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Two documentaries — one about big-budget Broadway musicals and one about a Brooklyn program aimed at high-school rappers — make it clear that art isn't easy.

In 1962, Marvel Comics introduced the character of Spider-Man — a teenager bitten by a radioactive spider who becomes a vigilante crime fighter. It took only a few years for the superhero, created by Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, to become a sensation in comic books and in a TV cartoon series. In 2002, director Sam Raimi brought him to the screen with blockbuster results. Now comes Spider-Man 3 — which, at $300 million to $350 million dollars, is reportedly the most expensive movie ever made.

This year's Pritzker Prize for Architecture has been awarded to Frenchman Jean Nouvel. Over the course of his career, Nouvel has designed more than 200 projects around the world, including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and a 75-story tower next door to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

British comedienne and actress Tracy Ullman returns to American television Sunday with the debut of her new Showtime series, Tracy Ullman's State of the Union. Ullman plays fictional characters as well as a host of notable personalities, including Cameron Diaz, David Beckham and Nancy Pelosi.

Animated heroine, beloved of preschoolers throughout the U.S., breaks the cartoon mold: She's Latina, bilingual, a tomboy — and she knows how to get problems solved. NPR's Rolando Arrieta explores how Nickelodeon's scrappy heroine came to be.

She's been acting for nearly 40 years; now she's taking a stab at directing, producing and writing. And she's doing all that — as well as acting — in one film: Then She Found Me. She tells NPR why.

The creator of the television series The Twilight Zone often battled with the networks over the content of his scripts. Noon on Doomsday inspired by Emmett Till's story, was considered too hot for TV in the 50's. It was peformed for the first time Saturday night.

After surviving the bombing of Hiroshima, Ikuo Hirayama went on to turn the devastation into art, creating through his paintings a "requiem" for those who lost their lives in the war. "I believe that flowers can blossom from anguish and inhumanity," he says.

Sleepwalking through his days, a widowed New York economics professor finds an unlikely friendship — and a way back toward happiness — with an immigrant who teaches him how to play the djembe drum.

David Simon, creator and executive producer of HBO's series The Wire, joins Fresh Air to talk about his career and the genesis of the show. Simon writes many of the episodes — and some story lines come from his former job as a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun.