Once I reached lunchtime and realized how long I’d been going on, I realized that it was just going to make good sense to split the first day of PBS into two parts (I’ll do the same for Day 2 as well), so we now rejoin PBS Day 1 immediately post-lunch, as we loosen our belts and are introduced to…

“American Masters: You Must Remember This – The Warner Brothers Story”: This is one of those panels that started out with a ho-hum line-up, and then – BAM! – it suddenly became awesome. I was always interested in seeing it, since I’m a film buff, but two days before it took place, we suddenly got an E-mail from PBS saying, “Oh, by the way, that Warner Brothers panel? We just added Frank Darabont (director of ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ ‘The Green Mile,’ and ‘The Mist’), Richard Donner (director of ‘Superman,’ ‘Lethal Weapon,’ and ‘The Goonies’) and Jon Voight (star of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ ‘Deliverance,’ and ‘Coming Home’) to it.”

WHAT? Oh, HELL, yes, I’m gonna be there!

And in addition to those names, also in attendance were actress Joan Leslie (‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ ‘Sergeant York,’ and ‘High Sierra’), Lauren Shuler Donner (producer of ‘Dave,’ ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ and ‘Free Willy’), Greg Orr (grandson of Jack Warner), and Richard Schickel, the film critic of Time Magazine since 1972 and the creative mind behind this historical retrospective.

Oh, yeah, I was excited.

Ultimately, precious little about the program itself ended up being revealed, aside from Schickel’s confirmation that the animation of Warner Brothers will be covered in a four or five minute segment. Most of it was the various actors and directors recollecting about their experiences for the company, plus a bit of reminscining from Orr about his grandfather and his reputation. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It was still pretty damned awesome.

Here are some highlights…

* Frank Darabont revealed that, whenever he makes a film, he’s always checking to see what other films have been made on that lot. “When we were shooting The Green Mile, for example, we were shooting on the Formosa lot, which was Warner Hollywood at the time, and it was the same sound stages where they shot ‘The Black Swan,’ going back to the silent days,” said Darabont. “If you love movies, you go in, and it’s not just a place where you are showing up. You start looking around the nooks and crannies of these places and asking questions, and I actually had some of my staff sneak into their offices and talk to their people and pull their files out, and we would start getting lists together of what had been shot on that sound stage. We started lobbying for them to start, you know, putting up plaques in the sound stages with the titles with some of the great movies. That’s now true at Warner Brothers. I like to think that me bitching about it had a little something to do with it. Maybe they were planning it anyway and I’m just humoring myself.”

* Joan Leslie spoke of how different the studio system was in her day than it is now. “I was signed in 1939 when I was 15 years old,” she revealed, “and they said, ‘We’ll groom you.’ In two weeks I was testing for ‘High Sierra,’ and I got the part, and I did five more pictures that year while I was 15. And I was going to school and doing publicity. Quiet wonder was like how I felt about the studio. These enormous stages, and glamorous people. The makeup department in the morning was busy and fun and talking, charming. And on the set, great feeling of teamwork. I think everybody on the set felt good when we made a good take. It wasn’t just it’s a take. We all felt like, ‘Gee, we did good.’ But I think that some of that has changed. And that doesn’t mean they’re not making great pictures, but it’s changed a lot. And I’m glad I was there then. I’m glad they did that purposely for me. I’m grateful to Warner’s for what they did. They took care of me. They gave me my identity.”

* There was mass praising of what a great studio Warner Brothers used to be, with discussions about how you’d meet after a film had done well and have the studio head throw you the keys to a brand new car. Once, according to Richard Donner, Christopher Reeve had rented a car on the studio’s dime, and when he asked if he could keep it a few extra days so that he could see the sights, studio head John Calley asked, “What’s his favorite color?” And the next thing you knew, Reeve had his own car to see the sights with. This trick backfired on them at least once, though, according to Richard Donner. ” When ‘Lethal Weapon’ hit, I don’t know, whatever mark, a lot of money, Bob Daley and Terry Semel asked us to have a little lunch in their office to celebrate,” said Donner. “And he said, ‘Would you come, and (Joel Silver) and Mel?’ I said, ‘Of course. And you’ve got to have Danny (Glover).’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure, Danny.’ And then I said, ‘You’ve got to have Jeff Boam.’ And Bob Daley said, ‘You know, this is just a little lunch.” I said, ‘Well, you’ve got to have them.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ By the time we were done, we had Rene Russo, Joey Pesci…every time I called Bob to add a name, he was very curt about it. So lunch was going on, and I said, ‘You know, in the old days, before you, after lunch they would have thrown some keys on the table, and everyone would have gone outside and got a Ferrari or a…’ Bob Daley looked at me and threw some keys on the table, and they were all brand-new Range Rovers…but he only started with three. Every time (I added a name)…well, the last two had to come down from San Francisco in a truck!”

