John C. Tibbetts
John Carter Tibbetts (born Paola, Kansas, October 6, 1946, and grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas) is an American film critic, historian, author, painter, and pianist. He is currently a film professor at the University of Kansas. Career. After receiving a Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Kansas in multi-disciplinary studies—art history, theater, photography, and film (the first person to complete what was then regarded as an experimental curriculum in multi-disciplinary studies)-Tibbetts was tenured as an associate professor. Under the general rubric of "visual literacy", his course work includes film history, media studies, and  theory and aesthetics. Before entering the academy, Tibbetts worked from 1980 to 1996 as a full-time broadcaster. He was an arts and entertainment editor and producer for a variety of radio and television outlets, including KCTV (Kansas City’s CBS affiliate), KMBC Radio, and KXTR-FM radio. During that time he also contributed many broadcast stories about musicians, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers to CBS Television, the Monitor Radio Network, Voice of America, and National Public Radio. More recently, he has produced two radio series about music, including the 15-part "The World of Robert Schumann" and the 17-part  Piano Portraits, that have been broadcast worldwide and are now a part of the permanent collection of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives in Lincoln Center, New York. Both derive from his knowledge of music and feature numerous interviews with musicians and scholars in the musical field. Music, theater, literature, and film play a substantial part in his 25 books and more than 250 articles. Recent book publications include "The Gothic Imagination" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), which featured his interviews with dozens of prominent figures in literature, music, painting, and film. Individual studies of filmmakers, writers, and composers include "Douglas Fairbanks and the  American Century" (Mississippi University Press, 2014), "Peter Weir: Interviews" (Mississippi University Press, 2014), "The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub" (McFarlen, 2016), and "Schumann: A Chorus of Voices" (Amadeus Press, 2010). Other book publications include "Dvorak in America" (Amadeus Press, 1993), which was a multicultural study of the famous Czech composer's sojourn in America from 1892 to 1895. The eminent cultural historian, Robert Winter, greeted the book enthusiastically: "Of all the books on American music at the turn of the century, none brings together so many interesting and richly interrelated dimensions as "Dvorak in America"." An historical overview of the  interactions of theater and film is explored in "The American Theatrical Film" (Popular Press, 1985), which is currently being used by Professor Charles Musser as a text in his courses at Yale University. Film adaptations of theater and literature are the subjects of his various edited reference works, including "The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film" (Facts on File, 1998; rev., 2002), "The Cinema of Tony Richardson" (SUNY Press, 1999), "The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays into Film" (2001), and "Shakespeare into Film" (2002). The dramatization on film of the lives of classical and popular composers, "Composers in the Movies: Studies in  Musical Biography" (Yale University Press, 2005), is the first scholarly study of the subject. It was praised by the dean of cultural studies, Professor Jacques Barzun, as "a welcome and worthwhile endeavor." It received second prize from the prestigious International Association of Media Historians for "Best Book on Media Studies" in 2007. Tibbetts continues to pursue his work as a painter, illustrator, and writer of fiction. He has published several short stories, in "Twilight Zone" magazine, "Weird Fiction Review", and been anthologized in Ballantine Books' anthology series, "The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Series Eight". He has executed many covers  and interior illustrations for his articles and books. His work has been featured in gallery exhibitions in Kansas City and at the University of Kansas, where the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has reserved a wall for his paintings. He has had a lifelong passion for portraits, and claims to have painted thousands of them, on commission and on his own. He has exploited his opportunities as a broadcast interviewer to draw hundreds of images of popular actors, filmmakers, musicians, many personally inscribed and autographed. These images, numbering in excess of 700, are currently housed in the University of  Kansas Spencer Research Library, where they are available for scholarly study and exhibition. His hundreds of video and audio interviews with prominent figures in the film, music, and literary fields can be accessed on his web site, "Over the Rainbow," as part of the University of Kansas Digital Initiatives program. His ability as a pianist of twelve years' training has resulted in a secondary career accompanying silent movies at venues including the American Film Institute Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Silent Film Festival in Topeka, Kansas, and the annual Buster Keaton Celebrations in Iola, Kansas. In addition to his teaching  responsibilities and mentoring activities at the University of Kansas (where he has served as Associate Chair for the Department of Theater and Film), Tibbetts brings his knowledge and experience in the arts to a wider community service. For the Kansas Humanities Council he has lectured and presented topics on the arts and local history to many communities around the state, such as Garden Grove, Ottawa, and Council Grove. For more than twenty years he has appeared as an arts commentator and critic on the "Walt Bodine Show" on KCUR-FM radio, Kansas City, and, more recently, as a reporter and  film critic on Kansas Public Radio. He organized the "Buster Keaton Celebrations," held annually in Iola, Kansas since 1992 and sponsored by the Kansas Humanities Council. In the 1980s he provided program notes for the concerts of the Kansas City Camerata Chamber Orchestra. Tibbetts was the recipient of Kansas Educator of the Year in 2008. National Film Society of America. In 1976, the "National Film Society of America", founded as an offshoot of the Bijou Film Society, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was associated with "The Bijou Theatre", of Bridgeport, first published in 1976, "American Classic Screen" magazine, until 1985. Tibbetts  was a member of the board of governors. On May 27, 1979, a "National Film Society" convention was convened in Los Angeles, by Randolph "Randy" Neil, of Kansas City, founder and president of the 5000-member society. Attending were: Mike Nichols, Jack Haley, Glenn Ford,<ref name="flickr-alan-light/214260206"></ref> Louise Fletcher, Don "Red" Barry John Houseman, Richard Donner, Virginia Christine, Victor Jory, Fritz Feld, Franco Nero, John McCook, Earl Holliman, Henry Brandon, Joan Leslie, Vivian Blaine, Henry Wilcoxon, Una Merkel, George Pal, Jackie Joseph, Ida Lupino, George Raft, John Phillip Law, Steve Landesberg, Robert Cummings, Rosemary DeCamp, Mel Torme, Judy  Canova, Diana Canova, Janet Leigh, Kelly Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Olivia Hussey, and Yvonne De Carlo.