John Barbours World
John Barbour "the godfather of reality TV" created, co-hosted, co-produced, and wrote 'Real People' - the first reality show, which was number one on NBC for three years during the early 1980's.
Barbour moved to the United States in the early sixties. His comedy act, particularly his 1965 album, It's Tough to Be White, dealt in part with civil rights and black-white relations.
Barbour hosted the pilot for The Gong Show in the mid '70s, and was a regular panelist on the 1988 Canadian (US syndicated) version of Liar's Club.
Barbour portrayed game show host Harry Monte in a 1975 episode of Sanford and Son.
John Produced, Wrote, and Hosted 'Ernie Kovacs: TV's Original Genius,'for Showtime that aired later on PBS. At the time it was reviewed as 'the best documentary about a performer!'
He also directed and wrote the 1992 documentary The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes. This film covers the investigation of District Attorney Jim Garrison, who, after the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, decided to further investigate the official report given by the Warren Commission. The documentary hypothesizes connections between the assassination and the FBI, the CIA, the Mafia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and other organizations and foreign affairs issues. The film won an award in 1993 at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain.
Guest, Mark Crispin Miller
MARK CRISPIN MILLER is a Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Boxed In: The Culture of TV; The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder; Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order and Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform. He is also the editor of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His essays and articles have appeared in many journals, magazines and newspapers throughout the nation and the world, and he has given countless interviews worldwide.
Miller is the editor of Icons of America, a book series published by Yale University Press. Miller is now at work on The Marlboro Man: An American Success Story, to be published by Yale University Press in 2011. He is also editor of Discovering America, a new book series from the University of Texas Press.
Miller earned his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1971, and his doctorate in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1977. Although he specialized in Renaissance literature, Miller is best known as a media critic. Before joining New York University, Miller served as director of film studies at Johns Hopkins University.
ABOUT FORBIDDEN BOOKSHELF
(New York, NY—June 9, 2014)—Open Road Media announced today Forbidden Bookshelf, a series of books curated by Professor Mark Crispin Miller of New York University. Forbidden Bookshelf titles fill in the blanks of America’s repressed history by resurrecting books that focused on issues and events that are too often left in the dark, including abortion, organized crime, the CIA, and financial inequality.
The series launches on June 10 with five books: Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy by Christopher Simpson, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam by Douglas Valentine, The Search for an Abortionist: The Classic Study of How American Women Coped with Unwanted Pregnancy Before Roe v. Wade by Nancy Howell Lee, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football by Dan E. Moldea, and The Lords of Creation: The History of America’s 1 Percent by Frederick Lewis Allen. Each of the first four titles includes a new introduction.
Additional books by I. F. Stone, Gerard Colby, Charlotte Dennett, Kati Marton, Robert Fitch, Bertram Gross, and John Dinges will be released later this summer.
Open Road Media CEO Jane Friedman said, “This list of books is much deserving of renewed attention. The issues they address are as significant today as they were when the books were first published. We believe that we will stimulate new conversation and debate through our intensive and extensive marketing platform.”
Mark Crispin Miller said, “Despite our First Amendment—or because of it—countless crucial books have been adroitly ‘disappeared’ through methods far less crude than outright censorship, from threats of litigation to press black-outs and/or charges of ‘conspiracy theory.’ Such tactics have repeatedly erased those books that we most need to read, because of their important truths about the powers that be; and so our purpose is to bring those books to life again.”
Miller is a professor of media studies at NYU and an accomplished author of several books, from Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988) and Seeing Through Movies (1990) to his more recent works on politics, including The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder and Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform. He has also written many articles for newspapers and journals, including four op-eds in the New York Times, as well as many pieces in the Nation, the New Republic,and the New York Review of Books, and articles for Harper’s,the Atlantic, Mother Jones, Esquire, and the Wall Street Journal. Through his blog, News from Underground, he is also an influential presence on the web.
About Open Road Integrated Media
Open Road Integrated Media is a global digital publishing company that creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media. Open Road has published fiction and nonfiction ebooks from authors including William Styron, Pat Conroy, Alice Walker, James Jones, Pearl S. Buck, David Halberstam, Victor S. Navasky, Gloria Steinem, Martin Duberman, and Richard Ben Cramer.
