From Canadian Jewish News, October 22, 2001 Bushmeat, an hour-long television documentary soon to air on the Discovery Channel, is a riveting, tautly-edited expose of the illicit trade in gorilla and chimpanzee meat in Cameroon and other countries of Central Africa. Toronto filmmaker Dawna Treibicz defied the odds to make this film about a subject that…
Category: Movies, Theatre
Repentant: A new role for the divine Sarah Bernhardt (1922)
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From the Canadian Jewish Review, September 8, 1922 It will be remembered that Sarah Bernhardt was born in Paris in 1844 of Dutch Jewish parents and was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the request of her father. She has recently given an interview to Miss Elsie Roow, of the New York Herald, in…
Screenwriting guru Syd Field fades to black
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From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2014 As announced in obituaries in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times and other publications, screenwriting guru Syd Alvin Field died last November in Los Angeles at the age of 77. It’s been 35 years since Field’s book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting was first published in…
Meeting Nehemiah Persoff at David’s Deli, San Francisco
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The rumbling is sudden and loud and the floor vibrates intensely. Yet patrons in this darkened theatre on Pier 39 in the Fisherman’s Wharf district remain calm. And why not? They have paid $7 to attend the San Francisco Experience, a 28-minute multi-media show that promises that “you will feel the earth shake.” Utilizing a…
Remembering screenwriter Robert Riskin
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Certainly you’ve seen of some of the movies that he wrote — the list includes Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Meet John Doe (1941) — but you may be forgiven if you don’t…
Portrait of Walter Winchell (1936)
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Archivist of Gothomania By Hye Bossin From the Canadian Jewish Standard, September 1936 New York’s prize piece of human curiosa is Walter Winchell. He climbed over Shaw, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, etc., to top the New York Post’s poll. Suckers stare at him in night clubs instead of the floor show. You are likely to hear…
All about Barbra
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From the Canadian Jewish News, October 2012 As legions of Barbra Streisand fans pay exorbitant prices (reportedly up to $500) for tickets to see her during her latest (and perhaps last) world tour — which includes a concert at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on Oct. 23rd 2012 — it seems a fortuitous time for the…
The Potash and Perlmutter Stories
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For years the magazines sent him rejection letters, inferring that his short stories about a pair of Jewish cloak and suit makers in New York were about as unmarketable as last year’s suits and dresses. But in the early 1900s Montague Glass broke through to the big time as major American magazines like The Saturday…
Great-granddaughter writes wonderful bio of Jacob Gordin
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◊ Finding the Jewish Shakespeare, The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin, by Beth Kaplan, has been newly released in paperback by Syracuse University Press, Spring 2012. One of the great moments in Yiddish theatre occurred the evening the curtain opened upon actor Jacob Adler in the role of “the Jewish King Lear,” as envisioned by…
Some Early Toronto Film Pioneers
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From the Canadian Jewish News, May 4, 2006 Born in the East End of London, leading British cameraman Joe Rosenthal came to Canada about 1900 at the behest of the Canadian Pacific Railway to make Living Canada, a series of documentary films intended to stimulate immigration. The series was a popular success in Britain, and…
