The Woman in the Window (1944), is a film noir directed by Fritz Lang that tells the story of psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) who meets and becomes enamored with a young femme fatale.
Based on J. H. Wallis' novel Once Off Guard, the story features two surprise twists at the end. Scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson founded International Pictures Incorporated (his own independent production company) after writing successful films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and other John Ford films, and chose The Woman in the Window as its premiere project. Director Fritz Lang substituted the film's dream ending in place of the originally scripted suicide ending, to conform with the moralistic Production Code of the time.
The term "film noir" originated as a genre description, in part, because of this movie. The term first was applied to American films in French film magazines in 1946, the year when The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Woman in the Window were released in France.
As in Lang's Scarlet Street, released a year later, Edward G. Robinson plays the lonely middle-aged man and Duryea and Bennett co-star as the criminal elements. The Woman in the Window also features Raymond Massey as the District Attorney, a friend of Wanley.
When the film was released, the staff at Variety magazine lauded the film and wrote, "Nunnally Johnson whips up a strong and decidedly suspenseful murder melodrama in Woman in the Window. Producer, who also prepared the screenplay (from the novel Once off Guard by J.H. Wallis) continually punches across the suspense for constant and maximum audience reaction. Added are especially fine timing in the direction by Fritz Lang and outstanding performances by Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey and Dan Duryea."
Red's Dream is a short film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by John Lasseter, which was released in 1987. To date, this is the only short that has not been attached to one of Pixar's feature films, the only Pixar Short to be rendered on the Pixar Image Computer, and the first Pixar Short to feature an organic character: the circus clown known as Lumpy.
According to Lasseter in the audio commentary, Ed Catmull wanted the Pixar staff to make a film using the Pixar Image Computer and the rendering software Chapreyes. Lasseter began to develop the story of a circus clown who is upstaged by his own unicycle while, quite separately, William Reeves began working on a city during a rainy night. At the same time, Eben Ostby had been wanting to animate a bicycle. Ultimately, the three combined their ideas, which resulted in the creation of Red's Dream.
Napoleon was Stanley’s lifelong obsession, and this was the movie he wanted to make more than any other. Kubrick sifted through more than 18,000 documents and books about Napoleon. He constructed a monster index file of the 50 principal characters in his movie, which were all written on 3x5 cards and organized by the dates of all the key events in Napoleon’s life from his birth to his death. He had a different card for each character. That way, Kubrick could quickly determine where, during any given period in Napoleon’s life, each character was and what that character was doing.
He had 25,000 index cards.
He constructed a picture file retrieval system that had 15,000 images on all things Napoleon. The images were classified by subject, which also included “a visual signaling method,” “allowing cross-indexing of subjects to an almost unlimited degree of complexity and detail.” His enormous picture file system was designed to help everyone involved in the production find any information they needed and not take up Kubrick's time with endless questions like the ones that plagued him during 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrick was so intense in his research that he reportedly began imitating Napoleon’s habit of bombarding everyone he met with rapid-fire questions, a character trait Stanley kept the rest of his life.
He even adopted Napoleon's eating habits. Malcolm McDowell, in various interviews, often told a story about Kubrick that took place during pre-production of A Clockwork Orange in which he witnessed Kubrick eat a meal with, say, a bite of dessert first, then a bite of steak, then another bite of dessert, and so on. “This is the way Napoleon ate,” Kubrick told him.
Volumes could be written about Kubrick’s plans for his movie. He intended to do nothing less than recreate perfectly Napoleon’s greatest battles. In 1968, he actually convinced the Yugoslavian and Romanian governments to loan out to him a combined total of 50,000 soldiers for $2 per man per day to recreate Napoleon’s battles.
He thought of Ian Holm or a young Jack Nicholson for the role.
In a 1969 interview (for his anthology book, “The Film Director as Superstar”), Joseph Gelmis asked Stanley the big question:
Why make a movie about Napoleon?
“That's a question that would really take this entire interview to answer. To begin with, he fascinates me. His life has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler. He was one of those rare men who move history and mold the destiny of their own times and of generations to come -- in a very concrete sense, our own world is the result of Napoleon, just as the political and geographic map of postwar Europe is the result of World War Two. And, of course, there has never been a good or accurate movie about him. Also, I find that all the issues with which it concerns itself are oddly contemporary -- the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relationship of the individual to the state, war, militarism, etc., so this will not be just a dusty historic pageant but a film about the basic questions of our own times, as well as Napoleon's. But even apart from those aspects of the story, the sheer drama and force of Napoleon's life is a fantastic subject for a film biography. Forgetting everything else and just taking Napoleon's romantic involvement with Josephine, for example, here you have one of the great obsessional passions of all time.”
Yes, it's our choice for the number one first film: Orson Welles fans can direct their complaints to the usual address...
