Commentary: Uncategorized

There will be better and more substantive testimonials and remembrances of this great, great man published this week. I met him briefly, on limited terms, but on news of his death, I found myself reliving the entire encounter. The worst of it left me dazed, shaking my head at myself, incredulous that it happened as it did. And while most of the joke is on me, there is enough in this tale to deliver some insight into how sharp, savage and charming a man Harry Belafonte was. In short, it’s always a shame to not share a good anecdote, so here we go: A few years back, HBO execs brought me in to look at a project that had been languishing at the network for too long: A proposed long-form miniseries on Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy of America in the King Years, perhaps the most definitive account of the critical years in the civil rights movement. Those who have read those three tomes will immediately understand that there is enough power and content in any one of them for...

Leaving this up for a week as a pinned tweet before locking the account. It’s been a lovely little war, folks, and some good fun was had,  But until this platform gets better and more honorable management, fuck it, no.            D.S. A long decade ago, my assistant, a millennial of course, explained to me that there was this sort of bulletin board, a tweeting, chirping sort of collective, where you post what you want to hype – a new season of television, an essay on your blog, a cute picture of your ferret. Okay, I said. You kids have fun with that. But no, there came a second moment when I found myself misquoted on something – I can’t remember what — and I wrote a corrective, which sat on my blog like a stale bagel on the plate until Reena explained it again:  You link what you write to the chirping thing, people find the chirp, and then find what you wrote.  So this odyssey began in simple utility...

Years ago, when saddled with the task of scripting a specific historical moment, I was confronted by the reality that film narrative is not the medium for open debate, that the camera must in the end be in one place at one time, that the actors must say their lines, and that a singular version of every moment will be delivered.  The task at hand was a miniseries on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – it didn’t get greenlit, alas – and the moment involved the last words of John Wilkes Booth, dying outside a burning Virginia barn, shot by a Union cavalryman, paralyzed, asking to have his hands raised and shown to him. There, upon viewing the mitts that had killed the greatest American president, the assassin declared, just before expiring, “Useless. Useless.” Or so the gathered Union soldiers all heard. At the point of dying, Booth could not have serviced history more perfectly than to reflect on his own vile act and pronounce it failure, encompassing...

Dorothy Simon, a homemaker who returned to her college studies after 30 years to graduate with highest honors and undertake a late career as a crisis counselor and therapist, died Sept. 21 of natural causes at her Silver Spring home. She was 97.  “I had the unusual pleasure of attending the University of Maryland campus at College Park with my mother,” said David Simon, the youngest of her three children. “We both graduated the same year, albeit she was summa cum laude and I was summa cum nothing. She was a far better student.” But even before her degree, Simon had embarked on a late career as a crisis counselor at Alternative House, a residential facility serving runaway adolescents and their families in McLean, Va. She also saw clients for personal and marital therapy in her Silver Spring kitchen. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. as Dorothy Ligeti, she was raised in Williamsburg, The Rockaways, and The Bronx before graduating from James Madison High School in 1940. She then attended...