This edition of Networthy includes links to ND-related films at the Sundance Film Festival, a 1-year anniversary reprise of a cool music video involving the ND Marching Band and a Grammy award winning rock band, and the inside scoop on last year’s Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien feud.
Two films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival have Notre Dame connections. Danielle Beverly, a visiting assistant professor of filmmaking, served as the field producer for Rebirth, a documentary that chronicles the lives of five New Yorkers in the years after the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. The stories of the five, who were touched by the tragedy, are interspersed between time-lapse photography of the Ground Zero site that has been filming around the clock since 2002. The film’s producers hope to one day endow a Project REbirth Center for victims and first responders of other tragic events.
Also, competing in the documentary competition at Sundance, is How to Die in Oregon, directed by Peter D. Richardson, ND class of ’02. The film examines the assisted suicide controversy in Oregon. In 1994, that state became the first to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
The New York Times columnist David Brooks recently cited Notre Dame Professor of Marketing John Gaski, ND class of ’71 and ’73MBA, in his column on interesting academic studies. Brooks reported that Gaski and a colleague found a surprisingly strong link between Daylight Savings Time and lower SAT scores, according to their study in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics.
4.5 million. That is the number of plays that the rock group OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass video, which features the ND Marching Band, has garnered on You Tube since it was posted one year ago in January. To learn how the Notre Dame Marching Band came to be involved in the project, read the story “A ‘massive explosion of joy and music,’” which appeared in the Winter 2009-10 edition of Notre Dame Magazine.
In Paradigm Lost, an essay published in the online Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Notre Dame alumnus and former poet laureate of Pennsylvania Samuel Hazo, ND class of ’49, examines three events that occurred in the last decade which he argues threaten the future of democracy in America.
Finally, in case you missed it in print, the December 2010 issue of Vanity Fair offered an excerpt from The War for Late Night, a forthcoming book by Bill Carter, ND Class of’ 71, in which The New York Times media writer offers a “behind-the-scenes” look at last year’s “Battle for the Tonight Show,” which ended with Jay Leno getting his old program back and Conan O’Brien getting a hefty settlement from NBC and a new show on cable.