WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-GRISHAM’S-“THE-FIRM”

 John Grisham is a brand name. Whether audiences have experienced “The Client,” “A Time to Kill” or “The Pelican Brief” in print or on film, the novelist’s law thrillers have had lasting impact. Now there’s fresh evidence: Almost 20 years after spawning a popular Tom Cruise movie, Grisham’s “The Firm” is the basis for a series that has a two-hour premiere Sunday, Jan. 8, on Global Television Network before settling into a weekly slot the following Thursday.

Grisham is an executive producer on the project being made by Entertainment One (“Rookie Blue,” “Haven”) in association with Sony, with Josh Lucas shifting from movies (“Sweet Home Alabama,” “J. Edgar”) to weekly television by assuming the former Cruise role of attorney Mitch McDeere.

The show picks up 10 years after the original story with McDeere believing he’s safe after a nemesis dies in prison, so he emerges from witness protection with wife Abby (B.C.’s Molly Parker) and their young daughter (Natasha Calis) and relocates to Washington, D.C.

Having barely survived his time with a corrupt Memphis firm, the attorney finds himself dealing with another law office apparently steeped in sneaky dealings. Tricia Helfer (“BattlestarGalactica”) plays the chief of that practice, which aligns with McDeere’s smaller office on cases he tackles with his ex-con brother Ray (B.C.’s Callum Keith Rennie) and street-wise assistant Tammy (Juliette Lewis, in the part that first gained Holly Hunter an Oscar nomination).

Thanks also to international sales, “The Firm” has a 22-episode guarantee, something very rare for a debuting series now.

Grisham’s “The Client” was turned into a 1995-96 show, and the author admits in a conference call that situation “certainly gave me great hesitation” about turning another of his books over for series purposes.

“It was such a dreadful show and painful experience, I didn’t want to do it again for a long time; I forgot about [doing] television over the years, though I never really forgot about film. The films have become difficult to make for a number of reasons, and I didn’t really think about ‘The Firm’ as a TV show until [fellow executive producer and former prosecutor] Lukas Reiter appeared on the scene and showed me a script. I thought it was very good, and I got excited about the idea of a weekly drama.

In becoming television’s McDeere, “Firm” star Lucas considers Grisham the viewer he must satisfy most. “There is a reason John Grisham is the massive-selling author he is,” the actor says on the show’s principal set near Toronto, “which is that he seems to have a literary respect that comes out of his iconic men. They have their failings, but their integrity is unwavering.

“There’s usually a great family sense to his stories as well, but consistently, the thing about his work is that it’s thrilling. That’s a difficult thing to drive forward in the world of procedural-based network television, and I pray that we do.”

If there’s any question Lucas is serious about his “Firm” work, consider the research he did for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” last year’s movie in which he starred with Matthew McConaughey (once a Grisham screen lawyer himself, in “A Time to Kill”).

“I went to the courthouse that was right near my house and just watched cases,” Lucas recalls, “and I really became fascinated, deeply moved a number of times.

“There’s such an extraordinary sense of life and death, it’s like the ultimate stage in so many ways.”

Meg Tilly-Bombshells

 Of women, bombshells and a world at war

Meg Tilly was living happily as a wife, mother and novelist on Vancouver Island — until she told her agent she’d like to dabble in acting again.

What she had in mind was the occasional play, she says — such as the role of Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that she did at Victoria’s McPherson Playhouse last summer.

The last thing the Oscar-nominated (for Norman Jewison’s “Agnes of

God”) actress had in mind was committing to a series on the other side of the country.

But when she read for “Bomb Girls,” she says, she was hooked almost immediately by the script and by co-producer Adrienne Mitchell’s directing style.

“I had no intention of doing film or TV,” she says. “When I thought of TV I didn’t expect — even in film, lots of times you don’t get directors who have deep, deep insight into the characters.

“By the time we finished, I was so happy I had gone, because I met somebody who I thought was an incredibly talented director, who gave me a deeper understanding of the character.”

The series, debuting Wednesday, Jan. 4, on Global Television Network, tells the story of a group of women working in a munitions plant in Toronto during World War II.

The story opens in 1941, when women were being hired en masse to staff Canadian munitions plants being set up to replace the ones that had been bombed in England.

“If it hadn’t been for our munitions factories, Britain would have fallen,” Mitchell says. “When we start our series, that factory has been in service for only about five months.”

Tilly plays Lorna, a 40-something shop matron who has to ride herd on an assembly line staffed by inexperienced young women.

The large ensemble cast includes Jodi Balfour, Charlotte Hegele, Ali Liebert and Anastasia Phillips as the women on the line; Peter Outerbridge (“ReGenesis,” “John A: Birth of a Country”) as Lorna’s embittered World War I veteran husband; and Antonio Cupo as a factory worker who is banned from joining the armed forces because he was born in Italy.

