IN CONVERSATION

John Williams in Concert

The noted film composer unveils a new violin concerto for PBS’s ‘Great Performances’ showcase, with virtuoso soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter and guest conductor Andris Nelsons.

The private music of John Towner Williams is rarely heard in concert, but there it is: The world-renowned composer of film scores for such familiar screen classics as Star Wars, Schindler’s List and Empire of the Sun has also composed more than 20 violin concertos, symphonies and chamber pieces for the concert hall. And yet, most of his followers only know him for his film work.

A John Williams Premiere at Tanglewood, premiering Friday as part of PBS’s Great Performances showcase, features the debut of Williams’ most recent work, 2nd Violin Concerto, with guest soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and will introduce Williams’ personal, private music to a wider audience.

The concert piece was performed earlier this year at Tanglewood, the venerable New England music venue and summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937. Williams’ own career spans seven decades. At age 89 — he turns 90 in February — Williams is still active in the arts, and small wonder:  the Norwegian composer Marcus Paus has remarked that Williams's "satisfying way of embodying dissonance and avant-garde techniques within a larger tonal framework” has made him one of the great composers in music history.

Williams himself might not agree. The famously humble — and soft-spoken — Williams once remarked to his friend, film colleague and creative collaborator Steven Spielberg that there are so many composers who are better than he is.

“I know,” Spielberg is said to have replied. “But they are all dead for a long time.”

In a teleconference call this past summer with TV reviewers, Williams’ shared some of his work habits and his general philosophy toward crafting orchestral music for the wider public.

“When I'm writing music, I’m always thinking about the medium that is going to be presenting it,” he said. “I love writing for orchestra, and particular orchestras. Even more so, I love the possibility of personally working with someone like Anne-Sophie Mutter, trying to capture what I think are her particular idiosyncratic tendencies in what she does. In a sense, I’m trying to present a portrait of her.”

Mutter, a world-renowned German violinist and four-time Grammy Award winner, was encouraged early in her career by the late Herbert von Karajan, long-time conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Mutter has had numerous works composed specifically for her — by Krzysztof Penderecki, André Previn and Henri Dutilleux, among others. And now John Williams.

“It’s the reason I’ve written a lot of concert pieces in my life,” Williams said. “There are people who perform individual solos, and I think one has to try to capture who they are, their essence. Certainly, in every case, without exception, they have proven a great inspiration for me.

“It also gives me freedom from composition of music for film, where there are constrictions. There are always areas of measurement one has to work within. We know how long a piece has to be, or how short it needs to be. When I’m writing for a soloists, or for an orchestra in general, I’m freed from all of those confining, arithmetic requirements of what has to accompany the film. It’s an area where I can find freedom to write what I like — and in this case, with Anne-Sophie Mutter, for someone I like very much.”

Williams said the violin holds a special place in his creative heart.

“If you ever pick one up and look at it, it is the weirdest-looking shape you could imagine. How any woodcarver ever arrived at that shape, and to discover that it makes the kind of sound that it does, is remarkable. Some of these instruments being used are now 300-years-old. The craftsmanship of some of these luthiers is unequaled. It simply cannot be improved upon.

“We all love the violin. It has the greatest range of most instruments. It’s an instrument that can simulate what happens with the human voice, where one note is elided or connected to the next note. It’s not as though we are pushing a button to get the next note; there’s a space where you can travel from note to note even without a so-called portamento or slide. It’s the humanizing aspect of a violin's ability to express.

“A concerto for a violin is a very specific kind of challenge. The difficulties of getting the balancing right are great. It’s a joyous thing to work with and solve, though.”

Film music is not as easy as it seems, Williams suggested. Whether it’s the two-note key for Jaws or the five-tone key for Close Encounters, simplicity does not always mean it’s simple to do.

“It’s a long process,” Williams said. “Those two-or three-note keys, or five-note keys, can be very elusive and hard to find.”

He laughed wryly. “Listen, I’ll use as an example. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The script called for a musical piece that had five tones. I said at the time, ‘If I write seven tones, it would be more like a melody, and two tones would be more like a doorbell. The requirement here seems to be five notes.’

“I must have written about 300 examples of motifs based on five notes, and finally, after all this, I said to Steven, ‘This is probably as far as I can go without starting again with five single notes played with no metric definition between any of them.’ We finally settled on the notes that we had.

“These simple themes that represent characters and little [musical] signals are things I have to work on very hard. I forge them, remake them, try to do what I need to do to get to what eventually seems like simple — the inevitable, the inescapable. Simple as they are, they are tricky to find.

“When they feel right, they communicate a particular emotion in a very short period time, which is very important in film music. We can feel it. We have had some success.

“I have to tell you, there's rarely a moment where, in my experience, I said beforehand, ‘Eureka! This is exactly right; this will work!’ There's always a little bit of uncertainty, until people respond in great numbers, and that tells you whether we’ve achieved that effect or not.”

Music has always been a part of his life.

“I don't remember a eureka moment where I suddenly discovered I might have the ability to express something in music, whether a small thing or something larger. For me, it's been a process of growth and evolution of discovery, and of great joy.

“I often say that music — especially for myself and musicians and artists and singers — is our oxygen. It is what supports us, what sustains us in our lives. It's more than a commitment. It’s a way of life, a way of living, a way of breathing. It's given me the greatest joy.”

A John Williams Premiere at Tanglewood premieres Friday on PBS at 9E/8C.

Brian Cox Goes Full King Lear in ‘Succession’

The new season of HBO’s most classicist drama finds tycoon Logan Roy (Cox) facing dissension in the ranks and a family split over the spoils of his business empire. Business as usual, in other words.

Brian Cox is utterly convincing as a force of malevolence in Succession, dramatist Jesse Armstrong’s King Lear-like morality play about a family patriarch torn over how to divide the spoils when he finally moves on to the next world — not unlike the real-life drama entangling Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — but Cox himself is from a different ideological mindset. He campaigned for Labour in the 2007 Scottish elections, and changed allegiances to the Scottish National  Party in 2011 because of their more enlightened commitment to higher education. He officially joined the SNP in 2020, citing the party’s more liberal attitudes towards social justice and the value of Scottish independence. He campaigned tirelessly against Brexit and remains a tireless supporter of the arts. These are not positions that would appeal to Logan Roy — or Rupert Murdoch.

Cox is only too happy to play against type in Succession, though. That’s what actors do, he said in a video conference call with TV writers last month.

“There are clear influences,” Cox said, drawing comparisons with King Lear, “the idea of somebody dividing their kingdom. In Lear, he does it with his three daughters. He’s hoping for someone to emerge that would be a worthy successor. So far, in (Succession), we have no comers. The classical element is present, definitely. We're all influenced — whether we like it or not — by certain kinds of archetypes. Logan is an archetype. He represents a certain authority.

“The downside is that he’s a white dinosaur. He’s near the end of his sell-by date, you he’s coming to the end. That is similar to Lear in that Lear has to think, Where do I go to? Where does it go to from here? Lear is happy to let go of his kingdom. He pretends that he’s able to let go of his kingdom, but he doesn’t quite because he makes certain provisos that keep him going. Logan is the same. He’s looking for a successor but, at the same time, he can’t let go. It’s very hard to let go of something that you created. There's a kind of archetypal dimension to that.

“That's what’s so exciting about the writing in Succession. That’s what’s so exciting about how the piece is developed.  It’s an ensemble piece, but it’s an ensemble where all the characters think it’s about them. Logan certainly thinks it’s about him.  There are Lear-like influences. I don’t think you can deny those influences. They're certainly there. You can't get around them. There are clear parallels.”

In the end, Cox believes, Succession is about family.

“Families have been the source of drama for centuries, going right back to Oedipus. It has a classical root to it. From my point of view, that’s what makes it. I'm trained classically. I come from the classical theatre, and so I find from the work point of view that it's easier. It's easier for me because the lines are very simple. The lines of pursuit are very simple. The interesting thing to me, as an actor, is the secrets, the character's secrets. And I think that's what we’ve been able to maintain throughout the whole series. Who are these people, and who do they become? We see it surprisingly with so many of the characters because they present different aspects of themselves that we never think of, and that can be very revealing.”

Succession is now in its third season, though there was a two-year break between the second season and these new episodes, because of production being shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant lockdowns. Cox is still a long way from becoming bored by character, though.

“That's what's brilliant about the writing. It's so beautifully honed from the start who these characters are, and yet they often take many different directions and are constantly surprising. I don't know about the other (actors), but the thing that I love about playing the role is I'm always surprised. It’s never quite — it seems to be on one trajectory but, actually, it never is. It’s on several trajectories. It’s really a reflection of how human beings live, a reflection of who we are as human beings, how we shift and how we dance. It's like a big dance in a way.

“Again, that's the brilliance of the team, what they do, and what they have created.”

Succession returns to HBO and HBO Max this weekend. The new season will last nine weeks, with a new episode each week on both the premium channel and HBO’s ancillary streaming service. 

“It’s unique, “ Cox said. “I don't think there's anything like it. It seems to me to be the best kind of drama. It's the kind of drama I always wanted to do, and finally the one that's doing it. And that's a great gift.

“I feel privileged to be part of it.”

Michael Keaton Confronts US Opioid Crisis in ‘Dopesick’

‘Dopesick,’ about a rural doctor caught in the crosshairs of the oxycontin crisis, marks some of Keaton’s most challenging work yet.

At first glance, Dopesick, Hulu’s eight-part dramatized account of how a single company triggered the worst drug epidemic in US history, looks like just another cautionary tale of the kind that played in movie theatres in the early 1980s — high-minded, socially aware fare like Silkwood, Norma Rae and The Burning Season, in which working-class, blue-collar workers take on corporate America and — briefly — gain the upper hand, if only for a moment. Dopesick takes viewers to the epicentre of America’s struggle with opioid addiction, from the boardrooms of Big Pharma to a distressed mining community in West Virginia coal country.

For Michael Keaton, the veteran film actor more familiar to cinemagoers for his appearances in crowdpleasers like Batman Returns, Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice, Dopesick marks a return to more sober fare like Clean and Sober, the 1989 film for which Keaton won that year’s National Society of Film Critics Award for best actor.

Dopesick, in which Keaton plays a small-town physician persuaded at first by oxycontin’s promise of eradicating pain without side effects, only to turn whistleblower and crusader when he learns the truth, wasn’t just an attention grabber for a name actor looking to take on a serious role, though. He had a personal connection to the story, and the hard-hit coal-mining communities near the Pennsylvania town where he grew up and spent his formative years (Kennedy Township, pop. 8,134).

