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Obit watch: May 14, 2021.

Friday, May 14th, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from one of the Indianapolis TV stations for Edgar Harrell and James W. Smith, both of whom passed away this week. They were 96 years old.

Both men were survivors of the USS Indianapolis sinking.

Harrell was the last surviving Marine. The Facebook page’s tribute to Harrell said, “During his time aboard ship, he helped guard components of the atomic bomb. After the torpedoing, he was a hero amongst his shipmates.”
Smith had served the longest aboard the ship, beginning in December 1943. The Facebook page’s tribute to Smith said, “During weekly zoom calls, James would regale the group with tales of wartime as a young sailor… tales filled with mischief, adventure, fear, heroism, and brotherhood… and of course girls and a few stashed bottles of moonshine that got him into trouble.”

I’ve been meaning to note this one for a couple of days now: Colt Brennan. He was a star quarterback at the University of Hawaii.

In 2006, he set what was then an N.C.A.A. record for touchdown passes — 58 — in a single season, raising the possibility that he would be recruited by the N.F.L. after his junior year.
Instead, he stayed on for his final year. The Rainbow Warriors finished the season 12-0 and made their only football bowl series appearance, in the Sugar Bowl, against Georgia on Jan. 1, 2008. Mr. Brennan was a Heisman Trophy finalist that season.

He was drafted by Washington in 2008 as a backup, was cut two years later, went to the Raiders, and was cut again.

According to his family, he was in a car crash in 2010 and was never the same: “…broke his collarbone and ribs, caused head trauma, and resulted in blood clots that would plague him the rest of his life”. He descended into addiction. Recently, he had spent four months in a rehab center.

Mr. Brennan tried to enroll in a detox facility over the weekend but was turned away because it was full, his father said.

Instead, he met up with some people at a hotel and (according to his family) overdosed on fentanyl. He was 37.

NYT obit for Billie Hayes.

Posted in 1970s, History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 12, 2021.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

Norman Lloyd. THR.

I think many people of my age remember him as “Dr. Auschlander” on “St. Elsewhere”, but man, what a career before that.

His first love was the theater, and he was asked by Welles and John Houseman to join their legendary Mercury Theatre in the mid-1930s. He played Cinna the Poet in Welles’ anti-fascist adaptation of Julius Caesar, the 1937 Broadway production that landed Welles, then 22, on the cover of Time magazine.

He would have been in Welles’ “Heart of Darkness”, if RKO hadn’t pulled the plug on that. He had a wife and a baby and needed work, so he left Welles before his next project: an obscure film called “Citizen Kane”.

His work as the bad guy Fry in Saboteur (1942) launched a relationship with Hitchcock that would span nearly four decades and include a role in Spellbound (1945) and work as a producer and director on the classic TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its follow-up, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
On Hitchcock Presents, Lloyd directed a 1960 installment, “The Man From the South,” an adaptation of a Roald Dahl short story in which a young gambler (Steve McQueen) makes a bet that his cigarette lighter can work 10 straight times. If it does, he wins a car from Peter Lorre’s character; if it doesn’t, Lorre will chop off McQueen’s finger with a hatchet.

Lawrence sent me this obit: Neil Connery, Sean’s brother. Neil did a little acting himself, including “O.K. Connery”, aka “Operation Kid Brother”, aka “Operation Double 007”, aka “episode 508 of MST3K“.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2021.

Monday, May 10th, 2021

Frank McRae, actor. He was in “License to Kill” and “Last Action Hero”, and did a few TV guest shots (“Quincy”, “Rockford Files”, etc.)

Pete du Pont, former Deleware governor and presidential candidate.

NYT obit for George Jung.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 9, 2021.

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”

She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”

…

She married David Coverdale, the frontman of Whitesnake, in 1989. The couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a pitcher with the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Tawny Finley, in a declaration to the Orange County Superior Court, claimed Finley used steroids among other drugs. She also claimed he bragged about being able to circumvent MLB’s testing policy. When told of his wife’s accusations, which also included heavy marijuana use and alcohol abuse, Finley replied: “I can’t believe she left out the cross-dressing.”

Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:

Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”

…

Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”

…

Over the next decade, Mr. Ward was a music and food critic (sometimes, while he was still at The American-Statesman, under the pseudonym Petaluma Pete) for the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle; one of three authors of “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (1986), in which he focused on the 1950s; and, in 1987, one of several founders of the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival in Austin.

