Movies Til Dawn

NBC Archives has made available "Mississippi: A Self Portrait", the complete, original one-hour documentary that my father made which in turn inspired us to make the "follow-up" documentary "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story". Click here to legally view the entire 1965 film.  We're hoping to be able to include the original doc as an extra on the DVD of "Booker's Place", along with "The Streets Of Greenwood", a fine short film made in the early '60's which we were privileged to be allowed to cull invaluable footage from, showing Greenwood Ms. in the height (or depths) of the Civil Rights era. Meanwhile, "Booker's Place" is playing this weekend at the Little Rock Film Festival where it's competing for the "Best Southern Documentary" prize. More fests to follow, I'm sure. And our Dateline NBC segment is being moved around the calendar but will soon land, I imagine, on the appro...

In 1978, when I was a Junior High schooler at the disastrous San Fernando Valley prison camp known as Walter Reed Jr. High School, our English teacher (name and face a total blank to me at this date) selected a few students who seemed to have an aptitude for creative writing to join in a supplementary outside-of-class group where they'd focus on essay writing. I was one of the lucky few chosen--I say lucky because just the fact of being able to leave a classroom filled with thirty assholes and sit in a quiet group of five or six was a heavenly thought to me. The mini-class was led by an aging--all right elderly--gentleman named Mr. Pola. And "gentleman" was absolutely the right way to describe him. It wasn't just the double-breasted suit and the worn but still elegant silk tie that he wore. He had a bearing, a gentle dignity about him, that felt to me (a kid who truly didn't belong in the world he'd been born into) as if it belonged in another era, maybe...