Literotica Cemetary

[KindaKinky]

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Greg Giraldo Dies at 44

September 30, 2010
Greg Giraldo, Insult-Humor Comic, Dies at 44
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Greg Giraldo, a comedian famous for his stinging insult humor, disgruntled rants and frequent appearances on Comedy Central’s highly watched roast series, died on Wednesday at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 44.

Mr. Giraldo had been hospitalized since Saturday night after he was found unconscious in a hotel room in New Brunswick, where he was scheduled to perform at a club. Mr. Giraldo had suffered a drug overdose, The Home News Tribune of East Brunswick, N.J., reported, citing New Brunswick police. The precise cause of death on Wednesday was unclear. A hospital spokesman said the family declined to release that information.

A former lawyer who gave up a job at a law firm to pursue comedy, Mr. Giraldo became a wildly successful stand-up comic touring the country as a headliner at many clubs and dispensing his own brand of sharp and often brutal humor. As Mr. Giraldo’s following grew so did his presence on radio and television. He performed more than a dozen times on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and become a radio regular on “The Howard Stern Show.”

Mr. Giraldo was particularly known for his clever and exasperated rants, which he used to great effect on Comedy Central shows like “Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn” and Lewis Black’s “Root of All Evil.” But it was his regular appearances on that network’s roast series — one of Comedy Central’s most successful shows — that drew particular attention. Mr. Giraldo was a mainstay on that series, taking the stage in more than a half-dozen shows to mercilessly ridicule pop-culture figures like Pamela Anderson, William Shatner, Chevy Chase — “I could only dream,” he told Mr. Chase, of making “three good movies” and 40 horrible ones — and, in 2009, a fellow comedian, Larry the Cable Guy.

“Some people say Larry’s only successful because he’s pandering to the lowest common denominator,” Mr. Giraldo said. “Don’t listen to these people, Larry. They’re just bitter and jealous and right.”

Mr. Giraldo’s fame grew quickly, and by 2010 he was making prime-time appearances on network television. Earlier this year he was a judge on the NBC reality show “Last Comic Standing” and a panelist on “The Marriage Ref,” the Jerry Seinfeld brainchild that also airs on NBC.

But Mr. Giraldo’s humor had a dark side, which he sometimes referenced in his stand-up act. He had been a heavy drinker, but in interviews in recent years he spoke of being sober — with occasional slip-ups.

Mr. Giraldo was born in New York in 1965. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard. He was divorced with three children.

As something of a running joke, Mr. Giraldo was often needled by fellow roasters on Comedy Central for being the comedian no one had ever heard of. But on Twitter Wednesday night, “R.I.P. Greg Giraldo” was the top trending topic, and his fans posted countless notes and tributes on his YouTube videos and Facebook and MySpace pages.

Mr. Giraldo’s last major appearance on Comedy Central was in August during “The Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff,” in which he hectored Mr. Hasselhoff about his own alcohol abuse.

“You used to have a car that started when you talked to it; now you have a car that won’t start when you blow into it,” he said.

Mr. Giraldo was one of the most widely praised and talked about comedians on the roast that evening. The show drew 3.5 million total viewers and was the highest-rated cable show of the night.

 

[Kenneth19]

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Greg Giraldo Dies at 44

September 30, 2010
Greg Giraldo, Insult-Humor Comic, Dies at 44
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
Greg Giraldo, a comedian famous for his stinging insult humor, disgruntled rants and frequent appearances on Comedy Central’s highly watched roast series, died on Wednesday at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 44.

Mr. Giraldo had been hospitalized since Saturday night after he was found unconscious in a hotel room in New Brunswick, where he was scheduled to perform at a club. Mr. Giraldo had suffered a drug overdose, The Home News Tribune of East Brunswick, N.J., reported, citing New Brunswick police. The precise cause of death on Wednesday was unclear. A hospital spokesman said the family declined to release that information.

A former lawyer who gave up a job at a law firm to pursue comedy, Mr. Giraldo became a wildly successful stand-up comic touring the country as a headliner at many clubs and dispensing his own brand of sharp and often brutal humor. As Mr. Giraldo’s following grew so did his presence on radio and television. He performed more than a dozen times on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and become a radio regular on “The Howard Stern Show.”

Mr. Giraldo was particularly known for his clever and exasperated rants, which he used to great effect on Comedy Central shows like “Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn” and Lewis Black’s “Root of All Evil.” But it was his regular appearances on that network’s roast series — one of Comedy Central’s most successful shows — that drew particular attention. Mr. Giraldo was a mainstay on that series, taking the stage in more than a half-dozen shows to mercilessly ridicule pop-culture figures like Pamela Anderson, William Shatner, Chevy Chase — “I could only dream,” he told Mr. Chase, of making “three good movies” and 40 horrible ones — and, in 2009, a fellow comedian, Larry the Cable Guy.

“Some people say Larry’s only successful because he’s pandering to the lowest common denominator,” Mr. Giraldo said. “Don’t listen to these people, Larry. They’re just bitter and jealous and right.”

Mr. Giraldo’s fame grew quickly, and by 2010 he was making prime-time appearances on network television. Earlier this year he was a judge on the NBC reality show “Last Comic Standing” and a panelist on “The Marriage Ref,” the Jerry Seinfeld brainchild that also airs on NBC.

But Mr. Giraldo’s humor had a dark side, which he sometimes referenced in his stand-up act. He had been a heavy drinker, but in interviews in recent years he spoke of being sober — with occasional slip-ups.

Mr. Giraldo was born in New York in 1965. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard. He was divorced with three children.

As something of a running joke, Mr. Giraldo was often needled by fellow roasters on Comedy Central for being the comedian no one had ever heard of. But on Twitter Wednesday night, “R.I.P. Greg Giraldo” was the top trending topic, and his fans posted countless notes and tributes on his YouTube videos and Facebook and MySpace pages.

Mr. Giraldo’s last major appearance on Comedy Central was in August during “The Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff,” in which he hectored Mr. Hasselhoff about his own alcohol abuse.

“You used to have a car that started when you talked to it; now you have a car that won’t start when you blow into it,” he said.

Mr. Giraldo was one of the most widely praised and talked about comedians on the roast that evening. The show drew 3.5 million total viewers and was the highest-rated cable show of the night.

WTF?!?!?!!?!?!?!?

I thought this was a joke...Well, so much for the roasts....Damn.

 

[KindaKinky]

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Stephen J. Cannell Dead at 69

Legendary TV producer Stephen J. Cannell has died
By Alan Duke, CNN

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Television producer Stephen J. Cannell, known for his work on shows including "21 Jump Street" and "The A-Team," died Thursday, his publicist said. Cannell was 69.

Cannell died from complications associated with melanoma at his Pasadena, California, home surrounded by family and loved ones, said a family statement.

He created, wrote and produced several iconic TV series, starting in the 1970s with "The Rockford Files."

His other hit series included: "Greatest American Hero," "The A-Team," "Hunter," "Riptide," "Hardcastle & McCormick," "21 Jump Street," "Wiseguy," "The Commish," "Profit," and syndicated shows "Renegade" and "Silk Stalkings."
Video: Stephen J. Cannell's 'At First Sight'

Viewers may best remember the trademark closing for Cannell's productions, which showed him at a typewriter tossing a sheet of paper over his shoulder.

He also acted, sometimes appearing in his own shows. Cannell had a recurring role on ABC-TV's hit series "Castle."

Cannell authored 16 novels, including the "Shane Scully" series.

He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Marcia, three children and three grandchildren, the family said.

Cannell overcame severe dyslexia as a child growing up in Pasadena, and later became a spokesman for the International Dyslexia Associationand an advocate for children and adults with learning disabilities.

He formed an independent production company, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, in 1979, which gave him control and ownership of his shows.

His studio is developing feature film versions of several of his hit TV shows, including "21 Jump Street" and "The Greatest American Hero." "The A-Team" movie was released in theaters last summer.

CNN's Jack Hannah contributed to this report.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Let us not forget that guy who was Carrie Fisher's dad.

Yeah.. good ole Eddie.

I'm still catching up with some names from a few weeks ago.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Rock band inspiration Leonard Skinner dies

Teacher disciplined students over long hair in the '60s and they later formed Lynyrd Skynyrd

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Leonard Skinner, the basketball coach and gym teacher who inspired the name of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, died in Florida, his daughter said. He was 77.

