Since this year it will have been 111 years since the birth of our most famous and respected film director Karel Zeman and also 60 years since making his most talked about film Baron Munchausen, we decided to pay tribute to him and commemorate his life and work by sketch. We tried to find as many information as we could from various sources but the biggest help for us was a book Karel Zeman and his magic World, which was written by his daughter Ludmila Zeman and grand-daughter Linda Zeman Spálený and published in 2015 by Albatros Media a.s. publisher. We recommend it too all fans.

I was put in touch to Peter Jones from Rotatorvinyl by kind help of Pete Hollidai from The Radiators from Space. I then realized he is a founding member of anarcho-punk band Paranoid Visions who were put together already in 1981 and I have never heard about them. So, it was nice chance to make interview.

This tribute article would not have been made if there was not that big... IF. If we wouldn´t prepare article about Jack Nicholson, we wouldn´t have hit the name Monte Hellman who was part at the birth of independent film scene in USA. We wouldn´t have recalled meeting Monte in Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2011(when his name didn´t ring the bell to us) which ignited interest in making an interview with him. While googling details, we figured out he died only four days before we got this idea, at the age on 91. So instead of intended interview (which maybe wouldn´t even happen) we put together tribute article from foreign sources. He deserves that. R.I.P.

Paul Kohner was born on 29. 5. 1902 in Teplitz, town on the North of Czechoslovakia. His parents Julius and Helen Kohner belonged to local Jewish community and Julius had nickname “Kino Kohner” since he run local cinema and published film newspapers. Paul had brothers Frederick who later became writer and script writer and Walter who later became Hollywood agent. His wife Hanna became the first ordinary citizen who talked publicly in celebrity program This is Your Life about her experience in Nazi death camps. It was in 1953. Paul has been a prudent, hardworking and purposeful man, who wasn´t afraid of taking risk and he could do swift decisions. Thanks to that, then 18 years old boy from Teplitz, with no experience, made his way on the ladder to the very top in Hollywood and he became very respected and acknowledged producer and agent and had the likes of Maurice Chevalier, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Bill Travers, Ernst Hemingway in his agency.

I got a video via email, where ex-Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovskij compared former Soviet Union with current European Union. I liked it and tried to find out more. I realized that, sadly, he has died two years ago in England, where he emigrated in 1976.In that video he talks about system which he witnessed and felt on his own skin (literally) and which is engulfing us now…