Julianne Moore talks to Dave Davies about what she learned while working on the soap opera As The World Turns for three years at the beginning of her career:

I learned to be a professional. You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you’re what they call a ‘front-burner story.’ So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you’re there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you’re on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again. And you have to do it. Everyone’s working very, very quickly. There’s not a lot of time to help anybody, you know, and they have to get it down, too. Unless somebody really blows a line that’s going to be the take they use. That’s just how it is. So you sometimes don’t give the kind of performance you want to give and there’s just not enough time and you go home and you watch it and you’re like, ‘Wow, I was terrible and so you think how can I make this better?’

Above, Julianne Moore in As the World Turns

Julianne Moore talks to Dave Davies about playing Sarah Palin in the 2012 film Game Change:

You don’t usually get the opportunity to kind of obliterate your physiognomy when you’re acting. And that was really fun and kind of welcome because we’re always trying to effect some kind of transformation in our heads and then it’s disappointing when you finally see the movie and you still see yourself there. But in this case, because I had so much physical help turning into something else. You know, it really … make me feel like I was able to look at someone else, which I loved.

Image via The Film Experience

David Bianculli on Steven Soderbergh’s new HBO film about Liberace, Behind the Candelabra, starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas:

Damon’s Scott is all aw-shucks innocence — and when a friend takes him to Las Vegas to see a Liberace show, it’s like taking a trip to Oz. They walk into the Hilton showroom while the performance is in full swing. And so do we — hit immediately, and viscerally, by the excessive glitz of it all: the gold, glass-topped grand piano. Liberace’s silver-sequined suit and heavily teased hair. And, of course, his carefully rehearsed casual stage patter, with which he entertains the audience while playing piano, sometimes with only one hand. You start the scene watching Michael Douglas but in seconds, you’re carried away, or at least dumbfounded, by Liberace.

Image courtesy of HBO

Novelist and adoptive parent Jennifer Gilmore talks to Terry Gross about whether motherhood is different than what she thought it would be:

This idea of what is hypothetical, for my protagonist and me as well, what does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to carry on the generations? How will motherhood be? ‘I’ve been taken away or not included in all these aspects of society’: that’s more the protagonist’s feeling than [mine], but when you actually get the child, you have no luxury to have this kind of imagining. You’re attending to his physical needs, the eating, the sleeping, the pooping, the singing, and so it’s much more physical. There’s love there. It becomes much less hypothetical. I know his color, I know his family. He’s just become our baby.

Image via Wikipedia

Steven Soderbergh talks to Terry Gross about making Behind the Candelabra, his new Liberace biopic for HBO:

It’s a very intimate movie. It’s a very emotionally intimate movie and there are scenes between them that are almost uncomfortable in their intimacy and would be if it was a man and a woman involved. … I always felt that if we did our jobs correctly, that halfway through the movie you’d forget that it was Michael and Matt and just feel as though you’re watching a relationship.

Image courtesy of HBO

Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Daft Punk, Random Access Memories:

I freely admit that, until the new Random Access Memories, I wasn’t much of a fan. I could appreciate the craft and imagination that went into creating the French duo’s mixture of electronic genres — techno, house, disco — but the mechanical repetitions and heavily filtered vocals didn’t turn me on in any other way. But now, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have come up with an album that exposes the human side of their musical impulses. It’s the equivalent of removing the helmet-masks the pair invariably wears in public performances. Random Access Memories is a collection filled with music that suggests mad romance, heartache and an embrace of the past that’s never merely nostalgic or sentimental.

Image courtesy of Sony Music

Novelist Jennifer Gilmore, whose new book — The Mothers — is based on her own experiences of trying to adopt a baby, talks to Terry Gross about the necessity of ‘selling’ oneself in order to appeal to a birth mother:

Of course, we thought, ‘These babies need homes. And we’re helping these babies have happy homes.’ That didn’t turn out to be the case. There are not as many babies as there are parents who want them. So you realize it is quite competitive. You join a pool of people, and it’s sort of a business out there now, a booming one. And there are more people who want babies than can be satisfied.

So what happens is, whatever route you take, whether you write this profile, you put it online, whether you do it privately, you’re sort of saying, ‘This is who we are as a couple’ or ‘We have this big ranch house’ or ‘We love museums’ or ‘We love soccer, we love children, we have nieces and nephews, and here are pictures of us with children.’ My husband and I made a pact when we started this that we were never going to misrepresent ourselves or lie about who we were. We live in New York; we live in a fourth-floor walk-up, so the rest of the country is confused by that.”

