First, there was the inimitable (though much imitated) Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s longtime sidekick who could do amazing things with the word “here.” He died on Tuesday.  NBC News has a tribute:

Then came the news about Farrah Fawcett, who died yesterday after a long and heroic battle with cancer (we got the alert in the middle of our editorial meeting). I’m told by our intern Abbie Ruzicka that “Farrah Fawcett hair” is literally a term of art in the hair world:

And then, of course, there was Michael Jackson, who died late in the day on Thursday. The first album I ever bought was “Thriller.” On Facebook and Twitter last night, about a million other Gen Xers said the same thing. Here’s a classic moment in an interview with producer Quincy Jones, not long after they’d finished “Thriller.” Check out the live snake Michael has in his hands:

And here’s his 1988 Grammy performance of “Man in the Mirror,” the song we went out on in today’s hour:

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This segment was originally broadcast April 16, 2009.

Long before “Dancing with the Stars” brought rappers and bullriders to the ballroom floor, there was Fred Astaire, bringing song and dance to the big screen.

In musicals from “Top Hat” to “Funny Face” and “Silk Stockings,” he wooed Hollywood’s leading ladies — and viewers around the world — with his elegance, grace, and impeccable dance.

Cultural critic Joseph Epstein brings a fresh take to the story of Fred Astaire, from vaudeville days to enduring icon of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

This hour, On Point: The art and life of the extraordinary Fred Astaire.

You can join the conversation. Did you grow up watching Fred Astaire’s footwork in movies like “Top Hat,” “Swing Time,” and “The Gay Divorcee”? Does “Puttin’ On the Ritz” make you get up and dance?

Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Evanston, Illinois, is Joseph Epstein, essayist and bestselling author of “Snobbery: The American Way” and “Friendship: An Expose.” His new book, “Fred Astaire,” appears in the “Icons of America” series from Yale University Press. Read an excerpt (pdf).

From New York, we’re joined by Elizabeth Kendall, dance critic and author of “The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy in the 1930’s” and, most recently, “Autobiography of a Wardrobe.” She’s a professor at Eugene Lang College, The New School of Liberal Arts.

You can see our Web special featuring Fred Astaire’s reflections on his own life.

Here’s Fred Astaire and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” …

Here’s Astaire and Ginger Rogers in “Swing Time” …

And here they are “Dancing Cheek to Cheek”…

Monika Hertwig in front of the house where her father, Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, forced Helen Jonas to serve as a housemaid.

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Monika Hertwig says she never understood her father’s role in World War II until she saw Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.”

And then she saw it. Nazi SS officer Amon Goeth, death camp commandant (played by Ralph Fiennes), killing and ordering killed thousands of Jews.

Helen Jonas was a slave in that camp — the camp where her mother died — a teenage housemaid to the commandant.

A new PBS documentary, “Inheritance,” captures the wrenching meeting of these two women.

This hour, On Point: The story of the Holocaust survivor and the daughter of the Nazi commandant who enslaved her.

You can join the conversation. How do we face the darkest burdens of history? Of inheritance?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is James Moll. In 1994, along with Steven Spielberg, he founded the Shoah Foundation, which records video testimony from survivors of the Holocaust. In 1999, he won an Academy Award for his documentary “The Last Days,” about the lives of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors. His new film, “Inheritance,” will have its national broadcast premiere on the PBS series P.O.V. tonight, and will be available on DVD in January.

From Weissenberg, Germany, we’re joined by Monika Hertwig. Born in 1946, she is the daughter of the notorious Nazi commandant Amon Goeth.

More links:

The P.O.V. website for “Inheritance” includes a great deal of background information on the film and the Plaszow camp, as well as an update on Helen Jonas and Monika Hertwig since their meeting in Plaszow, Poland.

You can watch a trailer for the film here:

Michael Crichton in December 2004. (AP Photo)

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For four decades in America and around the world, when technology ran amuck and humans ran scared, you could look for the hand of Michael Crichton.