“I’m in a fortunate position where what I do for a living affords me an opportunity to possibly change things or affect people in some way,” Keaton said, in a videoconference call with TV writers. “I look at it as a perk to what I’ve chosen to do for a living. I don’t necessarily seek these things out, but they certainly get my attention.

“Where I was, growing up, working with my dad and then for a survey company, you can be in West Virginia in — well, back then, the way I drove —  about 11 minutes. It doesn’t take you too long to get really deep into West Virginia and southeastern Ohio, and way down in southwestern Pennsylvania. I don’t pretend to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know these folks, I’m down with it, you know.’ But I do to some degree, or rather did. It’s not too far from where I grew up.

“That’s the hotbed, the hot seat, the centre. But the (epidemic) is all over. It’s upstate New York, Maine, rural areas, even here where I am now, out west.”

Keaton worked through similar emotional ground in his breakout role in Clean and Sober. Dopesick is similar, yet different. It’s more grounded in the here-and-now. It’s more immediate to today’s world. 

“Addiction’s been around since, forever. Opium addicts, heroin addicts, alcoholism — this is nothing new. Clean and Sober is still out there for people to watch. Public awareness is much greater. We know more about it. The stigma that used to be associated with addiction has changed.”

When Keaton first learned about the offer to appear in Dopesick as the mild-mannered country physician who helps break the oxycontin cover-up wide open, he hesitated.

“I thought, well, I played that one time; I did something on that subject, in that arena. I had already done it. Sometimes I think, ‘Do I really want to read this,’ because I tend not to read just anything that comes my way. But then I realized this is societal. It’s a much bigger canvas, a much bigger story to tell.”

Keaton knew about the oxycontin epidemic at the time, but only to a point. He quickly realized, after researching the role, that he knew less than he had thought.

“The shock to me is the ease with which this became epidemic. That knocked me out. It seemed too simple that this could have happened this way.

“And then, after I read Beth Macy’s book [Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, Little Brown, 2018], I realized this is not exaggerated in the slightest. The ease with which all this happened was sickening.”

Television has changed dramatically, Keaton added — at least the kind of television that’s being produced for the streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and HBO Max.

Dopesick also Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, Kaitlyn Dever and Rosario Dawson in key roles. It premieres Wednesday on Hulu, and will stream over eight consecutive weeks.

“I had done things on television here and there, but not much. Pound for pound, though, it’s gotten so good over the last 10 years, more or less. Quality is quality.

“In this instance — and I'll get this out of the way now, all the things I've wanted to say about this — it’s the writing. When you read something that’s good, it becomes real clear, real quick. It just jumps off the page, as they say. The words just jump off the page.

“Television has a big advantage over film or theatre with something like this. It’s hard to nail something in 90 minutes, or two hours, or two hours and 20 minutes. The beauty of television is you can delve deep down, you can drill down and develop something over time, and that is a real advantage. 

“And then the fact that this was about something. It was about something real.  For me, right now, it doesn’t matter if it’s television or the theatre, or a movie. I do a lot of different things for different reasons. I don’t think it’s ever going to go back to, ‘I’m only a movie guy,’ or ‘I’m only a theatre guy,’ or, ‘I’m only this kind of guy.’”

Keaton says he doesn’t always like to watch himself back on film, but Dopesick proved different, not so much as an actor who was part of the project but as an everyday viewer, hoping to learn something new.

“We were sitting, all of us here, watching the episodes the other night, a few of the early episodes. I’ve been in a lot of good casts. I’ve been fortunate to have acted with a lot of good actors. This was crazy. We’d look at each other and go, ‘Are you kidding me? How do you get better than that?’ And then the next scene there’d be someone else, where you say, ’Okay, here we go again.” Performance after performance, scene after scene. That doesn’t happen a lot. I’ve been in some good ones, man. But, whew, these guys — everybody, everybody, not just the folks here today but everybody, really strong, really impressive.

“They’ll all tell you, it gets easier when you have great material. That’s just how it is.”

He paused, then added with a wry smile. “Thank you. I got that out of the way.”

Examining the Sociological Implications Underpinning ‘Foundation’

Writer-producer David S. Goyer explains the thought process behind “filming the unfilmable.”

Isaac Asimov wrote his science-fiction classic Foundation in 1951. The term “unfilmable” wasn’t in vogue then, and even if it had been, the very idea of adapting Foundation for the screen would have seemed as remote in real-world terms  as the idea of man walking on the moon within the next 20 years.

A sprawling, time-jumping series of novels based on the idea psycho-history, the ability to predict the distant future based on humankind’s behaviour in the past, was unlikely material for a movie, anyway. Science-fiction movies in theatres at the time was all about BEMs — “bug-eyed monsters” — and serialized space operas like Buck Rogers. Movies of the era ranged from Superman and the Mole Men and Bride of the Gorilla to The Thing, and television was still in its infancy. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was nearly two decades down the line, and in present day engineers were still working out the kinks behind black-and-white TV,. Hardly anyone could have prophesied colour TV, let alone the 500-channel universe and Apple TV+.

Asimov based his scientific idea behind Foundation on the kinetic  theory of gases, which posits that while it’s hard to predict the behaviour of a single molecule in a gas, it’s relatively easy to predict the behaviour of that gas when it’s part of a larger collective.

Nearly all Asimov’s novels and short stories are based some scientific idea or principles. Character development and storytelling were not Asimov’s forte, even when he was at the height of his powers as a writer.

Goyer thought he had found a way, though, and in the newly founded streaming service Apple TV+ — eager to jump ahead of streaming rivals Amazon, Hulu, Disney+ and  Netflix — Goyer found a willing partner. A willing partner with deep pockets. Apple’s adaptation of Foundation is nothing if not eye-filling and handsomely mounted.

Goyer believed the key to adapting the 1951 Foundation in a way that would appeal to TV audiences in 2021 was to incorporate contemporary themes, in the same way Asimov riffed on a post-Second World War world still torn by memories of Nazi Germany and malevolent empires. Asimov himself was a Jew who had emigrated from oppression in Soviet Russia, Goyer told reporters in a teleconference call earlier this month . Western Europe at the time was still collectively recovering from wounds inflicted in the First World War, the collapse of the old empires and the ascendancy of America.

Goyer told the Asimov estate that in the same way Asimov shaped Foundation not as a prophecy of the future but as a mirror of the present. In the same way, Goyer told Asimov’s estate holders, he wanted his vision of Foundation to reflect the times as they are today. 

Goyer said he told Asimov’s estate holders, “I need to write about what’s happening now. I need to write about Brexit, MeToo, the ascent of nationalism again/. I need to write about climate change.

Religious extremism, mistrust in science, rising populism, the allure of strong-man dictatorships, economic fears — these are all themes and issues that ripple through Goyer’s version  Foundation.

Science fiction provides a the perfect canvas, Goyer insisted.

“We are talking about what’s happening today but through the tinted glass of the future,” Goyer said. “Asimov's message in Foundation was fundamentally a message of hope and I felt that was a message that the world could use right now – faith in human ingenuity.”

Foundation features more than 100 characters and is set against a backdrop of six different planets, each with its own society and different languages. Filming was based at Troy Studios in Limerick, Ireland, with a crew of more than 500 set decorators, make-up artists, costume designers, carpenters, electricians, camera operators and more. Foundation is Ireland’s largest ever film production, and is Apple TV+’s most ambitious program to date.

“"Trust me, there were plenty of times when I said, 'Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?’” Goyer recalled. “I'd call my wife from the side of a mountain in Iceland or the middle of a dust storm in the Canary Islands and just say 'What have I done?.’ I had to try to root everyone in emotion because we filmed it all out of order. We might be filming a scene when the preceding scene had literally been filmed 14 months earlier in another country, so you have to remind everyone where they stand emotionally in the scene.”

Foundation is 10 episodes in all, but it’s anticipated there will be more. Asimov’s original novel was designed as a trilogy, and in many respects the second novel in the series, about a genetic anomaly that shakes the foundation of psycho-history’s entire premise of being able predict the future — is in many ways the anchor of the entire story.

There will be more. Apple TV+ announced a second season, just days before Foundation’s debut this weekend.

The Making of ‘Muhammad Ali’- The Man and the Film

Ken Burns reveals the fine details behind his latest opus, the four-night ‘Muhammad Ali,’ premiering Sunday on PBS.

Life is never linear, and when a subject is as complex and emotionally, philosophically and ideologically layered as  the man born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.,, just seven weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the subtitle “A Film by Ken Burns” takes on added meaning.

It’s not just the weight of history. The man who would later reinvent himself as Muhammad Ali would find himself at the centre of generational debates over black and white, faith and reason, and war and peace. He would be loved and hated in equal measure, and it would be fair to say that throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and beyond, he would become one of the most recognizable figures of his time, on a worldwide, global level, and he would be loved and hated in equal measure.

And he could box.

“The Greatest” is an easy label, but hard to wear. Today, looking back on Ali’s life and legacy, it’s fair to say Muhammad Ali wore that label as well as any heavyweight prizefighter who laced on a pair of gloves.

Ken Burns has never been the type of filmmaker to shy away from complex subjects — if anything, he embraces them — but even he must have been given pause at the prospect of making Muhammad Ali, his four-night, eight-hour documentary that premieres Sunday on PBS. 

Neither straight biography nor hagiography, Muhammad Ali, filmed in collaboration with Burns’ filmmaker daughter Sarah Burns and writer David McMahon (the two share writing credit), breaks the mold of what we have come to expect from documentary films.

“We were interested in doing a pretty comprehensive look at his life, from his birth in segregated Louisville, Kentucky in the early '40s, to his death by Parkinson's in 2016,” Burns told reporters in a Zoom conference call earlier in the summer.

“That meant involving ourselves in lots of other intersections of this extraordinary life, in politics, in war, in civil rights, in faith and religion, in the definition of Blackness in the country, all sorts of complicated subjects. His personal life, the four wives … all the dynamics of African liberation politics, the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, the stuff going on with [George] Foreman.”

There were times during the making of Muhammad Ali — seven years in all — when the project must have seemed daunting, even for someone familiar with daunting subjects such as the US Civil War, baseball, jazz, waging a war on two fronts in the Second World War, the US national park system and US involvement in the Vietnam War.