#1. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Directed by Charles Laughton
Can a director’s one and only film really be considered a debut? If we made a list of the 50 greatest swansongs, could ‘The Night of the Hunter’ head that list, as well? Frankly, yes. Of all the diverse bodies of directorial work in the long history of cinema, Laughton’s stands as perhaps the most flawless and untouchable: no second-movie jitters, no mid-period slump, no slide into doddery obsolescence. One perfect film, one singular statement, achieving more in 92 minutes than most directors manage in a lifetime.
Much has been made of the film’s originality: the combination of influences, from Grimm fairytales through French romanticism and German expressionism to film noir, all fusing and mutating to form something wholly fresh. Perhaps the best description of the tone comes from François Truffaut – ‘it’s like a horrific news item retold by small children’ – but that’s only one side of the story, there’s much more to ‘The Night of the Hunter’ than just the naïve child’s-eye perspective for which it has become justifiably famous. Laughton may have identified most closely with his pre-pubescent escapees, but there’s no doubt he feels a little something for Robert Mitchum’s Preacher too: loathing, yes, but also respect, admiration, and just a touch of kinship. The film may be about the child in all of us – and the psychological escape routes we hunt for when that child comes under threat – but it’s about the cold-blooded, manipulative, cynical villain in all of us, too. The Preacher may be an archetype, but with his dry wit, self-awareness and dogged single-mindedness he’s one we can relate to.
It’s also interesting to assess the subsequent impact of ‘The Night of the Hunter’: for a film which left very little impression on first release, the tendrils of its influence have snaked into the most unlikely corners, as proven by this month’s BFI season of works related to Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’, of which Laughton’s film is the opener (Radio Raheem recounts Mitchum’s ‘left hand, right hand’ speech in Lee’s movie). It’s hard to imagine modern villainy without the influence of The Preacher: the easy charm, the quick wit, the relentless urge to destroy. Tales of indomitable heroes had been commonplace in movies and serials for years, but this is one of the first examples of an indomitable villain: he’s The Terminator with more personality, Michael Myers with charisma, Freddy Krueger in a different hat (but equally nightmarish).
There are directors who seem to spend much of their careers tilting at ‘The Night of the Hunter’: the queasy fairytale logic of Tim Burton, or the glittering psychic murk of David Lynch, whose ‘The Elephant Man’ is perhaps the closest any director has come to recapturing Laughton’s fragmented dreamscapes. But it’s a hopeless task: ‘The Night of the Hunter’ is a film which can never be, and perhaps should never be repeated, and the passing of time has done nothing to dim its singular, undeniable brilliance.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was, will runs at The Drawing Room in London until October 25, 2009. As well as production designs from concept artists Moebius, HR Giger and Chris Foss, there’s newly commissioned work by artists Steven Claydon, Matthew Day Jackson and Vidya Gastaldon.
Jodorowsky’s proposed 1976 adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel is now legend, and it’s possible that his outrageously ambitious plans are more fun to dream about than they would have been on the screen. But it remains a tantalising prospect that Jodorowsky might well have pulled off a science fiction equivalent of Fellini’s Satyricon. Either way, along with Stanley Kubrick’s unmade Napoleon, it’s one of the great lost film of the 1970s.
Among Jodorowsky’s proposed cast were Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, the last of whom was to play the Emperor of the Universe, who ruled from a golden toilet-cum-throne in the shape of two intertwined dolphins. Unable to secure the money from Hollywood to create the ‘Dune’ of his imagination, Jodorowsky abandoned the film before a single frame was shot. All that survives of this project is Jodorowsky’s extensive notes, and the production drawings of Moebius, Giger and Foss. These reveal a potential future for sci-fi movie making that eschewed the conservative, technology-based approach of American filmmakers in favour of something closer to a metaphysical fever-dream.
Moebius’s designs are wildly different from those used in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. His sketch of the Emperor on the left gives some idea of how Salvador Dalí might have appeared in the film, while the figure on the right is Baron Harkonnen’s effete nephew, Feyd, a far more radical conception than the grinning fool played by Sting in the Lynch version. There’s a lot more of Moebius’s sketches at the excellent Dune.info site.
London Fields (1989), Martin Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches.
The characters have typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined to come between the other two.
The book was reportedly omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in its year of publication, 1989, because of panel members protesting against its alleged misogyny.
In my post of last April the 13th I mentioned how Martin Amis "London Fields" is one of my favorite book of all time.
Michael Winterbottom is now adapting the book into a film that should be released in 2010.
Franklyn is a 2008 British film written and directed by Gerald McMorrow in his feature debut. Produced by Jeremy Thomas, the film stars Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green and Sam Riley. Filming took place in London in the fourth quarter of 2007. Franklyn held its world premiere at the 52nd London Film Festival on 16 October 2008. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 27 February 2009.
