Alan Alda, Jane Pauley and Fred Newman are featured guests in a special Live from New York’s 92nd Street Y simulcast on Wednesday, Oct. 1. The Sedona International Film Festival will broadcast the event at its Mary D. Fisher Theatre at 5:15 p.m., live as it is happening in New York.
What would you save if your house was on fire and it contained not only everything you own, but everything you are?
As we’ll learn from Alan Alda, Jane Pauley and Fred Newman, the question provokes unique responses, and forces us to delve deeply into our personal lives, work and faith. Psychotherapist and pastor Erik Kolbell, the author of the book of the same title, asks the questions and helps us all to consider what it is that we value most in life.
Alan Alda has earned international recognition as an actor, writer and director. He played Hawkeye Pierce on the classic television series M*A*S*H, and wrote and directed many of the episodes. In all, he has received 7 Emmys and has been nominated for an Emmy 33 times. He has also received three Tony nominations. Alda has the distinction of being nominated for an Oscar, a Tony, and an EMMY — and publishing a bestselling book — all in the same year (2005). His Emmy nomination was for his role on The West Wing. His Tony nomination that year was for his role in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. In addition to receiving an Academy Award nomination for his appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator that year, he was also nominated for a British Academy Award.
Jane Pauley was born on October 31, 1950, in Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1976, she joined NBC’s Today show as a correspondent, and later co-anchored with Tom Brokaw and his replacement, Bryant Gumbel. After resigning from her position on Today in 1989, Pauley began a successful NBC weekly magazine series, Real Life with Jane Pauley, which was later renamed Dateline.
Fred Newman grew up at the foot of storytellers in small town Georgia. He graduated Harvard Business School and worked with Newsweek magazine, and was first heard on A Prairie Home Companion as a guest in 1980 as author of his first version of Mouthsounds. He went on to work as an actor, a writer, and a fairly inept puppeteer with Jim Henson, hosting many shows for Nickelodeon and Disney (including the New Mickey Mouse Club).
Erik Kolbell is a writer, psychotherapist, and ordained minister. A Yale Divinity School graduate, Kolbell was the first Minister of Social Justice at Riverside Church in New York City where he worked on fair housing, racial equality, nuclear disarmament, prison reform and other issues. His work took him to Nicaragua as an official US observer for the first democratic elections, to Cuba with Pastors for Peace delivering medical supplies, and to South Africa on a fact finding mission during the apartheid years.