we will do everything we can,” said Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, a scientist who is in charge of the vaquita effort for the Mexican environment ministry.

The porpoise’s decline has been increasing exponentially, even as protection efforts have ramped up. In 1997, scientists counted 567 vaquitas; the number dropped by half in the next nine years, to 245. In just one year, the number halved again, to only 30 last year from 60 in 2015.

The vaquita may go extinct without mankind ever having gotten to fully know it. No live specimen has ever been taken. Because vaquitas are small and travel singly or in pairs rather than in big pods, following and observing their behavior is difficult. Tragically for conservation efforts, a female takes two years to produce a single calf, and two years to reach sexual maturity, so replacing each lost animal takes years. Already, vaquitas are so inbred that genetically, as Ms. Taylor said, “they basically all have the same last name.”

If the vaquita becomes extinct, Dr. Gulland said, it will have the distinction of being wiped out entirely through human action, even while humans were trying desperately to save it. “This is direct, human-caused extinction,” she said. “If there’s one lesson learned, it’s that we can’t manage humans.”

Mr. Brownell said this might be one battle the fishermen had won. “The fishermen just think, ‘Oh, good, if we can get rid of the last one, then we can get on and keep fishing.’” If that hasn’t already happened, many scientists now believe, it may soon.

#I wonder why even totoaba fishing is legal #as the FISH is endangered too #vaquita #extinction

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larryland · 7 years

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Mounting “Steps”

by Barbara Waldinger

Barrington Stage Company’s Artistic Director Julianne Boyd wanted something light to be sandwiched between the serious musicals Ragtime and Company, and settled on Taking Steps, a comedy by Sir Alan Ayckbourn, master of farce. There was one problem: the play is meant to be performed in the round, impossible on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage. Ayckbourn himself directed the premiere in 1979 at the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough, England, where he served as Artistic Director for thirty-seven years. The following year, when Michael Rudman mounted the piece at a West End theatre using a proscenium arch, Ayckbourn complained that it was not a fair representation of his work.

Having written seventy-seven plays and winning numerous awards, Ayckbourn is very specific about the way Taking Steps should be handled. Why is it so important? As in many of his works, the set determines much of the action. In House & Garden, for instance, two plays take place simultaneously on two different stages and can be seen separately. Taking Steps is likewise innovative, being set in a large, decaying Victorian mansion, formerly a brothel said to be haunted by a murdered sex worker. The house has three floors but the conceit of the play is that they are all on the same level. Ayckbourn’s stage directions dictate that although the stairs are flat, they give the impression of leading upwards. The furniture for each room occupies the same area of the stage so that the three levels “should and must overlap.” In the round, the steps would be visible to the audience looking down from tiered seats.

How do director Sam Buntrock and scenic designer Jason Sherwood overcome the proscenium arch problem? After collaborating for some four months, they arrived at an ingenious solution: they created an upper level stairway hanging from the flies, with two staircases and two doors that mirror the front and second floor bedroom doors below. This is the key or visual reference that helps the actors and the audience to understand the geography of the piece, since they are the only steps on the stage. Thanks to Buntrock’s insistence that the actors hit the ground running, rising to their feet on the first day of rehearsal rather than spending time on table work, they were able, through repeated physical movement, to figure out on which level they were playing. Even as the characters narrowly miss colliding with each other, they still have to maintain the illusion that they are on different floors. Quite a challenge for everyone involved!

One serendipitous result of rehearsing at Barrington Stage’s new Wolfson Center arises out of a pillar that impeded the actors’ rehearsal movements when entering the attic level. Buntrock cleverly decided to make its presence felt on the performance stage in the form of an imaginary beam threatening to smash into any character unaware of its position in the darkened room. Needless to say every encounter in the attic is fraught with comic danger.

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As the levels coalesce, so do the various plots. The women, Elizabeth (Claire Brownell) and Kitty (Helen Cespedes), “take steps” to free themselves from their male partners: Roland (Richard Hollis), Elizabeth’s wealthy, pompous, alcoholic, doting husband and Mark (Luke Smith), Kitty’s hapless fiancé, who literally induces sleep in anyone listening to him. Meanwhile, Roland is negotiating the purchase of the haunted mansion for Elizabeth (who hates it) from its owner, Leslie Bainbridge (Matthew Greer), a motorcyclist and builder, desperate for the income, with the help of Roland’s solicitor, Tristram (Carson Elrod), who seems to have no legal sense whatsoever.

