Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.
–Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC
In that vein, “Of Ships and Butter”, a 1970s (in color!) US Navy film about the Navy’s role in protecting shipping.
Bonus video: “U.S. News Review”, one of those old newsreels. I put it here because Veronica Lake shows up at about the :24 mark. And as far as I am concerned (and I hope the vast majority of my readers will agree with me) I need no justification other than “Veronica Lake”.
Your Wilford Brimley obits: NYT. Variety. THR.
Thing I did not know #1: he was, at one point (and “briefly”) a bodyguard for Howard Hughes.
Thing I did not know #2:
The Brimley/Cocoon Line. (Lawrence told me about this last night.) Not to be confused with the Mendoza Line, or the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal.
Alan Parker, director. (“Midnight Express”, “Mississippi Burning”, “Fame”, “Birdy”, “Angel Heart”).
For the record: Herman Cain.
Separating this out:
It appears the full MST3K version of “Mitchell” (not the full movie, but the complete MST3K) is available on the MST3K channel on YouTube.
Yesterday and today were big news days.
Olivia de Havilland. THR. Variety.
I did not know she was in “Airport ’77”. Not that that was a highlight of her career. Or Joseph Cotton’s. Or anybody else’s. But the “Airport” movies are on our list.
Regis Philbin, for the record. THR. Variety.
I’m probably giving him short shrift, but everyone has covered his death. And I never watched a single episode of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” or “Regis and (x)”.
Peter Green, founder of Fleetwood Mac.
John Saxon, working actor. THR. No obit from the Times yet. 198 credits in IMDB. I guess he might be most famous for his roles in “Enter the Dragon” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, and possibly “Mitchell”. I also remember him from “The New Doctors” segment of “The Bold Ones” wheel.
And he had guest shots in every damn thing in the 1970s: the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “The Rockford Files” (we watched “A Portrait of Elizabeth” last night: it’s a fun episode), “Banacek”, “Banyon”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…
…oddly, though, he’s another one of those guys who seem to have done everything except “Mannix”.
The paper of record did finally get around to publishing an obit for Ronald Graham. (Previously.)
Benjamin Storm Keough, Elvis Presley’s grandson. He was 27.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
The Saturday Night Live channel on YouTube has posted “Midday with Jennifer Hicks”. This is the “interviews with Bond villains” sketch that contains the frequently quoted (in my circles) line, “I question the wisdom of having a self-destruct button at all.”
(See also, especially number 9, number 9, number 9…)
This surfaced on Twitter, and I have not seen it before. I wouldn’t say I can’t stop laughing, but it does make me giggle.
Please watch this 35 second Magnum clip. I have not stopped laughing. pic.twitter.com/nneXjJxUPj
— Chris “Wear A Mask” Driver (@Jerkwheatery) June 30, 2020
I wasn’t a regular “Magnum” watcher when it was on the air, but I sometimes think I should go back and watch from the beginning. (In addition to doing the same with “Blue Bloods”.)
Oddly, though, I have a weird allergic reaction to “Quigley Down Under”, and I don’t know why: that movie should push my buttons, and I’d kind of like to have an (accurate) reproduction of the movie gun.
The great Carl Reiner.
…
“I always knew if I threw a question to Mel he could come up with something,” Mr. Reiner said. “I learned a long time ago that if you can corner a genius comedy brain in panic, you’re going to get something extraordinary.”
As Mr. Brooks put it, “I would dig myself into a hole, and Carl would not let me climb out.”
…
Also among the dead: Johnny Mandel, film and television composer.
Mandel was considered one of the finest arrangers of the second half of the 20th century, providing elegant orchestral charts for a wide range of vocalists including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole and Hoagy Carmichael.
Mandel scored more than 30 films during his Hollywood career, including the 1960s films “The Americanization of Emily” (from which the hit song “Emily” emerged), “The Sandpiper” (which contained “The Shadow of Your Smile,” earning an Oscar and a Grammy for Song of the Year along with lyricist Paul Francis Webster), “Harper,” “An American Dream” (which included the Oscar-nominated song “A Time for Love”), “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” and “Point Blank.”
