Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

Leonardo DiCaprio talks with Kurt Andersen about how much greed is good — he stars in Martin Scorsese’s new film The Wolf of Wall Street. Ben Stiller brings Walter Mitty’s daydreams to the screen in the feel-good movie of the season. And we revisit the golden age of musical theater productions that never saw the footlights of Broadway.

This week in our American Icons series, we take a look at Nirvana’s Nevermind — was it rock and roll’s last hurrah? Golden Globe nominee Kerry Washington shows her mean streak as the star of Scandal. And Jesmyn Ward relives the trauma of Hurricane Katrina in her novel Salvage the Bones. (Segments in this week's episode aired previously.)

What a year was 1913! In an exhibition in a New York Armory, American viewers confronted Cubism and abstraction for the first time. In Vienna, the audience at a concert of atonal music by Schoenberg and others broke out into a near-riot. And in Paris, Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s new ballet The Rite of Spring burst on stage with inflammatory results. Culture Shock 1913 tells the stories behind these and other groundbreaking events that year, and goes back to consider what led to this mad, Modernist moment. "I think in a lot of ways it was just the beginning of a century just of absolute chaos and nightmare, and as so often, the artists heard it and reflected it first," notes the critic Tim Page. WNYC’s Sara Fishko speaks with thinkers, authors, musicians, art curators, and historians about this unsettling era of sweeping change — and the not-so-subtle ways in which it mirrors our own uncertain age. This Studio 360 episode is an abridged version of a one-hour documentary Sara Fishko produced for WNYC. The original program, videos, and related podcasts can be found here. Host/Executive Producer: Sara Fishko Associate Producer: Laura Mayer Editor: Karen Frillmann Mix Engineer: Wayne Shulmister, additional mixing by Edward Haber (Originally aired: December 28, 2012) Slideshow: Art that rocked the world in 1913

The director Julie Taymor walks away from a high-profile flop and into a dream. She tells Kurt Andersen what went wrong on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and how she reinvented A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a new production off-Broadway. We look back on the year in culture: from Beyoncé to Miley to Macbeth. And just four years out of Juilliard, the actor Adam Driver (Girls, Inside Llewyn Davis) has arrived as Hollywood’s new star.

Kurt Andersen talks with the writer and musician James McBride, whose novel The Good Lord Bird recently won the National Book Award. McBride also brings his gospel quintet into the studio for a live performance. Kate Manning tells the story of one of 19th century New York’s most infamous, and perhaps misunderstood, women. Plus, we’ll hear about how the debut recording by soprano Leontyne Price set the bar for generations of singers.

The filmmaker Alexander Payne returns to his home state for Nebraska, starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father and son on a fateful road trip. Kurt Andersen talks with them and scene-stealing co-star June Squibb. We’ll explore the newest-oldest trend in movies: black-and-white. And Ornette Coleman breaks the rules of jazz and sets a new bar for spontaneous invention.

Follow the yellow brick road through America’s favorite story and discover places in the land of Oz more wonderful, and weirder, than you ever imagined. It's been over seventy years since movie audiences first watched The Wizard of Oz. Meet the original man behind the curtain, L. Frank Baum, who had all the vision of Walt Disney, but none of the business sense. Discover how Oz captivated the imaginations of Russians living under Soviet rule. Hear how the playwright Neil LaBute, the late filmmaker Nora Ephron, the novelist Salman Rushdie, and the musician Bobby McFerrin, found magic, meaning, and inspiration in Oz. (Originally aired: November 19, 2005)

This week, Kurt Andersen announces a new listener challenge: design a holiday ornament to be printed in 3D, courtesy of MakerBot. A writer and book designer creates his tour-de-force — a catalog of books by an imaginary author. We’ll hear how a classic performance by Will Rogers helped bring down a president. And the self-described “doom soul/gothic gospel” band Cold Specks plays live in the studio.

Kurt Andersen talks with the actor Lucy Liu, the action-movie badass who for two decades has quietly pursued a side career as a painter. The young writer Daniel Alarcón, born in Peru and raised in Alabama, returns to South America in his novels. Plus, the stranger-than-fiction story behind the cult movie The Room, and a visit with New Orleans royalty, the Wild Tchoupitoulas.

