Tag Archives: Mark

Mark Cuban on ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ cancellation: Words have consequences

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Hal Holbrook Dies: Actor Who Portrayed Mark Twain Was 95

Emmy and Tony winner Hal Holbrook, an actor best known for his role as Mark Twain, whom he portrayed for decades in one-man shows, died on Jan. 23. He was 95.

Holbrook’s personal assistant, Joyce Cohen, confirmed his death to the New York Times on Monday night.

Holbrook played the American novelist in a solo show called “Mark Twain Tonight!” that he directed himself and for which he won the best actor Tony in 1966. He returned to Broadway with the show in 1977 and 2005 and appeared in it more than 2,200 times (as of 2010) in legit venues across the country. He began performing the show in 1954.

He received an Emmy nomination for a TV adaptation of “Mark Twain Tonight!” in 1967, the first of multiple noms. He won four Emmy Awards.

He also drew an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for his role in the film “Into the Wild” in 2008. At the time of the nomination, the 82-year-old Holbrook was the oldest performer to ever receive such recognition.

Holbrook’s craggy voice and appearance lent itself to historical portrayals and other parts that required gravitas. Indeed, he also played Abraham Lincoln, winning an Emmy in 1976 for the NBC miniseries “Lincoln” and reprising the role in the ABC miniseries “North and South” in 1985 and its sequel the following year. Moreover he won his first Emmy, in 1970, for his role as the title character in the brief but highly regarded series “The Bold Ones: The Senator.” He played the commander-in-chief in 1980 film “The Kidnapping of the President”; a senior judge tempted into vigilante justice in “The Star Chamber”; and John Adams in the 1984 miniseries “George Washington.” Much later, he played the assistant secretary of state on a couple of episodes of “The West Wing,” and most recently he played a conservative Republican congressman in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and a judge in the 2013 historical drama “Savannah.”

In 1978 he was nominated for an Emmy for his role in a TV adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” as the Stage Manager, another role with which he is strongly associated.

Earlier, he drew an Emmy nomination for a noted role as a man who reveals his homosexuality to his son, played by Martin Sheen, in the ahead-of-its-time ABC 1972 telepic “That Certain Summer.”

He recurred on the late ’80s Linda Bloodworth sitcom “Designing Women” as the boyfriend to his real-life wife, Dixie Carter; his character on that show was killed off so he could take one of the starring roles in another CBS-Bloodworth effort, the Burt Reynolds starrer “Evening Shade,” in which he played Reynolds’ irascible father-in-law. He appeared in 79 episodes of the show from 1990-94.

Holbrook also directed four episodes of “Designing Women.”

In 2006 the actor guested on “The Sopranos” as a terminally ill patient who imparts some wisdom to the hospitalized Tony Soprano.

Holbrook’s inimitable voice, full of a world-weary integrity, was inevitably attractive to documentary makers and feature film directors requiring narration or voiceover. He narrated docus such as “The Might Mississippi” and “The Cultivated Life: Thomas Jefferson and Wine” and movies including 2011’s “Water for Elephants.” He won an Emmy in 1989 for narrating the “Alaska” segment of the “Portrait of America” documentary series.

The actor made a deep impression on the bigscreen as well, playing Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” — it was he who intoned the famous words “Follow the money!”; a power-mad police lieutenant in the Dirty Harry movie “Magnum Force”; and, in a brief and underappreciated performance, a stockbroker warning of the dangers of ethical lapses in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.”

Harold Rowe “Hal” Holbrook, Jr. was born in Cleveland; his mother was a vaudeville dancer. He was raised in South Weymouth, Mass., and graduated from Ohio’s Denison U., where an honors project about Twain led him to develop “Mark Twain Tonight.” Serving in the Army in WWII, Holbrook was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theater productions including the play “Madam Precious.”

Ed Sullivan saw him perform “Mark Twain Tonight” and gave the young thesp his first national exposure on his television show in February 1956.

Holbrook was a member of summer stock legit troupe the Valley Players, based in Holyoke, Mass., and opened its 1957 season with a perf of “Mark Twain Tonight.” The State Dept. sent him on a tour of Europe that included appearances behind the Iron Curtain, and Holbrook first played the role Off Broadway in 1959. Columbia Records recorded an album of excerpts from the show.

On Broadway, Holbrook played the role of the Major in the original production of Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy” in 1964. In 1968 he was one of the replacements for Richard Kiley in the original Broadway production of “Man of La Mancha” despite limited ability as a singer.

As Holbrook approached his mid-80s, he remained a busy actor, including multi-episode appearances on FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” and NBC’s “The Event.” In 2011 he was also in an independent film, the thriller “Good Day for It,” in whose conception he was intimately involved, and he appeared as a science teacher who knows the truth in Gus Van Sant’s anti-fracking film “Promised Land.”

Holbrook’s memoir “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain” was published in September 2011.

In 2014, Holbrook was the subject of the documentary “Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey,” directed by Scott Teems, which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and depicted Holbrook’s career portraying Twain. Holbrook appeared as Red Hudmore on the final season of “Bones” in 2017, and appeared in an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Hawaii Five-0” that same year. In September 2017, Holbrook announced his retirement from “Mark Twain Tonight.”

Holbrook was married three times. He and Carter were married in 1984 and remained together until her death in 2010.

He is survived by his three children and two stepdaughters, as well as two grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.



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Mark Zuckerberg and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are launching the Justice Accelerator Fund

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, is planning to overhaul its political program and spin out much of its advocacy work to outside organizations, Recode has learned.

It’s a strategic shift for CZI and the largest structural change to the organization since the couple created it five years ago.

