CURATION
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from this page:
by Title Holder
Network Node
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Name:
Frank Beacham
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City/Place:
New York City
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Country:
United States
Life & Work
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Bio:
FRANK BEACHAM is a New York City-based independent writer, director and producer who works in print, radio, television, film and theatre.
A former staff reporter for United Press International, the Miami Herald, Gannett Newspapers and Post-Newsweek, Beacham’s articles and stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Village Voice. Two stories from his non-fiction book, "Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder," are being developed into feature films.
"Maverick," his play (written with George Demas) was produced off-Broadway in 2019. It was the story of his work with Orson Welles.
Beacham co-wrote the Harvey Brooks memoir "View from the Bottom," and has written three non-fiction books on video for the American Society of Cinematographers. He is a contributor to "Toward the Meeting of the Waters," an anthology on the civil rights movement published by the University of South Carolina Press.
Beacham has conceived and written projects for companies that include Warner Music Group, NBC, Sony, Panasonic, Mindport Communications, Snell & Wilcox, Authentium, Next Level Communications, Ameritech, Pixelmetrix, AMG Media and General Instrument.
Beacham was executive producer of Tim Robbins’ Touchstone feature film, "Cradle Will Rock," which was released nationally in 1999 and is currently available on home video.
Beacham wrote and directed the American Public Radio drama, "The Orangeburg Massacre," starring David Carradine, Blair Underwood and James Whitmore. It won the 1991 Gold Medal for Best History and the Silver Medal for Best Social Issues programs in international radio competition among 26 nations at the New York Festivals.
Beacham produced, with the late Richard Wilson, the six-hour retrospective, "Theatre of the Imagination: Radio Stories by Orson Welles & the Mercury Theatre" and wrote, directed and produced the documentary, "The Mercury Company Remembers" with Leonard Maltin. Previously, he has written for "Riverwalk: Live From the Landing," a weekly jazz broadcast from American Public Radio.
During the 1970s and 80s, Beacham was owner of Television Matrix, a film/TV production company that developed and produced a wide range of programming for broadcast, cable, syndication and home video markets. The company also supplied video news crews and freelance news reporting teams to the networks and other broadcasters.
Beacham’s clients included ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, BBC, NHK, Canadian Broadcasting and many individual television stations. He provided all west coast production and post-production services for "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," "The Start of Something Big" with Steve Allen and the Emmy award-winning "Mr. Previn Comes to Town." His company also provided southeast production services for NBC’s "TODAY" show and Paramount’s "Entertainment Tonight."
In 1985, he teamed with Orson Welles over a six-month period to develop a one-man television special. "Orson Welles Solo" was canceled after Mr. Welles died on the day production was set to begin. Beacham’s other credits include "A Tribute to John Huston," hosted by Jack Nicholson and Richard Brooks; "Ronald Neame on the Director;" "Hollywood Chronicles: The Great Movie Clowns," hosted by Jackie Cooper; "Private Lives, Public People," and "A Day in the Life of Hawaii," directed by Gordon Parks.
As a writer/reporter, Beacham was a member of a joint investigative reporting team for New York Times/Post-Newsweek/Miami Herald that spent one year investigating U.S. Sen. Edward Gurney (R-Florida). Gurney was indicted and left office. At UPI, he was assigned to cover the civil rights movement in Mississippi in early 1970s. He was a documentary cameraman at 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. He provided multi-station radio coverage of flights of Apollo 11 and 13 from the Kennedy Space Center.
In 1977, Beacham provided television coverage of the Begin-Sadat peace talks in Egypt and President Carter’s 1978 trip to France for ABC News. He worked for CBS News in Nicaragua during 1979 when Sandinista guerrillas overthrew President Anastasio Somoza. He covered the exile of Shah of Iran in Panama for NBC News. He also provided television coverage of President Reagan’s 1982 European trip to 25 television stations (working in five countries in ten days).
Frank Beacham has a B.A. in Journalism, 1969, from the University of South Carolina. He did post graduate studies at UCLA, the University of Southern California, and the American Film Institute.
Contact Information
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Email:
[email protected]
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Telephone:
212-873-9349
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Address:
141 West 73rd St. #7S
New York, NY 10023
My Writing
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Publications:
WHITEWASH: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem & Murder
Lost stories from the Modern South
Discover the hip young black and white dancers that defied segregation after World War II and gave birth to Carolina “beach music” and the shag. Visit Charlie’s Place, the defiant interracial nightclub in Myrtle Beach where jazz met race music, and gutsy clubgoers risked their lives to take the dance floor. Witness the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in 1950 to stop the rise of the “forbidden” music that would soon become known as rhythm & blues.
Revisit the Orangeburg Massacre and find out why, after more than half a century, an aggressive effort continues to distort the role of former Gov. Robert McNair and his police forces in the 1968 killing of three black college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Join the author’s surprising journey to his South Carolina hometown of Honea Path when he discovers that his own grandfather organized a group of gunmen that killed seven men and wounded 30 others at the local cotton mill in 1934.
For all roads here lead to Black Rome, and everywhere, but all pathways lead to Bahia.
I created this matrix so the world might discover elemental cultural genius here in Bahia, Brazil: João do Boi (rest in power) and magisterial others... But following the dictates of logic, in order to make these artists discoverable worldwide, the matrix must, to the greatest extent possible, do likewise for all creators across the planet.
Pardal/Sparrow
The Integrated Global Creative Economy: uncoiling from this sprawling Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian cultural matrix...
The mathematics of the small world phenomenon transforming the creative universe into a creative village wherein all are connected by short pathways to all...
Tap the grey crosses on somebody's Matrix Page to recommend that person for the categories next to those crosses.
(Crosses visible when you are logged in)
The crosses will turn green.
That person/category will appear in your My Curation & Recommendations.
You will appear in that person's Incoming Curation and Recommendations.
You and the person you are recommending will be pulled by mathematical gravity to within discoverable distance of everybody else inside the Matrix.
In a small world great things are possible.
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
This Matrix was conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
Sodré
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Hence A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until...
And hence a platform whereupon all creators tend to accessible proximity to all other creators, irrespective of degree of fame, location, or the censor.
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome (where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
Assis Valente's (of Santo Amaro, Bahia) "Brasil Pandeiro" filmed by Betão Aguiar
Betão Aguiar
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Replete with Brazilian greatness, but we listened to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff in there too; visitors are David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR/WXPN
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Salvador is our base. If you plan to visit Bahia, there are some things you should probably know and you should first visit:
www.salvadorbahiabrazil.comAcross the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
Ex Terra Brasilis
Wolfram MathWorld
UNIVERSAL
Alicia Svigals
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Roberto Mendes
Luciano Calazans
Gustavo Caribé
J Velloso
Lázaro Ramos
Fernando Guerreiro
Maria Marighella
Russell Okung
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
RÁDIO MATRIX