Rosie O’Donnell, one of 19 baby boomers interviewed for PBS’ “The Boomer List,” said she didn’t have any problem coming out as a lesbian.
“When your mother dies when you are 10 years old, everything else is a speed bump,” the co-host of “The View” told director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Greenfield-Sanders interviewed one person from each of the years from 1946 to 1964 for the “American Masters” documentary, including Maria Shriver, John Leguizamo, David LaChapelle, Erin Brockovich, Kim Cattrall and Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder, who arrived for his interview in Los Gatos, Calif., on a Segway.
Billy Joel talked about working on an oyster boat when he was a young man, and looking up at a waterfront mansion and discussing with his fellow fisherman what kind of entitled snob lived there.
“Now I own that house,” the Piano Man said, “so I’m that guy.”
Samuel L. Jackson said he wanted to be the black Jacques Cousteau when he grew up, but his mother refused to allow him to study oceanography at the University of Southern California, and insisted he go to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he met black activists Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.
Jackson said a production of “The Threepenny Opera,” with its gangsters and scantily clad prostitutes, steered him toward acting.
But Jackson, who has 158 movie credits, said, “Don’t talk about my characters. Talk about me. I’m a good father, husband, son . . . I have an education. I believe in education. I read. I write. I conjugate.”
The documentary’s Sept. 23 premiere coincides with a show at the Newseum in Washington, DC of large-format portraits Greenfield-Sanders took of all the boomers.