LADY DAY:
THE MANY FACES OF BILLIE HOLIDAY

     Born in a black ghetto in Baltimore in 1915, Billie Holiday began singing in speakeasies and "good time houses." By the time she was eighteen, she was already recording with jazz greats Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson. Brushes with the law, a long addiction to heroin, hard love affairs--all were experiences that rang in her voice and gave added poignancy to her songs: "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone", "Miss Brown to You", "They Can't Take That Away From Me", These and other Holiday standards are presented in Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Kultur, $29.95 non- California residents, $32.35 California residents)

     This remarkable documentary includes rare footage of Billie singing with Lester Young's band and clips from her appearances at the Savoy Ballroom and the legendary Apollo Theater (with Count Basie). Rudy Dee and Carmen McRae provide background and commentary about  the times and troubles of the great Lady Day.

          (Running time: 60 minutes, Color/BW)

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 ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY:
ANDY WARHOL

     Andy Warhol was the Leonardo da Vinci of Pop Art: artist, filmmaker, magazine publisher (Interview) and businessman whose brilliant self-promotion earned him millions of dollars. This extraordinary documentary traces Warhol's career from a conventional art student at Carnegie Tech in his native Pittsburgh to his years in New York when he exploded like a firecracker over the art world with his Campbell's soup paintings and celebrity portraits. Before his death in 1987, Andy was working on a Pop Art version of The Last Supper-- daring and unpredictable to the end.
 

          (Running time: 50 minute, Color)

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 Ernest Hemingway    

     From the time he left home in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway's life was one adventure after another. Wounded during the First World War, he was decorated for bravery by the Italian Army, then settled in Paris where he served as a correspondent for a Canadian newspaper and moved in bohemian circles: Gertrude Stein, the Spanish Civil War, Scott Fitzgerald, bull fighting and African big game hunting were the backdrop of Hemingway's adventurous life. This exciting bio-documentary draws on interviews, rare photographs, and memoirs to present a vivid picture of the author of The Sun Also Rises, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and other enduring novels.
 

     (Running time: 30 minutes, Color)

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Truman Capote

     Truman Capote rocketed to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms, a precocious novel of the deep South. After that, fame stuck to Truman like glue, helped along by his genius for self-promotion and a small but remarkable body of work that included Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), the non-fiction detective novel that spawned a new literary genre. This video traces the rise and eventual fall of an American original.
 

   (Running time: 45 minutes, Color)

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Roy Orbison: In Dreams

     This superb video captures the creative genius of Roy Orbison, the man who
composed and sang "Only the Lonely," "It's Over," "Crying," "In Dreams," "Pretty Woman," and many other country rock standards. The video includes footage of Orbison in the studio and on stage singing his greatest hits and has interviews with the late Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins who knew and admired their fellow legend.
 

   (Running time: 93 minutes, Color)

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William Faulkner: A Concise Biography

     William Faulkner shocked American readers in the 1930s and 1940s with his themes of incest, murder, miscegenation. This outstanding documentary searches for the roots of Faulkner's tales and traces his progression from a small town boyhood to the internationally recognized writer whose works-- Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying--are still widely read and admired.
 

    (Running time: 30 minutes, Color)

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