The BEST episodes directed by Bestor Cram
#1 - Midnight Ramble
American Experience - Season 7 - Episode 6
Oscar Micheaux and the History of Race. Oscar Micheaux wrote, produced and directed over 40 movies and despite this was really not known because he was African American . This movie recounts the history of the black film industry from 1910 to the 1940s and includes rare clips and highlights.
#2 - Johnny Cash: The Story of Folsom Prison
BBC Documentaries - Season 2009 - Episode 41
Documentary which explores the most important day in the career of the legendary Johnny Cash. Cash's concert at Folsom State Prison in California in January 1968 touched a raw nerve in the American psyche and made him a national hero at a troubled time in American history. Using the stark images of rock photographer Jim Marshall, graphic techniques, archive footage and interviews with Merle Haggard, Cash's daughter Rosanne, band members Marshall Grant and WS 'Fluke' Holland, alongside former inmates of the prison, the film documents this explosive concert, the live album that followed and a transformative moment in the lives of Cash, the inmates of Folsom Prison and the American nation in the troubled year of 1968.
#3 - Birth of a Movement: The Battle Against America's First Blockbuster
PBS Specials - Season 2017 - Episode 1
Tells the story of William Monroe Trotter, a fire-breathing editor of a Boston black newspaper who helped launch a nationwide movement in 1915 to ban a flagrantly racist film, The Birth of a Nation. This film tells the story of a black civil rights movement few are familiar with—one that occurred a full 40 years before the one we know. D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece The Birth of a Nation is credited with transforming Hollywood and pioneering many of the techniques that have made the feature film one of America’s most celebrated and widely exported cultural creations. The movie was also flagrantly racist and glorified the Ku Klux Klan as its central protagonist. But what is neither famous nor infamous is the way America reacted to this revolutionary film. While The Birth of a Nation was a box office smash that became the first motion picture ever to be screened at the White House, it proved divisive in a country still struggling in the aftermath of Civil War Reconstruction and galvanized leaders of the national African American community into adopting a more aggressive approach in their fight for equality. Birth of a Movement interweaves the civil rights story of newspaperman Trotter and the years leading up to the release of The Birth of a Nation with the story of D.W. Griffith and the rise of a new medium, the feature film.