DelawareScene: Conversation with Nelson Pressley, Author of Fonda on Film @ Lewes Public Library

Conversation with Nelson Pressley, Author of Fonda on Film

Join in-person in the library or online for a conversation with Nelson Pressley, author of Fonda on Film: The Political Movies of Jane Fonda, a portrait of an iconic activist-artist bridging the gap between streets and screens, and enduring as one of the world’s most admired and controversial performers. Interviewing Pressley is Shelby Cooke, Programmer at Cinema Art Theatre and film critic.

This movie book about a mega-celebrity voyages through Fonda’s learning years in the 1960s and the calculated payoff of the 1970s. She emerged as a Hollywood scion challenged to prove herself while trying to rise above ingenue roles and sex-angst melodramas. Splitting time between the United States and France to stretch her range, Fonda broke through as the perky newlywed of Barefoot in the Park, the sci-fi pinup Barbarella, and the Oscar-winning star of Klute. Then Fonda earned her activist stripes with the Vietnam vets’ Winter Soldier hearings and her alt-USO F.T.A. tour. She survived the “Hanoi Jane” flap and, by the mid-1970s, transformed into a singular star on an unparalleled movie making mission. Fonda’s long post-Klute break ended with bold comeback hits—comedy and economic justice in Fun with Dick and Jane, high drama and political commitment with Julia. Over the following half decade, Fonda’s production company generated the purposeful movies that still underpin her actor-activist persona, including the groundbreaking Coming Home on Vietnam, the timely The China Syndrome on nuclear power, and the still-relevant 9 to 5 on workplace equality. Her more recent work protesting the Iraq War in 2005 and ringleading the 2019–20 Fire Drill Fridays campaigns on Capitol Hill illustrates Fonda’s political method—and how it guided her movie work.

Nelson Pressley was a Washington Post theater critic/arts journalist for twenty years, writing reviews, features and profiles, interviewing Tony, Emmy, Oscar, and Pulitzer winners, editing in the Weekend section, publishing a weekly theater review newsletter, hosting some of the paper’s first Facebook Live projects, and creating other video content.

NOTE: this session is available to attend in-person or through Zoom. You MUST REGISTER and indicate which you prefer.