Oral Histories

DJ Khaled won’t read this thread.

 

If you never read it, it's pretty damn good.

The Greatest Paper That Ever Died

 

Wow. Thanks!

 

+1

 

From 2014: Basketball fanatics Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert originally set out to make "Hoop Dreams" as a half-hour doc for PBS that would focus on the culture surrounding streetball. But as quickly as they got on the blacktop, they left it. The dreams of their subjects, Arthur Agee and William Gates, were too grand for just the playground, and instantly, the filmmakers were immersed in the young men’s lives, showcasing both the good and bad.

An oral history of Hoop Dreams, 20 years after its première

 

The mother lode: An Insanely Comprehensive List of 260 Pop-Culture Oral Histories

Fair warning: Many of the links are busted, but there's plenty of gold left.

 

My great grandfather was named Orel. He lived to be 91. He saw a lot of history.

 

I disagree with that, though. It's great for pop culture and sports, yes, but also for historical events and other stuff.

Not so great if you don't have enough of the subjects there. Otherwise, hit "Record" and let 'em all tell their tales.

Oral histories are gold.

 

If we got an oral history on Orel Hershiser's 59-inning scoreless streak, how meta would that be?

 

Thanks for this. I've bookmarked the page and will be trying to get to the ones that are of interest to me. The first one I clicked on was the one for "Almost Live!," the Seattle-based sketch comedy show that ran on Comedy Central in the early '90s. It was in reality a very local show that ran before a national audience, and the production values were pretty cut-rate, but that was part of its charm. The history of the show was pretty interesting, and until I read the story, I didn't realize Joel McHale got his start on that show.

As far as the format, I generally enjoy it, but I can see where it might be getting a little overdone. The "Loose Balls" book that was referenced earlier was my first experience with the narrative, and that still remains one of my favorite books. The one thing that can derail an oral history sometimes is something I touched upon when we had a thread on the "Deliverance" article that had most of the subjects speaking in the present day, but comments from Burt Reynolds came from an interview years earlier, and it also had input from the author of the movie's source material, who had been deceased for years. To make one of these truly effective, I feel you need to have everyone talking in present day to make it seem there is a conversation going on.