One need not obsess over baseball stats to be struck by the fact that it was exactly 50 seasons ago that yesterday’s World Series winners, the San Francisco Giants had also played the World Series – but lost. In 1962,… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Movies’
FDR’s Four-Times Happy Campaign Song & A Home Movie Showing Him Paralyzed
It didn’t start out as his – but like so much else, Franklin Roosevelt claimed it for himself because he saw its value of association. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, his wife’s first cousin, loved telling the story of a couple in… Read More ›
The First President To Win With Actors: Al Jolson’s 1920 Campaign Song for Harding
George Clooney, fundraising and providing thematic strategy for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign or Clint Eastwood speaking at the convention nominating Mitt Romney: neither story causes a blink in either Hollywood or Washington. Yet preceding even the famous efforts of… Read More ›
Mae West Nude, Getting Naked, Fighting Father Time…and Living
In her later years, Mae West spoke out against nudity in feature films – not on a moral basis but because she felt it didn’t allow the imagination to wander. “Never drop the seventh veil,” she once said about actors… Read More ›
Ike, Irving, Mamie & Merman: The Hit Song Which Elected a President
It was like a double-date between the entertainment and political world and while it resulted in helping a Republican, it had all been prompted by a Democrat. There’s No Business Like Show Business, Easter Parade, White Christmas: these are just… Read More ›
Ronald Reagan & Bette Davis: Politically Oppositional Co-Stars
Unlike Presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt, Nixon, or Obama, chronicling an unusual pairing between any Hollywood Actor or Actress and Ronald Reagan is almost an exercise in futility, a nearly moot story since Reagan was himself a professional Hollywood Actor… Read More ›
How I Came Up to See Mae West One Time, Got her Floor Lamps and Something Else
I once came up to see Mae West sometime. And I got her floor lamps. And something else. Having just been through an exhausting inventory of all the things I’ve inexplicably bought over the years and August 17 being her… Read More ›
In the Future….Floating Cities! From The Seventies!!?
Lockheed Martin’s Fifties Monorail for swift, quiet getting about town. Whether or not it was timed for Earth Day, word came this week that Lost Angeles will begin reconstructing the world premier mass transit system it destroyed a half-century ago,… Read More ›
Playing Presidents: The Actor JFK (and Jackie) wanted to Play him in the Movies, Part III
No President has had more versions of aspects of his life played out in film and television more than John F. Kennedy. The JFK character has appeared in a supporting role in any number of television biopics about others, from… Read More ›
Playing Presidents: Good History vs. Good Drama and the Actor JFK wanted to play Him, Part II
With so many events to bend into two hours, presidential biopics offer less chance to plumb the character of a President than do those films which focus on a specific conflict from their life. Critics faulted Amistad (1997) on both… Read More ›
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