|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sidney Poitier
Oscar for Best Actor
He said, "You can't talk, you can't speak, you can't read." No one ever said that to me before. And I always dreaded that someone would say that to me because I really couldn't read well and I really didn't speak terrifically. Certainly my accent was Caribbean. So his complaints were dead on. But I had to now not push that aside. I had to then look at it and say wait a minute, that's the me that he sees. Therefore, I have to assume the responsibility for either remaining that way or changing it and to change it for what purpose? I have to change it because I felt in myself that if I don't change, I would be less the person that I perceived myself to be.
View Interview with Sidney Poitier
View Biography of Sidney Poitier
View Profile of Sidney Poitier
View Photo Gallery of Sidney Poitier
|
|
|
Sidney Poitier
Oscar for Best Actor
There isn't a person that sits in a movie house, of any maturity, who hasn't been disappointed, who hasn't been exhilarated, who hasn't felt fear, who hasn't felt joy. Every one of the emotions that human beings experience, even the most terrifying ones, they have been akin to all of them at one time or another, either in their daily lives, their weekly lives, their monthly lives, their yearly lives. So that when they sit in that theater, that's all they bring in. That's the scoreboard they bring in. And they sit there and they watch actors playing at fear, embarrassment, at love, at hate, at all of the emotions in life. That's what they bring in. So when they sit there, and they're looking at actors doing that, they cotton to those actors that make that connection, makes that connection with them. And that's the actor's job, it's not their job. All they do is they bring this panel of human emotions with them. And these emotions are in neutral. They are absolutely in neutral as they sit there. And one by one, this really fine actress or actor begins to do things that somewhere in the consciousness of that audience, they're saying, "Ooh boy, yeah, I know about that. I've seen that. Wow." That's where the admiration comes from, because they can also tell when that actor or that actress is not reaching home.
View Interview with Sidney Poitier
View Biography of Sidney Poitier
View Profile of Sidney Poitier
View Photo Gallery of Sidney Poitier
|
|
|
Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State, United States of America
Colin Powell: One of my little rules is, you get all the facts you can. You get all of the analysis you can. You grind it up in your mental computer and then, when you have all the facts available to you, go with your instinct. I go with my instinct a great deal, but it is not just snap-go. You have to learn the technique of informing your instinct, of educating that little place down in your stomach where instinct resides, so that it is not blind instinct, but informed instinct. Built into each of us is a little calculator that can make judgments that will never appear on a piece of paper. And sometimes you just know something's right -- you can't prove it to anybody -- or you know something's wrong. Little ethical circuit breakers you carry around inside of you, or little right and wrong circuit breakers you carry around inside of you. So, I go with my instinct a great deal.
View Interview with Colin Powell
View Biography of Colin Powell
View Profile of Colin Powell
View Photo Gallery of Colin Powell
|
|
|
Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State, United States of America
Colin Powell: We can't just sit around waiting for government to solve some of these intractable social problems that we've had for years. Government has a role to play. It is time for all of us to live up more fully to the concept of citizenship. And for those of us who as citizens of this nation have been blessed with treasure, and wealth, and good position, and comfortable homes, and all the blessings of this land, to be a good citizen, to be a big citizen, requires you to do more in the way of sharing with those who are in need. So that a family that has three wonderful children ought to try to see if they could find three hours a week to share that life with a kid in need who doesn't have a mentor, who doesn't get to play in Little League and do the other things that we take for granted. Somebody in that family who might go tutor a school on an afternoon off from a job, and we're encouraging corporations to give them that afternoon off. And so that's what we mean by big citizenship.
View Interview with Colin Powell
View Biography of Colin Powell
View Profile of Colin Powell
View Photo Gallery of Colin Powell
|
|
|
Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
Jerry insisted and insisted and insisted on that opening number being larger, and engulfing a huge audience that wasn't Jewish, that didn't know about shtetls and so on. And over and over again, they'd talk about it, and then finally, one day somebody used the word "tradition," and he said, "That's it! Write about tradition. That, everybody has." So the show has been as great a success in Tokyo as it was on Broadway and anywhere there is tradition. Well, where isn't there tradition? Actually, unfortunately, there is less tradition today -- and that is a terrible loss culturally to all of us -- than there used to be, but that time, tradition was just international. Every country held on to that tradition, and the show succeeded because of it.
View Interview with Harold Prince
View Biography of Harold Prince
View Profile of Harold Prince
View Photo Gallery of Harold Prince
|
|
|
Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
George Furth had written a bunch of plays, and Steve said to me, "I have a friend name George Furth who has written a bunch of one act plays for Kim Stanley to star in. When you read them, it doesn't seem to be happening, though she is very interested." So I read seven plays, and I said, "Well, you know, all I could see reading them -- he writes great, Steve -- but all I could see was Kim Stanley running to make costume and wig changes and makeup changes. It just exhausted me. That's as far as my imagination would take me, but I'll tell you what, it's a musical." And he said, "It is?" and he called George and we met in my office, and I said, "Yes, guys. It's a musical," and they went and struggled, and Steve brilliantly figured out how to write a score for a show that did not move the show along, where the songs were not internal to the scenes, preserving George Furth's unique writing and at the same time amplifying the relationships between scenes, interrupting a scene, and doing a number and so on. It's a very uniquely contrived and brilliant score, and I felt comfortable in the birthday parties, which were dark. It all started with a birthday, ended with a birthday, and they reappeared. They're right up my alley. That's something that got added to the show. The show bubbles a lot of the time, but there is a dark spine somewhere there.
View Interview with Harold Prince
View Biography of Harold Prince
View Profile of Harold Prince
View Photo Gallery of Harold Prince
|
|
|
Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
It was a realistic show about a bunch of people who go to a theater and get very drunk and start to fight with props that were on the walls from an old musical. It eluded me. So what happened was we added ghosts, we added other people. We added alter egos for everybody in the cast, and a terrific sense of mystery -- À la recherche du temps perdu. We wanted to put something gauzy and melancholy on that stage, while telling the story of lost dreams and so on, and the guys did brilliantly. Then, of course, the apotheosis, the big moment in the thing, was when the four leading characters -- and the four leading characters in their youth -- all converged on stage, circled each other, screamed at each other, and that erupted in a Follies section, a real Ziegfeld Follies section.
View Interview with Harold Prince
View Biography of Harold Prince
View Profile of Harold Prince
View Photo Gallery of Harold Prince
|
|
|
Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
Harold Prince: Sweeney was very much Steve's show. I didn't get it. I got it as I went along. It's about revenge, and I don't think I am a vengeful guy. I don't think I feel revenge. I recognize its existence. The idea of it drains me, you know. It hurts my energy level. So it's about revenge, but I got into it, and I got into it because it's very possible I imposed something on it. No one else who has done it since has ever done that. I wanted it to have some social significance, and I realized the story takes place during the beginning of the Industrial Age in England, and that all of these people -- obviously, it turns to cannibalism -- some of them don't even know that they're inadvertently cannibals, but basically, I thought they are all sharing one thing. They never breathe clean air. They never see sunlight. From the day they're born to the day they die, they're victims. So I said to Eugene Lee, "Let's do it in a factory, and let's put a glass roof on it that makes it claustrophobic, and let's tell all of these people that they are in the same spot really as the two leading characters in the play, that they're all victims of the industrial age." This is a time when kids were on the assembly line for 14 hours a day doing piecework and so on, and that pulled the whole show together for me. Oddly enough, it has never been done (that way) since. There certainly are detractors who think, "Why did he bother?" but I bothered because it made it possible for me to direct it, and I did a good job.
View Interview with Harold Prince
View Biography of Harold Prince
View Profile of Harold Prince
View Photo Gallery of Harold Prince
|
| |
|
