On July 3rd, 2017, desperate for help and with seemingly no one taking his complaints of pain seriously, retired Marine Brian Easley walked into an Atlanta-area bank, gently informing a clerk that he had a bomb. He didn’t want to rob the bank, he insisted; he simply wanted the money he felt the VA had denied him for his own care.
He also wanted to be heard. Easley phoned both
June 17, 2022, marked the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the fallout of which would eventually lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Nixon and his tricksters were held to account in the end, largely thanks to brave insiders such as Alexander Butterfield, who disclosed the existence of the secret White House taping system, as well as Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell.
Charles Chaplin was born in a tough area of London and came to America not only to reinvent himself but partially to invent the language of the then-new art of cinema itself. Through pluck, luck and sheer determination, Chaplin became a leading man and director—often playing the familiar “Little Tramp” character for decades, first in silent films and then, most famously, with a rousing closing speech in “The Great Dictator.”
Miles Hargrove’s filmmaking career got off to the most unlikely of starts, and under rather heavy duress. In 1994, Hargrove and his American family were living in Cali, Colombia—in the backyard of the FARC guerrilla group. Hargrove’s father, Tom, wrote about environmental and other issues affecting the country then under civil war, and it wasn’t long before his reporting and activism began to draw the wrong kind of notice.
Perhaps no modern sports figure has gone from the heights of praise to the depths of public revulsion as spectacularly as Lance Armstrong, the disgraced former cycling champion who beat cancer, won several consecutive Tours de France, but then watched his legend implode after admitting to doping over the course of many years.
Armstrong’s unlikely rise and even more drastic fall
[jwplayer config=”TrailerPagePlayer” mediaid=”5151″]