WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C5
Television
BROADCAST CHANNELS
8/7/19
7: 00 7: 30 8:0 08 :30 9: 00 9:30 10 :0 01 0: 30 11: 00 11:30
4.1 WRC (NBC) u News u Access u Ellen’s Game of Games u Ellen’s Game of Games u The InBetween News u J. Fallon
4.2 WRC (IND) Little House on the Prairie Fr asier Fr asier Fr asier Fr asier Will & Grace Will & Grace The Office The Office
5.1 WTTG (Fox) Fox 5 u TMZ u MasterChef u BH90210Fox 5 News at Ten News The Final 5
7.1 WJLA (ABC) u Wheel u Jeopardy! u Press Your Luck u Card Sharks u Match Game News u Kimmel
9.1 WUSA (CBS) Off Script u ET u Love Island u Big Brother u S.W.A.T. 9 News u Colbert
14 .1 WFDC (UNI) Amor eterno La reina soy yoSin miedo a la verdad Noticias u Noticiero
20.1 WDCA (MNTV)u Family Feudu Family Feud Fox 5 News u Family Feud Fox 5 News u Family Feud Big BangBig Bang u Punchline u Punchline
22 .1 WMPT (PBS)Joanne Weir u MotorWeek u Ancient Skies NOVA u To Catch a Comet u Amanpour-Co
26.4 WETA (PBS) PBS NewsHour Ancient Skies NOVA To Catch a Comet Amanpour-Co
32.1 WHUT (PBS) DW News Reconnecting Rock Newman We’ll Meet Again Democracy Now! World News Justice
50.1 WDCW (CW) u black-ish u black-ish u Bulletproof u Hypnotize Me u DailyMailTV u Seinfeld Mike & Molly Two Men
66.1 WPXW (ION) Blue Bloods Blue Bloods Blue Bloods Blue Bloods Blue Bloods
CABLE CHANNELS
A& E Ghost HuntersGhost HuntersGhost Hunters(10:01) Ghost Hunters(11:04) Ghost Hunters
AMC (5:30) Movie: Ghostbusters II Movie: Pretty Woman HHH (1990) (10:35) Movie: Double Jeopardy HHH
Animal Planet North Woods Law North Woods Law North Woods Law (10:01) Lone Star Law(11:01) Lone Star Law
BET (6:00) Movie: John Q HH (2002) Movie: American Gangster HHH (2007)
Bravo Southern Charm Southern Charm Southern Charm Southern Charm Watch Southern Ch.
Cartoon Network Gumball Infinity Amer. Dad Amer. Dad BurgersBurgersFamily Guy Family Guy Rick, Morty Chicken
CNN Erin Burnett OutFront Anderson Cooper 360 America Under Assault: The Gun Crisis: Tonight CNN Tonight
Comedy Central South Park South Park South Park South Park South Park South Park South Park South Side DailyLights Out
Discovery Expedition Unknown Expedition Unknown Expedition Unknown Contact Expedition Unkn.
Disney Sydney-MaxSydney-MaxMovie: Descendants 3 (2019) Raven Coop & Cami Coop & Cami Raven Andi Mack
E! E! News Botched Botched Botched Botched
ESPN MLB Baseball : Milwaukee Brewers at Pittsburgh Pirates (Live) SportsCenter (Live) SportsCenter (Live)
ESPN2 Sign Spin. StairsCornhole Cup Dodgeball Movie: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story HHH (2004)
Food Network Guy’s Grocery Games Guy’s Grocery Games Guy’s Grocery Games Guy’s Grocery Games Guy’s Grocery Games
Fox News The Story With Martha Tucker Carlson Tonight HannityThe Ingraham Angle Fox News at Night
Freeform 10 Things I Hate About You grown-ish (8:31) Movie: The Wedding Singer HHH (1998) grown-ish The 700 Club
FX Furious Movie: Jurassic World HH (2015) Snowfall (11:04) Snowfall
Hallmark Movie: Stranded in Paradise (2014) Movie: A Brush With Love (2019) Golden Girls Golden Girls
Hallmark M&M Chronicle Mysteries Mystery 101 Murder, She Wrote
HBO Hard Knocks VICE Movie: The Favourite HHH (2018) REAL Sports Bryant Gumbel Hard Knocks
HGTV Property BrothersProperty Brothers Property BrothersHuntersHunt Intl Property Brothers at Home
History Forged in Fire Forged in FireForged in FireStrongest Man Strongest Man
Lifetime Married at First Sight Married Married at First Sight Marrying Millions (11:13) Marrying Millions
MASN MLB Baseball : New York Yankees at Baltimore Orioles (Live) O’s XtraESPNWS Future Phen. MLB Baseball
MSNBC Hardball Matthews All In With Chris HayesRachel Maddow ShowThe Last WordThe 11th Hour
MTV Catfish: The TV Show Catfish: The TV ShowCatfish: The TV Show Catfish: The TV Show Catfish: The TV Show
Nat’l Geographic Drugs, Inc. Drugs, Inc. Drugs, Inc.: The Fix Drugs, Inc. Drugs, Inc.
