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Boston filmmaker Rod Webber‘s documentary A Man Among Giants is Tiny’s strangely fascinating story. The film will have a special advance screening Friday, March 27th, at the Somerville Theater.

Tiny will be in attendance. He’s one of the most high-spirited people you’ll ever meet, so expect to be entertained before, after, and perhaps even during the movie – a live, running commentary is well within Tiny’s uninhibited range abilities.

Webber will also be in attendance and ready to answer any of your questions.  He also put together this promo video for the screening.  (Warning: Language) …

Also check out the trailer …

While the two students killed two years later at  Kent State in Ohio in response to the, protests of the Vietnam war    (similar only to Orangeburg in the sense that the students were involved in  non-violent activity)  is often remembered as a moment in history when the nation ‘lost its innocence’, the Orangeburg massacre, while occasionally mentioned  in an academic text in  the context, perhaps, of a college history class it has never received the reverential attention paid to the, (as the Neil Young song goes) “two dead in Ohio”.

Scarred Justice was conceived by Northern Light Productions as a way to rectify this near-silence.   Some southern law officials now assure the public that, given there is now a plaque in place in Orangeburg which memorializes the students, that all necessary truths about the flagrant abuse of justice which was Orangeburg have been aired.  While the governor at the time, Robert E. McNair later publicly claimed responsibility for the deaths, one wonders how much of this claim was for the sake of positive publicity, and is not supported by any restitution,  made to the former students and their families.

Judy Richardson, the narrator, writer and co-director (along with Bestor Cram) of the movie mentioned in the Q + A portion of the movie’s showing at the Harvard Film Archive that it took six years to get an interview with some of the law officials who were directly responsible for the incident.   The officers have never been punished.   As she put it, in response to those in the audience who may have thought that the incident was best left in the past, unexamined, “You gotta have the truth before you can have the reconciliation.”

- Sarah Pearlstein

A book recommendation for today: It’s The 400 Blows: a Film by Francois Truffaut from a Screenplay by Francois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy.

Facts: Published by Grove Press in 1969. Edited by The New Yorker‘s David Denby (then, “a recent graduate of the master’s degree program in film at Stanford University”). The series editor is Robert Hughes.

What does it offer? … The full screenplay for The 400 Blows including a chapter devoted to scenes omitted from the film – notably, its original ending. An introduction by Robert Hughes. A collection of articles from Cashiers du Cinema concerning the making of The 400 Blows. Two interviews with Francois Truffaut. Four critical responses to the film. And more than 100 photos, most of which are frame enlargements taken from a non-Cinemascope print of the film.

The book’s objective, writes Hughes, was to offer “information not otherwise readily available concerning the creation and reception of this film” and to “further study how the film relates to the director’s work and/or to film history.”

- Sarah Pearlstein

Here’s the trailer for the novel “Power Play” by Joesph Finder. It was created by my friend, cinematographer Ed Slattery. Ed founded Trailerpix, a company that makes movie trailers for books, short stories and screenplays so that the narrative of the written work can be promoted on television, in theaters and online.

- Sarah Pearlstein

- Sarah Pearlstein