Pop Culture Roundup: This Week
‘Star Wars,’ if it were directed by Ken Burns
A Native American art group launched a new video that takes pride in Indigenous culture and identity as a rebuttal to a controversial Adam Sandlers movie that stereotyped Native Americans earlier this year.
It’s March 27, 1957. A room full of Hollywood royalty sits, waiting for screenwriter Robert Rich to take the stage. He’s just won the Academy Award for Writing (Motion Picture Story) for the “The Brave One,” but to the bafflement of the audience, Rich is nowhere to be found.
Jesse Lasky, Jr., an executive at the Writers Guild of America, hurries onstage to accept the statuette on behalf of his “good friend.” Eyebrows are raised. Few knew who this apparently talented screenwriter was, and nobody had seen him in person.
The episode caused a media stir almost immediately. “He’s as much of a mystery to us as he apparently is to everyone else,” a writer’s guild member was quoted as saying in The New York Times the next day.