Inevitably, Muhammad Ali’s story and the Vietnam War would intersect.

“It's always a challenge to tell a complicated story,” Burns said quietly. “We’re drawn [as filmmakers] to complicated stories, stories engaged in an essential Americanness, whatever that is.

“Our process is the same. People sometimes ask, ‘So why Muhammad Ali now?’ We just laugh, because we made the decision to go ahead with this in 2013. We started working on it in 2014, and we have been working on it ever since. There was no sense it would arrive at precisely this moment.

“Our job is to really tell a story. We’re interested in facts and human beings and their complications.  This is a story with a lot of undertow and a lot of many interesting facets, and we charged ourselves with trying to do all of it. There's a sign in my editing room that says, ‘It's complicated,’ and we always try to be open to that.”

There was little point in telling a story that has been told untold times before. Burns wanted to reach deeper, to find a deeper meaning and try to get the essence of Ali as a man and as a person. That’s why Ali’s grown daughters play such a large role in Muhammad Ali.

“We have a selective memory — I am going to do this, oh, I'm going to do that, but there are moments where there's this incredible poise that he has.

“He and [Martin Luther] King meet together. He's a 22-year-old kid in Louisville, Kentucky, and he's cracking King up. Have you ever seen Martin Luther King crack up? Dick Gregory made him laugh a few times. I have seen that. Muhammad Ali made him laugh. It is so, so beautiful to watch.  And then in the next minute he puts his arm around him, and King is all of a sudden very nervous and uptight. In the space of one minute he goes from this to that.”

Ali, the public man, refused to play to others’ expectations of him, what he would do or say in given situations, how he would react to sudden events as opposed to how others expected him to react.

“There’s this really important moment when he’s exonerated by the Supreme Court on a technicality.

“He's facing five years in jail and a fine, and he's had his boxing career interrupted for three and a half years.  When he learns on the streets of Chicago that he's been exonerated and he can go back to boxing, some reporter sticks a microphone in his face and says, ‘What do you think about the system?’

“And he says, ‘Well, I don't know. I don't know who’s going to be assassinated tonight. I don't know whose inequality or injustice is going to happen.’

“So this still very, very young man, in a moment of victory when he could gloat and be the Muhammad Ali, the braggart, he's remembering back past Emmett Till, who was tortured and murdered during his lifetime and was his age, more or less, and he saw the open casket that his mother bravely showed to the world in the pictures in Jet magazine, and he’s going back through 350 years of treatment of African-Americans in the United States.

“And even though he didn't know it was coming, he was also talking about Rodney King and Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. He could have just said, ‘Yup, this was good for me,’ but he didn't.  He knew where he stood in relationship to everything.

“There are five or six or ten of those things marked throughout the film that just are mind-blowing, that somebody this young, somebody this poised, somebody in a sport this brutal could have that kind of heart, this capacious, large heart that makes you realize at the end of the day that he's a prophet of love.

“It's really tough to make a good film, but it is not brain surgery. It is not giving up your entire professional career and refusing induction into the draft and, as he said, willing to face a firing squad.”

Asked what one question he would ask Ali for the film, were Ali were still alive today, it would be to do with Ali’s decision to walk away from civil rights campaigner Malcolm X, after the two had become so close, Burns told The Televisionary. 

In his later years, Ali would regret his decision, or at least how he went about it. 

It’s an important question, Burns said, given the two’s relationship during Ali’s formative years and the significance of Islam in Ali’s life, not to mention Malcolm X’s positions to do with America and race.

9/11: One Day in America

The voice of former New York assistant fire chief Joseph Pfeifer resonates throughout National Geographic’s ‘One Day in America,’ a 6-part, first-person testimonial to survival on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The trouble with anniversaries is that times change. That’s true of 10-year anniversaries, and it’s doubly true of 20-year anniversaries.

National Geographic’s six-part docuseries 9/11: One Day in America, premiering Sunday, is one of the first in what will be a parade of 20th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, and yet it already feels overwhelmed by news events of the past two weeks from Afghanistan.

If 9/11: One Day in America has earned a special place, though, it’s that it’s a chronological reminder of the events of that day as they unfolded, 20 years ago, as recalled through the first-person accounts of those who were there, among them Joseph Pfeifer, former assistant chief of the New York City Fire Dept. Pfeifer was one of the first responders and was in the car as French filmmakers Jules and Gédéon Naudet, makers of the award-winning cinéma vérité 9/11, a film that was supposed to be about the day-to-day routine of probationary firefighters and turned into something else entirely.

9/11: One Day in America, made in cooperation with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, has been whittled down from more than 950 hours of archival material, assembled over a thee-year period, and features witness interviews with more than 50 survivors and first responders, many of them speaking for the first time.

It’s the voice of Pfeifer, though, the first FDNY chief to arrive on the scene at the World Trade Center, that jumps out to the fore.

In a conference call by Zoom this past week with TV reviewers, Pfeifer recalled firefighters who escaped the North Tower just before it collapsed, paramedics first to the scene who even today are recovering from PTSD memories of searching for life in the rubble, and survivors themselves, trapped for what to them seemed an eternity under mountains of concrete and broken glass.

