Arena — Season 1, Episode 155: Huston's Hobby
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
There were these five guys round the table: the Lightweight Boxing Champion of California; an expert on Pre-Columbian art; an honorary lieutenant in the Mexican army; an architect admired by Frank Lloyd Wright ; and a man of whom Marilyn Monroe said, ' No woman can be around him for long without falling in love'. What had they in common? They were all JOHN HUSTON , who also happened to direct The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The Misfits and 25 others. At the age of 74 he started work last week on the$30-million screen version of Annie. Gavin Millar visited him at his Mexican hideaway to mark the publication of his autobiography An Open Book.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.