https://archive.md/hcwBj
"
American Masters, an award-winning documentary series in its 39th season on
PBS, promises to tell “compelling, unvarnished stories” about the nation’s
most important cultural figures. The program’s most recent story, though—
Art
Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, about the cartoonist-author of
Maus, the
Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust, and a
self-described “poster boy for books being censored”—seemed to need a bit more
varnish on its approach to Donald Trump. In April, two weeks before it aired on
PBS stations, a 90-second segment of the film in which Spiegelman referred to
the president’s “smug and ugly mug” was cut from the film at the behest of
public-media executives. (The details of this incident were first reported by
Anthony Kaufman for
Documentary magazine.)
PBS has been under attack by the Trump administration since January. By the
time
Disaster Is My Muse was aired in shortened form, the network was already
under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, and the White
House had a plan to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes money on to
PBS. “Their
attempt at preemptively staying out of the line of fire was absurd; it wasn’t
going to happen,” Spiegelman told me this week. “It seems like it would be
better to go out with dignity.”
Alicia Sams, who co-produced the film, told me that she received a call from
the executive producer of
American Masters, Michael Kantor, at the beginning
of April. It was less than a week after a contentious congressional hearing in
which the network was accused of being a “radical left-wing echo chamber” that
is “brainwashing and trans-ing children.” According to Sams, Kantor said that
Disaster Is My Muse would need one further edit before it could be shown: The
filmmakers had to remove a short sequence where Spiegelman reads aloud from the
one of the few comic strips about Trump that he’s ever published, in a zine
associated with the Women’s March in 2017. There was no opportunity for
negotiation, Sams said. The filmmakers knew that if they refused, they would be
in breach of contract and would have to repay the movie’s license fee. “It was
not coming from Michael,” she told me. “It was very clear: It was coming from
PBS in D.C.”"
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