Zuckerberg and Chan will launch a new group focused on criminal justice reform that they will back with $350 million from their fortune. CZI will also be effectively merging their in-house immigration work with an outside group also backed by Zuckerberg, Fwd.us, which pushes for comprehensive reform.

All told, the billionaire couple is committing another $450 million to the two causes over the next few years. The changes are the latest evolution in how Zuckerberg is trying to accomplish his policy ambitions at the dawn of a friendlier Joe Biden administration — and at a time when he is becoming more of a political liability for those very causes.

CZI was launched in 2015 with a special focus on politics — one of its three original central “pillars” was an advocacy unit called Justice and Opportunity Initiatives — and it has grown to become one of the most important philanthropies in America. Now, that political work is being outsourced to external organizations, and the JOI team at CZI is expected to largely fold.

The philanthropy is increasing the total amount it is committing each year to criminal justice reform, and it seems likely that the revamp will increase the total amount of money that CZI puts into politics at least in the short term. CZI spent just under $450 million on these JOI programs over the last five years. So it could mean that CZI spends roughly in total as much as it did before over the long term, but in a more nimble, less centralized way — granting outside groups the autonomy to spend on whatever nonprofit or political causes they, and not CZI, deem best.

CZI would then be more of a political bank account and less involved than it is now in direct campaign and advocacy work, which can be hairy and hazardous work that generally makes enemies.

Some CZI employees have been worried about where they would fit into the new structure, according to two sources familiar with the matter, but CZI told Recode there would be no layoffs. Some employees who work on CZI’s political projects could find new homes at the criminal justice group or at Fwd.us.

Some people affiliated with CZI also have concerns, sources say, about whether each existing grantee will continue to take in the same total amount of funding under the new arrangement. CZI is not expected to offer so-called “sunset grants” — major financial commitments to nonprofits when a philanthropy is winding down its work in an area. But groups like Fwd.us are planning to try and ensure grassroots groups will not experience unexpected funding gaps, one source said, although some are nervous because these CZI grantees will now have to convince a new party to fund their work.

CZI’s political spending has drawn more scrutiny as its co-CEO Zuckerberg became more and more politically divisive because of his role as CEO at Facebook. Some of Zuckerberg’s travails in his day job have boomeranged onto CZI, which is a separate organization but is linked reputationally to the Facebook founder. When CZI launched an ambitious attempt this year to pass a California ballot initiative to modify a law that was widely considered the state’s third rail, opponents latched onto Zuckerberg’s involvement as a line of attack.

The new arrangement will, intentionally or not, give Zuckerberg more distance from his specific bets even if it ends up funding the same amount and types of political projects. CZI has also been dogged recently by unrest within the organization about how it deals with race and in its political work, including an ongoing discrimination claim (that CZI has said is “unsubstantiated”).

The spun-out, independent criminal justice group, called the Justice Accelerator Fund, will be led by Ana Zamora, who heads CZI’s work on the topic and used to lead the ACLU in Northern California. Zuckerberg has said that CZI spends about $40 million a year on criminal justice reform grants, making it among the largest funders of this work in philanthropy.

CZI is currently planning to spend about $350 million to stand up the Justice Accelerator Fund over the next five years, for an average of about $70 million a year. That organization, whose precise structure hasn’t yet been determined, will then award grants to new groups. CZI expects the Justice Accelerator Fund to eventually take in money from other donors in the future.

“This time is ripe for a more just America, and this surge of funding will dramatically speed up the pace of progress,” Zamora said in a new letter to CZI partners.

Another $100 million over the next three years will head from CZI to Fwd.us, which was originally focused solely on immigration work but now does some advocacy on criminal justice matters as well. A small amount of that $100 million is expected to be regranted to other groups. The majority of Fwd.us’s funding for operating has long come from CZI, about $30 million a year in funding, meaning that its budget is only increasingly slightly — albeit now with a longer-term commitment.

CZI’s work on housing affordability issues, the third plank of its JOI program, will stay under CZI’s roof and remain more on regional issues in California. Recode reported last month that the head of JOI, who oversaw all of this policy work, had left the organization.

The $100 billion-plus philanthropy will continue its work on the other two non-political priorities of its work — its support for scientific research and its education efforts, both of which have been heavily involved in coronavirus relief efforts.

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Report: Detroit Lions hiring Mark DeLeone as LB coach

The Detroit Lions have added another coach to their staff. As first reported by ESPN’s Field Yates, the Lions are hiring linebackers coach Mark DeLeone from the Chicago Bears.

DeLeone had spent the past two seasons with Chicago, following Matt Nagy, whom he coached alongside with at Kansas City for years. He got his start at the University of Iowa as a defensive assistant. In 2012, he got his first break in the NFL as the Jets defensive assistant.

He’s been coaching the linebacker position since 2016, helping players like Roquan Smith grow his career. In Kansas City, he also worked alongside Lions linebacker Reggie Ragland, who is set to become a free agent in March.

DeLeone apparently decided to move on from Chicago after defensive coordinator Chuck Pagano retired and the Bears announced safeties coach Sean Desai had gotten the promotion to replace Pagano. DeLeone is not currently listed on the Bears coaching staff on their official website.

In addition to DeLeone, the Lions officially announced Anthony Lynn as their next offensive coordinator, as previously reported. Also, Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free press is reporting that tight ends coach Ben Johnson is being retained by the Lions.

So their coaching staff officially looks like this right now.

Head coach: Dan Campbell

Offensive coordinator: Anthony Lynn
OL coach: Hank Fraley
RB coach/assistant head coach: Duce Staley
TE coach: Ben Johnson
WR coach:
QB coach:

Defensive coordinator: Aaron Glenn
DL coach:
LB coach: Mark DeLeone
DB coach: Aubrey Pleasant

Special teams coordinator: Dave Fipp



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