Sprocket_Man
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Posts posted by Sprocket_Man
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Following tonight's showing of WILL PENNY (an underrated-to-the-point-of-being-ignored film; the first twenty minutes, in particular, being probably the most accurate rendering of what a real cowboy's life was that's ever been put on film -- cold, miserable, underpaid, lonely and not at all the mythic image Hollywood has typically manufactured. It then transforms into pretty standard melodrama, but it's still very good), Osborne stated that star Charlton Heston's home was in Burbank (of all places).
From the early 1960s the Heston family have occupied a custom-built ridge-top house in the Coldwater Canyon section of the Hollywood Hills, above Beverly Hills (in his correspondence, Heston would identify the location as Beverly Hills but, technically, it is in the City of Los Angeles). Though only a few miles from Burbank, it's nowhere near the city limits of that Los Angeles suburb.
I really wish the writers of Osborne's pieces would do their homework or, better yet, that the executives at TCM would replace them with folks who are more diligent, take more pride in their work and have the necessary degree of reverence for the truth.
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Whoa! If you think that SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is based on a true story (besides the fact that there were, during the war, multiple brothers from a couple of families killed in combat), then you're laboring under a tremendous misapprehension.
The incidents depicted in Spielberg's film are 100%% fiction, including the extremely fanciful (and dramatically superfluous) scene in Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall's office, when he decides to risk the lives of a whole squad of soldiers by sending them on the proverbial wild-goose chase looking for the surviving Ryan brother. In reality, there was no such mission ever undertaken by the Army or any of the other armed services, for the all-too-obvious reasons that men get killed in war, and that while two or more from the same family dying may be unfortunate, it really won't affect morale, either among the troops or on the home front. What will affect morale is news of other, unrelated soldiers' lives being risked and maybe wasted in a pointless hunt for surviving siblings of the dead.
As I wrote earlier, most of the movie is B.S., from its combat tactics to the fact that Miller's squad walk far to closely together in enemy-held territory, thereby making it much easier for German snipers or an opposing force to kill them all quickly. (Just as a point of reference, Dale Dye, whom Spielberg employed as his technical advisor, and who makes a living in that role, never held a combat command in his years in the Marines.)
When the Sullivan brothers were all killed in a torpedo attack on the USS Juneau in 1942, the Navy changed its regulations to prohibit the assigning of siblings to the same vessel to reduce the chance that a family would lose more than one child. It's all they could do. The fact remains that the Sullivans all died, yet we went on to win the war, anyway.
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> {quote:title=JarrodMcDonald wrote:}{quote}
> It's definitely spring. Tomorrow is the first official day of the season...
I hate spring. And I hate summer even more.
I'm counting the days till next winter.
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> {quote:title=JarrodMcDonald wrote:}{quote}
> Okay, here's the deal:
>
> I bought a copy of this film several years ago and it sits in the original wrapping. I have decided that I am going to tear this film apart...I mean it figuratively and literally.
>
> I am going to watch it, very slowly...I will spend four to five hours on it, pausing it along the way and writing down notes. I am going to be very methodical about it.
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> I am going to be brutal.
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> If this film is as good as everyone says, it will be able to withstand my extreme scrutiny of it. If it's that good, then I will fall in love with it and reverse my opinion. But in the event I do not reverse my opinion, the brutality will stand.
>
> We have to understand,
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> There can be NO:
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> Well, it was made in 1942 excuses (it has to hold up to today's standards, or else it's time as a true classic is finite and it has a shelf life that it has exceeded).
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> There can be NO:
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> Well, anyone could find something wrong with it excuses.
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> There can be NO:
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> Well, that is not what Curtiz meant. (I will be reporting the facts of what appears on screen.)
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> There can be NO:
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> Exemption from politics. I am a registered Republican. If I feel the film is entirely too liberal and that it interferes with its entertainment value, I will definitely cite examples.
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> There can be NO:
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> Repeat viewings. I will only watch this film once and then I will put it under one of the tires and drive over it. I will crush it. If I happen to like the film, I will ask Santa to bring me a new copy later this year.
>
> Expect my findings in the next day or so.
The above relates more to the 12 ANGRY MEN thread elsewhere on the board, because you've appointed yourself a one-man jury that's already convinced that the defendant is guilty.
The idea of "innocent until proven guilty" is obviously a foreign concept to you; you think that CASABLANCA (or, by extension, any movie) needs to prove it isn't bad for you to think it worthy of being appreciated by others. Most people go to see a movie with an open mind; they'll roll with the movie's punches until and unless it strikes them as being ineffective, unconvincing and, perhaps, inane.
You, on the other hand, already think it ineffective and unconvincing without ever having seen it. So your only reason for actually watching it is to reinforce the convictions you already hold, which is the typical act of a narcissist. At least in a trial, a competent judge instructs the jury to leave its prejudices at the door and weigh the case on its merits. The judge in a matter like this is the individual movie viewer's conscience and sense of fairness, but the one in your skull is apparently Judge Roy Bean, who's already ordered the gallows to be built before the trial's opening arguments are even made.
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Makes no sense to you.
In fact, it's your comment that makes no sense (at least to anyone who has a sense of humor).
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> {quote:title=Jenetico wrote:}{quote}
> Speaking of the chicken or the egg. Which one is correct?
The egg. No joke: it's the egg.
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> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote}
> Some Universal films were cremated in the studio fire recently.
A lot of 35 mm prints and video masters were destroyed (I have it on good authority from a friend of mine at Universal Home Video that that the losses were substantially greater than the studio admitted to), but no negatives or sound elements were lost, as those are too precious to be stored in a mid-grade, above-ground (and obviously not fireproof) vault on studio property.
The problem is that if a print is requested for an archive or repertory screening, and the only print went up in the fire, Universal may not be too terribly inclined to strike another one for a purpose that doesn't generate much profit for the company.
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> {quote:title=fxreyman wrote:}{quote}
> Easy question.......easy answer......
>
> 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
I'll second that.
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> {quote:title=audreyforever wrote:}{quote}
> Yes, it was a good intro. And also he brought up how committed you had to be to work with David Lean. That's why Finney turned it down, and I believe Brando for the same reason. Even when it came to Doctor Zhivago, Rod Steiger was on the set for 12 months! But, in the end, it all pad off with each film, and as you can see, with this one, everybody worked their heart out.
Albert Finney emphatically did not turn down the lead in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. He signed a contract and began shooting the film in Jordan with Lean & Co. After two weeks' principal photography, Finney walked off the picture, leaving Sam Spiegel and Lean to re-cast.
As for Steiger and DR ZHIVAGO, he was offered the part of Komarovsky only after James Mason turned it down.
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I know Bob Birchard. I have his biography of DeMille, which is a somewhat different take on the director, in that its focus is deliberately narrower than earlier attempts (and DeMille's autobiography).
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Nearly twenty-six years ago there was an article in the Los Angeles Times about Cecil B. DeMille's "lost Egyptian city" in the sand dunes outside Santa Barbara California. It says something about one man's quest to unearth it that the paper thought it was time to cover the subject again:
latimes.com/news/la-me-lostcity19-2010mar19,0,1607195.story
latimes.com
COLUMN ONE
Digging up a piece of Hollywood history
Cecil B. DeMille's massive movie set, built in 1923 for 'The Ten Commandments,' lies buried on California's Central Coast. One man's quest to unearth the lost city has lasted nearly 30 years.
By Mike Anton
6:02 PM PDT, March 18, 2010
Reporting from Guadalupe, Calif.
Strong winds scour the dunes, which hide a curious history. Nails and fragments of concrete are scattered everywhere. Steel cables, carved pieces of wood and slabs of painted plaster poke out of the ground, ghosts rising from the grave.
In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California's Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination -- a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of "The Ten Commandments."
Under the direction of French artist Paul Iribe, a founder of the Art Deco movement, 1,600 craftsmen built a temple 800 feet wide and 120 feet tall flanked by four 40-ton statues of the Pharaoh Ramses II. Twenty-one giant plaster sphinxes lined a path to the temple's gates. A tent city sprung up to house some of the 2,500 actors and 3,000 animals used to tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.
"Your skin will be cooked raw. You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history," DeMille told his army of actors. "I expect of you your supreme efforts."
When he was done, the set proved too expensive to haul away, but too valuable to leave intact for rival filmmakers to poach. DeMille had it bulldozed into a 300-foot-long trench and covered with sand.
Peter Brosnan was a 30-year-old New York University film school graduate when he first heard the story in 1982. Over beers one night, a former college roommate laid out the fantastic tale of DeMille's lost city.
