2 PBS surprises

I rarely channel-surf these days: too damn many channels! And too damn much "reality" TV, not just silly shows like Survivor, but DIY shows on cooking and cleaning and exercising, and even "documentary" shows on driving big trucks along ice highways (who the hell knew?). But by happy happenstance, I stumbled on 2 PBS shows in the last week that I enjoyed. One was Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway, about how the 1976 Maysles Brothers documentary film Gray Gardens, which chronicled the life of two formerly rich women, who were blood relatives of Jackie Kennedy, who lived in squalor in a broken-down house in the Hamptons, became a hit, Tony-winning musical in 2006. The movie became something of a gay camp sensation, perhaps because Edie Beale was a theatrically larger-than-life person who was clearly having fun in the limelight. The film could even be seen as a forerunner of some of today's "living on camera" reality shows. The musical, which I haven't seen, looks like it was a showcase for Christine Ebersole (pictured), and when she left, the show closed despite having played to big audiences, both off- and on Broadway for over a year. This 45-minute documentary (about a play based on a documentary) was not much more than functional, but it piqued my interest in seeing the show, and the composer of the show's score, Scott Frankel, seemed articulate and interesting.

The other show was Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood, about the actors and filmmakers who fled Nazi Germany and came in a steady stream to the United States to form a little film colony of their own. Many, like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, and S. Z. Sakall, had solid careers here, though many more, some of whom were respected stage actors in Europe, became bit actors (most of the supporting cast of Casablanca) or found no show biz work at all. Much of the info here will not be new to classic film buffs, though I did not that two of the most famous film music composers of the 40's, Franz Waxman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, were German exiles, as was Henry Koster, director of one of my favorite moves, The Bishop's Wife. The doc gives short shrift to Edgar G. Ulmer who is known today as a B-movie auteur, but otherwise this was good viewing, with good narration by Sigourney Weaver.