Why did images of white, nuclear families dominate television in the 1950s? Why has it taken nearly 70 years for images of a diverse America—featuring people of color, immigrants, women as independent social beings—to appear on prime time television? Challenging the longstanding belief that what appeared on television screens in the 1950s and after resulted from some social consensus, The Broadcast 41 addresses these and other questions by telling two intersecting stories. The first story documents the heterogeneous perspectives of a generation of progressive women who had been…
Recently, an article in Esquire (behind a paywall, of course), cited Mary McCarthy's infamous putdown of writer Lillian Hellman in a 1978 interview: “I can’t stand her. I think every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but.'” Writers on the right and left love this line. What's better than a catfight, first of all? And what's more convenient than dismissing Hellman, a trenchant and powerful critic of alliances between liberals and…
A nice (and short!) profile of filmmaker Nicole London, whose beautiful documentary about performer and activist Hazel Scott is in post-production. This is a long overdue film about Scott's impact, influence, and art.