"I thought my friend was nuts," Brosnan said.
Then his friend showed him DeMille's autobiography, in which the director seemed amused at the prospect that his city would be unearthed someday.
"If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," DeMille wrote, "I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization . . . extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America."
Captivated, Brosnan embarked on a journey that has yet to end -- a quest to find DeMille's set, exhume it and produce a documentary about this unusual piece of Hollywood history.
The project would take him from film industry archives to the living rooms of aging ranchers who worked as extras on "Ten Commandments." He filmed their stories: How the "Hollywood boys" got thrown from unbroken horses; how a local 10-year-old with no acting experience played the pharaoh's son and was schooled by DeMille to put some mustard into his whipping of Moses; how the director ferried 240 elderly Jews from Los Angeles to witness the Exodus reenacted. The recent immigrants broke out into an impromptu dirge that stunned the crew.
Brosnan also collected stories from locals about the dozens of films shot outside Guadalupe from the silent era to the 1940s -- a time when the dunes were Hollywood's backlot for desert movies and ranch hands had fleeting encounters with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich.
Clarence Minetti, 92, is among the few still around with a connection to those days. He appeared in "The Last Outpost," a 1935 film starring Cary Grant. The dunes were colonial Iraq.
"We were British soldiers or something," Minetti said. "Paid $5 a day for me and my horse."
Minetti pointed Brosnan to one dune out of the hundreds that flow across miles of the spectacular nature preserve. It didn't shift in the wind. In fact, it never moved. One foggy morning in June 1983, Brosnan and two friends climbed Minetti's dune with brooms and a movie camera. Hours later they hit pay dirt: dozens of pieces of statuary, including a 6-foot-wide bas-relief of a horse head.
Brosnan and archaeologist John Parker developed a plan for the excavation. DeMille's estate offered encouragement. A Smithsonian Institution curator expressed interest in displaying pieces of the set. Charlton Heston, who played Moses in DeMille's far more famous 1956 remake, sent his best wishes.
"We were ecstatic," Brosnan said. "We were young, idealistic and thought: What a wonderful movie this is going to make! We thought certainly we could get some money from Hollywood and we'd be finished with this project in a year or two."
But in Hollywood, green lights are as ephemeral as a starlet's blown kisses. Despite years of effort, Brosnan could raise only a portion of the $175,000 needed for a full-blown archaeological dig.
Yet his passion for DeMille's lost city never waned. Now, after 27 years, Brosnan believes he's close to obtaining a grant that will allow him to use inexpensive editing software to fulfill part of his project -- a film showcasing his oral histories on Guadalupe's days as a stand-in for exotic locales.
"I didn't realize when I started this project that it was going to become an epic of its own," he said.
Brosnan's intimations of a breakthrough are welcome news in Guadalupe, a struggling farming town that has largely neglected its film heritage.
"For years people around here knew DeMille's set was out there in the dunes, but the attitude was, 'Yeah, big deal,' " said Shirley Boydstun, 81, a member of the Guadalupe Historical Society. "If it wasn't for Peter, this history would have been totally gone."
Guadalupe is the Zelig of the Central Coast -- a speck on California Highway 1 that has had more than its share of brushes with history. Portola's expedition passed through in the 1700s. Father Junipero Serra brought the first cattle. Lt. Col. John Fremont and his troops camped in town in the mid-1800s and accidentally torched its oldest adobe.
Guadalupe's Hollywood golden era ended in the mid-1940s when studios traded the wilds of Santa Barbara County for location shooting in the Sahara and Middle East. In later decades, Guadalupe earned a new reputation as a town where gambling, prostitution, drug dealing and corruption thrived until federal authorities cracked down in the 1980s.
"Guadalupe has always been the whipping boy of Santa Barbara County," said John Perry, 71, who like other old-timers is protective about his hometown's rich but conflicted history. "You never hear any of the good things about it."
Perry is Guadalupe's unofficial historian and his NAPA Auto Parts store is often mistaken for an antique shop. It's crammed with local artifacts: the dome light from the city's first police car, a 1949 Chevy; a wooden staff used by Valentino in "The Sheik," filmed here in 1921.
Locals know Perry collects stuff, so things just show up on his doorstep. That's how he came into possession of the plaster blob sitting in a glass case -- a sphinx claw from "The Ten Commandments."
"I should put a sign on it," Perry said. "When people come in and ask me where the lost city is, I tell them, 'I don't know. Maybe that's why they call it the lost city.' "
It's said there's a home in town built entirely with lumber scavenged from DeMille's set -- although no one, it seems, can tell you where it is. For years, two rescued sphinx statues guarded the entrance to a local golf course, where they slowly disintegrated.
Brosnan has brought overdue attention to Guadalupe's Hollywood era. His discovery of the buried set in 1983 made headlines worldwide. A few years later, a grant from Bank of America, which helped bankroll DeMille's movie, allowed for radar to be used to pinpoint large forms, including the giant statues of Ramses II. The 75th anniversary of "The Ten Commandments" in 1998 brought more headlines -- but not enough money.
Brosnan found himself wandering in a wilderness of creative indifference.
Today, he is 57 and the shoulder-length hair of his youth is close-cropped and gray. Brosnan had moderate success writing screenplays, but eventually shelved his Hollywood dreams for a master's degree in clinical psychology and a job as a Los Angeles County social worker handling child abuse cases.
"I got tired of suing people to get paid," he said. "I was writing films I wasn't happy with. Men with big guns. I saw folks in their 40s and 50s who were still hustling around town, trying for their big break. They were sad characters, and I didn't want to end up like them."
But the boxes of filmed interviews from Guadalupe stored in his garage nagged at him. He stitched together a rough cut of his documentary and published a booklet on Guadalupe's film history.
"Thirty years later, I still think it's a great idea for a documentary film," he said. "The people of Guadalupe have been wonderful to us. I'd like to see this benefit them."
A steady trickle of film buffs find their way to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, where chunks of DeMille's set are on display, including a bas-relief of a pharaoh's head reassembled by Brosnan's team.
The center recently put out a news release announcing that Brosnan's documentary would be released this summer. This made Brosnan nervous, since he is still talking to Paramount about getting permission to use clips from "The Ten Commandments."
Nevertheless, there are grand ideas floating through Guadalupe. Maybe the movie can premiere at the restored Royal Theater. Maybe the Dunes Center can sell DVDs to support its environmental work. Maybe this will revive the idea of hosting a classic film festival. And who knows: Maybe it can reignite interest in excavating DeMille's lost city.
"There's so much material out there," Brosnan said. "It might be a good place for a university to train archaeologists."
Perseverance Moses himself could appreciate.
mike.anton@latimes.com
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> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> Scottman, as a journalist and news reporter for nearly 40 years, I can assure you that none of us will ever know exactly what happened at the OK Corral, if we were not personally there to witness the actions ourselves.
Whoa! A few days ago in another thread, you described yourself as having been a cameraman for forty years (or whatever)!
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I guess all those raccoons have finally got their revenge.
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> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}
> Guess I never saw the third incarnation. I thought the film was only good as a satire of suburbia, and the dirt through the kitchen window crystallized that. So eliminating it wrecked the film, to me. But, what I call the "cosmic chandelier" near the end is pretty funny anyway...
I tend to agree with you. From the first time I saw the film, it struck me as two different movies: the tale of power lineman Roy Neary and his, frankly, silly and unconvincing imposed obsession with getting to Devils Tower (oh, those mashed potatoes!), and the story of M. Lacombe's pursuit of the aliens he suspects are about to descend on Wyoming. The problem is that the two narratives really don't mesh well, leaving in their wake a sense of having seen a series vignettes that don''t add up to a piece of cogent drama.
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> {quote:title=patful wrote:}{quote}
> *By the way, whenever you see saguaro cactus in a Western movie, that usually means the cactus itself was filmed in either Southwestern New Mexico, Southern Arizona, Southeastern California, or Northwestern Mexico.*
Or the "cacti" are made out of plaster, with wooden bases, and were trucked to the location from Hollywood.
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Let's not forget Jean-Luc Godard's CONTEMPT, with all those scenes at Rome's fabled Cinecitt? Studios, and the great Fritz Lang.
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Yes, they're going to be shooting a lot of the exteriors around the Center Diner in my home town of Peekskill, NY. Haynes and the location manager say that the town has the classic look of 1930's America:
City draws HBO, Winslet for
miniseries
PEEKSKILL ? "Saturday Night Live" may have called it
a "hellhole," but HBO seems to find the city
appealing.