Split between the parallel realities of contemporary London and the futuristic metropolis of Meanwhile City, Franklyn follows the tales of four characters. Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe) is a masked vigilante who won't rest until he finds his nemesis, Duplex Ride’s dangerous leader-The Individual. Emilia (Eva Green) is a troubled young art student whose rebellion may turn out to be deadly. Milo (Sam Riley) is a heartbroken twentysomething yearning for the purity of first love. Peter (Bernard Hill) is a man steeped in religion, searching desperately for his missing son amongst London's homeless.
The film begins in "Meanwhile City", but later moves into contemporary London for the finale.
Writer-director Gerald McMorrow wrote the original science fiction script Franklyn for his feature debut, which depicts a similar dystopia to his 2002 short Thespian X. In October 2006, actor Ewan McGregor was cast into the lead role of the film, which was slated to begin production in summer 2007. However, McGregor broke his leg in a biking accident in February 2007 doing the second Long Way Round and was forced to leave the project. Actors Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, and newcomer Sam Riley were cast in Franklyn in September 2007. Phillippe was the last to be cast in what McMorrow termed a 'now or never' situation, saying of their first meeting: "You have preconceptions about people... You expect the bleach-blond Californian kid and what you got was an incredibly erudite, brought-up-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks Philadelphia actor. When I met him we did not stop talking all afternoon."
McMorrow's visual inspiration for Meanwhile City came from the religious iconography he saw in Mexico City shopping malls. He later explained: "The idea was that if you're going to have a capital city based on religion, you've got somewhere like Florence or Rome and send somewhere like that three miles into the sky... Part of Preest's delirium and fantasies are based on the religion surrounding him and comics he read and films he saw. He sort of pieces together a jigsaw of his own delusions."Though Preest's mask was influenced by Rorschach in Watchmen, it was based on Claude Rains' Invisible Man.
Franklyn had a budget of £6 million, of which £1 million was provided by the UK Film Council through its Premiere Fund. Production began on 24 September 2007 in and around London and was completed by December 2007. Major locations included an East End bar and Greenwich Naval College, where many of the CGI sequences were shot. The film entered post-production by April 2008.McMorrow described his approach, "I used an atypical and off-kilter background, and told a story that wouldn't normally be told. The film was set around some tricky locations but we managed to shoot it."
With his unmistakable sound-mix of Jazz- and Swing samples and electronic music, Parov Stelar has secured his own unique position in the world of music. His fourth album “Coco” is a double CD that starts off where his successful LP’s “Rough Cuts”, “Seven And Storm” and “Shine” ended. On the other hand he is consequently developing his established jazzy sound, by adding new stylistic elements to his tunes. Also his dancefloor-productions, that up to now have only been published as singles, find a debut to a greater extent on his album. They meet with Stelar’s melancholic-melodious trademark-sound, which is well known from his earlier albums, but now is also spiced up with Hip-Hop beats and synth-pads. Parov Stelar manages to build bridges between his own worlds of sound with these extensive LP as well he as he does with listening- and dance-music in general. An electrifying album to fall for.
The Board of Governors voted to award honorary Oscars to producer and director Roger Corman, cinematographer Gordon Willis and to actress Lauren Bacall.
Corman is a king of low-budget "B movies" who made "It Conquered the World" (1956) and "The Little Shop of Horrors" (1960).
Corman is probably best known for his filmings of various Edgar Allan Poe stories at American International Pictures, mostly in collaboration with writer/scenarist Richard Matheson, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962) The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). All but Premature Burial starred Vincent Price. After the film version of The Raven was completed, he reportedly realized he still had some shooting days left before the sets were torn down and so made another film, The Terror (1963) on the spot with the remaining cast, crew and sets.
A number of noted film directors worked with Corman, usually early in their careers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Donald G. Jackson, Gale Anne Hurd, Carl Colpaert, Joe Dante, James Cameron, John Sayles, Monte Hellman, Paul Bartel, George Armitage, Jonathan Kaplan, George Hickenlooper, Curtis Hanson, and Jack Hill.
Many have said that Corman's influence taught them some of the ins-and-outs of filmmaking.
In the extras for the DVD of The Terminator, director James Cameron refers to his work for Corman as, "I trained at the Roger Corman Film School." The British director Nicolas Roeg served as the cinematographer on The Masque of the Red Death.
Willis has been a cinematographer on more than 30 films, and was nominated for two Oscars.
His films credits include All the President's Men, The Godfather, The Godfather part II and part III, and some Woody Allen's as Annie Hall, Manatthan, Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose.
The honorary Oscars that Bacall, Corman and Willis will receive are to honor "extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement" or service to the motion picture academy.
The 84-year-old Laurene Bacall was married to screen legend Humphrey Bogart until his death in 1957.
