VIDEO: Tony Kushner Talks LINCOLN and Modern Politics

Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Lincoln, recently joined Bill Moyers to talk about what Abraham Lincoln can still teach us all about politics, compromise, and the survival of American democracy. Click below to watch the interview!

Kushner is best known for Broadway's Angels in America, a play in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, a seven-hour epic about the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era New York, which was later adapted into an HBO miniseries for which Kushner wrote the screenplay.

His other plays include Hydriotaphia, Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, and the book for the musical Caroline, or Change. His new translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children was performed at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2006, starring Meryl Streep and directed by George C. Wolfe. Kushner has also adapted Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Corneille's The Illusion, and S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk.

In the early 2000s, Kushner began writing for film. His co-written screenplay Munich was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg in 2005. In January 2006, a documentary feature about Kushner entitled Wrestling With Angels debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was directed by Freida Lee Mock.

DreamWorks Pictures' Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg's hit theaters this November. The film's all-star cast includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, HAl Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, David Costabile, Byron Jennings, Dakin Matthews, Boris McGiver, Gloria Reuben, Jeremy Strong, David Warshofsky, David Strathairn, Walton Goggins, Lee Pace, Jackie Earle Haley, David Oyelowo and JarEd Harris.

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