…

He returned to Austin in 2013 and set to work on “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” which was published in 2016. A second volume, taking the music’s history up to 1977, was published in 2019. But his publisher declined to publish a third one because the second book’s sales had not been as good the first one’s.

Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.

These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.

Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 402

Friday, May 7th, 2021

Two videos on unrelated topics today. One short-ish, one admittedly long.

Short-ish: This is an episode of the old “True Adventure” TV show called…”Serpent Cult”, about snake handling religion in Kentucky. I possibly could have put this in last week’s travel entry, but it didn’t feel right there.

I actually kind of like the host’s introduction. When was the last time you heard someone on TV say:

  • I was brought up religious.
  • I believe in people’s right to worship as they please.
  • I have a point of view on this, but I’m not going to force it on anybody else.

Long (about 70 minutes): “Raid on the Northfield Bank: The James-Younger Gang Meets Its Match”.

I wanted to link this for two reasons:

1. There’s a pretty good movie that the Saturday Night Movie Group watched not too long ago: “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid”, which you can find on YouTube with a carefully crafted search or on Amazon (affiliate link). I don’t believe it is exactly historically accurate, but…

2. Massad Ayoob in “American Handgunner” actually devoted an “Ayoob Files” column to the “Great Northfield, Minnesota Bank Robbery”, concentrating on the role of armed citizens.

(I have also read, and can recommend, the book Ayoob cites: Shot All to Hell by Mark Lee Gardner. (Affiliate link.))

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Religion, Reptiles, Snakes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 5, 2021.

Wednesday, May 5th, 2021

Playing catch up once again:

Bobby Unser.

Unser conquered a fear of heights to capture the Pikes Peak climb a record 13 times, racing against the clock on a gravel road twisting through more than 150 turns with no guardrails overlooking drops of up to 1,000 feet. The previous Pikes Peak record of nine victories had been held by his uncle Louis.

He also won the Indianapolis 500 three times. Yes, three:

Unser bested Mario Andretti by 5.3 seconds in the 1981 race, but the next day officials gave the victory to Andretti after penalizing Unser one lap for illegally passing several cars under a caution. Had they imposed the penalty during the race, Unser might have made up the lap and won anyway, since he had the fastest car that season. An appeals panel reinstated Unser as the winner more than four months later but fined his team part of the winning purse.

Jason Matthews. This is a guy I’d never heard of, but am now intrigued by. He was a former CIA officer who wrote three spy novels (affiliate link) that are highly praised for their realism.

“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘Thank heavens for Vladimir Putin,’ ” Mr. Matthews told The Associated Press in 2017. “He’s a great character, and his national goals are the stuff for spy novels: weaken NATO, dissolve the Atlantic alliance, break up the European Union.”

Johnny Crawford. He was one of the original Mouseketeers, and later played Mark McCain, son of Lucas McCain, on “The Rifleman”.

Billie Hayes. Yes, “Witchiepoo”, but also “Mammy Yokum” in “Li’l Abner” (she replaced Charlotte Rae on Broadway, and played the role in the 1959 film version and the 1971 TV movie version).

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 3, 2021.

Monday, May 3rd, 2021

Getting caught up:

Pete Lammons, tight end for the New York Jets. He was 77, and participating in a fishing tournament in East Texas.

Major League Fishing, the sponsor of the tournament, said that Lammons, who was participating in the event, had fallen out of his boat on the Sam Rayburn Reservoir, a popular spot for bass fishing, and that the other man in the boat tried to rescue him. A team equipped with sonar recovered Lammons’s body a few hours later.

Olympia Dukakis, for the historical record. THR. Variety.

Jill Corey. This was a little before my time, but still an interesting story. She grew up in Avonmore, Pennsylvania (literally a coal miner’s daughter) but was discovered at 17 and went on to a career in music.

