Hollywood

Our guest is Clark Wiens, the president and co-founder of the non-profit Circle Cinema (which is located near the corner of Lewis and Admiral). This much-loved Tulsa landmark -- at once historic, unique, and irreplacable; a cultural lifeline as well as a crucial part of the our city's artistic community -- will soon turn 90 years old. Therefore, as Clark tells us, this special venue will soon host -- from July 7th through the 15th -- the Circle Cinema Film Festival and 90th Birthday Celebration.

Our guest on StudioTulsa is the remarkable Blondy Baruti, who grew up in a war-ravaged part of Africa, then came to the U.S. in order to become a professional basketballer, and actually ended up as a Hollywood movie star. And along the way, of course, he also played hoops at and attended the University of Tulsa. Baruti has a new autobiography out, which has been thus praised by Booklist: "What shines through here is Baruti's good heart, persistence, and absolute unwillingness to give up on his dreams despite repeated setbacks.

On this installment of StudioTulsa, we speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel about his new book, "High Noon." It's a detailed history focused on the making of one of Hollywood’s most popular, and most critically acclaimed, Westerns. It's also, as we learn on today's program, a quite deliberate if veiled parable about the then-current Hollywood blacklist.

What can American motion pictures tell us about the American South, and what can the South tell us about the movies? Our guest is Robert Jackson, an Associate Professor of English here at the University of Tulsa.

On this edition of ST, we welcome two curators from the Philbrook Museum of Art to our show. Catherine Whitney and Sarah Lees tell us about "Lusha Nelson Photographs: Celebrity, the Forgotten Man, and 1930s America," which will be on view through May 7th of this year.

"The Big Trail" -- a classic Western from 1930, and the first film in which John Wayne had a starring role -- was chosen in 2006 by the Library of Congress to be a part of the National Film Registry. And it was shot in a wide-screen format (rare for that time) by the legendary Hollywood director, Raoul Walsh. Just recently, it was announced that someone has donated to Gilcrease Museum a set of rare stereoscopic photographs that were taken on the set of this motion picture, which was actually filmed all over the West, from New Mexico to Utah to California.

On this edition of StudioTulsa, we speak with David Spear and Joseph Julian Gonzalez, two film/concert composers from Los Angeles who are both lecturing and teaching here at TU as J. Donald Feagin Visiting Artists. About a year ago, Spear and Gonzalez composed a new score of original themes for the 1928 silent film "Ramona" -- and in doing so, they also re-arranged the title song and adapted sacred and Spanish classical music for their newly created score.

On this edition of StudioTulsa, we listen back to a 2008 discussion with author and journalist Steve Lopez about his bestselling nonfiction account, "The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music." At that time, this book -- which explores themes of mental illness, homelessness, artistic inspiration, and creativity -- had just come out; it was later the basis for major motion picture of the same title.

On this edition of StudioTulsa, we speak with the filmmaker Kyle Ham, who grew up in Tulsa before studying theatre and film at DePauw University. Ham has a new movie out, his first feature, which he actually co-wrote with his former professor from DePauw University, playwright Steve Timm. That film is "Reparation" -- it's an award-winning independent motion picture about a troubled Air Force veteran who searches for clues to his lost memories in his daughter's artwork.

On our show today, a conversation with Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a writer and producer now living in Los Angeles who grew up in Tulsa and attended Holland Hall School (and later, Harvard University). He's probably best known as a writer and producer for the award-winning Amazon television show, "Transparent," starring Jeffrey Tambor and Gaby Hoffmann -- and his first feature film, "The Motel Life," appeared in 2013 and starred Dakota Fanning, Emile Hirsch, and Kris Kristopherson, winning both Best Screenplay and the Audience Award at the Rome Film Festival.

What's it like to score music for video games? And how does it differ from scoring for TV or movies? On this edition of ST, we speak with Lennie Moore, who has worked for more than two decades as a composer, orchestrator, and arranger of music for videogames, film, TV, and new media.

On this edition of ST, we chat with author Stewart O'Nan about his latest book, "West of Sunset," which is just out in paperback. It's a novel that imagines the final years of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life, when he was living and working in Hollywood in the 1930s...and trying, more or less in vain, to re-capture the literary greatness of his earlier years.

On this installment of ST, a look back at several of the more notable movies of 2015 with Michael Smith, the film critic at The Tulsa World. He joined this city's daily paper in 1996, and just to be clear about matters from the outset: Smith recently wrote in that newspaper that he thinks "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is the "best film in [that] franchise." Really? That good?

On this edition of ST, we speak by phone with writer James Kaplan, whose essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and elsewhere. The first volume of Kaplan's definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, "Frank: The Voice," appeared in 2010. Now comes the second half of that life, the widely acclaimed "Sinatra: The Chairman," which the author discusses with us today. As per Publishers Weekly: "The great singer-actor contains multitudes in this vast, engrossing biography of Frank Sinatra's mature years....

On this presentation of ST, we chat with Joe Randazzo, a former editor of The Onion and former creative director of adultswim.com who now writes for the Comedy Central program called @midnight.

John Williams -- the still-active genius who created the music for such classic movies as "Jaws," "Star Wars," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.: The Extraterrestrial," and "Schindler's List" (to name just a handful) -- is arguably the greatest composer ever to work in Hollywood. And his memorable, broadly popular music will be the focal point for the final Tulsa Symphony Orchestra concert of this season.

Our guest is the film historian and journalist Mark Harris, who's written for Entertainment Weekly, Grantland, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.

From "American Sniper," "Into the Woods," and "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" to "Wild," "The Imitation Game" (shown here), and "Boyhood," we're dishing on this installment of StudioTulsa about several of the notable movies that arrived (or else will soon arrive) in theaters in 2014. Our guest is Michael Smith, film critic at The Tulsa World.

On this edition of ST, a discussion of the distinctive films of writer/director Wes Anderson, whose vivid, detailed, and meticulously crafted movies include "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," and "Moonrise Kingdom" --- as well as "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which is still in theaters nationwide. Our guest is Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic for New York magazine who has a new book out about Anderson's decidedly ornate cinematic world.

One of the more famous lines attributed to John Ford (1894-1973), the iconic film director who made many of the finest Westerns ever to come out of Hollywood, goes like this: "When the truth becomes legend, print the legend." That line is from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a movie from the early 1960s, but it just as clearly applies to "The Searchers," the classic Western from 1956, with John Wayne and Natalie Wood, which is commonly seen as a Ford masterpiece.

He's a familiar and award-winning Hollywood actor, as well as an acclaimed director and producer. He's also (who knew?) a highly successful children's book author. Our guest on ST is Bob Balaban, who tells us about his newest book, "The Creature from the Seventh Grade: Boy or Beast" (Penguin Young Readers Group). In this funny, tween-friendly tale, we meet Charlie Drinkwater, a middle-school kid who's probably among the least popular --- and least noticed --- boys in his class.

Our guest on this edition of ST is Ken Busby, the Executive Director and CEO of the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa (AHCT), which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. As everyone who cares about the arts (and the ongoing presence of the arts) in this city knows already, the AHCT has been enriching the cultural life of our community ever since it began in 1961. And now, the ACHT is nearing the completion of its largest initiative ever, the new 42,000-square-foot Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa Hardesty Arts Center (or "AHHA"), which will open in the fall of this year.