American Playhouse

Fictionalized portrait of one of history's great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.

In an affluent area of downtown New York City, a Sunday evening dinner party is taking place. Hosted by Libby, an insecure thirty-something widow who lost her husband in an unfortunate accident, her guest of honor is downstairs neighbor Alice, a successful novelist, and Alice's lesbian lover, Boo, a family therapist. The other guests are Griever, Libby's best friend from group therapy; Norbert, Libby's gentle skydiving instructor; Tom, an old high-school boyfriend of Libby's now working as a jazz musician and composer, and Emily, Tom's current live-in girlfriend.

Charley Wyckham and Jack Chesney pressure fellow student Fancourt Babberly to pose as Charley's Brazilian Aunt Donna Lucia. Their purpose is to have a chaperone for their amorous visits with Amy and Kitty, niece and ward of crusty Stephen Spettigue. Complications begin when Fancourt, in drag, becomes the love object of old Spettigue and Sir Francis Chesney. - Written by Ed

In 1938 New York, a dentist finds his business failing and his marriage on the rocks. He is a hen-pecked husband with little drive left for success. That is, until he starts getting involved with his lively assistant, a free spirit with a penchant for tall tales and a hidden loneliness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's comedy of a stylish young flapper (Sean Young) who chooses a husband (Lenny Von Dohlen), but finds she can't compete with his family.

The Joy that Kills is a 1984 television film adaptation of Kate Chopin's short story "The Story of an Hour." It was directed by Tina Rathborne and co-written by Rathbone and Nancy Dyer. It was released in 1984 as a part of the PBS series American Playhouse.

Solomon Northup's Odyssey, reissued as Half Slave, Half Free, is a 1984 American television film based on the autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film, which aired on PBS, was directed by Gordon Parks with Avery Brooks starring as the titular character. It was the second film to be funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, following Denmark Vesey's Rebellion in 1982. Parks returned to direct the film after years of absence. He chose to work in the Deep South and to collaborate with a crew of mixed races. The film first aired on PBS on December 10, 1984 and as part of PBS's American Playhouse anthology television series in the following year. It was released on video under the title Half Slave, Half Free.

City News is an independent, American comedy film, written and directed by David Fishelson and Zoe Zinman in New York City in 1983, which was nationally broadcast on PBS in 1984, exhibited theatrically in the U.S. and Canada in 1983, and selected for 12 international film festivals in 1983-4.

Two young urban professionals, each with their own neuroses, make the fatal mistake one day of meeting by chance at an automatic bank teller machine and making a date for the movies.

A videotaped stage performance of Sam Shepard's play

A young Depression-era reporter is assigned to write his newspaper's advice column on the insistence of his mocking editor. Unhappy in the demeaning assignment, he begins to take an interest in one of the readers sending letters.

Weekend is a TV episode of American Playhouse directed by Paul Bogart.