CelluloidKid
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Posts posted by CelluloidKid
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*Whoopi Goldberg, Best Supporting Actress for Ghost*
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*WOW!! Times have changed!!*
The Hays Office found a few things in the picture objectionable: the killing of a Nazi that goes unpunished; as well as the lines "What are you doing tonight?" (deemed to suggest "sexual frustration on the part of Miss Crawford") and "Think of what we're going to do"..."I am." (US)
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*John Mills plays a British soldier who is caught up in the long retreat through France back to the Dunkirk beaches after the German break through in May 1940. Alongside his companions, they struggle back to the beaches only to be held there for days before being evacuated by one of the "Little Ships".*
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*The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe - Book Trailer*
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*_Best Troy Donahue films_:*
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Imitation of Life (1959)
A Summer Place (1959)
Rome Adventure (1962)
Palm Springs Weekend (1963)
Parrish (1961)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
Grandview, U.S.A. (1984)
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*Love the line Joan delivered: "Totalitarian manicure"!* .. I wonder how many taks it took for her to say these two (2) words!?.
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Ann Miller was in: _Mulholland Dr_. (2001) directed by David Lynch!
*NEW DIRECTOR: David Lynch!*
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I love the line, that Joan says to Fred after they are coming out of closet (They are hiding from the Nazis)... "First House we build will have lots of closets to hide in"..... ROFL!
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*This title will be released on November 2, 2010.*
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*Illustrated with over 300 photos, many of them rare and never before in print, JUST JOAN is a compilation of over four years of comprehensive research, culled from rare Lincoln Center archives, original magazines and those who knew her.*
*_The book is called_:*
_Just Joan: A Joan Crawford Appreciation_ and debuts June 30, 2010!!!!
Just Joan carries endorsements from none other than the inimitable Charles Busch and the divine Shaun Considine (author of Bette and Joan: The Divinie Feud); their words will adorn my book's cover!
More than 300 fabulous photos, and a moving, phenomenal afterword by Jim Sibal, the spouse of the late Carl Johnes who was Crawford's dear friend in her later years. Just Joan has been a monumental load of work in putting together, lots of stress and lots of joy, and definitely a labor of love.
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*Director's Cut of 'Metropolis' to Screen in England and Ireland!*
Alison Nastasi
Aug 3rd 2010
Cinematical
One of the most amazing film finds of all-time happened back in 2008 -- when several reels of film were discovered in a museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The reels contained excised footage from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, footage that was screened in Germany during the title's 1927 release. Not long after that premiere, Paramount and Ufa in Germany ordered the film cut by over 25 minutes -- something that incensed Lang, but couldn't be stopped. The footage was thought to be lost forever until that fateful day in 2008. In the years since, a team of film restorationists have been hard at work cleaning it up and putting it back together. Film fans are about to see the fruit of their labor.
Residents in the UK and Ireland will have several opportunities in the weeks ahead to experience Metropolis exactly as Lang intended (and complete with new subtitles, even) thanks to a series of planned screenings.
The UK premiere is set to take place on August 26th as part of BFI Southbank's Future Human season. Unfortunately, this event is fully booked. If you don't have tickets to that one, don't worry -- the film will screen again on August 29th as a prelude to the Cambridge Film Festival. This sounds like the perfect evening to me -- an open-air sunset screening where guests can arrive via chauffeured punts with lots of booze and warm blankets. Nice.
After that, the film plays the Curzon Midnight Movies on September 3rd, before making its Ireland debut on September 4th at the National Concert Hall -- complete with a "newly adapted music score for salon Orchestra."
The film has two more special screenings, with the September 11th showing at The Roundhouse -- complete with live music provided by the London Contemporary Orchestra.
Metropolis is set to open on 60 screens theatrically on September 10th -- so if you can't make it to one of these special screenings, you can at least see the fully restored director's cut of this classic. You can find locations over here.
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*Interesting .......... One of his first films for Universal was ?The Wolf Man? (1941), with Lon Chaney Jr.*
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*Robert Boyle?a GREAT art director, 1909-2010*
posted by otownrog
August, 3 2010
Orlando Sentinel (blog)
This man concocted the look of North by Northwest, one of the triumphs of movie art direction. He faked the UN, Mount Rushmore, this house behind Rushmore, and came up with that blueish color scheme for Cary Grant and the movie.
