Author Archive

Thirteen Days: Short-Range Tragedy

Written by Mimi Kramer on January 30, 2001. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

The morning after seeing Thirteen Days I rang my friend Janet Coleman first thing. It was way too early to be calling anyone, but I was dying to talk to her. There were things I wanted to ask her about Roger Donaldson’s elegant docudrama on the Cuban missile crisis–like what she thought had been the
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Imagining Ahab Imagining Ahab Relatives of Frank William "Billy" …

Written by Mimi Kramer on November 21, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Relatives of Frank William "Billy" Tyne, who captained the ill-fated Andrea Gail and went down with six of his crew during the brutal 1991 storm off New England, are thundering mad at George Clooney’s portrayal of their kin. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., against Warner Bros., Tyne’s family claims
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‘Round the Town with Burke and Hare, the Original Body Snatchers

Written by Mimi Kramer on November 7, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

In Val Lewton’s 1945 The Body Snatcher (which the old-movie cable stations have been showing a bit lately for obvious reasons) there’s a scene in which Boris Karloff tells Bela Lugosi the story of the mass murderers William Burke and William Hare who, between November 1827 and November 1828, sold the bodies of 16 of
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Double-Edged Swords

Written by Mimi Kramer on July 18, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Not long ago, I caught a glimpse of something I thought might be another possible function of the ekphrasis, as this device is called. It was toward the end of Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock (recently released on video), in which Bill Murray plays an aging vaudevillian with anticommunist leadings. He’s a ventriloquist who doesn’t
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The New Drag (And Why It Matters)

Written by Mimi Kramer on July 4, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

In the 1999 film adaptation of An Ideal Husband that recently came out on video, there’s a scene in which the hero, Lord Goring, attends the opening of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. All London seems to have turned out for the occasion, which ends with Wilde himself appearing in response to cries
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Why’s Stephen Sondheim Kicking Around Julie Taymor?

Written by Mimi Kramer on June 6, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Listen, beyond the fifth cataract the Nile heads directly towards Khartoum. –Radames, in the Elton John-Tim Rice Aida One of the strangest conversations I ever had was one in which Gerald Schoenfeld, the chair of the Shubert Organization, tried to convince me that Andrew Lloyd Webber was the saving hope of the American theater. It
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True Malkovich

Written by Mimi Kramer on March 28, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

The write-up appeared on the front page of the "Styles" section the Sunday after the opening–right under an article by Ginia Bellafante about vintage clothing. ("That Rarity, a Sizzling Opening Night Party," the headline ran.) There was a photograph of Sam Shepard cavorting at Laura Belle with the two hip young stars of the production,
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Remaking the “Classics”

Written by Mimi Kramer on March 14, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Then came "highbrow" culture–Masterpiece Theater, Merchant-Ivory, Miramax. Here the idea was to invent new ways of milking literature, either for profit or from a misplaced yearning after cultivation. Lately, the amount of time between remakes appears to be dwindling. Video catalogs currently list six different versions of Jane Eyre (1934, 1944, 1970, 1983, 1996 and
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Pacino, Papp and the Sophocles Problem

Written by Mimi Kramer on February 29, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

It stirred up feelings and ideas that have been rattling around my head for a number of years–about stuff my friends and I all care a good deal about, like acting and art and "the classics" and theater. To be honest, I think I had a moment of panic on your behalf. Oedipus is a
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Harry Potter and The New Britain

Written by Mimi Kramer on February 1, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain: The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. –A.E. Housman When I was last in London three
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