The series was created by Mitchell and Janis Lundman, best known for co-producing the dark, stylish cable drama “Durham County.”

“It was an incredible time,” Mitchell says. “Women went from extremes.

The transition they made in entering the work force was incredible.

“Suddenly they were thrust into a situation where they had their husbands’ and sons’ lives in their hands. And the responsibilities, the sacrifices they had to make, and the thrill of having this kind of responsibility and freedom that they never had — it’s an incredible world to explore.”

“Bomb Girls” follows the rush to replicate the “Mad Men” formula of stylish nostalgia blended with social commentary, which saw the experiments last fall with “The Playboy Club” (now canceled) and “Pan Am” (at this writing rumored to be on its way out).

However, unlike those series, and like “Mad Men,” this taps into something fresh and real. “Bomb Girls” is a story whose time is long overdue. This may be one of the last great, unexploited dramas of World War II.

Also, like the 1960s, the ’40s were a period of great upheaval and great energy, when many of the social rules were being rewritten, particularly about gender relations.

“It was a real culture shock for both genders,” Mitchell says. “If it hadn’t been for the women’s work force, those munitions factories wouldn’t have been up and running, and those bombs wouldn’t have been made.

“Yet the men couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t believe these women could do the job. It was mind-blowing to them.”

And Tilly’s character, Lorna, is right in the middle of it. She has a husband who is disabled and two sons who are fighting overseas. And she has suddenly been ripped from her home and thrust into a world she finds exciting and frightening at the same time.

“Women came from all over Canada to work in these factories,” she says. “Normal was you were born in a town. You were raised in the town. You were married in the town. And you died in the town.

“It was a challenging time, but it was a wonderful time, and some women have said those were the happiest years of their lives, because they realized what they were capable of, and it busted preconceptions of what a woman could do.”

Tilly admits that her situation isn’t completely removed from Lorna’s.

She’s a successful writer with four novels for young adults published and a screenplay in the works. Yet, like a lot of women with grown children, she’s re-entering the work force — as an actor.

“I guess I’m not primarily anything now,” she says. Then, she adds with a laugh: “You know what? I’m primarily Meg.

“The overwhelming sense I had when I was shooting ‘Bomb Girls’ is, ‘Oh it’s so much more fun this time around.’ ”

‘DOCTOR WHO’ XMAS SPECIAL A TREAT FOR FANS

Author Clement C. Moore was referring to St. Nicholas when he wrote of “a right jolly old elf” in his famous poem. But he just as easily could have been referencing a certain peripatetic, centuries-old Time Lord who zips freely through time and space yet holds a special place in his heart(s) for Earth humans, especially children.

That probably explains, at least in part, why “Doctor Who” and Christmas have become synonymous in the show’s U.K. home base. And now, for the second consecutive year, Space: The Imagination Station carries this year’s Christmas episode

Series star Matt Smith, who currently plays the 11th incarnation of the Doctor, couldn’t be happier about it.

“I think there is a sort of magic and scale to the Christmas episode,”

says Smith, (who also starred in the BBC’s “Party Animals” on Knowledge Network) who at 29 is the youngest actor yet to take on the role. “The Doctor and Christmas go hand in hand. In many ways, he treats every day like it is Christmas, so when it really is ‘that day,’ he’s like, ‘Whoa! Here we go!’ Also, it was just great fun to have snow in September.”

The actor is talking about the fall production in Wales necessitated by the special’s holiday premiere date, with crews transforming a real forest into a winter wonderland for exterior scenes. Smith says that put him into a holiday mood faster than almost anything else.

“It was completely exciting,” Smith says. “Ever since I saw Jim Carrey filming ‘The Grinch’ in September or whenever it was, I thought, ‘Wow, that must be so much fun!’ And it is. What was amazing was the snow in all the pine trees, because we were in that real pine forest, and that brings back all those sense memories, because it’s not really Christmas, is it, without that scent?”

“Doctor Who” fans watching at home will have to furnish their own scent-sations to the experience, but there’s plenty of traditional holiday sentiment in the story, which opens on Christmas Eve 1938, as Madge Arwell (guest star Claire Skinner) rescues an injured “Spaceman Angel” who promises to repay her kindness anytime she decides to make a wish. Three years later, a distraught Madge and her two children, Lily and Cyril (Holly Earl, Maurice Cole), flee war-torn London for a ramshackle house on the coast, where her efforts to give the kids their best Christmas ever get a boost from a madcap caretaker (guess

Who?) whose mysterious Christmas gift leads them into a magical wintry world.

