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How "Stay Gold, Ponyboy" Went from the Page to the Screen

Aired on Thursday, September 23rd.

"The Outsiders" -- both the well-known coming-of-age novel by S.E. Hinton and the likewise-titled 1983 film by Francis Ford Coppola -- certainly looms large in the cultural history of this community. On today's edition of StudioTulsa, we meet the California-based, Oklahoma-born grade school librarian who, back in 1980, encouraged her students to create a petition asking Coppola to make the film. Yes, this is really how "The Outsiders" got on the path from beloved young-adult book to cult-classic movie. That librarian is Jo Ellen Misakian. We're also joined today by the rap/hip-hop artist Danny Boy O'Connor, who owns and operates the Outsiders House Museum (established in 2017). Both will take part in a series of events and screenings coming soon to Tulsa that will center upon the motion-picture debut of a 4K restoration of "The Outsiders: The Complete Novel" (i.e., the revised and re-edited version of Coppola's film, which first appeared in 2005).

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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