Before the end of the decade, Ms. Corey had a spot on the “Johnny Carson Show” (a variety show precursor to his late-night talk show) and the NBC series “Your Hit Parade,” in which a regular cast of vocalists sang the top-rated songs of the week.
For a time Ms. Corey even had her own show, 15 minutes of song that followed the news once a week, a programming format that placed many popular singers in similar slots across the networks.
She recorded many records and performed at Manhattan nightclubs like the Copacabana and the Blue Angel. (Mr. Miller, in tight control of her career, turned down Broadway roles for her because her nightclub work was more lucrative.) And she was courted by heartthrobs like Eddie Fisher and Frank Sinatra (as he and Ava Gardner were divorcing).
She also made a “terrible movie,” in her words, called “Senior Prom” (1958).

In one of those odd cases that seem so common during that decade, where the line between “romance” and “creepy stalking” becomes blurred, she was pursued by Don Hoak of the Pittsburgh Pirates (even though she was already engaged) and married him in 1961. She gave up singing, but Mr. Hoak died in 1969 and she went back to performing.

Posted in Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

The Resurgence of Miss Extremely Low-Cut Backless Dress.

Friday, April 23rd, 2021

Vikki Dougan had a brief moment of fame in the late 1950s, mostly because of the backless dresses she wore.

Another Hollywood correspondent referred to her as “the most notorious ca-rear girl in town.” She was praised for her “marvelous exits” in the June 1957 issue of Playboy. Ms. Dougan was said to have been banned from another star’s preview party because her backless formal dresses were drawing too much attention, and Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Mamie Van Doren were all, supposedly, jealous.

But she quickly disappeared.

Ms. Dougan is also widely cited as the inspiration behind Jessica Rabbit in the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” — though Richard Williams, its animator, attributed the character’s look to a composite of Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall.

Now. in the Internet age, she’s been rediscovered.

Ms. Dougan, who was born Edith Tooker the same year as a major stock market crash but prefers that you not do the math, lives in a rent-controlled apartment building for seniors in Beverly Hills, and gets by on her monthly Social Security check. The woman who once graced the cover of Life magazine and dated Orson Welles, George Getty II, Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney, Barry Goldwater Jr., Henry Fonda, Huntington Hartford and Warren Beatty sleeps each night on an Ikea pullout couch in the living room.

(Subject line hattip, which is the first thing I thought of when I read this article. You should really pay the writer and find this story somewhere. Unfortunately, I can’t find a Kindle-based collection or a reasonably cheap physical collection containing this story on Amazon.)

Posted in Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 22, 2021.

Thursday, April 22nd, 2021

Tempest Storm.

I went back and forth on posting this, even though Lawrence sent me the obit from the Las Vegas paper. But what pushed me into posting this was that the NYT obit was from Margalit Fox, and she clearly had some fun writing it.

Routinely named in the same ardent breath as the great 20th-century ecdysiasts Lili St. Cyr, Blaze Starr and Gypsy Rose Lee, Ms. Storm was every inch as ecdysiastical as they, and for far longer. Almost certainly the last of her ilk, she was, at her height in the 1950s and early ’60s, famous the world over, as celebrated for her flame-red tresses as for her vaunted 40-inch bust.

…

Playing burlesque stages in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Bay Area, London and elsewhere, she was reported to earn $100,000 a year in the mid-1950s (the equivalent of about $950,000 today). Her breasts were said to be insured with Lloyd’s of London for $1 million. “Tempest in a D-Cup,” the headlines called her; “The Girl Who Goes 3-D Two Better.”
Visiting the University of Colorado in 1955, Ms. Storm precipitated a riot among eager male students that caused hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage — by doing nothing more than removing her mink coat.

…

Along the way she acquired four husbands and many lovers, among whom she said were John F. Kennedy (“He was a great man in everything he did,” she said) and Elvis Presley (“He really was the King”), while losing, night after night, her mink, gloves, gown, pearls and hat — though retaining her G-string and fishnet bra, and with them her virtue.
“I think taking off all your clothes — and I’ve never taken off all my clothes — is not only immoral but boring,” Ms. Storm told The Wall Street Journal in 1969. “There has to be something left to the imagination. If you take everything off, you please a few morons and chase all the nice people away.”

Peter Warner, sailor. You probably never heard of him, but his story is fascinating.

Especially the part about the shipwrecked boys.

