FredCDobbs

And Frances Octavia Smith began her career as a night club singer. She later became Dale Evans.

Leonard Sly, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers, starting in that Western music band in the movies in 1935. He later became Roy Rogers.

>I guess I didn't explain myself very well. I wanted to know if there was a factual book about (some aspect of) the movies that you enjoyed, and wished that the author had come up with other factual books along those lines. Ooppps.... I thought you meant books that I wished were turned into movies. Hmmm, I gues my original suggestion could be modified and I wish those old testimony books would be re-published as modern books. With no modern opinions and no commentary added. Just let movie fans read the original testimony as it occurred. The original books contain some of the most exciting "inside" stuff to ever be written about Hollywood, actors, directors, screenwriters, and producers.

*Attack of the Crab Monsters* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTVWQ8dxPW0 Man, that movie makes me hungry! I need a big vat of boiling water, some soft butter, a gallon jug of Tabasco sauce, some cocktail sauce, and about 50 boxes of Zatarain's Crab Boil. And some good Cajun music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9V5Z5R97MA

I just found out there was a new Nancy Drew film made in 2007 which grossed a lot of money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew_(2007_film)

Bonita Granville made 4 movies based on the Nancy Drew teenage-detective books, and I wish she had made more. I enjoy these books very much because they take me back to my high school days when I used to have fantasies about being a detective, a spy, a world traveler, and adventurer. I used to read the Nancy Drew books when I was about 12 years old, and I like them better as movies.

>What is the 1947 HUAC hearings please? I have never heard of this. Hi, Right after WW II ended, some government agencies and some newspapers and news magazines began to learn that a lot of Americans had joined the American Communist Party and that the Soviet Government in Russia was controlling the Party (known as the CPUSA). This developed into a type of spy scandal, and also a scandal when the House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities learned that a top editor for Time Magazine (a man named Whittaker Chambers) had worked as a Soviet spy in the 1930s. Chambers named other Soviet spies he knew, including one who worked for the Roosevelt Administration at a high level. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambers* This information followed closely the discovery in the late 1930s and early 40s about Nazi spies inside the U.S, which had been thoroughly investigated before and during WW II. This would be as shocking as to discover today, hundreds of Chinese spies or Americans working as spies for China, working in America today, in government, in the media, in industry, and in the Hollywood film industry. We did have one major spy like that, but her husband, a media mogul, recently divorced her. A couple of years ago, I warned about this woman on this very message board. Well, anyway it seems that by 1947 the House Committee (known as HUAC) had learned that some Communists were working in the movie business in Hollywood, and in 1947 they decided to hold public hearings about the pro-Soviet and pro-Russian Communists in Hollywood. This caused a big controversy back in those days, and a lot of misinformation was published about the hearings during the next 67 years. Were the Communists in Hollywood bad, or were the Congressmen bad? I think the only way for people to judge the situation properly is to read the actual testimony. And I think it would be very exciting to see a TV mini-series about the Hearings, a TV show that contained only real dialogue, taken from the transcripts of the Testimony. Here is one of the transcript books from 1947, where you can read the questions and the testimony of actors, directors, and screenwriters. Scroll down to CONTENTS to see the names of the people who testified: *http://www.archive.org/stream/hearingsregardin1947aunit/hearingsregardin1947aunit_djvu.txt*

I wish the 1947 HUAC Hollywood hearings would be made into a TV mini-series. Just the testimony, the questions and answers (which are in several volume of the transcript books). No editorial comment and no other stuff in the mini-series by the program's producers. Let the audience hear the questions and answers and decide for themselves about the hearings.

