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- Commentary: Thanks. Pauline, for the Movies
- From
- Dick Meister
Academy Awards time always reminds my wife and me of how much we owe critic Pauline Kael for teaching us, as many others, to truly appreciate movies. But though most film enthusiasts know Kael's work solely through her books and New Yorker reviews, we were among those privileged to have heard her radio commentaries in Berkeley, California, many years ago and especially to read, as we still do, the extraordinary program notes that she wrote for the extraordinary films she showed at the Berkeley theater owned by her and her husband.
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Piece Description
Academy Awards time always reminds my wife and me of how much we owe critic Pauline Kael for teaching us, as many others, to truly appreciate movies. But though most film enthusiasts know Kael's work solely through her books and New Yorker reviews, we were among those privileged to have heard her radio commentaries in Berkeley, California, many years ago and especially to read, as we still do, the extraordinary program notes that she wrote for the extraordinary films she showed at the Berkeley theater owned by her and her husband.
Broadcast History
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Transcript
It?s Academy Awards time again, a time to celebrate the motion picture, a time that invariably reminds my wife Gerry and me of the great debt we owe to the late film critic Pauline Kael for leading us into a lifetime of enormously pleasurable entertainment.
Kael taught us -- and I?m sure many others -- to truly appreciate and simply enjoy movies as movies ? to marvel at their uniqueness.
We still treasure the now badly worn printed programs describing the films that were showing at two cramped and drafy theaters in Berkeley, California, that she and her husband operated in the 1950s and 60s.
It was those program notes, written anonymously by Kael ? her equally plain spoken and extraordinarily insightful radio commentaries over local Pacifica station KPFA? and, of course, the terrific films she showed at the theaters that hooked us on movies for life.
Until then, the motion...
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Timing and Cues
INTRO: Commentator Dick Meister says moviegoers owe mucu to his favorite critic.
OUTRO: Dick Meister is a San Francisco writer.