Matched, as we know from the dating world alone, is a coded word. My spouse and I were matched with birthmothers not once, not twice, not three times, but a total of five times. The most horrible things kept happening: Birthmothers and those posing as birthmothers, birthfathers and those posing as birthfathers lied to us. Birthmothers are doing a very selfless and generous thing when they decide they are unable to parent and place their child with wanting parents. It is a decision made out of big, big love for that child. Adoption, when it is successful, is a wonderful thing. But everyone coming to it is grieving in some way. It would be wrong not to acknowledge this.

— from “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption” by today’s guest, Jennifer Gilmore. Gilmore’s new novel about a couple trying to adopt, The Mothers, is largely autobiographical.

Steven Soderbergh, who directed the new HBO Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, talks to Terry Gross about the significance of the flamboyant performer’s style:

You could make an argument that Liberace really invented the idea of ‘bling.’ mean, nobody was dressing themselves like this. When you look at the people that have followed him — whether it’s Elvis or Elton john or Cher or Madonna or Lady Gaga — you know, all these people are sort of building on something that he began.”

Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for The Doors, has died.

Here is an interview we did with him in 2006.

Image via Rolling Stone

Mel Brooks tells David Bianculli about the late Madeline Kahn:

I’m in tears thinking about Madeline. And what an incredibly gifted gift from god, Madeline Kahn. The funniest and most talented comedienne I think, including people like Carol Burnett who are great, you know, and Gilda Radner who was magnificent, but nobody — listen to me, David Bianculli — nobody could approach the magnificence and wonder of Madeline Kahn. She was really a great gift to us all. … I saw art [in her], not just funny. But I saw a person who was gifted with art. She’s the only one who actually could have worked in opera as an opera singer, as a coloratura. She was that talented or I think she could have worked as a longshoreman in New Jersey. I don’t think there’s anything that Madeline Kahn couldn’t do.”

GIF of Madeline Kahn in Young Frankenstein (1974) via trixiedelight:

Mel Brooks tells David Bianculli about turning down the Kennedy Center Honor the first time he was offered it:

I shouldn’t say this … but I’ll say it anyway. I was offered this — the Kennedy Center Honors — maybe a year or two before and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to wait for another president if I’m still alive if you don’t mind.’ I just didn’t feel comfortable when Bush was president to accept the honors. … Had I not gotten 110 awards, you know, I’m an EGOT so I don’t need any more. … The Kennedy Center Honors at the moment, I didn’t need them. … The only award I haven’t received, I think, is Woman of the Year and I don’t know if that’s not in the works just as an honorary Woman of the Year. I may get that too, but I’m not looking for it.

Kevin Whitehead reviews Sarah Vaughan, Divine: The Jazz Albums, 1954-1958:

A lot of jazz singing is about consonants—the percussive attacks the music swings from. With Sarah Vaughan, it’s also about the way she rolls out her vowels, reveling in a held note like Miles Davis. Later her vibrato could get excessive, but in the mid-’50s her taste and control were a marvel. That much is clear from a new anthology of Vaughan on EmArcy, Divine: The Jazz Albums 1954-1958 (Verve Select). (In that period she was made pop albums with strings, and some of the same tunes.) It’s six albums-plus on four CDs, recorded live or in the studio, with bands big and small. All but one session is sparked by another bebop institution, drummer Roy Haynes. He has a springy beat, using brushes, and doesn’t overplay.

Sarah Vaughan had a gallery of vocal timbres, gravelly to silky, round or strident, white-gloved or blues-drenched. Her pitch range was operatic, and her low notes have uncommon power. She drew inspiration from great soloists and gave it right back

Image via vainsmith

On Saturday, Oxbow won the Preakness Stakes, dashing any hopes Orb had for the first Triple Crown since 1978. The real news however was that jockey Gary Stevens was the one who rode Oxbow to that victory. Stevens, 50, is a Hall of Fame jockey who had only recently come out of retirement and gotten back in the saddle, so to speak. But boy does he belong in that saddle.

Here’s a Fresh Air interview with Stevens from 2003.

Image via ESPN

The one, the only, the wonder that is Mel Brooks is on the show today. I listened to the interview Friday and, well, I laughed and I cried. When he was talking about his late wife, the actor Anne Bancroft, to whom he was married for 40 years and who died in 2005, I laughed and cried simultaneously. At that point he’s talking to David Bianculli about learning Polish so that he and Bancroft could perform “Sweet Georgia Brown” together in that language, the clip of which is above. It’s fantastic.