NBC SportsNet WA Tr aining Camp Daily Premier Lacrosse League: Chaos LC at Whipsnakes LC DC Sports Tr aining Camp Daily Redskins
Nickelodeon SpongeBob SpongeBob Movie: Jumanji HH (1995) Fr iends Fr iends Fr iends
PARMT Mom Movie: Top Gun HHH (1986) Yellowstone The Last Cowboy
Syfy (7:05) Movie: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 HHH (2011) Krypton Movie: Arrival HHH (2016)
TBS BurgersBurgersBig BangBig BangBig BangBig BangBig Bang Full Conan Full Frontal
TCM Shop Around Corner Movie: Harvey HHH (1950) Movie: Anatomy of a Murder HHH (1959)
TLC Say Yes to the Dress Dr. Pimple Popper Unexpected Unexpected My Teen Is Pregnant
TNT 300: Rise of an Empire HH Movie: The Huntsman: Winter’s War HH (2016) Movie: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice HH
Travel UFOs: The Lost Evidence UFOs: The Lost Evidence UFOs: The Lost Evidence When Monsters Attack Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
TruTV Inside Jokes Inside Jokes Inside Jokes Inside Jokes Inside Jokes Inside Jokes Inside Jokes Imp. JokersImp. JokersImp. Jokers
TV Land Andy Griffith Andy Griffith Raymond Raymond Raymond Raymond Younger King (11:11) The King of Queens
TV One Cosby Show Cosby Show UnsungUnsungUnsung The DL Hughley Show
USA Network Law & Order: SVU Law & Order: SVU Suits (10:01) Pearson Law & Order: SVU
VH1 Basketball Wives Basketball Wives Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood (10:02) Basketball Wives Black Ink Crew: Chicago
WNC8 America This Week Govt. MattersABC 7 News Sports ABC News WJLA 24/7 News at 10 Govt. MattersWJLA News
WGN Movie: Bad Santa HHH (2003) Movie: Bad Santa HHH (2003) Married Married
LEGEND: Bold indicates new or live programs u High Definition Movie Ratings (from TMS) HHHH Excellent HHH Good HH Fair H Poor No stars: not ratedCa tfish (MTV at 8) Nev Schulman
and his guest host Justin Combs
help CJ track down a woman
named Shana, whom CJ has had
an online relationship with for
eight years.
Married at First Sight
(Lifetime at 8:30) The couples
reach the one-month
anniversaries of their marriages,
which is a better experience for
some than others.
Suits (USA at 9) Harvey and
Donna’s relationship is tested by
Faye.
Full Frontal With Samantha Bee
(TBS at 10:30) Comedian
Samantha Bee provides satirical
commentary on politics and social
issues.
PREMIERES
Bulletproof (CW at 8) The British
television drama series follows
detectives and best friends Aaron
Bishop and Ronnie Pike Jr. as they
fight crime on the streets of East
London.
BH902 10 (Fox at 9) The original
“Beverly Hills, 90210” cast
reunites for a six-episode
miniseries, playing themselves as
actors considering a possible
reboot. See Hank Stuever’s review
on C1.SPECIAL
Queen of the Pythons
(Smithsonian at 8) This one-hour
special looks at the daily life and
challenges of a 13-foot, 70 -pound
African rock python, including her
journey in motherhood.LATE NIGHT
Daily Show/Noah (Comedy
Central at 11) Sen. Michael F.
