Friday, May 31, 2019

Louise Brooks segment on "Positively Kansas" TV show

Louise Brooks can rightly be called a persistent star. And with the recent release of The Chaperone, this now more-famous-than-ever silent film actress is enjoying renewed attention. As Positively Kansas host Sierra Scott says, "She is once again a movie star more than 30 years after her death."



A segment devoted to Louise Brooks featured on a recent airing of Positively Kansas is now online. This episode of the Wichita TV show is worth watching, and not just because it includes your's truly, Thomas Gladysz, director of the Louise Brooks Society (via Skype), as well as local Kansas commentators.


Episode 509 of Positively Kansas was first broadcast on KPTS Channel 8, the PBS affiliate in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2019. The episode's descriptor reads in part, "See why a famous silent film star from Wichita is more popular than ever, decades after her death." The show gets most all of it's facts right, except for one glaring error. During the segment discussing Brooks' childhood, an image of a young girl is shown that is NOT Louise Brooks. This image has shown up elsewhere and is said to be a youthful Brooks, but it ain't. It's just a sweet looking girl with a dutch boy haircut.



Otherwise, the approximately eight minute segment devoted to Brooks has a good selection of images along with brief film clips from Pandora's Box and It's the Old Army Game.

Do all local PBS affiliates have their own local interest show? Has WXXI, the PBS affiliate in Rochester, New York done anything recently on the timelessness of Louise Brooks? Brooks lived in Rochester during the last decades of her life, and used to watch a fair amount of television, especially old movies, cultural programs, and informational shows like they might have shown on PBS in the 1960s and 1970s.

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