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Ophiliasgrandma
Member
09-04-2001
| Tuesday, September 28, 2010 - 4:34 pm
Here's the man I was thinking of. He still holds the record for the longest field goal kick...63 yards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dempsey
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Tishala
Member
08-01-2000
| Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 9:04 am
Arthur Penn, Director of ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ Dies NY Times Arthur Penn, the stage, television and motion picture director whose revolutionary treatment of sex and violence in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde” transformed the American film industry, died Tuesday night at his home in Manhattan, the day after he turned 88. The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Matthew, said. [...] Luckily, Mr. Penn had a back-up plan. Returning to New York, he mounted “The Miracle Worker” for Broadway with Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and the 13-year-old Patty Duke as Helen Keller. Mr. Penn’s highly physical approach made the show a sensation — “One of the most ferocious slugging matches in town has been waged nightly for the past eight weeks between an amateur fighter from the Bronx, standing 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 122 pounds, and a novice from Manhattan, standing 4 feet 4 3/4 inches tall and weighing 60 pounds,” wrote Nan Robertson in a Times story about the play — and the production went on to run for 719 performances. During the run of “The Miracle Worker,” Mr. Penn found time to stage three more hits: Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic,” with Jason Robards, Jr. and Maureen Stapleton; “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” in which the popular comedy team made their Broadway debut, and “All the Way Home,” an adaptation of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family,” with Arthur Hill and Colleen Dewhurst. When Hollywood beckoned again, Mr. Penn returned in strength in 1962 to direct the film version of “The Miracle Worker.” This time the film was a popular and critical success, earning Oscars for Ms. Bancroft and Ms. Duke and nominations for Mr. Penn, Mr. Gibson and the costume designer Ruth Morley. [...] After the astonishing success of “Bonnie and Clyde,” Mr. Penn had his choice of projects. But rather than move on to big-budget Hollywood prestige productions, Mr. Penn decided to make a small, personal film, very much in the spirit of the American Independent Cinema that would emerge in the 1980s. “Alice’s Restaurant,” released in 1969, revisited many of the social outsider themes of “Bonnie and Clyde,” but in a low key, gently skeptical, non-violent manner. Starring Arlo Guthrie and based on his best-selling narrative album about a hippie commune’s brush with the law, the film did not approximate the impact of “Bonnie and Clyde” but stands as one of Mr. Penn’s most engaging works, a warm and deeply felt miniature. [...]
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Ophiliasgrandma
Member
09-04-2001
| Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - 10:07 am
It looks as if the world lost a hugely talented man.
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Darrellh
Member
07-21-2004
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 5:48 am
Tony Curtis had one dream: to be in the movies. He succeeded. And how. Curtis, a last link to a bygone Hollywood of classic films (Spartacus, Some Like It Hot, The Defiant Ones) and classic stars (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Cary Grant), died Wednesday. He was 85. The Clark County coroner says the entertainer and father of Jamie Lee Curtis, died at 9:25 p.m. local time of cardiac arrest at his Las Vegas-area home "I'm just a lucky guy," Curtis said in a recent interview. "I was blessed." Not the kind of actor who won awards—although he was nominated once for an Oscar—Curtis was the kind of star who won fans. And leading ladies. "I was the handsomest of all the boys," Curtis told Britain's Daily Mail. Curtis' good looks, if not his self-confidence, landed him an early role with Jimmy Stewart (Winchester '73), and an early marriage to actress Janet Leigh (Psycho). The couple had two children, including Jamie Lee. The 1950s were Curtis' heyday. He made the racial parable The Defiant Ones, which put him on a chain gang with Sidney Poitier, the gender-bending Billy Wilder mob comedy Some Like It Hot, which put him and Lemmon in dresses, and which led him to rekindle a long-ago affair with Monroe, the ink-stained The Sweet Smell of Success, with Burt Lancaster, and the World War II submarine comedy, Operation Petticoat, with Grant. In 1960, he made perhaps the ultimate epic, Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas' Roman-slave drama Spartacus, which paired him in a famously censored (and since restored) bathhouse scene with Laurence Olivier. After the 1968 true-crime thriller, The Boston Strangler, Curtis' A-list run gave way to TV and movies such as The Manitou and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan. Looking back, Curtis cited his 1962 divorce from Leigh as the turning point. "A lot of people didn't like it," Curtis told Reuters in 2008. "I'm sorry they took it that way but I could not swallow my own needs just to get nice headlines in magazines." Curtis' needs—and conquests—in the ladies department were considerable. He married five times. He got Monroe pregnant. (He said she miscarried. He also said—perhaps his most famous soundbite—that kissing her was like "kissing Hitler." He later said he was joking.) By his own reckoning, he was more hooked on women than he was on drugs—and, for a time, he was hooked on both cocaine and heroine. Born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, Curtis lost the name—deigned "too Jewish" for mid-20th century ears—but never the New Yawk flavor, no matter how ancient a European he portrayed. Curtis didn't let anything—prejudice or accents—get in the way of his dream. "When I was young there were times that I would get pissed off and angry, but I knew I was going to get in the movies," Curtis told Esquire. "I looked in the mirror, and I said, 'How could they miss me?' And they didn't."
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Goddessatlaw
Member
07-19-2002
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 6:13 am
"Yonda lies da castle of my fadda dah prince . . . " RIP Tony Curtis, you were one of a kind.
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Mamie316
Member
07-08-2003
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 7:22 am
Makes me want to watch Some Like It Hot 
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Ophiliasgrandma
Member
09-04-2001
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 7:42 am
He was a very good looking young man.

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Beachcomber
Member
08-26-2003
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 9:48 am
He was. Now what was so racy about this censored scene from Spartacus? I have never seen the movie.
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Marysafan
Member
08-07-2000
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 9:58 am
I just read that Greg Giraldo has died of an accidental prescription drug overdose. I feel like we just spent the summer together as I tuned in every week to see "The Last Comic Standing". He was great on that show. His criticisms were often very constructive. He really understood comedy and tried to help others hone their craft. So sorry to lose him so young.
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Texannie
Member
07-15-2001
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 10:19 am
Beach, it alledgedly had homosexual overtones.
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Ophiliasgrandma
Member
09-04-2001
| Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 11:14 am
Re Spartacus: He was washing another man in a bath in a provocative manner.
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Darrellh
Member
07-21-2004
| Friday, October 01, 2010 - 8:02 am
Usually, TCM or AMC does a tribute night soon after a known actor or director passes. As sad as it is to know someone passes, it will be great to see all their work together.
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Texannie
Member
07-15-2001
| Friday, October 01, 2010 - 11:28 am
Stephen J. Cannell Stephen J. Cannell, the voracious writer-producer of dozens of series that included TV favorites "The Rockford Files," "The A-Team" and "The Commish," has died at age 69. Cannell passed away at his home in Pasadena, Calif., on Thursday night from complications associated with melanoma, his family said in a statement on Friday. During three decades as an independent producer, he distinguished himself as a rangy, outgoing chap with a trim beard who was generally identified with action dramas full of squealing tires and tough guys trading punches. But his range was greater than for which he was given credit. "Tenspeed and Brown Shoe" was a clever detective drama starring Ben Vereen and a then-unknown Jeff Goldblum in 1980. "Profit" was a shocking saga of a psycho businessman that was unforgettable to the few viewers who saw it: Fox pulled the plug after just four episodes in 1996. With "Wiseguy" (1987-90), Cannell chilled viewers with a film-noir descent into the underworld that predated "The Sopranos" by more than a decade. "The Rockford Files," of course, became an Emmy-winning TV classic following the misadventures of its hapless ex-con private eye played by James Garner. "People say, 'How can the guy who did "Wiseguy" do "The A-Team"?' I don't know," said Cannell in an interview with The Associated Press in 1993. "But I do know it's easier to think of me simply as the guy who wrote 'The A-Team.' So they do." During his TV heyday, Cannell became familiar to viewers from the ID that followed each of his shows: He was seen in his office typing on his Selectric before blithely ripping a sheet of paper from the typewriter carriage, whereupon it morphed into the C-shaped logo of Cannell Entertainment Inc. That was all the idea of his wife, Marcia, he said, and it "appealed to my sense of hooey. ... I'm a ham." He was also an occasional actor, most recently with a recurring role on ABC-TV's series, "Castle." A third-generation Californian, Cannell (rhymes with "channel") got into television writing scripts for "It Takes a Thief," "Ironside" and "Adam 12." It was a remarkable career choice for someone who had suffered since childhood from severe dyslexia (he became an advocate for children and adults with learning disabilities). Cannell in recent years had focused his attention on writing books. His 16th novel, "The Prostitute's Ball," will be released this month. "I never thought of myself as being a brilliant writer, and still don't," he said in the AP interview. "I'm a populist. With 'Rockford,' we were never trying to be important. And as thoroughly hated as it was by critics, I loved 'The A-Team.' I thought it was really cool." He was a producer of the feature film updating "The A-Team," released earlier this year. Cannell is survived by Marcia, his wife of 46 years, their three children, and three grandchildren.
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Cablejockey
Member
12-27-2001
| Friday, October 01, 2010 - 12:43 pm
I just read this and was quite surprised and saddened by the news. I watched all Channel's shows over the years and enjoyed them. He brought a lot to tv over the past 30 odd years. Sad news indeed.....