This week, the wunderkind composer Nico Muhly grows up — he tells Kurt Andersen why he chose a crime ripped from the headlines as the story for his new opera. Suzanne Opton captures soldiers at rest between tours in a series of haunting portraits. Plus, a critic assesses Banksy's month-long art spree in New York City, and designer to the stars Mario Buatta talks high design on the cheap.

This week, Kurt Andersen talks with Jessica Lange, who currently stars in the FX miniseries American Horror Story: Coven. We consider the blunders that lead Darwin and Einstein to their most brilliant scientific discoveries. And in American Icons, we revisit Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan romance novel The Scarlet Letter — in the age of the internet sex scandal, we find Hester Prynnes living within our midst.

This week in Studio 360, two contrarian takes on black history. Jeffrey Wright is stealing this season of Boardwalk Empire as a black empowerment leader who sidelines as a murderous gangster. And in American Icons, we explore Uncle Tom’s Cabin, asking how the saintly hero Uncle Tom became a race traitor. Plus, Kurt Andersen speaks with novelist Alice McDermott about the loss of faith in an Irish-American family, and a 500-year-old piece of music becomes very new again.

This is America’s vision of utopia. Generations of Americans have grown up with Walt Disney shaping our imaginations. In 1955, Disney mixed up some fairy tales, a few historical facts, and a dream of the future to create an alternate universe. Not just a place for fun, but a scale model of a perfect world. “Everything that you could imagine is there,” says one young visitor. “It's like living in a fantasy book.” And not just for kids: one-third of Walt Disney World’s visitors are adults who go without children. Visiting the parks, according to actor Tom Hanks, is like a pilgrimage — the pursuit of happiness turned into a religion. Futurist Cory Doctorow explains the genius of Disney World, while novelist Carl Hiaasen even hates the water there. Kurt tours Disneyland with a second-generation “imagineer” whose dead mother haunts the Haunted Mansion. We’ll meet a former Snow White and the man who married Prince Charming — Disney, he says, is “the gayest place on Earth. It’s where happy lives.” → What is your Disney story? Tell us in a Comment below. Special thanks to Julia Lowrie Henderson, Shannon Geis, Alex Gallafent, Nic Sammond, Steve Watts, Angela Bliss, Todd Heiden, Shannon Swanson, Katie Cooper, Nick White, Marie Fabian, Posey Gruener, Jason Margolis, Chris DeAngelis, Jenelle Pifer, Debi Ghose, Maneesh Agrawala, and Tony DeRose.   Bonus Track: Cory Doctorow on the Disney theme parks Hear Kurt's full conversation with Doctorow about his life-long obsession with Disney in general, and the Haunted Mansion specifically.   Video: Walt Disney's original plan for Epcot   Slideshow: Inside the Magic Kingdom

Kurt Andersen speaks with a poet who is translating new poems coming out of wartime Syria. Alfonso Cuarón explains why the astounding special effects in his new film Gravity take second place to Sandra Bullock’s performance as an untethered astronaut. In American Icons, we look at Cindy Sherman’s remarkable faux film stills that predicted the selfie as we know it. And Bill Callahan sings us to sleep with songs from his new record Dream River.

This is the monument that changed how America remembers war.  How do you build a monument to a war that was more tragic than triumphant? Maya Lin was practically a kid when she got the commission to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. “The veterans were asking me, ‘What do you think people are going to do when they first come here?’” she remembers. “And I wanted to say, ‘They’re going to cry.’" Her minimalistic granite wall was derided by one vet as a “black gash of shame.” But inscribed with the name of every fallen soldier, it became a sacred place for veterans and their families, and it influenced later designs like the National September 11 Memorial. We’ll visit a replica of the wall that travels to veterans’ parades around the country, and hear from Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel how this singular work of architecture has influenced how we think about war.     Bonus Track: Kurt Andersen's full interview with Maya Lin Hear Kurt's full interview with Lin about what it was like to stir up a national controversy at such a young age, and how her artistic career has evolved in the three decades since the memorial was created.   Bonus Track: Angela Matthews remembers Joseph Sintoni Angela Matthews reads the letter she left at The Wall for her high school sweetheart, Joseph Sintoni. It was featured in Laura Palmer's book Shrapnel From The Heart.    Bonus Track: Viet Nguyen on Vietnamese memorials Nguyen fled Vietnam with his family after the fall of Saigon, eventually settling in Pennsylvania in 1975. He has been visiting Vietnam almost every year since 2002, and explains how the war is remembered there.   Slideshow: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial Resource Center