“That was a day we all remember,” Pfeifer recalled. “As I look at the faces of the first responders and the people in that building, not only can you see their fear of what was taking place but you also see people together trying to get out. And, more than anything, I think that's what we see in this documentary, stories of people caring for one another.”

Pfeifer admitted his life “changed forever” that day.

“Not only did I have to take command of that incident, but afterwards we had to figure out how to come back, how to bounce back. We had to figure out changes. And one of the changes we made in New York City, and throughout the country, is that we need to work together, different agencies, fire, police, medical folks. We’ve spent the last 20 years doing that. And I can tell you that today, the fire fighters, EMTs and paramedics, police officers — we trust each other with our lives. That's what we saw that day, and what we've seen over the last 20 years.”

9/11: One Day in America was about distilling those memories and reassembling them in a way that would be both poignant and prophetic.

“I gave orders that day to our firefighters to go up to evacuate the building and rescue those who couldn't get out. And as they climbed the narrow stairs, they did ordinary things. What they did, climbing into tiny holes and surviving . . . we did ordinary things at an extraordinary time in history. And that's what we care about. I think that’s what you see in the film, and what you see with my fellow 9/11 survivors, that theme of doing ordinary things at an extraordinary time in history.”

Pfeifer says he still feels strong emotions when remembering that day. It took him a long time before he summoned the strength to visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum

“It's overwhelming when you walk in, just the size of it. You see the steel column that was ridden on by rescue workers. And you see a firetruck, a crushed firetruck. For me, I have my white helmet sitting in the Museum, so it's very emotional. I've been there, but my family hasn't been there yet. Because, that day, they thought I didn’t survive until hours later.

“An image that was very powerful to me was that, in Queens in New York, outside one of the hospitals that was heavily hit with COVID, that was overflowing, a fire truck pulled up in front and sitting on top of that firetruck were firefighters. And as the medical nurses and doctors and medical staff came out, (the firefighters) applauded. And, for me, that was the moment where 9/11 met the pandemic and we saw a new generation of heroes.

“So while we feel things are falling apart, we have to look for where we feel this sense of being together.”

9/11: One Day in America premieres Sunday, August 29 on National Geographic. The series will air over four consecutive nights with limited commercial interruption. Episodes will stream the following day on Hulu.

Playing with Sharks

New Disney+ documentary looks at the life and times of iconic shark researcher and marine conservationist Valerie Taylor, now in her 80s

Valerie Taylor is 85, which on the face of it might seem a little elderly for oceanography, let alone shark research, but there it is. Taylor, born in 1935 in Sydney, Australia is one of the original deep sea diving researchers and pioneered the research for much of what is known today about sharks and shark research.

On July 23 a Disney+ biographical profile, Playing with Sharks from National Geographic’s documentary film unit, will lay bare the details of a life spent exploring the world’s oceans and the life within. Taylor and her husband Ron were the primary shark consultants on the movie Jaws in 1975, this after then neophyte director Steven Spielberg happened across their work in the seminal shark documentary Blue Water, White Death. Taylor was one of the early adopters of diving among sharks without the protection of shark cages. Cages were used extensively in Jaws and was one of the first times shark cages appeared in a popular, mainstream feature film. Spielberg wanted advice about how sharks might behave around swimmers without the protection of a cage, and Jaws — while not entirely accurate — was the result.

Valerie Taylor later went on to become an ardent conservationist and protector of the oceans she would come to know as her second home. Sharks are among the world’s most maligned and misunderstood animals, she insists to this day, not helped by the “if it bleeds, it leads” hysteria of TV’s annual Shark Week, a staple of Discovery Channel and other high-profile media outlets.

The world’s oceans are in trouble, she insisted during a recent media conference call with TV reviewers, and it’s not just to do with the oceans’ apex predator. In recent years, despite her advanced age, she has campaigned against ocean plastic pollution, overfishing and the delisting of marine conservation sanctuaries by administrations like that of former US president Donald Trump.

“I fear for all life in the ocean, especially sharks,” Taylor told reporters. “Many areas in the world where we used to go and film sharks — in February last year, I was in our hot spot off Papua, New Guinea — we now see not a shark, not one. Not even a big fish.

“I'm sure there are areas where the shark population is healthy, but unfortunately they’re now being fished by the Chinese. Their lust for shark fin soup seems to take precedent over everything. I’ve been working, trying to get the Chinese government and the people there to understand that this is not a good thing, but they don't seem to care. I don't get a positive reaction.

“I've had my life. I've seen the world above water and below, when it was almost pristine. You could go in the water off the coast of Australia, snorkelling, and see a shark.

“I haven't seen a shark, a dangerous shark, or potentially dangerous shark, snorkelling for years.”

As a child growing up in Australia and then New Zealand, Taylor could not have guessed she would devote her life to the outdoors: She contracted polio at age 12 during the 1948 polio epidemic and found herself isolated from friends, family and schooling. Her early education never recovered and she left school at age 15 to work for an animation studio, eventually drawing for the New Zealand Film Unit. The family moved back to coastal Australia, in the beach side Sydney suburb of Port Hacking. She took up scuba diving, and the habit stuck. She would meet her eventual husband Ron Taylor while spearfishing to help make ends meet.

Why do we have a fascination with sharks? They're not cuddly. They’re not cute. In popular culture and in the real world, we fear them.  When people think of sharks, they think of great whites, hammerheads, bull sharks, the commonly known sharks. They think of Jaws.