Each of the actors handle the play’s considerable physical demands with aplomb. As Elizabeth, who claims to have spent her life training to be a dancer, Brownell leaps and pirouettes across the stage becoming entangled with the motorcyclist who attempts to rouse her from sleep, as well as with the clueless solicitor in a hilarious bedroom scene. As her husband, Hollis is a master of many moods, exhibiting supreme confidence and a stiff upper lip, along with an inability to distinguish similar-sounding words from one another. At times he is dead asleep or drunk, at others he is sobbing uncontrollably. As Elizabeth’s brother, Smith faces the unenviable task of boring the characters onstage while maintaining the interest of the audience—not always successfully. As the owner of the house, Greer, in contrast to his tall stature and dark motorcycle garb, plays eager to please, often laughing and surprisingly vulnerable. And as Mark’s fiancée, Cespedes, who appears sullen and quiet when we first meet her, bursts into life when she struggles to get out—literally from a cabinet where she is stuck, and figuratively as she finds a way, despite many obstacles, to escape from the house and the bleak future that beckons.

But it is Elrod who gives the most successful comic performance of the evening. The actor’s unintelligible explanations, his facial expressions, his fear of the sounds in this supposedly haunted house, and especially the elasticity of his body place him in the class of the greatest stage clowns of the Commedia dell’ Arte (reminiscent of Bill Irwin and David Shiner). Local audiences may recall his brilliant representation of a droid last year in The Chinese Room on the Nikos Stage in Williamstown, the highlight of that production.

The costumes, designed by Jennifer Caprio, serve the performers well, and in the most surprising onstage change, enable Elrod to switch from pajamas to a suit while running down two flights of imaginary steps holding a briefcase. Lighting designer David Weiner meets the challenge of this set by employing many onstage instruments, including standing lamps, table lamps, and even a wire with a missing bulb in the attic. Sound designer Joel Abbott not only provides us with appropriate songs of the period but also the noises caused by the plumbing problems of the creaky mansion.

English farce is not always easy for an American audience, who must grasp foreign accents, dry humor, and crazy antics. It takes a bit of time for this production to find its legs but once the physical elements of Ayckbourn’s expertly crafted situations dominate the action, lovers of this genre of comedy will find it delightful.

Taking Steps runs from July 20—August 5, 2017 at Barrington Stage Company’s Boyd-Quinson Mainstage. For tickets call 413-236-8888 or online at barringtonstageco.org.

Barrington Stage Company presents Taking Steps by Alan Ayckbourn. Cast: Claire Brownell (Elizabeth), Luke Smith (Mark), Carson Elrod (Tristram), Richard Hollis (Roland), Matthew Greet (Leslie Bainbridge), Helen Cespedes (Kitty). Director: Sam Buntrock; Scenic Designer: Jason Sherwood; Costume Designer: Jennifer Caprio; Lighting Designer: David Weiner; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Hair and Wig Designer: J. Jared Janas; Fight Choreographer: Ryan Winkles; Production Stage Manager: Leslie Sears. Running Time: 2 hours 25 minutes including intermission; at the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage of the Barrington Stage Company, 30 Union St., Pittsfield, MA, from July 20; closing August 5.

REVIEW: “Taking Steps” at Barrington Stage Mounting “Steps” by Barbara Waldinger Barrington Stage Company’s Artistic Director Julianne Boyd wanted something light to be sandwiched between the serious musicals…

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abetheone · 5 years

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Marcel Duchamp collection to be donated to Hirshhorn Museum

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Written by Ginanne Brownell Mitic, CNN

Over the last three decades, Aaron and Barbara Levine have amassed an impressive melange of conceptual and minimalist art. But, they jokingly say, they loathe calling it a “collection.”

“When you get the word ‘collection,’ it seems limited, like ‘I only collect minimalism’ or ‘I cannot look at anything beyond the parameters of my focus,'” said…

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tvguidancecounselor · 1 year

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TV Guidance Counselor Episode 582: Ian Brownell

March 25-31, 1989

This week Ken welcomes old friend, new fan, writer (film blog www.film5000.com) and host/producer of The Brattle Film Podcast Ian Brownell.

Check out this episode!

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