Clancy Sigal: Lord of the Gadflies

About

"Cormac McCarthy's veer" 30m 10s Cormac McCarthy has spent the last 25 years writing his novels at the mountain top retreat of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. An institute dedicated to the formal analysis of complex systems. In this documentary filmed at the library at SFI (and in the desert), Cormac in conversation with his colleague David Krakauer, reflects on isolation, mathematics, character, and the nature of the unconscious. -- -- "Clancy Sigal: Lord of the Gadflies" 1h 28m 21s Clancy Sigal ventured everywhere and accomplished everything a bold spirit possibly can in the turbulent course of a mere lifetime: street-smart city kid, precinct worker, union organizer, soldier, UCLA graduate, Hollywood agent, blacklisted target of McCarthyism, European emigre, Fleet Street journalist, novelist, staunch leftist disdainful of party lines, enemy of cant of any kind, psychedelic journeyer, skeptical devotee of psychiatrist R. D. Laing, National Book Award nominee, USC journalism teacher, and screenwriter of Frida and other films. An eloquent radical who shook up things in every milieu he encountered, nothing he ever wrote was predictable, except for the compassion, dark humor and demand for social justice always at the core. Hinged on extensive interviews with Sigal and with associates, this documentary offers an intriguing alternative view of recent US and UK history, peppered with provocative insights by the most savvy and candid of transatlantic travelers. Interviewees include critic John Lahr, actor Oliver Cotton, editor Tim Radford, playwright David Edgar, screenwriter Janice Tidwell, and more.