Bacall made her screen debut opposite Bogart in the 1944 movie "To Have and Have Not," the first of more than 30 films she starred in.
She is perhaps best known for being a film noir leading lady in such films as The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedienne, as seen in 1953's How to Marry a Millionaire and 1957's Designing Woman.
Bacall also enjoyed Tony-winning success in the Broadway musicals Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. She starred in films such as Sex and the Single Girl (1964) with Henry Fonda, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, Harper (1966) with Paul Newman, Shelley Winters, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner and Janet Leigh, and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Sean Connery among other stars.Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and a an Academy Award nomination.
9 (nine) is the natural number following 8 and preceding 10.
Nine is a composite number, its proper divisors being 1 and 3. It is 3 times 3 and hence the third square number. 9 is a Motzkin number. It is the first composite lucky number.
Nine is the highest single-digit number in the decimal system. It is the second non-unitary square prime of the form (p2) and the first that is odd. All subsequent squares of this form are odd. It has a unique aliquot sum 4 which is itself a square prime. 9 is; and can be, the only square prime with an aliquot sum of the same form. The aliquot sequence of 9 has 5 members (9,4,3,1,0) this number being the second composite member of the 3-aliquot tree.
There are nine Heegner numbers.
8 and 9 form a Ruth-Aaron pair under the second definition that counts repeated prime factors as often as they occur.
A polygon with nine sides is called a nonagon or enneagon. A group of nine of anything is called an ennead.
In base 10 a number is evenly divisible by nine if and only if its digital root is 9. That is, if you multiply nine by any natural number, and repeatedly add the digits of the answer until it is just one digit, you will end up with nine:
The only other number with this property is three. In base N, the divisors of N − 1 have this property. Another consequence of 9 being 10 − 1, is that it is also a Kaprekar number.
The difference between a base-10 positive integer and the sum of its digits is a whole multiple of nine. Examples:
The sum of the digits of 41 is 5, and 41-5 = 36. The digital root of 36 is 3+6 = 9, which, as explained above, demonstrates that it is evenly divisible by nine.
The sum of the digits of 35967930 is 3+5+9+6+7+9+3+0 = 42, and 35967930-42 = 35967888.
The digital root of 35967888 is 3+5+9+6+7+8+8+8 = 54, 5+4 = 9.
Subtracting two base-10 positive integers that are transpositions of each other yields a number that is a whole multiple of nine. Some examples:
41-14 = 27. The digital root of 27 is 2+7 = 9.
36957930-35967930 = 990000, which is obviously a multiple of nine.
This works regardless of the number of digits that are transposed.
For example, the largest transposition of 35967930 is 99765330 (all digits in descending order) and its smallest transposition is 03356799 (all digits in ascending order); subtracting pairs of these numbers produces:
Casting out nines is a quick way of testing the calculations of sums, differences, products, and quotients of integers, known as long ago as the 12th Century.
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art is a Chinese mathematics book, composed by scholars between the 10th century BC, and the 1st century AD; it is the one of the earliest surviving mathematical text from China.
Every prime in a Cunningham chain of the first kind with a length of 4 or greater is congruent to 9 mod 10 (the only exception being the chain 2, 5, 11, 23, 47).
Six recurring nines appear in the decimal places 762 through 767 of pi. This is known as the Feynman point.
If an odd perfect number is of the form 36k + 9, it has at least nine distinct prime factors.
Seconds is a 1966 American film starring Rock Hudson. Characterized sometimes as a science fiction thriller, but with elements of horror, neo-noir, psychedelia, and drama, the film was directed by John Frankenheimer with a screenplay by Lewis John Carlino. The script was based on a novel by David Ely. The film was released by Paramount Pictures and was entered into the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.
Arthur Hamilton (played by John Randolph) is a middle-aged man whose life has lost purpose. He is disengaged at his job as a banker, and the love between him and his wife has dwindled. Through a friend whom he thought had died years earlier, Hamilton is approached by a secret organization, known simply as the "Company", which offers wealthy people a second chance at life. The Company, in the person of Mr. Ruby (played by Jeff Corey), interviews Hamilton, and resorts to blackmail to convince Hamilton to sign on, foreshadowing the unfortunate consequences of accepting the Company's assistance.
The Company fakes Hamilton's death for him by means of a phony accident and a corpse disguised as him. Through extensive plastic surgery and psychoanalysis, Hamilton is transformed into Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson). As Wilson, he has a new home, a new identity, new friends and a devoted manservant. The details of his new existence suggest that there was once a real Tony Wilson, but what became of him is a mystery.
The remainder of the film follows Wilson as he copes with the consequences of his new identity. Relocated to a fancy home in Malibu, California, where he works as an already established artist, he commences a relationship with a young woman named Nora Marcus (played by Salome Jens) and for a time he is happy, but soon becomes troubled by the emotional confusion of his new identity, and by the exuberance of renewing his youth. At a dinner party he hosts for his neighbors, he drinks himself into a stupor and begins to babble about his former life as Hamilton. It turns out that his neighbors are "reborns" like himself, sent to keep an eye on his adjusting to his new life. Nora is actually an agent of the Company, and her attentions to Wilson are designed merely to ensure his cooperation.
In violation of Company policy, Wilson visits his old wife in his new persona, and learns that his marriage had failed because he was distracted by the pursuit of career and material possessions, the very things in life that others made him believe were important. He returns to the Company and announces a desire to start again with yet another identity. The Company offers to accommodate him, but asks if he would first provide the names of some past acquaintances who might like to be "reborn".
While awaiting his reassignment, Wilson encounters Charlie Evans (played by Murray Hamilton), the friend who had originally recruited him into the Company. Evans was also "reborn", and also could not make a go of his new identity. Together, they speculate on the reason for their failure to adjust, attributing it to the fact that they allowed others, including the Company, to make their life choices for them. This realization comes too late, as Hamilton learns that failed reborns are not actually provided new identities, but instead become cadavers used to fake new clients' deaths.
John Frankenheimer directed Seconds during the period that he worked on his most noted films including Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and Seven Days in May (1964). These last two films together with Seconds are sometimes known as Frankenheimer's paranoia trilogy.
Scored by Jerry Goldsmith, the theme music of Seconds is sort of a variation of Faust.
The "reborns" of the plot are ironically paralleled in a different context - three of the principal actors were proscribed from Hollywood films during the "Blacklist" years of the Fifties.
The title sequence was designed by Saul Bass.
Seconds was first released October 5, 1966. It did poorly on its initial release, but later developed a strong cult following.
The director of photography for Seconds was the legendary James Wong Howe, who is well known for pioneering novel techniques in black-and-white cinematography, and whose prolific career spanned nearly five decades.
Rock Hudson was five inches taller than his movie counterpart, John Randolph; the difference in their heights was worked around with carefully-chosen camera angles. Hudson and Randolph also spent a good deal of time together before production began, allowing Hudson to model Randolph's mannerisms, to resemble him more closely.
In Frankenheimer's commentary on the DVD he notes:
The depiction of Hamilton's plastic surgery includes several shots of an actual rhinoplasty operation. Director John Frankenheimer made several of these shots himself after the cameraman fainted.
The DVD includes footage deleted from the American theatrical version depicting nude revelers at a wine festival. Frankenheimer had also intended to restore a scene in which the transformed Hamilton visits his daughter, but the footage could not be found.
The scenes in Tony Wilson's Malibu beach house were shot in Frankenheimer's own home.
Brian Wilson and Seconds
Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson saw the movie during its initial release, between sessions for Smile. Under the influence of drugs, the early stages of schizophrenia, and pressure to complete Smile, Wilson found Seconds an especially intense experience, that affected him personally (beginning with his arriving late; the first dialogue he heard onscreen was "Come in, Mr. Wilson", taking him by surprise). His state of mind shifted over the next months, between fantasies of escaping his own life in a similar way, and thoughts that perhaps rival producer Phil Spector had somehow convinced Columbia Pictures to make the movie "to mess with my mind". Wilson later abandoned the Smile sessions, and did not see another movie in a theater until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. His experience was later recounted in The Beach Boys by Byron Preiss, Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! by Domenic Priore, and Wilson's own Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story (written with Todd Gold).
Michael Nicholas Salvatore Bongiorno, known as Mike Bongiorno (May 26, 1924 – September 8, 2009) was an American-born naturalized Italian television host. He started his career on Italian TV in the 1950s and was considered one of the most popular hosts in Italian TV. He was also known with his nickname il Re del Quiz (The Quiz King), and the pecularity of starting all his shows with his trademark greeting: "Allegria!".
Bongiorno was born in New York City, United States but moved to Turin, his mother's home city, early in life. During World War II he abandoned his studies and joined a group of Italian partisans. He was captured and spent seven months in the San Vittore prison in Milan and was then deported to a German concentration camp. He was liberated before the end of the war due to a POW exchange between the United States and Germany. He returned to New York and in 1946 started work at the radio headquarters of Il progresso italo-americano (The Italian-American progress) newspaper.
Bongiorno returned to Italy in 1953. He appeared in the program Arrivi e Partenze (Arrivals and Departures) on the TV channel RAI on the very first day of official public TV transmissions in Italy. From 1955 to 1959 he hosted the quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia?, the Italian version of The $64,000 Question. This was the first successful quiz show on Italian TV, and became one of the most famous Italian TV programs ever.
Another successful program was Campanile Sera (Bell Tower Evening, 1959-1962), in which a southern Italian town and a northern one challenged each other with questions made to representatives of the two towns who were present in the studio and practical games played by citizens situated at the same towns.
In 1963 Umberto Eco wrote an essay on Mike Bongiorno and his way of communicating named Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno.
Beginning in 1963 he hosted eleven editions of the Sanremo Festival. Then he hosted the quiz programs Caccia al numero (Number Hunting, 1962), La Fiera dei Sogni (Dream Fair, 1962-1965) and Giochi in Famiglia (Games in Family, 1966-1969). But the greatest success came with the quiz program Rischiatutto (1970-1974), an adapted Italian version of Jeopardy!, with 20 to 30 million watchers every Thursday night, the highest audience in the history of Italian TV. Other programs hosted by Bongiorno were the current events talk show Ieri e Oggi (Yesterday and Today, 1976) and the quiz programs Scommettiamo? (Wanna Bet?, 1976-1978), inspired by horse-racing, and a remake of Lascia o Raddoppia? in 1979.
He moved to Tele Milano (now Canale 5), one of the first Italian commercial TV channels owned by Mediaset whose owner is Silvio Berlusconi, to host I sogni nel cassetto (The unrealized dreams, literally "The dreams in the drawer", 1979-1980). After a brief return to RAI with the news-game Flash (1980-1982), he continued working for Mediaset quiz programmes Bis (1981-1990), Superflash (1982-1985), Pentathlon (1985-1987), Telemike (1987-1992), Tris (1990-1991), the statistic game Tutti per uno (Everyone for one, 1992) and from 1989 to 2003 La Ruota della Fortuna (the quiz which was imported in the States and other countries with the name of the Wheel of Fortune).
From 1991 to 2001 he hosted Bravo Bravissimo (Good, very good), a very successful festival aimed to under 13 years-old musicians, dancers and singers from all the world. He won 24 Telegatto, the Italian TV prize, and on May 26, 2004, in occasion of his 80th birthday, he was appointed Grand Official of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by the then Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Until 2005 he hosted Genius on Rete 4, an afternoon quiz show aimed at 12 to 14 year-olds. In 2006 and 2007 he hosted the prime-time quiz show Il Migliore (The Best) on Rete 4. More recently, he was also a guest of the second episode of the Gianfranco Funari's show Apocalypse Show on Rai Uno. On December 2007, Mike Bongiorno was made Doctor Honoris Causa [1]. On 26 March 2009 Bongiorno signed for SKY Italia after Mediaset decided not to renew his contract, and had planned to host a new TV show on SKY Uno due to air in fall 2009.
On September 8, 2009 SKY Italia announced Mike Bongiorno had died in Monte Carlo due to heart failure.
The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 thriller film made by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and produced by Stanley O'Toole and Martin Richards with Robert Fryer as executive producer. The screenplay, by Heywood Gould, is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin. It bears no relation to another film Boys from Brazil from 1993. The music score was by Jerry Goldsmith and the cinematography by Henri Decae.
Cast includes Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Lili Palmer, Uta Hagen, and a young Steve Guttemberg.
The Boys from Brazil is a guilty pleasure, a film that revels in its ridiculous plot and over the top performances to such a degree that you can’t help being swept along for the ride. Based on a novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives) this is a B picture with an A-list cast.
Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele is alive and well and living in Paraguay but he’s not content. He hatches a secret plan for a Fourth Reich. With the help of a Nazi underground movement he puts his plan into operation, a scheme that requires the deaths of 94 men aged 65 over a period of years. The only man who can stop this from happening is Ezra Lieberman, an old Jew who’s devoted his life to bringing war criminals to justice.
As Lieberman, Olivier has moments of true brilliance. There are times though when it’s easy to see why he was Oscar nominated for such an unlikely film; when he interviews Nazi nurse Frieda Maloney in prison there is a level of emotion that feels real and in his final confrontation with Mengele his hatred in palpable.
If you were drawing up a wish list of actors to play an infamous German war criminal I doubt Gregory Peck would make the grade, yet someone clearly thought he was right for the part. On the plus side, he does cut an intimidating figure in his white suit with dyed black hair and moustache. Sadly his performance isn’t as successful as his appearance. It would have been nice to see what Peck could have done with a villainous role that better suited his talents as there are moments here that almost work — his scene with Olivier at the film's climax being a case in point. In fact Olivier was the reason Peck originally accepted the role as he wanted to work with the veteran actor.
The rest of the cast is filled with familiar faces from both sides of the Atlantic – James Mason as another Nazi, Steve Guttenberg as the young Jew who finds Mengele, Lilli Palmer as Lieberman’s sister plus Denholm Elliott, Rosemary Harris (now famous as Spider-Man’s Aunt May), Bruno Ganz, Michael Gough, and Prunella Scales. It’s a good cast, though only Guttenberg gets much to do and James Mason and Lili Palmer are criminally waisted.
