From a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. Christopher Walken is a shy hardware store employee. But whenever he takes a part in a local amateur theater production, he becomes the part completely--while on screen. Susan Sarandon is new in town, a lonely itenerant telephone company employee. On a whim, she auditions for and gets the part of Stella to Walken's Stanley when the theater group does A Streetcar Named Desire. Before anyone realizes the problem, she falls deeply in love with the sexy brute, not knowing what the real man is like.
Jean Shepherd the famous writer of "The Christmas Story", as an older "Ralph," recalls his memory of a particular Fourth of July from his high-school years in Hollman, Indiana. Ralph plays the sousaphone in the high-school band to the instructions of the baton-twirling drum master Wilbur Duckworth. Ralph is grudgingly set up on a blind date, only to find himself in the company of the gorgeous Miss Junior Corn Blossom, who rejects his advances. On the Fourth of July Duckworth causes a power outage by twirling his baton onto an electrical line during a parade; the town drunk Ludlow Kissel sets off an enormous firework that explodes under his own porch; and Ralph's father entertains the neighbors with his annual dramatic display of fireworks. "Ballad of Ludlow Kissel" is sung by Leigh Brown. Produced by Olivia Tappan.
A young Depression-era reporter is assigned to write his newspaper's advice column on the insistence of his mocking editor. Unhappy in the demeaning assignment, he begins to take an interest in one of the readers sending letters.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's comedy of a stylish young flapper (Sean Young) who chooses a husband (Lenny Von Dohlen), but finds she can't compete with his family.
Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life. It s a story that happens every day, but until Gregory Nava's groundbreaking El Norte (The North), the personal travails of immigrants crossing the border to America had never been shown in the movies with such urgent humanism. A work of social realism imbued with dreamlike imagery, El Norte is a lovingly rendered, heartbreaking story of hope and survival, which critic Roger Ebert called a Grapes of Wrath for our time.
An alcoholic and femme fatale face troubles before a family reunion.
Video production of the Pulitzer-prize winning musical stage production. In the first act, "George", a fictionalized Georges Seurat paints his lover, Dot, and "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte." Characters who become figures and vice versa walk through the story. In Act 2, George's descendant, a sculptor, comes to terms with his grandmother, Life, and Art.
Fictionalized portrait of one of history's great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.
The rivalry between Hickey and The Shad begins to take a different direction when they realize they can cause more trouble together, as "The Firm".
The story of a strong-minded Polish mother, Halina Nowak who desperately wants her talented son, Jacek to have a life in the free world. On the eve of the Polish uprising, Halina, taking her teenage son with her, leaves her husband in Poland and heads for Washington D.C. where her feisty mother and sister now live. Halina, willful and fun-loving, has a gift for life as her son has a gift for music. Although educated, she braves her job as a cleaning woman at a radio station before making the grade to anchor-woman. While Halina embraces her new life to the full, Jacek is employed as a casual laborer Experiencing his first taste of school, Jacek falls in with a crowd of eccentric kids (including a far-out flirt named Mary), he crashes a car and ends up being suspended. Together, with a sense of adventure, mother and son confront a foreign culture gaining a new understanding of themselves and the country they have adopted as their own.
Fractured fairy tales of a darker hue provide the remarkable context for Into the Woods, which deconstructs the Brothers Grimm by way of Rod Serling. While the faces and names are familiar, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and company inhabit a sylvan neighborhood in which witches and bakers are next-door neighbors, handsome princes from once-parallel fables are competitive (and equally vain) brothers, and all the stories intersect through unexpected new plot twists. This video production by the original Broadway cast gets its marquee shimmer from Bernadette Peters's wonderful witch, but the standout (and Tony winner as Best Actress) is Joanna Gleason, who gives the Baker's Wife a mixture of warmth, pragmatism, and sudden, poignantly romantic radiance.
A touching story of life in rural Maine, and the changes brought about by the closing of a town's small boat-building company -- on which many of the residents depended upon for a living.
A recording of a live performance of the Broadway play about two days in the life of Truman Capote during the time of the publication of his controversial story "Answered Prayers" in Esquire magazine in 1975. The one-man show takes place entirely in Capote's condominium in the United Nations Plaza in New York City.