The story of the 1966 rescue, which made Mr. Warner a celebrity in Australia, began during a return sail from Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, where he and his crew had unsuccessfully requested the right to fish in the country’s waters. Casually casting his binoculars at a nearby uninhabited island, ‘Ata, he noticed a burned patch of ground.
“I thought, that’s strange that a fire should start in the tropics on an uninhabited island,” he said in a 2020 video interview. “So we decided to investigate further.”
As they approached, they saw a naked teenage boy rushing into the water toward them; five more quickly followed. Recalling that some island nations imprisoned convicts on islands like ‘Ata, he told his crew to load their rifles.
But when the boy, Tevita Fatai Latu, who also went by the name Stephen, reached the boat, he told Mr. Warner that he and his friends had been stranded for more than a year, living off the land and trying to signal for help from passing ships.
Mr. Warner, still skeptical, radioed Nuku’alofa.
“After 20 minutes,” he said, “a very tearful operator came on the radio, and then amongst tears he said: ‘It’s true. These boys had been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. And now you have found them.’”

The boys had been shipwrecked for 15 months.

At first the boys lived off raw fish, coconuts and birds’ eggs. After about three months, they found the ruins of a village, and their fortunes improved — among the rubble they discovered a machete, domesticated taro plants and a flock of chickens descended from the ones left behind by the previous inhabitants. They also managed to start a fire, which they kept burning for the rest of their stay.
They built a makeshift settlement, with a thatched-roof hut, a garden and, for recreation, a badminton court and an open-air gymnasium, complete with a bench press. One of the boys, Kolo Fekitoa, fashioned a guitar out of debris from the boat, and they began and ended every day with songs and prayer.
They established a strict duty roster, rotating among resting, gathering food and watching for ships. If a fight broke out, the antagonists had to walk to opposite ends of the island and return, ideally having cooled off. When Stephen broke his leg, the others fashioned a splint; his leg healed perfectly.

Mr. Warner was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Janet Warner, who said he had been swept overboard by a rogue wave while sailing near the mouth of the Richmond River, an area he had known for decades. A companion on the boat, who was also knocked into the water, pulled Mr. Warner to shore, but attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.

For the record, NYT obits for Felix Silla and Richard Rush.

Posted in Boats, Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 21, 2021.

Wednesday, April 21st, 2021

Jim Steinman.

He had a fascinating career, which is detailed to some extent in his Wikipedia entry.

Todd Rundgren eventually agreed to produce the record, but no big label wanted it; Mr. Sonenberg often joked that he thought people were creating new record labels just for the purpose of rejecting “Bat Out of Hell.” Eventually Cleveland International Records, a small label distributed by CBS, took a chance.

One little known fact: he was working on a “Batman” musical. A stage musical, not a movie musical. But there were plans for Tim Burton to direct.

Steinman said about Burton and the project, “It’s more like his first two movies than any of the other movies. It’s very dark and gothic, but really wildly funny. It was my dream that he do this.”

I think a musical interlude is fitting here.

Monte Hellman, director. We haven’t seen “Two Lane Blacktop” yet, but we have watched “Cockfighter”. I can really only recommend that one to fans of Charles Willeford, but it seems like there are a lot of those folks out there…

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 385

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

Today’s my birthday, so I’m queuing this up in advance. I thought I’d try to do something a little different today, maybe go back to some things I haven’t done in a while.

Like trains.

“Last of the Giants”. This appears to be a Union Pacific documentary about their “Big Boy” steam locomotives, which they operated in “revenue service” until 1959. UP still operates one “Big Boy” and one “800 Series” locomotive for promotional purposes.

Interestingly, the “Big Boy” has actually been converted to run on oil:

Bonus: Do you like people speaking with Russian accents? Do you like Zippos? I like Zippos. Most of the time, I can take or leave Russian accents.

By way of “CrazyRussianHacker“, “7 Zippo Gadgets You Did NOT Know Exist”.

It doesn’t (generally) get that cold in Texas, but I kind of want one of those Zippo hand warmers anyway. I remember my dad used to have something similar kicking around, but he didn’t use it much in my memory, because it doesn’t (generally) get that cold in Texas. There have been some New Year’s Eve’s when we’ve been setting off fireworks, though…

Bonus #2: Here’s a bit of a time capsule for you. It could also fall under “Travel Thursday”, but I’m not putting it there for two reasons. One, this is different.

The “Museum of Automata” in York. Apparently, this was filmed sometime in the 1990s.

