Reflections on Dumpster Diving
Essayist Lars Eighner is the author of Travels with Lizbeth, which he wrote on an IBM XT he found in a dumpster. The book was published by St. Martin's Press in 1993 to wide critical acclaim. He is currently working on a feature-length motion picture based on a concept by David Van Taylor and Travels with Lizbeth.
Producer David Van Taylor is the director of Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest, winner of the 1992 Independent Documentary Association award for documentary excellence. The hour-long film premiered simultaneously at New York's Film Forum and on the PBS series "P.O.V." Subsequently, Van Taylor wrote and directed Building Hope: Community Development in America, also broadcast on PBS. Van Taylor is currently directing a documentary about baboon-to-human liver transplants, a series on the history of the Religious Right, and a narrative feature about a dumpster diver who discovers a dead body.
Journey Home
Essayist Patty St. James Roberts was a participant in the eye-opening 1966 CBS film, Sixteen in Webster Groves, which looked at the American dreams of teenagers in the upper-middle class suburb of Webster Groves, Missouri, and revealed their complacency and lack of social concern. Today, she says her thankfulness for her own happiness, as a wife and mother, has led her to study to become an Episcopal priest.
Producer Arthur Barron wrote, directed and produced Sixteen in Webster Groves for CBS in 1966. Describing Webster Groves - an affluent, mostly white suburb of St. Louis - as "six square miles of the American Dream," the film set out to explore the lives and aspirations of the community's sixteen-year-olds to see what the American Dream had produced. Barron's work has been exhibited on CBS, ABC, HBO and PBS. He has won four television Emmys and numerous other awards.
Young Playwrights
Essayists Angel, Leslie, Yvette, Bernice, Maurice, Onalize, Brandy and Thomas live in the housing projects of Manhattan's lower East Side. These African-American and Hispanic ninth graders were students at Junior High School 22 in New York when they created their play.
Arthur T. Wilson is a noted poet, playwright, director, actor and educator. In addition to directing the New York Shakespeare Festival's Playwriting in the Schools program, Wilson has worked with many colleges and theaters throughout the country.
Producer
Nigel Noble received an Academy Award nomination for his feature
length documentary, A Stitch in Time, and was invited to the Cannes
Film Festival in 1988 with Voices of Sarafina!, which opened the 1987
Telluride Film Festival to a standing ovation. Broadcast on NBC and
PBS, Close Harmony (1981) received an Academy Award, Emmy and
Christopher awards. Other award-winning documentaries include Big
Apple Circus for HBO, Olympic Dreamers, Civil War Games, and No Bridge
Too Old for the National Geographic television series.
The Spiritual Deficit and the American Dream
Essayist Arianna Huffington, author, lecturer and broadcaster, will debut her own talk show, Critical Mass, this year on cable's National Empowerment Television channel. She lectures frequently on individual responsibility and the pursuit of happiness, and art and culture in the 1990s, challenging the absolute rights of genius. Her latest book, The Fourth Instinct, about man's drive toward meaning and spiritual fulfillment, will be published in May 1994 by Simon and Schuster. Her first book, The Female Woman, an attack on extremism in the feminist movement, was published in 1974 by Random House and translated into eleven languages. Huffington lives in Santa Barbara, California and Washington, DC, where her husband Michael is a congressman representing California's 22nd District.
Producer Marco Williams' most recent film, the acclaimed documentary, In Search of Our Fathers, has screened to critical attention nationally and internationally. It was broadcast on PBS' Frontline and was selected for the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition. Without a Pass, a 30-minute dramatic short starring John Amos and Branford Marsalis, received three ACE nominations, including Best Director of a Theatrical Special and Best Theatrical Special.
Dichosa Mujer
Essayist Rosa Martha Zarate Macias founded "Libreria del Pueblo," a literacy program for immigrants that has evolved into a nonprofit social service organization comprised of a sewing cooperative, legal defense center for women and children, English language classes and empowerment programs for migrant farm workers.
Producer Christine Burrill
(on right in picture) collaborated with producer Haskell Wexler on the
1971 documentary Brazil: Report on Torture. With Wexler, Bill Yahraus
and David Davis she co-founded Focal Point Films, a collective which
produced social and political documentary films from 1976 to 1980, on
topics ranging from nuclear disarmament to gangs in East L.A., to the
Vietnam War.
Program Three: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
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DECLARATIONS: ESSAYS ON AMERICAN IDEALS
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