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AROUND THE QUADS

ALUMNI NEWS

Maggie Gyllenhaal ’99 and Julia Stiles ’04 shared the cover of the November 14, 2003, issue of Entertainment Weekly with Julia Roberts and Kirsten Dunst. The four actresses star in Mona Lisa Smile, which opened last month and part of which was filmed on campus. Meanwhile, Amanda Peet ’94 was one of Jack Nicholson’s love interests in Something’s Gotta Give, which also opened last month.

GEHRIG

On November 3, Columbia and the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig MDA/ALS Research Center held a celebration and exhibition in honor of Lou Gehrig ’25’s 100th birthday in Low Library Rotunda. Gehrig, who played baseball for Columbia on South Field before going on to a brilliant career with the New York Yankees, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The disease is often called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The event featured rare Gehrig memorabilia on loan from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

KUSHNER

Angels in America, winner of two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, made it to the small screen with a splash. Tony Kushner ’78 adapted his epic play about relationships, life and death in the AIDS era into a six-hour production for HBO, which aired in two three-hour blocks on December 7 and 14. The first segment drew 4.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched made-for-cable movie of 2003. The HBO production was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson.

TRUMBO

Legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is the subject of the play Trumbo, written by his son, Christopher Trumbo ’64, which opened Off-Broadway on September 4 at the Westside Theatre (Downstairs). Trumbo was one of the “Hollywood Ten” who stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s by refusing to testify about colleagues’ alleged Communist connections; he subsequently was fired from MGM and imprisoned for a year. While blacklisted, he continued to write screenplays under pseudonyms — he won Oscars in 1953 for Roman Holiday under the name Ian McLellan Hunter and in 1956 for The Brave One under the name Robert Rich — until he was hired in 1960 to write Exodus and Spartacus under his own name.

The two-character (father and son) play consists of readings of letters from Trumbo to family, friends, former friends and others, and describes the family’s struggle for survival and Trumbo’s battles to break the blacklist. It has featured several outstanding actors in the role of Dalton Trumbo, including Nathan Lane, F. Murray Abraham, Brian Dennehy ’60, Gore Vidal, Richard Dreyfuss, Roger Rees, Robert Loggia, Christopher Lloyd and Charles Durning.

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