An Evening with Alan Arkin An onstage conversation with clips from his career followed by a screening of Little Miss Sunshine
Tue Dec 19: 7:00pm
Admission: $40 FSLC members, $50 general public
Alan Arkin began his career as an actor in St. Louis, where he was recruited into the then-new Second City group out of Chicago (Arkin had already had a measure of fame with his folk group The Tarriers). A Brooklyn boy, he made his Broadway debut in the early 60s in Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing and then launched his film career with a bang in 1966, as the Soviet officer in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
The 40 subsequent years have revealed Arkin to be, to quote Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan, “unfairly talented.” Arkin tunes into the particular frequency on which his characters are broadcasting and works a wildly unpredictable, living being onto the screen. Small wonder he began as a musician (let’s not forget that he’s also a director, writer and photographer), because his vocal instrument is one of the glories of American movies, and his acting has a musical buoyancy.
Lieutenant Rozanov in Russians; the lethal Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark; John Singer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Yossarian in Catch-22; Freud in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution; the mild-mannered director in Hearts of the West; the dentist besieged by Peter Falk’s agent in The In-Laws; the errant father in Joshua Then and Now; George Aaronow, sparring beautifully with Ed Harris’s Dave Moss, in Glengarry Glen Ross; Murray Abromowitz in Slums of Beverly Hills — that’s a roster of creations of which any actor would be proud. Add to that his amazing performance as the drug-addled grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine, one of the finest of 2006.
“Alan Arkin gives an Oscar-caliber performance as a foulmouthed, drug-taking grandfather who rebels against the indignity of aging by bursting all polite, civilized restraints.” – Stephen Farber, Hollywood Life
It’s an understatement to say that we’re very happy to have Alan Arkin coming to join us for a discussion followed by a screening of Little Miss Sunshine.
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