Jonathan Mitchell

The composer John Corigliano has collected an impressive stack of awards for his music. He won an Academy Award for his score to the movie The Red Violin, and a Pulitzer Prize for his Second Symphony. Jonathan Mitchell asked Corigliano about the music that ...

Smells can be hard to describe, but a good writer can transport readers by pulling them in by the nose. Adam Haslett, author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here admires Thomas Mann's Death in Venice for its stench. Everything in the story, ...

Summertime presents a lot of choices, like picking the least disappointing blockbuster movies, finding the secret vacation spots, and making the most of a day at the amusement park. We asked Eddie Sotto, a former ride designer for Disney, what makes a well-designed theme park ride. Produced ...

Caveh Zahedi's films are auto-biographical, to say the least. His new film I Am a Sex Addict follows his previous indie films I Was Possessed by God and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. Producer Jonathan Mitchell thinks we can learn something from watching ...

It used to be in popular music that you'd feel the bass line more than hear it. Today's bass players have to balance their crucial supporting role with increasing duties as a soloist. Bill Leigh of Bass Player magazine and Victor Wooten, a virtuoso ...

In a video game, the player ventures into the minds of dangerously insane patients at an asylum. The goal of Psychonauts is to resolve their conflicts and save the little kids whom they are threatening. Tim Schafer, the game's creator, told producer Jonathan Mitchell that ...

Meet "Reverend" Brendan Powell Smith. He's not an ordained minister, but he's applied all his creative energies and a vast collection of Legos to telling one story — one that features rape, incest, stoning, forbidden fruit, and rains of fire and brimstone. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

It's become a holiday tradition: every year, hundreds of people gather with boomboxes to perform Phil Kline's ambient, techno Christmas carol called "Unsilent Night." Jonathan Mitchell went along for the ride.

In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini — like an evil sorcerer in a fairy tale — condemned Salman Rushdie for heresy, essentially marking the writer for death wherever he was. Rushdie left his family and went into hiding, and reached out to his young son through a new book, Haroun and ...

In 1986, legendary sculptor and painter Frank Stella defied Melville's instruction not to paint the White Whale, and then spent the next twelve years chasing an artistic obsession that Stella says nearly destroyed him. Produced by Leital Molad and Edward Lifson.

Studio 360 presents the world premiere of Moby-Dude from David Ives, the master of the short play. Mark Price plays a contemporary teenager who summarizes the great American novel for his English teacher...in two minutes flat. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

The great fantasy and science fiction master Ray Bradbury was still relatively unknown when the director John Huston tapped him to adapt Moby-Dick for the big screen. Bradbury tells Kurt Andersen how he channeled Herman Melville while writing the screenplay for the film, which starred Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. ...

When Studio 360 asked producer Jonathan Mitchell to put together his audio impression of monsters he went to the movies...and to the TV news. Among his sources: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Werewolf, It!, The Terror from Beyond Space, CNN, and CNBC.

Angry battles of words — or beefs — have kept rap fans intrigued from the early days of hip-hop to this year’s conflict between The Game and 50-Cent. Three writers and fans explain how the beefs got started: William Eric Perkins in Philadelphia, Tricia Rose in Santa ...

Christine Chapman has always been an actress, but she couldn't manage to perform with a full-time job and a family to care for. Her dream of being in theater got a shot in the arm from Dennis Quaid one afternoon in an empty movie theater. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

Why does revenge show up so much in kids books? We hear from critic Leonard Marcus and Valerie Lewis, who owns a childrens bookstore in San Jose. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

It used to be in popular music that you'd feel the bass line more than hear it. Today's bass players have to balance their crucial supporting role with increasing duties as a soloist. Bill Leigh of Bass Player magazine and Victor Wooten, a virtuoso of the ...

Known for his huge, geometrical mobiles — abstractions hanging and spinning in space — sculptor Alexander Calder started as a child by making toys. As an adult, among the radical artists of 1920’s Paris, he crafted a metal menagerie of acrobats, ringmasters, lions and lion tamers. He even made stretcher-bearers ...

Ray Materson was in prison for an armed robbery he committed with a toy gun. He spent the first year of his seven-year term angry at the world and with himself for what he had done. Then he found a kind of redemption . . . in a pair ...

Critics make mistakes all the time. A musicologist named Nicholas Slonimsky collected them — short-sighted, ignorant, or vitriolic reviews of works we now consider masterpieces. We set excerpts from Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective to music. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.