Four highly cool New York Film Festival extras were announced this morning. The coolest, for me, will be a screening of the first three episodes of Oliver Stone‘s The Untold History of the United States, the forthcoming Showtime series. They segments will focus “on the events leading up to America’s entrance into World War II, the war itself, and the unjustly forgotten figure of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace,” says the release.
The Untold screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Stone, co-writer Peter Kuznick, historian Douglas Brinkley and The Nation‘s Jonathan Schell.
The second coolest will be a panel discussion of Pauline Kael by way of two books about the celebrated film critic — Brian Kellow‘s “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” and “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael“. Panelists will include director James Toback (whose Fingers will screen after the discussion), New York critic David Edelstein, Kellow, Geoffrey O’Brien and University fo the Arts professor Camille Paglia.
The third-coolest, I suspect, will be Tahrir, a doc about the Egyptian uprising by Stefano Savona. (I wonder if the doc will be so caught up the thrill of revolution that it’ll choose to ignore the sexual mauling of CBS journalist Lara Logan, an incident that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, or get into it or what.)
And the fourth-coolest will be Jeffrey Schwartz‘s Vito, a doc about groundbreaking film critic and gay activist Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet).