NPR: Susan Stamberg

Friedkin, Who Pushed Film Forward, Looks Back

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:03:00 +0000

As a kid in Chicago, director William Friedkin liked to frighten little girls with scary stories. When he grew up, he scared the rest of us with a little girl — Regan MacNeil, who is possessed by the devil in his horror classic The Exorcist.

And in The French Connection, he put knots in our stomachs with one of the great movie chases in American cinema.

When Friedkin directed these films in the 1970s, he was breaking all the rules.

In NPR's New Building, Everything Will Be Better ... Again

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 09:11:00 +0000

Starting Saturday, Weekend Edition is broadcasting under the fourth roof that's sheltered National Public Radio. NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg has worked in all of the locations since NPR went on the air in 1971, and once again she shepherds us to our new home.

Our very first, temporary offices were at 1625 I Street, in Northwest Washington, D.C., just down the block from the Christian Science Church. No furniture at first, so we sat on the floor.

Painting 'Renoir' In Finely Detailed Strokes

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:21:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA4pRAZQY3g

For John Baldessari, Conceptual Art Means Serious Mischief

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:10:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA

For Publicist Marvin Levy, It's All About Eyeballs

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 05:03:00 +0000

Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln has earned 12 Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director. Another Spielberg film — the multi-Oscar winning Schindler's List — will be celebrating 20 years since its release. These films have at least two important things in common: Spielberg and publicist Marvin Levy.

Levy started his career in New York writing questions for quiz shows. He wound up in publicity for MGM radio and TV personalities, but was lured to Hollywood in the mid-1970s.

For Film Set Decorators, Tiny Details Count

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 05:05:00 +0000

Picture Rick's smoky cafe in Casablanca, Lincoln's office at the White House of the 1860s, or the Mos Eisley cantina on the desert planet of Tatooine: A production designer came up with the overall look of those movie sets. But the booze on Rick's bar or the pens on Lincoln's desk — it took a set decorator and a crew to make them look authentic and believable.

On a recent chilly winter day in the backyard of a pretty picket-fenced house in Los Angeles, one set decorator is making rosebushes bloom again.

Hollywood's 'Hooray': Hardly A Happy Hymn

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:04:00 +0000

When the Oscars are handed out later this month, the ceremony will most likely be punctuated by music that has pretty much come to stand for movies and Movieland. Ironically, the composer grew up in Detroit, and the lyricist came from Savannah, Ga. — yet together they wrote the quintessential Tinseltown anthem.

"Hooray for Hollywood" was written for the Warner Brothers film Hollywood Hotel. It was a corny little "let's-go-to-Hollywood-and become-stars" movie from 1937, with some cute dialogue.

The movie didn't do much, box office-wise, but that song made it big.

From Aleppo, An Artifact Of A Calmer Age

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 08:28:00 +0000

Over the past six months, the headlines from Aleppo, Syria, have been horrifying. As the conflict between rebel forces and the government continues, the city has been overrun by tanks and artillery, and assaulted by shots, explosions and fires.

But Aleppo's present belies a much richer past. It's Syria's largest city, and one of the world's oldest continually inhabited urban areas.

WWII 'Canteen Girl' Kept Troops Company From Afar

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:20:00 +0000

American service members have long spent holidays in dangerous places, far from family. These days, home is a video chat or Skype call away. But during World War II, packages, letters and radio programs bridged the lonely gaps. For 15 minutes every week, "Canteen Girl" Phyllis Jeanne Creore spoke and sang to the troops and their loved ones on NBC radio.

Her Christmas shows were morale boosters. America must "use more sentiment and less tinsel, and that's the way it should be," she told her listeners during one wartime Christmas broadcast.