As fans may notice, the story doesn’t accommodate an appearance by the Doctor’s current companions, Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and her husband, Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill). Smith admits that he misses the pair on a personal level, just because they’ve become friends with whom he enjoys spending time, but the new characters in this Christmas episode offer rewards of their own.

“We’ve got new characters in this one: Lily and Cyril, the children, who are just brilliant, and Madge Arwell, the mom, and all these other wonderful characters, which makes it easier to bear, I suppose,” he says. “That’s one of the great things about this job: We keep getting all these wonderful guest actors: the Michael Gambons and David Walliamses and James Cordens. It’s like a wonderful master class for me.”

 

 

— set in World War II England — on Sunday, Dec. 25, the same date it airs in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

ETALK: TEN YEARS IN THE FAME GAME

The stars have been aligning for Ben Mulroney and Tanya Kim for almost a decade now. As co-hosts of “etalk,” weekdays on CTV, they have endured an apparently endless round of films, music, celebrity interviews and red carpets.
Now, heading toward its 10th anniversary, the show is celebrating its celebration of celebrity with an hourlong special, “etalk: 10 Years of Stars, Scandals and Life on the Red Carpet,” airing Monday, Dec. 19.
The show is a look back to when the show was a little, ambitious project with aspirations, to now, as the most-viewed entertainment show in Canada.
“We’re looking at what makes the show the show,” Mulroney says.
That will include past interviews, highlights of the show and the entertainment scene over the past decade — and a look at how the hosts have evolved with “etalk.”
Looking back, Mulroney says, he sees an awkward guy in a suit that was too big. “I didn’t know what to do with my hands,” he recalls. “I couldn’t memorize scripts the way I can now. I get very uncomfortable watching myself from years past. Everyone tries to explain to me that it’s funny, but I just get very uncomfortable.”
Co-hosts Mulroney and Kim have been with the show from its beginnings. Mulroney joined right out of law school, he says, admitting that his name got him in the door and into an on-the-job learning experience that has paid off handsomely. His first gig was as one of the hosts of the little-watched “The Chatroom,” which ran on the old talktv specialty channel, which has since become MTV Canada.
“I got really lucky,” he says. “I came into television at the dawn of digital cable, when we went from 30 channels to 300 overnight, and there just wasn’t enough content to fill those channels. So for the first time ever, not having any TV experience was entirely acceptable. There just weren’t enough people for the jobs.”
The way it worked out, he says, he was able to gain just enough experience to be ready each time “etalk” moved to a new level. “I got called in because I wasn’t afraid of the camera. And I was able to start on a show very few people watched, and get on-the-job training.”
Like her co-host, Kim started with “The Chatroom” in 2000, and stayed with “etalk” when it was spun off that show as a weekly. “I’d come on ‘The Chatroom’ Tuesdays and talk to Ben about the new releases that were coming out that day,” she says. “So that’s how I started, just talking about music.”
In September 2002, “etalk” went daily as a daytime show, and it moved to its present evening slot in the summer of 2003. It was that same year that Kim moved into the co-host job, when Mulroney’s previous co-host, Thea Andrews, left.
And over that time, Kim has gone from being “punk rock” to “a little more classic,” and something of a Canadian fashion icon.
“There’s a big difference — or at least I hope there’s a big difference,” she says, laughing. “Back then, I was more crazy. I had red streaks in my hair. I was a fan of Manic Panic, and the wardrobe was a little out there. I think that’s one of the things I really appreciated about CTV. They let me be who I was at the time.”
Both Mulroney and Kim say the biggest change they’ve noticed over the past decade has been the growth of the Canadian star system. When the show first went on the air, Mulroney says, the producers and correspondents approached the 30 percent Canadian content quota with a bit of trepidation. But they soon learned that there were all kinds of Canadians out there doing interesting things. It’s just that no one was calling them stars.
“If you don’t know how to tell a good story, you’re going to think, ‘Oh gosh, we’re going to have to talk about Anne Murray and Wayne Gretzky every day.’ But there are a lot of people doing great TV, movies, film, art, fashion, cooking. You name it, there are great Canadians doing that work.”
Contrary to the popular belief in much of the Canadian media that no one in this country cares about homegrown stars, Kim says the Canadian items play as well with the audience as the Hollywood ones do.
“I love that ‘etalk’ supports, fosters and encourages the talent we have in our backyard, as opposed to letting them slip through our fingers, go someplace else to get noticed — and then we do stories about them. We’re Canadiana, and we appreciate that Canadian stories are often more relevant than what happens in Hollywood. I like that we showcase that.”

KING’S SUSPENSE RETURNS BROSNAN TO TV

Before he was James Bond, he was Remington Steele … and he’s also a Stephen King fan, a boon to Pierce Brosnan in his return to television.
In recent years a star of such movies as “Mamma Mia!” and the Roman
Polanski-directed “The Ghost Writer,” the actor had a previous link to
the iconic horror novelist through some aspects of the 1992 film ‘The
Lawnmower Man.” He revisits King territory by playing an author
literally haunted by a tragic loss in the new A&E Network two-part
movie “Stephen King’s Bag of Bones,” airing Sunday and Monday, Dec. 11
and 12.
Brosnan channels King in portraying a writer, but the fictional
wordsmith’s circumstances differ. After his wife (Annabeth Gish, “The
X-Files”) is killed in an accident, creatively blocked Mike Noonan
(Brosnan) retreats to Maine — famously King’s own stomping grounds —
and becomes enmeshed in a custody battle between a child’s (Caitlin
Carmichael) mother (Melissa George, “Alias”) and grandfather (William
Schallert, “The Patty Duke Show”).
“Beverly Hills, 90210” alum Jason Priestley appears as Noonan’s agent,
who hopes his client will start turning out books again soon. That
could be helped or hindered by the supernatural experiences the writer
begins having, some involving the spectre of a blues-era singer (Anika
Noni Rose, “Dreamgirls”) with a traumatic history of her own.
“It wasn’t anything that was conscious; it was just the way it worked
out,” Brosnan says of tackling another King tale. “This fit in really
nicely with my schedule. Having said that, I’m a fan of Mr. King’s
work. I hadn’t really thought about ‘The Lawnmower Man’ until I was
reminded of it on the first day of doing this.”
Nearly every familiar King storytelling element is present in “Bag of
Bones,” all the more cause for Brosnan to reason, “When you come to
play King, you have to go full-tilt. You can’t shy away from what’s on
the page, and if you look at the actors who have played King
characters, they’re usually pretty assertive with their performances.”
Especially in the first half of “Bag of Bones,” when Brosnan has long
sequences built largely on reactions to what his alter ego sees — or
believes he’s seeing, whether he’s looking at a refrigerator or a
coffin — his work is largely wordless and reactive, rather than
holding to the tradition of delivering information to viewers through
dialogue.
“For the first four weeks, almost, I was just by myself,” Brosnan
confirms. “There were no other actors involved, and that was the
challenge of the piece. How do you keep it in play with just one man
and his fears and foibles and the persecuted state of his own mind?”
“Stephen King’s Bag of Bones” was executive-produced and directed by
Mick Garris, a longtime keeper of the King flame in putting the
author’s stories on film (“Sleepwalkers,” ABC’s versions of “The
Stand” and “The Shining”). Brosnan says Garris “was a great companion
to have. It was a pretty intense 38-day shoot, and there was little
time in many respects, so you couldn’t second-guess the material.
“Mick Garris is a seasoned and much-loved director of Stephen King’s
work, so I had him on my side. I knew I was safe with somebody who was
going to look after my back, and his own take on the material was
evident from Day One, even at the frantic pace at which we worked. We
also had a fantastic crew, so most scenes were done in just two takes,
three takes tops. It really did fly.”
To his pleasure, Brosnan learned he was requested personally by King
to be the central “Bag of Bones” star. “I was told he wanted me, and
… well, he got me, and I was very proud to do it. You say yes to
something, but then you have to go and do it, and the enormity of the
responsibility to the King world came crashing down.
“I’d spent two weeks between my previous project and this one with my
family in Hawaii, and I looked at just about all the film work there
was to see of King’s. I also dipped into the books. This is somebody
who is much-loved as a writer, so I invested as much as I possibly
could.”
While his credits include the miniseries “Noble House” and “Around the
World in 80 Days,” the Irish-born Brosnan hasn’t done television in
nearly 20 years. He’s kept active primarily through movies that also
have included an update of “The Thomas Crown Affair” (a sequel to
which is still possible, he reports) and this year’s “I Don’t Know How
She Does It.” He could return to the home screen again soon: With
producer Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”), he’s developing a series about an
international private eye.
For now, Brosnan sums up making “Stephen King’s Bag of Bones” as “a
fantastic experience. With this piece, you really put yourself in the
most vulnerable experience possible as an actor. To say I created a
character might be stretching it a bit, because so much of it is just
my own being, but I do think there’s a character in there.”

