Bill Cosby is one of the most influential and successful creative figures in television history. I Spy, the first network series starring a black actor, made Cosby one of the most popular actors in television. Cosby then starred as gym teacher Chet Kincaid in The Bill Cosby Show (1969-1971). The Cosby Show (1984-1992), about the Huxtables, an affluent Brooklyn family, was the top-rated show for five consecutive years. In one of the first special programs in the Museum's new theater, Cosby...

On the opening night of his retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image, director David O. Russell (The Fighter, Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings, and I Heart Huckabees) was interviewed by his friend, director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), following a special screening of The Fighter. The conversation, like their films, was unpredictable and unforgettable, and filled with surprises. It was part of the opening programs at the Museum's expanded and transformed...

Tom Hooper won the Academy Award for Best Director for The King's Speech, which also won Best Picture and two other Oscars. Hooper, and cast members Claire Bloom and Jennifer Ehle, were the first guest speakers in the Museum of the Moving Image's brand new theater, which opened to the public on January 15, 2011. Hooper had taken an overnight flight from Los Angeles after the Golden Globe Awards, where Colin Firth won Best Actor for his performance in The King's Speech. When entering the...

Amy Ryan's Oscar-nominated performance as Helene McCready, a working-class drug-addicted mother in Gone Baby Gone, established her as one of America's leading screen actresses. Her vivid, wide-ranging performances on film and television include her roles in movies directed by Paul Greengrass (Green Zone), Clint Eastwood (The Changeling), and Sidney Lumet (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), and on TV as Officer "Beadie" Russell on The Wire, Holly (Steve Carrell's girlfriend) on The Office....

In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael Caine, who was born Maurice Micklewhite, reveals that he chose his new surname when he saw a poster for Humphrey Bogart's movie The Caine Mutiny. Growing up in a working-class London neighborhood, Caine watched movies seven days a week; Bogart was his favorite actor. In more than 100 films, Caine has maintained a distinctly British persona but inflected it with a hardboiled, laconic style. In this discussion, presented in collaboration with BAFTA...

Michael Fassbender, the German-born Irish actor who received international acclaim for his performance as Bobby Sands in Hunger (2008) gives a pivotal performance in Andrea Arnold's film Fish Tank. He plays the charismatic, irresponsible Connor, a man who starts a flirtatious relationship with a teenager, Mia, while he is dating Mia's mother. Set in the projects in a bleak neighborhood on the outskirts of London, this emotionally complex, dynamic film has a cast that included nonactors, most...

Four-time Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges has received tremendous acclaim for his deeply felt and richly detailed performance as Bad Blake, a broken-down, hard-living country music singer in writer-director Scott Cooper's debut feature Crazy Heart. Bridges has appeared in more than 70 films, including Fat City, The Fisher King, and The Big Lebowski. As Bad Blake, who has had too many drinks, too many marriages, and too many years on the road, Bridges not only gives a powerful dramatic...

The 2009 film The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, based on an unproduced screenplay written by Tennessee Williams in the late 1950s, is the latest example of the enduring importance of Williams's artistic legacy. Two of the film's stars, Bryce Dallas Howard and Ellen Burstyn, and its director, Jodie Markell, participated in a panel discussion, along with legendary actors Eli Wallach and Elaine Stritch, moderated by The New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood. The lively discussion,...

The unfettered imagination of Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys) is on full display in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, an endlessly playful movie that contains Heath Ledger's final performance. (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell were brought in after Ledger's death to complete and amplify his role). Christopher Plummer is Dr. Parnassus, a trickster showman who travels through contemporary England, with a seemingly ramshackle show in which audience members step through a magical...

Jane Campion's Bright Star is a romantic drama about the final years of 19th-century romantic poet John Keats, seen through the eyes of his lover, Fanny Brawne. As in her best films, Campion creates a strong female character, depicting layers of desire and emotion that churn beneath the surface, and using imagery, music, and performance to create a tactile, sensual cinematic experience. Campion spoke after a preview screening for the Museum of the Moving Image.

Judd Apatow, the writer/director of Funny People, Knocked Up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin is the most prolific and influential figure in contemporary screen comedy. His work combines emotional honesty and insight with unabashed, frequently vulgar comedy, as he explores the most fundamental life experiences, including coming of age, losing virginity, dealing with pregnancy, getting married, and confronting mortality. In this Museum of the Moving Image program, Apatow talked about his career,...

Harold Ramis, who directed and co-wrote Year One, is the man behind some of the funniest Hollywood movies of the past thirty years. He wrote Animal House, whose raunchy humor revitalized screen comedy. He also wrote Ghostbusters and starred in the film with Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray. His many credits include Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, Analyze This, and The Ice Harvest. In this special Museum of the Moving Image program, Ramis talked about his career, starting with his days as head writer of...