Reason number two is that, sadly, from what I’ve found on the Internet, the museum closed quite a while ago.

Bonus #3: I will freely admit, I am posting this one to tweak someone who says “‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ f–king ruled!” (My own personal opinion: the monster fight scenes were pretty good. Unfortunately, there was an excess of humans and human interaction in the movie, and I really didn’t like any of the humans. The kaiju film that would “f–king rule” for me would be the monster equivalent of “The Raid: Redemption”: maybe two minutes of introductory setup, two minutes of epilogue, and 116 minutes of giant monsters fighting.)

Anyway, C.W. Lemoine ruins the first fight scene from “Godzilla vs. Kong”.

To be honest, I thought the movie looked a lot better on the screen at the Alamo than it does in this video. Also, to be fair, it is just a TV show movie: I should really just relax.

Edited to add 4/20: Hand to God, I had no idea Lawrence was even working on this, much less planning to post it today.

Bonus #4: I see a lot of folks talking about minimizing their lifestyle, and stripping away almost everything to the point where they can live almost completely out of a van. (I see very few of these folks who have toilets in their vans: apparently, when they need a bathroom, they find one at a gym, gas station, store, or other place of public accommodation. But I digress.)

Have you ever listened to these folks talk, or read any of their praises for van life, and asked yourself, “Self, what do these people do when it is -20 degrees? -20 Communist Centigrade degrees, too, not -4 American Fahrenheit degrees.” (See, by converting from Centigrade to Fahrenheit, you’ve already made yourself feel warmer. If you go a step beyond and convert to 455 degrees Rankine, you’ll probably give yourself heat stroke.)

Well, here you go.

Bonus #5: Okay, I know I’m posting a lot of stuff today. Consider this a present on my birthday to you, my loyal readers.

Have you ever asked yourself, while stoned on your couch, “Self, what ever happened to all those paintings Bob Ross painted?”

I’m going to guess: probably not, because I don’t think most of you are stoners. But just in case, the NYT (who probably are a bunch of stoners, judging from some of the crazy (stuff) they publish these days) investigated. Here’s what they found.

Posted in Art, History, Movies, Planes, Trains | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 20, 2021.

Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

For the historical record, and because Lawrence has already posted: Walter Mondale. WP.

NYT obit for Richard Rush.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 19, 2021.

Monday, April 19th, 2021

Marie Supikova has passed on at 88.

She was one of a small number of survivors of Lidice.

Mrs. Supikova was 10 when Nazi forces arrived in Lidice, a village of about 500, on June 9, 1942. They were bent on avenging an attack by Czech parachutists on Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the “final solution,” the Nazis’ plan to annihilate the Jewish people, which led to his death on June 4.
Looking to eradicate Lidice (LID-it-seh), the Nazis destroyed all the village’s buildings. They killed nearly 200 men, including Mrs. Supikova’s father, by a firing squad against a barn wall cushioned by mattresses. The women, including Mrs. Supikova’s mother, were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.

…

While there, she was one of seven children chosen because of their appearance to be re-educated as Germans (the others were sent to gas chambers). They were moved to a school near Poznan, Poland, where they stayed for about a year until they were adopted by German couples.
Her new parents, Alfred and Ilsa Schiller, gave Marie a new name, Ingeborg Schiller, and a tiny room behind the kitchen in their home in Poznan. In an article in The New Yorker in 1948, Mrs. Supikova recalled that the Schillers had argued about her presence in the household.
“You and your Party friends!” she quoted Mrs. Schiller saying. “Why did they pick you to take this girl?” Mr. Schiller, she said, shouted back, “They have ordered us to make a German woman out of her and we are going to do it.”

After the war, she was reunited with her mother, who was dying of TB. (Her brother was also executed by the Nazis.)

She bore witness to her Holocaust experience when she testified in October 1947 at the Nuremberg trial of members of the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office. Then only 15, Marie was one of three people — two teenagers and one middle-aged woman — to testify that day about the massacre and their lives afterward.

…

Before Mrs. Supikova’s mother died, she took her daughter to the ruins of Lidice.
“She told Marie, ‘We’re going to see your father,’” said Elizabeth Clark, a retired journalism lecturer at Texas State University, San Marcos, who is writing about Lidice for a faculty writing project. “Marie didn’t understand at first that they were going to the mass grave where he had been buried.”

