Smallscreen News

Gore Vidal's American Masters, August 3-9 on PBS, (VIDEO)

By April MacIntyre Aug 3, 2012, 15:49 GMT

Gore Vidal was a novelist, essayist, playwright, and social commentator whose career saw seven novels about American history, including satirical novels as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth. Vidal penned television plays, film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under a pseudonym.

PBS is now showing the American Masters' documentary, The Education of Gore Vidal (2003).

Gore Vidal was a novelist, essayist, playwright, and social commentator whose career saw seven novels about American history, including satirical novels as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth. Vidal penned television plays, film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under a pseudonym.

He was one of the most eclectic intellectuals in literature, writing cautionary tales about politics, sex, art, and philosophy. At the same time, he was a contrarian, a wise man and a realist. He was also wickedly funny.

Director Deborah Dickson spent hours with Vidal at his cliff-side villa in Italy and used the Ravello interviews as a thread, leading viewers through a labyrinth of personal and American history, world culture, and thought.

From PBS: "Vidal was born in 1925 with high political and social connections. His father, Eugene Luther Vidal, worked for the Roosevelt administration as Director of Air Commerce from 1933 until 1937. His maternal grandfather was Senator Thomas Prior Gore of Oklahoma, a Democrat who played an important role in Democratic politics for many decades. Gore Vidal’s mother, Nina Gore Vidal, was divorced in 1935, when Vidal was ten. She then married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy financier, who in turn divorced her and married Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother, thus establishing a connection between Vidal and the Kennedy clan that persisted through the presidency of John F. Kennedy."

Beginning August 3rd, 2012, PBS will stream The Education of Gore Vidal through Thursday, Aug. 9 (11:59 pm)

Watch The Education of Gore Vidal on PBS. See more from American Masters.

From PBS

"Gore Vidal (1925–2012) never lacked for labels: Witty, irreverent, and shrewd, a propagandist, a truth-teller, and an agent provocateur. Dramatist, novelist, screenwriter, actor, and public debater. A troublemaker at large, poking his pen at anyone who got in his way. That’s how Vidal seared himself into the American consciousness."

The documentary reveals a broad cast of interviewees illuminates Vidal’s work, his life, his contradictions, and his ability to dramatize and animate history, while sticking to the truth.

Explore Vidal's extraordinary life and work in American Masters The Education of Gore Vidal, a 90-minute original production of THIRTEEN's American Masters for WNET. Originally broadcast in 2003 on PBS, this film is now available for a limited time on PBS (check local listings) and online on the American Masters website (http://pbs.org/americanmasters) and PBS Video (http://pbs.org/video). The film, which competed in the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, was written and directed by Deborah Dickson and produced by Matt Kapp. 

George Plimpton, who recalls how Vidal encouraged him to pursue writing while the two were at prep school together, gives firsthand accounts of some of Vidal's "celebrity feuds" and questions some of Vidal's views. 

"To meet Gore is always to be on your toes," Plimpton says in American Masters The Education of Gore Vidal. "He always has some comment to make. Very often, it's not all that comfortable, you know, he loves that sort of thing with you, so it's like a game." 

American Masters The Education of Gore Vidal weaves verité scenes with interviews, movie, and archival footage, including clips from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and clips of Vidal with Jack and Jackie Kennedy -- who shared a stepfather with Vidal. The film follows Vidal from his home in Italy to America for the 40th-anniversary revival of his most successful play, "The Best Man," and a publicity tour for the final novel in his American Chronicles -- especially controversial for his views about F.D.R. and the U.S. entry into World War II. Scenes from his trip to America, including a visit to the 2000 Democratic National Convention to ruffle some feathers, show Vidal at work as observer and provocateur. 

Vidal has revealed the machinations and motives of politics and power. Born into a celebrated political dynasty, he was raised to be a politician, but writing was always his true calling. As he explains it, "You can't do both. A writer must always tell the truth ...and a politician must never give the game away. My family helped found this country and I have a personal, familial feeling about it. I hate what has been done to it." 

Whatever Vidal tackles -- be it politics or popular culture -- a hullabaloo ensues. The novel Myra Breckinridge was born from his Hollywood days, when he lived at the Chateau Marmont with Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Anthony Perkins. "This is pure Vidal. It's pure America," says Middlebury College Professor Jay Parini of Breckinridge, which Vidal describes as the story of a man who decides to become a woman who then falls in love with a girl and decides to become a man again. "It's what America is -- sex and power."

The novel was later turned into a film that Vidal refused to see because, as he explains, "I have high blood pressure." 

Vidal's closest friends -- who include Newman, Woodward, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon -- appear in American Masters The Education of Gore Vidal, reading excerpts from his writings. "'Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable,'" says Woodward, reading an excerpt from 1876. "'So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word.'" 

Controversy was the backdrop of Vidal's 50-plus-year career, from writings on the Oklahoma bomber all the way back to The City and The Pillar -- which he described as "the first unapologetic, openly homosexual novel in America." Following its 1948 publication, The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek boycotted reviews of Vidal's books. Undeterred, he chose another venue: television. 

Vidal's appearances on live television -- some of which are included in American Masters The Education of Gore Vidal -- were provocative and patently humorous. Embracing television as a pulpit to share his views, Vidal sparred with the likes of Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley in front of millions, giving late night television audiences hours of laughter. 

The New York Review of Books editor and publisher Barbara Epstein remembers watching Vidal on Dick Cavett during the golden age of television. "I had never heard anyone on television say, not so much unmentionable things, but true things when truth telling was about the last thing on anyone's mind," says Epstein. "It was a very rare thing and he's never lost it." 

In the film, literary critic Adam Goodheart likens Vidal to a 20th-century incarnation of the Marquis de Sade, for whom provocation was everything. "All of the signs are there -- his taste for irony, his gleeful wickedness, his sense of jealousy, his desire to annihilate other writers and other powerful figures... his desire to be both the guest of honor and the gate crasher at every dinner party," says Goodheart. "He wants to have it all." 

Born into a celebrated political dynasty, Vidal "intersected with history itself" -- reading the Congressional Record to his blind grandfather, seeing Roosevelt drive down Pennsylvania Avenue after his inauguration, watching Mussolini in the audience at the Italian opera, and listening when Neville Chamberlain declared war. 

Vidal's parents divorced when he was nine, and he turned the ensuing emotional turmoil inward. "If you are a natural storyteller and you are living in a story that you don't enjoy, which was life with mother, you do tend to rely upon the narratives that you tell yourself... If things got particularly unendurable in my surroundings, it would be like fuel on my inner narratives."