Hi Ham, I also receive TCM on SD on Directv. Their normal old films are shown in the 4:3 center section of 16:9 LCD screens. The black bars on each side are unelectrified parts of the screen. Dead black natural screen side bars that are NOT transmitted to us by TCM. When TCM transmitts an SD letterbox image via Directv, we receive top and bottom black bars that ARE transmitted to us by TCM, plus we see the natural non-electrified black side bars of our 16:9 screens. This leaves only the center portion of the screen with a small narrow wide-screen image, something about the size of a Band-Aid. That is what they call "Letterbox". However, keep in mind that we see the two top and bottom Transmitted black bars, PLUS the two natural black TV screen side bars since we are only receiving a 4:3 image transmission from TCM. This is sometimes called a Windowbox screen. When we see this, our screens are only about 1/3 lit up with an image. We can enlarge that 1/3 image to fill out the width of our screen with a letterbox image, and then receive only the two transmitted top and bottom black bars, with no black side bars, BUT the image is fuzzy because it is being enlarged by our TVs. Evidently, HD TCM is supposed to naturally fill out the screen, left and right, with an automatic switching signal. I receive this signal on my broadcast HD channels and they automatically fill up the entire 16:9 TV screen for regular TV programs. An HD broadcast of a wide screen film is automatically enlarged before it reaches my TV, and there are only two thin top and bottom black bars, with no side black bars at all. The image is sharp since I don't have to enlarge it with my own TV setting. I'm just guessing, but apparently TCM HD is supposed to do the enlarging for the 16:9 screen automatically, but sometimes it does not automatically do it.

>What is it about the adjustment people dread so much? When we enlarge the picture to make it fit our TV screens, the image becomes fuzzy and degraded, as if we were watching it on a 16 mm print. We can either watch that or watch a tiny picture with black bars on all 4 sides. Hey, we're in the 21st Century and we are receiving a 1910 movie image. Let's hope the guy turning the crank on the old movie projector doesn't get too tired.

The reason I still like the early Universal horror films is because when I saw them as a kid, either in a theater during a re-release or on television, they looked real to me. The old style of photography, the old lenses used, the unusual style of the acting and the unusual stories, all made these films seem believable. They seemed something like late 19th Century films of real events that might have actually happened in Europe in the old days. It would be like watching Triumph of the Will today. It is a very bizarre story about bizarre events in old Europe, but it actually did happen.

>Nice interview, another example that being old doesn't mean having bad memory. Hi ham, I want to tell you that.... uhhh.... mmm..... that, ah...... that..... well, I forgot what I was going to say. I'll get back to you later.

Carla in early films: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaVChkMdOqo

Dang, I haven't been that alert since I was about 35.

On Directv SD I see it as a letterbox designed for a standard 4:3 TV screen. I have to enlarge it to get a letterbox for a 16:9 screen.

I figure that Thelma probably travels a lot and reads a lot. Because she knows a lot of interesting stuff that is not usually taught in school.

>Getting involved with drugs (especially drug trafficking), with political activism and agitation against the existing government, engaging in criminally reckless behavior, hanging with low lifes or act like a low life yourself- and the bets are off and you may be in for a life lesson you won't forget! Yes, yes, yes! Do you remember that poor dumb American girl who got involved in radical politics in some South American country like Peru. She was arrested and when she went into court she called a bunch of the local judges fascists? She's been in prison in Peru for about 20 years all because of her bad courtroom attitude. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Berenson What a nightmare!

How did you get to be so smart, Thelma? Do you have some kind of fancy University Degree? You seem to know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff.

>That's Canada and its National Broadcaster for ya - terribly uncivilized. Of course we Americans don't have any uncivilized broadcasters.

>So Americans should think twice before travelling to lesser-developed nations. The same goes for traveling to Detroit, South Chicago, East St. Louis, and New Orleans.

I love this song by Peggy Lee:

I think you are right. That movie was based on a true story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Evans#Timothy_Evans_in_popular_culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christie_(murderer) "Christie moved out of Rillington Place in March 1953, and shortly afterwards the bodies of three of his victims were discovered hidden in an alcove in the kitchen. His wife's body was found beneath the floorboards of the front room."

Here is an English translation of the famous Zola letter, published in a French newspaper. It follows after a brief introduction: *https://archive.org/stream/IAccuse/zola_emile_i_accuse_djvu.txt* A second, slightly different, translation of the text. Please excuse the source. *http://www.marxists.org/archive/zola/1898/jaccuse.htm* A third source of an English translation: *http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/guieuj/DreyfusCase/Iaccuse.htm* Captain Alfred Dreyfus: . . Actor Joseph Schildkraut: