Movies On Demand, 3:00 a.m. ET
MOVIE DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: In my estimation, there have been two astounding, can’t-miss documentaries made about movies that were started but, at the time, long abandoned. The first was 1965’s The Epic That Never Was, about the ill-fated attempt to film Charles Laughton in an early version of I, Claudius (the surviving outtakes from which are fabulous). The second was 2002’s Lost in La Mancha, chronicling Monty Python member Terry Gilliam’s decades-long quest to film his version of Don Quixote, which he called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Fascinating outtakes there, too – but what’s even more fascinating is that Gilliam persevered, and finally released a version of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, 30 years after he began the project, in 2018 – where it received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Now comes a prime contender for a third such documentary: The Ghost of Peter Sellers, a film about Peter Medak’s aborted attempt to film Peter Seller in a high seas comedy called The Ghost in the Noonday Sun. Not only was it a troubled, problematic filmed-on-the-open-sea 1974 shoot (think Jaws, but with more laughs), but Sellers was in a high mode not just of acting, but of acting out. That’s according to Medak, at least, who actually directs this score-settling documentary.
PBS, 8:00 p.m. ET
Toni Morrison, the first Black American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (a feat she accomplished in 1993), is profiled in this new
American Masters documentary. It spends as much time on her art and technique as it does her biographical background, and her opinions about both her craft and her audiences are amazingly resonant in this current undercurrent of social change. She says of her canon, “I didn’t want it to be a teaching tool for white people.” And yet, speaking as an appreciative white person, it works precisely as that… but as a lot more.
Check local listings. For more info, see Mike Hughes' Open Mike.
HBO, 10:00 p.m. ET
Even in a socially distanced format, I expect tonight’s new edition to include lots of new reporting, as well as heated opinions, about what’s going on in the world of sports these days. And what’s going on – and not going on – is equally newsworthy, and important.