Skinner died in his sleep at the St. Catherine Laboure Manor in Jacksonville, where he had been living for about a year, his daughter Susie Moore said. Skinner had Alzheimer's disease.

He was working at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville in the late 1960s when he sent a group of students to the principal's office because their hair was too long. Those students later formed a band, using a variation of Skinner's name for their own.

During an interview in January 2009, Skinner said he was always bothered by the way the legend grew to say he was particularly tough on the band members or that he had kicked them out of school, according to The Florida Times-Union, which first reported Skinner's death.

"It was against the school rules," Skinner said then. "I don't particularly like long hair on men, but again, it wasn't my rule."

The band became popular in the mid-1970s, with hits such as "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird." Three of the band members, including lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, were killed in a 1977 plane crash. The band regrouped and continues to perform today.

Years after sending the young students to the office, Skinner found his son listening to an album called "Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd." The son, also named Leonard, said his father wasn't particularly impressed.

After discovering the connection, Skinner eventually made friends with some of the band members, according to the paper. They even performed at a Jacksonville bar the former coach owned.

Skinner later allowed the band to use a photo of his Leonard Skinner Realty sign for the inside of their third album, and he once introduced them at a Jacksonville concert.

Skinner's children said their father was never completely comfortable with being linked to the band but did grow to embrace it.

"He made a lot of new friends," Moore said. "That in itself really brought a lot of wonderful people in our family's lives, simply because they were Lynyrd Skynyrd fans, and they wanted to meet Dad. They loved him. They're part of our extended family now."

 

[JennyOHill2]

Eddie Fisher, Pop Singer, Dies at 82

Eddie Fisher, whose matinee-idol looks and smooth, romantic voice made him one of the most popular singers of the 1950s, and whose busy love life stole headlines in 1959 when he divorced Debbie Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor, died at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 82.

The cause was complications of hip surgery, his daughter Tricia Leigh Fisher told The Associated Press.

Mr. Fisher’s pulsing delivery and boyish looks made him a lethal heartthrob for a generation of teenage girls, who thrilled to chart-topping hits like “Wish You Were Here,” “I’m Walking Behind You,” “Oh! My Pa-Pa” and “I Need You Now.”

Between 1950 and 1956 he had 24 top 10 hits and nearly 50 songs in the Top 40. He reached a wide television audience on “Coke Time With Eddie Fisher,” which NBC broadcast from 1953 to 1957, and “The Eddie Fisher Show,” its successor.

He was irresistible to women, and vice versa. His career suffered badly over his very public and messy divorce from Ms. Reynolds, whom he had married in 1955 and left for Ms. Taylor.

The divorce became a major scandal partly because Mr. Fisher and Ms. Reynolds had been sold as Hollywood’s dream couple, and partly because Ms. Taylor had been married to Mr. Fisher’s best friend, the producer Mike Todd, who had died in a plane crash in 1958.

The gossip columns and magazines feasted on the breakup and the romance for months, and the adverse publicity caused NBC to cancel “The Eddie Fisher Show.”

The divorce of Mr. Fisher and Ms. Taylor was as sensational as the marriage. The smoldering romance between Richard Burton and Ms. Taylor, ignited on the set of “Cleopatra,” burst into flame before an eagerly watching world, and in 1964 the storied Fisher-Taylor marriage came to an end. Mr. Fisher, a worldwide object of derision as the ousted party, bounced back by marrying the singer Connie Stevens, the third of his five wives.

In his heyday Mr. Fisher was romantically linked with some of Hollywood’s most glamorous women, including Kim Novak, Marlene Dietrich and Angie Dickinson. His first autobiography, published in 1981, bore the almost inevitable title “Eddie: My Life, My Loves.”

Edwin Jack Fisher was born on August 10, 1928, in Philadelphia. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and his early singing experience came at the local synagogue. At 13 he won a singing contest sponsored by the “Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour,” a radio variety show, and he soon became a regular on the Philadelphia radio station WFIL, where his starting pay of 15 cents — the price of two trolley tokens — rose to $18 a week.

“It takes many qualities to make a good singer, but your boy has the most important quality of all,” a local voice teacher told Mr. Fisher’s mother. “In his throat there is a thread of gold.”

While still in high school he sang his way into the Buddy Morrow band, a job that took him to New York and led to an engagement with the Charlie Ventura big band. Too young to appear in nightclubs, he found work as a staff singer at the Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills, where his singing caught the attention of Eddie Cantor, who booked him in 1949 on a cross-country show. A contract with RCA followed.

“In one year, this boy will be America’s most important singer of popular songs,” Cantor predicted accurately. In 1950, the year that “Thinking of You” reached No. 5 on the charts, and “Bring Back the Thrill” and “Unless” cracked the top 20, Mr. Fisher was voted America’s most promising new male vocalist in a poll of disc jockeys conducted by Billboard. He then commanded $1,000 a week as a headliner at the Paramount on Broadway.

In 1951 he was drafted into the Army, which put him to work singing with the Army Band and touring bases overseas. “The Army gave me a lot more than I gave it,” Mr. Fisher told The New York Mirror in 1953. “Why, I did shows I never would have done. In the rain, the mud, off the backs of trucks, without a mike and sometimes without even music.”

He continued to record while on furloughs and resumed his career, with scarcely a glitch, after completing his two years of service. Stepping back into the headliner role at the Paramount, he began to look like the second coming of Frank Sinatra.

Seeking to capitalize on the golden Fisher-Reynolds marriage, RKO paired the couple in the musical-comedy film “Bundle of Joy” (1956). Mr. Fisher appeared opposite Ms. Taylor in “Butterfield 8” (1960), in a dramatic role that convinced him and the rest of the world that acting was not his destiny.

The hits became scarcer after the mid-1950s, and RCA dropped him in 1960. He returned to the label and recorded the minor hit “Games That Lovers Play” in 1966. The album of the same title, made with Nelson Riddle, became his top-selling long-playing record.

Mr. Fisher then entered a long slide and filed for bankruptcy in 1970. His career problems were aggravated by addictions to drugs and gambling, which he wrote about frankly in his first memoir and its successor, “Been There, Done That” (1999).

Besides his daughter Tricia Leigh of Los Angeles, he is survived by a second daughter from his marriage to Connie Stevens, the actress Joely Fisher, also of Los Angeles; two children from his marriage to Debbie Reynolds, the actress and writer Carrie Fisher and Todd Fisher; and six grandchildren.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Gloria Stuart, Titanic's Old Rose, Dies at 100

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Gloria Stuart fans upset that she was underused by Hollywood needed only to bide their time. For about five decades.

Stuart, the 1930s star, who achieved her greatest fame as the elder version of Kate Winslet's Rose in Titanic, has died. She had marked her 100th birthday on the Fourth of July.

"I would say I don't notice the difference between 100 and, say, 90," a frisky-sounding Stuart said this past summer. "You're still frail, feeble and full of you-know-what."

Career-wise, Stuart hit her peek at 87. As Old Rose, Titanic's signature survivor and storyteller, she rated an Oscar nomination, becoming the oldest acting nominee ever.

"Gloria Stuart was a force both on and off screen," costar Leonardo DiCaprio said in a statement. "An amazingly sweet person, a fantastic actress, and someone who always fought for what she believed in. She was one of the last great actresses from the Golden era of Hollywood. I was honored to have worked along side her. She will be missed."

Success, however, was not new to Stuart. The honey-blonde actress scored top-billing in 1933's The Invisible Man, and starred in dozens of movies that same decade.

But by the 1940s, Stuart's run appeared done—she was, after all, already in her 30s!—and at least one Hollywood columnist asked why she wasn't used more.

The years, or lack of roles, did not diminish Stuart's drive. By the time Titanic came along in 1997, Stuart was determined to impress director James Cameron, who wanted to know if she'd audition for the centenarian role sans makeup.

Declared Stuart: "I'll read for him without clothes!"

 

[JennyOHill2]

Actor Tony Curtis dies

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Actor Tony Curtis, best known for his comedic turn as a cross-dressing musician in "Some Like It Hot," has died at the age of 85, US media reported, citing his family.

