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People: Alan Alda – Alda’s new spark delves into human brainpower
By Neil Justin, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune 1/2/10
NVRC Note: The full story at http://tinyurl.com/ybwjpr7 includes this: “Alda’s relatability is a direct result of his actor’s training, particularly his work in improvisation, which forces you to listen and instantly react, a task that may have gotten harder for him in recent years as he’s suffered some hearing loss.
The “M*A*S*H” star may have hung up his stethoscope, but as his new project shows, he’s still
a man of science. Alda was at the Science Museum last month to promote the series, “The Human Spark.”
Any boring college class would benefit greatly if Alan Alda were plopped in the front row. Of course, recruiting the six-time Emmy winner to enroll in Biology 101 might prove difficult, so just appreciate “The Human Spark,” a new three-part documentary premiering Wednesday that explores how people have developed their brainpower while Neanderthals and chimpanzees have never shifted out of first gear.
The series could easily have been as lifeless as a stuffed mammoth behind a glass wall, but Alda makes it an easy, breezy science lesson, animating the most eggheaded of scientists with a persistent line of questioning and the eagerness of a child who just learned the word “why.”
“It was sort of like having a very difficult student who is of rather above-average intelligence,” said John Shea, an associate professor of anthropology at New York’s Stony Brook University who is grilled by Alda about Stone Age technology. “It’s usually a one-way street: You lecture, they take notes and you give them an exam. This was instant feedback. One of the real nice benefits of this process is it makes you work harder to make your points clearer and more easily understood.”
Alda has been down this road before. While the post-”M*A*S*H” years have included some of the juiciest roles of his career, including two seasons on “The West Wing,” which added to his 33 Emmy nominations, and an Oscar-nominated turn in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” he devoted more than a decade to “Scientific American Frontiers,” a series in which he first played the role of the nagging student.
Alda, 73, said he initially turned down “Frontiers” because they simply wanted him to provide narration.
- Thanks to NVRC, Fairfax
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