There are more than 500 different species of sharks, though, and even the habits of famous ones like great whites and whale sharks are largely unknown. Science still has much to learn. Taylor just hopes they will survive before too little is known about them.

“When we first started, scuba had just been invented and most of our work with sharks in the early days was because we were spear fishermen and the sharks would come to take the fish. We learned a lot about sharks then, but it was basically just their feeding behaviour.

“The change has been — not dramatic exactly — but dramatic and tragic, not just with sharks but with all marine animals, especially the large pelagics. I don't know how to explain that really. All I can say is I have been working underwater for over 50 years professionally with my husband.  We zeroed in on sharks, because shark material sold. We could make shark documentaries,. Nobody else was doing it.  We were doing it, and they were popular. It was easy then. There were lots of sharks.

“I wouldn't like to be go into the ocean to make a documentary just about sharks today because I’d have to look for them. In the old days, we could make them look for us, using bait. That’s no longer true.”

She was momentarily pensive.

“I've had my day. I'm very, very lucky. I consider myself being a little old lady sitting here very fortunate,  because I've seen the best there was in the ocean. I've seen a world underwater in its pristine condition.  My husband and I have found reefs that weren't on the charts — we didn't have satellites then — so how lucky can you be?”

It’s important that future generations witness the same, she said. That’s what she has dedicated her remaining years to.

National Geographic’s ‘Shark Beach’ — with Chris Hemsworth

Freudian slip: It’s all too easy when in hurry and typing the words “Shark Fest” to type “Shark Feast” instead.

Sharks get enough of a bad rap as it is, and Discovery Channel’s notorious — but popular — Shark Week is all the rage this time of year. Nearly 50 years after Jaws convinced millions of beachgoers not to go back in the water — provoking a media brawl between Jaws author Peter Benchley and the legendary oceanographer and marine conservationist Jacques Cousteau — sharks are still shunned, maligned and misunderstood.

That’s one reason National Geographic Channel — now a member of the Disney family of worldwide media channels, owing to recent ownership changes in the churn of communications conglomerates — introduced Shark Fest several years ago, a month-long festival of shark-oriented programs where the emphasis is on science over sensationalism.

This year’s Shark Fest kicks off Monday with Shark Beach with Chris Hemsworth (National Geographic, 10/9c; Disney+, beginning July 9), wherein the Australian film actor embarks on a personal mission to examine the science behind shark behaviour, and share ways humans and sharks can safely co-exist.

Hemsworth’s Aussie roots here are instructive: Australia is an island continent of coastal cities. It’s said more Aussies per capita know how to swim than in any other country of equal size and population. Australia’s location in southern latitudes, bisected by the Tropic of Capricorn, places it in the nexus of the Pacific and Indian Ocean currents, the traditional home of deepwater  sharks.

On Shark Fest’s opening night, Hemsworth’s Shark Beach is being paired with the more familiar sounding When Sharks Attack, which trolls familiar waters with terror-filled tales of beach invasions by these toothy critters of the deep.

There’s a serious story behind When Sharks Attack surface mayhem. Recent spikes in shark activity have both surprised and mystified marine scientists, and as always ready answers are proving more elusive than easy questions. Of the two programs — the clue is in the titles — Hemsworth’s Shark Beach is the more sober.

As Hemsworth points out, aided and abetted by experts who study marine ecology for a living, sharks are apex predators, top dogs of the marine ecosystem. They may have a reputation as bloodthirsty killing machines but as with most sweeping statements, this view is distorted.

Sharks limit the populations of the species they prey on, which in turn helps maintain nature’s balance.

Sharks occasionally do bite humans, but not all bites are feeding frenzies.

Sharks do occasionally grab humans by mistake. To a shark, viewed from below, a surfer resting on a surf board, arms and legs dangling over the side, looks much like a sea lion, i.e., prey.

Despite making easy headlines, not to mention quick hits at the top of the evening news, shark attacks are rare. The average number of unprovoked attacks on people in any given year is fewer than 100. Attacks do not mean deaths: The number of people killed each year by shark attack is fewer than a dozen. These numbers pale in comparison to deaths from bee stings, snake bites and evening lightning strikes, especially given the millions of people who venture into the water whenever temperatures climb.

Still, the stories persist.

“We're actually not on their dinner menu,” diver and photographer Kimberly Jeffries said in a recent National Geographic conference with media critics in Beverly Hills. Jeffries was one of the diver/photographers behind National Geographic’s documentary World’s Biggest Great White.

“(Films like these) help dispel all those myths and preconceptions that people have about white sharks,” Jeffries said at the time. “They're not these killers raging through the ocean. They're actually designed for a purpose. They're there to keep the ecosystem in balance. (Science films) dispel all these Jaws myths of white sharks lunging out of the ocean and attacking prey. We're just not on their menu.”

Why has there been a sudden increase lately in shark attacks along Australia’s east coast? The answer may be something as simple as too many people and not enough food in the immediate vicinity to something more complicated, a complex web of variables involving shifting ocean currents, and changes in sea temperature and acidity owing to global climate change.