He was perhaps most famous for writing “Suicide Is Painless” aka “The Theme from M*A*S*H”.
Joel Schumacher, director. Variety. THR.
Batman & Robin, however, was a critical disaster, and Schumacher admitted years later that he had made a mistake by listening to studio marketing executives, who wanted to target the film to kids.
“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Vice.
“A lot of it was my choice. No one is responsible for my mistakes but me. I think one curveball we got was at the eleventh hour; Val Kilmer quit due to a role he got in The Island of Dr. Moreau. There had been talks about it, but none of us were involved, not with Warner Bros. and certainly not with me. I talked to Val, and all he kept saying was, ‘But man, it’s Marlon Brando.’ It’s not like he was on a hook and chain here, so Val went. So it was [then Warners co-CEO] Bob Daly’s idea to acquire George Clooney. He was an obvious choice because he was a rising star on ER. I had a talk with him and he was like, ‘All right, if you do it, I’ll do it.’
Wait, wait: Kilmer skipped out on Batman because he wanted to do “The Island of Dr. Moreau“? I haven’t laughed this hard since the hogs ate my kid brother.
Jim Kiick, Miami Dolphins running back in the early 1970s.
Running behind a fearsome offensive line, Kiick, fullback Larry Csonka and halfback Mercury Morris propelled the Dolphins to three Super Bowls and back-to-back titles in the 1972 and 1973 seasons.
Kiick scored six touchdowns during those playoff runs, including one in Super Bowl VII, a 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins, that helped the team complete the N.F.L.’s only perfect season. Kiick scored another touchdown and Csonka added two more in Super Bowl VIII, a 24-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I had not heard of him, either, but he wrote The Shadow of the Wind, which is “…the second-most-successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece “Don Quixote,” according to Planeta.”
A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafón to write “The Shadow of the Wind,” but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
It starts in 1945, when a boy named Daniel Sempere is taken by his father to a mysterious place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where Daniel selects a book called “The Shadow of the Wind.” Fascinated by its obscure author, Julián Carax, Daniel enlists the help of friends to investigate the writer’s past, which also brings up the disturbing story of a character who has been burning all the copies of the book he can find.
That sounds like something that’s in my wheelhouse.
A character actor who eventually played leading roles, Mr. Holm had a kind of magical malleability, with a range that went from the sweet-tempered to the psychotic. In the theater he ran the gamut of Shakespeare, from the high-spirited Prince Hal to the tormented King Lear, and he left his imprint on two roles in Mr. Pinter’s “The Homecoming”: the sleek, entrepreneurial Lenny and his autocratic father, Max.
In films, Mr. Holm incarnated characters of diverse geographic origin and nature, including a tough New York cop in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1996), a big-city negligence lawyer in Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) and a bohemian genius manqué in the title role in Stanley Tucci’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (2000).
Exploring the world of fantasy, he was a malfunctioning robot in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001) and “The Return of the King” (2003), from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and Mr. Jackson’s subsequent “Hobbit” films.
Sushant Singh Rajput. He was a major Bollywood star:
Mr. Rajput started his acting career on television, where he was best known for his role as a car mechanic, Manav Deshmukh, in “Pavitra Rishta,” a soap opera that debuted in 2009.
After leaving the show in 2011, he made his Bollywood debut in 2013 as a gifted but troubled cricket player in “Kai Po Che,” a film based on a novel by Chetan Bhagat. For his performance he was nominated for a Filmfare Award, a coveted honor in the Hindi-language film industry of India. The critic Taran Adarsh said Mr. Rajput was “blessed with wonderful screen presence.”
He was 34 years old. The family did not specify a cause of death, but the paper of record reports that the Mumbai police were investigating it as a suicide.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources. Suicide.org has a list of numbers and organizations in India.
Edén “Commander Zero” Pastora.
Mr. Pastora, in a life of danger and adventure that stretched from the jungles of the Miskito Coast to the halls of Congress in Washington, was instrumental in toppling the military dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last of the line in a repressive family dynasty that had ruled their Central American country for nearly a half century.
