Richard Kimble

>I know of no untoward scandal involving Young "On September 27, 1978, Young, age 64, married his fifth wife, a 31-year-old German actress named Kim Schmidt. On October 19, 1978, three weeks after his marriage to Schmidt, the couple were found dead at home in their Manhattan apartment. Police theorized that Young shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself in a murder?suicide. A motive for the murder-suicide was never made clear" -- Wikipedia >I've never really been a big fan of Salmi anyway IMHO he was one of the great western villains. Maybe he was just playing himself.

>Well, he's not REALLY an "artist", but he HAS been in some movies. I find it hard for me to watch any movie O.J. Simpson has been in. OJ was a far greater at his craft/art of football player than Woody Allen is at his of director And will you watch Gig Young? Albert Salmi?

>I'm considering it, but first I'm going to boycott Steve Allen movies, see how that goes, and then move on from there.

>Later, in the 70s, Gordy moved his operation to LA, in order to be near the Hollywood establishment, and became actively involved in moviemaking. He started with a bang, LADY SINGS THE BLUES, but despite some successes over the years, he never had the same impact on movies as he did on music. Motown's most notable contribution to film was producing, believe it or not, the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove Those interested in the Motown sound should check out the documentary Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, which profiles The Funk Brothers, the legendary session band who play on almost all the label's hits. I know of two other documentaries about rock and roll session musicians of the '60s. This one deals with the Alabama band behind many great soul classics. This film profiles the L.A. musicians who played on hits by the Beach Boys, The Monkees, and many others Unfortunately TWC has never been officially released due to apparently insoluble problems with music rights clearances. It can be found online, if you know where to look.

>So you've boycotted his films since "Annie Hall", yet you have a critical opinion of over 30 films you've never even seen? Sorry, but "Manhattan", "Radio Days", "Hannah and Her Sisters", "Crimes and Misdemeanors", "Husbands and Wives", "Bullets Over Broadway", "Match Point", "Midnight in Paris" and many others are among the best movies made in their respective years. It is your uninformed (and childishly alliterative) opinion that is pretentious. I've actually seen most of those Sorry, but I've never recovered from the trauma of Interiors (I still have occasional nightmares to this day). I'm not really interest in WA's inferior imitations of Wilder and Lubitsch, and I'm definitely not interest in his imitation Bergman. I don't even much care for original Bergman. The tragedy is that WA was once one of the world's greatest comedy writers, and seemed on his way to becoming a great comic filmmaker. Instead he chose to make bland yuppie mini-dramas. At least we still have Bananas, Sleeper, Getting Even, and Without Feathers. > It is your uninformed (and childishly alliterative) opinion that is pretentious. http://tinyurl.com/n34a4tj

I've been boycotting Woody Allen movies since 1978 because they are preciously pretentious pieces of pompous poop

> I thought Nicholson WAS a good fit as McMurphy For me, Jack Nicholson is the safe, cleaned up Warren Oates. JN isn't bad, but Oates would have brought a sense of danger to the role that JN lacked. FWIW, Ken Kesey actually claimed Kirk Douglas was the best McMurphy. KK may have sincerely believed that, or it may have been his way of dissing a hugely profitable film that he saw virtually no money from.

> The queen is Ethel Merman IMHO Andrews missing out on the MFL film has caused more harrumphing than any other single example of this practice, although there has been plenty of gnashed teeth over Merman getting snubbed for Gypsy. Of course for career snubs Merman is the champ. >ANNIE GET YOUR GUN (1950)..again, Merman's role in the stage production is taken by Betty Hutton, though MGM initially cast Judy Garland. Merman would reprise the role again on Broadway in the mid-60s. Merman also did a super-truncated version for TV in the mid '60s. I believe the press agent in this was played by Jerry Orbach

>The thread title is meant to be interpreted in a variety of ways. And certainly, it applies to more than Butterflies Are Free. You didn't make that it clear, so I limited my original comment to BAF. In the larger sense the queen of this category would surely be Julie Andrews re My Fair Lady Lee J Cobb was passed over for the Death of a Salesman film but fortunately for posterity did a TV version in 1966. Same with Jason Robards and The Iceman Cometh -- he did a TV production in 1960. Other originators I would like to have seen: Zero Mostel - Fiddler on the Roof Ben Gazzara - A Hatful of Rain and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Cliff Gorman - Lenny. I once had a double LP recording of this production, and I've always felt Gorman's Lenny Bruce was far superior to that of Dustin Hoffman. Not Broadway or an original production, but perhaps the stage performance I most wish I could have seen: an LA little theatre production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, starring Warren Oates as McMurphy (1966). Jack Klugman, who saw this as well as Kirk Douglas on Broadway, said it was the best McMurphy ever. Douglas IMHO was totally wrong for the role, and Nicholson doesn't quite seem right either. But Oates, with his hillbilly thuggery and causeless rebelliousness crossed with childlike impetuousness, might have been perfect.

>The play is set in New York City while in the film the setting was changed to San Francisco Ditto for the same year's Play It Again Sam, which was moved b/c of a strike in NYC. I don't know if that's why BAF was moved.

Well my first thought is dissent with your assertion that the film is "great". I will the say that, having a long-standing crush on Blythe Danner, it would have been nice if she'd repeated her role, since then her film career might have gone somewhere.

>And was it out of some sort of respect, or against the law to film actual currency? Notice in all studio era movies clear into the '50's used that hokey looking paper money. It was actually against US law. I know of one exception this -- Anthony Mann's T-Men, where it is mentioned at the beginning that they have government approval to photograph the bills.

>"The Star Spangled Banner" can be heard in a lot of movies. Well, okay. Name some. I just remembered that it's played in Tora Tora Tora by the Navy band as the planes attack, but that's outside my studio era time frame. And of course it's in Woodstock from the same year. FWIW as late as 1971, the pilot for Happy Days showed Richie and his dad standing hand over heart as the TV station signs off. But song they're listening to is "God Bless America". Clearly, there was some hesitancy in the old days about using the SBB onscreen.

>In The Smallest Show on Earth, the audience rushes out as the movie ends so they won't have to stand while "God Save the Queen" is played. They are called "anthem sprinters." Just a few days ago something occurred to me. There seem to be very few films from the studio era in which we hear "The Star Spangled Banner". I can think of two, curiously both comedies: The Music Box and No Time For Sergeants. In both cases, the characters in the film that are listening (civilian in the first example, military in the second) stand at attention. Robert "Believe It Or Not!" Ripley made a BION short for Warners in the early '30s, in which we hear a quartet singing "To Anacreon in Heaven", an English drinking song whose tune Frances Scott Key appropriated for the SBB. This film was produced after the greatest triumph of Ripley's career, when he published a BION column claiming the US did not have an official national anthem. This caused a public furor (and avalanche of publicity for Ripley), leading to a Congressional act making the SBB America's official national anthem. The Music Box was released about a year later.

*The Bradbury Building* is an architectural landmark located at 304 Broadway at West 3rd Street in downtown Los Angeles, California. Built in 1893, the building was commissioned by Los Angeles gold-mining millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury and constructed by draftsman George Wyman from the original design by Sumner Hunt. - Wikipedia Vintage photo Recent photos A number of films and TV episodes have been shot at the Bradbury Building (though despite what you may have read, Double Indemnity was not one of them) DOA (1949) The Outer Limits - "Demon With A Glass Hand" (1964) Blade Runner (1982) Quantum Leap - "Play It Again Seymour" (1989) Wolf (1994) The Artist (2011) An interesting exploration of whether the1942 film China Girl filmed location shots at the Bradbury Building: http://ladailymirror.com/2012/01/14/the-bradbury-building-and-the-mystery-of-china-girl/

(Descriptions from Wikipedia) Red Rock Canyon State Park features scenic desert cliffs, buttes and spectacular rock formations. The park is located where the southernmost tip of the Sierra Nevada converges with the El Paso Mountains. Red Rock Canyon is an approximately 27,000 acres unit located along State Highway 14 in Kern County, about 80 miles east of Bakersfield and 25 miles north of Mojave. ===== Bronson Canyon, or Bronson Caves, is a section of Griffith Park in Los Angeles, California that has become famous as a filming location for a large number of movies and TV shows, especially westerns and science fiction, from the early days of motion pictures to the present. Its craggy and remote-looking setting, but easily accessible location, has made it a prime choice for filmmakers, particularly of low-budget films, who want to place scenes in a lonely wilderness. ===== Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park is a 932-acre park located in the Sierra Pelona Mountains, in northern Los Angeles County, California. It is in Agua Dulce between the Antelope Valley and the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles and seen easily by motorists driving the Antelope Valley Freeway. In 1935, Universal Pictures assigned Stanley Bergerman as executive producer on the film Werewolf of London. Bergerman suggested the Vasquez Rocks as the location for what was supposed to be Tibet. Since then, Vasquez Rocks have been used innumerable times in motion pictures, various television series and in moving and still photography advertisements, and continue to be used in them today.