In blockbuster bestsellers and movie thrillers across decades, Crichton unleashed reconstituted dinosaurs, deadly viruses, nanotech swarms, killer gorillas and more human threats to the status quo — female sexual predators and fiendishly clever bank robbers.

He created “ER” and “Jurassic Park,” “The Andromeda Strain,” “Congo,” “Prey,” “State of Fear.” This week he died at 66.

This hour, On Point: The man who gripped us, Michael Crichton.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Lev Grossman, book critic for TIME magazine. Earlier this week he wrote an appreciation of Michael Crichton as “A Master Storyteller of Technology’s Promise and Peril.” He’s the author of the novels “Codex” and “Warp.”

Lynn Nesbit, Michael Crichton’s literary agent for 37 years. She signed him in 1965 while he was still a medical student.

Chris Mooney, contributing editor to Science Progress. His forthcoming book, “Unscientific America,” deals in part with science and Hollywood. He’s also the author of “Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming” and “The Republican War on Science.” He blogs at The Intersection.

More links:

The official Michael Crichton website has a tribute to the author and information on all of his books and movies.

NPR.org remembers Crichton here.

The New York Times’ Charles McGrath offered an appraisal of Crichton this week, headlined “Builder of Windup Realms That Thrillingly Run Amok.” The Times’ obituary is here, along with an archive of features on his work.

Last May, Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote that Crichton’s 1993 Wired magazine essay, “Mediasaurus,” in which he predicted the extinction of mass media, now looks to be on target.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows sounds a similar note, and offers a thought for his friend Michael Crichton.

Director Mike Leigh at the premiere of "Happy-Go-Lucky" outside the Glasgow Film Theatre in April 2008. (Photo: Stuart Crawford)

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British director and screenwriter Mike Leigh has made a career just as far from Hollywood as he could get. Forget the divas, the starlets, the million-dollar-a-day actors. Mike Leigh works differently.

His films are gritty and urban. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, always looking to portray everyday people at work and at home in the drama of something like real life. From a 1950s housewife who doubles as an abortionist in “Vera Drake,” to a young black woman who seeks out her white birth mother in “Secrets & Lies,” Mike Leigh’s films make you think.

This time out, he’s making us think about smiling, laughing compassion as a principled stand. This hour, we talk with director Mike Leigh about his far-from-Hollywood life in film, and his latest release, “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

You can join the conversation. What Mike Leigh movies have spoken to you? “Naked” … “Life Is Sweet” … “Vera Drake”? How about his upbeat new film “Happy-Go-Lucky?” Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Mike Leigh, joins us from London. He’s been making movies for 35 years and has been nominated for five Oscars. He won the Best Director award at Cannes for his 1993 film, “Naked.” The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday calls the heroine of his new film, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” “this year’s most unforgettable and even revolutionary screen protagonist…. at a time when — in Hollywood, at least — violence, bleakness and pessimism are continually confused with moral seriousness.”

The official “Happy-Go-Lucky” website is suitably upbeat and there’s even a “daily dose of happiness” widget which you can watch here:

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Filmmaker Wayne Wang looks on during an interview in Hong Kong in March 2008. (AP)

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Hong Kong-born director Wayne Wang was named after his father’s favorite actor, John Wayne.

He knows his way around Hollywood and mainstream Hollywood films. He directed Jennifer Lopez in “Maid in Manhattan” and Queen Latifah in “The Last Holiday.”

But Wayne Wang made his name spanning cultures in “Chan Is Missing” and “The Joy Luck Club.” Now he’s back, in indie-director mode, with new takes on the Chinese and Chinese-American experience.

This hour, On Point: Wayne Wang on his latest films, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and “The Princess of Nebraska.”

You can join the conversation. Have you followed the work of Wayne Wang? Do you go for his big studio productions? Or his indie instincts? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Wayne Wang joins us from San Francisco. He’s directed eighteen films, from “Chan is Missing” and “The Joy Luck Club,” from Amy Tan’s novel, to “Smoke” by Paul Auster and the J-Lo hit “Maid in Manhattan.” His latest pair of films, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska,” are out this fall — “Prayers” to the art house circuit and “The Princess of Nebraska” to a YouTube debut.

