Mark Harris Movies

Documentary filmmaker Freida Lee Mock explores the rich life of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner in a film that traces Kushner's career from his 2001 play Homebody/Kabul through his 2004 collaboration with Maurice Sendak on a revised version of Brundibar. A trip to Kushner's hometown of Lake Charles, LA, provides a personal touch as the playwright attends his father's birthday party, with quiet scenes in his Hudson River Valley retreat offering moments of thoughtful meditation that stand in stark contrast to his harried Manhattan business dealings. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Filmed in Vermont, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is based on one of Mark Twain's more mysoginistic works. Mysterious stranger Robert Preston shows up in Hadleyburg, a town that prides itself upon the honesty and integrity of its leaders. Preston offers $40,000 in gold to the anonymous Hadleyburg citizen who, years earlier, had given Preston a handout and some valuable advice. The stranger sends letters to each of Hadleyburg's nineteen finest families, containing cryptic clues pointing to the identity of the beneficiary of the gold. Before the story is over, it becomes painfully clear that 18 of the town's "nineteeners" are willing to lie and deceive in order to claim the prize. Adapted by Mark Harris (who was compelled to sweat out 40 pages of the original story in order to make it "play" on TV), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg was first presented in tandem with a dramatization of William Faulkner's Barn Burning on PBS' American Short Story series; the program first aired on March 17, 1980. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

First published in early 1956, Mark Harris's baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly was swiftly adapted for television; on September 24, 1956, a streamlined 60-minute version of the Harris novel was telecast live on The US Steel Hour. Paul Newman plays Henry Wiggen, a slang-happy, unabashedly self-promotional pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. Wiggen spends a great deal of his free time protecting his dimwitted roomate, catcher Bruce Pearson (Albert Salmi), from being dropped from the team. It's not that Henry is overly fond of Bruce; it's simply that he knows (but the rest of the team doesn't) that Bruce is dying of Hodgkin's disease. This TV adaptation remains faithful to the first-person singular style of the novel by having Henry periodically step "out" of the drama to address the audience: this device is most effective at the finale when, after tearfully recalling the "ragging" he often gave his now-deceased teammate, Henry sobs "From here on, I rag nobody." A very young George Peppard appears as Piney Woods, the country-boy ballplayer who sings the ballad from which the drama's title is derived. A kinescoped version of Bang the Drum Slowly was included in the 1981 PBS anthology The Golden Age of Television. Harris' novel was later adapted into a 1973 theatrical feature, starring Michael Moriarty as Henry and Robert De Niro as the "doom-ded" Bruce. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi