Day: June 8, 2025

My understanding is that the first motion-picture camera sound blimps (i.e., foam-filled housing attached to a camera which reduces shutter sounds, designed with holes for the lens and viewfinder) began to be used with noisy three-strip Technicolor cameras back in the late ’30s.

Imagine having to work with a blimp of this bulk…it’s nearly the size of a Fiat station wagon.

Notice the date on the clapper next to Peter Ustinov in the below Spartacus snap — 4.15.59 or tax day.

One quick question: Why is CNN refusing to allow viewers to stream a recorded version of last night’s live broadcast of Good Night and Good Luck? Millions no doubt missed it and even some who saw it, I’m guessing, might want to catch it again. You can’t even find scene excerpts on Youtube. What’s the problem exactly?

Those ugly Disqus ads and links adjacent to the comments will be removed as soon as I can find the link to the Disqus billing info. Team Disqus can’t be bothered to make changing your payment info an easy process.

I’ve been saying from the get-go that Joseph Quinn‘s performance as George Harrison in Sam Mendes‘ quartet of Beatles films…I’ve said right from the start that Quinn is the Wrong Guy…a terrible fit in a physical-biological way, starting with his pale freckly complexion and reddish-auburn hair.

Ginger or copper-haired actresses have never had the slightest problem in Hollywood, of course, and a select few have become major stars — Cate Blanchett, Amy Adams, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Bryce Dallas Howard, Isla Fisher, Lindsay Lohan, Christina Hendricks plus yesteryear’s Katharine Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Myrna Loy, Tina Louise, Greer Garson, Rita Hayworth, Lucille Ball, Maureen O’Hara, Carol Burnett, Susan Hayward.

But ginger-haired guys have almost never made it to the penthouse level. Because there’s something about them that Americans just can’t quite settle in with or bow down to…not really.

Michael Fassbender, Lucas Hedges, Paul Bettany, Jesse Plemons, David Caruso, Ed Sheeran, Damian Lewis, Rupert Grint, Alan Tudyk, Brendan Gleeson, Danny Bonaduce, Eric Stoltz, Carrot Top Thompson, David Lewis, Domhnall Gleeson, Rupert Grint, Simon Pegg, Toby Stephens, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chuck Norris, Jason Flemyng, Seth Green, David Wenham…none of them ever made it into the elite winner’s circle, not really. Because people glommed onto that red hair and went “okay, fine, good actor but nope.”

The only copper-ginger guys who became gold-bullion movie stars were James Cagney and Robert Redford.

Quinn will never manage it, period. Harrison is currently fretting and frowning in heaven, pacing back and forth, knowing what’s to come and yet unable to wield any influence on planet earth. Mendes’ quartet will also blow chunks with good old hawknose pointy-chin playing Paul McCartney.

There’s a 4K UHD disc of High Society arriving on 6.24. Forget it. Too schmaltzy. Not worth the candle.

I streamed an HD version of High Society three or four years ago, and despite my knowing the source material (Philip Barry and Donald Ogden‘s The Philadelpha Story) backwards and forwards, I began losing interest very quickly. I wanted to savor Paul C. Vogel‘s scrumptious VistaVision visuals, of course, but the tone and attitude of this 1956 film is flaccid…smug and bland and about as un-peppy as an ostensibly clever society comedy like this could be.

The director…wait, who directed it again? Charles Walters, primarily known for light, glossy musicals (Lili, Easter Parade, Summer Stock) and being a respected choreographer.

The Philadelpha Story (’40), directed by George Cukor, has the non-musical pep! It captures the flush, jaded, fleet-of-mind cynicism that…uhm, I’ve long presumed goes hand in hand with having been born into old wealth.

Katharine Hepburn starred in Barry’s original, tune-free 1939 play as well as the film. Joseph Cotten played the Cary Grant / Bing Crosby role of C. K. Dexter Haven, and Van Heflin played reporter Macauley Connor, conveyed by James Stewart in ’40 and Frank Sinatra in ’56.

Honestly? I turned off the High Society streamer before it ended. Plus Crosby, 53 at the time, was way too old for Grace Kelly, who was 24 or 25 during filming. And Kelly couldn’t hold a candle to Hepburn…sorry.

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Has Scarlett Johansson or any hyphenate with her kind of power and popularity ever explored the possibility of producing or directing a feature (or maybe an six-episode miniseries) about influential TV journalist and former actress Lisa Howard? Somebody should look into this.

Howard (aka Dorothy Jean Guggenheim, 4.24.26 to 7.4.65) “was an American journalist, writer, and television news anchor who previously had a career as an off-Broadway and soap opera actress. In the early 1960s, she became ABC News’s first woman reporter, and was the first woman to have her own national network television news show.”

Howard developed a relationship, possibly of a sexual nature, with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, whom she interviewed on camera. The scuttlebutt says she may have also done the slip-and-slide with…let’s not go there.

Howard’s network career went south when she became closely involved in Kenneth Keating‘s U.S. Senate election in 1964 New York. (He lost to Bobby Kennedy.) The following year she killed herself (fact) with an overdose of pain killers, possibly prompted by and then having suffered a miscarriage and depression but who knows?

I know that Julia Ormond portrayed Howard in Part 1 of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che (’08), but I don’t even remember seeing her in that two-part film. Not a word or a shot. And I’ve watched Che three times, once in Cannes 17 years ago and twice with the Criterion Bluray.

In a seven-year-old Politico article, Peter Kornbluh reports that Howard “set up a meeting between UN diplomat William Attwood and Cuba’s UN representative Carlos Lechuga on 9.23.63, at her Upper East Side New York apartment, under the cover of a cocktail party. With Howard’s support, “the Kennedy White House was organizing a secret meeting with an emissary of Fidel Castro in November 1963 at the United Nations — a plan that was aborted when Kennedy died on 11.22.63.”

Oh, I get it — progressive industry women don’t to make a Howard film because a pillow-talk espionage saga is seen in some quarters as demeaning, and committing suicide in ’65 makes for a glum, defeatist ending.

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And the aging process, especially after the big six-oh, is rarely a kind or compassionate thing. But it cuts some of us a slight break.

Those favored with good genes, I mean, and who haven’t overly abused their bodies and souls with drugs and alcohol. If you at least half-resemble the person you were at age 21, you have reason to give thanks.