Arizona State University research scientist David Shiffman has written a book, Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator (Johns Hopkins University Press), in which he argues that sharks are among the most fascinating, most ecologically important —  and most misunderstood — animals on the planet. Their role as predators of the deep has earned them an unwanted reputation as a major threat to humans.

The truth is that sharks are not a danger to us, Shiffman says — they're in danger from us.

Hemsworth is on message. “It’s hard to put into words the serene beauty of these magnificent creatures,” he says, awestruck while swimming among grey nurse sharks with veteran marine conservationist Valerie Taylor off Australia’s coast.

National Geographic’s month-long Shark Fest aims to set the record straight. A month-long festival of TV programs won’t be able to do that on its own, of course, but it can’t hurt.

National Geographic’s Brian Skerry Takes a Deep Dive Into 'Secrets of the Whales'

There’s something about Earth Day that naturally brings the mind to the health of the world’s oceans and the living beings that live there.

For Brian Skerry, though, a National Geographic photographer and photojournalist who has made marine wildlife and underwater environments his calling since the early 1980s, it’s almost . . . personal.

During filming of his four-part project Secrets of the Whales, co-produced by James Cameron, narrated by Sigourney Weaver and streaming now on Disney+, there was that moment when, while diving with orcas off the coast of New Zealand, he experienced the eerie feeling that he was being accepted as one of them, if only for a fleeting moment.

He has dived among sea creatures long enough the know the perils of anthropomorphism — his first job was taking divers out to explore New England shipwrecks not far from his childhood home in Milford, Mass., founded in 1662 and the town where he grew up — and yet, there it was.

“I was hoping to see this population of orca who have figured out how to eat stingrays,” Skerry recalled during a Zoom press event for National Geographic earlier this year. “They have this international food preference. They love international cuisine, and the (orcas) in New Zealand like stingrays. I jumped in the water, and swam toward this family of orca that were hunting in a shallow harbour. This female came toward me with a ray that she had started to eat.

“As I got closer, she dropped it in front of me, and I swam down to the bottom. It was only about 30 or 40 feet deep. I knelt on the bottom, (near) that dead stingray, wondering if she would come back. And then,  out of the corner of my eye, I saw her swimming around my back. She came around my left, got directly in front of me, and just hovered there. She looked at me, looked at the ray, then looked at me, then looked back at the ray, as if to say, ‘Are you gonna eat that?’ When I didn’t, she just gently picked it up and brought it up. I was able to make a picture of this ray hanging out of her mouth, then she turned and shared food with her family. We got that scene as well. It’s just extraordinary to think that animal may have been — I don’t know — offering me dinner, and when I chose not to partake, she went on her way.

“I think it was just a brief glimpse into the world of these animals, and a reminder, I think, of how much we don’t know.”

Skerry worries that for all their intelligence — and their apparent human traits, in terms of family, communication and group behaviour — the most familiar, recognizable leviathans of the deep, face an uncertain future, unless drastic steps are taken to protect what remains of the world’s marine ecosystems.

Skerry recalled an observation he made while filming in the Norwegian Arctic, early in the Secrets of the Whales project, when he spotted a female orca, “this mom,” carrying her dead calf.

“Although we can't be a 100% certain why that calf died, it's highly likely that it was from toxins. Most orcas absorb all of these chemicals, PCBs, heavy metals that we've put into the ocean, and that finds its way into their tissues and their placenta. When they have a calf, particularly a new mom, all those toxins and heavy metals are passed on, so there's a high mortality rate with those calves. That’s a red flag, right there. That shows us the kinds of things that we should be concerned about. It’s a bellwether of what we're doing to the ocean.”

Nature programs like Secrets of the Whales are not just about pretty pictures, Skerry insists. It’s no accident National Geographic and Disney+ held the four-part event series back until Earth Day.

“I often like to think that the work that we do is about giving voice to the voiceless. With Secrets of the Whales, it's about focusing on the culture of whales, looking at their ancestral traditions, things that haven't typically been viewed.”

Making  Secrets of the Whales made for heavy sailing at times.

“I’ve been diving for over 40 years and have been making pictures, working for National Geographic for 23 years as an underwater photographer. As an underwater photographer, we don’t have the luxury that our terrestrial colleagues do, in the sense that I can’t sit in a camouflaged blind in some remote location and use 600-millimetre lens on a tripod and wait for some elusive animal to come wandering past.

“We can only stay underwater as long as the air supply on our backs will last. With whales, in the three years of filming Secrets of the Whales, that entailed free-diving, snorkelling, breath-hold diving, and so on. I’m only underwater for a couple of minutes, maybe, at best. So I have to get very close to my subjects. Even in the clearest of water, you need to get within a few metres of your subject.

“We've seen a lot of whale photos and documentaries over the years, but the difference with Secrets of the Whales is we're looking at the ocean through the lens of culture. These animals have languages, they have dialects, they are probably saying things that are alarming. The truth is we haven't deciphered all that at this stage. We're just at the very beginning of trying to figure those things out.  But what we can see, and what science is showing us, is that these animals have rich lives much like our own. They babysit; they have food preferences, depending on where in the world they live; they have singing competitions; they have parenting techniques and strategies; and they mourn for their dead.

“There’s real mystery there. We’re trying to bring the audience in, show them what we see, and realize that there’s a lot more going on there than we ever realized.”

— Streams April 22 on Disney+