* Jon Voight told a great story about how, while filming “Deliverance,” they would deliver the actors’ chairs to the set every day, and although they each had their names on them, Burt Reynolds spent weeks sitting in Voight’s chair. Finally, Voight confronted him about it. “I said, ‘Burt, let me ask you a question.’ ‘I’d be delighted to talk to you, Jon.’ I said, ‘Every day, we get these chairs. We don’t need the chairs. We’re happy here without the chairs. We’re sitting on the rocks and the logs. But every day for two weeks you sat in my chair. Oh, I don’t care, but can I ask you why?’ He said, ‘I’d be delighted to tell you, Jon. You see, when I sit in your chair, I can see my name on my chair.'”

* After someone asked if are there any movies that are out today that couldn’t have been made within the former studio system, it led to a discussion where Richard Donner ripped the major studio system a new one, mostly as a result of Frank Darabont’s prompting. “When you make a comparison to what once was and what is, there’s no comparison,” said Donner. “I mean, what was once was, as far as I’m concerned, was a family. We’re talking about the Warners family. There were a group of people who were the executives at the studios who made the decisions on what movies were going to be made. And they trusted you. They allocated the authority to make the movie. They gave you the money. And you really went out of your way to stand up and be a reliable individual just to thank them, in a strange way. And they left you alone when you made the movie. Today I have no desire to make a movie in a studio system whatsoever. It is the most inept group of human beings.”

After the cheering died down, Darabont said, “And that’s why I wanted Richard to answer the question. That’s what I’ve been dying to say, but I wanted to hear him say it.”

But Donner wasn’t finished. “They micromanage you in the worst way, and they have no track record,” he continued. “They have no history in any way. They’re businesspeople, and they’re all afraid of their jobs. And that’s reflected within the mother company.”

Whew!

“Independent Lens: Chicago 10”: I’ll borrow IMDb’s description for this flick, which is as good as anything I could come up: “Archival footage, animation, and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.” The voice cast for the animated sequences is pretty damned impressive – Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Ryan, Liev Schreiber, James Urbaniak, Jeffrey Wright, and the late Roy Scheider – but the real stars of the show will be the archival recordings from the original protesters. We were fortunate enough to have a panel for the film which featured Paul Krassner, editor and publisher of “The Realist,” and Bobby Seale, founding chairman of the Black Panther Party, but, unfortunately, the former ended up getting little time to talk due to the lengthy rants from the latter. Not that Seale wasn’t absolutely enthralling, but I was just kinda hoping to hear Krassner talk a bit more. I’m not going to dwell on this movie except to say that I’m excited about it (I still have fond memories of the 1987 TV movie, “Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8”), but I will give you an idea what it was like with Seale on the panel by closing with his answer to the ostensibly simple question, “Do you feel you’ve done a lot to further the movement for civil rights?”

Take a deep breath…and begin:

“Oh, yeah, sure. Constitutional, democratic, civil human rights, that was the basis of where I was coming from. Political electoral community organizing United States of America, using grassroots community programs like the Free Breakfast for Children programs, the free preventative medical healthcare clinics, even the breakfast program itself that J. Edgar Hoover jumped up for the second time on television to say we was a threat to the internal security of America. In the spring of 1969 J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program was a threat to the internal security of America. It is communist-inspired, blah, blah, blah, all because the California state legislature led by Willie Brown and others were getting ready to put a bill in for $5 million for all schools in the State of California to have free breakfast programs. It was sent to Ronald Reagan, then the governor. He vetoed 80 percent of it. The senate and the assembly got together, overrode it, put the whole damn $5 million in. Twenty-eight state legislatures across the country followed something in suit about free breakfast for children and free lunch programs across the country. We did that program with no government money. We did it with donations, grassroots, hard work in the community, yippies and hippies and the Haight-Ashburys would call me up sometime, we got something for the Panthers, boom, $6,000 one time for the breakfast programs, $5,000 another time for the free preventative medical healthcare clinics.

“The Black Panther party’s sickle cell anemia testing program related to the free preventative medical healthcare clinics in a five-year period working with medical institutions, doctors and other frameworks all across the United States of America in 49 chapters of branches — I organized 5,000 people all across the country. In a five-year period we caused the testing for the first time in the history of the United States of America, the testing of one million-plus black folks in the United States of America. So, yes, we did a hell of lot in that grassroots, hardcore community organizing, work and effort. And the power structure — J. Edgar Hoover and others in the year of 1969 moved to attack every last one of my offices all across the United States of America, which a lot of shootouts ensued because I had given directions that we have a right to defend ourselves. We will take the arrest, but we have a right to defend ourselves.

“They started coming in shooting. So in the end of the 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are murdered in Chicago, December the 4th, 1969, pre-dawn raid, like a Facist party. In the early part of 1969 in January, John Huggins and Bunchy Carter were both murdered and it takes Wesley Swearingen, the former FBI agent who wrote the book FBI Secrets, former FBI agent, who documents that one of the shooters was into the office of the district office of the FBI here in Los Angeles, talking about what had happened and the shooting that had happened, which says to me, the FBI was complicit in the murder of my Black Panthers and this is what they were about. It took a Senate investigation hearing ultimately to put the FBI on the spot, why are you running around here organizing two and three and four months in advance, plans to attack Black Panther party offices all over this country? Why are you doing that? And they’re he-hawing and lying, et cetera, but they’re getting some truth out of it. Simultaneously, the mayor of Seattle, where we had a chaplin of the Black Panther party, gets up and says I want the FBI out of our police department. You’re not going to attack the Black Panther party’s offices. It took that Senate investigation here to stop all of those shoot-outs that that was going on with the Black Panther party and the police across America. That’s what it took.”

