Spectator: Talk about Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them

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Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel is best known as a chronicler of the common man, but over the last 45 years, he's also interviewed luminaries of stage and screen for his radio show. The best of those interviews are collected for the first time in print in The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays with Those Who Made Them.

Jules Feiffer

No one interviews like Studs because no one thinks like Studs. His buoyancy, his curiosity, and his companionable style of inquiry have often turned a program on a subject I didn't give a damn about into an hour of thoughtful playtime. But how come I'm not in this book?

Roger Ebert

Studs Terkel's conversations are so exciting because he's an expert on the work of his subjects--he has a steel-trap memory--and because his passion gets them fired up--they shift from interview mode and into talking to Studs as they would confide in a friend. No one else captures conversation the way Terkel does.

Publishers Weekly

A collection of interviews with screen and stage actors, directors, playwrights and critics, Terkel's latest richly entertaining oral history is a departure from his bestselling interview books on weightier themes (Working; Hard Times; Race). Here, Terkel offers interviews--many of them reading almost like monologues, Terkel says so little--first heard on the Chicago radio program he has hosted for the past 45 years. Many of the exchanges feel dated, and there is an awful lot of chitchat. Nevertheless, the book's cast of characters is stellar--Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Lillian Gish, Zero Mostel, Pauline Kael, Marlon Brando, Uta Hagen, Tallulah Bankhead and August Wilson, among others--and Terkel has a knack for pushing buttons, opening floodgates, capturing his subjects in illuminating moments. "I've always regarded myself as an incomplete person," says Tennessee Williams in a particularly revealing passage. "Consequently, I've always been interested in my kind of people: people that have to fight for their reason... people who come close to cracking." Arthur Miller explains how the nation has gone soft: "In the '30s, people, in order to believe they were real Americans, believed they were responsible for their own fate." We also get Agnes DeMille on choreographing Oklahoma, Ian McKellen on the modernness of Shakespeare, composer/ pianist Eubie Blake (who wrote the first all-black musical, Shuffle Along) on his parents' tribulations as slaves and Kenneth Tynan on British class prejudice. A disarming, invigorating look at show biz, this quirky book closes, on a fittingly eclectic note, with Burr Tillstrom, creator of the TV puppets on Kukla, Fran and Ollie--which he duly impersonates during the interview. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Terkel is best known as the prize-winning author of books of oral history (Working, The Good War). But for the last 45 years, on his nationally syndicated radio show, he has also interviewed notables of the stage and screen. These interviews are collected here for the first time. Not surprisingly, Terkel is a very good interviewer; these aren't fluff pieces. Over the years, he talked with playwrights Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, and August Wilson; performers Arnold Schwarzenegger, Buster Keaton, Carol Channing, and Ian McKellen; directors Federico Fellini, Jonathan Miller, and Jacques Tati; and composers Eubie Blake, E.Y. Harburg, and others. Since the pieces range over 45 years, a lot of the interviewees may be more familiar to an earlier generation. Knowledgeable and perceptive, this is highly recommended for large public libraries and theatrical collections.--Marianne Cawley, Charleston Cty. P.L., SC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

A collection of previously unpublished interviews with some of the greatest luminaries of film and theater of the 20th century, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian. Interviews were conducted over the past 45 years on Terkel's nationally syndicated radio show. Some figures interviewed include Arthur Miller, Marlon Brando, Zero Mostel, Ruth Gordon, and Marcel Marceau. The volume lacks a subject index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Drawing from his many years of radio as well as some early magazine pieces, Terkel (Coming of Age, 1995, etc.) looks at his first loves, film and theater, as explicated by some of their most famous creators. One of the best parts of visiting or living in Chicago is hearing Terkel's radio program, a beacon for how intelligent, compassionate, and interesting talk radio can be. Terkel, who has dabbled in acting himself, is as fascinated by the art and craft of acting as he is by the many crafts explored in his classic Working (1974), a book to which he compares the current one. Terkel is the kind of guy who, by his own admission, is as riveted by watching a talented short-order cook juggle burgers as he is by a Eugene O'Neill play, and he brings that seemingly endless wide-eyed enjoyment to these interviews. The book has some wonderful moments. A ruthlessly frank Agnes De Mille talks about the difficulty of being taken seriously as a choreographer in the early days of her career and about the shock of seeing modern dance for the first time ("Our eyes were innocent"). Marlon Brando, reluctantly plugging his latest film, The Ugly American, begins to interview Terkel. Arthur Miller admits that his original ambition was to be a Russ Columbo–style crooner. And when the book is focused on craft, it is riveting. Unfortunately, Terkel is a bit more awed than usual by his interview subjects and some, like Federico Fellini, really don't have much to say. The result is a bit disappointing, with gems scattered amid too much dross. A regrettable oddity—a Studs Terkel oral history that has dull patches.