JIAN GHOMESHI: AN URBAN HOME COMPANION

 As Jian Ghomeshi says, public radio has come in from the cornfields for a hot cup of latte. The host of Q With Jian Ghomeshi, which recently began airing Sundays on CBC Television, the London-born, Toronto-raised Ghomeshi sees his show as the 21st-century answer to Garrison Keillorís famous  ‘A Prairie Home Companion.’
“In a strange twist of happenstance, I’m a 21st-century public broadcaster,” he says.  “My first language is English, and I self-identify as Canadian. But I come from a Middle Eastern background. I’m Muslim. I’m utterly urban. I grew up in London, England, and then Toronto. And I’ve lived in New York, and that’s it.” Ghomeshi also never thought he had a chance to be a public figure as he was growing up, he says.
The son of expatriate Iranians, he immigrated with his family to Toronto at the age of 8. He landed in the country at a time when revolution was sweeping his parents’  homeland - culminating in the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of its staff hostage.
“When I as a little kid in the 1970s, when we first moved to Canada, in Grade 3 or Grade 4, I did a project on Iran, on how fantastic this country was and the background,îGhomeshi recalls. ìThen bang, the hostage crisis happened and the revolution, and all of a sudden it was terrorist jokes. The area I lived in was quite conservative, and there were no Iranians.”
That was the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, which is now  populated by 100,000 Iranians. So growing up at that time, he remembers, he felt he had to keep his ambitions to be a hockey announcer or a politician to himself.
“I thought in either case  being in the media or being in politics would never work,” he says. “I could never do it, because my name is too weird, and I come from the evil place, Iran.   Obviously that has completely changed, to the point that I would say for the first time it’s not a detriment at all to be those things. That’s an interesting evolution thatís happened within my lifetime.”
Ghomeshi drifted into show business while studying history and political science at Torontoís York University. He started doing improv and joined the satirical folk-pop group Moxy Fruvous, which is probably best known for having Canadaís second indie No. 1 hit, ‘King of Spain.’

“I was playing in a band, doing musical theater, and at the same time I was a political activist, and I was taking poli-sci and history,” Ghomeshi says. “And I thought: If only I had focused on school I could be one of my academic heroes. Or if I had only focused on my vocals, I could be Bowie.  Instead I’m a jack of various trades and master of nothing, and where’s this all going?”
It turns out, the blend of bookishness and showbiz, and of the serious and the silly, made a good blend for someone who wanted to make a living talking and listening to artists and cultural figures.
Ghomeshi came to CBC in 2002 as host of the TV entertainment magazine show Play,where he honed his natural gift for interviewing.
“When he talks to someone, he listens intently,” says  Qî producer Arif Noorani. “He really is engaged in that conversation. And you can see that intensity on TV. “When Q went on the air 4 1/2 years ago, Ghomeshi and his producers were advised to keep it light and bright and keep the clips short. Then they were given a very long leash to create their show.
So they made this variety show, with long interviews - which has evolved into the highest-rated radio show of its kind in Canada, is carried on public broadcasting outlets across the United States, has a worldwide podcast and YouTube audience, and has now come to CBC’s main network.
One big reason for the showís success has been its ability to attract A-list guests. Since it went on the air, Ghomeshi has interviewed such people as Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Woody Allen, Salman Rushdie, Radiohead, Paul McCartney, Noel Gallagher, Stephen King and Maya Angelou.
Itís one of the few places on radio, TV or the Internet where a listener can find long, in-depth interviews with some of the world’s most interesting people.
“We’re the antidote to where entertainment journalism is going,” Noorani says. “We’re in it because of the ideas. We want to tell stories and be part of the public conversation.”
If that sounds like a return to the talk shows of the 1960s and í70s, itís also a leap into the future for public broadcasting, Ghomeshi says. “I’m the anti-Garrison Keillor. If he’s the paragon of public broadcasting, surely I shouldn’t be successful. But I think the connection I may be making may be not unlike the way this continent has changed in the last two or three decades, and particularly our country. More urban. More diverse. More first generation.”

