The Deuce – The Complete First Season The Deuce The Complete First Season (HBO Home Entertainment – 2018) New York City in the 70s was dirty, sleazy, violent and wild, but it also had a certain throbbing energy that the current Disney-ification of the city has pretty much defanged. Long before sky-high rents and massive chain stores turned the city into the world’s largest mega-mall, New York was America’s dangerous heartbeat; a throbbing, passionate netherworld of crime, mus

Richard Price Richard Price Living a Lush Life in Some Small Dive by Ronald Sklar Since he was a mere twenty-four, writer Richard Price has been greatly admired for his amazing ear for dialogue, his seemingly seamless writing style and his compelling urban plots. His new novel, Lush Life (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), about worlds colliding on New York’s contemporary Lower East Side, is just the right Price: a living and breathing thing in your hands. It’s not often that a new

Freedomland FREEDOMLAND  (2006) Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, Ron Eldard, William Forsythe, Aunjanue Ellis, LaTanya Richardson, Anthony Mackie, Clarke Peters, Peter Friedman, Domenic Lombardozzi, Aasif Mandi, Philip Bosco, Liza Colon-Zayas and Richard Price. Screenplay by Richard Price. Directed by Joe Roth. Distributed by Columbia Pictures.  113 minutes.  Rated R. Richard Price’s 1998 novel Freedomland was a searing indictment of racial and class wa

Michael Rapaport in “The War at Home” MICHAEL RAPAPORT THE WAR ON TELEVISION by JAY S. JACOBS Michael Rapaport is one of the best color guys in show business.  It’s rare that he gets the lead role, but when a director needs a legitimate, colorful, smart working-class guy for the second or third role, they dial up Rapaport.  He has been the punch-drunk boxer who dates Mira Sorvino in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, controversial teacher Danny Hanson on Boston Public, Will Smit

Richard Price RICHARD PRICE BETTER THAN FICTION BY RONALD SKLAR If Richard Price’s life story were made into a movie, you would accuse the joint of being too far-fetched.  But, as the old cliché goes, truth is stranger than fiction. Price came up in a Bronx housing project, but his gift for writing gained him entrance into the some of the nation’s top colleges.  He thrived at Cornell, Columbia and Stanford, despite his feeling like a fish out of water.  His first novel, The W

Elwood Reid Elwood Reid He Didn’t Six By Ronald Sklar Elwood Reid and I have formed the I-Love-Richard-Price Club. You already may (and should) know that Richard Price (The Wanderers, Ladies’ Man, Blood Brothers and Clockers) is the most brilliant working-class writer who ever lived. Elwood and I worship and adore him. So, kids: now you know the yin-yang of Richard Price. And, of course, you know me (I’ve held ten thousand jobs and my novel is in the works and it’s coming soo