Roman Polanski: Genius, Survivor, and Fugitive in One Life
March 1943, the Krakow ghetto is being liquidated. A terrified boy watches his father marched away and hears him hiss two words: get lost. The boy slips away and survives the Holocaust by performing a...
23 Juni 18min
S.J. Perelman: The Comic Genius Who Hid His Own Oscar
Imagine winning an Academy Award, writing iconic lines for the Marx Brothers, and defining the comedic voice of The New Yorker, then spending your life trying to erase that you ever did any of it. Tha...
23 Juni 19min
Saul Perlmutter: The Hunt for One Star That Cracked the Cosmos
Throw a baseball up and gravity brings it back. For decades astrophysicists assumed the whole universe behaved that way, slowly decelerating after the Big Bang. Then Saul Perlmutter and his rivals dis...
23 Juni 20min
John Wooden: The Wizard's Dynasty and Its Hidden Shadows
Flipping a coin and landing heads 88 times in a row is a statistical absurdity. Yet John Wooden's UCLA teams achieved exactly that kind of impossible dominance, winning 10 national titles in 12 years,...
23 Juni 20min
Shelley Berman: The Comic Who Invented Modern Stand-Up
Before there were observational comedians, there was a classically trained actor sitting on a stool with an invisible telephone, forcing audiences to lean in and eavesdrop. Shelley Berman fractured th...
23 Juni 21min
Sinclair Lewis: America's Forgotten Nobel Prize Satirist
He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, sold millions of books, and dictated the cultural conversation of his era. He was also slapped in the face at a private club, banned in ...
23 Juni 20min
Sophie Tucker: The Last of the Red Hot Mamas
She started out singing for tips between the onions at her family's Hartford restaurant. She ended up as the blueprint for every loud, unapologetic female entertainer who followed, from Bette Midler t...
23 Juni 17min
Stan Freberg: The Satirist Who Rewrote Advertising
Albert Einstein once walked out of a physics conference because he could not miss Stan Freberg's puppet, Time for Beanie. Years later, Freberg turned down George Lucas and the chance to voice C-3PO. T...
23 Juni 24min
