Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

America's five best fictional black presidents

The first movie to imagine a black president of the United States at any length was Joseph Sargent's satirical drama The Man in 1972. There, Douglass Dilman, president pro tempore of the Senate, happens into the Oval Office after the president and the speaker of the House die in a ceiling collapse. Unavailable on DVD, The Man is now a rarity, and yet it clearly forecasts the screen existences of subsequent black presidents. James Earl Jones uses his commanding, paternal, universally

Harlem's Apollo theater to create oral history

Columbia University and the Apollo Theater Foundation plan to create an oral history of the famed Harlem theater that launched the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and other music legends. The Apollo Theater Oral History Project will feature interviews with performers as well as cultural figures and politicians who helped make Harlem one of the nation's most vibrant communities. Planned as part of the landmark theater's 75th anni

The Underground Ansel Adams – Famous Photographer's Cave Photos Now Available for Public Viewing

The name Ansel Adams has become justifiably synonymous with photographic excellence, and his work is recognized and admired throughout the world. Most of us probably associate him most closely with Yosemite National Park, but he practiced his gift with lens and film in other areas as well. A new exhibit opening this weekend at Carlsbad Caverns National Park will give the public its first look at a different part of the natural world through the eyes of Ansel Adams, along with work b

Happy Days return as the Fonz and Richie Cunningham are reunited

Standing in front of a vintage car and sporting his leather jacket and unmistakable coif, Winkler briefly reprises his character from the 70s show on entertainment website www.FunnyOrDie.com Winkler, still having some trouble with his pronunciation, tells Howard this election is everyone's chance to right a wr-wr-wrong. Stepping back out of character, Howard says he and Winkler returned to their television roots to urge support fo

British architect to redesign New York Public Library building

Norman Foster, the eminent British architect who has made something of a specialty out of inserting contemporary designs into historic buildings, has been selected for a major renovation of the New York Public Library's landmark 1911 main building, on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets. Foster and his London firm, Foster & Partners, are to create a new circulation library in a space below the library's Rose Reading Room and overlooking Bryant Park that now houses seven l

Historic home of Shakespearean actor David Garrick in blaze

A fire which ravaged an historic villa that was once home to Shakespearean actor David Garrick was described as "a tragedy" by English Heritage. The Grade I listed Garrick's Villa in south-west London was badly damaged in the blaze, which was attended by 70 firefighters. Built in the Middle Ages, the building was converted into apartments in 1969. English Heritage said its structural engineers would assess the damage as soon as it was safe.

Rare Film Shows 1904 London Life

Sat next to me as the projector starts up is the man who found this piece of cinematic history, Professor Ian Christie. The historian stumbled on the footage, 104 years after it was filmed, while doing a routine search in the Australian National Film Archive. He was not expecting to find anything of merit. "You go along to an archive and you say: 'Show me your rubbish, show me the stuff you've never identified'," he tells me as the film plays on t

Onassis foundation buys prized El Greco

The Alexander S. Onassis foundation has bought an El Greco painting once owned by the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos to return it to the artist's home country of Greece. The Crowning of the Virgin is to be given on long-term loan to the national gallery of Greece, said Anthony Papadimitriou, the foundation's chairman. The 17th-century painting was bought from an unidentified American art dealer in the summer. “We were informed the painting was for sale and acted q

Titian masterpiece comes to London National Gallery for 100 million pounds fundraising drive

Titian's Renaissance masterpiece Diana and Actaeon has gone on show at the National Gallery in London to help accelerate a campaign to keep it in Britain. The London public has just four weeks to view the painting, which is on loan from the National Gallery of Scotland. The galleries need to raise £50 million by New Year's Eve to buy the mid-16th century work from the Duke of Sutherland to prevent it being sold abroad. That is one third of its estimated value on the op

William Holman Hunt exhibition at Manchester, UK

Among the three leading members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it's the one whose imagery is the most abrasive who is generally accorded the highest stature in the history of art. John Everett Millais sets out to charm and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to seduce, but William Holman Hunt is more powerful than either because he doesn't care whether you like his pictures or not. As eminent a Victorian in his way as Florence Nightingale or Thomas Carlyle, Hunt didn't know ho

The Hyped Panic Over 'War of the Worlds'

[Michael J. Socolow is an assistant professor in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine at Orono. He is completing a manuscript on regulation and competition in the first two decades of American network radio.] Frank Stanton sensed trouble. Sitting in his living room on the night of October 30, 1938, the young CBS executive tuned in to catch Orson Welles's adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. The program sounded crisp and engaging — but a

IOUSA Not OK: An Analysis of the the Deficit Disaster Story

The movie IOUSA portrays a picture of the United States as a country hopelessly addicted to debt. According to the film, the country is about to fall off a cliff if the budget and the economy continue on their current course. While there are certainly many grounds to be concerned about the country’s economic condition, the view presented in IOUSA is one-sided and misleading. This analysis puts many of the issues raised in the movie in a broader context and featu

Anti-Communist Polemic The Soviet Story Cuts and Pastes from History

Stalin may be enjoying a sinister revival in Putin's Russia, but not everyone associated with the former Soviet Union is amused. This pungently anti-communist documentary from the wonderfully named Latvian historian and filmmaker Edvins Snore is much more than a catalog of Stalin's Terror, which, among other iniquities, carried out ethnic-cleansing policies that starved seven million Ukrainians to death between 1932 and 1933. Drafting little-seen footage of Soviet mass killings that closely rese

London exhibit of Byzantine art trumps bureaucracy

A dazzling exhibition of a thousand years of Byzantium's art is in the final stages of assembly in London after months of labyrinthine complications. In fact the very definition of the word byzantine. This effort to bring Byzantium to Britain culminates in the opening Saturday of a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. And on Tuesday, with four days remaining before the official opening, the trials had not ended. "This was one of the most comp

Hitler planned 'Big Brother' style television to broadcast Nazi propaganda according to a new documentary

Adolf Hitler was on the verge of creating an Orwellian-style cable TV system to broadcast Nazi propaganda around Germany. Screens would have been set up in public places, including in laundries so housewives could tune in, according to a documentary based on papers and tapes found in his bunker. When the Allies overran Germany, engineers were on the point of a technological breakthrough to allow TV pictures to be transmitted to screens and sound to radio receivers.

Pensioner loses compensation bid after claiming police damaged her signed photo of Hitler during raid on house

A pensioner has lost a battle for compensation from the police over allegations that they damaged her signed photograph of Adolf Hitler, it was revealed today. Dorothy Phillips, 77, from Clandown, near Bath, took Avon and Somerset Police to court three times over claims the photo, which they seized during an investigation connected to her son. Mrs Phillips valued the photo at £10,000 and claims it faded while it was held at Bath police station as evidence.

Textile Experts Say Lincoln's Coat Shouldn't See Light of Day

The exhibit would be haunting: the famous bloodstained overcoat President Abraham Lincoln was wearing at Ford's Theatre the night he was assassinated, placed on display under protective glass in the lobby of the renovated theater for the world to see. Visitors could view it up close. Passersby could glimpse it from the street 24 hours a day. And the coat, its lining embroidered with the phrase "One Country, One Destiny," would be a moving symbol of the bicentennial of Linc

An exhibition on Britain's fight for civil liberties at the British Library

Through the dark days of the misnamed "war on terror", with its assaults on the rule of law and its stifling of dissent, it has been easy to forget that we live in a country with a rich tradition of fairness and tolerance, of protest and struggle. The British Library's forthcoming exhibition "Taking Liberties: the Struggle for Britain's Freedoms and Rights" serves to remind us of our proud past and recount the story behind the liberties that we so often take for granted.

We should turn to Charles Dickens in hard times

The new BBC adaptation of Dickens's Little Dorrit has been hailed as the perfect accompaniment to credit-crunch Britain, but it is not the only novel in which we find Dickens speaking to us, or even speaking for us, in these uncertain financial times. In all their painful, joyful, irrepressible life, his novels offer us glimpses of a world we think we have lost - a period of swirling fog and flickering gaslamps. But the closer we get to this world, the more we start to

German war film A Woman in Berlin opens old wounds over Red Army rapes

The gruff phrase “Komm Frau!” – Come, woman! – still sends shivers down the spines of elderly Germans. It was the command given by Russian soldiers as they prowled Berlin and other bombed-out postwar German cities, searching for women to rape. The hidden horror of those months is about to be revealed in a new German film, A Woman in Berlin, that is likely to shock the nation, stir resentment against the Russians and provoke a debate about morality in war. The film is