And from Oakland, California, we’re joined by author Yiyun Li. “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska” were adapted from her 2006 short story collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. She’s a professor of creative writing at Mills College.

You can watch “The Princess of Nebraska” here courtesy of the YouTube Screening Room:

And you can watch the trailer for “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” here:

Philippe Petit on his 1974 high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers. (Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images)

In the early morning light of August 7, 1974, an almost unbelievable thing happened in the skies above lower Manhattan.

One hundred and ten stories above the streets far below, 24-year-old Frenchman Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire secretly pulled between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and for 45 minutes, as police raged and pedestrians looked on dumbfounded, danced in the sky.

Now, of course, the towers are gone — since 9/11, just a memory above Ground Zero.

That absence has changed the context and meaning of Petit’s story. But in a way, that brings only more mystery and awe to it.

This Hour, On Point: Philippe Petit and a new documentary about his legendary New York performance, “Man on Wire.”

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from Shokan, New York, is Philippe Petit, world renowned wire-walker. In his youth, he planned and executed a number of daring, unsanctioned wire walks — between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris, off the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia, and between the 110-story World Trade Center towers. Now 58, he continues to perform and lecture and write. His 2002 book “To Reach the Clouds” is a memoir of his World Trade Center experience.

And joining us from New York City is James Marsh, director of the new documentary “Man on Wire.” It won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott calls it “thorough, understated and altogether enthralling.” It has just opened in New York, and will be hitting theaters across the country over the next month.

Click below to watch the trailer of “Man on Wire”:

Alfred Hitchcock was for years the master of movie suspense. But fifty years ago — May, 1958 — he brought out a film so weird that filmgoers didn’t know what to make of it.

It was called “Vertigo.” It had Jimmy Stewart as a San Francisco detective afraid of heights, on the trail of icy blond Kim Novak.

Hitchcock was a Hollywood hero, but “Vertigo” was a box office dud. Now it’s on many “ten best films of all time” lists. Obsessive. Perverse. Haunting. Bizarre. And, fans say, a masterpiece.

This hour, On Point: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” at 50.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Dan Auiler, film critic, historian, and co-author with Martin Scorsese of “Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic” and author of “Hitchcock’s Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of Alfred Hitchcock”

Jack Sullivan, director of American Studies at Rider University and author of “Hitchcock’s Music”

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly

The Paskowitz family was maybe literally like no other.

Nine kids plus mom and dad living in a 24-foot camper. Never going to school. Raised on the beaches of California, Mexico, and Hawaii with surfing as their be all and end all, and the sea as their teacher.

If you’ve ever dreamed of taking your family, your life, way off the grid, here’s the ultimate example.

A new documentary, “Surfwise,” captures the thrill of escape and the deep ambivalence of grown children looking back on being raised, as one says, “like wolves.”

This hour, On Point: Off the grid, and “Surfwise.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jonathan Paskowitz, the second of nine Paskowitz children and producer of “Surfwise.”

Moses Paskowitz, the fifth of nine children.

Doug Pray, director of “Surfwise.”

It’s just a matter of days now, and Indiana Jones is back in a theater near you.

Harrison Ford, the leather jacket, the bullwhip, the fedora — 27 years after “Raiders of the Lost Ark” they’re practically archeological artifacts themselves. But who cares? Everybody wants to get back to snakes and jungle and desert and adventure.

At Yale, where the new film, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” opens in ivy splendor, that story — a true story — has never gone away. In fact, it’s hot.

This hour, On Point: Bull whips everyone. We’ve got real-life derring-do, and the return of Indiana Jones.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe.

Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine and author of “Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World.”

Andrew Mangino, editor in chief of The Yale Daily News, he will be a senior next fall majoring in political science and history.

Christopher Heaney, a 2003 Yale graduate, he lived and studied on a Fulbright scholarship in Cusco, Peru, from 2005-2006, and is writing a book on Hiram Bingham III and Machu Picchu to be published in 2010 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Barbara Shailor, deputy provost for the arts at Yale University.

