S9.E8 ∙ Smart World: Made Of

"Shooting for the Butler" celebrates the life of Lord Dunsany, the 'Godfather' of Fantasy literature. His influence on the Fantasy genre includes J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and Neil Gaiman. The early short stories written between 1905 and 1918 are his most significant work but Dunsany went on to have a successful career as a playwright and wrote more than 68 novels. A fanatical huntsman, Lord Dunsany inherited a castle in Ireland and could trace his ancestry back to the Norman conquest. This larger-than-life character is evaluated in this 60 minute documentary, which includes excerpts from several film adaptations of his stories.

A fairly comic look into the making of the creatures and battle scenes for the film Army of Darkness (1993). We look at various different skeletons created for the battle, the creation of the pit bitch and some hilarious behind the scenes stories and footage of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell. Well worth looking at for any avid fan of the Evil Dead trilogy.

A documentary interview with the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, precedes the performances with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra of two of his works, "Il Transparente" conducted by Vaclav Neumann and "Instant Remembered" conducted by Marc Albrecht with soprano Penelope Walmsley-Clark, the solist.

The Brother Side of the Wake is an experimental documentary about the people of Venice, California, and probes the question that Orson Welles explores in The Other Side of the Wind: "Is the journey more important than the destination?"