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Dogdoc
Member
09-29-2001
| Friday, October 01, 2010 - 1:24 pm
I read and enjoyed a couple of Cannel's books.
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Goddessatlaw
Member
07-19-2002
| Monday, October 11, 2010 - 3:08 pm
Dame Joan Sutherland - the operatic soprano known as "La Stupenda" - has died. Dame Joan Sutherland
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Texannie
Member
07-15-2001
| Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 1:40 pm
Barbara Billingsley, Beaver Cleaver's TV mom, dies LOS ANGELES – Barbara Billingsley, who gained supermom status for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver, the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys in "Leave it to Beaver," died Saturday. She was 94. Billingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky. When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was 9, and Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. Billingsley's character, the perfect stay-at-home 1950s mom, was always there to gently but firmly nurture both through the ups and downs of childhood. Beaver, meanwhile, was a typical American boy whose adventures landed him in one comical crisis after another. Billingsley's own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed. She did acknowledge that she may have become more like June as the series progressed. "I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as the character they created," she once said. "So you become sort of all mixed up, I think." A wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her elementary school's plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else. Although her beauty and figure won her numerous roles in movies from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she failed to obtain star status until "Leave it to Beaver," a show that she almost passed on. "I was going to do another series with Buddy Ebsen for the same producers, but somehow it didn't materialize," she told The Associated Press in 1994. "A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot show. And it was `Beaver.'" Decades later, she expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had for the show. "We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written," she said. "But we had no idea what was ahead. People still talk about it and write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and grandchildren." After "Leave it to Beaver" left the air in 1963 Billingsley largely disappeared from public view for several years. She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in "Airplane!" playing a demur elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver. When flight attendants were unable to communicate with a pair of jive-talking hipsters, Billingsley's character volunteered to translate, saying "I speak jive." The three then engage in a raucous street-slang conversation. "No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn't been June Cleaver," she once said. She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, "Still the Beaver," that costarred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver's life. In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own sons and going through a divorce. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition. "Ward, what would you do?" she asked at the site of her husband's grave. (Beaumont had died in 1982.) The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel launched "The New Leave It to Beaver" in 1985. The series took a more hopeful view of the Cleavers, with Beaver winning custody of his two sons and all three moving in with June. In 1997 Universal made a "Leave it to Beaver" theatrical film with a new generation of actors. Billingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt Martha. In later years she appeared from time to time in such TV series as "Murphy Brown," "Empty Nest" and "Baby Boom" and had a memorable comic turn opposite fellow TV moms June Lockhart of "Lassie" and Isabel Sanford of "The Jeffersons" on the "Roseanne" show. "Now some people, they just associate you with that one role (June Cleaver), and it makes it hard to do other things," she once said. "But as far as I'm concerned, it's been an honor." In real life, fate was not as gentle to Billingsley as it had been to June and her family. Born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1922, she was raised by her mother after her parents divorced. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, divorced when her sons were just 2 and 4. Her second husband, director Roy Kellino, died of a heart attack after three years of marriage and just months before she landed the "Leave it to Beaver" role. She married physician Bill Mortenson in 1959 and they remained wed until his death in 1981. Survivors include her sons, three stepchildren and numerous grandchildren. ___
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Mameblanche
Member
08-24-2002
| Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 1:49 pm

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Ophiliasgrandma
Member
09-04-2001
| Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 2:19 pm
She stayed lovely until the end.
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Jhonise
Member
07-10-2003
| Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 3:28 pm

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Hukdonreality
Member
09-29-2003
| Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 4:06 pm
I saw that picture on Jerry Mather's facebook page, taken at a reunion they had in 2009. Gosh, she looked wonderful for her age. RIP Mrs. Cleaver
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Cablejockey
Member
12-27-2001
| Saturday, October 16, 2010 - 4:27 pm
What a wonderful character Ms. Billingsley brought to us in June Cleaver, mom of Wally and Beaver. She has given us a lot of enjoyment and happy hours of tv over the years. Over the years she has posed with Tony DOw and Jerry Mathers, but I have never seen pictures of her with her own sons. I'll to look for them. It would be intersting to see. Rest in peace Ms. B.
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Ophiliasgrandma
Member
09-04-2001
| Sunday, October 17, 2010 - 9:25 am
Here is the complete photo from above:

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Dogdoc
Member
09-29-2001
| Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - 9:59 am
Tom Bosley died today.
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Goddessatlaw
Member
07-19-2002
| Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - 10:21 am
NOOOOOOOO!!! What a funny, funny man. Just looking at his face made me laugh. RIP, Mr. C.
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