Redd Foxx: The King of Party Records Who Died Broke
On a 1991 soundstage, an actor did a pratfall, looked up, and said "get my wife." Nobody moved, because Redd Foxx had spent two decades faking heart attacks for laughs. This time it was real, and the ...
23 Jun 22min
Reggie Watts: The Disinformationist Who Loops Reality
Picture a musician walking on stage with no set list, no lyrics, and one goal: to completely disorient you. With a four-and-a-half-octave range, a keyboard, and a looping pedal, Reggie Watts builds en...
23 Jun 18min
Reinhold Niebuhr: The Realist Who Shaped Modern Power and Morality
How does one obscure theologian born in the 1800s become the favorite philosopher of Barack Obama, the intellectual fuel for Martin Luther King Jr., the admiration of John McCain, and the inspiration ...
23 Jun 20min
Richard Leakey: Fossils, Elephants, and a Life That Refused to Quit
A pilot lies in a hospital bed, both legs about to be amputated after a suspected sabotage crash. The president of Kenya arrives to offer prayers. The pilot waves him off and says: don't pray for me, ...
23 Jun 21min
Roald Dahl: The Spy, Fighter Ace, and Macabre Master Behind the Magic
The grandfatherly image of the man who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is almost entirely engineered. The real Roald Dahl was a World War II fighter ace who survived a fiery desert crash, a sp...
23 Jun 23min
Robert Benchley: The Lazy Genius Who Invented the Bumbling Everyman
In 1935 a man won an Oscar for a film called How to Sleep, in which he essentially napped on camera. That man was Robert Benchley, who publicly claimed to be profoundly lazy while producing over 600 e...
23 Jun 22min
Robert Townsend: Building His Own Table When Hollywood Said No
He lost a 1980 Saturday Night Live slot to an unknown teenager named Eddie Murphy. Seven years later, that same man was sitting in the director's chair shaping Eddie Murphy Raw. Robert Townsend never ...
23 Jun 17min
Robert Altman: The Hollywood Maverick Who Threw Away the Script
A B-24 combat pilot who later did PR for a dog-tattooing machine, got fired from hit network shows for refusing to follow instructions, and once punched an executive into a swimming pool over a six-mi...
23 Jun 22min
