FILM: CLANCY SIGAL:  HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST TO A-LIST

On tonight’s show, we’ll be joined by filmmakers Kurt Jacobsen and Warren Leming to discuss their new film Clancy Sigal: Hollywood Blacklist to A-List, about the turbulent and kaleidoscopic life of the novelist, street-smart Chicagoan, union organizer, soldier, Hollywood agent, target of McCarthyism, European émigré, Fleet Street journalist, boyfriend of Doris Lessing, psychedelic traveller, R.D. Laingian, screenwriter of Frida and other films, and relentlessly eloquent radical to the core.

Kurt Jacobsen, co-director and editor, is a Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and the author or editor of a dozen books, including Maverick Voices: Conversations with Political and Cultural Rebels, Pacification and Its Discontents, and Parables of Permanent War. He is co-editor of the psychoanalysis and politics journal Free Associations and for several decades was book review editor at Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture. His film writings have  appeared in such publications as The Chicago Reader. The London Guardian, New Politics, and Film Comment. His and Warren Leming’s previous documentary films include American Road, The Milagro Man: The Literary Life and Multicultural Times of John Nichols, Velvet Prisons: Russell Jacoby and American Academia, and Ed Asner: On Stage and Off Forthcoming from Malachite Productions in the UK is Legend of Charlotte Bach.

Warren Leming, co-director and co-producer is the author of Cold Chicago, a book on Chicago history and another on Wendell Philis, both by Kerr Publishing. He was a founding member of the band Wilderness Road, recorded by Columbia and Warner Brothers Records, and was musical director of Paul Sills’s first company of Story Theater in Chicago. He performed with the Second City Touring Company, the Second City Repertory Company and The Game Theater.  Leming founded the Post Rational Players, with the improv legend Del Close; and directed for Cross Currents Cabaret in Chicago. He has written for Heartland Journal, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Ink, Logos, and Dummydown.com.  With author/journalist Studs Terkel, he also founded the Nelson Algren Committee and directed cabaret theatre in Berlin.  Since the 1980s Leming has written and narrated seven documentaries with documentarian Denis Mueller; co-produced Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, the Road is All;  and, as mentioned,  has co-directed and co-produced several more docs with Kurt Jacobsen, including the one on Ed Asner. All three of them joined us here on Cat Radio Cafe in a losing attempt to discuss Ed Asner with Ed Asner.

Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer