Will Waspe
I suspect that Tristram Powell's ' Omnibus' show about the Hollywood witch-hunt of ' Reds,' screened by BBC 1 last Sunday, has been ' in the can ' for some time. The programme inter-cut old newsreel footage and filmed interviews with some of the principal figures looking back on those dire days. And one of those interviews, which viewers would understand to have taken place recently, was with a man who died three years ago.
Did anyone else notice, by the way, that the programme lifted, without so much as a nod of acknowledgement, the title — Hollywood on Trial — used by Gordon Kahn for his book on the same subject in 1948?
In spite of everything
The success of the National Theatre production, Saturday Sunday Monday was not achieved, 1 hear, without some fairly stormy rehearsal sessions. From the start, the Italian director, Franco Zeffirelli, not the least temperamental of artists, was far from happy with the English adaptation (by Waterhouse and Hall); nor did all the performances meet with his unqualified approval. Indeed, more than usually exasperated at one of the later rehearsals, Franco is said to have hurled a chair at Lord Olivier himself.
The fun people
The Observer colour magazine's ten-week guide to 'The Arts Today' has wound up with the ultimate tendentious frivolity; a bizarre list of what and who are ' out' and 'in.' The only ' in ' dramatists of the "seventies, you'll be facinated to know, are Rattigan and Priestley; Mae West is ' in.' but Vanessa Redgrave is 'out;' Scott Fitzgerald is ' out ' but Zelda is 'in;' in art, Picasso is ' out ' and so is Renoir, but we are on the brink of "the age of the hand-knitted computer." If the Observer had explained at the start that it was just having us on, It would all have been so much more enjoyable.
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