THE CARD GAME

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26 @ 7:00PM & 10:00PM

As credit card companies face rising public anger, new regulation from Washington and staggering new rates of default and bankruptcy, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman investigates the future of the massive consumer loan industry and its impact on a fragile national economy.

In The Card Game, a follow-up to the Secret History of the Credit Card and a joint project with The New York Times, Bergman and the Times talk to industry insiders, lobbyists, politicians and consumer advocates as they square off over attempts to reform the way the industry has done business for decades.

“The card issuers could do anything they want,” Robert McKinley, CEO of CardWeb.com, tells FRONTLINE of the industry’s unchecked power over consumers. “They could change your interest rate. They could impose an annual fee. They could close your account.” High interest rates along with more and more penalty fees drove up profits for the industry, Bergman finds, as the banks followed the lead of an aggressive upstart: Providian Bank. In an exclusive interview with FRONTLINE, former Providian CEO Shailesh Mehta tells Bergman how his company successfully targeted vulnerable low-income customers whom Providian called “the unbanked.”

“They’re lower-income people-bad credits, bankrupts, young credits, no credits,” Mehta says. Providian also innovated by offering “free” credit cards that carried heavy hidden fees. “I used to use the word ‘penalty pricing’ or ‘stealth pricing,'” Mehta tells FRONTLINE. “When people make the buying decision, they don’t look at the penalty fees because they never believe they’ll be late. They never believe they’ll be over limit, right? … Our business took off. … We were making a billion dollars a year.”

It took the economic collapse in the fall of 2008 to set the stage for potentially historic change in the consumer credit business. President Obama and his team pushed through a credit card reform bill in May, and they’re now looking to establish a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. But the banking and financial services industries contribute huge amounts of money to Congress — and the jury is still out on whether the new regulations can pass. “It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s a modest step,” says Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. “It’s a set of very discrete new laws. And the credit industry instantly set to work on how they could run around them. By itself, that set of rules won’t change the game.”

“It’s hard for them to get a bill through the U.S. Senate when the industry is pouring money into Washington,” says Martin Eakes of the Center for Responsible Lending of the banks’ political clout. “As Sen. [Dick] Durbin from Chicago recently said, ‘the banks, even as unpopular as they are right now in this crisis, still own this place.'”
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WYATT EARP

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28 @ 6:00PM

Wyatt Earp has been portrayed in countless movies and television shows by some of Hollywood’s greatest actors, including Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and more recently, Kevin Costner, but these popular fictions often belie the complexities and flaws of a man whose life is a lens on politics, justice and economic opportunity in the American frontier.

As a young man, Wyatt Earp was a caricature of the Western lawman. He gained notoriety as the legendary gunman in the shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, but shortly after his death in 1929, distressed Americans down on their luck transformed Wyatt Earp into a folk hero, a central figure in the narrative of how the West was won. Celebrated as a man who took control of his own destiny, Wyatt Earp came to epitomize the town-taming marshal responsible for bringing the forces of law, order and civilization to the Wild West.

Wyatt Earp’s actual life story, though, was more complicated than the romantic legend. He spent his youth carousing, gambling, and visiting brothels , sometimes just one step ahead of the law. A wanderer and an opportunist, Earp was ever in pursuit of greater fortunes in the next boomtown. He spent most of his life roaming the West, supporting himself with police work, mining, gambling, saloon-keeping, and real estate deals. After the tragic death of his young wife, Earp fell in among prostitutes and gamblers and remained closely connected to this underworld even after becoming a lawman. Soon after settling in the burgeoning silver mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp and his brothers became involved in a feud with the local Cowboys which culminated in the notorious 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

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EMMA

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7 @ 7:00PM & 11:30PM

Rich, independent and kind spirited, Emma Woodhouse has no interest in marriage herself, but is inspired by matchmaking for those around her. Once she has married off her close companions, she settles on the pretty Harriet Smith to fashion into her new playmate and ally. She persuades Harriet that she is too good for her suitor, the farmer Robert Martin, and encourages her to set her sights higher. But close family friend Mr. Knightley warns Emma that her meddling will cause great pain. Undaunted, Emma continues her efforts on Harriet’s behalf.

