Hilary Swank takes on another serious, typically male role in "Million Dollar Baby"

Interview By Steven Rosen

Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby"
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BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. -- Hilary Swank stops eating her shrimp pasta at the hotel cafe and laughs -- giggles, really, with a quick "nah, ha" -- at an outsider's observation about her career.

She'd been explaining, in a surprisingly self-deprecating way for a young woman whose smile and intensely wide brown eyes can melt the food on her plate, why she hasn't cashed in on her Best Actress Oscar for 1999's "Boys Don't Cry" with glamorous parts in expensive blockbusters. She is dressed nicely -- jeans, tan high-heel shoes and matching soft sweater with a white scarf tied around her neck like a bow -- but not like a fashion model.

Dawn of a drug culture
Beats sought spiritual alternative to the post-war world
By Steven Rosen

Since the U.S. government long has been engaged in a war on drugs, with mixed results at best, it is critical to know where and how our pervasive, entrenched modern drug culture started.

In Martin Torgoff's well-researched and superbly written "Can't Find My Way Home," the answer is startling. It started because, as Martha Stewart might say, it was a good thing.

At a time when most Americans were optimistically celebrating our victory in World War II, the first of the contemporary drug acolytes saw the horror of a ravaged world that had barely survived the catastrophe.

By Steven Rosen

Shola Lynch, director of the new ?Chisholm ?72: Unbought and Unbossed? documentary, has had an ongoing discussion about the nature of remembrance with her father, a retired history professor at Columbia University.

Why does history so quickly forget so many fascinating people, she asks him. She knows the father-daughter back-and-forth by heart: ?I go, ?He was left out of American history!? And he says, ?A lot of people get left out.? I say, ?But that?s unjust? and he says, ?Relax.??

But she hasn?t relaxed and accepted it ? and she?s not alone, either. Lynch is among a growing group of documentary filmmakers making features about often-forgotten or overlooked figures and events from the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. The ?backwash,? so to speak, from the simultaneous political, sociological and cultural revolutions of the period.