Grammy Award-winning producer, songwriter and musician T Bone Burnett and Oscar Award-winning screenwriter and director Callie Khouri will speak on April 4 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Burnett and Khouri will discuss music and film in two free, consecutive events 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. on “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 noon in her talk, “Don’t Get Me Started!”
Burnett’s “O Brother” soundtrack album sold more than nine 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 films “Walk the Line,” about Johnny Cash, and “The Big Lebowski.” 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, Burnett grew up in Forth Worth, where he first made records in 1965. He produced Texas blues, country and rock ’n’ 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 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. Besides the Oscar, she won the Best Original Screenplay Award from the Writers Guild of America, a Golden Globe Award and a PEN Literary Award. Khouri also was named among Glamour magazine’s top 10 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 Latifah, 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.
Burnett and Khouri’s talks 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.
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College of Arts and Sciences contact: Dee Reid, (919) 843-6339, deereid@unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589