IT’S A RUSSELL PETERS CHRISTMAS

It’s… a Rus-sell Pe-ters Christ-mas / Tell all your friends, or they’ll be mad,
Once a year, you cannot miss this / If you do you’ll get a hurt real bad,
We are wea-ring, gay ap-parell / Yes we all have is-sues with our dad,
Hol-iday is time for pure bliss / We can guarantee that you’ll be glad,
It’s…. a Rus-sell Pe-ters Christ-mas / It’s the most fun, that you can get,
If you dis-agree, then you can kiss this / When the song is over,
we’re not done yet,
Now, it’s time to get down to busi-ness / Russell’s flying in on his
private jet, Watch it now in high def-ini-tion / Before the nerds post
it on the in-ter-net, Welcome to my Christmas special / Set your PVR
for Christmas glee, It’s kinda corny and sentimental / And it’s
starring meeeeeeeeeeee! (with apologies to “Deck the Halls”)
What happens when you combine up a comedy heavyweight, his brethren of
Canadian and international showbiz friends, and a requisite frozen
pond surrounded by glittering, sparkling Christmas trees?
One heck of a Christmas special, that’s what!
Anchoring its holiday lineup, CTV presents the world premiere of the
original Canadian production “A Russell Peters Christmas” Thursday,
Dec. 1 at 9pm on CTV and CTV Mobile. The special is also the
centrepiece of the holiday schedule on The Comedy Network, premiering
there on Saturday, Dec. 10 at 10pm. Helping Peters make merriment are
Michael Bublé, Pamela Anderson, Ted Lange, Faizon Love, Jon Lovitz,
Goapele, Scott Thompson and his own mother and baby daughter.
Inspired by the variety shows of yesteryear, Peters puts his own
irreverent twist on the Christmas special, making it unlike anything
viewers have seen before. Along with the obligatory carolers, winter
wonderland setting, and cheesy glad tidings, RPC features legendary
comedians, lingerie models, Pamela Anderson as the Virgin Mary, and
the bartender from “The Love Boat.” With a mix of Russell Peters
stand-up; hilarious sketch featuring guest stars and Peters’ own
mother, Maureen and baby daughter, Crystianna; stop-motion animation
reminiscent of a Rankin/Bass classic (set in Bramalea, no less); and
show-stopping musical performances including the incomparable Michael
Bublé, it’s a holiday special like no other.
Following the CTV debut and leading up to the Comedy premiere of the
holiday special, the Peters antics continue with the Canadian
television debut of Russell  Peters: The Green Card Tour Live from The
O2 Arena Dec. 3 at 10pm exclusively on Comedy.

HOW WOMEN ROCK OUR WORLD

Bessie Smith to Lady Gaga is a wide swath in modern music, and “Women Who Rock” includes them and many in between Friday, Nov. 18, on KCTS.
Mixing interviews with key women musicians and live performance footage, Women Who Rock features the stories of trailblazers like Bessie Smith, Ma Raney, Mother Maybelle and Mahalia Jackson as well as contemporary stars Darlene Love, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Bonnie Raitt, Cyndi Lauper, Wanda Jackson, Mavis Staples, Deborah Harry and Kathleen Hanna of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.  Also featured are songwriter Cynthia Weill and journalists/critics Ann Powers, Nelson George and Holly George Warren.
Cyndi Lauper, with nearly 30 years as a music icon and worldwide record sales of 30 million, will host the program. The program breaks the female influence on rock and roll into distinct eras, starting with the music’s blues roots in the 1920s and 30s. It travels forward through time, telling stories of key musicians from each succeeding era, including rock and roll’s emergence in the 1950s, the girl group and counterculture era of the 60s, disco and punk in the 70s, celebrations of empowerment and fun throughout the 80s, into today’s predominance of women in pop, and much more. The film reveals the ever-morphing role of female performers and shows how today’s singers were influenced and inspired by their forebears.
“Rock and roll is a very wide river,” says filmmaker Carol Stein. She and Susan Wittenberg “wanted people who represented various eras,” she says, “We were trying to figure it out by categories. It’s a big tent.”
Though there’s a chasm between the likes of Mahalia Jackson and Madonna, the common denominator is music with attitude.
The documentary opens with James Brown singing, “This is a man’s world.” It soon cuts to Christina Aguilera belting the same song, and the irony is lost on no one.
Women are the top grossers in music in the 21st century, the documentary notes. But women’s rock roots go back to the very beginnings of the genre.
The catalyst for the film was an exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which helped the filmmakers decide who should be in the documentary. Darlene Love was finally inducted in 2011, and though her legions of fans had been asking about her inclusion for years, Love was sanguine.
She, of the voice that never stops and who has been hitting the charts since 1961, is completely at peace with how long it took for her to be recognized in the museum.
“It bothered me at first, and then I didn’t think about it anymore,”
she says. “You know what? I will be in there, in time.”
Stunning in a form-fitting satin dress — she kickboxes five days a week — Love talks with no regrets. Love sang backup for Elvis, Sinatra, Sam Cooke and many others. She’s been on Broadway and sees herself as a rock singer.
Love is probably best known for singing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” which she’s done annually since 1986 and always brings the house down. Love has that effect on people.
She started singing in a girl group, the Blossoms, when she was 18.
Years of doing backup for everyone from Tom Jones to Dionne Warwick followed.
While deciding whether she could go solo, she had a day job — cleaning houses. She was scrubbing a toilet in a woman’s house when her hit “Christmas” came on the radio. She knew then that she had to pursue a solo career.
She was 40 and dating Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, and he nudged her to launch her solo career. “He said, ‘Are you going to sing backup your whole life or go solo?’ So he put together a band for me,”
Love says.
She did a show at The Roxy. She recalls singing “Hungry Heart,” and some skinny guy in the back of the room was whooping it up. She asked someone, “Who was that in the back cutting up so bad?” Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt told her.
They were early boosters.
“We are still really good friends,” Love says.
And she credits her friends, including Springsteen, Elton John and Phil Spector, for helping her career. “It is tougher for women,” she says. “It was easier for me.”
Many of the female rockers in the documentary don’t seem to care how hard it was. They were going to do it, and it’s that attitude that fuels their music.
“Women who are adventurous, who step out of the norm, who don’t take no for an answer” is how filmmaker Stein describes them.
Many of the clips are extremely familiar, but the surprises come in the beginning for those who don’t know Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She looked like an unassuming church lady until she strapped on that electric guitar and became a rocker of pure audacity.
Relying, perhaps too heavily, on music journalists for commentary and taking a chronological approach, the documentary features popular clips, snippets of music videos and a few fresher interviews.
“Nancy Wilson played a ballad especially for us,” Wittenberg says. “If we spent time with the artists, they are very giving and very sweet.”
Ultimately the filmmakers want to convey “that rock and roll is thought of as a male art form,” Stein says. “From the start, women have made a profound contribution to the art form. This was a film honoring that these women were incredible artists. This is basically a tribute. To me it is a joyous celebration, a thank you to those who have given us so much joy.”
Even if rock remains dominated by the guys, Love says she knows the truth. “We are as powerful as men are in rock because men want to see us,” she says, “The men know we are there; they are just trying to act like we are not there.”

