FARM REPORT DIGEST
Before the Beatles Were Big
A Hard Day's Night was re-released in theaters this winter to new rounds of acclaim. Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert called it "joyous and original." Although his other notable film, The Mouse That Roared (1958), made actor Peter Sellers a star, Shenson, '40, always considered his Beatles movies -- he produced Help! in 1965 -- his best work. Shot in black-and-white documentary style, A Hard Day's Night chronicled a fictional day in the life of the band, featuring a title song that became a No. 1 hit. Shenson plucked the title from an offhand comment by Ringo Starr and asked John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write a tune incorporating Starr's "hard day's night" phrase. Shenson, who died in October a few weeks before A Hard Day's Night was re-released, was involved with dozens of films over the years; "but his very favorite, practically the love of his life, was A Hard Day's Night," says Paul Rutan, whom Shenson commissioned in 1966 to restore the Beatles films. |
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Quote "It's like having a big book like Don Quixote . . . but you're missing 100 words, and some words are in the wrong order." -- Richard Myers, professor of genetics and director of the Stanford Human Genome Center, describing his team's challenge in finalizing the human genome sequence, a portion of which they published in February
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Job: Security
Rice is once again giving advice to a president named Bush. Her appointment as national security adviser in January makes her the first woman to hold the post. A Stanford professor of political science since 1981 and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Rice served as University provost from 1993 to 1999. She took a leave from Stanford to join George W. Bush's campaign staff and was widely rumored to be in line for either secretary of state or the top National Security Council job. Her ties to the Bush family date to the late '80s, when the elder Bush brought her to Washington to be director of Soviet and East European affairs. Pundits have been watching Rice for some time, and many have been impressed. Jay Nordlinger, in a 1999 article in the National Review, predicted that a Cabinet post might make her "a major cultural figure, adorning the bedroom walls of innumerable kids and the covers of innumerable magazines." |
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Making the Best of a Painful Experience
Sontag, now in his 49th year as a philosophy professor at Pomona College, is legendary on the small campus for his devotion to students, according to colleagues. That devotion was tested when 22-year-old Jared Essig, a Pomona senior, stabbed the professor in a bizarre incident last fall. After Essig was arrested for shoplifting and vandalism on October 30, Sontag bailed him out and was driving him home when the student became agitated and delusional. Sontag pulled over to try to reason with him, but Essig pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed Sontag twice in the neck. After Sontag was hospitalized, doctors determined that the knife blade missed his carotid artery by a few millimeters; had it not, the professor would have quickly bled to death. Essig, now in a psychiatric prison program, was charged with attempted murder, but Sontag is working with the man's parents to mount a defense of temporary insanity. "If you knew Fred, you wouldn't be surprised," fellow philosophy professor Paul Hurley told the Los Angeles Times. |
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Life in the Reel World
The maverick New York film producer, whose work is being celebrated in a retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinématek, has shepherded some 60 films, including Academy Award-winners Reversal of Fortune (1990), Wall Street (1987) and Das Boot (1981). Pressman, '65, attributes his success in large part to an ability to identify charismatic directors. "I find there is an aura around [such directors] that people are energized by. That's what attracts me to them as well." His films are an eclectic bunch, but what ties them together, says Pressman, is that almost all convey the vision of one individual director or writer. "Each in its own way reflects the personality of one person," he says. A philosophy major at Stanford, Pressman credits classmate Larry Madison, '65, with inspiring his career. Pressman and Madison, whose father was a filmmaker, talked endlessly about making movies in those days. "That's when I really started seriously thinking about it [as a career]," he says. "Only through talks with Larry did it seem possible." |
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A Tragic End
Half Zantop and his wife, Susanne Zantop, were found dead January 27 in their home in the tiny town of Etna, N.H., three miles from Hanover. Susanne Zantop, 55, was chair of the German studies program at Dartmouth and also taught in the women's studies and comparative literature programs. Half Zantop, 62, was a professor of earth sciences. They met as graduate students on the Farm, where Half received his PhD in geology in 1969 and Susanne earned a master's in political science in 1968. Dartmouth President James Wright praised their scholarship and their nurturing teaching styles. "Susanne was a prolific scholar," Wright said, and a beloved teacher who had taken many students on college programs to Europe. Half was regarded as "an exceptional teacher and mentor" during his 25 years at Dartmouth, he said. "Their deaths are an enormous loss to our community." |
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