Eliane Karp-Toledo, first lady of Peru from 2001-2006, she is an anthropologist and currently a visiting lecturer at Stanford University.

In 1967, revolution was in the air. And not just on college campuses. Hollywood, too, was at the threshold of a generational rebellion.

The year’s Oscar nominees told the story: So long to the super-sanitized, big-studio moviemaking machines. Hello to the new rough-and-tumble — sex, violence, and rock-n-roll. Out with the “Sound of Music” clones. In with “Bonnie & Clyde”, “In the Heat of the Night” and “The Graduate.” Films that captured the American moment, and ushered in a new Hollywood era.

This hour, On Point: The Oscar films of 1967, and the birth of a new Hollywood.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Mark Harris, author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.”

Jack Beatty, “On Point” news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

In their new movie, “The Bucket List,” when Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman’s characters get the news that they’re going to die, and soon, they set out to do it all — skydive, climb Everest, see the Pyramids, travel the world.

When high school chemistry teacher Bryan Cranston is given six months to live in AMC’s new series “Breaking Bad,” he opens a meth lab and tries to make his family rich, quick.

What would you do?

This hour, On Point: we talk with real people given months to live, about life when the clock is ticking loud, and their real-life “bucket lists.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Phillip Krone, 66 years-old political consultant. In 2005, he was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. In 2006, came a diagnosis of liver cancer and was given six months to a year to live.

Kris Carr, 36 years-old documentary filmmaker and author of “Crazy Sexy Cancer.” In 2003, she was diagnosed with a rare stage four sarcoma for which there is no cure.

Judith Freedman, 59 years-old psychotherapist. In 2002, she was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and given 6-10 months to live.

In May 1941, when his towering masterpiece “Citizen Kane” hit the theaters, actor, director, writer, producer Orson Welles was just 25 years old. “Citizen Kane” would be called the best American film ever made. Generations of Americans would intone “Rosebud” as a totem of life’s deep mysteries.

Orson Welles — dazzling young American genius — appeared headed for a lifetime of triumph. But he wasn’t. He made more movies. He was broadcaster, newspaperman, comedian, political activist. He married Rita Heyworth, the era’s sex goddess. But by 1947, the supernova had left the country. The great Orson Welles looked tapped out.

Hear a conversation with actor Simon Callow who’s written a new biography that looks at the undoing of Orson Welles after “Citizen Kane.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Simon Callow, author of “Orson Welles: Hello Americans”, the second volume of a three-volume biography. Callow is also a director and actor. He has appeared in “Four Weddings and A Funeral,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “Amadeus.”

It’s the season of big releases and Oscar angling, at the end of a wild, up and down year for movies — from sweeping epics of war won and lost, to comic close-ups on pregnancy, young love, and growing up.

There were the perennial Hollywood blockbusters — from “Ratatouille” to “Spiderman III” to yet another “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

But there were smaller films, too, that stood out from the crowd and impressed the critics. “Waitress,” “Atonement,” “The Namesake.”

Up next, On Point: The movies that stole our hearts — and might just steal the Oscars.

-James Hattori

Guests:

Carrie Rickey, film critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe.

David Carr, media critic for The New York Times and author of the “Carpetbagger” blog on the Oscars for the Times website.

It sounds like a culture-war set piece: Hollywood rolls out a religious-themed Christmas blockbuster and conservative believers go ballistic. That was the story this weekend with the release of “The Golden Compass.”

Based on the wildly popular fantasy novels by British author Philip Pullman, a famously outspoken atheist, the film casts God and the Church as evildoers. Or does it?

Some have called for a boycott of the film. But Pullman fans say the movie lacks the deeper spiritual meaning of the books.

This hour, On Point: the storm surrounding “The Golden Compass.”

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Stephen Prothero, chair of the religion department at Boston University and author of “Religious Literacy: What Americans Need to Know.”

Hanna Rosin, contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly and author of “God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save the Nation.”

Father James Martin, Catholic priest, associate editor of America: The National Catholic Weekly, and author of “My Life With the Saints.”