40-YEAR WAR IN WHICH THE WEAPONS WERE WORDS

There were two earthshaking weapons threatening the world during the Cold War, but only one was used. And that would be propaganda.
That was the weapon of choice for both the East and West blocs in the four decades after the Second World War, when both sides had gigantic arsenals of nuclear weapons that they dared not use.
“Love, Hate & Propaganda: The Cold War,” hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos and airing on consecutive Thursdays, Nov. 17 and 24 and Dec. 1 and 8, on CBUT, is a sometimes amazingly detailed look back at those years.
The series could as easily be called “Language, Power and Persuasion.”
“I think what may have heightened the use of propaganda as a tool was that nobody really wanted an armed conflict,” says Peter Ingles, who produced the documentary series.
“Even though we were building weapons of mass destruction, deeper down we were fighting a war of words and ideas, trying to convince people that their ideology was better than the other’s. And that was done through propaganda.”
This series follows one that aired around a year ago under the same “Love, Hate & Propaganda” title.
That one dealt with the Second World War, and its main aim was to present to a younger audience what was, for older viewers, a familiar story.
“At first, it wasn’t even about propaganda,” Ingles says. “It was about bridging the gap between generations. But it worked so well that schools picked it up.
“And we got feedback, not just from teachers but from kids as well.
The teachers just ate it up.”
This time around, the series has a sharper focus and benefits from the availability of a wide range of pop culture artifacts from the era — many of which haven’t been seen in years.
As a result, this will probably have as strong an appeal to viewers who lived through the Cold War as for people who only know it as a historical label.
“Our main concern is to make this accessible to a younger audience,”
Ingles says. “But what’s interesting about it is that it’s something that stays very current. We’re still using propaganda today to get ideas across and to sell products.”
The series doesn’t follow a chronology from the fall of Germany and the drawing of the Iron Curtain across Europe (in Churchill’s well-chosen words) to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Rather, it proceeds thematically, from the fear and darkness of Stalin in Russia and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts in the United States, to the competing ideologies and each side’s styles of salesmanship, to popular culture and the final thaw.
Archival material ranges from grim footage of Korea, the Hungarian Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and Afghanistan to the lighter side of the propaganda war, fought with scientific breakthroughs, popular culture and consumer products.
“In the postwar period, North America was thriving, because we were on this economic push from the war,” Ingles says. “I remember seeing pictures of Europe, and the devastation, which went on for a long time.
“And this misery in which people were living was a perfect battleground for the war of ideologies.”
Some of the most interesting material is what might, on the surface, be taken as the most trivial: the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow; the pop culture reaction to the first Earth satellite, Sputnik, launched by the Russians; a Russian trade fair in New York; and an American one in Moscow.
As Episode 3 shows, there was a real struggle in the communist world to come up with an antidote to the seductive powers of Western culture, usually with little success.
Archival footage shows the Rolling Stones ripping up a stage in West Berlin — presumably within earshot of the East.
This is followed by fascinating and often hilarious footage of East Bloc pop stars, clean-cut and smiling and obviously manufactured for the purpose.
“Propaganda is manipulation of the masses,” Ingles says. “I think it’s actually more a part of the capitalist society: selling a product, selling a message.
“I think in the East Bloc countries, propaganda was propaganda. We were slicker at it because there was a lot more money behind it.”
In the end, we can be grateful that the nuclear weapons were never used and that it was the war of words that decided which ideology would emerge triumphant.
And one of the most potent symbols of communism, the Berlin Wall, became the symbol of the end of it.
“To me the surprise was the irony of the fall of communism,” Ingles says. “With all the missiles that were being piled up on both sides, it was finally words that brought down the wall. “It was the pope and his speeches. It was Reagan saying, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ ”

PAGE EIGHT

An all-star cast and a taut teleplay by one of England’s greatest living writers launch a new season of PBS’ “Masterpiece Contemporary”
with the spy drama “Page Eight” on Sunday, Nov. 6 (check local listings). Written and directed by David Hare, whose screenplay adaptations of “The Hours” and “The Reader” both earned him Oscar nominations, the splendidly acted thriller follows the fortunes of aging MI-5 intelligence analyst Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy), who finds himself drawn into the personal drama of a mysterious beauty next door (Oscar winner Rachel Weisz) even as an explosive revelation comes to light at work, where his boss, mentor and best friend Ben Baron (Michael Gambon) leads him to a single sentence at the bottom of page eight in a top-secret document — a sentence that clearly hints at a conspiracy of silence between top government officials in Washington and London involving information that may have jeopardized the lives of several spies on both sides of the Atlantic.
“It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had,” Nighy says happily of his role in the film, on which he also serves as an executive producer.
“I’ve waited a long time to play a spy, actually, so I was very grateful when I fi nally got to play one, not least because it was written by David, whom I have worked with all my life and who I admire beyond measure.  He is one of the greatest writers currently working, in my opinion, and it’s just a very cool thing to play.”
Hare got the idea for the story after talking with some people inside the real MI-5 (the British equivalent of the CIA) about the agency’s problems dealing with overt pressure from politicians asking them to manipulate intelligence data to support a political case, rather than to analyze the facts objectively, a dilemma that, Hare says, has split
MI-5 down the middle.
He didn’t start out to write another role for Nighy, his friend and colleague of more than three decades, but he quickly realized the actor was perfect for this role.  “If the man is meant to be sort of secretive and funny and loves jazz and women and is clever and is sort of one step ahead of everyone else, who am I going to get to play that except my old friend Bill Nighy? After about 20 pages, it became clear that it was him,” Hare says.
Both men speak with unguarded affection for each other, although when Hare, who was the fi rst director to cast Nighy as a romantic leading man many years ago, refers to his friend’s current status as “certainly in Britain, the erotic favorite of a certain middle-aged generation,” a bemused Nighy advises an interviewer, “If David had said that in front of me, as Englishmen we would have had to kill ourselves shortly afterwards.”
All joking aside, however, both Hare and Nighy talk of “Page Eight” as being something of a dream project, one that also attracted such A-list actors as Ralph Fiennes, playing a charming yet cunning prime minister, and Judy Davis as one of Johnny Worricker’s tart-tongued
MI-5 colleagues, despite the fact that the fi lm was produced on a $3 million budget over only five weeks.  It certainly doesn’t show.
Working with one of Hare’s best, most compelling scripts, these exceptional actors produce a gallery of such finely realized characters caught up in such vividly realized relationships that viewers are apt to feel as if they are watching a sequel to an earlier fi lm.
“When you come across something which is great art, you sometimes experience it as something familiar to you, as if it was something that already was in your mind but had not yet been revealed to you,”
Nighy says. “From the moment I read this script, it was as if I were remembering it. That’s obviously a trick of the mind, but there is a familiarity to it, as if the words are what I would have gotten around to saying myself given the time.” An executive at NBC/Universal, which co-produced “Page Eight,” likewise commented to Hare after screening the fi lm that “‘I feel I could take any of these characters and do a spinoff series with them, because I feel as if they exist and they are interesting people. You could take even a quite minor character and run another series off them.”
Even more happily, the BBC was so pleased with the film that it immediately asked Hare to write more Johnny Worricker films.
“We are planning to do two more, to follow the story through,” Hare says. “I think this is just the beginning.  When I first wrote it, the BBC’s first response was, ‘Can you do six?’ but I’m far too slow to do that.  I have faced that fact that I have to do three, because there is more to say on the subject.”
And that couldn’t please Nighy more. “I am jazzed in the extreme,” the actor says. “I am super-jazzed. It’s my absolutely ideal situation. If you had asked me, as some journalists do, ‘What do you dream of? What would be your ideal project?’ well, this is it. This is my perfect engagement. And the fact that there are going to be two more makes it super-perfect. I love being directed by David.  In the theater as well, he always has had a very highly developed visual sense. His aesthetic has always been very, very expressive and satisfying and mirrors mine to a certain degree. I love how he sees it and how he has been able to make it look. I am just very, very happy.”

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