Before yesterday, I didn't know much about Leigh Brackett. I'd seen the name in the screenplay credits of some notable films of course, but not much beyond that. Leigh Brackett's Chandlerish first novel, the hard-boiled noir No Good from a Corpse, was published in 1944. After reading it Howard Hawks sent for "this guy Brackett" to work on the script for The Big Sleep. Imagine his surprise when she showed up for work. Leigh Brackett and Howard Hawks on the Set of Rio Bravo: Yes I was aware Leigh Brackett was a woman, and I knew she'd written The Long Goodbye for Robert Altman. I either never knew or had forgotten she worked on The Empire Strikes Back (I'm not a Star Wars person). What I definitely never knew was that she was a prolific science fiction novelist and story writer. Indeed her Wikipedia page is devoted almost entirely to her SF output, with her screenwriting and mystery fiction careers almost as afterthoughts. Differing perspectives can be fascinating. If I'd written the Wiki article it would have been about LB's screenwriting career, mentioning her SF oeuvre only in passing.

Photoplay, July 1925:

There is no exact date, only landmarks. In 1957 the MCA talent agency was able to force Fox to hire Dean Martin for The Young Lions (in a role intended for TCF contract star Tony Randall), after threatening to withdraw their clients Brando and Clift from the project. For me this is a key turning point in the power shift from studios to agents. FWIW Universal continued to have contract players well into the '70s.

I much prefer the March version, although I agree with you that they went overboard on the Hyde makeup As for the Tracy, I yield to Somerset Maugham, who while visiting the set and watching Tracy's performance, asked in a voice loud enough for all to hear: "Which one is he playing now?"

> It was the earliest work I've seen JOHN CULLUM in, spectacular as Edward Rutledge Cullum plays a significant supporting role in All The Way Home (1963)

The songs are mostly mediocre: "Mama Look Sharp" is cringeworthy, while "Does Anybody Care" and "He Plays the Violin" are almost as embarrassing. "Dear Mr Adams" has the best lyrics of the score, with some amusing if elementary rhymes (and one embarrassing moment of choreography). The intended showstopper "Molasses To Rum To Slaves" isn't too bad either. The extended version includes the number "Cool, Considerate Men" which had been cut from the 1972 release (allegedly b/c Nixon wanted it (?)... Did he really think a movie song might cost him votes? He must've thought the movie would be a big hit rather than the box office flop it was). Like "Molasses". "Cool" is better musically than lyrically, but it is interestingly choreographed and the closest thing in the film to actual CINEMATIC film-making (most of the direction is awful, though I'll admit there is a perverse pleasure in counting examples of inept direction: "Look! There's William Daniels sitting stiffly on the table, just as he must have done on Broadway in order to break up the staging! Look, there's the messenger delivering the messages with the exact expression on his face each time!"). The saving graces of 1776 remains screenwriter Peter Stone's witty repartee and the superb cinematography of Harry Stradling Jr.

> I think the same thing goes for current rock-oriented singers who try to sing old standards. While I admire their desire to expose their fans to these great songs, as well as their good taste in choosing those particular songs, they just don't have the jazzy swing required to put the song over, in my opinion. Obviously, many of Rod Stewart's fans would disagree, but I'd rather hear him sing "You Wear It Well," which he sings superlatively, and leave "They Can't Take That Away From Me" to Fred Astaire. On the flip side, Linda Ronstadt's covers of rock songs like Warren Zevon's "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" and Elvis Costello's "Girls Talk" are embarrassingly bad, while her standards albums like What's New (arranged by Nelson Riddle) are very good.

Technicians working on the stop motion shots for Metropolis, 1927:

Movie theater on Woodward Avenue, Detroit, July 1917: A detail taken from this photograph (warning -- large file): http://i.imgur.com/cubos5i.jpg The film playing is Somewhere in Georgia, starring Detroit's baseball superstar Ty Cobb: