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Sidney Poitier
Oscar for Best Actor
One of the preparations I decided was essential to my survival was I had to learn to read. I really had to learn to read. I could read third grade level, fourth grade level. As I told you, I left school at the age of 12-and-a-half. I then decided that I have to learn to read well and I went about that process. That I knew was my goal. The reason was, I realized that in New York there were many streets. Some were numbered, but not all. Some were named. And three syllables, I had great problems with pronouncing three syllables. And every word that had three, four syllables in it, it staggered me. I mean it just defeated me. So I decided that I had to learn to read better because all of the information necessary for my survival came to me, would come to me in words.
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Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State, United States of America
A whole generation of senior officers came up, including me, General Schwarzkopf and many others, who having gone through Vietnam were committed to the proposition that if we ever have to face something like that again, as the senior officers it is our responsibility to work with our political leaders and if necessary push our political leaders to make sure that they understand what they're getting into, and have they made the right political decisions? And they're the ones to determine, you know, what the right political decisions are.
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Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State, United States of America
When we faced conflicts in Panama and in Desert Storm and in the Gulf War, where President Bush and his political leaders working with him, Secretary Baker -- Jim Baker -- and Secretary Dick Cheney, came up with clear political guidance and then supervised us very carefully. It wasn't just, "Okay, here's the guidance, you military folks just tell us what you need and you get it." We had to explain to our political leaders and justify to our political leaders what we needed and why we were going to do things the way we recommended to them. And they challenged us, made sure that they were satisfied that we had thought it all through and then they let us do the job. They turned us loose. That was quite a renaissance.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
I caught on to plays as reading matter. I don't do that much anymore, but I think it must have been a hell of a good idea, because I knew all those plays, all the history of plays from even pre-turn-of-the-20th century, and I read them all and loved reading them, to the exclusion sometimes of great books. And then I got to know very early on -- I'm very lucky -- I got to know a lot of those playwrights, be in the same room with Robert Sherwood and his like. There were a lot of great playwrights around. Sidney Kingsley I knew very well, and Elmer Rice I met, a whole lot of people like that.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
Harold Prince: I am very organized. I don't sit around and do little dots and drawings. When you first start directing -- the very first job I ever got, which was a stock job, directing -- you do little drawings of where you want your actors to go in the scenery. The first play was Angel Street. You know. Gaslight, I think the movie was called. And then you go in and you start to rehearse the actors, and then the actors, one of them says, "I would love to try going in that direction instead," and there is your whole job gone. Somebody who goes somewhere you didn't want them to go, what about all the rest of those people? So preparation is another kind of thing. Preparation is getting everything you need to know of a sensory nature about the characters, where the story is taking place, all those things. I mean what things smell like, taste like, sound like, and so on. That is an exercise you share with your designer as well. Boris Aronson taught me that years ago.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
He was the greatest designer that ever lived, I think. He would never design anything. I never saw him pick up a pen and draw something and say, "What do you think of this?" Instead, he'd say, "Let's talk about the food. Let's talk about what the restaurants were like. Let's talk about the sound on the street. Let's talk about " So Cabaret, for one, was a black box with selective bits of scenery and one huge surprise. I looked at the model for the first time, and there was this waffled, wobbly, funhouse mirror angled at the audience. They came in and sat down, they could see this distorted view of themselves, and it's like saying, "That's your metaphor, folks!" Sort of like the factory in Sweeney.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
I have two left feet, but my direction is characterized, I think, in some of the best work, by movement, and by how I will move a block of people you would call an ensemble or a chorus. And they are moving the way dancers would move. Their feet aren't doing anything, because I wouldn't know how to tell them that, but I can move them. Jerry moved people diagonally across the stage, from upstage down, directly downstage, turn around, move directly upstage. Strange energies come from all of that. The theater that he entered and that I entered moved laterally. They'd drop a drop, and things would move from left to right or right to left. They changed the scenery upstage. You would open there would be doors. I haven't had a door in a show for as long as I can remember. That whole world of inviting the audience to use its imagination and fill in the blank spaces is the difference between what I do and what people who do realistic films and so on do. Films weren't always realistic. I love old black-and-white silent films. They were forced perspective and all kinds of strange wonderful things that I use in the theater.
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