Tag Archives: The Kamla Show

Director discusses the Hollywood legend whose work led to cell phones, bluetooth technology

3-bottom, , , , , , ,

By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma

joanne@wktv.org

 

When we think of an inventor, we don’t normally think of a Hollywood bombshell who was mostly self-taught.

 

But Hedy Lamarr, known for her role as Delilah in the Cecil B. Demille’s “Samson and Delilah,” the highest-grossing film of 1949, was both the bombshell and the inventor. With composer and pianist George Antheil, she developed a device that allowed for frequency-hopping to keep the signals of torpedoes from being tracked or jammed. This system would become the basis of cell phone and bluetooth technology.

 

Lamarr’s life is the subject of the 2017 documentary “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.” The film’s writer and director Alexandra Dean sits down with Kamla Bhatt from “The Kamla Show” to talk about the film and Lamarr’s life. This edition of “The Kamla Show,” which is being aired by WKTV in honor of Women’s History Month, will air on WKTV 25 at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 20; 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, March 21; and 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 23.

 

“I made this film because when we close our eyes and think of an inventor we don’t think of a woman,” Dean said. “We don’t typically think of anything but a very certain type of man. We even might think of his pocket protector and the look on his face. We have a very specific idea of the people who shape our world and made it the way it is today.”

 

Lamarr, who was the inspiration for Snow White and Cat Woman, emigrated from her home in Austria to escape a bad marriage. Before coming to America, she was already known for the scandalous European film “Ecstasy.” She became a Hollywood icon starring with such legends as James Stewart and Cary Grant.

 

But being pegged as a seductress and with limited speaking parts, Lamarr was bored and turned to inventing. Her first husband had been an arms dealer and so she was familiar with weapons like torpedoes. An ad for the Inventors Council encouraged her to think about how she could help her adopted home of the United States and she eventually paired up with Antheil. In her later years, Lamarr became a recluse, impoverished and almost forgotten.

 

Dean said she was looking for a person who broke the mold of the traditional “inventor” and found Richard Rhodes book “Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Women in the World.” The book lead to Dean finally finding not only an inspiration to her movie but to life as well.

 

“Someone said to me that ‘Hedy Lamarr wasn’t only thinking outside of the box, she didn’t even know the box existed,’” Dean said. “That is how Hedy Lamarr inspires me. Why do we care that there is even a box. Why not just live outside the box. That is the message she gave me.”

 

The “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” has won awards at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Nantucket Film Festival, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival. For more on the film, visit click here.

The art of chocolate making is explored in the most recent edition of ‘The Kamla Show’

3-bottom, Citizen Journalism, , , ,
Amy Guittard, the director of marketing for Guittard Chocolate Company and the great-great granddaughter of its founder Etienne Guittard.

Etienne Guittard, with chocolate from his uncle’s plant, came to the new world in the mid-1800s with the hopes of striking it rich during the California Gold Rush. He discovered those getting rich were the merchants with the miners willing to pay top dollar for his premium chocolates.

 

This was the start of one the nation’s oldest chocolate companies, Guittard Chocolate Company based in San Francisco. In the latest segment of The Kamla Show, host Kamla Bhatt, sits down with Director of Marketing Amy Guittard, who is the great-great granddaughter of Etienne Guittard. The segment premieres on WKTV Channel 25 Feb. 12 at 10 a.m. It will show again on Feb. 14 at 11:30 a.m. and Feb. 16 at 2 p.m.

 

The factory still makes it home in San Francisco, operating 24 days, seven days a week and creates a whole range of chocolate products — about 200 different products — from chocolate chips to huge chocolate slabs. There is about 200 various products.

 

Guittard discusses the chocolate making process, which starts with cacao.

 

“It grows on a tree and that is where it starts,” Guittard said during the interview. “It grows 10 degrees either side of the equator in what we call the cocoa belt.

 

“What happens on the farm is a really critical component to flavor development. Lots of times people think chocolate becomes chocolate when it arrives at a factory which is very true. But a lot of the flavor development happens at origin. So that seed starts off in a variety of different genetics much like a Green apple, a Braeburn or a Pink Lady. There are different types of cacao. So that is inherent in the first flavor notes but also how the farmer ferments the beans and dries the beans is a really important component to flavor development.”

 

Amu Guittard’s cookbook

Guittard also discusses a variety of other topics such as the concept of “bean to bar,” owning the entire process from sourcing to finish chocolate; the issue of child labor in the cocoa fields; her own journey in coming to work at the family company; and her cookbook, “Guittard Chocolate Cookbook: Decadent Recipes from San Francisco’s premium Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Company.”

 

According to Guittard, the ultimate reward is being able to work in a field that allows so much creativity.

 

“I was in a restaurant in San Francisco and the chef brought me the flourless chocolate cake and he put it down and said ‘This is you.’ I was like ‘No, it’s you. It’s our farmers. It’s this whole beautiful amalgamation of creativity and that’s like so humbling and pretty cool.”

