The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Made Them (Hardcover)

by Studs Terkel (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In earlier oral histories such as Working, The Good War, and Hard Times, Studs Terkel showed a virtuoso talent for absorbing the small talk of regular Joes and Janes and turning it into a literary cross-hatch--Robert Browning and Herodotus, Margaret Mead and Steinbeck. It turns out all this was prologue. In The Spectator, Terkel reveals that if he loved the waitresses and hockey players of earlier books, it wasn't in "the way, nor to the same degree, as those in the world of the lively arts." You can tell, reading this book. The Terkel touch is all here, but in 50-plus interviews with the likes of Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando, James Cagney, Simone Signoret, Jacques Tati, and (weirdly) Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's Studs's range that astonishes. He has textured memories of remote stage productions of Arthur Miller's plays--which you might expect. But when he remembers Kanchenjungha with the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, Ray laughs out loud: "Where did you see that?" There are lovely little fender benders, too: in a basement apartment in Paris in 1963, Simone Signoret extravagantly praises Françoise Rosay and Agnes de Mille, characters we know from earlier chapters--de Mille especially. A choreographer who brought ballet to Broadway musicals, she explains that African rhythms and English clog dancing married to beget tap; with a shift from up to down beat, she says, "syncopation and jazz were born." Reading The Spectator, you marvel once again at Terkel's facility with people of all kinds--and his deep familiarity with the American century. --Lyall Bush

From 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 interviewsAmany of them reading almost like monologues, Terkel says so littleAfirst 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 stellarAEdward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Lillian Gish, Zero Mostel, Pauline Kael, Marlon Brando, Uta Hagen, Tallulah Bankhead and August Wilson, among othersAand 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 OllieAwhich he duly impersonates during the interview. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 364 pages
• Publisher: New Press; First Edition edition (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565845536
• ISBN-13: 978-1565845534
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,818,859 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Celebrate The Arts, Guided By A Master, January 8, 2000

By	Glenn Bowie (Red Wing, Minnesota, USA) - See all my reviews

Any reading of this book must be deeply personal. For me, tears often came in reaction to the sheer beauty of thoughts and deeds expressed by Studs Terkel and his interviewees. Hopefully the book will spark a theatre renaissance. No matter how large your village, town, or city, there is a need for a theatre of the people. Models described in the book can spur you into activity. Highlights of more than 55 interviews are given! My favorites: those with Arthur Miller, Ruth Gordon, Jonathon Miller, Moms Mabley, Uta Hagen, Edward Albee, and Eugene Ionesco. You will be compelled to share the book, possibly by reading aloud in turn with a companion.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Studs At His Craft, December 7, 2008

By	Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them (Paperback)

As is my habit when an author "speaks" to me, I have been running through the oral histories of the mainly average citizens of America collected by the recently departed Studs Terkel, the premier interviewer of his age. When I latch onto a writer I want to delve into I tend to read whatever comes into my hands as I get it rather than systematically or chronologically. Thus, I have just gotten my hands on a copy of Terkel's "The Spectator", a professional actor's memoir of sorts, that goes a long way to filling in some blanks in the life story of one Louis "Studs" Terkel (including information that the nickname "Studs" is from the Chicago trilogy "Studs Lonigan" by James T. Farrell, another author who will be reviewed here in the future).

For those unfamiliar with Terkel's work other than his seemingly endless capacity to interview one and all this little book acts as glue to understanding a life-long commitment to his craft as an actor, his appreciation of those who gave memorable performances, his fantastical recall of such moments in the theater and on film and his creating of a wider audience appreciation for various musically traditions like jazz, folk music and the blues. Nice work.

Studs, like many of the members of his generation, was formed by the hardships and cruelties of the Great Depression that I believe in his oral histories are his special contribution to insights into that period and that is reflected here, as well. That was a time, as today's' current economic and social events seem to copying, where one was forced to get by on wits, cleverness and sheer "guts". Studs himself did odd jobs around the theater trying catch on a performer. But not just any theater and not just any performer. This is the period of the Theater Guild and of WPA which gave cultural workers or those who aspired to such a chance. These early efforts formed the lifelong interest that he has in the theater, playwrights, directors and of the 'tricks of the trade' in order to make the audience "believe" in the performance. I found, personally, his probing and informed interviews with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams , two of my own favorite playwrights, the most interesting part of a book filled with all kind of interesting tidbits.

For his efforts, then and later, Studs had some success in his career as a performer first in the ubiquitous radio that informed the consciousness of many in the so-called "greatest generation" as a disc jockey and interviewer of various musical figures like Billie Holiday on his shows, the Wax Museum and the Eclectic Disc Jockey. It is the combination of the radio as a medium and the in-depth interview as a format that sets Studs apart. Today we have no comprehension of how important these little extended interviews are as a contribution to the history of our modern culture. Will the ubiquitous mass media sound bites of the 21st century or even the unfiltered presentations on "YouTube", or its successors, tell future generations what that culture was all about? I don't even want to hazard a guess. But for now, savor, and I do mean savor, Studs going one-on-one with the above-mentioned Miller and Williams or songwriter Yip Harburg, come-back actor James Cagney, culture critics Harold Clurman and Kenneth Tynan and many, many more actors, actresses, playwrights, impresarios, directors and other cultural gadflies. Kudos and adieu Studs.