Episodes

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Clara Bow, were stars who created trademark personas and spent their entire careers testing the limits of those characters. For many in the industry, both then and now, this type of career is considered the pinnacle of success, but for one actor it was the antithesis of the his art. For Lon Chaney, the art of acting was the art of continual transformation.

One of the early “scat” performers, Fitzgerald found a place among the growing jazz innovators, making recordings with such greats as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. Through fifty-eight years of performing, thirteen Grammys and more than forty million records sold, she elevated swing, bebop, and ballads to their highest potential. She was, undeniably, the First Lady of Song.

For the past fifty years, the Old Labor Stage on 44th street in New York City has been home to some of the most inventive acting, directing, and playwrighting in the country. Its members have included such greats as Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, Norman Mailer, Eli Wallach, Sidney Poitier, Edward Albee, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.

Known for his extended study of Washington Square Park and his distorted nudes of the 1930s, Andre Kertesz was a quiet but important influence on the coming of age of photojournalism and the art of photography. For more than seventy years, his subtle and penetrating vision helped to define a medium in its infancy.

Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films.

Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera had a profound effect on the international art world. Among his many contributions, Rivera is credited with the reintroduction of fresco painting into modern art and architecture. His radical political views and tempestuous romance with the painter Frieda Kahlo were then, and remain today, a source of public intrigue.

From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, Billy Wilder dominated Hollywood’s Golden Age. With over fifty films and six Academy Awards to his credit, he is one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest directors, producers and screenwriters.

Throughout the United States there are thousands of parks in which can be found bronze and marble statues of the major historical figures of times past. Among the greatest American sculptors and monument builders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1887, Arthur Rubinstein became one of the great pianists of the twentieth century. At age three, Rubinstein began to study piano, and within five years he had given his first public performance.

Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short and often erratic, she left behind a body of work as great as any vocalist before or since.

In the two decades since Bob Marley has gone, it is clear that he is without question one of the most transcendant figures of the past hundred years. The ripples of his unparalleled achievements radiate outward through the river of his music into an ocean of politics, ethics, fashion, philosophy and religion.

The Juilliard School is a performing arts conservatory located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1905, the school trains about 850 undergraduate and graduate students in dance, drama, & music. It is widely regarded as one of the world's leading drama, music and dance schools, with some of the most prestigious arts programs.

Delightfully quirky and compassionate in sensibility, Al Hirschfeld has immortalized the icons of American theater and film for the better part of the twentieth century.

In 1968, CBS News forever changed the face of broadcast journalism with the premiere of 60 MINUTES. It was a revolution in television programming created by veteran newsman Don Hewitt (1922 – 2009). 60 MINUTES was the first news program to break into the Neilsen’s Top ten, and has been the highest rated public news program for more than thirty years.

His passion was music and his big band sound quickened the pulse of a generation ready to shrug off the Depression and dance. With clarinet in hand, Benny Goodman was transformed from a child in Chicago’s impoverished Jewish ghetto into the king of swing, greeted with near pandemonium wherever his band played.