Richard Kimble

I have belatedly learned of the death of director Norman Abbott this past July. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/norman-abbott-dead-tv-director-910541 Norman Abbott, a nephew of famed comedian Bud Abbott who directed multiple episodes of such beloved TV sitcoms as Leave It to Beaver, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Munsters and Sanford & Son, has died. He was 93. Abbott, the brainchild behind the Broadway sensation Sugar Babies, the comeback vehicle for Mickey Rooney in the late 1970s, died Saturday in Valencia, Calif., according to Richard Lertzman, co-author of the 2015 book The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney. Abbott helmed 38 episodes and produced 22 of The Jack Benny Program and directed 43 installments of Leave It to Beaver and 23 of Welcome Back, Kotter. He also guided such series as The George Gobel Show, I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, Bachelor Father, Get Smart, The Brady Bunch, McHale’s Navy, Adam-12, Love, American Style and Alice. Abbott directed and provided the story for the quirky film The Last of the Secret Agents? (1966), starring the comedy team of Marty Allen and Steve Rossi. I will always remember him for "Classification Dead", Get Smart's classic spoof of DOA. In one scene the poisoned Maxwell Smart, desperate to find an antidote, leaves the office of a "Dr. Abbott Norman".

You remember all that, but you don't remember the star? https://youtu.be/AR1fDw8gZZc

Mystery Photo #10: The Films With No Namehttp://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2016/10/mystery-photo-10-the-films-with-no-names/

The Three Eunuchs: the background extras in this Biblical story (can anyone ID the film?) are Hal Roach, Harold Lloyd, and Frank Borzage.

Just below the headline, on the left where it says "VIEW THE DOCUMENT", is a link to a pdf of the FBI report which includes RM's statement.

Wikipedia: Anyone here remember this? You can read McDowall's statement to the FBI here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/roddy-mcdowalls-planet-tapes-0

I never saw these Irwin Allens as a kid, only caught up with them 10-15 years ago. I have to admit I developed a certain fondness for The Time Tunnel, I guess that's the history nerd in me. The episode where James Darren goes back to Pearl Harbor and meets his father -- who is fated to die in the attack -- is actually kind of moving. I love how the aliens on LIS invariably just walk onto the set, as Irwin Allen was unwilling to spend the SPFX $ to beam/transport them there.

I used to be able to say this about Star Wars until I got stuck at somebody's house for a socal event and one guy insisted on watching the original Star Wars on TV. So I ended up seeing about 25 minutes of it. And I was absolutely fascinated. Fascinated by how horrendous most of the acting was (aside from Guinness). It was like watching a 1970s industrial film.

First "casual", "everyday" use of television? It was earier shown as a sort of sci-fi device, but in The Time Of Your Life (1948) characters at the bar were shown watching a sporting event on TV.

Both hot dogs and hamburgers were well established by WWI. But this suggests other questions: First (and last?) use of an automat? First use of a TV dinner? Spaghetti -- For some reason associated with Jimmy Cagney. He had trouble trying to eat it in The Strawberry Blonde, while earlier he watched Paul Kelly eat a dish in The Roaring Twenties. Any earlier examples?

First Hollywood movie to how someone eating a pizza? Owning a pizza parlor is discussed as a business opportunity in the infamous Hot Spell, but IIRC the earliest somebody ate one was when Zohra Lampert served Warren Beatty a pie in Splendor In The Grass.

Oscar Brand, the lanky, affable, gravelly-voiced folk singer and songwriter whose weekly on-air hootenanny was the longest-running radio show in history with a single host, died on Friday at his home in Great Neck, N.Y. He was 96. Doug Yeager, Mr. Brand’s personal manager, said the cause was pneumonia. In addition to performing and recording prolifically, Mr. Brand wrote books, articles and the scores for Broadway musicals and documentary films. He also hosted television shows. But it was his radio show, “Folksong Festival,” for which he was best known. Every week for more than 70 years, with the easy, familiar voice of a friend, Mr. Brand invited listeners of the New York public radio station WNYC to his quirky, informal combination of American music symposium, barn dance, cracker-barrel conversation, songwriting session and verbal horseplay. Mr. Brand’s last show aired on Sept. 24, Mr. Yeager said. Everyone who was anyone in folk music dropped by. Woody Guthrie — Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, as Mr. Brand called his rambling friend — was known to burst in unexpectedly to try out a new song. Bob Dylan told a riveting tale about his boyhood in a carnival, not a word of it true. The music roamed hither and yon, and back again — from fiddlers to folk songs of the Appalachians to ethnic songs of the big cities. In the 1940s Mr. Brand played what were then known as “race records” by the likes of Memphis Minnie and Tampa Red, precursors of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll. ==== He scored ballets for Agnes de Mille and commercials for Log Cabin Syrup and Cheerios. He wrote music for documentary films, published songbooks and hosted the children’s television shows “The First Look” and “Spirit of ’76” as well as, from 1963 to 1967, the Canadian television series “Let’s Sing Out.” He also wrote, with Paul Nassau, the music and lyrics for two shows that made it to Broadway, although neither had a long run: “A Joyful Noise” (1966) and “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1968), based on stories by Leo Rosten. He was curator of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and served on the advisory panel that helped develop “Sesame Street.” Mr. Brand appeared as himself in the 1965 film “Once Upon a Coffee House,” also known as “Hootenany a Go-Go." http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/arts/music/oscar-brand-folk-singer-whose-radio-show-twanged-for-decades-dies-at-96.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

A cut scene? I don't recall Vito and Barzini meeting at the wedding reception.

George Orson Welles: "Cartoonist, Actor, Poet and only 10"

This pic has been described as taken on the set of The Searchers, but it looks to me like Ford is visiting Laurence Harvey on the set of The Alamo

In 1955 The Cheers would make the top ten with this spoof of The Wild One, written by Jery Leiber and Mike Stoller ("Hound Dog", "Jailhouse Rock"): https://youtu.be/OGNBBZDRqFo One of The Cheers, Bert Convy, went on to become an actor and by 1958 he'd done things like 77 Sunset Strip and Gunman's Walk (Tab Hunter's best performance, for what that's worth). That same year he released this novelty record, inspired (like John Zacherle's "Dinner With Drac") by Universal's recent release of its old monster movies to TV:

Agnes Nixon, a celebrated creator and writer of television soap operas, who introduced uterine cancer, venereal diseases, child abuse, AIDS and other societal terrors into the weekday fantasy worlds of millions of daytime viewers, died on Wednesday in Rosemont, Pa. She was 93. The cause was pneumonia resulting from Parkinson’s disease, her family said. In a career that paralleled the rise, enormous popularity and gradual decline of soap operas in the last half of the 20th century, Ms. Nixon fashioned many of television’s most popular daytime shows, drawing on a rich imagination to find the great and small human dramas lurking just below the surface of American life. To a 1950s audience mostly composed of women who were at home doing housework and raising children, Ms. Nixon’s early scripts for “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” provided an escape: a glimpse of dashing lives, handsome cads, passions run amok, dark secrets and terrible betrayals. But in the 1960s and ’70s she virtually reinvented soaps, creating for the ABC network “One Life to Live,” “All My Children” and other shows infused with social relevance and politically charged topics like racism, abortion, obscenity, narcotics, the generation gap and protests against the Vietnam War. Like their predecessors, the new Nixon soaps were disturbing, fascinating and addictive. Because she presented various sides of a controversy, they were more complex. But she tried to avoid preachy dialogue, letting action and plot speak for themselves. The conundrum was no longer simply whether Tara was pregnant, but whether Phil, home from Vietnam and scarred by the horrors of war, could still love her. Agnes Nixon, left, the creator of “All My Children,” with Susan Lucci in a 2011 episode of the show. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/arts/television/agnes-nixon-who-injected-social-ills-into-soap-operas-dies-at-93.html?_r=0

All you movie experts out there -- see if you can ID these mystery photos: http://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/category/unidentified-stills/

Hall Jr is very mannered in it, but the film itself is quite a tense little suspense piece Arch Hall Sr was played by Robert Mitchum in the The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961), written and directed by Jack Webb, who played screenwriter William Bowers (who plays the Senate counsel interrogating Michael Corleone in Godfather II). I believe Hall sued Webb for invasion of privacy.

I saw an interview with Wagon Train star Robert Fuller from about 10 years ago where he sounded, if not awestruck, at least impressed: "We had a few names on Laramie, but on Wagon Train we had a big star every week..."

Bette Davis also did a Virgnian, and IIRC Myrna Loy did one as well A whole slew of stars popped up on Wagon Train (presumably MCA chief Lew Wasserman convinced them it was in their best interest): B. Davis, Borgnine, Robert Ryan (several episodes), Stanwyck (several episodes)

First mention of Playboy magazine: One Two Three (1961)? The script for Wilder's previous film The Apartment referred to it several times -- it's where Lemmon sees the ad for the bowler hat -- but I believe all such references were removed from the final print.

A few exceptions off the top of my head: Fitzwilly - Dick Van Dyke went to Williams In Love And War -- Bradford Dillman strolls the campus of his alma mater Stanford Compulsion -- the college Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman (again) attend is never named, but it clearly represents the University of Chicago The Young Philadelphians - Paul Newman attends Princeton for undergrad, but goes to Penn Law School And perhaps my favorite example: in My Forbidden Past Robert Mitchum plays a Tulane professor!