Word: actors
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...Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said last month at the Cannes Film Festival. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist...
Eastwood bristled at the charge. "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn't raise the flag," he countered in an interview with the British newspaper the Guardian. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.'" Eastwood also suggested Lee should "shut his face." That didn't go down so well. Eastwood "is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either," Lee fumed. "I'm not making this up. I know history...
Dennis Letts, a former college professor turned character actor, appeared in the world-premiere production last year at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Then, just before it was to transfer to Broadway, he received a diagnosis of stage-four lung cancer. Hard discussions with the creative team followed; he decided to plow ahead with the part. In between chemotherapy sessions, Letts made his Broadway debut in early December, sharing in the rave reviews. Less than three months later, he died. "Dad did eight shows a week until late January," says his son. "Then he went into the hospital for what...
...might even call it touching--if the term didn't seem so out of place in Letts' oeuvre. An actor who began writing plays in the early '90s, he has turned out two slices of nasty trailer-park noir, Killer Joe and Bug; one spiritual-quest play with kinky twists, Man from Nebraska; and now, with August, a ferocious, giant-size family drama in which the gathering for Dad's funeral turns into a donnybrook of revelations, recriminations and extreme combat. It may be the best American play of the new century. It has snagged nearly every honor in sight...
Letts, 42, has lost the accent but not the plainspoken prairie equanimity of his Oklahoma roots. Both his parents were academics in the small college town of Durant, so it was something of a scandal when he ditched college and moved to Dallas at 17 to become an actor. From there he moved to Chicago, where he became enamored of the "gritty, in-your-face theater" exemplified by Steppenwolf. But it was a struggle. He had to move back home after a year to earn money, he battled drug and alcohol problems, and, after moving to Los Angeles...