Director Richard Linklater talks about his newest project on “The Kamla Show”

3-bottom, Citizen Journalism, , , , , ,
Steve Carrel, Bryan Cranston, and Lawrence Fishburne in “Last Flag Flying”

Director Richard Linklater will be the next featured guest in the latest episode of “The Kamla Show” premiering on WKTV Tuesday, Dec. 19, at 7:30 p.m.

 

Sitting down with host Kamla Bhatt, Linklater talks about his latest film “The Last Flag Flying,” currently in theaters including Celebration! Cinema North. The film, which stars Steve Carrel, Lawrence Fishburne, and Bryan Cranston, is based on the 2005 book of the same title by Darryl Ponicsan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater.

 

“Really loved those characters and what it was trying to say about middle age guys coming back together that had something in their past, and how time changes you and it doesn’t,” Linklater said during the interview as to why he wanted to do produced the film.

 

Richard Linklater (Photo by Lauren Gerson/LBJ Library)

Thirty years after serving in Vietnam together, a former Navy Corposman Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Carrel) re-unites with his old buddies, former Marines Sal Nealon (Cranston) and Reverend Richard Mueller (Fishburne), to bury his son, a young Marine killed in the Iraq War.

 

Linklater said this is not a war film in the sense that it is an epic battle with soldiers “taking the hill” but more of his type of war film where it delves into the lives of the characters.

 

“You are seeing these wars echoed through three individuals who have been through it then and now in different ways and it is really about their lives,” he said.

 

During the interview with Bhatt, Linklater also shares his love for film and how he watches them along with the influence of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky — considered a master filmmaker — has had on his career.

 

Linklater’s previous films include “Boyhood,” “Bernie.” “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” and “School of Rock.”

 

“The Kamla Show: Last Flag Flying” will be rebroadcast on Wednesday, Dec. 20, and Friday, Dec. 22, at 11:30 a.m.

Farmworkers activist Dolores Huerta featured in upcoming WKTV program

3-bottom, , , , ,
Dolores Huerta at the 2012 Induction of the Farm Worker Movement into the Labor Hall of Honor in the Great Hall (Official Department of Labor Photograph)

For most people, say farmworkers rights and they immediate think of Ceasar Chavez. It is only expected since he has been honored with a stamp, roads have been named after him and even buildings such as the Grand Rapids’ Cesar E. Chavez Elementary.

 

Say the name Dolores Huerta and most of those same people would go “who?” She is not a household name such as Chavez but her importance to the success of the United Farm Workers union – which she and Chavez co-founded – is no less than Chavez.

 

And Latino activist and rock ‘n’ roll icon Carlos Santana hoped to right that wrong by making the documentary “Dolores.”

 

Dolores Huerta

In honor of Hispanic Heritage month, which goes through Oct. 15, WKTV will air “The Kamla Show” featuring Dolores Huerta and filmmaker Peter Bratt, who will discuss the documentary that was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, recently released to theaters and set to air on PBS in 2018. “The Kamla Show” will air on WKTV 25 Monday, Oct. 2, at 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 11 30 a.m. and Friday, Oct. 6, at noon and 7:30 p.m.

 

 

Huerta, now 87, is still not messing around with her mission of empowerment. She moved on from the UFW after Chavez’s death in 1993 to found the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which provides leadership training in the grassroots style of activism she helped to pioneer. Huerta travels throughout the country spreading her message, but continues to focus most of her efforts in the Latino agricultural communities of the California’s Central Valley.

 

 

 

WKTV show features interview with “The Glass Castle” author

3-bottom, , , ,
Author Jeanette Walls (2009)

“The Kamla Show: The Glass Castle” will be airing on WKTV 25 on Monday, Aug. 21 at 5:30 p.m.; Wednesday, Aug. 23  at 11:30 a.m. and Friday, Aug. 25 at noon and 7:30 p.m.

 

In this episode, Kamla sits down with journalist and author Jeannette Walls to talk about her memoir The Glass Castle that is now a Hollywood film. The film stars Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts and others. The film was released on Aug. 11.

 

Walls grew up poor and lived in a home with no running water or electricity. She left home at 17 for Manhattan, where she completed her high school education and started working for a local newspaper in Brooklyn. Walls then went on get her undergraduate degree from Barnard College and became a journalist. She worked as a gossip columnist for MSNBC. While covering stories about celebrities, Walls realized that she had never shared her story of a gritty and nomadic childhood, where her family lived in cars, abandoned buildings and foraged for food . The irony did not escape Walls that she now lived in a nice apartment, while her homeless parents lived in an abandoned building and foraged for food. The dissonance did not escape her and that prompted her to write her memoir that became a best-seller.

 

If you are interested in learning more about Walls’ writing, check out a review by the Grand Rapids Public Library on her book “Half Broke Horses,” by clicking here.