The documentary Food, Inc., which lifts the veil on America's food industry, is a muckraking film that is elegantly made and entertaining. The Museum of the Moving Image presented the New York premiere, followed by a discussion with: Eric Schlosser, whose best-seller Fast Food Nation inspired the film; Robert Kenner, the director; Alice Waters, the renowned chef of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California; Gary Hirshberg, the president of Stonyfield Farm, the world's leading organic yogurt...

Sam Mendes, the Academy Award-winning director of American Beauty and Road to Perdition, was putting the finishing touches on the intensely dramatic Revolutionary Road when he started working on Away We Go, a whimsical and heartfelt movie about an expectant couple on a cross-country odyssey in search of a place to set down roots. The films are companion pieces: two very different movies about couples trying to find their place. Mendes and the film's co-star, John Krasinski, best known for his...

Pete Docter, the director of the Disney/Pixar movie UP, is one of the top creative figures in contemporary animation. He directed Monsters, Inc. and was a writer for Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Wall-E. Docter spoke at a Museum of the Moving Image event following a preview screening for the Museum's new family member group Red Carpet Kids. The discussion includes questions from some of the young children in the audience. The event took place just days after Docter returned from France, where...

The Mexican hit comedy Rudo y Cursi reunites Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, the stars of Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 road movie and sex comedy Y tu mama tambien. Rudo y Cursi is about stepbrothers who escape life on a banana farm and find fame, fortune, and rivalry as soccer stars. The film is the directorial debut of Carlos Cuaron, who wrote Y tu mama tambien. Bernal's and Luna's friendship and chemistry is on display in this lively discussion, which took place just days before the U.S....

To celebrate the release of his remarkable movie The Limits of Control, the Museum of the Moving Image presented an evening with Jim Jarmusch. The director talked about his entire body of work, starting with his NYU student feature-length film Permanent Vacation. His 1984 breakthrough film Stranger than Paradise, an eccentrically deadpan road movie was also a surprise commercial success that inspired the growth of the American independent film movement. With films such as Dead Man, Ghost Dog:...

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the classic independent film Putney Swope, an outrageous satire about race, commercialism, and corporate life, the Museum of the Moving Image teamed up with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to present a special screening with director Robert Downey, Sr. The discussion was moderated by independent producer and Museum trustee Warrington Hudlin. In the film, the head of an ad agency drops dead during a meeting of executives. Through a...

As a director, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker, James Toback (Fingers, Bugsy, Black and White, The Big Bang) has consistently explored the extremes of human behavior. For his intimate and innovative documentary Tyson, he found a perfect subject in Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champion who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and went through a rollercoaster career filled with fame and controversy. Toback's empathy with his subject results in a remarkably candid and revealing...

With his critically acclaimed low-budget independent film The Daytrippers, and his raunchy blockbuster hit Superbad, Greg Mottola established himself as a gifted director of comedies. On the occasion of the release of Adventureland, a personal film that invests the teen comedy genre with emotional depth and insight, Museum of the Moving Image presented a daylong retrospective. Writer/director Mottola and producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey discussed the film following a preview screening.

Dennis Hopper is one of the most iconoclastic and accomplished actors and directors in American cinema. He has appeared in nearly 300 films and TV shows, with credits including Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, and Blue Velvet. 2008 was a particularly good year for Hopper; he received great reviews for his performance in Elegy, starred in the TV series Crash, and was the subject of an exhibition at the Cinematheque Francaise. In this evening of conversation and clips,...

Jerry Lewis has been one of the most popular and inventive figures in American show business since the late 1940s. As a performer, director, writer, and producer, he has created an enormously entertaining body of work in film, television, and live performance that is deeply personal while offering a fascinating view of American culture. In this Museum of the Moving Image special event, Lewis discussed his career in a conversation with the film director, actor, and author Peter Bogdanovich....

Saturday Night Live has provided an irreverent yet influential perspective on American presidential politics since its debut season in 1975. Two days after kicking off its fall 2008 season with a sketch portraying Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, SNL was the subject of a panel discussion with series creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels (pictured left, selected by Time Magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people; cast members and Weekend Update co-anchors Amy Poehler...

The HBO series The Wire, a panoramic view of Baltimore through its drug world, schools, government, seaport, and newspaper, has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest television dramas ever produced. To mark the DVD release of the final season, Museum of the Moving Image presented a panel, Making "The Wire", with David Simon, the series creator and co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who wrote several episodes; and four of the show's stars: Seth Gilliam (who played...

Actor/director Stanley Tucci is one of the most accomplished creative figures in New York film, television, and theater. His films as director include Big Night (1996) and The Impostors (1998), and his memorable performances include Road to Perdition (2002), Winchell (1998), and The Devil Wears Prada (2006). In this informal conversation, Tucci discusses his art and craft with some friends: the chef and restaurateur Mario Batali; actress Hope Davis, who has worked with Tucci on five films;...