“I say, you’re a very attractive woman!”—Ralph Richardson, star of Long Day’s Journey Into Night , after dancing with co-star Katharine Hepburn at the film’s wrap party, quoted in A. Scott Berg, Kate Remembered (2003) Richardson made his comment in 1962, but you can get an idea what he was talking about 20 years before, in this iconic image from Woman of the Year...
Astaire and Rogers, poetry in motion. Swing Time , 1936 might be the best of the nine RKO Astaire-Rogers musicals. The plot is paper thin—Astaire plays a gambler and dancer who must earn $25,000 in order to win a bride—but the dance numbers, choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan, are luminous. “Waltz in Swing Time” is an incredibly complicated routine a “syncopated...
The White House is enlisting "Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker, Forest Whitaker and others from Hollywood and beyond to help push President Barack Obama's arts initiatives.
WASHINGTON — The White House is enlisting "Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker, Forest Whitaker and others from Hollywood and beyond to help push President Barack Obama's arts initiatives.
If eclecticism was the goal for Barack Obama in choosing members for the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, then he has succeeded hands down, judging from today's announcement of 25 appointees. Ranging from Hollywood actors to veteran...
Movie ballyhoo is in good shape this Halloween season. The made-for-$10,000 Paranormal Activity has become a runaway hit, thanks to clever Internet marketing. “Chaos reigns” T-shirts are being hawked (or foxed) outside theaters showing Antichrist. The timing of The William Castle Film Collection on DVD couldn’t be better, though Castle, the master of promotional [...]
Another more recognized than well known character actor has departed the planet with the passing of the apparently born-middle-aged Lou Jacobi at the age of 95. In a town full of Jewish actors and behind-the-camera talent, Jacobi and the late Ned Glass, who was as skinny as Jacobi was chubby and who made a recent [...]
In the nineteen-fifties, Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”) and George Stevens (“Shane”) tried to freeze the Western genre into a single archetypal film, while directors like Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann were taking it in bitter new directions. “Ride the High Country,” Sam Peckinpah . . .
Lloyd Grove attended Gore Vidal’s talk here last night, and re-capped the night at The Daily Beast . Comedian Richard Belzer was there as to lend his support to Vidal. Grove reports Belzer told him: “I’m here as a Jew who knows he’s not an anti-Semite,” Belzer told me about his friend. And if anyone says different? “I’m going to kick their ass,” he vowed....
by James Scott Bell I love a good Western. This uniquely American genre sums up our collective spirit better than any other. In fact, the decline in the popularity of Westerns seems to track right along with the fragmentation of our society. So a look back at the classics (I'm not into post-modern revisionist oaters) is also a look back at ourselves, as we were, silhouetted against the horizon. Maybe...
MARFA, Texas – Actor Randy Quaid and his wife have been arrested in West Texas for allegedly skipping out on a $10,000 California hotel bill. Quaid and his wife, Evi, were taken into custody Thursday afternoon, according to Santa Barbara County sheriff’s officials, who said authorities in West Texas informed them of the arrest. A statement [...]
A prominent movie and television producer, a New York theater producer and a high-ranking university arts scholar are headed to Washington to join the president's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. President Obama today said that he made the...
Sad news to report to the Nation tonight, I’m afraid. According to the Primetimeemmys Twitter feed, Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special, “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All”. Here are the winners of the categories nominated: Outstanding Art Direction For Variety, Music Or Nonfiction Programming 81st Annual Academy Awards • ABC • Academy of Motion [...]