THE JOHN GARFIELD STORY (Narrated by JULIE GARFIELD)
JULIE GARFIELD in person! With Pioneering Hollywood Producers/Directors/Authors JOAN KRAMER & DAVID HEELEY
Hosted by JUD NEWBORN, Curator of Special Programs
Thursday, October 27 at 7:30 pm |Members $20 | Public $25
Reception & Book Signing of In the Company of Legends and with live jazz guitar by Mike Soloway
20% off the book’s list price - A $5 savings!
Born Julius Garfinkle to Jewish immigrants, Forties Hollywood legend John Garfield – nominated twice for Best Actor Academy Awards for Body and Soul and Four Daughters – was the most important star caught up in the Hollywood Blacklist. The stress surely contributed to his death in 1952, when he was only 39. A forerunner to such tough-yet-sensitive rebels as Marlon Brando and James Dean, Garfield displayed what Lee Grant calls his “smoldering, somber, troubled street-guy kind of presence” in such hard-hitting classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice opposite Lana Turner (1946) and Humoresque opposite Joan Crawford (1946). He also played the Jewish GI who is Gregory Peck’s best friend in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), the first post-Holocaust film to treat anti-Semitism in America.
His impressive co-star list also includes Edward G. Robinson, Shelley Winters, Cary Grant, Ida Lupino, Patricia Neal, Jennifer Jones, and Maureen O’Hara.
During
WWII he was a force in creating the morale-boosting Hollywood Canteen (where
stars waited tables and mingled with GIs), and appeared in a 1944 eponymous
promotional film adaptation, with an all-star cast that included Humphrey
Bogart and Bette Davis.
In The John Garfield Story, narrated by Garfield’s daughter and namesake, Julie Garfield, pioneering Hollywood Golden Age documentarians Joan Kramer and David Heeley trace Garfield’s rise from a tough childhood on New York’s Lower East Side through his vagabond youth and apprenticeship with the renowned Group Theatre to the era of his greatest films. They explore the machinations that resulted in his blacklisting and tragic death - a funeral mobbed by thousands of fans - the largest turnout for any actor since Rudolph Valentino. This program - a must-see just two weeks before the Presidential election - will also explore the relevance of Garfield’s fate for today’s election controversies. (USA, 2003, 58 min., English, NR, DCP | Dir. David Heeley | Writers/Producers David Heeley & Joan Kramer)
BIOS
Julie Garfield: For years Julie Garfield has been among New
York's most respected acting teachers - and one of the few remaining
actors who studied with all the great masters, from Sanford Meisner, Bobby
Lewis and Stella Adler to Lee Strasberg.
She both narrated and helped create the documentary, The John
Garfield Story, made especially for Turner
Classic Movies as a tribute to her father. Teaching positions
have included New York University, The Ensemble Studio Theatre, T. Schreiber
Studios, and the Actors Studio West, as well
as private coaching. In addition, she's a
long-time member of the Actors Studio. Among her many Broadway
stage credits, she was honored with the Theater World Award and
the Variety Drama Critics Award for her performance as Sonya
in the Roundabout Theater’s Uncle Vanya, and also appeared with Zero
Mostel in The Merchant; in Neil
Simon’s The Good Doctor; and in Death of a
Salesman with George C. Scott. Her numerous
off-Broadway credits include plays at the Ensemble Studio Theater
and Manhattan Theater Club. Film credits include the role of Robert
De Niro’s wife in Goodfellas, as well as roles in The
Front with Woody Allen, and in Stanley and
Iris with Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda.
On television she has appeared on L.A. Law. Julie is now an accomplished painter, who has attended The Art Students League, The New York Academy, and The NY Studio School. Her painting "The Doll Maker" is being featured in the 2017 catalogue at The Art Students League, where she is a member.