The Bronx-born Curtis was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in "The Defiant Ones" with Sidney Poitier, but he was best remembered as Marilyn Monroe's cross-dressing paramour in the 1959 Billy Wilder classic "Some Like It Hot."

Curtis's life could have come straight from one of his Hollywood scripts: rising from the streets of the Bronx to become a matinee idol who boasted of sleeping with 1,000 women.

He will be remembered as much for the off-screen dalliances as for acting performaces that never perhaps won the critical acclaim and respect from his peers that he sought.

A string of hits alongside Burt Lancaster in the late 1950s, including "Trapeze" and "Sweet Smell of Success," transformed the son of poor Hungarian immigrants into one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood.

Curtis received his only Oscar nomination for the 1958 film "The Defiant Ones" in which he and Sidney Poitier play prison inmates who break out and spend most of the story chained together by handcuffs.

Curtis insisted his black co-star receive double billing -- a racial breakthrough at the time.

Known for his thick crop of black hair, he became such a mega-star that his raffish quiff was adopted by Elvis Presley -- suddenly everyone wanted what barbers knew as a "Tony Curtis."

The eldest child of Jewish immigrants, Curtis was born on June 3, 1925 and grew up in the back of his father's tailor shop. His parents were so poor that he and brother Julius were briefly dispatched to an orphanage.

In his frank 2008 autobiography "American Prince: A Memoir," Curtis laid bare that poverty-stricken Bronx upbringing, detailing the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In 1938, Julius died after being hit by a truck. Family tragedy would also haunt Curtis later in life when his son Nicholas died of a heroin overdose at the age of 23.

Curtis enlisted at 16 in the Marines and ended up as a crewman on a submarine, witnessing at close-hand the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

He later revealed he had been immitating his on-screen hero Cary Grant after watching him in the submarine war film "Destination Tokyo".

After earning an honorable discharge, Curtis enrolled in acting school and began playing stage roles until film producer David Selznick spotted the young talent.

Bit-parts paid the bills until Curtis, who by this time had dispensed of his given name Bernard Schwartz, got his break with a major role in the 1950 action-western "Sierra."

In a 2008 interview with AFP at his art studio overlooking the Las Vegas Strip skyline, Curtis described his dramatic sex-soaked ascent to Hollywood stardom as well as a traumatic decline and descent into cocaine addiction.

"I don't feel like I got the movies I should've gotten," said Curtis, who felt he was denied meaty roles that went to contemporaries Marlon Brando and Paul Newman. "I felt I deserved more than that the industry had given me.

He also acknowledged he may have been addicted to sex. "I realized if I could mount a girl -- and that sounds very cruel and very bestial but examine it for what it is -- a woman has accepted me.

"The main force in me was to be accepted by others. Not education, not money in my pocket, nothing except to be accepted by a girl."

After a three-year affair with a young Marilyn Monroe, Curtis married six times and was later candid about how his misdeeds had destroyed five marriages and ruined his relationships with his children.

Curtis's first wife was Janet Leigh, the screaming shower scene starlet of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."

"For a while, we were Hollywood?s golden couple," he later said.

"I was very dedicated and devoted to Janet, and on top of my trade, but in her eyes that goldenness started to wear off. I realized that whatever I was, I wasn't enough for Janet. That hurt me a lot and broke my heart."

Estranged for many years from the couple's actress daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, he is survived by his sixth wife Jill, who he married in 1998 when he was 73 and she was a 30-year-old voluptuous blonde.

A veteran of more than 120 films, Curtis was also an accomplished flautist and a painter whose work resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 

[JennyOHill2]

'Bonnie and Clyde' director Arthur Penn dies

NEW YORK — "Bonnie and Clyde" wasn't a movie that director Arthur Penn wanted to make, but when he finally agreed to it, he made sure that the violence provoked by the lawbreaking couple from the 1930s — and that led to the protagonists' bullet-riddled demise — wasn't disguised.

"I thought that if were going to show this, we should SHOW it," Penn recalled. "We should show what it looks like when somebody gets shot."

His cinematic art, he noted, only reflected the times: TV coverage of Vietnam "was every bit, perhaps even more, bloody than what we were showing on film."

The director died a day after his 88th birthday, leaving behind films — most notably "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Little Big Man" — that refashioned movie and American history, made and broke myths and sealed a generation's affinity for outsiders.

Daughter Molly Penn said her father died at his home in Manhattan of congestive heart failure. A memorial service will be held by year's end, longtime friend and business manager Evan Bell said Wednesday.

Penn — younger brother of the photographer Irving Penn — first made his name on Broadway as director of the Tony Award-winning plays "The Miracle Worker" and "All the Way Home," then rose as a film director in the 1960s, his work inspired by the decade's political and social upheaval.

"Bonnie and Clyde," with its mix of humor and mayhem, encouraged moviegoers to sympathize with the marauding robbers, while "Little Big Man" told the tale of the conquest of the West with the Indians as the good guys.

"A society would be wise to pay attention to the people who do not belong if it wants to find out ... where it's failing," Penn said.

Penn's other films included his adaptation of "The Miracle Worker," featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Bancroft; "The Missouri Breaks," an outlaw tale starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson; "Night Moves," a Los Angeles thriller featuring Gene Hackman; and "Alice's Restaurant," based on the wry Arlo Guthrie song about his being turned down for the draft because he had once been fined for littering.

"He had his own clear vision, but he was really excited to see what you could bring to a scene, every take," Hackman said in a statement. "You could feel him over there, just by the camera, pulling for you. However rough and tough his films are, you can always sense his humanity in them."

Penn was most identified with "Bonnie and Clyde," although it wasn't a project he initiated or, at first, wanted to do. Warren Beatty, who earlier starred in Penn's "Mickey One" and produced "Bonnie and Clyde," had to persuade him to take on the film, inspired by the movies of the French New Wave. (Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard each turned down offers to direct the film.)

Penn, in his 40s when he made "Bonnie and Clyde," took full advantage of his gorgeous lead actors — Beatty and Faye Dunaway — and of the story, as liberal in its politics as it was with the facts — a celebration of individual freedom and an expose of the banks that had ruined farmers' lives.

Released in 1967, when opposition to the Vietnam War was spreading and movie censorship crumbling, "Bonnie and Clyde" was shaped by the frenzy of old silent comedies, the jarring rhythms of the French New Wave and the surge of youth and rebellion. The robbers' horrifying deaths, a shooting gallery that took four days to film and ran nearly a minute, only intensified the characters' appeal.

With the glibbest of promotional tag lines, "They're young ... they're in love ... and they kill people," it was a film that challenged and changed minds. Beatty worked for a reduced fee because the studio, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, was convinced that "Bonnie and Clyde" would flop.

"Bonnie and Clyde," released in August 1967 and then rereleased early in 1968 in response to unflagging interest, appalled the old and fascinated the young, widening a generational divide not only between audiences, but critics.

The New York Times' Bosley Crowther, then at the end of his career — an end hastened by "Bonnie and Clyde" — snorted that the film was "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in 'Thoroughly Modern Millie.'"

But Pauline Kael, just starting her long reign at The New Yorker, welcomed "Bonnie and Clyde" as a new and vital kind of movie — an opinion now widely shared — and asked, "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?"

"The accusation that the beauty of movie stars makes the anti-social acts of their characters dangerously attractive is the kind of contrived argument we get from people who are bothered by something and clutching at straws," Kael wrote. "'Bonnie and Clyde' brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things people have been feeling and saying and writing about."

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, with Estelle Parsons winning for best supporting actress, and is regarded by many as the dawn of a golden age in Hollywood, when the old studio system crumbled and performers and directors such as Penn, Beatty, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese enjoyed creative control.

Penn, who had fought — and lost to — the studios over the editing of such early films as "The Left Handed Gun" and "The Chase," now was able to realize a long-desired project — an adaptation of "Little Big Man," based on the Thomas Berger novel.

"Originality is filtered out like tar is filtered out of cigarettes," Penn once complained. "I have not had a lot of success with the suits — or the dresses. Executives are executives. They're going to interfere as much as they can.

"('Little Big Man') didn't happen until I had so much clout I sort of made it happen."

None of Penn's other films had the impact of "Bonnie and Clyde," but the director regarded "Little Big Man," released in 1970, as his greatest success, with Dustin Hoffman playing the 121-year-old lone survivor of Custer's last stand. It was, again, a violent and romantic re-imagining of the past and an angry finger pointed at the war and racism of the present.