Bennet (D-Colo.), Natasha Ly onne.Tonight Show/Fallon (NBC at
11:34) Greg Kinnear, Phoebe
Waller-Bridge, Big Sean.Late Show/Colbert (CBS at
11:35) Tiffany Haddish, Jared
Harris, Smashing Pumpkins.Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC at
11:35) Josh Gad, Michael “The
Miz” Mizanin, Chris Janson.Late Late Show/Corden (CBS at
12: 37 ) Joel McHale, Betty Gilpin.Late Night/Meyers (NBC at
12: 37 ) Amanda Seyfried, Sandra
Bernhard, Storm Reid, Julian
Dorio.
— Nina ZafarMore at washingtonpost.com/
entertainment/tv.TV HIGHLIGHTS
ERIC MCCANDLESS/FREEFORM
Grown-ish (Fr eeform at 8) As the gang’s sophomore year ends, bottled-up
emotions start to unravel, causing rifts in friendships, relationships and
some interesting reconciliations. Season finale.
you had to make it worthwhile.”
That combination of abandon
and self-discipline aptly sums up
why Pennebaker’s work, and that
of his contemporaries, took hold
so strongly and will continue to
endure. He was part of an ambi-
tious, avidly curious generation of
newly minted New Yorkers who
flooded into the city from the
South and Midwest, many of
them beautifully educated thanks
to the G.I. Bill; children of farm-
ers, laborers and Main Street
businesspeople who brought a
singular combination of erudi-
tion and practicality to breaking
old forms apart and bringing new
ones to life. Your play is too edgy
for Broadway? Put it up in a black
box downtown. Hollywood mov-
ies are too corny and cheaply
sentimental? Write your own. The
camera hasn’t been invented that
allows you to capture sound and
image with the unvarnished
spontaneity the era calls for?
You’re a Yale-educated engineer:
Build your own.
Perhaps even more crucially,
the same postwar prosperity and
educational system that empow-
ered Pennebaker and his contem-
poraries also empowered their
audience — spectators their own
age who understood hip literary
and psychological references,
were skeptical of or ironically
amused by obsolete vernaculars,
and were reliably responsive to
music, plays, artwork and, yes,
documentaries, that demanded
new levels of candor and, occa-
sionally, confrontation. At least
when the establishment gate-
keepers got out of the way: When
Drew brought “Primary” to the
TV stations that Life owned, they
initially declined to run it, Penne-
baker recalled. “But filmmakers
saw right away that this was
where [documentary] was going
to go.”
Where documentary was going
was a place where filmmakers
were equipped — literally and
figuratively — to capture situa-
tions in which anything might
happen, an attitude born of a city
in which anything could happen.
As Pennebaker and I wrapped up
our conversation, the thrill of
those early days was still palpable
— a time when he was longing to
tell stories in new ways, figuring
out how to do it on the fly, and
counting on his own generation
to keep up. “Everything was sort
of actionable ,” Pennebaker said
fondly before he hung up. “Every-
thing would surprise you. But at
the same time you lived in New
York because that’s what you
prized — the surprise.”
[email protected]student named Robert Redford
would pop in to see a teenage
singer named Barbra Streisand in
a downtown cabaret. Nearby, a
cerebral stand-up comedian
named Woody Allen would try
out new material while the equal-
ly intellectual comic duo Nichols
and May rehearsed their new
Broadway show. An ensemble of
young actors including Cicely Ty -
son, Maya Angelou, James Earl
Jones and Louis Gossett Jr.
starred in an off-off-Broadway
production of “The Blacks” that
would set attendance records.
Gossett went to see Dylan and
Dylan went to see Gossett, be-
cause everyone saw “The Blacks.”
Uptown, writers such as Gloria
Steinem, Gay Ta lese and To m
Wolfe were inventing a new kind
of literary journalism while Rob-
ert Benton and David Newman —
both at Esquire, the mecca of the
New Journalism — began work-
ing on an idea they had for a
movie called “Bonnie & Clyde.”
“You had the feeling you were
throwing down at the end of
something and then something
new had to start,” Pennebaker
recalled of the era. “You could get
away with murder in the city, butdollar and a half, and you danced
all night,” he said.
