Episode for September 21, 2022
Episode 687: Stand Up Special with Actor, Writer, director, author, narrator and Zen Buddhist priest and teacher Peter Coyote
Hi there Kim and apparently Melanie who also reads the show notes. These show notes are for you 2 unless someone else wants to show themselves! I will see you at our next secret meeting and I will invite your favorite guest to join us! How about that for a bonus!
I wanted today’s conversation with Peter Coyote to be evergreen or always relevant whenever you decide to listen to it so I eschewed the normal production elements and news and got right to my chat with the legend. Special thanks to Mark Nolte and his ban City Park in Iowa City who wrote this song for Peter. Please go listen or stream it! My previous conversations with Peter are linked below
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PETER COYOTE began his film career at 39, after living nearly a dozen years in the counter-culture during the 1960s and 70s. Since then, he has performed as an actor for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including: Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Walter Hill, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Diane Kurys, Sidney Pollack and Jean Paul Rappeneau. To date he has made over 150 films.
In 2006 he had a major role in three televison series: The Inside on Fox-TV, the 4400 on USA Channel and played the Vice-President to Geena Davis’s President on Commander in Chief for ABC-TV until the show’s end. In 2011 he starred as the District Attorney in the new version of Law and Order – LA. In 2000 year he was the on-camera announcer of the Academy Awards Ceremony, taking the heavy-lifting off co-host Billy Crystal’s shoulders for the detailed announcements and data which played live to an estimated one billion listeners. In 2007 he was prominently featured as an old boxing promoter in Rod Lurie’s “Resurrecting the Champ” with Samuel. L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett, and also as Sally Field’s disreputable writing teacher on the television series, “Brothers and Sisters.” He recently completed a six hour series called The Disappearance which aired last year. Most recently, he played Robert Mueller to Jeff Daniel’s Jim Comey, and Brendan Gleeson’s Donald Trump. The series is called The Comey Rule and will be released this year on SHOWTIME.
Mr. Coyote has written a memoir of his counter-culture years called Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, appeared on three best-seller lists and sold five printings in hardback after being released by Counterpoint Press in 1999, it was re-released in November of 2010 and has been in continuous release ever since. It is currently in use as a source text for Sixties Studies in a number of universities including Harvard where he was invited to teach “The Theater of Protest” last year.
An early chapter from that book, “Carla’s Story, won the 1993/94 Pushcart Prize for Excellence in non-fiction. His new book, The Rainman’s Third Cure, released in April, 2015 is a study of mentors and the search for wisdom and he is currently readying a new book for publication in 2021-(TITLE) The I Behind the Mask: The Lone Ranger and Tonto meet the Buddha.
Mr. Coyote is well-known for his narration work, and has voiced 150 documentaries and TV specials, including the nine-hour PBS Special, The West. In 1992 he won an EMMY as the “Host” for a nine-hour series, called, The Pacific Century which also won the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.
In 2010 he recorded the12 hour series on The National Parks for Ken Burns and has recently completed the voice-work on Mr. Burns most recent series—a 16 hour special on The History of Country Music. He won a second Emmy for his narration on The Roosevelts, and has also done Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, and an 18 Hour series on Vietnam with Ken Burns. Mr Coyote and Mr Burns just completed a long series on Ernest Hemingway.
In 2011 he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and in 2015 received “transmission” from his teacher, making him an independent Zen teacher. He makes his home on a farm in Northern California, and considers working on his 1952 Dodge Power-Wagon his longest lasting addiction. He has 40 fruit trees and loves to make jam and walk with his two dogs.
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