First Draft - Arts and Entertainment

April 6, 2021
By Margit Longbrake, senior editor

In a series of new videos, New Orleans poets craft 21st-century responses to 19th-century poems.




February 24, 2021
By Eric Seiferth, curator/historian

After the Civil War, benevolent associations flourished in New Orleans's Black community, and so did their impact on life in the city.




February 9, 2021
By Melissa Carrier, Eli A. Haddow, and Keely Merritt

COVID-19 may have canceled parades for 2021, but it couldn't erase Mardi Gras entirely. Creativity flourished around the Crescent City in the form of a new tradition: house floats.




December 11, 2020
By Dave Walker, communication specialist

We spoke with Lance Nichols, whose role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, launched his acting career in major Hollywood films.




October 14, 2020
Margit Longbrake, senior editor

Amid the American Civil War, a new civil rights movement was forming in New Orleans—in French.




September 18, 2020
By Dhani Adomaitis, Madeline Drace, Michelle Harrison, and Cecilia Hock

For years, cinephiles have lamented a lack of originality coming out of Hollywood studios. However, there’s no shortage of stories waiting to be told onscreen, and that’s where we can be of use to studio bosses.




September 18, 2020
By Dave Walker, communication specialist

To help us celebrate one of the triumphs of recent Hollywood South creativity, Benh Zeitlin—who directed, co-wrote, and co-scored Beasts of the Southern Wild—answered a few of our questions.




September 10, 2020
By Judith Bonner, senior curator and curator of art

Over the course of the two years after Hurricane Katrina, Rolland Golden roamed the city’s flooded areas, sketching and painting a series of 26 scenes representing the turmoil and devastation of the city during the flood and the stark desolation after the waters receded.




August 21, 2020
By Mark Cave, senior curator

The wide range of materials features objects such as the typewriter Williams used to write the play, early manuscript drafts, original playscripts, playbills, and photographs (including Vivien Leigh’s photograph collection from the shooting of the 1951 film version), as well as posters, lobby cards, first editions of published volumes, and foreign translations. 




August 21, 2020
By Dave Walker, communication specialist

The 1951 film of Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans-set A Streetcar Named Desire won multiple Academy Awards and is considered a landmark of American cinema. To prepare for the August 24, 2020, #NolaMovieNight group re-watch of the film, First Draft returned to local dialect coach and acting teacher Francine Segal for insight into the film’s accents (always of interest to New Orleanians) and acting styles.






 

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