2011 would have been the 100th birthday of Tennessee Williams — above is a pic I took of the first home he lived in, in Columbus, Mississippi. In the NYT article about it, the first paragraph is this:
“DO you know what Spring Pilgrimage is?” asked Brenda Caradine, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Williams Birthday Celebration in Columbus, Miss. “It’s when you Yankees come down South to see our antebellum homes and we take back your money.”
…and the last paragraph is this:
“The entire country still needs Tennessee Williams as a voice for kindness,” said William Gantt, director of the Southern Literary Trail. “His work continues to champion outcasts, and his compassion for them will make him relevant forever.”
Tennessee Williams lived in Mississippi until he was seven, when his father got a job in St. Louis.
His obit in the NYT read in part, “He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart.”
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‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ will be 65 in 2012, and Warner Brothers will be releasing the movie on blu-ray including with three minutes of film that was thought lost until the ’90s “that had been trimmed from the film at the insistence of the National League of Decency and to avoid running afoul of the Hollywood Production Code.” This version will also include “five documentaries, commentary tracks, Brando’s screen test, a Kazan movie trailer gallery, and a 40-page booklet.”
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In 2005 I went to Benoit, Mississippi and photographed the Baby Doll house where the film, based on his Twenty-Seven Loads of Cotton play, looked like this:
It has since been restored and (wonderfully) looks like this today.