Again, I say, “Whew!”

“Independent Lens: Stranded: The Andes Plane Crash Survivors”: Yes, I want to see this, because I’m sure it’s enthralling. No, I’m not going to offer up many details about it, because I’m already depressed enough that I haven’t seen my wife and daughter in over a week. Talking up a movie about a plane crash might put me over the edge!

“Independent Lens: Dinner with the President: A Nation’s Journey”: I’m sure the people of Pakistan will really enjoy this documentary, but it just has no appeal for me. Sorry.

“The Forgetting: A Portrait Of Alzheimer’s And The Future Of Alzheimer’s”: I know, you’d think this would depress me even more than the flick about the Andes plane crash, and, in a way, I suppose it does. But since I have a personal connection to the disease (both my mother’s aunt and mother had it), I was very much enthralled by this particular panel. This special actually aired a few years ago, but it’s being re-broadcast with updates and new information about the progression on research toward curing Alzheimer’s Disease. David Hyde Pierce, late of “Frasier,” was in attendance for the panel, as he, too, has a personal connection to the disease: his father and grandfather had it. In a relatively bold move (well, for me, anyway), I decided to speak to our bond during the panel with my question.

Me: David, my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and I don’t really have any memories of her before she started to be affected by the disease. I was just wondering, how old were you when your grandfather began to be affected, and do you have similar memories?
David Hyde Pierce: Yeah, I knew my grandfather very well before he was affected. And so I saw the change in him, and I was…gosh, I think I was in my twenties when we really first started seeing signs of it. And, yeah, I saw the effect it had on him. I saw the effect it had on my grandmother, who was taking care of him. One thing that happened to me, though, in working together with this gang in this incarnation of “The Forgetting,” especially in preparing this panel and talking about what has happened over the last few years, one of the big improvements and changes we’ve made is how we view people with Alzheimer’s, how we view how they are. And I remember my specific revelation was the last memory I have of my grandfather. He was a very brilliant man, although not an educated man. He was self-educated. He was a chess player. He was a boat builder. He did all these things. And the last time I saw him, he was in a nursing home. And he had to be restrained, so his arms were tied to the arms of his wheelchair. And he was staring at a construction-paper booklet of flowers, cut-out flowers from magazines with the same thoughtful pleasure that he used to give to a chess board. That image at the time is one of the reasons that led me into working with the Alzheimer’s Association. It was something that broke my heart. I thought it was the height of tragedy. And what I realized, the revelation I had and how far we’ve come in dealing with people with Alzheimer’s was that, in a way, although it was terrible that he had to go through the disease, the tragedy in that moment was not his, it was mine. He was content. He was as content in that moment as he had been playing chess ten years earlier. And one of the breakthroughs or the evolutions we’ve had as people dealing with people in the later stages of Alzheimer’s as caregivers is accepting who they are in that moment; if they’re in discomfort, if they’re in pain, if they’re in distress, doing everything we can to change that; but if they’re happy, to recognize that that’s okay, even if it’s not the happy that we used to see them being.

I approached David after the panel and introduced myself, and we talked for a few minutes about my grandmother and I explained how even my fondest memories of her – when she would tell me stories about growing up – are tainted by Alzheimer’s, as she would inevitably tell the same stories over and over. I didn’t actually record our conversation, so I can’t offer you exact quotes, but we discussed how President Reagan’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was a major turning point in the world’s acknowledgment of the disease and the beginning of the gradual increasing of funding to search for a cure. It was a really nice conversation, and when I said, “It was a pleasure to speak with you,” and he said, “Likewise,” I actually believed him.

“Sid the Science Kid”: Okay, let’s close on an uplifting note, shall we? The evening event involved a trip to Jim Henson Studios, where we were introduced to their new PBS Kids series, “Sid the Science Kid,” and the technology of digital puppetry. It was – no exaggeration or hyperbole here – astounding. This will unquestionably revolutionize the animation industry. Remember the “Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie” episode of “The Simpsons,” where Homer asks if the cartoon will be on the air live and he’s told, “No, Homer, very few cartoons are broadcast live, it’s a terrible strain on the animator’s wrist”? Well, not anymore. This new technology involves two people: one is wearing a suit which allows their body movements to be matched by the character on the screen, while the other is utilizing more traditional puppetry moves within the context of a computer set-up and controlling the character’s facial expressions. What we were seeing on the screen was not, according to Lisa Henson, quite up to broadcast standards, but it was close enough that you can absolutely imagine this being utilized for, say, animated characters to appear on various awards ceremonies without needing all the lead time to prepare a segment. I am giddy at the possibilities.