When Pennebaker was ap-
proached to make a movie about
Bob Dylan, he had barely heard of
the singer-songwriter: “We were
much too sophisticated” f or folk
music, Pennebaker said, adding
that he and his friends preferred
listening to Bunny Berigan and
Benny Goodman records. He also
took advantage of the off-Broad-
way theater scene that was flour-
ishing in the Village. In fact, he
said, cinema verite derived less
from movies than the plays he
and peers were watching. “It all
had to do with recognizing the
drama within the spoken word,
and within the reactions of peo-
ple,” Pennebaker said. “[You’d] sit
and watch something as long as
you could stand it. You didn’t ask
questions or do interviews like
the news did. You just watched
something happen.”
While Pennebaker was soaking
up and synthesizing the art forms
swirling through the Village, he
was joined by a cohort of artists,
playwrights, actors, journalists,
musicians, performers and danc-
ers who were cross-pollinating in
similarly vibrant ways. An artnoted, the mood in New York was
just as expansive and full of possi-
bility, a function of “that strange
hiatus that followed World War II
in which everybody kind of made
out. People that were in the war
could go to college, which I had
done, and the people who stayed
home made a lot of money. You
could live in New York for almost
nothing. Everybody came out of
the war sort of better than okay.”
Pennebaker would “fall into
filmmaking” when Drew hired
him to join his team at L ife. But he
savored everything on offer in
New York, which was a hotbed of
creativity and ingenuity. He made
sure to keep up with the movies
that were being imported to
American art houses from Eu-
rope, especially the Italian neo-
realists (“because they were shot
in the streets”). But film wasn’t
his only passion: He talked sci-fi
with his Greenwich Village room-
mate, the experimental novelist
William Gaddis (who encouraged
him to quit his post-grad engi-
neering job). Of an evening, he
might walk over to Nick’s Ta vern
or the Stuvesant Casino to hear
jazz bands from New Orleans.
“You bought a pitcher of beer for acinema, or cinema verite, an un-
adorned style that jettisoned
scripts, narration and other dead-
ening conceits and instead simply
observed people speaking, behav-
ing and inhabiting their own en-
vironments.
The impact of Pennebaker and
his collaborators was nothing less
than seismic, creating a nonfic-
tion film language that became as
ubiquitous and universally ac-
cepted as the dry, educational
rhetoric it replaced. As inspired
by live theater as by such fore-
bears as Robert Flaherty and
John Grierson, Pennebaker
pushed documentary film to
evolve from a mere vector of in-
formation to a means of revealing
character and emotional truth.
“Primary,” D rew’s 1960 account
of John F. Kennedy’s challenge to
Hubert Humphrey for the Demo-
cratic nomination, was an early
example of the genre. (Pennebak-
er, Leacock and Albert Maysles all
worked on the film.) So was Pen-
nebaker’s 1962 film “Jane,” about
a young actress named Jane Fon-
da embarking on a nerve-racking
Broadway debut, and the Maysles
brothers’ “Showman,” about the
movie producer Joseph Levine.
All were products not just of the
team’s philosophical interest in a
new kind of nonfiction cinema,
but old-fashioned know-how.
“You gotta understand, there
was no equipment that could do
what we all thought could be
done,” Pennebaker told me in
2013, referring to small, portable
cameras that could also record
sound. “So Ricky [Leacock] and I
decided to build a camera that
would do that. It took a lot of
years and a lot of money, which
Life provided, unknowingly
mostly.”
Like so many artistic move-
ments that took hold in the 1960s
— whose formal innovations be-
came the symbolic lingua franca
that surrounds us today — direct
cinema was the culmination of
eclectic, overlapping changes
that only could have occurred in
post-World War II America. And
Pennebaker embodied those
changes to an uncanny degree: A
native of Evanston, Ill., he served
in the Navy, after which he stud-
ied engineering at MIT and Yale;
when he moved to New York after
a brief stint as an engineer, he
worked at a carpentry shop in
downtown Manhattan.
“A ll of the military equipment
you could imagine could be
bought on Canal Street,” Penne-
baker told me in 2013. “We bought
all our tools [there].” And, he
PENNEBAKER FROM C1
Behind modern documentaries, a filmmaker with a vision
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGESBob Dylan smokes a
cigarette as D.A.
Pennebaker films for the
documentary “Dont
Look Back” about
Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour.
Pennebaker was known
for his music-centered
films.