But deprived of a major role in the revolutionary government he had helped to install, and increasingly disillusioned by its Marxist-Leninist tendencies, Mr. Pastora went into exile and for years challenged the regime, led by Daniel Ortega, first with an international campaign of political pressures and later with hit-and-run guerrilla attacks inside Nicaragua.
Along the way he courted sympathizers and bankrollers in the United States, Europe and Latin America; took money and air support secretly from the Central Intelligence Agency; attacked cities in Nicaragua; was denounced by Managua as a traitor and tried in absentia; was seriously wounded by an assassin’s bomb that killed eight people; and once ran for the presidency of Nicaragua. He lost — and two years later, in 2008, announced that he had reconciled with the Ortega government.
Kurt Thomas, gymnast.
He competed in the 1976 Olympics, but didn’t win any medals. He won a gold medal at the world championships in 1978: he was the first American to do so.
He was a favorite to medal in the 1980 Olympics, but we all know what happened there.
He also starred in the 1985 film, “Gymkata“, a fact the NYT curiously omits from their coverage.
Two by way of Hacker News:
Akira Kurosawa’s storyboards. Oh, wait, I’m sorry: Akira Kurosawa’s painted storyboards.
(They keep saying “hand-painted storyboards”. As opposed to what: machine painted? Foot painted?)
The early history of computer chess, including the first national computer chess tournament.
I’m fascinated by computer chess, so I would probably have posted this anyway. Interestingly, though, this article also features (and quotes) an unexpected appearance by a now very prominent science fiction and fantasy writer, who at the time had recently graduated from Northwestern University and was interested in both computers and chess.
Bruce Jay Friedman, noted writer.
He also wrote the screenplays for “Splash” and “Stir Crazy”, and the works that were turned into “The Lonely Guy” and “The Heartbreak Kid”.
For the historical record: Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father.
Hutton Gibson belonged to a splinter group of Catholics who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, known as Vatican II. These traditionalists seek to preserve centuries-old orthodoxy, especially the Tridentine Mass, the Latin Mass established in the 16th century. They operate their own chapels, schools and clerical orders apart from the Vatican and in opposition to it.
But even among these outsiders, Mr. Gibson, who had early in life attended a seminary before dropping out, was extreme in his views. He denied the legitimacy of John Paul II as pope, once calling him a “Koran Kisser,” and said Vatican II had been “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.” He called Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist leader until his death in 1991, a “compromiser.” Mr. Gibson earned the nickname “Pope Gibson” for his outspoken, dogmatic opinions on faith.
After he was expelled from a conservative group in Australia, where he had moved with his family from New York State in 1968, Mr. Gibson formed his own, Alliance for Catholic Tradition. Beginning in 1977, he disseminated his ultra-Orthodox views in a newsletter, “The War Is Now!,” and through self-published books, including “Is the Pope Catholic?” (1978) and “The Enemy is Here!” (1994). The Wisconsin Historical Society library and archives holds Mr. Gibson’s published works among its extensive collection of religious publications.
…
In 2003, as Mel Gibson was directing “The Passion of the Christ,” his film about the crucifixion, Hutton Gibson gave an interview to The New York Times laced with comments about conspiracy theories. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, had been remote-controlled, he claimed (without saying by whom). The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was wildly inflated, he went on.
“Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” Mr. Gibson said. “It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”
In a radio interview a week before the February 2004 release of “The Passion,” Mr. Gibson went further, saying of the Holocaust, “It’s all — maybe not all fiction — but most of it is.” The comments added to an already simmering controversy that the film was anti-Semitic; the chairmen of two major studios told The Times that they wouldn’t work with Mel Gibson in the future.
Marge Redmond. She was perhaps most famous as “Sister Jacqueline” on “The Flying Nun”, but she did a fair amount of other TV: “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Matlock”, and more. She was also in “The Fortune Cookie”, “Manhattan Murder Mystery”, and “Family Plot”.
She was married to Jack Weston, and they were both good Cleveland people. Apparently, she died in February, but her death was only recently reported.