Penn earned Academy Award nominations for both films and for his first movie, "The Miracle Worker," based on the Broadway show about Helen Keller, played by Patty Duke in an Oscar-winning turn, and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, played by Bancroft. Among Penn's other stage credits: "All the Way Home," which won both the Tony and Pulitzer Prize in 1961 as best play; "Two for the Seesaw"; the musical version of "Golden Boy"; and "Wait Until Dark."

Penn traced his affinity for alienated heroes and heroines to the trauma of his childhood. Truffaut's film "The 400 Blows," he once said, "was so much like my own childhood it really stunned me."

When he was 3, Penn moved from Philadelphia to New York with his mother after his parents divorced. He and his mother, a nurse who had run a health food store, lived in a succession of apartments in New Jersey and New York City, and the boy attended at least a dozen elementary schools.

At age 14, Penn returned to Philadelphia to live with his ailing father and help him run his watch repairman's shop.

"He was an excellent mechanic. ... His hands were magical," Penn said. "But he was an evasive man for someone to try to make contact with. I think I'm like him in some ways. I'm not the most available of men, emotionally or personally."

He was no filmgoer as a child; books and baseball mattered more. Penn was frightened by a horror picture when he was 5 and said he did not see another movie until his teens, when Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" "staggered" him.

Along with Welles and Charlie Chaplin, Penn greatly admired Akira Kurosawa and the French New Wave directors, especially Truffaut and Godard.

He was known for allowing actors to improvise — and getting a wide range of expression from them in return. He believed words are to the theater as action is to film: "A look, a simple look, will do it."

Penn's 1960s success was bracketed by frustration. Early in his career, he was so angered by how Warner Bros. changed "The Left Handed Gun," a Western released in 1958, that he stopped making movies and turned to Broadway. He was fired from "The Train," a 1964 film, over disagreements with the lead actor, Burt Lancaster. And none of his later works found favor at the box office, though several — "Night Moves" (1975), "The Missouri Breaks" (1976) and "Four Friends" (1981) — won critics' praise.

Penn decided to live in New York, rather than Los Angeles, as Hollywood soured on his social vision. Broadway, too, seemed increasingly drawn to blockbuster musicals rather than serious drama, further marginalizing Penn.

"It was frustrating and more than a little humiliating," Penn once told The New York Times.

"It's not that I've drifted away from film," he said in another interview. "I'm very drawn to film, but I'm not sure that film is drawn to me."

Arthur Hiller Penn was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 27, 1922, the son of Harry and Sonia Penn and brother of Irving Penn.

Although both sons were involved in the visual arts, Arthur Penn later said that he saw little in common in their work and rarely discussed the ties between them. (Beatty would claim the director was influenced profoundly by his brother, who was known for a spare but dramatic photographic style. The older brother died in October 2009.)

Penn joined the Army during World War II, formed a dramatic troupe at Fort Jackson, S.C., was often in trouble for behaving disrespectfully to his superiors and was in an infantry unit that fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he studied literature in Italy for two years, then returned to New York, where he found work as a floor manager on NBC-TV's "Colgate Comedy Hour."

By the early 1950s, Penn was writing and directing TV dramas. In 1956, he debuted as a Broadway director, but "The Lovers" closed after just four days.

As a boy, Penn had little success learning the watchmaker's trade from his father, who died without having seen any of his son's films.

"He went to his grave despairing I would never find my way in the world," the director said, "and the movies rescued me."

 

[JennyOHill2]

Joe Mantell Is Dead at 94; Played Sidekick in ‘Marty’

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his son, Robert.

Mr. Mantell was a familiar figure on television beginning in the 1950s, appearing in guest roles on numerous series — dramas including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Lou Grant”; and situation comedies like “My Three Sons,” “Maude” and “Barney Miller.” In the early ’60s he had a regular role on the comedy “Pete and Gladys,” and in the late ’60s he had a recurring part on the detective drama “Mannix.”

In the movies he appeared in “Onionhead,” with Andy Griffith, and “The Sad Sack,” with Jerry Lewis. In “The Birds,” Hitchcock’s classic horror film about avian madness in a California town, he played a traveling salesman who advises, “Kill them all!”

But he was probably best known for playing a couple of sidekicks. In “Marty,” the Oscar-winning 1955 film adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his own teleplay about a lonely Bronx butcher (Mr. Borgnine) and his search for love, Mr. Mantell played the title character’s best pal, Angie. Angie began almost every conversation with the same question — “What do you feel like doin’ tonight?” — and always got the same answer: “I don’t know, Ange. What do you feel like doin’?”

For Mr. Mantell, who was nominated for an Oscar himself for best supporting actor, it was actually a reprise; in the television play, broadcast live in 1953, he had played Angie opposite Rod Steiger.

In 1974, Mr. Mantell appeared in the celebrated nouveau-noir sleuth film “Chinatown” as Walsh, an associate of Jake Gittes (Mr. Nicholson), a private eye who becomes embroiled in a complex mess involving water rights, incest and murder. It was a small role for Mr. Mantell, made notable by his final line, also the final line of the film, which was set in the Los Angeles of the 1930s. Gittes, shaken by the violent conclusion of events (which takes place in the sorry neighborhood that gives the film its name) is encouraged to go home and take it easy.

“Forget it, Jake,” Walsh says. “It’s Chinatown.”

Joseph Mantel was born in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn on Dec. 21, 1915. His parents were immigrants from Poland who ran a butcher shop. He served in the Army during World War II and, some time between his discharge and his film debut, in 1949, he changed his name, adding an “l” and altering the pronunciation from “MON-tle” to “man-TELL.”

In addition to his work onscreen, Mr. Mantell was also a stage actor whose credits included a Broadway musical, “Buttrio Square,” in 1952. Two decades later he appeared in a post-Broadway tour of “Twigs,” a play by George Furth that starred Sada Thompson in a Tony-winning performance.

In addition to his son, who lives in Lancaster, Calif., Mr. Mantell is survived by his wife, Mary; two daughters, Jeanne, of Encino, and Cathy, of Studio City, Calif.; a grandson and a step-grandson.

 

[phrodeau]

Barbara Billingsley, Beaver Cleaver's TV mom, dies

http://capitalbrand.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/ispeakjive.jpg
(AP) – 1 hour ago
LOS ANGELES (AP) — 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 was every bit as nurturing, classy, and lovely as 'June Cleaver' and we were so proud to share her with the world," her son Glenn Billingsley said Saturday.
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. (Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, 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.
"America's favorite mother is now gone," Dow said in a statement Saturday. "I feel very fortunate to have been her "son" for 11 years. We were wonderful friends and I will miss her very much."
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, 1915, 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.
Twersky said Billingsley's survivors include her sons, a stepson and numerous grandchildren.
Associated Press writer Bob Thomas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

 

[phrodeau]

Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, dies

http://images.forbes.com/images/2002/04/02/mandelbrot_200x260.jpg
(AFP) – 4 hours ago
WASHINGTON — Benoit Mandelbrot, a French-American mathematician who explored a new class of mathematical shapes known as "fractals," has died at age 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His wife Aliette told the New York Times Saturday he died of pancreatic cancer at a hospice.
His seminal book, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature," published in 1982, argued that irregular mathematical objects once dismissed as "pathological" were a reflection of nature.
The fractal geometry he developed would be used to measure natural phenomena like clouds or coastlines that once were believed to be unmeasurable.
He applied the theory to physics, biology, finance and many other fields of study.
"Fractals are easy to explain, it's like a romanesco cauliflower, which is to say that each small part of it is exactly the same as the entire cauliflower itself," Catherine Hill, a statistician at the Gustave Roussy Institute, told AFP.
"It's a curve that reproduces itself to infinity. Every time you zoom in further, you find the same curve," she said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Mandelbrot, saying he had "a powerful, original mind that never shied away from innovation and battering preconceived ideas," according to a statement published by his office.
"His work, which was entirely developed outside the main research channels, led to a modern information theory," Sarkozy added.
Mandelbrot had been "very critical of the prevailing banking models", adding that his "warnings were not heeded," Sarkozy said.
"France is proud to have received Benoit Mandelbrot and to have allowed him to benefit from the best education."
David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University, told the Times that Mandelbrot had effectively revolutionized his field.
"Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found," the Times quoted him as saying.
"He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects," Mumford added.
Mathematicians and economists were among those who reacted swiftly to Mandelbrot's death on the Internet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the statistician and philosopher best known for the book "The Black Swan," turned over his website to mourn Mandelbrot's passing.
The page featured only the words: "Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010, A Greek among Romans."
Chris Anderson, the organizer of the TED conferences that feature addresses from prominent thinkers drawn from a variety of fields, offered his condolences on his Twitter page.
He described Mandelbrot, who addressed the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference earlier this year, as "an icon who changed how we see the world."
A professor emeritus at Yale University, Mandelbrot was born in Poland but as a child moved with his family to France where he was educated.
In the United States and around the world, his work attracted the attention of academics, but also pop culture because the fractals he uncovered could be illustrated in stunningly beautiful, multi-colored representations.
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.

