A TRIBUTE TO GENE WILDER - EIGHT YEARS LATER

 It's hard to believe that Gene Wilder has been gone for eight years now. He was a superstar on and off the screen...

THEN AND NOW: ALAN ALDA & MIKE FARRELL

Here are the two stars of the iconic comedy Mash - Alan Alda and Mike Farrell. The first photo is from the set of Mash in 1975. Alan Alda was 39 and Mike Farrell was 36. Fifty years later almost, they reunited for another photo!

BEHIND THE SCENES: SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

One of my all-time favorite comedies was the classic Some Like It Hot. My 11 year old daughter also loves the film. Here are some great behind the scenes photos from the making of this 1959 classic...

GO FUND ME: CHILD STAR TOMMY COOK

Child actor Tommy Cook, has been dealt some tough financial and health concerns. If you could donate, it would be appreciated.

Tommy Cook is an American producer, screenwriter and actor. He came up with the story for the 1977 American disaster-suspense film Rollercoaster, starring George Segal. Cook also voiced Augie Anderson and Biff on Hanna-Barbera's animated series The Funky Phantom and Jabberjaw. Cook played a villainous tribesboy opposite Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, a "nice native lad" in Jungle Girl (a serial), and Little Beaver in the serial version of Adventures of Red Ryder.

Cook started his career on radio. He played Little Beaver on the radio series Red Ryder. He also played Alexander on Blondie and Junior on The Life of Riley. He had a starring role in the 1950 American drama film The Vicious Years.

On television, Cook appeared in a 1961 episode of The Tab Hunter Show. He had voice-over roles on animated series such as Kid Flash on The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, Augie on The Funky Phantom and Biff on Jabberjaw.

Cook returned to acting in 2017, making guest appearances on Better Things and Space Force.

You can donate HERE

HOLLYWOOD BEAUTY: AVA GARDNER

 va Gardner (1922-1990) was a stunning beauty. I can just look at these old photographs of her all day. It would be safe to say that she was one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood history. Here is the evidence...

BAD CINEMA: THE APPLE

The forgotten but campy The Apple is often considered the worst musical of all time. Apparently 1980 wasn’t exactly the best year to try a musical. Director Menahem Golan co-owned The Cannon Group with his cousin, Yoram Globus. They made some cheesy but popular films, like Breakin’, American Ninja, and Missing in Action. They were also responsible for disasters like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and the famously bad 1990 version of Captain America that never made it to American theaters. 

The Apple somehow tries to combine a future version of the Eurovision Song Contest (here, the 1994 Worldvision Song Festival) and a parable of the dangers of the entertainment industry with, wait for it, The Bible. You have analogues for Adam, Eve, and The Devil (Mr. Boogalow, who owns a label, of course). You have variations on temptation scenes (title song The Apple, which includes a sort of tour of Hell with dumb as anything lyrics “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire/Meet an actual, actual, actual vampire”). The climax of the film is The Rapture. Seriously, this is a real movie. Utterly crazy doesn’t even really cover it. But sadly, it’s not an eminently rewatchable kind of crazy. It’s just terrible.

This futuristic retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, set in the distant year of 1994. Mr. Boogalow is a record company executive who is symbolically the devil. Catherine Mary Stewart and George Gilmour are two Canadian ingénues who try to revive the long-dormant art of the love song (so 1970s!). Mr. Boogalow quickly puts a stop to that by tempting Stewart to the disco scene. The movie pretty much hits its record industry target, and predicts American Idol (except that, instead of soulless disco songs, for the most part the contestants on that show sing soulless ballads). It's not the stupidest movie in the world. On the other hand, it is one of the most garish imaginable, with its goofy futuristic clothes (people in the future always tend to like shiny things a lot), and the songs are beyond horrible. I do not recognize any stars in the film, and maybe that is for the best for all involved...

MY BAD RATING: 9 OUT OF 10

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG TIDBITS

According to producer/director Stanley Kramer, a young New York stage actor with a small part in "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961) held up production at one point. He was trying to understand his motivation in a brief shot which called for him to enter a room, cross to a table, and wait for Spencer Tracy to enter to hand him a folder. At 10:15 a.m., after sitting in his dressing room since 9:00 am, waiting to make his entrance, Tracy stormed onto the set and said, "Lookit, you come in the f***ing door and cross the f***ing room and go to the f***ing table because its the only way to get in the f***ing room. That's your motivation."

On the day Tracy gave his eleven-minute summation speech, the set at Universal Pictures was packed to the rafters with celebrities and studio executives. Kramer shot it in a single take, not because he thought breaking it up would necessarily lessen the impact of the words but because he knew he would get the maximum emotional payoff out of Tracy without having to start and stop. To be sure he had the coverage he needed without scheduling a reshoot, Kramer had the speech filmed with two cameras simultaneously from two different angles.

Montgomery Clift had difficulty with his lines, cues, and timing. He told Kramer he didn't know if he could actually get through the scene. Kramer did his best to reassure him, but it was Tracy who eventually helped Clift through it. Perhaps drawing on his own years of alcoholism, Tracy spoke to the younger actor with sympathy but with firmness, even relaxing his own dictum about sticking strictly to the script: "Just look into my eyes and do it. You're a great actor and you understand this guy. Stanley doesn't care if you throw aside the precise lines. Just do it into my eyes and you'll be magnificent." Clift spent four days getting through the seven-minute sequence, stumbling through and performing each take differently. At the end of his last take, the set broke out into spontaneous applause. "Monty's condition gave the performance an aura as though it were being shot through muslin, the way the words tumbled out and the disjointed, sudden bursts of lucidity out of a mumble," Kramer said later. "It was classic! It was one of the best moments in the film!" Some film historians and critics have since suggested that Kramer knew exactly what he was doing by casting such broken and erratic performers as Judy Garland and Clift in roles that called for expressions of pain, embarrassment, and terror...