Sally Rosenthal

American Masters is a PBS television series which produces biographies on enduring writers, musicians, visual and performing artists, dramatists, filmmakers, and others who have left an indelible impression on the cultural landscape of the United States.

This six part documentary miniseries presents the evolution of the Broadway musical from its inception in 1893 to current day 2004. It presents those influential players both on stage and behind the scenes, as well as a variety of influential Broadway shows, a handful which are known to have transformed the musical into what the audience knows it to be today.

Melding performance, biography and history, this features interviews with over 90 comedians, writers, producers, and historians.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Mae West achieved great acclaim in every entertainment medium that existed during her lifetime, spanning eight decades of the 20th century. A full-time actress at seven, a vaudevillian at 14, a dancing sensation at 25, a playwright at 33, a silver screen ingénue at 40, a Vegas nightclub act at 62, a recording artist at 73, a camp icon at 85 - West left no format unconquered. She possessed creative and economic powers unheard of for a female entertainer in the 1930s and still rare today. Though a comedian, West grappled with some of the more complex social issues of the 20th century, including race and class tensions, and imbued even her most salacious plotlines with commentary about gender conformity, societal restrictions and what she perceived as moral hypocrisy. Mae West: Dirty Blonde is the first major documentary film to explore West's life and career, as she "climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong" to become a writer, performer and subversive agitator for social change.

A visual journey into the mind and soul of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Navarro Scott Momaday, relating each written line to his unique Native American experience representing ancestry, place, and oral history.