http://cairnarvon.rotahall.org/pics/mandelbrot.gif

 

[JennyOHill2]

'Happy Days' Patriarch Tom Bosley Dies at 83

Tom Bosley, a character actor who will forever be known as Howard Cunningham from the hit sitcom 'Happy Days,' died on Tuesday at his home in Palm Springs, his family told TMZ. According to the report, Bosley had been battling a staph infection. He was 83.

Bosley's agent, Sheryl Abrams, told the AP that Bosley died of heart failure at 4AM Tuesday. She says he was also battling lung cancer.

Born in Chicago in 1927, Bosley gravitated to acting after serving in the Navy during World War II and found success in a stage production of 'Our Town' and later at the Woodstock Opera House in Illinois, where he befriended fellow newcomer Paul Newman.

Several small TV and film roles followed (in 'Bewitched,' 'The Mod Squad,' 'Get Smart,' etc.), but in 1974 he landed the role of a lifetime, playing the wise patriarch in 'Happy Days' alongside Ron Howard and Marion Ross, his onscreen wife. The show ran for 11 seasons and ushered in an era of nostalgia for the simpler and less turbulent 1950s.

The actor's flat Chicago accent served him well on the show, as the Cunningham's hailed from Milwaukee, two hours north.In 1984, Bosley struck gold again with 'Murder, She Wrote,' playing Sheriff Amos Tupper in the long-running mystery series, starring Angela Lansbury. He then took center stage in his own show, playing the title character in 'Father Downing Mysteries' from 1987 to 1991. He reprised the 'Happy Days' role in a 2005 episode of 'Family Guy.'

His 'Happy Days' co-stars are already reacting to the news. Ron Howard, who played onscreen son Richie Cunningham, tells PEOPLE, "Tom's insight, talent, strength of character and comic timing made him a vital central figure in the 'Happy Days' experience. A great father and husband, and a wonderful artist, Tom led by example, and made us all laugh while he was doing it. My last conversations with Tom reflected the love of life and peace of mind that he always maintained throughout his full and rewarding life. I miss him already.

Henry Winkler tells TMZ that he remembers being blown away by Bosley when he first saw him perform on Broadway. "And then I got to act with him for 10 years and he was great. Tom Bosley was our mentor. He was a true artist ... a great husband, and a fabulous father and grandfather. He will be sorely missed, but never forgotten."

Scott Baio adds: "He was a good man who taught me a lot about the business and business itself. He was a professional guy ... I'm sad."

Though he focused mostly on television and theater (his final Broadway appearance was in 'Cabaret' in 2002-03), Bosley did find some success in film and last appeared in the 2010 comedy 'The Back-up Plan' with Jennifer Lopez.

Bosley was the son of a real estate broker father and a concert pianist mother. He opened up about his early life in a 1979 interview with PEOPLE. "We were fairly wealthy until the stock market crashed," he said. "When I was 2, my father lost all his money."

He is survived by his second wife, Patricia Carr, and a daughter, Amy.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

Tom Bosley, a character actor who will forever be known as Howard Cunningham from the hit sitcom 'Happy Days,' died on Tuesday at his home in Palm Springs, his family told TMZ. According to the report, Bosley had been battling a staph infection. He was 83.

Bosley's agent, Sheryl Abrams, told the AP that Bosley died of heart failure at 4AM Tuesday. She says he was also battling lung cancer.

Born in Chicago in 1927, Bosley gravitated to acting after serving in the Navy during World War II and found success in a stage production of 'Our Town' and later at the Woodstock Opera House in Illinois, where he befriended fellow newcomer Paul Newman.

Several small TV and film roles followed (in 'Bewitched,' 'The Mod Squad,' 'Get Smart,' etc.), but in 1974 he landed the role of a lifetime, playing the wise patriarch in 'Happy Days' alongside Ron Howard and Marion Ross, his onscreen wife. The show ran for 11 seasons and ushered in an era of nostalgia for the simpler and less turbulent 1950s.

The actor's flat Chicago accent served him well on the show, as the Cunningham's hailed from Milwaukee, two hours north.In 1984, Bosley struck gold again with 'Murder, She Wrote,' playing Sheriff Amos Tupper in the long-running mystery series, starring Angela Lansbury. He then took center stage in his own show, playing the title character in 'Father Downing Mysteries' from 1987 to 1991. He reprised the 'Happy Days' role in a 2005 episode of 'Family Guy.'

His 'Happy Days' co-stars are already reacting to the news. Ron Howard, who played onscreen son Richie Cunningham, tells PEOPLE, "Tom's insight, talent, strength of character and comic timing made him a vital central figure in the 'Happy Days' experience. A great father and husband, and a wonderful artist, Tom led by example, and made us all laugh while he was doing it. My last conversations with Tom reflected the love of life and peace of mind that he always maintained throughout his full and rewarding life. I miss him already.

Henry Winkler tells TMZ that he remembers being blown away by Bosley when he first saw him perform on Broadway. "And then I got to act with him for 10 years and he was great. Tom Bosley was our mentor. He was a true artist ... a great husband, and a fabulous father and grandfather. He will be sorely missed, but never forgotten."

Scott Baio adds: "He was a good man who taught me a lot about the business and business itself. He was a professional guy ... I'm sad."

Though he focused mostly on television and theater (his final Broadway appearance was in 'Cabaret' in 2002-03), Bosley did find some success in film and last appeared in the 2010 comedy 'The Back-up Plan' with Jennifer Lopez.

Bosley was the son of a real estate broker father and a concert pianist mother. He opened up about his early life in a 1979 interview with PEOPLE. "We were fairly wealthy until the stock market crashed," he said. "When I was 2, my father lost all his money."

He is survived by his second wife, Patricia Carr, and a daughter, Amy.

 

[mBrow]

Cemetary?

Good spelling may have been another casualty, since the for the forum link the correct term is cemetery (not cemetary), one of my spelling words back in ancient times.

(Spelled fine in the first message)

 

[phrodeau]

Good spelling may have been another casualty, since the for the forum link the correct term is cemetery (not cemetary), one of my spelling words back in ancient times.

(Spelled fine in the first message)

Maybe you can figure out a way to edit thread titles.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

Good spelling may have been another casualty, since the for the forum link the correct term is cemetery (not cemetary), one of my spelling words back in ancient times.

(Spelled fine in the first message)

Amazing how this thread survived over 7 years before you happened along, isn't it? You should have restricted your 5 year senority to 18 posts. (Yes, I know - you are going to tell me I misspelled 'seniority' 5 or so yrs from now.)

 

[mBrow]

Amazing how this thread survived over 7 years before you happened along, isn't it? You should have restricted your 5 year senority to 18 posts. (Yes, I know - you are going to tell me I misspelled 'seniority' 5 or so yrs from now.)

Well, yes, truly amazing! Oui dew appreciate yore thought full note of support. Of coarse, their are sum trivia over witch wee mite ought knot bee overly concerned, granted!

And Bless Your Little Heart!

 

[CaptainKirk]

The man behind 'Penthouse'

Penthouse Magazine Founder Bob Guccione Dies at 79

AP DALLAS (Oct. 20) -- Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine and created an erotic corporate empire around it, only to see it crumble as his investments soured and the world of pornography turned toward video and the Internet, died Wednesday. He was 79.

A statement issued by the Guccione family says he died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano. His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, had said he had battled lung cancer for several years.