At his peak Franklin J. Schaffner directed some all-time classics, Planet of the Apes and Patton just to name a couple, but he was coming to the end of his career by the time he made The Boys from Brazil. He does a workmanlike job, managing to take the outlandish plot and create a film that for all its faults still strangely compelling.
It’s not the sort of film that’s going to make anyone’s top ten list but I doubt I’m alone in having a soft spot for it. Peck as Mengele makes this essential viewing for curiosity value alone.
Uta Hagen was an influential acting teacher who taught, among others, Matthew Broderick, Christine Lahti, Jason Robards, Sigourney Weaver, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Lemmon, Charles Nelson Reilly, Manu Tupou, Debbie Allen and Al Pacino. She was a voice coach to Judy Garland, teaching a German accent, for the picture Judgment at Nuremberg. Garland's performance earned her an Academy Award nomination. While being profiled in Premiere magazine, actress Amanda Peet said of her mentor Hagen that she was a woman whose class you didn't want to miss.
Olivier plays a Nazi-hunter in this film, whilst in the previous Marathon Man (1976), he played Dr. Christian Szell, a Nazi physician modeled after Mengele (who was still living during the filming of both movies). In Marathon Man, Szell is known as "The White Angel," whereas Mengele was known as the "Angel of Death."
The Men Who Stare at Goats In this quirky dark comedy inspired by a real life story you will hardly believe is actually true, astonishing revelations about a top-secret wing of the U.S. military come to light when a reporter Ewan McGregor encounters an enigmatic Special Forces operator (Academy Award Winner George Clooney) on a mind-boggling mission.
...Goats tells the true (albeit somewhat bizarre) story about a top secret unit within the American military whose purpose is to develop mind-control powers for “psychic spying.” The film follows a reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who stumbles into the story of a lifetime when he meets a special forces agent, Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). As they embark on a new mission, Lyn reveals his twenty-year involvement in this top secret, psychic military unit and shares details of their activities, each more bizarre than the last (including staring at goats in order to kill them telepathically).
On February 11, 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros. purchased Inception, a spec script written by filmmaker Christopher Nolan. Filming began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009. Other locations will include Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tangier and Calgary.Principal photography for the film began on July 13, 2009. On July 15, 2009, filming took place at University College London library. The signage of the library was altered to French to imitate a bibliotheque. On August 17, 2009, filming took place around the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, a bridge that crosses the Seine River in Paris, France. Filming also took place in Morocco on Monday, August 24th, 2009.
Warner Bros. has described Inception "as a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.
Cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a CEO, Ken Watanabe as Saito, the villain who blackmails the CEO. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, an associate to the CEO. James Franco vacated the role following a scheduling conflict. Marion Cotillard as the CEO's wife, Ellen Page as Ariadne, a college grad student and the CEO's sidekick, Cillian Murphy as Fischer, Tom Berenger as Browning and Michael Caine in "just a tiny part".
The film is scheduled to be released on July 16, 2010.
Born William Hal Ashby in Ogden, Utah, Ashby grew up in a Mormon household and had a tumultuous childhood as part of a dysfunctional family which included the divorce of his parents, his father's suicide and his dropping out of high school. Ashby was married and divorced by the time he was seventeen.
As Ashby was entering adult life, he moved from Utah to California where he quickly became an assistant film editor. His big break occurred in 1967 when he won the Academy Award for Film Editing for In the Heat of the Night. Ashby has often stated that film editing provided him with the best film school background outside of traditional university study and he carried the techniques learned as an editor with him when he began directing.
At the urging of its director, Norman Jewison, Ashby directed his first film, The Landlord, in 1970. While his birth date placed him squarely within the realm of the prewar generation, the filmmaker quickly embraced the hippie lifestyle, adopting vegetarianism and growing his hair long before it became de rigueur amongst the principals of the Hollywood Renaissance. In 1970 he married actress Joan Marshall, today probably best known for her guest appearance in the Star Trek episode "Court Martial" as antagonistic prosecutor Arleen Shaw. While they remained married until his death in 1988, the two had separated by the mid-seventies, with Marshall never forgiving Ashby, along with Warren Beatty, and Robert Towne for dramatizing certain unflattering elements of her life in Shampoo.
Over the next 16 years, Ashby directed several acclaimed and popular films, including the off-beat romance Harold and Maude and the social satire Being There with Peter Sellers, resuscitating the career of a brilliant actor who many felt had lapsed into self-parody. Ashby's greatest commercial success was the aforementioned Warren Beatty vehicle Shampoo, although the director effectively ceded control of the production over to his star. Bound for Glory, a muted biography of Woody Guthrie starring David Carradine, was the first film to utilize the Steadicam.
