Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

It’s summer movies in Studio 360 this week — big directors going small, small actors going big, and girls committing felonies. Vampire auteur Joss Whedon explains the appeal of a micro-budget Shakespeare film. Michael Shannon attempts to thwart the man of steel. Nancy Jo Sales, author of The Bling Ring, explains how Hollywood’s bad girls keep getting worse. And graphic design makes the news as Apple’s new operating system breaks a bad habit.

This week, on the eve of the Tony Awards, Studio 360 meets some of the stars who gave Broadway a remarkable year. Tom Hanks and George C. Wolfe tell Kurt Andersen about working on the last play by the late Nora Ephron, and Tim Minchin performs some songs from Matilda, the category-killing musical. And we begin our epic search for the best high school band ever! Ready, set, upload.

We go up, up and away with Superman and find out why "The Man of Steel" remains as popular and elusive as ever. Disguised as a mild-mannered reporter, Kurt Andersen explores the history of Superman with cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman, director Bryan Singer, novelists Michael Chabon and Howard Jacobson, and the 1978 Lois Lane: Margot Kidder. Is this strange visitor from the planet Krypton derivative of Jewish mythology? Can one superhero wield ultimate power for a moral good? And what’s up with the blue tights? Originally aired: July 6, 2006

This week in Studio 360, sleight of hand and other complicated tricks. Alan Cumming plays nearly every role in Macbeth. Magician David Kwong explains how he schooled Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson in magic for a new film, and plays a trick that leaves Kurt dumbfounded. Artist Sarah Sze takes over a building with her weird sci-fi structures. And we ask Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise) if it will ever be safe to love Richard Wagner.

This week, two unique theater events. Kurt Andersen talks with Alex Timbers, director of a new musical about Imelda Marcos — part history lesson, part disco dance party, but no shoe jokes. A Deaf actor performing in a signed version of a Harold Pinter play explains why on stage, actors’ voices are just a distraction from actual performance. Brazilian cellist Dom La Nena performs live. And Kurt makes small talk at the deathbed of network TV.

This week in Studio 360, two takes on motherhood. In Isabella Rossellini’s new series of web videos, she acts out unusual childrearing strategies — abandonment, cannibalism — in the animal kingdom. And a listener explains how Mary Karr taught her what she needed to know about having a teenage boy. Plus, a physicist finds beauty in the race to find dark matter, and musician Marques Toliver finds the common ground between Quincy Jones and J.S. Bach.

How did a poor kid from Brooklyn escape life as a shipping clerk and instead become Mel Brooks? Even Mel Brooks isn’t too sure, but “If you’ve got your mother’s love,” he tells Kurt Andersen, “you can’t go wrong.” Meanwhile, jazz composer Darcy James Argue conjures another, imaginary Brooklyn in an epic work for big band that’s a “total sensory overload.” And we’ll see how architects have tried to heal the memory of trauma at buildings like Sandy Hook Elementary School.

We're always talking about creativity, but what do we mean? Can we find creativity, can we measure it, can we encourage it? Kurt talks with professor and author Gary Marcus (Guitar Zero) about what science tells us about creativity. A researcher shoves jazz musicians into an fMRI machine and has them improvise; an intrepid reporter gets her creativity tested and scored; and a little girl introduces us to her imaginary friends (all of them). (Originally aired: November 23, 2012)

This week in Studio 360, mothers in hard times. Fiona Shaw plays a Mary furious over the death of Jesus in The Testament of Mary on Broadway, while our American Icons series explores “Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s classic Depression portrait — both the desperate subject and the famous photographer came to rue the day it was shot. Plus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist finds the black humor in the tyrannical regime of North Korea. And singer Jessie Ware, a rising star from the UK (and a friend of Adele’s), explains why South London is the new Brooklyn.

Jeremy Irons, the nemesis of a generation of movie heroes, explains the secret to playing bad believably. Kurt Andersen asks English folk-punk Billy Bragg if he’ll miss the late Margaret Thatcher, the nemesis of a generation of musicians, novelists, and artists in Great Britain. Novelist Meg Wolitzer expresses sympathy for teenagers (nemeses to countless generations of adults) in her new book The Interestings. And a Baltimore hairdresser shakes up classical scholarship by recreating elaborate Roman hairdos for the first time in millennia.

This week, Kurt Andersen talks with Tom Hanks, who loves to cut dialogue from his scripts — he’d be a silent movie star if he could. A legal reporter explains why the copyright law needs a digital overhaul. We meet Raul and Mexia, sons of a legendary norteño musician, who have come out of the shadow of their father’s accordion. And we call the winner of our Remixing Spring Challenge.  

Episodes of false identity, living large, and murder in the suburbs add up to the great American novel. Studio 360 explores F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and finds out how this compact novel became the great American story of our age. Novelist Jonathan Franzen tells Kurt Andersen why he still reads it every year or two, and writer Patricia Hampl explains why its lightness is deceptive. We’ll drive around the tony Long Island suburbs where Gatsby was set, and we’ll hear from Andrew Lauren about his film G, which sets Gatsby among the hip-hop moguls. And Azar Nafisi describes the power of teaching the book to university students in Tehran. Readings come courtesy of Scott Shepherd, an actor who sometimes performs the entire book from memory. Originally aired: November 25, 2010

This week in Studio 360, we meet Eric Whitacre, the rock star of contemporary choral music, who has a secret to his success: forming choirs online. We look for marital advice from the movies, but film historian Jeanine Basinger raises a cautionary note: a marriage isn’t good drama, or funny, unless it’s in trouble. And we go for a walk with sound recordist Chris Watson as he captures the birds and reeds and church bells that inspired composer Benjamin Britten.

This week in Studio 360, Kurt Andersen speaks with Edie Falco, who has taken on the toughest roles of any leading lady in this “golden age” of cable television. A Mexican artist gets creative with a hoard of confiscated guns, turning them into an orchestra of playable musical instruments. And a strange and disturbing conversation with Charles Krafft, a respected artist who has gone public as a Holocaust denier. Krafft insists that his earlier work using swastikas was ironic, not a form of clever propaganda.

An epidemiologist explains how life is like World of Warcraft when a deadly plague breaks out online. Rabies experts connect the dots between The Illiad, Twilight, and Louis Pasteur; plus, an apocalyptic world where children should be seen and not heard — the sound they make can be deadly.