Rusty Young, one of the founding members of Poco. I feel like I’m giving him short shrift, and perhaps tim will weigh in on this one. Poco was just a little before my time.

Catching up on a couple from the past few days when I’ve been tied up: Helen McCrory, “Harry Potter” and “Peaky Blinders” actress. She also did quite a bit of work in British theater.

Felix Silla. He was “Cousin Itt” on “The Adams Family”, and (as I understand it) played the physical role of “Twiki” on “Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century”. (Mel Blanc did the voice.)

McThag also did a nice tribute to him.

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Things I did not know. (#7 in a series)

Monday, April 19th, 2021

1. There was a 1989 movie called “Return From the River Kwai”.

It was not a sequel. Really. That’s what the filmmakers said. It was supposedly based on a book of the same name.

Columbia pulled out of a distribution contract after Sony bought them, and claimed Sam Spiegel’s estate threatened to sue. The filmmakers claimed Columbia pulled out because the movie made the Japanese look bad, and, anyway, Columbia owned the rights, not Spiegel’s estate.

There was a lawsuit.

The case went to trial in 1997. Columbia argued that “if you use a name and it becomes famous you are able to use it in a certain area of commerce, such as the exclusive use of River Kwai in the title of a film. It does not matter where Pierre Boulle got the name.”
In 1998 a court ruled that the title suggested the film implied it was a sequel to Bridge on the River Kwai. It was never released in the US.

Amazon has a region 2 DVD listed.

2. Remember “Hands on a Hardbody”? Remember “Hands on a Hardbody: The Musical”?

Obviously, I knew about this. The subject came up again over the weekend as part of a discussion with Mike the Musicologist about Broadway being out of ideas, and the sheer number of recent musicals based on movies.

What I did not know: Houston’s “Theater Under the Stars” (TUTS) tried to stage a production of “HoH” in 2014. Thing is, the director of the production decided that he was going to make changes:

Having attended the opening night of Hardbody at [Bruce] Lumpkin’s [director – DB] invitation, [Amanda] Green [co-creator – DB] described to me her experience in watching the show. “They started the opening number and I noticed that some people were singing solos other than what we’d assigned. As we neared the middle of the opening number, I thought, ‘what happened to the middle section?’” She said that musical material for Norma, the religious woman in the story, “was gone.”
When the second song began, Green recalls being surprised, saying, “I thought, ‘so we did put this number second after all’ before realizing that we hadn’t done that.” As the act continued, Green said, “I kept waiting for ‘If I Had A Truck’ and it didn’t come.” She went on to detail a litany of ways in which the show in Houston differed from the final Broadway show, including reassigning vocal material to different characters within songs, and especially the shifting of songs from one act to another, which had the effect of removing some characters from the story earlier than before. She also said that interstitial music between scenes had been removed and replaced with new material. Having heard Green’s point by point recounting of act one changes, I suggested we could dispense with the same for act two.

This upset a lot of people. Including Amanda Green and Doug Wright, the other creator. It also upset Samuel French, the theatrical agency that licensed the show.

So Samuel French pulled the plug. They withdrew their license and TUTS was forced to cancel the remaining shows.

That’s what i didn’t know, and honestly, was surprised by. I thought it was extremely rare for a licensing agency to go to that length: then again, I also thought it was extremely rare for a professional theater company to make those kind of production changes without permission of the licensing agency.

I’m still not sure how common this is, but someone in one of the linked articles above mentions a production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” which was shut down after one performance because the theater company gender-swapped a key role. This may be more common, and less newsworthy, than I think it is. But I still find it surprising that professional productions think nobody’s watching and they can do this (stuff).

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Theatre | Comments Closed

Things I did not know. (#6 in a series)

Friday, April 16th, 2021

I spent far too much time last night reading about celebrity perfumes.

But that wasn’t what I did not know. What I did not know was:

  1. The NYT used to have a perfume critic (Chandler Burr). For all I know, they may still have a perfume critic.
  2. “Upon her death in 2011, Elizabeth Taylor had an estimated net worth of 800 million dollars, the majority of it from her perfume brand. She famously claimed that her perfumes earned her more than all of her film roles combined.”

Posted in Bagatelle, Media, Movies | 1 Comment »

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