He?s worth recognizing because a perfect movie always has the perfect look.
Robert Boyle worked with Hitchcock, did big musicals, came up with the look for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) (the original) and art directed to beat the band ? four Oscar nominations, an honorary Oscar given late in life.
And he lived to be 100. Well done.
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*John Aylesworth, 'Hee Haw' creator*
Pioneer Press
Updated: 08/03/2010
*John Aylesworth, a TV writer and producer who co-created the long-running comedy-variety show "Hee Haw," has died. He was 81.*
Aylesworth died July 23 in Rancho Mirage, said his wife, Anita Rufus.
The Canadian-born Aylesworth, who broke into television in 1953 as a writer and performer on the Canadian sketch comedy show "After Hours," moved to the United States in 1958 to write for the CBS music show "Your Hit Parade."
He and his former performing and writing partner, fellow Canadian Frank Peppiatt, reteamed in 1959 to write for "The Andy Williams Show," a summer replacement program on CBS.
Aylesworth and Peppiatt went on to write for "Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall" and "The Judy Garland Show" and many other shows.
But Aylesworth and Peppiatt found their biggest success when they created "Hee Haw."
A summer replacement for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in 1969, "Hee Haw" tied with "Laugh-In" at the top of the ratings its first week and remained a hit throughout the summer. That December, "Hee Haw" was added to CBS' schedule.
The hourlong show, co-hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, was a showcase for the top country singers of the day and for regulars such as Minnie Pearl, Alvin "Junior" Samples and Louis M. "Grandpa" Jones.
? Los Angeles Times
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*Robert F. Boyle, Film Designer for Hitchcock, Dies at 100*
By WILLIAM GRIMES
New York Times
Published: August 3, 2010
*Robert F. Boyle, the eminent Hollywood production designer who created some of the most memorable scenes and images in cinematic history ? Cary Grant clinging to Mount Rushmore in ?North by Northwest,? the bird?s-eye view of the seagull attack in ?The Birds,? the colorfully ramshackle shtetl for ?Fiddler on the Roof? ? died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 100.*
He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and lived in Los Angeles, a son-in-law, John Biddle, said.
Mr. Boyle worked on more than 80 films as art director or production designer, synonyms for a job he once defined as ?being responsible for the space in which a film takes place.?
As a young assistant fresh out of architecture school at the University of Southern California, he worked on the Cecil B. DeMille western ?The Plainsman? (1936) and Fritz Lang?s ?You and Me? (1938). Over the next six decades he worked with a long list of top directors, including Douglas Sirk, Richard Brooks and Norman Jewison.
At the 2008 Academy Awards, as his list of credits was read aloud, he stepped onto the stage to tumultuous applause to receive a special Oscar for his life?s work in art direction.
Mr. Boyle is best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he produced indelible scenes like the climactic struggle atop the Statue of Liberty in ?Saboteur? and the crop-dusting sequence with Cary Grant in ?North by Northwest,? not to mention the seagull attack in ?The Birds.? He was also Hitchcock?s production designer for ?Marnie.?
?It was a meeting of equals: the director who knew exactly what he wanted, and the art director who knew how to get it done,? Mr. Boyle told Film Comment in 1978.
His art direction earned him Academy Award nominations for ?North by Northwest? and ?Fiddler on the Roof? as well as for ?Gaily, Gaily,? a period comedy set in early 20th-century Chicago, and ?The Shootist,? John Wayne?s last film. He was also the subject of an Oscar-nominated 2000 documentary by Daniel Raim, ?The Man on Lincoln?s Nose.?
?He was the last of the great art directors,? the director Norman Jewison said in an interview for this obituary. He worked with Mr. Boyle on ?The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,? ?The Thomas Crown Affair,? ?Gaily, Gaily? and ?Fiddler on the Roof.?
?His films have a look, an ambience, a setting that?s very real because of his scrupulous attention to detail,? Mr. Jewison added. ?Every nuance he could bring to bear to make a film real, he?d do it. He was a real cinematic artist.?
Robert Francis Boyle was born on Oct. 10, 1909, in Los Angeles and grew up on a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley. His degree in architecture, which he received in 1933, was of little use during the Depression, so he began working as a bit player for RKO Pictures. Fascinated by set design, he introduced himself to the studio?s art director, who directed him to Paramount. There he was hired by the great art director Hans Dreier, and wound up doing a bit of everything.
?We were illustrators, draftsmen, we would supervise the construction on the sets,? he told an interviewer for the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998. ?We did almost anything that the art director thought we ought to do.?
After doing second-unit work on ?The Plainsman,? with Gary Cooper, and ?Union Pacific,? both directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and ?Lives of a Bengal Lancer,? Mr. Boyle left Paramount to paint in Mexico but soon returned to the United States and began working for RKO and Universal. One of his first films for Universal was ?The Wolf Man? (1941), with Lon Chaney Jr.
Art directors enjoyed a varied diet in those days. ?We might be doing the Bengal Lancers one day and Ma and Pa Kettle the next and something else the next,? he told the Merrick Library. ?Saboteur? (1942) was his first collaboration with Hitchcock and the beginning of a series of unforgettably suspenseful cinematic sequences. For the climactic battle between Robert Cummings and Norman Lloyd, Mr. Boyle and his team constructed a studio model of the hand and the torch of the Statue of Liberty. To create the illusion that Mr. Lloyd, the villain, was falling in an uncontrolled spin from a great height, Mr. Boyle twirled him on a revolving chair as a crane mounted with a camera swooped upward at dizzying speed.
Mr. Boyle worked with Hitchcock on one more film, ?Shadow of a Doubt,? before serving in the Army Signal Corps in France and Germany as a combat photographer during World War II. After the war, they resumed their collaboration and he married Bess Taffel, a contract writer at RKO who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. She died in 2000. He is survived by two daughters, Emily Boyle, of Los Angeles, and Susan Licon, of Toledo, Ore., and three grandchildren.
Mr. Boyle?s touch is evident in the cleverly orchestrated Mount Rushmore sequence in ?North by Northwest,? in which large-format still photographs were rear-projected using stereopticon slides. He also used studio mock-ups of sections of the stone heads ? ?just enough to put the actors on so we could get down shots, up shots, side shots, whatever we needed,? Mr. Boyle said. For the famous scene in which a crop-duster strafes Cary Grant on a desolate road, Mr. Boyle combined location footage with a toy airplane and toy truck on a miniature field created in the studio.
Mr. Boyle said that the attack sequence in ?The Birds? may have been his trickiest bit of work. To simulate the point of view of the swooping birds descending on Tippi Hedren in a phone booth, Mr. Boyle and his team climbed a cliff overlooking an island off Santa Barbara, Calif., and photographed seagulls as assistants threw fish into the water, encouraging the birds to dive. Only the telephone booth was real. The town of Bodega Bay, actually a composite of several towns, was reproduced on mattes.
For ?Gaily, Gaily,? Mr. Boyle recreated turn-of-the-century Chicago on a backlot at Universal, right down to the elevated tracks in the Loop. Notoriously finicky about locations, he traveled the length and breadth of Eastern Europe for ?Fiddler on the Roof? before settling on a location in what was then Yugoslavia.
For ?In Cold Blood,? Mr. Boyle took the opposite tack, using as a set the actual Kansas farmhouse where the murders took place that provided the material for the Truman Capote book on which the film was based.
Trickery for its own sake did not interest him. ?If it doesn?t have any meaningful application to the story, it?s never a great shot,? he said.
Mr. Boyle took on projects of every description. He worked on Ma and Pa Kettle comedies and ?Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.? He was the art director for Sam Fuller on ?The Crimson Kimono? and for J. Lee Thompson on ?Cape Fear.? He was the production designer for ?The Shootist,? ?Private Benjamin? and ?Troop Beverly Hills.?
A movie, he said, ?starts with the locale, with the environment that people live in, how they move within that environment.? Sometimes that environment has to be built.
?I?m all for construction, because we?re dealing with the magic of movies,? he told Variety in 2008. ?And I always feel that if you build it, you build it for the dream rather than the actuality. We make up our own truth.?
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*_E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial_ (1982) ... Voted fave family film fodder .... WHY!? HOW!? I guess I was the onlykid who never liked E.T.*
3rd August 2010
*Steven Spielberg's ET The Extra-Terrestrial has been voted the greatest film of all time in a new survey.*
The story of an alien trapped on Earth trying to get home topped the poll of more than 2,500 people for radiotimes.com.
Movie expert Barry Norman described the sci-fi classic as "the perfect family film".
He told the Radio Times it was "a magical tale for children, a triumph of special effects, a chastening lesson to bigots everywhere and, as the director Steven Spielberg describes it, a simple and pure love story".
ET won four Oscars in 1983 but was beaten to the Best Picture award by Richard Attenborough's Gandhi.
The Wizard Of Oz came second in the online survey, followed by Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Toy Story.
*_The full list of 100 essential family films can be found in Radio Times, but here's the top ten_:*
ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Mary Poppins (1964)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
Toy Story (1995)
Shrek (2001)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Back to the Future (1985)
The Jungle Book (1967)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Reg readers with kids will doubtless be glad to see that classics from their own childhoods are well represented. Radio Times film editor Andrew Collins said: "Entertain one generation and they'll pass it on to the next. When the elusive ingredients come together? something magical happens: memories are imprinted*, bonds formed and imaginations fired."
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hair ribbons ........... _Hairspray_ (1988)
*NEW WORD: Spatial learning!*
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*_Pee-Wee's Big Adventure_ (1985)*
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Lee Remick was in: _The Omen_ (1976) directed by Richard Donner!
*NEW DIRECTOR: Richard Donner!*
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April 25, 2010
*A shaggy dog story about Marilyn Monroe and me*
*As a shy boy in Glasgow, Andrew O?Hagan was inspired to write by an obsession with Marilyn Monroe ? but it was her devoted terrier, Maf, who led him to discover her real story*
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article7105643.ece
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*_The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe_*
*by Andrew O?Hagan*
*_Publisher_:* Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe is the fourth novel from Andrew O?Hagan, and is the 'memoir' of the Maltese terrier given for Christmas 1960 by Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe.
*_Product Description_*
In November 1960, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn Monroe a dog. His name was Mafia Honey, or Maf for short. He had an instinct for celebrity. For politics. For psychoanalysis. For literature. For interior decoration. For Liver Treat with a side order of National Biscuits.
Born in the household of Vanessa Bell, brought to the United States by Natalie Wood?s mother, given as a Christmas present to Marilyn the winter after she separated from Arthur Miller, Maf offers a keen insight into the world of Hollywood?s greatest star. Not to mention a hilarious peek into the brain of an opinionated, well-read, politically scrappy, complex canine hero.
Maf was with Marilyn for the last two years of her life, first in New York, where she mixed with everyone who was anyone?the art dealer Leo Castelli, Lee Strasberg and the Actor?s Studio crowd, Upper West Side ?migr?s?then back to Los Angeles. She took him to meet President Kennedy and to Hollywood restaurants, department stores, and interviews. To Mexico, for her divorce. With style, brilliance, and panache, Andrew O?Hagan has drawn an altogether original portrait of the woman behind the icon, and the dog behind the woman.
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*Marilyn Monroe's last weekend: Told for the first time, an eyewitness's account of the row with Frank Sinatra that friends fear signed her death warrant*
By Peter Evans
August 2010
On Sunday, August 5, 1962, the body of Marilyn Monroe was found naked and face-down on her bed at her home on Fifth Helena Drive, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Brentwood, California. She was 36 years old.
'The long troubled star clutched a telephone in one hand. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was nearby,' reported the Associated Press that morning.
Long before she was officially discovered dead on the Sunday, neighbours had seen a mysterious - and still unexplained - ambulance parked in front of the film star's residence on the Saturday evening
Thelma Todd Day - Mon. Aug. 30
in Hot Topics
Posted
*Robert Osborne says he?s looking forward to learning more about Thelma Todd, a comic actress who will be honored Aug. 30.*
*?She is most famous for the way she died ? one of the great unsolved mysteries,? Osborne says. ?She went to a party and was found dead in her car in the next morning. There are hints she could have committed suicide or have been murdered. She could have been rubbed out by the mob.?*