The premier cable network is expected to start
filming "Mildred Pierce," starring Academy Award
winner Kate Winslet, in Peekskill next month and is
looking to cast 100 to 150 extras ? preferably
locals ? for the 1930s-era miniseries.
The announcement comes on the heels of a sketch
on "Saturday Night Live" where Gov. David Paterson,
portrayed by Fred Armisen, says he will spend his
remaining days in office doing a "farewell tour of
upstate New York ? hellholes like Plattsburgh and
Peekskill," and called residents of those cities
"freaks" and "rock eaters."
On Monday, Mayor Mary Foster publicly took
umbrage with the skit and invited the writers of SNL
to catch a free show at the Paramount Center for the
Arts.
"Here's a crew that works in Manhattan and knows
how to get to Peekskill," Foster joked, referring to
HBO.
"What I think is really exciting is featuring a
miniseries that will be filmed in the city's
downtown," she said of the area that in recent years
has been undergoing a renaissance. "It helps
reinforce all the work we've been doing here."
Foster said location scouts loved Bank Street and the
Center Diner. The Bank Street eatery is housed in an
old-fashioned train car. Waitress Addy Parris said a
crew visited the diner Friday and indicated they would
be shooting exteriors of it for the melodrama.
"I think it's a good idea to have it filmed here," said
Parris. "This is a historic diner that's been here
since 1937."
The project's location manager, Joe Guest, said via
e-mail they are "thrilled and honored to be able to
include a few key locations in Peekskill in the
miniseries."
"After carefully investigating towns throughout
Westchester County, as well as on Long Island, we
have found that Peekskill architecture has a unique
resemblance to Hollywood in the 1930s," he said.
The five-hour miniseries, adapted from the 1941
novel by James M. Cain, tells the story of Mildred
Pierce Beragon, a single mother struggling to
support her family during the Great Depression in
middle-class Los Angeles.
A feature film version of the book was made in 1945
starring Joan Crawford, who won a best actress
Oscar for her title role performance.
This latest version, directed and co-written by Todd
Haynes, will be shot primarily in New York, with
Peekskill being the only filming site outside of the
city, said Sabel, a senior casting associate at Grant
Wilfley Casting, who only goes by one name.
The Peekskill shoot is tentatively scheduled for the
last week in April and is expected to include both
exterior and interior scenes, along with Winslet on
location, Sabel said.
The casting company is seeking extras, both men
and women, who have a "1930s classic look."
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That's Ealing Studios comedies.
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> {quote:title=CineMaven wrote:}{quote}
> Audie Murphy...the most decorated soldier of the Second World War. Is it fair for him to play a soldier in the movies when he really was one?? Do you think it's a stretch in acting or just art imitating life?
John Huston's whole reasoning in casting Murphy is the extraordinary contrast of having the U.S. most decorated soldier playing a young fictional soldier who must wrestle with his own instinct to turn coward in the face of battle.
One of the film's most wonderful aspects is the way Huston and his cinematographer, Hal Rosson, make the film look almost documentary-like. Motion pictures wouldn't be invented until almost thirty years after the end of the Civil War, but if they had existed in the period 1861-65, and, someone like Matthew Brady had been on the battlefields shooting newsreels, one imagines that the footage would look a lot like Huston and Rosson's film.
Too bad that the studio had so little faith in the movie -- due, in no small part to their belief that the public wouldn't accept Audie Murphy playing a coward -- that it cut the film down to a mere 68 minutes. It would be wonderful if Warner Bros. would scour their vaults to try to find the excised footage so that Huston's lost minor masterpiece might be restored to his original intentions.
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> {quote:title=bongoBill wrote:}{quote}
> Has anyone ever looked and found much information on the special effects, specifically model warships, used in war films?
> I find it surprising that there seem to be very few photos of the miniature ships from movies such as 'Tora Tora Tora' and 'In Harms Way' It seems like the only ones for 'In Harms Way' were the few photos that a Life magazine photographer took while the film was shooting on the lake in Mexico.
> There seem to be a couple of photos of a few 'Tora' ships from the big backlot auction that was held in the early 70s. Another small group of photos from the shoot on the Fox lake.
> I would have thought that the studios would have heavily photographed and documented these things but apparently not.