Joan
Kramer and David Heeley: Starting with their award winning profiles
of Fred Astaire in 1980, five-time Emmy Award Winners Joan
Kramer and David Heeley (with a total of 20 nominations)
are authors of their universally acclaimed new book, In the Company of Legends (with a foreword by Richard Dreyfuss) telling
how they revitalized the genre of the Hollywood documentary while
providing exclusive, never-before-told background stories both delicious and
historically important. Through their innovative and definitive profiles
of James Stewart (hosted by Johnny
Carson), Katharine Hepburn (Katharine Hepburn: All About Me and The
Spencer Tracy Legacy: A Tribute by Katharine Hepburn, in which she
revealed their secret relationship), Paul Newman, Joanne
Woodward, Jane Fonda (Fonda on Fonda), Bette Davis,
Errol Flynn, Audrey Hepburn and more, they established a
reputation for finding the unfindable, persuading the reluctant, and
maintaining unique relationships long after the end credits rolled. They
also elicited an extraordinary range of luminaries to host or provide
commentary, including Martin Scorsese, Patricia Neal, Harvey Keitel, Olivia
de Havilland, Glenn Close, George Cukor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Peter O’Toole,
Henry Fonda, Sir Ralph Richardson, Ginger Rogers, Glenn Ford, Sidney Lumet,
Clint Eastwood, Sally Field, Gene Kelly, Peter Bogdanovich, Walter Matthau,
Ronald Reagan, Lee Remick, and too many more to mention. But their
documentaries also include complete, unique portraits of the major Hollywood
studios, including Universal and Columbia Pictures (The Lady
With the Torch). Prior to joining forces, Joan Kramer was
talent coordinator for The Dick Cavett Show. At WNET she
met former BBC Producer/Director David Heeley, who was the originating executive
producer of WNET/PBS’s iconic series Nature from 1982 to
1991, and has been nominated for three Directors Guild of America Awards.
Founding Top Hat Productions, together they also served
as producers for major films in the PBS Great Performances and
American Masters series.
Jud
Newborn: CAC's Curator of Celebrity Programs and the evening's
moderator, has lectured on the Holocaust and Human Rights coast-to-coast, at
the United Nations, and from Canada to Cape Town. He gave
the first lecture on the Holocaust ever held at the UN in 1995, taking the
opportunity to call out against the UN’s abandonment of Bosnian Muslims to mass
murder. He is co-author of the critically-acclaimed Sophie
Scholl and the White Rose, companion to the Academy
Award-nominated German film of 2006, Sophie Scholl: The Last Days,
recounting the true story of the famed German students who dared “speak
truth to power” to Hitler. Newborn served as Founding Historian,
curator and co-creator of NY’s Museum of Jewish
Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust from 1986 to
2000. Both a Fulbright Fellow and a Fellow of the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, he studied at NYU and was
a writer-in-residence at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He was
awarded his PhD with Distinction by the University of Chicago,
following three years of fieldwork in Europe that also included hunting down
former SS officers and working undercover for Poland’s Solidarity
Freedom Movement and Radio Free Europe just after the 1981 Communist
declaration of Martial Law and the sealing of Poland's borders. Along
with Waldo Cabrera of Fios1TV, he and the Cinema
Arts Centre have been nominated for a collaborative NY Emmy Award for
the TV segment of his hosting of Norman Lear, while his
collaborative animated short film on a child of the Holocaust, Ingrid
Pitt: Beyond the Forest, with two-time Academy Award-nominated animator Bill
Plympton, director Kevin Michaels, child animator Perry Chen, and executive producer Zhu Shen, has won numerous festival awards worldwide.
Thanks to Amy’s of Huntington for her fine floral designs - http://www.amysofhuntington.com/
A Rise Above Bake Shop - 333 Main Street, Huntington - 631-351-9811
Mike Soloway, Jazz Guitarist - http://www.michaelsoloway.com/
Jessica & Andrew Attard, Flashback Photography - http://tinyurl.com/ - jessica.flashback@gmail.com
Alex Wolff, Concierge Photography - http://concierge-photography.com/