Meanwhile, Emma is intrigued by the mysterious and elusive Frank Churchill, whom she hopes to meet at a party. Frank does not arrive, but instead Emma becomes the subject of unwanted attention from the vicar, Mr. Elton.

A few weeks later, village gossip focuses on the arrival of young Jane Fairfax and a large piano that she has been sent by a mystery admirer. Emma refuses to believe that Mr. Knightley could be the secret admirer.
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TIM McGRAW

Saturday, January 23  @ 8:00pm

In a record-shattering career, Tim McGraw has sold over 40 million albums, dominated the charts with 30 Number One singles and received three Grammys, among other countless awards. The 2009 release of his tenth studio album, Southern Voice, represents a new level of depth and intensity for the seasoned country artist, showcased on this episode of Soundstage. With a commanding stage presence, McGraw croons out his reflective and haunting new songs “If I Died Today” and “I’m Only Jesus.” Other show highlights include “Live Like You Were Dying,” “Good Girls” and “Still.”

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HOPE FOR HAITI NOW TELETHON

FRIDAY, JANUARY 22 @ 6:00PM & 9:00PM

PBS presents the global telethon HOPE FOR HAITI NOW. Wyclef Jean will join George Clooney and CNN’s Anderson Cooper in hosting MTV Networks’ HOPE FOR HAITI NOW, to air commercial-free across PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, BET, the CW, HBO, MTV, VH1 and CMT on Friday, January 22, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

The telethon will be hosted by Clooney in Los Angeles, Wyclef in New York and Cooper in Haiti. All donations will directly benefit Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, UNICEF and Wyclef’s Yele Haiti Foundation. HOPE FOR HAITI NOW will feature performances and celebrity appearances to be announced as well as live news reports from CNN.

Join HOPE FOR HAITI NOW on Facebook and Twitter.

Hope for Haiti Now” will begin accepting donations at 12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT on Friday via the following methods:

• Online: www.hopeforhaitinow.org

• Phone: 877-99-HAITI

• Text: Text “GIVE” to 50555

• Mail: Hope For Haiti Now Fund, Entertainment Industry Foundation, 1201 West 5th Street, Suite T-700, Los Angeles, CA 90017

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A Death in Tehran

TUESDAY, JANUARY 19 @ 7:00PM & 10:00PM

At the height of the protests following Iran’s controversial presidential election this summer, a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan was shot and killed on the streets of Tehran. Her death — filmed on a camera phone, then uploaded to the Web — quickly became an international outrage, and Soltan became the face of a powerful movement that threatened the hard-line government’s hold on power.

In A Death in Tehran, FRONTLINE revisits the events of last summer, shedding new light on Neda’s life and death and the movement she helped inspire.

In response to the international outcry over Neda’s death — including President Obama’s confirmation that he’d seen the “heartbreaking” video on YouTube — the regime set about attempting to rewrite the story, pointing a finger at the CIA and outside agitators, the same forces they blamed for the mass street protests and allegations of vote rigging that led to the greatest upheaval in Iran since the revolution of 1979. FRONTLINE uncovers some video of Neda’s killer — a member of the Basij militia who’d been brought into Tehran by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards to stamp out the “Green Revolution.” A medical doctor in the crowd who had watched Neda die now watched as the crowd considered its own violence against the Basij militia member:

“They started to discuss what to do with him,” the doctor recalled. “They grabbed his wallet, took out his ID card and started shouting, ‘He is a Basiji member; he is one of them,’ and started swearing and cursing him, and he was begging for people not to harm him or kill him. … They believed the police wouldn’t do anything to him as the Basiji are really powerful and he would have easily have got away, so in all of the chaos they decided to release him.”