On my first trip to Los Angeles in the early summer of 1978 I sneaked into 20th Century-Fox's lot several times, spending several days just poking around. The studio used to have a piece of land on the north side of Olympic Blvd., apart from the main lot, that was accessible by the studio's own bridge (they were in the process of selling off that acreage, but hadn't yet cleared the land. Among various craft sheds were many of he ship models from TORA! TORA! TORA!, just bleaching in the sun, though calling them "models" is misleading: each of them was immense -- 40-50 feet long, with the most extraordinary attention to detail, down to gunwale railings made of chains composed of individual links.
I'm sure that there is copious behind-the-scenes footage and still photos of the special effects work with these models, but for whatever reason, it has stayed locked up in Fox's vaults (though much of it may have passed into private hands by now). I'm sure we will get to see some of it eventually.
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I have to disagree; COMMAND DECISION, adapted from a stage play, is talky, contrived and static. TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH. on the other hand, has that wonderful semi-documentary look and feel that so many of Darryl Zanuck's films from the late 1940's-early '50's had, which was particularly appropriate for the subject matter.
The latter film, moreover, benefited from having deeper, more psychologically complex characters (how many films of the period would have been allowed to portray its protagonist -- played by one of Hollywood's biggest stars and most appealing leading men -- as having a nervous breakdown that renders him mute for a quarter of the film?) and a far more expansive physical production.
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> {quote:title=Brenny625 wrote:}{quote}
> Hi primos,
> Pete Duel died of a gunshot wound to the head. He was found by his girlfriend underneath his christmas tree. Alot of suspicious circumstances surrounding him, but also alot of drinking in his life and depression. I do believe it was suicide, but there were weird things going on that nite too.
He was Peter De[/u]uel.
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> {quote:title=Ricky2400 wrote:}{quote}
> * indicates that Darryl Zanuck once worked for the Warner Bros. prior to his forming 20th Century Fox; no doubt he learned some womanizing tactics from J.L.
>
> Harry Cohn may have been a S.O.B., but his meanness kept Columbia in the black for all those years, while the other studios were losing money.
I don't think that Zanuck needed to learn those things from Warner, or anybody else. Also, he didn't "form" 20th Century-Fox; after leaving Warner Bros., Zanuck and Joseph Schenck, brother of Nick Schenck, chairman of MGM's parent, Loew's, Inc., formed 20th Century Pictures in 1933. When Fox Studios founder William Fox had to liquidate his company due to a failed attempt to gain control of Loew's-MGM and being injured in a very serious traffic accident, Zanuck and Joseph Schenck purchased Fox's assets, including studio facilities in West Los Angeles, and another on Western Avenue in Hollywood, and merged them into a company they called 20th Century-Fox.
As for Harry Cohn, he may have been crude, mean and sadistic, but unlike a lot of his fellow moguls, he was honest. Others would try to weasel out of a deal if it soured, but not Cohn. His word was as good as gold.
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> {quote:title=Arturo wrote:}{quote}
> JarrodMcdonald wrote:
> Incidentally, his costar in HS, Linda Darnell (also giving a great performance) died an unusual, tragic death as well. In 1965, staying a friend's house in Chicago, she stayed up late to watch herself in Stardust, the 1940 film based loosely on her discovery by Hollywood. She fell asleep and the house caught fire, apparently from a cigarette she had smoked earlier.
It was April 9, 1965 (coincidentally, my father's 61st birthday). The house and fire were actually in Glenview, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and Darnell had been staying with her former secretary. She died from her burns the following day.
PS: The movie she'd been watching is STAR DUST, not "Stardust."
Where DOES Robert Osborne get his often wacky "facts?"
in Hot Topics
Posted
> {quote:title=primosprimos wrote:}{quote}
> Did you know his real name is John Charles Carter? A boring little name, true, but I didn't know the studio moguls played god with male actors too.
Yes, I did know it was his real name. The change had nothing to do with studio moguls, though it did reflect -- partly -- professional aspirations on Heston's part.
Heston's parents divorced when he was ten; his mother, Lila Charlton, married Chester Heston a few years later, and Charles took his stepfather's surname (while remaining closer to his real father, Russ Carter). Eighteen-year-old Charles Heston, still nine years away from his first Hollywood movie, changed his given name to his mother's maiden name, Charlton, when he appeared in David Bradley's semi-professional film adaptation of Ibsen's PEER GYNT (1941).
All kind of roundabout, but generally pretty organic to the man's life, unlike the wholesale crafting of stage names for so many other actors (Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis).