Summary: The brilliant work, personal struggles, and cultural impact of iconic American writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams explodes onto the screen in this innovative dual-portrait documentary. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Love, Cecil, and Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel) masterfully collages a wealth of archival material, including dishy talk show appearances with David Frost and...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Examines the life and legacy of African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights worker Maya Angelou, from her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her work with Malcolm X in Ghana to the recitation of her inaugural poem for President Bill Clinton. Includes Angelou's own words woven together with archival photographs and videos as well as interviews with Angelou's friends and family.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Peninsula

Summary: Words from a Bear gives a thorough survey of Momaday's most prolific years as a doctorate fellow at Stanford University, his achievement of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1969, and his later works that solidified his place as the founding member of the 'Native American Renaissance' in art and literature, influencing a generation of Native American artists, scholars, and political activists.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Explores the lesser-known tale of George's creators, Hans and Margret Rey. Years later, having heard that Hans was wasting his artistic talents as a bookkeeper in Rio, Margaret traveled to Brazil to persuade him to marry her and do something creative together. Arriving in New York as refugees, they started their life anew and over the next three decades, they created a classic that continues to...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: A documentary based on a series of interviews with Paul Bowles shortly before his death and anecdotes provided by his friends and collaborators including Gore Vidal, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Walters, Ruth Fainlight, Edmund White, William Burroughs, Francis Bacon and many others --Container.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: First Run Features [distributor] 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner's 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) was for decades mainly the stuff of legend; that changed when Aaron Brookner, the late director's nephew, discovered a print of it in 2011 and spearheaded a restoration. Includes on-screen appearances by Allen...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2015

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This is an unashamedly opinionated film. In Gore Vidal's America, the political coup has already happened. The right have triumphed and the human values of the liberals have been consigned to history. But how did this happen and who organized it? In this film Gore Vidal's acerbic, opinionated and informed approach rips away at the facade of the new America. The film dramatizes Gore's political...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Bullfrog Films 2014

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In this sensational tale of one of the greatest storytellers in history, George Plimpton's astounding journalism career is captured in heartwarming footage and intimate personal interviews.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Echo Bridge Home Entertainment 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This incisive and entertaining portrait of American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti explores his vital role as catalyst for numerous literary careers and for the Beat movement itself. Interviews with Ferlinghetti and others reveal a rich mélange of characters and events that unfolded in postwar America. In 1953 Ferlinghetti opened City Lights Bookstore, which quickly evolved into an iconic...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2010

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: After the death in 2004 of American theater actor and monologist Spalding Gray, director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) pieced together a narrative of Gray's life to create the documentary And Everything is Going Fine. Brilliantly and sensitively assembled entirely from footage of Gray, taken from interviews and one-man shows from throughout his career, it is a rich, full portrait, and...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Criterion Collection 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Award-winning docu-drama about the king of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac. Combines rare footage featuring Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Burroughs with music by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Zoot Sims.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Goldhil Video 2003

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: William Burroughs: the Beats éminence grise, "literary outlaw," culture hero to generations of poets, musicians, artists, and filmmakers who had their minds blown by his 1959 classic, banned-in-America "Naked Lunch." This film covers his life in a straightforward manner, but the portrait drawn is at odds with the character who wrote in outlandish graphic detail about then-forbidden sexuality in...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Yonilizer Productions 2011

Copies Available at Woodmere

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: WCMU 2005

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This is a deeply moving portrait of Maurice Sendak, a seminal talent who is conflicted with his success, and whose lifelong obsession with death has subtly and ironically influenced his work. Now 81, Sendak is best known for his first book, Where the wild things are, which he wrote after spending ten years as an illustrator. Through his own words, firsthand photos, and illustrations, Sendak...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures 2010

Copies Available at Woodmere

Burroughs, William S.

Summary: Explores the life, work, and performance style of writer William S. Burroughs through a series of readings in Scandinavia.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Microcinema 2010

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Examine the visionary work and turbulent life of one of the greatest and most influential American writers: Ernest Hemingway. Intimate and insightful, the series weaves together Hemingway's biography with excerpts from his work. The film penetrates the myth of Hemingway to reveal a deeply troubled and ultimately tragic figure.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: An artful and intimate meditation on the life and works of the acclaimed novelist. From her childhood in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio to '70s-era book tours with Muhammad Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writing room, Toni Morrison leads an assembly of her peers, critics, and colleagues on an exploration of race, America, history and the human condition as...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Goodman, Paul

Summary: Showcases the intellect of author Paul Goodman and rediscovers his ideas of the 1960's through archival multimedia, photographs, interviews, and readings of his poetry and journals.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Zeitgeist Video 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Author Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological work challenges assumptions about race, gender and cultural superiority that had been defined by the field in the 19th century.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

Steensland, Mark.

Summary: Looks at the life and career of the popular American science fiction writer.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: First-Run Features 2002

Copies Available at Woodmere