Veteran character actor and Tony Award winner, Mary Louise Wilson, age 79, teaches her first acting class to skeptical members of the YouTube generation, smashing their red carpet illusions and challenging them to bring emotional honesty into their acting. Features interviews with Frances McDormand, Melissa Leo, Tyne Daly, Estelle Parsons, Valerie Harper and playwright Doug Wright, discussing what it means to be a character actor, whether acting can be taught, what constitutes 'talent,' and whether the profession is harder for women.
Harry Landers is a feisty senior citizen who refuses to abide by the rules in a stodgy retirement home run by a dour Ms. Davis, in which Harry leads a revolt by the other goated senior citizen residents against the establishment.
The Simian Line is an American improvisational film, released in 2001. When Katharine (Lynn Redgrave) throws a party on Halloween, a psychic called Arnita (Tyne Daly) predicts that one of the three couples present at the party will break up by the end of the year. The guests don't take her seriously. Arnita doesn't tell them that she can see a fourth couple at the party, the long dead Mae (Samantha Mathis) and Edward (William Hurt). As days go by, Katharine grows increasingly jealous of her lover Rick (Harry Connick, Jr.), and his flirting with her neighbor Sandra (Cindy Crawford). Sandra is married to Paul (Jamey Sheridan). Marta (Monica Keena) and Billy (Dylan Bruno) are rock musicians who live in the same building as Katharine.
Joe Mulholland, Head of Production at a Hollywood studio, makes a rather fool-hardy promise to a dying friend. He undertakes to make a major movie using the title - if not the content - of a best-selling sex manual "Love in Sex". Enlisting the help of depressed screenwriter Herb Derman and rather off-centre director Sid Spokane to try and come up with an idea or two, Joe soon wishes he was not one of those people who always try to keep their promises.
Part fact and part fiction, Zoot Suit is the film version of Luis Valdez's critically acclaimed play, based on the actual Sleepy Lagoon murder case and the zoot suit riots of 1940s Los Angeles. Henry Reyna is the leader of a group of Mexican-Americans being sent to San Quentin without substantial evidence for the death of a man at Sleepy Lagoon. As part of the defense committee, Alice Bloomfield and George Shearer fight the blatant miscarriage of justice for the freedom of Henry and his friends.
Angel is the biker who joins a commune of hippies near a small town. When the town rednecks attack them, Angel calls up some of his bad biker buddies to exact revenge.
In 1995, ABC presented a telemovie version of the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie produced by RHI Entertainment. It starred Seinfeld's Jason Alexander and Vanessa Williams of Desperate Housewives. While this version remained mostly faithful to the original musical (Michael Stewart remains the only credited author of this version), several songs were added and re-arranged, and dialogue was slightly rewritten to smoothly facilitate the musical changes. The musical revolves around an Elvis Presley-type rocker who's about to join the Army. To mark the occasion, his manager's secretary arranges for him to kiss a random fan goodbye on The Ed Sullivan Show. Bye Bye Birdie earned four Tony awards in 1961, including Best Musical and Best Actor in a Musical for its original star, Dick Van Dyke. In addition to Alexander and Williams, ABC's production starred Tyne Daly, George Wendt, Chynna Phillips and Mark Kudisch.
Nicolai Dalchimski, a mad KGB agent steals a notebook full of names of "sleeping" undercover KGB agents sent to the U.S. in the 1950's. These agents got their assignments under hypnosis, so they can't remember their missions until they're told a line of a Robert Frost poem. Dalchimski flees to the U.S. and starts phoning these agents who perform sabotage acts against military targets.