CineSage_jr
-
Posts
3,852 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Never
Posts posted by CineSage_jr
-
-
"Personally, Major, I will take what comes."
-
Rose is taking her weekly beating over on another thread. Apparently a "first time caller, long time listener" was enraged enough to write the usual "nastygram".
"First time, long time."
"Can't you see I'm defending this woman's honor? Which is more than she ever did."
-- Rufus T. Firefly
-
Cheeta was Boy's real father; MGM had the little shaver shaved every week to cover it up and keep it out of the gossip magazines.
-
Una Merkel is pronounced "OONA", not "YUNA".
Una O'Connor (THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, THE SEA HAWK) was "yuna."
-
I, like many ordinary movie goers, will grow old and die remembering his films.
Can you say that about yourself?
Yes, I can say that I will grow old and die remembering DeMille's films. I just won't remember them fondly, that's all.
Shirley Jones was only up for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I personally believe it doesn't (or shouldn't) take as much to be up for a Supporting acting Oscar as for Best Actor/Actress.
Since every film generally has only one leading man and one leading woman, but each film can have several times more supporting players, any or all of whom are eligible to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor or Actress nod, one can make a very good argument that winning a Best Supporting ward is a greater accomplishment.
-
Six, if you include the ultimate Film Noir, DOUBLE INDEMNITY.
-
Apart from the fact that they've finally dusted off ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT, it's pretty much the saaaaame old stuff.
The very presence of a brick like THE AMBASSADOR'S DAUGHTER (again!) shows that the clueless programmers are still flying on autopilot.
-
"I respect responsible criticism," DeMille wrote in his autobiography. "What I deplore in many critics is not that they criticize, but that they do not see!"
DeMille wasn't the first, nor will he be the last, to hide behind a charge that others simply can't "see" what they do.
-
Word has come that Bebe Barron, the surviving half of the husband-and-wife team that provided FORBIDDEN PLANET with the first electronic "score" (I personally dispute that what they did was write music, let a lone a score, something with which the Hollywood musicians' union agreed, denying them screen credit as "composers") has died at 82.
From today's New York Times:
April 25, 2008
Bebe Barron, 82, Pioneer of Electronic Scores, Is Dead
By DENNIS HEVESI
Bebe Barron, who with her husband Louis composed the first electronic score for a feature film ? the eerie gulps and burbles, echoes and weeeoooos that accentuated invisible monsters and robotic creatures in the 1956 science-fiction classic ?Forbidden Planet? ? died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Her son, Adam, said she died of natural causes. Louis Barron died in 1989.
The score for ?Forbidden Planet? ? the tale of a starship crew that travels 17 light years from Earth to investigate why settlers on the planet Altair-4 have gone silent ? ?is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music,? Barry Schrader, a professor of electro-acoustic music at the California Institute of the Arts, said Thursday.
While the Barrons created electronically produced themes for the film?s characters and events, Professor Schrader said, their score crossed the traditional line between music and sound effects.
?At some points it?s actually impossible to say whether or not what you?re hearing is music, sound effect or both,? he said. ?In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now-common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.?
While later electro-acoustic scoring became more melodic, the Barrons? breakthrough fixed the technique?s otherworldly identity in public consciousness. Perhaps the most memorable character in ?Forbidden Planet? is Robby the Robot, who brews bourbon and performs herculean feats; for him, the Barrons composed a mechanically bubbly theme. For the invisible monster Id, a percussive sinking sound with a descending pitch punctuates every hole his footsteps leave on the planet?s rugged terrain.
Contemporary electro-acoustic effects are digitally synthesized. The Barrons used vacuum tubes and tape recorders. When it came to amplifying vibrations from a stylus on a record, vacuum tubes were a major advance from the days of the phonograph horn. Mr. Barron designed vacuum tube circuits, organizing them in patterns that controlled the flow of electricity to produce combinations of pitch, timbre, volume and other variables. The sounds were recorded on tape.
Mrs. Barron would sort through hours and hours of tape. Together the Barrons would cut and splice; play segments at varying speeds to change the pitch; run segments in reverse to create new sounds; or induce delays to produce echoing feedback.
Charlotte May Wind (her husband nicknamed her Bebe) was born in Minneapolis on June 16, 1925, the only child of Frank and Ruth Wind. She earned a music degree at the University of Minnesota in 1947, then moved to New York, where she worked as a researcher for Time-Life while studying music composition. Soon after, she met and married Mr. Barron, who was trained in electronics. Attracted by the avant-garde music scene in the early 1950s, the couple lived in Greenwich Village.
Their fascination with electro-acoustic music began with a wedding gift: a tape recorder. Part of their apartment became a studio. There the composer John Cage recorded his ?Project of Music for Magnetic Tape.? In 1952 the Barrons recorded the score for ?Bells of Atlantis,? a short based on a poem by Ana?s Nin, who appears on screen.
Then, in 1955, the Barrons crashed an art party in Manhattan for the wife of Dore Schary, the president of MGM. They told him about their unusual recordings. Ten days later they were driving to Hollywood, where Mr. Schary signed them for ?Forbidden Planet.?
The score drew critical praise, but a dispute with the American Federation of Musicians prevented the Barrons from receiving credit for it; their work was referred to as ?electronic tonalities.? That slight was soothed in 1997, when Mrs. Barron was given the Seamus Award of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States.
The Barrons divorced in 1970. In 1975 she married Leonard Neubauer. Besides her husband and her son, of Los Angeles, she is survived by a stepdaughter, Dylan Neubauer of Santa Cruz, Calif.
The Barrons never scored another feature film. But ?Forbidden Planet? is etched in the mind of Professor Schrader, who first saw it at the Majestic in Johnstown, Pa.
?I was a 10-year-old kid who went to the movies every Saturday,? he said. ?I sat through it three times and was still there for a fourth. Then I heard my father?s voice from the back of the theater, ?Barry, where are you?? ?
-
Great, awesome movie, and it's not all campy...there's an undercurrent in the movie..THAT'S De Mille's GENUIS...
Not at all campy? Are we talking about the same movie?
-
Well, Holly uncovers Harry's ethical and spiritual descent into selling worthless penicillin to those who desperately need it so, yes, death in the Vienna sewers is a deliberate and apt metaphor.
-
Midnight had the best script of any comedy I have seen in ages!
The script was by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder; what more need anyone say?
-
I believe he would have to count in base nine.
More like base seven (boy, did I hate the "new math" in grade school).
-
"Daughter of Hell!"
-
Mr. Sage, Maybe if you didn't have such an "Obscure" subject title, others would realize of the passing on of the last cast member from the film "Casablanca".
It's not so obscure as it is oblique, but it's the same as with movies today: there's so little value or interest in the obvious.
-
The last recognizable actor from the beloved CASABLANCA has died:
Joy Page, 83; in 'Casablanca,'
Bogart told her: 'Go back to Bulgaria.'
By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 24, 2008
Joy Page, the stepdaughter of Warner Bros. studio chief Jack L. Warner who earned her place in film history playing the dark-haired young Bulgarian newlywed in "Casablanca," has died. She was 83.
Page died of complications from a stroke and pneumonia Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said her son, Gregory Orr.
The actress was a 17-year-old Beverly Hills High School senior when she landed the role of Annina Brandel in "Casablanca," the classic 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid.
As the newlywed refugee in need of exit visas so she and her husband can get out of Casablanca and go to America, the character is faced with the moral dilemma of giving herself to Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) in exchange for the documents. But Bogart, as the worldly proprietor of Rick's Cafe Americain, intervenes by letting her husband win at roulette so he can buy the visas.
It was Page's first film role.
Although her movie mogul stepfather wasn't thrilled with a family member becoming an actor, Page had been attending acting classes at the studio taught by acting coach Sophie Rosenstein, who suggested that she read for the role.
Page had read an early draft of the "Casablanca" script that Warner had brought home and was not impressed.
"She told me she thought it was corny and old-fashioned," Orr said.
But after learning that Bergman had been cast in the movie, he said, she had a change of heart.
"She felt that would change the feeling of it, and it would become worthy and truthful because of what Bergman would bring to the picture," said Orr, adding that his mother "was very fond of the experience" of making "Casablanca."
"She said Bogart had been very nice to her; he was very patient and came in and rehearsed with her. And she admired Ingrid Bergman very much," he said.
Although Warner was pleased with Page's work in the film, he would not sign her to a studio contract or cast her in other Warner Bros. movies.
She went on to play Ronald Colman's daughter in director William Dieterle's "Kismet," a lavish 1944 MGM adventure-fantasy co-starring Marlene Dietrich.
Among Page's other films were "Man-Eater of Kumaon" with Indian actor Sabu (1948), "Bullfighter and the Lady" with Robert Stack (1951) and "The Shrike" (1955) with Jose Ferrer and June Allyson.
Page also worked in television, including on "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars," "Studio 57," "Cheyenne," "Wagon Train" and "The Swamp Fox" before retiring from acting in 1962.
Born on Nov. 9, 1924, in Los Angeles, she was the daughter of silent screen actor Don Alvarado (who was also known as Don Page) and the former Ann Boyar, who married Warner after she and Alvarado divorced.
In 1945, Page married actor William T. Orr, who later became a Warner Bros. vice president and film producer. They divorced in 1970.
In addition to her son, she is survived by her daughter, Diane Orr; and her half sister, Barbara Warner Howard.
A private service was held Wednesday.
-
Has he been on an "anti-pontiff" rant lately?
Really? I heard he had to be talked out of choosing THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN and FOUL PLAY.
-
Since you're a creature of the silent screen, Harold, show us how old you are by holding up the appropriate number of fingers...
-
Since Daniel Ortega is now the lawfully-elected president of Nicaragua, I suspect that a lot of those now-middle-aged Sandinistas are now holding high government positions.
-
It's interesting that there are also equestrian statues of El Cid in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seville, Spain (all by sculptress Anna Hyatt Huntington), and Burgos Spain, though possibly the finest one, by master sculptor Augustus St Gaudens (who designed the U.S.'s legendary $20 double-eagle gold piece) is in the forecourt of the Hispanic Society in New York City.
Old Rodrigo sure does get around.
As for KANE, several of the shots of "Xanadu" being erected in the "News on the March" newsreel are actually from behind-the-scenes footage RKO shot of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME sets being constructed on its studio ranch in 1939.
-
So perhaps MM are the woman's initials.
Couldn't be; a studio wouldn't adopt that kind of inventory system for its top stars, let alone some actor or atress who passed through its gates for just a picture or two.
-
It's possible that Silvio Belusconi, that nation's former, and new, Prime Minister and largest media baron, has pulled political strings to ensure that the channel, along with many other Time Warner outlets, doesn't gain a foothold in his country. It'd be no surprise that he doesn't want competion for his own TV networks.
Then, again, it just may be that Time Warner doesn't see that there's enough profit to be made by establishing an Italy-only feed with Italian-language programming. There may not be a deep-enough penetration of cable and satellite services in the country to make it worthwhile.
-
In his later years Coburn claimed to have been cured of his rheumatoid arthritis by the supplement Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM, or dimethylsulfone), though it's only approved for use in verterinary medicine.
-
Could be a problem with the receiver, I suppose.
Since it's the NFL Network, I'd have to guess that the defensive ends are guilty of illegal holding against the receiver.
THIS RECORDING WASN'T MADE BY KRELL MUSICIANS A HALF-A-MILLION YEARS AGO
in Hot Topics
Posted
As is so often the case, what it says on IMDb is largely meaningless. By the musicians' union's edict, the Barrons' screen credit in FORBIDDEN PLANET's Main Title reads "Electronic Tonalities Louis and Bebe Barron."
Mo mention of "music" or "composed by."
Tonalities is a pretty apt word, since it certainly is not music or a proper score, at least to someone who isn't a Krell.