Ravi Shankar, Who Brought Eastern Music To Western Legends, Dies

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 06:00:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsuFlxxrX8k

Hopper's Lonely Figures Find Some Friends In Paris

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:23:00 +0000

Earlier this summer, I looked for Edward Hopper's Morning Sun at its home in the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. In the painting, a woman sits on a bed with her knees up, gazing out a window. She's bare, but for a short pink slip. The iconic Hopper is a must-see, but on the day I visited, it was on loan to an exhibition in Madrid.

I finally caught up with Morning Sun in Paris, where it is on display as part of a Hopper show at the Grand Palais.

Leslie Caron: Dancing From WWII Paris To Hollywood

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:00:00 +0000

In the 1950s, the moviegoing world fell in love with a young French ballerina and actress named Leslie Caron. She brightened the silver screen in musical films like 1958's Gigi, where she played a young courtesan-in-training who befriends a rich, handsome suitor in 1900s Paris.

When Caron played Gigi, she was a big star.

Print-Inspired Art: All The News That's Fit To Paint

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 07:28:00 +0000

The print newspaper industry may be struggling, but newsprint is alive and well on the walls of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The show is called "Shock of the News" — and it examines a century's worth of interaction between artists and the journals of their day.

A 3-foot high, three-dimensional work in one gallery looks like geometric sculpture. The big white rectangle sits on the floor, squared off at the edges.

Hopper's Pensive Lady In Pink Travels The World

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 07:25:00 +0000

It's one of the ultimate images of summer: a woman in a short, pink slip sits on a bed, her knees pulled up to her chest, gazing out a window. Her hair is tucked back into a bun. Her bare arms rest lightly on her bare legs.

Edward Hopper painted her in 1952 for a work called Morning Sun. The picture has been widely reproduced for decades. But on a recent visit to its home at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, it was nowhere to be found.

"It's on loan right now to an exhibition," explains Melissa Wolfe, the museum's curator of American art. "It travels a lot.

India's Blackout A Reminder Of How Far We've Come

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 09:53:00 +0000

This week, the world's largest democracy experienced the world's largest power outage. Nearly 700 million — that's more than half a billion — Indians were said to have been without power Tuesday. No air conditioning. No traffic lights. No metro system.

Most of the power is back now, but the outage had resonance for me from the long-ago years when I lived in New Delhi and experienced power failures almost as regularly as I did steaming cups of dark, sweet Indian tea.

Fifty years ago, most Indians had no electricity. Power belonged — politically and financially — to the rich.

Reflective Art Brings Light, Color To Historic Spaces

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:02:00 +0000

This is a story about amazing beauty, imagination and magical effects — and it begins, ironically enough, at a one-time leprosarium, or hospital for lepers, in Beauvais, France, a small town outside Paris.

Lepers were sequestered in Beauvais in the 12th century. That history is now noted in an outdoor art installation made up of slim metal rods that curve up into the shape of a bowl.

Vuillard: A Parisian Painter And His Jewish Patrons

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:03:00 +0000

In 1940, a week after the Germans occupied France, a popular painter died of a heart attack outside Paris in the embrace of his powerful patrons. An exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York explores the life of Edouard Vuillard, a non-Jewish artist, and the circle of Jewish tastemakers who supported him.

Born in 1868, Vuillard was part of a group of young post-Impressionist artists who called themselves Les Nabis — stemming from the word navi, which means "prophet" in Hebrew.

Power Couple, Covering War (And Waging Their Own)

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:18:00 +0000

Before Christiane Amanpour, before Ann Garrels, before Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, there was Martha Gellhorn, one of the first great female war correspondents.

From the Spanish Civil War through Vietnam, she covered every major conflict of the day. But Gellhorn's reputation as a journalist was sometimes overshadowed by her marriage to one of the great American writers, Ernest Hemingway.

HBO has made a film about Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman.

A Museum Visit For Art Lovers With Alzheimer's

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 17 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Many art lovers feel completely in the moment when they stroll through the galleries of a museum. That feeling was particularly true on a recent morning at the Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C. The Kreeger runs a special program for people with Alzheimer's — seniors, their caregivers and middle school students are paired together to enjoy the art and one another's company.

The mansion turned gallery was designed in 1967 by renowned architect Philip Johnson for art collector and philanthropist David Kreeger and his wife, Carmen.

Colorful Visions At African-American Art Exhibit

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 03 May 2012 06:17:00 +0000

The African-American experience is reflected, right now, on the walls of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Exuberant dancing in Chicago. Laundry on a line in the nation's capital. A girl smiling out from her father's warm jacket — all captured in photographs, paintings and sculptures from the 1920s through the 1990s.

The show is called "African-American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond." And there is a question: Does it segregate — or at the very least compartmentalize — African-American artists?

In 'Ocean Park,' Gentle Portraits Of California Light

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:37:00 +0000

In the late 1960s, while America was in turmoil over the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, a painter in Santa Monica, Calif., was creating a series of tranquil, glowing canvases that made his reputation and transfixed art lovers.

The Extraordinary, Ordinary Life Of Alexander Payne

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Alexander Payne watches a movie every day — or tries to, anyway. Lately, the writer and director of The Descendants has been busy going to nomination and awards dinners, in advance of Sunday's Oscar night — when the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay prizes could be his.

On a recent morning, we joined Payne at his house, up a wriggling canyon road in the Santa Monica Mountains, to see how he was spending this "in between time" — the release of a well-regarded film, the waiting until Oscar night.

Private Screening: How Hollywood Watches Its Work

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Before they made it to the Oscars, the nominated films — not to mention all the films that didn't make the cut — were viewed by some 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Charmed and Charming Life of Rosamond Bernier

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:01:00 +0000

In 1947, Vogue magazine sent Rosamond Bernier to Paris to cover European cultural life as it recovered after World War II. She met everyone who was anybody — Pablo Picasso befriended her, Henri Matisse gave her fashion tips, Alice B. Toklas baked for her.

What Makes Newton-John Get 'Physical' At The Gym

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:52:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA

Dancing Through History With First Ladies' Gowns

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Every four years in January, Washington, D.C., plays host to the country's biggest "prom." Inaugural balls bring out happy winners, administration bigwigs and a gown — on the first lady — that will become a part of history.

An exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History displays some of those gowns. NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg took her dance card to the show.

Powerful Portraits Capture China's Empress Dowager

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:26:00 +0000

Intrigue! Riches! Sex! Some violence! Not the latest movie plot, but a story that lurks in the background of some 100-year-old photographs of The Empress Dowager — once the most powerful woman in Asia. The mostly black-and-white photos languished for decades in the archives of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Now, they are on display and give a glimpse of Old China at a time when today's China is the picture of modern power.

Cixi — pronounced tsuh shee — ruled China for 43 years.

Booksellers' Picks: Catch The Year's Freshest Reads

and — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 08:09:00 +0000

This winter, our independent booksellers have selected books that range in subject from toasters to typeface, odd bookmarks to old Volkswagons, department stores to pasta design.

Mrs. Stamberg's Relish Goes To Washington

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 05:01:00 +0000

All families have Thanksgiving traditions, and longtime NPR listeners know that Susan Stamberg is always willing to divulge her own. Every year since 1972, Stamberg has shared her mother-in-law's now famous cranberry relish recipe on the radio. Stamberg says the relish — a shocking pink, like Pepto-Bismol — sounds terrible, but tastes terrific.

This year, she's brought her recipe to two chefs who have worked in the kitchen of a well-known address — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

For Gertrude Stein, Collecting Art Was A Family Affair

NPR: Susan Stamberg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 05:01:00 +0000

A reunion of art is taking place in Paris right now. Works that haven't been there together in almost a century are reunited once again. The art was collected by writer Gertrude Stein and her brothers starting in the early 1900s. The Steins bought paintings right out of the studios of young avant-garde artists — Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others who would become masters as the 20th century progressed.

The Steins' tiny apartment — situated on a narrow, tree-lined street — was jammed full of paintings.