Penthouse reached the pinnacle of its popularity in September 1984, when it published nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after the release of the issue, which sold nearly 6 million copies and reportedly made $14 million.

A frustrated artist who once attended a Catholic seminary, Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine's first photographer. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.

Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Hugh Hefner's Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women, dubbed Penthouse Pets.

"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He added that he attained a stylized eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera.

"To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen," he said. "That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood."

Guccione estimated that Penthouse earned $4 billion during his reign as publisher. He was listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people with a net worth of about $400 million in 1982.

Guccione built a corporate empire under the General Media Inc. umbrella that included book publishing and merchandising divisions and Viva, a magazine featuring male nudes aimed at a female audience. He also created Penthouse Forum, the pocket-size magazine that played off the success of the racy letters to the editor that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I'd be writing you..."

Guccione and longtime business collaborator Kathy Keeton, who later became his third wife, also published more mainstream fare, such as Omni magazine, which focused on science and science fiction, and Longevity, a health advice magazine. Keeton died of cancer in 1997 following surgery, but Guccione continued to list her on the Penthouse masthead as president.

Guccione lost much of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.

Probably his best-known business failure was a $17.5 million investment in the 1979 production of the X-rated film "Caligula." Malcolm McDowell was cast as the decadent emperor of the title, and the supporting cast included Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole.

Distributors shunned the film, with its graphic scenes of lesbianism and incest. However, it eventually became General Media's most popular DVD.

Guccione also lost millions on a proposed Atlantic City casino. He never received a gambling license and construction of the casino stalled.

Legal fees further eroded his fortune. Among those who sued were televangelist Jerry Falwell, a California resort, a former Miss Wyoming and a Penthouse Pet who accused Guccione of forcing her to perform sexual favors for business colleagues.

In 1985, Guccione had to pay $45 million in delinquent taxes.

The next year, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry. Guccione called the report "disgraceful" and doubted it would have any impact, but newsstands and convenience stores responded by pulling Penthouse from their magazine racks.

Circulation dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites.

"The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview.

In 2003, General Media Inc. filed for bankruptcy. A private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse the following year in a bankruptcy sale.

Penthouse and related properties are now owned by FriendFinder Networks Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that offers social networking and online adult entertainment, including some with the Penthouse brand.

Guccione was born in Brooklyn and attended prep school in New Jersey. He spent several months in a Catholic seminary before dropping out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He wandered Europe as a painter for several years.

April Guccione said her husband was working as a cartoonist and a manager of self-service laundries in London when he got the idea of starting a magazine more explicit and aimed more squarely at "regular guys" than Playboy, which cultivated an upscale image.

Guccione's staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial.

"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," wrote Patricia Bosworth in a 2005 Vanity Fair article about Guccione, for whom she had worked as executive editor of Viva.

"He hired and fired people - then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."

Sponsored LinksGuccione's management style even sparked a rift with his own son, Bob Guccione Jr. In 1985, the publisher helped his son launch the music magazine Spin, with Bob Jr. serving as editor and publisher. After just two years, the two clashed over the direction of the magazine and the elder Guccione decided to shut it down, forcing his son to secure outside funding.

Success as a publisher allowed Guccione to amass an impressive art collection, which included paintings by El Greco, Modigliani, Dali, Degas, Matisse and Picasso. The works adorned his 30-room, 22,000-square-foot mansion in New York City.

Guccione's financial problems forced him to sell his art collection in 2002 at auction. The collection had been appraised by Christie's at $59 million two years earlier. Four years later, he was forced to sell his Manhattan mansion.

Guccione eventually went back to painting, and his works were shown at venues including the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio and the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, said April Guccione, who married him in 2006. The couple moved from New Jersey to Texas in 2009.

Married four times, Guccione had a daughter, Toni, from his first marriage and two sons, Bob Jr. and Nick, and a daughter, Nina, from his second marriage.

April Guccione said services for her husband will be private.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Simon MacCorkindale

http://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/images/2007/04/06/simon_maccorkindale_203_203x152.jpg

Simon MacCorkindale, the actor who died on October 14 aged 58, built a 30-year stage and television career playing handsome, often roguish, charmers – most recently the consultant Harry Harper in the popular BBC hospital drama Casualty.

In 1985 he was touted as a possible successor to Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the role of James Bond. The rumour put MacCorkindale – who had often maintained that he would be a superstar by the age of 35 – three years ahead of schedule. But he never did become 007.

Charles Pendered MacCorkindale was born on February 12 1952 at Ely, Cambridgeshire, the son of Scottish parents. His father, a station commander in the RAF, was sent to 17 different postings in as many years, and Simon spent his childhood in perpetual transit, settling only briefly at various bases in Britain, Germany or Belgium.

Educated at Haileybury, where he was head boy and played rugby, he wanted to follow his father into the RAF, but at 13 failed an eyesight test. After considering a career in the Diplomatic Service, he decided to train for the stage at the Theatre of Arts in London.

His ambition was to direct rather than to act, and indeed he did later find success as a writer and director. But acting parts kept coming, despite his initial intention to remain out of the limelight, and in the mid-1970s he made his breakthrough on television as Lucius, the son of the Emperor Augustus, in the highly-regarded series I, Claudius.

In 1977 MacCorkindale won the role that propelled him on to the international stage, starring as the smooth murderer, Simon Doyle, opposite Peter Ustinov's Poirot in the feature film of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile.

After co-starring with Michael York and Jenny Agutter in a film version of Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1979) and appearing as a younger-than-usual Macbeth at the Ludlow Festival of 1980, he spent several years in California.

But roles in major Hollywood films were not forthcoming. Instead he starred in a short-lived television adventure series called Manimal, about a man who could assume the form of various animals. The special-effects led show, which was also aired in Britain in 1984, preceded his appearance in the American soap Falcon Crest from 1984 until 1986.

Stealing Heaven (1988), based on the story of Abelard and Heloise, was a film which he co-produced with his second wife, Susan George. It was panned by The Daily Telegraph as "a dire medieval teen-pic", but MacCorkindale was already planning another film about the mysterious case of Lord Lucan, predicated on the earl's innocence. This project, for which MacCorkindale also wrote the script and in which he planned to star, was finally abandoned in 1996 after he fell out with the backers.

He joined the cast of Casualty in February 2002.

In 2006 MacCorkindale was diagnosed with bowel cancer, after complaining of feeling unwell while recording Casualty in Bristol. But his illness did not stop him taking a six-month sabbatical from the BBC at the end of that year to return to the stage for the first time for 20 years, when he joined a touring production of Agatha Christie's The Unexpected Guest.

In May 2007, contrary to previous indications, he was told that the disease had spread to his lungs, and that he had five years to live. He left Casualty later that year. But he refused to end his career, and in 2008 again returned to live theatre, appearing as Captain Georg von Trapp in a West End production of The Sound of Music. His last role was as Sir David Bryant in the television police series New Tricks.

"I don't want people to think that I'm pale, losing my hair, losing weight and on the way out," he said in 2009. "I'm not. I'm as active as I've ever been."

In the last year he spent much of his time with Susan George, whom he had married in 1984, at their 45-acre Georgian stud farm on Exmoor, where they bred Arabian thoroughbred horses.

Simon MacCorkindale married first, in 1976, the actress Fiona Fullerton. The union was later dissolved. There were no children of either of his marriages.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Norman Wisdom, Funnyman, Dies at 95

Norman Wisdom, one of Britain’s best-loved cinematic clowns, who also earned a Tony nomination on Broadway, died. He was 95 and had continued performing until he was 90.

An elfin man of doleful mien, Mr. Wisdom was often described as the rightful heir to Charlie Chaplin. For six decades he reigned as one of Britain’s most celebrated comics, appearing in nearly 20 films and many television shows as well as in live performances.

His films shown in the United States include “Trouble in Store” (1953) and “Follow a Star” (1959). He was also featured in the Hollywood picture “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968).

Mr. Wisdom appeared in two Broadway shows, most notably in the musical “Walking Happy,” for which he received a Tony nomination. The show, which ran for 161 performances in 1966 and 1967, had music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn. He later starred in the comedy “Not Now, Darling,” which ran briefly in 1970.

Reviewing “Walking Happy” in The New York Times, Walter Kerr called Mr. Wisdom “a zany original with ruffled hair, rueful eyes and an altogether irresistible appeal.”

