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Carolina students will have a rare opportunity to learn from Grammy Award-winning producer, songwriter and musician T Bone Burnett and Oscar Award-winning screenwriter and director Callie Khouri during two events on April 4 in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room in Wilson Library.
Burnett, who won four Grammy Awards for composing and producing the soundtrack, concert and best-selling albums for the film “O Brother Where Art Thou,” will lead a discussion at 11 a.m. entitled "Resonance: All Instruments Are Drums."
Khouri, who won an Oscar with her screenwriting debut for the film “Thelma and Louise,” will discuss the film business at 12 , under the title "Don't Get Me Started!"
Burnett’s “O Brother” soundtrack album sold more than 9 million copies and dominated the Billboard chart for more than a year. He co-produced the subsequent concert documentary and two highly successful concert tours featuring the Southern traditional music and musicians of the film.
Burnett won another Grammy for producing “A Wonderful World,” the duet album recorded by Tony Bennett and k.d. lang. He also composed and produced the music for the Johnny Cash bio pic “Walk the Line” and “The Big Lebowski,” and he has produced recordings for Elvis Costello, Alison Krauss, Roy Orbison, Sam Phillips, Ralph Stanley and Gillian Welch.
Born Joseph Henry Burnett in St. Louis, T Bone grew up in Forth Worth, where he first made records in 1965, producing Texas blues, country, and rock & roll bands. In 1975 he traveled with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review tour before forming his own group, the Alpha Band with other musicians from the tour.
Burnett recently released two new collections of his own music: “The True False Identity,” his first album of new original songs since 1992, and “Twenty Twenty – The Essential T Bone Burnett,” a 40-song retrospective spanning his entire music-making career.
Khouri galvanized women and sparked a nationwide debate in 1991 with the release of “Thelma and Louise,” a controversial female “buddy” film that she says would never be made in today’s Hollywood. In addition to the Oscar, she won the Best Original Screenplay award from the Writers Guild of America, a Golden Globe Award and a PEN Literary Award, and was named among Glamour magazine’s top ten women of the year.
She made her directorial debut in 2002 with “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” which she also adapted for the screen. She recently finished directing her second feature film, “Mad Money,” starring Diane Keaton, Queen Latifa, Katie Holmes and Ted Danson.
Born in Texas and raised in Kentucky, Khouri studied drama at Purdue University and the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles.
The presentations by Burnett and Khouri are sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for the Study of the American South, the Writing for the Screen and Stage Program and the Southern Folklife Collection.