Aside from Shampoo, where he was by all accounts a creative adjunct to Beatty and Towne, Ashby's most commercially successful film was the Vietnam War drama Coming Home. Starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, both in Academy Award-winning performances, it was for this film that Ashby earned his only Best Director nomination from the Academy for his work. As Voight had reportedly been difficult and uncooperative during production, many feel that it was Ashby's skillful editing of a particularly melodramatic scene which earned him the award. Arriving in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era, from a production standpoint Coming Home was one of the last films to encapsulate the ethos of the New Hollywood era, earning nearly $15 million dollars in returns and rentals on a minuscule $3 million budget.
Because of his critical and (relative) commercial success, shortly after the success of Coming Home Ashby formed a production company under the auspices of Lorimar. Entering into a drug-induced spiral after Being There (his last film to achieve widespread attention), Ashby became notoriously reclusive and eccentric, retreating to his spartan beachfront abode in Malibu, where he smoked prodigious amounts of marijuana and frequently refused to eat in the presence of other people.
The productions of Second-Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out − the latter a Las Vegas caper film that reunited him with Voight and featured Voight's young daughter, Angelina Jolie − were plagued by the director's increasingly erratic behavior, such as pacifying former girlfriends by hiring them to edit Lookin' To Get Out. Studio executives grew less tolerant of his increasingly perfectionist editing techniques, exemplified by his laboring over a montage set to the Police's "Message in a Bottle" for nearly six months. Initially set to helm Tootsie after two years of laborious negotiations, reports of these bizarre tendencies resulted in his dismissal shortly before production commenced.
Shortly thereafter, Ashby − a longtime Rolling Stones fan − accompanied the group on their 1981 American tour, in the process filming the documentary Let's Spend the Night Together. The occupational hazards of the road were too much for Ashby, who overdosed before a show in Phoenix, Arizona. Although the film was eventually completed, it was relegated to cable TV.
The Slugger's Wife, with a screenplay penned by renowned playwright Neil Simon, continued the losing streak. Ostensibly a commercially-minded romantic comedy, Simon was reportedly horrified when he viewed Ashby's rough cut of the first reel, sequenced as an impressionistic mood piece with the first half hour featuring minimal dialogue. Remaining defiant in his squabbles with producers and Simon, Ashby was eventually fired in the final stages of production; the completed film was a critical and commercial failure. 8 Million Ways to Die, written by Oliver Stone, fared similarly at the box office; by this juncture Ashby's post-production antics were considered to be such a liability that he was fired by the production company on the final day of principal photography.
Attempting to turn a corner in his declining career, Ashby ceased to use drugs, trimmed his hair and beard, and began to frequent Hollywood parties wearing a navy blue blazer so as to suggest that he was once again "respectable". Despite these efforts, word of his unreliable reputation had spread throughout the entertainment industry and he could only find work as a television director, helming the pilots for Beverly Hills Buntz (a Dennis Franz vehicle that purloined the premise of Beverly Hills Cop and lasted for thirteen episodes) and Jake's Journey (a planned collaboration in the Arthurian sword and sorcery vein with Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame that never came to fruition because of the creators' ailing health).
Longtime friend Warren Beatty advised Ashby to seek medical care after he complained of various medical problems, including undiagnosed phlebitis; he was soon diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that rapidly spread to his lungs, colon and liver. Some friends of Ashby grew incensed when his girlfriend Grif Griffis who had been by his side day in and day out insisted upon homeopathic treatments after all medical treatments had failed, and refused to let them see him. Ashby died on December 27, 1988 at his home in Malibu, California.
Sean Penn's directorial debut The Indian Runner is dedicated to Ashby and his contemporary, pioneering independent filmmaker/actor John Cassavetes.
Today Ashby stands as an underappreciated filmmaker of the New Hollywood era, with only one web site dedicated to his works and no critical retrospectives of note as of 2006. Some have attributed this to his lack of a distinctive "style", with his oeuvre ranging from heartfelt drama to dark, biting social satire to farcial comedies with no consistent pattern. Being There has always elicited the most criticism, but this is mostly in regard to its controversial ending. In the opinion of actor Bruce Dern, "What happened to Hal Ashby, both what he did to himself and what they did to him, was as repulsive as anything I've seen in my forty years of the industry".
A biography written by Nick Dawson entitled Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel was published in March 2009. Ashby was also discussed, and his output as director examined, at length in Peter Biskind's seminal book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998).
Also in 2009, a tribute was held to honor the work of Hal Ashby. The event was hosted by Cameron Crowe in the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. Among those in attendance, on June 25th, 2009, was the musician, Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. "The impact of my musical legacy was due in part to the fact that Hal Ashby embraced my albums and used them as a soundtrack for his amazing film Harold and Maude. People are as tied to that film as they are to my music and this event is an opportunity for me to honour the memory of the man", said Yusuf.
In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.
(Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1944)
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