Mr. Wisdom’s unabashedly slapstick style — embracing spills, pratfalls and all manner of silly walks — made him one of the last living links to the British music hall tradition. In his trademark cloth cap and too-tight suit, he was a small shambolic Everyman, battered by life but emerging roguishly triumphant in the end.

It was an index of how nobly Mr. Wisdom played the underdog that for decades he enjoyed a cult status in a most unlikely place: Albania. According to many news accounts over the years, his films were among the very few Western pictures shown there during the postwar regime of the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. (Mr. Hoxha apparently chose to interpret Mr. Wisdom’s plucky, down-at-the-heels screen persona as anti-capitalist allegory, the British press reported this week.)

On Tuesday, the Albanian prime minister, Sali Berisha, announced an unofficial national day of mourning, according to wire-service reports.

Norman Wisden was born in London on Feb. 4, 1915, into a life more threadbare than any he portrayed on screen. His mother abandoned the family when he was a boy, leaving Norman and his brother to be reared by their father, a chauffeur of improvident habits and violent temperament. In interviews, Mr. Wisdom recalled having to steal food to survive.

After his father abdicated parental duties altogether, Norman lived in a children’s home before striking out on his own when he was about 14. He held a series of knockabout jobs including errand boy, apprentice waiter, ship’s cabin boy and army band boy. (The fact that he played no known instrument was apparently no impediment.)

He served with the 10th Royal Hussars in England and India — during that time, he learned to sing and play the trumpet, clarinet, xylophone and much else — and it was in the Army that he developed a flair for entertaining. In 1946, after leaving the service, he began his career in London music halls. Along the way, he changed his name to Wisdom.

Mr. Wisdom was divorced. Survivors include a son, a daughter and grandchildren.

 

[Beco]

James MacArthur, who played "Danno" has died

Associated Press 10/28/2010
Stage and screen actor James MacArthur, who played "Danno" in the original version of television's "Hawaii Five-0," died Thursday at age 72.

Mr. MacArthur's agent, Richard Lewis, said the actor died in Florida of "natural causes," but no direct cause was specified.

In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mr. MacArthur was most recognized for his role as Detective Danny "Danno" Williams on "Hawaii Five-0," which aired from 1968 to 1980. Episodes often ended with detective Steve McGarret, the lead character, uttering what became a pop-culture catch phrase: "Book 'em, Danno."

Jack Lord, who starred as McGarret, died in 1998.

Mr. MacArthur quit the role of McGarret's sidekick a year before the program's final season.

"Quite frankly, I grew bored," he explained on his website. "The stories became more bland and predictable and presented less and less challenge to me as an actor."

"Hawaii Five-O," one of the longest-running crime shows in TV history, with 278 episodes, was shot on location in the Hawaiian islands. It was the first Hawaii-based national TV series. The drama has been remade by CBS with a new cast this season.

Mr. MacArthur, born Dec. 8, 1937, seemed destined to become an actor. He was the adopted son of playwright Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes, an award-winning actress often referred to as "First Lady of the American Theatre." Silent-film star Lillian Gish was his godmother.

"They did teach me a lot about the theatre just through my life with them," he said of his parents in a 1957 interview in Teen Life magazine. "They never pushed me in any direction. Any major decision has always been my own to make."

James MacArthur made his stage debut at age 8 in a summer-stock production of "The Corn is Green."

His breakout role was in the 1957 "Climax!" television-series production of "The Young Stranger," in which he starred as a 17-year-old who has a run-in with the law.

He entered Harvard that same year but dropped out in his sophomore year to pursue an acting career.

As a young actor, Mr. MacArthur appeared in the Walt Disney movies "Kidnapped," "Third Man on the Mountain," "Swiss Family Robinson" and "The Light in the Forest."

He also had roles in "The Interns," "Spencer's Mountain," "Battle of the Bulge" and "Hang 'Em High," as well as many guest roles on TV series such as "Gunsmoke."

He performed in many stage plays, including the lead role of Hildy Johnson in a 1981 production of "The Front Page," which was co-written by his father in the late 1920s, at the Stanford Community Theatre in Palo Alto, Calif.

His live-acting career won him the 1961 Theatre World Award for best new actor for his performance in "Invitation to a March."

Mr. MacArthur said one of his favorite "Hawaii Five-0" episodes was a 1975 segment called "Retire in Sunny Hawaii Forever," because it marked one of the rare times that he worked on-screen with his mother. Ms. Hayes played Danno's Aunt Clara, who visits Hawaii and helps the detectives solve a murder.

Asked by the Hawaii Star Bulletin newspaper in 2003 about his fondest memories about working on "Hawaii Five-O," Mr. MacArthur replied: "Living in Hawaii.'"

 

[eyer]

Pontiac: 1899-2010

"On April 27, 2009, amid ongoing financial problems and restructuring efforts, GM announced that it would phase out the Pontiac brand by the end of 2010 and focus on four core brands in North America: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC."

"GM's agreements with Pontiac dealers expire Sunday."

Ahhh...GTO, Gran Turismo Omologato, Italian for "ready to race"...

...MAGNIFICO!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39937135/ns/business-autos/
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=12016406
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac

 

[JennyOHill2]

Jerry Bock, Composer of Fiddler on the Roof and She Loves Me, Dead at 81

Jerry Bock, who composed the indelible score to Fiddler on the Roof, and collaborated with longtime creative partner, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, on many other shows during a prolific 15 years beginning in 1956, has died, his friend and lawyer Richard M. Ticktin told Playbill.com. He was 81.

Mr. Bock died in the early morning hours of Nov. 3 at Northern Westchester Medical Center in Mount Kisco, NY. He had a stroke on Oct. 30, and died of heart failure Nov. 3, Ticktin said.

Mr. Bock lived in Manhattan. Survivors include his wife, Patti, daughter Portia Bock, son George Bock and granddaughter Edie Mae Bock. Funeral services will be private, his lawyer said.

The opening notes of Fiddler — six melancholy saws on a violin — are as familiar as any passage in the history of American musical theatre. To adapt Sholom Aleichem's sadly comic tales of Tevye, a shtetl-dwelling dairyman in late-19th-century Russia, Mr. Bock drew on the rich musical heritage of Jewish prayer and klezmer music, while staying within the framework of musical theatre songwriting traditions. The 1964 score relied heavily on fiddle-tinged minor melodies. Even the happier songs, such as "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" and "To Life," seem to be musically underpinned with potential sadness.

The show was an instant hit with audiences in 1964 and ran for six years, and was much-revived on tour and on Broadway. "The effect comes close," wrote Harold Clurman, explaining the musical's effect on audiences, "within the facile laughter, the snug appreciation of an anticipated showmanship, to something religious."

Mr. Bock said he felt blessed he didn't come up with a "Some Enchanted Evening" for the show. "The whole score somehow received an appreciation without one particular number stepping out from it," he told Playbill.com. The news of Mr. Bock's passing comes as a second recent shock to Fiddler fans: Joseph Stein, the librettist of Fiddler, died Oct. 24 at age 98. Harnick survives them.

Fiddler contained nearly all of Mr. Bock's compositions that are familiar to the wider public, including "If I Were a Rich Man" and "Sunrise, Sunset." But among theatre fans, his scores (with lyricist Harnick) for She Loves Me, Fiorello! and The Rothschilds are equally treasured. She Loves Me, in particular, is embraced as a near-perfect piece of musical storytelling, replete with small-scaled melodies that succinctly reveal character. The show musicalized the familiar tale of "The Shop Around the Corner," about two store clerks who detest each other, but are also, unknowingly, loving pen pals. The score includes such intimate treasures as "She Loves Me," "I Resolve," "Will He Like Me?" and, most famously, "Vanilla Ice Cream," in which the heroine reads love into the simple gift of dessert. The song was first delivered by Barbara Cook.

Mr. Bock and Harnick first hit it big with Fiorello!, a buoyant musical about New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, which won them their first Tony Award, not to mention a rare Pulitzer Prize for a musical. The duo were invited to write the score by director George Abbott and producer Harold Prince, who had seen their previous effort, The Body Beautiful, a flop that ran for 60 performances in 1958. Reversing that inauspicious start, Fiorello! ran for 796 performances. They would go on to win Tony Awards for Fiddler and be nominated for The Apple Tree and The Rothschilds. They also wrote the musical Tenderloin. Taken together, this run of shows made them arguably the most important musical team writing for Broadway during the 1960s.

