About Last Night

“An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”

James A. Michener, Space

From 2003:

As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines—if not most—rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were “self-checked,” a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all—it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about…

Read the whole thing here.

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

An excerpt from “Emlyn Williams Plays Charles Dickens,” performed in 1987 at the Swansea Festival. Williams reads Dickens’ “Captain Murderer.”

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I write about the original 1954 live-TV version of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men. Here’s an excerpt.

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Most people know “Twelve Angry Men,” in which Reginald Rose dramatized the contentious deliberations of a New York jury, from Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film version, whose screenplay was written by Rose and which featured a top-flight ensemble cast led by Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall and Jack Klugman. More recently, the Roundabout Theatre Company brought Rose’s stage adaptation of “Twelve Angry Men” to Broadway in 2004 for a successful run. To this day it is a regional-theater staple, as well as the sixth most frequently staged full-length play in American high schools (where it is performed with women in the cast and is known as “Twelve Angry Jurors”). 

But many fans of the film are unaware that “Twelve Angry Men” began life as a live-TV drama directed by Franklin J. Schaffner that aired on CBS’ “Studio One” in 1954. It ranks alongside Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty,” Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” Abby Mann’s “Judgment at Nuremberg,” JP Miller’s “Days of Wine and Roses,” and Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight” as one of a small number of live-TV dramas from the 50’s that were subsequently turned into artistically and commercially successful movies.

I mention all this because it is now possible to watch the live-TV version of “Twelve Angry Men” on YouTube, meticulously restored from a surviving kinescope film of the original 1954 telecast­—and you know what? It’s better than the movie. A lot better….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original Studio One telecast of Twelve Angry Men:

Jack Teagarden sings and plays “Basin Street Blues” in a 1958 TV clip. He is introduced by John Cameron Swayze. The band includes Tony Parenti on clarinet, Ruby Braff on trumpet, Marty Napoleon on piano, Chubby Jackson on bass, and Cozy Cole on drums:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.”

John Galsworthy, Justice