[Interviews with Neil Simon and Eric Bentley] [videorecording] / City University Television in association with The Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts [presents]
1 videocassette (VHS) (112 min.) : sd., col.; 1/2 in.
Summary
Four separate interviews, two with Neil Simon and two with Eric Bentley (ca. 28 min. each)
Neil Simon talks about his beginnings, writing skits with his brother, how he is an observer of people's behavior, speech patterns, body language and confrontations with each other, gaining writing skills working for the Sgt. Bilko television program, his own process of writing and re-writing his plays, how he doesn't outline but lets the characters create the plays, visualizing the set before writing, how his work is usually based upon real places and people from his own life, his feeling that it is better not to rewrite, how film is a director's medium and the screenwriter is the low man in the process, his belief that comedy has serious themes, and that his newer works have less laughs and are more introspective.
Eric Bentley talks about translating Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello and the problems in attempting to capture their tempo and rhythm as well as meaning, his first successful play, Are you now or have you ever been?, his play Lord Alfred's lover being turned down by Robert Brustein because of the homosexual subject matter, his variations on three plays by the late 18th century writer Heinrich von Kleist, gay themes in drama becoming more possible in the 1970's, his own early schooling and attending Oxford and Yale Universities, his books on theater, the writer George Bernard Shaw and additional feelings about Pirandello and Brecht, and his opinions of the playwrights Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller.
Part of the series, CUNY Spotlight, broadcast on CUNY-TV, sponsored by the City University of New York.
Performer (note)
Interviewed by Edwin Wilson.
Event (note)
Videotaped by the cable station, CUNY-TV, New York, N.Y., 1992.
Title
[Interviews with Neil Simon and Eric Bentley] [videorecording] / City University Television in association with The Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts [presents]
Imprint
New York, 1992.
Series
CUNY Spotlight
Performer
Interviewed by Edwin Wilson.
Event
Videotaped by the cable station, CUNY-TV, New York, N.Y., 1992.