Their partnership, however, would not outlive that decade. Bock and Harnick's split came with The Rothschilds in 1970, when they had had a falling out over the replacement of the show's director, Derek Goldby, by Michael Kidd. Furthermore — according to Harnick — Mr. Bock decided it was time for him to return to writing his own lyrics. (Harnick called him an excellent lyricist.) While Harnick eventually spoke publicly about the break-up, Mr. Bock steadfastly refused to be interviewed about the matter. Mr. Bock's career as a Broadway composer ended with the dissolving of his partnership with Harnick — 15 years of constant activity followed by nearly 40 years of all-but-complete silence. When Mr. Bock did return to Broadway, it was for a revival of one of his efforts with Harnick. (They wrote a new song, "Topsy Turvy," for Yente the Matchmaker for the most recent revival of Fiddler on the Roof. It is thought to be the last song they wrote together; it is heard on the PS Classics cast album of the revival.)

Jerrold Lewis Bock was born Nov. 23, 1928, in New Haven, CT, and raised in Flushing, Queens. He studied the piano from an early age and was soon able to play complicated compositions by ear. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he wrote a musical titled Big As Life, about Paul Bunyan, which toured the state and had a run in Chicago. After graduation he spent three summers at the Tamiment Playhouse in the Poconos and wrote for early television revues with lyricist Larry Holofcener.

Despite his reputation as a composer, Mr. Bock had, from early on, equal ambitions to write lyrics. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 with the revue Catch a Star, in which he collaborated on both the music and words with Holofcener — whom he had met at college — and George Weiss. The show, which starred Sammy Davis, Jr., had a respectable run of a year. Mr. Bock and Holofcener also worked together on Ziegfeld Follies of 1956, which closed before it reached New York.

Mr. Bock and Harnick met the next year and began a partnership. It was a meeting of opposites, by Mr. Harnick's estimation: "I tend to approach things skeptically and pessimistically. Jerry Bock is a bubbling, ebullient personality." Critics have sometimes observed that Mr. Bock provided the complicating compositional edge to the partnership, while Harnick's lyrics furnished a balancing directness and emotional simplicity. The team was known for adapting their scores to the shows at hand, which were set in places as disparate as Russia, Hungary, Europe and New York City, from the 18th to 20th centuries.

A story connected to Fiorello! illustrates their adaptability. Confronted with a clumsy, confining scene set in a precinct house where party workers were playing poker while talking politics, they composed "Politics and Poker." The song became one of the hits of the show and likely helped win them the Pulitzer.

Mr. Bock was often lucky in his interpreters. Nearly all of his and Harnick's musicals featured a towering central performance that captured not only the spirit of the character, but of the show itself: Tom Bosley in Fiorello!; Barbara Cook in She Loves Me; Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Rood; Barbara Harris in The Apple Tree, a trio of short musicals about the history of male-female relations; and Hal Linden in The Rothschilds.

Mr. Bock's last major project was 1040, a musical about the tax code written with Jerry Sterner. It had a read-through in November 1997 at the Musical Theatre Lab at the University of Houston School of Theatre. But there were differences, and Sterner ended up presenting 1040 the following year as a play.

The Princess Who Could Not Be Heard, a new work, played the 29th Annual Houston's Children's Theatre Festival in 2007.

The Jerry Bock Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, established in 1997, is an annual $2,000 grant presented to a composer and lyricist. Mr. Bock was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.

According to his lawyer, in recent months, Mr. Bock had been writing music and lyrics for a new musical, Counterpoint, based on a script by Evan Hunter. The script adaptation was by Stuart Ostrow.

Mr. Bock was a 2010 Emmy Award winner for Outstanding Original Song — Children's and Animation category — for "A Fiddler Crab Am I," penned with Larry Hochman and Billy Aronson. It was heard on the series "Wonder Pets."

 

[JennyOHill2]

Sparky Anderson Dies at 76; Hall of Fame Manager Led 'Big Red Machine'

George "Sparky" Anderson, a born storyteller who became the first manager to lead teams from both the American and National Leagues to World Series titles, died Thursday at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 76.

Anderson died as a result of complications from dementia. His family announced on Wednesday that he had been placed in hospice care.

Anderson managed 26 years in the majors, the first nine with the Cincinnati Reds and the rest with the Detroit Tigers. When he retired following the 1995 season, his 2,194 wins (against 1,834 losses) ranked third all-time behind Connie Mack and John McGraw.

Anderson was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame five years later, joining many of the players who had been instrumental in racking up all those wins. And he made clear in his induction speech how much his players had meant to him.

"Let me tell you this, and get it straight, and I hope every manager that follows me will listen very carefully: players earn this, by their skills," he said. "Managers come here, as I did, on their backs, for what they did for me. I never believed different, I will never believe different, and I think that's what made my career so lucky."

Anderson's aw-shucks style came through just like always that day in Cooperstown, but there was an element of luck involved in the South Dakota native's ascent through the baseball hierarchy.

A second baseman during his playing days, he made the Phillies' Opening Day roster in 1959 as a 25-year-old and spent the entire season with the team, playing in all but two games. The Phillies weren't very good that year, finishing last in the National League, and Anderson did his part in contributing to that end by hitting .218.

He would never play in the majors again, bouncing around the minors for a few years before moving to the coaching side like many a mediocre player before and since. But there was something about the way Anderson managed a team that brought him success like he had never experienced as a player.

Anderson spent 1969 as the third-base coach for the San Diego Padres and was planning to join the California Angels' staff for the following season when he got a call from Reds general manager Bob Howsam asking him to replace the fired Dave Bristol as manager in Cincinnati. Anderson had previously managed in the Reds' farm system, but was hardly a known quantity in the Queen City.

When Anderson landed in Cincinnati on Oct. 9, 1969 for his introductory press conference, he was greeted by a Cincinnati Enquirer headline that blared the thought on everyone's mind: "Sparky Who?"

Cincinnati soon found out. The Reds went 102-60 in Anderson's first year, making the playoffs for the first time since 1961. They fell to the Baltimore Orioles in five games in the World Series, but the bar had been raised on the banks of the Ohio River. After a brief fall back to 79-83 in 1971, the Reds reeled off five consecutive seasons in which they won at least 95 games.

Howsam had assembled a core group of players led by Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez and Pete Rose that would collectively be known as the Big Red Machine, and Anderson finally directed them to the pinnacle of the sport by the middle of the decade.

The 1975 Reds won 108 games and downed the Red Sox in Game 7 of a classic World Series for Cincinnati's first championship since 1940. It didn't take long to add another, as the Reds cruised through 1976 and swept the Yankees in October for back-to-back titles.

But when the Reds finished in second place each of the next two seasons, missing the playoffs, management decided it was time for a change. Anderson was fired and spent the spring and early summer of 1979 at home in California, playing golf. It wasn't long before the Tigers decided to part ways with skipper Les Moss after a slow start, though, and Anderson was back in the game.

Over the next couple of years, he nurtured the young talent coming up through the Tigers' system to build around the double-play combo of Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, the gritty former college football player Kirk Gibson in the outfield, Lance Parrish behind the plate and a pitching staff led by the hard-nosed gamer Jack Morris.

Detroit won 92 games on the way to a second-place finish in 1983 but left no doubt about its intentions and abilities the following year. The Tigers roared to a 35-5 start and cruised home from there before overwhelming the Royals in the ALCS and handling the Padres in five to secure Detroit's first World Series title since 1968.

Anderson would lead the Tigers to the playoffs just once more during his tenure, in 1987, but he remained a fixture in the Tiger Stadium dugout through the end of the 1995 season before deciding to call it quits at age 61.

"There's two kinds of managers," Anderson said in his Hall of Fame speech. "One that ain't very smart. He gets bad players, loses games, and gets fired. Then there was somebody like me that was a genius. I got good players, stayed out of the way, let 'em win a lot, and then just hung around for 26 years. It was a lot of fun."

Anderson is survived by his wife Carol, two sons -- Lee and Albert, a daughter -- Shirley Englebrecht -- and nine grandchildren. At Anderson's request, there will be no funeral or memorial service.