The Iranian government admits 11 protesters were killed on June 20, but doctors from three Tehran hospitals confirmed at least 34 deaths. Other bodies were buried by security forces without first being identified. In October, the regime tried to script the end of the story for Neda. But instead, Neda’s mother made a very public stand. The government offered her financial help if she would blame Neda’s death on opponents of the regime. All she had to do was to agree to call Neda a “martyr” for the Islamic Republic. But she refused, telling FRONTLINE: “Neda died for her country not so I could get a monthly income from the Martyr Foundation. If these officials say Neda was a martyr, why do they keep wiping off the word ‘martyr’ which people write in red on her gravestone?”
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Influenza 1918: American Experience

Monday, January 18 @ 7:00pm & 10:00pm

Early in the morning of March 11, 1918, a young private reported to the Army hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of fever, sore throat, and headache. Then, another sick soldier appeared, then another and another. By noon, the hospital had more than one hundred cases; in a week, there were five hundred. Forty-eight soldiers died at Fort Riley that spring. No one knew why.

Influenza 1918 is the story of the worst epidemic the United States has ever known. Before it was over, the flu would kill more than 600,000 Americans — more than all the combat deaths of this century combined.

“For the survivors we spoke to,” says producer Robert Kenner, “the memory is one of horror and fear — which may explain why many Americans were willing to let those few terrible months fade into obscurity. Schoolchildren know more about the Black Plague from centuries ago than they do about this episode in our recent history.”

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WALLACE STEGNER

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

This film is a portrait of the conservationist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner. He was many things: teacher, historian and environmentalist but, above all, Wallace Stegner was a writer. Considered by many to be the “Dean” of western writers, he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and non-fiction author, with more than thirty full-length works and countless essays addressing the landscape, humankind’s footprint and the evolution of a region and nation. Award-winning producer John Howe has captured the tremendous influence Stegner has been on the lives of generations of readers and students.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also was a student. Stegner’s The Wilderness Letter became the conscience of the conservation movement. This one-hour documentary paints a portrait of the West that Stegner so loved and reveals insights into his life through interviews with his famous students, contemporaries and family. Peter Coyote narrates.

YOUNG @ HEART

TUESDAY, JANUARY 12 @ 7:00PM & 10:00PM

The Young@Heart Chorus, a group composed of New England senior citizens, has delighted audiences worldwide with renditions of songs by artists from The Clash to Coldplay. YOUNG@HEART chronicles seven weeks in the lives of the members of the chorus as they prepare for a one-night-only concert in their hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts. The group is made up of two dozen spirited seniors — former schoolteachers, executives, doctors, and food service workers — who specialize in reinterpreting rock, punk, and R&B classics from a unique perspective. What ultimately emerges in the film is a funny and unexpectedly moving testament to friendship, creative inspiration, and expectations defied.

Led by Bob Cilman, their demanding musical director, the retirees are rehearsing their new show, struggling with Sonic Youth’s dissonant rock anthem “Schizophrenia,” and giving new meaning to James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” With less than two months to go until the concert, the performers grapple with new lyrics and unfamiliar melodies. During their thrice-weekly rehearsals, they gradually take possession of music ranging from R&B classics like Allen Toussaint’s “Yes We Can Can” to Coldplay’s emotionally powerful ballad “Fix You,” upending assumptions about old age, love, sex, and death.

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Sam Cooke: Crossing Over

MONDAY, JANUARY 11 @ 7:00AM & 11:00AM

Narrated by Danny Glover, the film features archival footage and interviews with Cooke’s family and intimates including Muhammad Ali, Herb Albert, James Brown, Dick Clark, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler, and more.

Sam Cooke put the spirit of the Black church into popular music, creating a new American sound and setting into motion a chain of events that forever altered the course of popular music and race relations in America. With You Send Me in 1957, Cooke became the first African American artist to reach #1 on both the R&B and the pop charts. It was risky for this young gospel performer to alienate his fans by embracing “the devil’s music” – but he proved, with his pop/gospel hybrid, that it was, indeed, possible to win over white teenage listeners and keep his faithful church followers intact.

American Masters Sam Cooke: Crossing Over premiering nationally, Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings), features interviews with Muhammad Ali, Lou Adler, Herb Albert, James Brown, Jimmy Carter, Mel Carter, Dick Clark, Sam Moore, Earl Palmer, Billy Preston, Lou Rawls, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler, Bobby Womack and more. The film is produced by John Antonelli and D. Channsin Berry and directed by Antonelli. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters. American Masters is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG – one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers.
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